Dhru Purohit Show - We’re Not Separate from Nature, We’re Made of It: An Honest Conversation About Soil, Carbon, and the Future of Humanity with Paul Hawken

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Pique Life, and BiOptimizers. When we think about carbon, we often associate it with pollution, greenhouse gases, and climate change. But carbon is not the enemy—it's the essential building block of life. From the soil beneath our feet to the air we breathe, carbon plays a central role in the biosphere. The real issue lies not with carbon itself, but with how human systems have disrupted its natural balance. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with environmentalist and author Paul Hawken to unpack the deeper story of carbon—its vital role in life, its misrepresentation in climate discourse, and its power to connect all living systems. Drawing from his new book Carbon: The Book of Life, Paul explains why regeneration, not just sustainability, is key. He also shares how we can restore our relationship with the Earth by embracing Indigenous wisdom, ecological thinking, and a shift from extraction to restoration, reminding us that healing the planet starts with rethinking our values. Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, and bestselling author who advises governments and business leaders on climate and ecological regeneration. He’s written nine books with six national and New York Times bestsellers. He founded both Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration, which created the world’s largest network of solutions to the climate crisis. His newest book is Carbon: The Book of Life. Tune in to this powerful conversation to discover how rethinking carbon could help us heal our planet—and ourselves.  In this episode, Dhru and Paul dive into: Carbon as the foundation of life (00:40) The vilification of carbon from an environmental perspective—and the secrets it holds (3:05) Dissolving the human–nature divide and reconnecting with the natural world (11:20) The message behind Claire Davis' food experiment with infants (17:40) How awareness and communication with nature could help shift humanity (25:13) Balancing human wants versus needs (35:43) The idea that Earth has a form of awareness (46:59) Challenging the idea that human existence is a plight on the planet (1:03:23) The limits of technology in healing the Earth—and how it has improved human life (1:10:53) Carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture (1:15:42) Rethinking the phrase “growth is good” in the context of nature, humans, and technology (1:21:33) The impact of outcome-focused living and raising awareness about health (1:31:03) Reevaluating infant formula and banning pharmaceutical ads—genuine progress or public deception? (1:37:43) The future of agriculture: banning chemicals, pesticides, and harmful toxins in America (1:42:43) There is a solution, a path to change—and we are part of it (1:48:43) The need for community, the power of connection, and our role in making life better (2:02:13) Also mentioned in this episode: Paul’s Book - Carbon: The Book of Life Project Drawdown Restor Eco Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? Abundance  For more on Paul, follow him on Instagram and his Website. This episode is brought to you by Bon Charge, Pique, and BiOptimizers. Right now, Bon Charge is offering my community 15% off; just go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Right now, Pique Life is offering 20% off the Pu’er fermented black and green teas. Plus, you’ll get a free beaker and frother when you go to piquelife.com/dhru. Go to bioptimizers.com/dhru now and enter promo code DHRU10 to get 10% off any order of Sleep Breakthrough and find out this month’s gift with purchase. Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Hawkin, an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Carbon is often vilified. It's seen as this culprit of climate change. It's an us versus them mentality, and it's either you are against carbon or you're for environmentalism, right? You're either with us or against us, as George Bush famously said. But you've described it. Not as this villain, but as this animating force of life.

Why is it so important for us to change this story and this relationship that we have with this molecule that's the foundation to life? Because it is the foundation for life. Exactly right. And we see carbon as an element. And we were taught that in high school science, of course. And we can measure and look at it that way. but what we've done is basically objectify it and make it a thing when in fact there's 1.2 trillion molecules in every cell of our body.

And so we're looking at it with the same mindset that caused the problem of global warming, which is to objectify the living world and to objectify and make other the causes and to create an economy that's all about cell. and grasping and getting and taking and extraction and concentration. And not about community, which is all life arises from community, and not out of respect, not out of compassion, not out of kindness, not out of a sense of connectedness, which is we're inseparably connected. It's just our minds that have sort of diluted us.

And, of course, all our media and social media and everything that we are individuals. you know, the only individuals in the world are in comic books and westerns. There is no such thing as an individual. And yes, we have a distinct mind, and we can think things that are very peculiar to us and not anybody else, and we can connect that,

and we have extraordinary language to do that with. But that doesn't mean biologically we're individuals or we're separate. And so part of the reason for writing carbon the book of life is just to see the climate movement, frankly, fail. in its story and its narrative and in its impact. And when I say fail, 99 point,

you put in the integer of the people who live here do nothing about it on a daily basis, and that's been true for 50 years. It seems like in this world of tribalism, across the board, I'm not just talking about politically, in the environmental movement, for a long time, it was a useful vehicle.

When I say useful, I'm not saying helpful, but it was a useful vehicle to use carbon as the boogeyman to basically degrade the other side. Either you believe

in this idea or you don't believe and you're part of the problem. Where did that come from? It came from good science. There's no question that when you increase tri-atomic particles in atmosphere, you know, molecules and water, is one of them, by the way,

CO2 is another one, that they reflect back infrared rays. And the infrared comes from the sun, heats the planet, heats the atmosphere, you increase the number of CO2 molecules in the air, and a certain amount of heat is reflected back, and as you have more molecules, there's more heat, and that's global warming 101. We've known that since 1856. So the rhetoric and the concern is, well, let's stop putting them up there. And that's what Project Drawdown was about, which I created in 2013, which is, can we just bring it back home, please, and stop putting it up there and get some sort of equilibrium that we had at one time

in terms of the climate, the atmosphere, heating, warming, etc. And so it makes sense. I'm not decrying what we did a Project Drawdown or that logic, but in the process of doing that, we separated ourselves from cause. We're looking at cure, but we have to go upstream the cause. What's the cause? Why are we putting it up there? And why are we putting it up there in massive ways with a rhetoric and a story?

And I say the story now is the climate narrative. There's completely BS. And part of that BS is that we're in an indebted. energy transition and if we get to net zero by 2050, we're going to be good to go, you know. And that's just not true. We're not in an energy transition whatsoever. We're actually using more coal gas oil and wood than we did last century, and the century before that, and a century before that. And so what I wanted to do is get to step back and look at it as a whole, not to be solutionist and not to say, listen up, I know the way, you know,

No, but to actually provide people another way of seeing the world, which is what they're in. So that's about being in a world. And to see it in a way that gives them a much more expansive, inclusive. And to me, a more compassionate way of understanding how we got here, where we are, and where to go forward from that point. But not in the sense that, you know, like, I know you don't. I'm not interested in that. You know, a huge part of that is fundamentally starting off with this important molecule that's been so demonized and re-approaching its role in all life, not just human life, but everything around us. You say in the book, carbon is a window into the entirety of life with all its beauty, secrets, and complexity.

Tell us about some of those secrets that carbon has. Well, the secrets are in the 3.4 trillion creatures that we share this planet with. And then in the uncountable number of plants that we also share this planet with. And I often say to people, not in an arrogant way, I hope, but that we don't know where we live. We don't know where we live. We literally don't know the Earth. But furthermore, we don't know who we live with.

our understanding of invertebrates and vertebrates and creatures and birds, et cetera, is just now sort of opening up to the idea that plants, insects, have consciousness, have language, have emotion, these qualities that we have never associated with the living world. And that is the, we're on the cusp of a huge breakthroughs in science and understanding, you know, not just that whales speak, they do, and we understand that. And we have obviously primate behavior studied by Jane Goodall and others in terms of their communication. But we're talking now about bees having emotion.

And this is science. This is not projection. And that's what I mean about, that's our family, that's our kin, not biologically, you know, in the sense of genetics, but without whom there is no life on earth. And so to give a sort of expansive sense of the words you read, the complexity and the majesty of this place is just changes perhaps your sense of respect.

And then maybe it changes your sense of what you are doing or not doing as a denizen of this planet. You're here, you come, you live, you go. So what are you going to do while you're here? Are you going to increase life on Earth? Are you going to decrease it? Are you going to destroy what has taken a billion years to create? And we're losing 70, we've lost 70% of our mammalian population in the last 50 years. That's a pretty rapid decrease. Or are you going to do, are you going to act in such a way, live your life in such a way, that absolutely creates more life, not only for your children and your children's children,

but for all people who follow us. And actually the fact is that by and large, indigenous people, that is to say the tribal cultures and maybe tribal is not the right adjective, have been doing that for tens of thousands of years. And you could say, well, they didn't have a choice. Fair enough. You didn't have technology. They didn't have ways not to.

But they stayed in the place and they learned to live there. and it taught them how to be, in a sense, the autistic caretakers, you know, but the progenitors of life in that place, that is to create more life. And so if you look backwards and you look at the record that we have that we're putting together anthropologically and biologically of people who lived before the settlers, before the colonists, before they were, in a sense, discovered,

and then rapidly in many cases, not terminated, but exploited, you find people who have an extraordinary way of seeing the planet, they could hear plants. We thought, oh, yeah, right. You know, we are mocking them. They actually can hear plants. They can communicate in such a way.

They see a world differently. Well, they've been there for thousands of years. They had lots of time to learn how to do that. We've been here, I say, the settler colonists, they've been here a relatively short time. Now, I don't mean to exempt China, India, and cultures go back four or five thousand years. Those are different than the settler colonist cultures

that I'm referring to who came in from Europe to the Americas. But I think what I'm trying to get at is like there's so much wisdom around this. There's so much knowledge. The future is not in intelligence. The future is in knowledge. and we're all kind of on AI, what doesn't matter what's artificial intelligence or not,

the future is in knowledge. And knowledge is gained in a completely different way than intelligence. One of the core themes inside of the book that is going to be a huge part of today's discussion is this idea of dissolving the human nature divide that you're so perfectly articulate in the book. You've said it's not that there's a climate crisis. We are the climate crisis.

We are the climate. It's not that there's a biodiversity crisis. We are those creatures. So why do you think modern society created a duality between humans and natures? And how do we return to some of this knowledge, this wisdom that maybe ancient societies had intrinsically? And how can we collapse this boundary to recognize

that our lives are inseparable from the living world and nature? I think on the West, we have to look to the Enlightenment in the Scientific Revolution that came out of Europe and it was extraordinary, is extraordinary to this day, but it depended

upon naming and making distinctions as opposed to seeing inseparability because that was already present for people they didn't understand it necessarily in Europe but they, so, I mean, Descartes and so many

of the discoveries it emerged from Western science in Europe. Basically, it was about separation. It was about making distinctions. You name something, if it's at that, then it can't be a this. So you have to make distinctions, and we continue to do that to this day. But that atomizes the world. It makes it into pieces and parts, and then you think, well, what am I going to do with that?

How am I going to exploit that? can I do this, can I do this, whatever, and so forth. That was the birth of the type of medicine that's being practiced to this day in the West. And it has some good sides. It has some very destructive sides. It's very different than Ayurvedic medicine, which goes back, you know, I don't know,

4,000 years, 5,000 years. I mean, on your program you're talking about C-15, right? And, well, C-15 is in ghee. which has been used in India for thousands and thousands of years, even by vegetarians practically. Why? How do they know? They didn't know it by a name or code.

But somehow they figured out how to create a diet and a food system to create healthy people, right? And so I think that where we are right now is this meeting, maybe it's not a meeting in the traditional sense, But, I mean, we're seeing this explosion of Western science as it continues to, but we're also seeing it meet indigenous wisdom. It's called traditional ecological knowledge. That is the ecological knowledge that the 5,000 cultures, you know,

that non-Western cultures had and acted upon and act upon to this day. And what we're discovering is not how much more we know. I think what we're discovering is that we don't know. In other words, that it's more of a mystery, the living world, nature. And so that produces a sense of humility, a sense of discovery, a sense of wow, what I said earlier about insects having emotions. you know, like that's so such an anathema. If you said that even 10 or 12 years ago,

you'd just be laughed at, you know? In college, you wrote a paper, you'd be good enough. You would be not, you wouldn't pass, you know, and so forth. So the rate of discovery right now is really on, is the threshold of what we don't know, we didn't know. So if they have emotions, well, but they don't have a cereum. So how, they don't wish their cortex? They don't have a cortex.

well, how can they do this? And so there's a great deal of, what's a revealing of what we don't know going on right now. And the fact that mother bats have a different lingo than the male bats, and they call it motherese. And they name their young. And they teach them about the male bats on the other side of the cave, like, watch out for that one.

And if you take the ultrasonic sounds that they're making, which we can't hear, and you slow it down, so you can hear it, it is the most beautiful sound you've ever heard and you've never heard anything like it. That's what I mean about. We're just at these thresholds who are like, well, where do we live? And who are these 8.4 million, excuse me, species? and what we know is they're communicating every single moment, every day, everywhere on the world. They're talking to each other, just like ourselves talk to each other.

And what are they saying? What do they know? And we've long thought that our intelligence could understand everything. And now we understand that there actually may be very, very profoundly different types of intelligences on this point. planet who see and understand it very differently, and it's not like we're the top dog. We are in terms of language, no question about it, you know, and with all due respect to Homo sapiens and the brain that developed from the use of language, the use of language that developed our brain, I mean, it's extraordinary.

But beyond that, though, there's a whole world here that we don't know, and we're just, I think, sort of like, you know, somebody coming to a threshold or a mountain top and looking down and going, oh my gosh, look what I see before me. You know, I never knew that was there. And that happened, you know, when Lewis and Clark went over the Rockies and different explorers, you know, like there's huge lands there. Well, these landscapes of biology that we are now broaching and going into. And I hope we do it well.

But whatever we do, we are learning that we are part of. of a extraordinary web of life, far more so than we actually knew. There's all these different and beautiful stories inside of the book, and one that comes to mind after you sharing what you shared is the story about this food experiment that was done by Clara Davis and the infants, and I believe it was in like 1930, 1928, somewhere around there. Right. Can you talk about that story?

And in particular, the message of the story signifying that maybe there's these deeper forms of intelligence that we're just not hip to yet. And what happened if we were more hip to him? Most of us do not have a ton of extra time for more than a few basics every day. It can be hard enough to try to cook and eat healthy three times a day, work out, get your protein in and get all of our work done at the same time. By the time 8 p.m. rolls around, I just want to relax and wind down for bed, maybe get some stretching in. But what if I told you that there was an easy, relaxing way to support your health while you're watching your favorite TV show,

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And Clara Davis, who ran the thing, decided to run an experiment because children are very fussy when they're small about what they will and won't eat. They'll push it away. They don't like the taste, whatever. And so what she did with her nurses, they had the children around the table, oftentimes holding them with their very,

little and had 32 different foods and they had fruits and vegetables they had meats they had dairy um they had some things that like liver and things that you know you can't imagine child wanting liver it you know too but they put them out and they let the child choose what she or he wanted to eat and children came in there actually who were not well i mean they came in sick you know, or with the disease. And she watched them heal themselves by what they chose. And after six years, a pediatrician who had worked with them all six years, you know, to make sure everything was cool,

said, these are the healthiest children I've ever seen in my life. And again, they would go on binges, like a binge. You can't binge on healthy food, but, I mean, go this way for a while. they go this way and they do this, every child chose differently. They didn't choose all the same things. They didn't pay attention to what the others were eating. And so they were healed or they became very healthy. And then now we have a culture where people don't know what to eat.

We have food designed purposefully to be addictive by organoleptic scientists who work for Pepsi's and Mars and Mars and Coke and all the ultra-processed food companies. And we probably have the sickest population of young people in the world in the United States. And because the innate wisdom about what to eat was banished by chemical manipulation by scientists. And so when you see obese or whatever, you know, children, you know, 10, 11, 12, 30, 40, whatever, you know, who are sick and not doing well have different diseases. Yeah, of course.

In fact, you write that one of the kids, they believe, had rickets and they sought out cod liver oil, something that kids would never really, no adult would think that a kid would be seeking that out. It's sickening. And continue to take that until basically their rickets was gone. He was cured. He was cured. Then he never wanted to eat it again. That was it.

So how did he know? And that innate intelligence is there and everybody. And now it's completely covered up by just the distractions and the communication, the algorithms, the food. I mean, everything is going at us and basically destroying our core and native intelligence. It really is. And we see it. You know, from the outside at this point in time in the conversation, it can be easy for somebody

to feel like, okay, humanity. is lost, but is there an opportunity to step back into that wisdom, even amidst all of the quote-unquote brainwashing that's taking place? Absolutely. And I think what's happened is we look to centrality and power for change. In other words, we think conference of the parties is that the climate conference of the parties. There was a biodiversity conference of the parties. It was in Kali last year in Colombia. And, you know, politicians and corporates and NGOs get together.

You know, there was Azerbaijan last year in Baku and tried to come up with a, like the Paris mandate came out of the conference of the parties. Like we, being all the countries in the world, agree. that this should be so, we should do that, et cetera. Well, it's failed every single time for 29 years, and nothing's worked. And the reason for that is I'm not trying to detract than the people who attend in their sincerity,

but it is nature isn't top-down. No top-down solution is going to fix the problem. The very verb fix is the problem, because that makes it other. Like we're going to fix nature. We're going to fix the climate crisis. We're going to combat. we're going to tackle it. If you look at the language that imbues, you know, the, and I would say

rather sincere belief or concern about where we are, I'm not decrying that, the language absolutely guarantees failure because you can't fix. You can't fix, you know, something we don't even fully understand. You can either work with the floor of life or you can be in that floor of life, you can respect the floor of life, or you can take, extract, destroy, and for whatever purpose you think you have a right to do. And that's what's happening in the world. And so we hear that term, it's an extractive economy, very much so. I mean, 500 years ago, when the Portuguese and the Spanish and the Dutch and others, you know, came, the English, of course, came out of Europe. I mean, they basically took whatever they wanted.

They took people, they took cultures, they took land, they took crops, they took anything, and brought it home, sold it, made a lot of money, and made even more ships to go out and extract from the living world, minerals, silver, gold, etc. And we're still in that economy. Absolutely, in fact, even more so than we were in the 16th and 17th century. And so how do we change that?

I mean, because people are insecure. They want more. They don't want less. And there has to be a point where we realize that more is creating less. I mean, we're getting more and more and more. You can see it at our stores. You can see it in people's lifestyle. You can see it in homes.

You can see it in their cars, whatever. But actually, there's less and less and less. The planet is starting to star, starting to be dead. decimated, starting to be not just deforested, you know, but reduced, look at what's happening for batteries, you know, in the Tesla's, you know, put the Tesla side or Ila Muska side. The batteries have cathodes and anodes, of course, you know, storage. Cathodes made of what? You know, I mean, what do we make it out of?

Well, we make it out of cobalt. Where's the cobalt come from primarily? The Congo. What's happening in the Congo? Well, besides war, Paul Kagame and Rwanda, there's different armies. But children are the miners in the Congo for cobalt, for our batteries, for our Tesla. And they're digging holes, really. But no pit stops, nothing to prop up the land or the soil.

tunnels to go in and bring out carbon, children being buried alive. These are six years old, seven years old, eight years old. This is for our Teslas. And any other. Any other thing? With all due respect, yeah, I didn't want to, I'm not Elon musking this. I'm just electric car, an EV. Yeah.

And other batteries. Yeah, yeah. Our iPhone, we all have an iPhone. Yep, yep. You know, computers could have been the Prius long before that, which has partially a battery that's part of it to. Hybrids. Yep.

No question. It got you off. No, yeah, absolutely right. And like I said, I wasn't trying to demonize Tesla. I was just trying to give an example because it's so ubiquitous now as an EV. But the point being is nobody thinks about that. Nobody feels that. Nobody would want to do that.

Of course. Find me a person on the street to say, yeah, yeah, I want children to basically die, you know, getting cobalt for my cathode on my battery. I mean, nobody wants that, but we are in a system that's doing that. And it's once, twice, thrice, four times, five times removed from any possibility of awareness or connection. This is what I mean, why we're so violently disconnected from each other, from place, from what we buy, what we eat, the farms, what's happening on the farms, and so forth. And that's the state of the world. And so in that, you have these narratives about fighting, tackling, you know, combating climate change, you know.

And for me, and I just have to say I'm just like aghast at that language because it's the same mindset that is causing and has caused the situation we're in today. You know, very male language, I might say, very gendered language, you know, fixing is another one of those. I love to fix things. I think that's okay, better than okay. But you don't fix something. You actually find out who you are and where you live and how this earth works, and that is missing from the dialogue.

And even when we use the word biodiversity, what does that mean? I mean, it's code word. Of course, we do know what it means, but we don't. And one of the examples I give in the book is a scientist in New York who are botanist. He wanted to know how many roots because that's where nourishment comes from,

a plant comes from the soil. You know, the energy comes from the sun, right? And carbon dioxide. Mixed well and you have sugar and the plant grows. But the plant sends down roots for moisture and for nutrients. So you want to know how many roots of rye grass, a single kernel of rye. And using an electron microscope, he counted 14 million.

14 million. It's just like a ridiculous number. And 10 million were real roots and 4 million were hair roots. So we put down aside 10 million roots. Well, what are they doing down there? They have high fee on the tips. They're connected to mycelia, connected to fungi. And they're transacting.

They're conversing. You're conversing is wrong word. Communicating with the mycelia and vice versavers. and basically the plant saying, I need what? I like the nitrogen. I want phosphorus. I want selenium, in some cases, zinc or whatever. The mycelium can understand it.

And then in its network, which is extraordinary, it's producing it, bringing it back, and swapping it for carbohydrates. That's a single kernel of rye. Now, just step outside and look at her. go to a forest. Look, we have no idea. And what we do know now, Drew, is that we've recorded my celia. They are communicating. It's a clicking sound, like the Botswana and the son people in Botswana, sperm whales. It's a clicking sound. And it's in patterns, not just random. And the patterns

repeat, and then there's series of patterns that clump together and repeat. And Adam and Adam Aski at the Royal Society of London says, these are sentences. And of course, other mycologists have said, well, no, you're wrong. But he's saying, well, what is it then? What is it, this systematic repetition of clicking sounds in series with spaces, just like most code in a way, is communication? And again, you say, well, what does it have to do with, you know, climate change and this and that, and a heating planet and biodiversity?

What it has to do with you, and that is if you see the world as it is more like it is than what we believe it is, it changes you. I mean, carbon, the book of life isn't a solution. It's not trying to change anything other than present. the possibility of you seeing yourself in a different way, you know, and to wonder through a sense of, oh my gosh, I never knew, or how could that be? Or really, a bat flew into my room last night, you know, where we were sitting so beautiful, going in circles, going in circles, going in circles, going in circles. We're the only country in the world. I think bats are bad, you know, culture.

everywhere else in the world, they're sacred. And this is sacred, beautiful, beautiful bat going around and around. Of course, I went to the other room and opened up a door and it, you know, it went up way. But it was just like, it felt like a blessing to me as opposed to, oh, my God, it's a bat in the room. Of course there's a bat in the room. Isn't that extraordinary? I want to pick up on this theme of duality, which is a big part of the book, is recognizing that. After reading through the book and hearing some of your talks that you've had recently,

which will link to the show notes about the book, part of my thinking was just in the same way that you say, hey, carbon is neither good nor bad. It just is, right? It's fulfilling its purpose in the fabric of consciousness to show up and be a key molecule in the creation of life. In that same way, would it be fair to me to look at things like you know, I believe it was since the 1950s, almost 500 million people in China have been lifted

out of extreme poverty. A big driver of that is the yearning and the urge for more. It's the urge for growth, for possessions, for materialistic possessions, for creation, for building. And a huge part of that is also having used nature, no different than any emerging economy that would be there, just at a much bigger scale, as a means to an end to fulfill the hierarchy of needs of human beings. Is that good, is that bad, or is that just the unfolding of the likelihood of that situation? And yes, we want to do better through awareness and spreading awareness and having places and people and countries and societies be aware of their implication of destruction to themselves because they are nature, even if that's as simple as,

hey, you're putting toxins in your own body through air pollution, which is going to reduce your lifespan, through these PFAs and microplastics and other things. That's not good for us. And it's also understandable that human beings in the context of this modern world would be doing those things. It's not right or wrong. It's just the way that the system was. And yet, we need a different system. Is that a fair way for me to think about it? And what am I missing inside of the way that I'm projecting that? When it comes to sleep aids, honestly, you have to be careful, especially if you're sensitive to some supplements like melatonin and prone to middle of night wake-ups and really vivid dreams like me. Some sleep aids can make you feel a little

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and wake up truly refreshed, I highly recommend giving sleep breakthrough a try. Well, I mean, it's a perfect description, and I would say the Chinese G-C-Ping will not decide, their future, nature will decide all of our futures. That's going to be, they're the decision, it's the decision maker of whether we survive or not survive, whether we live well and beautifully and, you know, or don't in warlike conditions. So your question is, well, where do we go to from here?

Actually, if I could just interrupt. Yeah. Just, and I do want you to expand on that. But it's more in the sense of, you know, we have people, health has become so. mainstream here in America in so many different ways, right? I'm talking separate from the political landscape. But within that context, I think largely a lot of people have felt that they've been on the receiving end of saying their life, their profession, their yearning for, you know, improving their family's economic means has been deemed to be bad in the same way that many people have demonized, which you're trying to get people out of, they've demonized carbon as being bad. And this book is reframing that.

Anytime somebody's told me that I'm bad, that I'm wrong from any kind of perspective. Yeah, it really works. People shut down. Yeah. They don't listen. Right. And so I'm speaking a little bit to this larger idea is that can we see even things like growth within the duality of life, that there's a lot of things that end up happening because, If we were in that same position as those individuals, not to stick on China, could be these emerging economies in India that might be using dirty fuel sources or whatever it might be, right? We would be doing largely a lot of the similar things.

And yes, we need a better way. And can both of those things exist? And partly that takes us down out of this idea of somebody else has to fix it. It has to be a top-down approach. This is somebody else's fault. This is the problem with people in Brazil who are cutting down the rainforests, not the demand that we see in the United States for people wanting grass-fed beef, which partially has led to a lot of that deforestation that's there, right?

Is that bad? Is that good? And can we move away from those labels? See it as not helpful for us to get to our ultimate goals as a society? And what is it better and different? system look like. It's a great, great question. First of all, I do not in any way. I'm not an anti-people person or do I go around decrying or criticizing how people are living. That's not my job. That's not my role. And it's not how I feel. And so what people are doing, you know,

in China or any other group, you know, is doing what people have always done. They've tried to take care of their family, to feed their children, to be warm, to be safe. You know, these are basic human. needs and they're not being met, by the way. I would say over five billion people wake up every morning with threatened. They wake up and they're worried about food, safety, security, education, health, work, money, their home. I mean, the list goes on, you know, current existential threat. And what the climate movement has done for years is talk about, you know, future existential threat. Well, that doesn't really help people. They need to be served now.

They didn't determine the world that they got born into. They weren't part of the decision-making process. And so they will reach towards the resources that are available to them and educate themselves and do whatever they can, you know, to make a better life. Okay, let's step back from them. that for a minute. Is there then the question back to you, can we provide human needs? Human wants, we'll put that aside for a minute, okay, desires, that's different, but human needs, true human needs, including security, joy, culture, music, you know, I mean, I consider those needs as well and so forth. Can we do that in such a way that we create more life

as we do it instead of less. That's really what comes down to, Drew. And so we have to be educated. We're just trash in this place for our needs and wants, okay? Let's not go after that. Let's go after, how do we get there? And is there a way that we can flip that? And I say, yeah, there is, absolutely,

but you have to want to do it, right? and you have to have education and knowledge and ways of doing it. And so there's a company, Northern California, called Oath, and it invented a biostimulant, which is over 114 different microbes. Healthy soil is a biome. We have a biome in us. We know very well biomes are really important, and they're kind of magical and mysterious,

and they're changed very quickly. And basically, this biostimulant is being used in Rwanda. And the University of Rwanda is studying at Paul Kagami is very, very aware of it. And it's increasing yields extraordinarily, 35, 40, 50%, no chemical fertilizers. Okay. In other words, it's going with what soil wants to be instead of trying to trash it and top dress it with chemicals that were invented by the Germans. to make better bombs and better poison gases.

Right? So we think, I think, everybody thinks, healthy, available, affordable food is a basic human right. And so it's not about saying, oh, well, chemical farmers and this and that makes them wrong. No, it's about, look at this, look what's being discovered, look what's being invented,

look what's being practiced, look what's being implemented around the world. And what I would say to a larger level, I mean, I think most people don't feel like they have control. They don't have a say. They don't have a voice and so forth. But underneath all that, I said there's not top-down solutions, but there's a different solution, which is there are thousands and thousands and thousands

of communities in the world that are living differently, that are growing their food differently, that are relating to each other differently. We don't hear about them. They don't light up our amygdala, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and social media do. They're small. You can ignore them. Fine. But at ETH, the University of Zurich and so forth, the Crawthor Lab has called Restore.eco, you know, no E on the Restore. And you can put that in the show notes, and it's got over 200,000 areas in the world where people are restoring life on Earth. And you can write the location and the name of the organization or who's doing it and so forth.

we don't hear about that. So I think humanity is having a response and it's a beautiful response and it's happening all over the world and we just don't know about it. We don't hear about it. Zooming out for a moment here, in the book you talk about the earth being

a conscious planet, a sentient plant. I'm super curious on your thoughts on this. Do you believe that the earth has a form of awareness in itself. Yes, I do. I do. There's a book called, are we smart enough

to understand how smart animals are? This title of the book. And so to think that that's true isn't to then say, I understand or I know this is why. I can't explain it.

I believe that to be true. But I, there's a lot of things you can not explain biologically and go back. over a billion years that have emerged from the planet that we don't have an explanation for you really don't and it'd be hard to imagine that if there's 3.4 you know trillion creatures these are our earthmates these are roommates here and they're talking every day right they are they

communicating maybe talks around verb whatever word verb work for you is fine. But they're communicating. Every cell in your body is communicating, but the cells next to it and around it. So it's hard to imagine that in that collective conversation, and again, some scientists are always in a conversation. They can think what they want. I think what I want. But the science is going to a human conversation that is now that's encompassing all of life. And it's hard to imagine that all of life doesn't have kind of an emergent intelligence that is communicable, you know, that is communicated and being heard or being acted upon. Yeah, so I do believe that's true. Actually, the Gaia hypothesis

that James Lovelock came up with, and he came up with that hypothesis. He's trying to figure out how Earth made the atmosphere because they were talking about terraforming Mars way back then. Well, we have to get an atmosphere. We can't really terraform it unless we have air, oxygen, you know, atmosphere. And he said, well, I can't figure that one up, but I have to figure out how we created this one. And if you read the, he's a scientist, he read about it saying, we can't really explain how we, how this one got created. And, but we do know that the creation and life and atmosphere, so forth, were a symbiosis, you know, it was a symbiosis. And so we know that ocean, phytoplankton bloom change, you know, when the temperature changes. And,

that there's this, the earth is constantly adjusting, you know, to itself, really, because the atmosphere and the biosphere are the same thing, just like you have air and gas inside your lungs, but you don't call that your atmosphere, you're one body, and you have gas, and you have solid. It's just like the earth is the same thing, that little thin veil, the blue thing, you know, that, you know, encloses a planet.

is the planet. But yeah, you go into areas of sort of mysticism and so forth, mystery. I love mystery, but in my book I stick to science, actually. I have, when we did Project Data, Project Regeneration, we had a phrase that said, in God we trust. All others bring data. So everything in the book is about data. Okay, it's not about supposition.

or belief. Everything in the book is about data, and yet the core and fundamental takeaway that I had is that when we step into this sense of awe, if we stand into this sense of presence, you can't help but to see that you are part of it all and that the part of it all is you. So this may seem a little bit off topic, and you can say pass on the question, but it's a perfect place to ask that, you know, your writing for me carries a deep sense of reverence for the intelligence, the sense of awe that I just talked about, from the microbes and the sound of the microbes which you talk about and this all the way to the stars, has your personal

sense of awe, knowing how important awe is to the recognition that we are part of it all and all of it is part of us, has your sense of awe been shaped by any kind of peak or all? altered states, whether it's been from meditation, psychedelics, or of course, time in nature. And I ask with the sense of if awe is such a central part of once you get that, everything else seems to come into place, could anything that you've done be a vehicle or a tool for other people that are looking to increase that sense of connection and recognition that they are a part of nature and nature is part of them. That's a really good question.

And I could go back in my early youth too and talk about plant medicine, which I started to use when I was 20 years old. And always so with respect to the teachers and sources, you know, as opposed to just molecules or things that, you know, changed your brain waves. So I was very fortunate to be around. People were very reverent about plant medicine and what it means and how it was used

in not as you didn't go dancing with it, you know. And it wasn't about parties and it wasn't about that. It was about introspection. And then that introspection really, was, maybe introspection is wrong word. But I mean, but that inner journey and so forth, you know, was inevitably connected to everything you saw. And in the way you saw it, I remember it so well.

And I, because of that, I went into the natural food business, actually, and I no longer took any plant medicines. Not because I thought they were bad, or shouldn't or anything, I just stopped. I felt, I'm good. And so subsequently to that, I would say it had more to do, not to say I didn't have experiences when I was a child, but it had more to do with being in nature and literally being in it, and listening, watching, seeing, and then just being pretty much appalled by my ignorance by what I didn't know, you know, by lack of certainty, by just questions.

And that exists to this day. And I think what happened through is that when I was young, my home was a really bad place to be in. It wasn't safe. So I spent every moment I could outside. And I always felt safe in nature, never felt threatened, rattlesnakes, fire, this was nothing. I was just, I was, it was cool. My uncle who got captured in World War II

by the Japanese and then escaped into the Philippines jungles for three years, I think, and then he fed himself on snakes. Wow. And so when I was growing up, he was a herpetologist. He studied snakes. That's what he had already studied. them for three years in a way. And so he would teach me how to handle snakes. And this is a bawa, and this is a rattlesnake, and this is how you hold it. And don't grab it there, grab it here, and so forth. So there was that immersion into something we often feel threatened by, you know, a snake. Right away, we get, you know, alert, at least. But I feel like that that whole experience of being safe outside carried into the rest of my life. And,

as opposed to seeing it as other or as a threat or I'm not, I can't survive here. I can. I knew I could. So that's influenced me a lot. And then actually working in, I started a natural food company. And what interested me was because I started because the food was crap then. I'm sorry, it was just like it is now, but in many cases. But I wanted to have organic food.

and that was the term we used. And then I spent several years contracting, meeting with, and learning from farmers all over the country who had been processing organic agriculture, sometimes for decades and decades. They didn't change, you know, because it was demand. They did it because there was land, and they wanted to treat the land properly

and leave it to their sons and daughters in the way they found it were better. And these people were like teachers. They were like gurus. They were like, because they knew their land and such a, and so that was a teaching for me, you know, that connection between people in the land, you know, and that what you can learn by being on the same land roughly,

you know, instead of, you know, getting an airplane, flying to some place and fly back. And you don't learn much that way. You can have a good time, but you don't learn. You learn by staying in place. And so those had a big impact on me. And I think the last thing, which is just that seeing the climate movement itself be extraordinarily dualistic and ineffective. And I'm not talking about individuals who do things and try to make a difference.

I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the movement itself, the rhetoric that came out of the conference of the parties and corporations and, you know, all that sort of stuff. And finally, you know, I did what I could on that, but that's why Carb in the Book of Life came out to say, can we just change this conversation? Because I don't think it's working. It's not bringing us together.

One of the thoughts that I had is that some of the people, not that I would ever say somebody needs this book, but let's use that language. I felt that some of the people that could most benefit from this book have been the loudest voices of the environment. environmental movement. When a lot of people see your work and they think, oh, if we could only get the other side, which often means to them, Republicans, people who voted for Donald Trump, people who work at oil companies, if we could only get the other side to embrace this idea,

the world would be a different place. I felt more of, there's all these people for years that have been talking about the climate crisis. And yet they use the most of, and yet they use the most, as you mentioned, dualistic language in the world instead of meeting human beings where they're at. What do people care about? People care about clean water. They care about clean food. And you can't talk about some of the themes inside of this book in the modern climate crisis without stepping into some aspect of recognizing that we live in a political landscape. And what I've seen over the years, even as somebody who always felt is very pro-supportive of a lot of themes that you talk about inside of your book, Drawdown and many of the conversations

and so many people in this podcast come on and champion things like regenerative agriculture, which you've been talking about forever. What I've seen firsthand is I'm seen years of largely top-down media, or it could be top-down influence in the form of celebrity saying how beliefs that I had about food or toxins in my food system or concerns about pharmaceuticals was considered anti in some sort of way. And it just goes back to this idea that I felt some of the people that could most benefit to actually get us across the finish line as a human species together because we're all it together are the individuals that want to put down the other side for believing in something

that they deem to be incorrect, false, or misinformation, which is largely that they may not understand yet why somebody wouldn't want to eat seed oils in their diet, even if the data is mixed or might really care about, you know, being selective about, you know, being selective about certain therapeutics or might really have concerns about microplastics that are out there. So it's less of a question and it was more of a point that this to me,

stepping into a sense of awe and awakening is a book for anybody that's still stuck in the idea of it's me versus you, it's us versus them. Exactly. I couldn't agree more. It's interesting to see their early reviews and readers and their response. A lot of them use the word poetic a lot,

which I've never, I've written poems, but I've never published them. This is not a poem. But I think what I mean by poetic is that it gets to how they feel. It evokes a feeling in them, you know, when they read certain sentences or certain paragraphs. And that's what missing from, again, the climate dictums, the climate certainty. I think, you know, my observation is that people strive to get a megaphone,

and once they get it, they don't want to give it up. They have a podium, they have a platform, you know, they've platformed themselves, almost. And people listening, you know, I mean, obviously. see, it must be good at something, you know, like AOC and Bernie Sanders, you know, going around, you know. And it's a fun experience for the people attending and for if you're at the, if you got the microphone, you know, you can. Yeah, it's fun to say that this is all the fault of corporations and billionaires. It's not recognizing that the average person on the street, they need to fill up gas in their car. Yep.

Right? we're not yet at this level where electric cars are available to everybody at a price range that makes sense and even within that context electric cars sure aren't perfect but they're a step in the right direction in humanity's involvement yeah it's an easy narrative to want to blame the other person in fact i was listening to somebody interviewing you and i they were super well-intentioned and i'm not here to call out any names but i think this goes back to a core idea you know, in a question that was given to you, the interviewer, again, well-intentioned was likening human beings to being a virus on Earth.

Right. I heard that. And I think if we fundamentally, we fundamentally have to ask ourselves, if the story of carbon is about creation of life and human beings are part of that, how could we think of us and our existence on Earth, which is part of that unfolding of consciousness? a bad thing. It's not perfect. It's an evolving situation.

But I do truly feel that some people believe that growth and even the existence of humans is a plight on this planet. And that's a very sad story to me. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, sure. I mean, I do think the existing capitalist exploitive extractive system will collapse economically.

Question about that. because it's based on debt, debt in every sense of the word, both capital debt. I mean, you know, and it can't sustain itself. That's for sure. That is not about human beings. That's about a system. And obviously, people who think they can benefit from the system want to be part of the system. They want to be in the Trump administration.

They want to be in Washington. They want to be in banks. They want to be in whatever. That's happening. but the bulk of humanity is different than that. The bulk of humanity are really quite lovely. I'm not saying those people are nice. I'm just saying humanity is really a lovely species.

And as opposed to a virus or some, you know, disease that happen to be crawling across the planet. Now, do we make mistakes or do we know the right thing to do? No. Do we have we, you know, caused a lot of damage? Yes. Do we cause suffering? Yes.

It's been wars forever from 6,000. years and more. But I do feel that we're at the cusp of something that's coming to life, a borning that is really beautiful. That's what I see. I can see all the things that Bernie Sanders and others are saying about others. You know, I can see the polarity and I don't necessarily disagree, but it doesn't, it doesn't move the needle, you know. I mean, Bernie Sanders was, you know, when he ran for president, I've known him for a while, he's a great guy. But, I mean, he was going on as private from city to city to city, giving four or five speeches a day and decrying fossil fuels.

Well, his jet A fuel was taking him from city to city to city to city. If you don't realize that people who are on oil rigs and people who are for oil companies are really good people, then we're in real trouble. They are good people. the moms, their dads, they have children, they have grandchildren, you know, they give the part of a church, they take care of people who are unwell or less well in their community. These are good human beings, you know, but we're so focused on this projection. And one thing I want to say about the

climate narrative, too, it gets to this, is that we have this idea that we're in an energy transition. if people would just figure it out, you know, somehow, you know, and switch to renewables, right, solar, wind, that, you know, we would have the net zero in 2050 and everything would be solved and, you know, like. And true, that's just so extraordinarily mistaken. We're not in an energy transition. 80% of the energy in the world is coal gas oil. 20% of electricity, we can make that renewable probably, and by 2050, maybe, maybe not. Let's say we do. But you can't make steel, you can't make cement, you can't make plastic, even if you don't want to.

You can't make aluminum. You can't make roads. You can't make sidewalks. You can't make with electricity. So can we stop talking about this energy transition? We are not in an energy transition. Can we have an adult conversation? about where we actually are,

hugely dependent on fossil fuels, hugely dependent on them. We can't do it with nuclear either. They say, oh, we'll do nuclear. They can't make cement. That can't make steel. That can't make aluminum. That can't make glass.

I mean, come on. I'm undereducated on that. Why couldn't nuclear be a part of that? I'm undereducated. You can't because you can't make cement with electricity. You can't make steel with electricity. You can't make... You're saying it needs fossil fuels.

It needs fossil fuels. If you're going to make cement. And if you're going to make steel. And you're going to make cars. And if you're going to make roads, if you're going to make buildings. I mean, and so we're not even having a conversation that's actually logical. Because they came up with Jimmy Carter as president that we're going to energy transition, nuclear energy.

Somehow we just have nukes and we have basically renewables and we're good to go. It's just, again, I'm just saying, can we just have an adult conversation? That's absolutely not true. We use more wood in the first 25 years of this century than the last century, if we per 25 years. In other words, we use more wood per capita in this, in 20, from here to 2025. More wood in the 20th century than the 19th century.

More wood in the 19th century than in the 18th century. We used more fossil fuels. the same way more in the last 25 years per century than in the last 100 years we use more coal in the last 25 years than we have if you perrated it over the last century the 20th century the 20th century used more than the 19th century 19th century needs more 2.3 billion people depend on wood every day for food or a food that's cooking and heat 2.3.3 billion people depend on wood every day for food. A food that's cooking and heat. three billion more than all the nuclear power in the world by a factor of four that's the world we live in and again i'm not i am definitely not in this solutionism here saying by the way uh i got this idea

you know read my book you know that's not what i'm saying at all i'm trying to say can we look at the whole of the situation we're in with respect because that's what you're talking about you talk about You talk about the people who don't know or cannot possibly entertain doing anything other than what they're doing to stay alive and survive and take care of themselves and their children. That's respect. And so we have to enter this whole conversation with profound respect for each other and acceptance and listen to things that we may disagree with, but listen with openness, receptivity, and compassion as opposed to. to being right. I mean, being rights is a sure way to be wrong, in my opinion. And I hope nothing in the book comes across that way.

You know, I do take a couple of days at technologies where I'm going, are you kidding. Did you do physics in ninth grade? Because this won't work. You know, so it's not like going out to the people or the promoters of the technology. It's just saying it won't work. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. Okay.

So there is a growing hope in technologies like carbon capture, geoengineering, people talking about, you know, I think it was Bill Gates talking about reflecting the sun's rays away from Earth even. And yet you suggest, as you mentioned, that these may be rooted in the same thinking that created the crisis in the first place. Yeah. What are the limits of technology in healing the earth? And as part of that, where is the room for the viewpoint that's largely today in Silicon Valley being called being a techno optimist, the idea that if you study the history of humanity, that major improvements in lifespan, in quality of life, came from the deployment of technologies at different level, sanitation, antibiotics, etc. And the role of technology to help human beings, when appropriately used, to be a part of something that can help us take care of ourselves, lift others up, and also take better care of the planet. So where do those things come together and where do they divide? Technology is really the word weaving.

So weaving together knowledge, okay? And that's, technology has always been with us, you know, even when we didn't call it technology. You know, I mean, making a carpet is technology. Making clothing is a technology, really important technology. So we can't be pro-tech or anti-tech. I mean, it's so silly, you know. We are geniuses, human beings, at technology. However, having said that, you can promote technologies that may,

make sense from a financial point of view that don't make any sense in terms of science. And one of those is carbon capture. There's a direct, you know, DAC, you know. And the idea is that you can suck the air, you can, down, and there's four parts of CO2, right, per 10,000 parts. And you separate that out and then you've got the CO2 and now you have to separate the C from the oxygen, you know, get the carbon. All right. And then you liquefy it and then you pump it somewhere where the geological formation and you put it there and you capture it.

And somehow this is a solution. Okay. What's wrong with that picture? The picture is that the reason CO2 is in the air is called entropy. We all studied it. Second law of thermodynamics. energy only goes one direction. If I burn something, you get ash, right?

You can't make a log out of ash. You make ash out of a log. CO2 is entropy from burning coal gas and oil and wood. Right. So what are we going to do? We've got to set up these enormous machines, by the way. They're really huge, you know, that are basically sucking, separating, you know,

liquefying and pumping. Well, that takes energy. Well, where's the energy that come from? Well, they're saying renewable, it'll come from renewables. Solar and wind, okay. Solar and wind also have a footprint. It's not like they're free,

it's not free energy. They have a big footprint to make a solar panel. They don't last 20, 25 years. You know, wind turbines, they have the wind turbine problem, the blades. No one knows what to do with the old blades, okay? It takes a lot of energy to make a wind turbine. all right so that creates entropy if you use energy there's entropy that's again second law

inviolable so what we're saying is we're going to use entropy to cure entropy it's like uh-uh not possible it's simply not possible you know and so to me um that would be like saying like a year a rancher and you have a lot of cattle and you know and looking at all these cows paddies on your pasture. I'm going, you know, let's make a cow out of that cow patty. Because the cow patty's entropy, right? It goes one way. We took the energy out. Cow did. We did. We eat. Boom. And we poop. Okay. But to, to, so that's where direct air capture is to me sort of like, I'm a gog. I'm absolutely a gog as a layperson that that gets a hall pass as a technology that's going to make a difference. And I say some of the other ones, too,

just like, no, they won't work. We do know what we'll work, but that isn't one of them. Speaking about knowing what works, one of the things that you talk about in Drawdown, which is a Solutions book, and that's not the focus of this book here. That's the primary focus of today's conversation is on the topic of knowing what does work is carbon sequestration through regenerative agriculture. Yeah. Share it with our audience. In contrast.

Yeah, the purpose of regenerative agriculture is not to sequester carbon. That's the outcome. For example, you know, I mean, there's many analogies in health. You know, the purpose isn't this. That's the outcome, right? Health is the outcome. But, you know, the purpose is not to buy a lot of bottles of pills. And so Regen Ag basically is taking,

I consider soil an organism, not as a medium. And we, it's full of different living things, of course, you know, live soil, that is healthy soil. So are we. You know, we consider ourselves an organism, but soil is an organism, in my opinion. But whether you like that term or not, it doesn't matter. Healthy soil is full of life.

You know, microbial life, bacterial life, and there's nematodes and worms and beetles and all sorts of things crawling inside. making it home. 90% of all insects actually come back to the soil at some point, you know, daily or weekly and so forth. And or the plants on the soil. But the, we talk about regenerative.

The soil is the source of all life. And I don't mean to exaggerate. Find me a source of life besides the oceans, by the way. But on land, find me another source. There is no other source. It comes from plants. All animals, insects, everything, eat plants, right? And some, or they suck, you know, the honey or the nectar or this, or they nibble at it and so forth.

All comes to that. So all 5,000 cultures that have existed here that we can identify have always called it Earth, Mother Earth. They knew. What's a mother source of life? life. Men can't have babies. Women can. The earth has babies. It's called life, right? And so that's where we get away. We eat the animal. The animal ate the plant. So we can plant the plant, eat the plant. We can eat the animal. Either way, we are coming from the soil. So regenerative agriculture is just a flip of what we've done for the last hundred years. What we're doing is

feeding the plant. NPK, you know, artificial chemical fertilizers. And not only that, the end part, the nitrogen for sure is now enrapped or covered with PFAs for a time release because it breaks down over time. Well, so now the PFAs are in our soil and they're systemic and they're going up into the plants and we're eating PFAs that are put there. So when you top dress the soil with NPK, the plants are happy in a certain way. They have what they need. They get green and get big.

But the problem is that they're weak and don't have all the micronutrients. They don't have the minerals that you absolutely need for viability and for true health. And so insects come in and say, oh, delicious, like a thousand acres. Same thing. Wow, let's go. Breathe and eat. And at the same time, what happens as the soil weakens from chemical fertilizer, lack of roots going down.

the roots don't go down now, they go out, go laterally. They get everything they need from the surface. Then the soil is degraded. And as the soil degrades, weeds come up. And it's so interesting about weeds because we think weeds as, quote, quote, weeds, right? Wrong plant, wrong place. But in fact, if you actually know weeds or these plants, because your plants are not weeds, and you look at the land, you can tell from the weed what's wrong with the soil.

They are there to heal the soil. It's nature's way to heal. Like the Canadian Thessal things will have deep tap roots go down. Why? They're bringing up minerals up to the subsurface into the labable parts of the soil, right? So regeneration or regenerative agriculture is simply doing what soil does everywhere it always has in terms of making itself richer, renewing, you know, being part of a cycle of life. And so in a forest or in a meadow or in a grassland, you know, it's eaten by animals and the poop goes down

or the plant then withers and dies in the winter and it goes back into the soil. There's a cycle. And so the gender of agriculture, you have more life in the soil? You have more carbon. So people talk about like, okay, it's suppressors carbon. Yes, it does, and we should do that. But that's not why we should do it. That's the outcome.

Really going back to the larger idea of the book of actually your goal should be creating more life on Earth. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I can say this emphatically. The only way for it for humankind is to create more life on Earth. There is no other way. I don't care what Bill Gates says or what some oil companies is or this or that and so forth. There is no other way. Does part of that include also human life?

Yeah, absolutely. Because for a long time, the top environmentalist, we're seeing human beings as a burden on Earth. And the thing that they miss is that we're part of nature too. And there's a way of existence that's there that, you know, to quote, you know, the writer, architect, author, environmentalist in his own form,

William McDonough, growth is good, right? growth is good. Nature. In nature, growth is good. It's done in harmony. And that's what we've forgotten as a species and we're trying to get closer back to that source. But to say that growth is bad.

Yeah. Right? Like do we look at the growth of a tree and say that's bad? No, but let's parse this a little bit. Growth of what? Please. Growth of what?

Growth of what? Of course. There's all the nuances. So you don't want to just, you don't want to just praise the verb or, you know, are the noun growth. I meant in terms of the human species to think that the way forward is less humans on the planet,

which has long been the view of some environmentalist, that seems like a losing battle. Yeah, yeah. Because it's creating a disconnection between us. But I agree with you that unchecked capitalism, unchecked growth that uses nature as a means to an ends, poisons our waters, pollutes our air, pollutes all that stuff.

That's growth, too. But that's not the growth that we want. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Going after people is not really a winning combination of, you know, a winning argument because they already feel like a victim. Most people on earth, frankly, today feel like a victim. They are coping.

And we may be not realizing that in our privileged existence here in California, or parts of California. But really, go out there, talk, interview, see people, are very threatened by the world as it is today, and they're coping and doing the best they can. And again, that's why this isn't an anti-human thing. It's a pro-human thing. It's like these people, these mothers, these children,

these fathers are good people. They need to have the capacity to take care of themselves, not to be taken care of. That's patronizing. And so that, when we're talking about creating more life, the tools, the things, the materials for their home and so forth, there's a company called Invent Wood, and it's in Maryland, and I think I wrote about it a little bit in the book,

but, you know, Chinese inventor, and basically it can take bamboo, but obviously any form of wood, and make a substance that is lighter than steel, one-sixth the weight, you know, and 50% stronger, one-half the cost, and replace all steel. And so that's like, whoa, no steel, because steel you can't make without coal.

So you don't, you eliminate coal right there. And you treat the forest very, very differently. You don't need much wood or bamboo to make it. And, you know, that's 8 to 9% of carbon emissions are from steel manufacturing. So that's just, there are techniques and technology. is being invented now, which are just extraordinary by really amazing human beings. We don't hear about them so much. And maybe in my next book, I think I will talk about them.

To give people a sense of the genius of humanity as opposed to its banality. I'm not sure if you've come across this, but there's some new work out by the author, Ezra Klein and his co-author. they've written a book, Abundance. Yep. I haven't read the book, but I've been watching a lot of the conversations. And I think in the context of this conversation, again, you can always say pass. We'll take this out.

But where I wanted to get a chance to get your perspective on something, as a long-term Californian resident, one of the things that the Brooke talks about is that largely states and cities that consider themselves as liberal, very pro-environment, like California, they've been focused on process and not always outcomes. And there's a world where some of those things can come together. And in the book, they talk about specifically the challenge in California as a state. And from the excerpts and the conversations I've seen that are out there. And one of the conversations that are there is that because of such stringent laws that came from a good place, well-intentioned, we put this barrier in terms of building housing for a lot of the population, especially

individuals on the lowest end of the economic totem pole. And part of what the left can wake up to, largely just using it as a pocket or people that have been the staunchest environmentalist in the traditional sense, is, is it time to revisit some of our views that is still pro? allowing us to build, but not getting so stuck in the not in my backyard way, environmentalism that prevents the state from being affordable for people to live into. That's my loose explanation of it, and I'm sure somebody gave it much better explanation. Have you been following this conversation?

Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I wish I hadn't used the title because they don't create abundance. They just shift the rate of exploitation of the environment. there is no abundance in their thesis. What they're talking about is the polarity between the Republicans and the Democrats. Republicans get shit done. And Democrats are going, wait a minute, but what about this? And what about this?

And what about this? And all these laws and strictures and so forth, you know. And they're looking at both parties and saying, you know, you're California, you know, you had light rail plan forever. You've got 20 billion invested so forth. And it looks like it'll never be built. Or the interventions on homelessness. Exactly.

that don't exactly doing anything yeah we see the results of this um uh i just had to repair a pathway at my house where i live okay and it was made of actually wood that i manzanita that i found there at in in the where i am like a reclaimed type of wood it's manzanita manzina and yes and everything else is reclaimed wood and so forth and we were fixing it and a building spectra went by and said I read tagged it and said, I said, we're just repairing it. It's been there for 16 years. And red tagged it. Okay, $95,000 later, over 14 months later.

And I was a contractor in my mispenu, so I know how to build things, you know. Oh, you have to go look at the cement blocks and you have to just get x-rays to show that there's steel and them sufficient amount of rebar. I mean, it was so bizarre. It wasn't just building inspectors taking care of safety. And, of course, you know, I mean, make sure everything's cool. And so, I mean, that would make anybody a Republican right there, that experience, you know, a very liberal town. And so I get what Ezra and what's his name, I forgot this name, but Dave.

Dave, yeah, are talking about it. I get that. But it doesn't create abundance. It creates more, but not abundance because it's still based on an, extractive economy, you know, where is this cement, where is the wood, where is the asphalt, where's all this stuff going to come from, you know, low income housing and so forth. I have a friend Jonathan Rose, the Rose companies, and he builds the best low income, I mean super low income, subsidized, people can't even afford to live there green housing in

the world in the United States and they're full. You can't get in. What city is this in? Oh, Denver, L.A., San Francisco, I mean, all over. And so there's somebody who really cares about people, about architecture, about design. He builds common places, built places for people to get together. So they're not in cell blocks, which you see in so low-income housing is like, you get drug gangs and you get people don't know each other and all this sort of stuff.

He's really thought of through. We know how to do this. But he just doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or Democrat. He just does it in those cities because they need it. But I'm just saying it's like, we really need to have the conversation about abundance. Because the book I'm writing right now, when I saw that, I said to my wife, gosh, I would have used that title from my book if they hadn't used it. So kudos to them. Yeah.

It's a much deeper conversation. Yeah. I mean, what abundance are they talking about? Because they're not talking about the living world. They're not talking about nature. They're not talking about water. They're not talking about forests. They're not talking about creatures.

They're not talking about roads, you know. They're not talking, you know, et cetera. Right, right. It needs to be taken a lot deeper. The thing that I did appreciate at least that the conversation is happening is similar to the larger environmental movement, which, again, you've paved this unique path where you really are focused on outcomes. And I feel like a lot of the movement can learn from you is that if we don't keep outcomes in

mind and people and what they really need to live. a good life, we're going to miss the boat on things. You saw this during the last election. There were so many individuals that cared about health as their primary voting in this world because they have an autistic child. And they know that vaccines don't cause autism, but they're so concerned about all the chemicals. And they've read the studies that say that mothers that have higher levels of BPA and their bloodstream are more likely to have an autistic child. And they're wondering, why the hell are we not

devoting major resources at the NIH or other places to study this thing? They are dealing with parents who are getting Alzheimer's and they're so young. They're in their mid-60s. And you're like, what? They're dealing with people who are, every one of their friends is having autoimmune issues or other stuff. And I think that for a lot of people, it was so focused on this one human being, right, is so bad that we can't let him back into the office, that they miss the boat on the fact that so many individuals, I'm just talking about this health block, largely people who were previously considered themselves completely liberal, always voting Democratic, they actually are speaking up about something that they really care about. And if politicians would listen and give

that voice, I think there's way more of those people that are out there than individuals realized. They care about the environment. They care about health, first and foremost. They don't have all the answers, but they want people. Doesn't matter what side of the aisle. They want them to talk about the fact that, yes, we are poisoning the earth. We are poisoning the climate. But what about us here in America that have all the resources in the world are spending all this money on health care, and yet every family out there is feeling like they're getting sicker, not healthier. Well, they are, and we should go upstream. That may be the name of my next book actually is upstream.

And because we're dealing with it downstream, and we're dealing with everything you named, and we're trying to deal it pharmaceutically or other means, you know, which is the biggest industry in America is basically pharmacy. And so you're dealing with the NIH, you're dealing with the USDA, you're dealing with the agencies that have been bought and captured a long time ago by big ag, by big pharma. And so we have a system that is basically corporate. It's a corporate government. And that's in those areas, in those particular areas.

And instead of having, whether it's agency or whatever it is, polity that says, can we just go up to cause? You know, there's a parable of the river. It's been around for a thousand years, and it shows up in different ways. But it's about people being by a river river and they're eating or whatever they're doing. And then they see somebody going down the river, you know, who's like, can't swim, obviously, but being carried away by the floor of the river. And they go, jump in, you know, pull the person out.

I go, wow. you know then there's another one you go back and do it again then there's another one and forth and somebody says i think we should go up wherever and find out who's throwing them in because we'll never we'll never fix it here who's throwing them in yeah yeah and the point is so we aren't going upstream in this culture we're going downstream go out CNN you see ads for diseases i've never heard of and i'm fairly literate i've never heard of these is 13,000 diseases but i mean and medicines. Well, that must mean there's a lot of people watching CNN

that must have that disease or they wouldn't advertise on CNN. They're not doing it for vanity reasons and so forth. So, I mean, we're not going to cause. You know, we're going to cure, but cure actually is symptomatic. You know, it's not cure. It's not creating health.

This whole, your whole problem is about health. It's not about, you know, and understanding. you know, the, but the extraordinary, again, we talk about complexity, the complexity of the human body, you know, I mean, it's just this wondrous mystery. And we have a, we have a system of governance, you know, so if people voted for Trump because they thought Bobby Kennedy, who I've known for a long time, was going to save the day, he's not going to save the day because the Senate is controlled by ag and pharmacy. And it's never going to get through Congress in any shape, manner or form.

it is anti-everything that Bobby Kennedy stands for has spoken to. It doesn't matter whether Trump likes them or not. And so but either way, regardless of who you voted for, why or this, or who spoke to people's needs and who didn't, the fact

is that unless we're going upstream to cause, and the cause is in our food, the poor quality of our food, how we engineer our food, how we advertise. I mean, it's just abhorrent. And to me, and I say that to me, Pepsi, Coke, Mars, you know, these companies are committing a crime against humanity by spending $5 billion a year teaching 11-year-olds to drink Mountain Dew. The highest

amount of sugar and caffeine you can take from anything you buy in the store. And with pop stars, thrown in just to make sure that it's attractive. So that's where we live. That's the culture we're in. We've created this culture. So unless we're really talking so that people can mothers and fathers and doctors and who care about this, we can come together on this, but we can't come together by treating it downstream. You know, you mentioned something that I'd love to just have you expand on a little bit more. I think largely people listening to this podcast would say, I'm not waiting for anybody to save the day, but I do think people can come into a position of power at a company, potentially in government, and directionally move in the right direction. Some things they'll be successful on, some things they might not be successful on.

From the outside following the early stages of the campaign, there's been a few things that it seems that under Secretary Kennedy's leadership have happened. The first one is recently the statement being made to reevaluate how infant formula is being made in the United States. And it does seem that along with it, there is a lot of signaling that there is an upcoming ban on pharmaceutical ads being advertised on television, which some people feel is not really related to the marketing of the products, but is actually a weaponized method to control favorable coverage of pharmaceutical companies on CNN, Fox, Fox takes ads from pharmaceutical companies. All the big players do. They're on YouTube. They're everywhere, right? And so directionally, are those things that are taking us in the right way and are worth

fighting for? Or do you feel like we're being misguided? Well, we're being misguided by the president of the United States every single day. and with intention, the question is, can somebody within that, you know, make a difference? I don't know that they can. We'll see. Make a difference in key areas, you know, which are around health and welfare, health and not welfare, but, you know, the welfare of human beings in terms of their health.

I don't know. I mean, to, you know, work for somebody who is, has incapable of not telling, of, of telling the truth, incapable of it, just lies purposely every single day and says things that are so bizarrely incorrect. And basically, his teacher is Roy Cohn. If everybody wants to know how Trump acts the way he does, read about Roy Cohn and you understand, he has a method to his madness and so forth. So did Hitler. So did Dictor-Rubon. So did a lot of people. And, and Steve Bannon talks about flood the zone, flood the zone, flood the zone. You just, every day. It's just all the stuff's coming at you, coming at you, coming at you, and so forth.

You know, whether Bobby Cho's made a right choice or not, I don't know. You know, I don't believe that corporate America as it's constituted is going to let too many changes being made in our food or medicine. I don't think they'll love. It's the profits. You know, and they have big influence to the contributors to Trump. They're not contributors to Bobby Kennedy. We'll see. You ask fair questions. You ask very fair questions. Yeah.

And I love your thoughts on it because as you mentioned, you've known him. You have a major voice in this space. So to just close that track of questions with something, what would be something that you would like to see him do, even amongst the fact that you've said very vocally, you don't imagine that maybe either he could be empowered in the right way to do it or that big farm, a big ag, big food is so powerful that they could stifle it even amidst that what would be something in the next or some things in the next one two three years that you would like to see secretary kennedy do that would make you feel wow that was something significant it's not that

full answer to the question because there's many questions and there's usually not one full answer but if there were to be something what would it be I have lots of candidates, pesticides be one, which he doesn't have any control over whatsoever. And what would you like to see happen there? Oh, I mean, we approve pesticides here that other countries don't. I mean, we approve herbicide made by Syngenta, all right? And Syngenta was an English company, and now it's owned by the Chinese. Okay.

and the herbicide is banned in the UK and banned in China, but they fight to sell it here, Syngenta. What name does it go under? I know Sijenta's the name of the company. Do you know which herbicide it is? I'm blanking on it right now. We'll figure it out. I'm embarrassed.

You know, I'll remember it. So it's something we sell in the States, but it's banned in other countries. Well, it's banned in the country where it's made. China. So just even as a start, this Maine, it's probably one of the best sellers for Sijenta. if that was able to be taken off the market, that's something that you would be. It's a bigger competitor, you know.

Yeah, it's a huge company. And I'm just saying, if you look at what the EPA authorizes, other countries are going, can't understand why we authorize it. Look at the science, you know. And so that is set. Again, go to cause.

Can we go to cause, please? I mean, the second highest, level and almost the first level of cancer in the United States is where? Where? Well, I know because I follow your work, Iowa, right? Oh, yeah. Tell the audience why. Pesticides and glyphosate, probably glyphosate, you know, who knows? But, I mean, the rich black soil, you know, that Iowa has and had, you know, I mean, no wonder people want to farm there. It's extraordinary soil originally. But because this corn and soy, basically it's just drenched in pesticides and herbicides.

Every farmer knows it. Every family knows it. They're seeing cancers there in like third, fourth generation farmers, you know, their great grandchildren that have never been seen before in the Midwest. Like where did it? It is like such unusual forms of cancer, you know, in children, tiny children, so forth, you know. And so I say that only because about pesticides is because if you could just get to EPA,

you know, because it's corrupt. The EPA process is totally corrupt when it comes to chemicals. And that's what Kennedy is against and tries to stop and tries to, you know. But I think it's a lot faster and a lot more decisive if we ban the chemicals used in agriculture that are banned, excuse me, in Europe and even China. I mean, we are the outlier in the world in terms of allowing chemicals that are extremely toxic to be used.

Anything else you would add to that? A low-hanging fruit that would make you feel like this was a significant sense of progress in the environment or in the toxic nature of our society. here in America? The greatest toxic source, I believe, is agriculture. I could be wrong, but I think it is.

We have 500 dead zones in the oceans today. It all comes from agricultural runoff. Okay. And nobody sees that, and they don't think about it. You know, they eat, there's whatever, you know, from the farmer. That's number one.

Number two is we have lost our pollinator population about 70%. There's different estimates as to that, so I don't want to say that's true or not true. But it's around there. When we get to about three or four percent pollinators, the Earth flips and goes back a billion years, which just dies. And where are we at right now? 70. We're at 70.

So if we get to three? Yeah, get to three. We have 70 percent loss. 70% loss. The loss, yeah. So I would go after there's pesticides being used on top, obviously on the soil, and pesticides being used to coat the seeds that are systemic, you know. And they go up to plant and they go into leaves and blossoms and insects eat and die.

and they're just to protect the seeds from predation in the soil, but they go everywhere in the environment. And so, but they're in applesauce for babies, you know. And so, again, I think if we look at holistically or like the whole picture, like you cannot lose all the invertebrate population. in the world that pollinates our plants. It's not about just losing pollinated plants. We would lose that, of course.

We can eat things that are non-pollinated. I'm talking about E.O. Wilson, probably the most profound and recognized entomologists in the history of the world from Harvard saying, you get to 3 or 4%, it flips. There's no more life. There's no more fish. Oceans die, too.

and I think that's in my book. Maybe not. But the point being is that I would go to these points of intervention, I would call them. They would make a huge, huge difference. It's harder in health because there's so many diseases, so many different maladies, so many different treatment modalities, you know, and some of which makes sense, some of which I don't really think make sense. some of which are toxic in their own right,

some of which have done double-blind studies. And if you know, if you just are slightly better than the double blind with the chemical, then it gets passed. You know, I mean, it's stuff like that, you know, which you're going, this drug has been authorized, it's past, you can buy it, you can sell it, you can prescribe it,

you know, this just, it's just corrupt. Even amongst that corruptness, taking it back to the ideas inside of this book is I was left with this sense of when you truly step into this awe to understand that even with everything that's wrong, there's also everything that's right. And I think largely most people, when they step into that sense of awe, they feel like, sure, there's a lot of problems that are there. but the awe, the beauty, the laughter, the joy, the everything that makes consciousness worthwhile and celebrating in nature, there's way more good than there is bad. And it reframes how you even see the bad out there. One quote that stuck out to me in the book was, every problem is a solution in disguise, or it wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I feel that that thinking is a available to you, only when you step into that sense of awe, which to me comes along with the fact

that, yes, there are problems, there are injustices, there's things that we've gotten wrong as a society, as human beings and as man. But it couldn't be any other way than it is, including our desire to want to change it. I agree. Because how did it end up this way? This is the way that it is. And through the inspiration of yourself. and highlighting solutions and not seeing ourselves from nature, the acceptance of, okay, this is the way that it is.

And inside of that problem is the solution. Let's not try to argue against reality, but rather step into it and see that the solution is there and we are part of the solution. We can be part of that solution. And it comes back to stepping into that awe and that awakening. that we are no separate from nature and the through line between all of us is carbon. That's my takeaway from it. It is, I agree. You did a better job than I did just there. I think that I'm very, I am sure, as I said earlier,

that we're in a stage of collapse in many areas. I'm also very sure that humanity is rising in beautiful ways everywhere in the world. And the life only exists in community only, Your cell is a community, for example. It doesn't exist outside of community. And what's happening is people are forming, gathering, coalescing into communities, small communities,

which we may see as marginal and not important, but it's important to them. Changing the land, changing schooling, changing relationship, changing how they build their buildings, changing how they interact with each other, you know, reducing their footprint, which is not their overall purpose, but it's the overall outcome of being a community,

being a community that celebrates, it has music, the chairs, you know, the cares. And that's happening all over and find one near you. They exist or make your own. So that it's the only way to me to be able to take in the news, you know, and to read that. If you read that every morning, it's kind of a toxicity itself.

you know, and to counter that, you really want to really focus on the extraordinary qualities of human beings, you know. And go for that, go to that, be that, you know, support it, you know. And that exists as well. And so the thing about you talking about awe is that we are awesome. Okay. People are awesome. And I talked about the inventor, but I know him now. And he's like a Thomas Edison.

He's got all these inventions. And he's so not childlike. He's smart as a way of it. But he is childlike in a way. There is a kind of innocence and joy that he has. He is here. He exists. And I've just been very fortunate to meet him.

But to me, he's like an example of what's out there. where from Uganda to the zombie people up in Norway to everywhere on Earth. In Japan, I hear about and connected to or read about, informed about things that are coming up. It's kind of like after a fire, we had big fire here, L.A., okay. But watch what happens, you know. The grass comes up. It's super green why it's been fertilized by the ashes, right? So it's greener than normal.

You get wildflower blooms. that you've never seen before. You know, maybe not tissue because of the dryness, but you will and so forth. In other words, we are both the fire and the new growth at the same time as opposed to being one, you know. And so that's my guide.

That's how I'm guided, I guess, I'm going to say, is by people just like yourself. Paul, before I let you leave, I got to ask you about this. A lot of people don't know that you, in Boston, I believe in the 70s. You talked about founding a natural food store. That natural food store was Air One.

Yeah, right. Where did the name come from? It came from a book by Samuel Butler. And it was a 19th century send-up of 19th century England. And so it was a spoof, actually. And the main character in the book is shipwrecked and lands. And he's climbing over a mountain range. He comes down.

whole city and people and so forth. I mean, it's really New Zealand, but it doesn't ever use a name. And he goes there, and he's just so amazed by what he's seeing, and then he's arrested because he has a watch on, or maybe, I don't know, whether it's a far, but he's got to watch. And he's thrown in jail, and he said, well, what did I do? He said, we banned machinery. We banned it here. Machineery enslaved people. And that's beginning. And then people go to the the colleges of unreason, and they go to the colleges of unreason to learn ways of talking that only people in the colleges of unreason can understand. If you didn't go to the college of unreason, then it's just garble. You can't communicate to anybody else and so forth.

And on and on. Again, it's a send-up of England because I thought at that time the world was upside down and backwards, especially the food industry, because I'd had my own experience of having asthma for six months to 18 years old, and then changing my diet and boom, in nine days I could breathe again for the first time in my life without aminophanophenophen, without a drug. The first time, I could feel air at the bottom of my lungs. And I thought, WTF, I went to doctors all this time.

And I went back to them because I had three doctors prescribing the drugs I needed because I was ODing on them. I could only have to get three different doses just to breathe. And I went back to him and told them about it, you know, and I went on basically food fast, simple. And they just dismissed it. They all dismissed it.

Oh, psychosomatic, this, that, just a chance, you're lucky. Maybe it's your age. And then I started to expand my diet, you know, because there was vegetables, particularly, but grain seeds, vegetables, you know, non-seed oils, et cetera, et cetera, you know, the things that are all obvious today. And I had to go a different store, different store, Chinatown, Japan town, the Quaker store here.

I had to go to the farmers market. And I thought, it should be a store, you know. But so when I was in Boston, there was a kind of a buyer's co-op where on Newbury Street, and it was under the macrobotics and brought in food. and then one day you just split it up. So it wasn't really a store. It was like a cop. You know, you just came in bags there and scoops and, you know.

And so I was asked to, it became a store, sort of without a license. And I was asked to take care of it, and I did because I could read. Nobody came in. And I loved reading. And one day somebody came in to the store and said, how do you know this food is organic? and there's oats actually and it says because I get it from the Mennonites in Pennsylvania

like come on somebody else at the same week said how do you know your oil your seed oils are cold pressed I said it says right there you can read it cold press

and they both you know I thought I didn't know I felt like I didn't know they were organic the oats I didn't know the oil was cold press I just believed it

so I wrote to Hane, there's Hain, by the way, and said, you know, tell me about your cold press oils. And they said, well, there's no such thing as cold press. It means cold processed, which means, you know, we chill the oils, take out the steer rate so they're clear and not cloudy. And I was furious. And then that's, I don't know, the same week, the oats came from Pennsylvania, and they came off the back of a bobtail and with no lift.

And so these 100-pound bags of oats. and you could see in these Beamas bags this label sewn into it National Oak Company, Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa. And I was taking these bags down and I immediately got on the phone you had to get information

in Des Moines, Iowa, National Oil Company, there was no... And a really bright, nice woman answered, hi, can I help you? I said, yeah, tell me about your organic farming program. And she said, huh?

Tell me, what? I said, tell me about your organic farming program and said, honey, would you tell me what that means? You know, and it's like, I explained. She said, oh, gosh, gee, I don't know. You know, we just buy oats and roll them. That's all we do here.

And then Hayden wrote me back a letter with it. And if that hadn't happened, I would have just gone, done something else. I don't know what I would have done. And I said, oh, man, I'm going to replace every single thing and by that store. There wasn't that many skews, by the way,

maybe 50 skews, but, and with organic. And I'm going to walk the farm, meet the farmer, see them make sure, because I, you know, I had a grandfather of the farmer I grew up there, and that it's organic. And so that DNA is still in the airwant today. Now, the difference is that we were very affordable. We had 500,000 students in Boston who couldn't afford to eat anyway,

some ways, but certainly not, you know, high-priced foods. So it was very reasonably priced, you know, and people could afford to eat out of Air One and it grew and grew and grew, you know, yeah. Yeah. Now, I know that people think of Air One as the most expensive grocery store in America. That's how it's often introduced on social media. Yeah. And it might be, but as part of that, I don't see that as a bad thing.

And I'm not saying that you're saying it's a bad thing. I see that as a demand of, you know, if you look at a city like Los Angeles where you have the modern day air one that a lot of people know, you literally have people flying in from Japan and other countries to see it and take photos with the $20 individually wrapped strawberries that are there, is sure, it may be a little gimmicky, but it's actually a byproduct of the fact that people really do care where their food comes from. and it's not that it has to be highly priced, but a little bit of like, it sort of replaced some of the other aspects of luxury in people's life. People thought that getting great luxury food, like if you wanted to go spend $100 on something,

you'd go to some fancy Michelin Star restaurant. And then you realize that a lot of these restaurants are buying the same groceries from the worst grocery stores or places or whatever. It's just they know how to dress it up in service and other things. So I kind of like the fact, that people are excited about spending money on things, that, sure, it might be a little bit expensive.

And that's obviously not we're going to scale to the rest of the world and people in America. But it's part of the signaling that there's a demand and an interest in people wanting the purest and cleanest things that are out there. And it's one part of the global landscape of solutions that are there. So I give them high marks on the organic quality. for sure, airwine. In terms of price, you know, I mean, a lot of things that are high price there, you don't really need.

If you're buying, you know, grains and vegetables and good oil, you're fine. You can shop at air one. No problem. You're not, you know, there are things they sell there that are very expensive too. Sure. But, you know, but they're doing it. And so, yeah, I don't take credit for it. I could credit for starting it for sure, but what it became is what it became, you know.

So I opened the store on Beverly Boulevard. I opened that store. And we had a lot of really very famous actresses and actors and people. I used to deliver to the door and they opened the door. Oh, that's so-so. I was a delivery boy and the manager and the owner. But, yeah, so I've seen it matriculate, you know, and become this phenomenon.

Yeah. Well, I'm a huge fan of, you talk about community. I think we need communities. And I think of, you know, how many times, like, I want to take a meeting. And somebody's excited that, oh, we can go to the hot bar at Air One. And we know we can get, like, really good food overall. Right.

Right. There's plenty of different options that are there. There's mac and cheese. There's this, there's that. But you can get grass fed bee. if you can get wild caught salmon. And I think it's a larger landscape. And I think going back to our earlier part of the discussion,

we're talking about Tesla, we're talking about this. I just want to see more solutions overall. And I think that when you step into that connection, that you're not devoid from nature, one of the first things you start to do, however you get there, is you start to also see how do I want to play my own individual part in making the world a better place?

Because I am part of the world. It could be somebody starting a podcast, could be starting to somebody writing a book or a newsletter, being a reporter who focuses on these stories and these companies and groups and farms that are doing something different. Could be a teacher that's slowly trying to get healthier food into her classroom. Whatever it is, we all have that little role that we can play

and sometimes that little role turns into a large role. And I think that that becomes a huge part of we as the collective cells in the organism are all stepping up and making the world truly a better place and not just expecting that somebody else does it. We are playing our part and raising awareness in the way that we can. And I think if we have that mentality, we're less likely to, you know, there's nothing wrong with criticizing people that need the criticism. But our day is not encapsulated or controlled by the news or social media that wants to get us stuck in. All our

problems in life are being caused by somebody else. I'm going to agree more. At the same time, I think we have to be cautious that, you know, we are so privileged. And so we're in a bit of an echo chamber in terms of what should, should be, you know, what works, what doesn't work. I'm not arguing against them so much as I'm saying is that we want to be sure that at least in awareness, we are aware of the entire of human being and what they're experiencing on a daily basis in terms of, nutrition in terms of food, in terms of clothing, in terms of warmth, in terms of health care, in terms of knowledge, and so forth.

And that's harder to get. I live in a very privileged community as well, so I'm not, you know, of north. And so it's important if we're going to look at it holistically, we've got to look at the whole, and we're not the whole here. But we're fine. I mean, we exist here, you know, and nothing wrong with that. But we have to make sure that the, what I say is just like, we have to, we have to, another way I say it is like,

it's almost like we've gone down this road, whether on foot or whatever, but of degeneration and on every level, our seas, our water, our health, you know, I mean, levels of disease, you know. I mean, air quality. I mean, the ubiquity of chemicals, pesticides. And you go right down the line. We've gone down this road to degeneration. We can see the end of that road now.

That's what we're talking about, both of us. And it's like there's a fence there, you know. Whatever we're driving doesn't go any further. So what we're, I think the stage we're at now is like, huh, okay, I get that. Now, do a 180. Look the other way. How do we make this regenerative?

Not like, stop that, stop that, you're wrong, don't do that. You know, that's easy to criticize or to blame or to be righteous, right? It doesn't help. But to just look at it. It's the question. It's the question. Hmm, good question. It is a really good question.

And I said earlier, and I mean it, the only way, and the only path forward to humanity is regeneration. We've gone about as far as we can go this way in terms of degeneration. So that's the simple, you know, axis upon which, I think, you know, lives that will make a difference should basically pivot on. I heard you in another interview say that one of the thoughts of the multitude of thoughts that was an inspiration around this book is also you facing your own sense of

your age, where you are in life, and thinking about what happens when you're not here, as people tend to do, even though knock on wood, I hope you have the longest amount of time here that we could possibly have with you selfishly. In that sense, I've also feel like I've heard two thoughts from you

in different interviews. I've heard some thoughts, which is we're unsure if humanity will make it. And another thought that's there, which is humanity will make it. That is part of the duality that exists that's there. Help me understand how to make sense of it as we're winding down this conversation.

Sure, just change the tense. Humanity isn't making it now, does not. And humanity can make it. You know, both are true as opposed to predictively, like they won't, they will. And that's predictive. I have no prophecies, no insight into the future. I do have a sense of course, of direction, of flow, you know, and that flow, the one where they can't make it, we can't make it, so forth, is polluted and is, you can't tie its own shoelaces anymore, you know. I mean, it is failing.

It is tripping up. is causing disease, causing suffering, you know. And there are some amazing people doing things that are joyous, that are creative, that are rooted in common sense and higher sense, both, you know, who their lives is dedicated to that, and it takes many, many, many forms. There's not one form. And so I look at both, you know,

I, when I read, I read a lot because I'm writing and you got to write to the zeitchrist. You've got to write to, you know, the world that you live in. But, you know, when I open up the Times of the Post to the Guardian or F.T. Or it's kind of like being punched, you know, in the nose. But then the rest of the time I'm reading stories or papers or books or books. listening, you know, like the podcast like yours and other people on the podcast, by the way, not just you. And I get excited. I get a Boolean. I get, you know, ideas come. I make notes, you know, or read this, you know, go to show notes and say, oh, my God, he talked about or she

talked about that and it's your show notes, you know. And then, so I have a source, you know, that's different than the onslaught of what's coming at me in the morning. I do the onslaught because I have to know the zeit guys. I have to know what people, people are getting because if I'm not communicating to them, who am I talking to? And so I do that, sort of, bimodal, that sort of every day, you know. The zooming in and the zooming out. Yeah, yeah, you know, and it's like, oh, my God, that's so crazy, that's so stupid. Oh, my God, this person is so amazing, so brilliant, you know, and so beautiful.

It's both. And in terms of my, I mean my wife is younger than I, and I often say, yeah, well, I'm one of those people's leaving. I'm leaving soon. And, you know, the whole people, the new arrivals are kind of wondering what the, you know, hell, what were you thinking, everybody, you know, because I got here and this is a mess. You know, this is like our teenagers. And they're right, they have the right question, the right conclusion, by the way. And but I said, when you leave, and she said, well, don't say that. don't say soon.

I said, well, whatever. I mean, but it's a different perspective if you spent, you know, decades and decades in your life, you know, trying to make a difference, you know, caring and so forth, and then meeting great people. Thank you, by the way, for inviting me. And at the same time, seeing the rise of just utter stupidity and crassness and greed and hate and delusion,

all those things the Buddhists talk about. and to balance both of that. And so what are you going to do? You're here a short time relatively now. You didn't know that when you were young. You never thought about Terminus. You never thought about, you maybe thought about death, but it's very romantic.

Not really, you know, on death. And now I do. And I've been very, very, very, very fortunate. You know, I had one little thing stuck in my esophagus, which I had to go get taken out by hospital, they just push the thing down. But I've never been in a hospital. I've never been hospitalized.

I've never had a disease. I've never, you know. I go to those dentists or things they fill out, the medical forum, you know. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here, they think I'm just being in a hurry. I said, oh, it's not just none, none of the above. You're healthy from living a healthy life.

And it's so simple. It's not like complicated, you know, know? I mean, and people say, well, what's your secret? There's no secret. I said, the problem, the secret is what I don't eat. I don't smoke. I don't drink. That's the secret. The foods I eat are fairly standard, you know, in, you know, fruits and vegetables, you know, non-seed oils, things like that. I mean, just like, you know, healthy. That's it. Don't do anything. I don't take any pills. I don't take anything of a bottle. I don't swallow. anything, I don't, you know. And so it's not like you have to, you know, have a pharmacopoeia.

You open the cabinet door in the kitchen in the morning, like, okay, I'll take this. I took it. Oh, that's one a day. This is two a day. This is that. You can do it if you want. I mean, but I think that our health is actually innate. It's, we're innately. The body always wants to move to that kind of level of well-being. It just stopped messing with it, you know. whether you sleep or your work or what you breathe or what you smoke or what you know all the things you don't do that and i'm always getting better at it as i age but yeah well whatever you're doing it's working and it's not just leading to a sound body but obviously from your book carbon which is out now everybody can pick it up we have the link in the show notes it's leading to a sound

mind as well. And I want to acknowledge you for taking the opportunity to write a book like this, which is in a way a different book, but so perfectly fits into the narrative that you've presented to people about the power that we have as human beings when we return back to source. And it's poetic. It's beautiful. I love the stories inside of there. And I thank you, ball for all your work, including this book, and for coming on this podcast and having this conversation. Drew, I am very, very grateful for you, period, and for being in your company and being invited. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the

subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me and it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend share with a friend who would benefit from listening number two before i go i just had to tell you about something that i've been working on that i'm super excited about it's my weekly newsletter and it's called try this every friday yes every friday 52 weeks a year i send out an easy to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health we cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health sleep community longevity and so much more if you want to get on this email list which is by the way free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health

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