Aaron Perry
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In this regenerative technology-focused episode, Tom Chi discusses a wide range of massively scalable solutions designed to regenerate ecosystems and transform our world. His fund, At One Ventures, has invested in several potentially game changing companies, including: Iron Ox (robotic agriculture), Dendra Systems (drone tree planting), Treau (advanced air conditioning), Cruze Foam (biodegradable styrofoam and polyeurethane alternatives), Climax Foods (providing the “Rosetta Stone” for plant-based meat alternatives), Wild Earth (sustainable pet products), Apis Core (3D-printed, low-carbon geopolymer cement/robotic masonry), Finless Foods (Sashimi-grade sea food alternatives), and Semtive (advanced wind generators), and Precision AI (drone crop/weed analysis).
Tom is as much a philosophical humanist with a deep commitment to the ethics of non-violence, stewardship, and kindness, as he is a brilliant technologist and shrewd capitalist. Interviewed from his home-office in San Francisco following devastating wild fires and the post-apocalyptic visuals of dark orange skies at mid-day, Tom shares his idea of “charging our trauma batteries,” and looks to previous generations for examples of intrepid resilience. With a global perspective, he advocates “letting nature rest.” He also speaks to the “trifercation” of global agriculture: subsistence farming on small plots, mono-cropping on 1,000+ acre plots, and specialty cropping on 10-2,000 acre farms – and that different strategies are needed to transform each for better ecological stewardship and humanitarian outcomes.
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:https://www.atoneventures.comtomchi.comTwitter: @thegoodtomchiInstagram: @thegoodtomchi
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 with Tom Chi from At One Ventures. Hey Tom.
Hey there.
How are you doing today?
Pretty good. Just had lunch.
Yeah. That’s great.
Tom Chi has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysical researcher to fortune 500 consultant
to corporate executive, developing new hardware and software products and services.
He plays a significant role in established projects with global reach, including Microsoft
Outlook, Yahoo Search, and scaled new projects from conception to significance, like Yahoo
Answers from 0 to 90 million users.
Tom has pioneered and practiced a unique approach to rapid prototyping, visioning, and
the leadership that can jump start innovative new ideas, as well as move large organizations
at unprecedented speeds. These approaches have benefited over a dozen industry leading
companies. He most recently served as head of product experience at Google X, developing
technology such as Google Glass and Google’s self-driving cars. His current focus is working
with social and environmental entrepreneurs around the globe, rebooting the fundamental
frameworks of entrepreneurship itself, and coaching and teaching a limited number of values
aligned organizations and leaders.
So Tom, I’m really happy to have this opportunity to visit with you and talk about several of
the projects you’re engaged in and working on. But before we get into kind of the latest
and greatest that you’re engaged with, let me just ask you a bit about your background
and backstory. How did you get into technology in the first place? What first drew you to
the tech arena?
I mean, I started building things from a very young age, so like four or five. So anything
that was around, I guess a lot of people have stories about like, oh, I was very mechanically
inclined. I like to take things apart. I never just took things apart to take them apart.
I was always taking them apart because I could see some other thing you could make with
them. So I started that from quite early and built a bunch of really, I don’t know,
sophisticated for my years kind of things from the very early days. So how did I start?
It’s just, I just started.
Yeah, it’s in your blood, so to speak. You’ve been at it for a while. Let me ask, can
you just describe succinctly what you and your team are doing at one ventures and what
is unique about your approach as a finance vehicle?
Yeah, we’re a venture firm that is focused on helping humanity become a net positive
to nature. So we kind of see the goal of our work and hopefully the goal of the larger
economy over the course of human history is to go kind of create a world where human
presence on the planet makes nature healthier because we’re here as opposed to the crazy
damage that we’re doing right now or just being more efficient around that damage or getting
to some sort of uneasy truth through some level of sustainability. I think we should put
the bar much higher and say, well, if we’re here, then we should really contribute.
And we define nature as air, water, soil, biodiversity. So you got to ask a question, how
could you redesign industry so you build health in those four areas as opposed to death?
And how do you, how do you find this is, you know, either resonating or perhaps you’re
finding resistance with some of the established companies and interests and sectors out there?
Yeah, you shouldn’t worry too much about that. Like, you know, they’re, I’m paraphrasing
Buckminster Fuller a little bit, but he basically said something like, don’t bother fighting
systems, obsolete them. So we’re basically building the, you know, the foundation of the
next economy. And we’re doing it in a way where the unit economics and the environment
economics are superior. So most of the games so far has been better and better unit economics,
but worse and worse environmental costs. And that’s how we have been pushing the economy.
But if you basically say, no, we’re only going to invest in things that have both better
unit economics and better environmental economics, then you start a different kind of trajectory.
Yeah, that’s great. I love that. Bucky Fuller quote, and I’ll track it down and include that in
the show notes because it really is apropos for our discussion today. You know, Tom, you and I met
last summer at a conference at which you were talking about the use of drones to plant trees
to the tune of millions per week in certain regions of the world. And I just want to ask getting
into some of your different technologies and projects, could you summarize for our audience
that particular technology and the impact you’ve already had thus far with it? Yeah. So what I
mostly talked about during that session last year was the planting side of things, but the team
has also been working on monitoring and maintenance as well. And altogether, it represents a radical
reduction in the cost to be able to restore ecosystems. And I know a lot of questions come up,
like we never plant monocultures. We’re always planting a variety of species as recommended by
folks that know that terrain well, whether that be local ecologists, indigenous peoples, that sort
of thing. And we do so in a way where we’ll plant the first stage of ecological succession. And then
after a couple of years, we might come back and plant a follow-on stage of ecological succession
because the most resilient ecosystem is the really healthy, diverse ones. And those are also the
ones that lead to the most permanent carbon storage. Those are also the ones that have the most
co-benefits in terms of their production. So yeah, that’s broadly what the company does. Since we
last heard about the work, the team has continued to improve the tackian is the leading player in
the world in terms of reducing the cost of restoration per hectare. And they started out with, you know,
single-hector tens of hectares type projects. They’ve moved through hundreds of hectares,
thousands of hectares that work on tens of thousands of hectares projects right now. And we’re
bidding on some hundred thousand hectare projects. So we’re going into a pretty interesting restoration
scale. What are you guys finding in terms of success rates with germination of seeds and, you know,
maturation and all of that with the technological approach? Yeah, so the simplest answer is that we do
as well as nature does in the same system. And we’re focused both on the above ground diversity
and below ground diversity. So we’ll sample things like what’s the soil microbiome like, you know,
and what went healthy looked like here. And what’s the mix of, you know, mycelia that you want to have
beneath the soils. And we will go and prep it to both restore above and below. And yeah, I mean,
overall like we’re getting really good traction in terms of the types of quality restoration
that’s coming up. So the folks that we’ve worked with look at the quality of restoration that we’re
doing. And it’s significantly exceeding their expectations. So I’m just say we’re kind of
doing fine on that front. I know that folks want to go narrow it down to like germination rates,
but when you jump into that, it actually gets a lot more complicated because a tropical rainforest
nature, nature planting a seed in that environment might have an ubercent germination rate.
Corial forests might be 15%. And like we do roughly the same as nature in those settings. We’re not
able to plant an aborial setting and get a 90% germination rate, but neither can nature. So like when
the thing spans from 15 to 90%, then if you were like tell me the germination rate, it’s like,
that’s a little too imprecise. Yeah, that makes sense actually. And I’m curious, are you,
is that particular enterprise tapping into the global carbon markets? And is that one of the
finance levers that’s being utilized? So we are not being paid for carbon credits at this moment.
I think that as the business gets into the 100,000 million hectare kind of planting scale,
which is something that will be at within, you know, I’ll say about 12 months, so not too far from
now, then I think we become very interesting in terms of folks that want to play in the carbon
markets because the cost of carbon sequestration per ton via biological sequestration tends to be
very, very cheap compared to technical sequestration. So technical sequestration like
direct air capture or retrofitting a point source emission or smoke stack, you know, that’s kind
of in the 50 to 200 ton, you know, dollars per ton range. Bio sequestration is oftentimes less than
10 dollars a ton and we’re kind of in the range of less than a dollar a ton. So I think from the
pure, you know, cost perspective, we’re very attractive. Now the reason that bio sequestration
hasn’t already taken over the world and the folks, you know, people, you know, are spending a
bunch of time on technical sequestration still is that technical sequestration is good in terms of
additionality. So if I grab stuff out of the air and then put it in the ground, it’s clearly
additional, like, you know, clearly something has moved. It’s good in terms of measureability
because you know exactly how much flow through this pipe or exactly how many kilograms of material
you collected and depending on how you do it, it can be good in terms of permanence of storage.
And bio sequestration depending on the approach can be much weaker on those fronts, but we believe
that using the approach that we’re doing that the additionality will be clear because there’ll be a
lot of places that were degraded ecosystems and after we work on them, there’ll be, you know,
you know, very healthy ecosystems. So that’s clear additionality. We believe that we can get
great measureability because we’ve already been working on the machine-learn algorithms to be
able to go identify species and quantify carbon in the landscape. So I think we’re going to get to
as accurate in terms of the measureability. And then relative to the permanence, it really there,
it’s less about how deep can you vary underground. It’s much more about how robust is that ecosystem?
Is the more robust the ecosystem than the more permanent the storage, basically.
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So where can folks go to learn more about the tree planting
technology that you’re working with online? Yeah, the trees are the sexy parts. So everybody
wants to talk about the trees, but we do also plant grasses and shrubs in every kind of species
that is supposed to be in that environment and also trees for sure. You can find out about it at
dendra.io, d-e-n-d-r-a.io. Great. Yep. And then I want to ask you also about the choral planting robot
project that you’re working with. I understand that’s in partnership with the National Science
Foundation. Is that right? Yeah, we got an NSF grant to build a choral planting robot. So we
started in June of this year. As of October 8th, we did our first successful pilot test,
and now we’re doing, yeah, where we planted one. Now that said, we planted one, which is not the
rate that we want to be able to go plant at, but the one that we planted, we planted it in less than
15 seconds, and we’re replacing a task that humans take about five to 10 minutes to do.
And we think that, and that wasn’t even fully automated yet, there was like some human in the loop
steering the thing. So we believe that once we do some some basic feed forward automation,
this is even before we get into complex control theory, like we can get the planting time down to
more like three seconds. And that means we’re replacing a five to 10 minute task with three second
task, we’re replacing a task that humans, humid divers need to do with something that a robot can
do. So we can also using manufacturing scale produce a lot of these robots. And the reason I’m
talking about scale in this way is we are, you know, the loss of coral reefs is a major crisis
right now. We are losing, you know, about 1.3 hectares per minute right now globally. And a
hectare is 100 by 100 meters. So you can think about like the biggest coral reef you’ve ever seen,
imagine that disappearing every single minute. Now, of course, it’s not all continuous, it’s across
the whole globe. So it’s a little crusty here, a little thing here, some bad stormers there,
store damage there, bleating them in the summer of so and so. But when you when you average that out
and even it out, then it’s we’re losing them at a rate of 1.3 hectares a minute. And if you look at
the best ways that we know how to restore right now, it takes us about a decade to restore a
hectare. So, you know, if you lose it in a minute and it takes you 10 years to build it back, then
we clearly have a lot of orders of magnitude to get through before we can be anything close to
the rate of loss. So the the whole point of taking a 10 minute task and bringing it down to three
seconds is where you get a couple orders of magnitude there. And then through, so let’s say you get
two two and a half orders of magnitude there and we have about six orders of magnitude to close.
So we’re like a million times too slow with this stuff. You know, you get a hundred
X just in the speed of planting changes. And then you pop into, you know, robotic manufacturing
scale and you you pump out 10,000 of these robots, 1,000 of these robots. And we purposely
designed the robot to be relatively inexpensive. So the one that has done the successful, you know,
pilot run, the total robot right now costs less than, you know, $3,800. And this isn’t compared
in comparison to a lot of marine robotics research platforms. Easily cost half a million,
million, two million dollars, right? So if every one of your robots cost two million dollars,
how many are you really going to put into service? Very few. But if we can get this thing,
if we’re already under 4,000 and we can push the price of this robot down to less than 2,000
or 1,500, then a couple of million dollars goes and funds a lot of this stuff. And all of a sudden,
it’s not that inconceivable for us to put, you know, 10,000 coral planting robots to work
around the world. In that kind of scenario and model, where does the revenue and funding come from?
Or where do you anticipate it will come from as that scales up?
Yeah, I mean, there are some countries that are spending, you know, reasonably aggressively to
be able to try to protect or restore their reefs. So Australia, Thailand, you know, those sorts
of places. You know, there are other places where more at the hospitality scale, you know, like a
hotel chain that is losing their coral reefs and they would love to bring them back because
they’re just direct tourism revenue associated with that. So I do think that there is some
market here, but the reason that this is grant funded as opposed to venture funded right now
is there’s significant market development to be had before you can really
quote unquote capitalize on the market. But the general just here is very similar to, you know,
tree planting or eco-restoration drones where we can we can bring down that that cost of
ecological restoration by a factor of 10, you know, we can go in here and we can bring down the
cost and speed of coral restoration by a factor of 10, 100,000. And that enables a lot of different
avenues in terms of affordability, you know, a rich donor who wants to put in 20 million to go
protect an entire coastline. All that becomes possible if you’re able to go bring down the
effective, you know, economics on it. Yeah, very interesting. I would imagine that one of the other
potential constraints that is being thought about is the farming and production of the baby coral,
right? So as all of technology scaling, you’re going to have to get all these little babies from
somewhere. How does that look and how does that get located around the world? Yeah, so they’re actually
already our coral nurseries and some of them are tied to the pet trade. But, you know, and so some
of that can be put to work, but also I’m an investor in a company called coral vita, which is
basically working on next generation coral nursery. And this includes, you know, like
sexual reproduction and trying to go use some of the best techniques to be able to produce
heat resistant coral through selective breeding. It includes asexual reproduction in terms of
a approach called hyperfagmentation, which is developed by Dave Vaughan from the Million Coral’s
Project that can speed up the growth of hard corals between 20 to 50x. And then some automation
changes to be able to make it so that we’re able to, you know, create industrial scale in terms of
how much we can grow baby corals that would be suitable to bring back into the environment.
Yeah, very interesting. Now, let me ask a question that I imagine, you know, some of our audience
might be wondering. So, you know, here I am thinking about the myriad of this topic science fiction
movies and stories I’ve come across. Do you picture a future where we’ve got drones running around
all over the place flying around and swimming around in the oceans? And what do you say to folks
when they maybe experience a bit of discomfort with that kind of a future vision?
Well, I wish that we already lived in the world that we valued that ecosystem at the level that
we could just have people go out there and do all this work. Yeah, that’d be great.
I would say at least how things have gone so far, it doesn’t seem like that’s the case.
And, you know, look, there’s a lot of folks that are trying to close the gap. They’re like,
well, if we could go quantify ecosystem services and then get insurance companies in on things and,
you know, whatever, the 50 techniques, then that’s basically them trying to go change the economics
to be able to allow humans to get in there and do that work. Because otherwise how you can pay those
humans, but like I kind of, you know, am on the sidelines watching this talk about for 20 years,
and I’m like, doesn’t seem to fully be working yet. Because it’s not like, you know, every year that
we’re around, we’re 10 times better at restoring forests or coral reefs, like we just haven’t gotten
better at it and we’re not doing a great job of it already. So when you’re starting from a
poor baseline, and you’re not getting much better at it as a system as a species, then you’re like,
hmm, we probably need a plan B on this. And air go, let’s go in there and change those
unit economics in a really compelling way and make it so that we can afford to go invest in the
restoration of these ecosystems. Yeah, yeah, I really appreciate that perspective. And I know in some
of our email exchanges leading up to this discussion, I shared with you a concern I have personally
about thinking that, you know, technology’s going to solve everything and that the sort of human
heart and compassion piece is not important. And I was so delighted when you responded back to
a couple of my emails, sharing your perspective on some of those issues that we might consider more
philosophical or ethical in nature. And before continuing on and asking you about a few of these
other amazing technologies, I want to, I want to just, you know, take a kind of pause in the
conversation and ask you about some of these softer aspects of ethics and philosophy and compassion.
And how does that, how does that play into the work you’re doing and into your decision making as
a leader? Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of places to, you know, answer that question from, you know,
one is that my mom is a Buddhist, so definitely compassion and thinking about the suffering of
beings has been a part of my upbringing. And I see a lot of how we’ve constructed the economy as a
as a systematic, you know, source of suffering for all types of beings, whether it’s the fact that,
you know, 95% of all mammal biomass on the planet is livestock. That’s crazy, right?
More than 70% of all birds on the planet are livestock. That means all of wild birds, you know,
all of wild mammals, all of wild mammals less than 5%. That represents a ton of suffering. And it’s
suffering for everybody. But, you know, another lens on that is the automation lens. Like, I
was part of the leadership team of Google X, so I worked on the self-driving car. Yeah, there’s a bunch of
folks. It’s like, you’re taking away these trucking jobs, you’re taking away these driving jobs. Like,
what are we going to do? And yeah, I mean, I share this story like back in 2013, I got contacted by
the government of Singapore. And I met a delegation of six folks from the government of Singapore.
And they wanted to ask about autonomous vehicles, because they knew it’s a thing that I’d
spent some time on. And we sat down and we were kind of talking. And they gave this amazing
explanation that I will never forget, which is they’re like, okay, so Singapore is like,
we’re a small country and we’re fixed in size. We’re not going to be able to double our, you know,
size. We’re not going to invade some other space and get more land. And you can only build so tall
before it becomes impractical. So we estimate that we can only increase the Singapore population
by X more before it becomes too crowded for folks to be able to, you know, live prosperous lives.
So given that, we can’t continue to grow our GDP via immigration. It means that the only way
that we can become more prosperous as a nation is for everybody in the nation to become more prosperous.
So we’ve done an analysis of all the low-paying jobs in Singapore and the largest
low, you know, the largest cohort of low-paid workers that we have in Singapore are cab drivers.
So, and this is back in 2013. This is before there was any kind of autonomous car available.
But back in 2013, they’re like, okay, so we’ve done this calculation. And because of it, we’ve
already started a retraining program for any cab drivers that would like to kind of up level
their skills into better careers. And as we start to reduce the supply of cab drivers,
we would like to backfill them with autonomous taxi cabs. And I was like,
just that little twist is so huge, right? In the US, it’s like autonomous driving is coming.
You know, everybody get out of the way or a steadiest-time career will destroy you.
And in Singapore, they’re like, no, I mean, we care about the people first.
And if you’re not becoming more prosperous, we don’t want to displace you, right? So let’s
have the demand side of how many autonomous cars we want be a function of how much we’ve been
able to adjust the supply side and how many cab drivers we’ve been able to graduate into other
careers that they prefer. And I was like, that’s such a human way to go approach automation. I
freaking love it. And in the US, we don’t even bring up that type of discussion because we have a
bunch of mythologies that we believe in, which are definitely not true. One is that the invisible
hand is moral where it will lead to moral outcomes. That’s definitely not true. And then the other
thing is that, oh, you know, if technology’s coming, if humans just better get out of the way, like,
no, no, we invent things and we build an economy to, you know, for the purpose of a healthy society,
for the purpose of a healthy environment, that’s what those things should be used for. We shouldn’t
just say, oh, well, sometimes society and environment are sacrificed in the process of making a
successful economy. Like, the society is a super set of economy. Environment is a super set of
economy. Yes. Like, why would you prioritize the subset over the larger thing? We’re blowing
it pretty hardcore on that front. And some of it is, you know, local to the US or the West.
And some of it is, yeah, inside of all of us in the systems that we’ve created.
Yeah, absolutely. I so appreciate what you’re saying. And I will share with you and tell you a
little more offline. I’m working on a writing project in which I take to task a handful of these
mythologies that we see particularly here in the United States that, you know, greed is good and
you know, winner take all and everyone else be damned kind of mythos that really has permeated,
especially in the 20th century as well as the 19th. A lot of the business behaviors and economic
behaviors here in this great nation of ours. And I’ll share more with you about that, Tom.
The subject went to our conversation. But I really appreciate your perspective. And it seems,
you know, with the Singaporean governments doing in that example is not only a great demonstration
of compassion and a humanistic approach, but also means in terms of their economic management
that they’re not introducing or designing for the types of dislocations that we have seen in
this country can lead to really troubling outcomes and consequences. And you know, it’s probably not
lost on many folks that some of the social turmoil that we’re experiencing currently in the United
States is the result of or at least related to some of these dislocations that different sub-sets of
the population have been experiencing as various tech sectors advance and accelerate, right?
Yes. And it’s not even just in the tech sector. It’s the mythology is everywhere.
And we have prioritized economy over society and environment, not understanding that it’s the
subset. If you have an unhealthy society and environment, you cannot have an economy.
Exactly. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you for saying that, Tom. Well, let me ask you now about
iron ox. And all of these technologies, by the way, folks, you can find listed and discussed at
the website at 1ventures.com. So be sure to go there if you want to not only read about these
technologies, but also see images of them. So iron ox really caught my attention. Can you tell us
a bit about that? Yeah, so if you guys are familiar with Dutch Greenhouses, like what the
Netherlands has shown is that a tiny country. So the Netherlands is a tiny country. It’s the
second largest agricultural exporter in the world. And it’s like, well, it’s obviously not because
they have so much land. It’s the super tiny country. But what they have been able to do is they’ve
been able to show really consistent high quality production using greenhouse agriculture.
And what iron ox does is it basically leaps frogs off of that and says, well, what if you also add
robotic automation to that setting as well? And then you end up with a setup where you are able to
go and grow really healthy, really well cared for food, a fraction of the cost of what it currently
costs to grow our food outdoors. And because it’s indoors, you know, in the greenhouse environment,
then you have a lot of control. You’re not as worried about adverse weather events,
which will be a helpful thing too, as the climate continues to destabilize.
So I think that in iron ox approach to things, so it’s basically greenhouse automation,
and we’ll allow us to go address the food security issues of the future. And relative to environment,
there’s an important element as well, which is we use 50% of the habitable land on the planet
to feed ourselves. And you know, things like the destruction of the Amazon, I think there’s a
misunderstanding from like movies in the 90s and stuff that’s like, oh, it’s all these, you know,
timber companies that are coming in and cutting it down. Because I think chainsaws are very
just very cinematic. But in practice, if you look at the numbers, it’s single-digit percentages of the
take of the Amazon comes from timber companies, you know, paper pulp timber. The great majority,
more than 90% of the destruction of the Amazon is to go, they don’t even take the wood, they just
burn it down in order to go plant soybean and graze cattle. And that’s fully food production,
and to the extent that we can do food production in a way that does not require us to just
eat up, you know, because we already ate up 50% of the habitable land surface of the earth for food
production, we can only eat up so much more of that. So like, we kind of need to stop that and
actually roll it back the other direction. And if you’re familiar with, you know, the book Half
Earth, then it basically kind of talks about like, well, if we could set a side half of the earth
for nature, then that would allow us to preserve more than 90% of the historical biodiversity of the planet.
That’s how I so appreciate you sharing some of this information, particularly about the
Amazon, I feel that that’s a really important one for folks to understand more. I want to ask you
also as a follow-up, you know, many of our friends and colleagues are devoting their entire
lives and careers to the regenerative agriculture movement and are doing really important work
in those settings, often in temperate regions. And I’m curious how your commentary and your
vision for technologies like iron ox might fit into a scenario that also includes other aspects of
regenerative agriculture or not, right? I’m curious what you see there looking out into the future.
Yeah, so I think there’s going to be, so I think regenerative agriculture is incredibly important.
I think that there’s going to be an interesting bifurcation, which is I would like there, you know,
for factory farming to be fully replaced and, you know, by cellular agriculture or plant-based
alternatives, I would like for, you know, a bunch of our food production, especially the industrial
food production, to be replaced by things like iron ox. But, you know, look, neither of those things
directly regenerate the soil, but what it does is it alleviates a lot of the ecosystem pressure that we’re creating through these
Extremely, you know, unsustainable ways that we’ve been producing food
And I think relative to you there are the rest of the food that we produce if we can go do that in a way that is
So our regenerative if we can do it in a way that is that brings
You know community together and like that is clearly preferable and and obviously in soil regenerative
You automatically get in their carbon storage and other things that
Well co-benefits like carbon storage co co-benefits like stabilizing, you know local weather patterns, you know, co-benefits
Like you know providing community level resilience. Yeah, so there’s gonna be many settings where that is the case and
You know, I know it’s really tough because everybody especially in a a
You know short attention span world
Once it to be like one answer that we can push forward and love you to answer for everything, but global agriculture is already a
Triforcation, right? So there are there’s one fork of the triforcation
Which are all these folks that are you know in the lower resource nations working, you know less than five acre plots and
Then there is another part of the triforcation, which are these massive, you know, 5,000 10,000 acre plus, you know
Like monocrops that we use for corn soy wheat that kind of thing and
That is almost fully automated anyhow. That’s just a huge tractor and one dude where sometimes it’s it’s an automated system and doing
You know 10,000 acres or more in a monocrop and then the third
Triforcation are the folks that are farmers that are working between like one acre and
2,000 acres that that grow a lot of the food we eat and
What’s funny is that the food we eat we call them specialty crops so like things like artichokes and garlic and whatever things that can’t be ground up into
You know, you know, you know flour or made into corn syrup or whatever we consider that the specialty stuff
But in practice, it’s like that’s actually most of the food we eat in the
In the developed world and the developing world it is the
sub five acre farmers that are doing most of the growing but there’s already a triforcation right now and you got to go think about the
Update to all the forks in the triforcation and I think that gives you a more nuanced understanding of where things can go
Because the triforcation is also not accidental. There are both human and economic factors that make those the the thing that we’ve gone with so far
Yeah, yeah, that that is really great to hear that explained so clearly
Let me
Move on here from iron ox to ask you about true in my print pronouncing that correctly
It’s pronounced true
But it’s it’s not a real word it stands for thermodynamics rules everything around us. Okay
And and what is that? Can you tell us a little bit about that project? Oh
Sure, it’s a company, but yes, what they have done is
PhD from Berkeley
You know another from MIT another from Stanford they got together and they decided to reinvent the air conditioner from the ground up and
Without getting into lots of details the basic thermodynamic design of the air conditioner that we air conditioner some refrigerators that we use today
Was basically finalized in the 1920s, so we have not improved them at all in terms of just basic efficiency
You know, we styled them differently, but like the the heart of the thing is very similar to 1920s tech
So they basically the compressor condenser model or whatever that is right?
Yes, and using refrigerants that boil at a particular temperature in order to go, you know
Okay
And and doing that against kind of a carno cycle
So so anyway, that’s all just the standard way that the guts of a refrigerator air conditioner put together
But what TRO is done is they kind of took it from first principles and said well with modern
Approaches and manufacturing in a more modern lens on what we understand today. What can we do and they have been able to put together a
A approach to air conditioning, which is 30 to 50 percent more efficient and therefore costs less to run
but also does not require any fluorine-based refrigerants and
Relative to those refrigerants has 6,000 times less greenhouse gas impact
So for folks that don’t know you should read the book drawdown
That’s one thing because the very first thing in the book drawdown is refrigerants are creating lots of
greenhouse gas emissions and warming and to put it into like a
Maybe a more relatable context
refrigerants which are called F gases another way of you know, it’s a shorthand for fluorine-based gases
That’s what the F stands for
F gases
Have about as much greenhouse gas impact as all of cars combined
So, you know if we could go and redo how we do air conditioning and refrigeration we could make a world where
It’s like we took all the cars off the road and
We especially want to work on this now because as the planet is warming up
Then you’re getting record heat waves in northern Europe and places that didn’t have air conditioning before adding it and
You know, you also have the the middle class in India, you know, being able to afford this stuff now and also
In India, it’s getting also unbearably hot so even folks that are used to a hundred degree heat
It’s clocking in at 125 degrees some days. They’re like no
I mean even with our cultural practices and our you know design for passive cooling and all the different
Things that we do to make you know hot area livable. This is unlivable
So there’s going we we
Estimate that the number of air conditioners in the world is going to double in the next 10 years
And we would like to get ahead of that and not have that be like doubling all the cars on the road
Yeah, absolutely
Tom, let me
Reminder audience that this is the Wiener’s Community podcast. I’m your host Aaron William Perry and today
We’re visiting with Tom Chi from at one ventures
You can go to at one ventures.com to get more information
You can also find info on Tom’s work at Tom Chi.com
And his handle is at the good Tom Chi. Is that right at the good Tom Chi?
Yep
HUG-O-D-T-L-M-C-H-I. Yeah, and that’s Instagram and Twitter
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Saves and massage oil sent to you
As as a thank you in a way to boost your self-care practice. So a huge thanks to all of our sponsors and
supporters and
It’s it’s really fun. Tom going through these different companies and technologies with you and moving right along
I want to ask you about cruise foam and when I saw the image this one really made me smile because I imagine some of our
Friends and audience will really appreciate this one
Yeah, so cruise foam is basically a
replacement to
A type of plastic so styrofoam and polyurethane foam can be replaced with cruise foam and what cruise foam is made out of is
A kite in biopolymer. So it is made from and it can use any source of kite in but the current source of kite in is
Shrimp shells from the from the shrimp aquaculture and
And shrimp fishing industries now what’s so interesting about this foam well
We’re able to go produce this foam cheaper than petrochemical foams
Right, so like part of the reason that plastics have been so hard to displace and they’re literally everything and in everything
Everywhere and in everything is that
The when you think about the cost of anything you can think about it as the cost of the raw materials like the feedstock
And plus the cost of the processing that’s required to transform that raw material into whatever you know
Thing you’d like want to use it for and you add those together. It’s roughly the cost now
The petrochemical industry has had an unfair advantage in that the raw material for plastics is just a residual
Byproduct of you know oil and gas refining and it means that their feedstock cause comes in pretty close to zero and
It means that if you want to go displace
Plastics in terms of costs
You need to you need your feedstock plus processing to be cheaper than just the processing cost on the petrochemical plastics
And cruise foam does fit the bill and we’re basically hunting down
Alternatives for all seven major types of plastic
Because you need to go fight that battle for every type of plastic
Separately, so cruise foam is kind of our cut at that for the styrofoam and polyurethane foam side of things and
The when you go make the stuff out of kite and biopolymer
It is fully marine degradable. It is fully soiled degradable with no technical recycling
So you buried in the ground you throw it in the ocean it becomes ocean and dirt
You know in a month or two
That’s so exciting well very very neat to hear about that and how about tell us about climax foods
Climax foods is basically like the
Rosetta stone to be able to go translate any
Animal-based food that you would like to replace with plant-based replacement
So there’s been a bunch of companies that have like founded themselves on replacing a single product
So impossible burgers like let’s them replace a burger and you know
You know collafia. It’s like let’s replace dairy milk with nut milks and like you know whatever
This is great like let’s replace those things for sure, but what
Impossible foods
Yeah, sorry what climax foods is doing is they have kind of
Created the Rosetta stone so that you are able to go sample any animal this food product
And it’s hour of them will go calculate here’s the recipe of plant-based ingredients that will get you the closest flavor match possible
And they’ve been able to go do that they’re starting with cheeses so they’ve already produced a whole line of cheeses
That I’ve had a chance to taste because I get to go to the
The test kitchen and the cheese cave and all this sort of thing and try these things out and the stuff
Just tastes amazing. I mean it that there’s been taste testers that in our trials who are like
I thought you weren’t going to give me a dairy-based cheese and it’s like we did it
You’re eating the you’re eating the climax foods
You know cheese right now and it just kind of blows their mind
But both in terms of being able to so imagine you know the following problem technically
Imagine there’s thousands of plant-based ingredients that you could combine
Because in the global supply chain there are roughly thousands of ingredients that exist in a large enough supply
relatively easy to source with a co-packer or to you know a do-food work with
So imagine there’s thousands of them and imagine that you know you needed to figure out the exact recipe
That combines like the perfect you know eight of them into something that’s going to taste amazingly close to blue cheese
Or amazingly close to whatever pick your animal-based product that you want to displace
Well, normally that would take you know 10 to 12 months in a test kitchen iterating
Trying trying trying and then you end up with things that are kind of okay you end up with a
A you know plant-based mozzarella, which is mostly just starch
It doesn’t have any of the protein value. Does it but it tastes kind of all right
But what what climax foods
Has been able to do it with exactly the same problem setting is is they can go parse through you know
billions of combinations of those thousands of green ingredients in seconds
And they can go produce a recipe which is a way closer flavor match than what the you know food scientists and these labs are able to do in one they can do it in one day
So it’s just the difference between do you want to take 12 months to make each plant-based product or do you want the recipe today
And then what recipe do you want tomorrow?
So I’m very excited because
I’ve tasted what’s coming out of it and it tastes incredibly close
And they are also able to just tweak a couple other variables
They did one tweak and they were able to go um replicated cheese
But double the amount of protein in it and reduce the price of it by 3x
Yeah, wow and that was just a tweak to the algorithm
It didn’t take more time in a test kitchen
They just said well, let’s make price one of the important variables and not just perfect flavor match
Incredible. Well, let me just ask. Do you have a favorite of the
cheeses that you’ve tasted so far?
Hmm
I mean I was born in Asia, so I’m no cheese expert, but the the Camembert
the blue cheese
They did like a
good I believe
The stuff is good. I mean, I don’t know what else to say about it. Yeah. That’s great. Well, I mean that really underscores the
advantages of
Rapid prototyping. I mean that is that is you know
orders of magnitude more rapid than the more traditional approach
Yeah, absolutely and of course you still want people to taste it on the other side of it
But like all of the stuff that
That is that slow experimentation process. They’ve collapsed that down by a factor of a hundred
And then you can just get to the tasting and then see what people like
And they have been really um
Getting a good read too in terms of where are
Which sort of flavor compounds there’s more sensitivity and less sensitivity on for some things where it’s like
Oh within this band a factor of three of saltiness this all tastes the same to people
Then there’ll be other parts where it’s like no one percent more of this really changes everything
So we’re learning a lot that is not obvious about how how flavor works
Yeah, I appreciate that. Well, I see your friend there the cat keeps popping on and off
Cameras. It’s good to see you’ve got a buddy there with you
I cannot keep her from doing this. So I just stop trying to tell her to not do it
That’s great
Let me ask you about wild earth. Can you give us a summary of what that one is
Yeah, so 25% of
Meet consumption in the US is four pets
Slow cats and dogs primarily, but I know we got some other pets, but
I think there’s like something like a hundred million pets or something in the US. So it’s quite a bit
So I’d understandably they eat you know
20 to 25% of
The meat demand and what wild earth is is it’s basically a
alternative way to feed your pets
basically using
yeast and fungi production in order to make a very nutritious very high protein
dog food kibble right now and
They’re working on on the other pets and they’re working on lots of different variations there, but basically the
The dogs that have been eating wild earth and it was also formulated
In concert with veterinarians in order to make sure it has a complete nutritional profile and that it’s really good for the health of the animal because people say
Oh, you’re gonna make my dog a vegetarian. That sounds awful. It’s like no no no
This is this is well considered well formulated and the and the
The pets that have been having it we we took numerous surveys on this front and owners are seeing
improvements in
I guess they I guess the company calls them pet parents. I will use that
not sure so pet parents you know are noticing a
Improvement improvements in coat energy level digestion and joints
So especially if your animal has trouble with any of those things
Then you might want to go check it out if your animal’s totally healthy then it’s
You may not notice a difference. They’ll just be eating slightly different food that doesn’t require a bunch of animals
but
If they do have an issue with any of those four things then then it might be a great thing to try out
Great. Yeah, and how about apis core
Apis core is a robot that can 3d print the masonry work on buildings and they can
They can do that work about 10 times faster and two times cheaper
And because it’s a 3d printing approach that uses continuous extrusion of
Of cement
Then it actually prefers a type of cement that’s called geopolymer cement
And geopolymer cement has got about 90% less carbon footprint to produce
So without getting into all the details there’s four injuries industries that put together represent um
Like more than 90% of the carbon emissions from industry
That’s steel aluminum cement and chemical separations
So we’re basically going after all of those
And you know to be able to go find a way to reduce the
The carbon footprint of cement production and the embodied carbon that’s in buildings that we are
Are producing then it’s kind of a big deal for for global industrial emissions
And apis core gives you a really good reason to kind of shift over because geopolymer cements are well proven
They are in buildings today. We know them to be safe and stable and make a quality building
But because they cost a little bit more than then Portland cement which is the cement that is in almost all buildings around the world
And it never refers to a formulation. It doesn’t all come from you know Portland, Oregon or anything but
But it’s like because
It costs a little bit more than Portland cement than Portland cement has won the whole industry
But like when it comes to
Apis core
Because they do this continuous extrusion which means they’re like basically spitting out the thing
Like you know somebody that’s using a cake decorate or type thing right because they’re doing you know
Continuous extrusion it actually works better with geopolymer cements
And because the the system is already 10 times faster two times cheaper than you are hardly
Noticing the the you know the extra cost of geopolymer cement your project is still coming in 40 to 45 percent cheaper
And you are now, you know having 10 times less carbon impact
That’s incredible and are there any opportunities there for some of these emerging materials like hemp crete
And working in some of the other plant-based
Fillers and thermal insulators that folks are mixing into
Things like concrete. Yeah, that that can definitely work with this approach as well. So
um, and some of your listeners probably know all this stuff backwards and forwards
But just to give a little bit of distinction for the ones that don’t
cement is kind of that binding material and it takes a lot of carbon to go produce and then you add cement plus aggregates
So aggregates are kind of like crushed of gravel or rocks or local materials or you know
You can also throw in hemp, you know for hemp crete you can you can throw in some of you know
Insulating materials to go save on you know improve the r value of your walls
Um, but basically the aggregate plus the cement equals the concrete
Yeah, that’s great. Thank you
And then two more to ask you about
Second to last here on the list. I’ve got is finless foods. Can you tell us a bit about that one?
Yeah, they do cellular agriculture for bluefin tuna. So there are types of
So, you know, when we know how to farm it, we go we take it too far
That’s why 95% of the mammals on the planet are livestock, which is crazy
but
But when we don’t know how to farm it like bluefin tuna or all these wild caught species
Then we still take it too far. We overfish them to the point that we collapse our fisheries and then
um
Yeah, actually I guess we never go back and repair them
We just collapse them and stop fishing there for a little bit and then nature tries to struggle back
uh, so
What finless foods does is they they start out with some tuna cells and then they they multiply those cells in order to go make your tuna
and um, so that’s a approach that is broadly called cellular agriculture and
What it what it could mean if it’s successful is that we can just stop
Doing wild caught tuna period that we can let the that species rest and return and
You know tuna
I mean we don’t think about it this way because we mostly eat it
But tuna is an apex predator for much of the ocean
So between tuna and sharks like most of the ocean has one of those two as their apex predator or the combo
You know marine mammals are a little bit higher up on the chain, but there’s very few of them
We already we already killed 97% of the whales on the planets and you know
Huge percentage of the dolphins and other marine mammals like we already killed them
So like uh, if we hadn’t erased though all of them they would be the apex
But what’s left of the apex is tuna and and sharks and we’re fishing a lot of those away and killing sharks
Because we don’t like them or for sharks and soup so we’re making a mess of things
Uh, so if finless succeeds
Then we can make uh shishimi grade tuna
So the very highest end and of course if you can do the high end everything else is easier than that
But you know shishimi grade tuna for less than wild caught market prices
And we can make it so it becomes non-economical to go and and hunt tuna at sea
And eventually you know
We would want to use those sorts of techniques to go and and stop all wild caught fishing
Um and just left the oceans rest for a hundred years
Yeah, I really that that whole notion of
letting nature rest is uh, not only
an essential
imperative
But also it’s got a poetic ring to it and I really appreciate you putting it that way
um
Well
Tom last but not least I want to ask you about
Semptive am I saying that one correctly the wind generators?
Oh, yeah, so it’s a vertical axis uh small scale wind turbine
Which you can use for residential light commercial and distributed infrastructure
um
Applications and you can imagine it’s kind of like the
It’s a unit similar to a solar panel
Uh, but it gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of
of making your own choices about renewable generation
Because you can either wait for your grid to change
Um or if you got the sun or you got the wind then you can just you know get it going
And Semptive is very attractive because uh both because of how it’s designed
It’s designed very elegantly to be able to have a very um
Small switch on speed before it starts to generate power. So you know over three mile per hour wind
It’ll already start to generate power
um
You know at it’s at its full speed, you know, then
Then it’s you know, uh, we have two units one that generates uh 600 watts and the other one that generates 2.4 kilowatts
So it’s substantial relative to the amount of power that a house uses and um
And also the cost of electricity generation
Over the lifetime is quite low because the units are also very robust
So we’ve never had one fell yet, but like you know
I’d estimate like the mean time to failure of these things being like 30 40 years
So you end up with you know you buy a thing once you get you know decades and decades of
Of the power generation and you do it at low cost and it’s a good compliment, you know because
Um the sun doesn’t shine at night, but the wind can blow at night
And uh, you know in a lot of times when the sun is not strong the wind is blowing blowing
So like a storm’s coming in
Sun’s blocked out your solar panels are doing nothing
Well the wind is picked up with the storm
So it can be a strong complimentary um
Uh energy generation option and for distributed infrastructure it also helps quite a bit because
And this gets like um
A little in the weeds, but I think a bunch of your folks we care about this like
When you go and make road access to an area
Then you really invite a lot of industry to come in there especially as you make the bigger roads
To be able to come and extract all the resources
And this has been one of the big fights like just earlier this week
Uh, we lost protection of the Tongus National
Forrest in in southeast Alaska and and the Tongus had been protected both by that act
And also because they had not made many roads that would make it easy for loggers to come in and and take yet
But like to the extent that we can do distributed infrastructure around the world without having to do a lot of road infrastructure
We also you know have that as like a barrier to prevent
You know um more aggressive resource extraction and development
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s that’s quite a strong point there
And uh just a quick shout out to our friends at weekend the organization that’s been doing a lot of work to help
Protect the Tongus and uh, we’ve got a lot of work to do in that arena at this point
Well, Tom, it’s it’s been great visiting with you today and before we
Sign off. I just want to invite you if there’s anything else any sort of general you know messenger statement
You’d like to make to our audience
Please the floor is yours
Yeah, I mean I’ll share something that I just wrote in our quarterly report for our fund
Which is about a month and a half ago in San Francisco
We all woke up to a sky that was like dark orange
And you know you kind of expected to get bright during the day
It did not like I went and ran an errand around noon time
And it was so dark at noon that people needed to use headlights to drive
There’s it was you otherwise could not it’s just too dark to drive
And that was followed by you know seven or eight days of completely unreadable air
Like if you went outside your eyes were stinging your lungs were stinging within five minutes of just you know normal activity outside
And I know that during that time period
Um folks were feeling those dystopian feelings
They’re like this is the end like this is what our future is going to be like every single wildfire season
And even that is now that season is extending to be longer and now there’s a counterpoint season on the other end of the calendar and
And
I had a lot of time to think because I was basically hermetically sealed in my you know you couldn’t even open the window right
Like hermetically sealed in my place in San Francisco
So plenty of time to think and it made me you know come up with this term
Which I call charging our trauma battery and what does that mean?
So if you think about um the great depression and the dust fall
That was another time where we let things get out of hand
Wild speculation on wall street terrible ecological practice in the heartland
Led to major ecological destruction and economic destruction and it all came together
Uh in the early 30s the first half of the you know of 1930s and in that world
People were standing for hours to get a crust of bread or some watered down soup and they and they watched their fields that were once verdant
You know turned to dust and and storms that they need to that blocked out the sun and um
One thing that you can say though about the generation that lived through that
Was that they were a generation that never wasted anything
So when people talked about their grandparents or their parents that lived through that time
It’s like oh grandma will get a store from the you know get a bag from the store and use it 47 times until it’s like tatters
Before it gets tossed away
And it’s like to me what that meant is that collective trauma kind of
Charge their battery in a particular way. It made them well prepared for a particular type of challenge
of not of not using too much
And you look at how they stepped up in world war two
Because there’s a lot of you know shortages in world war two too
But that generation had charged this trauma battery and was able to go deal with those shortages and and do what needed to be done
And when I looked at that red sky, you know
You know after thinking about this during that week
I was like that’s what’s happening right now. We are charging our environmental trauma battery
We’re having an entire generation
Understand what the damage looks like
And for some people it might be the death of their coral reef or a red tide which you know washes up a bunch of you know
Dying and toxic things on their shoreline for other people it might be a red sky where it’s so dark
You can’t you can’t drive it new, you know for other people it will be other ecological disasters
The power of frost melting and their houses like sinking into ground that had been stable for hundreds of years thousands of years
And whatever the trauma is we are creating a generation where our trauma batteries being charged
We are going to be ready to go fight through what needs to be fought through
And love the things that need to be loved
In order to see through to the other side of what I think to be one of the greatest challenges like humanity is going to face
Absolutely beautifully
said my friend. Thank you so much Tom and
Thank you for
Taking some time today to visit us. It’s really appreciated
Yeah, no problem at all. Thanks for the thanks for the invitation
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