As an accountant and a “performance measurement guy”, Mark Anielski understands global economics and GDP, but is interested in how we measure happiness and wellbeing as opposed to measuring output in financial terms.

In his conversation with Ben, he discusses

• The difficulty we all have in understanding where money actually comes from
• How money is created ex nihilo (”out of nothing”), and why this is a problem
• The history of our relationship with money
• A question around the translation of the Lord’s Prayer that relates to debt

Further reading

• An Economy of Well-Being, Mark’s book
• Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index
• Herman Daly
• 30 Lies About Money, by Peter Koenig
• Sacred Economics, by Charles Eisenstein
• the Great Reset
• GameStop Crash Wipes Out $5 Billion in Market Value
• And Forgive Them Their Debts, by Michael Hudson
• Hungry ghost
• The Big Short (2015)
• Paul Moore (the HBOS whistleblower)

Hello there.

Welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

The series of conversations with entrepreneurs, advisers, activists,

and academics, intending to inspire you and maybe challenge with ideas

from the margins, the periphery.

Because that's where the ideas which we're going to shape tomorrow are hiding

today, on those margins, the peripheries.

This week, I spoke to Mark Anielski.

Mark's an economists and expert in the economics of wellbeing.

He's written a couple of books about it.

You'll find those in the show notes.

In this conversation, we talk about his work with the first

nation people of Canada.

And we also talk about money, but maybe not, as you would think.

Do you know where the money in your pocket comes from?

No, I didn't either.

Hope you enjoy this conversation.

Mark, welcome to Peripheral Thinking.

Maybe we should dive right in.

Could you start by telling us a little bit about your work?

So my focus has been on measuring wellbeing as an kind of fundamental

operating principle of economies.

Because word wealth comes from the old English, it means the

conditions of wellbeing and happiness means wellbeing of your soul or

wellbeing of spirit from the Greek.

So I, I spend my time as a consultant.

I working primarily with first nations in Canada and trying to advance this,

what we might call a sovereign wellbeing economy based on their traditional

wisdom understanding of creation of nature of laws, and so that's been my

passion for the last last five years as a consultant, but I've worked around the

world and it was most recently in London, in September on another crazy mission.

Sometimes I think I'm like one of the blues brothers like mission from God,

and I don't know what's going to happen next, but every step is perfectly ordered.

When you talk about the.

The kind of book that you wrote in 2007, so in fall in kind of shorthand style.

So is that talking to a lot of what I know as all kind of people might know what the

sort of government of Bhutan were kind of famous for is that a similar idea?

That's correct.

The Butan advance what's called the gross national happiness idea?

that actually back in 1972, the king of bhutan.

But he, it never became very public and for many years but he kind of tongue in

cheek said, why are we measuring gross domestic product, which came out of world

war II really as a measure of economic progress, when in fact certainly the

Buddhist Bhutan is a Buddhist kingdom, what is the ultimate goal of life?

The happiness.

Aristotle said that the Buddhist said that, so yeah.

So my work relates to that, but really as an economist saying What are the

actual, what's the science of happiness?

What are the determines building blocks of wellbeing?

I'm a performance measurement guy.

So I know how GDP is cooked, or I know the recipe I need on the secret recipe.

And so my work has been well can we stablish new accounting systems

at different levels from the nation level down to the corporate level that

actually measures as Bobby Kennedy said, the things that make life worthwhile.

In other words, the genuine wealth, that's the word like coin is like

genuine wealth, meaning the conditions of wellbeing that align with what we

value most to live with ethically.

So this is heavy stuff.

It's a, it goes back to Greek philosophy and, an indigenous philosophy of,

what is it that constitutes the human being and our human journey.

And it's not the pursuit of money.

And so my other inquiry has been from, since I call it by calling

a Jerusalem in 1992, when at that stage of my life, I was not married.

And it was thinking about whether I should be a monk or spend the rest

of my life in prayer, in a monastery.

And God said, no, I don't.

I want you to go into the temple of the money changers and figure out how

to redesign the global money system.

And I like, okay, sure.

And a year later I was married and I've been pursuing this,

what I call it, civilization of love operating model ever since.

And it's some people say what a joke, here we are, in a two years into a pandemic

and for me COVID was a wake-up call.

It's okay.

Showtime, it's time to actually try to advance this wellbeing economy idea,

pragmatically and a new money system.

And so the conversation that we touched on just before Christmas and interested

in now was, I think I had also read one of the things something that you heard

written, which I'll include reference to, which was talking about debt essentially.

And I think it was actually, I read a thing which was about the kind of

cost of debt and how that was related to the kind of climate crisis or as a

potential solution to, to the climate crisis, given that the kind of cost of

servicing debts and the kind of weight that, that puts on effective, I think

you were talking about, it was 52 cents of every dollar that everyone's in the U

S and which will be the equivalent here effectively going to servicing a debt.

So this kind of this push to growth being seeded back to the debt question.

That's right.

And so my mentor, Herman Daly was the one of the fathers of ecological

economics back in 99 and Washington, I went to visit him and he said, I said

you're interested in this relationship between debt and GDP and economic growth.

And he said, mark, this, could this be the most important inquire of your

career to figure out how this all works.

And so I came to the conclusion that even bark Carney when he

was bank of England's governors.

98% of the money that we call money is created as a debt.

When banks issue loans, I'm like hold on a minute, he's verified something that

some of us have known for a long time, but one guy like Mark Carney, who's from

Edmonton says that, then you're like, wait a minute, stop hit the pause button

BBC, and let's unpack what he just said.

And what he was saying is that all money is debt all money, except the

2% per pound Sterling, whatever, Canadian dollars us dollars, but that's

small portion of what we call money.

And then you have to, so what I did is I started to look at what statistics

do I need to track to understand what the actual money supply is.

And it logically be the total amount of debt in an economy.

Private debt, household, government debt, business debt.

And so I found those just sticks from the federal reserves data.

Because that was, I always have a hunch, the system will brag about

certain things and that, that was his bragging table, Uh, members called

D3 and schedule Z1 or something.

Total amount of outstanding debt in the United States.

I'm like, okay.

So that is the actual money supply in the United States.

And guess what?

It never stops growing so well, how fast does it grow?

Well, since 1947, the total amount of debt has been doubling

around seven to eight years.

Oh, that's interesting.

Okay.

So that debt has a interest cost to it, right?

Because every credit card balance or every mortgage, or every government

bond has an interest coupon on it.

What's the cost of that total amount of interest being paid by all of us and

the economy while there's no official number, cause they don't report that.

So what I have to do is calculate what the average interest rate say is on all

the mortgages in Britain or Canada or whatever, and then calculate all of these.

So we have all these debt line items and you calculate the interest, what you

think is the interest cost of that debt.

And what I know as an economist, that interest payment is embedded in GDP.

It's embedded in every expenditure of our households.

Has to be.

Even though you don't see it on your receipt at the, till the grocery store

or whatever, a gas station it's there.

And that's how I came up with this estimate of over 50% of the average

American is spending 50% of their income on hidden interest charges.

It's even higher in some countries counters around 65.

Primarily because mortgages are, are so important and dominant right in the

Canadian household spending profile.

But hardly anyone talks about this.

There's no official accounting of this.

And my argument has been well, if that's true, then all the other things

that we're talking about, climate change, you think about it, right?

GDP is connected to greenhouse gas emissions, there's high correlation.

Therefore what's actually driving GDP growth?

As Herman Daly said, you have to maintain an economic growth commensurate

with the rising level of debt and the rising costs of interest payments.

And even at the lowest rate of interest in our lifetime we

still have very high levels of interest payments in the economy.

So you can't solve climate change.

In my opinion without Dealing with this problem.

And nobody talks about it.

It wasn't a disgusted Glasgow.

It's not part of the UN sustainable development goals.

It's just missing.

It's an agreed.

Yes.

It's a terrible thing to go undebated.

I mean, It's interesting, isn't it?

Because it links to also the fact that this whole topic of money is quite

undebated and undiscussed really.

And actually, so there's only like for myself, I read a book a few

years ago by I think he was actually a management consultant who was

called Peter Koenig and he wrote a book called 30 Lies About Money.

And so in that kind of, he just shines a light on some of the things which are all

of us are willfully blind towards, and that was the first time I had read anybody

articulated the thing you're talking about the fact that, where does money come from?

And we were talking about this before Christmas.

I, then it was really planted a seed with.

I was then bothering my own children, nephews, nieces, kind of kids of

all ages, basically just asking the question where money comes from.

I don't know.

Of course actually it's that thing.

It's the phrase in my mind, the it's as if it's the water in which we swim,

isn't it's ever so much everywhere.

Somehow.

It's not something that we discuss all we debate.

And to your point around your relationship to climate change,

but also money in general.

I think if I did a sort of straw poll walking down my road to the kids' school

or wherever it might be and asked everyone along the way, where does money come from?

Actually, I don't know what people would think.

From the bank from the government would be maybe the kind of responses

that they give, but they don't really understand what that means.

They don't.

And there was a young, 20 year old Canadian who a few years ago, he just,

he did one of these street poles.

You just went around asking people where they thought money came from.

And most people, when they stopped to think about it, there were, they're

like the government prints it.

And even the finance minister, Paul Martin at the time was fumbling with his

co it was the one with the remarkable scene where he was like he was just

fumbling cause he didn't know the answer.

And then he blurts out well, before the money there was trade and

I'm like, this is just nonsense.

What are you talking about?

You don't you're the finance minister and you don't know.

That the origin of money is bank created loans.

And to some extent, government issued bonds when they go into deficit,

like COVID like, who's talking about how many bonds have to be issued

to pay us, to survive economically.

Nobody talks about it.

So what that kind of means practically.

So that, so if I want a mortgage for example, or something like that, so

obviously I go to the bank and the bank says, here's whatever thousands of pounds

to, as a contribution for your mortgage.

So that essentially is just debt, which is, that's not taken from an account over

here and put in my account over there.

It never existed prior to you stepping into the bank.

And if the teller of the loans officers showed you their computers

screen, try it out one day.

Maybe I'll see if they'd do it.

You know, normally the banker has a computer, like you're looking at

the back of the computer, right?.

and like, no, no, I want to see your computer.

Can I sit right next to you?

And can I watch your keystroke entries?

So you've asked, you've asked me a bunch of questions, Ben so do you have a job?

Yeah.

Oh, you're, self-employed, you're a bit, risk is a bit risky, whatever.

You got to, you got a good government job or so fine.

So they check you out, your legitimacy to even, receive a mortgage.

I always say the word mortgage means a death pledge in French, and so

it's wow, but you didn't know that.

And so you, you pre qualify for a mortgage because you have a

job and you have some collateral.

Oh, you have a motorbike or you have a car, like in case you

default, we could grab that.

And by the way, we'll grab your house too.

If you default they don't tell you all that fine print stuff.

And suddenly you walk out with say a 200,000 pound mortgage.

But the reality is the mortgage.

The money didn't exist prior to you coming into the bank.

And I'm like, hang on okay, show me that truth.

Show me if you could show me that 200,000 pounds came from the deposits

in the right, in the bank that those pounds were aligned with your mortgage.

I'll buy it, but that is not what happens.

And people like really I'm like, really, you go and ask a loans officer, go ask a

president of a bank to explain how this works and they will be chasing their tails

because they've never thought about it.

So that's why I'm saying having a bank as the best business in the planet because

you're creating money out of thin air.

In Latin, it's called ex nihilo, out of thin air, out of nothing.

And it's fitting that we as Latin fee it for money, which means to be

created out of light, like just nothing.

So money is a remarkable instrument that of que human creativity.

It has enormous power.

And the fact is we created it and therefore we can design it.

My whole point is we can design money anyway, to serve

any goal we want for society.

Do you want full employment and living wages?

Do you want to solve climate change?

You could solve all these things just by deciding that we will

only create as much liquidity.

I mean, It's fitting that we've used the water metaphor.

You think about it.

Liquidity currency banks are on water metaphors.

And we know something about water.

If you try to damn it or store it up, it has a way of breaking down

dams and breaking rock, and it follows this crazy serpentine path.

Like it's totally inefficient.

Like a river is totally inefficient, the way it moves.

So all these beautiful water metaphors we use for money.

And yet we don't treat the natural laws of nature with respect to money.

So in other words, money should actually be, if it was modeled after nature, like

the sun I've asked great for students, this question, where does money come from?

What do you think?

And then some kid says from trees and I'm like, it's true

in a way, my dad used to bug me.

Why do you think money grows on trees?

So it was my third book is stolen draft, money grows on trees.

And I'm like Yeah.

some part, but what gave the tree life, without expectation of a return?

They're like, whoa, look outside.

What do you see in the sky?

Can we mimic this?

Can we mimic money commensurate with the sun, with trees?

In other words, money could be super abundant, or it can

be made super scarce, right?

And so just so I understand, just to so the fact that 98% of money is

created is imagined out of thin air by banks who have the monopoly over that?

How, what, why is that a problem?

It's a problem because money is not democratized.

If money was democratized of all of us in the village decided how much liquidity

we needed to have a market and have a flourishing, everyone has at least

the ability to pursue a living wage, a meaningful life, meaningful work that

would change everything, wouldn't it?

So the issue is not the money system.

It's the, those who have the power, those who have the corporate charters,

those who have central banks, many of which are privately owned, like

the federal reserve one of the first experiments, the bank of England.

And we know the problem of, of the concentration of power as Abraham

Lincoln called him the money power.

And one of my favorite stories is Napoleon himself.

He thought he'd be smart and borrow the model, the Bank of England's model

called create the Bank Royale for France.

And at the end of the day, he got, he didn't just lose at

Waterloo, he lost his aspiration.

It was remarkable.

If you study his life, he wanted to democratize money for the French people.

And the guys in England basically said over our dead bodies,

you're never going to democratize money because if you democratize

money, it's over for all of us.

Now you could say all that you're into cuts.

I'm not into conspiracy.

I'm into this is business.

Those who control the issuance of money rule the world.

And so then if we did design a system based on kind of natural principles

that had abundance baked into it how, what a, what is that story?

How are we going there?

So what I've been developing and fortunate, I'm doing it with first

nations people here in Canada, the first peoples who have actually very ancient

laws of natural law, what we would call natural law in the church, on the

Catholic church, we called natural law.

And these are laws that are just fundamental to creation that all

wealth comes from the creator.

All wealth comes from God summit.

In other words, all wealth, meaning the conditions of wellbeing,

something Adam Smith never defined in the wealth of nations.

And I was jokes like why did he not define the word wealth in his whole

book on the wealth of the nations?

And I say that probably because he was Scottish, he couldn't admit that the

13th century English define the word wealth as that conditions of wellbeing.

Wela meaning wellbeing, the letters T H meaning the conditions of something.

So my argument is if money is related to the real wealth of a nation, the

people that live relationships, we have social capital, the land and the water,

natural capital, the built capital things we build, then money should

flow as a requirement to oxygenate the assets of the nation to, to achieve what

sort of an optimization of wellbeing.

Impacts wellbeing return on investment optimize the wellbeing conditions

in a society and not an equally distributed to the extent that nobody

should go without a living wage.

And I'm not arguing that everyone should be equal because my model's based on

that each person has a certain set of talents, gifts, or skills or capacities.

The indigenous people say every child born is an answer to a prayer.

And when you did your vision quest when you're 12 or 13, you received

a download from your relatives who were praying for you that, Ben,

you're going to be a good father, you're going to be a good accountant,

you're going to be a gun hunter.

And I'm like, okay.

That's why now when I go to school, What is school?

What is education in the law and means to draw forth what's

already within you from the lens.

That's what education means, but that's not what we understand it.

So my point is like all of these attributes of a genuine wealth

monetary system are all aligned to asking what's the best and highest

use word we use in real estate.

What's the highest and best use of any given asset class.

So our monetary authority, our governments are then comprised of we,

the people who collectively understand that each of us brings a unique

set of assets from ourselves, from our household and our neighborhood.

We're sitting in ecosystems called watersheds there's natural principles

and laws that govern ecosystems that we pay attention to, and

we don't create too much money.

First of all, we don't need that money anymore.

We just need a perfectly, super efficient liquidity system that creates just

enough money for sustaining these assets, maintaining your home, maintaining

infrastructure, dealing with climate, whatever, you know, like let's reduce,

let's find renewable energy options, let's reduce our carbon footprint.

All of those things are possible.

And that is a super efficient system.

Now people say that's really sounds really complicated.

I said, it is, it's more complicated than the current system because the current

system has this kind of wild west.

Like just create, the banks and create as much.

If you think about the paradox is the banks could actually do

everything I'm talking about.

They could create enormous amounts of debt and liquidity, but there's no discipline.

There's no guiding principals.

There's no values that underline the decision for a bank to issue loans,

except we just want to make more fees that we just want to profit maximize.

No, No, that's not why we gave you a corporate charter.

And I'm not saying we shut down the banks.

I'm saying, make the banks behave.

That the way that you want them to behave.

If you come in and you want a business loan, you should be expected to provide

a good business plan that says, I want to open a cafe or restaurant.

Wait a minute.

Like maybe there's too many restaurants already.

Maybe you're not going to survive.

You could try, but it would be right.

It would just not be mature or responsible to issue loans to companies that probably

are not going to survive anyways.

And all the commend through a grief that will come as a result

of you going bankrupt or whatever.

Anyway, so these are all very complicated.

And I'm saying that there?

is nothing in the world like this yet that I could see.

Even the indigenous people who have very ancient ways of thinking about money.

They didn't have banks and had no currency systems that use seashells womp them.

They wrote treaties were in Latin Sood grit generous meaning there were

relationships that were continually negotiated as the journey together, down

this river together between the crown and the indigenous people of north America.

Very interesting contracts, but always continually renegotiated as you

journey to meet a mutual, a mutuality of responsibility over the last.

Over Stewart.

It was stewardship.

That's why the king and the indigenous people signed treaties, right?

So anyways, I'm going off on again, I'm way at this tributary, but only

to to bring it back to what I'm trying to do with the first nations is can we

redesign a modern monetary system that is rooted in your ancient traditions

of knowing of that all wealth came from the crater we didn't create, right,

anything like we are tenders of the land.

We're farmers, we're stewards.

We don't hunt over hunt the deer.

Otherwise we'll start in five years.

So we, they take their clues from nature.

Nature is the model.

It is the teacher.

And money must be modeled after nature.

Otherwise we're in trouble.

Behind me, somewhere on the shelf I've got the book, which we, I know you, you're

very familiar with Charles Eisenstein's book sacred, a sacred economy,

the economics.

Yeah.

Charles and I are good friends.

I didn't, I realized that sitting in the UN in 2012, listening to the Bhutanese

prime minister, we sat next to each other and I'm like I said, hang on Charles.

This is, we're sitting in the wrong place in New York.

Aren't we?

And I said, he said, Yeah.

you're right.

I said, we should be sitting in George sources office.

We should be in wall street.

This conversation about happiness with all due respect to the prime

minister and the secretary general, this is the wrong place to be sitting.

And Charles said, you're right.

Is that I'm going to go at one o'clock he got up because I'm going

home, going back to Harrisburg.

And I can spend time with my kids, I'm like good for you.

Get back on the train.

Get out of here.

Listen, all the prince Charles, blah.

Bali's like politicians.

Talk about happiness, just what are we doing?

Cause I think my question reading his thing was how, because obviously

the kind of spirit of everything that he's articulating just makes sense.

You're the how guy.

Okay.

I love Charles.

But it was like, it's the how, and what I've been trying to do in my life

is like the practical, because I have this accounting background, I know GDP.

I know, I know monetary policy.

I know how the banks create the money.

And I know that I'm creative enough to propose a better system.

Now, the fundamental question is, Okay.

smarty pants after writing about it in 2007, why hasn't anything happened?

I said because if you think about it, the 2008 crisis, we

didn't learn anything from it.

And we didn't discipline the bankers, in fact, we gave them more money.

We bailed them out when a lot of those banks should have been

reprimanded or being allowed to go bankrupt, because they were playing

with crazy synthetic derivatives of money, and subprime mortgages.

And, and, And you look back in time, you look at when those decisions with

subprime, they were made by president Clinton and, and his advisors and

said, Hey, this is a great thing.

we need to get people who shouldn't get mortgages onto

and onto the debt treadmill.

And this is just ridiculous.

They knew what they were doing.

They had to have known the consequences and it, none of them are in jail.

Like at least in Iceland, they put some of those guys in jail

cause they're Vikings maybe.

But they're still operating.

And the debt is, keeps that the only thing that happened in 2008 was the

debt curve in the United States actually went sideways for the first time since

it never, it's never gone sideways.

th the, The PRI the private debt curve essentially did?

No, the total debt curve goes like this for about 18 months?

Which means shit, you're going to have, it's going to have a heart attack.

It has to keep.

And so then it presumes and COVID has just exploded the debt.

Like the debt is so far.

So the question is when the interest payments on the debt reach a hundred

percent of the GDP or whatever, or household spending, is that it is that

the blowout is that when we really, and so now we have these conversations at

world economic forum, the great reset, Klaus Schwab stuff's like, wait a minute.

These guys knew exactly what they were doing.

And I've always said, people said when is it going to end Mark?

You said in 2007, it could end very soon.

And then 2008 crisis hit.

And I said, I told you, I can tell, the game of musical chairs we played as a kid.

Like when will someone lift the needle off the record player

and the whole thing fall apart?

Well it, it could happen that way, or it could be a knock on effect where,

as we saw with both in the U S and in England with H boss collapse of

H boss, and, it could have caused this contagion where everything,

even in 1999, learn long-term capital management almost collapsed the system.

Cause there, there was these Harvard mathematicians playing with algorithms,

and it took Greenspan to step in and stop the, because these things may

have a way of unraveling just on their own mathematically once they start.

And one of the things I've observed, if you follow the

phenomenon of GameStop, that little and how the little guys, Right?

The 20 year olds were literally, they could have choked the hedge fund guys.

They could destroy the hedge fund market, but the boys stopped the trading.

Like, they have the power to stop the trading.

And but it could have all, and I'm saying what happened if another kind of game stop

but occur today where we all decide it's over all the sociopathic system that we

are ignorant of ends and we find a full democratization of money and it could be

through blockchain and it's not going to be, Bitcoin is going to be something else.

Bitcoin is not the answer.

The theorem is not the answer like these are, people say, what about Ethereum?

I'm like cute, but it's not wellbeing based.

I'm talking about a fully transparent wellbeing backed global.

And not just a global, but relevant to the ecosystem in which you live.

If you live in Ireland, we have a watershed called whatever, and it

has certain biological ecological capacity that are unique to Ireland

that are not, that are unique to Russia are unique to wherever.

And that's what I'm talking about and it's not, and I've got the accounting

systems too, to know that it's possible to operate these systems.

Now, the best I can do right now is I can play in Excel.

I can play in spreadsheets and show you a debt non debt based system in

which the savings are enormous, the cost savings just alone on interest.

I said, I can go, I can take you from a 40 hour work week to

a 20 hour work week like that.

Are you interested?

I'm gonna run for prime minute.

I am going to give you every bread at 20 hour work week, even with COVID even

staying, working at home, it's possible.

Oh, that would be, why would it be inflationary?

None of those things are true.

Why don't we do it at what's the consequences?

Because my argument is if I gave you a 20 hour work week, that means you

have 20 hours in our discretionary time to do what you know, play with

your kids more and go for walks more.

Are you going to cook more?

Are you going to spend time with your neighbors.

Or are you going to drink alcohol?

What are you going to do with the 20 hours?

I just gave you because before that for multiple generations,

your grandparents were debt slaves.

How much hours of life energy did people waste working just to pay for interest

that they had no understanding of?

This is the great crime against humanity.

So UK debt is something like two, just over 2 trillion pounds which I

think has gone up by something like a quarter in the, over the COVID times

or something extraordinary like that.

So the the UK government owe something like 2 trillion pounds in total.

And the other thing is of course, no one ever speaks about debt, they

always speak about the deficit.

So which number is also much smaller as far as the news is concerned, rather

than saying we owe 2 trillion pounds, it's always just a question around,

oh, it's a deficit and the deficit is this month or whatever it might be.

So apparently something like 40% of all of the money that the

government owes in our country.

And I guess it's similar-ish elsewhere.

Something like 40% of all the money owed to the bank of England.

So technically it owes the money to itself.

Exactly.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ben, for stating the obvious.

The problem is the 60% that's owned by owed two who are owned by who?

Now here's the interesting thing as with Canada.

So I did this mouth too.

So th Canada issued a 500 billion of new bonds.

So that's how governments balanced their budgets, right?

If they're in deficit, they have to sell that, which is called bonds.

And the controller or the finance minister here.

Here's the great thing.

I know I've asked the finance minister and controller in Alberta, how did you

create the 10 billion to balance a budget?

And he says uh, it's just, it's just paper.

It's you mean like this.

So you put $10 billion down and then what happened?

I signed my name to it.

And then what happened?

We took it to the market.

You, you sold it?

Who bought it?

I can't tell you.

What do you mean you can't 10 billion.

There's a lot there.

There's gotta be like fragments of this.

Gotta be contracts and invoices and.

Sorry, can't tell you what you can't tell an Alberton, how much w who's owning the

Chinese own it to the Brits, like bank?

Who come on.

This is ridiculous.

And, but that's the answer.

So you took a piece of paper, you wrote 10 billion on it and you were

able to sell it because we have a good credit rating or whatever people

perceive government debt or bonds is like totally, risk appropriate.

But in the case of Canada, 500 billion, and people go, wait a minute, 500

billion seems like it's a big number.

You know how big it is?

Prior to the COVID, the amount of outstanding federal debt was 740 billion,

which had been accumulating since 1974.

Wait a minute, we added 500 billion, additional debt to

that 35 years of, you know, and nobody talks about who bought it.

And then you check, oh, wait a minute.

Let's check the Bank of Canada's balance sheet, the Bank of Canada, it looks

like it purchased most of that debt.

And to your point, wait a minute, the Bank of Canada is owned by us.

We are the shareholders of the Bank of Canada.

It's not a private bank, like the U S federal reserve.

So why would be pay interest on our own debt?

And why wouldn't we just after the pandemic.

It's a war.

It's like we did in world war two.

We sold war bonds to Canadians with a zero coupon rate and a 10 year life.

In other words, we lend our money to the Canada Canadian government

so they could beat the Germans.

And I said, it's no different today.

This is a war on a virus and when the virus, when the pandemics over I hope

the Bank of Canada just strikes the pen through the debt and says it's over.

And if you think about a logically, all that money, that 500 billion went into

our pockets so that we could survive and pay the bills and the mortgages.

And so the money spent you say it's inflationary.

No, it's not.

It's not really.

If you, if they gave us too much money and we didn't actually need 2000,

roughly $2,000 a month was given, then could argue 2000 was just enough.

Like it was a living wage.

But then if you start to look now again, it's wait, how much of that

government COVID debt money was bought by the private markets?

Then we've got a problem because now we're paying interest on this private

market held debt, which to my earlier point exacerbates the 52 cents now it

goes to something higher, or 75 cents or whatever, these will vary by nation.

But that's it, isn't it because we should have never privatized that COVID debt.

No way.

And the interesting thing too is I don't think the private sector

even had the capacity to buy all that, that they w they themselves

would have never taken on that much.

So in the you're talking like four or 500 a billion, which again,

these numbers become meaningless.

Our brains called compute them, but, four or $500 billion

in Canadian dollars in debt.

But I think it's the increase in the UK government that is like

400 billion pounds, which is, the

I mean, It's actually smaller on a per capita basis and you've got 60 whatever

million we have 38 million, you're yeah.

Okay.

1.6 times 400 is whatever.

So it's, I would, it would be interesting to compare countries and

see on a per capita basis, how much government COVID debt was created.

And what's interesting is savings rates actually increased as these these and a

lot of people just said, hang on a minute.

If government just pays me 2000 a month forever which won't be

the case then why would I go back to my minimum wage job, and.

Exactly.

You basically said a guaranteed income as possible because

you created the bond to do it.

And that's the other point I make is like all this climate change stuff.

I said, do you know what the government could create special purpose instruments

called climate bonds or whatever.

They could create very unique instruments to solve the biggest problems we face.

And make them special purpose so they have a clear like green bonds

have a very special purpose, right?

So right.

The term sheet.

So it's this is what this instrument's going to do.

And these are the expected outcomes.

So a lot of the work that I do, my background is as an entrepreneur, but

involved with setting up businesses, I do a lot of work with people who

start businesses and are in that thing.

And like I say, over the last year and a half, two years, I think everybody's

a little bit embarrassed to admit it, but many of them have had the best

fucking two years that they've ever had.

Exactly you and I included party like, wait a minute.

I didn't have to travel And I didn't have the buy anyone lunch or coffee like, Ooh,

Yeah.

And CA and their clients are spending money and it's all it's a lot of that

is go, but it's, I'm really curious.

So all of this money that was issued, so all of this debt was bought.

So like in the UK, let's say whatever, 800 billion pounds worth of money

is owned by the Bank of England.

Just so I can understand, like when the w where did that money come from?

So the Bank of England they've just issued that's also effectively made up

money somewhere because the bank doesn't have any gold or anything anymore.

I know that was sold long time ago,

Now they're just Canada Trudeau sold every last time.

Like where's the gold on to come on.

It's not all in Manhattan, I hope.

See the bank of England or the bank of Canada exists as

a sovereign national bank.

So it's an arm of the parliament, right?

It's an, so it's accountable to parliament, not like the federal

reserve, that's different.

So every sovereign central bank simply acts as a manager of

inflation and all these things.

So I'm trying to strike really plain language, but the point is it's the

finance minister, him or herself, which, who issues government.

The bonds, then the bank of England or Canada can buy those bonds.

And sometimes what's happening with the Bank of Canada is some of that COVID

bonds are now being sold to the private market and I'm like no, stop that.

Who gave you permission to do that?

There's has never been a debate about this, because if you privatized that

COVID debt, then we're in trouble in my opinion, because there could be a

debate in the parliament, say we're going to, we're going to dictate the

Bank of England to write off that COVID debt because it's pandemics over.

We didn't see, we only needed the money as an emergency, infusion

of cash to keep things going.

But once it's back to a normalized.

Now, all that said, we still haven't solved the debt money system thing at all.

Nothing's changed in that regard.

So the GDP has to keep growing, still growing, even in a post

pandemic and people say, oh, it wasn't a gray, we paused the whole

world of planets breathing easier.

We will go back to the same treadmill unless what's

interesting is for information.

We are in the Jewish calendar year 5 72, which is actually, we are in the middle of

the Jubilee year and the Jubilee year, all debts and all wealth was to be forgiven

and all wealth would be redistributed.

Now this goes back to the ancient Sumerian clean slate laws.

So the Jews adopted those ancient Samarian laws and called the Jubilee.

And then my question is why aren't we having a discussion in 2022 in

January about what the world could do to have a great Jubilee, a proper

reset, and wipe out all the debt in the world, because it's possible.

Now it would require everyone to agree though, because one

country could not do it on its own without having repercussions.

So when we hear language like the great reset or the, the UN

development goals, I'm like, there's, where is this discussion?

Whether it's in churches or the rabbis or across all faiths, Islamic

communities, they know this, they're not allowed to have interest.

This is a huge issue that I don't see any.

Meaningful debate around.

And I guess in really super simplistic terms, the reason the kind of war you

run up against it goes back to this thing around power, because at the

moment, the kind of money system and all of that is then inextricably linked

with power or, so it's reinforcing some power centers within that.

And so the own new way of having the conversation around this is by directly

challenging those power structures.

challenging it, but also educating like we're doing right here.

We're having to discussion people, and I think it's ignorance and

naivety that are raelly to the benefit of those who have the power.

And I'm saying that from a perspective, I know a lot of people who, once they

realize this, how this game works, they get some people just enraged.

They can't believe that this kind of injustice continues and

has been going on for centuries.

Like I referenced in, Napoleon's go ask the Polian, what if, what

are you would've done differently.

So this is a very, very ancient, longstanding issue, but I think the

only way to solve this is to have a transparency and understanding.

If you look at Medicis, right, in, in Italy, the reason they became the dominant

bankers of Europe is because of Luca Pozzuoli and Leonardo DaVinci designed

the double entry bookkeeping system.

500 years ago, right?

After the big plague, the black plague, the Renaissance happened

that Luca, using ancient Samarian, mathematics, debits equals credit,

which is inspired by nature, Fibonacci.

One-to-one always one-to-one for every entry, there's an offsetting, right?

Except there was something flawed on Luca.

So the Mdicis became like, I believe the Medicis became the central.

They became the Jesuit, which was, became the bankers of the Vatican

because they knew the Rothschilds and they all knew that if we have the

part of control, issuance of money through loans, we will always dominate.

So that is not to say they're bad people.

They're just good business people.

And.

So that's why the Metta cheese were so successful and other bankers in Europe.

So you have to go through this very long sweet sweep of history.

Now, the interesting thing is, you know, I go back to an interesting

phrase and so Jesus gives us the Lord's prayer in Matthew.

And he doesn't say, we've been saying the word trespasses

forever in the Lord's prayer.

But in fact, the original language is forgive us, our debts.

As we forgive our debtors.

And Michael Hudson, brilliant economic historian, who has written

all about the history of debt, 5,000 years of compound interest, all of

this stuff, his latest books, call called And Forgive Us Our Debts.

And I'm like, this is what just restoring the original language

makes us think about, wait a minute.

He said debts and debtors.

I know what that is.

I don't know what a trespasses, I think it's a property violation, but why

did the church change the language?

And if our mindset, if we suddenly were more conscious,

that actually was about money.

Jesus turned over the money changers in the temple.

Why did he get angry at the money changes?

What was it about money?

And the transactional thing that happened in the temple was you had to

exchange your normal shekel for a temple shekel in which she could then buy an

animal sacrifice to put on the Piring.

And he said no, this is not how God works.

You go directly to God.

You can talk directly to my father.

So forget.

So debts become an encumbrance to the relationship with the divine.

So it breaks and it causes us to do strange things and behave.

In congruent with a God of love.

So that's been my main focus now.

It's like, how do we get back to reestablishing a covenant relationship

we have, and this is why the indigenous people are so powerful and important

to me because they remember they exist only because the creator,

because God allows them to exist and they treated money very carefully.

They use seashells as a proxy.

They had elaborate forms of exchange and laws of mutuality

or understanding of reciprocity.

Whereas the west went into this beginning really in ancient China,

you know, sort of agreed centered system in which those who can control

the issuance of money rule the world.

I kind of wonder you feel it, it feels like these are the kinds of debates which

should be happening in universities, obviously not under the architecture

of the economics department, but it's if because students obviously

understand debt, they understand these things because that's the currency

of the world in which they operate.

And also, if you were going to, cause I was thinking like before.

How you would start to further this debate even politically.

And of course, like if you think about the mainstream political parties,

they are all so concerned by appearing economically sound, you know, nobody

is going to pick up a point of view, which is seen as contentious or opposed

to the system, because they would see that as compromising themselves so that

they're not the route to go through.

You can't go that way.

So it's where can you on the peripheries on the margins start to bubble up

kind of understanding around this.

And I wonder whether sort of the students for all of the obvious reasons,

whether that is a kind of place to go,

No you're right, Ben.

I've always, when I.

Give presentations at the university.

And I taught for 10 years in the school of business here.

And I taught corporate ethics or corporate social responsibility.

And some of the students that was a joke, and I said, I'm going

to give you one lecture on money and you do your own homework.

And then you come back and let's talk about what's possible.

Because out of your imagination, we, now we have blockchain, we have all

these other, interesting platforms that 25 and 30 year olds are working on.

And I'm like, I'm excited.

Like, so, you know, I've come up with a model called soulprint wellbeing, which

is, came from my trip to Singapore.

I was thinking hang on if time, hours of life lived is all we have in common.

You have your born Banyard glasses already Mormon, you're born, it's

700,000 grains of sand and that's how many hours you have to live.

Okay.

And, do you want that side, your bed side table every morning, you wake up

and you're like, shit, statistically, I've got so many grains left.

And that means you'll live to about 82.

So I was like, wait a minute.

If That's the common unit that we all have this in our digital

wallet or if you really want an hourglass, fine, terrify you because

you'd be looking at all the time.

But the point is, if now life was about exchanging of time.

So here we're spending over an hour in a fun whatever conversation, but

we leave because the exchange of our time is creating a mutual benefit.

It could be hope.

It could be joy.

It could be despair.

You might go, God, I'm so depressed off of that conversation.

So my depression, my liability side of my balance sheet went up because

despair went up by 10 basis points.

But my, maybe my joy went up or my hope went up.

So I was thinking what if we created a platform which this exchange of

time had, the benefits are measured in emotions and qualitative, right?

And this will be a totally different kind of economy.

Now in that way, we'd be each other's bankers in a sense,

because we're all the same.

Your grains of sand are more valuable than mine.

You might decide to spend eight years studying brain surgery

or something, and great, good.

for you.

I should, we should be paying you for the eight years of education.

You should not be having any debt.

Because we talk about intellectual capital and all this stuff, but you

should be receiving at least a living wage, 20 pounds an hour or something to

go and study astrophysics or whatever, because You're good at astrophysics.

So that's the economy I think is possible.

Chris Serrano heard, he heard me speak in BAMF few years ago at

a distributed energy conference.

I blurted out the soul print thing and he calls, he grabbed me like

ran out of the room and it's what?

He said, I'm working on this crypto, this blockchain thing that I'm

going to present in Dubai and he went through place for his idea.

And he said, I think your idea is like, it's fantastic.

But he said, the problem is, I don't know how you can make money with it.

I said, that's the point a well-being platform of relationships of mutuality,

the only way it can make money is maybe on the backend where I'm calculating

reduced counseling costs or healthcare costs, because cause your joy went up,

your hope went up and therefore your blood pressure has improved or whatever, but

that's, it's not a compelling economy.

And they're like yeah, but still, so you realize a lot of the kids in the

blockchain world, the Vitel Butrans who had considered brilliant and quite a

remarkable young man or still wanting to get rich, they're still motivated by

the same motivation of the Medicis and it's, we've got to stop, because again,

it's all that mentality of money will make me happy and it's no, it won't.

I guess it's, there's a sort of paradox isn't there because in a sense that

kind of, that race, that quest for kind of more money, the kind of filling

ourselves up, the kind of the empty filling, the empty ghosts kind of idea,

which is, they could talk about it and in, in kind of Buddhist circles is it's

linked to a story that money is power.

But of course we're projecting power onto the money, but I guess the kind

of slight paradox is though there are people who have used money to create

power for themselves, which I picture.

And disproportionately by sociopath, the movie, the corporation, it was brilliant.

It said the corporations have the best CEOs are, have, psychopathic

tendencies sociopathic.

And it makes sense.

So unlike what, hang on a minute, it's what portions of society are

sociopaths and they're running the show while we like, who are children

of we believe in love, we believe in all this other, good stuff.

And we're beholden to a system that is managed by sociopaths who have no,

maybe they lack empathy, compassion.

My fascination is these men, mostly men of power to, how can we go to

sleep at night with a clean conscience?

Like 2008 thing.

How could these men continue like, I advise Bernie Madoff victims in New York.

I said, Bernie is just a foot, he's just a doorman to these other levels of men who

you seem to have no empathy, and I said, even to Searles, like I presented my idea,

this genuine wealth idea in 2011 to two sorrows at Davos, through a friend of mine

who was hosting a dinner with the Deutsche Dutch bank, vice chairman and sorrows.

And so it was a two page briefing.

I wrote it in my second book, Climate Wellbeing, what I've proposed the sorrows.

And I said, and thinking, look, I've read sources, this stuff he's a

financial outcome as he's brilliant.

And he's cynically because he understands human behavior.

He calls humans are stupid.

Like there they are sheep, like sending.

And so whether he, so he's a financial Alchemist and he said, I don't think the

world is yet ready, says to my proposal.

I don't think they're ready to accept a world of holistic wealth.

Wow, what a brilliant statement now Coppock, Vaser who's vice chairman.

Deutsche bank says to my proposal, I'm intrigued enough with this idea

that mark presents to consider being a Sherpa of the idea to the next G 20.

Now Deutsche bank sorrows.

One guy says compelling.

Other guys cynically says, no, I don't think humanity is ready

to take the responsibility.

That's it.

That to me says, speaks volumes.

So the set, of course, the money powers, Abraham Lincoln, what all

always say, humanity's not ready.

A they're ignorant.

They don't understand.

And in fairness to all of us, because we don't understand, there's no debate,

there's no opening for conversation at universities or economics, professors.

None of them know where money comes from.

They talked about price and quantity, you know why x-axis stuff?

No one ever says, where did the snake around the stick come from?

Where the dollar come from?

If you don't understand that, how can you talk about price and quantity

relationship on the demand supply curve.

I do.

And maybe it just reflecting my kind of mood of the moment.

I do feel quite hopeful and joyful about all of these quite exciting.

I think all of this, because

it's very exciting.

Ben

There's so much, we clearly will do me and we're at a time

of kind of huge kind of change.

There's so much imbalance in our systems, whether they are financial,

whether they're social, whether they are ecological, environmental,

whatever, they may be, so much kind of imbalance in those systems that,

like any sort of stretchy elastic band at some point it breaks back and it's

okay, so what does it break back to?

And I think I happened to watch again over the weekend just by chance the movie, The

Big Short about the 2008 sort of crisis.

Isn't it great.

My Bernie Madoff victim friends watch it.

And they said, Mike, you're right after I watched the big short, I said,

see, isn't it's an amazing reflection.

And it's really a profile of human psychology and like that, and Yeah.

just love it.

And and everyone's incredulous and anyways it's fantastic.

And the incredible thing is that actually, and so it goes on, and

there's, you know, so it goes on, nothing has actually changed.

So here's like historical, cause I wasn't a Windsor castle in September

touring through the apartments of queen Victoria and all that.

And and I'd been St.

George's chapel in 20 18, 2 interesting lecture, which is.

Beautiful chapel where Henry the eighth is buried and sun was setting through

the amazing stained glass and the lecture was, it was an academic on AI.

So it was very stodgy, and I was invited by my friend, Peter West

tooth friend of prince Charles and all this stuff anyways, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm thinking that AI lecture was incredible.

I was, I just can't even imagine Henry the eighth, like thinking about artificial

intelligence and I'm like, oh my God, what happened to original intelligence?

So in 2016 I went to London because Peter West, who is fabulous man, who is

friends with the Queen's bankers family.

So he tours me around.

And Peter says, you, you want to check out the bank of England,

like a really great museum.

I was like, Yeah.

let's sure I'd love to.

So we walk into the bank of England museum because a young woman that curator.

And I said excuse me, before we go into the, for the tour do you

have a, do you have a tally stick?

The tally stick was the first form of money, most stable form

of money ever created in England.

Which was a notch piece as was an oak stick right, that was the money.

So you're talking about, re igniting our imagination, and

that's what I've talked about.

What were the decisions that were made by the Kings treasure

in terms of tally sticks

Yeah, the kind of reigniting the imagination.

And I think maybe that's a kind of useful kind of point to beautiful kind

of place to, to wrap it up on the thing.

I said, something you just said in there where you were talking about the talk on

AI and uh, you know, in, in the chapel and what happened to original intelligence.

There's somebody else who I'm speaking to a guy called Jeremy lent who's written

a book called the web of meaning, and he has this great phrase in his book,

again, playing on this aid, which he talks about as animate intelligence

which is this kind of, this actually the, we are abundant with this natural

intelligence that kind of natural understanding of how things work and flow.

And actually it's tapping into, this is our opportunity.

it's true.

And like my, I was like the cherry on top for me, or the sprinkles is like

that original intelligence has to do with an innate capacity for love.

Like we are loving creatures and we are hardwired for relation.

And COVID has taught us a lot That we cannot be physically separated.

Otherwise we will die.

And love is the only currency that I know and the word power

means to be able and French.

So the power of love is the most important discussion I think we need to have, and

we're maybe rediscovering the essence of who we are, and that gives me great hope.

Thank you for listening.

Really hope you enjoyed that conversation with Mark.

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