Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Utopia (part i)

Episode Date: November 16, 2017

A new ToE mini series on technology, society, work, art, love (the ToE basics) but this time your host dons a pair of Utopian tinted glasses, and sends Toe Producer Andrew Callaway on the road to visit Utopian communities. Plus Basic Income. ********** click on image for more information and links***********    

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Utopia, Part 1. I'm really trying to stay away from the idea of commune. I'm like, this is not a commune, but some of what we're doing is a little communal. And I don't know how to reconcile that yet. Meet Dustin Nemos. He's the founder of Galt's Retreat, a brand new intentional community that he's building in the rolling hills of Tennessee.

We wanted to homestead, didn't have the money anymore to buy land, so we got together as a group with other people that have the same philosophy, the same value system as us. Like, voted Trump and stuff. You know, quality people. Dustin found most of these quality people from a Facebook group dedicated to anarcho-capitalism. I think most of the people involved are on the same page enough where we can kind of come together and see the benefits of putting in money and having shared use of stuff. I hope that we can come to some sort of an agreement on building a group kitchen without it being a commune. You're seeing it definitely in the early stages right now. It's rough. I'll show you kind of where the path goes.

They're essentially in the middle of the forest. Couple trees, mostly with an ax, which sucked. The only help I've had so far was my wife, who's like 90 pounds. Now she's pregnant, so she's refusing to help me lift stuff. She says it's not good for the baby. There's a creek on the property,

but I didn't get to see it. If you want, I could take you down there and show you. Probably we'll get ticks that way. Spider webs. I did get to see the livestock. Mostly rabbits and roosters in a big multi-level cage. These guineas are my solution to the tick problem. Chickens eat about an average of 10 ticks an hour.

He's got a barbecue setup that he calls his kitchen. My wife is from Taiwan, and she's gotten to where she can cook rice on the barbecue grill, which is pretty incredible. And his tiny house is really tiny. I can go in if you want, but not a lot of space to turn around. Plastic wrap is covering the windows. We figured we would have enough savings left to finish, but we got out here and we didn't have quite as much,

so now we're building it as we go. Once everybody gets here and gets their house built and we have a driveway, it's going to be awesome. When Dustin first showed up, he was welcomed by other intentional communities in the area. They invited him to potluck dinners, gave him free roosters, and taught him how to communities in the area. They invited him to potluck dinners, gave him free roosters, and taught him how to deal with the terrain.

But this relationship was doomed from the start. One of them saw my bumper sticker that said InfoWars, and then they just got so mad. So we don't go to the potluck anymore. But Dustin doesn't need their generosity. He's got YouTube. I go to town to get internet signal and download videos and bring them back and kind of learn stuff. So do you have another job or source of income right now?

Are you focused fully on that? I still have some passive income from online stuff I've done, like affiliate marketing and such. Is that from blogging and stuff? How does that all work? Well, you know what? I'm a pretty honest person. I was involved in some adult stuff at one point,

and that gave me a nice passive income to sit on. So another thing that kind of divides me from conservatives, you know. Is that like hosting or like acting? Acting. It be waiting tables, which is what i was doing before yeah and uh i actually made uh enough to you know at one point like i had multiple apartment buildings and stuff it's probably the best thing that ever happened to me losing all that money to that lady who uh who investigation. I don't want to say her name. Dustin's convinced his fellow non-communers won't judge his porno past. In fact, he's sure Galt's retreat will be free from cultural conflicts because of their shared love for a certain book

and the values it embodies. I feel like that by going into things from a similar value system, especially this particular belief group that's all anti-government and doesn't really believe in that stuff, but still respects private property and contracts, I'm expecting not to have many problems with that stuff, with that sort of mentality among people. All right, before I forget, I want to ask about the name. Galt's Retreat.

Well, that's based on John Galt. You know who that is? I mean, I do, but for the list. Okay, well, John Galt is a fictional character in an Ayn Rand book. Don't hate me. John Galt saw the problems with society, and much like what we're doing here, he decided to leave. He said that I'm going to stop the engine of the world.

He was like, I'm just going to get together with the productive people and we're going to withdraw. And we're going to leave and let the other people that were mooching off the productive people learn the hard way because they won't listen. So in the fictional story, he got together with the others and they went to a secret place called Gulch. And, you know know the economy probably i guess fell apart after that i haven't even read the book honestly but um you know i've i've seen so many quotes from ayn rand now at this point i feel like i've probably read half the book We're coming up fast on installment number 100 here at The Theory of Everything. I've produced a number of shows now on the things that obsess me. Technology, society, art, work, cities, relationships, and the transition from analog to digital.

And while I'm proud of this work, looking back, dear listener, I'm struck by how bleak most of the programs are. I'm not saying I'm surprised. I mean, I knew from the very beginning that these bright and shiny platforms like Google and Facebook were hoovering up all the information we were sharing and oversharing with each other so that they could then use this data against us. I also knew early on that these platforms would completely change how we live and work and love. And transition, is it even the right word? Have we transitioned from analog to digital or have we simply moved from one ring of hell to another one? But like I said, I am proud of the work I've done here, and it's heartening to see so many of the issues I've taken on now mainstream topics of conversation. But for this next mini-series, we're going to try something different.

You see, I've had this question for a while now. What if I made a series on technology, society, art, work, cities, relationships, my main themes, But this time, instead of trying to expose the dystopian, we aim for the light at the end of the tunnel. Hope. Yeah. For this new Theory of Everything miniseries, I am going to don a pair of utopian tinted glasses. I've designed this series around a number of site visits to actual utopian communities.

I'll be visiting a few legendary places like Christiana in Copenhagen, and I've sent TOE producer Andrew Calloway on a road trip around America. But after hearing his report on Galt's retreat, I called him up for a quick chat. You told me to focus on the future, So I just wanted to go someplace brand new. You know, they were just getting their start. No, I'm looking for places we might actually want to move to. You took us to Moronsville. Look, any utopian community that's just getting their start is going to seem a little naive.

But, you know, he's actually out there building a new society, a new world. This guy named his goddamn community after a book he hasn't even bothered to read. True. Utopia isn't just a place, though. For this new Theory of Everything miniseries, we're also going to revisit utopian idealism and utopian ideas, like getting rid of poverty. I believe that most people on the right and on the left have a very simple but wrong assumption about the poor,

and that is that there is something wrong with them. Poverty is, as I always like to say, it's not a lack of character, it's just a lack of cash. Rutger Breckmann is a Dutch historian and writer, and a champion for the idea of basic income. Governments giving its citizens cash. This is an old school utopian idea. It goes back all the way to Thomas More, who believed mankind should view the wealth it has as a gift from the past. That argument is even stronger today because, you know, in the past 200 years, we've got a lot richer and more than, well, 99% of that wealth, we didn't do anything for it.

We were just lucky to be born in the 21st century. So it makes sense to give everyone a dividend of that tremendous progress we've already made. Basic income can mean a lot of things. If everyone gets a stipend, then we're talking about a universal basic income. If the unemployed get stipends, then it's a limited basic income. For Rutger, the place to start with this idea is with the poor. And in his book, Utopia for Realists, he makes the case that if society seriously wants to get rid of poverty, then it should provide the poor with a basic income. We've got a mountain of studies, of research that shows that especially in the long run, a basic income pays for itself. This is sort of maybe a right-wing way of framing it. But I think it's important to remember that, for example, poverty is just incredibly expensive. If you think about

child poverty, there's one study that estimates it in the US at $500 billion each year. And it's just cheaper to eradicate poverty completely. Rutger is kind of obsessed with getting his message out to right-wingers. Well, I think it's often important to use sort of almost right-wing language to defend progressive ideals. That's what I try to do all the time. He's really good at this. I believe that a basic income would be the crowning achievement of capitalism. My first encounter with Rutger was his TED Talk. I'd like to start with a simple question.

Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? TED, of course, bills itself as the conference for ideas that could change the world. And over the past few decades, dozens of people have taken the stage, waving around a thing that they were each certain would end poverty. Things like shoes, water bottles, textbooks, hand-cranked computers. Rucker went on stage at TED and called all these folks out. We should stop sending shoes and teddy bears to the poor, to people we have never met. And we should get rid of the vast industry of paternalistic bureaucrats when we can simply hand over their salaries to the poor they're supposed to help. A lot of people in the audience were laughing

and it was a bit of a weird moment for me because I thought to myself, well, I'm actually talking about you guys, you know. We need to give your salaries to the poor you're pretending to help. Rutger's ideas about basic income and poverty are extremely compelling. But for me, what's truly radical is his vision for how a basic income could solve the problem of work.

With robots and automation taking over more and more of the tasks humans used to do, Rutger's convinced we're at a crossroads. On the one hand, more meaningless jobs could be created to replace the ones that are disappearing, or governments could provide their citizens with a basic income so they could spend their time doing something meaningful.

From the left to the right, politicians are still saying we need more growth, we need more jobs, we need to fight unemployment. But the thing is, so many of these jobs are absolutely meaningless. They don't need to exist. And if the robots will take more and more of our jobs, that can go on for a very long time. It might be now 30 or 40 percent, but it could be 60 percent in the future. It could be 80 percent, it could be 60 percent in the future, could be 80 percent, could be 100 percent.

We might live in a society at some point where everybody is pretending to work, while we're all just browsing Facebook and sending emails to each other. We need to update our ideas about what work even is. And if we say, well, work is just creating something of value, making the world a little bit more interesting or beautiful or whatever, I'd be all in favor of that because then all the unpaid work is suddenly important as well. And a lot of paid work will not be very important anymore.

There are so many lawyers, consultants, bankers who at the end of the day will admit to you that even though they earn a lot of money, their job is completely meaningless. Rutger told me that when he started this book four years ago, basic income was a forgotten utopian idea. No one was talking about it. By the time he finished it, a number of governments were doing actual experiments, providing its citizens with cash. My podcast comrades at 99% Invisible recently did an episode on one of these basic income experiments currently taking place in Finland. If you want to hear how governments are attempting to implement this idea

using design thinking, I highly recommend this episode. And when Rutger was in Vancouver for his TED Talk, he learned about another experiment, an experiment actually based on some of the studies he wrote about. A Dutch friend had passed his book on to someone who had then sent it to someone else, who had then sent it to a Canadian politician. That idea traveled around the globe towards Canada, and I met up with this person, and she had just received half a million in government funding to start a huge study in Vancouver, where they are going to give cash to homeless people. And that is, you know,

as a writer, that is one of the most exciting things that can happen, you know, that you can really see your ideas at work in the real world. Rucker Breckman's book is called Utopia for Realists. Little Brown, recently published in American Edition. Since Benjamin hated Galt's retreat, I wanted to make sure the next stop on my tour had more of a utopian pedigree. Which is why I'm headed to The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. The Farm is one of the most famous utopian communities in American history. They were self-sufficient within a few years of starting,

growing their own food, making their own school, and birthing their own babies. Over 2,300 people were born on The Farm. At their peak in the late 70s, it was a mecca for midwives. They were writing and printing books on site that sold over half a million copies. And they even had their own band. You're listening to them. They had a bank, a motor pool, a cannery, a medical clinic, and an ambulance service. They were as commune as communes get. The obvious answer to all the famines across the world is if we would all share across the world and don't have some of us be very rich while some of us starve to death.

That's the voice of Stephen Gaskin. On Columbus Day in 1971, he and about 300 of his followers left their home in San Francisco on a caravan of school buses in search of a plot of land off the grid. The leaders say they'll find the land through vibrations. When the vibes get good, that's where they'll stay. They really liked the vibes in Tennessee, So that's where they built the farm. And those vibes are still attracting people today. We had never been anywhere like that before with all the natural buildings and like hobbit houses. We were totally blown away. Loved it.

We met this guy who offered work trade to us for like a month. And when he ran out of work, he was like, well, do you want to stay or do you want to go? And by then we had totally like fallen in love with the farm. That's Laura. Three years ago, she was on a road trip with her boyfriend. They stopped by the farm to check out the geodesic dome and they never left. Sometimes I just like, I'm laying in bed. I'm like, I can't believe this is my life. Like I'm in Tennessee. I'm like with all these crazy hippies. It's great.

And, but that's like part of our goal in being here is to show that like, it's like great to like kind of step out of general society and see what life is like in other forms. A lot of the farm doesn't look much different from general society. I saw actual white picket fences. And I saw a woman carrying grocery bags from Kroger's out of her minivan into her two-story house. If you want groceries, you've got to drive into town. Because there is no farm on the farm.

There's a lot of gardens, but yeah, no. Back in the 70s, it was a huge farm, but when it came time at the changeover in the 80s, when people were like, okay, now you've got to start making money, no one really wanted to take on the farming because there's not a lot of money to be made. Almost all of the food production came to an end in 1983, with this event people refer to as the changeover. There aren't jobs for farmers, chefs, or bakers anymore. And this is why Laura spends two hours a day

driving back and forth from her job at the Buckhead coffeehouse chain. That's like, you know, not ideal because you have to commute and everything, but that's kind of where the money is at. Commuting. jobs, money. Before 1983, people who lived on the farm didn't have to deal with stuff like this, but the changeover changed everything. We had a new start in 83, which is the point at which we said the commune thing isn't working, at least not at the scale we're trying to do it with 1,500 people. Let's make it a co-op.

Phil is one of the original settlers who came from San Francisco with Stephen Gaskin. He believed that the farm could save the world by setting an example for the rest of society. They didn't have a complicated philosophy. It was centered around a simple idea, sharing. for the rest of society. They didn't have a complicated philosophy. It was centered around a simple idea. Sharing.

It wasn't something alien. It wasn't something from India. It was homegrown, hippie philosophy. When Phil talks about the early days, it kind of reminds me of Dustin at Galt's Retreat. You know, I was an English major. And I had never built anything, literally. I'd never built anything. The first house I built on the farm, I needed a government manual about how to frame because I'd never done it. It was the same thing for most people here. It was a huge learning curve

and rough living for a while, but they did it. They built houses and a telephone system, a flour mill, and a bakery. I think it's indicative of the kind of, not only the idealism, but the tenacity that we're going to do this. We don't care what it takes. We're going to stick it out and figure it out. We were committed to the idea of making a community work. But not just any community. They were building a radical new society. Everyone on the farm shared everything. And since all were welcome, that meant they shared with everybody. Anybody that wanted to come here came here. We had what we called an open gate policy.

This is the incredible thing about the farm. Most communes either closed their gates or just fell apart after troublemakers showed up. For 12 years, the farm managed to keep its borders open. To everyone. I had one kid that was a committed kleptomaniac. He lived in my house, and he would take stuff and put it all under his bed, as if you were never going to find it.

And we took care of him. There were kids that were in our school that were probated to the farm by local courts that said, well, if you can live with the hippies for six weeks, well, I won't put you in jail. Just go out there to the hippie farm. We had a proposal in the 70s that we publicized that pregnant women that were thinking about having an abortion, we would say, don't have the abortion, come to the farm, we'll deliver your baby for free, and then we'll take care of your baby. If you ever want it back,

you can come back and have your baby back. We were really trying to do things, extraordinary things. By the time of the changeover, there were nearly 1,500 people living on the farm. Half of them were kids. Taking care of so many people put an enormous strain on their original beliefs. We had too many single moms, too many kids. I don't mean to say we had too many, It was just that we couldn't afford these people.

So that's what caused this shift. After 12 years of being totally open, they closed the gate. Even if it wasn't just an issue of the economics, we were maturing. We started having our kids and families. We got to the point where we said, we want to manage ourselves. The changeover was an example of how we could adjust, that we could be flexible about how we maintain the community. Being flexible meant rethinking the vow of poverty the settlers all took when they first came to the farm.

It also meant rethinking the very idea of sharing. With the changeover, they had to figure out how to go back to capitalism. Since everything was shared and everything was owned in common, how do you decide who gets what? You know, it gets to be, you know, there's all this stuff. What about that car that's been used for the midwives? You know, who gets that? And, you know, there are people that left that didn't really want to leave,

but that they had to because they couldn't afford to stay. Yeah, it was hard. A mass exodus followed. In two years, over a thousand people left. Today, there are under 200 residents. The farm kind of feels like a ghost utopia, or at least like a museum. Every once in a while, when I was walking around, passing by the old school buses from the caravan,

the empty playgrounds, the geodesic dome with no one underneath, I would hear somebody laughing off in the distance. But I never found the party. People have a really big expectation of a lot more community happening where then they come in on the surface, it really doesn't look like it, but it takes a bit more than five or six days to really get the feel of like,

okay, there are things happening, you just have to be kind of in on it. Even if you can get in on it, it's really hard to stay. Laura told me she's one of the lucky few who just showed up on the farm and made a life out of it. I don't know anybody else who's done it that way except for back in like the 70s, you know? Like that was totally what she did. But a lot of other people have tried since I've been here and it just doesn't work out for some reason.

We knew a family who got turned down for provisional membership, and they ended up leaving the farm. And they had been here not much longer than Trevor and I, and we were very disappointed. They were like our first neighbors on the farm. We were very sad about that. I don't know what happened, but just the universe wanted us to be here and opened all of the right doors for us, and we just kept going through them. But in order to become a full member with voting rights, Laura still needs a few more doors to open. And the key is money.

Money for the membership fee. Money for the monthly dues. Gas money for her commute. And if she wants to live in a house on the farm, she's going to need a lot of money. Because the one thing that is still shared on the farm is the land. Because we're owning the land together, you can't get a construction loan or a mortgage here.

So my wife and I lived in a double-wide trailer, which you could get a mortgage for, for 15 years, and squirreling our money away until we reached the point at which we said, okay, we've got enough now, we can build a house. It's almost like the one thing that is shared on the farm is what's keeping people who don't have serious money out, like young people looking for a new home. They don't have $100,000 in a tin can in the backyard.

Phil was super kind, and he showed me around his amazing house. He's got a sweet downstairs basement studio where he records music, and an editing suite with all his old AV equipment from the early days of the farm. It's an awesome man cave. But Phil acknowledged that what he built isn't really radical. We've actually found ourselves making some compromises. For my wife and I, running our house with solar power is not, the return on investment at our age is not real great. We're on the grid. And I think that's a disappointment to some people.

I have to admit, I'm one of those disappointed people. I can't give Phil shit for kicking out the kleptos. But come on, no solar panels because they aren't cost-effective for old people? Maybe I'll come back after the next changeover. Right now, our population is probably averaging in the, I don't know, 60? Maybe even older? Average? So we're looking down the barrel here. The farm could very well end with the passing of the original guard. This is why Laura is saving up for those voting rights.

She wants to transform the farm into a place for young people. Part of our goal in being here is to attract more people our age and show that like the farm has so much potential. I mean it's already done all these great things we could be like you know reviving a lot of these great things like for instance I want to have a bakery on the farm. There used to be a bakery here. There's potential to like be doing all of these things again more farming and food. And more and more people my age are interested in that. What's really impressive about Laura is that she didn't just show up looking for utopia. She decided to put down roots somewhere she could build a utopia.

And that's the beauty of this place. The farm has an incredible radical history, but it's also got a history of flexibility. So I see the potential. I could maybe even stay, take some of that AV equipment out of Phil's basement, get the old radio station up and running. I could start the farm's podcast.

I am basically the sort of person that Laura wants to attract here. A millennial searching for a better world. I would at least bring the average age down. But for now, it's really hard to see myself living there with so few other people my age. But Laura told me that I wouldn't have to worry about that for long, because she knows how to bring in millennials. Through Airbnb. Yeah, well, we have made so many good connections through Airbnb of people who would not normally come to the farm.

Jason, who is our facility manager at the training center, his partner booked us through Airbnb. And before, she had never heard of the farm. She wanted an outdoor, like, hippie retreat. She found us, met Jason, and now has heard of the farm she wanted an outdoor like hippie retreat she found us met Jason and now has moved to the farm all because she found us through Airbnb that just blows my mind that like people can find out about us through that and just totally fall in love with the place and like it can just change the direction of their life.

You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Utopia, Part 1. This installment was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with Andrew Calloway. It featured Rucker Breckman, Dustin Nemos, and Laura and Phil from The Farm. Thanks to Julie B. for helping out in Utrecht, and everyone who helped Andrew out at The Farm. There's tons more information at toe.prx.org. That's where you can sign up for the TOE mailing list as well.

The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at radiotopia from PRX.