129: Charles Eisenstein | Are We Meant to Live Like This? The Price of “Normal” Modern Life

Charles Eisenstein is an author and speaker whose books and essays explore themes of community, human connection, economics, and social change. He is known for works such as The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.

Charles joins us to explore how modern family structures have evolved and what's been lost in our transition from community-based living to isolated nuclear families. 

What gets lost when we accept today’s idea of “normal” life? Together with Charles we discuss the shift from community to isolated nuclear families, the fading of shared caregiving, and why so many people feel something essential is missing. 

Charles shares his view that grief and discomfort about modern life are important signals, not problems to fix. 

Together, we question how community skills have eroded and what it might take to rebuild real connection. 

If you find yourself questioning “normal” and longing for deeper connection, this conversation offers perspective and encouragement to trust that feeling—and to look for ways, big or small, to rebuild genuine community in your own life.

🔗 Connect with Charles Eisenstein 

• https://charleseisenstein.org/
• https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/ 
• https://www.youtube.com/@charleseisenstein 

🗓️ Recorded July 11, 2025. 📍 Bremerhaven, Germany

Chapters

• 3:40 Unschooling in Social Context
• 10:44 Nobody Should Have a Baby Alone
• 19:58 The Loss of Community Sounds
• 30:31 Grief as a Way to Integrate Loss
• 39:57 Rules vs Natural Community
• 45:58 Learning Skills of Relationship
• 52:45 AI Pushing Us Back to Reality

Transcript

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we are together with Charles Eisenstein, and first of all, Charles, a warm welcome. It's nice that you could find the time.

Charles Eisenstein: 0:17

Yeah, I'm happy to meet you and see what we're going to do.

Cecilie Conrad: 0:22

Where this goes, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 0:23

Yes, yeah. So where this goes is that I, for some time, have been looking at family structure, has been thinking about how family has developed, what has happened, because we are a family who is world schooling and homeschooling before that, and unschooling and standing outside society in some ways we do when we take our kids out of the normal school settings and have been living this life for the last 13, 15 years. I've begun to ponder more about it and then I actually had a chat dialogue with ChatGPT, where I said who do you think could be an interesting guest we could talk about these kinds of things with? And it came up with you, charles. Wow, chatgpt.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:13

Huh, it's kind of scary, isn't it? Yeah?

Jesper Conrad: 1:17

So I would start out by admitting I haven't read your books, but after looking into it I was like, yeah, he seems interesting. I definitely want to get to know Charles more and know more about it.

Charles Eisenstein: 1:30

Well, I will try not to be boring. Definitely this is a topic I have thought about a lot and you know, written about some. So, yeah, happy to explore. I've also done, you know, some kind of unschooling, homeschooling and, you know, mixed in with some school also tried lots of different things and I'm not sure if I could. I I don't think I could be an advocate for any one of them.

Cecilie Conrad: 1:59

No, yeah, well, we talk a lot about unschooling. We are pretty sure we believe in it. But I mean, we always say that the most important thing is everyone's freedom to make their own choices and do what works for their family. So, even though we talk about unschooling all the time, it's not like one of our kids haven't been to school.

Jesper Conrad: 2:27

No.

Cecilie Conrad: 2:27

Because one of them was and yeah.

Charles Eisenstein: 2:30

Yeah, I think the whole conversation only makes sense in a social context. You know, like if you're, say, living in a village somewhere and all the kids are learning from adults, you know, and participating in adult life, and learning how to hunt, and learning how to grow sweet potatoes and learning traditional ways, then unschooling is something very, very different. Like you know, there it's either unschooling and the child is learning all those things, or maybe you send a child away to some missionary school or some state-run school which separates them from traditional ways of life and ways of thinking. That's very different than in my society and probably your society, where school is where all the kids are and so you take them out of school and it's not like there's, you know, life happening around them and adults doing things that they understand and that they can apprentice to and they can learn from. You know they're, they're it's so isolated. So I think that that you know we have to talk about the context when we talk about unschooling, homeschooling, schooling.

Jesper Conrad: 3:50

Yeah, because that's a. I'm super happy you go in that direction because it's one of the things that I can see where we have been drawn towards not having our kids in school. But then my wife, the first couple of years, did an enormous work of going out to find the other kids, create the community, and now we are creating what we are calling world schooling villages where we have families that move in together for a month in the same area. It is traveling families because the community is so important.

Jesper Conrad: 4:25

I want to go a little back to something my wife said some years ago that I still return to. We had been up visiting her cousin who had had a newborn and you know it's the kind of it wasn't a big baby shower as the people have in the States, but it was. We come and visit and we see the baby and these things. And on the way down the stairs from visiting them, cecilia looked at me and said nobody should have a baby alone. And I've just been thinking deep and long about this because I was like, oh yes, that is what we have done to our society. We live in these small units, two people getting a baby, and we wonder why people are stressed out.

Charles Eisenstein: 5:09

Yeah it's insane. It's insane to try to raise a baby inside a box. Yeah, yeah, I was recently at a excuse me. I was recently at a gathering where someone had been, had lived, I think, in a village in Africa somewhere, and she spoke of a woman that she met there who didn't know who her own mother was, wasn't sure who her mother was because from her earliest memories there were many, many, many women who adored her and who took care of her. She could go to any hut and get fed, and so it kind of almost didn't matter who her mother.

Charles Eisenstein: 5:59

The whole idea of family as we know it in the West didn't even exist. There wasn't family, and then separate from neighbor, separate from relatives, you know, it was all a village. And wow, imagine like growing up with 50 people adoring you and playmates all the time, how rich your life would be and how secure you would feel in the world. Like that's, that's a. It kind of speaks to the poverty of our society which, you know, ironically, we think that we're the wealthiest, but like that, you know, that's something that money can't buy. You cannot buy having 50 people who adore you.

Charles Eisenstein: 6:41

And I think that here we are in this situation, like you and I, people who do things in a different way, who defy the program, who don't just send their kids to school we sense that there's something wrong here, there's something wrong with the way that we are living, and so we try to find a different way. And you know, we do our best. But no matter what we do, we can't change. We can't wave a magic wand and change the ground conditions. We can only make steps toward sanity. You know, like you're doing with the world school gatherings.

Cecilie Conrad: 7:21

Yeah, I think also. I mean, one of our mantras in our family is that the context will always be relevant. We talk about that all the time, that when you can try to come up with some principles and rules and strategies and it's a good idea to do that but at the same time, any decision will always have a local anchor in the relevant context. And being a world schooler and an unschooler in Europe in these years post-COVID, it's also a contextual choice and it's a choice that happens inside a society. I think you said in the opening something about being outside of, standing outside of, and actually I don't think we are outside of society. We're part of this world. We're just doing things in a different way. But the way things work limits our options and we're just trying to not necessarily make the most of it, because that's like bigger, better, faster, more, but more like make the most meaningful version of it that we can make in the actual context, and I think I hope most people do that. It's not about using schools or not.

Charles Eisenstein: 9:13

It's about making a conscious choice about how we want our life science to be yeah, yeah, making making good of a situation that isn't ideal, but uh, you know, here we are.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:27

I don't know that it is an idea. I mean, well, probably it isn't, but has it ever been, will it ever be, or will it always be some sort of chaos and we have to adapt?

Charles Eisenstein: 9:40

I don't know yeah, well, that you know, gets to uh, metaphysical questions it becomes quite complicated.

Cecilie Conrad: 9:46

But I'm what I'm, what I'm aiming at is just, I think in in, in the circles we move, in I'm not saying you're saying it, but I often feel that we have to be so much against what is it's so bad and it's so wrong and we're going in the wrong direction and everything's falling apart and people are a sheep or robots or whatever, and it's a very negative worldview and sometimes I just want to say I love the motorway man.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:14

It takes me fast to where I need to go. I mean, it might not be ideal for everything that we have motorways cutting through our landscapes, but there certainly are advantages and I believe that you can probably put this mindset to most things that we maybe could disagree with, that we can also see how it can be a benefit or how we can find our ways. I don't love the motorway if there's traffic, so I avoid going in the afternoons, but that's the navigational part that I find a way to navigate the society that is, and I try to avoid being too much against it and talking too negatively about it. I don't know. I mean there are many things these years that are much better than 100 years ago. Just think about women's rights, or I'm saying sanity, no.

Jesper Conrad: 11:12

Yeah, sanitation.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:13

Sanitation.

Jesper Conrad: 11:13

Sanity maybe not, maybe not.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:15

Yeah, sanitation, Sanitation, sanity maybe not, maybe not, maybe not sanitation, no, but I mean at least you know it'll be clean-ish if you end up in a hospital.

Charles Eisenstein: 11:25

Well.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:27

I think it's a very hard analysis to make to say that it's worse now than it was a hundred years ago.

Charles Eisenstein: 11:32

Yeah, I don't think it matters you know, the way it is now is the way it is now, and I think that the value in those kinds of conversations is that it can identify something that has been lost. Because when you identify what is missing then you maybe can recreate it, rebuild it. But if you don't even know what's missing, then you feel lost. You feel that maybe the problem is yourself and not your circumstances. So, like when I was a kid, if you went outside you would always hear the sounds of children playing in the neighborhood. The other day and I don't I don't hear that anymore very often, but the other day it was a holiday I I heard it because I think our neighbors must have had their relatives over and they were actually playing outside a game of I don't know some game outside. And I remembered that noise, the sound of children playing. I remembered how it was there every day when I was a child and I felt sad that I don't hear that sound anymore, that I don't hear that sound anymore. It's like that's for me. That sound is a kind of a nourishment that when I don't have it I forget even that this vitamin exists. So you know I don't. So to recognize that loss, that doesn't mean that I have to wallow in despair. It doesn't mean that I have to wallow in despair. It doesn't mean that I have to reject all of society. You know, and I think it is helpful to say, oh, here's something valuable. And then when I have a creative choice like what do I want to create for my children? What do I want to choose? Do I want to move here or move there? Do I want to put them in school or not? Move here or move there? Do I want to put them in school or not? You know, I have information that I integrate by actually feeling sad about it. You know, like, oh, there's a little grief there and I think that grief is a way to integrate loss.

Charles Eisenstein: 13:47

And you know the motorway, like, again, like I have in my mind, as a child there were special places I'd like to to go. There was a, a wild place behind our house, a few blocks away, that was undeveloped land. There was a, a quarry there actually, and just, you know, some undeveloped land, or these pine trees and blackberry bushes and this path. It was probably 10 or 15 hectares of undeveloped land, maybe even more, and, um, I got to know that land like part of myself. You know it. It became part of my being. It was an intimate friend.

Charles Eisenstein: 14:37

And so again, like today, there's a concept called the roaming radius for children. It's how far does the average child roam unsupervised away from the house? And it used to be several kilometers, and now in my country it's, you know, only several meters. Oh my God, yes. And so again, like here's another loss. You know, and yeah, maybe in the days when children roamed far and were free and played with each other, there were bad things too. Infant mortality was very high. Who knows if it was better or worse, but still to feel the value of those things, I think that helps us navigate toward the future things.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:33

I think that helps us navigate toward the future.

Jesper Conrad: 15:35

I like the way you put it because I'm in this flux between trying to understand, see what has happened in my own mind not a big research guy, not very academic but I look at, oh, we went from the local communities into the cities and then we went into smaller and smaller units and then in a period we have praise, like the nuclear family, and part of me is, as you say, missing something. So part of me is trying to look at what to blame for the development. But again, as Cecilia also say, why be in the blaming mode? And I like how you put it, to be in the hey, I can see I missed something, using the feelings as a pointer.

Jesper Conrad: 16:17

And there is something about how the families has become smaller and smaller. I find it difficult. And the outsource of the care, For example, my parents are getting older and it saddens me that I don't feel I have this very strong connection with them where it would be natural for me to take them in. It's not there, that feeling. And seeing that that feeling is not there feels so bad I don't like to say it out loud, you know, kind of so you say it on the podcast.

Jesper Conrad: 16:47

So I say it on the podcast no, but I also recognize that is. What makes me sad is that that feeling of wanting to do it isn't there. Where I'm trying to go is asking you how you started your path of discovery down this. Was it your education, or why have you been interested in this field?

Charles Eisenstein: 17:10

Since I was very young, I had an intuition that normal was unacceptable and a rebellion against it, one or two institutions that were corrupt in a civilization that was otherwise found, but that the very fabric of our whole civilization was not in service to human fulfillment and the flourishing of life. Let's put it that way, and so that includes every aspect of it. You know, from the way babies are born to the way we raise children, to the way that we produce food and entertainment and knowledge, all the way to the way that we take care of our elderly and the way that we die, the whole thing top to bottom, every institution. So when I became a parent, you know it became very personal how do I raise my children in the most beautiful way I can, given our embedment in a society that, as I said before, is not ideal for the raising of children? And I didn't have you know what I mean Like, maybe I had theoretical answers, but the theoretical answers didn't help me that much, you know when. Yeah, you know children should be playing outside unsupervised. And, yeah, you know, children should be playing outside unsupervised.

Charles Eisenstein: 18:53

But the neighborhood I found myself in, I thought there would be lots of kids playing outside there when we moved, you know, with our two-year-old, when my first wife was pregnant, you know, with her second baby. We moved to a suburban neighborhood a lot of young families, you know, and no one outside. You didn't see kids outside. Where are all the kids? You know, I guess we moved there in uh the fall. There were a few kids but, um, I thought, well, we'll start community. You know, we'll get everybody together, we'll have a community garden. You know, here's a spot for a community garden and no one was interested.

Charles Eisenstein: 19:51

So my ideals, my concepts about what an ideal childhood would land and overcome the zoning regulations and the building codes and everything that are in the way of actually living right then maybe I could do it, but I wasn't in that kind of situation. I could only choose from the menu that was in front of my face. That was in front of my face and you know, like most people, I had my own share of programming and you know neuroses and hangups and injuries, and you know it was all I could do to keep the peace in my marriage and even that didn't work. You know like I mean. So I guess I realized that the return journey, or the journey to a society that actually can accommodate children is a long journey and you know, maybe, if you know, maybe if my children have a better childhood than I had, then I've done my part, you know, and maybe they will be able to create what I was unable to create for them.

Jesper Conrad: 21:08

Yeah Well, yeah, thank you for sharing. I sometimes feel we are, and I know Cecilia says that we are part of the society, but the way we live both adults working from home, full-time, traveling as nomads then I feel that we are kind of a satellite that is circling around. That's how I see it. And Then my question is, as you talk about the fight against normal, if we could talk a little about natural versus normal, because at some point in our life I wanted to move into an eco-village and we went and visited one and we saw several and what we found was that some of them had more rules than society. It became very heavily regulated and it was like oh, that's what I wanted to get away from.

Charles Eisenstein: 23:01

I wanted natural and relaxed, and so I'm trying to find a way that is natural, inside the norm or inside normal or next to normal. Yeah, if you study anthropology and read about the way that human beings have lived, people have lived in so many different ways. You know some societies, even pre-modern societies, were very highly structured, with elaborate rituals and taboos that you know made life not very free, and other societies were much more laid back, and each one of those provides a different container for the development of the human being or the development of the soul. You could even say it's hard to say whether one is better or worse than the others. You know there's in highly organized societies with elaborate rules elaborate like they sometimes have very, very strong community. You know who you are and you can, you're free to develop.

Charles Eisenstein: 24:15

You know it's like like a sonnet, there's a type of poem. The sonnet has very strict rules, or the haiku very strict rules, but that doesn't mean that you cannot be creative, because there's too many rules. Like you can develop within that container and we are fundamentally social beings. So there's always, to some extent, there's always going to be um ways to negotiate our relationships that are based either on explicit rules or implicit rules. We're not actually here to be free. We're here to be in relationship and I understand the impulse towards freedom when the relationships have been industrialized and used, you know, to control and oppress people.

Charles Eisenstein: 25:18

And you know, then of course we want to break free from those. But you know, again, we're here to relate, you know, so they're going to be replaced with something. Again, we're here to relate, you know, so they're going to be replaced with something. Yeah, I have visited many ecovillages as well, and to me it's like it's not so much. Oh, there's too many rules, it's more of okay.

Charles Eisenstein: 25:42

Here is the way of being that this place offers. Is that a fit accommodation for who I am right now? Maybe, you know, if I settle in that eco-village, I can see the ways that I can develop, the things that will confront me that maybe should be confronted. Maybe there are ways that I'm selfish and could be more in mutual obligation to people and really involved in their lives.

Charles Eisenstein: 26:19

You know, and I'm hanging back from full incarnation, I'm hanging back from being fully in relationship to other human beings, and maybe this is the step I need to take into this community, or maybe this isn't actually the right one for me, but then I can look at okay, what is it exactly that's keeping me back, you know? Am I afraid to really plunge into life, into relationship, to be fully incarnate, or is this actually not a place conducive to my development and and who would I become here? Is that who I want to become? So there's, there's a, you know, a lot of self-examination. I think that goes into a decision like that. Uh, that can't just be reduced to okay, too many rules, or, you know, I know.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:09

Well, I think the too many rules for us is it actually is a condensed version of what you just said that we don't want to participate in a community that needs this number of rules, that like all the little posters on the walls of things to do and not do and when to do them and how to do them. If a community needs that kind of explicit rulemaking, then it's not a context where we want to live in, and, of course, I'm sure that there are people who thrive in that context. I really hope so, because lots of people do live in these communities and I hope they thrive, as I hope for everyone on the planet, and I'm also sure that we have different personalities and different needs as to personal development and who we want to become of rulemaking, then it's not for us. That's the short version, but you're right. You're right. It's not the rules in and of themselves, it's just the vibe of it. It doesn't align with our way of being and it does not align with who we want to become.

Charles Eisenstein: 28:21

See, I think there's one more thing I want to bring into that. An indigenous village does not have rules posted around. You know, a traditional, even a traditional European village, a 16th century village in Belgium, or whatever. They're not going to have rules posted around. They don't have that many laws, written laws. It's all informal, it's all based on social expectations, social pressure. There's no rule that says you have to share with your neighbors, but if you don't, people start to talk about you, they start to gossip and then when you have trouble they won't help you because you're stingy. So this becomes second nature, it becomes a way of life.

Charles Eisenstein: 29:02

Today we have none of that, or almost none of those habits and those understandings that come from living in community. So we have to kind of rebuild it. If you just take a bunch of people and throw them together and say, okay, we're going to have an ecovillage and we're not going to have rules, everybody is taking with them the habits of a monetized, industrialized society. They don't have the habits of gift culture. They don't have the habits of gift culture. They don't have the habits of mutual aid and mutual obligation. They don't have the skills to navigate a situation which isn't governed by explicit rules, because they have grown up in a society that is governed by explicit rules.

Charles Eisenstein: 29:46

From the legal system to school, you know there are rules and punishments and it's an authority that enforces them. So we don't have we just don't have the skill set to live in community right now, and I think that the rules that eco, like ecovillages, might go into it. We're not going to have rules, but very quickly they discover that that doesn't work. Basically, we are, we're in the remedial class where we need help, a stepping stone to redevelop the skills of community. Yeah, that's why I think that they do have rules and I guess ideally, over time, the rules could be let go of.

Jesper Conrad: 30:36

Why do you think we have lost that skill set? Is it the smaller family units you're only responsible for your own small unit or is it the outside control from school, state et cetera?

Charles Eisenstein: 30:51

Yeah, I think it's both, but it's especially that we live in a society where the rules are imposed from without many of them anyway, like in school. If you have a dispute with another kid, you know you go to the teacher. If you even have an opportunity you have a dispute with another kid, you know, you go to the teacher. If you even have an opportunity to have a dispute, you know you're expected to be in a certain place at a certain time. Your entire day is governed by rules imposed from the outside, and even children's play, when children's play is mostly supervised and in the form of organized sports, you know, with adults running the show. Then, like when I was a kid, we still had some of spontaneous, unsupervised childhood After school. You know people didn't have after school activities back then. They didn't get shipped off to karate class or to piano class or. You know you come home from school and you'd go outside where all weekend you'd be outside and find the other kids and so we'd play. You know games and you have to pick teams and then you have to argue about the rules and then you play and then there's the dispute and you spend another, pick teams and then you have to argue about the rules and then you play, and then there's the dispute and you spend another, you know, have another argument about the rules and at the time is spent actually arguing and working out disputes. That is precious.

Charles Eisenstein: 32:23

By doing that, you learn how to get along with people when there's no authority present. If there's an authority present a referee or a parent then you never go through that process. And that's just one example of the stunting and atrophying of those skills. We never develop those skills because we're always in organized, rule-governed situations that we just don't have the opportunity to learn. And I would also extend that to living in a money economy where you never need the people around you. If you have money, then you can buy all the things that you need, so you never have to learn to get along with people. If your neighbor hates you, no big deal. If you don't have the skills to get along with your neighbors, it does not hurt you very much Because you can just buy everything from Amazon. And that was not true even 100 years ago in most places.

Cecilie Conrad: 33:30

Do you think we have lost the feeling Now I'm saying we as a collective humanity, we, which is maybe stretching it, but okay, let's just play with the thought experience Do you think we've lost the feeling that we are dependent on each other as human beings, that we are dependent on each other as human beings I mean theoretically we accept it and emotionally we still experience it, but we've lost a lot of the skills and a lot of the economic structures of dependency, and dependency on nature too.

Charles Eisenstein: 34:06

You know, like I mean, I like to look at nature but you know, most of the food I buy is not from this land. Right here I have a garden. You know, I get maybe five percent of my food from that. But, um, you know, I'm not in relationship, most people are not in relationship very deeply to the people around them and the animals and plants around them, and that. But we all have a longing to rebuild those relationships. There's like we're bursting with desire to be in relationships, of giving and receiving again, and that's why, you know, when a hurricane happens, I was just actually in North Carolina and people were telling me about the days after the hurricane no electricity, no running water. Everyone comes out of their house, they start knocking on their neighbor's door do you need anything? Somebody has some, some meat that's about to spoil. They, they, they cook it and feed everybody. You know, somebody has bottled water, like somebody has a generator, and people, finally they get to be, to be in relationship. And what a great time it was yeah, you know.

Charles Eisenstein: 35:26

So what you're saying is we need more crisis well, it gives us a glimpse of what we want yeah, yeah, and, and what we really want is to need each other and to be needed yeah, yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 35:40

Well, I I've been thinking about the process of moving away from normal, from from the norm, where in me it was natural for me to first define all I didn't like kind of to have mental crutches to move away from the norm. But now I'm at a point where I'm looking at the norm and saying, okay, that is not for me. What is for me is over here and it starts building towards it. But I can also see that it has taken many years of living in a different way. How do we? I actually feel and think that people can sense this longing? Because I've been considering why were everyone so happy with the Matrix movie? But then, looking from the side, with my back then more negative mind, I was like but you're still living inside the Matrix, but why did it have such a big effect on people? And I think it's because they know and feel that there is something they want, but I don't know how to help people go there.

Charles Eisenstein: 36:54

Well, yeah, I don't think that there's, you know, any magic wand, any magical solution. It's a matter of slowly rebuilding, motivated by this longing and by the recognition of what you're actually longing for, which is reunion, to return into full relationship and into full being, recognizing that then you can walk the path, the long, long path back home. The path, the long, long path back home. And so maybe that means, maybe it is to start an eco village or live in an eco village and take the baby steps back into relationship, to recover the skills of community. Or maybe it's the world schooling camps that you do. You know, where even people you know have a festival, burning man, where for a few days you're living in a different reality, or people doing community building work, just where they live, where it's about connecting the gifts and the needs that are already present in that community that aren't being met.

Charles Eisenstein: 38:11

And it could be in a very small way, you know it could be tutoring school children, you know, there, you, you could say, well, ideally they shouldn't even be in school, but you know, maybe it's working class parents and and school is free, babysitting, and that's the only choice. And, you know, like to have a big brother, big sister coming in and caring about them, giving them attention. You know, there are so many things that I would even say that we are here to serve the reunion of children, these human souls to each other. This is our mission here to steer humanity toward the return journey into relationship, and it can be very, very small scale, very humble, you know.

Jesper Conrad: 39:14

It's a longing, charles, I've seen grow in me and I first saw it some years ago when our oldest daughter, who is a published author. She gave a talk, read a little aloud from her book, doing good, and I was also a little envious. I'm like, oh man, if I had been so cool when I was her age. But that aside, what I really loved about that was that people met up around something. But it also to me seems that people need this anger of something to meet about to draw them in. So Cecilia and I gave some talks to the homeschooling community in Denmark before we left and it was too much Six, seven in a week. We were drained afterwards and in between.

Jesper Conrad: 40:06

But seeing the people come, being together, talk, chat with each other, we had made the format where it was a slow start, a break and then a potluck afterwards. It was really nice seeing people connecting. And I actually think and I've been thinking about it since I started working a lot with ChatDBT. In the work I do, I use it a lot every day I've had this idea that I think reality will become more and more important, also due to AI, because everything is so, it is so easy and so much fake that missing people in real life. I actually think that AI in some sense is pushing people towards meeting because it is too unnaturalistic for us. Yeah.

Charles Eisenstein: 40:58

I think that you're onto something important there. First, I'll just say that it's just wonderful that you're bringing people together who actually are meeting each other's needs, simply, if nothing else, simply to validate hey, yeah, you're not crazy, I'm seeing the same thing you are. That's an important emotional need that can't just be met by AI. You actually, like you're saying AI is helping us to recognize what AI cannot do and what digital services of any kind cannot do. There are things it cannot do. It cannot be in physical presence with you, it cannot touch you, and when you bring people together, that is where our future prospects are. People ask what is employment going to be like?

Charles Eisenstein: 41:53

when AI starts performing all these functions that human beings have performed Well employment and, more generally, the ways that we serve each other will happen in the things that AI can do that require a body. So I think that in-person gatherings it's ironic, you gatherings, it's ironic. It seemed that digital technology like Zoom was making in-person gatherings obsolete. Especially during COVID, all these conferences, everything moved online and people thought, well, we'll be able to reach even more people by having our conference online, because in person only a few hundred people can come, but online we could reach millions, we'll have a bigger impact. But having gone through that, they're discovering that something is missing from the online conference cannot be captured as data Physical presence and touch and the spontaneity of meeting somebody in the parking lot or, you know, in the line at the cafeteria, things that can't be scripted, things that happen in relation to a physical space. We are, ironically, because of technology, we are now recognizing how important those are and, yeah, I guess that's all I have to say about that for the moment.

Charles Eisenstein: 43:46

Charles, your books, as I said, I haven't read them yet, but for people listening, where should they start? Well, maybe it's hard to say. The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, I think, is probably the best one to start. My books are almost all in German as well, by the way. I guess you just have to look up my name, and the translations of my books in German are very, very good. I know that not because I read German, but people have told me that, but also because the translators did it from love. They weren't just a paid professional, they were highly educated PhDs. You know who loved the books and did them better than a professional would do them, because there's a real resonance there. So you know those of your listeners who read German. I mean, if you read English, then yeah, you know, read the original, but the German ones are really good too.

Jesper Conrad: 44:40

Right, yeah, english then, yeah, I read the original, but the German ones are really good too. What are you working on now? Is there any new books coming? We talked with a wonderful person who has a farm and they live off the farm in a family culture where it's been on generations. She said this thing about writing. For her, it's a way of exploring a subject. She writes a book when there's something she wants to know, and then the product ends up becoming a book. I don't know if it's the same for you, but what are you exploring these days?

Charles Eisenstein: 45:12

I haven't been writing books. I've been writing just essays and articles on my sub stack. I've been writing a lot and articles on my sub stack and I've been writing a lot about different things about AI. I've been writing a lot about AI and some political things about peace, Charles so in the start you talked about that.

Jesper Conrad: 45:33

You had this drive in you from young about there was something wrong about what is presented as normal. Do you have any recommendations to how we get better at feeling the difference between normal at one side and natural on the other? Because when we have been inside this society and have get accustomed to this is how you do, this is how you act. As an example, during the last 50 years in denmark we have gone from having five percent of people in nursery homes, which would have been back then. If you send your child to a nursery home you would have been the weird one out 5%. Now it's 95% in Denmark of children who are in nursery home over 50 years, and people don't know this when I talk with them. For them, it's natural now, or normal, to send your children away. But how can you listen to the boys if normal is standing and shouting at you? How do you work with your listening, so to say?

Charles Eisenstein: 46:54

Yeah, so the natural-normal distinction can be useful. I don't usually think in those terms, but it can be useful. I don't usually think in those terms, but it can be useful. Normally, when we sense a wrongness, when we sense, when we have a protest against the way things are, the voice of normal says well, that's because you are not well adjusted, it's because you have a problem, because you are discontent. It will assign a pathology to you if you do not adjust to the way things are.

Charles Eisenstein: 47:32

The most important treasure is this knowledge, is this protest, this feeling that it's not supposed to be this way. There's a better way to do it. There's a better way to be, to validate your feeling of not being at home in this normal. That doesn't tell you what to do, but at least you're not going to be gaslighting yourself. At least, even when everybody else tells you that you're crazy for taking your child out of school, at least you won't join them and say, yeah, I'm crazy, I need a pill, I need a doctor. And that's why it's so important to have community of other people who say, yeah, you're not crazy, I see what you're seeing, even those who are talking about how wrong everything is. I think that's even important too, because it validates you. It validates really what you're longing for isn't to escape the society that we find ourselves in.

Charles Eisenstein: 48:46

That's not the deepest long. The deepest longing is to transform it, because we are born into it with that mission. We did not, we did not just make some dumb mistake in incarnating into this world, into this particular society, into our particular biography, our circumstances, which may have been very bad, very traumatic, maybe people who have suffered abuse or terrible things. You didn't do that by mistake and it wasn't a punishment for bad behavior, it was a choice because on some soul level you saw that this situation can be transformed, it can be redeemed. You saw that this situation can be transformed, it can be redeemed. So all of us are kind of missionaries here to build, to co -create. I call it a more beautiful world. That's the longing. It's not just to live in a more beautiful world, the longing is to be a creative agent of it.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:02

Yeah thank you that's a beautiful full stop it's a beautiful full stop for this conversation. I don't need to comment on that nope, I would just say agree, chance.

Jesper Conrad: 50:13

It has been very interesting. Thank you for taking the time. It was a big pleasure talking with you today.

Charles Eisenstein: 50:20

Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Jasper and Cecilia.

Cecilie Conrad: 50:23

Yeah, it was fun.

Charles Eisenstein: 50:24

Very nice to meet you. Bye guys.