David Sauvage [00:01:14]:
The phrase collective experiences of God has been coming up for me.

Vision Battlesword [00:01:18]:
Oh, really? Collective experiences of God?

David Sauvage [00:01:22]:
Well, then I'll let you. That's one phrase that's in my head.

Vision Battlesword [00:01:26]:
Well, thanks for sitting with me today for a Sacred Conversation. I'm really looking forward to this. I was really hoping that we would have an opportunity to do this while you're visiting in town. So thanks so much for taking some time and space. David Sauvage. I pronounced your name right.

David Sauvage [00:01:44]:
You got it.

Vision Battlesword [00:01:45]:
Who are you? David Sauvage.

David Sauvage [00:01:47]:
You just started with the hardest possible question.

Vision Battlesword [00:01:52]:
I like to get the hard ones out of the way. Off the bat, maybe.

David Sauvage [00:01:57]:
Can we bracket that question and come back to it?

Vision Battlesword [00:01:59]:
You can answer it any way you want.

David Sauvage [00:02:01]:
Yeah, I'm going to answer it with. I don't have the answer yet, both in my life and in this moment, but I think I'll have a better answer for it as the conversation unfolds.

Vision Battlesword [00:02:13]:
Perfect.

David Sauvage [00:02:15]:
But maybe in a trivial sense. I'm a friend of yours. I live in the Hudson Valley. I help people understand themselves in many different ways. I write and I think about a lot of the same things you think about.

Vision Battlesword [00:02:36]:
I love that. Well, I'm sure we're going to uncover some of the things that we both think about over the course of the next hour or so. My name is Vision Battlesford. I am the founder of Sacred Light and the creator of the power activation, as well as a program for helping people with relationships called intentional autonomous relating. And I'm the host of sacred Conversations, which is what we're doing here today. And before we started, I heard you. You mentioned a phrase that's been coming up a lot for you recently. What was that again?

David Sauvage [00:03:12]:
Collective experiences of God.

Vision Battlesword [00:03:14]:
Collective experiences of God. And I came into this little conversational container with the idea that we might talk about money. And also I have an idea that we might talk about healing, which is all of those things, healing and money and God all sort of somehow came up together into that collective experiences phrase. So what do you feel like talking about today?

David Sauvage [00:03:40]:
Oh, I really enjoy being led. Although I'll say one thing before I'm led, I want to remark on a similarity we have, which is, it's rare that I meet somebody who has as organized a mind as I have. And you have a very organized mind, and you also, as I do, have a certain fetish for precision. We have this in common. You, unlike me, have a very organized house. So my organization ends at my mind and does not tend to extend into my physical space the way I see yours does. So that's what I felt like saying upfront.

Vision Battlesword [00:04:28]:
Thank you for that. I take all that as a compliment, and I love that phrase. It's never occurred to me before, but is on point in describing me, which is that I have a fetish for precision. You could call me a precisophile, perhaps.

David Sauvage [00:04:44]:
Yeah, I have something like that, too.

Vision Battlesword [00:04:46]:
I like that. I like that a lot. And I've often. I've often felt. Oh, go ahead.

David Sauvage [00:04:51]:
Sorry.

Vision Battlesword [00:04:51]:
Yeah.

David Sauvage [00:04:51]:
If you look at vision battle sword, you could see the fetish for precision, but if you looked at me, you wouldn't see it. You could easily see me as unkempt or messy, and if you walked into my house, you might have the same experience. So there is that weird difference between us two, even though I do feel like our minds are very similarly. They're not similarly organized. They are organized to similar degrees, but they are organized differently.

Vision Battlesword [00:05:24]:
Well, I've always felt that fetish for precision from you, which is one of the things that's always attracted me to you and why I think we've gotten along as well as we have just in sharing that there's something special in that kind of intimacy. And, yeah, I love that you brought that up and connected, allowed us to connect on that as we're kind of getting started with this. For me, I thought when we were talking earlier that things were starting to get really juicy when we were getting into the topic of money. And there was a specific question that I asked you when we were having lunch moments ago that you said, I believe the exact thing you said was, that is the best question. And I said, okay, great, let's stop there and I'll ask it. Let's just begin right where we left off, which is what do you believe about money?

David Sauvage [00:06:20]:
I'm pausing because I believe a lot of things, and some of those things are really complex. And I also see that my beliefs shift around it. So that's one thing I believe, is that what money means to us shifts. So money is ever shifting in its meaning. What money meant to me when I was a teenager is so different than what money means to me now when I'm 43. And what money means to you is different than what money means to me. And I think that that's more true of money than other things. So a car means something similar to me as it means to somebody else, but money changes its meaning based on who's talking about it and how they relate to it.

David Sauvage [00:07:17]:
Money is a story that we have somehow collectively granted our consent to, or collectively agreed upon. Many of us have not consciously given our consent. I certainly do not give my consent. But I am still part of a web of interdependencies held together by money that we are all in through some kind of unconscious, or in some cases, I suppose, conscious agreement. And I don't think it's right to say, as most people who believe they feel deeply into money often say, that money is just energy. I think that that isn't true. I don't think money is just energy. I think money is much closer to a unconscious agreement of how resources are meant to flow.

David Sauvage [00:08:22]:
Money is an unconscious agreement made by human beings around how resources are meant to flow. And another thing I'll say about money, and we can go at it at so many different levels, I'm closing my eyes because I'm trying to really feel into all these different ways of thinking about it and feeling into it. Another way we can think about money is that money is a projection of the resolution of our unmet needs. So money on one level is a series of. Is a story that we've all agreed on about how resources are meant to flow. On another level, money is a projection of our unconscious, of what will meet our unmet needs. So if I feel like I am hungry, I think I need money in order to eat, or if I feel like I am sad, I often think I need money in order to make myself happy. Or for me, I thought for a long time and still do that if I'm going to express myself fully, creatively, I need money in order to do that.

David Sauvage [00:09:43]:
Most of us, many of us feel that money is the same as survival. I need money in order to survive. Questions like how will I make rent? Money is like the bottom line thing that we need in order to meet what we think are our unmet needs. And in that, money is a lie. It's an illusion. It is what inserts itself between us and our needs and requires of us, frequently, behaviors in order to meet those needs. So money is a fictional story that steps between us and the meeting of our needs. And then on an even deeper level, and maybe the deepest level I can get to right now, at least until you ask me some questions.

David Sauvage [00:10:40]:
Money is a jerry rigged half solution, like a band aid, but a band aid that keeps expanding and expanding that papers over distrust in community. If we had trust in each other and in the earth, money would be a joke. It would be absurd if I trusted you to give me what I needed when I needed it. And you trusted me to give you what you need when you needed it. And we were in community, where resources flowed based on where our hearts were pointing, based on where the need was, money would be an absurdity. But at some point, probably at many different points in many different cultures, there was a subtle and then less subtle rupture in trust. And I no longer believed that my needs would be met. And you no longer believe that your needs would be met simply through a gift economy.

David Sauvage [00:11:46]:
That trust got ruptured. And once that trust was ruptured, now I don't trust you anymore. Now I need an IOU. Now I need to account for things. Now I need to keep track of things. So money represents and is a false substitute for a breakdown in trust, in community. And that is one of the reasons why it's extremely, extremely hard to have real, honest and deep relationships if you have a lot of money, because you can't build real, true trust when you are constantly using the artificial version of it. Money is like a.

David Sauvage [00:12:32]:
Like a dark shadow that is absorbing all of our unprocessed wounding. And we believe that it will resolve it. But really, what we're wanting underneath all of that, if we could possibly find our way through the money matrix, the money illusion is just to be held and to hold others in loving community.

Vision Battlesword [00:13:01]:
Well, I got a lot of juice for a real small squeeze there. That was nice. I want to inspect each of those three perspectives on.

David Sauvage [00:13:16]:
Thanks for keeping track. Amazing.

Vision Battlesword [00:13:17]:
First, I want to make sure that I captured them mentally. I'm not actually capturing them with anything.

David Sauvage [00:13:25]:
If anyone can capture things mentally, I believe you can.

Vision Battlesword [00:13:28]:
Well, let's see how well I did. So what I captured from that is, first and foremost, money is a story. It's a story that we agree to or we've been led to believe that we must agree to we inherently give our consent to participation in a collective story, which is the money story.

David Sauvage [00:13:51]:
Yes.

Vision Battlesword [00:13:51]:
Secondly, money is a projection of our unmet needs, or it's a thing that we project our unmet needs onto sort of like a blank screen that we can project anything that we feel is lacking in our life, whether even that's both physical material, but also even emotional, spiritual, social, and so forth.

David Sauvage [00:14:18]:
You got it.

Vision Battlesword [00:14:19]:
And third, money is a substitute for real trust. It's a thing that we use as an IOU instrument, which really means I actually don't trust you fully. So I need some sort of a note that creates a contract of an obligation that you have for some future reciprocity to me.

David Sauvage [00:14:46]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [00:14:46]:
Did I get that right?

David Sauvage [00:14:47]:
Yeah. Or I'm going to store. I'm going to store my community capital.

Vision Battlesword [00:14:51]:
Yeah.

David Sauvage [00:14:51]:
What used to be social capital. I don't trust social capital anymore. I don't trust the natural way resources flow through communities. So I'm going to take that social capital and I can convert it to something I can actually literally count.

Vision Battlesword [00:15:08]:
Nice. And then there was kind of like a little sprinkle on top of that three layer cake that I caught at the end, which had to do with a place that we hide our collective shadow also.

David Sauvage [00:15:23]:
Yeah. This is maybe the hardest one to get at, but let's say for you, money equals survival. Even though you have. This is not. This may or may not be true of vision. I'm using you as a random hypothetical. Let's say you may or may not actually have enough money to live comfortably by contemporary american standards, but you need ever more money because you feel in your body that if you don't have x amount of money, you're going to die. And you have a story that you'll run out of.

David Sauvage [00:15:55]:
Housing, healthcare, nobody will support you. This is extremely common story. Many, many people will resonate with that story I just shared. And then for me, I don't have that story. I feel very surprisingly comfortable at the idea of being homeless. And if I don't have health care, whatever, and maybe my parents would help me out or I'll bounce from place to place. I don't have a survival story around money. In the same way I know so many other people do really have a story that if I could only have enough money, I could create the way I want.

David Sauvage [00:16:26]:
There are books in me that would come out faster. There's podcasts I could hire a producer for. There's all these creative expressions, events I want to put together that I don't want to charge people for. I'm like, I'm in the story. I'm truly in the story that I'm operating at 30% of what I could do if only I had money. So for you, money is survival. And that's because you have not worked through the place in your life where your survival has, in the past, been threatened. And so you're projecting the resolution of that trauma based need onto money.

Vision Battlesword [00:17:02]:
Is that a fourth different thing, or is that a thing that is encapsulated or.

David Sauvage [00:17:10]:
I think it's encapsulated. It's, like, extension of the second thing. But I think it makes the most sense if we think about it as the whole thing. It's like the dark. It's the. It's the vicious cycle that holds it all together. Like the dark glue. This is the dark glue.

David Sauvage [00:17:27]:
This is why money works inside our culture.

Vision Battlesword [00:17:31]:
It's almost like, okay, so, like, the fourth thing is almost like money is an artifact of trauma bonding between us.

David Sauvage [00:17:40]:
Yes. Yes. Or it's. It's a collect. It's the collective shadow that lives, that holds together by virtue of all of our individual unprocessed shadows. So the person who thinks I need money to survive is, in our culture, extremely unlikely to process whatever survival trauma is giving rise to that illusion. And me, even at my level of awareness and healing, I'm still in the story, David, right now. This person with all this analysis of money is still, right now in the story that I'm only operating at 30% of my capacity for lack of money.

David Sauvage [00:18:13]:
And so I haven't fully processed in my unconscious the relationship between creativity and freedom and how I felt stifled in some way. And so there are homeless people right now writing poems, feeling fully creatively expressed. And here I am bitching that I don't have enough money to publish, self publish my book with the illustrator I want. I'm clearly in some kind of delusion. Am I going to work through it in this lifetime? Hopefully. But I don't know. Right now, I'm stuck with it. So then you and I come to make a deal with money.

David Sauvage [00:18:44]:
And really, if I give you money, I'm actually giving you the illusion that money will help you survive. And you give me money. You're giving me the illusion that I need money for creative freedom. And what makes money so freaking sticky is that it does the trick, sort of. It does the trick, sort of. So you get the money. If you feel like you're not going to survive, you pay your rent. You feel calmer, your nervous system relaxes.

David Sauvage [00:19:08]:
And now it reinforces the illusion that you need money to feel safe.

Vision Battlesword [00:19:11]:
Totally.

David Sauvage [00:19:11]:
I get my money. Somebody gives me money. I hire the illustrator that I want, the book goes out. It's a big fucking success. It makes money. And now I'm fully reinforced in the illusion that I need money to succeed. Because we've all agreed on it to such an extent that it has so much power. The reason it has so much power, though, is because of all of our unprocessed wounding.

David Sauvage [00:19:30]:
It's like the root trauma is the community trauma, but then all of our traumas feed into that original collective trauma and further make it harder and harder to untangle. And it's like, this is why it's so hard to have straightforward and honest conversations about money, even with people who are mature, even with people who do a lot of work. And you start asking, a dear friend of mine just told me that she inherited a couple hundred thousand dollars. And I could see the bravery it took for her, like, it took brave, like bravery for her to tell me the amount of money that she inherited and what that meant to her and all the shame she had to work through to tell me that. And there's just so much. Blegh.

Vision Battlesword [00:20:15]:
I can certainly relate to the experience of when the money situation feels scarce or chaotic or out of control or unmanaged, how that has such ripple effects all through my psyche and going through. Going through life in a more depressed state, going through life in a more irritable state, in a more reactive state, you know, more susceptible to all types of triggering, more susceptible to all types of stories and distractions versus when the money thing feels abundant or feels in control or feels stabilized and organized. Stabilized and organized. Well organized, probably for me, more than the average person because I could even, you know, for me personally, I can be in a scarce state with regard to money. But if it's well managed and well organized, if I. If I ultimately feel like at least I have good accounting for my scarcity, I can still have an element of relaxation and an element of more peace and calm in my life and feel overall more optimistic and positive about things versus when I don't know how much money I have, I don't know where my money is going, I don't know, you know, I can't account for my resources, then I feel disharmonious, disorganized, disregulated, etcetera. My sense is that that's a very common. Oh, yeah, a very, very common human experience.

Vision Battlesword [00:21:59]:
And even for people, it's not so much even really about the quantity of the money, because I think I see this experience playing out for people at all levels of the social spectrum. People with millions of dollars nonetheless can feel scarce, or people with, let's say, millions of dollars of resources or whatever can still be feeling scarce or chaotic or out of control with their money situation. It's just a matter of scale. It's just a matter of multiples, of adding zeros to the number, but the feeling is the same. I just think that's an interesting kind of anchor point that we can all attach to for this money conversation of just thinking about reflecting on our own relationship to money, what it's been like for us in our life. And maybe, you know, just kind of starting to stimulate a thought process about what is our belief system about money. And you shared with me earlier that you actually hold an MBA. And so I'm curious, starting with that first point, about the story of money.

Vision Battlesword [00:23:07]:
Tell me the story of money. I'm curious, and I mean, not story.

David Sauvage [00:23:11]:
That we're all in.

Vision Battlesword [00:23:12]:
Yeah, not from your perspective per se, because I know that you've thought deeply about it and you've gone very deep in terms of some of these ideas about community and trust and things. But just tell me the surface level story of our culture. Of what? What is the story of money?

David Sauvage [00:23:28]:
Money is. Is a store of value that helps us facilitate trade more efficiently than we could with any other medium of exchange. It works best generally when backed by an authority that we trust, although there have been some holes in that recently with electronic scam artist money. That was my story. There's holes in that cultural story. With the rise of these electronic, not electronic money. What are they called? Bit dollars? Bitcoin.

Vision Battlesword [00:24:10]:
Cryptocurrency.

David Sauvage [00:24:11]:
That's the word I'm looking for. Yeah, sure. And on a social level, inside our culture, there are things you can do that will make you more money. You need to figure out how to value yourself in the marketplace and make yourself marketable, whether at the level of skills, so that you can be paid appropriately for your skills. If you develop your skills, you'll be able to get more money in the market, and then you can take that money that you make and use it to build a comfortable life for you and those you care about. You can also, if you do well enough, invest it wisely so that you can use your money to make more money, which is an amazing thing. And the other. The other story that I definitely got a lot of in business school is if you have the wherewithal and the courage and the vision, it's possible to come up with a whole new way of making money than other people have come up with, or a slightly different way of making money.

David Sauvage [00:25:22]:
And then you are this sacred and magical being called an entrepreneur. And then if you figure out how to provide value at scale to either a lot of people or to the right niche, then you can make a whole lot of money. And then you have achieved a very worthy level of status inside our culture, and you deserve a great deal of recognition for that. Money is also what makes the world go round. We know that if you want to get something done, you really need money. And there's definitely an imbalance of power. And we should probably redistribute money a little bit because the people who have it probably have too much of it. But ultimately we need to preserve a system in which people can work hard and or innovate so that they can make money, so that they can drive growth for all of us, so that living standards can improve, so that technology can improve and we all do better.

David Sauvage [00:26:27]:
And let us be thankful for the amazing technology of money that facilitates all of this is the horseshit story that most of us have been taught.

Vision Battlesword [00:26:36]:
That all sounds like horseshit to you?

David Sauvage [00:26:38]:
All of it.

Vision Battlesword [00:26:38]:
Every single part of it.

David Sauvage [00:26:39]:
The whole fucking thing.

Vision Battlesword [00:26:41]:
Fascinating. Okay. In the.

David Sauvage [00:26:46]:
I mean, some of it's true, trivially true.

Vision Battlesword [00:26:49]:
Like what parts are trivially true?

David Sauvage [00:26:53]:
I mean, it's trivially true that if you figure out how to sell something that the market needs, it is trivially true that you can make a lot of money at that. I mean, that's obvious. I'm not debating the physics of it, but the. But the underlying value system on which all of this story rests is total horseshit.

Vision Battlesword [00:27:15]:
Okay. Yeah, well, that's exactly where I was going to start probing, was around value, the concept of value, because the very, very first thing I think that you said the very first line, the money.

David Sauvage [00:27:29]:
Is a store of value.

Vision Battlesword [00:27:30]:
Yes, that's the first line of the book of money is money is a store of value. Do you think that's true?

David Sauvage [00:27:40]:
I think it's got the lie in it immediately. So, like everything with money, there's enough truth in it that it perpetuates. And if it didn't have truth, the story would fall away. Like the dem. The devil always says something true. The devil always offers you something you really want. The way the devil gets you is that he embedsd what he really wants into what you really want. And then you make the deal, and you don't realize until your soul is sucked out of you how fucked up the deal was.

David Sauvage [00:28:16]:
So when we say money is a store of value, we have both the truth in that we can take, I don't know, books off your bookshelf and reduce them to a dollar amount if you went to the bookstore. But at the same time, money, when I take all your books off your bookshelf and turn them into their market value of, let's say, $500, and I give you that $500, and I say money just stored all the value of your books, your heart sinks because the value of your book wasn't what you can get at the marketplace. The value of your books was your relationship to those books, was the markings you put in those books, was the care in which you assembled those books.

Vision Battlesword [00:29:05]:
Well, how about even before we get to the markings or the care? But, like, how about the information that's actually contained in the books and the information, it's not contained in the $500?

David Sauvage [00:29:14]:
It's not contained in the $500. So when we say money is a store of value, what is the value that that money is storing when we get the $500 for the books? It's storing the value of it in the marketplace. But the marketplace is not the place where we get the most value. The marketplace is the place where we get those things that money can buy.

Vision Battlesword [00:29:39]:
I see where you're going.

David Sauvage [00:29:40]:
So what it does is it takes what is a value and reduces it to the money economy, and as a result, causes us to devalue on a deeply unconscious level that we've all accepted the real value of that. And then the people who are focused on the real value, in this case, let's say, the authors who are putting years and years into stories that really matter, are generally pushed to the fringe of the money economy and struggle with it. So if you create value that can be reduced to money, you thrive, you get status, you win. In this game, if you create value that isn't reducible easily to money, you suffer, you struggle, and people have trouble seeing the value of what you do, because money is not just a store of value. That's the. But really, in our money economy, money is the primary store of value.

Vision Battlesword [00:30:29]:
This is really great, and that's the devil.

David Sauvage [00:30:32]:
And I don't mean that in a simply metaphoric sense. I actually think, like, this is a demonic energy that is moving through. At that phrase, money is a store of value. It's the reduction of everything beautiful and meaningful and true to a simple number. It's extracting the soul and just leaving the corpse to feed on.

Vision Battlesword [00:30:54]:
Okay, well, that hopeful imagery aside, I.

David Sauvage [00:30:59]:
Do see going all the way.

Vision Battlesword [00:31:00]:
I do believe I see your point, and I think your point is very interesting or at least stimulating. It's very stimulating to me in thinking about money more deeply, and I think uncovering some realities about it that I had not really thought of before. I love the focus on this word value. I think we're right over the target right now.

David Sauvage [00:31:25]:
We are.

Vision Battlesword [00:31:25]:
And so I just want to, like, I just want to translate everything you just said into kind of some visual imagery that was occurring to me while we're talking about specifically the books. That's a great. That's a great example of how money is not a store of real value in the sense of if I have a book, I have value in the form of information. I have value in the form of maybe something that I can learn, a practical skill that I can glean from these pages, or a fantasy world, a.

David Sauvage [00:32:01]:
Beautiful aesthetic experience, fantasy world that I.

Vision Battlesword [00:32:04]:
Can escape to for hours and hours of pure joyous, or a record of important history of facts that should not be forgotten and all that sort of stuff. If I take that book and sell it at the marketplace and receive a $50 bill, I don't have any of those things anymore. All I have is a fancy looking piece of paper that I hope someone will later on want to trade with me for something else that has some real value. And then we assume that there's some equivalence that we can somehow create an equivalence of value between entirely dissimilar things, such as the difference between a book on history and a shopping cart full of groceries or enough gas to fill up my car or whatever. So the imagery that was kind of occurring to me is that money. You could think of money instead of as fancy looking pieces of paper or numbers in a computer account somewhere. If you imagine taking real resources, books, furniture, cars, how about trees? How about the natural world, nature, food, energy, all of these different things, these actual, real, tangible, valuable aspects of what actually creates life and meets our needs, and put it into a machine that has a giant funnel, and you're putting all of this stuff into this machine that actually just breaks it all down and reduces it to some sort of a uniform slurry of matter that comes out the bottom. And we can fill glasses with that and say, well, here's your tree, here's your car, here's your gasoline, here's whatever.

Vision Battlesword [00:33:48]:
But all you get is an identical, homogeneous substance that you can say, well, this contains all of the units of value of that real thing, but it doesn't actually do any of the things that that thing does in terms of actual needs meeting. It is inherently an idea. It's a concept and an abstraction of value, of the idea of value, as if value itself is fungible in the same way that this arbitrary token is fungible. Yeah, there's a flaw there that you're detecting in that statement. Money is a store of value. Money is only a store of theoretical value because we choose to believe that. Because we choose to agree that the inherent energy or labor or creativity or natural resources or whatever that went into any sort of object that, you know, we may place value on can be actually transmitted from place to place through this intermediary, which itself is actually valueless.

David Sauvage [00:34:57]:
Yeah, beautiful.

Vision Battlesword [00:34:59]:
That's interesting.

David Sauvage [00:35:01]:
I would say it's not. I would say there's an intention behind it. Like, money seeks to turn everything into money. It's doing. There's a theory, which I like generally, which is the purpose of a system, is what it does. And so, like, it's not a value neutral thing. It's in the greater sense, the word value. It's not a value neutral thing to take a book and reduce it to money and then talk about the book just in terms of its financial value, which, by the way, is what publishing companies do all day.

David Sauvage [00:35:42]:
That's a non neutral activity. That is a. That is saying that our highest value, if you are the CEO of a publishing company, your truest, highest value is the reduction of meaning to capital. Like, that is your totem. And that, to me, is like money. And if you work in finance, you're primarily just looking at how everything does reduce to money. You're constantly reducing everything to money. The people who have the most money are those people who spend the most amount of time reducing everything to money and then trading money against itself.

David Sauvage [00:36:23]:
It just becomes more and more abstract. And the more you're involved in experiences that are fundamentally valuable outside of the money economy. Like, if you're waking up every day trying to love people on an individual level, if you're waking up every day trying to tell beautiful stories, you're existing on the edges of the money economy. It might give you enough to survive, but barely. It's keeping you deliberately in scarcity, because you are not fully contributing to money's intention inside our culture, which is the reduction of everything to itself. And we're close, like, we're close now to where we won't have much of a natural world left. Like, we will have turned the rainforests into money. We will have turned our oceans into money.

David Sauvage [00:37:07]:
We will have turned everything into money. We're taking all this diversity, like you said, putting it into a blender and spitting out money.

Vision Battlesword [00:37:15]:
Well, I want to bring up. There's a term you haven't used yet, but I want to bring it up now because of what you just said about this industry that plays this game within the realm of abstractions, where money begets money begets money, and money changes into different forms of money. And the word I want to bring up is finance. My sense is that there's a distinction between money as a concept or a tool or a technology, if you want to think of it that way, versus finance, which is almost like a science or a domain or an industry, which is built around money, which sort of is almost like a virtual reality that has its own set of rules. And I think that increasingly, we as a culture and a civilization, have actually lost the distinction between money and finance. And that's kind of part of the slippery slope of where we find ourselves today. Then you did invoke a term which is economy, which I also think is different, is I think an economy or the economy is a different concept from money or finance. That doesn't necessarily require either per se, but we tend to mix all of these terms up.

Vision Battlesword [00:38:40]:
In our story of, let's say, western capitalism or american capitalism, we tend to mix these all up like money, the economy, the financial system, so called finance, business, entrepreneurship. There's just like this little pot that we kind of mix this into this, into this one homogeneous stew in a way where I think there's value in separating these concepts out and kind of treating them individually and noticing that the one does not necessarily need, require, or depend on the other. In all cases, I think the world of finance does need and depend on money, but I don't think money necessarily needs or depends on the world of finance. And I think the economy certainly doesn't necessarily need or depend on money or finance, although certainly we've built a kind of economy that is highly dependent on both of those institutions or structures. But there's another phrase other than money as a store of value that I think often comes up in the story of money, which is money is a medium of exchange. What do you think about that? Does that feel a little less charged or like there's an obvious paradox in it to you versus the store of value? Point?

David Sauvage [00:40:03]:
Well, there's a tragedy built into it. Similarly, with money as a store of value, money as a medium, exchange. I think the tragedy built into it is that when we start talking about money as a medium of exchange, we're inside a story already where we're being forced, without even noticing, inside a story that we need mediums of exchange. So it's kind of like a no brainer. And then there's the myth that money arose turns out to be total b's, the myth that money arose through barter. There was barter, and then that got too complicated. So somebody figured out, we can do it with money. That story is a 19th century capitalist myth to make money make sense to us, but it didn't actually happen.

Vision Battlesword [00:40:51]:
Really?

David Sauvage [00:40:52]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [00:40:52]:
Where do you get the history of money?

David Sauvage [00:40:55]:
You can read books called the history of money. You can google, like, barter. Did money come from barter? And any scholar who's looked at this is agreed that it's not the case.

Vision Battlesword [00:41:07]:
Fascinating. Well, what's the Reader's Digest version of where did money really come from?

David Sauvage [00:41:13]:
Well, it really depends on what you mean by money. So there's multiple different strands of the origin of money, and I feel like I will stumble and bumble if I go into it, but I want to, so I'll pass on that. Maybe I'll pick it up later. But the money is a medium of exchange. I don't want to pass on. It is a medium of exchange. And it's tragic that we have mediums of exchange. The world of exchange is a world that has lost its sacred connection.

David Sauvage [00:41:54]:
And so what I wish we could see is, like, money is a substitute for a gift economy. Money is a sad substitute for a gift economy. That would feel, like, truer to me than money as a medium of exchange, though money is a medium of exchange. It's a little bit like saying, money as a medium of exchange feels to me like saying, what do they get? People have cancer. That's really bad for you.

Vision Battlesword [00:42:30]:
Chemotherapy.

David Sauvage [00:42:31]:
Chemotherapy. Chemotherapy heals cancer. You're like, no. Chemotherapy is a really toxic way of treating cancer. That alleviates and alleviates it, and in some cases, triumphs over it, maybe inside a really toxic system that created the cancer. Like, so money is a medium of exchange. It's like chemotherapy cures cancer. Sure.

David Sauvage [00:43:00]:
How do we get underneath that? Can we get underneath that, or are we already surrendered? And we are already surrendered? Like, it's so hard to even be able to say these things. If I start talking about what I'm saying here to people less thoughtful than you, it's like, there's not even a receptiveness to the stuff I'm saying, it immediately gets dismissed or thought of as woo. Or it's like we're so inside the story of money that we're not even available to see beyond it. Well, and even inside, like, crazy left, not crazy far left thinking. Even inside socialist thinking, they're still like, no, you still need, of course you still need money. We're just distributing it differently.

Vision Battlesword [00:43:40]:
That's right. Huh. Well, okay, well, are you saying that money is not a medium of exchange.

David Sauvage [00:43:48]:
Or are you just saying money is a medium of exchange, but that is a non neutral statement.

Vision Battlesword [00:43:53]:
Okay, I'm with you.

David Sauvage [00:43:54]:
That masquerading is a neutral one. Chemotherapy cures cancer.

Vision Battlesword [00:43:57]:
I got you. Okay, what about money as a form of energy?

David Sauvage [00:44:06]:
That's me. Like putting my finger in my throat.

Vision Battlesword [00:44:08]:
Yeah.

David Sauvage [00:44:09]:
There's a way in which it's trivially true.

Vision Battlesword [00:44:12]:
Okay.

David Sauvage [00:44:13]:
And like, I don't know, a bookshelf is a form of energy.

Vision Battlesword [00:44:16]:
Sure.

David Sauvage [00:44:16]:
Chocolate is a form of energy. Calling things a form of energy is the spiritual equivalent of turning everything into money. I mean, everything is. Everything is, oh, you're not a person. You're just a form of energy. It's like, okay, well, I've taken out, by calling you a form of energy, I've taken out anything meaningful about you, and I've said something trivially true. And the reason I've taken anything meaningful out about you is because I don't want to see what's actually meaningful. So when people are saying money is just a form of energy, what I'm hearing is there are all these other aspects of money that I can't process, can't digest, can't be with.

David Sauvage [00:44:55]:
And so it's really safer for me to look at it as just a flow of energy. It's a way of compartmentalizing out those things about money that on some level we know to be true, but that we can't bear.

Vision Battlesword [00:45:07]:
Hmm, interesting. There's something that you said that you just kind of invoked it again and it jogged my memory. I wanted to kind of inspect a little bit the statement of money wants to turn everything into money. And like you alluded to the natural world, like, we're turning the rainforest into money, we're turning the mountains into money. We're turning all these things into money. First of all, I think that's a very interesting concept to me, to think of money almost as like a virus itself or like a cancer or a self replicating machine that literally wants to like that. Like the paperclip machine that turns the world into paper clips.

David Sauvage [00:45:46]:
It's like the money is already happened.

Vision Battlesword [00:45:48]:
Turns that turns the world into we already have it. Well, I want to inspect that, though. That's. It's an interesting concept to me. I can see. I can see what you mean. Let's put it that way. I can see what you mean by that.

Vision Battlesword [00:45:59]:
But I want to push back a little bit on the. I don't see the rainforests, let's just say, being literally converted into physical dollar bills. Maybe in some cases they are, because they're made of paper or. And also, I think, linen or something, but being physically converted into dollar bills, or I guess, even weirder, would be physically converted into zeros in a bank account. It's not that it's being physically converted into other forms of resources. Right. Other forms of.

David Sauvage [00:46:37]:
But the purpose of converting it into other forms of matter is to make money. So the rainforest, if the rainforest is being clear cut in order to make room for cattle, because the people who are making money off those cattle don't have to deal with the collective loss that we all feel when the rainforest is cut down for their cattle, that, to me, is a reduction of the rainforest to money.

Vision Battlesword [00:47:02]:
I get what you're saying, but try to follow me and what I'm saying here for just 1 second.

David Sauvage [00:47:07]:
I will.

Vision Battlesword [00:47:07]:
Because what I'm saying is the phrase making money in itself is kind of meaningless. Making money is just making imaginary stuff in your head. Right. In a way, what's actually being made is not money, it's cattle.

David Sauvage [00:47:26]:
Right.

Vision Battlesword [00:47:27]:
And then what's actually being made from cattle is people or whoever's consuming cattle, right, is steaks. And people eat the steaks. So I'm saying real things are actually being made. What's happening is matter is being converted into other forms of matter, generally more complex in a way, not diminishing the complexity of the rainforest, I think generally simpler.

David Sauvage [00:47:51]:
I would.

Vision Battlesword [00:47:51]:
Maybe so. Maybe so. You know, maybe a smartphone is highly. A highly complex system in its own right. It's a totally different type of system than natural minerals that exist in the ground or in a mountain, or all of the different forms of energy that went into producing it and running it. So when. So my thought is that this idea of making money in and of itself is already an illusion. It's already.

Vision Battlesword [00:48:25]:
It's a part of the fantasy land, yes. That we're inhabiting. In the story of money, what's really important is what is what. What is being done? What. What is being taken from one place, changed and moved to another.

David Sauvage [00:48:38]:
Place.

Vision Battlesword [00:48:38]:
And money is the motivation for people doing things, ultimately.

David Sauvage [00:48:45]:
Yes. Yeah, that's cool. I like that.

Vision Battlesword [00:48:50]:
So, in a way, you could look at it as it is a medium of exchange in that way. And the kind of, let's call it the money myth, the money mythology that is sort of the basis for my understanding of what money is and what an economy is, is that at its most simple, money is essentially a promise to do labor. If it's a store of any type of actual value, it's a store of actual human effort. That's really the energy. That's the actual form of energy that money encapsulates.

David Sauvage [00:49:29]:
What if I, like, buy land or something?

Vision Battlesword [00:49:33]:
Well, you could, yes, if you're trading money for any form of property or, you know, inanimate material. In other words, not directly for a service. Like, hey, you spend an hour of your time doing this thing. For me, it would seem like, oh, money is equivalent to land or a cell phone or whatever. But what the kind of economists that I've read and. And paid attention to would say is that if you trace it back, if you go backwards in time far enough, you eventually get to a point where somebody did something, somebody exerted effort and produced something with their own personal labor, their own personal human energy. And that is the actual thing that the money is storing and is being traded around. In that sense, there's a sense in which you could say that money is a form of slavery, because it's essentially.

Vision Battlesword [00:50:35]:
It's an iou for, you have to do work for me now. In other words, you could almost reverse the money paradigm, where the story of money in our culture is, oh, I do work to receive, so that I can provide for myself and have a first, make a living, literally to live. And then beyond that, to experience greater and greater forms of comfort and convenience and luxury. But there's another sense in which you could look at it as it's actually exactly the opposite. It's a form of withholding, which is akin to a kind of slavery in the sense of, I give you this, and now you must do for me in return, because this dollar essentially represents. It literally represents human labor. That's a whole story, too, until we get robots running around doing all of the labor that humans could do. That's what it ultimately comes down to, is the only way that we get material pushed around and moved around and converted from one form into another is by humans doing it.

Vision Battlesword [00:51:47]:
And then when we get robots, then we're gonna have a new kind of ethical dilemma, which is, is it really okay to have them as slaves instead of us?

David Sauvage [00:51:56]:
I think we've already passed that point. We already have robots as slaves.

Vision Battlesword [00:52:01]:
I have one that vacuums my floor.

David Sauvage [00:52:03]:
Yeah, it's already. We've already normalized it.

Vision Battlesword [00:52:06]:
Yeah. So I guess I'm just. I'm doubly skeptical, I guess. Like, maybe I'm even more skeptical than you are in a certain way because I look at this whole idea of finance and money makes more money or money wants to make more of itself or something like that, as even one illusion removed from the regular illusion that we're already inhabiting. Because money just doesn't really exist in the first place. It's all just people doing stuff.

David Sauvage [00:52:39]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [00:52:40]:
You know, and then we may use some kind of a physical or virtual token to keep track. Keep track of who's done what, stuff for who.

David Sauvage [00:52:51]:
Really keep track of who gets to decide. That's.

Vision Battlesword [00:52:55]:
Yeah, that's. That's right.

David Sauvage [00:52:57]:
It's really.

Vision Battlesword [00:52:58]:
It's a measure of influence.

David Sauvage [00:53:00]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [00:53:00]:
It's a telling of telling. Allocating resources and people power. Yeah, yeah, that's it. But I really like. So now, like, let's see, I want to skip ahead to number three because I also like to think about things in a historical context and in like a. I like to deeply comprehend things going all the way back to where they originated. And so when you're talking about money as a substitute for real trust and community, that one really resonates for me because I can see what you mean by that. And I, so my mind immediately imagines, starts imagining a tribe, a tribal community where there are actually some tribal civilizations.

David Sauvage [00:53:49]:
Even, that still have some form of money.

Vision Battlesword [00:53:52]:
Well, I was going to say that.

David Sauvage [00:53:54]:
Oh, that don't have money. They're both.

Vision Battlesword [00:53:56]:
Yeah, maybe they do, maybe they don't. But what I'm saying is that I think there are still some tribal communities and societies that still exist in more or less a traditional form that have not yet been assimilated into global civilization, you know, whatever that is.

David Sauvage [00:54:14]:
There's only like one or two. I think we're almost at the end of that.

Vision Battlesword [00:54:17]:
Yeah. Have we run out? The last time I checked in was kind of like in the late nineties. So.

David Sauvage [00:54:21]:
Yeah, I'm not sure. Maybe there's one. There's really. Most tribes have been corrupted by money.

Vision Battlesword [00:54:31]:
Well, I think at least we seem to believe that there was a point in time where there were these tribal societies that did operate on what I think you would call a gift economy type of model. It was several family groupings it was a population of probably less than 150.

David Sauvage [00:54:52]:
It was not necessarily. There's this. If you read the dawn of everything by David Graeber, I'm proud to say was a friend of mine, his partner on it, whose name escapes me. They talk about how there were some cultures that existed without money that might have had thousands of people.

Vision Battlesword [00:55:10]:
Okay, I'm open to that. I don't think it matters to my point. The point I'm trying to make there is the. I can't remember the name whose theory it is, but the magic number of 150 tribal communities or something along those lines. But I think the point I'm trying to make is just that we do seem to believe that these models existed at a point in time that there is a way of organizing society and economy at a particular scale. Question mark about where that scale may or may not break down, but where everyone was just working together to make a living in common, common unity, community. Right. Just, you know, I do my thing and you do your thing, and when you need something, I help you out.

Vision Battlesword [00:56:05]:
Give and receive. Sacred reciprocity. Why? Because we're all surviving together, hopefully thriving together. There's not. There's not really a need for a medium of exchange when you have love. Yeah. Or when you have a certain kind of intimacy, a certain kind of shared container. Let's just say where it's like there's really no space for money because everything is so integrated.

Vision Battlesword [00:56:34]:
I guess that's how I imagine it's great. It's an integrated economy. That's how I see it. Or imagine it. So when does trust break in an integrated economy? Tribal community situation. One thought that occurs to me is pretty obvious. What if two communities bump into each other and want to exchange resources? Maybe community a has some specialization or natural resource. That's just their natural wealth from the area that they reside in.

Vision Battlesword [00:57:15]:
Community B has something different. We could both benefit from exchanging our natural gifts with each other. But you're not part of my travel community. You're not my family. I don't even know if you're. Maybe you're going to attack me later. I don't know. Is that the beginning of where we need to outsource our trust to some neutral medium of exchange? I know you don't think that phrase is neutral, but I don't know.

Vision Battlesword [00:57:43]:
Where does it come from?

David Sauvage [00:57:47]:
We're in the place where history meets mythology meets imagination.

Vision Battlesword [00:57:53]:
Fair enough.

David Sauvage [00:57:54]:
I liked your example, though. I would bet that when those tribes came together, if they had been operating independently inside two gift economies. What would have happened was they would have gifted to each other, and then maybe somebody killed somebody from the other tribe, and now there was no more trust. So they weren't going to just gift to each other. I'm just making this stuff up, but, like, who knows what they're like. Any trauma, it's not so much what's happened, it's the inability to repair. So there's going to be breakdowns in trust. In any family, there's going to be traumas and schisms.

David Sauvage [00:58:38]:
And in any community, there's traumas and schisms. I think that goes all the way. I'll bet you elephants are having trauma and schisms. It feels like something got ruptured permanently, or at least all the way up till now. There was just, like, some moment where we couldn't go back and heal it, some moment we couldn't go back and grieve, some moment where we just kept going and going and then kept building on the fact that we didn't do the work. And now we're here, and, like, the world is at this tipping point because we just still haven't done the work and we're still outsourcing this communal healing to this money machine, and everything is now, like, almost ripped apart.

Vision Battlesword [00:59:28]:
Well, I can certainly relate to what you're saying in the sense that, I mean, it seems obvious to me, but then again, there's certain things that I've read that helped to program me for this particular belief system. It seems obviously to me that our civilization, so called our global, what has now sort of become a global civilization, is the product of a runaway pathologic human template that originated somewhere but has been literally gobbling up all of the people and all of the resources of the entire planet for some number of thousands of years. That's what it looks like to me, but I didn't create that idea myself. Have you ever read anything by Daniel Quinn?

David Sauvage [01:00:18]:
Yeah, like Ishmael? Yes. I haven't read that, but I know about it, and it's on my list. And then what's the name of the demon that, is that him? Who says that? There's somebody who says there's, like, a name for the demon of rapacious western civilization, particular demon that an indigenous culture saw in us.

Vision Battlesword [01:00:39]:
Hmm. Maybe there is something about a demon in there. I don't remember that specifically, but the word that he uses for the specific culture. So the idea generally goes that there was a point in time where, you know, there were some millions of humans on the planet, and there were many, many thousands of cultures that were small and local and tribal. But he calls all of those different tribal civilizations at a certain point of time. They all followed a certain template that he calls levers. The lever template, which essentially means we're going to leave everything alone. We're going to leave you alone.

Vision Battlesword [01:01:26]:
We're going to leave you alone. We'll leave these resources here for the next person. We're lever is essentially, and of course, they would make a living for themselves from the land. And different tribes didn't necessarily get along or share gifts with each other. And they might have some territorial conflicts about establishing where their boundaries are and things like that, but they weren't declaring war on each other. They weren't conquering each other. They weren't taking each other's resources and people and assimilating their cultures and things. And then an innovation occurred.

Vision Battlesword [01:02:11]:
Some culture somewhere flipped and created a new program which is called Taker, the Taker culture. And the taker culture is exactly the opposite. It's, we are going to declare war on you. We're not just going to compete with you for living from the land, but we're actually going to take from you with force and get bigger and then take more and get bigger and then take more and get bigger and so forth. And we essentially, according to this school of thought, we are the takers. We are the result of the takers that has almost, but not quite taken everything.

David Sauvage [01:02:55]:
Yeah. That feels right.

Vision Battlesword [01:02:57]:
And so we're this monolithic, I guess, somewhat cancerous culture. Yeah, that's the same culture. And this is in the use of the term culture. This particular culture spans geographies and languages and skin colors and ethnicities. It's not about what language you speak or what you look like to be a part of this culture. It's about your thought process. It's about your mental programming, the story that you inhabit, ultimately, it's the taker story. And I think that's exactly what.

Vision Battlesword [01:03:31]:
That's the money story is merely a.

David Sauvage [01:03:34]:
Piece of the taker story.

Vision Battlesword [01:03:36]:
I think so, yeah. Does that ring true for you?

David Sauvage [01:03:38]:
It does. It's a great facilitator of the taker story.

Vision Battlesword [01:03:43]:
Mm hmm.

David Sauvage [01:03:44]:
And it's like, in service to the taker story. Like, the taker story is like, oh, I have a friend that I can use money. He'll make this go so much faster.

Vision Battlesword [01:03:54]:
Yeah, that makes sense. Like, it's. It's a technology. It. Yeah, it's an accelerator, just like a plow or a sword or.

David Sauvage [01:04:06]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [01:04:07]:
Anything that lets you just take more more quickly. Except this one kind of breaks the rules of even the physical world. There's really no limit to how much you can take.

David Sauvage [01:04:18]:
This one is a form of, like, really widely adopted black magic. Money is a form of dark magic. It's like cast a spell. Money is the spell that has been cast over our collective psyches, and we are in its spell all the time, and it's so hard to see past it.

Vision Battlesword [01:04:44]:
What's the spell? Or what is that black magic?

David Sauvage [01:04:48]:
Well, it's the way it's worked on me, for instance. It's like, oh, I need money to be creatively expressed. And that's true enough, because if I don't have money, I can't do all these things that my soul really wants to do. And that's because you agree that I need to pay you to do something. So the black magic is that it doesn't exist. We're all in a story that it does exist. Even those of us, like you and me, who realize that it doesn't really exist, still act as if it exists as necessity in order to meet whatever needs we haven't fully healed from in ourselves.

Vision Battlesword [01:05:27]:
Well, if you're talking to, like, let's say you're with a group of people and everybody believes that there's a twelve foot tall, you know, blue alien named Ralph. Yeah, that's part of the group. And everyone's interacting with grauf as if he's there. And real. You don't see Ralph, but, like, you're crazy. You kind of, you kind of got to pretend like you do, because everything revolves around Ralph, apparently, in this.

David Sauvage [01:05:52]:
And then at some point, somebody will be like, it's, it's, it's just a. Ralph is just an energy. Like, you don't have to tell us he's imaginary. He's just an energy. And if you do the things that align with Ralph, you will get love and support. So what's wrong with you? Why don't you. And then some people are like, I have a great relationship with Ralph. I've really figured out Ralph.

David Sauvage [01:06:15]:
And then everyone's like, oh, how do you figure out Ralph?

Vision Battlesword [01:06:17]:
Ralph hates me.

David Sauvage [01:06:18]:
Yeah. And Ralph is not. Ralph is not the one who does the spell. There's a force behind Ralph that is doing the spell so that we all see Ralph. And that thing is having its needs met through Ralph.

Vision Battlesword [01:06:34]:
Yeah, that's the piece of it where I don't want to say, you lose me a little bit, I guess for me, I have a sense that money itself is actually neutral. That's my sense.

David Sauvage [01:06:49]:
Is everything neutral?

Vision Battlesword [01:06:51]:
I don't want to go down. I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole, because all I was trying to say is that. No, no, you're fine. All I was trying to say is that I'm not. It's not immediately resonant for me that money needs to have a malicious, destructive, dark, negative force behind it. Like a. Like a. Like a puppeteer with a puppet.

Vision Battlesword [01:07:18]:
However, I believe that it probably does, but I don't think it must, let's put it that way. Does that make sense?

David Sauvage [01:07:26]:
Yeah, I guess I would agree with you. Then it's an intention has a lot to do with it. Maybe we can try to redeem money here at the end of our conversation.

Vision Battlesword [01:07:36]:
I hope so.

David Sauvage [01:07:37]:
The redemption of money. I'd like to.

Vision Battlesword [01:07:40]:
I'd like to at least at some point, pivot to. Yeah, what's that? What's the alternative? Or is there, like, ultimately, I want to get to. What is a gift economy? What does that even mean? What does that look like? Can there be money in a gift economy? Would it actually be good for there to be money in a gift economy, but maybe utilized in a different way or maybe with a different story that creates it or something along those lines?

David Sauvage [01:08:10]:
I would say, like, my belief is that right now, money is a pathway to hell, and it's leading us there very efficiently. But it doesn't have to be so in the way that money is neutral. Money, we are learning through money, and we have hopefully reached the end of reducing these things of great value to this arbitrary figment in our collective imagination. Hopefully. And the redemption of money is when we start putting money toward that which has non monetary value. So we can re reverse the whole trend of reducing that which has value to money by putting money toward that which is ultimately priceless.

Vision Battlesword [01:09:05]:
Like what?

David Sauvage [01:09:06]:
Like small versions of this. We experience all the time where we want to give money to somebody because what they did really meant something to us. And we are offering the money as a kind of sacred, sacred reciprocity. It's really taking on its most beautiful purpose. And that is how money is redeemed. When we put our money into something, because we genuinely feel and believe it in our hearts and we value it in a way that money cannot ever capture. Aha. Then we are putting the force of our current story into the general repair of the world and of community.

Vision Battlesword [01:09:51]:
You brought it right back to what I envisioned earlier when we were talking about. When we're focused on that word value. And I felt that there was something really core in that word, in using it in a different way, which is there's this homogeneous idea of value as this universal energy or something, which may or may not represent human labor. But the word value also is personal. And like a different question than how much value is money is what kind of value does this money represent? You see what I mean? It could be used in a different way that has to do with exchange of values. Am I making sense here?

David Sauvage [01:10:47]:
Yeah, I think you're making some sense. I think I can make it make even more sense maybe if we think about the way we use our time. And in the capitalist equation, money is time. So it'll work here. Good enough. It's like, are we spending our time doing things we don't fully believe in in order to make money? Then we're reducing our time to money? Or are we spending our time to do things that really genuinely matter to us? Yeah, and then our time is now sacred. So money, similarly, are we putting our money into things so that we can make more money? Are we putting our money into things that we can mindlessly consume? Are we putting our money into things we truly believe in, like at the level of our heart, at the level of our soul? But more and more of us are wanting that kind of alignment in our lives. And then money can be an accelerant of that.

David Sauvage [01:11:43]:
It can be like, oh, I'm putting my money where my heart is. I'm putting my money where my soul is pointing. I am now fully aligned, and now it's accelerating my expression expansion and healing through giving it out. And as a result, it's moving through the culture, accelerating everyone else's expression expansion and healing.

Vision Battlesword [01:12:02]:
Right. But even in what you're saying right now, you are expressing a particular value system. You're expressing your values.

David Sauvage [01:12:12]:
Yes.

Vision Battlesword [01:12:13]:
So you're drawing a contrast between, let's say, mindless consumption, which is one value system, versus doing things that you really believe in or engaging in expressions of your heart and soul. These are different values. And so that's what I'm saying, is I have a sense that, well, first of all, I think that part of the old school story of money, at least, again, I'm kind of quoting, you know, some, let's say, austrian or kind of libertarian type economists in their sort of, I don't want to say idolization.

David Sauvage [01:12:50]:
Exactly, but they certainly, that's the perfect word.

Vision Battlesword [01:12:53]:
They certainly think money's pretty, pretty rad. Like, they think. They think it's.

David Sauvage [01:12:56]:
I literally, that's exactly the right word.

Vision Battlesword [01:12:58]:
Okay.

David Sauvage [01:12:58]:
It is an idolatry. Let's just say.

Vision Battlesword [01:13:00]:
Let's just say that's what it is. Or let's just say, at the very least, there's a respectful honor. It has a place of honor to them. And one of the reasons that it has a place of honor is because it does allow different people to have different values and to allow them to maximize their own personal flourishing, as at an individual level, their own personal flourishing within their scope of values. Where I. Hey, I want a big tv and lots of vacations and to eat cotton candy every day, or whatever those things are that I personally like, those are my values, and I can exchange money for those things. You, on the other hand, prefer spiritual experiences and beautiful trips to beautiful remote locations and a much simpler lifestyle. You can exchange your money for those things and give the rest away to charity, if you like, and that's an expression of your values.

Vision Battlesword [01:14:01]:
So I think there is a piece of the story, at least the story, that suggests that that's one of the ways that money is useful. But I think that there's a different. There's something that you were expressing a moment ago that I'm really trying to articulate, if I can, because it's kind of coming through for me. But it's a really new thing that's just starting to form. That has something to do with. What if we had a relationship with money, which is to say, an arbitrary medium of exchanging energy with each other, if we wanted to define it that way, where I'm actually able to communicate my values through that. Because that's what it sounds like you're trying to say, that you'd like to do. You want to have money, and you'd encourage people to use money to express themselves and their values, to share those with the world.

Vision Battlesword [01:14:59]:
No, that's not what you're saying.

David Sauvage [01:15:01]:
No, I'm saying something stricter, which is like not all values are created equal. In the immortal words of my friend John, he said something really beautiful. He said, some version of all this community talk is really nice, but at the end of the day, each of us has our own separate bank accounts. And I really feel the tragedy of that. And that story is a story that values the individual over the collective and values my autonomy over the rainforest.

Vision Battlesword [01:15:35]:
I want you to articulate something fundamentally different for me then, because when I'm hearing you, what I was hearing you say a moment ago is still very much rooted in that same story of, I've got my money, but you have a particular opinion about what would be good for me to do with it. But what's a totally different. What's a radically different story?

David Sauvage [01:15:57]:
Not so much what would be good for you to do with it. I'm not saying that. I'm saying when we do this, when we grow up enough collectively to work past the illusion of money by putting our money back into things that are inherently valuable, maybe that's the. Maybe that's the key word, back into things that are inherently or deeply valuable, not based on what I value or you value that there is a higher. There is a cosmology in which certain things are more valuable, like the rainforest. An old growth forest is more valuable than any amount of money you can put on it. There's no deal that you can make for a forest that's 500 years old. There's literally no deal that is the right amount.

David Sauvage [01:16:48]:
The sacred is the center of a healthy, balanced world. And as we align our money with that which is sacred, money will cease to exist. It will leave us. It will leave us like, oh, you've learned your lesson. Thank you. I don't think we can just bypass that journey and be like, oh, we don't need money. We have to actually transmute money back into community, back into love, in order to finish collectively this insane money journey that humans are on right now.

Vision Battlesword [01:17:20]:
I think I see it now. Okay, so the core of the value conversation is actually, in your opinion, I'm trying to encapsulate what I think I'm hearing you saying. Ultimately, our dysfunction with money is an expression of our dysfunction personally and as a society. In other words, yes, it is the expression of our values.

David Sauvage [01:17:44]:
Yes.

Vision Battlesword [01:17:45]:
The problem is those values are fucked up.

David Sauvage [01:17:46]:
Yes.

Vision Battlesword [01:17:47]:
Okay. I can see that.

David Sauvage [01:17:49]:
Yes.

Vision Battlesword [01:17:50]:
That makes sense to me. So what does a gift economy look like? Or what does a different. What does a different society that's using money in a different, healthy way look like?

David Sauvage [01:18:01]:
Well, I think money is like a transitional technology in this story that I'm creating here.

Vision Battlesword [01:18:07]:
I can see that, too.

David Sauvage [01:18:08]:
So it's. We move out of it, and it starts to lose its value the way everything has started to lose its value. As it becomes money, money will start to lose its value as the things we put it into regain their right value.

Vision Battlesword [01:18:20]:
Oh, fascinating. Okay.

David Sauvage [01:18:22]:
And if then more and more of us start doing that, like, redeeming money for that which is genuinely sacred, I think at some point it will shift to where we all start recognizing, obviously, that things are sacred and cannot anymore be converted into money. And we start supporting people who are doing sacred work because we now see it as so obvious. It's, it's going to be so obvious, like, we can't stop ours. And society and communities will organize around that which is sacred. When enough money goes toward that which is sacred, like the story will, will switch. And instead of valuing money above all things, which is what our culture does now, will value. I mean, it's so obvious. What our hearts and souls tell us actually is a value when we heal and get centered and listen to God, listen to the divine, listen to the deepest truth that moves through us.

David Sauvage [01:19:20]:
I think Charles Eisenstein describes it really well in the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible. One of my favorite books of all time. Everything that is given is given freely and with love. And everything that is received is received because one genuinely needs it and is nourished by it and is grateful for it. This is not that hard to imagine. In little pockets, some families achieve measures of this just between them. Friends achieve this in moments and in pockets. And, you know, you could spend a few weeks in a summer camp and feel what this feels like sometimes it's probably going to look like a lot of smaller communities oriented around land and oriented around the sacred and oriented around each other.

David Sauvage [01:20:08]:
And those communities will make things that feel really aligned with those communities to make, and will give them to other communities joyfully, who then receive them joyfully. In a world where we know that we are going to be resourced, because we're all now in a new story, not in a story that we can't trust each other. And therefore, we need a store of value, therefore, that we need to accumulate in order to be safe and then manipulate other people into believing that this is the ultimate store of value. We're out of that story, and we're going to enter this other story where what my heart is telling me to do, I'm going to honor because it feels right. And you're going to receive, and you're going to feel grateful because that feels right. And that's the whole exchange. We don't need to figure out anything else. Like God or the universe or nature already imbued us with the technology of healthy exchange.

David Sauvage [01:21:01]:
It's already in our nervous system. It's called giving and receiving. It's called gratitude and love. Like it's generosity, heart care, compassion. We already have all of those technologies. We've just gotten away from them. But our new story can be like, oh, our body knows what the right thing is. Something like that.

Vision Battlesword [01:21:22]:
I like it. I like it. I'm imagining it. You had your eyes closed while you were saying all that. And I didn't have my eyes closed. I was watching you. But I'm imagining in my mind's eye, my mental projector, how these communities look. And I think in a lot of ways, there might be a lot more simplicity to life.

Vision Battlesword [01:21:46]:
There might be less technology in some cases, there might be a return to certain traditional, more traditional ways of living, or ancestral ways of living. And I think that we also have a beautiful opportunity to utilize this incredible technological flourishing that this monetary phase of our evolution has helped to create, along with all of the baggage that it created, where we might have yet be able to micromanufacture and have a very abundant, have abundant energy sources and have, you know, fully, fully technological micro communities and societies, maybe even macro societies, that can continue to create an even more and more imaginative lifestyle for us as time goes on.

David Sauvage [01:22:45]:
May it be so, but I'm.

Vision Battlesword [01:22:47]:
For me, I see there as being a really easy. I see there being low hanging fruit here in terms of an opportunity for people who are so inclined, who resonate with these concepts that you and I have been kicking around of what could a new story be? What could a new story look like? Is this story that we've been taught and told and even indoctrinated into from our earliest age all it's cracked up to be? Or is there something missing? Are there contradictions? Is there some kind of toxin packaged in there that we haven't fully detected? And so I think for anyone so inclined to be curious about, how could we move out of that story and into a new one? You mentioned a phrase earlier called sacred reciprocity, which I think is also a phrase used by Charles Eisenstein, you know, his explorations of a new paradigm of economics and things. And, you know, that I'm a proponent of something that I call sacred reciprocity. And other people have also referred to it as value for value. It's just, it's the simplest trick. But I think it can be a very powerful element of how we build a bridge, because it doesn't require getting rid of money, it doesn't require changing our economic model, you know, or upending our financial system in any way. But it does turn, I think it does turn our thinking on its head with regard to how we exchange energy with each other. And that just simply is.

Vision Battlesword [01:24:33]:
And this, I believe perhaps this is also a stepping stone to what we may call a gift economy. But the trick is just simply, I will do for you first and then you reflect back to me what you feel that was worth whatever that was, instead of us, like, let's say, agreeing on a price, and then in a very suspicious way, like, okay, you give me yours and I'll give you mine.

David Sauvage [01:24:58]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [01:24:59]:
It's like, I'm actually just going to give. I'm just going to give you mine.

David Sauvage [01:25:02]:
But if you don't get anything back, how does that feel?

Vision Battlesword [01:25:08]:
It doesn't feel good.

David Sauvage [01:25:10]:
Yeah, I've tried this and I've had some success.

Vision Battlesword [01:25:14]:
It has happened for sure, and it doesn't feel good. But what I've found in the last two years that I've really embraced that in kind of all of my, all of my different approaches to providing service and providing value in the world is that I have received more than the baseline expectation that I set. I've actually received more in return. I think part of that is because I try really hard. I'm incentivized to do a really, really good job the best that I possibly can. I'm also incentivized to, you know, be diligent about who I choose to serve. And the other thing that, that's important to me about value for value, is I open myself to more possibilities than just money in them. Like, I'm open to being resourced in different ways.

Vision Battlesword [01:26:16]:
Like, are you, is money scarce for you? Well, okay, like, what other. What other value would you potentially have to offer? Or what other value could actually be meaningful to you to give? That creates the feeling of equitable exchange, sacred exchange.

David Sauvage [01:26:34]:
I just think it's a step.

Vision Battlesword [01:26:36]:
I think if we embraced it. Yeah, I mean, I think if enough of us embraced it, because I know.

David Sauvage [01:26:40]:
That I've gone in and out of it and really struggled with it.

Vision Battlesword [01:26:43]:
It's not easy. You know, you're fighting uphill because everybody still believes in Ralph. You know, it's like you're. It's like you're trying to talk people into, like, okay, for the moment, let's pretend Ralph doesn't exist. How would we interact with each other? Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, I've flipped a lot of people. I flipped the light, light switch on for a lot of people just in that approach where, you know, sometimes people are really skeptical, like, yeah, that's not gonna work for you. It's like, well, it's working for me to a level so far. You know, other people are just absolutely impressed with it.

Vision Battlesword [01:27:17]:
You know, just that is really, really cool and courageous, and I fully support it. And those are the, those are the folks that really embrace the model and tend to give, you know, well, more than I might have expected. Anyway, I just wanted to. Just wanted to throw that out there.

David Sauvage [01:27:36]:
I like that. I like that. I like. I like the. I love the experimentation. And this is, like, any way we can try to find a way through this Maya, this illusion, while still operating inside the illusion, like, is better than just mindlessly operating inside the illusion. Where I've found the most satisfaction is when I have been able to find a sponsor for the work that I do and then do my work for free or offer it completely as a gift without even accepting money in return. So what I love the most is, like, somebody gives me money, and then I offer something to people, and I refuse to take money.

David Sauvage [01:28:26]:
And that scrambles the brain.

Vision Battlesword [01:28:32]:
It's disrupting the program.

David Sauvage [01:28:33]:
Yeah. It really disrupts the program on the part of the receiver. It scrambles the programming. So that's been my. That's been my experimentation, but it's not. It hasn't. I'm a. I'm actually not a bad fundraiser, but I'm certainly no master.

David Sauvage [01:28:50]:
And so I've tried your way. It's also been a struggle for other reasons. And then I've tried, like, just charging the amount of money that would feel good to receive, and then I end up. And that's it. And then I end up working with people that I don't feel as good about because they're just paying for it, and I feel used. It's like it's a shit show.

Vision Battlesword [01:29:08]:
Well, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that value for value is a program that I've used to successfully get rich.

David Sauvage [01:29:13]:
Yeah. Or even to get to a place of, like, genuine ease and comfort.

Vision Battlesword [01:29:19]:
Yeah. There's a level of ease and comfort that would be nice to achieve as yet. But I think what I'm trying to demonstrate, I believe I'm certainly demonstrating it, is that that's not what motivates me.

David Sauvage [01:29:35]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [01:29:35]:
That's not the point.

David Sauvage [01:29:36]:
Yeah.

Vision Battlesword [01:29:37]:
That's beautiful of my life. You know? Would I like to be comfortable? Sure. Would I. Would I like for my life to be easeful? Of course, yeah. Do I want to have all my needs met? You know, do I want to feel like I'm flourishing as a person? Yeah. And, you know, at least for me and my value system, all of those things don't really include yacht or, you know, multiple homes or, you know, a large bank account or things like that. I'm more interested in other things, and in particular, I'm interested in, you know, moving the ball forward from a perspective of society and development of our human experience toward the kind of thing that you and I are talking about, which is, you know, I imagine something that feels more tribal and communitarian and sacred, where everyone is having their needs met and flourishing as people, and where we actually all don't have this stress in our life that this thing called money seems to have created even at the same time as it's created, I think, a certain fuel and fire and motivation for a lot of this kind of technological development, which in its own right has side effects which are costly, that I think those costs are catching up with us on a global and civilizational level, and it's just time for us to grow up to the next stage of responsibility for ourselves and our world.

David Sauvage [01:31:18]:
Amen.

Vision Battlesword [01:31:20]:
And that feels like a good place to kind of bring the. Bring the plane in for a gentle landing. I also want to just reflect to you real quickly that, you know, I mentioned my philosophy on value for value, and I just want to reflect to you that I'm hearing that approach that you espoused also, which is different, but I like it. And I just wanted to anchor it in our conversation, this idea of taking all of this so called value or so called energy or whatever it is that we've amassed in this abstraction called money, and actually converting it back in the same way that we'd convert energy into matter in a physical sense, converting it back into things with tangible value.

David Sauvage [01:32:03]:
Or intangible things with things with inherent.

Vision Battlesword [01:32:06]:
Value is the word you use. Things with inherent value or sacred value. I really like that concept of. I'm just. I'm just anchoring myself to that because it's not a thought that I'd really had before, but I like that. All right, beautiful conversation, my friend. Thank you very, very much.

David Sauvage [01:32:24]:
Thank you, vision. It's been a joy.

Vision Battlesword [01:33:08]:
I really appreciate it. I love you, brother.