For Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money Institute, it’s all about balance. Every moonshot needs an Earthshot; diversity and efficiency; simplicity and complexity. That’s where the “deceptively simple” concept of Beetcoin comes in. Providing crowdfunded, 0% loans to organic and local food projects, Beetcoin is a challenge not just to the food system but the growth economy at large. Hear Woody and Brian dig into the details on this week’s Steady Stater.
Beetcoin: https://beetcoin.org/
For Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money Institute, it’s all about balance. Every moonshot needs an Earthshot; diversity and efficiency; simplicity and complexity. That’s where the “deceptively simple” concept of Beetcoin comes in. Providing crowdfunded, 0% loans to organic and local food projects, Beetcoin is a challenge not just to the food system but the growth economy at large. Hear Woody and Brian dig into the details on this week’s Steady Stater.
Beetcoin: https://beetcoin.org/
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Pat Choate:From the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, this is The Steady Stater, a podcast dedicated to discussing limits to growth and the steady state economy.
Brian Czech:Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Brian Czech, and our guest today is Woody Tasch, a pioneer of mission-related investing. Woody is the founder and Chair of Slow Money Institute, a nonprofit headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, that has channeled tens of millions of dollars to small, local, and organic food enterprises around the world. He's the author of such books as Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, and most recently, AHA! Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over. Beetcoin is a new crowdfunding initiative from the Slow Money Institute; we'll talk about that in a few minutes. In 2010, Woody was recognized by UTNE Reader as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World." Woody Tasch, welcome to The Steady Stater.
Woody Tasch:Thanks, Brian, appreciate it.
Brian Czech:Well, first off, Woody, I understand you recently left Colorado for Providence, Rhode Island, and are currently going through the process of unloading 70 boxes of books. I wonder if old Jeff Bezos approves!
Woody Tasch:Oh, man, like you're airing all my dirty book laundry in public. But you know, I've been around a while, and I've collected a bit of a library and certainly glad I did because over the course of writing the three books I wrote, I heavily leaned on many of the books that I'm looking at right now on my bookshelves. But yes, I just moved to Providence to be grandpa, be near my daughter and my new grandson, and I grew up on the East Coast. So I never lived right in Providence, but I lived all around here for many decades.
Brian Czech:Okay, well, nice to be home for you, then. Well, let's start with the concept of slow money. People might have a good instinctive idea of what is meant by slow food, in contrast with the term fast food. But Woody what differentiates fast and slow money?
Woody Tasch:Well, you ask the question in exactly the right way, because I had been writing about -- a little, I hadn't written my first book yet -- but I'd been writing essays, and letters, and different things about patient capital for a while in my capacity as treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in New York. And also, after that, I became chairman and CEO of Investor's Circle, which is an impact investment angel group. And I'd been talking about patient capital, that perhaps the most important thing we as impact investors could do would be to truly think long term, and then work backwards from what that would mean to us. That sounds very simple. And it is. But it's also extremely tricky for most investors to actually do because of all the pushes and pulls of markets and whatnot. And so there was patient capital, and then I had the good fortune to visit Italy in 2000 and meet Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food and oh my god, patient capital, it's really slow money. When Carlo started Slow Food, people knew what fast food was. When I wrote the book on slow money, no one was really complaining about fast money. But hopefully we are shining a light on that.
Brian Czech:Yeah, and it's kind of a parallel complaint with our complaint about the bloating GDP. Because, you know, the old formula, velocity of money equals GDP divided by the money supply. So I think in rooting for slow money, we're rooting toward a steady state economy at least.
Woody Tasch:Yeah, absolutely.
Brian Czech:Tell me if I have this right, Woody. Beetcoin is a new crowdfunding platform, where small donations are bundled as grants for local community farming groups. And these groups are called SOIL groups, that stands for Slow Opportunities for Investing Locally. And these groups dole out 0% loans to local farmers and food enterprises in general. Is that the gist of it?
Woody Tasch:That's it. Sounds good to me. So we've got, yeah, basically, there are two components. There's one on the ground, the local component, where groups are making 0% loans locally, and that's made with donated capital. So the members of these local groups chip some money in, and then they get together -- pre-COVID in person, now, mostly virtually even locally. And they vote on making 0% loans to local farmers and local food entrepreneurs and whatnot. When that money gets repaid, it stays in and recirculates in the community. So it's like a permanent revolving loan, grassroots revolving loan. There's a lot of words you could put on it: microlending, revolving loan thing... but we just call them SOIL groups -- as you described it -- they're just 0% loan groups. And now we're adding the layer of the Beetcoin platform. We want to see if we can generate a large number of small donations online and use that capital as matching grants and seed capital to grow the SOIL groups. We'd like to see the SOIL groups go from five -- which there are now -- to hundreds, which is a rather daunting prospect, but given the state of things, we feel we should -- that's what we need to do.
Brian Czech:Yeah, well, the time is right, for sure. And let's talk a little bit about the etymology of that word Beetcoin. You know, what comes to mind to me is "beat it Bitcoin, we want Beetcoin!" You guys on the website describe it as both a "non-crypto, non-currency," and a"deceptively simple" idea, which would be opposed, I guess, to the deceptively complex world of cryptocurrencies, NFTs now, and blackchains in general. So, did you have any more in mind behind the choice of that name?
Woody Tasch:No, I mean, you're making this interview too easy, because you're kind of getting it all. I don't really have to explain anything. Which, of course, is very heartening to me, because we worked hard at how to put this out in the world. Yeah, the basic, the playfulness of the Beetcoin brand, if you will, or the name, is important, you know. There's such a, there's a pall over all of us now, you know, there's a shroud of confusion and, let's say, thinly veiled despair. I don't know why I'm picking these words right now. But you know, we're dealing with a lot of very horrible stuff. Some of it is, well, a lot of it is environmental, obviously, at all layers, and a lot of it is political and social, and that's also at all layers. And then we've kind of got that extra thing of fake versus true, versus, you know, what's -- We don't know what to believe anymore. And those are all tied together, obviously. To me, the power of the Beetcoin brand is that it touches on all that in a second. It's not for me to explain the power of the brand, per se. But I'm just saying, in my interactions with lots of people, as we were developing it, we could see that it kind of hit on a lot of things. And yes, it is deceptively simple. Just like everything we're talking about -- what's simpler than people getting together and making 0% loans to farmers down the street, that should be the simplest thing. But because of the 0%, and because of the world we're in, it's perceived as being not that easy to do. It should be the easiest thing of all to do. It's the most concrete. It brings us together with our neighbors, our friends, connects us to the place we live. But thank you for, I mean, you called it out in the right way, when you were kind of playing with the word Beetcoin. So that's very heartening to me.
Brian Czech:Yeah. Well, you guys are really good at communicating. We found in your AHA! book this quote: "What I've come to hear when people say, 'I don't know much about finance' is, 'I don't like the financial jargon and all that represents. I don't completely trust even the best investment products. I don't completely trust my own common sense, either. I want to have an authentic conversation about money, but I'm afraid to do so because I know deep down that economic growth is doing long-term harm.'" Woody, do you really think that the understanding of the ills of growth is really that widespread?
Woody Tasch:I don't think I said in that passage that it was widespread. But I'm being a little coy in that reply, I think it's very deep. I think that's how I'll answer you. I think there are a lot of people that, at a very deep level, have some awareness of this. How many people it rises to conscious level where they would talk about it at a dinner party or have an open conversation about it -- I can't say that. I can report based on my career, but more importantly, the last dozen years of doing of talking to people all over the country about slow money. And this is everybody from farmers to financiers, you know, a few billionaires here and there. The reason slow money has happened. The reason I'm on this podcast with you and I've gotten we've gotten to the point of developing Beetcoin and whatnot, is because I've been on the sending and the receiving end of lots of energy about this for quite a number of years now with many thousands of people, both directly and indirectly. And that means something. I feel like I've learned something from that. And it has to do with what, you know, your question about how many people use the word "illth", which I believe came from Ruskin -- at least that's who I attribute it to -- who, you know, was very influential in Gandhi's thinking and whatnot. So it's not a new idea. In other words, I mean, Thoreau was talking about parts of this too. In my reading or thinking whatever it goes back to Thoreau, and through Thoreau to Ruskin, and Gandhi and Tolstoy, then jumps foward to E. F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly, and Wendell Berry. So this is a thread that's been going on for a while, as people, as a few people, were seeing the long-term consequences of industrialization and globalization, and whatnot, you know, it's just seeing it a little sooner than the general public. And now, I think we're at a point where that the depth of that is, you know, it's down there at the root level for lots of people, but it's very scary. It's complicated. You know, money's always been a hard thing to talk about. But now in a world where things are so fast and so volatile, and so complicated. So I guess what you just heard is I can't really answer your question. I'm delighted that you found that passage. And I'm not surprised you did, given your work on steady state economics.
Brian Czech:Now, that's a great answer, actually very insightful. And when we review books like yours, that'll be one of the first things we look for. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about the book and how easy it is to read and stuff -- which is saying, it's a big compliment, you know. It's something that we all have more of in this kind, in this genre, if you will. But the 0% loans are the part of the model that's most likely to catch the attention of steady-staters. So you guys at Beetcoin describe the 0% loans as an [quote]"unequivocal statement of intent to shift radically and constructively from an ethos of'how much can we make, how fast,' to an ethos of patience and care." I'm wondering, did you have the steady state economy in the back of your mind when you devised that element to Beetcoin?
Woody Tasch:Well, it's really interesting. I'm, how would I say this? I'm kind of an irreverent. Irreverence, you know, can be the highest form of compliment. I think I just poorly paraphrase Jefferson or somebody, anyway. It's very hard-- so I'm not a trained economist. I didn't stay in academics. It had nothing to do with. I mean, if I probably would have been an English teacher, if I'd stayed in academics, you know, in 1973. And the reason I went there to your question is because when I hear the word steady state economics, I kind of think about the word "economics." And it makes me think about the profession of economics. It makes me think about specialization in general, and all the reductionism and problems that have come from overspecialization. And it also makes me think about institutions and institutional approaches. I know everything I'm saying could be a hot button for somebody listening to -- many they are. So I'm not trying to piss people off, per se. I'm just being honest about where I come from. And I think it's okay to say that because you wanna to talk about the book, which I love -- because the book is obviously a very personal summation for me of a lot of, let's say, work on-the-ground activism-- doing entrepreneurship, making small venture capital investments, being a foundation treasurer, working on mission-related investing in the early days -- and those were all very entrepreneur, they were actions-- they weren't, there wasn't -- I didn't have a theory. I mean, people ask me if I have a theory of social change, and I still don't, for better or worse, I'm not saying it's a good thing. But I'm just being honest that I don't. So yes, of course, the ethos of steady state economics, but it wasn't not at a theoretical level, per se. So in other words, when I get, when I hear discussions of degrowth and steady state economics, you know, it's probably as hard for me as it is for any other non-economists to grok to all the complexity of that. So I prefer just to go down to the grassroots level and say, what needs doing in my town, in my place, that I understand. And then from an investment standpoint, you confront it, which is how much money do I need to make, how fast, that's a very personal -- that's about as personal as you can get. And as we talk about the book, I think what will become very obvious is how humanistic it is. It's not, it's interdisciplinary. Whatever words you want to put on it, but it's not theoretical -- there's not a theoretical construct that I really put out. That's, let's say, pro-growth or against growth per se. It's just obvious if you take all this to heart, that you're gonna be moving that fastly away from maximizing growth.
Brian Czech:Okay, well, that's that'll be a good thing to follow up on. But first, we need to take a short, non-commercial break with James Lamont. Take it away, James.
James Lamont:Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying the show. You might be interested to learn and we recently sent out the Winter edition of The Steady Stater newsletter. It's a quarterly email newsletter that gives a roundup of CASSE various activities over the previous few months and is really helpful for catching up on any thought provoking content that you may have missed. It's also an easy way to introduce those steady state curious friends in your life to an abundance of great material with a simple forward. You can sign up for the email list and read previous editions of the newsletter by going to steadystate.org and panning over the "Follow" tab. Now, back to the show.
Brian Czech:Welcome back. We're talking with Woody Tasch, founder and Chair of Slow Money Institute and the initiator of Beetcoin. Woody, as literally grounded and serious as much of your work may appear, you also place an importance on poetry and graphic design too. Your new book is almost more like a pamphlet with small digestible sections and a pleasing aesthetic. Much of it is available freely on the beetcoin.org website too. What's your favorite part of the book? Woody?
Woody Tasch:Wow, there's a question I haven't had yet. I don't know if I can pick a part. I'm just gonna respond to the way you said it. I took the liberty -- I guess you'd say -- of formatting it, because anybody who knows publishing will know that we self-published this, because no publishing house would have let us do it this way. Their first reason would have been cost. The second reason would have been the very interdisciplinary. I use the word irreverent once before, I don't know why I'm thinking on that word today, I don't usually use it. But there's a playfulness to it, that could be off-putting to a professional editor. And that's on purpose. Because -- you know, as we've touched on a little bit already in this discussion -- I think part of the project that we're all engaged in is reconnecting to all the parts of ourselves and in our community. That's relationships. So left brain, right brain, heart, soul, our lives as local citizens, community members, the way we interact with other living things in the places where we live. And it can get a little more esoteric from there. But putting all these pieces back together is kind of a process of weaving, of imagining, of giving yourself permission, much of things. And so that's what you've commented on the format of the book -- it's got lots of visuals, it's broken into small pieces, it moves back and forth between anecdote and history, and, you know, bits of theoretical analysis woven through, but not at the level that would rise to, let's say, a professional thesis on something or a manifesto of any kind. It's much more humanistic than that. So you asked me my favorite thing. My favorite part of the book is that you just described it that way. I'm not being facetious. It means a lot.
Brian Czech:Nice. Yeah, it's, and I could have said, what's your favorite aspect of it? And I think that's a great answer, then. That does stand out. Well, when folks, when they visit your website -- that's beetcoin.org-- the first thing they see is the message, "Funding organic farms and local food systems is as important as going to Mars." And then elsewhere, we see the case that rather than moonshot, we need an earthshot. So another nice shot across the bow buddy Bezos.
Woody Tasch:Well, just to name a name. Sure.
Brian Czech:Yeah, why not?
Woody Tasch:Yeah I mean. Yeah, there are some others. And what can we say about that? I mean, if you take space, if you take space travel and cryptocurrency as -- and what I'm going to say now will seem pathetically incomplete or inappropriate, even -- if you just take them as the latest shiny objects. Now, there are a lot, they are much more than just shiny objects. But if you take a broad look at history, and look at the way we've chased new technologies, consistently, just pick a point to start, like start with a car, just pick one. And then look at the arc of the car over 100 years. And look at the problem the car was developed to solve, which was manure in city streets wasn't the problem of going too slowly, initially, and then speed came later. So you look we started to get rid of manure in city streets. And a century later, we have whatever how many cars are there on the planet now-- I'm not sure 1,000,000,003 or something, or 1,000,000,005, or some number. But that's not the point. The point is the 420 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. So we got the manure off the city streets. And now we have carbon in the atmosphere. And that was a very[quote] "astonishingly successful technological innovation." Now we're talking about going to the next astonishing technological innovation, which is going to Mars. I think a certain degree of Luddism is called for without being pejorative, and without criticizing people for making too much money or any, or their egos being too big or anything like that. You don't need to go there really, you just need to say that our history as a species chasing technological solutions is quite checkered. You know, it has produced some amazing things. And it has made some people amazing amounts of money, and it has pulled a slug of humanity up the economic ladder. So there are a lot of things to say about it. But you can't just stop there you have to go. And there's so many other things that we've diminished in the process and so many long-term problems that were created, that -- I think it's very fair to remind ourselves -- that, in a sense -- put it this way -- for every moonshot, there should be an earthshot, just say it like that. To that point, Brian, many people who saw my, who see the website for the first, for the Beetcoin website, who are very deeply into organic when they see that it says"funding small organic farms, local food is important to going to Mars," they immediately email me going: "oh, it's more important." And I'm going "well, that's more important. It's more important to you." But for most people, just to say it's as important as a radical statement.
Brian Czech:Yeah, not to pick on Bezos either. But, you know, in addition to the technology aspect, if there's any symbol of fast money out there, and the real economy, I suppose Bezos should be as good of a symbol of that as any, so.
Woody Tasch:I'll tell you. It's so confusing, though. I mean, here I am. I just moved to Providence, and I'm getting settled and whatnot. And I've had, you know, probably a dozen stops at my house over the last couple of months from the Amazon Prime delivery truck. So I'm not going to sit here and be a hypocrite and say, "you know, blah, blah, blah," and then on the back, I'm still -- you know, we're all in it. You know, we're all complicit. We're all involved in this thing. And I'd rather go back to just what I said before: for every moonshot, there should be an earthshot.
Brian Czech:Well put that on a bumper sticker, and then sneak it down on that Amazon truck.
Woody Tasch:Yah there you go. Great idea. I'll leave that to you. Come on, I gave you the idea. But you can go do it.
Brian Czech:Okay. All right. So now you've spoken of what you describe as the schizophrenic tension in organizations working for social change. You see "the imperative to generate competitive returns" casts a long shadow. And that's something you're trying to avoid with the Beetcoin model by crowdfunding rather than institutional grants. Do you have any other thoughts, Woody, on how such groups can sidestep the financial systems that are some of the very things in need of change?
Woody Tasch:That's such a -- I mean, to me, that's the heart of what I'm doing, and what I find so vexing at times, inspiring it other times. You used the word"intention" earlier -- I can't remember exactly what context you used it in. But I, I have a section in the book that talks about nutrient-dense food, and I kind of suggest the term"intention-dense enterprises." And then I say a small farm is the most intention-dense enterprises. It's kind of a mouthful. But the point is people's intent, their intention, the people have good intentions. They want to be green, they want to buy green, they want to get some bad players out of their investment portfolio -- this is not everyone -- I'm saying there's a whole bunch of people who are kind of thinking like that. But there is a huge drop-off between their intention and what they actually do, for a whole bunch of different reasons. If I were trying to simplify, summarize those reasons, I'd say they have to do with scale, intermediation, institutional complexity, and traditional inertia, groupthink that happens in institutions, just a whole bunch of things like that. And it just makes it very hard for an individual to kind of translate their intention into a direct action. And so the way you frame that question, you kind of made it either/or, you said, You're either going to be inside the financial markets fixie, or you gonna have to go outside. And I think that's true in some ways, and in other ways, it's not true. I mean, look slow money, if you change tracks here a little bit, approach it a different way. I often quip in Slow Money meetings. I quote Oscar Wilde, who said that the whole trouble with socialism is it requires too many evening meetings -- which I think is a very funny thing. Yeah. So, and then I always add "slow money is not a form of -- it's not socialism. It's a highly sociable form of capitalism." And I'm saying that now because we're both inside and outside of financial markets. You know, a local food system is a marketplace. A farmer's market is a marketplace. A CSA is a market of some kinds of very small, hyper local market. But I do think, for people's intentions to be expressed, they do have to be as direct, and local, and small as possible to allow those intentions to flow because as soon as they get abstracted, pooled into larger pools of capital, made more anonymous, all these other things happen that kind of spoil the contaminate, or corrupt the intention.
Brian Czech:Well, to quote your book AHA! again: "the promise of disruptive, next-economy tech entrepreneurs has given way to an elite of T-shirt-wearing robber barons." And you also call these tech CEOs and venture capitalists a modern incarnation of old-fashioned royalty. Beetcoin may be trying to take us back to the low-tech land, but, of course, you guys are pretty dependent on the internet, too so. You got any thoughts on the picking and choosing among the technological options? Any rules of thumb you might impart?
Woody Tasch:Drink a lot?
Brian Czech:No. Coffee, you mean, right?
Woody Tasch:No, but that counts too. So this goes back to my -- I'm glad I said -- what I said about Amazon and getting stuff from the Amazon Prime truck. And it's funny, that's probably the most negative passage taken out of context, not in a bad way. But I'm just saying, there's very little in my book that is vilifying individuals. It's but in that passage, it does sound like I'm making fun of the vilifying high tech CEOs. But I think a fair reading of the book would see that there's a very broad -- I just had a friend of mine just read the book. I hadn't talked to her for quite a few years. The specific thing she said in her first email to me about the book is, it casts a very broad "we." In other words-- it's not -- we're all in it together. And so, you know, part of my psyche is a tech psyche. Part of my psyche is a composting psyche. In my case, it's more of the latter than the former, but I've got all parts in there. And I really, it's really about balance. It's really about balance and about the fact that because of the gravitational force of money -- it's particularly fast money -- our money gets sucked into in a certain direction, and therefore our financial intention goes with it, and so we lose balance. And that's why -- I think I'm going to come back to this "for every moon shot, we need an earthshot" thing -- I haven't, I just kind of landed on it before, and I think I'm gonna stay there, because it's just about balance. Everything is about balance. And so for one person to have $50 billion, is pretty ridiculous. I mean, come on people. I'll say more about it. So I don't, I don't know anybody who has $50 billion. I do know a few people who have a billion dollars. And it's not about them, or, and I know, a few more people who have hundreds of millions of dollars. And now -- what I'm going to say would get, they'll get me in trouble if any of them hear this-- I don't pity them. I'm going to say I pity us. I'm gonna make it about us. I pity us as -- let's make it on a societal level, we are wealthier than we've ever been here -- let's quote E. F. Schumacher on this, I'm going to butcher it a little bit. Schumacher said, "the wealthier society, the more difficult it becomes to do things that lack an immediate payoff." That is a friggin, profound insight, in my opinion. And so we're all in it together, the wealth has been created, and it's corrupting everything. When it gets concentrated to that level, it's much bigger than a person or an ego. It's the society, it's just a reflection of things being out of whack at a societal level. An example of this is philanthropy. When you have pools of capital, you referred to -- in the intro to my work in mission-related investing. And all mission-related investing was this very simple realization that we have these pools of capital, that are surplus capital, that are put aside to do good. And then they are all invested to maximize return in the very marketplace that created the problems that philanthropy is set up to try to solve, which means to be more concrete, in our case, we had investments in Monsanto, who were giving grants to sustainable agr groups. And I, on the board, said, come on, we can't keep doing that. That is schizophrenia.
Brian Czech:Well, you know, you've written that diversity and efficiency are two sides of a coin. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Woody Tasch:Sure. This is the concept of balance, Earthshot, moonshot, just stated a different way. So a simpletons view of economic history, I suppose, would conclude that all of the theories, and then all of the industrial systems that come, that are based on those theories are all about increasing throughput, making more things cheaper, making things faster, making more things, making people buy more things. And all of that is described as efficiency. And again, I mean, at the risk of over quoting E. F. Schumacher, one of the chapters of Small Is Beautiful starts with a sentence that says something like this -- the modern economy is the most inefficient system ever developed by mankind. And he's talking about -- Wendell Berry does a lot of this also, of course, so does Herman Dale, I mean, they're all circling around the same thing -- which is all these micro -- efficiencies of, let's say, at the enterprise level, you create all these efficiencies, and you export all of these, the externalities, or the long-term costs, that result from those micro-efficiencies get exported out into the air, in the soil, and in the community and whatnot. And eventually, they build up the whole system as a whole is extremely inefficient in the sense that it creates problems that can't be solved. So that's all about the quest for what happens with the multiage century-long quest for efficiency. And if you translate that into the food system, just for a second, just to get closer to the diversity, the biodiversity part of diversity, but it works on the social side, too. You know, there were something like 100 -- This is one of many examples -- of something like 100 varieties of potatoes in commercial cultivation in 1900. And by 2004, varieties accounted for 95% of the potatoes grown and consumed in the United States. So the global supply chain in food is driving biodiversity out of the food system.
Brian Czech:Sure.
Woody Tasch:And I had the occasion to be on a panel at a food investment conference once, and we had to, at the end of the panel, make a concluding remark. And I looked at the audience -- and I'm not a provocateur, I'm really not -- but sometimes you just have to, just have to push a little bit. And I looked at it, and the audience was full of venture capitalists and food entrepreneurs. And so I said, if we're going to make money growing, and then manufacturing food products, and marketing food products, growing food, manufacturing food products, we should do it in a way that does not diminish biodiversity. And for one second, everyone in the room felt bad, because everybody who knows anything about food products knows that in order to make, you know, 10,000 pallets of a uniform food product and get it every day to Walmart or wherever it is you're doing, you are not paying attention to biodiversity. You're paying attention to efficiency, and uniformity, and, you know, commodities and whatnot. Say the same thing can be said at all levels of the economy.
Brian Czech:Yeah, well I think one of the things that comes out of this is we have to broaden our perspectives when it comes to that concept of efficiency. And so what do you -- if people have enjoyed what they've heard here today, and I think everybody would -- how can they get involved or connected with Beetcoin and with Slow Money?
Woody Tasch:So the way people can get involved is in a way that we never had before. If all of this sounds pretty good, let's go back to for every moonshot there needs to be an earthshot, you want there to be more earthshots of this kind. And you, let's say, you can't make this a life activity for yourself. You just want to find some way to chip in some money. We hope you'll, people will do it through Beetcoin. No amount is too small, we hope we'll be aggregating lots of small donations, and then that money will go through us to local groups that are doing 0% loans, and then stay local. Once it goes through us to the local group just stays local recirculates in perpetuity. So that's our answer to your question. Now, if this sounds good -- I mean, of course, I'd love people to buy the book, more importantly, read the book, it's available free on the beetcoin.org website. But if you want a hard copy, then you can purchase one from Slow Money Institute as well. I'm pretty sure it was T. S. Eliot who said that we have to beware of trying to create systems so perfect that men do not need to be good.
Brian Czech:Alright.
Woody Tasch:Which is an amazing thing for a poet to have said. So same thing to me applies with money -- the idea of coming up with new kinds of money, or new theories about money. I know that sounds a little crazy, because I'm talking about slow money. But slow money, it's slowing down the money we have. What's that mean? It's taking, you know, good, old, fashioned fiat currency -- there's a little, I have this little video if you poke around the website, you'll see at the bottom of one of the pages, there's a little video of me saying some stuff about this. Just taking our good, old-fashioned fiat currency that came from plantation capitalism and fossil fuels all that stuff, and doing something that is directly good with it that we understand, and that is not about our own personal remuneration. It's about creating good for the community. That's what slow money is. It's a very simple and direct utilization of the money we have to do something good.
Brian Czech:Fantastic. Woody, it's been great talking with you, and we wish you all the best with Beetcoin. We are certainly going to be more interested in Beetcoin over time, and we'll be, we'll come back around to you probably later in the year for a follow-up, and thanks so much for challenging some of the fundamental assumptions about growth too.
Woody Tasch:Well, if we just you know, we can blame Herman Daly, and E. F. Schumacher, and Wendell Berry if we want. I sometimes joke that these guys all ruined my life, because I, you know, I read their books when I got out of school, and I believed that they were right. And then I thought, okay, if they're right, what do I, how do I live in a way that manifests those ideas? And that's a bit of a challenge, but, so that's my way of saying thank you for having me. It was a privilege to associate myself however briefly with steady state economics and the work you guys are doing. So thank you.
Brian Czech:Well, folks, that about wraps 're up. We've been talking with Woody Tasch, founder and Chair of Slow Money Institute and author of AHA! Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over. Beetcoin is drawing attention to the fundamental links between our food system and the broader economy, unsustainable links at this point. And it's not just a vanity project for rich hippies, or even -- should I say -- beatniks. When people ask how farming or business would work in a steady state economy, Beetcoin makes for a great example, especially with those 0% interest loans. We encourage listeners to take a look at beetcoin.org for great food for thought, and to consider a donation to a Beetcoin project as well. I'm Brian Czech, and you've been listening to The Steady Stater podcast. See you next time!