“The clever guy will take a half hour to have an accident, and the stupid guy will take ten minutes.”

There are whole different families of complementary currencies. One of them is local currencies. One is regional currencies. Another is functional currencies. Another is social-purpose currencies.

A resilient, efficient system needs to be diverse and interconnected. On the other hand, diversity and interconnectivity decrease efficiency. Therefore, the key is an appropriate balance between efficiency and resilience.

The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.

Look at any financial institution, at any bank. They’re all photocopies of each other. There’s no diversity of institutions and even less diversity of currency.

Therefore, just as you say its very logical that an ecosystem like this will collapse, it’s very predictable a monetary system like this will collapse, too. And it hasn’t finished collapsing, by the way.

Our [American] money system is structurally brittle. It doesn’t matter if you put a very clever guy or a stupid guy at the wheel.

GREED AND COMPETITION ARE NOT THE RESULT OF IMMUTABLE HUMAN TEMPERMENT…

Complementary currencies work in addition to existing money, rather than replacing existing, official money.

The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World

They send you into the world to compete with everybody else to get the second $100,000 that never was created and bring it back to them. So if we’re in a world with zero-growth population, goods, services, and money, the problem would be obvious.

Basically, for any complex to be sustainable needs to have a balance between two factors: resilience and efficiency. These two factors can be calculated from the structure of the network that is involved in a complex system.

Conventional money is supposed to be doing everything. By adding in complementary currencies, you actually get different types of things and different outcomes from different complementary currencies.

Money is created through bank debt. When you go for a mortgage through a bank, they give you $100,000 to buy a house and basically send you out into the world to bring back $200,000 in the next twenty years. The first $100,000 is principal, and the second is interest.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

TV is a hard job. You work 15 hours a day. People tell you what to do. I hate to do it.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone’s tired, things get on top of them.

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.

Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.