171 Charles Eisenstein - Money or ecology: investors have to make a choice on which master they serve

A conversation with Charles Eisenstein, writer of Sacred Economics and Climate: A new story, about his fascination for soil and regenerative agriculture, his advice to investors as well as the role of animals in regeneration, his thoughts on our fascination for quick technology fixes, vertical farms and clean lab-grown meat.
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We also discusses what is the role of tech in regen ag and food, why most research on yields and productions is flawed, and what returns we can expect when we truly engage with regeneration at its core.

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/charles-eisenstein.

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Chapters

• 0:30 Why are you doing what you are doing? Why Soil?
• 6:00 What do you say to a tech optimist?
• 13:00 What returns are possible in regen ag and food
• 19:00 Magic wand question
• 20:50 1b dollar question
• 23:11 The role of technology
• 30:37 Veganism and the role of animals in regeneration
• 43:35 Can we and should we put a value on nature
• 50:35 What do you believe is true about regenerative agriculture that others don’t believe to be true?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

A conversation with one of the most fascinating thinkers and writers out there, the writer of The Sacred Economy and Climate, A New Story, about his fascination for soil and regenerative agriculture and what he would do with a billion dollars to invest and his advice and direction to investors and what he sees as the role of animals in regeneration and his thoughts on our fascination for quick technology fixes, vertical farms and clean lab-grown meat. I'm looking at you. But what is the role for tech in regen food and ag? Plus, why most researchers on yields and production is flawed and what returns we can expect when truly engaging with regeneration at its core enjoy 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 time 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 with Charles Eisenstein, the writer of Sacred Economy and Climate as a New Story and many other books. Sacred Economy and Frederic Lallouz really shaped this podcast immensely. We're operating in a gift economy in this podcast because of that book. So I'm very, very happy beyond all the other things that Charles has done to welcome him here on the podcast and explore regenerative agriculture, investing, food, and so much more. Welcome, Charles.

SPEAKER_00: 2:09

Yeah, happy to be here, Koen. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01: 2:12

And I think in Sacred Economy that came out just after After the financial crisis, you already mentioned, I read it quite a few years later, but you already mentioned soil so much. Do you remember when you started to be interested in this, I wouldn't say regeneration movement, but also the soil part specifically? Because I don't think you grew up on a farm or you have very close connections with that. Do you remember when that, I wouldn't say awakening happened, or when that moment happened of like, wow, soil is more

SPEAKER_00: 2:38

than dirt? Yeah, I didn't grow up on a farm, but my father was an avid gardener. And even my grandfather was in the gardening on my other side of the family. So it is, and he was always making organic preparations and raising earthworms, you know, and making compost. So it was in my consciousness from quite an early age. And then in my late teens, I started reading Wendell Berry and other bright lights in the organic movement. So it's been part of my life, you know, since I was a I mean, what could be more fundamental to the human relationship to the world than how we get our food? So yeah, that's the skeleton of the story.

SPEAKER_01: 3:28

And do you feel something has changed? I mean, I've been following, let's say, the soil movement or the agroecology movement for the last 11 years. And I feel there's more energy, more interest, especially the last few years. But I also fear that it's just my bubble that grew. Have you seen more interest in what could be more fundamental than how we eat and what we eat and how that food has been grown? Do you feel as well that there's been at least more interest or more movement there? Or is it from within the bubble simply a growing bubble?

SPEAKER_00: 4:03

There's movement in many directions at once. On the one hand, there are trends toward more and more technology and even the hijacking of organic standards to include hydroponics. which is basically saying, well, we don't even need soil anymore. Even in a lot of greenhouses that aren't fully hydroponic, they're still growing these things in these mediums that are not really even soil. Soil cannot be under perfect control. So really coming into a relationship with soil means participating in a process larger than ourselves. That's another aspect of the word organic. Originally it refers to organic molecules carbon based molecules in the soil but the word organic also connotes organs so understanding soil as an organism with organs but also understanding soil as an organ itself and maybe humans as another organ and the various species that live in an ecosystem as another organ so it's more of a really like true organic agriculture understands this organismic principle and understands the principle of participation instead of full control. So that's one direction that's happening, you know, that toward more technology away from the soil, which is a trend thousands of years in the making. You know, the highest status in society is usually the person who is not getting his hands in the soil. It's the priest. It's the king. It's the scientist. It's the financial...

SPEAKER_01: 5:48

Which sort of started with the invention of agriculture. Before that, probably there were no people that didn't get their hands dirty because we all participated.

SPEAKER_00: 5:59

Right. Ironically enough, yes. But then we have a movement in the other direction that started, I mean, maybe back in the 1960s with the back to the land movement, which is also a back to the soil movement, which is also a cultural re-embracing and return to our embeddedness and our inclusivity with the rest of life. So in agriculture, as you know very well, there's a movement toward investing in soil, understanding that the more alive the soil is, the more alive we are, and the richer the soil, the richer the human being. So that's a movement in the other direction, and it seems like they're both happening at the same time.

SPEAKER_01: 6:45

Yeah, and And imagine we're doing this like in a theater, which hopefully happens soon again. I mean, and there's like a room full of investors or people working in the finance sector. And I think many of them have been, I wouldn't say lured into, but definitely been very interested and a lot of money and energy has flown into the technology side of things. And over the last many, many years, especially lately, like if you compare even what alternative meats or clean meat or lab grown meat or whatever we want to call it has raised in terms of attention and does money compared to life-based forms of agriculture. What would we tell them in terms of what would we say on stage to sort of diffuse our technology will save us or technology will just fix this agriculture problem and then climate, et cetera. What do you normally say to people that, yeah, but we'll just figure out a technology fix for this instead of saying like, look, it's take a step back. This is part of life and agriculture and soil is sort of reflecting on of how we treat that organ, which is our skin, basically, or the skin of the earth. What is your normal response to the technology will fix it all or will save us all, which I think many people would like to believe and thus invest, maybe listening to this as well, invest money into?

SPEAKER_00: 7:59

Yeah. It would be very convenient and comforting if technology were the answer, because then we wouldn't really have to change our ways. We would just let the scientists do it, come up with the next gee whiz invention, and the problem is solved. That, of course, ignores the centuries long history of technology creating new problems that were unanticipated that must be met with even more technology. technology and more technology and more technology. So it becomes an addiction. Once you go down that path, you depend, you become dependent on the technology. Once you start fertilizing crops with synthetic fertilizers, once you start relying on weed killers, once the soil is degraded, then you depend on those inputs even to maintain a normal you know what had been normal

SPEAKER_01: 9:07

so it's an addiction yeah it's an addiction to keep up and you probably need more

SPEAKER_00: 9:11

right higher and higher dose so the phenomenon of unintended consequences where technology creates even more problems that need to be met with more technology that is inevitable because technology and this scientific reductionistic approach to any especially agriculture, it always leaves something out. It leaves out, because science is based on only the things we can measure. So if there's anything important that we don't measure or can't measure, then it's going to cause problems. It gets neglected. It gets destroyed. It causes problems in the future.

SPEAKER_01: 9:54

Biodiversity plus a million other things are like, ah, yeah, we forgot about the insects. And we forgot about this. And we forgot about it. Or we didn't see it until it disappeared.

SPEAKER_00: 10:03

50 years ago, soil scientists thought that soil was a collection of chemicals and that if the soil wasn't fertile, that means that you could add, all you have to do is add whatever is lacking and it would be fertile. Like a

SPEAKER_01: 10:18

growth medium, basically. Yeah, it was a neutral thing that you...

SPEAKER_00: 10:22

Right. So they didn't understand the importance of the soil microbiome. They didn't understand the importance of the mycelial networks. They didn't understand the importance That was left out of the calculations. So if we're going to rely on technology to solve our problems, we have to ask, well, what are we leaving out of our calculations now? What is important that we don't know is important.

SPEAKER_01: 10:51

As we can probably assume that we don't know most of it, we sort of have to assume that we cannot go for the easy fixes or the on paper easy fixes, because it always sounds easy on paper. And then 20, 30, 10 year or two years down the line, we noticed that actually we created more issues with that. Then the natural, I mean, there are two, then maybe somebody in this amazing theater we're in, somebody raises their hand and say, yeah, Charles, it all sounds nice and funny. But with this life approach and the original work etc how we're going to feed the world I get the question a lot from especially people that haven't visited a farm recently but how do we like there are all these numbers and we have to feed 10 million 10 billion people and etc etc etc you have an amazing short which I will definitely put in the show notes as well a short audio clip I think it's seven minutes where you talk a bit about the the history of these models of this research on feeding the planet and the question I think the title is literally can we feed the world regeneratively but if you had to summarize that or so actually we can take easily seven minutes for that what what do you normally say when people say yeah how do we feed the world with this stuff it sounds great very very it sounds even a bit naive and it sounds like a place that would like to be these type of farms etc or these type of landscapes let's make it a bit broader but but can we feed the world with that

SPEAKER_00: 12:07

right so this is yeah i've gotten this criticism before it's very privileged of you to think that we could all eat organic agriculture but the world's poor can't do that we have to maximize production to feed so how bad of you

SPEAKER_01: 12:18

yeah yeah you're starving people

SPEAKER_00: 12:20

basically yeah so so that That critique is really based, I'm sorry to say it, but it's based on ignorance. And it's based on faulty models. It's based on a very selective historical understanding. In fact, when organic or regenerative agriculture is done properly, it can produce a lot more food than monocrop agriculture. But it depends on how you do the comparison. So if you're going to compare Organic row crops with conventional row crops and hold everything else constant, then the conventional is going to outperform the organic, especially if you're just taking two blank fields and you're controlling all the variables except one. Do you use pesticides on this and not on that? That's just one variable. But organic agriculture isn't like that. You can't hold variables constant if you're really in the true spirit of it. growing practices in every place will be unique to that place. So you can't really do side by side comparisons like that. for organic and regenerative agriculture to reach its potential in terms of yield, that requires years and decades of building soil, of learning the land, of learning what works in that microclimate, of building a relationship.

SPEAKER_01: 13:49

And building that microclimate even, from scratch in many cases, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 13:52

Right, so if you did that, if you somehow could do a study where you compare that true organic practice over 30 years to conventional practices over 30 years, you get very different results. But even without doing that, there's still an awful lot of data that shows that small, diverse farms can outperform large farms. But it depends on the crops, too. If you're going to say, well, we're going to only measure commodity crops, then the difference is not you know, it's not so clear then that organic outperforms. But even there, I

SPEAKER_01: 14:33

think we see people that are outperforming. And I mean, of course, if you choose commodity crops, I mean, choose in some case you don't, but you don't choose, you're forced into or the circumstances, but then you also have to be part of the commodity system after, which means you're a price taker and which probably means very low margins, if margins at all, which means leads to a whole other array of issues. And then I would imagine another question coming up, like, okay, what about the returns like are we and I hear that a lot in regenerative agriculture my response usually is we have extracted so much from these ecosystems that there are potential returns there are absolute returns to be made depending how you do it what you do obviously it's not going to be 25% per year or whatever crazy amount we can get in certain let's say stock market operations or casinos or bats we place in other places but there is a debt to pay there is a risk restoration needed there's a there There's a valley there, and we don't know how deep it is. It depends on the place, how deep it is. I think an old-grown forest has like 3% growth. Maybe that's what we can harvest, or maybe we can't. What is your answer on the returns?

SPEAKER_00: 15:44

The question of returns is related to another issue that I wanted to bring into the yield question, which is the people making these projections about world population and Can we feed the world? They take certain trends for granted that are actually part of the problem. One of those is urbanization. And they understand it as a good thing to... It's an advance. It's a development, a positive development if people are leaving the land, going to the cities and gigantic tractors and machines and robots even are doing the agriculture because it's freeing people from labor. If we actually do want to have a regenerative system and heal the planet, more people have to go onto the land. Because as I said before, it's a relationship. To do it really well, you have to be in a personal relationship with the land. You cannot be on your

SPEAKER_01: 16:47

combine two meters above the ground for 2,000 hectares.

SPEAKER_00: 16:52

Right. So an ideal agricultural system would have, like today in America, 1% of the population is engaged in agriculture In 1950, it was 10%. In 1850, it was something like 70% or 70%. So I think it should probably go back to 10%. And that's actually- Imagine the

SPEAKER_01: 17:18

life on a place if we go from one to 10, which is a 10X, the amount of people in rural communities and schools and systems, and the amount of life that would be in the countryside would be amazing.

SPEAKER_00: 17:30

Yeah. And a lot of people want to do that anyway. Like so many young people would love to go back into agriculture, but it's pretty hard because of the economic barriers. But that's what we need to do. However, labor is expensive. And if you want to really get high returns from agriculture, you have to do what Bill Gates is doing. You have to consolidate vast mosaics of independent, small subsystem farms, like in Africa. This is one thing that the Gates Foundation is doing. You have to consolidate them into gigantic plantations, mechanized plantations, and get rid of all the people and use GMO seeds and insecticides, herbicides, pesticides, et cetera, et cetera. And then you can actually make a lot higher return. At some point, if you are a funder or an investor and you care about the earth, you you're going to have to make a choice at some point what you care about more, the return financially or the return ecologically. And there are situations where you can have some of both, but at some point you have to decide what master do I serve? What do I care about the most? What am I willing to sacrifice for? Because Regenerative agriculture, okay, there's always exceptions. There's brilliant farmers out there who are making lots of money, much more than their neighbors. They're doing really well. There's those opportunities still. But system-wide, you're not going to make 20% returns in this field for very long and really stay true to the purpose.

SPEAKER_01: 19:22

Yeah, there's an important tension there. We had a conversation with Mark Lewis, one of the people that runs Trailhead Capital, and they proudly claim hunting for unicorns in regeneration. And I asked him, is there a tension between that and regeneration? He said, absolutely, but we've done so much damage that we feel or we see that for a short period of time, there might be outsized returns possible. And then hopefully they're not possible anymore because we've done so much restoration that it sort of starts to flow to a more old-grown forest type of return, which is a few percent maybe, and not every year. And that's okay. And that's enough. So I think we should be very, very aware that everybody promising you crazy returns and claiming regeneration in the same sentence, I would ask a lot of questions about. Because there is somebody's paying and somebody's being extracted and somebody's being squeezed. And somebody could be earth, soil, people, other organisms, whatever we choose, but it's going to be extractive somehow, somewhere. Yes. Although we could-

SPEAKER_00: 20:23

we could on a policy level change the playing field. So if we internalize- So what would you do?

SPEAKER_01: 20:28

I mean, this is a question I'd love to ask, the magic wand question. What would you change in ag and food or in general if you had one, let's keep it in ag and food, if you had one magic power, only one wish, what would you change?

SPEAKER_00: 20:40

I'm not going to limit it to one. There's two, actually, that I would like to say. Everybody always

SPEAKER_01: 20:44

does that. It's really what I say, one only. Yeah, but I would do two or three.

SPEAKER_00: 20:48

Yeah, well, one would be to internalize some of the costs that are externalized onto the ecosystem and make it expensive to deplete groundwater, make it expensive to cause soil erosion, like levy some kind of a fee on any practices that do those things so that all of a sudden regenerative practices become a lot more lucrative. And then you're going to see the investment move into that area. So we don't have to just rely on the occasional unicorn or on the altruism of investors who, you know, they're under their pressure to make a return as well. It's not like they're greedy necessarily. Maybe they are, you know, heading a pension fund or something like that. So, you know, we can't make things black and white like this. And in fact, trying to blame greed for our problems is the same mindset as trying to find the weed or the insect that is causing all the damage. Find the one thing to denounce and to attack. If only

SPEAKER_01: 21:56

that would disappear, then we would be fine.

SPEAKER_00: 22:00

So we can change the playing field. And that's something that has to happen on a policy level. And then, you know, if I had... a billion dollars, say, I would, I mean, I would, I'd be thinking more in terms of philanthropy, but it might work through an investment model too. I would invest in young farmers, get them on the land. I guess.

SPEAKER_01: 22:30

Like getting them on the land, meaning you would buy, you would be the regenerative Bill Gates, quote unquote, like you would buy it, hold it, probably not, no speculation. You would never sell it. I'm imagining. And then getting young farmers on it to, to do what they do best and probably they don't have the huge lease necessity they would do very different farming practices because they can do it

SPEAKER_00: 22:52

yeah buy the land then maybe give it to them with a below market rate mortgage conditioned on them doing regenerative practices and have some kind of accountability that is not only based on metrics, but is based on some community function where there's a community of regenerative farmers that when they inspect each other's farms, it's from the perspective of, I'm going to help you be an even better farmer. And so there's a network of trust that is built that has financial backing that say, I'm investing in you to help our society make this transition. So you're not going to be under as much pressure to convert your soil into money, which is, despite the best intentions, that's what happens to a lot of farmers. So they need a bulwark to shield them, to some extent at least, from those market forces. And it's not perfect, but yeah, we've got to invest in... So it could be buying land, as I just said, or it could be, hey, we're going to support you for$20,000 a year for the next five years for you to learn your trade. And we're going to maybe support apprenticeship programs at regenerative farms. There's so many things that we could do if we turned our money that way. And some of them would be philanthropic and some might be investments. Some might be up to governments to do things like that. But that's kind of the way I think about it.

SPEAKER_01: 24:37

And it really seems like the focus you would take would be on literally getting more people on the land, getting more people engaged with the land. And I think it's a very valid one as agriculture seems the best gateway into a lot of other very, very tough questions we need to ask ourselves. But that relationship with land and food is probably the best entry point there. And what would you then say to this room of investors? Okay, we support young farmers and that might be part of your portfolio. What is then the role? I say, yeah, but what about technology? What are I'm looking at some robot companies, et cetera. What would you give them as questions to ask? Because there is a role for technology, but we need to be very selective. How would you assess technology companies or technologies, let's say, in regeneration to help the young people on the farm? Because there might be very interesting technologies we can use. What would you ask those technology companies to flush out the ones that are just looking at, let's replace everybody with robots, to the ones that are actually relevant for regeneration or could be relevant for regeneration, or don't you see a role for technology, let's say, at all?

SPEAKER_00: 26:38

I'm just thinking there's robots now that pick strawberries, which is very hard labor. My brother is a farmer. I've spent mornings picking strawberries. It's hard on your back. It's hard work. I don't think anybody should be picking strawberries all day for an entire strawberry season. It's drudgery. As long as we have a system that requires that we have enormous strawberry farms you know rows and rows of strawberries then yeah robots are an improvement over human labor but if you're growing them in the most beautiful possible way then for one thing you can't have a large enough field of strawberries to justify a robot it would just be cost prohibitive it would be a poor investment secondly if you don't spend at least a little time on your hands and knees feeling the soil then you're not actually going to be the best farmer possible. I was quite inspired by Alan Savory, the regenerative pioneer rancher. He says he walks his land barefoot. The only way that he can tell exactly where to move the herds is through his feet because he can feel the soil. He can feel the land in a different way that way. so that's maybe more of a distant vision but robots you know might have some role in transition but you know I mean I just don't feel that excited about them I don't think that they're like really what you have to look at if you are an investor who cares about the future and you have a vision for what the future should look like then you have to bring your resource to bear you have a series of choices do I um serve that future or don't I? And every investment opportunity that comes up, you can ask, is that a step toward the future I want to see or is that a step away from it? Now, some people might think that a future of these clean, shiny robots doing all the work while we're sitting in front of our computers having digital experiences is the best possible future. I do not want that future. My beautiful future has a mosaic of small farms and gardens and you know 10% of the people are farmers and 50% or more are gardeners and it's a varied landscape and it's biodiverse and yeah we got our hands in the soil more it's not bad to get dirty and so this requires reversing a lot of deep cultural prejudices that go back to ancient times you know where the peasant the lowest on the totem pole was the dirty one and yeah like we want to go back to connection to earth and that change in value in values undergirds any kind of positive change we want in our relationship to nature and to soil we have to valorize that profession valorize being in the soil, being of the earth and in the earth. So when it comes to robotics or these gigantic hydroponics factories that you have in the Netherlands. I'm sorry for that. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of investment potential there. You can make a lot of money that way. But is that a step toward the future that you really want to see?

SPEAKER_01: 30:31

And you brought an interesting point up there on connecting back to soil and nature. And what do you see? Because I'm imagining somebody else would raise their hand in a theater. And you brought up Alan Savory, who was actually one of the reasons I rolled into the space 12 years ago now, because I saw the potential of holistic management. And even before he did his TED Talk, I will put the links below for anybody who didn't see that yet or didn't go deep into that. What do you see in this whole debate on the role of animals in landscapes, in regeneration. I feel there's an enormous amount of debate on it and very easily getting polarized. How do you normally move in that space? Because you bring up Ellen Savory, you bring up the relationship to animals and to the rest of the world and to nature around us. How do you normally move in that space of where it really easily gets, what do you want to say, quite nasty in a discussion around vegan versus this, versus that, et cetera, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00: 31:33

Yeah, I've been interested in Alan Savory for quite a while. I've interacted with him a couple of times and I'm quite humbled by the man.

SPEAKER_01: 31:43

I've had the great pleasure to ask him one question once on groundswell, which was, I wouldn't say a highlight of me, but still, he fully said the$1 billion question. I think he said everything on lobbying and great marketing to really reach the people that are in the driver's seat. I'm butchering his answer now, but that was his main answer. Like we need to change the narrative. Sorry, but go

SPEAKER_00: 32:06

ahead. He impresses me as a very humble man. So I listened to humble people. So I've mentioned him before in books and stuff. And then people send me George Monbiot's article. So it was like, oh, you know, Savory's been debunked, you know, here. And I thought that article was really quite shoddy and not very thorough and had a lot of tenuous and fallacious arguments. And I was not impressed by it. And it just seemed very ideological. And, you know, part of our culture's... dysfunction comes through a escapism and a denial of death and and a denial of ourselves as part of nature uh and uh you would

SPEAKER_01: 33:01

see them as the same thing like we have to accept

SPEAKER_00: 33:03

we're part of nature and that's like we're trying to transcend that's right like we're trying to transcend nature and ultimately this is the ultimate goal of the technological program is to transcend death itself and in in some of these futurist visions you know we upload our consciousness into computers Where we have constant genetic and nanotechnology interventions in our bodies and we achieve immortality, we become no longer natural. So part of that, and we see in our culture in the West, a denial of death in so many ways. We hardly ever see a corpse, for example, in modern society. And old people are shunted into these warehouses, you know, these nobles. nursing homes. Until they die. And we have a fetish for youth. So all this denial of death that suggests that we can somehow exit the cycle of nature. So I think that that aspiration to transcend nature is behind... The move towards synthetic food and hydroponically grown food and robot grown food. It's also, it infiltrates the ideologies around veganism to some extent as well. And, you know, that... And I've got nothing against vegans. I wrote a book on this issue as well, actually, called The Yoga of Eating. It's about deep self-trust and what does the body guide you toward. So if it guides you toward veganism, then trust that. But I think that, see, and it depends on the place, but generally speaking, animals are really important to make the land into a whole organism. I don't know of any ecosystem that doesn't have animals on Earth. So the question then is, what are the right animals and how to incorporate them? And that requires deep familiarity with the land. It's funny you say

SPEAKER_01: 36:06

incorporate there, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 36:08

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's many, you know, the kind of grazing that Alan Savory does works in some places and maybe not others. So it can't be, it shouldn't become a dogma in and of itself. But yeah, there's so many people using animals to heal land that you can't just ignore that on ideological grounds and say, well, that must be bad because, you know, meat, eating meat is bad. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 36:36

And also there, I think, where we started with this as well, it's very cherry picking on the research side. I mean, the amount of debunking Ellen Savory and all of that, if you look into that, it's... Yeah, just the fact that there are no good peer-reviewed papers doesn't mean it's not true. I think that's for many things, but the fact that hundreds of thousands of farmers are using, or livestock farmers, or ranchers, or whatever you are, are using methods or processes similar and having amazing results should count for something. And most farmers I know, at some point when they're in their regenerative journey, they will integrate animals to a certain extent, and they never go back. It's not the other way, which is very interesting. There happens to be a role of animals. And I think the second question is, should we eat them or not? That depends on you, et cetera. But there is definitely a role in regeneration. And obviously, that role is not inside a CAFO operation being shoved grain down your throat. I mean, that's actually very, very clear. That's the last thing we should do. But it's very interesting how that debate gets incredibly heated in two and a half seconds, basically. And even bringing up Ellen Savory triggers a lot of things in people. I wonder where what that is, what's the, I mean, many debates get heated these days, but this is one that, of course, close to us because we talk about food and regeneration and agriculture constantly, but the role of animals really brings out a very, very strong reaction that the role of pesticides, for instance, doesn't, or Roundup or GMOs or highly processed food or whatever you want to call it. Do you have an idea? Is that that fear of death that triggers that? Or what do you think why it gets, why it hits such a nerve when we talk about the role of animals.

SPEAKER_00: 38:24

I mean, this gets into all kinds of psychology and I don't want to oversimplify it. I think people get upset and are highly committed to veganism for many reasons. So I don't want to overgeneralize. This is going to veer way off topic, but I think maybe just really briefly, one thing that happens is that in our society, we are so cut off from our relationships to each other, from community, from place. We don't really know who we are. Our identity is very tenuous. And we also carry a wound of self-rejection, which is part of the war on nature. It becomes a war on ourselves. So we have a very strong desire to know ourselves as good, as moral, as virtuous, as one of the good guys. So...

SPEAKER_01: 39:19

rest is bad yeah or the others are etc yeah

SPEAKER_00: 39:22

right right and so one way to do that and to gain an identity is to have a you know a dietary practice that says that not only are you being healthy but you're being ethical you're being a good person you're raising your vibration like and you get reinforced in that by people around you um and and so you know Some vegans, especially the ones who are very moralistic and judgmental, are perhaps motivated by that to some extent, but usually not all. Generally, they really care about animals, too, and it hurts them to see the suffering of animals. And then, of course, there are the ecological arguments, which I think are hard to sustain when you're talking about really regenerative practices. Um, Yeah, and so partly there's like this idea that if only we didn't practice animal agriculture, suffering of animals could be avoided. But, you know, my niece raises rabbits. Which is not easy,

SPEAKER_01: 40:30

by the way.

SPEAKER_00: 40:32

Yeah, she loves her rabbits. She thinks they're really cute and stuff, yet she's able to slaughter them and butcher them, you know, and make hats out of the skins, you know, and eat and sell the meat. Those rabbits make a lot of babies. It's not like if they were in nature, all of the babies would have a full rabbit life and grow up to be a rabbit mommy. If a rabbit has several litters, a mother rabbit could have 50 babies or more in her lifetime. On average, two of them make it to reproduction. Otherwise, the population in nature would explode. So death is happening all the time. And it's only when we are boxed off and distanced through technology, through our screens, if we are sheltered from actual biology, only then can we imagine that death suffering is not happening all the time. Pain and suffering and death is not happening all the time in nature. Now, actually though, the baby rabbits who are being devoured, I mean, most of the animals in nature that die are babies. It is a high-risk proposition to be a baby rabbit or a tadpole or a baby anything in nature. Most of them are babies. And you know what, though? Most of their lives are in joy, right? Usually it's only a few moments of intense stress and gruesome death, even if they are the ones who get eaten. So if we're really going to rejoin nature, that's what we can look to as a goal. That it's not that we will banish death in animals or ourselves, but it's that their lives should be good lives. They should live well. They should... not live a life of confinement and they should be able to contribute their gifts to the other beings around them. Like, like, and that's, that's, that's how you integrate animals into a regenerative system. Like I have some chickens in my backyard, you know, and I'm just learning. I haven't raised them for that long, but I'm learning, you know, they like go and scratch up everything and I can use that to destroy weeds that are getting started in this patch. If I move the chickens here, Like I'm just starting to figure out how to use, how to incorporate them into a system. So yeah, those are just some of my thoughts on this issue. I hesitate to bring them out in this format because it's, as you said, it's really, really touchy and I don't want to seem as if I'm saying all vegans are dogmatic because they're actually compensating for their loss of identity and self-worth in like, you know, that's just one of the things. I won't

SPEAKER_01: 43:40

make that a title, don't worry. Yeah, no, but it's, it's very, it's very interesting to, to explore. I think that, and I think for many, for many people in general, I think for many investors, for many It would be really good to spend some long quality time on, let's say, highly diverse farms or highly alive farms, just to see how difficult it is, challenges, opportunities, the beauty, the death, the destruction, all of it, what comes to growing your food, because most of the food we eat comes from the soil. A tiny bit comes from the oceans. And also there, we need a lot of regeneration. But before we start making fancy PowerPoint presentations about the role of alternatives meat, et cetera, to spend a good quantity of time and quality of time being humble and listen on farms. And yeah, it is a bit more, it's very complex, very interesting, very fascinating, very rough, and not easy to grow the food we need or we like to eat. And then on another touchy subject, I see a lot of people now trying to come up with putting a value on nature. And you've spoken about that in the past as well. I actually asked Satish Kumar as well, like, what do you think about the carbon credit markets or the biodiversity market as it's sort of starting to pop up. And he simply said, yeah, I don't think it's the end game. And he mentioned somewhere in the range of if we manage to use it to create significant resources to restore a lot of things, it's OK as long as we realize we can never measure the whole thing. It's impossible to measure nature. It's impossible to measure biodiversity. Impossible. We measure a piece of it. And we don't know the full depth of that. What do you, because a lot of the extractive returns we've gotten over the last decades and centuries are because we pulled in more into the money system. We put more of nature into the money system. What are your hopes and fears, let's say, of this putting value on nature movement that is sort of happening? If we just quantify it, then we'll manage it better. What do you normally think about that? Or what are the first thoughts? that bubble up in this, another massive rabbit hole, obviously.

SPEAKER_00: 46:33

Yeah, I agree with Satish about this, that maybe as a temporary expedient, you know, it can be useful.

SPEAKER_01: 46:40

Transition.

SPEAKER_00: 46:40

Yeah, to put a value on things that had zero value before, as long as we understand that whatever value we put on it is less than its true value, because you cannot reduce the sacred to a number, right? And this isn't just a philosophical objection. It's very practical. Because if you put, say... the value, put a number on it, put a billion dollars on the value of a certain forest or an estuary. Well, if you say that it's worth a billion dollars in ecosystem services, then you are agreeing that if you could make$2 billion by digging the whole thing up and putting a lithium mine there, that you should do it. If you're trying to internalize costs with policy and say, okay, you can do whatever you want in the land, but it's worth a billion dollars in ecosystem services, so you're going to have to pay a billion dollars fee. It's better than paying no fee. But Elon Musk comes in there and he's like, oh,$2 billion worth of lithium here. Let's do it. And yeah, that$1 billion is an expense. So it undervalues the– like how can– and the base assumption is that Earth itself– is worth something x yeah is worth x like what what like how do you ultimately calculate the monetary value of ecosystem services if you're not like what's the basis of that calculation it's it's because that would

SPEAKER_01: 48:29

suggest that we can just cut everything down and move to mars and then because that was the so what would you then do is say okay we currently can estimate it's a billion dollars with our current and we know it's way more we don't we're not even going to say 100 x because we just don't know but that's what we currently can imagine is this or how would we then how would we then frame it

SPEAKER_00: 48:49

in that transition period global gdp like the gross world product is about uh about 100 trillion dollars um annually okay uh give or take so at a normal discount rate, you could say that the value of the earth is something like, you know,$5 quadrillion or$10 quadrillion, something like that. So that's obviously absurd. If aliens came and said, we're going to make you a deal. Here's$20 quadrillion. Okay. And we're going to buy Earth from you. And we're going to drain the oceans. And we're going to destroy the

SPEAKER_01: 49:40

whole place. Our shareholders say we should do it. Yeah. We have to seriously consider that offer.

SPEAKER_00: 49:45

So obviously, Earth is not worth any amount. And therefore, anything that is an integral part of Earth is also not worth any amount, any finite amount. So we have to really understand the limits of this way of thinking. It might have... useful expedient applications, but we have to feed something else into our collective and personal decision-making besides numbers. We have to have some other way to guide and govern economic, industrial, technological activity. can't just be by the numbers. We have to incorporate other values besides value.

SPEAKER_01: 50:29

Because the numbers, you can make the numbers tell everything as well. Like it's very easy to... Yeah. Yeah. Spreadsheet economics, especially agriculture is not the real deal. So where, and I love to ask this question, not always at the end, but in this case, I want to be conscious of your time as well. Where do you, I'm imagining you don't go, maybe not with your chickens and interest in Ellen Savory, but go to a lot of region at conferences, let's say, or region ag and food conferences. But when you meet people that are interested in regeneration or regenerative agriculture and food, where do you see that you think differently? Where are you contrarian? What do you believe to be true? And this question definitely is inspired by John Kemp. What do you believe to be true about regenerative agriculture that others don't? There are many things. What is the main one that pops up now when I ask this question?

SPEAKER_00: 51:23

Yeah, regenerative ag conferences are like, I have the feeling like, yeah, these are my people. I feel very at home in them. And it's not that I have any serious disagreements I'm fascinated by all the, especially the cutting edge technology. So we can talk about technology in many ways.

SPEAKER_01: 51:45

So what is the technology that fascinates you the most at the moment? I

SPEAKER_00: 51:48

guess it's one that's the most, but for example, the guys doing like the Korean natural farming stuff with all of the fermentations, you know, and like developing ways to use bacteria and microorganisms to enhance the aliveness and productivity of a farm. Like that's fascinating. It's fascinating. I mean, what would our agricultural system be like if we poured the billions of dollars into researching that and supporting young researchers doing that, that we now put into making GMO seeds?

SPEAKER_01: 52:22

And yet you said a billion dollars. You said, let's put young people on the land. You could also put it on the technology, but this kind of technology side,

SPEAKER_00: 52:30

which maybe has a bigger

SPEAKER_01: 52:32

multiple

SPEAKER_00: 52:33

effect. Yeah, and there's other technologies. that are maybe farther out there, there's a whole biodynamic system. There's ancient and indigenous understandings of how to plant with the moon or astrological things. There's- Which are

SPEAKER_01: 52:51

surprisingly practical in, I mean, if you look at large scale biodynamic farming, yeah, they've been following that for very, very proven, very, very deep into the right we research community, let's say, not the general agriculture university ones. They always think that these biodynamic people are the weirdos in the corner. But it's been working at scale for a long time. This is not something that we recently stumbled upon or something. I would say it's quite established in the right, let's say, the right circles. Yeah, but it's something that people look at, especially like, oh, that's weird. And it's

SPEAKER_00: 53:31

like, yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 53:32

but look at the underlying and they're way weirder stuff than that. actually.

SPEAKER_00: 53:36

Yeah. There's lots of weird, there's lots of weird stuff. There's people using like magnetic rails and planting between those. There's people using, you know, Victor Schauberger water technologies, you know, where they're, they're making sure the water irrigation water is going through natural channels. And like, I mean, there's all the water retention. Some of this stuff is out there and outside the bounds of acceptable science. And some of it is within the bounds of acceptable science. So if I'm, you know, at all a contrarian, I don't have that role in regenerative circles, but I'm more of like advocating, yeah, let's push the boundaries even further because miracles of healing and productivity are possible when we tap into these other realms of technology. I

SPEAKER_01: 54:25

think it's a great place to end this conversation. I think it was quite a few rabbit holes, but a lot of other ones that we could talk for absolute hours about, but to the push to push our boundaries and to push into the unknown or the known we already know it but let's say it has to come into the realm of acceptance is I think a very good place to end I want to thank you Charles so much for your time this morning you have a very busy schedule and I thank you so much for taking the time to share some of your thoughts with us today

SPEAKER_00: 54:58

yeah it was my pleasure

SPEAKER_01: 55:02

thanks Thanks again and see you next time.