After reading Charles Eisenstein’s book “The Ascent of Humanity” a few years ago, many things changed in my life. I moved to the countryside, re-thought how I wanted to work and started to learn about gardening. During this transformative chapter of my life, Eisenstein’s texts were my guiding principles. Never before had I heard anybody so eloquently sum up the reasons for the problems in our world, and the potential changes we could make to set a new direction for ourselves and the Earth.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard from a friend that Charles Eisenstein was coming to Sweden, and that he’d visit the community I’d moved to. He was going to give a presentation at the Youth Initiative Program – about 3 km from my house. I reached out and was granted an interview.
I was about to invite my biggest source of inspiration to my house to sit down for a chat. A huge moment in my life.
Parts of this interview have been used previously in the film An Unlearning. I’m now releasing it in its entirety for the first time, in the form of a podcast episode.
/Mattias Olsson
Founder Campfire Stories
Footnotes
The book referred to as one that’ll ”come out soon” in the interview; Climate: a new story, has now indeed been released.
Charles’ comment ”I spent many years researching what a world that wasn’t based on artificial scarcity would look like” refers to his book Sacred Economics. The economic model for Campfire Stories came from that book, which advocates gift economy.
Anybody curious about the Youth Initiative Program can read more about that here.
The music in the show is from the awesome duo Hang Massive. Listen and find out more about them here.