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In this second interview with Tom Chi, Founder of At One Ventures, Tom provides updates on his fund’s work, and discusses his forecast on the next three economic “epochs” that humanity will create and experience through thoughtful guidance and compassionate commerce.
APPROACHING NEW ECONOMIC EPOCHS
In our current epoch, what Tom calls “Epoch 0,” our global economic activity is primarily extractive, and has embedded in it a dangerously destructive logic: “to run the economy, we must destroy the ecology.” In the next epoch (Epoch One), our economic activity will be “materially productive” instead of extractive, Tom asserts. Then in the subsequent epoch (Epoch Two), the global economy will be primarily focused around enriching ecosystem metabolics. Finally, in the most advanced economic epoch (Epoch Three), Tom predicts that we’ll be maximizing diverse nutrient flows and “savoring” each solar photon and each water molecule – all within the logical rubric of global commercial activity. These Epochs are discussed in further detail in the “State of the Planet” talk that Tom gave at a recent At One Ventures annual general meeting of shareholders. Tom has shared a Vimeo link to this talk – available in the show notes.
Ultimately, according to Tom, we are undergoing an evolution of human economics that is taking us from the massive extraction and exploitation of our current “Anthropocene” economics toward a fundamental and systematized ecological and societal sacredness that will infuse stewardship and regeneration into our entire global system of trade and commerce.
This is a very lofty, compelling, and – one might also say – inspirational view of what’s possible in our shared near- and mid-term future. And, although Tom is a philosophical humanist, he is by no means isolated in an ivory tower. Rather, Tom is the founder and CEO of the investment firm, At One Ventures, which has already deployed approximately $150 million into a variety of advanced regenerative technologies through its first fund, and is now deploying $300 million through its second fund. The fund is performing in the very top 2% of all venture capital funds nation-wide.
ECONOMICS IS A DESIGN DISCIPLINE – NOT A SCIENCE
Perhaps one of the most salient insights that Tom shares with us in his second Y on Earth Community Podcast appearance, is the critically important recognition that economics is a design discipline, not a science. That is, instead of dealing in “laws of nature” as is too often assumed and/or conflated with economics, the systems and structures of our global commercial activity are instead the result of human constructs. And these all too often are embedded with erroneous, immoral, and ultimately ineffective assumptions.
ABOUT TOM CHI
Cornell educated, Tom Chi has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to designer to corporate executive developing new hardware/software products and services. He has played a significant role in established projects with global reach (Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Search, Google), and scaled new projects from conception to significance (Yahoo Answers from 0 to 90 million users). Tom has pioneered and practiced a unique approach to rapid prototyping, visioning, and leadership that can jump start innovative new ideas as well as move organizations at unprecedented speeds. These approaches have benefitted both industry-leading multinationals and startups alike. He was a founding team member of Google X developing technology such as Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars. Through his investment work he was able to establish and elaborate a thesis on how humanity can become a net positive force through the emergence of environmentally regenerative technology as well as radically disrupting “nature-negative” industries. This has allowed him to combine two areas of longtime focus – developing breakthrough technology while addressing global issues. Tom brings a fundamentals-driven (both physics and financial) approach to investment and is deeply passionate about supporting entrepreneurs, building relationships, and helping to realize a future that brings humanity and nature back into vibrant harmony.
RESOURCES & RELATED EPISODES
Tom Chi – “State of the Planet” Talk – At One Ventures Annual General Meeting
Episode 137 – Georgia Kelly, on Mondragon Cooperatives
Episode 127 – John Perkins, “Life Economy vs. Death Economy”
Episode 96 – John Fullerton, Founder, Capital Institute
Episode 94 – Tom Chi, Founder, At One Ventures
Episode 28 – Scott Black, Executive Director, Xerces Society
Episode 25 – Hunter Lovins, “A Finer Future”
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Welcome to the YonEarth community podcast. I’m your host, Aaron William Perry. And today
we’re visiting for a second time with technologist and financier Tom Chi. Hi, Tom.
Hey there. How are you today? Pretty good. I’m really looking forward to our
conversation and we’ve got a lot to cover obviously. Absolutely. Tom Chi is the
founder of At1 Ventures which has already deployed over a hundred million
dollars into several companies working on regeneration stewardship and
sustainability technologies. Some of these companies include iron ox which is
robotic agriculture, dendra systems which is drone tree planting, true which is
advanced air conditioning, wild earth, sustainable pet products, apes core 3D
printed low carbon geopolymer cement and robotic masonry, and several others.
And is in the middle now of a second fund which is looking to deploy
somewhere in the vicinity of 300 million dollars in the coming months and
quarters. And we’re so excited Tom to see the progress with all that you’re
doing with these important technologies and to hear that the first fund has
gone so well. And just in case some of our audience don’t know just to give a
little more on your background, you know Tom went to Cornell University and
prior to launching At1 Ventures did a number of technology projects and
products with companies like Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Search, Google, etc. And was
involved in the Google Glass and Google self-driving car development
efforts. And so yeah we’re gonna have a lot of talk about today including some
specific technologies. Some of the view you have into the phases of our
economic development relative to sustainability technologies will chat a
little bit about AI even. And to kick things off Tom I just thought I’d ask you
openly, you know, how are things at At1 Ventures? And what’s happening that’s
got you excited at this time? Yeah things are going very well. We as you
mentioned, we raised 150 million fund one and we did 27 investments in that
fund and that fund is off to kind of a flying start, you know, relative to
peers that started in the same year around the same size were in the top two
percent and not just for a climate but for across all types of funds and all
types of sectors. So yeah just outperforming the market by quite a bit on that
front and we are mostly done raising a 300 million dollar fund to though
that is open until, you know, toward the end of July. Wonderful and I imagine
you’re already eyeing a number of investment opportunities and probably it’s
not at this stage appropriate to talk about many of them or any of them in
great detail but I’m curious if you’re seeing emerging trends in the
technology as it relates to sustainability as it relates to ecology restoration
as it relates to climate change mitigation. Are you seeing anything that’s
emerged in the last several months since you launched fund one? Well to be clear
we started fund one, you know, over three years ago at this point so there’s a
lot that we saw and a lot of it’s well represented in the portfolio of 27. For
fund two we did our first close and fund two last summer so we’ve already had
some time with fund two but you basically open up the fund raising window for a
little bit so you know there’s some time for folks to come in so we are
actually already have eight investments in fund two including for example the
first vaccine to protect honey bees ever created and also now USD approved as
of December of 22. Oh wow that’s interesting yeah there we know
colony collapse disorder has been one of the greatest threats to our global
food supply. I imagine you could speak to some of the facts and figures on that.
Absolutely and colony collapse disorder is basically a a rough way that people
have been kind of describing the output of things. Now sometimes it was related to
things like you know American Fowlbrood European Fowlbrood which is the types of
diseases that this vaccine protects against because those tend to be the types of
diseases where the whole hive fails at once as opposed to you know things that
hit individual bees but may not be as damaging to an entire hive. But if I
want to go help characterize the major stressors for bees there’s there’s
three major stressors. One of them is Neonicotoid pesticides which are widely
used all throughout North America. They’re kind of ostensibly banned in
Europe but there’s a lot of you know agriculture that is grandfathered in where
they continue to use it at pretty large scales effectively everywhere in the
world. Another one is a type of parasite called the Varro destructor mite which
like you know if you were to scale it up to a human size it’d be like the size of
a dinner plate on a human that’s like what you know like a 12 inch dinner
plate on a human. Like that’s how big it is compared to a bee proportionally.
And you know a bee can like live with one a mite but if it ends up with two
three mites then it’s kind of a metabolic drag at a level that it really weakens
everything about the mite. And then the sorry about the bee and then the third
category is these diseases which is the stuff that the vaccines are meant to
address. Yeah wow that’s great to hear. I’ve heard some many billions of
dollars worth of food production in some significant portion of everything we
consume as humans comes from the pollinated crops. Yeah so the majority of
biomass on the planet is actually angiosperms which are flowering plants
like 80 percent. And given that the role of pollinators you know just even
beyond the basic food system is enormous. And we have been both damaging the
pollinators within our food system and if folks really want to dive into
this the University of Maryland has been running the kind of the industry benchmark reports
in terms of annual bee losses from the commercial perspective. You can just you know
search the the words that would make sense given that sentence to be able to find it not too
hard to find. And you can kind of track the kind of losses that we’ve been having.
I’ll short circuit it and say that we’ve been losing 40 to 50 percent of the commercial bees
per year every single year. So it is very dramatically impactful to the industry. This is not a
thing where it’s like a minor hit and they’re just working around it easily. This is a thing that
is leading to a very bad situation because we have fewer and fewer bees which means we need
to split more hives in order to try to get more bees which actually reduces the genetic diversity
and then because we don’t have enough bees then we bring them all to a couple places you know
North America like most of the commercial bees in North America go to southern California for
for the almond the almond crop in January and February. And the combination of reducing genetic
diversity and then concentrating everybody in the same spot at the same time that’s like a recipe
for a total collapse. Anyway put that aside for a second. That’s just the commercial stuff.
In the larger picture of the you know 80 percent you know biomass that is flowering plants
then it means that all these pollinators are out there not just the honey bees but there’s all
these pollinators that are out there that are critical to biodiversity on the planet and because of
the way that we’ve been doing agriculture and because of how widespread agricultural practices
across the world then we have been both killing the honey bees which you know we obviously keep
you know better stats on but we are accidentally killing a bunch of pollinators and for you know if
you follow the work of Charles Darwin then you’ll know about like the the moth with the 11-inch
proviscus and he kind of theorized that this moth must exist because there’s a plant with like a
you know like a 10 or 11 inch like you know like depth that you would need to get to you to be able
to successfully pollinate it and actually a lot of life on earth is like that where there is literally
only one pollinator or there might be a primary that does 90 percent of it in a secondary that does
10 percent of it and what has been happening is we have been accidentally extincting or massively
impacting the the populations of plants around the planet by hitting pollinators that weren’t even
what we’re trying to hit with our pesticides right we were trying to go deal with some some specific
agricultural pests in the field not these pollinators but we have been kind of hidden in across the
board and it is both affecting you know the biodiversity of those pollinators of course directly
but also what they pollinate a bunch of species are starting to go extinct because we just killed
all their pollinators. Yeah we did an episode a while back with Scott Black the executive director
of the zersi society that’s doing so much to help educate and mobilize the public around
these issues with pollinators and other invertebrates specifically and just recently was also
interviewing a Chelsea Green author talking about wood ship in agricultural gardens and orchards
and other settings in order to help rebalance the fungal to bacterial ratios in the soil ecosystems
similarly the the broad scale use of pesticides has severely disrupted underground we’ve got the
pollinators and invertebrates above ground and then we’ve got this other set of ecosystem members
below ground where we’ve essentially been systematically destroying the fungal species and
have seen an increase in the bacterial species bringing the soil ecosystems out of balance as well
and so this is an above and below kind of a two-pronged situation it’s so important that we’re
addressing right and i’m curious if you’re doing any work with soil related regeneration at this
point with your portfolios. Yeah actually one of our fun two companies is called myrotera and they
basically have created the you know the most accurate way of being able to go measure the compounds
that are in soil and the technology is such that you could do the stuff infield you could you know
measure everything and change your your treatment plan if you’re a farmer within the same day
as opposed to right now you would typically need to go around and take a bunch of soil samples a
bunch of soil cores send them to a soil testing lab wait for weeks or months by the time the stuff
gets back it’s like other management practices has happened in between you’ve applied fertilizer you’ve
applied you know herbicide you’ve applied different things that might actually change that profile
so we’ve never been able to just like understand where the soil is right now and then be able to
make smart management choices and because of that you know it’s estimated that the application of the
the most common inputs into agriculture are massively over applied right now and this is you know
NPK’s nitrogen phosphorus potassium is kind of like the the classic like super trio and then
depending on what you’re growing then there will be different you know micronutrients and
others that you will track because it’s important for that crop type but NPK is pretty common across
the board so something like this will would allow you to kind of go into the field understand NPK
literally right there and be able to go you know adjust how you were applying things in the field
immediately and and by our estimates it could move into the territory of doubling farm incomes
just given the nature of the current margins and the percentage of the cost structure that
currently goes to over application and the over application helps nobody right if you put extra
nitrogen on the field you’re like oh maybe it stays fertile for the next year no it doesn’t
basically becomes nitrous oxide emissions which is basically the third most you know prevalent greenhouse
gas that we are producing at scale after carbon dioxide and methane so it helps nobody the farmer
wasted money that could have been money in their pocket you know the the environment is further hurt
the soil is not improved in any way from it so to be able to go fix this fix multiple problems
including the kind of runoff that leads to eutrification downstream
yeah now there is one other one other like benefit and tweak to this is in the process of being
able to like grab NPK the same instrument doesn’t just get three things it can actually you know
assess everything that it’s trained for so we could train the thing to actually pick up hundreds
of interesting compounds including all this micronutrients but notably be able to go measure soil
carbon directly and there’s a lot of people that are out there say well if I fly this satellite
and we’re used synthetic aperture radar and we interpolate the points right then one can presume
that the soil carbon levels bubble block and I would just tell you that it’s really hard to pull that
off you’re just very far away from the thing you’re trying to measure and a farmer walking their
field just kind of pointing this instrument a number of things you can get insanely more accurate
and if you wanted to be able to enroll farmers into you know the larger system of carbon markets
that it’s helpful to be able to just get very accurate measurements close up now besides the fact
that’s um you know it’s been hard to measure in the past the other reason that carbon markets
haven’t been that interesting to farmers is you know your land might sequester you know one to three
tons per year per acre right we just kind of put it in a reasonable range look it can do less than
that for sure you know but certainly farmers have been able to get into that range and if that’s
the case if you look at the voluntary carbon markets right now maybe you’re going to net yourself
eight dollars ten dollars twelve dollars you know at the end of the year on an acre that might
top line a thousand dollars so you can understand why people don’t completely change their
management approaches to get eight more dollars on a thousand now look their margins are way worse
than that maybe they’re take home from the thousand dollars is only sixty dollars but even then
it’s like do you change the management practice for everything and put yourself in kind of this
unknown space in order to try to nudge things up by eight dollars it’s not it’s not that you know
compelling to most farmers but if you actually have an instrument where they’re going out there
measuring NPK which is what they want to do anyway because you might save a hundred dollars on
on fertilizer and inputs for hundred fifty dollars and you get this very material to your to your
net profitability then then in the process of doing that you actually automatically got the
carbon measurement then it just becomes a bonus on top of something that you were going to do anyway
and the one last thing I’ll say about this tech which I think is very very compelling is that
unlike you know neutron backscatter or a bunch of these you know other kind of near and for
red spectroscopy approaches which have a bunch of different limitations not only will we be able
to go and and measure that carbon directly we will be able to go tell the difference between
you know short labile carbon long labile carbon and mineralized carbon and in these markets people
have a at a huge price premium for things that are kind of mineralized because we know that to
stay in the in the soils in a pretty stable state for thousands of years sometimes tens of thousands
of years right and then labile carbon short labile carbon might be in an organism and then back
out in the atmosphere in five days you know long labile might be in there for you know five years
ten years you know hundred years but you know it will come back out in a bit but to be able to
understand the relative proportions and kind of teach farmers from that direct measurement
to be able to to manage things in a way that massively improve their profitability but also
kind of creates that on ramp for a relationship to carbon markets it’s it’s very exciting on a bunch
of fronts we we could not be more excited about the kind of forward potential of that type of tech
getting into the world. It’s so wonderful so that’s Mira Tara and just for some of our audience that
may not know the term eutrophication this is a of tech getting into the world.
It’s so wonderful.
So that’s Mira Terra.
And just for some of our audience,
it may not know the term beautification.
This is essentially when we overload
in water environments, the nutrient density,
we lead to essentially oxygen-starved situations
leading to major dead zones in many of our river
deltas worldwide.
And so this is a really significant issue
where our major river systems meet the oceans of the world.
And I didn’t catch that.
The highest form of water pollution
in the world by volume.
And it has very substantial ecological effects.
Yeah, yeah.
I didn’t catch the name of the honeybee vaccine company
if you mentioned it and want to share it.
That’s called Delan Animal Health, E-A-L-A-N.
Cool.
I want to be sure to share with our audience also, Tom,
this wonderful talk that you gave
at one of your annual general meetings
and shared with me and with our YonEarth community state
of the planet talk.
And we’re going to make this available in the show notes
and probably through the YonEarth community blog
page for folks to check it out themselves.
In this talk, you mentioned several really interesting things
about emerging technologies, about some of the trends
that you’re tracking.
And one of the things specifically that struck me
was your characterization of these four different epochs
in our economic development, our technology development,
as it relates to things like ecosystem, stewardship,
regeneration, climate stabilization,
and so on, which, in the way you characterize these,
it begins with epoch zero.
Can you walk us through this framework
and tell us a bit about this?
Yeah, so I’m glad you’ll be able to kind of post it
for folks to see the full talk, because full talk’s like an hour.
So there’s no way that I’d be able to fit it
in like a five minute answer or whatever.
But it’s called the three epochs of ecological technology.
Because there’s three where you’re actually trying
to get better relative to the relationship
of economy to ecology.
And then the zero one is the one we’re in right now,
which is the fully extractive economy.
So epoch zero is the extractive economy.
And the gist of the extractive economy
is that natural resources are understood to be commodities.
People achieve financial leverage
by basically scaling extraction.
So if you can, if the same equipment
can cut down twice as many trees in a day, then boom,
that’s scale, guys, that’s how we get leverage.
And then economic indicators in that kind of framework,
which is remember the framework of today,
tend to either be uncoupled,
but often more often antithetical to ecological goals.
So like on one hand, you might look at that
and you say like, yeah, yeah, okay, sure,
the same machine where like version 2.0 of that machine
can cut down twice as many trees per day.
Yeah, I would make a lot more money like that.
It’s a big economic win.
But you can see how that’s like directly against
the ecological health indicators.
So effectively, like in this current epoch,
to run an economy, we cannot help,
but destroy the ecology.
Now, if you think about where we could be going instead of that,
because it’s like, well, you know,
what are we even talking about?
You’re just describing the world of days.
Is there any other thing you could do?
Then the epoch beyond that is called
the material productivity economy.
And the gist of material productivity,
is it as a slightly different question?
It asks, you know, well, first it recognizes that,
you know, instead of resources just being commodities,
that resources, you know, natural resources
are still commodities in this framework,
but with practical natural limits.
And we actually see a bunch of economic frameworks,
whether it’s donut economics or whether it’s, you know,
that were like the different kind of analyses of like,
oh, we’re using three and a half earths of this resource,
that kind of thing, that are basically trying to talk
about the commodities with practical limits kind of thing.
So all of that thinking fits in a material productivity epoch,
which by the way, there’s still two more epochs beyond that.
So, you know, but that said,
this is the epoch, which is closest to us.
And because of it, it’s the one that we can most practically
work on today.
But getting to it, if you understand
that commodities have practical limits,
then what it means to get better
in a material productivity economy
is you ask yourself the question,
well, how do I get more financial leverage
by more judicious and effective use
of the same amount of material or the same amount of energy?
So for example, like if I go and take a handful of sand,
a handful of sand could be sold to the construction market
for literally pennies, right?
Fraction of a penny for a handful of sand.
But the same amount of mass and a handful of sand
could be used to go make a hundred microchips.
And that might, you know, that might get you back
like $5,000 worth of the top line revenue
compared to, you know, if you’re selling it to like a
through a sand and gravel situation
to construction, it might be one penny.
Now, that was the same amount of physical material.
We had to do different things to it,
but like we got more material productivity out of it.
That’s why it’s called the material productivity up up.
And the same sort of question around materials
can be asked around energy.
So for each, you know, kilowatt or jewel or BTU,
you pick your favorite, you know, unit of energy,
then how do we get the most benefit?
Whether it’s economic benefit, social benefit,
ecological benefit, that’s the question
that the material productivity epoch asks of us.
Now, like I said, this is the one that’s closest to us.
And most of the folks that talk about sustainability
are talking about different variations of this epoch.
But, you know, in our work and if people spend time
with the talk, then you will hear
that there’s a couple epochs beyond this.
So, so, and the next epoch is kind of the first really big jump.
So, epoch two, because everything until now is like,
look, natural resources are commodities.
We just got to be smarter with it.
You know, we need to have an outer ring to the donut.
We need to have an inner ring to the donut.
Hey, right, like we just got to be smarter
about some of these things.
But, epoch two is the first big jump.
And this is basically instead of understanding
natural resources as commodities,
what if we understood, you know, the actual resource
is healthy ecosystem metabolic.
So, not nouns, not the nouns of tonnage of wood extracted,
lumber extracted, not the nouns of, you know,
like tonnage of like mind or extracted,
which is the way that we think about economic growth
right now and resources right now.
But like thinking in turn, which are also nouns, right,
those are basically just like this is a thing
that I can sell you, it’s a noun.
If instead you have the big shift of starting to think
about ecosystem metabolic,
you start to understand the resources of the verb.
The watershed is a verb or a watershed to be healthy
actually creates an enormous amount of economic value.
Now, we find out that it’s a lot,
enormous amount of economic value when we mess it up, right?
When we dam it or we mess up the poison, the ground water
or like, you know, put a bunch of fertilizer in there
so it’s eutrophied and so on and so forth, right?
Like we find out later that oh my gosh,
this was actually the resource.
Now what is a watershed?
A watershed is not a noun,
but I can like pick up and sell you,
like I can sell you like a couple tons of timber
or where I can sell you a couple, you know,
tons of the specific extracted ore
or even like a service, right?
Like a watershed is effectively only healthy
if the verb is going right.
And you need to like get out of that mindset of like,
well, what even happens on a market exchange?
A market exchange is basically selling nouns.
So this stock is a noun and it represents a company
that does this type of extraction
and that’s a bunch of nouns and if you get out
of that entire thinking,
if you get out of that line of thinking entirely
and you start to understand we are only here
because of a series of healthy, you know,
ecological metabolic verbs.
And to the extent that we start to treat those verbs
as actually the core of where economic, you know,
wealth comes from,
then we will start treating the whole thing quite differently.
Now there’s been a bunch of like, you know,
partial stabs at this.
So for example, valuing nature-based services
is an example of that.
But in a way that’s kind of taking the verb
and trying to move it back into a noun frame
and be like see, like it’s worth this
as opposed to the ore that you would have got,
it was worth that, right?
But the problem with that frame
is you’re not valuing the metabolic directly.
And because you’re not valuing it directly,
we might discover a new type of ore
that is just more valuable than the ecosystem service.
And also it all explodes.
So like I’m not saying that people should not do that type of work.
I’m just saying that it has programmed in it
a type of fragility because the foundational thought process
is still trading nouns in a market
as opposed to the verbs are the source of all economic value
and in a way they are sacred.
And actually the question of sacredness
is a pretty deep one on this,
where it is often said,
we live in this market economy, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I know we’re going to talk a bit
and we can talk about that next, actually,
after I talk about the epics about,
economy economics is the design discipline
as opposed to a science.
But right now we live in this kind of market economy
or we all kind of believe it in enough
that’s the current way that economics is designed.
And because of it, everything has a price,
which means even the damage in the world,
if you could make enough money at it,
you will feel free to do it.
But I will put out there that we actually do have a type
of economic classification that’s outside of that.
We haven’t used it very often,
but it’s really important that we get more familiar with it.
And for lack of better term,
I call it kind of like the sacred fraction of things, right?
And for example, there are international laws
against selling organs, right?
Because even though organs would have a market price
and a person could live without a kid, right?
It’s possible, a lot of people do.
Then it would be a very dangerous world
if you basically just had a price for all of that
and people might use that to go exploit the poor
and be like, well, you know, you only make $10 a day
and your kidney would be worth this much, right?
Like you start to get into pretty gruesome things
if you don’t have a fraction of the world
that is just considered to be sacred.
And I think everybody understands this.
Like if you had just had your first kid
and you’re like, you know, walking down the street
and the kids in the stroller, whatever,
and they’re six months old or something,
if somebody walked by and said, how much?
You’d be like, no, this is not for sale.
I know we live in a market economy,
this is just off the table.
We’re not even a little bit okay with that.
So like clearly every human mind understands this category.
We pretend not to understand this category
when we participate in a market economy.
But I think we actually need to put some more things
in this category, including the sacredness
of ecosystem metabolic as the source
of all value creation in the economy.
And this is why I say Epic II is actually a pretty big shift.
Now, if you get that done,
then where you get financial leverage
is not from the machine that can extract stuff
twice as fast.
The place where you get financial leverage is
that a little bit of care in protecting
or enriching the ecosystem metabolic
leads to massively healthier ecosystem metabolic,
which creates way more wealth
than the tiny bit of care that you put into that.
And you think about all the folks
that spend time on regenerative landscaping
and agriculture, right?
They’ll spend a little bit of time
with some earth moving in order to set up some scales
like in order to go change the moisture transport
about the landscape.
And because of it, they are encouraging
healthier ecosystem metabolic.
Well, that one time upfront cost
could lead to major economic benefit
year after year after year.
And actually the more that you make those verbs healthier,
then the more, it actually,
unlike most mechanical things
that where the maintenance cost gets higher over time,
in this case, as the ecosystem gets healthier,
the maintenance cost gets lower over time.
So like the net productivity is higher,
the maintenance cost is lower and lower.
And in the crudest terms,
you can call this a form of financial leverage.
Because at the end of the day,
then a bunch of money people are going to need
to understand this.
And they like to go here words like financial leverage.
And this is absolutely mappable
into that framework.
But you need to first understand
that the basic metabolic is sacred.
And then once you get into that,
then you can start saying like,
okay, well, what is most honoring of the sacred metabolic?
And what is the ways that we can work with,
manage, be in concert with these metabolic
so that it gets way healthier,
because we’re around, as opposed to,
oh, well, we cut down this forest,
but the land can still take it.
So we dug out this ore,
but the land can still take it.
We killed these pollinators,
but the land can still take it.
This is how we got into sustainability as a mindset,
whereas like we knew we were destructive.
So we’re just like, let’s not destroy it more.
Let’s bring it up to that level of a truce.
But to me, it’s like the truce is not stable.
The truce that you might come to you
with a sustainability only mindset.
Because like when somebody makes a sustainable business,
it’s almost like you have gotten to this balance point
where market, tech, and ecology
are all just kind of in and up balance.
But tech and economy just keep on changing, right?
So it’s a very unstable truce.
So you and your company might have gotten it
to a good spot in 1980,
but then market and technology has changed by 1990.
So your thing that might have been actually
materially sustainable back then,
then the truce is broken and you need to fix it again.
The truce is broken and you need to fix it again.
So this is why I think we need a bigger jump
than that mine state.
You need to flip over to the other side
where ecosystem metabolites are effectively sacred.
And then you start thinking about leverage
in terms of verbs as opposed to nouns.
You know, verbs on improving the health of that metabolism
is opposed to nouns on intensity of extraction.
Let me let me interject with a quick question on this
because it’s such a beautiful articulation of vision
and hopefully where we’re headed with epoch two.
And the way you just articulated it really compliments
the way you did in this other video
we’re making available.
I have a question which is you’re describing the what
in a really beautiful and profound way.
And I want to ask about the how.
So how do we mobilize capital into the behaviors
and activities of epoch two in such a manner
that there’s a sufficient profit mode of there
that the investor class is typically looking for?
Yes, so you already mentioned one of the companies
dendrosystems and dendrosystems does scalable
ecosystem restoration.
And you know, oh, well, who’s in the market for that?
Well, our initial customers were these kind of mining companies
where they need to do it for regulatory reasons.
But some of our more recent customers
getting more and more interesting where we had done
a pretty extensive restoration of main grows
in southern Myanmar.
And what’s the story behind it?
Well, basically those main grows initially were there,
but the Myanmar government actually cleared them
for quote unquote economic development.
What actually happened in clearing them
is they got rid of the source of subsistence fishing
for a huge population in southern Myanmar
and also they had starving people on their hands.
And they now needed to spend a huge amount
in government services just to have the people not starve.
Now, you look at something like that
and you’re like, well, that’s chaos, right?
So they basically came and it’s like, you know,
actually it would be cheaper to just fix the ecosystem
than it would be for us to keep paying these, now,
now that’s a government type situation.
And I think governments because things are currently
like externalized from industry are oftentimes
going to be the folks that are actually first looking
at doing some things in epoch two.
But it doesn’t mean that you aren’t creating
very clear economic value as mentioned there.
Another one is that same company is now looking
at restoring over 20,000 hectares of main grows
around the Abu Dhabi region.
And what you may or may not know about it
is they cleared their main grows some decades ago as well.
And Abu Dhabi has developed quite a bit
over those decades and because of it,
people want to have beachfront property
and they want to be able to go to the shore.
But because they destroyed all these kind
of natural erosion barriers,
then they’re needing to go out there
and mine sand for literally billions of dollars
in order to just dump them there
and hope that it doesn’t erode away, which of course it does.
So you look at this as like, well,
wouldn’t it be way cheaper for you to actually fix this
by spending $50 million putting the ecosystem back in place
than it would be for you to spend billions of dollars,
you know, trying to go and dredge sand
and dump it in some other place that just erodes away.
And we have this all over the place
and the barrier islands along the eastern coast of North America.
It was just everywhere this type of, you know,
quote unquote, business is happening
that is honestly, once again, just both ecological chaos
and economic.
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