Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 18: Lary Kopald

This blog is a transcription of the 18th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.

In this episode, Gregory interviews Lary Kopald, friend, collaborator in the regenerative agriculture movement, and cofounder and president of The Carbon Underground. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.

Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, I’m your host Gregory Landua.

Hello regenerates and welcome to another episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. This is episode 18 with Lary Kopald, my friend and collaborator in the regenerative agriculture movement. He’s cofounder and president of the Carbon Underground group that has been a not-for-profit group that has been pivotal in really building the regenerative movement into the natural products industry along with his cofounder Tom Newmark, who will the next guest on the podcast with me. Lary and I had a fantastic wide ranging conversation from the correlation between 5G and the Corona virus to what the opportunities are for our planetary civilization and what some of the threats are and what some of the transformation dynamics are of this particular moment in time as well as a good deep dive into the strategy that underpins the Carbon Underground’s work in the world to accelerate and scale regenerative agriculture. So, it was a lot of fun. Always great to talk with Lary. I got pretty passionate at the end there just talking about information and data integrity and how that really needs to underpin things moving forward, so that this movement which is so important to the world isn’t captured in today’s era of shattered sense making and knowledge and meme warfare. Those of you that have heard me ramble on about that, feel free to skip that section if you want or listen in again. Anyway, I think that this was a great conversation. I’m really grateful for his time and the work that he’s doing out there in the world. It’s an interesting counterpoint to listen with the conversation with Loren Cardeli from A Growing Culture side by side because I think Lary and Tom and Loren have very healthy strategic tension and all of their hearts are in the right place and they’re all very smart and dedicated and doing good work in the world, so there’s an interesting opportunity there for the movement as it were. Please enjoy this episode and I look forward to comments and I hope it sparks some deeper understanding amongst the listeners of this podcast who are less familiar with what’s going on in the regenerative agriculture movement to see the massive potential and opportunity that we’re serving here. Both from a climate imperative as well as a business opportunity. Enjoy and I look forward to your comments.

Lary: Does this thing ever really get behind us? A lot of the big experts in this area are saying this virus alone isn’t going away, it’s just going to subside. But it may be a recurring event and climate scientists have been saying for ten years that this is going to start happening. I don’t know if — did you read the MIT study on, I think it was titled, We’re Not Going Back to the Way it Was Ever. Something like that. And it came out about ten days ago and it’s –

Gregory: I didn’t read that. I’ll take a look.

Lary: If you can’t find it, let me know, because I’ve got it somewhere. Basically, the premise was we are now into the age of viruses. As a result, lockdown of civilization will be a recurring event several times a year. What that means is it may be life as normal for two months, the amber alert goes out, everybody lockdown for a month, something is coming through. We all go through and then a month later they say, “Okay, all clear. You can all go back to school and go back to your jobs.” That’s what they’re saying the new normal is going to be. If that’s the case, I don’t know how you plan school, work, sporting event seasons. I don’t know how you do lots of things, but I also wonder what’s the impact? Let’s just say that happens twice a year. And they were sort of, from what I remember intimating probably three would be a better number, but let’s say twice. Let’s say two months a year the world does what it’s doing right now which is we stop driving and flying. Is that enough (break in audio) [inaudible 00:05:32] with the, and we’ll probably get into this today, but is that enough with the [dragged] down capacity of regenerating the soil to maybe get us through this thing? I don’t know.

Gregory: I think that’s a good question. I mean I think I have a lot of different lines of thought. One, I think being able to have an honest conversation about the positive — like just how starkly clear it has to be to everyone that there’s an inverse relationship between current economic activity and environmental health and how clear that is. I think a lot of people have talked about that, but there’s sort of a global moment where the sky is clear in China and we can see the waters clear up in Venice and we can see all of these clear evidences of Earth’s capacity to rebound and regenerate when we’re not actively degenerating, eroding, extracting due to the status quo economy. That’s sort of like point number one. Point number two that you’re raising is what does society look like if this is the new normal? And I kind of think point number one and point number two which is that there may be a scenario in which due the large urbanized population combined with changing climate that these sorts of pandemics are normal. To me, those two points together demand us to restructure our economy and our society. We have to, because we simply can’t just go like, “Oh we’ll just return to normal for two months and then we’ll lockdown and we’ll return to normal and we’ll lockdown.” That’s [untenable] which I think is what you’re saying. There has to be structural changes to how the — and I think it points towards, if we choose to accept it, we can go two different directions. We can either go some weird totalitarian surveillance state direction with [crazy scary] technology.

Lary: Wait, we’re not there? I thought we were there.

Gregory: This is certainly very likely to bring us much closer to that. I mean China is certainly there, and the west is there in a different way. But how that actually crystalizes — do we relocalize and do we double down on quality of life and things that improve general human health so that we’re more resilient to pandemics because everybody is just healthier and more connected? Or do we take the reduce, isolate, atomize control response? Which of those responses do we take? Or a hybrid of the two. (break in audio) [inaudible 00:09:09]

Lary: Yeah okay.

Gregory: I just popped off video there. You broke up just a little bit.

Lary: Yeah, you froze. I’m going to close video. Can you hear me?

Gregory: Yeah, I can hear you well.

Lary: Okay. Well I think we’re down to that. And it could be my end it could be, I don’t know this time of day is bad time for connectivity.

Gregory: And you can call in if you need to. (crosstalk) [inaudible 00:09:45]

Lary: And this is fine — I’m happy to, but this sounds fine if this works for you.

Gregory: So far so good. Let’s keep going. So, you were just going to comment likely there’s some kind of hybrid between –

Lary: Well, I don’t know, or there’s a third and a fourth and a fifth that we haven’t put in there.

Gregory: Totally, maybe it’s a false phytotomy. Although, it does feel like, in my social media bubble, my personal algorithmic bubble that I live in that all of us seem to have our own these days. I see a little bit of what feels to be a schizophrenic sense making on this — the technocratic side of things, which I have connections in and a seat in that world. There is very much the new norm of, isolate yourself for the good of the whole and meanwhile we will get a vaccine and we’ll get technological solutions and we’ll do quantitative easing and we’ll do all these different things and then we’ll gear up to do more of that in the future and we’ll just sort of iterate on that. And that will be the response. And then on the other hand (crosstalk) — Go ahead.

Lary: No, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to hear your other hand in the comment.

Gregory: The other hand, in my bubble and the inner section I sit in, you have the — I guess more permacultural approach which is like, “Hey, this why localized village scale communities have their own resilience and have very short supply chains and can sort of isolate themselves and then reintegrate at a whim and people have high quality life and are very healthy and you have your own elders integrated in the community and health care integrated into the community.” Everybody sort of like, “Duh, this is what we’ve been saying. This is just a healthier more resilient way of being.” It’s very different than the technocratic civilization scale approach, this more grass roots approach. “Hey [victory gardens], hey plant some trees.” Because the issues with a pandemic like this — suffering aside, the Corona virus per say is not that scary. Other than the [knock on] effects it has when all of a sudden you have way more people needing health care and what that may do to supply chains and what that may do to society. The death toll goes up [orders] of magnitude. Anyway, those are the two voices.

Lary: Yeah. There’s so much to talk about here. I was talking to a friend of mine who was [NIH] for 25 years and really does know this stuff. And by the way was think first guy I knew to self-quarantine saying, “This is going to be horrible. We’re staying home.” And that was five weeks ago.

Gregory: What date was that, that he did that?

Lary: I would say that was — what are we, April 2nd, end of February. It was still in February.

Gregory: Yeah, that’s not too far off. We started isolating right at the beginning of March with a few calculated risks. But that’s.

Lary: I mean, I was in Costa Rica and the decision really — we had a conversation, do I stay there, do I come back? And I actually, because I went down there and I wasn’t feeling great and so [Anders] like, “Maybe you should just stay there.” And our doctor said, “No, get back here.” I’m not sure it was the right decision. Other than the fact that I’m with my family. But so be it. I think there are unbelievable lessons here if we’re –

Gregory: Amen.

Lary: If we are open to looking in that mirror. Truly looking in that mirror and not getting distracted when somebody throws a tiny bit of money at us. If we are truly wanting to figure out how this happens — and oh by the way with close to 60% of the human population living in cities, this is going to become common because we’re living on top of each other. You know what I mean? If we don’t change something, I’ve had long conversations with people at [Danone] and Unilabor about, is globalization going to survive the way it’s all set up? Which is a wonderful question to have. I think the answer is — you know when you talked about localizing and victory gardens and things like that. Yeah, I think self-reliance — something we’ve seen percolating for the last ten years is probably going to get a bit of a turbo boost here. Is it going to be enough to shake systems? Probably not yet. Not yet.

Gregory: But maybe.

Lary: Maybe.

Gregory: It depends on how bad this actually ends up being. There’s still a branching pattern of, it could be really bad or it could be much, much less bad. If it’s really bad, then we sort of edge societal bubbles, like the self-reliance homesteading space will get a huge boost and if it’s kind of bad, it’ll get a boost, but not a huge boost.

Lary: Right, we got through it. It really wasn’t all that bad at all. We’ll look back at it and laugh. Exactly. Did you see the last Sunday’s New York Times? The section call, I think it was The Big Empty.

Gregory: No, I don’t read the Times.

Lary: You need to go look at this. All it is, is it’s about a 16-page section of photographs of cities around the world. Completely –

Gregory: Yeah. You still with me?

Lary: You see it like that — yeah I’m here, you there? Are you there?

Gregory: Yeah, I’m here.

Lary: There’s something about seeing the world empty all at the same time. And you literally go, “Oh my god. This has never happened in history. May it never happen again.” But looking at it is absolutely chilling.

Gregory: It is.

Lary: Two-year point. How bad is it? How much does it force us, absolutely mandate, that we take a serious look. By the way if we have millions of people die from this, which is entirely possible, then the trauma of mental health. They’re now saying in the United States, everybody is going to lose somebody important to them. That’s a chilling thought. You there? You gone?

Gregory: No. I’m just sitting with that. It’s very chilling. It hits home.

Lary: Seriously, you hear that and then of course the first thing is, “Okay, so who is that in my life? Oh my god. I mean we look at [andrea’s] father who’s an unbelievably healthy 92-year-old but he’s a 92-year-old. If he gets sick, didn’t even let him in. Go home, whatever. What does that do to society? What is it doing to us that we can’t be with our loved ones as they’re dying? And we can’t have funerals for them?

Gregory: That’s the big thing. That’s the big thing that I keep wondering about. In conversations with my in-laws and my parents who are obviously are I guess higher risk than myself or Amy or the kids. I mean, I guess there are two ways you could approach this. One is full of fear trying to avoid death at all costs, and the other is — I mean obviously as you said there’s a million ways, there’s a whole spectrum. But if we sort of divided it, the one is to be like, “Well we’re going to optimize for care and connection and roll the dice and if it comes up snake eyes, then that’s just life and death.” The other is, we’re going to do everything that’s humanly possible to save every single life whatever the cost is. And there’s the whole spectrum in between. And I have to say my parents tend to be more like — I mean they are happy to say they have plenty of space. They’ve got their garden. They’re doing their thing. They’re pretty much homebodies, anyway, retired now and whatnot. But they’re more like, “Hey, we’re baby boomers and us and people older than us are the people most likely from this and if that happens, we’re just glad it’s not the young people that are going to die and C’est la vie this is just how it goes.” They’re pretty [stoic] about it. They’re like, “Hey, you know, thank god it’s not the Spanish influenza that was killing people in their prime who had kids and families.” And that’s a gut punch. Not that young people aren’t dying with this, but I [spews] older. I hear that voice and I think there’s probably a fair number of people who are sort of like shrugged shoulders, “Yep, there’s a million things I could die of and here’s another one.” And just honestly looking at the statistics. How many people die of air pollution, cumulative air pollution and lung issues every year that won’t die because of this? How many people die of traffic accidents that — there’s all these ways that civilization [eats its own] and I’m holding all of that just wondering what’s the calculus of survival here that makes the most sense that preserves our humanity, I guess.

Lary: Every one of these thoughts. Every one of these calculations is so complicated, because — let’s go with that for a second. Let’s say that we lose a whole lot of our elders, but the younger generations go on. What does that do to us as a society? My gosh, I mean look at your kids and how they look at their grandparents. I don’t know what that means. Again, the emotional, the family history, the passing down, the sharing of tradition. What is that dent going to do?

Gregory: It is. It’s a huge dent. It’s such a crazy transformation to think about and may the best possible thing happen which is that this serves to reconnect gratitude with our elders who our society tends to shove away into nursing homes and disconnect with society.

Lary: Absolutely. There’s another thing. Let’s go the other direction. I have a 14-year-old. And I have been raising this kid right now in the age of technology and as you are raising yours. And the concern when you see a room with six girls in it, they’re in their bedroom and they’re all hanging out and they’re all talking and they’re laughing, but they’re on their devices and they’re not looking at one another. And there’s no feedback from the facial expressions and you sit there, and you go, okay, what we’ve been worried for a long time and then we do okay no device time and whatever. But what’s so interesting is that my daughter — and she’s on her device more than ever and we have to allow it. But she is missing human contact with her friends and we’ve talked to her. I think that one of the outcomes of this is that kids go, “You know what? Connecting on a device doesn’t replace being with one another.” That’s a beautiful awareness.

Gregory: I have the sense that, that — it’s sort of like an analog to that is people’s algorithmic social media bubbles and the trolls and the election and the echo chambers and decrease of the capacity of collective sense making due to technology and how people — I mean I guess — I actually think in a similar way to how you’re watching your daughter wake up and make a choice about how she interacts with technology and what she prioritizes. I have the sense that, that is also happening at a societal scale. I actually have more hope that people will be like, “You know what, actually, I can take some responsibility to look at my filters and some other things and make sure I get a balanced diet of news and other things and I’m going to just do that.” People build immunity to meme warfare in essence. I feel like I’ve watch myself do that. I’ve watched myself say, “I know that people are actively trying to manipulate me and therefore I have to do the following things. I need to actively stretch beyond places that I would normally read from and actively look for multiple points of view and be conscious of — you can sort of sense when something has been engineered for viral clickbaitness. Just be aware. It’s like an immunity that builds up. And I think the same thing is true, I hope, the same thing is true around addictions around technology. But I do fear that — it’s like an unprecedented moment. Zoom records everything that we’re talking about and they sell everything to third parties, just like the other big companies, Google. At the same time there’s like an unprecedented load through the surveillance capitalist system. Unprecedented data about human behavior in times of stress is being hoovered up and held privately to do what with. Is it going to be used to increase public health? Maybe. Is it going to be used to sell us shit? Definitely. That’s an awareness I have as I walk around — I go on a walk, I still have my phone in my pocket, I’m like, “Man I sure would love to have beautiful private human — not even private, but agenda free human connection without — sitting around with people that I love in a campfire where I’m not being listened in on so that somebody can sell me something the next day when I hop on Google.

Lary: Or let’s get the next step, surveil for other reasons. What China’s done with their good citizen program, but the — and I’m sure you’ve seen the videos and read the articles about the possibility that this virus which as we know is not an organic thing may be related to the [rollout of 5G] and — have you read all of that or seen any of these?

Gregory: I looked at some of those. I chose not to read very much of that, but maybe I should revisit it.

Lary: My cousin is one of the experts, has been on the impact of EMFs and WIFIs and now 5G. She’s MIT Harvard. When I got the first video about this that really went deep into the science of it and how everything vibrates at a frequency. All mass vibrates, all things vibrates. And what is fascinating, and she validated this, is that 5G vibrates at a level of 60. You know what else vibrates at a level of 60? Oxygen. That was an interesting fact that started look at and then they just traced. And I’m not saying it is or it isn’t. What she has said is it very well possibly be, but we certainly can’t conclude. But if you look at 5G which is basically created in the Wuhan district. Next it went to South Korea who ramped it up. Then it went to Northern Italy that ramped it up. New York, Silicon Valley, and LA have it the worst in the United States where it’s been launched. Okay, you could argue. Maybe that gave it it’s windows in the universe to come in maybe. I don’t know. It is fascinating that 5G is not about downloading a movie faster, it’s all about surveillance. When you talk about the stuff you’re talking about — if the irony of this is that this big new tool to keep us under control tanked the global economy, probably the biggest oops in the history of [humankind]. Right?

Gregory: Yeah. That’s very interesting. That’s an interesting take on it. One of the questions I have is, most people who have a home internet system and a router are swimming in 5 gigahertz WIFI, which is the same frequency that they’re using at a — those are just like mega routers that are being put up [inaudible 00:31:39].

Lary: Yeah, it’s kind of like being under a dome is how it’s described. It’s an inescapable end relation of us. And that’s where it really messes with you.

Gregory: Maybe we’ll all, now that everybody is at home with their 5 gigahertz routers, maybe that’s just going to be even worse. I mean it’s totally — I certainly don’t belittle at all the need to understand rigorously and I’m much more of a precautionary principle sort of guy. Why adopt something new that may have unforeseen risks and maybe you can’t say one way or another. Is this a consequence of that? There may be some correlation, is it causation, it’s hard to say. The same places that have human density tends to be the first places to get 5G. There could be a number of different causal relationships. And it may be complex and it may be multiple things converging. It may be proximity. Those happen to global hubs of travel plus 5G somehow makes it easier to spread or more deadly or who knows what.

Lary: I was talking to a friend of mine at Google last week and we were talking about 5G. I said, “So you guys are going big into 5G.” he goes, “We are.” And I said, “Why?” There’s was this really interesting pause and he goes, “You know, we don’t really know.” And I said, “Okay that’s a strange answer.” And he said, “Well, 5G has a faster ability to move data. It’s really what it is.” He said (break in audio) [inaudible 00:33:43] just fine. Nobody’s complaining anymore that it’s too slow. And it’s kind of taking a car that can go up today 120 miles an hour and making it go 500 miles an hour. Why? I thought that was such an interesting comment.

Gregory: Yeah. I mean what else could people be spending all of that infrastructure investment on? I don’t know, maybe retooling, global food systems, or something. I don’t know. We might be able to think of a few things.

Lary: Yeah. How about that. That would be interesting. Exactly. You and I remember dialup. We remember this stuff. Now — I was listening to this guy and he was saying so. You know this is pretty virus, but he said, “You’re driving in your car and you want to find out the way to get somewhere so you take your phone out and you punch the address in. and your phone sends a signal to a satellite that analyzes where your car is at that exact moment and where the places you want to go. And some of them even analyze the traffic and it calculate a route for you to take. And if it doesn’t happen in five seconds, you get impatient. And it’s so true. I mean think about what just happened. You’re right, if you’re sitting there for a couple of seconds, that’s not instant. So, if we’re used to fairly instant technology feedback and we can calculate, at this point, hundreds of billions of calculations a second, what do we need the speed for? What are we doing?

Gregory: The answer lies in AI, big data, smart cities. The vision of it isn’t about the humans interacting with the — it’s about the nonhuman agents that actually can use that uptake in speed to increase their ability to [imbibe] data and run calculations and take actions.

Lary: So, why do we need it?

Gregory: The good and the bad of that. I mean, I think the answer is we don’t. What do we need? The challenge here from my perspective Lary is that — I mean we could go into of different off the deep ends. I forget who the gentleman is who said this, one of the techno futurist Silicon Valley people talks about humans as the reproductive organ of technology. That we’re just incubating this new silicon-based life that’s going to be birthed and have different — and be from that perspective. The people who resonate with that as an exciting thing, I think tend to be misanthropic. From my perspective.

Lary: That’s the whole transhumanist movement.

Gregory: Exactly. That’s right. There is a truth. There’re different levels of this. There is an unavoidable truth that culture, technology, and our economy are inexorably linked into a complex coevolutionary feedback. So, technology itself is — I think it is accurate to think of itself as in some way its own living organism that’s doing its best to feed itself. It’s not just like humans are in the driver’s seat here. The technology itself is a strange attractor that has its own generator functions that are moving it and humans are agents of that, but it’s flipped, it isn’t just people — I don’t think we can get the proper sense making and meaning making from thinking, like why are lose people motivated to do that? Why is Google motivated to do that? Google is essentially like a giant machine. The sum of Google and the way Google behaves is best thought of not as a bunch of humans, but it’s a hive and the humans are serving something that is no longer human, I think. That is a strong position to take and I hold it loosely. But I think it makes more sense. It’s more explanatory. It has more explanatory power from my perspective to help me make sense why the hell. Why the hell would people just do that just to do it? Oh, because that technology has some agenda itself that is not just like human welfare and planetary balance and health. Technology has a different set of things that it’s optimizing for and it has essentially captured these corporate entities in a way — again, strong positions, loosely held. But you can do a thought experiment. Is this true? Has it just captured the FAAG, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, arguable apple is the least captured of those, Google? And it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s sucking energy out of the human and ecological spheres and pouring it into technology for something that who knows if I can even conceptualize. And it certainly doesn’t have any proximate benefits for myself, my family, or my community really.

Lary: Yeah. I listen to you and I understand intellectually everything that you’re saying. And my first reaction was, every generation we hear that in one form or another. Barbara Marx Hubbard said, “The Earth was never more than a chrysalis and we’re on our way to being completely spiritual beings and that’s what evolution is all about and we just” –

Gregory: [reword Gnosticism] I think that’s true, there’s a long spiritual tradition that remakes itself at every generation. What you’re saying is absolutely true. And that is it’s sort of like transhumanist technological perspective. It’s not that different from Christianity really and the [inaudible 00:41:14]. It’s the same story in a different way.

Lary: Well in a way. And where I was going to go with it is, I don’t doubt the technology is going to increasingly — trying to figure the word — I don’t want to say control, but influence one of many components of our lives. I don’t doubt that because that train left the station. We’re just not going back to caves and (break in audio) [inaudible 00:41:44] we need to manage them in ways humans just can’t process fast enough to do it. I understand that. But I also happen to be a Jewish Pantheist and I believe wholeheartedly in the concept of [ubuntu] and I believe that we belong to a whole of nature, we don’t belong to a whole of manmade technology. For me, if we don’t figure out a way to keep the former healthy, then we’re buying ourselves a short term efficiency joyride and all hell is going to break loose.

Gregory: I resonate with that. [ubuntu] or [inee] in the [Nguni] language. There’s sort of like the web of — or in [la kesh] in my end, the interconnected interdependent wholeness of [inaudible 00:42:58] this thing called an interbeing these days that — and I think that is — I resonate with that. I’m not [ted kaczynski] over here (crosstalk) [inaudible 00:43:13]

Lary: By the way, was not wrong on a lot of things, but go on.

Gregory: Totally, I may not be [ted kaczynski] but I have his book Close at Hand as a cautionary tale as someone who’s active in the technology space now. And I made that decision not because I’m particularly techno utopian, but because I feel like we have to reconcile the massive incising potential for efficiency that digital technology provides with the interconnected wholeness and health of our home, the planet. And to me that’s the imperative of the day. That’s the work. That is the [darma] right now. At least my own, and I think, maybe at a generational level as well. It feels like the imperative right now to explore that dynamically with big hearts and discerning minds. That’s just what we need to do. And this corona virus moment is definitely an initiation one way or another. And with any initiation cathartic disruptive shake up, some new state will become out of this that is for sure.

Lary: I hope it’s for sure. I’m not convinced, I’m hopeful. I really am. The reason I say that is I think that the spiraling down is happening faster than the building up right now. And I think what you’re saying and I agree with is that the building back up, the rebuilding, however you want to look at it, is going to accelerate, no question. But is it going to get there in time? I don’t know. I hope so.

Gregory: Yeah. That is the question. That is the question and we have to behave as if it may not and we have to pour everything into — it’s a paradox. Do you track at all the game B movement?

Lary: I don’t. I don’t.

Gregory: Game B movement. I think is loosely affiliated of merged out of the Santa Fay institute and it’s — I sort of put it in the consolation of there’s the metamodernist movement which is kind of political almost. And then there’s Game B which is kind of like this group of people and they’re kind of cousin to the regenerative movement in a way. And they’re basically saying Game A is this rivalrous competitive, it’s the world we live in — everything is the way that it is now and to get ahead in society, you have to behave certain ways and do certain things. The economic game is rigged in a particular way. And Game B is sort of this vision and invitation to imagine what — I guess you could say game theory is that underpins a society that values non rivalrous cooperation for the good of the whole over being the winner of a rivalrous war or market economy or whatever it is. That’s the basic…

Lary: I mean that certainly reflects a lot of the discussion going on right now. We hear the very simplistic, “Well the virus doesn’t know borders.” But what does know borders is global trade. What you’re talking about is an economic system based on global trade which in it of itself just really may not continue. It’s not going to continue the way it is right now and I look at the projects that the carbon underground was absolutely ramping up to spectacular opportunities of level and everything is basically, hopefully, just on hold because borders are closed and we can’t move people and we can’t move goods, and we can’t move experts and we can’t move this. and technology is helpful but probably more helpful later on in some of these projects. So, the game Be movement and I will look it up, I mean I want to get smarter about it, but it sounds like you could almost call it the common sense movement. Right?

Gregory: Yeah, I think so. There’s some underpinning, different folks are pivotal as thought leaders. Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jordan Hall, [Jim Rutt], these folks are laying out a very cogent argument. The premises of the argument are essential like A) human nature is malleable, meaning different cultural context, people exhibit different things and the presumption that people are selfish — it’s because of our cultural context. It’s like the standard — it’s like if you read any anthropology, you would know. There are different human societies that different conditions exhibit wildly different behavior patterns and social structures and things like that. It’s like the first premise which isn’t inviting us to design and think about how we actually structure society and the best way and rethink markets and institutions in light of that. That was premise one. Premise two is, if you have exponential technology, and you have an arms race with that exponential technology, nuclear weapons or AI or whatever it is. Eventually you get to a place where the probability of mutual inhalation is very high. So, if you keep doing that over and over again, we’re all fucked. Basically. Is premise two. You sort of come with those two basic, I think fairly unarguable premises, it very quickly leads you to, “Okay, if that’s true, then we need to start taking particular actions around the way that our businesses are structured and the way that our families interact and the way we engage with local and national politics to essentially try to create conditions so that hopefully — I guess another premise is, it’s very hard to change adult behavior. You have to — the kids need to be socialized in a way that allows them to inherit a system that is trending towards non-rivalrous. That’s the other piece of this. You sort of just cross your fingers and hope we don’t fuck it up in the next 20 years and then do everything you can to invest in the next generation. In a way is the most cogent, and again, this is plan B. It sort of resonates with my theory of change pretty strongly, but I’m not claiming this is my own or necessarily a strategy. I mean I would endorse it, I guess. I think there’s other things that they missed, for instance, their, in quotes, regenerative movement pickup on around what kind of businesses and livelihood and where the opportunities are in today’s economy to bridge to a future economy that is based on regenerating our planetary ecological commons.

Lary: Yeah. And when we’re done doing that let’s talk about humanity’s behavior towards one another.

Gregory: That’s where plan B is very firmly intrenched, they’re sort of saying, “look, the” — which I totally agree with. They’re basically saying you can’t just — and I don’t know it’s sort of the chicken or the egg, right? But they’re sort of saying the emphasis kind of ends up being on social — like new forms of governance, new forms of education, new forms of social arrangement that the hypothesis is increases creativity to the degree which those sorts of organizations and social structures can out compete a rivalrous hierarchical corporate or governmental structure so you can survive off of the pure creative output.

Lary: I don’t know, maybe that’s true. I come at it from a somewhat different point of view. I don’t believe that when you’re in the throes of stage four brain cancer, you work with a new trainer. I really think that living under the existential threat of the host no longer being able to support us and a projection of 15 years from now having 2 billion environmental refugees on Earth and we’re already well over a hundred million, so we’re on our way. Until we can stabilize that. Until we can remove that, it’s going to be really hard to focus on some of these other critically important things. And it’s why I’m doing the life work I’m doing.

Gregory: Agreed.

Lary: If what I’m hearing you say, and I completely understand and, in some respects, agree with the logics of it. If you’re going to rebuild, if you’re going to redesign, do it holistically this time. I get it and the truth is it will never sustain itself without that.

Gregory: I think that’s the truth is that we can’t actually successfully reduce the climate change to a single problem to solve a symptom of a root cause that’s much deeper. That gets us retangled up with the social questions.

Lary: I think if you live under a constant threat of floods, droughts, fires, no food, no water, little things like those. I just don’t know how there’s more bandwidth because that’s going to suck more and more of it up. And maybe we’re coming back full circle to the beginning of this conversation about what do we have to give up for the whole and at the beginning it was, well you know what, maybe it’s some of the seniors for the sake of the youth. I’m never one to say with anything other than a broken heart. Do we need to put some of these more human issues a little bit less on the front burner, while we at least, give us a healthy place to live on. I don’t know.

Gregory: It’s interesting, my last podcast conversation was with Loren from A Growing Culture, and I think he was making an impassioned and emphatic defense of the social has to come first and the critique of the regenerative movement, in quotes, that there’s this — sort of like working from the opposite end of the question and saying, first we have to stabilize these basic things because otherwise if you just think of Maxwell’s hierarchy otherwise people aren’t even in a place to have this conversation about governance or cooperation or transforming society. If you just had your house burned down or flooded or supply chains have broken and there’s no food because of soil erosion or whatever it, we can’t even have that. I think it’s both and — one of the things that I recently — on of the pieces of wisdom that I’ve been thinking about a lot is just this sort of idea of, be good to one another or else. What are the consequences if you’re not good to each other? Is the people end up fighting each other in the midst of collapse and that depletes the ability of society to actually respond to reality. Instead you are in a war in the midst of collapse. I kind of don’t see a way around –

Lary: I could agree more.

Gregory: If it doesn’t have to be a radical — you work with what you’ve got. I don’t the we can — I think we can keep the invitation and the image of a pretty radically different society and a different relationship to markets, not that they’re going to disappear or something. But different ways that people relate to markets and globalization and governance and these sorts of things while being very pragmatic in dealing with what we have with the sort of imperative of, be good to one another or else. You can’t respond to crisis without having integrity.

Lary: Right. I would guess — and I understand Loren’s point of view, knowing Loren, and there’s no way that I’m going to argue against his point of view. I hope he wouldn’t argue against my point of view here, but the beauty of what we’re talking about is if you were to, and let’s be clear here, we’re not saying either or, we’re saying which gets the priority and which comes right underneath it. I think that’s what we’re talking about and the beauty is both of those boats must and will rise together. They have to. They have to. If you focus on taking care of people and creating their sovereign ability to care for themselves and grow food and have community and things like that. The planet will do better. And conversely, if you restore the soil and you take poisons out of the air, so children aren’t born with 200 chemicals in their bodies. There’s just no way that society is not going to benefit and improve. You have a greater capacity for it on either side, whichever way you look.

Gregory: I agree.

Lary: I’m more fearful of the natural systems snapping and what that might do and I am more heartbroken of the mistreatment of parts of humanity toward other parts of other humanity. The good news is, and it really is good news is I am — well I used to say I’m an optimist looking at what actually could happen here. And when you look at the healing capacity of nature, which is astonishing, and we’ve never truly tested it other than blocking off a fishery and watching it restore itself and it’s always faster and a greater rush to abundances than we had predicted. So that gives me a lot of hope in that. But recently I’ve been, and I apologize, I don’t even remember where I first heard it. But somebody was talking about the fact that they were asked how they could be optimistic given all of the stuff going on, and their response was, they’re not an optimist, they’re a possibilist. That’s a real wonderful distinction. Because optimism is somewhat passive. And possibility puts more engagement responsibility out there. And that gets me more excited. It’s very interesting. When we look at, going back to the conversation about technology and what it is doing, what it’s going to do, what it can do, what we don’t even know it can do. Shit, I’d like just not to have to wear glasses anymore. [inaudible 01:02:18] I’m being facetious. When you look at the tools that we have– but then you have to, we have to come together and do the overlay of application. Right? How cool is it that the price of oil has tanked and gas is going to 99 cents a gallon? Gee, how great is that? Well of course it’s not. It’s horrible. Why we’re not creating a defense act initiative right now to convert everything to renewable power, it’s all — we know what we can do. It always comes back to what we will do. I think this moment that we’re living in, I think the irony — and I have so much faith in both nature and the spiritual games that the universe loves to play of the irony of a respiratory virus shutting down a planet and people all over the world in the cities going, “Oh my god, I can feel how much cleaner the air is.” You can measure how much cleaner the air it. The Earth is literally breathing better because we’re dealing with a respiratory virus, and I don’t know what to make out of that. Maybe that’s just a funny little way of looking at it. But I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I don’t think that we have spent last 200 years with a ramp up over the last 50 compromising the planet’s immune system. Is this really a surprise that this is happening right now? Of course it’s not.

Gregory: No not at all.

Lary: Yeah. There aren’t magic bullets, but there are — I don’t even like that expression anymore. But magic wands, how about that. Let’s say that. When you look at things like the regenerative movement which it was seven years ago that this awareness percolated up for the first time. Maybe the first time in the modern world, but percolated up the true importance of soil in ways we didn’t know, both the bad and the miraculously good. And look what we got? We can do this stuff, it’s the mort important thing in the world, feeding the world and providing healthy water and now we knew something that restores the capacity to do both of those. When you have it predicted to be the number one food trend for 2020, that’s pretty awesome, pretty awesome. You could sit there and you could argue that technology is really important there because we all look at the data of the soil transformation or the carbon sequestration or all of the things that we’re measuring and creating tools to measure, but the truth of the matter is we don’t really need any of that do we? If we all just farmed in a regenerative way (break in audio) [inaudible 01:06:21] it’s still going to have the effect. Again, big opportunities to look in the mirror. Technology is a tool, right? Like so many things. Communications is a tool, what do we do with this stuff right now?

Gregory: I certainly agree that agriculture is the imperative intervention point. I think if you add together — in the drawdown book, they sort of fragment it out agriculture and land use into 15 different subcategories. and if you recombine all of those it blows everything else out of the water in terms of the drawdown potential both in emission reduction as well as in net sequestration. It also is the very foundation of civilization. That’s where our relationship to how we extract nutrition from the environment in order to make humans and how we do that, both how the soil ends up and how the workers end up and how the supply chain works. All of that. There’s an irreducible complexity there which we refer to as, in quotes, agriculture. I keep wanting a better word than agriculture because of course, agriculture refers specifically to a style of creating nutrition out of landscapes that generally is like annual pillage and it is bigger than that. There’s all of these (break in audio) [inaudible 01:08:20] and (break in audio) [inaudible 01:08:22] there’s just so many different ways that people engage in producing nutrition in gardening, their landscapes. So, I keep struggling with, what do we actually call that? I don’t know. [inaudible 01:08:43] the umbrella that’s more accurate. But I agree, that’s been my life’s work. It’s your life’s work. I’m very excited with how much progress has been made there. I mean it may be good time to just talk about that for a moment because we’ve been doing, I think, a completely and relevant and situationally appropriate walk around where we are as a civilization in this crazy moment, of course this podcast is going to date itself pretty easily because we’re talking so much about this present moment, pre peak of corona virus in the United States since it’s on our minds. I think it’d be interesting to talk a little bit about the strategy that the Carbon Underground has had, sort of focused on transforming the global food system and the successes, or almost successes. Obviously, as you were noting the conditions of globalization may, we don’t know yet be taking a pretty radical turn. The strategy, nonetheless, has created a lot of awareness and a lot of will and some pretty significant transformation already. I’d be interested for you to outline that for folks who are listening and for me as well. What’s the Carbon Underground been focused on and what’s the overarching strategy been and how is it going? I think we sort of teed that up really nicely at this stage of the conversation.

Lary: I hope so. Right. Given what we’re all trying to accomplish here. For anybody listening who doesn’t know. Carbon Underground was created in 2013 and it was created after the information started percolating up around the world if there’s a relationship between soil health and climate change and that’s really what we were born out of. Tom Newmark and I cofounded it. We, at the time, were both on the board of Greenpeace and some other big boards, we were very committed environmentalists. I won’t speak for him, I was somewhat awakened, embarrassed, that I had been out there talking about climate change for so long. Writing about it and working with big corporations in my day job in the advertising world. And I didn’t even quite understand the dynamics of it. None of us did. But I was out there standing on a soap box a lot. So, when we saw an opportunity to turn our approach to it on its head, and what I mean by that is have people understand the carbon cycle a little bit differently than we had. We had spent the last, well we’re about to hit the 50th anniversary birthday so 43 years, whatever it was demonizing carbon and we’ve got to get rid of carbon and we’ve got to stop carbon emissions and they’re killing us and they’re harming the planet and it was misguided on so many levels, not the least of which, as we all know we are carbon based life forms. We wouldn’t be here without it and we have never created a single molecule of carbon, ever. All we do is move it around. So, when you start to understand it in that sense and put it in context of emissions take carbon from the ground and put it up in the atmosphere, and guess what? You know what that’s happened over time before. We’ve had major volcanic periods on this planet. We’ve been at seven thousand parts per million, not 415 or 416, whatever today’s number is. Seven thousand. Interestingly, what nature did each time is ramped up photosynthesis and drew it back down and there’s an explosion of abundance. And when you start looking at it and go, “why isn’t that happening right now?” It’s because we haven’t focused on [the drawdown component] and so we started looking not only at understanding that better. And we hosted the first gathering really ever, we had people from 23 countries come down to the farm in Costa Rica, scientists, and a couple of big corporations and a lot happened there. There’s a lot of information that got shared for the first time. Some people say the regenerative movement really took off there Regen International was born there. And it was really born out of a need to understand and have some sort of hub that regenerating the Earth was critically important but that you could have multiple reasons for doing it. It could be climate change, I could be food production, it could be human health, it could be the restoration of fresh water, all these types of things. What we did at the Carbon Underground, we sort of looked at, okay — so what got us excited was not that there was a solution to some big problem out there because we all know that there are solutions to lots of big problems out there that do not get implemented because we don’t have the will. But Tom and I come from the world of big business and we said, “Well, wait a minute. The biggest industry in the world, the food industry, is going to benefit from this. The third largest industry in the world, the fiver industry highly dependent on agriculture [inaudible 01:15:18] is going to benefit from this. Now we’re able to use the levers of business in a positive way for the planet rather than fall prey to the false hope of it’s the environment or the economy. That got us very (break in audio) [inaudible 01:15:41] to a corporation and it’s still the case, in most companies. You say, “how’s your supply chain doing?” Especially those of you dependent on agriculture. You just see the fear in their eyes. It’s collapsing at the farm level and all of these companies are going, “I don’t know what the yield will be next year. I don’t know where the yield will be next year. And oh, by the way, I don’t know what the cost is going to be next year.” So, it’s kind of hard to plan. So, when you walk in with something, that says, “Well we can help restore the health of that.” And I’m not saying us, I’m saying we the regenerative movement. It falls on some different [ears] and if you walk in through the sustainability door. So that got us very excited. And we spent five years doing everything we could to help grow the movement. About 2018, early 19’, we had a very serious change in direction. We completely planned for it. We changed our mission statement to — very simple, and it is “To accelerate the transition to regenerative agriculture to mitigate the climate crisis.” — sorry, to accelerate it at scale.

Gregory: What was it before?

Lary: It was about educating the world and the kinds of things that I think any movement needs in its early stages. And it still needs it, but we’re now mature enough as a movement. This is a classic example of Buckminster Fuller’s, don’t attack the current model, create a better one and then people will move to it. There are not a whole lot of people who are fighting the fact that restoring soil health and keeping it healthy is a better model for the food industry.

Gregory: No, I don’t experience. There are different layers of intrenched skepticism here and there, but no one is arguing with the basic premise that agriculture that actively improves soil health and sequesters carbon is better if it is achievable than the alternative.

Lary: Well correct, and when you do an overlay with the fact that the current system is collapsing. Absolutely collapsing. So, you’re not sitting here saying, “Hey we’ve got something cool over here, I know you’re happy where you are, because nobody’s happy where they are. This train is out of the station and that’s a fantastic beautiful wonderful thing. So, what we did is we said, “Okay, so our DNA comes from the big business world. So, we understand strategies and projects and the development and stuff like that. So, we said, “ let’s migrate. Let’s shift our own strategy into” — and it’s really those two things I call accelerating the movement and scaling the progress. So, we said rather than doing what we were doing, let’s now focus on specific projects that accelerate and scale and they do it by either the inherent size of the project or the replicability of the project. There’re different ways that you can achieve those results. So we moved into things and I’ll tell you a few of them. I think we touched on it earlier, the Thailand project. We spent about eight months. We were invited into Thailand and we were sitting in a hotel room with the minister of agriculture and we went in and they wanted to learn about regenerative. We did a very short presentation and what made it, I think, different than many of the others is that what we had learned about Thailand is the reason they were so interested in doing something for their soil is because they’re a Buddhist nation, they are a farming nation, 35 million farmers. They said to us, “Our soil is dead. The only way we grow things is by putting more chemicals, which are poisoning more and poisoning our people. This is not good. Our farmers are no longer able to support their families and it is so important — world soil day is on December 5th because the UN wanted to honor [inaudible 01:21:11] the previous king of Thailand who walked the entire country of Thailand with bags of seeds for decades, bringing seeds to farmers saying, “If you learn how to grow food, your family will never go hungry. Dont grow poppies, grow food.” And he gave this transition capacity to the people and he’s beloved for doing that. This is inherent in the identity that the Thai people have. So, we said, “This is going to restore that. If you restore your soil health, you bring all of that back. You bring the capacity back, you bring the spiritual health back that they –“ and the minister in literally crying right there in this — he’s literally crying and he says to us afterwards, Tom and I were there, and he said, “Will you take a ride with me?” and we said, “Sure.” And we went for a long ride outside of Bangkok, I don’t know, and hour and a half drive and now we’re into farmland. I use the term loosely. He has the car pull over on the side of the road. We’re on a little highway and he says, “This is my farm. We grow rice on my farm.” And it looked like cracked concrete. Literally looked like cracked concrete. And he said, “It’s dead. Can you bring my soil back to life?” and we said, “Yes, we can.” That began a process that took, I mean this was an eight month development process, but we finally have signed a partnership with the ministry of Thailand where regenerative agriculture and the methods that we used and partner with everybody in the movement in regenerative have been written into the new government of Thailand. Every time there’s a new king, they literally create a new government and as you know, they had a new king last year. It’s literally written into the new ministry of Thailand to restore the soil. And what they’re looking to us to do is bring the (break in audio) [inaudible 01:23:43] come up with plans for what should be going on, bring the partners from a buying standpoint, so who are the companies out there that want to buy regeneratively grown ingredients? And they can be big and they can be small and if we do that, if we do those things because — and by the way we said that to them in our initial conversation, we said, you know what, there is a growing demand for something that has a very limited supply and if you grow this people will come. And if that doesn’t show itself to be true, we know that your commitment will go away and you’ll go back to the old ways of doing things. We do believe we can bring customers in for it. And so what they said is, “Great, if you do those things, we will provide and this is critical to that acceleration of the movement. We will provide the labor and the funding for the transition of the farmers and the training and education of the farmers. That last thing is one of the biggest obstacles to the accelerating of the shift to regenerative because who pays for that? If I’m General Mills and buying 10% of the output of a farm, am I really going to pay to train that farm and subsidize my competition? I’m not going to do it. Unless I’m contracting for most of a farm’s production, I’m probably not going on the hook for that. And there are companies like General Mills who are creating funding programs but they’re small, they’re not going to change the industry and they’re certainly not going to do it as quickly as we need to do it. So to have the government come in and say, “Okay, we will do that.” And it’s the bank of agriculture Thailand that’s going to do that. That’s a bit of a game changer and that enabled us to then go to large companies, industries by crop. For example, we we’re deep in conversations on cacao and sugar and these conversations are manifesting in different ways. In some respects, it’s building a regenerative cacao industry in Thailand. In the sugar area, it is keeping a sugar industry. Right now, they have a very large sugar cane crop. It’s very detrimental to the soil, to the farmers, to the air when thy burn the bagasse every year and they choke all of the cities in Asia that we see every year. The sugar companies that we’re talking to, and they’re very big companies and their customers are all the giant food and beverage companies and they’re all saying Thailand’s soil is so bad that we’re going to pick up stakes and we’re going to move and we’ll go to [Myanmar], we’ll go to Malaysia, we’ll go here, we’ll go there. Where we think we have a couple more years of productive soil before they destroy it and then we’ll have to move again. So, doesn’t it make more sense if the government is really committed to doing this, partner with them and do it? Those are the types of things that we are looking to develop and a lot of these things. And we’ve got work already being done with companies in Thailand. So, we’ve started all of this. Now we’ve got borders that are shut down just as a couple of big things we’re going to ramp up and I don’t know where it’s all going to come out. I don’t. Yes, it’s in some respects perpetuating a globalization system that we have right now. But again, our focus is, and our commitment is to mitigate the climate crisis and our theory of change to doing that is accelerating the restoration, so I only move to regenerative agriculture. So, we’re looking at Thailand as — if this really truly were to work the way we’re dreaming it can is they would become the first major domino. They’re the sixth largest company in terms agricultural exports — I’m sorry, county. And if they start growing regenerative goods and respecting the health of their soil, people are going to want to buy that production and they’re going to want to buy it over other types of production of the same crop. That hopefully is going to force change through the system. That’s the scale that we’re looking at there. I’ll give you a couple other things that we’re looking at. Because we have a lot of people at the Carbon Underground that have been involved in consumer advertising and marketing and movements and things more at the people level than a corporate or governmental level, we responded when the United Nations put out a study about two years ago saying that two and half billion people on Earth share these three characteristics about climate change. One is they are extremely concerned. Two is they feel impotent to do anything about it. Three is they have the ability to do something. As a result of that information, we said, “Okay, so what can we give them that they can do simply, affordably that can make a difference?” And we created a adopt a meter program, as you’ve probably heard of and we very [soft] launched it at the [Aspen] Institute, the middle of 19’. What it does is, for $5 or your local equivalent, you adopt a square meter of degraded soil and we restore a square meter of degraded soil and we do it by partnering with companies that are doing land restoration right now and working with farmers and ranchers or even wetlands and other areas of restoration. That enables people to feel that they’re literally doing something. This is something that is a crowd sourced action item that helps mitigate the climate crisis. Even without, because we were gearing up to a big launch for the 50th anniversary of birthday. We had corporate partners and entertainment partners and concerts and all of this kind of wonderful stuff that was all pretty dependent on people getting together, so we had hotel chains and sporting events and things like that. So, now we’re looking at what can we do digitally and we’re working on it and seeing what we can do. The point was not necessarily — wasn’t about raising money, it truly was about giving people something that they could do so they feel a part of the movement to solve the problem. They know that they’re helping farmers which is increasingly important wherever you are in the world whether it’s Chicago or [kyro]. Doesn’t really matter. Those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at. We’re working with organizations like America’s farmland trust and some very, very high scale large projects that would create new models that would be tested on, what do farmers in America need to transition to regenerative? How much of that is help on the health of their soil and coming up with soil health planning and how much of that is (break in audio) [inaudible 01:32:50] with different incentives and things like that so those are the kinds of things that we’re focusing on now. And again, we’re looking at large scale projects. We were approached by NASA a few months ago and there was the whole anniversary of Apollo 11. There was a mission called One More Orbit and three of the current astronauts, well two astronauts and a cosmonaut who have spent more time in the space station than any human beings on Earth got together to try and break the speed record of flying around the world. Okay, you can ask yourself how critical it was that we did that, but okay, we’re pushing the envelope. They came to us and they said, “Can we make this mission Carbon neutral?” and we said, yeah sure, but why? Well climate change of course and we gave them the wrap that that’s not going to help climate change, we have to go carbon negative, or as some people call it carbon positive right now. Another thing I’d love us to settle on, but it’s got to be a reduction.

Gregory: Climate positive, carbon negative.

Lary: Thank you. Perfect. Thank you. So, they completely bought into it and they said, “We’re in. And we’re going to fund working with you guys the restoration of enough soil that we know, we’re going to measure the carbon.” And we did all of that. And we made the mission carbon negative. But the reason we did that is not — it really wasn’t because we wanted to do a Carbon negative cool mission it was because the sponsor of it was Qatar airlines. And these astronauts are very engaged in the airline world and we said, “What we want is we want you to work with us to bring the concept of carbon negative flights from here on in and not carbon neutral.” So, we’ve been in discussions with that because that scales and accelerates the restoration of land and mitigate climate crisis. I keep coming back to that for a reason. That’s the mantra. If it’s not doing that, we’re saying, we’re not going to engage in it. So that’s been a huge shift, it’s a liberating shift I have to tell you. Puts our asses on the line than [movement] building does in some respects because everything we’re doing is quantifiable and measurable which is phenomenal.

Gregory: This is like a long overdue check in at the intersection of Carbon Underground and Regen Network, how are you providing robust scientifically verified quantified carbon sequestration units for insetting or offsetting or whatever the mechanism of choice is for these corporates. What does that look like? Is it this stage is sort of like socializing and agreeing that that’s good and building the publicity campaigns and things about that? Or have you advanced to the stage where you’re clear about what it looks like for them to appropriately invest in land regeneration in order to achieve carbon negativity and how that is quantified and verified and traded and all of those different mechanisms?

Lary: I’ll give you that same somewhat nebulous response everybody else will give you right now. Because that’s where we’re all at, but the way we’re approaching I think all of these projects involve the soil carbon initiative as a way of measuring the impact on soil health. As you know we were part of creating that with [Dknown] and [in the Labor of Ben and Jerry’s] General Mills was there Green America is very involved and about 150 other stakeholders. It was created to be a verifiable verification tool the business could use [on the impact] of their supply chain actions on soil health and it measures four core things. It measures biodiversity above and below the soil. It measures the filtration rates of water. It measures aggregation and it measures the shift in carbon that’s sequestrated in the soil. I will tell you that the last one — it’s still that holy grail to us like it is to everybody else, I dont care who you talk to, but when you say, “So, how are you inexpensively measuring carbon in a way that you really truly trust whether it’s for depth or other ways you want to look at it.” And I don’t think anybody is real comfortable where we’re at right now and that’s the bad news. The good news is, as you know, every other day, somebody is coming out with a new sensor or a new approach and it’s getting better and better and better. What used to be a hundred dollars and acre is now certainly dollars an acre and some people say it’s going to get to 40 cents an acre in pretty quick time. The answer is we’re at the early stage of all of this and none of our [projects] are to the point where we’re reporting. The SCI is having a boom in opportunity and in testing right now in the sense that we’ve got probably 20 companies, we just had a meeting on it the day before yesterday, so this is pretty [current], but there’s probably 20 pilot projects going on. Different partners that are doing it in different sectors in different regions. And then there are some large-scale applications that are waiting to utilize it as well, like Thailand, which has agreed to utilize it. And those are large scale projects. That’s our approach, not that that’s going to give us all the data or all of the answers or everything we need. Certainly, that goes into the hopper with the economic data, all of the things. We look at that. We look at acres or hectares that have been converted. We certainly look at what happens to the value of everything being done and I phased it that way in the sense that we know that if you reduce input costs and you maintain and secure your yields, the farmers theoretically should do better. There’s thousands of [inaudible 01:40:52] of that happening. But we also know that the environmental services is becoming (break in audio) [inaudible 01:40:58] what NORY’s doing what Indigo’s doing. Those are very exciting types of things, but I don’t think anybody’s got it entirely figured out right now. That’s okay. We’re ten minutes into this. Again, this goes back to the early part of this conversation. How do we partner with technology? How does it serve humanity and in some respects how does humanity serve it? To your point earlier. This may be the biggest application of it, maybe the most important application that we’re going to see. I’m not giving you the specific, this is exactly how we’re doing everything. I’m telling you how we’re approaching it right now.

Gregory: That all makes sense. I think there is an interesting — there’s multiple — there’s a lot of different people working on the same problem. That means that there’s going to be pretty rapid innovation and I think a couple years down the road, with quantification and verification issues will be resolved to the level that they’re needed. Maybe even in the next six months or year. And you certainly worked very hard on that as others are. And I think there’s going to be multiple competing markets as well. Indigo, NORY, Regen Network, our approach has always been we want there to be a robust scientifically verifiable and decentralized governance that’s precompetitive over the foundation of claims and science because these new markets around carbon drawdowns can’t be as shitty as the previous carbon markets were. If they are, we’ll have two or three good years of bubble and hype and then everybody will no longer believe in the system and far as I can tell, we’re the only people working at that — at the infrastructure level. At least in a transparent way in a all cards on the table sort of way. Hopefully what we’re doing is empowering, I mean my hope is that what we do ends up — we will only succeed in our theory of change and business proposition is if what we’re doing is so deeply useful to the Carbon Underground, to NORY, to Indigo Ag to the ecosystem market space consortium all, as a base layer of the foundational piece that allows the right transparency and integrity and approach to the digital technology that’s going to underpin all of this that everybody adopts it or a version of it. [inaudible 01:44:10] it’s open source people can just grab it and upgrade it if they need to.

Lary: We’re 100% in alignment with everything you’ve just said and would add to that that we believe that for this to be successful, we have to subservient to what nature and the experts in agriculture who are the people who manage the land are going to teach us rather than coming up with a set of protocols to give them. The SCI is an outcome based, we’re going to measure soil health and however you get there –

Gregory: That’s fantastic.

Lary: Yeah. I mean my god, what can you teach us that we don’t know? Or What works better in Thailand than what we’ve been doing in west Africa? You’re going to help us.

Gregory: Yeah, I know. It should be outcome based and it should be regionally adaptable and I think that’s fantastic. I’m very excited about how that all ended up, and I think there’s a growing — what’s cool — I mean I think for my theory of change SCI is great. What I would like to see is actually competitive marketive standards essentially. Or as I would say, methodologies. I think some of it may be standard, some of them may be more specific methodologies and out of that then you start to see. Like what we’re working on right now is the ability to quickly and cheaply audit the [competent] interval and risk associated with a wide variety of different approaches and make that tool available for decision makers and markets to be able [cost in] the risk because I don’t actually think — ecological landscape ecology, soil science, these are all probabilistic sciences. They don’t give you truth of the capital [tea] they give you a [confidence] interval that in this place with this soil type, this test tells you this. Extrapolated across a range because you’re not testing everything and so you have to. It’s all — there’s these thresholds. And the probabilities associated with claims, to me that’s the foundation. It isn’t actually, obviously over time we’ll continue to upgrade the precision of these standards and methodologies and data collection and we’ll lower (break in audio) [inaudible 01:46:52] will get better and better. But the fundamental piece from my perspective the market needs in order to quantify in value is risk associated, so you can determine how much you’re willing to pay for and how much is hedging the risk associated with the claims. Right?

Lary: Yes, and I think what you’re hitting on is a big shore ahead of us for a couple of reasons. And what I’m talking about the chore, is getting people to accept that we’re not ever going to be able to predict with precision because we’re talking about nature and that is the variable. I can tell you how much it’s going to cost to make a car on a production line because I can control those things. The best analogy I’ve heard that we’ve probably put 20 billion dollars into global efforts to be able to predict weather and all we’ve gotten to basically is when you watch the weather report, they say, “Well, there’s a 40% likelihood on Thursday.” That’s much more precise than we used to have. But it’s not telling you it’s going to or it’s not. When you factor the — we factor nature in going, it’s a critical component, we have to respect, and the whole point is to work with nature again. Let’s rekindle this relationship. We have to factor that in. There are others, as we know, that are going to and already are attacking the lack of specificity because of that variable. Well, how am I supposed to invest, or how is an industry supposed to change if there are these potential swings in outcomes? And by the way –

Gregory: Well yeah, but the swings are within. I mean that argument just bothers me so much because the swing can be quantified. That’s the thing, is everybody needs to back up a second and say, “You can” — there’s this thing called statistics and it’s been around for a while and it allows you to do things like say, “okay, if there’s a 95% precision associate with a claim or an 80% precision associated with the claim, you can calculate how many carbon units you can successfully claim within the range of variability that exist. [inaudible 01:49:50] pull my hair out. We have to decouple something. And we have to decouple the ongoing evolution of bettering better measurement systems, and as you said, they’re never going to be perfect because we’re dealing with complex adaptive evolving systems that are, the weather related to how much carbon gets sequestered out. The soil type as do the farming practices, etc. etc. etc. and you can’t handle all of that. We can’t actually successfully with 100% precision model reality in that way. But we can get better and better at it and we can be honest and transparent around risks associated with claims and essentially that just allows the market to cost in the probability associated with a claim along with the value of the carbon and just have a single price if that’s what we’re aiming for, if that’s the way to internalize this into corporate books or funded governmentally or create incentive programs if that’s the theory change.

Lary: You’re preaching to the converted of course. To me, the thing we have to be most intransient on, and I use that word intentionally because we’re talking about the transient elements of nature. We have to convince people that there is not a perfection in the measurement, it’s what you said, it is a statistical probability. And prediction that we can feel pretty comfortable about.

Gregory: Well what people don’t even realize is that’s even true with renewable energy credits and carbon [enbaitment]

Lary: Absolutely.

Gregory: That’s what drives me nuts. There’s like a double standard. People talk about emissions from smokestacks as if they have a 100% precision in statements about emission reductions and they don’t have anywhere close to that. I’m just like, where’s the disconnect that the shift from this sort of like mechanical version that even there, there’s statistical risk associated with claims and not very much rigor associated with like who provided the data and the model and who double checked that so that you actually know something happened. It’s sort of like a [C] minus in terms of how those markets all work to preserve integrity.

Lary: There you go, there’s something 100%. But when you look at some of the groups of people that are going to be engaged in this, when you look at a farmer that is — here is where the compassion hat goes on and I’ll switch hats in a second but when you look at a farmer that is borderline losing the farm. We know it’s happening in every, the suicides, the bankruptcies, and you say we want you to change how you’re doing things. They may intuitively believe in it, but they’ve been raised in many cases on a “you put this much out of the bottle, you get this much out of the plant.” Linearity and so that’s a very human fear of the unknown. So, we have to be sensitive and smart about that. The other side of the coin is those people who have been making those claims use this much out of the bottle. They’re going to try and drive that wedge with that uncertainty. That’s the one that concerns me more and if you’re listening right now, we’ll say what we always say which is you guys know a lot about soil and agriculture, come sit at the table because as a lot of the companies are saying in the food industry, we’re about to hit a brick wall if we keep doing it the way –

Gregory: I mean there are. They ecosystem service marketplace consortium you know Syngenta is on that.

Lary: Right. Right.

Gregory: In that group. I mean they’re — and I’ve seen some crazy scary Monsanto videos that I’m like, “Oh wow, they just watched a kiss the ground video and then remade it and put a Monsanto sticker on it.” I mean as you said, I generally tend to completely agree with you that there has to be a seat at the table and this transformation has to include — There has to be an invitation for these businesses. What I like to say, I had this really interesting conversation with an investor who is heavily invested in agrochemical businesses who I was talking about investing in Regen Network and he basically came up to me after a pitch and said, “So what you’re doing is going to threaten the businesses that I’m already invested in.” and I said, “Yeah. What I’m doing and what we’re doing and what this transformation is — like either you can choose one or the other. You can choose that there’s a functional global economy in 20 years or you can choose to continue to get your short term dividends from those companies in the way that they’re currently operating and if you choose to have a functional economy in 20 years, my hypothesis is that’s better for your current investments, what I’m saying is the businesses you’re invested in are going to have to radically upgrade the way that they approach soil health, the way that they approach agriculture in general, they’re going to have to find new products and services and they have a privileged place right now, but they’re going to have to act quickly and they’re going to have to be effective and there’s no reason why — like what Regen Network and Carbon Underground is the harbinger of change that has to happen. So, companies can either feel threatened by it or they can take up the call and evolve their business models to be supporting farmers to have the healthiest possible soil and internalizing previously externalized environmental costs and supporting all of the stakeholders that they already have incumbent relationships with. It’s a great opportunity I think for those businesses. They’re just going to have to do it with integrity otherwise, frankly, they’re going to out of business. That’s my [inaudible 01:56:47].

Lary: Look. The UN as we all know in their [uncted] report in 2013 said we have 60 harvests left at the rate we are destroying topsoil with industrial agriculture. So if that’s where his customers are and they’re going to be gone in what’s now 53 years, I don’t think that bodes really well. It’s a little bit like being in the coal business right now. The shift is happening. They have the infrastructure. They have the knowledge. You know Monsanto spent the last several years buying up all of these data companies. Cool, great. Wonderful, let’s apply that. Let you make your revenue off that asset that you have. But let’s keep the system going rather than manage the demise of it for short term gain to your point. We all know that, right? We all know that.

Gregory: Yeah. It’s just sort of like, I feel fully confident that we can beat those businesses at their own game. We will make an economy that values soil health and farms and landscapes that are optimized for photosynthetic gain and matinence and increase of soil organic carbon will be more profitable and businesses can either participate in that or lose. My pledge is that that’s going to be something that happens in the next five years. Because we need it to happen that quickly and that will be the next era of whether it’s a global or local economy that’s just what’s going to happen and it isn’t because we’re going to heroically do it, it’s because we’re all going to participate in accepting that that’s just the reality that we live in. that’s what’s happening. it’s an inevitability.

Lary: It is. It’s an inevitability that is different than getting off oil. Because of the criticality of it and because of the fact that two billion people on Earth are engaged in the activity of growing food. Right? So, if the way they’re doing it is increasingly failing them and there is a healthier way, there is an inevitability. There’s also an astonishing joy that comes from it. Right? So, I agree with you. I mean are we going to beat these companies? Sure, I’d love for them to all flip to the other side right now. The other side to me is one that restores and maintains solid health and farmer viability instead of working against those three things. I can tell you right now that the Carbon Underground isn’t going to beat them, Regen Network isn’t going to beat them, but a movement is. And a movement and a company’s dependent on healthier agricultural approaches are and it’s moving.

Gregory: This is what I think we are in the early days of an exponential change of the global economy that is inevitable. That shift is I could sum up in a simple flip of the script that is the narrative around the same — if you extrapolate the carbon as the devil narrative versus carbon is something that we have to have a healthy relationship. We understand that there has never been in human history a more advantageous time to optimize photosynthesis because there’s never been this much in human history — this much atmospheric carbon available to convert through photosynthesis into nutrition and soil health. We are at — and energy and we’re at the ground floor of a new economy that’s going to go exponential and people who are first movers and maintain their space. Even if we don’t achieve the non-rivalrous beautiful cooperative social vision that I love and all we do is shift the competitive market dynamic that we currently inhabit to understand the value represented by turning that atmospheric carbon into soil and nutrition and energy in the best possible way. People who understand that understand that that is the bit operating this is reality of the future are going to be very wealthy that businesses that operate in that way are going to do very well and businesses that don’t get that that’s what’s going to happy are going to be caught in the same way that nations that didn’t realize exponential growth of COVID-19. If you don’t see the exponential curve and you don’t take action, then there are consequences. And that’s my belief about the reality of the relationship between atmospheric carbon and terrestrial carbon stocks like soil is essentially summed up in that kind of meandering.

Lary: We’re all doing a lot of meandering right now. I think the group think is moving in a spectacular direction right now. As we do that meandering. It’s pretty exciting. Yeah, it’s a race, but it’s pretty damn exciting.

Gregory: It’s a fun one. And that reframing I think is really exciting — I mean it is essentially what your — it’s a different way of explaining what I think you and Tom have done such a good job of in bringing the soil health and regenerative agriculture conversation to the corporate world which is a reframing from problem to opportunity. That this is this enormous opportunity to grow resilience in your supply chain, to take climate action, to create short term premium markets for people in the first world who feel impotent and want to take climate action and are willing to change consumer behaviors at a premium to do so in the short term at least. All of these things add up to — there’s almost no downside to people taking immediate swift action. And then if you add in the layer that I’m proposing which is if you think about atmospheric carbon as the new reserve of carbon. That we put it out of the Earth and we put it in the sky and now we get to turn that into well generated through agriculture. Get busy, because when we get back down to 350 or 280 ppm, photosynthetic efficiency is going to be back down again. There’s never going to be a moment that you can — and I am speaking to the extract value mindset that I think many business people are in. This isn’t necessarily resonate me as a motivator, but you can very easily get the narrative of at 410 ppm you’re going to be much more effective at this basic translation of value from atmospheric carbon and sun to bring it together to create something that the economy needs in a way that sequesters carbon back into the soil so that you can repeat that and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it season after season. It’s never going to be easier than right now, so get in and get moving quickly. Otherwise you’ll be left behind.

Lary: Back to the domino. Right? We’ll leave this on. There’s never been a successful revolution of social change, at least in all the analysis of 1000 years of it. That did not have momentum and an expectation of success for it to grow into that revolution, that change. We have the momentum, we do. I mean again, predicted to be the number one food trend for this year. We have the momentum. We need to achieve the expectation of success, we need to get to that mental tipping point where it just starts building on itself and we’re really damn close.

Gregory: I think so, and to me, the intervention point that I think makes a transition is around a critical mass of fortunately or unfortunately, in quotes, experts or thought leaders feeling completely comfortable with the quantification question. And having consensus and then eventually percolate that even if people don’t understand how that consensus was generated and they don’t understand the science or the technology that underpins that consensus. The consensus existing, people feel and it becomes ubiquitous that that is the case. And I think we’re just a little, but like I said I don’t think we’re very far off from that happening. And it’s an enormous opportunity. It’s an enormous opportunity because it’s the intersection, I believe, to generate that consensus and to keep it up in integrity to it doesn’t slide the way that previous carbon markets did or that I even, in my judgment our academic world has slid or our news industry has slid or our news industry had slid that sense making and consensus of reality has been fragmented and people don’t trust things. We have to have a deep level of trust about this and therefore the way we approach the generation of that knowledge has to be very thoughtful and well executed at the intersection of regenerative agriculture and emerging technology, which gives us the ability to have that truth anchor. As I’ve said, it’s a mess in many other spaces in our society. We can’t have the most objective reality that we all live within, which is the health of our biosphere, have that shattered sense making. It needs to be unified and in order to be unified it needs to have deep integrity and it can’t be captured by special interests. That’s my personal mission right now, is creating the integrity around the sense making and knowledge generation around ecological health, specifically soil and biodiversity. Beyond soil, I’m not a soil maximalist necessarily as you know. But it has to include that, that’s just it, without that piece, everything else doesn’t actually work in my mind. At least it doesn’t work long enough to achieve our goals. I do think, no matter what, regenerative movement goings to go on a five plus year uptrend. The question is, does it have the legs to be a 50-year to 500-year reality? Instead of just a short-term trend?

Lary: Or is it just the new reality?

Gregory: Right.

Lary: That has to be what it is. Right?

Gregory: Right. I guess what I’m trying to bring up is I think there is a risk. There’s a hazard at this moment of us falling down. Let’s be frank, experts can’t be trusted anymore. That’s a societal change that happened over the last five years in terms of its ubiquity. And people have been in the process of disenchantment around experts for a while but it’s really become clear kind of tracking at the same level as soil and draw down becoming understood by a wider group as pivotal. They’re interesting trends of consciousness and that means in order — go ahead.

Lary: I was going to say, we haven’t used the phrase in the last half hour at least in the same way we haven’t used it in the same month societally of climate change. And at some point, we’re going to go back to climate change being the biggest threat and it not being COVID-19. So, when you said a second ago, this has to be unifying, it’s not just among people, it’s unifying among issues and solutions.

Gregory: Agreed. And in order to do that we can’t trust the experts, meaning we have to set up the infrastructure that is more robust that the academic peer review system. We can’t fall down the rabbit hole because I can no longer trust someone with a Harvard PhD and a chair on the national science foundation because they’re so caught up in politics and they’re so willing to defend false positions in order to keep their own economic reality that as an educated person, you have to question everything. And that’s exhausting and unattainable. So, you spiral into a who can I trust, what do I trust fragmentated sense making scenario in which collective action becomes impossible because of the conditions that we’ve generated in our society. To me that intervention point, how do you make in a society where we can no longer trust our experts, how do you create a sense making and knowledge generating infrastructure around the most important sense making and knowledge generation area of our lifetimes which is ecological health and soil heath particularly? How do we do that in the best possible way? Can we just rely on a bunch of experts in closed doors deciding that they agree on a standard? No. We cannot. Because those experts can’t be trusted because of the way the economic system works, they can’t be trusted not because they’re bad people but because they all have [tendrils] and incentives that are opaque and not understandable. So, that’s where I sort of become this fervent advocate that moment for this other emerging technology, this other emerging scenario that was custom build for generating trust out of trustlessness, anchoring a decentralized consensus in a way where you don’t assume that people have the best interests. But out of it you get the net result is clarity and consensus and that’s, in quote, blockchain or distributed leger technology is one way in which we create shared reality in a way that you actually can audit, I guess. As an individual at low cost.

Lary: I completely agree with (break in audio) [inaudible 02:14:11] I’m not as despondent as you appear to be on the reliance on experts and (break in audio) [inaudible 02:14:20] there’s a convergence going on right now of vested interests and change. So, I’m sitting there going, “You know what? The biggest industry in the world is (break in audio) [inaudible 02:14:41] the experts that they believe are going to keep their companies successful and (break in audio) [inaudible 02:14:51] the misinformation that is out there is going to be disproven and they’re going to find out what works better and they’re going to go with it. And I have faith that they have the power (break in audio) [inaudible 02:15:03] when you look at governments, which is the second most powerful entity in the world right now, and you look at the single biggest cost to governments which is health care and you look at the analysis of the reduction of the cost of health care (break in audio) [inaudible 02:15:21] global — from shifting to regenerative agriculture because you’re feeding people food with fewer chemicals and greater nutritional content and it’s estimated that I could reduce health care costs by 25%. Those are things that I think are going to motivate the people who really truly have that scale of vested interest and that scale of power to find the right ways of doing things and we all know that the way we’ve been doing it is not the right way. I’m not quite as despondent as what I heard from you and I (crosstalk) [inaudible 02:16:10].

Gregory: I guess I’m just trying to say, again maybe this is a core premise or the premise that I hold which could be encapsulated by this quote I can’t remember who said it and I’m going to butcher the exact quote, but you can’t trust someone who depends on not knowing something for their paycheck to learn it.

Lary: You cut out. You’re cutting out a lot right now. You can’t (break in audio) [inaudible 02:16:49]

Gregory: Yeah. Lary, actually you’ve been cutting out off and on for me for a little bit. I’ve been able to understand you, but it’s probably going to be hell for our listeners. Maybe you could try calling in with a cell or landline into the number you call into there on the Zoom. There’s bottom left corner there you can shift from internet audio to phone.

Lary: Let me do that. Let me do that. Let me find your thing, I will (break in audio) [inaudible 02:17:31] in about ten minutes, let’s go for the big ending. Alright, I’ll call you right back.

Gregory: Alright, sounds good.

[Lary Changes Lines]

Lary: On line one, okay, you there?

Gregory: Yep, I can hear you.

Lary: Okay great, you only hear one of me which is more than enough.

Gregory: Yeah. Fantastic. I was just sort of saying this quote which is in rough. You can’t trust a man whose paycheck depends on not knowing something to learn it. And although I agree with you and I’m generally optimistic about where unarguable scientific consensus and common sense are pointing to in terms of the potential regenerative agriculture and regenerative land use more broadly and how businesses benefit from engaging with all of that. I do think, again, the fuel for that transition to actually become the new normal will sputter out unless we deal with that problem which is the perverse incentive around knowledge generation and sense making that currently exist which we see [inaudible 02:18:59] with fragmented media and a captured mainstream media and the reality of academic institutions and their capture etc.. So, there has to be real concerted effort there in the short term.

Lary: I don’t think this is mutually exclusive, but I look at it a little bit differently. I look at the fact that at least in the latest studies on farmer attitudes in the United States, which may be the hardest to change, 93% have said they need to improve the health of their soil. Less than 50% are doing it because they don’t know how, but they know they need to do that. Then when you talk to the people that are buying their production, increasingly, they’re also saying we need to improve the health of our soil. If that is a strong and growing awareness and what everybody’s looking for right now is how do we get there, the news media doesn’t matter. The disinformation matters temporarily.

Gregory: But Lary, politicians matter. The farm bill matters.

Lary: No question, no question.

Gregory: Especially mid to long term, but for short term as well. The status of the heartland of globalized provision of agricultural goods in the world, in the United States which is the United States Midwest in California. With a few strokes of a pen and a transformed farm bill could radically change, where do subsidies go and why? I guess what I’m saying is if we think that the entrenched interest that currently –the world’s biggest industry which is currently massively subsidized in a way that destroys soil health as the foundation of everything, I’m less optimistic that unless we really are rigorous around — like having complete rigor around knowledge generation that we won’t for completely selfish and fucked up reasons see the movement essentially turn into a greenwashing campaign and the status quo maintain itself.

Lary: Okay, now you’ve brought politics into it. Which, do we have another two hours? But there’s nothing you said that I’m going to come within 100 miles of disagreeing with. And by the way you don’t have to go back to the recent farm bill, let’s go back to the bailout of a week ago which has leveraged up to 6.2 trillion dollars in it and I believe if you add all of the agricultural stimulus money there, it’s about 80 billion dollars. It’s not even in there. What does that tell you about everything from the power of the agriculture industry that is not [in there more] but to the awareness and all of the elements of food. So, you’re 100% right in that, and I look at the fact that we are still massively subsidizing the oil industry and that’s decades of awareness, right? I sit there and I go, “Okay, so you know what? There is an increasing maybe for the first time in this arena. An increasing advocacy effort happening around different agricultural ways of supporting farmers and companies in the system and it’s going to take time. It is. This is no longer just a farming group doing it or farmers doing it. There are large companies. There are in some cases governments that are already reaping the rewards of it and so they are changing policies more on a state level, but I’m not arguing with you. Where I would kick my own self in the head is go, “Okay, but in 30 years we haven’t stopped subsidizing the oil companies and we’ve known A) we don’t have to and B) It’s suicidal. So, where’s my confidence that we’re going to do it in the food industry and maybe it’s not there. I don’t know, you’re bringing politics into it. And I also think we have to remember that that and the misinformation world and the corporate news and all of that and 50%, well not 50, whatever, 38% today of Americans don’t really believe in climate change or believe enough to do anything. That’s a U.S. dynamic and there’s a lot of other people out there. I remember way back when and you were around when we all sat down and said, “The U.S. is going to be the last company to change the way it approached agriculture. Last country. So we all sort of all did the napkin pencil on — so can we draw down enough carbon, can we change enough of the system without the United States to help to reverse the arrow? And the answer is yes, we can, we don’t want to. It makes it harder. I just always want to remind us that as powerful and influential as we are in something this big, we’re not the only driver out there.

Gregory: I agree with that and most of my work and our current pilots and everything that’s happening in my little corner of this movement is there are several things going on in the U.S. There’s a lot more going on in other places, but I don’t actually think — I don’t think that we can sidestep the imperative of information integrity. To me it’s a clear part of this irreducible hole that demands immediate attention in the right way. To me it’s baked in fundamentally to if you’re dealing with something like agriculture that fuels the global economy, you have by its very nature a complex set of stakeholders who are interacting with information and the supply chain, stream of supply that stems from that soil and goes out into the world. There are companies, there’s a farmer, there’s consumers, there’s the government, everyone is involved, touches everyone in society somehow. And it just begs for the appropriate design of how the information flows and who owns what piece of that information. So if Monsanto captures agriculture data and we rely on Monsanto to give us the information about soil health that fuels a global carbon drawdown marketplace and governmental subsidies and other incentive mechanisms that realign — that we’re hoping will realign the economy with ecological health, I will just sort of leave it to you and the listeners to surmise what happens then.

Lary: A) I don’t think anybody knows, but B) and I’m certainly not advocating that we put our faith in Monsanto to do the right thing. Or [Buyerin] or any of these companies. I think that at this point is still a suicidal decision. What I was saying is if they choose to use that data realizing as you talked about when you were talking about your investor in that industry, if they realize that that model is being diminished the same way the oil industry is being diminished [inaudible 02:28:24] is being diminished, if you want to make money, you invest in the new model and you figure out smart ways to do that. If that’s what happens with your friend that you were talking about, if that’s what happens to some of these companies, I think that’s a good thing. Maybe they’ll learn from that.

Gregory: Just to be clear, he was unwilling to change his short term.

Lary: Right, and I’m not expecting any of these. It hasn’t happened yet. Yes, to your point they talk about it a lot. I’m pretty sure that the climate smart trademark is owned by Monsanto.

Gregory: Yeah it is for sure.

Lary: And what they’re definition is, is agriculture that is done in a way that is less harmful than it used to be.

Gregory: Precision ag. It’s more efficient even (crosstalk) [inaudible 02:29:24]

Lary: Right, less harmful, it’s not beneficial. It’s cutting from three packs a day to two packs a day. Nobody’s naive here and I’m not expecting, I’m expecting it to happen [around them] I am. And by the way your — what felt like a little defensiveness on the integrity of information don’t ever, you don’t have to make that argument here. We thank goodness live at a time where we do have the ability to measure. We don’t always have the ability to get the correct data public or mainstreamed. Right? And that’s a problem. And you framed it very well and we have to deal with that.

Gregory: Thank you. Apologies to you and anyone if I sound offensive. I think it’s just something that feels often times — I think it’s core to what we’re truing to accomplish. And the Regen Network value proposition is somewhere at the heart there [and set a sort of premises], and I think I get impassioned by it because my perception is that I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness out there. And none of what I’m saying is really all that hard to bake in from the beginning, but from time to time I feel like — I feel worried that — I’m worried about what happens if we don’t bake it in from the beginning, I guess. Anyway, we can put that particular conversation to bed at that. I don’t think there’s very much daylight between out perspectives there at all just to be clear. I am just passionate about it and feel like it needs to be — sort of get more of a central stage that doesn’t get talked about much.

Lary: No argument, I’m hoping it doesn’t get discussed because it is starting to get baked in, even with all of the caveats you threw out. The old mantra, “What gets measured, gets funded.” Or gets transitioned or you can put whatever you want in there. That measurement has to be unadulterated clean data that the minute we start screwing with that, everything gets undermined. Yes, you’re correct. 100%.

Gregory: I know that you have a full day ahead of you and likely need to hop to other things. So, I wonder if you want to just — any concluding thoughts and maybe also sharing with listeners, where they can — if they’re feeling invigorated and excited about what they’re hearing about what the Carbon Underground is doing. How they can engage there.

Lary: Sure. I guess the first thing I would day is, and we’ve certainly hit it on this phone call. We are quite possibly living through the greatest transformation in human history. If we need food and energy and clean water and the movements that are happening right now are starting to transition to a regenerative way, a partnership with nature as opposed to a taking from nature at her and our expense. When you see what going on right now and you look at the pushing down of control over our lives that a village in Africa can put a solar panel up and do things they could never do before including connect with the world or the sovereignty that comes from growing your food in a way where you’re not dependent on chemicals. This is a massive, massive shift to a way of living our lives where we’re going to feel a part of how that life is being enabled. And not be dependent on the systems that have been created quite frankly, in some cases, have been created to make us dependent on that. You can get off the grid in many, many, many different ways and as we do that and we put the puzzle pieces back in different ways, it’s going to be really exciting. That being said, we can’t expect this to happen by having those typical people that are in power or those typical people that are influential or those people who are willing to give [up themselves]. This is an effort that’s going to take all of us doing it. So, when you see a farmer talking about regenerative, support the shit out of him or her. When you see a company put a product out there and it’s using regenerative techniques to get there, buy it, support it. If you see a project like even adopt a meter, if went to adopt a meter and adopted a meter, you’re supporting all of that including climate change. I fantasize about the day when we’re looking at climate change going, “You know what, we took care of it. We did not see the cataclysmic.” It’s going to be painful. It’s like the next month in this country with Corona, it’s going to be horrible. Best case scenario for climate change is still going to be pretty damn rough. If the plane bounces a few times but lands, it’s a lot better than crashing and we can do all of that. I guess I just want to go back to, let’s focus on what’s possible and make it happen.

Gregory: Possibilist.

Lary: Yeah, possibilist.

Gregory: Love it

Lary: Exactly.

Gregory: Beautiful, well thank you so much. I just looked at the clock and realized we’ve been going for a little while, which has been fantastic. It’s always like going through a portal, getting to talk to you Lary. So I appreciate you taking the time and super grateful for your service to the world and all of the work that you’re doing and just wishing you and the family health and happiness and all of the blessings in this time of global weirding — it’s like peak global weirding with the pandemic in full slope. I hope that it is bringing some unforeseen blessings in some way. So, thanks for taking the time here on the podcast.

Lary: Thank you for what you’re doing with Regen Network and what you’re doing in the world and even with this podcast. We’re coming together. We’re doing this. and if we don’t believe in creating this better world together, we’re not going to get there and it’s a blessing to be able to have these conversations. And yes, we did talk for a long time. But it’s been great, and I just think of all of the carbon I’m not emitting because I’m sitting here right now. Not in a car. I live in LA .

Gregory: Exactly. I mean it’s the big slow down. It’s bringing some really interesting unforeseen blessings. I’m excited what this several month economic pauses is doing for our yearly carbon budget for sure.

Lary: Absolutely. If nothing else, nature is breathing easier for a moment and the population that lives in cities, which is most people are sensing it. They’re talking about it everywhere and not let anybody forget because we do that all too often.

Gregory: Amen

Lary: Alright amigo.

Gregory: Beautiful. Have a beautiful day.

Lary: Onward. Stay healthy.

Gregory: Onward.

Lary: Bye, bye.

Gregory: Bye.

[End of Audio]

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