Living Unchained: Building a moneyless, post scarcity society

Ben’s disorientation deepens as he confronts the realities of life without money: shared abundance, trust in technology, and communities built on care instead of profit. Each experience challenges his assumptions—and begins to soften his skepticism.

For updates on all things "Waking Up" and or to purchase the book to tag along with this seasons BookCast visit www.wakingupstory.com.

In Episode 1, we met Benjamin Michaels: a billionaire dying of cancer, clinging to control while the world outside his skyscraper begins to reject everything he built. Today, in Episode 2, we walk with him through his final moments—his last conversation with his daughter, his death, and the quiet beginning of something radically different.

For updates on all things "Waking Up" and or to purchase the book to tag along with this seasons BookCast visit www.wakingupstory.com.

Season 4—where we take a journey through Harald Neslein Sandø’s novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity. This isn’t a textbook. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a story—a sci-fi narrative about a man named Benjamin Michaels who wakes up a hundred years after being cryogenically frozen… into a world that no longer uses money.

This season, we’ll travel with Ben as he grapples with the collapse of his old beliefs, and we’ll reflect on what that story means for our lives today. In each episode, I’ll read several chapters, offer a recap, share reflections—often tied to ideas from my own book Unchained: Living Without Money—and end with a weekly contributionist challenge to try in your own life.

For updates on all things "Waking Up" and or to purchase the book to tag along with this seasons BookCast visit www.wakingupstory.com.

As Season 3 draws to a close, we reflect on Lewis Hyde’s afterword to The Gift, written 25 years after the book’s release. In this powerful final chapter, Hyde explores the future of gift culture—how we support art, science, and connection in a world consumed by markets. We look at the call to create gift institutions that last beyond us—and the responsibility we all share to become good ancestors. With reflections tied to Unchained: Living Without Money and a preview of Season 4’s journey into Waking Up: A New Dawn for Humanity by Harald Sandø.

In this final chapter, Lewis Hyde steps back to reflect on everything we’ve explored—asking not only what the gift is, but what it means to live in alignment with it. And for us, as we reach the end of this season, that means taking stock of what we’ve learned and how we carry it forward.

Here, we follow Ezra Pound—not just the poet, but the ideologue, the economist, the man who tried to rebuild a moral society by reshaping the mechanisms of money itself. It’s a descent into myth, politics, and silence… and it asks a piercing question: What happens when the giver tries to become the architect of the gift’s delivery system?

In this episode of Living Unchained, we dive into “Imagist Money,” the fourth section of Chapter 10 in Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Here, Hyde unpacks Ezra Pound’s radical vision: a currency that decays, a poetic economy grounded not in usury, but in the enduring gifts of nature and art.

Today’s episode continues Chapter 10 of Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. This is Part III — The Jew in the Hedge, and I want to offer a clear warning upfront:

This episode deals with Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism, mental unraveling, and the psychological shadows that haunted his later years.

It is not easy listening — and it shouldn't be.

Last time, we walked with Ezra Pound through his poetic awakening and his sensitivity to cultural value — value that lies beyond the realm of price. Today, we follow him deeper — into the politics of the imagination, and into the tension between the artist’s impulse to give, and the society’s habit of commodifying.

Hyde introduces Ezra Pound’s poetic method as a kind of healing response to the fragmentation of modernity — and explores Pound’s drive to use poetry as a force for integration, moral coherence, and ultimately, gift exchange.