The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Post Growth: Life after Capitalism by Tim Jackson

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Post Growth: Life after Capitalism by Tim Jackson Capitalism is broken. The relentless pursuit of more has delivered climate catastrophe, social inequality and financial instability – and left us ill-prepared for life in a global pandemic. Tim Jackson’s passionate and provocative book dares us to imagine a world beyond capitalism – a place where relationship and meaning take precedence over profits and power. Post Growth is both a manifesto for system change and an invitation to rekindle a deeper conversation about the nature of the human condition.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. There is a wonderful author that we have on the show today. It's a really amazing, every time you tune into the show, there's wonderful, brilliant authors on it. And we have another one today. So we'll be talking to him to watch the video version of it and all the wonderful authors we've found on the show. Go to youtube.com ForgeSKrissVoss, hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com. Forge has Chris Voss. Also go to, what is it, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram.

There's multiple accounts and groups over there. You can follow the Chris Voss Show and myself and all that good stuff. Today, we'll be talking with Tim Jackson. He is the renowned author of the newest book that's out, Post-Growth, Life After Capitalism, which is pretty cool. And so we have him on the show. We're going to be talking today about what his book is about and what it means to us in our lives and making it better. Tim Jackson is an ecological economist and writer. Since 2016, he has been a director of the Center for Understanding of Sustain prosperity at the University of Surrey in the UK,

where he's a professor of sustainable development. From 2004 to 2011, he was economics commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development Commission, where his work accumulated in the publication of Prosperity Without Growth, which has subsequently been translated into 17 foreign languages. And what do you know? Here he is to join us on the show. How are you, Tim? Welcome.

I'm good, Chris. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the show. Thank you for coming. Give us your plugs for people and find you on the interwebs. Yeah. Timjackson.org.uk. There's a lot of stuff there and stuff about the book.

That's probably easiest at Prof Tim Jackson is my Twitter handle. And it's also my Instagram and you'll find me on LinkedIn as well. All right. What motivated you want to write this book? It came from that work that you talked about earlier. Some years ago, I was economics commissioner, which was a job reporting to the UK government. And my task there was to think about the relationship between economic growth, the continual expansion of the economy, and the fact that we're living on a finite planet, which doesn't get bigger year by year, and where that comes into conflict. And so Prosperity Without Growth was the report that came out of that was a report to government, it was all about policies and technologies and statistics. And what was interesting is that

although the government itself, the UK government, I have to say, wasn't that interested in receiving that report from its advisors, a lot of other people became very interested in it, because it's a kind of at the end of the day, it's a question that affects all of us. And it's like, how do we want to live on a finite planet without trashing that planet, but having a good quality of life? And so i really i wrote post grace for all the people who were interested in that question but weren't policy wonks you weren't interested in graphs and statistics and weren't economists and i tried

to write it in a way that sort of told stories and put us as a culture in context which is where that slightly scary subtitle comes life Life after capitalism. Did someone kill capitalism? Because it's life after capitalism. How does that work? Yeah, yeah, no, I once had a title for the book, which was Who Killed Capitalism? And that's a chapter in the book, actually. And of course, the most obvious answer is nobody. Capitalism is alive and well, thank you very much. And living in the US and the UK, probably also in China, and everything's fine and dandy. But there's things that have gone wrong inside capitalism. That's what I wanted to look at. And it was very interesting when I started writing it back in January last year, before the pandemic, before the lockdown, before the tragedy

of the last year, I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum, and there were capitalists turning up almost en masse at that meeting saying, oh, no, things are wrong inside capitalism. We've got to do something. Capitalism is dead. Long live the new form of capitalism, shareholder, stakeholder, woke capitalism. We can fix it, don't worry. But the message really interestingly was that there is something wrong, and that capitalism has led us down the wrong path sometimes. And it's presided over environmental degradation. It's presided over poor wages to the most essential workers in society. It's presided over inequality. It's presided over financial instability. And my argument actually was it's even worse than that. Somehow capitalism's got more and more into its head that what we need as human beings is more and more and so it just doesn't know where to stop

it's pushing us down this consumerist route towards a materialist society that is not ultimately very good for us yeah do we i think i i really believe we live in a world of unfettered capitalism at least we did over the last four or five years, where we're throwing governments away for just unfettered, I forget what the word is, but just a level of capitalism that is uncontrollable or doesn't want to be controlled, actually. Capitalism, that's a good word. That's what it is. Yeah. Rogue capitalism. Just pollute the seas, pollute the air, do whatever you want in the name of a buck,

pour mercury down children's throats, just have all sorts of fun. Who needs an EPA? And it's been a really interesting thing, but unfettered or rogue capitalism, this is something people need to really understand. It kind of surprises me because a lot of people don't understand these things. They're like, well, I really want my coal miner job. And so I need to have government surplus coal because I really enjoy black lung. I realize these guys get paid a lot for it. We've got to come up with some sort of alternative for the future, which is slowly happening. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that we tend to think that capitalism is fixed. We think it's part of our culture. It couldn't ever be otherwise. We forget that capitalism is only 150 years old. It's not going to last forever because nothing lasts forever. And so we need to think about where it went wrong and what comes next. And those people, those workers dying in coal mines from black lung, they do not have the best life that they could possibly have. And capitalism is not that interested in giving it to them. That short-term fix of let's have the government protect these jobs, if they're not the right jobs, if their jobs are killing people, if their jobs

are underpaid and dangerous, capitalism isn't serving those people. It's serving the people on Wall Street who are getting richer and richer. Yeah. And we saw how many people got, how many of the billionaires just got, I think it was like 45 more billion dollars over the coronavirus thing while everyone else got poor basically we saw that worked out for them and they just went off to his private islands and and this yeah crazy and the people the tragic statistics of covid were often the poorest in society the ones who weren't the gamblers the ones who were at the front line on the front line trying to protect our lives and they had the raw deal out of it. Yeah. Tell us some other features or segments that are in the book. What does it

mean? Prosperity is health. That's the kind of thing of tackling head on the idea that capitalism is sold to us, that more and more is better for us, that the more we have, the better off we are. And that's, you know, yeah, that's the kind of mantra of growth if you like let's just have more that's capital and answer to everything we haven't got very healthy lives in the poorest people in society but that's okay let's just have more and more for the richest and eventually that'll trickle down and the poor will get better off and and we know that doesn't work we've seen that not working and i was really struck when you think about the lesson of the last year, that actually the fundamental element of our prosperity is our health. When that goes missing, things go wrong. And actually, it was a very interesting point in time in many countries,

at least, because many governments actually recognize that when health was at stake and life was at stake, that is actually their priority. Thomas Jefferson said it 200 years ago, the first and only task of government is the protection of health and life and not its destruction. And so this idea, and it began to grow on me, that actually what characterizes health rather than just gross, which is a very, more and more, thank you very much, health is about balance. It's about a good balance between having too little and having too much. And that balance is a fine art. Finding that balance is a fine art. You don't get it by bursting through every frontier, expanding at every opportunity and continually tempting people with the idea of more. You get it by recognising where health lies,

where your physical health lies, where your mental health lies, where your community's health lies where your physical health lies where your mental health lies where your community's health lies and finding that balance between the having too little and there's no doubt that some people do have too little and having too much and there's no doubt we're just talking about it some people do have too much and and actually even happiness isn't about having more and having too much it is about that balance somehow between deficiency and excess so that's a key that's a key metaphor in the book but i just wanted to say actually another thing about the book which is it tries to approach these what could be quite dry academic intellectual things through stories and those stories are the stories of people who

to some extent were my kind of intellectual heroes and the people who had these had similar ideas. So I start, for example, with Robert Kennedy back in 1968. And he gave this speech at the University of Kansas in March 68. And nobody knew that three months later he was going to be dead but that speech at the in Kansas in 1968 was an extraordinary speech because it was the launch of his presidential campaign in 1968 and it was a speech of a man who was hoping to be the leader of what was then the richest most powerful country in the world and he stood up in that crowd and and he said grace is not the be all and end all grace is not what we were here for grace is not about human dignity and end all. Grace is not what we were here for.

Grace is not about human dignity and purpose. And we don't live in a good country until we pay attention to those things over and above material affluence. So it was a way, if you like, of having my messages or the messages that I'm interested in exploring related to people that everybody knows about and that we're talking about them ages ago and so all the characters in my book have that kind of quality that have that quality of being ordinary people living ordinary lives sometimes with very tragic endings but having extraordinary vision and learning about those people to me i think is a kind of resource it strengthens you it makes you feel that a different world is possible. And it brings forward that vision out of the realms of universities and think tanks and

into the lives of ordinary people. You talk in the book about consumerism. Where did consumerism go? It's interesting. In a way, consumerism pretends to make us happy. That's what consumerism has on offer. Everything, consumerism pretends to make us happy. That's what consumerism has on offer. Everything actually.

You can fulfill all your needs. You can be happy. You can be your highest status in your community. If you buy the right things, you'll be respected and looked up to. And ultimately, it even promises us almost a sense of immortality that we can go on forever and ever getting richer and richer. And even if we don't, then our kids can. So it's almost like a religion in a way consumerism has become. And the most extraordinary thing to me is that consumerism wouldn't work if we were all happy, because if we were happy, we wouldn't need to go out and buy all these other things that consumerism needs us to go out and buy. So actually, when you look at it and you look at it more deeply,

you find that consumerism trades on unhappiness. It trades on dissatisfaction because it's dissatisfied consumers that we need. And you think about that sort of thing that people talk about, psychologists talk about post-purchase dissonance. It's a wonderful phrase. And it's when you've gone out and you've spent a lot of money that you probably couldn't afford on something that you get home and you realize pretty soon it's a piece of junk. And it's not actually fulfilling that promise of happiness.

And at first it seems accidental. Oh, that's a shame. It's a good job. All my purchases aren't like that. And then you begin to realize that there is a sense in which all purchases have to be like that. Because ultimately, if you were a satisfied consumer, you wouldn't be doing a job. You wouldn't be going out shopping again. You wouldn't be fulfilling that function of always wanting more. So consumerism promises us happiness, but ultimately it couldn't work if it didn't make us continually unhappy.

Does social media play into that? Because like you, a lot of people go on like Instagram or something and they have FOMO, fear of missing out. And they see somebody that's clearly a staged and framed thing. But a lot of young people, I think, I don't know how many, but many people, many young people get fooled into believing that, oh, that guy is really driving Lamborghinis and living his best life. And all he did was, I don't know, buy a product and they're usually doing product placement. So like Doves, I'm not picking on Dove, but just doing example, Doves made me drive Lambos. And is social media a problem to rampant consumers and going around? Yeah, yeah, it is.

It's the new it's the new kind of mainstream for advertising really advertising always did that that was its job really was to connect us emotionally to a product to make us feel as though we could not do without and and almost sometimes to shame us into it you know what does your car say about you what does your dog food say about you what is the toilet rolls say about you? What does your dog food say about you? What is the toilet rolls say about you? And what are people going to think when they come into the home and see this tatty toilet? You need this one, not that one. And that dialogue has always been the dialogue of advertising, the role of advertising to create an emotional connection between the products that people want to sell and us as raw, visceral beings who are susceptible to that. Let's face it, we have the ability to

think symbolically. So we create these symbolic associations with all this stuff. And they become in our minds, they become fulfilments, not just for wiping up, but actually everything in our life that we aspire to, including that wonderful status of being good citizens. And so I'm not knocking that mechanism, because I think if you look at every society, you see that mechanism, that material things play a symbolic role that allows us to have rich emotional lives and connections with each other. But in the hands of capitalism, what we've done is we've created an engine that insists that we have to translate everything into that mechanism. And social media, as you say, actually, I have to say, it's not just young kids who are led astray by advertising on social media.

I don't know about you, but lockdown, Instagram, the product that they know that I want, that maybe will be delivered in three months time. And probably when I get it, isn't going to be any good, but was I ever a sucker for it? Yeah, of course I was. Yeah, I had all pretty pictures and pretty videos. And my favorite ads, they creep me out because I think they go too far. And they really play on women's emotions. But they're the ones that I saw like an ad.

I think it was from Walmart the other day. I pick on Walmart since they're not an advertiser and it was like so i the either the tagline i think the tagline was something about the best mom or the greatest mom shops at walmart and you're just like what so you're a horrible mom if you don't and this gal was going on her daughter runs up mom you're the best mom ever something along those lines and the mom's like oh yeah great i ordered these things from walmart honey and you're just like you're just like wow man that kind of seems to have gone over a couple lines yeah of shaming and the way that's very clever the way that advertisers have done you could respect in some sense of how clever they are because the way they've used kids in order

to do that it's not just you need to be the best mom for your kids, but you need your kids to have a decent status in society. So you play off the kids, you play off the parents, you play off the relationship between kids and parents. You do what it takes when you're advertising to create that emotional link. And it can be, yes,

you say brutal, unfair, obscene, almost obscene. I've seen the same thing in diapers. I think there's a diaper advertiser that says the same thing. Good moms choose so-and-so diapers. And you're like, so people don't buy that?

Or horrible moms? Is that what you just implied, Derek? They're bad people. Yeah, it's like a kind of a moral calculus, isn't it? What you buy, you add it all up, and that tells you how good you are in society if you were to believe these things. And of course, and the weird thing is

we don't, at some level we don't, we know we're being manipulated, but actually the manipulation is so powerful, so unregulated and we expose our kids to it. We expose ourselves to it.

We expose everybody in society to it. And it becomes almost impossible to free yourself from it unless you ban, you know, you ban your kids from the TV or take their phones away or stop them going on social media, which becomes very difficult, obviously. And it is, and I think, important to recognise that it's a societal problem, that it's a condition of our culture that every individual, including the two on this call, are susceptible to. Wait, I'm susceptible to it too? No, it's really out of control. And I think when they do products and stuff on Instagram or Facebook or any of these other sites, you see the likes. And people are like, oh, yeah, I want to be successful too.

I want to use Dove soap to drive Lambos. I'm just using extreme things. And just everyone's living their best life. I think it was a joke a comedian did years ago. I forget who it was. My apologies to whoever. But they said that when archaeologists from the future, I don't know, they might be human or they might be aliens.

They'll be digging up our society going, what are these guys doing? And they're going to look at all of our stuff and be like, wow, they all had some disease that made them smile all the time. They're all smiling in their Instagram. This is a weird culture they had. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I have this fantasy about digital archaeology that actually in the because almost everything is becoming digital so everything that we remember and record and our culture is going to be laid down on this digital technology and of course it's going to be thrown away it's going to be degraded and i have this idea that in the future a really important job is going to be

the digital archaeologist who runs around digging this stuff up and he's got all this access to kit from over the last 150 years that he uses to piece together a picture of what society was like under late capitalism in the early 20th century and as you say what kind of sense will you make of it and in a way that's a good it's an interesting way to think what's left when that goes down What is it about us that is really human? What are the things that would, could make it for a better life? And that's part of the task of the book, I guess. Yeah. So how do we resolve this? What are some things that you give us in the book so that we can resolve these issues or try and come to a better resolution? One of the things, and it really struck me, I had young kids that are growing up now. I used to take them on holidays, to take them into nature.

And because I was preoccupied with keeping them happy and giving them what they want, we would go past an advertising hoarding, for example, for an animal park, it was called. And you'd go into this animal park and you'd be led round in corridors with thousands of other parents looking after thousands of other grumpy kids, looking through the fences at these animals that you couldn't properly see. And at the end, you come into the, you know, the merchandise area, where you've got all this fluffy stuff and you cannot stop six-year-old kids wanting fluffy toys. It's just impossible. So you come out of that, you spent a fortune, your kids are grumpy, you're thinking, what the, what am I doing here? And then the next day, and we need to get out of this. I just took them into the hills behind the house where we

were staying. And I thought, oh, I'm going to have to really entertain them here. I'm going to have to really find something to do and interest them. And I didn't at all. They interested themselves. They played for hours by streams, building dams or collecting wood or role-playing or playing chase or running around. And that to me, it was a long time ago now, but it became a sort of critical insight to me that there are things that we are happier doing than traipsing around after consumerism and after stuff. And I believe that we've lost that understanding. We've lost it out of our schools. We've lost it out of our education systems. We've lost it out of our world and the task. It all becomes one somehow. Psychologically, it's been shown that this is one of the most satisfying, most fulfilling states that human beings can experience. And yet

it's undermined by materialism. It's undermined by having too much stuff. It's undermined, interestingly, by having too much comfort. In some sense, there's a place that is better than the place that consumerism offers, but we have to come out of our comfort zone. We have to learn different skills. We have to teach our kids how to find this place. And actually, it offers us, after capitalism, a better kind of life. And it's available. It's a message that you can take into your individual life, finding that place and understanding where it is and developing your pathway and you're just like ah oh i just like some poor some poor guy with kids is getting a sucker by the setup there and the kids i was the same way when i was we'd walk through the store and drive my poor mom crazy i'd be like

we'd be like mommy mommy what that's here what that's here what this what this can we have this in fact i think one of her deals was if we were good in the store and didn't make too much of a problem we got like a candy bar or something that was her way of yeah right giving us what we drive her crazy with the can we have this can we have that i remember my brother he would throw he always wanted a special cereal for our car i think he'd throw a fit if he couldn't get that cereal and it was expensive and and i don't think it was good for me. So my mom was like, no, get out of that. And he threw a fit there. And he was an ADD.

Yeah, it's interesting. But in a way, that's a really good, that's such a good story. Because it's a metaphor for what we are. We're all kids in the candy shop. And that's what capitalism kind of preys on, in a way. If we're kids in the candy shop we're told more and more is the way to go there are no restraints on us and it's very difficult to see how you can ask people to self-regulate in those conditions that is i i actually won't

i have to say i'm a sugar junkie and i won't have biscuits cookies cookies in the house. I cannot have them in the house because I know if they're in the house, I'm just going to eat them. I started dieting years ago and lost 75 pounds. And one of the most important things I learned, I think it was from Penn & Teller's book or it was from somebody on Facebook. But the important rule for dieting, if it's in your house, it's in your mouth. So don't bring it home. Don't buy it. Don't bring it home. Don't buy it. Don't bring it home. Yeah. Don't go shopping when you're hungry. But in a sense, we're all having to do

that to try and break it. And we've got all this now. We've got these telephones with apps on which tell us what our ideal body weight should be and what our calorie intake should be. And we're doing all these calculations. And yeah, you can do it if you really work hard at it. But in a society that doesn't want you to do it, eventually that's going to go off the curve. Obesity is going to rise. Illness is going to rise. Hypertension is going to rise. The medical service is going to be under pressure. And that's not the direction of more prosperity. That's the direction of less. Yeah. Some other aspects of your book that we want to take and talk about, some of the questions I had, what lessons can lockdown teach us about

society? What did we learn on that? Or did we learn anything for that matter? Yeah, I think we're still learning it, Chris, and we're going to be learning it for a while. It's coming. It's actually here. Yeah, we have it here too, yeah. Do you?

Yeah. I'm going to start wearing a mask again. I've got my inoculations or whatever, my shots, but evidently this thing can be, I just don't want that thing in my body. I don't care that I have shots, but evidently this thing can be, I just don't want that thing in my body. I don't care that I have shots, but it's scary. It's 40% more contagious. So you're right. We might go into another lockdown. So I'm sorry to interrupt you. Go ahead. No, I think it was a very humbling sort of thing for humanity. Really? You thought you were

invincible. Hey, hang on. There's this little thing. You can't even see it. You don't even know how it works. The doctors don't even know how it works. And it can bring you down. That's a very humbling thing to find out. But it also taught us, it did teach us that lesson about health actually being more important than wealth when it comes to it. It taught us that lesson about actually what the role of government is back to Thomas Jefferson. It taught us also sometimes, and I'm not saying this is true for everybody, sometimes it taught us that the most important people in society, the people who saved our lives

were not well looked after before we got there. Or after. Or after, absolutely. We were clapping the health workers in this country. I'm sure you were as well. And then two months later in the UK, there was a call from nurses for a pay rise. And they were given the government agreed a pay rise that was less than the rate of inflation. So that's how much we were valuing all of those

people who served our lives under capitalism. But it also taught us, I think there were some interesting studies about about lockdown itself, where people found the skills that they hadn't had before they found space that they hadn't had before, they found space that they didn't find before. There was something nice and more healthy about going out into an environment that wasn't stuffed full of cars all over the place. There was cleaner air. There was these stories of actually how you could see the mountains in the Himalayas from a province in India that had never been seen for 30 years. There was this sense actually of kind of nature beginning to recover a little bit from the impact of human activity. And there was also this sense of us not comfortable at all, really.

You're staring in the lockdown mirror and you're asking yourself, who am I? Who is this person? What is my life? And it forces that kind of period, that sense of reflection. And out of that reflection sometimes came, not always, but sometimes stronger relationships, skills that you'd forgotten or that you didn't know you had, new interests and the ability to, even just sometimes the ability to stop because our lives are so busy and harried and hurried and we're continually under the consumer myth we're continually on the move and getting things and moving and lockdown did it gave us that just momentary who are you really what is it that really matters and and that was it had its tragic sides and it had its really deeply uncomfortable sides but it also i

think is a point at which, and that's what I mean by we're still learning lessons. We're still learning the lessons from that. We don't know where that's going to take us, but it does offer us different ways of thinking about society and about what we want in our lives. It's funny. It made me really analyze my life. What was important initially, it was really focused because I was like, what's most important to you in life? And the human beings in your life can disappear in a heartbeat. And you don't get to hold their hand when they go into the hospital. You don't get to talk to them. In some cases, in the early days, you didn't get to go to their funeral. My sister passed away during the coronavirus. She didn't get it, but she'd been in care homes for all of her life.

And so her health wasn't good and she had seizures. I'm sorry to hear that. And you couldn't go to her funeral, was that? We were able to go to her funeral, but it was the loneliest funeral I've ever been to. It was just me and my mother and someone from her church and then the person who worked at the funeral home like it was the four of us it was like the most saddest it was a sad funeral in and of itself but it was incredibly sad because you're just like no one could come like all of the all of the nurses who cared for wanted to come and you just couldn't have people at your thing yeah i there was a lot

of stuff that i sat down and went i went wow this is uh this is heartbreaking this is come and you just couldn't have people at your thing. Yeah. I, there was a lot of stuff that I sat down and when I went, wow, this is a, this is heartbreaking. This is hard. And you go, what do I value most? And for me, I was like, I value my mom and my sisters the most. And I'd really like to see them get through this and I'll be the side. And fortunately I have that, but yeah, a lot of people learned a lot about who they were. I think that's really important. The pandemic and the period of the last year has been about tragedy, and it's been about loss, and it's been about suffering. And it seems to me that capitalism tries to always turn our eyes away from that. It tries to say, if you struggle, if you strive, if you compete, if you have the right stuff, if you get on, you'll get on and everything will be fine.

It'll be fine forever. And of course, it's nonsense because everyone dies and everyone experiences loss and everyone experiences suffering. And I was really struck by where does capitalism get that idea from that it's going to be OK forever? And it really gets it from a process of denial that if you look at the early philosophers around capitalism, you'll find they acknowledge that everything is a struggle for existence. And then they look at human beings and say, ah, human beings are selfish, they're competitive. That's the best way to get the best conditions out of life is for everybody to compete. And they turn life and society into a competition, where if you win in the competition then you can be your best self you can leave this suffering behind you and you don't have to suffer anymore and of course

it's nonsense and i was particularly fascinated by the fact that actually there's a sense in one of my characters that is a vietnamese monk and he says his religion is buddhism and i was fascinated by the fact that budd that Buddhism starts in exactly the same place that everything entails suffering, that we cannot escape suffering. But instead of saying, if you struggle and strive and you compete and you become your best self, you're going to escape from it. Buddhism says, actually, that's not true. You will just turn the world into a greater scene of suffering. The way to address that suffering is to turn and face it, to have compassion for it, to have compassion for other people, to build your relationships around other people, to value the things that really

matter and to find inside your life the way of navigating and negotiating that suffering. And it's so diametrically opposed. Now'm not suggesting that we all become buddhist monks it's just not everybody's cup of tea but it's it's a really deep reflection on the fact that we chose a past that potentially leads us and other species on the planet and our descendants into greater and greater suffering instead of facing that idea that suffering is an important component of life and that we should be compassionate as a result of the compassion is our root not out of suffering but coming to terms with loss and coming to terms with tragedy and doing what we can to alleviate that loss and that tragedy.

And it's a very different direction than consumerism is taking us. There you go. There you go. Anything more we want to touch on in the book or tease out for readers to pick it up? I suppose the other thing, when I was talking about flow, there's something about that discussion that we've just had about compassion and suffering might feel a bit heavy. But the thing about flow actually is that it can be very joyful. So that's another thing that, in a way, we need to focus on and brings joy into our lives.

It's one of the things that we could occasionally find through lockdown in deeper relationships or more calm in our lives or a deeper connection with nature. And I think that's another theme in the book is that in order to find those things, we develop the skills that allow us to become creative. And it's a really interesting way to think about economics, because we think about economics as selfish people competing to produce the most and increase the GDP, and everything will be all right. And there's no poetry, there's no art in it, there's no music in it. There's no love in it, really. And so part of what the book is trying to do is to say, what would our society look like? What would our economy look like? What would our economic system look like if we put those things back into our consideration of what the good life is? And it leads right back to that speech by Robert Kennedy back in the day, because all of those components were in what he was saying. And they're all in the work of Tishnath Khan, and they're all in the work of

an environmentalist in Kenya called Wangari Matai, and they're all in the poetry of Emily Dickinson. And so those people, in a way, I bring together in the book to make that very simple point that our lives after capitalism can be richer, better, more fulfilling. And where was that speech at for Bobby Kennedy? University of Kansas. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to have to pull it up. I'm a big, he's my number one hero. So he's great. And that's, you just get lost in it. And I went to write down a rabbit hole the whole time, looking at the lives of some of these people and fantastic stuff that you can find on YouTube. And I watched his videos during that campaign over and over again and listened to his words, listened to the way that he spoke, listened to the way he connected with people. He would turn

up at a crowd and they would take the piss out of him because he had long hair or longer hair than was fashionable. And he would just turn it around and make a joke of it. Yeah, I've got long hair, but I'm here. I've come to you. I'm speaking to you. And on the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated, he was in front of, he was in a town in Indianapolis where there was a largely black crowd and he stood in front of that crowd and he sympathized with them. And the mayor actually said to him, don't go in front of that crowd. They're bloody lynching, mate. You couldn't do that. that and he said to the you might not be able to do that but i know these people i've worked with them i've talked to them i've

developed things with them i can stand in that crowd with my wife and kids and i will be safe and he did it and he talked to them about loss about. He even quoted poetry to them. And that was the quietest town in the US that night. And you get the stories around these lives rich because of the humanity in these people. And to me, they're a kind of shining example of a different way of thinking about our society and a route out of the dysfunctionality of capitalism. I love your book. I'm glad people, I'm glad there's more information going out. People need to understand I'm a capitalist. I believe in capitalism, I'm an entrepreneur all my life, but even owning business all my life, I can look at trickle down economics as a failure. I can see

the heavy hand of billionaires that are owning our governments and just doing whatever they want and trying to make it so that governments don't have any sort of regulation on them and just rampant, like you say, rogue capitalism. It's really interesting. I don't know if you've studied, I imagine you've studied much U.S. behavior in society, but it's interesting in America, there's this thing that we're willing to sell our souls and our bodies to capitalists and billionaires and we vault them as heroes and we think that they give a crap like there's there i have so many friends that are like elon musk is the greatest he cares about us no one else you're like he does not he cares about you as a consumer of his goods let's say he pan-globalist. He's not concerned about democracy or things that are important to us.

He's concerned about making money. And these guys all think that it was the same thing that we saw with a president recently. We're like, oh, he's going to get an office because he cares. He's a billionaire, and so he doesn't need money. So he's actually going to care about people. And you're just like, are you insane? And they did a study, and they found that a lot of Americans, they see a lot of this capitalism as oppressive and not good for them. They don't want the rules changed because there's this

delusion. And they addressed it in the movie Fight Club, where marketing for years, it told us that we'd all be millionaires. And so they don't want the rules changed on the billionaires or millionaires right now because everybody in America thinks they're going to be one eventually. So they don't want the rules changed when they get there. You're like, this is insane. This just makes no sense at all. Yet this is the area that's been sold to us. Yeah, it's been sold to us. There is a kind of sense in which we've been gaslighted. And I in a way a part of our task right now is to lift our eyes above that and to say actually here's some other things here's some other things that human beings are about and here's some other heroes and these people have

some extraordinary ideas that can that could transform our society can make us richer in a different way and of course we all need we all heroes. And we all want to believe that we're as good as those people, or we could be as good as those people. And if our heroes are all people who are just searching for more and more flashy and more status and more expansion and breaking through every frontier until we get to Mars, or we're rich enough so that we can go up in space with our brother on a vanity moonshot. That's a bad place to be. And it seems to me we have to weave together.

We have to build with whatever we've got a different sense of what we're aspiring to. And the characters in the book are part of an attempt to do that. Here's a different road. These are different people. They are as heroic as those people that are leading us astray. And some of them, you know, care more about us than those supposed leaders ever will. There you go. There you go. It's been wonderful to spend time with you today. Give us your plugs as we go out. Yeah. So you can find more about the book on timjackson.org.uk.

You can find me on Twitter at ProfTimJackson. And you can find me on Instagram and LinkedIn and places like that as well. I'm at the University of Surrey. My research there is asking that very simple question, what can prosperity possibly mean on a finite planet? There you go. There you go. Tim, it's been wonderful to have you. This has been a great discussion. I hope people pick up the book and read it and realize how bad this capitalism is getting out of control. And how good it could be if we did change it. Yeah, there you go. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you very much, Tim. So pick up the book, guys, Post-Growth, Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson. You can find it. It's on wherever you find books anywhere. Find books anywhere. Go ahead and order the book's on wherever you find books anywhere. Find books anywhere. Go ahead and order the book up from wherever you do. Support your local booksellers as well. You can go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, and see all the books we're reading and reviewing.

Go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all those places, Instagram. And you can also go see us on youtube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, further to show your friends, neighbors, relatives. Thanks, Tim, for being here. Thanks, my audience, for being here here and we'll see you guys next time