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The Sustainable Hour no. 556 | Transcript | Podcast notes | Utopia questionnaire
This week’s episode explores the urgent need for community resilience, community wealth banking, systemic change, and creative solutions in the face of escalating climate, economic, and technological crises.
Our guests are Wayne Wadsworth, also known as Wadzy, and Marama Grace Brownsdon, also known as Mims, who shares Wadzy’s vision for a new system: Worldwise Eco Bank Systems (WEB$), community-owned banks, and Renewable Economy Parties (REPs).
Opening and acknowledgement
Tony Gleeson acknowledges the Wadawurrung people and highlights their ancient wisdom as a guide to addressing today’s climate challenges.
David Suzuki’s warning
Mik Aidt shares David Suzuki’s sobering perspective: the fight against climate change is effectively “lost” at the national level, urging communities to prepare locally – as Finland has – by strengthening social bonds and readiness for crises. Local examples include resilience programs from Geelong Sustainability and the Surf Coast Environment Group.
Global Outlook with Colin Mockett OAM
Colin covers:
- Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” in the U.S., which dismantles climate initiatives and favours fossil fuels.
- United Kingdom’s proactive climate leadership ahead of COP30, with ambitious renewable energy and green finance commitments.
- Climate disasters: deadly floods in Texas and wildfires in California.
- The loss of the methane-detecting satellite, which EDF vows to overcome.
Community wealth banks
Wadzy explains his ideas on creating community wealth banks and a more democratic, equitable banking system that breaks free from the oil-backed US dollar and its global dominance. He traces the history of banking from its ancient roots to modern exploitation, showing how oil and global finance are intertwined, propping up inequity and environmental destruction.
Wadzy advocates for:
- Localised, community-owned financial institutions.
- Restructuring monetary systems to be democratic and transparent.
- Embracing emerging technologies – AI, robotics, 3D printing – wisely, to serve communities rather than deepen inequality.
- Preparing intentional, resilient communities with a clear vision of their own “utopias.”
We discuss Wadzy’s ideas about Utopia versus Dystopia, and hear that Wadzy would like to get our listeners involved by filling a questionnaire:
→ Fill Wadzy’s Utopia questionnaire
AI, community, and music
The conversation also explores the role of AI in both creative and practical solutions. Mik explains how AI is used in the podcast to create “poetic journalism” through songs distilled from interviews. We premiere the song “Richer Than Before”, based on Wadzy’s writing, and close with “Hush Now Little One” (Climate Lullaby), inspired by Mims’ talk about the youth’s climate anxiety.
– A defiant anthem calling for people-powered change, rejecting war and greed in favour of integrity, resilience, and a brighter future. Inspired by Wadzy and Mims.
– A tender and hopeful lullaby that comforts a child – and the parent – through climate fears, reminding them they’re not alone and that love and resilience will endure.
→ More songs from The Sustainable Hour
. . .
Marama’s reflection
Marama Grace Brownsdon (Mims), 30, reflects on the generational challenge of remaining hopeful and engaged despite systemic failure and cynicism. She emphasises learning from elders and participating in intentional communities that suit different needs – cultural, economic, service-based, identity-based, or quality-of-life-oriented.
→ Wadzy and Mims were guests in The Sustainable Hour no. 547 in May 2025.
The episode concludes with encouragement to envision and act on personal and collective visions of a better future, harnessing both ancient wisdom and modern tools to create resilient, creative, and human-centred communities.
Tony’s concluding comments
Along with the right to be critical of a current system comes the responsibility to suggest alternatives. This is what Wadzy gave us today. Both our guests, Wadzy and Mims, challenge us to think of living more gently on the Earth. Wadzy wants us to rethink our financial systems. Are they currently fit for purpose? Whose interests do they serve? And what is the true cost to us and our environment of having a system that puts profit ahead of anything else, turning our world into a competitive dog-eat-dog world?
Wadzy’s alternative system of community and people’s banks replaces that competition with co-operation and an emphasis on the “greater good” for that particular community.
Mims challenges us to think about what true communities are like, the benefits of the co-operations they bring to human existence, and how they align with what it’s like to be human.
Yes, we have choices in all of this.
How do you answer Wadzy’s question, WHAT IS YOUR UTOPIA?
The Sustainable Hour will be back next week looking at new sustainability issues and initiatives. In the meanwhile, be ready to learn, listen, and connect with your local community.
“Find people who are more competent if you are not. We had an amazing phone call with a cybersecurity expert last night. He’s got it covered. They’ve got it covered. There are people out there who have the things you don’t understand covered. They’ve gone to do the courses, the universities, the lectures, the field days. They’ve been there and maybe they just don’t have your final piece of the puzzle be in community because that’s where you find your people with that.”
~ Marama Grace Brownsdon
→ Subscribe to The Sustainable Hour podcast via Apple Podcasts or Spotify
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
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“Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs?
Who has fire extinguishers?
Where is the available water?
Do you have batteries or generators?
Start assessing the roots of escape.
You’re going to have to inventory your community, and that’s really what we have to start doing now.”
~ David Suzuki, environmentalist, in Canada
| Geelong Sustainability: Community Resilience Training Opportunity |
| In partnership with The Resilience Canopy, Geelong Sustainability is proud to bring the nationally recognised Resilience Canopy Practitioner Training to the Barwon region. If you’re a passionate community member, volunteer or a local leader and interested in building skills to support community resilience, you can learn more about the program and complete your Expression of Interest here. Or if you would like to hear more about the training before expressing your interest, attend the free online information session. When: 5.30 – 6.30pm, Wednesday 23 July (via Zoom) RSVP here. |
“My response to those who say it’s “too late” to address climate change and global environmental damage: It is NOT too late. As long as one tree is still standing, one whale is still swimming, and one child is still breathing it is not too late to protect something precious.”
~ Dr. Jonathan Foley
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12 years ago, Wadzy helped building the Eco Centro in the Maldives.
BBC 20-min documentary: ‘How do we live well on this planet without destroying it?’
A group of academics and activists are questioning the possibility of endless economic growth on a finite planet and are advocating a bold solution: degrowth. Originating in France, the degrowth movement has spread to places like Japan, the UK and Barcelona, taking root in academia, grassroots organisations and among university students.
The movement argues for a ‘democratisation of the economy’ and for collectively managing key resources, like housing. Critics argue that opposing economic growth is impractical and warn of negative consequences, especially for the most vulnerable. BBC takes a look at the theory – and asks what the practice might look like.
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A storm is coming — not just of climate collapse, but of political and spiritual reckoning — and what we do in the next five years will shape the revolution to come. rogerhallam.com/the-inevitab…
— Revolution in The 21st Century (@revolution21c.bsky.social) June 27, 2025 at 1:18 AM
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“When individual action serves systemic change, and systemic change enables individual action, the feedback loop becomes not only positive, but revolutionary.”
~ Kasper Benjamin, The Minority Report
→ RenewEconomy – 4 July 2025:
Congress votes for “big beautiful lie” that will kill wind and solar, condemns world to 3°C warming
“The bill is more or less as promised by Trump to the fossil fuel industry in return for an estimated $1 billion of support in his election campaign.”
→ ICM – 1 July 2025:
Major reversal in ocean circulation detected in the Southern Ocean, with key climate implications
“Satellite data processing algorithms developed by ICM-CSIC have played a crucial role in detecting this significant shift in the Southern Hemisphere, which could accelerate the effects of climate change.”
Dr. Graeme Taylor outlines the core arguments from his new paper, emphasizing that without immediate cooling interventions — such as solar geoengineering — there is no realistic path to stabilizing the climate and preventing irreversible impacts like ice sheet collapse and mass extinction.
The discussion addresses the controversial but increasingly necessary role of solar radiation management, the ethical and governance challenges it raises, and the need for a global scientific and policy consensus to move forward.
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INDEX of The Sustainable Hour no. 556
00:00 Flirting with climate disaster
03:43 Global Outlook: Climate news and political polarisation
13:58 Wadzy: Community resilience and local solutions
27:20 The future of banking and economic systems
34:41 AI, technology, and community engagement
48:30 Creating a New Utopia through collaboration
Transcript of The Sustainable Hour no. 556
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General:
We are flirting with climate disaster.
Jingle:
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson:
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land of the Wadawurrung people. We pay tribute to their elders – past, present and those that earn that great honour in the future. We’re broadcasting from stolen land, land that was never ceded. As NAIDOC Week draws to a conclusion, we’d like to acknowledge the accumulated depth of knowledge that they’ve gained by nurturing both their land and their communities for millennia before their land was stolen. And in that ancient wisdom lies so many of the solutions as we face up to the climate crisis.
Mik Aidt:
‘We need revolution,’ says David Suzuki. And who is he? He’s one of our world’s environmental elders, you could call him, in line with, for instance, Sir David Attenborough or Jane Goodall. He said that in an interview with the Canadian news outlet iPolitics, where he talked about Trump, the American president, who he sees as ‘a triumph of capitalism and neoliberalism’. And as ‘someone who is going to wreak havoc’.
And Suzuki is not in a good mood. ‘The fight against climate change is lost,’ he says.
‘The units of survival are going to be local communities. So I’m urging local communities to get together.’
And he pointed Finland as a place that’s offering a great example because the Finnish government has sent a letter to all their citizens warning of these future emergencies that are coming, whether they’re floods, droughts or storms.
‘They’re going to come and they’re going to be more urgent and prolonged,’ says the government of Finland. And governments will not be able to respond on the scale or speed that is needed for these emergencies. So the Finnish government is telling their citizens that they’re going to be at the front of whatever is coming, whatever hits, they better be sure to be ready to meet it.
‘Find out who on your block can’t walk because you’re going to have to deal with that. Who has wheelchairs? Who has the fire extinguisher? Where’s the available water? Do you have batteries or generators? Start assessing the roots of escape.’
David Suzuki from Canada is telling us ‘you’re going to have to inventory your community.’
That’s really what we have to start doing now. And that is, in many ways, what we have started doing here in Geelong. In the Geelong region. For instance, Surf Coast Environment Group has been running a resilience course for some time. And now Geelong Sustainability, a group of some 10,000 people, are opening up a new resilience program as well.
And we’ll be talking, I think, quite a bit about that. And also about the economical side of this in The Sustainable Hour today. But first, it’s time for our weekly global news bulletin. And we have, as our listeners would know, Colin Mockett OAM, ready at the news desk. What’s the outlook? What do you have for us, Colin?
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COLIN MOCKETT’S GLOBAL OUTLOOK
Well, it sort of nails down what you’ve been talking about, Mik. It illustrates the polarisation, if you like, of the environment at the moment. Because our roundup begins this week in Washington, where President Donald Trump’s giant tax and spending plan that he called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was passed with no changes last Thursday.
The $4 trillion “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act is now ready to take effect across the U.S. economy, slicing into every aspect of the nation’s effort to address climate change and environmental injustice.
It’s essentially 887 pages of legislation that largely erases the Inflation Reduction Act that Democrat President Biden brought in three years ago. The new Trump Republican legislation effectively cuts out all incentives for buying electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances. It phases out tax credits for wind and solar energy. It opens up federal land and water for oil and gas drilling and increases the profitability for both industries, while creating new federal support for coal.
It also ends the historic investment in poor and minority communities that carry a disproportionate pollution burden, but that was money that the Trump administration had already stopped. And it effectively wipes out, cancels or wrecks any and all spending on greening by all areas of the U.S. federal government.
Now to the saner politics of Europe, where in London’s Guild Hall, more than 2,000 climate leaders from business, government, finance, and civil sectors met last week for the UK’s annual Climate Action Forum. The event was hosted by Britain’s Climate Action Group and its speakers were encouraged to unveil plans ahead of this year’s COP30 in Brazil. Among the guests were this year’s COP president and the Brazilian environment minister.
They heard from Britain’s energy security and Net Zero minister, Ed Miliband, who delivered a clear vision for the UK as a clean energy superpower. Does this ring any bells with you? How long have we been talking about Australia becoming a clean energy superpower? But Britain is now claiming it.
Ed Miliband outlined the concrete steps being taken to accelerate the UK’s global transition to a net zero, nature positive future – to be detailed at COP30 in Brazil. As such, he emphasised the dual opportunity to create a new generation of well paid green jobs and secure long term industrial resilience. He also spoke of the role of the finance sector – especially insurance – in pressuring for action against climate change.
The Lord Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan said that Transport for London, which is the city’s largest consumer of electricity, had awarded a multi-million-pound contract to supply it with solar power for the next 15 years. This marked significant progress toward the capital’s goal of running 100 per cent of its public transport on renewable energy by 2030, less than five years away.
The Mayor also unveiled a new Climate Finance Taskforce to help unlock capital investments needed to meet London’s net zero targets. “We must be doers, not delayers,” he said, opening the fifth round of a £500m Green Finance Fund aimed at delivering projects across the city to deliver energy efficiency, clean transport, renewables or heat networks.
Also at the Forum, Linda Freiner, the Chief Sustainability Officer of Zurich Insurance Group addressed the stark and growing recognition that climate change is financial risk. She said, in simple terms, “If it’s not insurable, it’s not investable.” She said that insurance and finance would have a significant place at COP30 in November.
Back to America where there was deadly flash flooding in Texas this week, while, in California, more than 300 firefighters are battling a massive blaze, foreboding the threat of summer wildfires arriving at a time when President Donald Trump has slashed funding to federal agencies tasked with fighting climate disasters. The “Madre Fire” broke out last Wednesday in San Luis Obispo, a rural county in the heart of California. About 200 residents were evacuated, with dozens of buildings under threat.
It is the biggest blaze so far this year in California, which is still scarred by wildfires that destroyed swaths of Los Angeles at the beginning of this year. The Madre fire spread quickly. In 24 hours it engulfed more than 21,000 hectars, according to the state’s fire service Cal Fire. Images from the state warning system showed columns of black smoke overhanging mountains in the hilly, remote region. And the Madre Fire follows several other blazes, raising fears of a difficult summer ahead for a state already traumatised by those January wildfires that killed 30 people.
Now to Norway, where a $134 million satellite, that was on a mission to detect oil and gas industry emissions of the greenhouse gas, methane, has mysteriously been lost in space. The satellite, named MethaneSAT had been collecting emissions data and images from drilling sites, pipelines and processing facilities around the world since March. It went off course about two weeks ago, according to the Environmental Defence Fund which was running the project. Its last known location was over Svalbard in Norway, and the operator doesn’t expect it to be recovered as it had lost power.
The whole project was backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, who, if you remember, got married last week in Venice. EDF senior vice president, Amy Middleton, said that the launch of MethaneSAT in March 2024 was a milestone in a years-long campaign by EDF to hold accountable more than 120 countries that in 2021 pledged to curb their methane emissions. It also sought to help enforce a further promise from 50 oil and gas companies to eliminate methane and routine gas emissions made at the Dubai COP28 climate summit in 2023. But EDF vice president, Amy Middleton, had the last word. ‘We’ve made so much progress and so much has been learned that if we hadn’t taken this risk, we wouldn’t have any findings,’ she said. ’We’re seeing this satellite loss as a setback, not a failure.’
And that fairly positive note ends our round-up for the week.
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JINGLE:
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
. . .
Tony:
Our guest today is Wayne Wadsworth – Wadzy. Our regular listeners would remember that a while back now we had Wadzy on talking about the safer, more just, inclusive, sustainable, peaceful and healthy world that we’re all yearning for. Today he’s back on to talk about webs, world-wise, eco-banking systems and community wealth banks. Wadzy, welcome back!
Wadzy (at 14:19)
Thank you. And I did listen to the world news in terms of Ed Miliband and what’s happening in England and their desire to be a carbon negative. But if you look at what’s realistically happening in the United States, you’ve actually got the revenue. They’re going, no, we’re going to drill. And you have to then understand, well, why does the United States pretend to be a neutral country keen on ‘drill baby’?
And then you have to you have to go back and why the United States is oil and it goes back to the condom. You’ve got to trace the bank system itself and why I think, without actually developing a global new currency, oil will predominate as a major thing that’s destroying the planet because oil is the American dollar. We actually need a new banking system.
What props up the American dollar? Without oil, the last American dollar is gone. The American economy collapsed. So it’s something I’ve been thinking about over many years. I’ve been involved, obviously, in the whole green thing for 70 this year, so 40, 50 odd years. And we’ve gone back and collapsed unions, all those organisations of working class sort of politics, being continually wound down, the Greens, know, the environment movements have been either stuck with funding or sidetracked, know, where we were moved globally. In a whole lot of ways, we’ve stagnated and in many ways gone back.
I mean, some places, you know, we’ve gone forward in some ways, but particularly if you look at United States, it does my head in. Sort of moving forward of areas where the economy runs the world. They’re going backwards at a greater speed now, you know, ‘drill baby drill’. And then you have to understand, why does the United States really stand out against in the most important problem? You know, we can fix it. It’s not that difficult. And the United States is saying, no, we haven’t got a problem. We’re going to keep ‘drill baby drill’. ‘There’s no global warming.’
There’s no end to the environmental crisis of the American ruling class who want to keep drilling oil.
You have to go back, back into history. If we go back, you know… if we follow back to the stone age, basically, what was the first bank? It was a carcass. You could cook that carcass, and if there was some left over, you could trade it with the tribe down the road – for a bit of labour or spare here, or something like that.
So banking is not a new thing, and surplus value isn’t a new thing. Tribes learnt that if you have access to the banking system, the whole banking system, the next surplus, you could try with other trotters. And if you could preserve that, or preserving seeds, you could use that as trade.
Banking is a very primitive old thing. It’s the evolution of banking and the self that changes, you know.
We then had actual bankers. You know that the first banking system was based on gold. So if you had gold, you could go and buy other things, and you can go to war against that tribe, or that tribe, or that country, so of the banking system itself, through history. Go. Bye-bye. As long as you had enough gold to do it, you could pay for it.
But the bankers learned that they could store that gold and then print money, more money than the gold they actually had. So, came what’s called the “gold standard”.
In particular, people that got it down in the Middle Ages started bank,s and they said, “All right, well, you put your gold in here and we’ll give you a value against that gold.” And then they realised they could actually have a “gold reserve” and then they could fund promissory notes. The thinking was: “He has gold reserves so promise more promissory notes.”
The kings and the queens could fund wars and things like that, so they did. They funded in many cases, they funded the French Empire. The English – in banking system, the Rothschilds in particular.
War with Albania, they knew they lost that war, but they led the stock market to believe that they won and bought all the stocks at very low price, and when the English found out that the ringgit had actually won, stock prices went up and they cashed in big time.
That really started that thing where okay we can profit from you know we can actually the finance from war.
Back then the British pound really relied on that gold. I mean, you look at the British Empire, it was the most impressive empire of all the empires. They were able to just scungy little wet currency, colonised through currency. It was what they say, the pound sterling. It was backed by metal. And they were able to run the global economy. And we talked about, you know, we’re talking about the whole world.
It’s closed since then, every empire, but the British Empire had an amazing empire that was based on gold and then being able to print money in relation to value of dollars.
Now, if we then go to the First World War, all that sort-of broke down to a large amount, but at the end of it, the Brits won and the Pound Sterling was still the global currency.
The Second World War changed all that, because at the end, the Americans joined the war and showed their power. I think their idea was: ‘We’ll come in when either side is winning and we’ll make a buck anyway. We’re selling.”
They started selling everything to the Nazis, and everything on both sides. But their cleverness was to stay out of the war and then cash in at the end, which is what they did. They didn’t join the war till 1943 – at the end of that war – they were literally reserved.
That was before giving to England who was broke. It actually owed America hundreds of millions of dollars. So the Americans never ever gave anything to the English. It was either leased or they sold it to them.
At the end of the Second World War, there was a was a huge war debt to the United States. And that’s where the whole change came. They bought in the Bretton Woods Agreement, which literally ended the British Empire. Britain was saying: “Thanks, bankers, hand it over to the United States”.
And the agreement with that is that United States would literally take over the Empire. Everything would be based on IMF, and the IMF, based on $35 an ounce. And that worked pretty well for quite some years.
Then the Vietnam War came along. The United States went from a creditor nation to one with a whole lot of money. And then from US dollar, so all go through the US and the US dollar.
I think it was, the French who went over and said, ‘We’ve got a holiday of dollars, we want our gold that you’ve got stored in the New York Reserve.’ And very shortly after that year, gold back from the dollar, you know, was an ounce. They withdrew the gold backing from $35 an ounce to $300 an ounce very quickly. We had so much currency that it just printed more money.
So we all thought at that time that that was the collapse of the American empire. They devised a plan to back the currency with oil. The plan was that the Saudis in particular would sell all their oil in $US dollar and the return for that was that the Americans would make sure that the Saudis weren’t overthrown – or something like that. So they put in military bases right throughout The Middle East, and basically protected all of them. And that’s why the Middle East has been such a mess since then, really.
And so that was actually created a credit boom where we saw the introduction of credit cards, a lot of private industries that were… And if you follow that ownership of and control of all the cards, lots of different industries run by the government who can see through oil. It’s the pin that holds the United States together now.
So if that falls apart, what holds the standard If you look at it now?
The completely bizarre thing about the American debt is that China gives money – or money in bonds – in America so they can buy Chinese goods, because they don’t have the dollar, the actual money to buy it. So, they’re Americans to buy Chinese goods and the same with Japan.
The Chinese are playing. It’s an American to realise, ‘Well, we can’t just keep going and take your pain in debt because some are paying more in interest than you actually pay now.’
It’s something like 30 per cent of their income just goes on interest. So if interest rates go up, the debt in America is not stable, it’s not payable. And that’s why you have to understand that’s the reason why Trump is so corrupt, because that’s the only thing that’s really backing the “how do we face that? We’ve got a bank of international settlement, all in U.S., so they can bankrupt countries. You know, an African country wants to pay, we want to get off the IMF and World Bank
Dollars which control global currency and also, so, look at your dollar. Well, you’ve seen it. Iraq, Iran, Gaddafi, all overthrown, not because they’re all… But they’re overthrown because they want to get away from… Now the thing is now you’ve got Brexit, which is a very powerful trade war with China, Russia, Brazil, big hitters in it. So they can’t… Iran too, yeah. But how do you, you know, like, if that’s the case, how do we change that?
The whole environment thing can’t change when you’ve got one country that runs and then you’re dependent on oil to do that. So BRICS is a good idea in terms of, yeah, it does take away that power of the United States to the whole global economy.
So they overthrow countries and keep the dictatorship going. But in itself, it’s not undemocratic. The banking sector is very democratic. So to me, we need to develop a monetary system that’s controlled by BRICS or by some tiny minority. And so that’s sort where that evolved from a democratic organisation and the high-tech systems are undemocratic.
So at the moment, you’ve got a tiny group of central powers. So if we had a system where… a member of that… So for example, let’s take United States, around a million people. And then you’ve got… People, they would have the members on that. Bankers who run the whole system. I don’t know what they do, what their secret meetings, none of that’s public.
Every country, global bank. People, India 1.2 billion people, the member board would be reflecting the population of their position. So every country would have members on that that decide the policies of that bank. It’s not just decided by United States at the moment. So it’s lot more democratic because they can’t just go, “we’re going to fund the overthrow of who we don’t like because they can’t go into Africa and cut off your credit”. They don’t like what you’re doing. A board national banking system. So long, get it?
We’re going to be all crazy because we don’t feed your people and you want to do sustainable farming and you want to get rid of the oil, plant trees and you want to get it. We’re not having that. They can overthrow those governments just by cutting off funds, which is what they’ve done for the last 20 odd years since the oil was backing for the dollar. Good luck.
That’s the first stage.
It’s incredibly difficult thing to do because you’ve got the most powerful organisation in the world besides the global community. That economy, we want to get rid of you and replace that certainly not. So it has to be, it has to be just in terms of if you looked at Australia, for example, we had our own Commonwealth Bank years ago, and they flogged it off. So we don’t have a public owned. But if we had Australia, so we have a bank in three stages.
Any bank anymore. But community wealth banks in Australia, community that deals with the global situation, much like our reserve does at the moment.
And then you have, the federal government, our federal government gives grant money to communities. So in Australia, we’ve got councils all around us. So that grant money goes to distribute that money in their council area. So you’d have communities in those areas that actually run the economy of those areas. And that’s a really important thing because of the changes coming.
Australia would go to councils who would then. Well, that, councillor… We’ve got 3D printing, we’ve got AI and robotics. So those three things people don’t realise are going to change things more than any technology that we’ve had. You know, if we look at the technology that came in, we’re going to put as things and the head.
We all thought computers were lots of work, they weren’t. In fact, it created lots of employment.
AI is different in that you can hold factory and run it without, literally without stuff. And they do have factories in China now. actually don’t have any stuff. They don’t even have lights in them. It’s all in the dark,
because they don’t need lights. So we’re going to see the disappearance of… It’s going to be in entities like… And, you know, if you’ve got an AI thing that can store the whole history of legal practices in every legal matter. And you can have that. not just the people of manufacturing jobs, medical industry.
Wars can be fought in the world on one computer. You know you don’t need hundreds of thousands of people even now, you know, we know ourselves, we can… Mik was saying you can do this radio thing type in hololiz and it comes up and he said that to me these technologies are coming and unless we develop systems that can intervene, we’ll get swept away we might be lucky to react with them, we might get a bit of money each week that the state pays us, but it’s well for most of the people. The people at the top will be doing pretty well as they always do. Pretty for the rest of us? It won’t be a very pretty, but they won’t be free.
So unless we get into reactive with those changes that are coming, whether we like it or not, and we are very much cognisant with it, as people at the bottom of that, what do we want out of AI? What do we want out of robotics? What do want out In reality, and what do you want to hear?
In 20 years you’ll be able to have a 3D printer on your phone, or most of it. I had 3D printers three or four years ago. I could print lots of amazing things just by downloading a program, paying two bucks from Maribu to download the file for it and print it on the. The technology’s here now, it’s not something that’s coming. It’s going to speed up like it, everything does. Society, we want and that will be able to print your mobile.
And how do we interact with a financial system that’s going to have the capacity to produce enormous amounts of goods and services way above what we… Do we want to have 10,000 more things? How do we think now?
How do we react to that? Yeah that’s where I’m coming from. We need to start talking about that. And of course the environment comes into that hugely, you know, because all this new technology can bring amazing, all the technology we need to clean up the planet. You know, there’s three basic things which is, you know, turn all the planet back to what it was. We can do that with cool technology.
Things we can produce to me to clean up our mess, so we can stick some of that back to us, away from the world of plastics to plant-based products. What do we do with people with that technology? And go, you know, what do we want as people with that? So I think that’s the question we really need to start looking at and what finance?
Do we want a financial system that will allow us to be part of that system. But out of the financial system, we’re just at the bottom of the line. The wish I had at and we might get a handout, is a win-win.
Mik:
That’s exactly, I mean, there’s one big word, Wadzy, that rings in my ears and that is the word ‘control’. Control. How do we change all the words that you have given us here and that insight into action when there is such a strong control already on that system? They’re not going to be happy if we sort of rebelled and began to make our small community. Banks, eco banks, 20 people got together in one place and 20 another place and so on. That would be seen as rebellion.
Wadzy:
That will be, yeah, quite a bit. If you look in Australia now, we do have called Beyond Bank that’s actually owned, I’m a shareholder. It’s actually owned by us. Now you can do all the… …more things a bank can do and it can lie in most normal things.
Big banks account create money out of nothing which big banks can do. So they’ve restricted the little banks unable to do that, which obviously gives the big banks a big advantage over little banks.
I think what we can do to start with is join those, you know, to leave the commonwealth, join the community. So I think that would be a start. Get people to I’ll thank all the big banks and community banks that are already by the community anyway. It’s a big step. What happens when in mass half of the big bankers and restrict it as a threat?
When that starts happening, the government will intervene on our behalf.
They set up the Grimeen bank in Bangladesh, which was tremendously successful. It helped poor women, nurses, businesses. A tremendous bank. And Devane did recently write off the bank and become entrepreneurs. The government, you know, they made the bank only to rip people off, borrow money from people. I think we’ve never seen that for rich people.
So they will live in, but the point is, we can – and I think our job is to – educate people about how it can work for us. How the military system works, not against us, you know. And if the government does intervene, we can have control. Why are you intervening in our banks? They belong to us. Why do we not hand them over to them?
We could campaign to say, ‘Why do you need the big banks?’
I think we have to develop an argument around why we should have ‘community wealth banks’ and why and what society we want to see. We use community wealth banks because things are going to have to be localised hugely when technology comes in because we might not need transport.
At the moment, all the materials and this technology we want comes and transmits goods thousands and thousands of miles from places like China. We’ll actually be able to produced quite closely. I could buy a roll of organic plastic actually have my print on it. In my lounge, or it could be made at a community 3D printer shop.
And I can have that sitting on my desk, that print out local, you know, don’t have to, it doesn’t have to. Even the effect on China is going to be huge because then they really know they are no longer the industrial country where everything comes from. Poor countries can start printing their own wealth.
Mik:
This is so interesting in a way, because you remember I started today with saying a quote from David Suzuki in Canada saying ‘We need revolution’. But the thing is, it sounds to me like a revolution is coming whether we like it or not.
Wadzy:
It is coming, yeah.
Mik:
So: the revolution is here. It’s only question about how do we respond to that.
Wadzy:
Yeah, I agree 100 per cent. The AI revolution is here, it is not coming – it is here. The robotics are probably two or three years away. Evolution is here already. It’s not coming, the evolution is here and self-driving cars probably in which is the robot for $30,000 or $40,000 dollars, three years you’ll be able to go on.
Mik:
I think the listeners just need to understand what you explained very quickly about what I did with your book. You’ve sort of made a draft of a book about this eco banking system and everything. if listeners are not aware, in the last half year or so, we have not been playing other people’s music. We have been producing our own music in The Sustainable Hour. I think we may be the only podcast in the world that actually has this process of that we take an interview that we have done, put it into AI, which makes first a transcript, and then turns the transcript into draft song lyrics. And then I go through the lyrics and we put them into another AI that produces some music. I modify it a bit. And within an hour or two, we have a song, which is an excerpt of an interview. So it’s a ‘journalistic song’, you could say. It’s the concentrated version of what this person… the message of this person.
And we did that with you and Mims last time you were in The Sustainable Hour. And you seemed to be OK with it at the time. And so I thought this time I’ll do it in advance, so I can play it for you now. Actually, I took your book and I threw it into AI, and I said, ‘Do you see any potential for a song from all this writing that Wadzy had done here?’ And you know what the AI said? ‘Yep, I can see some good lyrics there.’ And it came out with this:
. . .
SONG (at 37:15)
‘Richer Than Before’
[Verse 1]
From cave to city, from gold to wire
We built this world on dreams and desire
Now we stand at the fork in the road:
Climate Armageddon — or safety for all?
[Bridge 1]
Will we rise or sell our souls
To the banksters and the fear machine?
Will we take back what they stole?
Which future will we choose?
[Chorus]
We don’t need what you’re fighting for
We don’t need your bombs, we don’t need your war
We trust in science and honesty restored
And we’re already richer than before
[Verse 2]
People power, people’s land
Our integrity is not for sale
The banker’s promise, written in sand
is a fragile and fading tale
[Bridge 2]
Plant the seed and watch it rise
A world where all of life can thrive
Healthy, wealthy, and wise
We can do it, right where we live
[Chorus]
We don’t need what you’re fighting for
We don’t need your bombs, we don’t need your war
We trust in science and honesty restored
And we’re already richer than before
[Outro]
We built this system — we can build another
Utopia or dystopia — the choice is ours
. . .
Wadzy:
We need these places that are creative and people involved in their community.
Marama:
Because something more than likely is gonna fit for you.
. . .
Mik Aidt:
The choice is ours. What do you think?
Marama:
Wow. Awesome. I mean, I’m kind of tripped out. I’ve just turned 30 and I’m still very bad with AI. So I’m kind of tripped out how good quality those lyrics was, the pacing, like for that to have been computers, robots, samples of voices – whipped up – that could have taken months…
Mik:
So just to the listeners: who’s talking here is Mims, who came together with Wadzy, but you’ve been very quiet until now. You were together last time in The Sustainable Hour.
Marama:
Yeah, yeah, no, was really, it was just really an honor to hear you speak about it again, about this system that we’ve been kind of raised in with a lot more naivety and hope that, you know, at some point we’ll make it, and we’ll end up with our two-bedroom, three-bedroom house and we might have the honour and privilege of being able to procreate and continue on this species.
And the older we get, the more that seems like not only just a foreign concept, but also ends up with this very cynical, disconnected, lost, kind of down and out-of-luck mentality that I see in many of my generation where it’s, but why should I try? ‘They’ve already told me my degree is not going to get me employment. So why should I try?’
And that mentality limits the capacity, I think, as I hang out with incredible minds such as yourselves, it limits the capacity of energy that we do have. Yes, we don’t have all the answers between 15 years old and 30 years old. You don’t have all the answers. But as we’ve just seen from the AI capacity, if we are to believe that an algorithm can focus more on the truth behind the questions that we’re asking, and hopefully we are creating services and systems that don’t have necessarily political biases, that they are just collating as much data as they can, so that when we fish for our answers, we are getting a comprehensive approach to that. I think there is hope.
You know, it’s biblical and there’s probably other spiritual texts that have it that say like our elders dream the dreams. They’ve got the lived experiences. They’ve seen the nightmares. They’ve lived through fire, floods and droughts that weren’t connected to the rest of the world like they are now. When a landslip happens in Nepal, we get to learn about it in Melbourne, in Sydney, and vice versa. When we had the fires rip up the East Coast, American, Canadian firefighters were on hand. We now have a global community which ties us into, where do we go from the banking structure?
And that’s where my favorite thing is looking into these communities. My one little thing which I’ve just found and I just really, it summarises it really well in my mind is that there can be five community categorisations of communities. And this is coming from the foundation of intentionalcommunities.org:
One is the cultural preservation. Are you having a community to culturally preserve something? Are you guys, you know, for instance, Amish or Hittite – is the examples they had. Are you preserving a way of life? And that’s why you’re starting a community or a business or a village? Or wherever you’re in entering into with this group. It’s an economic security, the cooperatives, the food banks, Intentional Communities include ecovillages, cohousing, community land trusts, communes, co-ops, coliving, and the ways that we are able to then create like the source bulk food, where we all go to a place that has grains and pastas and rices. Is it going to benefit us economically? Is it a service-based community? These sort of constructs that our generation… You know, we see Vinny’s and we see the Salvation Army and their homelessness appeal, and we feel like they’re doing something. So why do I need to do something? Someone else is already doing something.
Or is it identity-based refuges where we saw through Epic where people had an idea and they wanted to be supported by other people? So 40,000 Australian citizens went to Canberra to start an identity-based community where we all found different identities once we got there and realised that humans aren’t easily controlled, and that people still end up wanting to be able to be right about their opinions.
And the fifth one that actually comes up is the quality of life.
So just even in flickering through those five things, what is your intentional community going to look like in five, 10 years from now? Is that something that you’re going to chip in with your friends, get 10 or 20 people together, putting $20 bucks in a week for a year and seeing what’s possible at the end of that? Or is it joining one of the 500 different intentional communities in Australia? Learning from their prototypes, what they’ve developed, their legal structures, guidelines… Because something more than likely is going to fit for you. And you’re not too far gone. I’m talking particularly to us 15 to 30 year olds who feel like it’s too much: You have the world at your fingertips with these sort of people who have already spent 40 years setting cool things up. We’re just here to add that energy and that next drive, the bridge to the automation and augmentation of our reality.
Mik:
Thank you, to Mims, who is traveling together with Wadzy and today had her own response, you could say, to everything that you have told us, Wadzy. Wadzy, what was your own feedback on the song, which was like an extract of the booklet or this sort of draft book that you have written?
Wadzy:
Yeah, you said to me the other day, and I listened to it, and I was sort of blown away, to be honest, because I remember I was with a woman and while ago and we sat down and we wrote a song and it probably took us
a couple of days and it was fun but it wasn’t what you call professional. I was amazed that it could take those words, which were quite complex, and then put it into a very listenable song.
Mik:
So just two things to add to that. I think it is a collaboration between human and machine in the sense that I am very much the editor of everything in that process. And I do make remakes and remakes and remakes until I’m satisfied. And by the way, I am a musician myself. And also it should be mentioned, I don’t do this for money. I do it because I see it as a new way of communicating the same things as you’re saying in your book, how would that go out if it was in a song? And could it reach a different audience in that way?
I think that’s what I’m experimenting with. It’s ‘poetic journalism’, you know, ‘music journalism’ in a way. And it’s a new genre that hasn’t existed before. And I’m getting a lot of criticism, especially from musicians saying ‘This has no soul, you’re in the wrong space!’ But I’m still experimenting. Because one thing is – and I think you’re aware of that as well, Wadzy: AI is not going away.
Can I just put in… Geelong Sustainability has just launched a community climate resilience training program. And you can sign up to that. There will be training sessions in October. And if you go to Geelong Sustainability’s website you can register your interest. There’s different ways of participating. I think that is a very important initiative locally, where everything that you have talked about today, Wadzy also integrates. These questions that you’re raising definitely are part of that discussion.
So this story doesn’t end with this program. This is a new beginning.
Wadzy:
Just one thing, you know, we’ve been setting up community gardens in Australia probably for 30 or 40 years and the failure rate’s quite high, and the failure rate in community farms is quite high. It’s really… We need to look at why those things fail, you know? There are reasons for it, obviously. And I think AI can play a huge part in making those more successful, you know.
I’m not worried about AI. If we use it wisely, it can be a great tool. Or if it’s used against a horrible thing. Any technology can be used for good or bad. You know, can get a person over the head with a good brain. So what are we going to use the AI to repair this? You know, we’ve got the whole Earth to repair this. There’s no lack of work. And if someone loses their job to AI, it could be horrible thing. If they want to go out and do a community garden, wouldn’t that be a great thing? You know, they’ve still got a lot more humanity, it’s probably a worthwhile thing to do in their community and be part of that community. So, you know, we can use AI to actually build communities and that’s what sort of excites me.
Marama:
How do we transition in a way that reduces death, illness, destruction and moving… you know, yeah… How do we just reduce what seems to be inevitable? Because that’s what they keep pitching. Depopulation, move into the cities, the deserts are increasing. You don’t want to be out west. These kind of distorted lies instead of let’s create communities out west that have self-sufficient feedback loops with water, sunshine…
Talking about ‘no soul’ for your song, now we can take those lyrics and remix them like now all of us muso friends we can take those lyrics and we can make it into something coming up with that.
Mik:
Exactly, it’s just a draft, it’s just a suggestion and you can take it further and you can make a real human recording. You can even play it live around the bonfire. So…
JINGLE
Mik:
This was all we could fit in this particular Sustainable Hour. Any last comments?
Tony:
Yeah, I think that Wadzy’s got a thesis prepared for us, I guess: a ‘Wadsyfesto’. And we’ll put links to it in the show notes. I think there’s lots of, it’s not just a theoretical operation. It’s how to actually implement it as well. And we need that more than anything. It just reinforces the fact that we have choices as we transition to this new world.
Wadzy, I’d to congratulate you on the paper that you produced from this. There’s lots of important information in it. I think today, we just kind of just covered the theory, but there’s many practical applications as well towards the end. Now, right at the end, you’ve got this page, ‘What’s your utopia?’ What would you like our listeners to do with that?
Wadzy:
I wrote that paper because everybody’s got a different utopia. If we all asked each other ‘What is your utopia’ we would probably be different. And that’s not a bad or good thing. I think it’s a good thing that people use a utopia because as we develop the AI and collective intelligence, we want to enhance their own intelligence and their own understanding and what really they want in society does have different ideas about utopia.
How do they see their community and what’s the best thing that would be good for them in that community? So it’s a very challenging question if you ask people what their utopia is, you know, because they have to think about, actually, what is my utopia and how would I build that utopia?
So really, programs like this can empower people, I think, can help people to think about, ‘Okay, utopia is a great idea and I don’t agree with Wadzy, I don’t agree’, actually sit down and think, you know? ‘I think… I’ve got my own utopia. And in my community, how could I do that?’
So really, if we look at the relations of every city – it has a new expression of art and culture and they’re all different. You go to the European cities where they had the Renaissance. Pictures of the Renaissance changed. You had Bruegel painting working class people. That was the Renaissance. I think AI could really bring in a Renaissance of that whole creative thing.
Look, the cities we’re building are so ugly. God, I go to Melbourne: How could someone build such an ugly monstrosity? … and then you go to Europe and you go to places where there are some beautiful buildings. And they could build this 400 years ago. We’re in this bloody thing now and we’re building crap. Ugly suburbs and ugly cities, why are we doing it? We can get people involved. We are a suburb, it’s what people want, it’s not shifting in their big… The rest of your life, it’s a life that doesn’t have any social services. No, we didn’t. It’s good.
So when I am developing it, it’s because we’ve got this thing, a mortgage, pay for it, live in isolated community. And that’s not gonna, you know… We build that… People go off and go off to a job that that’s the point. You know, we are building all these suburbs where people are meant to go off to an office and work all day. In 20 years that’s not going to exist. So how do we make those communities really exciting and inviting? And that’s what I think, and create… We need to have places that have people involved in their community. And that excites me about AI. And that’s what’s going to challenge us in this next period. How do we make AI work for us, not against us
Colin:
Ah look, I’ll just say that we now face a huge challenge. AI adds so much more than just making songs out of the air. It’s collecting information on every time you click or every time you look at a screen. And that information can be used in so many ways. It can be used to help humanity and it can be used to control humans and that’s the worry that I have.
But I will say that I found it really astonishing that that was not a human voice singing.
Wadzy:
I did too.
Colin:
Now I can recognise AI. Thanks to you, Mik, I can recognise AI-completed songs. They’ve now got a sort of a recognisable pattern to me – and that’s bound to change as well. But look, I’ll finish up this episode by saying: be part of the future, be aware of the future…
Mik:
Be ready.
Colin:
Be ready for it, yeah.
Marama: (at 55:08)
And find people who are more competent if you are not. We had an amazing phone call with a cyber security expert last night. He’s got it covered. They’ve got it covered. There are people out there who have the things you don’t understand, covered. They’ve gone to do the courses, the universities, the lectures, the field days. They’ve been there, and maybe they just don’t have your final piece of the puzzle.
Mik:
Be in community, because that’s where you find your people.
Colin:
Yep, I will go with that.
. . .
SONG (at 55:45)
‘Hush Now Little One’
(Climate Lullaby)
(Verse 1)
Hush now, little one, the night feels long
The world outside can seem so wrong
But here by my side, you’re safe and warm
Love still matters – yes, even more
(Chorus)
You grow your roots around the stone
You’re not meant to face this all alone
The stars shine, can you hear they sing?
Even through despair, you’ll find your wings
(Verse 2)
I feel the weight, I see the storm
I do my best to still keep us warm
The clouds are dark, the water’s cold
I carry you both – the young and the old
(Chorus)
I grow my roots around the stone
I’m not meant to face this all alone
The stars shine, I can hear them sing
Even through despair, I’ll find my wings
(Bridge)
It’s okay to cry, to feel afraid
This hurt we feel means we’ve still awake
But don’t build your home in the pain you find
Let love and awe hold your mind
(Chorus)
We’ll grow our roots around the stone
We’re not meant to face this all alone
The stars shine, we can hear them sing
Even through despair, we’ll find our wings
(Outro)
So close your eyes, my precious one
The fight’s not over, and we’re not done
It’s a broken system, but we still belong
And only love will keep us strong
. . .
Audio excerpt, radio news speaker:
Health authorities are warning Australians to stay out of the heat today as temperatures climb yet again after heat records were broken yesterday. Australia’s ongoing heat wave has been pushing temperatures to almost 50 degrees Celsius.
. . .
Al Gore (at 59:32)
We, the people who live on this planet, have the capacity to make the changes necessary to save our future. The greatest president in my country’s history, Abraham Lincoln, said at a time of dire crisis, ‘The occasion is piled high with difficulty. We must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew.’
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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