Utopia, dystopia, and reclaiming hope

Elle Griffin writes The Elysian, a publication dedicated to exploring utopian ideas, reimagining the future of capitalism, democracy, work, and humanity through essays and fiction. She is aformer journalist at Esquire, Insider, and Forbes. She's writing her book "We Should Own The Economy” in public.

I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their stories, and it’s such a beautiful question that I’ve adopted it. But it’s a big question, so I tend to over-explain it—just like I’m doing right now. That’s the biggest lead-up ever.

Before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in total control, and you can answer—or not answer—in any way that feels right to you. The question is: Where do you come from?

I was born in Germany. My parents were in the Air Force, and after that, we moved every two to three years all over the U.S. Now I live in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’ve lived here for ten years—minus two years when we were away traveling.

Do you have any recollection of what it was like moving around so much?

I really loved it. It was a chance to see new things everywhere we went. It’s interesting because my sister—she’s two years younger than me—didn’t enjoy it as much. Now she wants to stay in one place her whole life. But I loved it, and I still continue to move and travel a lot. I think some people really thrive growing up that way, and I was definitely one of them.

Do you remember what young Elle wanted to be when she grew up?I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was in elementary school. Then, from middle school through high school, I wanted to be a Broadway actress. I started college as a dance major because I wasn’t a strong enough singer to make it on Broadway.

But pretty quickly, I realized I just wasn’t at the caliber of Broadway performers—you kind of have to be by the time you’re 18. So I thought, Okay, I want to devote my career to the arts—what’s one art form I can stick with for life? I chose writing, and I’ve been doing that ever since.

Tell me more about that—when you say you chose writing, what did that look like? How did you make that choice?

Well, I didn’t know writing could be a career. In college, I actually graduated with a double major in fashion merchandising and French. My first job out of college was as a buyer for American Eagle Outfitters, and I absolutely hated it.

When my husband and I moved to San Francisco, I pivoted and became a buyer for Williams Sonoma, which is a home goods and kitchen retailer. I worked in their cookbook division—buying the books that would appear in Williams Sonoma stores.

While I was there, a position opened up in the catalog department. I transitioned to a project focused on overhauling the Williams Sonoma catalog. At the time, I also had a French cooking blog on the side—it was just a fun passion project I had started right after college. I was really into making my own baguettes, my own yogurt—things like that.

And the name of said blog—long defunct. It was just a product of my early twenties, and I was really into cooking and I was working. But I didn’t think of it as a career. Being in the Bay Area and going into the Williams Sonoma catalog and working with cookbooks, I kind of thought, okay, maybe there’s something I can do related to writing in my career.

But my plan at that time was: have a good job that pays me a good income so I can have free time to write and do my passion, and save all of my money so that I can spend my time as a writer.

I ended up working in the Bay Area for probably seven years, all the time with some sort of blog or publication on the side—until one of the publications I had on the side started doing pretty well.

When I left—at that time I was working in content marketing for a tech company—I decided to leave the tech world when my husband and I moved to Salt Lake City. And I was going to go full-time with writing and publishing.

I got a job as an editor for Forbes and The Muse, working remotely. So then I started getting into the business scene. And then when we moved to Salt Lake City, I got a job as the editor—editor-in-chief—of Utah Business, which is a business publication that covers the tech scene in Utah.

So that was kind of like business writing. I did that for a number of years while freelancing for major publications on the side, until I went full-time with my Substack.

And how is the Substack going? How do you introduce the Substack to people?

Yeah. So I write The Elysian, which actually, again, started as a side project while I was working at Utah Business. At the time, I wanted to publish my Gothic novel, and I decided to serialize it on a newsletter rather than publish it as a standalone.

So I did that, and I raised $20,000 from paid subscribers during that process. And it was so fun. I was just like, well, this is a unique way to publish a novel.

And then I switched jobs to a new media company. And after three months, they decided they didn’t want to focus on publishing anymore, and I was laid off. So I was like, okay, well, I’ll go full-time with my Substack then. Because at that time, I had a following and some income, and it was pretty decent.

So I switched the publication to focus on a combination of my professional and personal interests, rather than just my personal interests. Now I focus on how we can create a better future by reinventing our systems of government, systems of capitalism, and the various systems that support humanity. And I am writing a utopian novel on the side as I research these various systems and how we can change them through my newsletter.

Yeah. It’s really wonderful stuff. I can’t—in that way, I can’t recall how I actually encountered the Substack, but I really appreciated what you’re doing.

And I think the first one—I mean, I live in a small town and have become really passionate about citizens assembly. That’s one piece I know you had a wonderful interview about.

So yeah, maybe—can you tell me a little bit about what you’re learning about the future of governance and what’s possible?

Yeah. It’s interesting, because I think—because I approached the topic from the standpoint of, I want to write this utopian novel that takes place 10,000 years in the future.

What should the government look like then? What should the economy look like then?

I had to do all of this world-building that you would typically do for a novel. But what’s interesting here is that I was using the real world. I was researching real-world things, like: what are the governments that are the best governments in the world? What are the models of economy that work really well for humanity?

I was researching these things. And coming at it from that mindset is very different from approaching it from the current modern world and what we have now, and just being like: these are what we have now, so these are what we’re always going to have.

So therefore, I don’t know, I think a lot of times if you're focused super on the here and now, you can only come up with options like: we should get rid of capitalism, or we should go back to socialism—even though we've tried these experiments and they haven’t worked out in the real world.

So I think it’s worth seeing what case studies worked and what haven’t, but then also seeing, okay, but where could we take that in the future? Because what we have right now is not what we’re going to have 100 years from now. What we have now is not what we had 100 years ago.

So we can be more imaginative in our journalism, and that’s definitely the approach I take. I sometimes call it speculative journalism or solutions-oriented journalism, because I’m not reporting on what we currently have—I’m imagining what could be, by focusing on real-world examples and how we could get there.

Yeah. It’s amazing. I don’t know that I was aware of your—maybe this is what I responded to. I think my own activities in my community really came out of, I mean, all the problems that we all know, but I remember encountering solutions journalism. And Amanda Ripley’s “Complicating the Narrative” essay was a big piece of inspiration for me. So it’s cool to hear you reference it. What's your—how would you describe your relationship with solutions journalism? And what does it mean to you to practice it?

Yeah, I think it’s interesting, because early on—maybe this was two years ago or something—every time I would write a piece, like I would write a piece about how the states should be in control of their taxation in the U.S., not the federal government. Or I would write about: could all the U.S. states be their own country? Or: could every country in the world be part of NATO and end all world wars?

And people would comment, like, this is not possible. You’re living in a delusion. Or: you’re naive. How could you think—obviously we could never do these things. That’s ridiculous.

And my response to that was: how could you say that? Literally, the things that people imagined 100 years ago, we now have. And back then, people were like, that’s impossible. That’s impossible, we could never have that.

I mean, to think about the Founding Fathers of America writing a new government into existence and being like, hey, what if we didn’t have monarchies? Common Sense by Thomas Paine—I mean, come on—it was no greater work of what you might call fiction to people back then. But they took it seriously. They were like, wait, maybe we actually should be separate from Britain. Wait, maybe we could invent a government that doesn’t have a king. Maybe we do this totally differently. What can we do? What can we do? And people were brainstorming. I mean, The Federalist Papers were like brainstorming out in public. And I love that. I read that stuff. I live for it.

And I was like, why shouldn’t we still be doing that today? Why do we have to just be like, what we have now is permanent. Now that we have a government, let’s not amend our Constitution anymore. Let’s not make any changes. What we have is perfect. Let’s keep going.

Like, no. We should continue to reimagine these systems, just like writers have been forever.

So it just seems to me a natural way to—yeah, everyone’s saying the systems don’t work, the systems don’t work, the systems are failing us. Okay, well, then what should we do instead?

We have that power of brainstorming.

Yeah, I love it. The—you speak about the imagination, right? I feel like I would love to hear you talk about the role of the imagination in this, because I feel like that’s certainly what you’re pointing at.

Yeah. I mean, I actually structure my newsletter as if it's like an old social club. I take a lot of inspiration from the old socialist clubs during the Enlightenment—not because I'm pro-socialism. I'm pro-socialism in the context of how it's used in the modern Nordic countries. But what I’m really interested in is what happened in those social clubs during the Enlightenment.

Because here were these people who were like, I don’t know, industrialization has happened, but I don’t really like what this is doing to workers. And maybe workers should be treated differently. Maybe the state should take over the economy so that we can all be workers in it and everybody can be prosperous.

And the way they came up with these ideas was through two things. One, it was writing letters, which they published in pamphlets and delivered to every door and circulated in the square for a penny or something. And they published journals. Think of the Royal Societies or the socialist clubs in England and in the U.S.—they published books.

Edward Bellamy was the head of the Socialist League in the United States, and he wrote this book Looking Backward, which was a novel that takes place in the year 2000 about what the world should look like. And that inspired everyone at his socialist clubs to be like, we should build this future in real life.

And in England, you had William Morris, who didn’t like Bellamy’s book, so he wrote his own in 1890 called News from Nowhere. It also took place in the year 2000, with what the future should look like—but it was more artisans, and it was less high-tech. And his socialist clubs in England were like, yeah, we should support the merchant class and all of this.

So on the one hand, we had the writings. And on the other hand, we had the meetings—the socialist clubs themselves—which everyone was a member of. And they got all of the written materials and brainstormed with them when they met in person. Like, “I didn’t like that article you wrote in the last pamphlet,” or “Here’s why I disagree with your novel and what you want for the future.”

And people played these ideas out in the clubs and through the letters, and were publicly brainstorming together. That’s how I view my own newsletter—through that lens. We are publishing pamphlets, we are publishing books, we are publishing writings, and then we have gatherings on Zoom.

And I did some experiments with in-person this year to talk about these ideas and how we could make them a reality. And now I’m working on a long-term book project that is thinking that through: how could we, in the case of capitalism in particular, take some of these ideas and create a better version for the future?

So there’s this writing pamphlets/action/leagues-and-action structure that I’m very interested in. And that is the inspiration for my solutions-oriented journalism. Let’s start with the brainstorming and the ideas. Let’s refine them through discussion. And then—how can we actually create them?

Yeah, it’s amazing. What do you love about the work—about your work? Where is the joy in it for you?

Really the creative aspect of it. Right now, I’ve been really struggling with understanding the news. I’ve been having to read this wide variety of news sources to try to understand what’s happening in the world. And I’ve found it really frustrating to understand what’s happening in the world.

So I’ve worked with ChatGPT to design my own news source that would give me the information I want. And give me a larger view rather than this zoomed-in, sensationalist view.

And that’s been a very creative project. It’s been very fun for me. Because at the same time as I’m trying to come up with a better news source for myself, I’m imagining what a better news source could look like. What would that mean? What would that even look like? Could that work on a larger scale than just for me?

And I think it’s fun to—I don’t like journalism that focuses too much in the weeds, where there isn’t the imagination and creative element. When you're just focused on, “Here’s how the social system works here, and could we implement that?”

I’m interested in the bigger picture—the more creative vision. It’s not all going to happen at once. It’s going to happen over the long term. So being fully imaginative with where it could go in the future is really fun for me.

Yeah. You mentioned you're in Salt Lake City. I'm curious, how did you come to be there, and what do you love about it?

My husband and I were living in the North Bay of San Francisco for a long time. I felt like I wasn’t close enough to the city—to San Francisco. We were living in Marin, in Fairfax. And my husband thought we weren’t living close enough to Tahoe, the mountains.

So we were both working remotely at the time, and we were like, let’s see if we can find a city in the mountains. We did a kind of road trip to a bunch of them, and we ended up liking Salt Lake City the best. It’s a kind of medium-sized city, and it’s right at the base of the mountains, so it works for both of us.

As we say, we can go on a beautiful hike in the mountains during the day and go see a Broadway show at night. So that’s a good mix.

Nice. Talk to me about utopia. This is an idea that I probably pretend like I know about, but I don’t really know about. What are we talking about when we talk about utopia, and what role does it play for us?

Yeah. So I think utopia—utopia is the word developed by Thomas More for his book of the same name. It meant two things. It was a play on words. It meant “good place” in the Greek, but it was spelled with a “u” instead of an “eu,” so it actually meant “no place.”

So it was kind of an interesting thought experiment. It was like: here’s a good place, but it’s also not in existence in the world. So it’s no place. But here’s what an ideal little island could look like.

And then writers have taken that up since then in so many forms—Francis Bacon, as I said, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, a lot of sci-fi novelists. One of my favorite utopia novels is Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from 1915.

So we have this long genre of people writing what a better world could look like—what a better future could look like, what a better government or island community could look like. Aldous Huxley famously rewrote his Brave New World as the sequel Island, which is like: what if we used all the same things that went wrong in Brave New World to create a utopian society in Island?

So it’s long haunted the work of writers as a way of imagining what a better future could look like. And it’s conversely what gave us the dystopian genre—writers saying, here’s how things could go terribly wrong. And that makes for a more dramatic novel, of course, and a more fast-paced novel, but gives us a lot of views of the world gone bad.

So I kind of wanted to resurrect this utopian genre a bit, because I just feel like the dystopian genre now is haunting our imagination a little too much. We can only imagine the ways things could go wrong. And I think that’s hindering us in our ability to develop things that could do good. So I’m interested in exploring that genre further.

It’s amazing. I didn’t really see this coming, but I had a project a long time ago—in my capacity as a research consultant and brand consultant, I would often take out ideas for new products and share them with people to understand how to better communicate them, or even refine what they were.

And I had a period where I was working in nonfiction TV, you know what I mean? And so I took out a concept for a whole series, and it was a series about science fiction authors.

And I got a bunch of genre people together, and we were talking about what they love about the genre—about science fiction and all that stuff. And they had all these really beautiful, romantic, utopian ideas, and heroic ideas about why that space is so satisfying for them. But all the stories about science fiction were so dark and so dystopian.

And I feel like there’s one—is it Neal Stephenson? I think maybe at one point he wrote a piece that said we’ve sort of failed humanity in terms of science fiction. Like we really have such a negative view—we have a dystopian instinct, in a way, in terms of the stories that we tell ourselves about the future. And this is what you're talking about.

Exactly. I think it's crazy that we can only think of computer chips in our brain as mind control, when there’s nothing in science fiction—or very little—that uses that to make quadriplegics walk. There are so many good uses for technology, but we can only see the Minority Report vision because that’s how we use it on shows.

You mentioned one novel—one science fiction or utopian novel—that you liked quite a bit. What—do you know the one? Can you tell me?

Yeah. H-E-R-L-A-N-D. Herland. She was a feminist writer in 1915, part of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. She was a mentor of Edward Bellamy. So I told you—Edward Bellamy was the socialist who wrote this Looking Backward utopian novel that was a high-tech future. He was like, imagine if we could see orchestras in our homes—like Spotify. Or imagine if we could have credit cards where we could buy everything from an Amazon-like warehouse, right?

He had kind of a high-tech vision of the future. And then I said, Bellamy wrote his novel, or—William Morris wrote his novel two years later saying, “No, I don’t want that.” We want this more medieval—artisans, stone workers, beautiful architecture, the whole world’s artists kind of novel.

And then Charlotte Perkins Gilman was both a friend of William Morris’s daughter and a mentee of Edward Bellamy. She was like, honestly, I think both of your visions won’t function unless we get women involved. So she wrote this response utopian novel that was an entire society of women. The men all died going to war, and only the women are left in this society. And they evolve to reproduce just as women.

This women’s society managed to create this competition-less future where there is no capitalism, because everybody just wants to help each other out. They want to create a good society for their children. And the book takes place with these three men who stumble across this society. They think what they’re going to find is—it’ll never work. It'll be a bunch of nuns living in the woods, or they’ll need men to come in and save them and have kings.

And they’re so upset when they get there. They’re like, “How do they operate without that? Without a king? How do they operate without competition?” They think this wouldn’t work, but they have this very well-functioning society.

So hers was kind of like—actually, it’s the male ego that is making capitalism so warped. And if we didn’t have that, maybe we wouldn’t have that. So it’s kind of an interesting book, for sure.

Yeah. What do you love about that? Like, what excites you about the book or that story? What—yeah. Do you know what I mean? What makes a story like that so important to you?

Well, I think at the time I wrote an article comparing the book to the Barbie movie when that came out, because both portray this feminine kind of utopia. In Herland, they all live in these pink chateaus—these pink stone chateaus. And it’s this biodynamic forest where every tree is fruit-bearing.

And it’s very beautiful—gardens and crushed stone underfoot. And the guys were like, wow, this is so pretty. Why are aesthetics so important? And the Barbie movie has this Barbie Land idea where it’s this hyper-feminine kind of concept.

What I thought was interesting about both is that they portrayed the world as if—what would the world be like if it was fully designed by women? And I thought, in both books, you can also see the world as it’s designed by men. You have the Ken character in the Barbie movie who goes into the real world and is like, oh, this is the world designed for patriarchy, you know? And in Herland, it’s the same thing. You have these guys coming from the real world who are like—the real world is—and in both cases, the real world is the masculine utopia, kind of, so to speak.

And the feminine utopia is completely foreign to us. When you look at the male utopia, you're like, okay, well, that actually is what our real world is like. And when you look at the feminine utopia, you're like, oh, that isn’t actually what the real world is like.

So I found it really interesting. I do think there are elements of our culture that are more male-influenced than female. And I’ve said this before in relation to sci-fi too—like, the fact that sci-fi is all generation ships and technology and going to the moon and silver spacesuits, and not gardens and beautiful treehouse villages and this kind of more aesthetic idea—is because we have so much male-written sci-fi and not as much female-written sci-fi.

I’m oversimplifying, obviously. The gender roles are not this specific. But I think it’s interesting to think about: what would the culture be like if there was more of a feminine presence?

You know, in the Barbie movie, it’s hyper—it’s like we’re having dance parties every night, and we’re wearing sequins, and we’re doing all of the jobs, and men aren’t in any of them. And it’s kind of this overdone idea, but it’s like, well, there’s kind of not enough of that in the real world. So I find that concept interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of so many different things—what you were just talking about. I’ve had conversations with people, maybe in journalism too, about the work of Deborah Tannen. She’s a linguist, and she wrote a book about gendered communication.

The title of her book was You Just Don’t Understand. She characterizes that there are masculine ways of communicating and feminine ways of communicating. The shorthand version is that men very often communicate to report—they’re reporting information. They don’t really face each other. They’re shoulder to shoulder.

And so men are always reporting information. That’s what they do. And women are building rapport. So there’s all of this stuff that’s going on in the conversation between women that has nothing to do with information, but is doing all this other work.

And there’s certainly a way—I think I was talking to a journalist friend—and we just sort of looked at news through that lens. And imagined: what would a rapport-building news operation look like, right?

And this—does this feel—it feels like a speculative question that would provide rich results, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my favorite movies is a film called The Pod Generation. And when I watched that, I was like, this is the first time I’ve seen a sci-fi film be beautiful. Like, I actually wanted to live in this future—maybe.

And it was because it was a feminine director. She was inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe for all of the color palettes and the architecture and the design. And I was like, this is a pretty future. I love this.

What’s the name of that movie?

The Pod Generation.

I will look it up.

Yeah, you have to watch it. It’s so good.

So, we’ve talked a little bit about—well, yeah—what other models are out there that you’re particularly excited about, that you see? Whether it’s governance, right? And/or the economy?

Yeah. I think most recently—I told you I kind of designed this news source for myself—and what I did was create a report card for the world. I have every country on there, and I’ve used four different indices that rate countries on various factors.

There are two very prominent ones that rate countries on democracy, human rights, and freedom—those are V-Dem and Freedom House. Then there’s the World Bank Governance Indicators report, which reports on government quality—so, public voice, corruption, all these different factors. And then there’s the UN’s Human Development Index.

I went through and weighted all of these indices and gave each country a score, from one to 100. And that allowed me to rank them A, B, C, D, F, based on what each country gets.

This provided me with a framework for how governments around the world are doing. What are the ones we want to study that are doing a really good job? What are the ones that we don’t want to study because they’re not doing a good job—or we want to learn from them what not to do?

I’ve been enjoying having this bigger picture, and then using that to ask: now that we know overall how countries are doing, what are the ways that they’re swinging?

A lot of these indices—they’re annuals, they come out every year—and ended in 2024. So have things that happened in 2025 really created these drastic swings for any of the countries on this list? It’s been interesting to see how various events could sway things.

I’ve been doing this kind of comprehensive analysis—from installing a new social education system and what that would do to your points and swings, to collapsing into dictatorship or totalitarian government and how that swings your country down. And how much of that is possible in a given year.

So it’s allowed me to look at everything from a step back and say, okay, what are the actual tangible things that happened in 2025 that are making some of these countries go up or go down?

That’s allowed me to explore governance from a more high-level view. Because in the U.S., you’re just—every day you’re like, why don’t we make the island of Alcatraz into a prison again? And then three months later, obviously we’re not turning it into a prison.

And then it’s like, why don’t we buy Greenland? And three months later, it’s like, okay, well, we’re not actually buying Greenland.

There’s just this kind of weird—there are these wild swings happening every day. And I was like, but I don’t think there are actually wild swings happening, big picture.

There are some things that are majorly pivoting us up and pivoting us down, but it’s not what the media is reporting as far as the wild swings. I wanted to be able to understand: how is the world doing? How are the countries doing? What is making them go up or down?

This is allowing me to explore how these systems could change for the better. Because we’ve seen what countries have done that have given them wild swings in the up direction. We’ve seen what countries have done that have given them wild swings in the bottom direction. And we can learn from those.

I also think it takes a big period of inflection to make a lot of things go through. When FDR came in and did the Labor Act, that had a huge effect across the country—but we had been fighting for labor movements for decades at that point, until we had this wild swing. It was the Great Depression, World War I—everything was in flux.

And then we were like, okay, well, now we can do anything because everything’s up for grabs. So let’s just make a bunch of labor movements pass. Let’s go, go, go.

And that changed everything—40-hour workweek, minimum wage, no child labor—and drastically changed the whole country. I think we are entering one of those key moments of inflection now, where everything seems up for grabs and nothing is off the table. We’re having these wild ideas coming through in government.

So why not have some good ideas ready that are tested, and we can look to other countries that have done them and say: okay, when the next FDR comes, let’s go, go, go, and push through all these major changes and make major good happen in the world.

So when you ask what’s exciting to me in these systems—it’s that we actually have opportunities to make big swings in the positive direction in a lot of our countries right now. So why don’t we learn what those are and try to figure out what those are, so that we’re ready when we do have a moment to enact them all?

Yeah, it’s super exciting. I really connect with what you said at the end there about just the possibility that we’re living in. Not everybody has that reaction. Of course it’s chaos, and it’s pure, unadulterated chaos. But it is the kind of chaos...

I mean, coming from the world I come from, I just think of the ritual process—and that we’re in this really liminal period, where things are sort of betwixt and between, the way Victor Turner would talk about.

And I don’t know that I’ve ever really been—I mean, it’s a stupid thing to say—but I’ve never really felt that way. And I didn’t think it would feel like this, you know? That it would be tinged with horror, in a way. Or with real stakes.

So I really—there’s a way in which these ideas come across as very beautiful and innocent, but they’re deadly serious ideas, given the context that they’re trying to show up in.

Yeah. But I think we have to realize that a lot of good things in our world came from periods of really bad things. I mean, the Labor Act only came across because capitalism was going so badly and people were treated so horribly.

And the Depression, and yeah, World War I—that was crazy. And World War II obviously was insane. And even the French revolutions, even the Civil War—getting rid of slavery. To do really good things...

I’m not saying we had to do them with war. The United States had a revolution, and then France had a revolution. But then a bunch of European countries were like, we’ll just not have a revolution. Our kings and queens are learning from this and being like, oh, let’s establish a parliament.

So I think we can—we can take from this crazy, bad, tumultuous time and be like, okay, now we’re going to come in and say, let’s not do this. Let’s do something different.

You are writing a book, We Should Own the Economy? Can you tell us about it?

Yeah. I’m writing that one right now in public for my subscribers. So I was kind of researching better models for capitalism. I had written a couple of posts to that extent. Usually, when I research an article, I have a list of things I want to research and learn and solutions that I want to think through and come up with. I read all those things, come to some thoughts, and it ends up being an article.

And I had an incredibly long—eventually I realized, okay, this isn’t going to be one article or even a series of articles. This is a whole book’s length worth of things that I’m trying to research here.

So I ended up putting the outline—the whole thing—up on a platform called WeFunder, which allows you to crowdfund investment. And I said, “Hey, I’m interested in writing this book called We Should Own the Economy. Here’s what I’m going to research. If you’d like to invest in the book, you can invest, which will help me research the book, which will help me market the book. And in return, you’ll earn a share of the profits when the book eventually sells.”

But I’ll write the book live for my subscribers. And you can follow the process and help me crowdfund my research as we go—crowdsource my research.

To my surprise, within the first month, we had raised $50,000. On WeFunder, it’s like—you have a test phase. If you reach $50,000 in pledges, then you can officially open a community round. But if you don’t reach the $50,000 in pledges, nobody gets billed and you don’t get the money. It’s a way of just testing if there’s a market.

That’s what I was doing. I was just testing if there was a market for this book. Would anybody else want to know this information besides me?

And I was shocked when we reached the $50,000 within one month and we opened a raise. Now we’re almost at $70,000. And people were like, yeah, we want this book.

So we opened the round this summer. I'm researching chapters now and publishing them as they come out. And my readers are responding in the comments and providing more information. And it's been really fun.

So this will be a multi-year project I’ll do over the next few years as I research what a better economy could look like in the future.

Yeah, it's amazing. What’s it been like growing the Substack? What's your experience been? I mean, your community sort of predated Substack, is that right? Am I putting that in the right order?

I had 1,700 newsletter subscribers on a TinyLetter list before I moved to Substack. And those were just people who had been following me for like 10 years from various blogs I had. It was kind of a hodgepodge.

But I had a publication—I pursued my graduate studies in Mariology, which is the study of the Virgin Mary. So I used to write a lot of philosophy and esoteric content. So I had a lot of subscribers from that—that's probably most of them.

Wow. And wait, now I’m fascinated about Mariology. I don't know that—this is not something I've encountered before. Can we take a little side trip to Mariology?

Yeah.

Can you tell me, what is Mariology and where did it take you?

Yeah. So interestingly, in the Catholic Church, a lot of the materials pertaining to Jesus and Christianity and the Jewish movement are in the Vatican Library in Vatican City. But interestingly, Mary has kind of her own sort of cult following around the world, and they put all of her materials in the Marian Research Library, which is in Dayton, Ohio.

And they actually closed the Vatican Library to researchers—I think it was after Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, because he had access to the Vatican Library and then wrote these novels that I think the Church deemed heretical. And they were like, okay, we’re not letting journalists in anymore—this is for priests and everything.

But the Marian Library was still open, so long as you were a student at the Mariological Institute. So I just thought that would be fun to research. I was interested in the idea that there are a lot of deities around the world, but in the Christian and Western world, Mary is kind of the main female one. And so I think that has influenced our culture in a way.

So I was interested in studying that and what she meant to different cultures around the world. Mariology had such a boom during the Renaissance and even Enlightenment periods—there's so much art of Mary and every possible representation of her. So yeah, I spent five years studying her and learning—reading a bunch of really, really old documents at the library. And it was really fun.

That was amazing. This is a total non-sequitur—not total non-sequitur. Do you ever read Robertson Davies? Do you know him?

No.

He’s a Canadian novelist, but I feel like you just took me into a world that reminded me of those novels. They were very academic, esoteric, kind of intellectual novels. So what do we learn about ourselves from Mary?

I mean, I can show you—I can link you to my final project there. My final project was to recreate eight Marian icons using modern photography. So using photography, I shot Mary of the Assumption, the Dormition, all this famous Catholic iconography—Mother and Child, her holding the baby.

And I recreated them. My goal was to recreate them the way they would have thought of Mary circa the year 0 to 100, as opposed to what she became afterward during the Renaissance and everything. Because the Christian writers in the New Testament were writing a—what would you call it? They were trying to convince people. They were trying to bring people over to their cause.

Right.

So all of the language they use about Mary and Jesus—they took directly from Isis and Horus and Egyptian mythology. Because this is the Middle East at the time. This is Egypt and Israel, and everybody was well familiar with Isis and Horus and the mother-and-son story.

And they were saying, look, this is the same thing. Mary is Isis. They used the same terminology: mother of God, virgin mother. They used all the same ways of describing her. And they used all the same words to describe Jesus—son of God.

And so they just took all that language and said: this is the new thing, but for the Jewish people. And this is why we need to rise up against our oppressors.

And it was a very powerful statement. The word used in the Greek was parthenos, which doesn’t mean you didn’t have sex—it means you were unmarried.

And that was a powerful thing, because women were owned by their husbands at that time. So it wasn’t saying, “look, this woman is pure,” which is how the Renaissance later used it. It was saying, “look, this woman belongs to no man. She belongs to God only.”

And that was a very powerful statement to make. To say that Jesus is the son of God and not the son of man is a powerful statement to make.

It was saying: we are worth more than how the Romans are treating us.

It was a revolution. It was powerful. And it was a peaceful revolution.

And I wanted that to come across in the iconography, because it doesn’t come across in the art we have now. So that was the final accumulation of my project.

Yeah, that’s amazing. I really appreciate it. I’m glad we took that detour into Mariology. It’s fantastic. Do you have any— I have this question, it doesn’t always work, but—do you have any mentors that have influenced you or shaped you quite a bit? And then there’s sort of a second part to this question, which I ask: are there touchstones—ideas, concepts, or themes—that you kind of return to all the time in your work? Either mentors or touchstones?

Mentors—Victor Hugo. My favorite author by far. He was thinking about things the way I think about things. He was like, “This is what’s wrong with the government. It’s the French Revolution. This is what’s wrong with Catholicism. We need to have a revolution there too.”

So he was thinking about these same ideas that I’m thinking about—and thinking about them both in the form of nonfiction and fiction, just like I am. So I really, really relate to him. Modern thinkers—let me look around my library really quick.

Oh, nice. Beautiful.

Probably Kevin Kelly has thought about a lot of these ideas. He’s really influential to me. Rutger Bregman, who wrote Utopia for Realists—I love him. Love him.

I’m weirdly really into the book Half-Earth Socialism—not because I’m interested in socialism, but because I’m interested in the idea. They come up with this: if we had a world government that could design the way the world works, here’s how we would design it. And I just think that’s fun to read, even though I wouldn’t want the world they end up creating. It’s interesting to think about.

So that would probably be my modern mentors. A lot of children’s authors as well—like Peter Pan. That was a utopia. The idea of Neverland as this place where youth is the most important thing—I think that’s really beautiful. Let’s not grow old and cynical, but let’s keep our childlike wonder.

I really love—I think children’s books are the best source for utopia. Utopian thinking. You know, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, those kinds of things. We’re having too much sense. We have too much sense in the world. We need to be a little bit more illogical—with the Alice in Wonderland concept. Literary absurdity or something.

Yeah. What always struck me was—he was a mathematician, right?

Yeah. And I think that’s so important, because—okay, why would a mathematician write something so absurd? Because you can’t just think fully in rational tones all the time. You have to break out of that mold and be like, blah blah.

My nieces do this all the time. They’re like, “Would you come visit my world if we could only travel to everyone’s houses by umbrella, and we were just whisked away in the wind to each other’s houses?”

And I’m like, “Yeah! And what if we could also just jump in the ocean and immediately pop up in another body of water somewhere else in the world?”

And we just go down these weird, totally absurd ideas. But when you unbundle your mind from rational thought, I think sometimes that’s where the most creative ideas happen. And then you can come back to the rational world and be like, “Wait—some of this we could actually do,” or “Maybe we do want this.”

Like, what is the rational way of wanting this absurd idea?

Perfect. I want to thank you so much. This has been a pleasure speaking with you. I really love the work that you're doing, and I really appreciate you responding to my invitation.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was really fun.