176 Cameron Frayling on what is needed to unlock biodiversity credits

A conversation with Cameron Frayling, co-founder of Pivotal, about why and how biodiversity can be measured cheaply and what that might enable.
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Getting sick of the carbon hype? Get ready for the biodiversity one, but first, we have to figure out how to measure it and what a biodiversity gain actually means.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Getting sick of the carbon hype, get ready for the biodiversity one. But first we have to figure out how to measure it and what a biodiversity gain actually means. The current status quo is sending a team of ecologists to survey, meaning listening, looking, etc. at plants, insects and birds and make a report. That is, as you can imagine, extremely expensive and only mining companies can afford it, also because they're forced to do so by law. So what role can technology play here? How do we bring down the costs of these surveys by 100% X. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume. And it's that we as investors, big and small, and consumers start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community. And so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you. If our work created value for you, and if you have the means, and only if you have the means, consider joining us. Find out more on gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. That is gumroad.com slash investing in regen ag. Or find the link below. Welcome to another episode. Today, we go deep into measuring biodiversity with Cameron Frayling, the co-founder of Pivotal Earth. Welcome, Cameron.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

Hello. Nice to be here.

Why are you doing what you are doing? Why biodiversity?

SPEAKER_00 1:49

And I mean, biodiversity is a buzzword luckily now, or it's becoming a buzzword in our little bubble. But let's unpack a bit how you, because you're not a biodiversity ecologist that has traveled the world and went deep into the Congolese forest to, I don't know, to measure butterflies or something. So how did you end up focusing on this fascinating, but probably relatively new, at least professionally for you, world of biodiversity? What led you to this fascinating path you're on now?

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Sure. Sure. Well, my background has actually been in creating life science companies. I've created a few companies in Cambridge in the UK. They've all been focused on genetics, cancer diagnostics, therapeutic development. And I really enjoy bringing together very smart people from very different backgrounds to solve difficult problems. And along the way, you usually invent a few things. Over the long term, I mean, life science can be incredibly impactful for humans. And what I found though was i was very hungry to create more of a direct positive impact on the nature that i saw around me um many people obviously enjoy spending time in nature but you know my wife is actually a phd ecologist who has carried out biodiversity surveys all over the world and over the years i've been able to hear uh in depth some of the problems with biodiversity surveys mostly how painstakingly manual they are and the lack of real investment in space um but also the issues

SPEAKER_00 3:15

did you ever join her like did you get exposed to this this nature like is that even a thing like do you can you come along as as the plus plus one in that case and do you get exposed to the crazy jungles or the crazy places she must have been or you heard the stories back back when she was back home basically

SPEAKER_01 3:32

uh so i would get to here when she came home that's right so i mean like some of them she went like for example she went on one uh for a month in liberia and she was there with like 15 ecologists there were two guards there was a medic when they stay at night it's at a it's at a camp it's got fencing it's controlled Yeah, there's no way a plus one would have been welcome, although I would have loved to have seen it. And now we're doing them together.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

And so then that's how these biodiversity surveys are done. Large teams on the ground and manually ticking boxes, counting, listening to things. I mean, that's what I imagine. And I mean, we can all imagine the time it takes and the costs, which means it's only being done by very, very few, in very, very few places and very few organizations that have those budgets or are forced to have those budgets.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly expensive. This is one of the things that blew my mind and that I've got to hear about over the years is just how expensive it is. That one survey that she did, the cost of that team that she led was half a million dollars. But there were three teams and they went back twice, one for the wet season, one for the dry season. Who on earth could possibly afford that level of survey? Only companies that are required to do it and only for the most profitable projects. And I guess it's for this reason that if you look at compliance with biodiversity offsetting regulation, compliance is 20%, even though it's actually law in 42 countries for highly destructive industries.

SPEAKER_00 5:02

So it's really, it's law in many places. We have to do this. We don't because it's simply unprofitable or you cannot even put it in a budget of if you're running a large scale plantation. The only thing that can afford that are the extremely extractive mining industry that makes enough money and that has somewhere in their budgeting plans, which means like, do you have any clue how much like globally, like how many of these biodiversity surveys are done? Like how much do we know actually of biodiversity? Is it like 0.01%? Is it 1%? No, probably that sounds a bit too much. How good of an eye do we have or an understanding do we have of our state of global biodiversity if we don't do these

SPEAKER_01 5:44

surveys? The first question is how many of these surveys I've actually done. If you look at the Polson report, which I can forward to you after this, it's very good. It's slightly out of date now, a couple of years out of date, but it went through and tried to put some kind of number on how much is actually spent by these companies on biodiversity offsets in the regulated market. And it's about 9 billion per year, which is way more than people expect. Most people have never heard of a biodiversity offset. But the thing is, is that there's a reason for that. Mostly they're done with shell companies. They're done with NDAs. And also they're incredibly flawed. They... are not at all linked to actual outcomes for nature. They enable offsets to be created, which are not based on real outcomes. And this is one of the real things that we are trying to solve.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

And so when you're saying they're flawed, they're not connected to real outcomes, which means a company is paying, a company is paying surveying or that credit has to be created, but it doesn't have a real connection to something that improved in biodiversity, obviously on the ground or in the sea or whatever it's created. So that 9 billion is being pumped around basically in a sector, which is still quite a lot. And maybe some of that does something positive, but it's nowhere near what we need. And even that 9 billion you're saying is not being used effectively or put to work effectively because it could be quite a big impact. Nine billion is a lot of money.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

It is. So what I would say is that the way the offsets have been constructed historically is deeply flawed. I can give you an example, but also I think the time is long past. We need to be looking at creating significant gains, regenerating the land, regenerating nature. And I think simply offsetting destruction is not we're near enough. Let me give you an example of an offset that is public, and therefore I can talk about it. So it's actually an example of a good case. There are far, far worse cases than this. Some of them are absolutely appalling, but this is a good one. This is Rio Tinto, and basically they wanted to dig a mine in Mongolia. And so they did a biodiversity survey, and they said, look, what biodiversity is there on the ground? We need to comply with regulation. Any nature that we destroy, we're going to have to offset. So they did the survey, they got a sense of what was there, and they said, okay, great, now we know. Find us an ecosystem which is similar, a similar habitat, and then find somewhere where we can restore biodiversity and therefore offset any destruction that we cause. And so a team went out and they found an area which was 50,000 square kilometers. And they said, okay, if we take down fencing in this area and we reduce hunting, we can increase the species, abundance of the species, we can improve migration, you know, biodiversity should improve. And so Rio Tinto said, great, okay, what we'll do is create a trust in Mongolia and we'll put 25 years of funding into this trust, which is what they're required to show to comply with the regulation. And then biodiversity will increase and then off we go and dig our mine. And so they did this. They put$70 million into a trust in Mongolia. 7-0. 7-0. And there's

SPEAKER_00 8:59

a team of people. Just to be clear, it's not 1-7, it's 7-0. 7-0.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

And then this is to fund these actions of removing fencing, trying to reduce hunting in the region. In the meantime, they go and start digging their mine. Now, the issue is that, let's imagine those people in Mongolia are absolutely the best in the world. There is no guarantee they're actually going to increase biodiversity in this area. And yet, the mine has started to be dug. And this is one example of how there's a huge disconnect between the destruction that takes place and the actual increases that are created. So there's no guarantee. There's no real link to gains that are made. And I guess this is what we're trying to do is enable people to invest in actual measured outcomes, not in hopes or aspirations or simply putting money into a trust. And that would really change, I think, what happens on the ground.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

So that's the issue at the moment. Yeah, we put 17 million in, which is a lot of money, but then there's no connection to, I mean, if we at the end said, oh, we spend it all in 20 five years or even less on removing fences but nothing really happened because it didn't reduce hunting or maybe it increased hunting or we did grazing differently or what like there's no there are no kpis there's no measurement it's just okay we imagine it would cost or we legally we have to put 70 million that's sort of a rounding error in our budget anyway of this mind which is a few billion and let's put it in distrust we we tick the box of our biodiversity plan and if there's anything happening on the ground or not or this money flows to whatever trust outs side or is being eaten or because people went to to to gamble on it or whatever this this money done we will never know and maybe there will be a scandal at some point but it won't ever come back to Rio Tinto because they did their work and they did actually their work because there's no outcome there's no outcome piece which sounds exactly the same as we're struggling with in in carbon and soil carbon and and we are regenerative or we're not unless it's connected to an outcome it it is very very um very shaky let's say so how how would you change that and And then let's get to why outcome. I mean, we already talked about it a bit, but why measuring the outcomes is so difficult until now or was so difficult until now.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Yeah. So I think this is the problem to solve. It's number one, you have to be able to reduce the cost of the monitoring. Otherwise, there's no way that you can measure the outcome. And

SPEAKER_00 11:24

improve it because most of the money will go to measure it.

SPEAKER_01 11:26

Exactly. It has to cost less than any revenue that you might gain or financial gains that you might get from improving an providing an outcome for nature. And so the first thing is, can you bring down

SPEAKER_00 11:38

the cost? Like a hundred X less or something like that. What are we, what are we talking about? If you, in your, in your mind or in your goal and your, your business plan, what are we, we're not talking 10 X less or a few percent, but this is like significantly less to enable much more, much more measurement and repeatedly and et cetera. So what, what are you hoping for? What are you targeting?

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Yeah. Well, so yeah, I guess let's just go through why we think it's actually possible to do this now. So the first point is that you've got amazing off-the-shelf sensors these days. They can do really incredible imaging, acoustics, you name it. But also there's autonomous navigation of drones, which can collect data at scale in ways that just haven't really been possible. And then there's machine learning. And so when it comes to data collection, the first part is, well, we can't have 15 people walking through a far or walking through a landscape, that's just way too expensive. It doesn't scale. I mean, are there enough ecologists out there to handle the demand for all the sites that are in the world? I would say almost certainly no, it's not a model that scales. And certainly it's very expensive. So instead of 15 people, can we have one person deploying lots of sensors, technology, flying drones, these sorts of things? And the answer to that is, well, yes, you can have one person collecting data on something like a even now with our first pilots, something like 100 hectares per day per person. And then all of that data is uploaded into the cloud where we can then analyze it with data pipelines. It's passed through machine learning. And then the really critical thing is that it's quality controlled by ecologists who are actually expert in that particular habitat. And what they're helping with is quality control, but also annotation, identification of species. There are not databases that we can just tap into for every area of the world. And so we're creating some of these ourselves that's going to be a substantial amount of work a substantial amount of money but in the end once we have looked at one habitat and identified a first set of species if we go back we're going to have you know a much easier time the second time it'll be faster be less expensive and it scales and so then you have a way of collecting data which works on sort of medium scales, hundreds to thousands of hectares, and then you've got a method of analyzing the data, which definitely scales. What we need to move to to bring down the cost even more is enable third parties to actually collect the data for us, for us to help with quality controlling where they go, helping create a plan, place the sensors here, here, and here, fly the drones here, here, and here, have minimum requirements for the quality of the data, be able to quality control that and evidence that they were actually where we said they were. Because ultimately what we want to do is be able to warrant to companies and to investors that the gains that we see are real and exist.

How did the first pilot look like?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

I think it's a... Fascinating. I mean, lots to unpack there. But one thing you mentioned, it's getting, like there's a path to getting even cheaper or there's a path to learning and we're creating some of these databases ourselves. And of course, if you have to send out a manual or personal team of 15 people, that's only going to get more expensive over time. Like flights are getting more expensive. Everything gets more expensive. And these ecologists, if they're getting, if there's more demand, obviously they should and they will charge more. In this case, there's a very clear path. Like you do certain projects in certain France and after well of course if you go back to the same site it becomes a lot faster and thus cheaper because you already surveyed a lot of the species even if there was no database you sort of created one but if you go to the neighboring ones if you go to a similar site I mean the the learnings are there because it's it's stored in the cloud it's stored in a and the software can start to to take over certain things doesn't mean it takes over everything of course there's an ecologist that has to make the first time but at least it makes it makes it scalable and so it very practically on the ground. You mentioned first pilots. How does a first pilot look like? In this case, it's you, I know that. But how should we imagine? It's a field, it's a farm, it's a forest. What have some of these, of course, without revealing too much, but some of these first pilots look like if we should think, okay, you say there are amazing sensors around. Okay, how big are they? Are they small? Or how should we bring us visually to one of these pilots and how it works?

SPEAKER_01 16:38

So the first pilot we did was actually in April. So we're still very young, We only kicked off, you know, following a pre-seed round late October last year. So we've got off the ground pretty quickly. And the first staff that have joined, actually, the first one was a PhD ecologist, sorry, PhD mathematician. And she is absolutely amazing. And her focus is on looking at indices of biodiversity, what they mean and what they don't mean. And that was actually her postdoc work as well. And then there's an assistant professor of machine learning who's joined us. And then

SPEAKER_00 17:12

there's also... Just on indices, what do you mean by that? because we talked about it in pre-interview and it's fascinating. Because when you start measuring or start identifying things like, oh, I saw this grass species and this insect, not everything is as important. You can get overwhelmed by the amount of data. So why is the first one you hired on math, basically, just to figure out what should we pay attention to or how does that work in biodiversity?

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah. So let's come back to that because that is a huge question. So the first thing is with those people, we started putting together the plan of how are we actually gonna survey our pilot. And so it was 177 hectares with this wonderful, wonderful couple who owned this 400 hectares in Portugal, very kindly allowed us to come and measure. They have been working on improving biodiversity for I think at least 15 years. They had a survey done by a university probably a decade ago, and they shared some of the results of that, the sort of habitat classifications and things like this. and very generous in letting us come and measure the site. And the first thing we did was fly drones, you know, something like 100 meters above the ground, very standard to create a habitat map. It gives us very good resolution for very little money. We have a two centimeter resolution map. And with that, we can then feed it to machine learning, which then simply categorizes the different kinds of habitats. So you've got 177 hectares. You're going to have a bunch of different types of habitats there. We don't need classify them with machine learning, we can pass that to a Portuguese ecologist that we're working with who can very quickly say, okay, done. And then that's a great start. And it's really important to have these habitat classifications as well, because they're going to link to credits in the future. So then the other thing we did was place on this 177 hectares, 30 different acoustic sensors. So we used ones with a really high frequency band. They go all the way up to 384 kilohertz, which means that we can sample birds, bats, insects, mammals, amphibians, and we recorded all of these things. So I've got lovely recordings of birds. Actually, throughout almost the entire 24 hours, you can hear things. We've got owls in the middle of the night, crickets chirped all night, amphibians, frogs, they were going crazy. There's a lot of life on this farm. And we did them in two different ways. So we them as arrays which helps us look at the distance between a sound that we hear and that helps us with abundance calculations and then we also had point sensors so we had these 30 sensors and then we also had really low level drone flights by low level i mean two meters above the ground going 1.5 meters per second and then looking at different angles so the first one was actually

SPEAKER_00 20:09

you were flying this right just for drone people this this is low and and i don't know if you were using what is it first person view like that's really easy to crash into stuff and and it but it's meant to be low because it's sort of the height of of an ecologist walking through the field i mean depending on the height of the person if you're from the nordics maybe it's even a bit higher but it's like it's that that it's more or less the the height of the ice but it's not easy to do that but it's also not super difficult i think i mean the forest it's tricky but in in most places you have to pay attention and you shouldn't use a super expensive drone probably

SPEAKER_01 20:42

yeah that's exactly right so it is it It is meant to mimic a person walking through that habitat and what they would actually see. And I have to say, it works really well. It works really well. We've been feeding it to a botanist, a Portuguese botanist, and he is able to identify basically everything. There's sort of six species that he wasn't able to identify just with the imaging that we took. And then we also have camera spacing straight down, and that allows us to do a percent cover of different species. So it's proved really, really effective. And that

SPEAKER_00 21:13

gives us... This point is so interesting. You send it to a Portuguese botanist that obviously didn't have to travel to visit the site. Could be in his or her office somewhere. Could be not in Portugal at all. Could be the expert on this stuff that lives, I don't know, Northern Norway. And he or she is able to do it from his or her office, laptop, computer, et cetera. And not once, but because the data can be used again to do the next one in Portugal or the next one nearby, et cetera, et cetera. So there's that learning curve that should make it exponentially cheaper overtime just like every deployment of solar makes it cheaper over time, just like technology does. And in good and bad, and at the same time, easily a team of 15 botanists that have to walk that field are not getting exponentially cheaper over time.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

That's exactly right. He's actually, yeah, he's in Madrid.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Yeah. And who cares? Yeah, there's internet. So what's the point? So he identified it. Probably he would have preferred to be on the field, I can imagine. So there's a small tension there. But it's definitely not scalable if he had to try travel from Madrid to Portugal to that farm to do, I mean, it becomes, yeah, you can do the cost calculations. So you look forward and down. Sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

One thing that's been really amazing is the response from ecologists that we've been contacting to help us identify these things. Not at all. They're overjoyed. The consistent message that we get from these ecologists is that they're often very tired of being used to look at projects where all they're really measuring is loss. And so the idea of going out there and helping us measure gain is sort of a dream come true. And yeah, for sure, they'd love to be in the field, but there's going to be plenty of chance for that. And all we're doing is increasing the scale of the impact that they can have.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

There's going to be a lot more fields to visit. Yeah, that's for sure. A lot more interesting ones, not just a mine site that then you know whatever you're surveying there in a year is going to be basically a big pit with a huge hole in it. And yeah, that must be quite depressing, actually. I never thought about that. Okay, so you're collecting all these is visual data, the acoustic data, you're feeding it between brackets to the experts, you identify certain things, and then what happens? Or that was basically the pilot until now, or what has given that data or what came out of that for you? What were surprises, interests, also for the couple, obviously, that is living on the farm?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Well, one surprise was we identified lots of different birds, some of which are really not meant to be there. And so it's interesting to sea. And we're now trying to check.

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Men by whom? Like, sorry, like, why are they not meant to be there? If they want to be there, they can be there. Or you were doubting like, oh, this thing has been extinct in the Iberian Peninsula or because they should be in the nature area. Maybe they prefer to be there.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

One of them is actually an owl that's endemic to Cyprus. And yet somehow we seem to have picked it up. So we're making sure this is true. So there's a lot of sort of quality control that needs to go in. Certainly at these early stages, we're going to pick up lots of things that are not real, but that's what quality control is for. And that's why I were working hand in hand with these ornithologists in this case. And they're amazing. I mean, my God, they can identify pretty much everything just by ear. The skill levels these people have is just staggering.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

their hearing and eyesight for sure and your identifying grasses, etc. I had to laugh because it reminds me, I put the link in the show notes of an interview I did with Isabella Tree on rewilding and wilding their farm or their estate in Nepp and they had nightingales coming back and everybody was arguing they weren't supposed to be there because they're forest birds and they don't have a forest, they have an open savannah and slowly the scientific community came around and said, yeah, maybe they are actually open savannah birds and we pushed them all the way into the forest and they barely hanging in there and now they got their natural habitat back and of course they flock to that estate where they have more pairs than in some neighboring nature estate that should be all about nature. So they're not supposed to be there but they're there. So how do we cope with that? You're going to probably find a lot of these things which are going to be very, very interesting, disturbing. Some of them are going to be small errors in your data but many of them are going to be sort of small errors in the scientific data set that has to be adjusted.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

I think that's right. I mean, So the ranges for these species, they're trapped by lots of different groups, and they're also going to change over time. So sometimes the resolution of the information we have is relatively poor. So there's work that's done by the UN, for example, the UNWCMC, who do incredible things with biodiversity data. And the resolution of the maps they produce is often sort of the 10 kilometer by 10 kilometer pixel size. And so, I mean, a lot, you know, a lot that could happen in that sort of, where you only have that kind of resolution. But also, things get to change as with, you know, warming planet and, you know, habitats will change, things will migrate.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

And so, what are your lessons learned of this first pilot? It sounds like quite a bit worked, which is amazing for a first pilot, like in terms of, again, what What are next steps now? Are you going to repeat them? Different environments, different... What does the roadmap... It's maybe not the right word, but what are the next steps after this pilot? Are you going to buy a better drone or a lot more server space? What's happening?

SPEAKER_01 26:39

In terms of things we learned, we did manage to collect all the data that we intended to, which was a small miracle. It was amazing. I had a serious encounter with a barbed wire fence. I managed to... up with like cuts on my face. And the sad thing is I still don't have any kind of sexy scar. I was really hoping for something. Because

SPEAKER_00 26:59

you were flying the drone and you walked into it or

SPEAKER_01 27:02

what happened? No, I actually just, a piece of wood collapsed and I fell onto my forearm and then I had a backpack on, so it pushed me down and I fell on my face.

SPEAKER_00 27:12

Anyway, I'm all

SPEAKER_01 27:13

fine. So no, we learned a lot. We But what we're doing is now turning this into a bunch of different indices. You asked about what are these indices of biodiversity.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Yeah, let's unpack that piece a bit. Why is that important to figure out, okay, with all the things we see and hear, let's now bring it back to something that we can track over time or that makes sense to track. How do we pick what makes sense to track? Is it this insect group or that insect group? Is it this plant? Is it that noise? What do we focus on in all this noise between brackets? Yeah. How do we focus on the important sounds?

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Yeah. So I think the way to look at this is, in some ways, it's a few things. And then it's also, how do you create a credit? Because I think that answers, to some degree, some of these things. So if we just think first of how do you actually tackle creating a credit from these indices of biodiversity and the data that comes out of it? And then again, hopefully again, not always again, hopefully again. If it's going to be real, sometimes it's going to go down and we have to expect that to be true. So I think the first thing is you have to choose the right people to work on it. And so, I mean, my co-founder, Zoe, and so she has more than 20 years working with a wide variety of stakeholders on the ground at a policy level. I mean, she was a British diplomat. She was negotiating policy, but she's also carried out biodiversity surveys on the ground. It gives her a rare set of experiences and worldview. And I think that the other person that is really critical to constructing a biodiversity credit in a sensible way is a mathematician. And so there was a paper that we read that we really loved. And it was all about biodiversity indices, what they mean and what they don't mean. And I'm happy to send this to you afterwards. Basically, we reached out to the first author and we loved her. She was great. And in the end, she joined. And she and Zoe are now spearheading how you construct this credit. She's very much in charge of which indices we use and why. And right now, we're actually writing a pretty lengthy white paper on why we're doing what we're doing, how you think about these things. But it's not just, I mean, the math has to make sense. It has to make sense for people on the ground, from a biodiversity point of view, from an ecologist point of view. And so I think, first, you've got a mathematician and ecologist helping construct this. But then we also needed to work for the people who are actually going to be trading any kind of value. And so we need to speak with traders. And that's what we've been doing. You know, people who would purchase, sell, trade a credit, and we need to understand their needs. We also need to talk to companies, understand what they need. And we also need to speak to farmers and foresters and people doing rewilding, understand what they need. I think the other thing is that...

SPEAKER_00 30:21

What did you learn speaking to the traders and the companies that are currently part of the 9 billion seriously flawed system, let's say? Like, are they frustrated, excited, in What's the, what's the, what's the, yeah. Like it seems to be biodiversity is on the curb of, of like having their hype moment. Like, like carbon has had a soil carbon for at least a while. Like what's the, what the, what's the atmosphere in the, in the sector? Are they getting like, Ooh, finally somebody is tackling the measurement side or they're threatened because maybe they get, they get disrupted. What's the, or the companies are super excited because they want to do more. What's the, what's the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Yup. So the first thing is that all the people that we're talking to who are on the voluntary side, because ultimately the regulated market has, you know, there's lots of places that we can go there. We're actually speaking to people who develop properties, for example, and they have to meet a biodiversity net gain requirement. But the people that we're speaking to, when I say traders, they're people who are now looking at a biodiversity credit and how they could put it on their platform, you know, what they need, what they want. And it's the same with the companies. A lot of the companies that we're speaking to are not required do this. This is something that they see as of tremendous interest to their customers, to the person walking on the street, and something that they need to address. Some have been buying carbon credits for a long time. For example, there's a very large car manufacturer that we spoke to who has a lot of experience and teams of people that buy carbon credits. Basically, their request was a biodiversity credit specifically, not something that's tacked onto carbon. In terms of the, let's see here. We're seeing a few other things, for example, For people who are doing forestry and planting kind of biodiverse forests, we're seeing people being offered a certain amount for the carbon credit, but then saying, look, quality of the project is incredibly important to us. And so if you can also evidence the biodiversity gain, that's an excellent indicator of the quality of the project, we will increase the carbon price. And you can link then carbon price to a biodiversity gain. That's not a biodiversity credit per se, but it's a way of stacking

SPEAKER_00 32:37

biodiversity on top of carbon. Because you avoid that issue of the monoculture forest plantations with the dead zone underneath, basically. But yeah, we stored a lot of carbon in the tree. Like, yeah, but this is not really what we meant by reforestation. So that almost becomes a guarantee, like if biodiversity has gone up, we know that it must be a more diverse forest than some of the horror pictures we see on some of these reports and articles. Very interesting.

UNKNOWN 33:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

Yeah. And then there's two other sets of people that it makes tremendous sense for us to work with. So one are investors. So investors who are putting money into projects that they expect to have an income, some kind of outcome for nature. And their comment is, look, we put hundreds of millions into a project. How do we know that it's actually having the outcome for nature that we expect? You know, we think it should, but how do we really know? And so they're saying, well, you know, we're prepared to now start putting into our operating budget, you know, monitoring as just part of the cost of doing business. And I would say that makes complete and absolute sense. If you're not monitoring, how do you know that you're actually having an outcome for nature? And the other is, you know, food groups who are saying to their farmers or making claims that they're going to be moving to regenerative practices. Well, how do they know what's actually happening on the ground? And so I think one of the sort of groups that we're going to start working with is the And so...

SPEAKER_00 34:39

let's step back one to you've done a few pilots now like what's in in the works before you or what needs to happen before you can work with all of these fascinating interesting relevant groups that might come knocking on the door relatively soon or some are you're in many conversations like how do you go from these pilots to something quote-unquote a machine that does these things like like the company is a machine not saying you should become a machine but like how do you do hundreds of these or what's your idea there i mean you've built companies before funny enough in the life sciences I would argue this is life science as well because you're definitely studying life but what is needed like in a year or so to start working to get to a scale you can absorb a lot of these projects and do hundreds of actors here thousands of actors there like what do you feel is missing still what do you need to get done apart from hiring people obviously

What should smart investors, who want to invest in Reg ag and food look out for?

SPEAKER_01 35:35

yeah so our next part our second part is actually going to be in Wiltshire on an agroforestry farm. I think that will be a lot easier than our first one. It'll be slicker, great. But then since we've done the first one, we've actually had an explosion of people asking us to come and monitor in different ways. Last week alone, there was a 700 hectare regenerative farm that I visited. There was a call with another 700 hectare farm that went in Spain. I spent time with the land steward at the largest state in Holland, 6,800 hectares, and they're doing amazing things. And all of these would like to find ways to evidence the outcomes for nature that they're creating in order to have real financial incentives be possible. I mean, some of them are, it's very complicated because there's this dense thicket of subsidies that we need to sort of navigate. But ultimately, if we want to change Houndland is used, we need to change incentives so that there is an outcome for nature being incentivized.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

And so... In this hype of, or hype, I don't want to call it a hype yet, but let's say a starting hype around biodiversity, what would you tell investors that are getting interested in it, that are, let's imagine, I always try to say, let's imagine we're in a theater, we're doing this in real life, it's a nice old theater, we're sitting on stage, we're having this conversation there, which I hope will happen at some point, and the room is full of investors. What would you tell them to look into after, like when they get out and they're getting all excited about okay this is this biodiversity piece is real there's something that we really really need to crack there and let's not get into the the carbon funnel only let's let's not get tunnel vision etc what would you give them of course not as investment advice but what would we give them to to go deeper into are there certain reports places to visit things to think like a mindset or a framework like when they walk out of the theater what what should be the first thing they do um to to go deeper into this space potentially put money to work and make investments change things on their farm or what kind of frameworks would you give them?

SPEAKER_01 37:54

So I think the first thing is that when you look at biodiversity loss, one of the real dominant drivers is, of course, land use. It's how we produce food. It's what we do with our land. And I think when you're looking at the impact of your supply chains or your operations on biodiversity, look where all your materials come from. That's a good start. You can work work with consultancies to help sort of evaluate what that impact actually is. And you can get it right within, I don't know, even a factor of 10 is a good start at the moment. And then you have a question as to what you then do. And this is, again, part of what we're trying to solve. At the end of that, how do you then directly just invest in something that helps offset maybe your impact? There is very little you can do to actually invest in an outcome. And that's because the cost has been far too high. And so if we can bring down the cost, we can then create a way of actually investing in outcomes for nature, which people could then simply purchase on an exchange. One way we might do that would be via an option, so that if you have a game that is created, someone has pre-purchased that at an agreed price, that allows the person on the ground to actually get investment to actually do that. If the biodiversity does not actually appear, well, then you're not committed to buy it.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

So how would it work? Because that's like one of the estates you talk about, or let's say a farm that says, we would love to do certain hedgerows. We would love to buy a much more complex cover crop mix. We would love to integrate trees. But of course, it's always like, yeah, these things have real impact, but it might take five years or it might take X years. How would, in the ideal world, biodiversity credits be used, like you mentioned now, to fuel that change underground? and then be interesting both for an investor, both for a buyer and also for the land steward and or the farmer? How would that work?

SPEAKER_01 39:59

Yeah. Well, I mean, firstly, the price that people pay for gains has to be set by the market and it has to be sufficient to enable people to be financially better off doing these things. They may take a hit in one way but be better off because they've increased biodiversity. A great example would be for carbon projects where you could plant a model culture of eucalyptus and that's going to be appalling for biodiversity in most cases. On the other hand, if there is a biodiversity credit that goes alongside a carbon credit, you can choose. We can allow people to simply look at how they would be financially better off and they really should, I think, be better off if they have a combination of carbon and biodiversity in the mix. I mean, one message I'd really like to make, I guess, to convey is that If you sequester carbon, it's not a guaranteed outcome for biodiversity. It's not always going to have a positive impact. On the other hand, if you have a gain in biodiversity, there's almost always a carbon benefit as well.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

It's more important to look at the biodiversity one. That's the proxy for, in many cases, of course, there are exceptions, etc., but in many cases, it means you sequestered carbon as well. It's very difficult to not do the two of them together, but it's possible to do carbon and and not biodiversity, as we just discussed in eucalyptus or something like that, which should trigger it. Yeah, it should trigger the market. One

SPEAKER_01 41:28

thing I find really interesting is that you talk to carbon developers and they say, there's a real lack of projects. We struggle to find supply of projects. And you have this incredibly ruthless attitude sometimes in some of these carbon project developers. And if you talk to the farmers that I've been speaking with and you say, would you like to have a carbon project on your farm 90% will say, no, you're just not interested. If on the other hand, you said, would you like to restore-

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Why is that? Because it's not sexy, interesting. They can see it as potentially a lot of trouble. Why is that strong no?

SPEAKER_01 42:04

I think, well, I wouldn't want to speak for them, but I think it doesn't resonate with the people that I speak with. On the other hand, if you say, would you like to restore nature on your farm? Then the answer, of course, is an overwhelming yes. I mean, they love their farms. They want to see it thriving and full of life. And so I would say that from a supply point of view, restoring nature and having a biodiversity credit is a message that clearly resonates with people far better than carbon. And so I would say for any developers out there, you should bear that in mind.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

And like the farmers or the people reaching out now that want their farm or their state or whatever they manage to be surveyed, are they looking to do that out of their own pocket? Are they hoping that you sell credits anytime soon? Are they doing it because they have some clients or people they work with supply? I mean, like what's the reasoning or they just want to do it and it's for them an expense. Like we really want to, to do this baseline. And then like, what's, what do you see? What's their, their reasoning to, to reach out now, even though they know it's probably quite early, there's not a clear market ready. There's not a, an exchange that they can, they can sell credits tomorrow and they might have to pay it for them by themselves. And they, they, they are pioneering. Like what's the, the reasoning to get in touch, even if it's quite early in this case.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Yeah, I guess we see a few different, I guess, motivations. So with the regenerative farmers that we speak with, they're incredibly sincere. They've been doing this for decades. The farm may have been in their family for generations. They are very serious about what they're doing. And they're always looking for ways to sort of finance additional outcomes for nature to help prevent any degradation on their farm. Some of them are driven to do that because they've seen their crops starting to fail. And I guess in different parts of the world, that might be common. I was just in Holland and I was told that that's not something that they see. I was also told something that's not something they see very often in the States. I don't know if that's true or not, but certainly some of the farmers I've been speaking with, that was one of their motivations. Equally, we see people who are now looking at biodiversity as almost an investment they can make. So they are buying land. They're intending to rewilded, they expect to be able to increase the value of the land and to have a financial gain for their investors. And part of that is a strong biodiversity component. And what they need is a tool that can help monitor affordably. Right now, I think that's not something that they could do in an affordable sort of way, in any kind of robust way. And then there's other people who are clearly doing this as just you know, a way that they can have a positive impact, but it's very financially driven. And we're seeing that, I guess, in a few different places. I won't mention any projects, but, you know, it's also very worthwhile. We should definitely do those too.

What if you could change one thing over night?

SPEAKER_00 45:03

Yeah, we need a lot more money, I would say, in this space or resources and energy to focus on it because the underlying unconventional, inconvenient truth is that most of our landscapes are severely degraded, even the nature area is whatever we fenced off is not at its potential let's say in terms of life it could support a lot more life and anything we can do to bring that back or even not even bring that back because it sort of suggests there was a perfect period before where it was intact etc. To bring it to its current in the current context highest potential in terms of biodiversity life etc. would be a goal to look out for and then if I always like to ask this question, not just the smart investor, what should they focus on, but also what would you do if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing in anything, but let's say the land use or agriculture, even specifically in a biodiversity space, what would you change if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight?

UNKNOWN 46:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

If I could change one thing overnight, I think I would. I think it's all about incentives. I think it's all about creating real incentives for people because I don't think there's anything else that really drives changes in behavior at the scale that we need. And so I think there are many, many people out there who want to create outcomes for nature, who want to restore nature and biodiversity. But that means nothing if for most people they can't afford to do it or the incentives are stacked in against them. And so I would say, if I could, you know, snap my fingers, I would say. And

SPEAKER_00 46:46

which one? Is there a specific thing? Is it Elms in the UK? Is it the cap in Europe? Something in the US on the insurance side? Is there something you would target specifically? And like, okay, if I could change one thing, or would it be stop plowing? I mean, what would the incentive be? Or we pay for nutrients, so quality over quantity? One

SPEAKER_01 47:08

thing I've been very reluctant to do is pass any judgment on what is actually going to achieve these gains. I think it's different in every single ecosystem, in every single habitat. You have to listen to ecologists. You have to work with the farmers on the ground who are often very smart and they're using the land as a way of experimenting. How do we enable them? How do we enable them? How do they become financially better off where every time they receive a payment, it's because they did something that was real, that actually resulted in an outcome. And I would say that could have a very rapid, you know, transformation on how we use land. In terms of what land I would target, I would say the food system first. If I could, I would have started this entire concept with the oceans. You know, I love marine protected areas. I would love to have this concept start soon within say the next year or year and a half moving to marine. The issue is that, you know, land, We've got relatively good concepts around who owns land and how you funnel incentives to people. When it comes to marine, shorelines are owned by governments. If it's a marine protected area and there's an incredible increase in biodiversity, who do I pay? How do I funnel money? And I would say, I think there are people who have some answers to these, but I think everything about marine is a little more complicated. So perhaps my answer is also, if I could snap my fingers, I would make this possible for marine.

SPEAKER_00 48:40

Very interesting answer. I would agree. It's 70% of our Earth and absolutely not 70% of our attention and resources and extremely neglected. And also there, there's the space to restore an abundance and a speed probably a lot faster than on land. We forget how much can come back, how quickly. And we see that in some of these marine protected areas. In a few years, life exploded again if we stopped over fishing and stop dumping, et cetera. And that's a financial question. Like if we can pay, we can harvest relatively sustainably over time, but we need to restore quite a lot, which means we need to stop for a while. And in that stopping period, somebody needs, you still need to eat. So there needs to be an incentive and that money is there. It's just not, it's not getting to the people that then need to stop fishing, which are obviously not the richest people on this planet, but also the ones that are most affected by the crumbling of that ecosystem. So very, very interesting. interesting. But at the same time, yeah, on land, it's easier or it seems easier. There's entities you can pay. You know more or less who owns what. It's easy to see if somebody plowed or not or the trees are still there. But yeah, I'm seeing a lot more attention for oceans and things like that and a lot more attention for the whole regenerative farming in oceans. It's definitely a wave that's starting. For sure, the acoustics are being built. For sure, the sense are being built for sure. The modelling is being done and let's hope it moves quickly there. There's one other

SPEAKER_01 50:18

thing. If I could snap my fingers again, I would have vertical farms everywhere. I would have a huge amount of land freed up by some of the vertical farms that are doing some really amazing work. I think it is a smart solution. It's something I think people should invest in. I think it could take a lot of strain off of our land and leave that land free then for rewilding and restoration. Because otherwise, we still need to farm on it. And I think that's just a reality. And I think the efficiency of the system makes it sort of a no-brainer.

SPEAKER_00 50:58

Yeah, I think we're going to get some emails about that because the reality there is that the efficiency is very challenging still. I think for the lettuces, the higher end crops, absolutely. The unfortunate truth is that most of our calories don't come from that and are being the few wheat varieties we eat and they command most of the land we farm. And I think it's extremely interesting. It very limited in terms of potential i think in terms of calories you can grow um and the energy costs are especially now but the energy costs are coming down because of efficiencies because of renewables obviously but are still the inputs are significant in terms of materials simply to to build them in terms of fertilizer that has to go in um of course very efficiently but still has to be mined somewhere i've yet to see very advanced let's say biocompost facilities doing that and making the teas and things like that and the nutrient side is It's okay, but you cannot get to the highest level of nutrients. We see now in research that if you don't grow it in soil, which you still can do inside, obviously, but I think it gets a lot of hype and it gets rightfully so. Some of the investments, I think the potential is limited in terms of the calories we grow now. And if you want to get hectares under management, you look at soy, wheat, corn, et cetera, that are rice as well. And I think they're the impacts in terms of water, chemicals, biodiversity. are massive because it's so much land or grasslands. I mean, that's the other, like if we can make grasslands way more diverse, that really kicks off things for birds and species. Because if you, I think it's only a few percent in the US of agriculture land is used for vegetables. Even though we have to change that, it's a very small percentage of the total land use. So I don't know. I think we're, I'm curious, reach out to people if you have views on that. I know people have invested in it a lot of money, but I've yet to see it go beyond the the higher end things for restaurants, which of course we shouldn't ship around the world and go beyond, like I've yet to see anybody do corn, et cetera, at scale inside, because it seems like the economics just don't make sense yet. And the input side is, they often say it's fully closed, et cetera, but fertilization has to come from somewhere. It doesn't grow for free. And the energy costs now, especially if we're in an energy crunch, it's just massive. And yeah, it doesn't allow to do many things, but it's a It's a path to check.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

I guess I'm just going on some of the conversations I've had with some of the vertical farming companies that I've spoken with. And I think clearly it's not affordable for staple crops, which is obviously a shame. But there's more that's grown than just staple crops. And I think anything you can do to take pressure off the land, I think it's kind of where I'm going.

What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment portfolio tomorrow morning?

SPEAKER_00 53:52

Yeah, and I would just argue that if you want to take pressure off the land, you would look at the majority of crops we grow on the land or the larger ones and see if we can make significant changes there compared to the few percent we use currently for vegetables, even though we shouldn't ship that from California to New York. That doesn't make any sense to ship lettuce in a truck, obviously. And the nutrient side of things, I think we need... No, the research shows that there are some limitations there when you take out the soil pieces, especially. And I see now, I mean, close to where I was born in Rotterdam, you see a lot of greenhouses, not on the vertical side. I mean, they're definitely relatively flat, but the energy prices at the moment, the gas prices, et cetera, just make it very challenging to do that as they need the electricity, they need the CO2 to be burned, actually, or they need to see it to be released to grow even faster because of the high ground prices underneath. So it's a challenging tension they're in at the moment. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes as we speak. But what would you do? Actually, it's a good question. A good bridge to, if you'd be in charge of a 1 billion euro, 1 billion pound, 1 billion dollar, I mean, you can pick your currency investment fund, what would you focus on? What would be your, of course, not onto the, I don't need the dollar amount exactly, but what would be your priorities if you had to put that to work with the longest time frame you can imagine if you want to or you can put it all to work in a few years and go after a VC approach? What would be your focus?

SPEAKER_01 55:26

I think the answer for me is incentivizing changes in the way land is used. I would invest in land use whether for food production or not. That encourages coexistence with nature but not necessarily land acquisition. I think incentives for the people who already own the land to manage it differently. I think create incentives based on outcomes. I think tools to evaluate the relative value of gains in biodiversity are needed. And of course, that's what we're offering or working to offer. I think the financial incentives for gains that are measured and real, you know, if you have those, you can change the balance towards...

SPEAKER_00 56:00

How would that gain look like? Like how would that, like what would be a biodiversity, maybe you're still thinking of that, but a biodiversity gain, maybe I should have asked this question earlier, but what would a biodiversity gain look like if I I want to buy that or sell it, depending on which side I am?

SPEAKER_01 56:16

Yeah. So I guess what it would look like probably would be not one index, but multiple different things. So you would have units of fragmentation, sort of a dashboard, and you need to compress that into something simple. This is one of the things that, speaking to commodity traders, they emphasized is that understanding what you're looking at needs to be fairly straightforward and simple. Because

SPEAKER_00 56:41

not

SPEAKER_01 56:41

everybody

SPEAKER_00 56:41

as an ecologist that can read those things.

SPEAKER_01 56:44

Yeah, they need to not care what it is per se and still be able to understand its relative value. So I think it also needs to be linked to the habitat types or habitat classification. For that, we're going to use the IUCN habitat classifications. And so you can have units of change as measured by multiple different indices and put together into a number that makes sense in some sort of way, along with the habitat classification. I think if you have that, that's then a tradable asset. The units that you measure, the indices that you choose, they need to be sort of non-redundant. They need to be sensitive to change. And I think this is, again, you need the right people working on these. We have an ecologist, PhD mathematician. I think it's something you then need, obviously, feedback on. But I think we can sort of lead the way in creating something that really is robust and makes a lot of sense. We had seen examples of people constructing kind of pseudo credits and a lot of the time the math goes out the window which i think is not okay

SPEAKER_00 57:49

and i mean we've discussed a few of these already but if you had to pick one where you are contrarian this is a question that definitely is inspired by john kemp i'd always ask where do you think like within in i ask it within regenerative agriculture but where do you think different um like when you when you are visiting a conference and i mean this is a weird times to visit conferences but when you are with your peers or in the biodiversity scene, where do you clearly think different? Is it on the tech side? What do you believe to be true that others don't in this space? We've mentioned a few, but if you had to pick one, what would you pick?

SPEAKER_01 58:26

I'm going to actually finish the previous question because there's something else I want to mention. If I had that billion dollars, yes, it's incentives, but actually it's also focusing on physical scale. So I would prioritize landscape scale. I think if you have that much money, I think investing in land use change, you should go really big. Prioritize huge parcels of land in areas that are naturally highly biodiverse.

SPEAKER_00 58:49

So you would almost pick one landscape or a landscape to show. Or like, look, this can be done if you do this at an integrated, large, holistic scale. If you pick the right pieces, we can significantly gain biodiversity at a landscape scale, which is something that people doubt about. We usually talk on a field level, we talk about, and we don't really say, okay, what does it take to bring back this river or to stabilize biodiversity loss here or to stop the erosion or to stabilize local climates? I mean, these are the dreams we need to have if we want to do something. Would you focus, do you think a billion is enough to positively influence a landscape?

SPEAKER_01 59:31

I think so. I think so. So I think, you know, you can look at thousands of hectares. You can look at parcels where, like if you look at the UN, there's a thing called the UN Biodiversity Lab, for example. It's free. It's a map that anyone can look at. It has many different layers. And you can look at what they call the global significance of different biodiversity areas. And so I would, you know, pick areas that have a high significance, find a degraded landscape where an ecologist tells you there's a decent chance you can restore it, I would focus on that. And for me, it's not a question of can you restore these areas? You absolutely can. There's plenty of examples. I would say if you just plant trees, that is not a guarantee of anything. On the other hand, if you take some time, think about it, work with ecologists, you absolutely can. I have no doubt, and I've seen lots of examples of this. I would say... When it comes to really large areas, you could actually see greater changes for biodiversity, greater gains for biodiversity, because of course, different species have different habitat ranges. And the more space you leave, actually, the greater the impact you can have. So I would say...

SPEAKER_00 1:00:38

So there's a network effect. Economies, like that's a bad word, like the economies of biodiversity of scale or the biodiversity scalability is there if you do it, like the larger you get, there is a stuff gets more space, meaning... more things can live there and thrive there.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

Yeah, yeah. So I would say if you really wanted to have the biggest impact possible, pick areas where, I mean, I know there are areas in the world which are a little bit degraded that or have been, you know, they've been used as grassland recently. If you just leave them alone, you can see massive changes in just a few years. You know, and there's plenty of these. There's more than enough for people to invest. I don't know if a billion dollars is enough, but it would certainly get you a long way And if you're not purchasing the land, which is incredibly capital intensive, and you're instead focusing on how do you have a business model which uses the incentives that you can create by being able to measure outcomes for biodiversity, all of a sudden, that is a very powerful lever that you can pull.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:40

Yeah, no, it's a very interesting conversation we've had many times on the podcast. And the most, it seems to me, the most established part of Regenec investing, at least, are these land funds, which are amazing. SLM, Clear Frontier, And there are many of these, I'm forgetting a few, but there are purchasing the land, like a real estate play, purchasing the land, purchasing the building, seeing value somewhere where nobody else sees it, clean it up, make it super energy efficient, et cetera, et cetera. And then either sell it, rent it out for a while, et cetera. And that's very established. It's amazing, but there is a limit of scale because there's only so much land you can buy. And there's a limit of money because there's only so much money you can raise for things like that. I have no doubt that hundreds of millions, probably many billions actually will flow into that. space because it's the most established institutional investors like it etc etc but we have to think beyond that and also ask questions on concentrated land ownership and do we want this to be in a few hands or not even though it might be pension funds etc so how do we work with farmers land owners land stewards national parks whatever to not having to buy that but influencing positively without owning it because we don't need to and of course the biodiversity gains or the gains in general can be a way to do that so I think it's then a bit goes quite a long way but still you have to be very smart of how to structure that but I think that we're going to see a lot of smart people going after that because that's where how do you partner with landowners and land stewards that manage large pieces and help them to speed up their transition or to speed up the transition of the land and the CEO business

SPEAKER_01 1:03:15

I think that's right and actually the very first sort of concept I explored a couple years ago was exactly this what would it look like if you said simply started purchasing land in order to improve it. So buying degraded land, trying to restore it. What does that model look like? And in the end, I think what we've chosen to do is something much more scalable and much more efficient.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

Yeah, I've had some investors, if they're listening, they will know who I'm talking about, that made that calculation, like how far does my money go in terms of investing? Of course, looking at the return, but also looking at the carbon return and in this case, biodiversity return and not owning the land or not buying the land and made their euros and dollars go a lot further. So I want to be conscious of your time and thank you so much for this lesson and sharing your knowledge and your current status. I know you were doubting a bit, like, should I come on? We're so early, but we love to follow things early. We love to chat. check in early and then follow it over time. Because just like with gains and biodiversity gains, you need to be there early, do a good baseline, check in, start building the relationship and then keep coming back and sharing lessons learned, new pilots, first credits are going to be sold at some point, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you so much for coming on early, sharing your work in progress. And of course, thank you for the work you do.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:33

Well, thank you. And thanks for the invitation.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:39

Thanks again and see you next time.