How We Build Relationships Across Time | Michel Bauwens
What if the way humans have always organized themselves — in tribes, in gifting circles, in shared village pastures — never actually disappeared? What if it just kept reinventing itself, quietly, beneath the noise of states and markets? Michel Bauwens, a global thinker in peer-to-peer systems and the commons, has spent decades following that thread. His conversation spans deep history, the fractures of the present, and the scattered experiments pointing toward what might come next — not as prediction, but as possibility. Three questions anchor it: where have we come from, where are we now, and what are people already beginning to build?
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MAGICommons Podcast (00:00)
Cosmolocalism is a model of looking at the world which says everything heavy should be more local and everything light should be more global and shared. We have done so much globalization and it's really not sustainable the way we've been doing it. A certain measure of localization is necessary and by doing that we can diminish our weight on nature.
MAGICademy Podcast (00:29)
Today with us is Michel Bauwens
He actively work with researchers, governments and agencies to explores ways that digital layers of the planet Earth and peer-to-peer layers can potentially create a more collaborative society structure into the future. So today, our conversation's focus will be on the
relational grammar and cosmolocalism.
Beep beep beep. In front of you lands a spaceship and out walks a friendly alien. If you were to use one word, one sound, or one movement to invite the alien to play, what would that be?
Michel Bauwens (01:12)
Well, I will do what you just did, which is like this. You know, I honor the God in you. Let me just tell you a little anecdote. I've been twice to the Vatican and I actually saw the book that they have about the position of the Catholic Church towards aliens. And it's exactly that. they say that if they exist,
they'll be children of God just like us, so we have to treat them with the same respect as we would treat a human person. Just a little anecdote, and I think that's... We shouldn't prejudge who they are and what they are and see... Just open up a normal relationship and see where that goes, I guess.
MAGICademy Podcast (01:47)
I love it.
beautiful yeah because we are all coming from this whole universe and we don't know how big this universe is so to honor that very fact is i feel like it's not only correct but also divine it's very intentional beautiful wow cool all right so relational grandma like what do you mean like ⁓
Michel Bauwens (02:02)
Bye.
MAGICademy Podcast (02:18)
why yeah what is this what it is and what it is not
Michel Bauwens (02:18)
All right, yes. Okay, I'll try
to explain it as simple as I can. So first of all, ⁓ I'll just mention the name of the person who spoke about this first, which is Alan Page Fisk, F-I-S-K-E. And it's a very boring book, The Structures of Social Life. I don't recommend reading it because it's like a catalogue of... But his thesis is very simple.
MAGICademy Podcast (02:24)
Okay. ⁓
Michel Bauwens (02:42)
There are four ways of dealing with people that have existed throughout time and in every region of the world. And they occur in different mixes. So the first one, it calls it communal shareholding. And it's whenever you exchange something with the whole. So let's say you're a hunter gatherer society and the hunter comes back, it's not gonna sell it.
is going to be for his family, for the whole, right? And then within the family, they will have a method of cutting up the animal and who gets what, know, the rules for that. so is or like an Amish person when they get married, right? The whole community makes their house together. And then the expectation is that you are also going to help other new couples when they need to build their house. Right.
So there's no direct exchange. You are doing it for the community, as it were. And the logic is very simple. Give a brick, get a house, right? By contributing to something that is common, it's better for everyone. And that is actually the primary way that humans live for basically a few hundred thousand years. When they're in small groups, it's the primary thing. So once you settle down,
MAGICademy Podcast (03:29)
nice.
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (03:52)
You know, you can't just flee when you have a conflict. Now you have to live. You you're doing a bit of agriculture, horticulture. Once you settle down, how do you keep the peace? And that's the second modality. It's called equality matching. It's commonly called the gift economy. And basically, you know, I'm going to give you something to make you in a good mood, basically, and you will feel that you have to give me something back. And so that's how we keep the peace.
MAGICademy Podcast (04:17)
OI
Michel Bauwens (04:18)
creating good relationships, giving gifts to each other. It's often confused with the commons and it's different. Because here you actually expect something back. And the way it's called equality matching is because it's a paradox, right? If I give you, I actually become superior to you because I gave you something. I put myself higher than you. So if you want to reestablish the relationship on an equal level,
MAGICademy Podcast (04:41)
I give something back
to you.
Michel Bauwens (04:43)
You
have to give something back. So that's why it's called equality matching. But this is a gift economy. And you know, like the Northern.
MAGICademy Podcast (04:48)
It does create some
sort of stress though, like somebody gives it to you, then you feel like... ⁓
Michel Bauwens (04:51)
Oh yeah, it's just so I'm not saying these are like ideals, right? Because for example,
if you say an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that's the dark side of the gift economy, right? You demand retribution, equal retribution. I've done you harm. Now I have to restore the harm I did to you. Yeah. And it's either like if I blinded somebody or your family, you expect
MAGICademy Podcast (05:03)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (05:17)
me to blind myself or to give money to compensate. yeah, and that existed for thousands of years. This was how the law worked. Even in medieval times in Europe, was still mostly how the law functioned as a retribution. Yeah.
MAGICademy Podcast (05:21)
Yeah, side and the light side.
And it's also part of like human nature like when we think somebody give us something automatically, biologically even, we feel like we need to give it. ⁓ So yeah.
Michel Bauwens (05:42)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And those two modalities,
right? They're the first ones. They're like they have existed for the longest time. So then something happens. And what happens is, you know, maybe there's a climate change event, maybe there's some catastrophe and I cannot survive. I have to get something from another people. Right. So I'm going to invade you. And of course, in that context,
reciprocity doesn't work anymore because now it's more like a protection racket in a way. So I'm the master and my group rules your group and I will
you from other people who also want to invade and in return for that protection you'll pay taxes. So that's called authority ranking.
MAGICademy Podcast (06:34)
So it's like a colonization.
Michel Bauwens (06:36)
Yeah, so it does basically, you know, feudalism, tributary systems. so authority ranking means you get according to your rank. Right. So, you know, if you're a count or Duke or a king, you get different things. Everybody can expect like to have a certain standard of living depending on their status in society. Right. And it's associated with the state, with the creation of the state.
And once you have a state which can protect the safety and the security of people, then you get the fourth medallity, is markets. communal shareholding.
equality matching, authority ranking and market pricing. That's the way FISCA calls it. there is a history to it, right? So they dominate in a kind of historical succession, but they always exist. just, you know, for example, think about dating today, Dating today is a market because market pricing is now dominant. So
MAGICademy Podcast (07:08)
gift you
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (07:29)
you you pay for a dating site, right? So dating has become marketized, right? So that's how it works. And so here's a theory from a Japanese guy called Kojin Karatani, or I think there they say the opposite way, Karatani Kojin. And he wrote a book called The Structure of World History. So mode A and B is a two first, mode A is a two first ones, Mode B is the state.
MAGICademy Podcast (07:34)
Mm.
Michel Bauwens (07:54)
Mode C is the market. And here's what he says. We are designed anthropologically, genetically to live in mode A. That's really what we want. Remember, for thousands of years, we lived in families and clans, right? We know everybody. Everybody we know is good to us. They're family. And the enemy is outside, maybe, right?
MAGICademy Podcast (08:03)
Mode A.
Michel Bauwens (08:15)
And so it's convivial and we know the people around us, we trust them, we can ask them things. So that's kind of this peer-to-peer idea. Yeah, exactly. And so here's what he says, and it's very interesting. Humanity always wants to recreate mode A at a higher level of complexity because we don't really like civilization. Civilization is alienating.
Now you have classes and some people are on top and some people are the bottom. Some people are slaves, some people are domestics. You live in a big dirty city with people you don't know and you don't know if you can trust them. ⁓ civilization is richer materially, but it's also alienating. And so we're always trying to make civilization softer. So first we do that through religion.
MAGICademy Podcast (08:50)
And everybody is so stressed because they want to climb all the ladders.
Michel Bauwens (09:03)
So the early civilizations were very brutal. It's all about fighting, conquest. And then you have what we call the actual religions that happened like 600 BC, more or less at the same time in the whole world. So you have Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Greek philosophy, Hebrew prophets, they all kind of emerged at the same time. And it probably has to do with urbanization and stuff, right? Because it's weird that it's...
that the whole world moves in the same direction, more or less the same time. And so they want to make the world more ethical. So now you're living with strangers in a complex society. Let's have religion so that the warriors who go out and conquer and pillage outside, they shouldn't do the same inside. So basically the priests are there to civilize the warriors. On behalf of society,
they create ethical rules and laws so that everybody has to behave in a certain way that is more human in a way, inside a particular society. So that's the role of religion, is to kind of soften civilization, to go back to harmony. We should love each other, we should respect the environment, we shouldn't cheat, we shouldn't lie.
You know, all these things, right? And then, then Karatani says the second moment is when, at least in the West, we stop believing mostly, you know, the majority of people no longer believe in religion. So now we do it through mass politics, right? So he says, once we stop believing in the other world,
in the vertical aspect of transcendence, going beyond ourselves in a divine world, now happiness lies in the future. So it's like we collapse it from the vertical dimension to the horizontal dimension. So there is now, then there's a big change and then we will be good. So socialism, anarchism, fascism, liberalism, they all promise a better future.
and kind of paradise where people will be better together, but in the future, if we do X and Y. Yeah, and I think actually this is ending as well. So if you look at history, you could say 1789 with the French Revolution is the moment that religion loses its primary role. From now
MAGICademy Podcast (11:10)
in the future yeah yeah
Michel Bauwens (11:33)
change is political, right? Before 1789, people would fight about the right religion.
After 1789, nobody fights about the right religion. Religion has become a private thing. Now people fight around communism versus capitalism or something like that. So the right way to organize society, it's a political fight. And I believe right now we are even moving away from that. And we're moving in a third stage where the...
The yearning for mode A, if you like, to return to this conviviality that we like, is expressed in constructive networks. I'm already making a bridge to cosmolocalism here, Constructive networks. So if you want to change something, more more people no longer believe they can do it at the level of politics and society. The trust in politics is very, very, very low. Nobody trusts the media, the Congress.
MAGICademy Podcast (12:12)
Ew.
Michel Bauwens (12:27)
And so if you want to change, you have to find like-minded people and organize your life differently. And it's no longer like the family. It's going to be like by affinity. Yeah. And so, and I, and that's kind of what I'm engaged in is there are millions of people in the world who are changing their life, you know, by going back to the countryside.
MAGICademy Podcast (12:38)
Bye,
Michel Bauwens (12:50)
⁓ creating new kinds of farming and so we're in the midst of a new type of change which is not a political revolution anymore but is ⁓ and even web3 and crypto these are all networks of people that construct something together right and so you can look at history as this it never works out the way people want but people keep trying
We need a better society. We need to be more friendly with each other. We need more peace. We need more justice. That is something that is part of our being. And so maybe I want to say one more thing. So, you you have these four different ways of dealing with the value. And if we are in one, we behave in a certain way and we can move in the other and then we behave in a different way. So think about a mafia boss, for example, right? Like.
MAGICademy Podcast (13:27)
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (13:37)
In the mafia, he has to be very tough. People have to obey him. And if people don't obey, you punish them. But these people can be very good fathers and mothers. Because once they go to their family, they can actually be very different. They love their daughters and their sons. And they're not going to treat them in the same way that they would treat the people who are members of the gang. So that's important.
MAGICademy Podcast (13:39)
yeah very clear rankings ⁓
Michel Bauwens (14:00)
When you're in a market, you behave in a certain way. When you're in a commons, you behave in another way. And to a certain degree, it determines your behavior. So you can design society in a different way. And so I believe in the commons as a way to design society in a different way, not instead of the market and the state, but also next to it. But here's the thing, markets and states
are very efficient in some ways, but they're extractive institutions. They need to produce a surplus and they're competing with other institutions that want the same. And so they always tend to overextend themselves. you know, there are studies about this. Every society until now has collapsed. There's no counterexample, right? Societies are cyclical. Yeah, they don't, they always overuse their resources and then they collapse.
MAGICademy Podcast (14:44)
It's hard to sustain always the surplus. ⁓
Michel Bauwens (14:50)
and then something else comes back. So it's this endless cycle of... And now we have a planetary system that's destroying the whole planet. And the commons was the counter-cyclical generative institutions. So the commons is, for example, in a village in the Middle Ages. It still exists, but let me give you an historical example. So you're a farmer.
You have your own plot of land of your family. You have to work for the Lord in exchange for protection. But you also have common land with all the other farmers in your village, where, for example, you have an agreement that your animals can graze there on Mondays and your neighbor on Tuesdays and that neighbor on Wednesdays. So they make these common agreements. And it's like a social security system when you don't have a state.
It's how local people kept the balance. And you find it in every civilization, whether it's China, Islam, Christianity. And under Christianity, the third most important festival was called the Rogentide Procession, where all the villages would walk around their
and reconfirm their commons. And it's called Beating the Bounds because they would use these white markers that we still have on the highways, right? And they would say, this is from us.
MAGICademy Podcast (16:12)
Yep.
Michel Bauwens (16:13)
And so was very important for their identity as parishioners that they had these commons, these local commons that they collectively managed. Right. So then we have the digital coming. So you could make a history of the commons. Let me very briefly do that. So first commons were physical. Pastures, mountain slopes, you know, things like that. Right.
Under capitalism, we don't believe in that. So starting in the 16th century, we do something called the enclosures and we basically say everything has to be private. So we start fencing property and we abolish the physical commons. So all these farmers have to flee the countryside. They come in the city. And, in the beginning was very cruel. Early 19th century, if you were a working class, you die when you're 35.
So they did. Yeah, it's a hyper exploitation, know, child labor, you know, no, no insurance, no pay work 18 hours a day until you fall down. You know, they it was very, very hard. And so that that lasted until like 1850, you know, when people like in Manchester, Birmingham, they were dying when they're like 35 or 40 on average, which is
MAGICademy Podcast (16:59)
Because of heavy labor demand? Like why? ⁓ cool.
I think.
Hmm.
Michel Bauwens (17:26)
which is less than they used to live before, where they lived maybe 50 or 55. So before it got better, it got worse. But so what the workers did was create a social commons, right? They neutralized their risk. So they created insurance, fraternities, unions, and that became controlled by the state. So the welfare state is basically you take all these things that were invented by the workers
workers and you make it a civil rights. And now it's for everybody, but now the state is doing it for you. And that's very different, right? Because now you don't control it anymore. It's something you get from the state as a passive consumer. So the third phase of the commons is the digital. It's 93, we invent a browser, we invent, and so now we have the web and the browser.
MAGICademy Podcast (17:52)
distribute.
Michel Bauwens (18:15)
which means everybody in the world can share knowledge. So we create shared knowledge commons, free software, shared code, open design, the Wikipedia, know, everything. And I would argue we are now entering a phase where the digital is mixing with the physical. It's becoming so important that we can't do anything anymore without this layer of shared computing.
And that's what I call Fidgetal. Right. So here comes Cosmo localism. And sorry, I am answering it before you ask the question. Cosmo localism is a model of looking at the world, which says everything heavy should be more local and everything light should be more global and shared.
MAGICademy Podcast (18:56)
What do you mean by heavy?
Michel Bauwens (18:57)
So matter, right? So humanity today spend two or three times more on transport than on making.
You know, like when you eat shrimp, right? The shrimp is fished in Canada or in the Atlantic, right? They send the boats to China. The Chinese workers clean the shrimp and send it back to the US, right? A tennis ball has like 400 components and has like, you know, it takes 40,000 miles to make like one tennis ball, right?
MAGICademy Podcast (19:11)
Hmm transport it to
I didn't know that.
Michel Bauwens (19:29)
We have done so much globalization and it's really not sustainable the way we've been doing it. So I think a certain measure of localization is necessary. And by doing that, we can diminish our weight on nature by two thirds. And so, but it's not localization.
MAGICademy Podcast (19:44)
What kind of
things?
Michel Bauwens (19:47)
We can like it's a choice basically so there was this company now. It didn't work yet because of the You the prices are still still very low and so it's hard. It's still hard to compete with this model But I'll give you an example this common was called arrival So they reduced the number of processes to make a car from 750 to 50
and you have robots, right? And you just order your car and they make it locally when you order it. know, just on a platform, they make the car for you according to your specifications. So the designs are available in the whole world for all these company outlets called Arrival. And then you make it and you know, there's
Like a lot of drones are made that way, know, maker spaces.
Some computers are made that way. There's examples. I'll give you a
nice example in India. It's called Solar Lamp. So Solar Lamp is an open design, right? So that means it's shared globally. Everybody in the world can say, make a Solar Lamp. So you have to invest in a small factory and you can make these Solar Lamps. So what they do in India is they give these Solar Lamps to
poor students in the villages that don't have electricity. So four million kids can now study at night and do their homework because of SolarLab. So then they made an agreement with, it's called ITT, it's like MIT in India, ITT in Mumbai, and they made these free short courses, 10 minutes each.
and 400,000 students can now study university level exams using open source education because of the solar lamp, right? And then of course, maybe 4,000 can actually go physically to the university. So this is marrying open design with local physical production, right? So it's distributed manufacturing is basically what we are looking for.
not big factories that make a million cars and send them all over the world, but having these small factories everywhere in the world to make a number of things locally. And you can make biodegradable materials, circular production methods. Anyway, so that's kind of the model of cosmolocalism where... So, okay, ⁓ I'll give you the... So this is my last article, right? was called the geopolitics of cosmolocalism.
And I talk about the archipelago of regenerative villages. Because cosmolocalism means translocal organizing. You should look at history as you have physical entities like nations, villages, and then you have non-territorial entities like the church, the pope and the caliph.
They're not the head of a territory, they're the head of a community. Wherever Christian Catholics live, they should listen to the Pope, right? Whenever Muslims live, they are connected to the Caliph. There's no Caliph right now, but that was the original idea. So we always had this interaction between...
MAGICademy Podcast (22:35)
Mmm.
you
Michel Bauwens (22:50)
territories that are managed by towns, cities, kingships, monarchies, countries, nation states. And then we had non-physical communities that are kind of like United Iran's common ideas. And so now we have this extraordinary technology that...
MAGICademy Podcast (23:03)
Hmm.
Common idea and value, beliefs.
Michel Bauwens (23:13)
allows us to organize translocally in real time and share designs and share production facilities in an entirely new way. So I think that the balance between the two is changing. So the balance between the physical world of nation states and these new type of communities is changing. And that's what I'm kind of following and trying to understand.
And so we talk about network states, network nations, all these new things that are
MAGICademy Podcast (23:51)
regenerative society?
Michel Bauwens (23:52)
the problem, I think, of the current system is that it's not good at taking into account what we call externalities, right? So, if you're a company, your aim is to make as much profit as you can. You have to. That's the law. Like if you're a corporation, you have a duty.
And if you don't do it, then your shareholders can actually attack you. And so that means that everybody is trying to serve their own interests. And then in theory, the state has to regulate that. And I would say that worked more or less until the 1980s. But in the 1980s, we had the first wave of digital networks, and it was used.
basically by finance to become global. So now we have nation states, right? Where the state is supposed to regulate the market, but it doesn't work. They're too weak to do it. And so we have a regulation problem. And that's why nobody trusts the government anymore because they're weak. They can't really solve because a lot of issues have become global. Yeah.
MAGICademy Podcast (24:51)
Because the
limitation, I think there's a conflict or a mismatch between what the state is designed to do, which is very local, and now with everything that is becoming digital with the digital layers and this global impact, it's hard.
Michel Bauwens (25:08)
Exactly. Exactly. So we have a regulation crisis.
then the question is, how do we solve it? And we have basically three models that are competing. One is the Western model, which is market centric. And basically the global economic forum, the World Economic Forum, their idea is to have multi-stakeholder
MAGICademy Podcast (25:16)
Yeah.
Mm. Yep.
Michel Bauwens (25:32)
governance. So you have 400 domains, like education and transport. So they have identified 400 sectors. In each sector, you have people from finance. They're the strongest. You have official NGOs, and you have weak nation states. And they try to regulate and create rules for the whole world.
which is what lot of people don't like that, right? Especially if you're a Republican or a populist, you call them globalists and you don't like that because they want to basically run the world globally. And so what about democracy? So people feel that they're losing their power to this process. So then the other thing is, the other side is basically Russia, China and the BRICS, right?
MAGICademy Podcast (25:54)
Yeah.
Yeah, still feel like...
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (26:17)
And they want to have stronger states. want, in a way, go back to the older model, strengthen the states. And the Chinese and the Russians and the Indians, they talk about the civilization state. not a pure nation state, which is a European invention, which is secular. They want to go back to their history to create a stronger identity and then have these states negotiate together.
MAGICademy Podcast (26:22)
Hmm.
⁓
Hmm.
Michel Bauwens (26:41)
And so
that's what basically the BRICS countries want to
Recreate a nation-state model, slightly adapted and without the domination of the West. And what people like me want is to create a capacity for local communities to manage themselves, but to become stronger through trans-local coordination. So the archipelago idea.
MAGICademy Podcast (26:56)
Mm.
Hmm.
Michel Bauwens (27:12)
You know what the archipelago is? It's the idea that you have, for example, islands in Polynesia or in the Caribbean, right? They're all separate, but then they send out boats to each other, they make friendship. so... ⁓
MAGICademy Podcast (27:27)
It's like a commons
like people just operate in terms of that, like we're all together, we're helping each other.
Michel Bauwens (27:30)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, or, you know, oasis
in a desert. so they're quite autonomous, but then they create links with each other. Right.
MAGICademy Podcast (27:43)
Feels like
the motivation of that is very strong because they are each each of those groups are isolated and they need to survive together by coming together as as if so it's like by survival even
Michel Bauwens (27:52)
Yeah. So, and now you would see, for example, you
know, people want to do permaculture or people who want to do collective purchasing of organic food. You know, these are agreements between consumers and groups of farmers. Right. So, and all this is now called bio-regionalism. Right. So, bio-regionalism is a very powerful and fast growing movement where people say, we have to restore our territories to health.
MAGICademy Podcast (28:07)
Mm-mm.
Michel Bauwens (28:19)
That's what regeneration is, right? You have on the one side forms of economy which pollute and destroy your environment. then you have other people saying, no, this is no longer working, we're destroying the planet. So now we need forms of economy where we actually make the soil better and we have more trees. so how can you create an economy that actually makes things better instead of just destroying them? Right? So that's what regeneration is about.
And there millions of people doing it. The press doesn't talk about it. But I can tell you, for example, in France, there are now 1,500 eco villages. And 10 years ago, there were only 150. And you have to know that 80 % fail. Yeah, so from 150 to 1,500. And you have to know that 80 % fail. So that means to have 1,500, you had maybe 10,000, right? Because it's difficult to do. It's not easy.
MAGICademy Podcast (28:57)
1500?
Michel Bauwens (29:10)
Land prices are very expensive. And so in order to be stronger, if you do this, you have to connect horizontally with all the people doing different things in your bio region. But you also have to organize cosmo locally. All the people doing the same things all over the world can help each other. All the people doing permaculture can learn from each other at a global level. And so if you're attacked, let's say a hostile nation state that doesn't like what you're doing or
transnational finance that doesn't like what you're doing. Now you suddenly have both a horizontal and a vertical layer of solidarity and of coordination, right? You can actually coordinate together and so become more efficient, right? Because in order to win, you also have to be better than what you're replacing. You can't just be idealistic and say, you we're going to do organic food.
Well, if it's 10 times more expensive than toxic food, you're not going to win. So you have to find other ways so that you can do organic food and you can be actually cheaper than the bad food. It's not easy to do, right? Because the whole system is against it. But here's the thing. The thing is that the existing system is working less and less. And so it's giving more and more opportunity to people who want to do different things to actually do it.
MAGICademy Podcast (30:10)
Because it's... ⁓
Michel Bauwens (30:23)
And now we have this whole technology that we can learn very, very fast now. And there's studies showing that we learn eight times faster now than 20 years ago.
a very bad example. Making what's called IEDs, explosive devices, right? So it took the Taliban 20 years ago, it took them like a year and a half to learn how to do it. If you would do it now, it'll take you like four weeks. Because everything is on the internet. with movies. I live in Thailand, Burma is next door.
MAGICademy Podcast (30:54)
Because everything is already open sourced, you can just find it.
Michel Bauwens (31:02)
Okay, that's a bit complicated. So let me stage it first. So you have the invention of Bitcoin, right? The first socially sovereign currency in the world. And in order to work, it needs an accounting system which is called a blockchain. The blockchain is the first universal ledger in the world. So this is instead of everybody having his own accounting, you can now have an accounting between a whole ecosystem.
so you can see the impact that you're making. This is a real revolution as well. Okay, so then there's a project called Ethereum, is to create a computing system based on the blockchain. Okay, do you still follow me? And this thing is working. Yeah, and this is what we call Web3. So Web3 is the attempt to recreate
MAGICademy Podcast (31:40)
Yes, closing my eyes definitely helps.
Michel Bauwens (31:48)
a fully distributed computing infrastructure. like the internet was meant to be, but also to protect it so that it doesn't degenerate. so tens of thousands of people are working on this. I went to, it was called DevConnect in Bangkok, 20,000 people and 800 side events. So this is huge. I'm just telling you, this is huge, right?
MAGICademy Podcast (32:10)
Yeah.
Michel Bauwens (32:11)
Many of these people are nomadic, right? They work in different countries because they just have to work on their computer. And so what they create is pop-up villages when they come together for six weeks, a month, and they learn from each other. So it's amazing. You'll have like 20 sessions a day. You can choose where you go. And, you know, there's so much learning in such a short time. it's self-organized, so you have different
MAGICademy Podcast (32:35)
Who is organizing all that?
Michel Bauwens (32:39)
brands, one is called Edge City, one is called Zuzalu, I went to Zoozaloo, Montenegro. And I tell you because this is what I wanted to tell you. It's an anecdote, but it's important. So I sitting on a table with a collapsist somebody believes that we cannot solve the climate crisis. Everything is going down the drain. So the best thing we can do is, you know,
help each other out while we're going down, basically. Then you had an impact investor, who someone who invests in green technology. And then we had a climate denier. Someone said, no, there's no problem. There's no climate change. Everything is going well. So these people, in many other environments, they're ready to kill each other, basically. I'm exaggerating a little bit, right? But they're like...
MAGICademy Podcast (33:23)
mentally, mentally.
Michel Bauwens (33:25)
They're political enemies. Well, in this environment of Zuzalu, they're talking in a very friendly way around the same table. And I said, wow, this is rare. And it's because they're all building an infrastructure that will be good for all of them. So they unite around their open source commons because they know they're making something that will be good for everyone. And that creates unity in the diversity.
So that's, think, the force of the commons is that you can do that. As long as you and I are contributing in something we believe in, you can be Asian, I can European, you can be a socialist, I can be a capitalist. We don't care because we're building something together and I need you and you need me. So I think this is the beauty of the commons that you can do that. creates...
MAGICademy Podcast (34:11)
It's beautiful.
Michel Bauwens (34:14)
⁓ It creates a capacity to unify people around common goals.
MAGICademy Podcast (34:27)
That's beautiful. So your magic. So when you, when Michel was about 11 years old or even earlier, what did he enjoy doing, creating or playing so much that time disappeared?
Michel Bauwens (34:40)
I can tell you exactly. I have to tell you I had a bit of a difficult childhood. I was an only child from two orphan parents that didn't have lot of skills, interpersonal skills. I was also taken away from my parents when I was 18 months old. had asthmatic bronchitis. I remember pretty horrible things like having to eat my vomit, being in a glass cage, having long nails like this. I had a pretty tough childhood.
and took me a while to work on these things. But I can tell you exactly what I did because I was alone a lot. And in Belgium, we are crazy about bike competitions, right? The sport, yeah. It's like football, we follow it. We have these competitions and who's gonna win? And I would spend...
MAGICademy Podcast (35:17)
⁓
Michel Bauwens (35:26)
hours and hours like imagining my own and you you could buy these little bikers you know and they have a number and I would invent my my whole world and I would do this for hours and days and days and do my own competitions that was a thing.
MAGICademy Podcast (35:44)
So you have imaginary competitors when you're biking.
Michel Bauwens (35:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And
I know it sounds a bit weird. Maybe people are going to think I'm crazy, but I still do that. So before I sleep, I construct a world and I have this planet and I'm building a railway and it's four million four million miles long. And, you know, I think about how to organize it and who's going to live there. And, you know, anyway,
the architecture and so I'm building these 3D worlds in my brain and I fall asleep that way. I do this almost every day when I'm home. It just gives me peace and I try to build it. So I've been doing this like for 20 years now.
You know, it's yeah, it's world building. know, science fiction authors do that and authors, right? When they because before they write a book, they have to imagine the whole world in which the story is going to happen. So I do this. I do this to fall asleep. It's the way my brain works.
MAGICademy Podcast (36:26)
Yeah.
world.
Many novels could come or many movies could come from that.
Michel Bauwens (36:39)
Yeah, I'm not good
at fiction. I tried it. just, but I'm pretty good at nonfiction. I can write pretty well. And so people could check out my sub stack, fortcivilization.substack.com where I, every two, three weeks I write something. And the last one, I think we discussed it was the geopolitics of cosmolocalism, in which I try to explain our market state in the commons interacted on the global stage.
MAGICademy Podcast (37:07)
Yeah, so for folks who are curious, ⁓ we would definitely encourage you to tune in to Michel's Substack. And also we're curious, what do you think is childlike wonder in your own life across personal and professional? What role do you think that plays?
Michel Bauwens (37:24)
I think it's a bit difficult for me and the way I solve this is through traveling. So for me, nothing beats being in a new place that I've never been. And I'm just in awe. And, you know, again, it's a bit silly, but instead of visiting like a tourist, I just go left, right, left, right, left, right. And I do this, you know, because I want to discover how the people live there.
I don't want to visit the cathedrals and the museums. I just basically want this feeling of like, you know... Yeah, yeah. And so whenever I'm in a place, I'm always like, wow, I'm in Rio de Janeiro, I'm in this place, I'm in that place. And I just walk. It's a very European thing. There's books about this. In French, we call it flané.
MAGICademy Podcast (37:53)
living as if you are local.
Michel Bauwens (38:08)
You know, it's directionless wandering, but I'm in all. I love cities. love you. I love like, you know, like going in Istanbul, for example, and seeing all these crafts people that are still working there on the streets. Like I'm in heaven. just, I don't need, and I'll continue. Another thing, you know, I have four children and the only thing I need to be happy is to be around my children. I'm, I'm instantly happy when I'm around my children.
MAGICademy Podcast (38:09)
Flannie... wandering...
Michel Bauwens (38:34)
I don't need them to do anything. I don't need them to be anything. I'm just like happy that they're in the world and that they, you know, they're finding themselves and being creative. And I'm just like, wow. And I've always been that way. And maybe because I was alone as a child that I can appreciate that so much, you know, because I know what I was missing. And so for me to have been a non-each side with two orphan parents and to not be a happy father with four happy children.
and a great wife, she's just amazing. I say, OK, I may have fucked up a lot of things in my life, but that, like, I'll be happy when I, you when I leave for the other plane, I will say, yeah, I did it. No, I did this. I I turned that around. Anyway, yeah.
MAGICademy Podcast (39:07)
Sorry.
That's so beautiful. That's
so beautiful. And for our audiences who are curious to reawaken the sense of wonder what simple things, daily simple things that you would recommend them to try.
Michel Bauwens (39:30)
That's a hard question, because it may not work for everybody, but I think I start my day with reading. reading, but reading in a particular way, right? I take notes. I read 90 minutes only, three books, 30 minutes each. And then I meditate about my reading. I think what did I learn today?
Did anything I read today change my vision of the world? Did anything I read today connect to other books I may have written some years ago? And so I read slowly, much less than other people in academia. But I can talk for hours about every book I read. And I think it doesn't matter even if you read 15 minutes.
But over time it changes you, it gives you a depth. That's a big problem with computers. I don't open my computer before 1pm. Because I know it turns my brain to mush. It fragments your... And so the capacity to have long thoughts in depth, I think that can only come from reading.
MAGICademy Podcast (40:24)
It's super fragmented.
Michel Bauwens (40:34)
And so I urge everybody just read a little bit. If you don't have time, don't worry. 15 minutes. Who doesn't have 15 minutes? But if you do it every day, it will change your life. ⁓
MAGICademy Podcast (40:46)
And they can read on
their mobile
right? With like apps or you recommend a physical book.
Michel Bauwens (40:57)
⁓ Yeah, you know, is something...
Yeah, because you know the thing is so... Unless you have E Ink, right? Like a Kobo or something. But if you read on the computer, there's actually not a fixed surface. What you get is you're bombarded with photons and your brain imagines it's a text, but it's not. And this has been proven, this has been tested.
People don't retain nearly as much when they read on the screen. It's like 40%. Don't do it. I mean, do it if it's like a working thing. But if you really want to think you have to read a physical book or have a co-bo with E Ink, which is also fixed, it really affects the brain.
MAGICademy Podcast (41:40)
Hmm. Okay, good advice. I always have, I always struggle with reading on the computer. I would prefer to grab a physical book and read it and there's something unique about reading through a physical book.
Michel Bauwens (41:42)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I do the same. don't, you know, I'll scan
articles, I'll scan them, but I will never read them on the screen. If it's important enough, I'll print it out and I'll do it. Yeah.
MAGICademy Podcast (41:57)
Yeah, I sometimes will print it out.
Yeah, see, I read very slow too. I'm the slowest read. I'm so slow. And I have come back and reread, so I hear you. ⁓
Michel Bauwens (42:03)
Yeah.
Yeah, So here's what I do.
Okay, let me just finish with this. So I read the book, I take notes. When I finish my book, I reread my notes. And when I finish my notebook, I reread the whole notebook with four or five books. So this means I have engaged with these ideas three times, right? Which is not...
MAGICademy Podcast (42:27)
So you read,
you take notes, and then you read the notes after work.
Michel Bauwens (42:32)
So I read the notes
of the book when I finish my book, I reread the notes on the book, and when I finish my notebook, I reread the notebook an extra time. So I've basically read these ideas three times. Plus, I think about them, right? I make half an hour every day where I think about what I've read. And so that creates anchoring, right? It's kind of...
MAGICademy Podcast (42:37)
Mm-hmm.
three times.
Mm.
Mmm.
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (42:55)
you know, creates neurological connections in your brain. So you remember much, much more than if you don't do it. So then I have a few more tricks. Let me just quickly share them with you. So you have to mix temporality. So I read macro history for big, big, big, big time. But when I travel, I read specific books about specific periods and specific people like the Vikings, the Incas, the Aztecs.
MAGICademy Podcast (43:06)
Yes.
Michel Bauwens (43:20)
So I can go from the concrete to the long term. And then I scan the internet, that's for the short term, and I read essays. So you have to think, somebody writes an article for the internet, he worked on it a few days, maximum. Somebody who writes an essay might have worked weeks and months on it, and somebody who's written a book.
MAGICademy Podcast (43:24)
Mmm.
Michel Bauwens (43:41)
has worked a year or more on it, So you mix temporalities. I think that's very useful as well. So your brain can go from the short to the long and back. You get this flexibility in your brain if you do that. You can... ⁓
MAGICademy Podcast (43:44)
Yep.
Mmm.
Mmm.
Yeah, I'm not frozen. I'm just closing my eyes to process the information. It helps because I get sensitive too. So it helps me to only process one information through the sound. I feel like that actually resonates with the word integration. It does tie back to all the ideas that we've talked about. I think one way to find this midway
Michel Bauwens (44:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you do that sometimes. ⁓
MAGICademy Podcast (44:24)
this integrative way beyond the duality beyond yes, no, right, wrong, left, right, and one or the other is to actually read about them, learn about them, be open-minded and constantly take note and then reread your notes and then rethink and then ask guiding questions in terms of does that change of, does that help to change?
or not change what I'm currently thinking and that takes a lot of repetition, takes a lot of patient reading and it does take careful selections in terms of the forms, the short form, the mid form or the long form. So it's a lot of weaving and integration with open mind, yes, still a very clear and anchoring point because everyone has their own
thinking. So it's all about how has it changed it? Have I improved it? And then coming back to everybody built their own world. Like you, build world through your imagination before bed. And some other people may build world to
the world for them is their family. Maybe for some people, the world for them is the local community. Maybe for some others, the world is the physical world as of now. Maybe it's a country, maybe it's a
global thing so I feel like everybody is building their world by what they have come to truly knowing and the integration takes a lot of learning, selection and repetition. ⁓
Michel Bauwens (46:04)
You
are what you pay attention to, right? That's who you become. And so this is the danger of our world is they are stealing your attention away. You don't want to be a person who gets manipulated and whose attention wanders to what they want you to follow. have to have your self-sovereignty, as you say, is also taking charge of your attention. You have to be the master of your attention.
MAGICademy Podcast (46:29)
Yes, someone has once said in the podcast is to align your intention with your attention. I think that is...
Michel Bauwens (46:38)
Yeah, yeah,
I agree with that. Yes.
MAGICademy Podcast (46:40)
such an important mini first step. I think before that we'll venture into the bigger mission of world building that takes a lot of coordination and building networks. Something that we can do at least within ourselves is to start to read and be selective what we read and not just read but intentionally repeat and then integrate.
Michel Bauwens (46:43)
Yeah, yeah,
MAGICademy Podcast (47:03)
in terms of our worldview as of now and see how that evolved as we continue to read, to align our intention with attention through reading.
That's so beautiful. my goodness. ⁓ We need to pause. We need to stop now because it's already so long.
Michel Bauwens (47:16)
Yeah.
I feel nice
when I talk to you.
MAGICademy Podcast (47:26)
Maybe I'm helping you
to integrate also from this perspective. As we conclude, what do you think is your magic?
Michel Bauwens (47:35)
Well, I think that I never speak without feeling what I say. So I have a lot of people, you know, and I'm not saying this to brag, right? This is not what it is about. But I have a lot of people saying that I changed their lives. And it's not my intention. But, you know, if you speak true to yourself, right?
So not to show that you know things, that you want to convince people. No, you just speak the truth as you experience it, as you seek it. I think that gives you power. Because when I give a lecture, I know people are transfixed. Because it comes from a deep place.
It's not bullshit. I can be wrong, of course, about what I'm saying, but it's something that has been digested. And I think that's magic. What do they say again? The Greeks? Truth, the true, the beautiful and the good. I'm not good at the beautiful. I try to be good, but I think I'm mostly oriented towards the true. Everybody has his own way of prioritizing these three things.
And I think for me it's the truth. I'm really seeking the truth.
⁓ to the degree that human beings can know the truth, I am seeking that truth.
MAGICademy Podcast (48:38)
Yeah, and I think the good
I love that. I think the truth, the good, the beauty, they're all very subjective. Even truth. mean, yes, research can potentially find the absolute truth, but even that we have limitations. No research is perfect. So I feel like it's all alignment. It's all alignment. I think the truth is in alignment with what this is currently. ⁓
Michel Bauwens (49:09)
Yeah, and
you know, I also think when you you know, I think when you're so I you know, I am not enlightened or anything. I'm not very particularly wise or anything. But I do think I'm self actualized. Right. I do think that at some point something happens that you're like you feel you're aligned, you found your purpose. I have definitely found my purpose when I was about like 42 years old. And that changed my life.
MAGICademy Podcast (49:10)
and it will evolve.
Michel Bauwens (49:33)
You know, I so that process of integration is, I think, we're striving for, you know, can't control it fully. then but then suddenly, like you get that gift where the things come like together, you know, and then you can. So there is Eric von Neumann, he's a union psychoanalyst. He wrote about. Central version.
And he said, you know, until you're 35, you have to adapt to the world. Basically, you have to work on digesting all your inheritances, you know, your culture, your country, your parents, your education, and make sense of what the world is giving you. But then ideally, you know, you then become sick. So now I will no longer adapt the world.
I will no longer adapt to the world. I want to change the world. want to adapt the world to what I can bring to the world. And yeah. And so I think that's what I did. And yeah, it's a very good book, The Evolution of Consciousness. I think it's called by Eric von Neumann, which is quite fascinating. And what he does in that book is he looks at the evolution of mythology over time in the whole world.
MAGICademy Podcast (50:32)
it up.
Michel Bauwens (50:38)
and how it reflects the evolution of the human psyche, how we got more mature over time as well, and how mythology reflects that. It's a fascinating book. And then there's also a really nice book that I recommend.
MAGICademy Podcast (50:48)
human evolution
of consciousness? Yes.
Michel Bauwens (50:52)
Yes, the evolution of consciousness.
And then there is a book called The Varieties of Religious Experience from William James, where he talks about once born and twice born people. Once born people, they live in a good time, a good village, good parents, so they fit. But that also means they don't have to ask too many questions. And then some people like me, you know, we're born and something doesn't work. Like something is wrong with the operating system.
MAGICademy Podcast (50:56)
Okay.
Michel Bauwens (51:17)
You're in the world, but you're not of the world. That's a kind of gnostic, it's called the gnostic condition. And these people have to go through a crisis, the dark night of the soul. But when they come out of it, they're actually richer than the other people because they had to go through all these experiences to find their meaning. And so the book, Familiion James, is about all the founders of great religions.
MAGICademy Podcast (51:23)
Yeah, I feel like an outsider all the time.
Michel Bauwens (51:42)
basic Reformation founders, the Presbyterian, Methodist, and all these. And he describes their life and it fits that pattern. So these people are generally unhappy in their youth and then something happens, they get integrated and then they do these amazing things. create new social movements and they have millions of followers and they create new worlds.
MAGICademy Podcast (52:03)
It's such a great pleasure to have this wonderful multi layered integrative, expansive
yet entering conversation with you, Michel. And thank you so much for sharing your wisdom, not only learned wisdom, but lived and integrated wisdom with us. we're nobody's perfect. And I think what's really important is we just keep going. We just keep building. I think that's the only...
action that we can do, keep learning, keep building and keep weaving and keep integrating until we graduate.
Michel Bauwens (52:38)
Yeah, until we die. When we stop learning, we're
MAGICademy Podcast (52:41)
That's so beautiful. Thank you, Michel.
Michel Bauwens (52:42)
Yeah, thank you. You're
also, I have to say, you're a very stimulating host. And yeah, I think you bring the best out of people. So thank you for that.
MAGICademy Podcast (52:51)
My pleasure.
Michel Bauwens (52:52)
Yeah,
that's what we do here all the time in Thailand.
MAGICademy Podcast (52:54)
Yeah, that comes to me intuitively. That's like how I do it. I do this and I also do this.
Michel Bauwens (52:57)
Yeah, it's a great gesture.
You know what it means, right? I honor the God in you, right? So it's a sign of deep respect for every other person as representing the Divine. I think it's a great way to greet people.
MAGICademy Podcast (53:13)
Yeah and that's how we greet aliens too. It's all coming back in a full circle.
Part 1: What Has Been — The Deep Grammar of Human Organizing
Anthropologist Alan Fiske identified four fundamental ways humans relate to one another, present in every culture across recorded history. The first is communal shareholding: the logic of the family and tribe, where you give what you can and take what you need — the primary human mode for hundreds of thousands of years. The second is equality matching — the gift economy, where giving and receiving keeps relationships in balance. Its shadow, Michel notes, is retribution: "I've done you harm. Now I have to restore the harm I did to you." The commons and the gift economy are often confused but are distinct: in gifting, you expect something back; in the commons, you contribute to the whole.
As societies settled and scaled, two more modes emerged. Authority ranking gave rise to the state; market pricing gave rise to commerce. Both are generative. Both are also, in Michel's framing, extractive — requiring surplus, prone to overextension. "Every society until now has collapsed," he observes evenly. "There's no counterexample. Societies are cyclical."
Yet something has persisted alongside these dominant modes: the commons. Physical commons in medieval villages. Social commons in the labor movement. Digital commons in open source and Wikipedia. Each wave dissolves and re-forms. The pattern, Michel suggests, points to something anthropological: "Humanity always wants to recreate mode A at a higher level of complexity because we don't really like what we lost with civilization. Civilization is alienating." Every era finds a new way to reach back toward the communal.
Part 2: What Is Now — The Civilizational Intercycle
Michel borrows from Gramsci to name the current moment: "The old is dying, but it's not dead yet. The new is being born, but it's not mature yet. And we live in a time of monsters." He calls this a civilizational intercycle — unusual not because one cycle is ending, but because many are ending at once: economic, ecological, political, cultural.
At the center is a regulation crisis. Nation states were built to govern bounded territories. The forces shaping daily life — finance, technology, ecology, information — are global and move faster than any government can follow. Three responses are competing: multi-stakeholder globalism, the BRICS reassertion of strong civilization-states, and a quieter third path — cosmolocalism — assembled from the bottom up by people building around institutions rather than through them.
Underneath all three is what Michel calls the phygital shift: digital layers merging so thoroughly with physical life that the two can no longer be separated. "We have an immature technosphere which destroys the biosphere," he says. "Our challenge is to create a mature technosphere that can live with the biosphere." Not catastrophe — a design problem. Meanwhile, at the edges: "We are in a period of a Darwinian selection of seed forms." People are trying new things. Most will fail. Some will not.
Part 3: How We Build — Possibilities Worth Exploring
Cosmolocalism is an organizing principle rather than a blueprint: "Everything heavy should be more local and everything light should be more global and shared." Matter and energy carry real ecological cost in transit. Knowledge and design travel freely. Solar Lamp — an open-source design available to any small manufacturer — brought light to four million students in India, enabling 400,000 to access university-level education. One open design, locally made, globally connected.
Michel describes this as the archipelago model: islands autonomous and rooted, but linked through mutual aid and shared knowledge. Eco-villages in France grew from 150 to 1,500 in a decade. Bioregional movements connect farmers, consumers, and makers. Web3 communities test new governance models. Diverse, scattered, still being proven.
What draws these experiments together is something the commons has always done: make cooperation easier than conflict. Michel describes sitting at a table at a Web3 gathering — a climate collapser, an impact investor, and a climate denier, talking openly and generously. "As long as you and I are contributing to something we believe in, you can be Asian, I can be European, you can be a socialist, I can be a capitalist. We don't care because we're building something together and I need you and you need me." The commons as structure rather than ideology.
The inner dimension threads through all of it. Self-sovereignty, as Michel frames it, begins simply: "You are what you pay attention to. That's who you become." In an environment engineered to fragment attention, choosing deliberately where it goes is an active personal practice.
⭐ Michel & MAGIC
Michel Bauwens is a Belgian political theorist, founder of the P2P Foundation, and author of Fourth Generation Civilization on Substack. But beneath the credentials lives something more private: since childhood he has been a world-builder, spending hours constructing imaginary competitions, and still today assembling entire planetary landscapes in his mind before sleep. "It just gives me peace," he says. That same impulse — holding complexity until the parts fit — is inseparable from what he calls his magic: "I never speak without feeling what I say... you just speak the truth as you experience it, as you seek it. I think that gives you power."
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mbauwens/
Substack: https://substack.com/@michelbauwens
Creative Process
Discuss Potential Outlines: Human + ai
Create Initial Drafts & Iterate: Human + ai
Ensure Guest Alignment: Michel Bauwens
Ensure Final Alignment: Dr. Jiani Wu
Initial Publication: Mar 7, 2026
Disclaimer:
AI technologies are harnessed to create initial content derived from genuine conversations. Human re-creation & review are used to ensure accuracy, relevance & quality.
