The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Tom Chi: "Net Positive for the Planet – from Beavers to Bionics"

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

On this episode, Nate is joined by inventor and investor Tom Chi to take a broad look at the principles guiding innovation and capital - and how we might shift these to be more biophysically aligned in the future. For the past few centuries, our global industrial system has been dominated by growth-based economics without awareness of its dependence on the biosphere - or the waste that it leaves behind. What would it mean for our technology to be ecologically centered, working in service of and in synergy with complex, biodiverse life on Earth? How can we work within our current financial and governance systems to create initiatives that benefit both ecosystems and economies? More broadly, what cultural shifts could we imagine that move beyond seeing ourselves as simply dependent on ecological systems - but rather as a part of the entangled whole?  About Tom Chi Tom Chi is the founding partner of At One Ventures, which backs early-stage (Seed, Series A) companies using disruptive deep tech to upend the unit economics of established industries while dramatically reducing their planetary footprint. Previously, Tom was a founding member of Google X where he led the teams that created self-driving cars, deep learning artificial intelligence, wearable augmented reality and internet connectivity expansion. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/AjGOGfzAvyc  More info, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/120-tom-chi 

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I'm pleased to introduce Tom Chi to this podcast. Tom has worked in a wide range of roles from astrophysics researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing hardware and software. He's played a significant role in established projects with global reach such as Microsoft Outlook and Yahoo Search.

Tom was also one of the founding members at Google X, developing technologies such as Google Glass and Google's self-driving cars. His current focus is much wider than the, these issues I just mentioned. He's delving into human development with social entrepreneurs around the world. His new project is a climate green tech fund called At One Ventures. We discuss his worldview, his philosophy, the great ask of humanity ahead of us in the next century. His successful investment techs in the green sector. This guy has a big heart and a big mind.

And this was another fire hydrant full on conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Please welcome Tom Chee. Hey, Tom, great to see you. Hey, good to see you, Nate. And Tom and someone else you have on your lap. This is my cat. So Frank was with me a few minutes ago.

He was no longer. He went outside. Tom, I will start with, an admission of sorts or a self-reflection, self-observation. You and I were at a dinner four or five years ago, and I immediately was impressed by you and liked you, but I was thinking to myself, this guy doesn't get it. And you and I were at a dinner a few weeks ago, and I talked a lot with you about your projects and what you're doing.

And I had a realization that maybe it's I am the one that doesn't get it. So I hastily scheduled you to be on the show and I want to unpack a lot of your, your ideas, your ethos, your work. And I'm really looking forward to this. So let's start at the big 60,000 foot aerial view. In one of your talks in the last couple of years, you explain your vision of the future, which you break down into three epochs. Could you explain what these are and why they're important and how?

how you see them progressing. Yeah, absolutely. And the context for this is I give a talk, you know, at our annual meeting, I give a talk to all of the investors in our funds and our firm. And the purpose, I run a venture capital firm called At One Ventures. The purpose of the firm is to help humanity become a net positive to nature. So a affirmative goal that we actually want to move toward, as opposed to Thou Shall not exceed 1.5 degrees C, which is,

a very different goal construction psychologically, a whole different topic, really. So when I saw your email address and your company's name, I thought it stood for atone ventures like we're atoning for wrongs. Oh, actually, that's on purpose. So in, so, you know, the way it's spelled out is at one ventures, like being at one with yourself, nature and the universe, and that is part of the goal. and being at one with things, like with the kind of greater totality of things is very central to a lot of Eastern spirituality,

whether it's like, you know, the idea of the Tao or many other phrases, Chi, all that kind of thing. And then atone is actually very central to Western spirituality, where there's original sin and atonement and forgiveness and all these sorts of things. At the end of the day, I do think that there is a spiritual core to one's work,

because if you only, you know, try to use capitalism as your, as your kind of moral guidance, there's a lot of bad places you can end up. So it's helpful, actually, in the name, to go evoke, you know, both of the kind of large spiritual traditions on planet Earth.

And, yeah, kind of on purpose. But yes. But with all that context, then, you know, the subject you're talking about is some framing that I did on what it looks like for humanity to become a net positive nature. And one thing that I tell our LPs is that that's a big project. It's a project that will probably take 200 to 500 years, right? And I don't know that very many venture capitalists are basically saying our mission will not be accomplished in this lifetime or the next three generations. But I'm a physicist as well. so I'm very used to like what it takes mass energy flow-wise for things to go change their state.

You know, the cryosphere is in a bad state. Like if everything was fixed, it'd take at least 50 years for the ice caps to refreeze into some sort of stabilized position, if not a bit longer. So even if everything was already fixed right now, it would be a half century to get to the actual moment of repair, even if you're on a good trajectory of repair. So I think it's useful to kind of take the step back and start talking about things. on that type of time scale. And the kind of arc that I built for them was this idea of three different epochs of ecological technology, that we will start on the ones that are closer

to us right now. We can actually do a huge number of our investments. We'll be in that first epoch, but we can build toward a powerful visionary one, which is actually where a lot of the economy gets redesigned around that idea. And it kind of puts us in a spot where the basic function in the economy helps humanity become a net positive to nature. But one doesn't redesign an economy overnight. An economy doesn't take a different form overnight. So even that project would take 50 years, even if everybody was totally on board

and wanted to go change how all these systems worked. So that's why to kind of think in those sorts of timescales. But jumping right into it, Epic Zero is where we are right now and doesn't count that much. And it's actually the one that people are most familiar with. And actually you do a lot of talks about. which are kind of the failings of an extractive economy. But I'll mention it very quickly because one way to go understand why economies

become what they become is to go look at what are the what are kind of the axiomatic ideas inside of that economy. So inside of the extractive economy, if you can go extract more resources and less time, if you can clear cut that forest faster, then that is you getting financial leverage. And in fact, we have built generations of machines that can go take the resources, you know, whether it's grown resources or mind resources, take them out of the planet faster and process them faster and then make them into board feed or, you know, mineral stocks of various types and, you know, into primary manufacturing, all that kind of stuff.

And if that's your underlying principle for how you get financial leverage in an economy, then, of course, you are going to create an economy. where the further success of the economy is the direct detriment to the natural environment. And I kind of say that the current economic design is either oblivious to or actively against, you know, the health of the biosphere. And that's why it basically can't continue forever. But let's not spend that much time on that. Like, let's get into the first epoch. The first epoch is called material productivity. And instead of doing the kind of flat idea of let's maximize GDP or let's extract resources as quickly as possible to go make the most money in the least time,

then its guiding principle is more along the lines of understanding that we live on a planet that doesn't have literally infinite physical resources. There are some things that are infinite and we will get to that in a little bit, but it does not have literally infinite physical resources. So the mature productivity economy asks a slightly different question, but one that highly overlaps with the existing economy, which is what is the maximum GDP that I can get for a ton of feedstock? What's the maximum GDP that we can get for, you know, if pollution must be created in this industry, what's the maximum number, you know, GDP economic benefit, human benefit that can be created if you have to have a ton of pollution? Right now, we don't ask those sorts of questions,

so we're actually very inefficient with those things. But, you know, know, to give you a sense of how much room there is of people that really decide to be skillful around the use of materials, well, you think about it, like if you go grab, you know, a chunk of sand, like let's say I go and grab a kilogram of sand and I go sell that to the construction market, it's pennies. It's literally worth almost nothing, right? But if I take, you know, a kilogram of sand and it becomes, you know, advanced chips that go into GPUs or new AI processing, units or the or fast you know like multi-core processors that same kilogram of sand might actually have $10,000 of economic value now the difference between a couple pennies for the kilogram of sand in a

construction context versus you know thousands of dollars in a semiconductor context basically shows the same material and I know that's a semiconductor sand can only be grabbed from particular places it's fine right but like you know like the same core material in terms of what it is, silicon dioxide largely can become something that is literally thousands to millions of times more valuable. And that's getting a lot more material productivity out of the same, you know, kilograms of feedstock.

But isn't the material productivity the same? It's just the incentives or who's getting the benefits is different because someone now is paying pennies for that same. and having it worth thousands of dollars if they turned it into chips? No, because there was a point in the economy that that sand could never be worth more than pennies, right? So many inventions need to happen

in the course of finding the new echelons of material productivity. But once the stuff is invented, you can't uninvent it. Well, I mean, you can decide not to use that type of production in the future, but like we know how to do it at that point. And back then, if you go back, to before we knew how to do those things and you challenged somebody to take a kilogram of sand

and make $10,000 with it, they'd be kind of hard-pressed. I don't know how you do it, actually. So actual economic value is being created, and you're using the same amount of physical resource to go do it. Now, this is a different type of leverage, right? In the extractive economy, you want to make the money twice as fast. You cut down the forest twice as quickly. and it's not really giving you orders of magnitude improvement. But, you know, if you are very skillful at material productivity, whether it's from the feedstock side or from the pollution side, then you can get a lot more human benefit in outcomes, economic benefit.

You know, actually getting to something really concrete, like in our portfolio, we have a company called gradient. And gradient, you know, just like every other air conditioner on the planet, does have some greenhouse gas impact from its refrigerants. And most greenhouse, most refrigerants for air conditioners and refrigerators in the world are based off of fluorinated gases. So, you know, EPA calls them broadly classed as F gases. They're one of the four major greenhouse gases. And they're one that is not talked about that often, but they are extremely potent per gram. and they also have an insanely long half-life in the atmosphere.

So it's not unusual for fluorinated gas, including ones that we use in industry to have a 10,000 or 50,000-year half-life in the atmosphere. So way longer lived than carbon dioxide, mass and massively longer live than methane. Now, if you think about the world in very short timelines, then methane proportion gets real big. If you think on the GWP of 100, which most of our stats are kind of keyed off, of then carbon dioxide first, methane second, right? Go down the list. But if you think about a long time frame, like a thousand years plus, then the F gases are the main thing that's left. Anyhow,

so gradient is, you know, for the refrigerant pollution that is created from air conditioning, we actually use a refrigerant that has 6,000 times less greenhouse gas impact. So you're getting the same cooling tons. And by the way, the OPEX is 2X cheaper as well. So it costs you less to run the air conditioner. But like, so you're saving half, you know, twice as much money, you're like your bill is half as much every single month for the same amount of cooling tons that you're getting from your air conditioner. But in terms of the pollution footprint that you're leaving, relative to the, the refrigerants that you're putting up in the atmosphere, because a little bit's always getting out, then it's, we're getting 6,000 times more benefit.

But from a CO2 standpoint, you're not getting a significant benefit, but from a total greenhouse gas over a long time you're getting a massive benefit. Well, the CO2 footprint is mostly related to the energy use going into the device. So to wherever you live and if you live by a coal plant. And on that one, you could say we're not getting a huge benefit, but we're getting a 2x benefit. So it's about half as much, you know, carbon intensity, depending on how carbon intense, your specific, yeah, sources.

That's impressive. Let me, let me ask some questions. Because knowing the way your brain works, I'm going to have to interrupt so that I understand. Doesn't the individual and the societal discount rate matter hugely for these sorts of questions? Because if our society totally doesn't care about 100 years from now because they don't believe in the future or they're too pessimistic or any other thing, let alone 6,000 years from now, isn't this endemic to the human biological condition that we don't see, I mean, the future is about as real to us as leprechauns. And so does that matter to your investors, to the inventors, et cetera? For instance, if we had a much shallower discount rate and cared as a culture about 6,000 years from now, the gradient product you just said would go like,

hotcakes. And then there's the Jevins paradox, which we'll talk about in a minute. But what do you think the discount rate of our culture affects some of the projects that you're talking about on these different epochs? Yeah, the reason that it doesn't affect the way that we do this investment in epoch one is because in all of our investments, we're looking for something that's called the triad. Try it as a disruptive deep tech, which is ushering in radically better unit economics paired with radically better environmental economics. And I would say 95 plus percent of the customers of our portfolio companies, they honestly could care less about the environment.

They buy it because it makes them more money or saves them a ton of money. So look, an air conditioning bill might be $300 in a month during a hot month. It might be $200 in a month in a hot month. It's nicer if it's $80. bucks. It's nicer if it's 100 bucks. So you're this company gradient or this product is two times cheaper than regular air conditioners and it's over a long time frame, 6,000 times better from a GHG. Immediately because right now you would be using F gas-based refrigerants that have 6,000 times

more greenhouse gas impact today. But in the long run, the proportion even gets worse because of the long-lived nature of F-GASS. Yeah. But yeah, no, up front, it is also cheaper to run. Okay, well, then the logical next question is two-part question. If it's cheaper to run and we're headed into a warmer world and it's a groovy air conditioner technology, A, why isn't that selling like hotcakes all over the planet? And B, if it does, don't we run into the Jebens paradox?

a rebound effect where people then save money and buy a secondary conditioner or they save money and go to Home Depot and buy something to build. I mean, that gets beyond the scope of your company and your vision, but we live in a... I mean, if they bought 6,000 of them, then sure, they would catch up. But there's a point where you win by enough that it's hard to actually create as much damage. But the answer to your first question is it wasn't going like hotcakes initially because part of our investment thesis is to get into these companies before they get to manufacturing scale. And we have a bunch of people in the team that all three partners have a background of manufacturing.

We have a dedicated manufacturing support core. So by the time we're done working with you, now you're at scaled manufacturing. So we've been working with them along the way. And it is kind of selling like hotcakes. They got a $24 million pre-order to go buy a bunch of units. They just closed another $34 million pre-order. So they already have more than $60 million in bookings for a relatively early stage venture. And look, $60 million is not going to change the planet overnight.

But when your unit economics are that advantage, then that is eventually going to be the way that we do this industry. Well, I was just in India. And India is planning to double coal production by 2030, partially because they want to be self-sufficient. in energy, but partially because they're going to, they realize they're going to need a lot more cooling and electricity for air conditioning. So I would think something like this would be scalable. Yes. Oh, yes. No, like this will definitely have some pickup in that part of the world. It's also going to get a lot of pickup in northern Europe, places that did not traditionally have air conditioning and now really need it. Okay. So the orders I mentioned so far are all U.S.

and North America based. But yes, we see very strong prospects around the world. And did you fund this or the inventors invented it with optimizing for CO2 pollution? So I got into this pretty early. I actually got into it when it was a three-person company as an angel investment. And then when the firm started, we warehoused it into the firm. and then added to our position and took a little bit more of a meaningful position. Yeah.

But the inventors of it, the three-person team, did they begin by optimizing for CO2 biosphere impact or for cheapness and profitability in the epoch zero framework? They were thinking about both. Yeah. They definitely wanted to see if we could use a refrigerant type that had way less greenhouse gas impact than fluorinated gases. So that was definitely part of the original invention constraint and premise.

Now that said, if we happen upon an inventor that wasn't trying to invent it for ecological reasons, but it still has this massive ecological benefit, we're not going to fault them for it. We're just like, hey, you may not have noted this, but you have created way more material productivity around XYZ. We'd love to back it. Tom, when you and I have,

met five years ago relative to today, how many people are you coming across in your position that are those three-person teams or what have you that are really developing products with an eye to ecological sustainability and the longer time frame? I think the number is definitely increased. I actually never thought it was actually a small number. I will say that it's been chronically underfunded because like look, you know, we had 20 years of everybody kind of deciding that venture, you know, Silicon Valley venture capital is just software. And enterprise SaaS is like, you know, the easiest way to make the most money for the least amount of money in. But I think we solved a lot of the important enterprise SaaS problems, not to say that there's none left,

but you're now at the spot where it's like, hey, this thing is going to optimize your procurement system by 5%. Well, we already have 50 of those. So I'm not saying that you can't build a 51st version of that software, but like the other 50 were kind of okay already. So I think we're kind of running out of gas on that. But what it means is that we have like a lost generation. Like the place is called Silicon Valley.

It's not called Enterprise SAS Valley. It's not called Lines of Code Valley. It was called Silicon Valley because we solved important things for the semiconductor revolution. Then we solved important things for the physical. hardware of the internet revolution. And then we got into the web software and other things on top of that. And then we got into these overly easy business models, you know, around SaaS or advertising. And then everything just narrowly popped into that. But ahead of all this, we had a couple generations of venture capitalists that were very skilled at physical hardware and building physical things. And you can make a lot

of money out of it. Like those people, you know, they have their names on the side of buildings right now. because you absolutely can make money at it. Okay, so before we move off onto Epoch 2 and Epoch 3, presumably, let me make sure I understand. So Epoch 0 is business as usual, basically. Epac 1 is determining how much GDP you could get from a certain amount of scarce non-reduable material. Yeah, from a kilogram of material or a kilogram of pollution that must be put out, right? Given the pollution that has to come out, how do we use the least amount of inputs to get that?

Well, how do you get the most GDP for each kilogram of pollution that you make? Because this still makes refrigerant pollution. It's just 6,000 times less impactful and you're getting the same number of cooling tons. So. Okay. So what is, what comes next then in your longer term framework? So Epic 2 is the first big leap. And then Epic 3 is it even further leap, but the first big leap comes from the fact that in Epic

Zero and Epic 1, we were still treating resources as nouns, right? Like, this forest can become board feet. The forest is a noun, the tree is a noun, we cut it down, we make it into board feet, that's a noun. The first big jump is to actually understand that the resources are there, not because of nouns, but because of verbs. a forest can also be understood as a verb, like a piece of land forests itself, like a verb. And that comes from having access to the right amount of water, nutrients, you know, resources in the air, and then the right biodiversity around it.

And lack of chainsaws. Sure, exactly. Now, the whole point, if you understand, you know, the verb to be the locus of where value is being. created as opposed to just thinking about that as the noun as the output of the value being created, then you can understand that there's a different way to get financial leverage, right, by investing in the robustness of the verb. If the verb is incredibly robust, the forest grows quickly. It grows with, you know, with, you know, good, like, disease resistance.

It grows. Look, we make all these monocrops and then we end up with disease problems for obvious reasons. and then we ask questions later on. It's like, why is it so expensive? We have to put all these inputs on the land. You didn't necessarily need to. You didn't have a healthy verb. Because you didn't have a healthy verb,

because the only thing that you thought about was the noun at the end of the day, you were focused on the amount of yield that was coming from this land and the idea of a noun. But you can actually get an enormous amount of financial leverage if you invest in the healthy metabolics

of the forest so that it is more self-sustaining, more pest resistant, more able to go use the natural resources that are available to it in a skillful way. Is embedded in your statement you just made somewhat of an oxymoron that you're getting more financial leverage by treating the forest as a verb? Because if you're still focused on financial outputs, then somehow that's not going to jive with ecological stability, unless we're at a much lower scale.

Well, not necessarily, because it's, If you look at the ancient land practices, including, you know, a number of indigenous people that actually used a lot of wood for fuel, for building material, for basically a lot of the same stuff we still use it for, actually. Then there was practices where there was a lot more selective culling, but actually plenty of culling. And they would go and purposely pull down particular trees that would open up canopy in order to allow things to go happen on the floor around them.

But they were doing it in a skillful way, not just on a... monocropped thing. And then they would rotate around, you know, the faces of a hill, for example. So over the course of, you know, a generation, they would do one full rotation around the hill, and the entire thing that they started with would have grown back even stronger than when they started. So in that case, they're basically doing continuous take. Now, look, you can clear cut and just move, you know, sideways and try to clear cut again and move sideways, but you just eventually run out of space. So you end up with a business that, might actually integrate to less value creation over time

than to skillfully rotate around and do a little bit of investment of the metabolics of the forest. And what is Epic II called? Well, Epic II is focusing on the metabolics. It's basically understanding the underlying flows of a system as opposed to as opposed to understanding everything as the nouns.

So it's the verbs. Epic 2 is the verbs. Yeah, there's a lot of different ways to go phrase it. I think verbs is like the simplest phrase for it. Like the more kind of nerdy term that I gave in the talk was the idea of enriching ecosystem metabolics. And this is just to say that, you know, and this is actually a point that's worth making because a lot of people are saying like, we're moving into a fully virtualized economy.

Everything's digital today and all the money is going to be made. And it's like, no, everything in the economy was either. mind or grown, right? Look around you. Everything that you do, even the things that we're talking at right now, this thing, the screen I'm looking at, all these sorts of things, all of the stuff was mined or grown. Now, if you can go make a bunch of money off of the same device, then great. This is material productivity-wise better. So that's fantastic, but you cannot get away. There's no such thing as a virtual economy, right? You can pretend that the system line stopped there, but at the end of the day, there's a physical substrate that you're working off of. Now,

If you understand that everything in the world is mined or grown, then you understand that there were metabolic processes of the earth that created the opportunity for you to harvest the thing that was grown, to harvest the thing that you're getting through mining. And if you start to understand that you can get tremendous financial leverage by focusing on the health of the thing that makes the valuable thing, so this is like, you know, birthing the goose that lays the golden eggs as opposed to hoarding all the eggs that come out,

we're cutting the goose open in order to grab the eggs that are inside of it. Which is what we're doing now. So this is the first time I've heard this. Let me repeat it back to you in a way that might clarify. So APAC 1 is material productivity figuring out how much GDP you could get for a unit of pollution or a unit of raw material input. But now this is like the first derivative of that where you're looking. at the ecosystem metabolics and figuring out how much GDP can I get from a stable, healthy ecosystem metabolics?

That's right. And you'll actually, because you start to work with the metabolics of that ecosystem, then actually nature's on your side. Like a lot of times in the extractive economy, nature is either against you or at best neutral. It's just like sitting there, you know, to be taken. So can you give us an example? of epoch 2 versus epoch 0, how we're working against nature right now

and how that same product or human service might be different in your Epic 2 framework? Yeah, well, there's a couple that I can go share. So one of them is actually a very well-known example, which is the water purification of the Hudson Valley and the water system of New York. And they basically used to have multiple billions of dollars that were going into wastewater treatment, and it's understandable.

You're trying to make water for, you know, eight, nine million people. So I get it. But then they realized that actually if they went upstream and they worked with some of the landholders to go change a little bit of their land use practices upstream, that it was reducing the amount of kind of water processing that needed to happen downstream by a factor 10. So, and it was a very small financial costs for them to go talk with those landholders and be like, hey, can you make this tweak? Oh, can you go adjust how you're working on this land in this way? And they financially compensated some of those landholders as well, but massively cheaper than trying to go solve that problem downstream. Because basically, the natural systems were doing number of things

that the water treatment system would eventually do. Now, we call those nature-based services when it happens in this kind of non-financial context. But to give you, you know, a number of another one. So one of our portfolio companies is called Dendro Systems. They use all sorts of tools like drones and other sorts of robotics and scanning technology in order to massively accelerate ecosystem restoration. Now, where in the world is eco-restoration at business? Well, it turns out that in the regulated resources market, it's definitely a business. And what it looks like is there's all this mining that we do in the world. And let's say a, strip mine goes and and you know there's a strip mine and it covers 5,000 hectares. Well typically,

you know, in order for a mining company to keep their mining license, after they have kind of destroyed that land, they are on the hook to go restore that much hectareage times a small factor, typically between two and five. So if you destroyed 5,000 hectares, you'll be on the hook to restore, you know, 10,000 to 20, 5,000 hectares, you know, and as the kind of, the kind of the repair that you do in exchange for doing all that damage. Now, what they would normally do back in the day before Dendra is they would hire these super low paid field crews to go out there and handplant things. And the problem is that a mining site is actually physically dangerous and also like a bunch

of, you know, people would get heavy metal poisoning just from like breathing and touching the soil in that area. It was honestly not a nice work environment in any way either. and they're being paid, you know, a terribly small amounts to do eco-restorations that, you know, were just okay. But what Dendera is able to do is they're able to fly the drones over, scan the landscape, analyze exactly where to plant things, including what species and what locations as a function of, you know, light exposure, moisture exposure. So it would require the least amount of maintenance in terms of being able to have to

go back to that land and take care of those plants and plant them in the right proportion. And an example of nature working with us is there's this landscape that had been completely destroyed by a strip mine and the ore had been removed. And, you know, after the oars removed, they usually put the dirt on the side and they call it the overburden. It used to be called an ecosystem, but, you know, in the context of mining, it's called overburden. And then once, you know, you've done the thing that you've done, then they just throw the dirt back on and then they try to start ecosystem restoration. Now, if you don't have a good intervention, that becomes a muddy, eroded landscape. It might as well be the surface of the moon, or if you have anything, it's just some weeds, right?

Definitely doesn't look anything like the ecosystem that was there before. But working with local ecologists, we got advice on what are the sprinter species that we should plant? And by going in there, sprinter species. Oh, the sprinter species are the ones that in the, in the course of ecological succession, those are the first that actually get established, which then create the foundation that the next set of species can come into the ecosystem. And then through a series of, you know, phases like that, which is called the series of ecological succession, then you arrive at the ultimate, you know, best ecosystem for that spot, which is, you know, in ecological terms called the climax community. This is like the peak of biodiversity that that, you know, land and

caring capacity could have. So the enriches. ecosystem metabolics in the epoch 2 is trying to optimize for climax communities in various ecosystems in a way. I think you'll get it when I share this data point. So the ecologist told us what the surrender species were. And instead of having a bunch of low paid, untrained people just kind of willy-nilly try to repopulate the thing, which has a way lower success rate, we put the right mix of species in the right place.

and we planted about 15 different species in the right places and the landscape. Now, once those 15 species were in the ground, 18 months later, you know, our survey of the land had 70 species coming up. Now, where did all the other species come from? They were in the dirt. The seeds were wading in the dirt. And because we had put the right foundation down, we were working in line with the metabolics of how that ecosystem wanted to come back.

And we massively reduce the time of that first stage of ecological succession. So 15 species actually became 70 species, which were then self-propagating and then speeding up the pace that the next stage of ecological restoration succession happened. Whoever owned the land and got the minerals out of it or whatever, how did this change their cost structure, what you just described? It's way lower with a better outcome. And that's the case of basically all of our companies. cheaper cost structure, way better outcome, both in terms of performance and massively better outcome in terms of ecological benefit. How many places around the world is an example of what you just described happening?

Well, you know, that particular company has already planted across 20 different ecosystems on four different continents. So I'll tell you many places in the world where we have very concretely done this work. And, you know, the images, you know, that, like relative to the, you know, strip mine I'm talking about were done in dry land, you know, moderate elevation. But we also have fantastic, you know, restorations that I can show you where we're doing massive mangrove planting, which is obviously the opposite. Very humid, near the shore, partially aquatic ecosystems. Actually, the team is out in Abu Dhabi right now. and on planting, you know, during the planting season, when they go out, they're actually able to plant about 120,000 mangroves a day with four field operation people.

And in that process, restore about 83 hectares a day. Now, the 120,000 mangroves, you know, once you put it through the actual germination to successful survival to adulthood rate, comes out to about 100,000 mangroves that get established per day. So yeah, no, it's a very interesting scale. And it's something that, yeah, we look, I mean, there's a really simple way to explain this. Like the tools of conservation, we didn't give them anything. Like you talk with the conservation and restoration folks, they're still using the tools from 100 years ago. Like binoculars, little quadrots where they can go count the species inside of a square meter, little clickers to be able to count bird populations and fish populations.

they're still using the same kind of stuff we had 100 years ago. And every other industry got to advance and do manufacturing in a thousand X the scale or 100 X the quality or what have you. And we didn't give any better tools to conservation. And if you spend any of the modern skills on those areas, you will find that there are 10x, 100X wins to be had in those areas as well. We just never spent the time working on those tools. 10x to 100x financial returns?

Well, in terms of efficacy per dollar in. Now, if that is related to something financial, in the case of regulated resources, it absolutely is related to something financial in that if the, you know, a typical mind that we might work with in Australia, let's say, is toplining like $700,800 million per year. So if they actually have an environmental violation that shuts them down for a month, the cost is astronomical. a call. Now, if you could spend two million dollars to go have the ecosystem restoration come

through really well, then if you can take the number of down days because of infractions from 40 days to one day, then it massively more than paid for itself. Okay, I have a lot of questions. So you're implying and your stellar returns of your fund would give evidence to the fact that these technologies are working even without a major change in incentive structures and regulations and things like that. That is by design. Those are the types of investments that we back, yes. But wouldn't the type of technologies that the people you're investing in are developing

like be complete moonshots if we change the regulatory structure and started to price in ecosystem services or externalities or things like that, just a little bit. Oh, look, if we did governmental changes and that type of incentive change, then yeah, then the businesses are even more amazing. But everything that we get into actually already has better unit economics. So it's already viable without regulation. And there are some things that we haven't been able to go kick, you know, and some of those things may require regulatory. Like, you know, the, like, the death of, you know, honeybees in North America could be understood as a three-part comorbidity model. And, like, one of the, you know, elements, the neonicotoy pesticides,

I don't think we're going to be able to find something that has better unit economics than neo-nick pesticides, right? Because it's basically a one-time application that then gets through the entire plant as opposed to surface applications which need to account for the weather, like whether things are get washed off and need to be applied multiple times in the season, blah, blah, then I don't know how we beat the unit economics and neonics. That said, we are, you know, we did back the first company in the world to develop a vaccine for a number of critical honeybee diseases, specifically bacterial brood diseases, which is one of the other three in the three-part co-orbidity model. It's the diseases, the varro-destructor mite, and neonic pesticides. I don't know how to

go win against neonic pesticides on a pure economic basis. The vaccine absolutely, like, is actually getting really interesting kind of financial possibilities for it because it's the, it's obviously not only the first vaccine to ever protect honeybees, but it's actually the first vaccine ever developed by humans to go protect any invertebrate. And it's actually opening the door to, you so many other things that we can do that would be economically valuable from it. Okay. This is all super impressive as it was when we met a few weeks ago. And actually, like, that's a good example because that is still an epic too.

Because like the metabolics of pollination are really critical for the health of the planet. And to the extent that we can go work with the pollinators that then give all of this oomph to how, you know, how the flowering plants. And the majority of biomass on planet Earth is plants. 80% of all plants are angiosperms, which are flowering plants. So they're obligate mutualists that require a pollinator. So to the extent that you have technologies that really strengthen the pollinators on planet Earth, you are strengthening a huge swath of life on planet Earth.

And those are metabolics that are on your side. We're not paying for most of that. So does the enriching ecosystem metabolic framework, Is it scale agnostic? I mean, right now we have a 19 terawatt metabolism as a global human economy. So let's just say that you use tech to make all these things better that you were just describing. But, and that adds a productivity to the whole system while increasing the ecosystem health. Except that productivity gets turned into dollars and yen and,

and rubles and euros and is then spent on Home Depot and NASCAR and Walmart and other stuff. So is there a decoupling or does that environmental impact at the broader meta scale still happen under this framework? Look, I mean, the reason that there's things at different epochs is if they then go to Home Depot and buy materials, for example, we have an epoch one bet that is about how to massively improve those materials and do it with much less waste and do it at a way lower cost structure. I mean, I can talk about that company if you'd like as well. So we're trying to hit it on all these different fronts. It is true that like, you know, you solve a thing here and then you might get some reflow

in some other spot. But if you're solving on multiple fronts at once, then it's like, no, I mean, you'll run into some improvements if you go in this direction too and you run into some improvements you go in that third direction. Well, it's it's not your job to change the entire incentive structure of our capitalist society. You're just trying to- I'm not changing the incentive structure. No, I'm basically the incentive structure is exactly what we're working with. Like these businesses want to make more money. That's the reason that they buy our equipment. That's why the reason that they use our materials. That's the reason that they, you know, save energy with the things that we ship to them.

Yeah, absolutely. So, so let's just assume that we stay at today's level of GDP and 19 terawatts of energy are required to power it. If your company's doing these things would scale, then our pollution and our footprint, our ecological footprint on hurting nature would decline quite a lot because we're using a technology and applying it to improve the metabolism of ecosystems, for example, planting mangro trees, et cetera. Yeah, that is correct. And actually, you know, look, we're at the point where even without pricing in the value of nature-based services and all that sort

of thing, like one of our first big mangrove restoration projects in that company happened from land that was cleared in southern Myanmar, and the government purposely cleared out the mangroves, because they're like, we're going to start a huge shrimp industry down here, and they're going to make so much money. In practice, they cleared all these mangroves, and there was a large population of folks that were doing subsistence fishing from the mangroves, and those people started, you know, needing federal government assistance because they're starving now. They literally took away, you know, their fishing and hunting grounds. And basically, it was more. more expensive for them to pay the folks to not die than it was to just put the mangroves back.

Actually, similarly in Abu Dhabi, they cleared their own mangroves in order to have, you know, these particular types of beaches and a particular type of shoreline. And then they found out that, hey, stuff is eroding away. And then all of a sudden they were dredging, spending billions of dollars dredging sand. And now they're, instead of spending billions of dollars dredging sand to put their, their beaches back, they pay us $50 million. and we put the mangroves back. So once again, insanely cheaper

than what you were already doing. So instead of boosting labor productivity, you're talking about boosting ecosystem productivity, and yet that's still from an anthropocentric viewpoint, right?

It's boosting the ecosystem productivity for humans. Well, this is the bridge, because at the end of the day, like, would we have backed pollinators if we didn't need the honeybee economically? Probably not, right? Would we have put the mangroves back in Abu Dhabi if it wasn't so expensive to do sand dredging and try to fix that only for it to be a temporary fix? Probably not. But I, but like this is why I say that some of the stuff is going to

take 200 to 500 years because we get to do lots of Epic 1 bets where every normal capitalist is like, oh, I get why that's amazing, right? Because you're getting, you know, same cooling tons for half the energy or you're getting it for like a fraction of the pollution or you're getting for it. That's very easy for them to understand Epic One bets. And I'm going to say like 75% of our portfolio is Epic One Betts. So that makes it very easy. It's like walk up easy for people to understand. Epic 2 like I said is the first big leap because we start to talk about verbs instead of nouns.

But it's a very powerful position to come from in terms of leverage. You think about the Archimedean idea of like if I find the right place to stand to get the leverage, the verbs have way more leverage than kind of mucking with the nouns. Now that said, at this particular moment in history, we can only get up to you bets off if they are like half a step away from something that we obviously economically care about, like pollinating crops that we want to go eat, or, you know, like restoring a coastline that we want people to live on or we want to do, you know, real estate development on. And hey, man, that's the world today on that front. I wish some of that stuff was different, but at least one is able to go introduce how much leverage that can come

through the backing of verbs instead of nouns. We kind of, I mean, this is not your job. But if society had a more longer term or an optimistic view of the future, that would enable people to visualize and care about epoch one and epoch two. And as we head into what I call the great simplification with potential wars or climate impacts or a financial reset, all of those things actually do the opposite. They steepen people's discount rates, which makes it tougher to invest in and imagine the things that you're doing, which means that there needs to be kind of a cultural, in a way explaining your framework. of the different epochs, in some ways,

that is a parallel and as important project as the tech that underpins it. Well, I think the framework is important because, like I said, 95% of the customers of our portcos could care less about the environment. They don't even know that they're benefiting things

because they're just going after their own economic benefit. But if at the core of it, and the 5% that we're looking for something, you know, that was more sustainable. They happen upon our companies and they're like, oh my gosh, I was just going to do like a pilot thing and then make a blog post or a press announcement about it. But like this is a better way to do this part of the business. We should adopt it for the whole thing.

We shouldn't just do a pilot. So like, so I would say that like even if you have a steeper discount curve on time, then these people would as rational economic actors would still be excited about the stuff, you know, in Epic 1, absolutely. And, you know, remember, Epic 2 is still way cheaper than dredging sand. Epic 2 is way cheaper than hand pollinating. Epic 2 is way cheaper than a lot of the other things that the tech that we're doing at that level is supporting. And what's Epic 3?

Yes, Epic 3 is the biggest leap. And in order to go understand Epic 3, you need to have the foundation of understanding that value can be created and leverage can be created by supporting verbs, but you've got to build on that even further. Now, in order to go understand Epic 3, then there's, you know, I call the philosophical foundation of Epic 3 the idea that there's plenty of room in the middle. And this is kind of a nod to Richard Feynman. He wrote a paper and gave a talk back in 1959 that was called Plenty of Room at the bottom.

And what he was basically saying is, well, you know, we mostly, you know, physics-wise, we've mostly made things that are kind of human scale, or we've made things that are factory scale, or if we've ever made a small thing, then maybe like a Swiss watch, we've like made some pretty small components in a Swiss watch. Because think about the world, you know, like up until the 50s, right? Like the smallest things we'd ever made. But basically what Feynman was saying in his plenty of room at the bottom was like, well, you know, with, with, you know, with lithography techniques, we actually should be able to make things really, really small, right? We can actually make, you know, like denser and denser computation. We could make micro machines. We could make,

so he basically predicted the semiconductor revolution, the nanotech revolution, you know, and half of the stuff, we still haven't finished yet. But he, like, predicted two huge economic arcs that happened in the subsequent 50 years. Because the physics basically said, there's plenty of room at the bottom to do more value creation at smaller and smaller sizes, as opposed to kind of the Swiss watch being like the, like, the detail limit for the size of things that human beings were engineering at that time. Now, plenty of room in the middle refers to the following. So almost all the energy for life on planet Earth comes from the sun. You know, there's a little bit that comes from, you know, geothermal vents and all sort of thing,

but, you know, almost all the, all the energy that powers the biosphere is coming from the sun. And a photon will arrive from the sun, and it'll spend a certain amount of time on planet Earth, and after a certain amount of time, the energy from that photon will be re-radiated back to space in the form of infrared. And the input and the output are always equal. If it didn't, then the planet would just over time would overheat like crazy. Now, the reason that, you know, the planet is warming at all is because of greenhouse gases, there's just a longer residence time of that energy in the atmosphere before it radiates back out. But it's always equivalent, the amount of energy in and the energy out. And the middle is that time period,

between, you know, the photon arriving and its energy being radiated back out in space. And what I mean by there's plenty of room in the middle is that one can go design an economy around how many organisms are benefited in that middle time period between the photon arriving and the energy exiting the Earth system. Now, to make this really concrete, let's talk about some fates of this photon. That photon could arrive on planet Earth, it could hit a rock, and it could immediately radiate back out as infrared into space, and zero organisms were benefited. You know, maybe if a lizard lays on that rock later, it'll warm its belly a little bit and like something

would have benefited. But, you know, there's many rocks where that doesn't happen, and therefore that photon benefited nothing in the middle in that time period between arrival and reentry of its energy into space. Now, think about a second case where the photon arrives instead of hitting a rock, it hits the solar panel. Well, now it's going to be part of helping, you know, a couple organisms in that household. So whatever, maybe four people and a dog. Great. Fantastic. Well, five organisms got benefited because of this photon arrive before it got radiated back out. Now, let's talk about a third example where the photon arrives and instead of hitting a rock or solar panel, it hits a green leafy plant. Well, now the plant is going to go use

that to go synthesize plant sugars that then get fed down into the roots and drive the indef, entire underground ecosystem and all the different critters that live in the underground ecosystem. That plant, of course, it's powering its own body, and it then gets eaten by an herbivore, which then gets eaten by a predator, which then eventually dies and gets eaten by detrovers and that sort of thing. You might be helping dozens of macroorganisms and many millions to billions of microorganisms with just that one photon. Now, that's basically saying that the amount of good that a photon can do between in the middle is incredibly elastic. It can get to a very, very large number. And an epoch three is called the maximization of diverse nutrient flows because it's built off of

two ideas of what life is doing in the universe. If you had to boil the algorithm of life in the universe, at least the life that we know of in the universe in terms of what it's trying to do, life is trying to savor every photon, savor every water molecule, which is do the most in the middle with the photon, do the most in the middle of the water molecule. What the middle for the water molecule is, is most of the available water in our planet, because a bunch of it's locked up in various places, but most of the water it's available to life is part of the hydrosphere where it evaporates off of the ocean and then it rains down over the land. and it'll start at like a high peak, like, you know, at the top of a mountain or in a snowpack, and it'll run back down to the ocean. And between the top of that elevation and the bottom, that's the middle for the water molecule. And there's many organisms that could be benefited in that middle.

Now, basically, life is trying to go savor every photon while it's in the middle. It's trying to savor every water molecule while it's in the middle. And over time, life works toward the maximization of diverse nutrient flows. Is this akin to the maximum power principle that says organisms self-organized to best degrade an energy gradient? You don't have an oak tree that has one leaf, which would be maximum efficiency, and you don't have a billion leaves because they would be shading each other and they would cost so much. You have the exact number of leaves to get the most sunlight in the middle. So I think you're talking about that from the particular standpoint of an organism or a species, and that's certainly part of what is happening to go make this macro arc happen, but that principle

by itself is not the whole macro arc. The macro arc spans well beyond any species or any time era in the history of the planet. But when one thinks about the maximization of diverse nutrient flows, was we likely had life on planet Earth, even in the late Hadean, right? In the early Hadean, it was literally like the floor is lava. Like, it was pretty difficult for things to live because the... When was the Hadean? The Hadean was the very first, you know, like half billion to three quarter billion year

of planet Earth because there was still a bunch of bombardments from solar system objects. And basically, the whole, the planet was pretty molten, basically. You know, it conditionally cooled in spots and eventually cooled down and had a hard crust. And then at the end of the Hadesian started the Archaan. Now, the Arcan basically led to a massive proliferation of single-celled organisms across the planet. We didn't have eukaryotes yet or anything, but we had really simple single-celled organisms. And, you know, that is a, obviously, that's way more life in the middle than when we had the Hadean, right? Like almost nothing could live in the Hadean. So that's part of the maximization. But it wasn't quite diverse.

yet because it was just a bunch, you know, a couple species of single-celled organisms, or actually even the definition of species was a little funky back then, but we don't need to get into the minutia here necessarily. But if you give, you know, if you give it some more time, what life wants to do is continue to go diversify those nutrient flows by making new species that are taking different ecological niches in terms of doing interesting things with minerals that are available, doing interesting things with different forms of energy. that are available. You know, for example, like, hey, I can use acoustic energy to hear things.

Well, that's pretty interesting. Well, now I can do more diverse set of behaviors that can then help me do interesting in different niches. That is basically what life is trying to do in the universe, period. Okay, so I can't help but make a simplifying observation from your explanation of Epoch 3. You said that if a photon hits a solar panel, it helps five organisms in a house. but if it hits a green leafy plant,

it helps unknown ones in the biology under the soil, et cetera. It's noble, just such a large number we don't spend a lot of time counting it, yeah. But does that, does that imply that solar panels are not the optimal path for the photon, given the Epic 3 framework? Well, look, it might be the right thing in particular cases, but, like, actually the punchline is something different, which is, because there's a lot of discussion around, like, okay, do we do donor economics? Do we go into degrowth? I mean, even a lot of the work

that you're talking about in the great simplification is kind of along those lines because it's like, oh, we're in epoch zero and it's garbage. We absolutely need less of epic zero. So I have nothing against the idea that we need less of epic zero. We absolutely need less of epic zero. And that leads to the ideas on degrowth and all these sorts of things. But you have to understand that life on Earth, if you follow the algorithm of life on Earth, you don't need less of it. You need more of it. Right? Like what Earth has been doing over these billions of years is actually making more life and way more diversity of life, you know, touching more and more niches. That is the algorithm of life on planet Earth. And if you wanted to go-

It interrupted five or ten times with minor and mass extinctions. Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I agree. But even then, like, we actually have the most diversity of anything in Earth's history now, even after those mass extinction. We can get set back pretty hard, but, you know, we had the great dying. We lost like 95% of biodiversity at that point, but sprung back pretty strongly. Anyway, the whole point is that is what life is trying to do on planet Earth, and one can design an economy that can go on forever if you focus on the maximization of organisms benefited in the middle, because you can keep on getting more and more economic benefit.

This is where you go beyond the Anthropocenter. lens. That's right. In Epic 3. Because like, like, you know, in the early arcane, the thing would go hit a single-celled organism and that it would kind of do its thing. And there wasn't a complex web of life in the soil. There wasn't a complex ecosystem of, you know, herbivores to predators to, you know, detrovers or whatever. That type of diversity didn't exist on Earth yet. It basically would receive a little bit of energy from the environment, live its life, and that would radiate back out as infrared. So it actually, life itself was starting at a lower level in terms of how many organisms were being benefited in the middle.

But if you give life enough time, it diversifies things which are creating a type of wealth, which we really do experience as wealth. It's not limited in the same way that, that like mineral extraction or clear cutting of forest is limited. One of my recent guests, and I forgot who was a climate scientist and said in a 3 to 5 degrees Celsius world, we actually could have more life on the planet, but it would be cockroaches and jellyfish and bacteria, and it wouldn't have much complex life like whales or dolphins or elephants or humans. So are you saying that the more organisms the better, or do you

qualify by complex life or other metrics? The reason that we would have less complex life is because of how acutely it happens. So if it happens as an asteroid strike or if it happens as human beings like careening the temperature out of control in sub 1,000 years, then yeah, a lot of things are going to die. I mean, things died during the ice ages to interglacial time periods as well, even though that was a way more gradual transition. You gave a thing, whatever, 10,000 years to go adjust as opposed to 100 years. So we will lose a lot of species because of how acute the change is. but if it stabilizes for a period of time, then Earth will achieve a pretty substantial amount of biodiversity.

Now that said, I don't think we should be irresponsible. Like when the great dying happened, it basically took, you know, easily tens of millions of years, but one can interpret it like up to 50 million years for the biodiversity of planet Earth to recover. And I don't know that like humanity is like wanting to be responsible for wiping out, you know, 50, 50 million years of progress. I think very few people are aware that that is at stake.

That is what we are currently engaged in, but yes. Yeah. So you are a businessman. You run a venture fund. I like the framing of the Epoch 0123. Epic 3, though, is really almost your philosophy, your story about the next. thousand years as kind of an Overton window ethical, you know, stake in the ground as a story. And I think if more people thought of that story, then maybe that would change our values,

our consciousness, and maybe our decisions and our investments. Is that what you're hoping for? I actually would frame it slightly differently, which is in Epic 3, I am actually just describing how life works in the universe. and we can end up with an economy that is well aligned with that or not. If we don't, if we end up with an economy that's not aligned with that, then a lot of death happens and hey. Yeah.

And look, there's many survivable civilizations where we don't get fully in line with that. That's where some philosophical elements of economy design can come in. But the actual underlying thing that's happening, I am describing just how life works in the universe. So could you visualize and explain? that if we, in the coming century, graduate from epoch zero to epoch one and we integrate epoch two, what would an epoch three human civilization society look like 500 or 1,000 years from now?

Oh, yeah. I mean, like the, I think we actually have little peaks of it, right? Because what happens in that sort of, If you are really understanding, maximizing the number of organisms that are benefit in the middle, and you start to really go and build an economy around it, it means that you need to be listening to more organisms than we are today. We mostly look at organisms as, you know, resources or food, you know, or materials for ourselves. That's how we look at organisms. We don't like think about like, well, what is this organism trying to be? what is, you know, a great life for this organization, organism,

what would be a maximization of its life experience. Now, that said, we have little peaks of it, right? Like, you know, people interact with their pets in a very deep way. And that actually shows that even across different species, we're able to start understanding each other. And actually, I have a cat, and, like, you know, like recently it was established that cats actually don't meow at each other. like cats, it's a very rare thing for cats in colonies to meow at each other.

That's not how they communicate. Cats actually developed meowing to talk to us. And that's actually showing that a species can work out. Like, hey, I need to relate to you better. And I'm going to start vocalizing because vocalizing is a way that you guys interact. And by vocalizing, I'm able to interact with you in a more skillful way. Now, in the same way that a cat can have the consciousness to go figure out to go do that, and because of that, install themselves in households around the world,

then imagine human beings had some of that same affinity. Look, we do have it going one way with our pets and some of the animals that we care about, but, and, you know, some of the protected species, people are very passionate about and they want to have that deeper connection with. But imagine it was just part of the larger vocabulary that people are thinking about organisms, not just as resources, but organisms as other, types of sentience that we are effectively, you know, wanting to listen to you as a process of maximizing how many organisms are benefited in the middle.

So that sounds aligned with a lot of indigenous thinking, but let me ask you a really difficult question, which might be slipping into the minds of some of the viewers. There are now 1.2 billion dogs on the planet or something like that. I'm a dog person. the amount of dogs on the planet outweigh all the other wild mammals on the earth at this moment. So given your epoch three goal of maximization of diverse species. So we're not winning on diversity yet because we have such a small aperture for compassion for other organisms. So right now we have a real small cadre right now. The reason that I know that it can be much larger is that I've seen folks,

start to build relationships that are a lot more diverse than that. And I live in San Francisco prior to the time, but I also live in Hawaii. And our old place in Hawaii was next to these volcanically heated tide pools. And because of it, a bunch of people lived along the shore, you know, next to wild fish. And actually one of our neighbors, you know, Joe, basically had a puffer fish that knew her and honestly loved her, right? Basically, like, you know, Joe would come out there and over a couple interactions, like figured out, oh, the thing that the puffer fish likes the most is stewed chicken. Nice. So they would have a little interaction where Joe would come out and see if for, and the pufferfish was named Esmeralda. And it didn't tell us their name. That's what Joe named her. And basically, but like Joe and Esmeralda had developed this amazingly deep relationship. And because we knew Joe, we would sometimes go over there and hang with Esmeralda and be the. as well. Like Esmeralda could absolutely tell the difference between our different faces and it would

behave differently around us. It actually would have a different personality around us just knowing how we were. Actually, closer to home in that same house, we had a koi pond in the backyard. And between myself and my wife, we have different feeding behaviors. Like I would like look on the back of the thing. It's like this many koi that weigh this much. Here's how much, you know, food to put into the water. And I would typically put it in the same spot in the pond, you know, just. just so, you know, it would be kind of organized. But like my wife, when feeding the koi fish, she'd be like, you get food and you get food

and basically throwing food all around, not, you know, not consistently measured, just different styles. Anyway, these fish could recognize us from 20 feet away. And when I was walking up, they would all swim to the one spot that they knew I was going to start putting the food in. And when my wife was walking up, they'd start swimming in circles because they were excited because they knew they were going to be fed,

but they didn't know where the food was going to land. So this is all, you know, in my wheelhouse of empathy with other creatures. However, from a biological scale perspective, this isn't good for the chicken, the puffer fish, and the farmed fish or cow parts

or whatever you feed to the goldfish. I mean, there's a, there's a preference of, of, uh, of, of,

So here's my hard question for you. If we value the relationships between species, between organisms on the earth, and you're talking about epoch three, 500 years from now, 1,000 years from now, what sort of human economy could thrive in and live like that, couldn't you argue that the rest of the world and the rest of the species would be better off if there weren't humans? Well, this is really the question of how wide does our aperture of compassion eventually get. If it ends up including a bunch of organisms, then no, actually things might go quite well. And, you know, one thing that I noticed from visiting a lot of indigenous lands is if you look at how a number of things were actually organized in society, because I think we're already well aware that when key stuff,

species are healthy on a landscape, the entire landscape is healthy. You don't need to literally take care of every single critter on the landscape. But if there's half a dozen keystone species on the landscape and they're all taking care of well, then actually the whole landscape is quite healthy, even if that might have, you know, 5,000 species on it. But if you go to the Pacific Northwest and you look at the totem poles, the animals that are represented are basically all Keystone species. If, you know, I spent some time with the Iowa tribe, which, you know, it's Iowa with the letter Y at the end. That's where their original lands where they now live in Kansas because we dislocated them multiple times. But like their, their, you know, society was built

around 12 different clans. And it was the Buffalo clan and the Beaver clan and the, and the, and the bison, oh, sorry, the bison's buffalo and the wolf clan and all sort of thing. And every single one of those clans was referent to a keystone species. And the purpose of that clan was to be more empathetic to to, to understand, you know, how to relate to, and pay attention to the health of that keystone species, amongst other responsibilities. Now, that is a achievable point where a relatively small expansion in the circle of empathy allows you to have incredible leverage over the overall ecosystem becoming healthier and the thousands of organisms as opposed, thousands of species as opposed to just the six or 12.

Earlier on this show, I had Vandana Shiva, Jason Bradford, Andrew Millison, and others talk about the fact that we could, with the technology we have today, grow as much or more food without using fossil fuels, but it would require a lot more human labor input and applied technology, which we didn't know before we had to Haberbosch. So what you're saying is almost the cultural equivalent of that, that somehow along the way, we have the potential at least, it's unknown that we could morph from extractors to stewards. Well, I'm actually saying something maybe even more hardcore, which is we already worked this out a bunch of times in a bunch of different places. We just, through colonialism, we wiped out a lot of those people. Now that said, it doesn't mean that we can't rediscover.

It doesn't mean that to the extent that any of their cultures are still extant. Because when I was with the Iowa tribe, I was like, okay, there's the 12 clans. And then the person that was kind of telling me about this history who is of that tribe was like, yeah, but all but three of the tribes have died out. All but three of the clans have died out. And it's like, oh, crap. Right. So like, yeah, like think about the deep wisdom that happened in those nine clans. that were focused on the, you know, one is focused on the beaver and one is focused on the coyote

and whatever. Like, think of what was lost with those folks. Now, that said, luckily there were still three left. And I got to talk with some of the folks from those three and the wisdom is there. Now, can we recreate that wisdom? Absolutely. Can we make decisions, you know, about how we run some things in society that would allow us to take a little bit more care? I think so. It doesn't sound that hard. But yes, you can get incredible leverage out of that sort of thing. And even like Andrew Millison, Van Deva-Shiva stuff, one thing that I'll say is that what happened with industrial agriculture

is that we used to do everything by hand. We used to weed by hand. You know, we used to like, you know, handle pests by hand, right? So what happened in the 20th century is we replaced manual mechanical labor with chemical labor. But like what is actually possible in the 20th century, 21st century, because I have a background in robotic signal processing, you know, I built very sophisticated robots, you can actually replace a bunch of that stuff again with robotic mechanical

as opposed to human mechanical. And you can actually beat the unit economics of input costs relative to chemical. Now that said, I love the work of Vandev and Asheva and Andrew Millison, a bunch of the folks that you're talking about, because I think embedded in their work is also more time with human beings building a more fluent relationship. with many of the organisms that I'm wanting the wider circle of compassion and empathy to extend too. So you kind of get a two for one. But I will say that even within the auspices of our current modern economy where people are like flipping out that everything's going to robotics and AI or whatever, no, you actually have a moment where you might be able to start back down the right chain. Instead of like

soaking everything in chemicals, whether it's glyphosate or or, you know, nitrogen-based fertilizers or whatever, you actually start to fix some of that stuff mechanically the way that we used to do human mechanical labor to go do this stuff. And yeah, it'll just be robotic mechanical labor with still compelling or even better economics than chemical. What happens to the humans that used to be doing the labor that are now replaced by robots? Well, what's actually happening right now in U.S. farms, at least, especially now that we have tightened up border, the border, is that a lot of folks are not able to actually even get the full agricultural output of their land because they don't have enough labor available. So it's kind of the opposite problem at the moment.

Look, more than half the food in the world is grown by small landholder farmers, you know, people that are farming like half an acre to five acres, let's say. But I will say that a bunch of those folks, if you do give them a better route, and actually to be, you know, very kind of straightforward and connected to personal story. It's like my parents are from rural Taiwan. They were those people as well. They were, you know, close to the land, growing rice, growing tea, you know, up in the mountains of Taiwan. My, my dad's family did a bamboo export business, you know, because they, they, he was born under Japanese occupation. Anyway, um, so we were exporting bamboo to Japan. So, but like they were those people as well. Now, as soon as they actually had an

opportunity to not be farmers. They're like, a bunch of them are like, hey, I wasn't trying to be a farmer. This is just how anybody made money in this setting. So we had to do it. So look, there's, there will be a percentage that didn't want to be farmers, and that's fine. Like, let them not be farmers. That's like my parents. There's a percentage like in the Western world where we've tightened down on immigration laws where they can't even manage the fields right now. There's a shortage of labor, in which case, there is no resistance to robots. Now, if you have a setting where this actually is displacing people that want to be farmers, then it's a deeper conversation. Let's talk about it. But there's so much to do before we got to like a head-to-head battle where people want to be farmers

and robots are taking their jobs. So let me move on to the topic where you and I met at a couple occasions, which is climate change. So much of the climate research currently is focused on extrapolating business as usual and our current trends to see that we're going to negatively affect the biosphere and we're headed for warmer temperatures, two degrees, maybe three degrees. Oceans continue to absorb CO2, get warmer and more acidic. You and your work suggests that we could perhaps reverse engineer this practice to figure out specific actions that would result in better climate outcomes. You just mentioned Taiwan and bamboo.

And I want to ask you also, is bamboo something I've been hearing about as a regenerative ag sort of thing? So could you break down how you envision reverse engineering what's happening to climate and some examples you're currently aware of? Well, I think we have, and there's a communications question as well as a practical work question. but I think we've over-rotated around just that CO2 number. Now, the reason the CO2 number is important, and it is very important, so I'm not saying it's an unimportant number to track, but we literally made everything just about this one number, is that if you focus it just on that one number, then you'll start to see things like huge direct air capture plants as a possible solution.

but I did a calculation that the biggest direct air capture plant ever built, it's actually going to have less impact than 200 beavers. And it's like, okay, well, you know, trust me, the 200 beavers were way cheaper than the billion dollars that went into making the plants. So whatever, right? Like, that's us missing the point. Like, because we got so focused on this one number and we got so focused on how capital can go play with how you move this one number.

But beavers do a fantastic job sequestering carbon because they build. dams and then the river system feeds all this organic material which then goes into the sediment and gets trapped there. Fantastic. That's why a bunch of our historical, a bunch of our oil and gas deposits were historical wetlands. Those are places where you really concentrate a lot of kind of compressed organic material and basically beavers make those wetlands. Now, long story short, we don't think about that because we have such a narrow view of how the system works. Well, we're like idiot savants that are focusing on one thing and to the detriment of everything else. Yeah, because there's going to be a lot of resources that are extracted to go make that direct air capture plant.

And then, of course, with that one number in mind, the biggest direct air capture plans, they're focused on, well, I can use this carbon for enhanced oil recovery. In which case, they might even be carbon emitting. And it's like, okay, we're super losing the thread here. Now, if we move beyond the price of carbon and that's where, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to do something. some of those things as well. Though honestly, I don't think that we should have a carbon trading scheme. I think we should ramp it down the way that we ramped down CFCs, the way that we ramped down DDT,

the way that we ramped down lead and gasoline, all things that happened in the modern era. These were not a super long time ago type things. These are like 1980s, 1990s type interventions. And what that basically looked like is you didn't put everybody out of business on day one, but you made it more expensive to use those substances. And then after a couple years you made, you turned the dial up even further. And a couple more years, you turned the dial up even further.

And by year 10, it was basically impractical to go use that stuff. Now, it meant that the folks that had recently bought CAPEX that was still productive, they're like, well, look, we'll change over on year seven. It'll be pretty expensive for us. But by then, you know, I would have gotten most of the use out of my productive CAPEX. But I'm definitely not buying new CAPEX in the space. And the people that were about to retire their CAPX is like, let's upgrade now. Because like, you might as well,

upgrade because we're about to start getting penalties on this old capax. So effectively you're talking about a slow release carbon tax or non-renewable tax. Yeah, that basically ramps up. So instead of a kind of trading scheme where you need to go populate the stuff with credits and then people can kind of dissemble all sorts of things and play all kinds of games on how credits are counted, no, no, no, it's just polluter pays. And polluter pays on a graduated scale that kind of kicks up. And you can't do this on 10 years relative to the carbon economy.

You'll take a little bit longer, but you might be able to do this on a 25-year scale in terms of the age out of the productive cap-ex related to a high-carbon-intensity economy. So anyway, long story short, going back to the more basic idea is, look, we over-rotated on carbon and we made it too complicated. It should just be polluter pace. and we shouldn't just think about, you know, carbon. We should think about the natural ecosystems that are supporting life. Now, if we understood that, we would understand the benefit of beavers in the first place

and would have come to us pretty quickly, like, oh, if you want to do that, and also make your landscape more fire resistant. We're also pretty annoyed with wildfires right now. Well, it turns out that landscapes recover much faster if there's beaver dams in the area because they basically create an area that doesn't burn down that repopulates the seeds. around it, right? So on many, many fronts, like things that we are, you know, insurance companies are retreating and losing billions of dollars because we can't insure any of these landscapes anymore, they're fire prone. It's like, okay, well, you lost billions of dollars over there. You're spending

billions of dollars on direct air capture. A beaver would solve both of those problems. I would be remiss and not asking, are you investing in beavers? I'm not. And this is actually a really important thing, which is, why wouldn't we have already done this if beavers are so much better at it? It's because it's hard to financially enclose a beaver. And the things that get economic scale in the economy are things that are easily financially enclosed, even if they don't create value, right? A credit default swap doesn't create any value, but it's intrinsically financially enclosed. And NFT is really a financial enclosure envelope.

Like nobody even cared about the art inside of it. So basically, like financially enclosed things trade quickly. quickly, they attract money quickly, that sort of thing. We don't know how to financially enclose a beaver. And because of it, like, we have that kind of mismatch. Now, if there was a design problem to go do, it might be to ask the question of how does one successfully financially enclose, but without poisoning how this natural thing works, you know, in order to get more money into the spot to go have these things happen in the world. Well, and then I don't know a lot about beavers, but I would presume if we scaled the beaver population 2x, 5x, 10x,

that that would be deleterious to some other animal or organism. It probably wouldn't be because when the colonists came to North America, it's estimated that there's over 100 million beavers in North America and 1600, and now we're down below 5 million. We almost wiped them out. It's actually when the, when, you know, at the point that the colonists first came over to the Americas, there was about 75 million people living in the Americas and 85 million people living in Europe. And then we kind of wiped them out 95% as well. So like, trust me, there was plenty of carrying capacity for those things and the land was healthier because of it. The bison also built the soils on the Great Plains. Now we're at the point when

we first inherited the Great Plains inherited. I mean, we killed all the people and displaced them and the Iowa tribe lives in Kansas. Now you get it, right? But like the, you know, like, when when we first got there, there was multiple feet of topsoil in the Great Plains. Five feet, eight feet, nine feet, very normally seen. Now in agricultural soils across America, the average topso depth is a quarter inch. So like, we really mucked it up badly, and it wasn't because, like, like, you know, there wasn't enough carrying capacity and the bison were mucking up. No, the bison were creating the carrying capacity.

The beavers were creating the carry capacity. That's why they all had clans, a scientist. them. Well, we we financialize the human experience. Sure. Well, look, like once we've worked out the corporation in a bunch of methods of financial enclosure, then that kind of took over as a virus on everything. And look, I'm not saying that that can't be an improved thing. Like, you can have new mutations and you can have a healthier version of an organism. So there might be a new mutation on financial enclosure that is able to go include things. in this more thoughtful way, in a longer term way,

and really pay attention to the myriad explosive benefits of taking care of a couple of Keystone species, taking care of a couple natural systems. So beyond beavers in your work, do you have hope, are you seeing regenerative technologies that potentially have the ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere in tandem with maybe we, cap or eventually slow the amount of emissions that the global economy emits.

Well, in terms of the practical stores, there's basically five. It's forest soils, histosols, ocean micro, and ocean macro. And all- What's histososos? Histos are wetland soils. So it's like a special case of, you know, soils in that histosols have incredible carbon intensity per acre compared to, you know, like a grassland soil. or like, you know,

agriculture soil. So like when we drained the wetlands, that sort of thing, we really did. And, you know, you've seen the math, I'm sure, on like when we like drain a peat bog and then we go and burn a bunch of stuff. Yeah, the emissions footprint is insane because that was such a concentrated source of carbon.

So anyway, all five of those places in nature can store way more carbon than what we've emitted since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Now, that said, we have not been on a task of actually putting any of that stuff back in a skillful way. But one thing I like about thinking about those five sinks is at the end of the day, one can, so I'm formally trained as a physicist and electrical engineer with a specialization of robotics and signal processing. And my physics brain basically says this is basically a mass transfer problem, right? We currently have 1.7 trillion tons of CO2 that's in the wrong place.

about a trillion up in the atmosphere or about 0.7 dissolved in the ocean. It's all in the wrong place. That mass needs to go to a different place, right? Now, that basically is a mass transfer problem. If the mass needs to be transferred, and it needs to go through a collection aperture, then there's two ways to approach the collection aperture. You can either have an enormous collection aperture, like a forest or fields or wetlands or what have you, or you can have a tiny collection aperture, like a direct air capture plant that you build on one square kilometer of concrete. Now, if you try to do it on a tiny aperture, it's like trying to suck all the carbon

through a soda straw. So if you look at the balance of plant for a bunch of these direct air capture plant, a huge percentage of the energy just spent fans sucking air through the tiny aperture. But if when you work with a huge aperture... Those things make no sense. When you work with a huge aperture, then sunlight powers the whole thing. It typically improves the local ecosystem, which gives you more resistant. zillions anyhow. And then, you know, you can capture a huge amount because your collection is so

large without forcing any air over it. So you're hopeful that we can move that pools of carbon from the atmosphere into those five sinks? Those five things already store more than what we've done since the Industrial Revolution. And some of them much, much more. Can they increase amount that they store? They can increase the amount if you invest in the metabolics of them. This is part of the reason for the talk as well, right? Like, if you understand Epic 2, you will understand the metabolics of carbon pick up in these five sinks. Except what if you have to emit and burn more carbon in order to get the existing carbon back to the sinks? Well, you, that will happen, you know, a bit no matter what, but I think it's really just about the ratio,

right? There's some things that give you a lot of leverage and something, because look, a direct air capture plant, you know, captures carbon, but you need to build a lot of facilities for it. A beaver, you don't need to build as much facilities. Did it maybe cost you something to go truck a beaver, you know, 300 miles over to like some other stream? Yeah, there are some carbon emissions related to trucking the beaver over. So is this a core part of your work is looking at regenerating, regenerative agriculture, negative carbon emission technologies? Well, absolutely, you know, I'm spending time on this and studying, like part of the reason I was out in Kansas with that tribe is they are part of a large project to go regenerate their soils. So I was looking at both, you know, indigenous practice as well as improved, you know, regenerative agricultural practice and basically seeing, you know, at the ground level what it looks like to go do that. And of course, I come from the venture capital world and I work with all these other capital. allocators. So while I'm sitting there, I am thinking about, like, is there a party for which

this would be the right, you know, kind of, you know, thing to point their capital at? And how would it mesh? Now, that said, these folks are getting done with actually relatively small amount of capital already. So, like, if capital doesn't need to play, then that's totally great too. But at the end of the I'm quite interested in what does it look like for us to do the work practically? And then if there is a way that a tiny bit of financial enclosure helps to speed it up, then let's talk about it. So from the practical standpoint, you've looked at lots of different technologies. You clearly know the path we're on with CO2 emissions and the growing metabolism of the human economy.

How confident are you that we could move from 425 parts per million to 400 to 375, keeping the economy, I mean, morphing the economy in the direction of epoch one or Epic two, but using regenerative agriculture to move into those five sinks. Is it a moonshot? Is it 50-50? I mean, how confident are you that that can actually happen? And what, and name a couple of technologies that are promising? Well, I think it can definitely happen. And I gave a talk, you know, about the future of agriculture at, you know, this event. And one of the folks in the Q&A afterwards was like,

but how could it change? You got Monsanto and Syngenta and these huge companies that have these vested interests and we've been doing this like huge, you know, unsustainable agriculture. How could it ever change? And my reply was like, hey, we literally just invented unsustainable agriculture 50 years ago.

So why in the world do you think it could never change? I'm not saying that it's easy to change that it's going to happen in a day, it won't. But I think our scope of imagination needs to be a bit bigger than what happened in the last 50 years must happen for the rest of time. We know that it can't.

Because right now, we keep on burning down our tiny little, you know, like wealth of topsoil and you get to the end of that, there's nothing that you can do in this current system. So like the kind of, the turning point on that

is coming soon, whether we like it or not, just as a function of, you know, top soil availability and how viable these farming businesses are right now. A lot of American farming is a money-losing business. We can't keep on doing that forever. So can you briefly give me a couple of technologies in agriculture that you are really excited about that can draw down carbon? Yeah, so a couple different things. So we, one of our companies that is, you know, kind of a half unicorn already, and they're adding, you know, millions in top line quite quickly. The product market fit is excellent. Is monarch tractors, it's autonomous electric tractors. Now, what's cool about that? Well, obviously, you know, by being electric, then you're saving all the kind of diesel emissions and also the

cost of the energy is about, you know, four to five times cheaper in terms of all the work output that you're getting and how much you're paying for the energy in the tractor, it's dramatically cheaper than paying for diesel. So you see why farmers are already like that. But the autonomous part of it means that, you know, because we have these labor shortages in American and Canadian agriculture, then they can get a lot more done with the staff that they do have. So even basic autonomy things like, you know, mowing and bailing and all that sort of thing, well, just let the robot do it then, right? go and have your farm hands go work on higher value per hour tasks. And we're seeing like a bunch of adoption.

That's why it's kind of like a rocket ship in terms of the demand for that product. And I look at that. The autonomy stuff, right now we're doing the easy autonomy stuff. Like mowing is actually pretty easy autonomy tasks, though I don't want to oversimplify the complexity of autonomy. Still take some work, but still like it is something that the robots are confidently doing, no problem. As you start to talk about the more sophisticated field operations, that starts to overlap with some of the stuff that, that, you know, Vanana Shiva and other folks are talking about,

where it's like, no, there actually are ways of, you know, for example, you know, drill tilling as opposed to, well, look, you can have a machine go do that or you could have a hand go do that. And if you can have the tractor pull something behind it that is autonomously doing that, then actually you are closing that labor gap. That's what I was saying about.

we had mostly a mechanical farm economy where it was like human labor, you know, oxen as labor, you know, like mechanical plows, all that kind of thing. And then we moved to a chemical type farming and we can move back to mechanical but robotic mechanical. So I look at this as like, well, not only are you saving people direct fuel costs and people are already excited about that, you're saving them labor costs, but you're also allowing more sophisticated labor to happen for the same amount of money, including labor that would be the right precursors to be able to move into some of the regenerative ag practice. Now, that said, there's still plenty of implements to go build, still plenty of automation

routines to go build, and you start at the easy end of it, and you work toward the middle, and then the human beings do the sophisticated end for now. But that could be a huge boon in terms of making more sustainable agriculture within reach, within the labor fraction that we currently have available. Do you know anything about bamboo? You mentioned it earlier and I have some friends that think there's a big potential of sequestration if it's scaled like in Europe even. Can you speak a minute or two about that? Bamboo grows like a weed. It's a type of grass. It's basically perennial. You, it, you know, it, it, you don't need to spend a bunch of time planting it. It basically, you know, can grow laterally, rhizomatically. So it, it, it, um, you know, it's, um, you know, it's

honestly kind of spreads out of control. Like whenever people say to go plant it in their garden, it's like, oh, plant it in a box that is contained so it cannot go and take over your entire yard. So relative to like farming difficulty, I'm going to say not that hard to farm as things go. But as it grows laterally and upward and fast, it's sequestering carbon.

Yes, it's sequestering carbon. And if you go and harvest that and make it into durable goods, then that carbon is stored for a reasonable amount of time, right? Like, I live in a wood frame building that was built in 1911, and yeah, all the carbon in that wood is still right here, even though it's a biodegradable material that is earth compatible. And if all the wood in this building was broken down and thrown in the dirt, it would become dirt over the course of a year, then no, like, you can go and grab useful building materials and effectively sequester them through use. Are you looking at any companies that are scaling bamboo or using bamboo in different ways? Yeah, we've looked at some things in that front. A lot of it has to do with the kind of processing technologies

in order to go make them more compatible with how people are, you know, currently building. Because look, the more wild things, and honestly, I love this type of work, you know, are the folks that are really using all the properties of the bamboo, like the flexiness and the way that it dries over time and all sort of thing in order to make these really, you know, compelling woven structures, every kind of thing. Now that said, that's not how we make, you know, most of our buildings in the world. So to the extent that you can go and take a bunch of thin strips of it, and then you can make it into something that's like a big old, you know, crossbeam,

then we kind of like that. We know how to make you build with that kind of material. So to the extent that we can simulate some board feet or simulate, you know, surfacing and all these sorts of things that we would otherwise use a different. building material for then and then make it easily metabolizable by the construction industry, then yeah, we can pick up a lot more. We can build out the demand side of that pretty substantially. I don't know how you even have time to do a podcast with me because you're on top of so many things. So as head of a very successful venture capital fund, how do you decide which ecological

projects are worth investing time, brain power, and capital into. Well, I mean, the reason that we have time is actually really straightforward, which is even if we hit all of our goals and we raise every penny that we are trying to raise and deploy every penny really well, then we're still going to be deploying like less than one percent of the capital that's going into climate and a even tinier fraction of the money that's going into venture. And given that, like, we spend a bunch of time. The reason, that the three epochs talk was written was to speak to our LPs. Our LPs in our annual general meeting represent over a trillion dollars of capital under management, you know, across the funds that

they manage. We obviously get like a little sliver of that and that's great, but it's like, imagine what happens if a trillion dollars of capital gets to hear messages like this and starts to open up, you know, the kind of perspectives of where they can look to get interesting returns. So I do things like this, you know, reasonably regularly because like our firm is like there's a lot of things about what we do that, that, you know, I think, you know, people have said, oh, that's very visionary and that's very exciting. And it's like great. But I think about myself as a boringly practical person. And like, I think the reason that I like to go share these things is I'm not trying to go share some funky, you know, theory about the future. Number one, I'm just, the farthest up book is just describing how life works in the universe.

That's not a new thing that happened. That's just an old thing that's been happening forever that we forgot. So there's nothing to prove about it. That's just how life works in the universe. It's maximizing every photon, it's trying to maximize diverse nutrient flows. That's just what it does. But like relative to the work that I share in investment, sometimes I call myself the anti-entrepreneur, because most entrepreneurs are talking about what's going to happen if you give me money.

I'm almost always talking about the thing we already do. did. So like the amount that you need to, you know, the suspension of belief that's required to go understand the thing is very light because it already happened. You can go out to the site. You can see the restored mangroves. You can go, you can go to the place where there was a massive outbreak of American foulbrood and then it's been addressed by a vaccine. You can go to the places where they're installing a ton of these air conditioners, you know, and it can actually both heat and cool. These air conditioning slash heating units and you, and you, York because, you know, they have way better energy efficiency and they also happen to have this

fantastic environmental impact. I think myself as a boringly practical person that just, you know, reporting to people, well, I know this works because we just did it. And if you want to measure how well it worked, then go ahead and measure it. But here's, you know, the headlines. And if you want to have some further details on exactly how, then I'm happy to have that because, again, that leverage of we're deploying less than 1% of the capital. So how does the other 99 The reason I'm kind of dogging direct air capture is we've already spent more than 10 billion on that. And we probably could have, you know, just recruited 2,000 beavers.

Like, it would have been fine. So do you have any other colorful examples like that that you haven't mentioned so far in this conversation, projects that you're really excited about, whether they work or not, that are kind of novel and cutting edge that you think are cool? Well, I think like, you know, if I needed to go summarize like the more meta of, the beaver point is I think it would be very advantageous for us, you know, just in terms of practical leverage, like I don't care what philosophy you build around this or not, to become the keystone species that takes care of keystone species. If that's all we did, we would have

amazingly good leverage over the health of the planet, and then that would return to as many multi-fold, right? Because now the hawks are working for us and the salmon are working for us, and the coyotes are working for us, and the beavers are working for us, not because they are actually working for us, because we are opening our circle of compassion enough to understand what they need. And in providing mutual care,

then all of us get huge benefit, including, you know, the bison, including, you know, the wolves, the sea otters. I could keep on going. There's a ton of tapers, whales, everybody, right? This segues into a concept that I've heard you talk about, that we are all connected, not in the sense of mysticism, per se, but rather from obvious observations in the world like you just pointed out. Can you explain how you arrived at this

realization and how that affects your outlook and the work that you do? Yeah, I mean, the actual answer is when I was 29 years old, I had built a pretty good career in technology. I was already kind of an up-and-coming executive. But the way I built that career is I worked under this idea that, you know, when problems get hard, I just work harder. And, you know, and that worked fine as an individual contributor. And then when I started having people reporting to me, I would do this thing where it's like, hey, you know, so-and-so's working hard, but they only got 80% of what needed to get done done. Okay, I'll pick up the other 20%, right? Oh, you know, so I would go around and like my team of five, oh, okay, you were 20%.

short, no problem, I'll pick up the extra work. Oh, you're 5% short, I'll pick it up. And that worked fine because I'm a person that has a little bit more than normal capacity. But once I had like a 30 person team, that thing was killing me. And I didn't understand that it was killing me, but like I, I, like, had a stress behavior where I would come into work every day and I would fill up a 24 ounce cup with ice chips and I would just chew ice in the morning as I worked through, you know, my day plan and my early emails and started working items. And what was actually happening is the stress was basically completely effing up my insides. And at age 29, I had an incident where there was a kind of acute disconnect in my lower GI track

where I lost 40% of my blood in less than 30 minutes. I almost bled to death. And I was, you know, I luckily got to the emergency room. In the emergency room, like because it was injured, terminal bleeding, they couldn't tell what was happening right away. But once they started taking my vitals, it instantly turned from like, oh, I wonder what's happening to, this person's about to die. And they went and in order to go, you know, keep me from dying, they had to do, like a lot of times, oh, you're short on blood, we're going to do a blood transfusion. I didn't have enough time for that. They did four

simultaneous blood transfusions, one in each limb, all at the same time. And then when that came through, that was not enough too. They did another four simultaneously immediately after that. So I had eight transfusions just to stabilize and then two more over the night. And actually in those last moment, and when I woke up the next morning, the doctor basically told me, it's like, hey, glad you made it through because you were about, you know, one to two minutes away from irreversible, you know, organ and brain damage. Like, you might have lived, but you'd be a vegetable. Um, so like, yeah, glad you pulled out of it. But like, what I was actually feeling in those last minutes is my body was already in the process of dying. And I can give you this a whole explanation on what

it's like to die. But like in the process of dying, I actually had a very strong feeling of returning. And I was like, what the fuck is that? I mean, because I'm like, look, my my, my dad's an atheist, my mom's a Buddhist. So like, it's not that I have. And look, I grew up in the east coast of the U.S. so I was exposed to all the American religions and all sort of thing. I, like, you know, like spent some time at Bible study or whatever. I know some of the spiritual traditions. You know, I'm no deep expert, but know a little bit about it. But, like, my overall, like, worldview was basically a scientific, you know, pragmatist.

And what would it even mean to be returning? And after I ended up living, because the next morning I, like, woke up and I realized a couple different things. Like, you know, most of a human's body is fluid. Most of that fluid is blood. And I had most of my blood changed out over the night. So I was actually more other people than myself, you know, that next morning, which is already a head trip. But then the other part was that I had only lived because of the generosity of 10 people I would never meet. And I think, you know, a bunch of those things plus that sense of returning basically set me out on this, you know, quest to be like, what was that all about? What does it mean? Now, number one, it did change my life philosophy quite a bit

because when you effectively die once, your fear of death changes quite a bit. Not that I had like a really terrifying fear of death before, but afterwards it was kind of like none. Not to say that I'm trying to put myself in really dangerous situations, but I know what it looks like or feels like to die all the way down to the last little bit, you know, minus the actual crossover point. So I was like, no, guys, it's fine. Like the, my fear of it is, you know, and that helps a lot. And it's almost like this life then is your second life. You get, it's like an extra one up.

You're free rolling. Exactly. You like grab the green mushroom and you get an extra life in the game. And it's like, okay, this is a freebie, man, free turn. And so now you want to, you want to pay it forward to the three epochs. Well, it's a longer process because I needed to actually go and work out what it meant to return. And I started to understand that actually everything that we are made of is basically immortal stuff. And what I mean by that is if you look at the decay time of protons, neutrons, electrons, then it's substantially longer than the age of the universe, right?

you need to be like a billion billion times the age of the universe so far for like an electron before you hit an electron's half-life and protons even more and neutron it can be a little bit less depending on the setting but then the neutron just decays into other things that also have super long longevity so you look at this is like we're basically made out of immortal stuff we're just you know specific pattern configurations of immortal stuff and like then what then is the person because where did that pattern come from? Well, those patterns aren't just in you for that one moment. Like the pattern, like, the pattern that, like, became DNA has had a multi-billion-year run on planet Earth,

and we're inheriting all of that pattern intelligence. And, like, the pattern that is the shape of a human being has got a couple hundred thousand-year history on planet Earth, and we're inheriting all of that. And, like, you start to understand that I am just a localized moment of patterns. intelligence intersected in a particular way on a immortal things and even those patterns, even though they may not be immortal, are extremely long lived. And what it means is that when you die, you're basically returning to the field that makes all things, including things like you. So in some ways it's like, okay, well, I mean, it'll emerge in different patterns. Actually,

the same atoms are going to go emerge in different patterns and they're going to get to do all kinds of things. They're going to be part of a blade of grass and a cat and a flower and a cloud. They're going to be every kind of thing. And they'll also be a bunch of humans in the future too. So I'm returning to the field that makes that over and over and over. Powerful. I want to be respectful of your time, Tom, and I have a bunch of closing questions, but I wanted to ask you this. It's kind of a non-secular to what you just said. But I overheard you when we were together a few weeks ago telling people that we were talking about space exploration and colonizing other planets. And you said, we may colonize other planets someday in the future, but it won't be us.

It won't be humans. Could you just spend a couple minutes unpacking what you said or did I hear that correctly? Yeah, the thing I said is that, you know, multi-planetary species is an oxymoron already? Because species are, at least species as we know them, are organisms that are forward propagating DNA. And DNA is, the nature of DNA is to become of place. So if we actually settle anywhere for, you know, 20 generations, we will speciate. We already have, you know, you know, changes in the, in the genome that have happened in shorter times than that. and we've definitely seen with, you know, fruit flies and other things, we can get them to speciate in seven generations. So I'm kind of being generous with 20, right? But if you went to a place

like Mars, no matter what you do in terms of like, hey, let's say we live in bubbles and we go and make the atmosphere exactly the same as the Earth inside of that bubble and and and we try to grow earth food in particular ways, well, we're trying to control it and try not to speciate, but you're on a planet that has one third the gravity. And species have speciated for way less of an environmental change than one third of gravity. So like given that like, look, you spend 20 generations on Mars, we will not be humans exactly.

Now that said, if what people mean is we're going to become multi-planetary and the seeds of our DNA are going to become the species of these other planets, then that could be an accurate statement. But I don't think that people actually have that mental model. They have the mental model of more like the manifest destiny where it's like the same people that we are

are going to go out there and we're going to propagate everywhere. Well, I mean, we would need to be insanely lucky to go find something that was earthlike enough that we wouldn't speciate. And this would be gravity and atmospheric composition and availability of resources, like a lot of things would need to be similar. So in the, according to my worldview, the extremely unlikely event that we do colonize other planets, it will be the descendants of humans and in some other hobbies.

form. It won't be homo sapiens the way we are now because of the conditions. Yes, and just the same way that look, look, 20 million years ago, there were no great apes. Like our closest living relative back then was a gibbon. Right. Now, you look at that and it's like, and look, to get to some of these stars, it might take us on the order of millions of years when you think about the pace of space travel, right? So like, yeah, the distance between a gibbon to us is the distance that these folks will go and they will probably have speciation on the trip and then they would have further speciation upon arrival for the setting that they end up being in. I'm worried about the next 10 or 20 years. If we could segue to you giving advice to people

watching this show who are concerned about ecological overshoot, climate, oceans, energy depletion, poverty, inequality, financial, overshoot, all those things. You are a problem solver and have a different mental outlook than a lot of people I've met in this space. What sort of personal advice would you give to the people watching this program who want to play a role in our collective future, but are, you know, have anxiety and, and worry about all these trends I just mentioned? Yeah. So I will say that because I'm a physicist, then I'm intrinsically a realist because you just need to look at the physical state of things.

So I am not, you know, like happy and excited about the current physical state of things. I'm also very realistic about how long it would take to repair it. I don't think that there's any venture firm or any group of people that like, because of wham-ban sort of actions, goes and fix everything in 10 years. It's just literally the physics of it,

the mass energy, you know, the time it takes for that to propagate is just too long. compared to, you know, how ambitious that people are want. And actually I say that partially because that's part of where the anxiety comes from. If you think you can solve it in 10 years and you're failing at it, then you will go and, you know, you'll work yourself almost to the grave. Like I almost work myself to death, like, you know, just working harder trying to make that

difference in a short amount of time. But like, if you start to understand that this is a two to 500 year arc and that your generation is going to get to do the first five to 10% of it, and you're going to hand on the next, you know, five to 10% or 10 to 15% to, you know, the next party and the next party. And you get ready for something that might take five generations that already starts to be a psychologically healthier place to come from

because that is what it will physically take, the time it will physically take to solve the problem. So if your expectations are closer in line with what is physically possible, that's already helpful. The other thing I would say that is a helpful thing is the other kind of anxiety that's happening is career anxiety, stability anxiety, because robotics and AI are coming and go take all the jobs and all that sort of thing. And I worked on robotics and AI as part of my career path as well as my university research

and all the way back to my formal training. So I have a decent amount familiar with it. And what I like to kind of communicate to people is there will be a bunch of jobs in the 21st century. But those jobs will be built around what I call the four C's, like the letter C. And the four Cs are creativity, compassion, critical thinking, and community. And these are things that, you know, AIs and robotics are not particularly good at. Now, look, somebody will go throw a bunch of prompts at things, and they'll pick, like,

the best one out of a thousand, be like, oh, it looks like the robot is critically thinking. And it's like, no, no, no, look at all the other prompts. It was a bunch of garbage, right? Like the responses to all these other prompts. It was a bunch of garbage. and you cherry picked it. Actually, you did a creative act in curating that one out of a thousand

that kind of sounds like the machine knows what it's talking about. But hey, we'll put that aside for a second. But if people like understand that the core of jobs in the future are those four things, then I think actually particularly things like compassion and community

are things that are going to be central to the repair of our civilization. That like we got into a spot where everybody was told to hyperconsume and their own individualistic bubble and it didn't lead to, you know, greater happiness for people. And it led to a lot more material consumption, you know, compared to the marginal happiness that it might have added.

And you actually get to a point where it's so much material consumption, you realize that the whole game doesn't actually do it for you. And some people fall into depression off of that, in which case you've done a lot of consumption and are even worse off. Now, if you start to understand that the jobs in the future, things like community and compassion are really core. of them, that leads you more into connection, into, you know, being with other human beings and making meaning in the way that meaning was always made. And that sort of process with way

less material resource use, you know, actually leads to way bigger improvements in happiness, right? Like there's the long, you know, the Harvard longevity study where they basically nailed it down to, well, the two big things that make people healthy is healthy life habits, like, you know, diet, exercise, that kind of thing, and human relationship. And that's it. Those are the only two things. Now, none of those things sound like the latest toaster oven for whatever or what's in fashion this, you know, this, you know, season.

And the reason that people try to follow the fashion of the season is they hope to connect with other people, right? They're hoping that through that consumption, they get to connect with other people. But like, what if we skipped those steps and just started to understand? Those are the two main things. Let's go build an economy around doing those two things really well. And then let's do that for the Keystone species as well. And if that's all we did, we'd be in pretty good shape.

I'm so glad I had you on the program because I think your job description as a venture capital tech investor, I usually don't talk to a lot of people like that. But you're thinking so many steps ahead that your ethos and your life ethic and your four Cs are actually very aligned with my thinking. And that gives me this relational synergistic feeling that is, was unexpected. I'm not surprised that a bunch of people would arrive at, yes, this is kind of what we need more of because it's so, the lack of it is so glaringly painful. And look, when you're in the din of what, you know, a capitalist or consumerist culture is telling you to, want, then it's a little bit hard to pay attention to it. But I'm actually almost glad that we burned people out on social media and all these other things because it like ended the dream that

more digital consumption is the thing. Because we had a whole arc around physical consumption. And I think we learned, you know, the conspicuous consumption of the 80s, well, maybe this is not everything. And, you know, like people push back and it's like, we're going to wear grunge clothes now. though now they sell distressed genes for 200 bucks now, but whatever, who knows? But like, which is hilarious. But I think, like, we're understanding that digital consumption doesn't drive that much happiness either, you know, beyond a certain point. And between the two, like, sometimes you need to, typically people don't change until they have absolutely failed at their goal, or they have absolutely achieved their goal and realized that it didn't do what they wanted.

And I think we absolutely achieved a bunch of physical goals and, you know, digital, content goals and realize it didn't achieve what we wanted. Door number three and door number two were kind of closed and now we're switching our gaze to door number one, which is the four Cs. Well, the one other thing I'll toss out there, which I think is a very important framing for, you know, the economic arc, you know, since the Industrial Revolution is that we spent most of the 20th century figuring out how to strip mine the physical resources of the planet. And now with these digital tools, we're spending most of the 20th century.

first century figuring out how to strip mine the cognitive resources of the planet. And I think we need to, if we understand that that's the basic arc of what's been happening, then we can get enough distance to imagine a different way that this could go. If you get too involved in the tiny thing, it's like, well, this person got banned off of Twitter and that person got pulled back on and now I'm going to go fight about that. No, no, no. At the higher level, we got multiple companies that are doing cognitive strip mining that are basically your your your the sanctity of your thought processes is now intruded with ads and misinformation and on a finite resources which is how many coherent thoughts can a person have in a lifetime it's not infinite because it takes a certain amount of time for

neurons to go fight like the signals in your neurons at their fastest pace only move 90 feet per second there's a actual physical limit to how quickly one can think and how many actual skilled coherent thoughts they can have in a lifetime and we're ruining that resource right now. That's profound, and I understand it. I think that meta view of social media and technology is important to realize. A couple more questions, Tom. What is your biggest fear or worry in the coming decade,

and what is your biggest hope in the next decade or so? You know, like the planet has recovered from other mass extinctions and given enough millions of years, then it will get to some state of health. So I'm not so worried that the planet will forever be, you know, torn asunder because, look, we can do some real damage. Like, we could do, you know, a great dying type event, and it could take 50 million years for the planet to come back.

And that would be a real loss in terms of all the amazing stuff that could have happened in that 50 million years, even if we're long extinct, like we could still have that kind of. of negative footprint in time. So I think that's a very bad outcome. But you know, but you give that 50 million years and the kind of planet is back. I think another bad outcome is we don't extinct ourselves, but we basically make it so that, you know, we only find 11 organisms to be useful and we have a planet of 11 organisms.

You know, that's the kind of extreme, but you get it, right? and yeah well dogs and cats would be two of them and then something else for a food right a bunch of algae and that and whatever for for the food and yeah but anyway like I think that would be a very sad outcome because that would be almost going back to the archaian right it would just be down to a couple organisms again and all of the you know planetary resources in the middle go to just a couple different species that have like you know replicated to no end And look, I mean, we can come back from that too. Like obviously we went from the RKN2 a diverse ecosystem now,

but man, that would take a real long time. So I think that's a real bad outcome as well. And I think the other bad outcome is more of an intergame outcome that like people buy into the types of things that, because despair only helps the system continue to propagate. Like the people that would be in despair are the people that want change. If you're already fine with the system as is, you're not in despair that the system continues. But if you, if the system's not changing in the way that you hope and it drives you into despair,

then the tiny subset of people that are like really wanted to change and might have the ability to are now not in the inner game state that they could actually do it. And that's why like, you know, conversations like resetting to say, hey, it might take two to 500 years as opposed to extinction rebellion. we got to get it done by 2030, otherwise we're all dead. No, no, that is a setup for despair because it will not be done by 2030. There's no physics way for it to happen by 2030. Now, could you elect better people by 2030? I hope so, right? Could you pass better policies by 2030? I hope so. Could we already start to make some moves relative to how we do agriculture

industry? Yes, I hope so. I'm not saying we should sit on our hands, but I think like when you set up the psychological frame like that, you're setting up for a lot of very passionate people to fall into despair. And I think that is also a waste of the cognitive resources of the planet. Bioakumalafe said the world crisis is urgent. We must slow down. What you need to connect with the timetables that things actually do repair on. That's why I mentioned that the cryosphere, the ice caps take some time to refreeze. Even if you've solved everything, even if we could get the carbon down to pre-industrial, you know, revolution level, you know, like 280 to 300, you would still need over a generation for that to refreeze.

So, hey, that's just what it takes, guys. And, you know, actually going to the very beginning of the conversation, the reason that the, you know, the tagline for our firm is to help humanity become a net positive nature is that's a type of goal construction, which is the world that you want. as opposed to our goal construction so far has been thou shall not exceed 1.5 degree I see. And the reason I say that specifically is that a thou shall not goal is actually very common in human society. Obviously the Ten Commandments is the most well-known collection of Thou Shall not Goals. But psychologically, the problem with Thou Shall not Goals is nobody reads the Ten Commandments.

And it's like, I'm so jazzed about, you know, going out and living life that like the nature of Thou Shall not goal is you could live. literally fuck it up into the very last day of your life. So it's like, everything was great, and I like coveted my neighbor like the day before I had a heart attack. Oh, fuck, right? I messed it up. Like, a thou shanat goal constantly has you on anxiety's edge. That is not the cognitive frame that we can come from because of thou shanat goal is always on the edge of being broken and you failing and you are anxious because of that. As opposed to something that you're trying to actively build toward like a society where humanity is a net,

positive nature where your day-to-day contributions can slowly build up to something that really matters. You're not on the nice edge all the time. Yeah. So on that, is that what do you find most hopeful in the coming decade? Is more and more people coming to that realization and applying it in their lives? Well, that is definitely a hopeful thing because look, that was in the very first talk that I gave that kicked off, you know, even raising fundraising for the first fund. And I've had, And I gave that talk for the very first time in 2018 in Quito Ecuador. And, you know, I've had people come up like all throughout the years as I speak at other events. It's like, oh, I saw you give that talk in 2019.

I saw you give it in 20. It still is in my mind. Like, that's what we need to be working for. And then I changed this about how I did in practice. Change that about how I do my practice. And I was like, that's it. Because we do need to solve these inner game problems. we can't be irresponsible about, you know, our goals themselves creating anxiety that's unsustainable.

That's an instant fail. And like nobody's like pushing back on that right now because the goal is still real. We don't want to exceed 1.5 degree C. But when you formulate it in that way, you're not formulating people psychologically for the long run. And if it's going to be a long run kind of situation, like a multi-generational baton race, and you've like situated your psychology so you're going to burn out. in five years, we're never going to get there. So the fact that these ideas are honestly so simple, and like a lot of what happens in the world right now is like fighting around ideology,

I think most of what I share in the world is just either scientifically true or it's one of the obvious ways that a thing should be done. Because look, any civilization that is net negative to nature, even a little bit, like let's say a civilization is only 0.1% net negative to nature per year. It still has a thousand years and that's its death date, right? Because nature runs out. When you take away 0.1% per year, in a thousand years, you've got nothing left. So like literally the goal construction is also something that obviously must be true at some point in human history. Otherwise, we will not survive. Every civilization that has the opposite goal construction, whereas even a little bit net negative, we'll have a death date on civilization. So that's clearly a threshold filter for your

investments and your firm and your own personal ideology is net positive for the planet. That's the first pass. Like, look, a lot of my talks, like, they definitely do point at a way of seeing the world. But like I said, you know, most of it is just scientific fact, because that's just how life in the universe works or that's just how histosol's work. That's how, you know, bison work, whatever, right? Or at least as much as how we know they work. So, like, there's honestly no ideology to have other than, well, here's the data. You could read the papers and, you know, this is our best scientific understanding. And when I do assert something about the future, like working toward a world where humanity is a net positive nature, you can have many other goal

constructions, but that one's kind of obvious that if you don't do it, that we're going to have some problems at some point. I mean, we're experiencing them right now. The reason that everybody's so stressed is that we're more than 0.1% net negative to nature per year. That's why people are more like, Oh, civilization's going to have a big reset when 100 years and 50 years and 200 years, because it's way more than 0.1 right now. So, like, I don't even consider the stuff that I'm sharing like an ideology. It's almost like, well, we're going to end up there somehow because if we don't, then every civilization that doesn't end up lasting.

It's a truism. It's a truism. There's lots of ways to go, you know, label the thing. I almost kind of like flip it around where you basically say, yeah, anybody that doesn't achieve that eventually runs out of gas, right? So if you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal recourse to your family or your reputation or anything, what is one thing that you would do to change human and planetary futures? I think it'd be useful for us to remember that the money system was created to go and track value. it's not value itself. And that if we realize that we would start to recognize a lot of places

where we were tracking value very inaccurately in the monetary system, but like, you know, people have found like pockets where they can operate like that. And if the goal is money itself, then they're doing great by that standard. But if they all remember that, well, money is like meant to represent value and be able to exchange things, you know, that represent value, then we would kind of remember, oh, we have this mismatch right here in the economy, mismatch right there

and the economy mismatch some other place in the economy. I think that would be a very helpful realization, and I don't see us quite getting there yet. I think it's like there are some things that are culturally starting to move in that direction, but I don't, it doesn't feel like a breaking the ice type moment yet. It feels kind of like a looking around, it's like it's real desolate up here.

Something's wrong. but we're not breaking the ice yet. This has been great. You are a multifaceted, wise and intelligent human. Do you have any other closing words of wisdom for our viewers? I don't think there's anything that's, you know, that's special about the way that I'm thinking about it or the way that I'm doing it. I think it's very easy to do work in the style that I do it. But the way that one does it is you pay attention to the nuances.

of things as opposed to generalizing them because when you generalize things then actually shuts off your brain. So like don't generalize. Like actually dig into, well, how does it work the way that works? The other thing to go look at is to go understand rates not states. So if you, it, because

the state of the world is the culmination of the rates. And you can actually tell what is going to happen in the future by understanding which things are working at the highest rates. And it's very simple, which is that like, you know, when the EPA success ban something, it oftentimes takes five, seven years to go ban a thing. Even after they know it

causes cancer or creates this kind of problem in the environment or whatever, it takes them a while to actually get it done. But when that substance gets banned, you know, a chemical engineer will work around it, oh, I'll just take this out and replace it with a double with a hydroxyl group where I'll double bond the nitrogen and that's a different molecule now, blah, blah, they'll get that done in three months. So like when you think about the rate of three months compared to the rate of seven years, I can already tell you who wins that race. And a lot of things that are broken in society, you actually need to go back to the rates. Like, what are the rates that are outpacing the rates that, that, you know, these other rates that is basically making this state. And actually, what's nice

about rates is instead of being overwhelmed by the size of the state, because once it culminates to the state of the world, it feels overwhelming. And people, like, feel like they can't make any change on the thing. But when you break it down to the tiny rate at the beginning, it's like, oh, Yeah, that rate is very approachable because that's just one human being doing something on a lab bench. Okay, I got it. No problem. And that could be different. I love that.

That makes sense to me. Please come back in six, 12 months and give me an update on the tiny rates that you and your company have changed. And thanks so much for all the work you're doing to make our species and our planet net positive. Yeah. It's going to take everybody and it's a multi-generational project. That's also why the firm is not named after me. Like who wants to go and work at something named after someone who died like 500 years ago.

Sounds dumb. Like it's called Out One Ventures because I wanted to be something that would still mean something in 500 years. And I think being at one with ourselves, nature, and the universe will still mean something in 500 years. Thanks so much, Tom. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform

and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani.