VDAO Ep.3 Designing Antifragile Systems Regeneration, Nature & Decentralization with Rob Avis

Transcript

So, if the most negative thing we've done is build a nuclear bomb, why are we not envisioning what the most positive thing could be? Imagine a world full of people that are planting trees whose shade [music] they'll never sit underneath. I mean, that's that's where we need to get to. And I believe technology can play a role in that. We [music] have a pretty good sense that we've destroyed 50% of Earth's forests over the last 10,000 [music] years. So, we're about 50% less trees than we had 10,000 years ago. Earth will go on with or without us. I think that's the thing that people need to know. Um, it'll just reboot and do it again. When I first got involved in permaculture, I was definitely an environmentalist. I was an activist. I was mad at the world. Um, I was mad at big corporate America and all

of these things going on. Um, it was such a, you know, I was a victim at the end of the day. I was a victim. And, um, I remember, sorry, it just reminds me when you say this there. I remember there's a a a YouTube video of you like gorilla planting a tree activism I can support man >> hey Rob good to see you man welcome >> yeah thanks for having me >> so uh every time we meet someone new on the the podcast we try and get a sense of like what their motivations are and what what's their their why? It's like

where we always kick things off. So, I'm curious. I wonder if you could Yeah. What's your why? Tell us a bit about what motivates you as a as a builder. >> Well, um I'll probably go back to when I was 7 years old. [clears throat] I uh I ended up at the Vancouver Zoo and there was a display a television basically showing a uh the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. It was just the most devastating thing that it's one of my earliest memories actually. And uh I remember asking my mom uh if we could write the prime minister to ask him to stop the destruction of the rainforest because of all the repercussions of of destroying such an

important system on in Earth's ecosystem ecosphere I guess. And I did. I wrote the prime minister. I got a response back from him. Um, obviously the Canadian prime minister doesn't have a lot of agency over what happens in Brazil, but uh that was kind of the early start of my kind of environmental roots and then uh you know largely just lived a a really incredible childhood. Uh we had a forest outside of our backyard and um spent most of my time running around in the forest. And then fast forward uh my my parents were always in the industrial food uh industry. So, my dad had multiple multi-million dollar uh food enterprises, factories, and uh the the last big factory that he had was in

Edmonton. We moved from Vancouver to Edmonton in Alberta, central Alberta. Um we built a 40,000 foot facility. We're doing about $25 million a year in cheesecake. And uh and so I grew up in industrial food. Like we I watched the the cheesecakes move through kilometers of pipe. And at first it didn't really phase me, but as I kind of became more conscious, it's interesting now that I have teenagers watching them in the dream state that they're in till, you know, their late teens. As my dream state disappeared and I started realizing that I was eating food, going through kilometers of pipe, uh I started questioning the systems um that I just considered to be normal as a kid. I went into mechanical engineering. Uh the the

main jobs in Alberta because we're the Texas of the north is in the oil and gas industry. So I moved from industrial food to industrial energy. Uh I was the guy bringing in massive amounts of natural gas into various facilities that we were designing and uh tearing down huge amounts of forest. Ironically, um, you know, my very roots, I was ended up doing the thing that I was really concerned about at 7 and, uh, I was getting ready to to cut down a massive swath of forest to bring in a new pipeline. And I ended up seeing this video from Jeff Lton, permaculture designer from Australia, who had uh, regenerated this meaningless piece of land in the Dead Sea Valley, hypers saline soils, lowest place on Earth,

very little rainfall. And as he was building forests, I was cutting them down. And it was just very ironic that this had come just as I was getting ready to pull the trigger on this massive swath of forest. And yet in the background, I felt incredible cognitive dissonance because how can I criticize the very industry that I'm supporting as a consumer? I'm heating my house with natural gas, driving to work with fossil fuels. Um, fossil fuels have created so much opportunity in our society. We can fly. I can fly to you literally, I could hop on an airplane tonight and be there tomorrow morning.

Like, that's amazing. Whereas, where I live right now on my farm, if I wanted to get to Edmonton 150 years ago, would it be a three-day walk? Like, just think about the the scale of of change that we've seen in the last 150 years as a result of of fossil fuels. Um, so we ended up quitting our jobs after I watched that video, both my wife and I. She was also a petroleum engineer and we wanted to seek a different narrative and so we traveled to Denmark. We traveled to Germany. We traveled to to Northern Africa, uh, central Africa, Australia. Um, we converted a Volkswagen van drone on vegetable oil. We traveled through Canada, the United States and Mexico in that Volkswagen van.

um trying to find uh different narratives, trying to find how other civilizations or societies had solved the energy, food and water nexus and problems that exist in our in our culture today. And what we found was that every culture had their own set of problems. They were different than ours. Um like Denmark, for example, was forced with either moving towards nuclear or uh inventing the wind industry. And they chose as a country to invent the wind industry. So, Vestus was born out of the 1970s uh oil crisis that the world had to deal with. And so, one of the best parts about fossil fuels is it allows us to travel to other societies and see how different people have solved different

problems under different constraints. From there, we started Verge Permaculture. We've taught close to 10,000 people uh regenerative design around the world over the last from 2008 onwards. And then 2020, Fifth World was born, which is a slightly different mission than our education company, which I think we're going to get to. So that brings us up to today. So I've been teaching permaculture and regenerative design and doing consulting for close to 15 years, I guess. Um, and then before that, oil and gas, and before that, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Cake Factories.

>> Nice. So even back in the early days like your relationship with where food comes from was a big driving factor here. Yeah, I mean it's uh I just wrote about that today actually. I mean I'm super grateful for industrial food just like I am for industrial energy. Uh I don't grow all of my own food yet. Um and so I still do need to rely on those systems from time to time. Um actually still weekly. I still buy the things that I don't grow on my farm from that system. And so it's really easy for us to be activists and blame all of our problems and be and actually victims at the end of the day and not be grateful for what those systems have actually

facilitated. They've opened up opportunities for humans to express themselves in ways that would not have been possible had we not, you know, had Henry Ford not actually created the division of labor. And so I grew up in I don't know what you want to call it, but um a latestage version of um Henry Ford's uh insight, you know, I mean I I was the guy that putting cherries on the cake. I that was my job for eight hours a day for one part of my career at the cake factory. and understanding even you know I was listening to Naval Ravocant's uh podcast recently on how to get rich and he's like there's five ways to scale it's like labor capital manufacturing

code and media and so having grown up in a a factory um that's manufacturing um you know media I've had a lot of experience with just with with Verge and teaching and all the YouTube videos that I've created now Fifth World's uh you know got some capital to play with so that we can actually experiment with different ways of of kind of getting into the regen space. Uh we've got I think we're going to talk a little bit about code as we we've experimented a little bit with software um and uh it's kind of interesting to to kind of have been in those different spaces uh and and amalgamate those into the work that we're doing today. So for those who are kind of new, you mentioned

there like the regen space and and uh you talked also about like systems and I I I get a sense that systems design and system thinking is really a key part of your your work and and and your motivation like understanding systems and building systems. I wonder if we can bring this term like uh that's really important in the the Val ecosystem about anti-fragility from your point of view as like an expert in systems design and systems thinking like what what does this term mean what what is an anti-fragile system and how would you define it? Uh I mean obviously the word is a bit jargony. Uh it was originally coined by uh anime Nicholas Taleb who's

written several books that are very difficult to read. Um uh I'd recommend listening to them and uh because he's he's such a fer he um he loves to let everybody know how how intelligent he is. Um, and so if I'm re if you're going to read his work on uh specifically on the book antifragile, which is where the term he really explores that term, there's a a book I recommend reading first, which is the bed of procrusties, uh, which basically gives definitions to all the apherisms that he constantly refers to in that book. And if you don't understand the apherisms, then the book won't make a lot of sense. You'll have to end up reading it twice. I wish that somebody had told me that before I read it. Um,

but the easiest way to explain anti-fragility is to use some personal examples. So I think the word fragile is pretty easy to understand. If I was shipping a wine glass to Germany, uh, I would put a label on there that said fragile, handle with care. We've all seen that label and it makes sense. And so we can say we can define fragility as a system that is harmed by volatility. So when you apply volatility to a fragile system, it breaks. And and so then the next um thing that comes after fragile is resilience. And so in the ecological

world, resilience is actually their version of antifragile. But Nim says that we need more granularity to describe our systems than just referring to uh resilient systems as antifragile systems. So there's three basic states that we're going to go through. So resilience is the next one. And the best way to think about a resilient system is one that uh resists volatility. So a sidewalk is a great example of that. If I uh a sidewalk is used for walking on and if I take a hammer and I hit the curb on the sidewalk really hard, that curb will chip. If I do it long enough, it'll keep chipping, but the sidewalk is still functional

as a sidewalk. Even with the chip, if we want to get into the physics of it, resilient systems will degrade over time as and and basically increase in entropy, so in disorder um as it is subject to volatility within a system. And and so concrete is a great example of that. And then the last state which is antifragile. Uh anti being that it's the opposite of fragile is a little bit harder to wrap your head around. And it was a huge insight to me when I read that book that I was teaching uh regenerative design which is essentially the design of antifragile systems for

the betterment of humankind. Now let's dig into this concept of antifragile. So if I was sending you something to Germany and it was antifragile, so the label said antifragile instead of fragile, what would the sub header on that label say? So just to remind you, the fragile label said handle with care and it's if fragile is opposite of antifragile, what would the subheader on that label say? >> I don't know, like uh throw like smash me around or something. >> Yeah, exactly. they apply apply volatility to this system. So antifragile systems don't resist volatility, they benefit from it. And in fact, when you remove volatility from an

antifragile system, it actually gets worse. And so what's a good example of that? Well, the human body is the personal example I was referring to. If I sit on a couch for the rest of my days, my muscles will atrophy. They'll actually get worse. But if I want to improve my well-being and we're seeing all of this amazing information come out about longevity these days and when you look when you dig into the longevity science um there's only a few things you can do to live a healthier lifestyle for longer. So there's and it's actually they're referring to it as life uh health span not lifespan. So lifespan is the number of years you live. Health span is the number of years that you live with a really incredible uh ability

to to benefit from health. So uh fasting perfect example. So you stop eating for a period of time from anywhere from 16 hours to 7 days that applies a uh applies volatility to your metabolic system. And if you get into the science of fasting your you know after seven days your immune system is completely reset. Your ability to process insulin uh or deal with like sugars blood sugars goes up. You end up with autophagy. your body starts to consume the six cells in your body. Another one is weightlifting.

Uh when we lift heavy weights, our muscles get bigger. So we have more receptors for sugar in our in our muscles. Um one of the biggest leading indicators of longevity is actually the muscle mass that you have going into as you get older. Um, V2 max, your body's ability to bring oxygen into its body is a function of how many times and how hard you sprint. And you basically you send yourself past the point of exhaustion. And then your lungs say, "Oh, that was a horrible feeling. I better make sure that I adapt so that I can take in more oxygen per minute than I was before." So the body adapts to volatility and uh specifically the dose dose dependent volatility that like if

we go too far if we lift too much weight we can get herniated discs we get can have hernas um we can tear muscles and so every antifragile system has a dose dependency that uh and if we stick within that dosage then we are able to actually make the system stronger make it more resilient and and so we can bring that concept out now into the 30,000 ft level um and say that um ecosystems are antifragile um and I when we were describing resilient I said that sidewalks will degrade with uh over time they'll increase in entropy antifragile systems are the opposite of that in that they're

synropic and so they get more complex over time they become more ordered over time and it's the life force um that ultimately is what we're describing when we describe an antifragile system uh life itself uh gets more complex over time if we give it the right conditions and the right dosage of volatility. >> So very interesting. So the I guess at the highest level of our system when we're looking at like if we're looking at an ecosystem we can assess for how it responds to volatility. Does it improve and respond and enhance through volatility or does it like degrade?

And you mentioned you you mentioned there the ecosystem example. It makes me think about like this term like well this is actually a question like where does the term regeneration fit into this? Like that's often used to refer to ecosystems. What's the I guess two questions. what is a regenerative system and how does that relate to anti-fragility. So let's let's go back a few steps and uh let's [clears throat] describe kind of three main paradigms. Uh I think it's important for folks to understand. And so I like to think of uh the 20th century as is like when humans really embraced the industrial revolution. And I'm going to call that the uh conventional paradigm. And uh you were very focused upon like increasing

GDP, increasing production at any cost. And there was very little emphasis placed upon uh negative externalities. It was like we were just our KPI was more revenue, more GDP, more employment. Um and in a lot of ways, human well-being flourished as a result of that. However, those negative externalities have started to build up and we're starting to see them all across the planet. um and we it's getting really difficult to ignore them now. So we have to kind of look at those a little bit uh through a different set of lenses. The next paradigm that kind of emerged in the late 90s maybe even early 90s [clears throat] was a sustainability movement and its whole mo was to reduce human footprint

and I would argue it's not a very good goal. um if you came to me at the beginning of of today's call or even right now and you said, "Hey, Rob, how's your marriage doing these days?" I said, "Oh, it's sustainable." [clears throat] You'd probably feel pretty pretty bad for me. Like, nobody really wants to be in a sustainable marriage. Um and so I think the words that we use are really important here. And I think that it especially when we're talking about an aspirational vision for humanity, which is what the sustainability movement was trying to aim at. What is it that we're sustaining?

Are we sustaining degraded rivers? Are we, you know, sustaining degraded oceans, degraded? Like, are we sustaining degraded soils? Sustainability actually, in my opinion, is the end state, not the middle state. And so, we can only really start to sustain things once we've fixed them up and brought them back to where they should be. And I think that the the thing that's really dangerous about the sustainability movement is that uh it really emphasizes this concept of uh net neutrality, reducing human footprint and uh things like landscapes like zeroscaping when we cover the front lawn with uh with rocks or maybe even fake grass. And the problem with those

statements is that it has a negative connotation which everybody probably on this call has detected on Facebook or whatever social you're on X, which is that um humans are inherently destructive. Like if you really kind of dig into what they're saying about, you know, being vegan or reducing your footprint or any of these things, none of them in themselves are bad, but the underlying messaging is that uh at best humans can be less bad. And that's really really important. And and I'm going to give you a real world example on on the opposite of that now, which is regeneration. And so regeneration is this idea that we actually do have a footprint. Newton got

it right. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And trying to pretend that we can live without having a footprint is a false narrative. So if we have a footprint, what does it mean to make every footprint better than it was uh before we actually put our foot down? And and let me bring that down into a less esoteric example. So, I have two creeks on my on my farm, and since we bought this farm 5 years ago, uh the owner before us was killing all the beavers.

We've stopped killing them. We have eight very active beaver families on the two creeks that we steward um that have come through our property. And to the untrained eye, when we walk through our forests, when they come down to the beaver dam, uh these like to the untrained eye, the the forests around the creeks look like a complete disaster. Like there's trees everywhere. There's wood chips everywhere. Um there's these like crazy mud dams that are getting built in the creek. Uh the water looks a bit murky. Uh they're building channels out into these beautiful grasslands. They used to be fields. Now they've got these channels in there. And to the average person, they're like, "Oh man, the beavers are

destroying this landscape. It was so beautiful before and now they've destroyed it." The beavers have created a footprint. They've created disturbance. They've actually used their life energy to to do these things. The KPI on the back end of a beaver dam is a 28-fold increase in biodiversity. And it's biodiversity, it's the fundamental, the number of meaningful connections between species that creates antifragile systems. That's where anti-fragility comes from. Because if you've got lots of meaningful connections in biodiversity, if one of those species gets knocked out, the other ones will come in and and fill the niche. And regeneration, in my opinion,

is actually where we need to be as a species. And in order to do it, we actually have all the tools. We have all the knowledge to do this stuff. I'm sure there's more knowledge to be had. The hardest thing that we have to shift is our mindset. We have to actually shed the guilt of being human. Um, we have to acknowledge that we have a footprint. And, um, I think one of the reasons that people feel very disempowered right now is because the the scale of problems that exist on planet Earth like climate change or AI um or uh ocean acidification or soil erosion, they're so huge, you know, it it completely overwhelms you. And so we we have to help people to understand the

difference between sphere of influence and sphere of concern. There's a lot of things that fit into that sphere of concern. Um and if you focus too much on that, which is what social media will do, you forget about the part of your life that you can actually influence and change. That's the sphere of influence. >> Yeah. So I was just thinking about the uh the relationship there between like your land as you describe it and the beaver as a inhabitant of that land right as a part of that ecosystem. Like what you're describing is a disruption to the landscape that is having a positive beneficial effect in o on the overall health of the ecosystem. And it

sounds like what you're saying is that like you're you're you're laying out an optimistic vision for the role of humanity in ecosystems that aligns us a little with the the role of the beaver in a way like a disruptor to an ecosystem that if we're mindful about how that how we're relating to the environment, we can actually have a positive impact, a disruptive impact, but a positive impact. And I guess bringing in the anti-fragility piece, if if we're designing and operating within anti-fragile systems rather than like designing super fragile systems that break under disruption and volatility.

>> Yeah, we could be pos as positive as we are negative. So, if the most negative thing we've done is build a nuclear bomb, why are we not envisioning what the most positive thing could be? And using our our life force to uh I mean bring back a philosophical belief that the indigenous people of this land had prior to us, which is seven generations thinking. Imagine a a world full of people that are planting trees whose shade they'll never sit underneath. I mean, that's that's where we need to get to. And um and I believe technology can play a role in that. I don't think the the problem with these conversations sometimes, I'm not saying we're going there, but although we could

um it'd be interesting, is there tends to be a lot of um dichotomy. It's like nature or tech, humans or nature. And it's like those are false narratives. Um there's always a middle ground. And um yeah, I could take that in a lot of different directions, but uh yeah, I'll pause there. Yeah, I think I think you're right. Like there is this kind of it there's a lot of nuance, right? Like it's not there's no simple silver bullet solutions to these challenges that humanity is facing. But I think you're coming down, you're you're bringing it back to a real fundamental uh point about like our mindset. Are we

optimistic about humanity's role in this or do we see ourselves as like just harmful and nothing else? And I I think that I I like that framing. I guess what I would I would bring in here at this point though is like there are uh like the the critique if we can call it that of the regenerative movement is that it's like it can get like super woo woo or like super like uh like unrealistic too philosophical like how do you respond to that? Uh I'm sure you've heard that you've been teach you said you taught 10,000 people through VA right? I'm sure you've heard this on multiple occasions. Uh so yeah, like how do you respond? And also do you have any

kind of uh examples of this either positive examples or negative examples either fragile systems, antifragile systems that have really informed your uh learning on on your journey. >> So I would I would um parse that a little bit in that. So for the last 15 years I've been teaching permaculture. Um and permaculture came out of the 70s7s and 80s. So very much the kind of the tail end of the hippie movement if you will. And its original roots from Bill Mollson were actually very pragmatic. Um, when you look at what Bill was proposing, um, a lot of the stuff that that the VDA is actually

espousing, um, are actually well documented in his writings, which is really interesting, just in a slightly different way. Regen, I think, is is the next iteration of permaculture, or at least it's a more of an applied um, version of what Mollis was trying to get at. They're not quite the same thing. And I would actually argue that regen people at least on the a side of things, on the agriculture side of things, are very pragmatic. Um, so if you look at folks like Gabe Brown, you know, he's an industrial farmer that has wholesale adopted regenerative practices. Um, he's using giant John Deere tractors. Um, he's using seed um from industrial seed cleaning plants to

create his own cocktail cover crops. He's raising hundreds if not thousands of beef a year, pork, chicken, um, all on a fairly industrial scale while enhancing, uh, soil organic carbon, water harvesting capability, nutrient density of the products. And he does actually occasionally use a herbicide. And so now all of a sudden, it's no longer us versus, you know, Bayer or Monsanto. It's like these are just we have to look at everything we've built in the last 150 years. We're tool builders. That's what humans are. We build things. We we create technologies and and um and he's just coming at it from a very pragmatic

space and saying here's the KPI that I want. Here's the tools that I have access to. Um, and all of these tools, by the way, whether it's roundup or tractors or tillage equipment or planting machines or harvesting machines, these are just tools of disturbance. And I think it's really important because the word disturbance connotates has a negative connotation. But if we take like nature has no sentiment. Let's just start there. Nature doesn't have um she doesn't have sentiment. She she basically has one metric of success which is like how efficiently can I use the amount of energy coming onto the planet on on a second by- second basis so that no photon hits the ground. So it's trying

to maximize the amount of solar energy being collected per square meter of earth. It's a solar collector. That's all it is. Um and humans are we're we're tool builders. And so if we have a a regenerative KPI, which is like better more soil organic carbon, more biodiversity, more nutrient density, cleaner air, cleaner water, like those would be some of the things that we'd be aiming at, then why would we limit the tools that we can use to get there? And and so where kind of the woowoo stuff comes in is is very much um we get very purist about what we can and can't do.

Um, and we kind of can lose the forest from the trees. Uh, and and so you can end up with people kind of in the camp of like, well be I'm going to limit the number of tools that I can use in order to get to this outcome. And other people are less bothered by that and they're just mad scientists. And there'd be good reasons not to use certain things like like if something is a known carcinogen, maybe we shouldn't use that or if we're going to use it, we should be a little bit more pragmatic or or conscious about how we use that specific tool. But I've tried and sometimes it's hard. I've tried to keep an open mind about GMOs and some of these other chemicals. I personally don't use them, but um I haven't found a good use case or reason

to use them because they're expensive. Um, but I do try and keep an open mind so that if there ever is a situation in the future where it is justified, I I I'd like to think that I'd be open to trying an experiment using those tools. Yeah. So, it sounds like what you're saying is like the it it's context dependent like the response to the system if it's an agricultural system or another system like it's is context dependent. So it's not like we can be dogmatic about our approach. I don't know. I think if all if all you have is a hammer, every problem can look like a nail,

right? >> Mhm. >> Whereas what you're describing is like a more nuanced and methodical and pragmatic approach to systems design. And you're talking about that reflected in the work of like Gabe uh was it Gabe Brown? You said >> Gabe Brown. Yeah. >> Um yeah. on in agric an agricultural context. >> Um I'm wondering if you've got any other examples of like who's where where have you seen this anti-fragile systems design and regenerative systems design applied like in a really positive way. Neil Spachman is a really great example of this. And so he uh you can actually see his project on I'll give you two examples. Um you can see his work on YouTube on the Alba project. We can put

a link in the show notes. And uh you know he used machines and and design and and uh in Saudi Arabia to harvest water coming off of a mountain side in order to regrain um chunk of desert that was growing nothing. Uh, and again like from from my early roots of wanting to move away from fossil fuels, here's a great example of how we use fossil fuels to change the geomorphology of a piece of land in order for it to change its relationship to water. And as soon as it changes its relationship to water, we can start the repair process and it goes very quickly.

Another really great example of this, less fossil fuel use, but uh is the Penny Water Project in India. Um, I believe it's the the entrepreneur from Five Hour Energy. He made a pile of money and he created a competition and the villages actually started to comp compete against each other with regards to who could harvest the most water in the monsoon season and they're competing for this prize. And so Andrew Millison has done a really great job at documenting all of these amazing water competitions happening in uh in India.

Um, and so there's a smattering of these projects around the world. Another one is the lowest plateau in China, uh, hundreds of thousands of acres, you know, regenerated using bulldozers and human labor, um, to just change how water interacts with it. Uh, until we have enough evidence and experience as a species to know that this is possible, um, we just haven't mobilized the will to do it on mass. And how would you say like like what's the role of digital tools in in this space like in some communities like you mentioned permaculture before there might be a sense of like we need to go back to the land we shouldn't be using digital tools

like it's all has to be analog and that's the way that's the future and then on the other extreme you might have because we're like I guess with vow and the green pill to some extent also There's people that are like lsters in the community, but there's also crypton natives in the cryptonative kind of den archetypes. Some people might be on the computer like 15 hours a day reading charts, trading crypto on Discord fully living their lives online. So, and maybe they don't like hang out on farms and stuff and that. So at these two polls, there's one poll where there's maybe a disconnect from the land and then

another poll where there's a disconnect from tech and even a skepticism on both sides, you know, uh around like what that means and and so forth. How how do you view that in terms of the relationship between digital solutions and real world solutions? >> So about seven years ago, I started reading anthropology books. uh because I wanted to get a better sense of of our roots, you know, and and obviously there's a lot of stuff that in prehistory that we don't have any clue about. And so, you know, there's different people are trying to piece together kind of what humanity might have looked like 10,000, 12,000, 14,000 years ago. And and we're starting to get

shards of what that looked like. But there are a few things that we can say with a fairly high degree of certainty. And I'm a very probabilistic thinker. So everything I say just I'm not I'm trying not to speak in absolutes because I think it's important but um because it it opens up the possibility for more dialogue afterwards with other people that may have better answers than I do. But we know that or we have a we we have a pretty good sense that we've uh destroyed 50% of Earth's forests over the last 10,000 years. So we're about 50% less trees than we had 10,000 years ago.

And the reason that we've destroyed those forests is actually out of uh self-interest to feed ourselves. So um some anthropologists say that the human population got as low as 1,200 people after the the younger dus and we were forced into agriculture. So that's when we started planting the first seeds in order to survive because we weren't able to rely on hunter gatherer techniques. Um, as a result of that last ice age, humans over the last 10,000 years have followed the exact same pattern over and over again, which is deforest, plow, and desertify. So, we cut the forest down, we burn them, then we use in the past animal labor with a

plow. We turn the soils over, we plant versions of monocultures, single species type plants, so that it's easy to harvest. And then once we've exhausted that ecosystem's nutrient, we move on to the next one and we start the process over again. We cut those trees down. And because we've mineralized and extracted, we've basically mined the soil. Um those systems over time uh don't return. In fact, the the fertile crescent, which is where kind of the cradle of humanity, is mostly desert. Now, the most fertile places described in the Bible are now deserts. And you just let that sink in a little bit. And um and so when we look

at kind of the the agricultural stack over the last 10,000 years, basically being annual grains, livestock that you can um train basically like um uh animal husbandry and uh domesticated wild uh livestock. And it's kind of weird that we use the same agricultural stack everywhere on Earth in spite of the fact that our bio bio regions are so different. Like I get to minus 40 here for 3 weeks a year and then minus 20 for the rest of the wintertime and then at most we get to plus 20. Why am I growing the same species and trying to run the same systems northern Canada that somebody in the Middle East is like in Egypt is

trying to grow? um there's not a lot of bio regional bio regionality and so we've actually interestingly enough we've forced our species to genetically adapt in order to be in all these places but the pattern that remains the same is deforest plow desertify now coming back to your question where does digital play into all of this it's only in the last 75 years maybe like the 1960s let's say maybe a little bit beyond that but not much since we've We've actually had the ability to send rockets into space and point cameras at Earth and uh feedback is a a super powerful tool and it reli relies on our ability to actually

especially now have digital technology that gives us uh rapid feedback and in fact I use that today like I wear a Whoop. Um, this is giving me real-time biometrics about my body so that I know I'm getting enough steps. I'm lifting enough weight. I'm getting enough cardio. I'm in the best shape of my life now because I have this incredible feedback mechanism which calls me out when I'm being lazy. So, humans ability to look back on our impact and the disturbance that we create allows for course correction. Same way that a speedometer makes sure you don't go over the speed limit. A gas tank makes sure that you fill your fuel tank up um on a regular basis so you don't run out of

gas. Digital technology has given us uh the ability to create dashboards to uh critique ourselves and optimize not get rid of but optimize our disturbance. And that's actually the thing that gives me the most optimism going forward is that we now have democratized inexpensive data streams that we can deploy and we know that humans change behavior when they're given the right information. So that's how digital technology builds into this space. the opposite end of it. So on the called the tech bros or I don't know how you want to classify these folks but the people that are like really far over into the accelerationists maybe um and

I'm not super versed on this. You'd be more versed than I will but this is me coming from an ecology bias looking in on some of the stuff that I see on LinkedIn. There's a quote from uh Mcdana which talks about how if I gave you a design brief on to design a piece of technology that self-replicated um generated biomass or sequestered carbon produced oxygen created food created habitat uh and did it without any labor cost all on its own without any intervention from humans. Didn't need to be repaired by a mechanic. It had self-repair mechanisms. Um, you know, go design that. And that's a tree.

Um, I don't think there's any piece of technology that we'll ever build that will that will compete with the capability of a tree. And and so when I look at some of the like people trying to pump CO2 underground, you know, using technology to do that, it's like it already exists and it it doesn't it's cheap. I can buy seeds for pennies on the dollar. Um, and it doesn't require a company to be involved other than to put it into the ground and let it do its work. I think that there's an opportunity to stop trying to corner the market or patent a piece of technology that nature has h been working on for four billion years. Um, and so it's not

tech or nature. Um, I think there's a word that goes in front of the tech which is like what's the appropriate technology? How do we bring appropriate technology into the world and how do we um bring nature into that space as well in a way that uh honors like think about the the trillions of experiments that nature has done over the four billion years. We will never be able to compete with that. like it's it's just got such a long time horizon. Even if it's been moving slowly, no matter how many MVPs or lean startups we create, we'll never be able to replicate it. So biomimicry is kind of the merging of those two spaces. And it's super exciting to see what those folks are

doing. So pretty interesting, man. And from what you described there, like you're really you're reminding me a lot like this balanced approach that you describe to what's essentially growth and like applying tech in a way that is meaningful and adds value. Like for example, the uh the uh monitoring of ecosystems to help us help inform how we interact with them to enhance the ecosystems that we all depend upon. Like this reminds me a lot of Vitalik's um blog post he wrote in like 2023 I think it was late 2023 on uh it was called like my techno optimism

and that's where he introduced this concept of defensive accelerationism where it's about uh uh acknowledging that we need to grow and develop and accelerate technological advancement but doing it in a balanced way that also takes a account of like you know technology can cause harm and we need to be defensive in the way that we're approaching that and I guess that that brings in the concept of like if we're thinking about Vitalic we're thinking about crypto obviously um with Vow and and uh that emerged out of FIFA we can come on to talk about that but I just want to before we go there I want to touch on this concept of like decentralization so we've talked about

what antifragile systems mean to you uh we've talked about uh a little bit about uh resilience and regeneration and how that fits into that picture. The final kind of higher level concept I wanted to touch upon was decentralization. So where does decentralization and decentralized systems fit into this this picture um around like antifragility and so forth. So before I go there, I just want to add one last thing to the last statement we made, which was um Go ahead. The reason that humans destroyed the fertile crescent was because the feedback mechanism was so slow.

They didn't recognize, they didn't understand they lived on a planet. Um, and they didn't understand because the >> they didn't have Twitter. >> They didn't have Twitter. Yeah. I mean, they didn't have satellites. And so for them, it was like they were just moving from one ecosystem to another. They didn't realize they were having these aggregate impacts on Earth. And so technologies allowed us to get that feedback mechanism quicker. That was where I was going with that decentralization. I mean, I would give all the credit of decentralization to nature. It's the ultimate decentralized self-organizing system that uh operates from the ground up.

And uh at its roots, permaculture was aiming at a decentralized open-source movement because like personally, if I had if I had a trillion dollars or even a billion would be more than enough. Actually, I don't need a trillion. If I had a billion dollars, um you know, I would just go out and and do the water harvesting work and the and the the forest planting and all that stuff in in as many places as I could for as long as I possibly could do it until I died. Um, that's what my heart wants to do. But when I put my strategy cap on, um, and and this is the thing that this is this was the point in my life when I moved from being an environmentalist into a

humanist actually. Um, when I first got involved in permaculture, I was definitely an environmentalist. I was an activist. I was mad at the world. Um, I was mad at big corporate America and all of these things going on. Um, it was such a, you know, I was a victim at the end of the I was a victim and um I remember sorry [laughter] it just reminds me when you say this there I remember there's a a a YouTube video of you like gorilla planting a tree >> back in the activism I can support man [laughter] >> yeah well that's that's appropriate example >> a victim but at least you had some that that also looked like good fun as well

right just planting trees randomly in places >> well I wasn't a victim then or at least I was less of a victim than before I took my first permaculture design course because what like the essence of what permaculture states and most people don't know this like people think of permaculture as like organic gardening on steroids or um or activism or some sort of earth spirituality. It's none of that stuff. Uh if you go back to the original intent that Mollis laid out, it's very very straightforward. It's take responsibility of yourself and that of your kids. [clears throat] So, stop blaming your problems on other people.

Uh, if you're not perfect in your own little system, you have no right to criticize anybody else and get your house and garden in order so that it shelters and feeds you. It's the ultimate form of of decentralization. Wendel Barry said that when less than 3% of the population grow food, we lose democracy. Um, because it's the like the fundamental energy source of humanity is food. And as we see the amalgamation of all of these corporations um like losing our ability to grow our own now we're relegating the most important energy source to a small number of players um who can decide who gets to eat and who doesn't. That's pretty scary situation

to be in. And it's kind of similar this there's analogies to this in our money system and that like where data is going right now. And so what I learned, one of the most important things that I learned, we talked about it earlier, is that everything gardens. So every species on Earth, whether it's the woodpecker or the beaver, manipulates their environment to to better themselves. So the woodpecker plants pine beetles and pine trees so there's more pine beetles so that there can be more woodpeckers. And the Arctic fox urinates around its nest so that certain grasses grow and um they can actually propagate the vos that they like to consume. Um the beavers create habitat um that actually encourages poppplers to grow because that's the food that they

like to eat. Um and beavers actually farm them. They actually do inventories of the poppplers in the area and they will they will carefully cut and um and consume them at the same rate that they're growing. So we have the right to be on this planet. We have the right to manipulate our ecosystems. Um, but I could spend the rest of my life planting forests and if I don't teach humans the importance of the ecosystems that they live amongst, then somebody's going to come in right behind me and cut all these things down again.

And so the most important climate change we have to focus on is the one between our ears. It's how we operate on this planet. It's our belief about where we exist within our ecosystems. Are we above it? That's the industrial kind of former conventional system. Are we below it? We're less than nature. We don't even deserve to be on this planet because we just destroy it. Or are we part of the community? Are we like mixed right into that web of life? And what role do we actually um have to play on this earth? Um what's our role? What's our position? what can we give back to this community that we rely so heavily on? And so permaculture

at its core is decentralization because it says that if we want to solve all these really big problems that we're worried about like climate change and ocean acidification, soil erosion, we start right outside our back door. We start solving those problems in decentralized ways. And the way you scale a decentralized system is with millions of nodes. And so what I love about the promise of crypto and kind of one of the things that we're trying to figure out at Fifth World is it has the ability if we can figure out the formula to create the rails to inspire an entrepreneurial revolution to regenerate planet Earth at breakneck speed. But we have to figure out how to

get nature on the balance sheet. We have to figure out the tokconomics of all of that stuff, assuming it was some sort of a token system. I don't know. I mean, we we brainstormed about this. We don't have a shortage of labor. Uh we don't have a shortage of knowledge. I don't even think we have a shortage of money. Like, we're seeing that we can just print as much as we want. Um I think we we need a new vision. We need a vision of of what humanity can aspire towards. I I love what Elon Musk has done, at least the analogy of of his vision of Mars. All he does is talk about Mars every single day and he's like, "Humanity needs a vision to work towards." Um, I think we need the same

sort of vision that he's creating for Mars, for our planet. Um, and I think we need to figure out what he's figured out. He's figured out how to mobilize capital to get humans to Mars. We need to figure out how to mobilize capital on Earth in order to spawn the largest earth renovation project ever. >> I love it. And I I love that you you brought in there the connection between nature and tech, like building on the the last part of the conversation about defensive accelerationism and decentralization like nature as the ultimate decentralized system. But I'm curious, let's shift focus on to to Fifth World

itself. You you mentioned there um Fifth World's kind of uh well, you kind of touched on the mission. I wonder if you could just uh tell us a bit more and maybe give us some examples of of your work with within Fifth World specifically around like I don't know. I'd love to hear some examples of this in practice in the in the real world what you're working on with Fifth World. >> So Fifth World's mission is the acceleration of uh the adoption of decentralized food energy and water essentially. So where crypto is focusing on data and assets so call it the bits.

We are wanting to focus on the atoms and uh right now the expression of our work is is primarily consulting. And so we work for individuals that want to see uh their properties uh embody this concept of decentralized food, energy, and water. Um and so we'll typically show up on a property and uh we map out kind of the ecosystem DNA essentially. So we try and understand what's going on on the property. We want to know where the property wants to be. So if you walked away from this piece of land, what would it tend towards over the next 100 years?

Um because we can take a 100redyear repair cycle and we can shrink it down to 10. Um if we can understand where it wants to trend towards and if we can understand the resources coming onto and leaving the property things like water, things like dust, things like uh seeds, human labor, uh wildlife, uh fire, uh snow, all of these things, if we can understand all the natural resources that interact with that property, we can change and I would say we can bend aspects of the property. So not completely transform it, but we can understand where we have the ability to intervene in really healthy ways and we can accelerate that regeneration process

from 100 years down to 10. Um I was just actually out at our flagship site in Cam Loops, uh which is in the uh central BC. It's actually an inland desert uh so it's very dry there. And uh about five years ago, we uh showed up on this property. The well was dying. There was very little water on the site. The client wanted to have uh the ability to feed 20 people indef indefinitely. Um and I basically just said to to Dave, who's actually one of Fifth World's co-founders, visionary thinker. Um I said to Dave, like, you can't you can't grow food without water. It's not possible. like you're either going to have to truck it in in large large

quantities or we're going to have to figure out another solution. I think his well was producing 0.1 gallons a minute. So basically nothing. And the water coming out of the well had a ton of minerals in it. So if we had tried to irrigate crops that it would have caused all sorts of soil problems. So we devised a water harvesting scheme for him uh which basically harvests all the snow melt coming off in the spring which most people just let go to sink. Uh we harvest about 1 and a half million gallons of water every two to three years depending on how the malt the melt lands. Every spring is a little bit different. So some years we get water, some years we don't. And so we've created this huge reservoir of water on the property. So the water that we collect every 3 years, let's say, should

last 3 to 5 years um to irrigate all the systems we've put on there. Uh we're growing food forests, which is basically an orchard that that is mimicked around a forest. We have two passive solar green houses that are growing, uh olives fajoas citrus um rosemary uh, guava, pineapple, banana, you know, in in northern Canada. It's crazy. Um, so two tropical green houses. We have an annual garden there that grows an enormous amount of food. We've got uh a main crop garden which grows all of his root crops. We have a low tech root seller that stores all of his food. Um, he's just about finished building his

micro grid. So, this is a system that connects into the grid. It integrates batteries, generator, and solar. And, uh, BC is actually going to be having some sort of an arbitrage system coming up soon with their grid. So, Dave will be able to not only have redundant power no matter what happens to the grid, but he can program these systems to export when the price is high and import when the price is low. Um, which opens up a lot of really cool opportunities like heating buildings with Bitcoin miners because you could then use your surplus energy to, you know, mine tokens or and then take the heat off of that to heat spaces and all sorts of neat possibilities start happening with the where the energy tech is going. And so

that system integrates food, energy, and water in one unified system. Dave now has the ability to grow enough food for 20 people indefinitely. he can operate uh electrically indefinitely into the future. And his systems are designed to harvest water where he had none before. So we're now seeing regeneration of his well. We're seeing uh spring lines starting to open back up again after 5 years and it's just literally beginning. And so that 100redyear span is now, you know, rapidly moving towards that 10-year repair cycle. And these skills can be taught rapidly. The permaculture design course is kind of the the DNA of that. Uh especially when you can take

people through those systems and they can put their hands on them, they can see them. Things start clicking really quickly. And what's crazy is that people want to be part of this stuff. Like the minute they they see it, it's like, "Oh yeah, this is what I want. I didn't know I wanted it, but I want it now. I want to eat carrots that are sweet again. I want to see the deer return. I want to see the forest come back. I want to hear the bird song in the morning." There's an innate desire in people and a lot of it's kind of asleep right now until somebody tastes it and then it's like, "Oh yeah, that that's super cool. I want to be part of that."

>> I love it. I love the like your vision is like super optimistic, right? Like although I I don't think you're being naive about challenges that humanity faces but it's there are ways we can respond like shocks, disruption, disturbance whether it's to the soil or whether it's to human systems at large are likely to come. That's just part of the what history shows us, right? But what you're describing is a system that can withstand that those kind of shocks.

And what would you say to someone like was maybe living in a urban environment like maybe renting a property or something like are there different levels to which someone can approach becoming more antifragile and more resilience resilient in their lives? And if so, like what advice would you have to someone that was >> oh I have so much hope >> coming from a >> different level >> and so much hope actually. So I get this question all the time. In fact uh I post about like we work a lot on rural properties and I do get some negative comments from time to time on LinkedIn from people saying oh that's just what the ultra wealthy can do. And it's like no that's not true. Um, so I left

$300,000 a year in the oil ga and gas industry and I lived in my mother-in-law's basement suite for 10 years. Um, and because I I wanted it so bad. I wanted to move in this this way so badly. It probably was a maladapted um decision actually on my behalf. It probably would have been better to make more money and then build a really big demonstration site. Um, interesting to kind of contemplate those things. But anyways, that was the decision we made and we are here today uh which is great. So there's a guy working for us. His name is Adrien Buckley at Fifth World. He's in our design team. And uh he was one of my first students actually uh urban planner uh had no didn't have two dimes to his name. In fact, he had a

bunch of student debt. And he was so motivated by this that he jumped in with both feet. Uh he was renting uh in a community in Calgary and uh didn't have a garden um but just had to get involved. He had the same bug that I did. And and this guy is like Johnny Apple Seed. He's completely obsessed with apples. I have never met anybody more passionate about apples than Adrien Buckley. And so sometimes we get really in like obsessed with doing things um like like having a vision in our mind to go and do something and we don't have the resources to do it and we ignore all the resources that are sitting right in front of us. And Adrian didn't have this problem. Um, and so he started something

called Calgary Harvest and he built a little crappy little website. Uh, he took his cell phone GPS and he started going around and and like every journey starts with that first step, right? We all want to scale up and do huge things right away, but we we we fail to forget that the scale up starts with a small step first. So, in Sunnyside, uh, he started walking around his community. Didn't even own a car. And, uh, which is a big thing in North America. And he started walking around Sunnyside and he documented, I think, five or six trees on his website. And these were trees sitting in people's backyards that never got picked. The apples would fall to the ground. The homeowners were pissed off because they

had, you know, apple cider fermenting in their backyard to go out and pick all these apples up. And he saw a market need literally at the end of the day. That's what he saw. And so then he put out an email to the Verge Network and to the Calgary Permaculture Guild Network and said, "Hey, I'm organizing a community pick. We're going to give one-third of the apples to the homeowner, oneird to the picker, and one third to the food bank." Well, it turns out most homeowners don't want the apples. They've eaten enough already. Food bank sometimes wants it and sometimes not. So the picker ends up getting this huge amount of fruit.

Fast forward now, he's got a fairly sophisticated website. He's just finished his picking season. He has over a thousand trees documented in Calgary um that are not being picked. So, it's a resource that's just waiting to be utilized and he has a community of people that go out and pick these and then they benefit from these from this food. Not only that, there's secondary benefits that come from this. They are starting to uncover genera or like species of apples that nobody's ever seen before because an apple seed from a Macintosh will not grow a Macintosh tree. All the Macintosh apples come from the same first Macintosh tree that was grown from that first seed. They always grow genetically diverse or divergent

species. So we know how many seeds are in an apple, but we don't know how many apples are in a seed because it just kind of that's how that species expresses antifragility. So now Adrian's starting to name these apples based upon the communities that they're in. And eventually he's he's going to actually start clipping the scion wood and propagating them as like uh you know Calgary apples that nobody has ever seen before. It's a super cool idea and it could be replicated across every city. And so people get really depressed about not having their own garden or their own backyard to do this stuff in. But the city is your backyard and somebody else is paying for that land and they're paying to keep that apple alive. All you have to do is uh

solve a problem for them and you open up these opportunities for yourself. And there's a woman in Australia. She's a millionaire now. She started her business making quint jelly um by doing the exact same thing that Adrienne did. And so she never owned a tree in her life and she leveraged the decentralized orchard. I can't remember whether it was Adelaide or or Sydney or whatever and built a business off other people's assets that they viewed as a problem. It's a just a great story. >> I love it. So, I guess just before we we wrap things up, I uh as you were talking, I remember something you said to me uh year or two ago about like how when you're out there speaking or maybe

on LinkedIn or whatever, you just you you want to inspire the out of people and you [laughter] rethink we inspire the out of people because there's a lot of doom and gloom and fear and concern And even in many cases like conflict internally, externally and that can create a kind of vibe that might be a barrier to inspiration, you know? And so what's your to kind of wrap things up? Like if you were now at this point where you're at, if you wanted to inspire the out of people that are listening to this right now, like what is it that that gives you hope and optimism looking like 5 years, 10 years

out into the future? What gives you hope and what would um you say to inspire the the out of someone that's listening? So, I I canoe quite a bit in the summertime and uh I love I love river canoeing. And when you're going down a river, you're always looking for the the line that you're going to take. Uh, and if it's a aggressive river, there can be hazards that you don't want to go over because you'll end up sinking your boat. And if it's a really aggressive river, if you sink your boat, you can you can get into a lot of trouble. And so, you have to be aware of the hazards.

But if you put all your focus and and stare too long at the hazard, that's where your boat goes. So, you also have to look for the pathways. And that's what makes canoeing really fun is is navigating uh through that course and trying to figure out how to steer the boat in the right direction. And so all these hazards that that are really depressing, we have to keep them in the periphery. Um we have to know about them. I think the problem with social media is that um it it takes it out of the periphery and it puts it like right in front of you non-stop. It's like you think about the word push notifications.

It's like we don't need to be push notified about all the in the world um you know every 5 seconds that it comes out. It's it's it's it's incredibly harmful on our body. And and like coming back to the tech conversation you had earlier, four weeks ago, I started leaving my cell phone in my office, which is a 30-cond walk from my home. And uh because I wear my Whoop, like I've got my uh I've put on tons of muscle. My V2 max is going up. Like all these things are improving, but I've hit a bit of a plateau. And the last thing that I've been avoiding is my sleep.

And I started leaving my phone in my office at night. And um within the first night, my sleep score went to 100%. I was like, "Holy mackerel, I had no idea that this blue light and the constant pings on Slack and um text messages and I don't even have social media on my phone, but just like that the cortisol that comes from being constantly connected um doesn't allow us the time to to recharge." And I think it's it's really important that we're conscious ourselves of like our own well-being. Like we have to heal ourselves before we can heal the planet.

And there's so much information available to us to do that. And once we're whole or starting to become whole ourselves, then we can start to um to fix the things around us. I think so. Like I said earlier, we have enough knowledge to fix this. We have enough money to fix this. If we just as a society decide we're going to direct the resources there. There's definitely enough labor out there if we really want to do this. There's enough examples of how this is being done around the world. We're not going to get there through fear. Um, you know, and I get scared, too. I'm I'm a human. I get these things concern me. I have two little kids and um, you know, I get worried about these things, too. But we have to make a pathway that tastes better. It has to be

more fun. Um, it has to be better than what exists today. And I'm biased. I think that the way that I live is better than what we have today. I don't know that everybody's going to agree with that. Uh, I work pretty hard on my farm to do what I do. But we don't all have to follow the lifestyle that I choose to live. There's different versions of it. There's different iterations. There's different like, you know, Adrian's cate categorizing trees in in Calgary. That's his version of that. And I'm growing a lot of my food on a farm. That's my version of that. I think uh we all tend to want to move towards these kind of physical expressions of it. I know that the Green Pill podcast is heavily biased towards the tech and crypto community. The hardest Gordian

knot that we've alluded to in this podcast in my mind are the invisible structures of society. It's how we organize. It's how we create trust amongst each other. It's how we spawn a new vision of humanity. It's how we create cohesion in a world that is rapidly fracturing into uh tribalism. Um these are the invisible structures and we can actually go back into nature. We can go into looking at how self-organizing systems, which is fundamentally what like when I read crypto jargon, and I call it jargon because it's so many terms I don't understand, but like when I talk to guys like you or or other people in our

company that are uh you know, crypto crypto natives, you guys use all these words and and like there's analogies to the words you guys use in crypto to how ecosystems function. I mean, we're actually talking the exact same way. It's just you guys have sexier language than we do. And um and so my call to action for the Green Pill community is keep keep building, keep working on these invisible structures. Figure out governance systems. Figure out how to create cohesion amongst humans and get outside into nature and start looking at the architecture that exists in these ecosystems and bring it into the way that you design your products and your tools. We're tool builders. You guys are building tools. I'm building tools. Um,

it's time that we start really doubling down on working together and figuring out how these two worlds can merge because I believe that that that there's a solution between these two worlds. Uh, and it just needs more exploration. And Kevin and I were driving or we were just hanging out at uh at the Cam Loop site last week and we were like, man, we should really talk to Chris and and get a a hackathon going around this idea. And I we were kind of brainstorming what that could look like. And uh it's definitely a conversation you and I have to have offline at some point, but um we need to create more collaboration.

>> I love it. Real world real world builders hackathon. Yeah, I think there's definitely something there. I love that you kind of brought so much optimism to the conversation today whilst also not skirting around the the challenges and the the fear that that can elicit in all of us. And I think for me just responding to change and uncertainty in a way that secures our resilience or and when it comes to like water systems, energy systems, food systems seems to be linked very much to health. That's what I'm hearing from what you're saying.

health, security, and that enables us to move forward in the world and respond to some of the the bigger challenges that humanity is facing. So, it's inspiring. You you have inspired the out of me. That's why I'm super bullish on Fifth World. But, uh, yeah, like just any final thoughts before we wrap things up? Anything you want to add? Yeah, I mean it's it's the health of just tying into that health piece. Um you know, if we want to be healthy, if we want to have long health spans, um it's in our self-interest to fix these systems. uh in fact I would say that people working in this realm

whether you're trying to create the decentralized money system or data system or the decentralized food energy and water systems um you can come at it from that's the right thing to do for the planet or you can come at it from the most enlightened self-interested people on earth are actually people doing regenerative design uh because we're aware that um our well-being is directly tied to the well beinging of the ecosystems around us and as a social structure. Money um is how we all interact with each other. Data is how we interact with each other. You know, water and and nutrients are how trees do what they do. Um we need water and nutrients as well, but we also need to

be able to communicate with each other. And I would argue that the decentralized money and asset system is just as important as the decentralized food, energy, water, and even ecosystem that um allows us to operate on this earth. Um, and until we do have another Mars base, uh, or wherever we're going into the universe, we should make sure that we've got our own house and garden in order and make sure that spaceship Earth is, um, has the best chance of being able to continue to sustain human civilization. Earth will go on with or without us. I think that's the thing that people need to know. Um, it'll just reboot and do it again. The question uh that we have to answer and collectively

come to terms with is do we want to be on the extinction list because that's where it's going if we don't change course or do we want to be a part of this ecological community for as long into the future as we can. Um that's what's at stake. >> Thanks for a great conversation Rob. It was it was great. >> Thanks for having me. Hey,