S4. - Ep. 14 Community Currencies with Scott Morris

Transcript

welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers focused on use crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of episodes every couple months this season is all about lean mean Capital allocation machines what ways can we do Capital allocation differently now that we can build it on chain and what are the weird and fun and different ways that we are going to do Capital allocation in the 23 in 2040s because of blockchains so uh this is a fun season for us to get into Community currencies and the guest today uh Scott Morris is a community currency practitioner turned

regenerative economic system designer and strategist his job is to balance high level perspectives on systems and value propositions with a knack for simplifying complex ideas into things regular folks can understand it's what we'll be doing today on the green pill podcast talking about Community currencies how to design them and how to understand them as a a member of local communities for for those of you who have followed green pill this season season 4 episode one was all about Mofi which is what do we have to learn from mushrooms in melium when we're designing web 3 based systems you may remember Scott as the person who wrote the forwards of the Mofi book and he

actually is the one who incubated the Mofi me with Jeff EMT and uh was a big part of that project so um a lot of ideas shared between the Mofi Meme and the community currency work that Scott has done the the idea of mut Mutual reciprocity that we see in mycelial networks is an idea that is imbued into Community currencies so on this episode we were talking about Community currencies what are they what community currencies have historically been successful what role do community currencies play in a funding ecosystem what does plural money look like as opposed to the money monolith that we have out there like the US dollar or or Bitcoin and in what ways can place base

public goods funding system and capital allocation fit into our Ecology of capital allocation so on this episode we talk a lot about Community currencies and what we have to learn from them as we're designing mimetically local currencies memec coins and Dows from the history of geographically local community currencies so I I think that you're really going to enjoy listening to Scott he just has a deep experience in community currencies and I think we've got a lot to learn from him so enjoy Scott what's good hey how you doing Kevin good why don't you tee us off with an intro of yourself yeah sure so my name is Scott Morris AKA The Token

Jedi have a degree in interdisiplinary studies and political economics from Alabama I moved to Iowa where I went to the Maharishi International University and did a degree in Consciousness studies and the development of human potential and combined that with an interest in community currencies and economic resilience this was in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 which had a very strong negative impact on so many of us among you know that large number was my family we lost our family business and our family home and I found myself very compelled uh given the qualifications that I had and the general knowledge of how few people our age could even go grapple with the

subject matter to figure out what people on you know regular main streets in America and you know Community economies everywhere could do in the face of financial crisis and currency crisis and credit crisis right there's just so much volatility going on in the world I wanted to know what we could do to protect ourselves from future crisis so that has turned into a long career in crypto where a lot of people are very interested in how to design quality currencies and incentives and so I find myself working more and more with networks that connect across multiple communities all trying to have a regenerative impact where they live great well I think the primary aperture of our conversation today will be

Community currencies and that fits really nicely into our theme for the season of capital allocation on green pill but I did want to briefly mention that you wrote the forward in the exploring Mofi book that Jeff EMT and Jessica zartler wrote and that we dropped at eth Denver so that's another fun moment of of overlap between between our work and yeah anything to say about Mofi and and I I don't know are there Mofi principles in community currencies uh absolutely I mean you know the community currencies are what inspired the Mofi meme really is like understanding that you know this this not not to go too deep too quickly here but a lot of people seem to believe that

crypto's great superpower is going very big and I actually believe it's the opposite I think crypto superpower is going really small and you know thinking in those terms of you know place-based resource allocation networks was the intersection of you know mycelial networks and financial systems design you know that was behind the Advent of the meme in the first place so uh yeah it's it's same same but different for sure I think we should go deep so Community currencies what are they what role do they play in a funding system why are they what type of capital allocation are are they really good at let's let's go down the rabbit hole so I prefer to use former mentor and adviser of mind's definition his name was

Bernard leer he defined a currency as any an agreement within a community to use something as a means of exchange and so there's really there's three critical elements to that there's agreement there's community and there's the the means right a medium so the the first part of that is the most important it's an agreement right it reminds us that all money is predicated on an agreement between some you know group of people we can have debates right around you know Central banking system and Fiat and how legitimate that stuff is ETC there's there's so much history right that we're we can't really Escape but the critical Insight here is that we are free at any

time to make new agreements around what we're going to utilize as a marker for Value as a vehicle for Value right and as a representative of our shared values as a community so what we've witnessed for Millennia right is that humans in in times of Crisis reinvent money and you know this is is not to say that all of humanity relied on money there are there are cultures out there that are you know that have achieved moneyless and you know what we would describe as kind of you know to to borrow from our good friend Charles eisenstein The More Beautiful World our hearts know as possible right where the

economy runs on Vibes and my accounts are denominated in karma uh that that's a very beautiful vision for Humanity building trust and and living in richer relationship with itself but I believe that we need a bit of a transition plan right we've been stuck in this very trustless mode of being and way of thinking about money and so uh it's we're kind of baby stepping across you know with with that as the one side of the spectrum and the more trustful way of interacting as the other side of the Spectrum Community currencies very often kind of fall somewhere in between and baby step people from you know kind of

the Legacy economy and the way that that operates to you know that more beautiful world kind of thing can exist and have existed for a long time on paper one of the things that I managed to do over the years is to amass a pretty decent Siz collection of community currencies uh for the people who are just listening I've got a handful of community currencies from all around the world uh some from Kenya some from you know Italy some from so these are all Community issues that's right sorry to interrup I was going to ask uh these these Community issued they're not issued by governments they're issued by local communities that want to have control of their currency or do some sort of

experiment around rewarding people on some value axis that's exactly right you know so one that's not too far away from me here in New York is the Hudson Valley currents which I've got right here got a you know a lovely note it's got some foils on the back to keep it secure you've got another one that here is a Time credit from the UK this is from the spice system that had I think you know 30 something locations around the UK that all use these time credit notes to represent one hour of Labor uh which you could earn by doing some community service picking up litter or whatever uh providing some some tutoring to some young students or you know perhaps

spending some time with some lonely Elders uh and then you would be able to take that to a local business or like the Civic Center or the city pool and get in for a reduced cost if there's any you know cost in pounds or whatever at all so generally these things emerge based on the recognition that you know the the the monetary and the financial systems are not serving all of us they are primarily there to serve the interests of capital and of people who have it and are you know primarily oriented around the commercial economy and that there are a lot of unmet needs in in spite of the fact that you have ample resources whether those resources are you know the the the time that people have on their hands you know other forms of productive capacity that

are you know scattered throughout the community once you learn how to tap that as basically an asset class right you learn how to uh create po of value that can then be allocated in service of any number of community priorities right whether that is preserving the environment whether that's taking care of our people or it's even supporting a local business Community there's a whole host of different configurations and I'll tell you it it never gets old learning about these things because each one is a story of a community coming face to face with some kind of challenge or crisis and you know overcoming that by kind of breaking what we would

normally consider to be the rules of you know money and finance by recreating a a currency that that is oriented towards serving their needs I have a couple questions about how to design a community currency but I think maybe it might make sense to ground The Listener in one or two spefic specific examples that you think have worked really well do you have a favorite example or two that that you want to take us through and ground Us in those real world examples yeah yeah absolutely I love having the opportunity to shine some light and some love on the work of the Grassroots economics foundation in Kenya my personal hero will Ruck the American guy who went there for like peace score or something originally and he had a degree in quantum physics I believe it was quantum physics and um he realized

that uh in the course of his work there that you know these rural Villages were extremely vulnerable to the you know kind of booms and busts the normal economy the global economy right as they were able to produce things and Export those things they imported you know Fiat money and then they could exchange that Fiat money for a little while but very quickly it would leak back out of the community and the community itself would basically run out of money and just have to sit on its hands until the next came around and so he started experimenting with Mutual Credit models and helping these communities connect around pooling resources and you know improving material conditions and that has been

wildly successful he served over a hundred different communities there and has struck you know a a very fine balance between rooting this and real relationship in real people and including technology there as uh an an assist right the tool that helps us you know keep track of what's going on in the system and transactions and the like but he has not lost sight the fact that the relationship building and the trust building is really the primary exercise so what I also really appreciate about Will's work is how iterative it has been there for a number of years I would call him up like you know once a quarter or once every you know six months or so and i' would ask him like Hey man walk me

through your model like what are you guys going going on what do you have going on right now and it would be different every time and I'm like bro am I going crazy or are you just changing the model this much and he's like yes we are live iterating this thing so that it is staying very close to you know the needs of the communities and you know what they deem to be kind of most relevant and valuable and I really respect that that is absolutely the right way to go about this beyond that there I mean there's there there's so many great examples it's really hard to to pick a few I mean let's see one that that Bernard like to cite a lot was the Swiss this is the wi Bank it has also evolved over the years but it has been around for over 80 years and there are

there's research that validates the hypothesis that this mechanism right which which began as a B2B Mutual Credit style kind of safety net economic safety net for times of economic bust has played a role in the Swiss economy's reputation as being very stable much more stable than other economy and the reason for that is very simple right the econom is doing fine right everybody's able to participate in that and use it the need for these kinds of systems is very low right but when the economy takes a dive people need fallback systems and so these are those kinds of safety nets that people can fall back on in times of economic crisis and they can

still get business done you can still meet local needs with local resources regardless of what's Happening elsewhere right because we've already kind of made those agreements and set up the system yeah it's it's really great to have these ra the ation grounded in real examples I have a couple questions that I want to just pepper in about the design of these things it and uh maybe we can go try to toggle back and forth between real examples and then economic design and and going back before back between the a prior theory of how you do these things and the empirical examples is is how we ground The Listener in how do these things actually work or not work and I think the first question I have is what backs Community currencies so coming from a paradigm of Fiat or or

in crypto we talk a lot about uh currencies being backed by gold or currencies being backed by the military uh it it feels like these local community currencies are backed by Mutual Assurance between the peer-to-peer communities that have legitimately accepted them I a Mutual Credit system we just had Ashley Buck on the podcast and a Mutual Credit Credit system is just I agree to do X for you if you do y for me and we kind of keep a ledger of who owes who what is that what backs Community currencies and how does backing in local context Community currencies differ from the global currencies like the US dollar and Bitcoin and ethereum that we're that we're used to so the first thing to understand about Community currencies is the term Community currencies is a blanket term that includes many

different styles right currency system so Mutual Credit is kind of one of those disciplines and you can see Mutual Credit as applied to a businesso business Network right that's basically the entire barter and trade industry which is like 14 billion dollars a year globally you know networks of local businesses and others trading their spare capacity with one another on a Mutual Credit basis you can also see Mutual Credit applied in the form of time Banks you know just as the the spice time credits that we referred to earlier those systems can operate on you know what they call the zero balance basis right where like I spend one down and you gain one and if we add all the downs and the UPS together you get a big fat zero and that's what they you know

that's how they do things but there are many many other styles so you can choose to back the the local currencies with with real goods and services from the local community economy looking for my I had a an example here that I could share but I lost track of it but there was a one that was the deli dollars right so this is a very early example in the US where you know basically you had a deli and the bir share region of Massachusetts they need to change locations and they need to finance their ability to move from building to building and so what they decided to do was to pre-sell sandwiches from the deli right that you would only be able to

redeem after they moved um and so people purchased these so-called Deli dollars and that was what financed the move of the deli and then they were able to come in and redeem these for discounts on sandwiches for you know a period of time after the move was completed you can back them with USD or with your you know kind of Legacy fiat currency uh the positive of that is that it makes exchanging into and out of the currency uh much easier for Lay people people who are aren't used to this kind of thing and they just kind of want to buy their way in or have the ability to cash out you could back it as Once Upon time there was a banking crisis in Ireland and Guinness started issuing payroll

checks okay and small denominations right because all the banks were closed and nobody had any access to cash and so what happened was the pubs I mean it's Ireland became huge you know hubs of you know kind of community economy and exchange and the you know the pubs were basically using their tabs in a way as a decentralized credit system and then Guinness you know started issuing paychecks and low denominations so that people could use them as a circulating currency in that period as well so you had beer backed local currency which I think is just fabulous it feels like there's this this pocket of opportunity where if the Global Currency isn't working for local community either because we're late in the long-term debt cycle and that currency is spiraling or

just you're in the part of a part of the world that the monetary system just doesn't function for you the lack of utility of of the existing system kind of creates an an opportunity for people to take back their currency systems and similar to how the printing press created the ability for anyone to distribute their ideas and the internet did did sort of the same thing digitally now we can create sites and distribut our ideas it feels like there's something here where people are taking back their ability to issue currency and and saying hey the global system run by the elites is not legitimate and the legitimacy of the local relationships creates this little pocket of of local values and local

legitimacy that the global system just can't touch and you know I'm wondering if that's how you can sort of conceptualize the design space here it it feels like there's a lot of different really exciting experiments and creating local legitimacy in local trust within Community currencies and my mind goes to next is how do we design dalls with these thousands of years of lessons about local legitimacy and go from geographically local to mimetically local uh meme coins being indexed on on shared values or just funny memes and whether what are the lessons there so any reactions to to that oh yeah absolutely um you know as might be able to gather from my origin story earlier

uh this is fundamentally about you know kind of sovereignty ultimately this is about you know people having control over their own Destinies really uh you know and and and I designed for the scenario right that we were going through another financial crisis such as in 2008 I really you know I couldn't help but hold on to the visceral experience that we all went through during that time where money you know more or less just stopped moving because people were so panicked about what was all going to happen in the Fallout you know but ultimately that was all created that was all thanks to the the greed and recklessness right of a bunch of coacts on Wall Street who are gambling with the

rest of the country's money and that just didn't seem right right so my question was like why on Earth should you know small towns in Iowa right have a hard time putting food on the table because some gambling addicts and New York City decided to crash the economy that just doesn't make sense so it really does creating your own currency you know creates a a a membrane creates a a bubble it creates a space for just that economy to be the priority and and you know you you can actually see this in our own history as we were beginning to break away from the British and the colonial era we started issuing our own scripts so that we could transact without having to pay the the taxes to

the crown like this is that that was one of the reasons why the paper tax was such a problematic thing was because they were looking to to to tax all of the like Colonial on Colonial economic activity and that just didn't it didn't work let me let me see if I can connect that back to the to the you know from play based to mic thing and how do we Design Dallas the critical thing here is is is the transparency right learning how to collaborate in O in the open right and to have you know the systems that you know basically just provide the kind of transparency we expect from the government anyway but clearly aren't getting and you know that does require you know the um the community have a

level of Consciousness and assertiveness right to be mindful of its own kind of situation and Circumstance and to make decisions about uh where they want to Target uh that resource of course there's a lot of caveats around how do that responsibly but yeah that's the general gist it feels like there's something with the long-term debt cycle here uh I'm not sure how many of our listeners have read Ray Doo's the changing world order but basically the idea is that the dominant currency or economic system changes roughly 80 years and the beginning of that world order is period of an expansion and everyone's doing really well but over time these currencies get captured by the elite and then they're not really serving the everyday people and then that's when the world order changes and it also feels

like a Time when when Community currencies might we need to revisit the local because the the global World Order is isn't working anymore and I know there's a lot of people in crypto that feel like we're in a time right now where the US dollar is being inflated and they worry about it becoming a hyperinflated currency and there's this changing World Order what role do you see for Community currencies in the year 2024 what are the most promising experiments for for you right now yeah really appreciate that point Kevin because I'm also a r doio fan you know and that that kind of perspective is you know what I would describe as you know kind of the background in

interdisciplinary political economics right it's like this major zoomed out view of power and history and you know the various eras that we exist within um and I think he's absolutely spot on that you know we are and I mean bro it's not like you got to look hard for it open up Instagram or the news and you'll see the decline of the American Empire so I I I think that that's absolutely right and you know the the way that the dollar was put in this unprecedented privileged position in the course of the Breton Woods monetary agreement at the end of World War II um is is is just like kind of insane you know and especially once you realize

that that that was not the only proposal that was on the table uh there was like a more Equitable and fair proposal that was on the table that was a function of EF schoemer and let's see I think it was KES right who put forward the bankor proposal I could feel free to go you know Google that and tell me I'm wrong but the bankor proposal was about you know maintaining a healthy balance of trade between you know kind of a more Equitable International group of states right rather than putting one currency as you know the gatekeeper um and that that that is what basically fueled American exceptionalism and the 20th century and you know even the the war machine right because we

basically had no downside to just printing cash because there is a constant demand for US dollars in other central banks other Central Bank so so what the dollars hemony created was a situation where foreign central banks required US dollars in order to issue their own currencies so basically everybody had to wait for us to issue dollars spend it on whatever we wanted to spend it on most likely the military and then that would somehow end up in their central banks uh vaults and then they would be able to issue their own currencies afterwards and so that meant as far as you know the the pecking order for the global economy we always got to

go first we always had first mover Advantage um and now finally we're seeing a movement away from that right with the bricks uh structure creating alternative uh Reserve Solutions so that people are not wholly dependent on the dollar uh you know as we know which became the Petro dollar Etc um which means that over time the demand for those dollars from those central banks and foreign economies will go down and so my concern is what kind of an impact is that going to have on the American middle class right on regular people um who are already struggling you know we know that we are over half of us have less than $1,000 in the bank right and like a solid 40% of us couldn't survive

a $500 emergency like we're a population that exists in a state of great economic precarity and you know my general theory here is that we took globalization too far we have over globalized based on the false belief that there would be no consequences to you know burning oil and shipping things all the way around the world all all the damn time um and we're realizing like hey wait a second like that the oceans are like basically on fire you know if you see that one graph of the surface uh temperature of the oceans and this year it is just way outside the average the the like Zone and it's like so obviously

so we realize that we need to uh dial things back and kind of recircularized production and consumption so that we can avoid you know boiling the planet any further so as far as you know the modern case examples let's see I mean again Will's work is ongoing and outstanding uh the Hudson Valley currents are live I'm always inspired by my dear Stephanie rarick's work in Madison Wisconsin uh her mutual Aid Network work there is outstanding um she's had a line on Mutual Aid as the key theme for a long long time I think we're playing with a couple themes here we're playing with the local versus the global I think our friend vest likes to talk about Cosmo

local which is the combination of the cosmos the global with the local we're playing with the relationship between the elites and the the everyday people and we're playing with the ideas of basically mimetically local versus versus globally local I'm wondering I'm wondering how the lessons from Community currencies translate into Dow and memec coin design probably a lot of people in the audience are are Dow designers or maybe messing around with meme coins what what have we learned in thousands of years of community currencies and and specifically the people that you just talked about who are doing stuff you know what what what other principles can we can we adopt yeah absolutely wouldn't be right to to fail to mention Elan or ostrom's

principles for governing the common of course right that's that's foundational stuff and I you know listeners to this podcast who already encountered the green pill book will likely recall there's a page on that that has those on there at the end of the day this is this is all about building trust right and and either we're building that trust on the human to human level right or we are intermediating that with some technology where it's like I'm going to trust what I do on that technology or what I read from that technology but it's still all groups of humans sharing some kind of purpose that's kind of what what I feel is the the catchall to both of these circumstances is shared resources for

shared purposes right and it just so happens in the course of Designing multiple Community currency models and multiple token economies I found that there's this common underlying pattern of you know what a an open collaboration looks like and and I mean that in kind of a functional sense and I was able to develop a framework for mapping you know what could become a dow right a cause for an organization in a way that you know focuses on like who is there and where is where are these touch points right and where is the value flowing that is essential to this and so uh it's about being clear about what your your your shared purpose is uh it's

about working with the stakeholders who are involved in that shared purpose right if you're working on housing then you know you're going to have to go deal with all of the stakeholders that are involved in housing right regardless of whether or not you like them you know you at least kind of need to go do whatever level of requirements Gathering you can with that type of stakeholder to make sure that you are designing something that is feasible and is viable yeah I would say the the consistent thing is you know moving at the speed of trust and being transparent about you know when we're issuing units what are those going towards like what kind of behaviors are we incentivizing right and then how is that benefiting the whole

and then what happens from there right so there's basically four stages to the life cycle of a currency or a token right there's like the the minting of it right it comes into into existence there's the issuance of it how that gets into circulation right there's the circulation of it what are we going to do with it once it's out there right and then there's the eventual Redemption of it for some kind of value whether that is you know tokens in a reserve pool or it's a slice of pizza depends on the model in question right yeah it's really fascinating I I think there's a lot of deep lessons here but I'm also mindful that the design space is a little bit different I feel like in in the old

world in the local communities we have trust based off of face-to-face interactions if I you over I'm gonna have to see you again and that's just not true in these digital communities we also have sort of a multi-tenancy communities where I'm a member of maybe 15 probably 100 different uh communities and a lot of them I just add them to Discord and then I just deprioritize whereas with a local community when I see you face to face and we're geographically local with each other there's not the ability to sort of of multi-tenant between different communities as much and and just the way trust is built online is is so different than the way it is locally so it feels like there's some challenges as we move into the new design space but also some deep lessons that are very high Lindy uh

effect which means that they've been tested over over many years yeah absolutely I think you're right about that well I guess we're getting towards the bottom of the episode I'm curious if you have any props that you want to show off I know that you showed already the local currencies that that that you have um I'd love to do a little show and tell with with the other props that you've got there yeah sure man so one thing that I've got here this is a like there's only five of these okay so what we're looking at is a bound volume of all of the our toown newsletters that were created in itha these were created by a gentleman by the name of Paul glver he's the one who created the Etha hours and whose shoes I

attempted to fill in my own work Etha one of the things that I love about this is that you know it it it's so much about storytelling right it's it's not only focused on the exchange value of the currency but it's about like what are we getting done and you know what can we aspire to and what are we celebrating as a community Through the use of this um and it's also so it's up and down the socioeconomic stack it's not just the money it's the culture that you're building uh the money was called what was it called itha bucks itha hours Pi that hour okay yeah it has these really lovely like handrawn infographics just going to do my best to position it there for the the ones on YouTube but it's a it's really a delight it's I kind

of view this as a a t of spells from you know a forgotten age but this is how it used to be done right you you you have people come together for like a potluck you talk about stuff right and then they had this newsletter they would issue you know once a month or whatever it was and you can advertising for that uh in that for the local currency so you instantly kind of create a sync for the local currency that you're issuing these two things tend to go together really well um the other thing that I brought along is this super cool standard catalog of depression script of the United States inside the 1930s including Canada and Mexico um and this is just an incredibly incredible compendium of examples of

community currencies that emerged in the Great Depression and they were all issued by different communities some of them were issued by tax authorities as tax anticipatory notes Google that for a fun time some were issued by school districts some by Community Finance corporations uh it is just like a treasure Trove right of innovative ways of thinking about Community Finance so this's just kind of you know I I I like to share these things in these kind of communities just so that people in web 3 get the memo that like hey it it didn't all with Bitcoin right and if you like my hot take for the day Bitcoin is the original shitcoin it's not good it's not good I know it's made a bunch of people super

wealthy but it's not good you know like we've already seen how crazy ways will proof of work is as a a hashing algorithm like we can get the same benefits right as far as like you know transaction finality immutability etc etc for a fraction of the cost in electricity so at this point you could kind of think of of Bitcoin as like kind of this hostile AI right which bribes humans into taking on its cause right by having some of its limited tokens um and then it's just forever going to increase in its appetite for electricity on the planet so you know if you're looking for the end of the world from AI then

Bitcoin is an easy place to find an example well I like you know one of the things I'll say is your conception of the these Community currencies as an egregor um basically uh for those of you who don't know that word an egregor is basically a shared psychic thought form uh basically it's traditionally associated with witchcraft where you're doing like a seance together and you create an egregor but you can think of a lot of networks as aggregor like crypto Twitter is an aggregor and and uh Bitcoin talk is is an aggregor and in in thinking about these different Community currencies the network of humans and the shared thought form they create as different aggregor that have different value sets in different different scales to them you know Bitcoin and US Dollars

kind of being the Godzilla egregores and then things like I I don't know uh let's call a or or compound or or give from giveth at being these smaller egregor that are that are powerful on on different value vectors and and seeing them all interact with each other and sort of e and flow together and compete for attention which is one resource out there but also Capital out there it it feels like we're in this really interesting time of the mixing of a lot of different value systems and and these aggregor are going to be competing with each other and it's really consequential which one wins in the year 2030s for how economics move together so um you know

you've expressed a distaste for Bitcoin but I'd also I'd love to ask you know which which egregore which Community currencies in the digital realm in the dowas space are do you think are doing it right and where would you like to see us double down it's a good question um I as you know there's not people doing it no no no there are there are thankfully and and that's one of the things Kevin that I that I'm that that gives me hope you know that my handle is the token Jedi so I I have strong feelings about hope I think that hope is one of our most precious resource to work with so one of the things I'm very thankful for is that you know now more than ever before we have you know what what have come to be called public good funding resources including gitcoin and

Beyond right that are changing the rules of allocating Capital right the theme of the whole uh season here right but what that is enabling us to do is to build up these infrastructures uh that Empower communities in ways that just would not get funding otherwise right so I'm really uh encouraged to see those things coming online uh even though you know getcoin doesn't have a coin per se love it by the way but you know the green pill network is is is a great example of this and I've been working with refi Dow uh this year uh both in terms of their di ification working group uh which I co-led using the model that I was speaking to earlier which I referred to as the value flow Compass uh and then

also the local nodes program so that's where people are organizing in their own locations all around the globe to create a more regenerative economy and thinking of you know ways to use tokenization and incentive design to do that right but the critical qualifier there is that you're creating a regenerative value flow not just not just slaving away for shareholder value you know so yeah I would say just to name one right quala is a fantastic example out of Canada of you know coming up with a regenerative financial model for preserving uh Force right I think that is absolutely a fantastic group happy to give them a shout out well

that's really cool to to hear where your hope comes from it helps my my hope uh be brought forward also and hopefully for the listeners as well I have one last question for you this is the question I ask all guests toward the end of the episode if you are maximally successful in 10 years what does the world look like so project us out to 2034 what is the ecosystem of community currencies and in your work look like well uh so things that go right okay well first and foremost we have recircularized local economies right so that we're way less dependent on shipping uh shipping things you know I mean it's just crazy man you go out there and look at the r of shipping and

stupid stuff we do will just blow your mind I mean it's just such incredible waste uh creates so many incredible negative externalities that are coming right back at us in the form of cataclysmic weather events so we got to knock that off but I see a future where people both Co cosmically and locally right have a much more accessible and Democratic economy and this is powered by digital Market spaces uh where people are able to align the value that they have with the values that they hold so to use a very timely example if you are someone who is protesting the genocide in Gaza

and you don't want to participate in supporting the Israeli economy and you want to desize your economic activity and you want to participate in the BDS movement I boycott divest in sanction um then there will be markets that are available for you that are free from Israeli produced goods and services that's kind of the E exclusionary way of doing things um there would also be digital markets that are only available for people who produce goods and services locally so if you want to keep your money in the local economy that becomes very easy this kind of a market scape if you will is complemented by a great range of monetary plurality which is what you just referred to there we've got you know thousands and thousands

tokens and currencies that are out there people will I I hope let's let's say everything goes right that means people have you know finally realized that you you can't have this much unconscious energy in money and this is where like the whole Consciousness study really shows up uh is that you can't have this much unconscious energy around money and around capital and not end up with uh so people are much more mindful of the the connection between the they participate in an economy and the currencies that they accept and the currencies they hold and the things that

they invest in are all creating the future right and so there it becomes much easier for people to earn and Save spend in alignment with the values that they have which you know ostensibly and hopefully are about leaving a better world for our children and our grandchildren than the one we inherited that's what it looks like to me that's a great place to end it well Scott we've got some links to your profile in the show notes so listeners can te check you out at the token jedi.com and you are on twitter.com the token Jedi anything else you want to call out in case listeners want to learn more about your work or Community currency I would recommend uh checking out the

international journal for Community currency research if you would like to find more academic resources around this they are connected with the ramix organization that has a biannual uh conference this year it will be in Rome in November so if this is something that you're interested in or passionate about I would be looking at that I would also encourage people to check out the collaborative Finance uh community and event that's the Kofi event where we came up with the mic I meem they're having the second annual event this year in Bosnia at the end of June I believe it is also check out informal systems work and cycles. money I think I think it's cycles. money uh they are basically translating uh some work out of Slovenia

and Sardinia and Italy where networks of of of businesses and others in the local economy can automatically create cost savings by submitting invoice uh it's really radical stuff so a lot of really good resources out there you just kind of got to know where to look uh definitely feel free to hit me up uh not on Twitter so much but I do exist and you can find me at the token jedi.com amazing thanks for com so much for coming on the the green pill podcast this is great my pleasure bro thanks for having me all right we just heard from Scott Morris really excited about Community currencies and the work that Scott has done I also think that there's a lot of threads to pull on community currencies especially if we're designing

mically local currencies through ethereum or Cosmos or any of the other tools that allow us to to take the currency ideals away from the globalists away from the elites and bring them back to to local place so I think this was a really fun episode thanks for listening to the green pill podcast again we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive sum digital systems to the world like Scott Morris like the people who have been working on community currencies if you value our work you can collect this episode go to pods. medgreen pill to find all the episodes and to start collecting shout out to zerox Lucas who is the top collector of a recent episode and while you're here please make an

offering to our algorithmic overlords Please Subscribe rate and review it really helps people find green pill and the regen movement until next time see you later peace and love