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Woody Tasch is the founder and chairman of the Slow Money Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to catalyzing the flow of capital to local food systems, connecting investors to the places where they live and promoting new principles of fiduciary responsibility that bring money back down to earth. Since 2010, via local Slow Money networks in dozens of communities in the U.S. and a few in Canada, France and Australia, over $57 million has gone to 632 small, local and organic food enterprises. Tasch is former chairman of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit angel network that has facilitated more than $200 million of investments in over 300 early-stage, sustainability-promoting companies. As treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in the 1990s, he was a pioneer of mission-related investing. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
Heis the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green), SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute), and AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over (Slow Money Institute).
In this episode, we talk about completing capitalism as opposed to punishing it, the slow money movement, playful visionaries, allegiance to land as an act of healing and Woody's upcoming work.
For more information about what Woody's up to, check out www.beetcoin.org.
For more information about what Woody's up to, check out www.beetcoin.org.
Save What You Love with Mark Titus:
Produced: Emilie Firn
Edited: Patrick Troll
Music: Whiskey Class
Instagram: @savewhatyoulovepodcast
Website: savewhatyoulove.evaswild.com
Support wild salmon at evaswild.com
Creators & Guests
Host
Mark Titus
Mark Titus is the creator of Eva’s Wild and director of the award winning films, The Breach and The Wild. He’s currently working on a third film in his salmon trilogy, The Turn. In early 2021, Mark launched his podcast, Save What You Love, interviewing exceptional people devoting their lives in ways big and small to the protection of things they love. Through his storytelling, Mark Titus carries the message that humanity has an inherent need for wilderness and to fulfill that need we have a calling to protect wild places and wild things.
Guest
Woody Tasch
Woody Tasch is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green), SOIL: Notes Towards the Theory and Practice of Nurture Capital (Slow Money Institute), and AHA!: Fake Trillions, Real Billions, Beetcoin and the Great American Do-Over (Slow Money Institute). Tasch is former chairman of Investors’ Circle, a nonprofit angel network that has facilitated more than $200 million of investments in over 300 early-stage, sustainability-promoting companies. As treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation in the 1990s, he was a pioneer of mission-related investing. He was founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. Utne Reader named him “One Of 25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.”
What is Save What You Love with Mark Titus?
Wild salmon give their very lives so that life itself can continue. They are the inspiration for each episode asking change-makers in this world what they are doing to save the things they love most. Join filmmaker, Mark Titus as we connect with extraordinary humans saving what they love through radical compassion and meaningful action. Visit evaswild.com for more information.
00:00:00:15 - 00:00:26:19
Mark Titus
Welcome to the Save What You Love podcast. I'm your host, Mark Titus. Today we welcome to the show Woody Tasch. Woody is the author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money Investing as if food, farms and fertility mattered. Also, soil notes towards the theory and practice of nurture capitalism. And Fake trillions, real billions. Bitcoin and the great American do over.
00:00:26:21 - 00:00:55:05
Mark Titus
Woody is former chairman of Investors Circle, a nonprofit angel network that's facilitated more than 200 million of investments in over 300 early stage sustainability promoting companies. As treasurer of the Jesse Smith Noyes Foundation in the 1990s, he was a pioneer of mission related investing. And Woody was also founding chairman of the Community Development. And Woody was also founding chairman of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance.
00:00:55:07 - 00:01:19:08
Mark Titus
Ernie Reader named him one of 25 visionaries Who Are Changing Your World. In this episode, we talk about completing capitalism as opposed to punishing it. The slow money movement. Playful visionaries. Allegiance to land as an act of healing. And Woody's upcoming work. Thanks for joining us today and enjoy the show.
00:01:19:10 - 00:01:55:02
Music
How do you save what you love?
When the world is burning down?
How do you save what you love?
When pushes come to shove.
How do you say what you love?
When things are upside down.
How do you say what you love?
When times are getting tough.
00:01:55:04 - 00:01:58:16
Mark Titus
Woody Tasch! Welcome. Where are you coming to us from today?
00:01:58:18 - 00:02:12:04
Woody Tasch
Hey, Mark. good to see you. I'm coming to you from my relatively new, old home. It's an old home. I'm new here. in, And I'm also old. Let's not get into all that. Providence, Rhode Island.
00:02:12:04 - 00:02:22:18
Mark Titus
Yeah. Speaking of old, now that we've gotten through the, you big, ubiquitous tech problems that, come with a certain age, as we were saying.
00:02:22:20 - 00:02:26:10
Woody Tasch
Oh, that's a whole other subject. But I definitely do want to go into it, though.
00:02:26:14 - 00:02:33:16
Mark Titus
Yeah, I know. Well, yeah, we. The last time we saw each other, we were in, Boulder, Colorado.
00:02:33:18 - 00:02:34:09
Woody Tasch
Yes, sir.
00:02:34:11 - 00:02:40:04
Mark Titus
Yeah. And you have made this trip across the continent. How is that treating you so far?
00:02:40:05 - 00:03:02:21
Woody Tasch
Oh, man. I'm. I'm very. I'm lucky. I had ten good years in Boulder. That was all great. And then my daughter had a son. you know, it was during Covid, so I didn't see him for a while. And then finally, I saw him and we all looked at each other and said, well, I guess I can either keep living up here by myself in the mountains, or I can go be a grandpa, I think.
00:03:02:22 - 00:03:12:09
Woody Tasch
Oh, but I grew up back here. I never lived, I've never lived in Providence proper before, but I've live various spots up and down between New York and Boston and whatnot. So it's kind of like a homecoming to me.
00:03:12:14 - 00:03:18:14
Mark Titus
Oh, that's so good. That's so good. It's it's fun time being a grandpa.
00:03:18:16 - 00:03:19:03
Woody Tasch
what you say.
00:03:19:03 - 00:03:20:23
Mark Titus
Is it's a fun time being a grandpa.
00:03:20:23 - 00:03:35:13
Woody Tasch
Fun time. I said one time. yeah. Like one. Oh, gosh. I only get the only one that I'm aware of. yeah. Yeah, it's it's, you know, it is what it is. It's kind of crazy and and, another exploration.
00:03:35:15 - 00:03:55:04
Mark Titus
Well, listen, I know you've got, I'm just thrilled to have you on here. You're a big hero of mine, mean. Oh, yeah. You've you've. Look, I, I've read increase into the nature of slow money several times. And as you come on, as you can see, this, this is booked up and marked.
00:03:55:09 - 00:03:56:14
Woody Tasch
And you still want to talk to.
00:03:56:14 - 00:04:23:01
Mark Titus
Dog eared and. Yeah. And I still believe that I keep coming back for more. Yeah. It's it's it's really revolutionary. And, I would love to dig in to for our listeners who don't have a grasp of what slow money or slow economy or farm to table or any of that stuff is, you know, let's even go a step back further.
00:04:23:05 - 00:04:29:00
Mark Titus
Tell us your story. Where'd you grow up, and how did you get into the work that you're doing?
00:04:29:01 - 00:04:30:20
Woody Tasch
Okay, if you're going to do that.
00:04:30:22 - 00:04:32:01
Mark Titus
I'm going to do.
00:04:32:03 - 00:04:56:10
Woody Tasch
Like, a Benjamin Buttons on you. I'm going to go backwards. Do it only because I already shared a few. My little morning story about the cherry blossoms outside my porch. Yeah, I'm not going to do that. But what I was out there doing was working on a PowerPoint for a few billionaires who might be in a position to give serious chunks of money to the Slow Money Institute.
00:04:56:11 - 00:05:24:20
Woody Tasch
Now, that's a weird way to start a podcast, but I don't mind doing it because who knows who might possibly hear this? I know it's kind of crazy, but life is crazy. It is. so I'm just kind of putting that signal out, even though this wouldn't normally be a venue, I would do that. But I'm sharing Benjamin Button style because I've been trying to synthesize in a certain way, everything I've learned from the slow money movement for the last 15 years, which you would think would be not easy.
00:05:24:20 - 00:05:43:18
Woody Tasch
But you know, something I would be able to do. And it has been remarkably challenging because it's been a very open ended process. It is a movement and there's no central anything. I'll, I'll flesh that out a second. Sure. Yeah. What do you kind of want me to do my thing? So let me tell you how I got to the.
00:05:43:20 - 00:05:46:21
Woody Tasch
So my front porch this morning, I'm doing a PowerPoint for a few billion.
00:05:46:21 - 00:05:50:09
Mark Titus
You're good at this. This is this is excellent. I'm loving this, Benjamin.
00:05:50:13 - 00:06:02:15
Woody Tasch
And it's actually it's not, it's a part of the story. I mean, this is all about wondering if we might actually be able to change directions.
00:06:02:17 - 00:06:03:18
Mark Titus
00:06:04:10 - 00:06:41:21
Woody Tasch
like, actually, like, seriously, genuinely change directions. What I mean by that, not just do incremental change through existing structures and, and, according to outdated economic thinking of bygone centuries, which unfortunately is still shaped, has shaped everything we do in all of our institutions and markets as despite all the shiny objects and all the fast, this, it's basically industrial thinking that started about 400 years ago to, you know, gained a lot of speed maybe 200 years ago, took off like a rocket ship 50 years ago.
00:06:41:22 - 00:06:58:19
Woody Tasch
And now we're kind of going, okay, now what? And I think you have to be a little foolish to think it's just going to be more of the same from here. Yeah. that we're just going to go faster and faster and invent more stuff, and somehow we're going to solve all the problems created by by too much speed.
00:06:58:19 - 00:07:25:09
Woody Tasch
And, and, you know, rate of change that is incomprehensible. So, so those are all the issues on the journey to wondering if we might change direction for me, went through a bunch of things, you know, I'm not a spring chicken. so that means I've done some things. and they took me through, you know, small time venture capital that 35 years ago when the industry was very young.
00:07:25:09 - 00:07:47:16
Woody Tasch
And, but they $10 million fund was actually a thing of. People won't believe it when I hear that number. but anyway, cut my teeth on that then I was the foundation treasurer for Environmental Foundation, and I worked that. I ran an angel network doing sustainable angel investing. So I'm not saying this to, like, have a list of whatever, but it's just,
00:07:47:18 - 00:07:48:06
Mark Titus
Morton. Right?
00:07:48:06 - 00:08:15:17
Woody Tasch
Kept, I kept I kept probing and pushing, and I was kind of restless. I don't mind saying I've been restless because I restless like, ten years at a time, so not not totally restless. to try to figure out. Was there an alternative possible, even though I wouldn't have said that's what I was doing at the time, I didn't quite have that clarity of purpose, but but I was very concerned about climate change and environmental stuff, and I believe very much in Wendell Berry.
00:08:15:17 - 00:08:37:08
Woody Tasch
And we have Schumacher and and if you believe those things, those people and that set of ideas and you really take it to heart, you can't just totally do business investing as usual. So I didn't and, I wrote the small, beautiful book. I hope that wasn't too long of a story, but I wrote the small, the small beautiful.
00:08:37:10 - 00:08:58:12
Woody Tasch
I didn't write a small. I wrote this low money book, which I subtitled in deference to F2 marker. The subtitle to increase into the Nature of Slow Money is Investing as a Food Farms and Fertility Matter, because the subtitle of Schumacher's book, small, as Beautiful as Economics is that people matter. I'm not the only one who has done that.
00:08:58:14 - 00:09:24:00
Woody Tasch
I quite a few people have done subtitles kind of like that in deference or doffing the cap to to Schumacher. So that book small is beautiful, I think. is one of the truly seminal books that I ever encountered, because it just there it deserves. It just poses from a deep place, a few kind of alternative ways of thinking about things.
00:09:24:00 - 00:09:51:00
Woody Tasch
And one of them is that unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is impossible. And that that is, still highly debatable. In other words, lots of intelligent people debate that all the time. Yeah. Second one, because that's at the system level. And systems are pretty hard to really come to a definite decision about. So complicated. But bringing that down to kind of a cultural human level.
00:09:51:00 - 00:10:09:07
Woody Tasch
The second tenet is unlimited, increase consumption is not synonymous with improved well-being. and that one, if you if I say that in a room with 5100 people and say how many people agree with the first one, maybe some of the hands of the second one, all the hands go up. No one believes that increased consumption is synonymous with improved well-being.
00:10:09:09 - 00:10:42:15
Woody Tasch
And so that makes it kind of brings, so, you know, once you kind of grapple with stuff like that, you realize the economy is built for efficiency and throughput and growth. And, you know, corporations are like little accelerators and supposedly risk minimizers, but they're exporting risk out onto the whole system. And, you know, once you get past the superficial stuff and you think about it all, you you just realize we're confronting this, this horrible set of conundrum by being economic people, and having money kind of organize everything for us.
00:10:42:16 - 00:11:05:16
Woody Tasch
so, that kind of led me to, to write this slow money about 15 years ago. wasn't trying to start anything. I'm always quick to add that, and the evidence as evidence, I will give the last 15 years because a movement did emerge, but I didn't. There was no structure to it. There was no one way to do slow money.
00:11:05:18 - 00:11:23:18
Woody Tasch
There was just a bunch of volunteers and a lot of different places. Step forward. we shared a kind of a vision. I don't mind calling it a vision. it is, you know, the simplest part of it is we must bring some of our money back down to earth, and. And if and again, if we were with a group of people.
00:11:23:18 - 00:11:45:09
Woody Tasch
And I said, what does that mean to you? And people started raising. And God means, you know, no CFOs or it means buying your food locally or it means investing in things that we understand near where we live or what I mean, it does mean all those things, it means Earth, literally Earth. you know, by bringing it down to Earth, it implies we have to we're going to slow it down.
00:11:45:11 - 00:12:14:10
Woody Tasch
In the process of doing that. And a whole bunch of things flowed from that. So, we've been at this for 15 years. Around $100 million has gone to around 1000 small organic farms and local food businesses and dozens of communities. it's been very lumpy like you'd expect. We have volunteers burning out transition. It's all volunteer. and I coming back to this morning with the PowerPoint, have the blessed challenge of going, okay, now what?
00:12:14:12 - 00:12:40:11
Woody Tasch
And it really has taken me a while to build up my own gumption to say, okay, this is it's been you can put whatever adjective you want on a very positive adjective of some ground, but whatever it has been, it's kind of opening the door to to a larger opportunity, a need. And so, I'm going to see if I can raise some serious money, which I've never done.
00:12:40:13 - 00:13:01:15
Woody Tasch
I mean, we raised money along the way to kind of in a very emergent, ad hoc way. I'm extremely grateful for that. but we never we call ourselves the Slow Money Institute, but we're not really an institute right now. It's just me and a couple of part time helpers. You know, we were up to a staff of 5 or 6, and now I hope that's not too much detail for listeners, but it makes it real.
00:13:01:17 - 00:13:41:11
Woody Tasch
It is real. So, you know, having a small NGO that that is kind of, supporting disparate activities in a very decentralized way is not a there's no real business strategy for that. So, I'm hopeful, but going forward, we can actually, take what we have learned and build on it, scale this low money movement into something much larger and more international that that allows, very small donors to play alongside angel investors seamlessly and that honors local decision making and, creates slowly circulating pools of, of local capital.
00:13:41:12 - 00:13:55:04
Woody Tasch
And so that was a mouthful. What I just said, there's a bunch of strategy things in there. but that's what we got. That's what we're trying to do. and I won't say more about it until you prompt me, because I think I've gone too far into the weeds already.
00:13:55:04 - 00:14:22:07
Mark Titus
Hey. It's okay. This is what we're about here today. Well, just to be clear on it, for our audience, the book is called inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money Investing. As if food, farms and fertility mattered. But we're going to refer to it as the slow money book today. So the Slow Money book that, is, it was an inspiration to me when I tried to talk about the conceptual things that you are bringing to.
00:14:22:07 - 00:14:42:01
Mark Titus
And they're really clear to me when you're when you're speaking them out loud and they're clear in the book, when I talk to people, that aren't necessarily aligned, I've already bought into the concepts there. You know, there's a certain skepticism or there's a like a, well, where are you? Where are you going? Are you going? Are you are you a socialist?
00:14:42:01 - 00:14:57:07
Mark Titus
Where are you going with this? And in the book, in Slow Money, you quoted Tom Miller, who was the first CEO of the Kentucky Highlands Corporation in and he said, we're not trying to rein in or correct or punish capitalism. We are trying to complete it. What do you think that means?
00:14:57:09 - 00:15:18:01
Woody Tasch
Wow, I love that you pulled that quote out. I think you're the first person interviewing me of all the things I've done. Whoever pulled that particular quote up spoke to me. So Tom became a dear friend. it's worth just citing a little bit more about him because, he meant a lot to me. He's passed away, unfortunately.
00:15:18:03 - 00:15:42:06
Woody Tasch
after he ran Kentucky Highlands, which was a very kind of a cutting edge economic development venture, kind of a thing in Appalachia. He he went to New York and ran the program related investments at the Ford Foundation for ten years, which is where I met him. While, program related investing being a kind of a niche inside philanthropy that was kind of pioneered by Ford and MacArthur, back in the 90s.
00:15:42:06 - 00:16:02:10
Woody Tasch
And, Tom, you know me, they were, like, lending money to Grameen Bank and really doing cutting edge things. And the idea there, which is very pertinent to both your question the way you asked it and to the larger story is the some of the large foundations realized. Well, there's kind of a third way that we need we don't want to just do grants, and we don't want to just do market investment.
00:16:02:13 - 00:16:20:23
Woody Tasch
Like, isn't there something in between? No one ever said it may be that simply because it was these institutions, but that's basically what was going on and this idea of program related investing emerged. Or, I won't get into the weeds on it. They got IRS permission to do a certain kinds of investing and counted in a certain way.
00:16:21:00 - 00:16:45:01
Woody Tasch
Those are the details. But basically it was below market lending, mostly to, businesses that were directly aligned with the mission of the foundation. So let's say you are an arts, you're supporting the arts. You would make a loan to, let's say, an inner city group that was renovating their theater or something, and you would do it as a loan, but a very below market, though.
00:16:45:01 - 00:17:07:00
Woody Tasch
And so it would be a high risk, low interest rate loan to a group that you might also have provided a grant to. so what? So, so yeah, so slow money as a whole. And Tom's comment about completing capitalism as a whole is about trying to fill in a whole thing. Capitalism, let's say, or a hole between capitalism and socialism.
00:17:07:02 - 00:17:34:06
Woody Tasch
Those those are big isms. So I, you, you know, you have to say them sometimes, but but, slow money is definitely neither. Well, it's definitely not socialism. And it's a form of capitalism. You know, it might seem to coy if I call it a highly sociable form of capitalism, by that. But but because it's very place based and very relationship based and it's very, and it's inefficient.
00:17:34:08 - 00:17:58:12
Woody Tasch
but but, to complete capitalism, to go back to Tom. So and Tom became one of the first board members of Slow Money when we started 15 years ago. So it's all that's why I kind of belabored it a little bit. He's meant a lot to me and to us getting going. to complete capitalism, we need to not, only.
00:17:58:14 - 00:18:21:05
Woody Tasch
Put Band-Aids on the wounds that capitalism creates. That's a that's a slightly snarky comment, but, because everything isn't just a Band-Aid, but whatever. Not just try to fix the things that we break while we're doing capitalism, but we need to try to create a form of capitalism that doesn't break things while creating jobs and, creating wealth and whatnot.
00:18:21:07 - 00:18:46:08
Woody Tasch
And obviously, I've just crossed over into Zuckerberg territory with the phrase break things, which is kind of on purpose. because slow money is like the opposite of move fast and break that. it's kind of the opposite of moonshots. I'm not against those things to the point of completion. We're not against capitalism, I'm not against Silicon Valley, but I am against pretending that's all there is.
00:18:46:10 - 00:19:06:14
Woody Tasch
And that's the only way to be a smart business person. And that's the only way to be a smart investor or an intelligent person on the planet right now. I mean, I that part, I sign off, I sign out there, it's like, no, those things are tools. They're incredibly powerful. They I need to finish all that. And but everybody knows what that is.
00:19:06:16 - 00:19:34:15
Woody Tasch
And I think most people of goodwill can say without sounding radical, they've gone too far. They're out of control. They're or at least or if not quite, that they're creating severe imbalances and risks to everything, both economic and ecological. And so the completion of capitalism, if all of that made any sense, is where's the slow part? Where is the local part?
00:19:34:17 - 00:19:59:17
Woody Tasch
Where is the human part? Where is how do we have capitalism and community at the same time? Is there really ground up is a really such thing as kind of ground up, but ground up sounds like hamburger, bottom up social change that everyone wants structural change that everyone wants. And what happened to when I took my I finally took my my little sabbatical year 16 or 17 years ago now.
00:19:59:17 - 00:20:22:10
Woody Tasch
And the book came out was, you know, I was trying to get away from the Band-Aid, incremental. How do we just improve reporting? How do we get this regulation? You know, because it just seemed intuitively obvious to me that was not going to create the change we needed fast enough. And what what like what came out? What came up from that process of exploration for me was the idea of slowing money down.
00:20:22:12 - 00:20:41:07
Woody Tasch
At the moment, the single most important thing we could do as investors is lengthen our time horizons. I think generationally, instead of think about how much money I can make next quarter, because that ripples through everything. So I see you knitting your brow and, you should have done it a while ago, so I would have stopped sooner.
00:20:41:09 - 00:21:00:11
Mark Titus
I, I am intrigued as to how the concept of slowing down is inherently tied to place in your movement in in the movement of slow money. How do those two things can, come to confluence?
00:21:00:12 - 00:21:28:01
Woody Tasch
Great question. they wouldn't necessarily have to, I guess, but I mean, the, the, the converse or whatever I would say is that if money is going really fast, it's not going to stay local. There's that in other in other words, if you if you start there, so I, I into it two ways. First that that money seeking optimal rates of return or maximum rate of return is going to go global.
00:21:28:07 - 00:21:47:14
Woody Tasch
It's going to go cyber because that's where the speed is. That's where the returns are. That's where the fast economic growth is. And so that's why everything all the all the money has gotten sucked up into these global whatever you want to call them technologies. I don't even know if that's a word, but but I think you know what?
00:21:47:19 - 00:21:49:14
Mark Titus
I'm buying it. Yeah.
00:21:49:16 - 00:22:10:00
Woody Tasch
All right. So there's that. And all of our systems have been geared towards that through Wall Street and through Silicon Valley and outward to maximize the flow of capital and the rate of return on capital. So of course, very little of it. It's going to stay local or circulate locally in that model. Well guess what, Main Street is dying and all that that you know, people are leaving the towns and going to the cities.
00:22:10:00 - 00:22:37:09
Woody Tasch
Me it's all part of the the same thing. Now actually, where the Sloan came from was me being awake at 2:00 at 2 a.m. in the morning in Italy, the home of slow food. And writing in a journal. Something about this. Never thinking I was ever going to even write a book, much less use that journal entry. And it turns out I just wrote several pages on if we're really serious, we have to slow down.
00:22:37:09 - 00:22:58:15
Woody Tasch
We have to. And then and then while I was there, I realized, oh my God, that's slow food. What we need is slow money. We can't just we can't just buy slow food with our fast money. We actually need to create a new flow of capital that supports all of this stuff appropriately. And, if you let me just blather on one more bit on that.
00:22:58:15 - 00:23:23:07
Woody Tasch
Yeah, I would say there's another very practical way you asked about place. so I'm going to try to get back to place in a second. A small, diversified organic farm is a place. It's not an abstraction. It's not an instrument, a financial instrument. It's not designed to make a lot of money. In fact, it's a very hard way to make any money.
00:23:23:09 - 00:23:42:23
Woody Tasch
even when you're very successful. that's why it's so precious. That's why it's so important. And in order to get money to them, which would be another part of anybody, that same skeptical person who says, I don't understand why money going slow could be good. How could that be good? Well, that same person may or may not.
00:23:43:01 - 00:24:10:09
Woody Tasch
If you say to that person, funding small, diversified organic farms is as important as going to Mars. And if you look at that person, probably 80% of the time you'll get a blank look back, but maybe 20% of the time you want someone to go, yeah, of course I can see that attitude. Let's see right away. I say, well, if you want to do that, we got to figure out a way to do that because the money doesn't naturally flow there.
00:24:10:11 - 00:24:39:01
Woody Tasch
The money is being sucked out, you know, in all these other directions. So now I just just to say just a tiny bit more about the place because I answered fairly abstractly, I guess, what slow money is, is bunches of people coming together locally in person. Believe it or not, it was pre-COVID in person. You know, in small groups, groups of six, ten, 20, 30, 40.
00:24:39:04 - 00:25:12:00
Woody Tasch
And then when it gets very successful, the groups get bigger than that. But but in the scheme of things, very small groups of people and collaborating together put some of their money into local farms and food businesses. And in most cases, the way that's done is the people come in to actually get in rooms together and talk, and people collaboratively decide, and I hope we up well, I'm going to ask that we have time at some point during the podcast where I could describe the current iteration of that, which are, we call them soil groups.
00:25:12:00 - 00:25:34:22
Woody Tasch
This has evolved over the course of the movement, so only a small group of people inside the larger movement are doing this so far, but making 0% loans to local farmers, which is the slowest of money because that time we're using donated capital. So that money is circulating. I think of it as financial compost. It's a super slow and it's circulating in perpetuity in the community.
00:25:35:00 - 00:25:39:19
Woody Tasch
and so, so I hope that puts a like a punctuation thing on the place part.
00:25:40:00 - 00:26:07:19
Mark Titus
It, it does. And I want to go a little bit further into the, sort of the logistical idea behind this to how, what in a really clear, you know, layman's terms, why do we want this? Why do we want localized, distribution, localized food sources, localized. You know, what's what's broken about the whole system that we need to fix?
00:26:07:21 - 00:26:26:04
Woody Tasch
Oh, man. Come on, I it's too early for me to have a martini, and I'm, I'm. I just really have to answer that question. All right? That shot. All right, so.
00:26:26:06 - 00:26:52:21
Woody Tasch
I would just sort of, by reference, by innuendo, refer to. The 60s and 70s or not. It's even goes back before that because Rachel Carson maybe was in my to me maybe was the beginning of the modern environmental movement. That's just me. I'm not a I'm not a real historian, but let's say the when we started knowing that all the chemicals we were making could kill things.
00:26:52:23 - 00:27:20:12
Woody Tasch
okay. So we've known that now for like three generations, but we're still have are putting tens of thousands of chemicals into the environment and testing almost none of them for toxicity. That's still a thing today. That's astonishing and horrible. It's like impossible to comprehend. and if you want to bring that forward into a super topical thing, you have Nicole Shanahan standing up, accepting Robert Kennedy's nomination.
00:27:20:14 - 00:27:41:09
Woody Tasch
I don't know if you happened to watch her speech, and she was talking about where her Covid skeptic, where her vaccine skepticism came from, and she has technical chops of a certain kind. If you're certainly not against technology, let's put it that way. She's no Luddite. And she said, we can't we don't understand all these interactions. It's impossible for us to understand them all.
00:27:41:12 - 00:27:55:18
Woody Tasch
We've never tested for them. We couldn't even analyze them. And that is true. You have to say. I mean, that happens to be true whether you go to the next step and you and you become a skeptic and you take all these other stance, that's another thing. I'm not going there, right? I don't happen to myself, I have to say.
00:27:55:18 - 00:28:21:14
Woody Tasch
But that's not that's not the point of the comment. we don't the, you know, the impacts that the human economy has had on the biosphere are barely understandable, but the big negative consequences are becoming clearer. that's how I feel about everyone who has to decide how they read the tea leaves. there are still people going around denying climate change, so some right here next door to me.
00:28:21:16 - 00:28:49:05
Woody Tasch
So, but I think of that 20% that I paused, making the comment before, you know, it's probably bigger than this part is probably bigger than 20%. Now people say, oh my God, things are kind of going in a bad direction here. So your comment about what's broken is really or what's so good about local. if Schumacher famously said at one point, if everything were small, I'd be arguing in favor of big, but he.
00:28:49:07 - 00:29:09:10
Woody Tasch
So it's a matter of balance. It's a matter of like a common sense. It's a yin yang. It's a great quote. Oh, it it's a great quote. It's so because everything has gone so global and so industrial and so technology oriented and so fast and so cyber and so anonymous and so just add you and your editors on there.
00:29:09:12 - 00:29:39:10
Woody Tasch
Localization is a is is a kind of a frame for going. We have to a get to know one another again reconnect to the places where we live. Reconnect to the land. You know, this has all kinds of ramifications. But the big strokes of it, the broad strokes of it, I think are fairly simple. And my daft when I was starting to go back to the 60s and 70s, I was kind of going back to the the counterculture as we understood it in those days, which was about the military industrial complex.
00:29:39:12 - 00:30:06:13
Woody Tasch
It was about. You know, an abiding fear that nuclear weapons and military interests and the industrial interests around them were going to kind of run roughshod over the rest of society. Now, whether that happened or not. Again, you we can all reasonably discuss that. But but causes for concern are certainly reasonable and and I is now this new manifestation.
00:30:06:15 - 00:30:24:23
Woody Tasch
And I think the reason that even the people who developed AI are freaking out about it is kind of Oppenheimer. Ask if you will, if you want to use another topical thing that has tormented as he was, they still went ahead and I dropped the bomb. I'll trying to figure out what to do now. Well, the same thing with AI.
00:30:24:23 - 00:31:05:02
Woody Tasch
They're dropping the bomb now. No one's going to stop it. People are going to express concerns about it. hopefully some some, some guardrails will be put up that whatever they in the world, they can be. But something we can all do to fill the hole in, in capitalism, complete capitalism and, address these concerns without fighting too much and without trying to reach up to the levers of power that even if we reach them, we probably will pull a budget, is we can connect locally and start doing the right thing.
00:31:05:04 - 00:31:25:07
Woody Tasch
My version of the right thing, a good thing, I'll just call it a good thing. locally. And I would list under there things that we understand that make our community healthier, that help one another. You know, obviously food and farming is like the best way to start that, in my opinion about it. It's it's very concrete. There already is a local food movement.
00:31:25:07 - 00:31:46:10
Woody Tasch
We can build on that. But to your point, I love the way you framed because you framed it both about capitalism and about places. It's about a lot more than food. It's about caring for one another. It's about health care. It's about education. It's about housing. It can be about all those things that just we aren't. So money as a movement has been focused on food and farming because that's there's plenty for us to do right there.
00:31:46:12 - 00:32:14:03
Woody Tasch
And, I do feel like using the soil as a kind of an ultimate, both metaphor. A metric is a good thing because it is. It is literally and metaphorically ground it. It's like we're coming down to earth, and, it is, it is fascinating and mind, but it's mind boggling to think that Da Vinci said, you know, whatever that was 500 years ago, that we know more about the movements of the stars than we do about what's going on beneath our feet.
00:32:14:07 - 00:32:34:08
Woody Tasch
True. That was 500 years ago. It is still true. It is still true. We're getting stuff back about how like what the distance of the diameter of the black hole is or whatever, the fact that and I've got all those amazing images and it's like we go, oh, okay. Yeah, I understand that. Well not really. We can see it.
00:32:34:11 - 00:32:54:10
Woody Tasch
We hear what it is. It's like hard thing. It's mind boggling. Yeah. We don't know how soil fertility works really. We haven't. Suzuki's David Suzuki said this is 20 years ago that we haven't named 95% of the species in the in the soil yet. We don't. We've only put it in the cup. We've only named 5% by his estimate.
00:32:54:15 - 00:32:56:19
Mark Titus
Well well, well yeah.
00:32:56:19 - 00:33:03:02
Woody Tasch
That's so that's the local list. That's the local. It's the soil is local. It's. That's right. It's like it's right beneath our feet.
00:33:03:04 - 00:33:30:11
Mark Titus
Well and it's, you know, it's inarguable. Food is inarguable. Food is something that is, completely goes across every spectrum. Political divide doesn't matter. We all have to eat. We all have to consume everything in the universe. Consume. Stars, consume. We do that. But how are we consuming? And to your point, you know about what's under our feet.
00:33:30:13 - 00:33:58:18
Mark Titus
It's astonishing to me the things that are literally in front of our nose, under our feet. reading headlines this week about scientists are really digging in to studying the female anatomy for the first time in depth. This is mind boggling that what there's there's there's two versions of human being really to this. It's 2024 and we're, we're digging into this now.
00:33:58:20 - 00:34:29:04
Mark Titus
But so it's right here, right now. It's all it's all around us. But you're going so fast. Western society here in the United States. It's got to your point. It's going so fast. We can't slow down enough to see the cherry tree in your front yard to to contemplate the soil under our feet, to contemplate what another what the, the other sexes, a gender, experiences in their bodies.
00:34:29:04 - 00:35:08:04
Mark Titus
And, you know, it's it's astonishing to me. Which is why I think I'm so drawn to this idea of slowing down, noticing, paying attention, paying attention to our neighbors are and getting to a place where we can have a relatable conversation about the things that are truly important to us, not just the all engaging, all consuming, at all times pursuit of more, which has been what has been inculcated to us for a couple hundred years.
00:35:08:08 - 00:35:19:17
Mark Titus
As you point out, you know, early on in the conversation here and it's it's all pretty serious stuff. And here's I want to I want to run another quote by you from from the book from Slow Money.
00:35:19:19 - 00:35:21:09
Woody Tasch
Can you, can you hold that for a second?
00:35:21:09 - 00:35:22:19
Mark Titus
Yeah, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
00:35:22:21 - 00:35:38:05
Woody Tasch
Because I just want to pick up on what a tangent to or another whatever to what you just said. Yeah. It's not just that we're inculcated with the idea that more that we need more. It makes it sound like like Madison Avenue, like just that kind of convinced us that we need a new car every four years. Now, there is that there's.
00:35:38:05 - 00:36:08:01
Woody Tasch
Yeah, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of that. Yeah. I but in case I do is bad enough. There's another thing, which to me is tied a little bit to me kind of translating my, my knowledge of Wendell Berry stuff. with respect to went on for and bastardized it, but, and that is that because we're not here we are now at the end of, let's say, hundreds of years of industrialization, urbanization and technological everything.
00:36:08:02 - 00:36:13:10
Woody Tasch
and so we're in a place where almost none of us produce anything that we consume, like almost none of us.
00:36:13:11 - 00:36:18:19
Mark Titus
There you go. Yeah. Okay. That's right. So. Or have the slightest idea how to do that.
00:36:18:21 - 00:36:35:04
Woody Tasch
That's how to do it or how to fix anything that we own. Even that's right. So we're surrounded. So what is it? What does that mean? That means we're dependent on our money. And so we're just living in a state of what I'm calling an existential fear, which I don't think it's too grandiose of a description.
00:36:35:04 - 00:36:36:21
Mark Titus
I don't I don't think so at all.
00:36:36:23 - 00:36:53:12
Woody Tasch
Because if you only have money to buy stuff like this, you said we always need more. There's no such thing as enough. We always need more words. I come from because you can never have enough money if you have to buy everything you don't know if what's going to happen to prices you don't know, like if there's going to be a shortage or this or that, you don't produce anything.
00:36:53:15 - 00:37:16:22
Woody Tasch
So you just want more money. That's your form of security. That's a kind of a that's all you got. in a certain way. and coming back to the local thing, I should have given the most obvious answer, which was we had a glimpse during Covid of what happens when supply chains get screwed up. Now. Yes, that you know, that sounds, I think our problems are deeper than just what happened in Covid, but I'm just saying there was a glimpse.
00:37:16:22 - 00:37:44:06
Woody Tasch
It's like, oh, whoop, got a little blip there. Well, that wasn't just a little blip, but but but suddenly there was a disruption and all of a sudden like, where am I going to get my food? Or maybe my toilet paper, where I'm going to get this? Where do I get that? So we did get through that. The local food movement, CSAs and whatnot did have a big boost during Covid because suddenly people were like jonesing to go to the farm, stand on the street if they had one anywhere near them.
00:37:44:08 - 00:38:03:14
Woody Tasch
but most of us don't have access to stuff like that. So we're living in a state of existential fear, and we need money to buy the stuff we need to survive or to fix the things we need to survive. So that's just a deeper. I just want to go a little deeper on your comment of, like, we're taught that we always need more because of that, because it's almost at a deeper level than just that.
00:38:03:16 - 00:38:31:04
Mark Titus
I was in a stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross in college. It was one of the most fun things I've done in my life, and with the guys I was with and in that that play by David Mamet, there's a line, hooray for me. Q and that's that's kind of the you know, that's kind of the the to this point, capitalist dogma, you know, of, not it's not everybody's so crass.
00:38:31:04 - 00:39:01:21
Mark Titus
Is that or has a conscious desire to execute on that. But it's it's all, you know, it's there. It's kind of serious stuff. It's like if you have more of of this shine of this shiny things, you are held in higher esteem.
00:39:01:23 - 00:39:34:18
Mark Titus
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00:39:59:02 - 00:40:33:03
Mark Titus
That's same spelled backwards. wild.com and eat wild to save wild. Now back to the show. I there's a quote in your book, where you say the success of slow money will depend on a vision that dares to be playful, that dares to assert a connection between human and human race and humility and humor. I love this, how does this notion break away from that capital of you.
00:40:33:04 - 00:40:41:02
Woody Tasch
To do that? And I love you for pulling me, and you're pulling all the the really the nicest things out of my book. That's really I'm very grateful. Seriously.
00:40:41:04 - 00:40:50:12
Mark Titus
Well, hey, I don't like I don't like. I told you this thing is this sucker is marked up every third page. So I got so much out of it, Woody.
00:40:50:14 - 00:41:03:15
Woody Tasch
But, you're you're more than making my day. Whatever. So thank you so much. so. So, yeah, I can't quite,
00:41:03:17 - 00:41:21:04
Woody Tasch
I can't quite explain, if you will. my compulsion. with exploring new language and wordplay and, Well, actually, I can explain it.
00:41:21:05 - 00:41:23:16
Mark Titus
Take a stand for, unfortunately.
00:41:23:18 - 00:41:54:21
Woody Tasch
Hence doing PowerPoints and all that stuff. Well, look, this is about getting out of the box, obviously. So. And it's about needing, and a new story and a new so you can put words on it like slow and local when there are words small, those are words we already have. We can use them. But being a little more irreverent than that, I guess I haven't said this to anybody really ever before, but saying it now it's me doing my bad.
00:41:54:21 - 00:42:16:04
Woody Tasch
George Carlin or Firesign Theater. In other words, if you grew up with a certain kind of irreverent, countercultural impulse and and I just want to say, if I if I had any shred of credibility still to anyone who's listening, I wasn't a hippie, which is that not not against hippies. I wasn't a redneck. I'm a little against rednecks.
00:42:16:04 - 00:42:24:04
Woody Tasch
Sorry. but the point is, I was always kind of down the middle. I was always kind of.
00:42:24:06 - 00:42:47:04
Woody Tasch
You know, just looking for a third way. And that is the unifying theme which is down the middle in a way. you can't use the language, the dismal language of professional, of everything ideological this and technocrat that and formal everything. And so breaking out of that requires some playfulness. It requires a little more like, come on.
00:42:47:06 - 00:43:17:12
Woody Tasch
Seriously. Like you're really going to go there like, you think that really explains everything, but I'm lumping in my mind when I'm saying that all kinds of professional categorization disciplines, all the reductionism of education, specialization, silos, all of that led to derivatives, all of that led to the Gaussian copula formula. All of that led to Moore's Law doesn't mean those things are that we throw them out.
00:43:17:14 - 00:43:42:22
Woody Tasch
It just means they're manifestations of extreme specialization, extreme, reductionist thinking down into certain narrow things that you can manipulate and create extraordinary things in those in those arenas. So those things are going to be celebrated. I hope anybody listening, you know, here's I'm not, but. Having the gumption, which is a kind of a playful word that I like for that.
00:43:42:22 - 00:43:45:07
Mark Titus
Reason, just a great word.
00:43:45:08 - 00:44:05:16
Woody Tasch
Having the gumption to reassert just common humanity and simplicity and other things. Outside of that, I'm just saying there's a realm of life that I'm not letting that go to if I can get have the gumption. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of gumption now because those those areas have kind of invaded all areas of our thinking and feeling.
00:44:05:18 - 00:44:16:20
Woody Tasch
I look, everything is mediated. You and I are doing it now. Is it? I love zoom actually. I love and hate it and I've a love hate with it. I'm like, everybody does sure do know how great we're able to do this today. I mean, it's it's really.
00:44:16:20 - 00:44:19:12
Mark Titus
Yeah. No one across the country.
00:44:19:14 - 00:44:30:10
Woody Tasch
So I'm very grateful for that. And I hate that everything in life is on the screen, that we pay more attention to the screen than we do to the people in the next room. Everybody knows that's true.
00:44:30:12 - 00:44:40:19
Mark Titus
Well, I've I've broken that slightly because I got my pals here with me while we're on zoom. So we all right. Yeah. Oh. All right. Well, and I look for.
00:44:40:21 - 00:44:45:02
Woody Tasch
That somewhere down there. But I can't get her. I can't just get her to come up. Up the stairs.
00:44:45:02 - 00:44:50:12
Mark Titus
Dear listener. Yeah. Dear listener. Who's who's not watching the, the YouTube version of this. I just held up.
00:44:50:18 - 00:44:53:13
Woody Tasch
So, so, you know, just to finish on humor and humility.
00:44:53:13 - 00:44:54:12
Mark Titus
Yeah.
00:44:54:14 - 00:45:24:23
Woody Tasch
This is actually a serious topic for me. Sure. because, you know, I spent a few decades in New York, you know, wearing a suit. but again, it sounds like I'm about to make a wholesale castigation of everyone who's still doing that. And I almost am, but not of the individuals that I mean, I it's about the systemic consequences of the whole thing, right?
00:45:24:23 - 00:45:44:04
Woody Tasch
It's all good people doing good things and going to work every day to try to make a positive contribution. And, you know, all that stuff and be rewarded financially for doing that all good up to a certain point. But then we end up with systemic collapse. So to me, I guess I could have given an easier answer.
00:45:44:04 - 00:46:13:00
Woody Tasch
Like it's better to laugh than to cry, but, so word play is my is my. That helps me get into that space where where I can be just irreverent enough in the, you know, imagination. Good thing I think, I try to let it percolate up where I can, because the old ways of thinking, however, are not serving us well to solve the problems we're facing.
00:46:13:00 - 00:46:17:17
Woody Tasch
So that means, you know, all hands on deck. So that includes humor.
00:46:17:19 - 00:46:53:00
Mark Titus
Yeah. And I just love the root of it, too. Humor, humility, humor of the earth being grounded, getting our egos out of the way so we can come to a more, sane and, human. Human. There's the human there of the earth, approach to how we spread this energy that is called the economy around. And maybe there's a way that it can this is going to lead right into my next question.
00:46:53:00 - 00:47:09:20
Mark Titus
Nurture us all so that what is you use you use these beautiful words in these beautiful terms in your book. What is Nurture Capital ism in your mind and how does it fuel what you call the restorative economy?
00:47:09:22 - 00:47:31:09
Woody Tasch
Well, thank you again for asking such a point on just that. Like like the question that's right. Put something on the head. I don't want to lose one other thing that popped up for me before I get to. Yeah, I hit it on on humility. Just following up on the, the thing I was in a little workshop about 30 years ago that happened to be run by Tom Chappell, the founder of Tom's of Maine.
00:47:31:09 - 00:47:54:09
Woody Tasch
Yeah. Which in the day, well, not in the day, you know, now it's part of an internet in a multinational corporation. But when it was a small, independent thing, it was, I don't know, whatever it was, what was back then. And Tom was running the workshop and there a bunch of people in the room who were aspiring socially responsible entrepreneurs, investors, you know, people who really respected him for it.
00:47:54:10 - 00:48:18:15
Woody Tasch
Done. And he was leading us through a kind of exercise about, envisioning imagining the qualities we would want in our company as we were growing our company. And somehow in the course of that workshop, the word humble came up to me and I said something like, could there ever be such thing as a humble company? And the answer is probably not.
00:48:18:17 - 00:48:40:19
Woody Tasch
That's that's not to say there aren't any. That sounds that's ridiculous, but by and large, the corporation is set up to become something that isn't humble. It's set up to be powerful and efficient and a generator of jobs and wealth and a producer of, you know, whatever, you know, the rest of that story. Humility isn't one of the things that translates well.
00:48:40:21 - 00:48:47:05
Woody Tasch
More recently and working on the on the sequel to to this book, which I hope I get to to mention. Yeah. Before we get up. Sure.
00:48:47:05 - 00:48:47:22
Mark Titus
We we definitely.
00:48:47:22 - 00:49:11:03
Woody Tasch
Well I've been, I've been focusing on the word intention. which is kind of related to humility in a certain way. In other words, being able to kind of stay focused on simple intention and kind of not the kind of knocked off your game. and then it's hard to hold intention in a corporation to, to hold personal intention.
00:49:11:05 - 00:49:31:05
Woody Tasch
It almost forces you to leave your intention at home. You know, you come in and you and you, there's a collective intention. You're sort of buying into a certain collective. But I'm talking about personal intention that the one personal value is like what you would like to do, what you would like to see happen. so I guess I'm trying that.
00:49:31:07 - 00:49:39:09
Woody Tasch
So humility can be a form of strength. Everybody knows that. and so I'm in favor of that.
00:49:39:11 - 00:49:54:19
Mark Titus
How does that how does that then feed into this notion of nurturing, nurturing each other and nurturing each other through capital? The nurturing capitalism? And how does it fuel then, the restorative economy?
00:49:54:21 - 00:50:35:07
Woody Tasch
All right. So to be completely transparent, I don't know if anyone will care to hear this or not, but I got my focus on the word nurture came from reading a passage from Wendell Berry, which I've read many times in public. it's from the first several pages of The Unsettling of America, which is kind of some consider his magnum opus that he wrote the 70s, and he's contrasting nurture and exploitation, and he basically has this beautiful, page long, Wendell Berry esque, articulation of the difference between nurture and exploitation.
00:50:35:09 - 00:50:59:05
Woody Tasch
And he uses the idea of a small farmer as kind of the ideal of a nurture and a strip miner as the kind of villain scapegoat for the exploiter, and then describes all the different things that those people do and think about in the course of doing what they do. To describe a so he imprinted on me this idea of nurture as a, as a thing that's a long time ago.
00:50:59:07 - 00:51:19:18
Woody Tasch
And then somewhere along the way, in the search for the Third way and all the rest of the stuff we're talking about in language and whatnot, I realized, oh my God, venture, nurture. Like we need to shift from venture to nurture, not a wholesale shift, but we need to create a space between venture capital and philanthropy. I can be more specific.
00:51:19:18 - 00:51:44:09
Woody Tasch
I think I will be more specific because this is a real idea. and it's what my mythical billionaire is going to fund, the Slow Money Institute so we can explore further. is the idea of a nurture capital sector that is actually a third leg of the stool, or a third way between venture I. When I say venture, I kind of mean investing writ large.
00:51:44:09 - 00:52:09:07
Woody Tasch
The most industrial strength version of which is venture capital. It's it's exploration, manufacturing throughput, standard of living, all of that stuff is the venture part. And then we have philanthropy, which in the 20th century emerged as a sector to try to, let's say, fix the problems created by the venture, if you will do the things that the venture can't do.
00:52:09:09 - 00:52:34:11
Woody Tasch
And so the so the sector gradually emerged, called philanthropy. But there's a whole lot of things that neither venture nor philanthropy can do. And guess what? One of them is a small, diversified organic farm, meaning to be concrete. These are both very concrete things and they are abstract. There's the systemic implications, and it's also super pragmatic. A small farm is a business.
00:52:34:11 - 00:53:03:03
Woody Tasch
It's not a it's not a nonprofit. It's right. it's just not a very profitable business. It's very hard way to make a living, but it produces lots of benefits for the community and the biosphere. But but they're not easy to monetize. and possibly they never should be monetized. So what do you do with that? Just let it go out of get it, let it become extinct because there's no way to fund it or figure out how we're going to fund it, how we're going to provide it, the financial resources it needs to flourish.
00:53:03:05 - 00:53:35:10
Woody Tasch
Well, that, by definition, would be a form of nurture capital. And I've only loosely extrapolated from there and my thinking to a range of things that you could imagine of a similar sort in our local communities, a local service providers of various kinds that provide vital services that are not very profitable or not well remunerated, but which we without which our communities and neighborhoods and by our regions will never thrive right now, just like the crumbs of capitalism going there.
00:53:35:12 - 00:53:50:11
Woody Tasch
You know, it's whatever we drag back through taxes and this and that. It's just the it's crumbs. How would we get a more meaningful, positive upwelling source of human and financial resources to the things that needs another frame? And I think that frame is nurture capital.
00:53:50:11 - 00:54:20:23
Mark Titus
Beautiful. I love that you're so integrated with archetypal images, too, because these things, I think, are finding common ground and finding a way forward. The earth, the the birth mother, the food itself, again, an inarguable and an apolitical piece of existence. And the farmer, the farmer is, you know, an archetypal image that red or blue? Right or left, it doesn't matter.
00:54:21:00 - 00:54:51:15
Mark Titus
You know, I can't find a person who is going to have a harsh opinion about a farmer. and so I want to, based on that thinking and in that very real archetypal imagery that is resonating so strongly with me, I want to bring up one more quote of yours from the book where you say our fate is being determined by deeper struggles for our hearts and minds allegiance to flag versus allegiance to land, allegiance to nation versus allegiance to place.
00:54:51:17 - 00:55:18:14
Mark Titus
This really struck me, and I think going back to the images that we were just talking about here, we are so divided in this United States right now, despite those political and social differences. From your point of view, where where can we begin healing our wounds and coming together to survive and thrive through a notion like this of nurture capitalism and a restorative economy?
00:55:18:16 - 00:55:27:08
Woody Tasch
Well, I already kind of gave you versions of my answer to that.
00:55:27:10 - 00:56:10:22
Woody Tasch
You know, I just don't I don't see any. Vehicle I think about mix my, my metaphors and my language here, but any other means or, pathways to healing. That don't involve reconnecting to one another in the places where we live and the land. Yeah. And that is just how I feel about it. I agree, after all the experiences I've, I've had, I've been I've had the, fascinating and challenging, experience of traveling all over the country, talking to thousands of people in all kinds of different capacities.
00:56:11:00 - 00:56:29:02
Woody Tasch
some of the leading financiers on the planet happened to be it once or twice, you know, b b in, in the mix, often lots of small farmers and lots of what I would call just plain regular folks who want to know where their food comes from and where their money goes, which is a pretty big group.
00:56:29:03 - 00:56:43:11
Woody Tasch
People who are like realizing what things like what? You know, I don't I don't just want to get my food off of, I'm not going to name any particular corporate distributor. Doesn't know I don't just want to get my food off of the, you know, highly processed food off the back of that truck. I want it to be fresh and local.
00:56:43:13 - 00:56:59:20
Woody Tasch
And to your point, I really like to know the farmer. And I'd really like to bring my kid to the farm. Now, that's that's the ideal. That's when you're lucky and you live close to a farm like that. You get to do that. But it's okay. It's okay to embrace the ideal and realize that is a thing. Like, like it would be better if more of us could do that.
00:56:59:22 - 00:57:19:07
Woody Tasch
So I just don't see a pathway to healing that doesn't involve all of the different facets. I mean, there's another way to say that which I, which which just reiterates and just says there's no better place to start than with how we feed one another, how we take care of the places where we live on the land.
00:57:19:09 - 00:57:54:14
Woody Tasch
So it's just a place to start. It's a place to to rediscover everything that we lost when, let's say, as recently as 100 years ago, a third of the population was directly connected to a farm enterprise in some way, shape or form. That's just 100 years ago. I mean, nothing, nothing. When I talk now, like, you know, we always cite the number 2% of Americans, okay, that's not even a real number because three quarters of that are factory farms and very large commercial enterprises that we call farms that are really more like industrial enterprises than they are.
00:57:54:14 - 00:58:18:19
Woody Tasch
In other words, they're producing commodities for corporate supply chains. They're not growing food for local people or tending the soil. Right. And that's what it's actually worth, just holding that for one second because we're covering so much. Just think about that for a second. We call them everything. A farm that's out there doing something, growing some kind of corn, some, you know, an ethanol farmer is a farmer is growing corn.
00:58:18:21 - 00:58:47:06
Woody Tasch
Okay. but his business model is he's producing a commodity for a corporate supply chain. Okay. As opposed to the I'm just going to make up something. The 30 acre, small, diversified organic farm, it could be 300 acres. So there's no it's not like a zealot zealously guarded like small thing, medium sized, but a farmer that has a diversified food and farming operation.
00:58:47:06 - 00:59:12:16
Woody Tasch
So there's growing food for local and regional markets in the process of doing that. He's also he or she is are it's also creating soil fertility, putting carbon in the soil. It just comes with the package. Yep. And so it's a totally different thing. That farm and the industrial ethanol thing, they're both called farms. They're not the same thing.
00:59:12:18 - 00:59:18:21
Woody Tasch
now, what was the question you were asking? What did you ask about? You ask something about healing, and I feel like I straight off of your.
00:59:18:21 - 00:59:41:23
Mark Titus
You know, you didn't you you actually steered right into it. you were talking about healing the wounds, and I, I think that it's dead on about getting to no place again, getting to know each other, getting to know where our food is coming from. These these things empower us. And they demystify things that are unknown. And we are afraid of the unknown.
00:59:42:01 - 01:00:11:15
Mark Titus
And so I think what I see a lot of your work doing is, in fact, calling us to awaken to what's actually happening, where are we actually getting the things that we consume, and who are those people behind those things? I mean, I have a taste of that, obviously, in my business selling salmon, my partner is a fisherman who catches the fish the same bucket, essentially the big bucket from Bristol Bay that we share with the rest of the country.
01:00:11:15 - 01:00:22:17
Mark Titus
And it's a story. And you know what? People are hungry for that story. And and there's a reason for that. And it's part of it is to demystify this thing. Now, listen, I promised you I will.
01:00:22:17 - 01:00:42:21
Woody Tasch
And. Okay. Yes, I know where you're going, but yeah, but he missed ification is great. That great topic. because and that goes back to the humor and the irreverence a little bit because it's like all of the mumbo jumbo, you know, all the razzmatazz, all the technical, financial, you know, like what is the Gaussian copula formula?
01:00:42:21 - 01:00:59:01
Woody Tasch
How many people even know those words, much less have looked at what the formulas? That's the that's the thing that led to all of the derivatives. So the black Sholes formula for US stock options pricing, which led to the crash in the 90s. You know, these are like black boxes. They're things it's the Wizard of Oz stuff, you know.
01:00:59:03 - 01:01:22:23
Woody Tasch
And so dangerous. Defining is important because people do. You're good when people. Let me very quick anecdote. Sure. I was talking to someone, a successful creative artist and who he'd been, I'd been introduced him and he said something like, well, I don't really understand finance or economics or anything, so. But I grew up in a small town, this is exactly what he said.
01:01:23:01 - 01:01:42:17
Woody Tasch
he said he didn't understand it, but. But he did understand. He said I grew up in a small town, and we used to all go to the pharmacy for lunch. And we would sit at the counter. I mean we knew the pharmacist and he said now the pharmacy is gone and there's a Starbucks there. And he said it just kind of feels bad to me.
01:01:42:19 - 01:01:55:17
Woody Tasch
But he said but he said and then he made some apology after that like but I know there needs to be economic thing and I know he did it. he might have even said, I'm an investor in Starbucks. I don't know if he said that or not, but I didn't that he might as well. And he said, am I missing something?
01:01:55:17 - 01:02:31:18
Woody Tasch
He told me the little story instead of I'm missing something. I know you're not missing anything. That is it. It's that simple. Demystify it. It's simple. When you put your money into the markets, into the institutions, into the ETFs, into all these things, where what does it end up doing? It ends up doing all that stuff. And then we go down the street and complain at a local zoning meeting about something, you know, honorary or something, or we're trying to raise $200 here and $500 there to fix something down the street, because all of our money got sucked up into this other thing, which is tend to make everything uniform, commodified.
01:02:31:18 - 01:02:33:11
Woody Tasch
Oh, yeah. because.
01:02:33:11 - 01:02:39:17
Mark Titus
It doesn't make financial sense. Otherwise, if you keep going on this accelerated, accelerated, accelerated scheme.
01:02:39:17 - 01:02:59:03
Woody Tasch
So demystifying is sort of taking that it's like, no, just see it for what it is. That's what it is. This is my one my one little sort of semi gripe with Bernie a little bit. I, I'm not a political person so I don't mean to go there, but when he says it's okay to be angry at capitalism and then he goes on his rant about, okay.
01:02:59:03 - 01:03:14:08
Woody Tasch
Yeah, there's a lot of things to be angry about in the world, right? But scapegoating the CEOs of the companies that your pension fund is invested in, to me, is not one of them. In other words, we are all invested in the system that we want to change.
01:03:14:10 - 01:03:15:09
Mark Titus
01:03:15:11 - 01:03:37:07
Woody Tasch
You know, if you have money in a financial institution or money in a retirement account you are invested in, that is the money and the system is our money. So the question is, can we take some of it back? At the risk of sounding a little Brexit, can we take some of it back, put it to work near where we live in things that we understand, starting with food.
01:03:37:09 - 01:03:38:03
Woody Tasch
Beautiful.
01:03:38:05 - 01:03:49:00
Mark Titus
Beautiful place to park it for today. And I, I'm going to tell you, Woody, that this this is, this is a portend for another version of this. I hope you'll consider coming back for another chapter.
01:03:49:04 - 01:03:51:00
Woody Tasch
If you if you if you still want to have.
01:03:51:00 - 01:04:13:15
Mark Titus
Me. Oh my goodness I there's I literally I'm on my sheet. I have more questions. But I wanted to give you the chance to read us a little something from the forthcoming new, as you called little Book that you're working on. I did, I confess you sent it to me. I didn't realize you sent it to me until an hour before the call.
01:04:13:20 - 01:04:23:09
Mark Titus
But the good the bad side is, I didn't get to look at it before our talk. The good side is I got something to look forward to, so that's awesome. But could you give us. Oh, you're only half naked.
01:04:23:11 - 01:04:46:23
Woody Tasch
You're only half right. This is my last. It does exist already. and I'm working on the sequel to it. Okay, but. Right. So, I wrote this during Covid, the tiny book format on purpose. It's really like a long essay, but it does exist in hardcopy in case anybody wants it. It's called A Call to Farms. Some thoughts on food, money, and Nonviolence in honor of Wendell Berry.
01:04:47:01 - 01:04:47:12
Mark Titus
Beautiful.
01:04:47:14 - 01:04:48:03
Woody Tasch
01:04:48:05 - 01:04:48:14
Mark Titus
How about.
01:04:48:14 - 01:05:12:23
Woody Tasch
It? I started writing it the month in March 2022, meaning the month after Russia invaded Ukraine. And like all of us, I was lying in bed going, couldn't this really be happening? Like, are we really we? Meaning the big we are homo sapiens. We're, you know, are we really going down this road after all we've been through to voluntarily just launch into this thing?
01:05:12:23 - 01:05:34:15
Woody Tasch
All right. And so I'm just going to read. So this is basically a thinking about nonviolence as it relates to kind of the food movement, nurture nonviolence. You can see where the connections are. Great. so I'm just going to read, these are very tiny short pages. I'm just going to read the first page and a half and then one other little section.
01:05:34:16 - 01:05:35:20
Woody Tasch
so thank you for letting me do that.
01:05:35:20 - 01:05:40:09
Mark Titus
Absolutely.
01:05:40:11 - 01:06:07:19
Woody Tasch
This is a call to farms. It is and is not a response. It is not a response to any one brigade's route, the military mind that mapped it, or the propaganda that is translating it into ideological talking points. It is a response to the forces that turned low these few brief millennia and lower these few brief centuries and lower.
01:06:07:19 - 01:06:24:12
Woody Tasch
Yet you think low as surely. But no, there seems no end to the great acceleration these few brief decades, these few brief tweets, these few brief algorithmic breaths, these few brief, ultra fast bursts of ones and zeros.
01:06:24:14 - 01:06:43:04
Woody Tasch
The Fertile Crescent into the oil patch, an amber waves of grain into food as a store of cheap shelf stable calories to does fuel for internal combustion engines. Food as industrial power.
01:06:43:05 - 01:07:10:12
Woody Tasch
This is a call to farms because there is healing to be done. Trust to be restored, mutuality to be rekindled, biodiversity to be valued, conviviality to be nurtured, carbon to be sequestered, bread to be broken, affection to be shared, humility to be cultivated.
01:07:10:14 - 01:07:12:06
Mark Titus
That's beautiful. Woody. Thank you.
01:07:12:08 - 01:07:22:23
Woody Tasch
All right. And then I would just like to just as a little teaser, the thing I'm working on now, my place, the sequel.
01:07:23:01 - 01:07:37:22
Woody Tasch
Healing the wounds of the industrial food system is not as a project on the same pedestal of urgency as ending the war in Ukraine, but it is an urgent project nonetheless, and not entirely unrelated.
01:07:38:00 - 01:08:30:05
Woody Tasch
We are called to respond to immediate crises and to attenuate causes of future crises. This includes mitigating overreliance on global supply chains. It also means actively working to restore mutuality and trust from the international and national levels, down to the level of bio region, community, neighbor and household, but not necessarily in that order. In response to military crisis, a few extraordinary souls may choose the difficult and complicated path of conscientious objection in response to the collateral damage of globalization, the choice to become a conscientious investor is far less dramatic, far less binary, far friendlier, driven, sure, by being mad as hell and not wanting to take it anymore, but at a deeper level by a
01:08:30:05 - 01:08:35:01
Woody Tasch
sense of conscientious affection.
01:08:35:03 - 01:08:45:10
Woody Tasch
And those last two words are a great place for me to end today, because that's the working title of the sequel to this conscientious affection.
01:08:45:12 - 01:09:00:18
Mark Titus
I love it, it's beautiful. What he thank you so much for reading that I was worth putting that to the end. To cap this off, where can folks get into what you're working on? How can folks get involved? So think deeper.
01:09:00:20 - 01:09:18:17
Woody Tasch
we're trying to, drive, let's say our vast internet traffic, to. Okay, stick with me. Everybody ready? Here we go. bitcoin.org. Bitcoin like the beat bitcoin.org. It's a thing.
01:09:18:18 - 01:09:26:14
Mark Titus
And it's a real sign up for the newsletter I'm on it I love it I get it. And this is why I reached out to you. It's a it's a great newsletter.
01:09:26:14 - 01:09:50:02
Woody Tasch
If you go if you go there you'll see the current manifestation of a lot of the work we're doing, it's focused mostly on these groups that are doing 0% loans locally. But the whole slow money story is there. and my books are there for anybody who wants to, this one is available. you can just get the whole thing online for free, but if you want a hard copy, we did print some so you can buy them from us.
01:09:50:04 - 01:09:53:03
Woody Tasch
all the proceeds go to the Slow Money Institute.
01:09:53:05 - 01:10:08:09
Mark Titus
Well, I want to definitely make this a part one of our conversation. There's a lot more to dig into, but for today, it's a beautiful piece of writing to leave us with. Thanks for making this happen, Woody, Tash. And, till next time, I'll see you down the trail.
01:10:08:11 - 01:10:25:01
Woody Tasch
Hey, Mark. I know it's kind of all about me today because you were asking, you know, it's your podcast, and you were interviewing me, but, I'm a big fan of what you're doing, and, would love to learn more about it over time to. But, so and thank you for hosting this, and, we look forward to the next opportunity.
01:10:25:01 - 01:10:37:13
Mark Titus
That sounds great. We'll make that happen. We'll do an online or an offline chat here. Okay. Get off the, the ones and zeros here and do something face to face one of these days. Yeah. Take care Woody. We'll see you soon.
01:10:37:15 - 01:11:08:21
Music
How do you say what you love?
How do you say what you love?
How do you say what you love?
How do you say what you love?
01:11:08:23 - 01:11:32:23
Mark Titus
Thank you for listening. To Save What You Love. If you like what you're hearing, you can help keep these conversations coming your way by giving us a rating on whatever platform you're listening from and leaving a comment on Apple Podcasts. It really helps get the word out. Check out photos on our Instagram feed. We're at Save What You Love podcast, and you can get links from today's featured guest in the show notes of this episode.
01:11:33:01 - 01:12:01:21
Mark Titus
Join our growing community by subscribing to our newsletter at Evaswild.com, and then clicking on connect in the upper corner. You'll get exclusive offers on wild salmon shipped to your door, and notifications about upcoming guests and more. Great content on the way. That's at Evaswild.com the word save spelled backwards, wild.com. This episode was produced by Emilie Firn and edited by Patrick Troll.
01:12:01:23 - 01:12:07:19
Mark Titus
Original music was created by Whiskey Class. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you all down the trail.