Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast features 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
345 Antonio Nobre - If nature were a bank it would have been saved already
A conversation with Antonio Nobre, Brazilian agronomist by training and world’s leading Earth scientist, serving as the scientific director of the Biotic Pump Greening Group. He has dedicated his career to studying the Amazon's ecological dynamics and its crucial role in climate regulation and is an expert on water cycles, native Indigenous knowledge, and much more.
We talk about how Antonio found his way to the Amazon after being born and raised in São Paulo, how he rebelled against the Green Revolution during his time at agricultural university, and how he discovered the incredible workings of forests—especially rainforests. We delve into their magic: how they thrive on practically barren soils and flourish against all odds. We also explore the overview effect—the transformative experience of seeing Earth from space—and how it often turns astronauts into environmental activists.
This is a two-part conversation with Antonio Nobre.
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Wow, this is a marathon, and for very, very good reasons. We sit down for more than two hours. No worries, we cut it in two pieces with Antonio Nobre, one of the world's leading earth scientists, an expert on flying rivers, biotic pump, water cycles, native indigenous knowledge, the Amazon and a trained agronomist. In this first part, we discuss how Antonio rolled into the Amazon after being born and raised in Sao Paulo, how he rebelled against the green revolution, taught at Ag University, and how he discovered how forests, especially rainforests, really work and how magical they truly are, growing on practically empty soils and thriving. We dive deep into the role of the overview effect, the effect seeing the earth from space that astronauts have, and how it turns most of them into activists. Take a cup of tea, coffee, cacao or whatever you drink, or go on a long walk. This is going to be a marathon, but, believe me, it's worth it. 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 gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg that is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg or find the link below.
Speaker 1:Welcome to another episode today with a Brazilian agronomist by training, but also earth scientist and a scientific director of the Biotic Pump Greening Group. He has dedicated his career to exploring the Amazon's ecological dynamics and its crucial role in climate regulation. Welcome, antonio. Well, thank you. Thank you, koen, I'm really, really looking forward to this one.
Speaker 1:First of all, a shout out to Philippe and Diana, who made this possible and introduced us. Of course, we've been following your work from a distance because we never met in person for a while, and I think there's so many things to explore here. But to start with a personal question you already mentioned or I mentioned, but you mentioned to me before you're an agronomist by training and you came full circle, as you said. But how come you went into that field? How come you spent most of your waking hours focusing on or looking into the magical world of what's happening in and, in this case, also, very importantly, above soil? What was the trigger or what was your path towards looking at the natural world instead of engineering, physics, marketing, like which other career paths, probably easier ones, you could?
Speaker 2:have Well. First of all, I was born in Brazil. I'm descendant half of my family is from Italy, the other half is from Brazil. My father is an ancestral Brazilian lineage and he had a profound love for nature. And when I was growing up we lived in a small property next to the big metropolitan zone of Sao Paulo, but oddly enough it was an island of Atlantic forest, the rainforest that once had stood in the eastern border of Brazil, which is pretty much destroyed now we have about 3% or 4% left. But I was lucky enough to grow up in this small patch and I grew up there. So I went to school nearby and when I grew up further and went to Sao Paulo to study, in the evening and in the nights I slept, with the sounds of owls, you know, and it was silence. So it was quite a contrast my daytime in Sao Paulo, study, and in the evening and night yeah, the glass buildings.
Speaker 2:I'm hearing this and this love for nature. Then, when I had to decide whether I want to go to engineering school like my brothers or else, I felt like I needed some life and engineering and gears mechanical engineer like one of my brothers, and also the other brother was meteorologist I basically thought it was too arid. So I started searching and I found agronomy, Because in agronomy I would have the land like I grew up in the land, I would have life, plants, cultivation, and I would have also machines. I loved mechanics, et cetera. So I went into this University of Sao Paulo it's Luiz de Queiroz is the most regarded agriculture school in Brazil and one of the best in the world and I had this initiation in the arts of manipulating ecosystems for the human sake manipulating ecosystems for the human sake and I had quite a lot of disappointments during these few years when I was in agricultural school. Very quickly I was among the minority there that was like. This was in the 70s, so it was the time of the hippies and also the. We were very quickly doing things alternatively from what we were taught in in in class and we were taught about the Green Revolution. We had to fight the hunger in the world. We have to produce food using technology etc. And in the free hours we were doing some horticulture and some alternative agriculture. So I had this militance, starting that early on, on alternative ways of doing agriculture and then, when I finished, during this few years, I went many times during my vacations to the Amazon.
Speaker 2:I was fascinated with the Amazon. When I was 11 years old, my father we were watching TV. There was a military dictatorship in Brazil and they start opening the big Trans-Amazon Highway that tore through from east to west in the Amazon and one day the general that was the president was inaugurating the first stretch of this road and was in TV and he was standing on the top of a tree stump that was 10 meters of circumference and was smoking and inaugurating this forest stretch of this Trans-Amazon Highway. And I saw my father. My father started crying and basically he started saying they're invading the Amazon, they are going to destroy the forest, they are going to destroy the forest and crying.
Speaker 2:And I was 11 years old. I was incredibly touched by this scene and since then I wanted to go to the Amazon, to go to the Amazon, so it's a parallel thing. Then during the university, I went like seven, eight times to the Amazon. I spent time in the Brazilian Institute for Amazonian Research, INPA, where I would come later and become a scientist there, but I did many studies on nutrient cycling, micro meteorology, hydrology, soils and botany and ecology etc. During this introduction to the Amazon and the first thing I learned in the Amazon was that everything that I was taught in agriculture school was near to useless for understanding the rainforest.
Speaker 1:And this, so let's double click on that you mentioned. You noticed immediately everything you learned. I'm imagining what you learned during the day, not the stuff you were studying in the evenings, but what you learned during the day at ag, school and university was not useful. What are some examples? Example the unlearning you had to do. Example was about soils, for example.
Speaker 2:I got to the soil department in this institute and I spent some two months in internship and the professor there used to be a professor in in my home university in sao paulo and he retired, went to the amazon and was, you know, doing research on amazonian rainforest soils and he first thing he told me said, anton, everything you learned in Sao Paulo, you just throw it out through the window. It doesn't work here because the soils.
Speaker 1:But what's your response when somebody tells you that? And you're young and maybe naive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was a little bit disheartened Okay, disheartened because I thought it was. I put a lot of effort I love the soil part of my curriculum and this was a focus of my undergrad to study soils and chemistry and etc. And when he said that and then took me to the field and we dug trenches and did sampling and brought samples back to the lab and he started showing me what a I'll say, oxidized tropical rainforest soil looked like, why it wasn't like that rain for soil looked like, why it wasn't like that and everything about, for example, exchange, cation, exchange capacity, ctc as we call, which is a measure of how those soils are able to hold nutrients like calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, etc. It was a different story. Soils were different and nonetheless you had this incredibly luxuriant forest on top of a very infertile soil. So he basically said look the soils here in the rainforest. They are a mechanical support and a store of water, not much more.
Speaker 2:Everything that you learned about nutrient you know, and how the soils are important and the clay in the soil etc. Is true for different kind of soils, like volcanic soils and the soils that are in in we find in the rest of brazil, but not in the amazon, for most part. Of course there are exceptions and this was a big like discovery for me and I was disheartened. I said whoa, I took one of the hardest disciplines in agronomy, which was soil genesis. Someone, a professor, was someone who came from a very highly regarded American school Purdue and a very highly regarded american school purdue and and he was famous for being tough and and passing his class was very tough.
Speaker 1:You had to learn everything about mineralogy and soil genesis and you arrive in the amazon and you could throw it out. Yeah, it was not. No, no, no use there. But did it? Did it trigger you to become more interested?
Speaker 2:or did it sort of like, okay, like, it triggered me to start questioning established uh, wisdom. For example, one that had incredible consequences on the fate of the forest was a professor from University Federal Rural do Pará, which is in Belém, in the mouth of the Amazon, and he conducted, years before, a study comparing soil fertility of a patch of pasture with a patch of rainforest, and he found that pasture, the soil profile, had more nutrients than the soil under the forest, and his conclusion was pastures is much better than the forest because the pasture is enriching the soil. This misguided conclusion that he had in his reductionistic study was the alibi, how to say the excuse used for the military, the excuse used for the military to develop the big roads in the Amazon, because they basically say look, the science is telling us that taking the forests out and putting pasture is much better, because then you have fertile soils and then we can do agriculture, and then we can do pasture and cattle raising, et cetera, can do agriculture, and then we can do pasture and cattle raising, etc. So when, when I, when I saw this this is what's in my early, early years in the amazon I thought that, uh, there was something fundamentally wrong in the approach, the whole approach of of the green revolution and um revolution.
Speaker 2:And of course I had already an initiation during my evening time in undergrad, as I told, and I started deepening this and my master's I did in tropical ecology. I studied a cross-section of vegetation, rainforests, the mycorrhizae and the soil as the profile where the roots were going, how the forests were feeding, and the conclusion of my master's dissertation was that the main wealth of the forest was above ground, confirming what this professor had told me earlier, that forest in Amazon for most part is just mechanical support and a store of water. And along many expeditions I made and later I was in charge of the soils lab in the institute where I was hired as a researcher we found, for example, in the northwestern part of the Amazon, near the border to Venezuela and Colombia and Brazil. We found sand dunes under the forest. You know sand dunes and I remember this struck me because I thought sand dunes in a rainforest, sand dunes that had the same shape Sounds like two different worlds, yeah, the same shape as you find in the Sahara or in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 2:You know those same features of aeolic piling of sand and then a forest on top of it. It wasn't just a sand dunes, it was sand dunes under the forest, and this was one. Then, studying water chemistry, For example, getting water from the Rio Negro, which is the main tributary of the Amazon River, and it drains this corner of the Amazon, the very old, geologically old terrain we wanted to measure the electric conductivity of the water, and to do this you use an instrument that actually measures how the electricity flows in the water, and it's a function of how many, how much ions you have dissolved in the water, how many, how much nutrients you have in the water. You know cations, anions, and this instrument you calibrate in the laboratory using distilled water, which should have no cation dissolved.
Speaker 1:Nothing in it. Yeah, pure water, yeah.
Speaker 2:H2O and I went into the Rio Negro and also in some upstreams and I had negative readings. Which basically says negative reading in a conductive emitter means the water that I was measuring in the field was purer, had less nutrients than the distilled water in the lab. Okay, because I calibrated with distilled water.
Speaker 1:So when I got negative, which means the forest takes everything out the forest takes everything possible out. Is it true with other forests as well, or is the Brazilian rainforest?
Speaker 2:a rainforest in general.
Speaker 1:Is that unique?
Speaker 2:No, you will find this anywhere where you have a very abundant water cycle, you have a lot of washing and percolation of water in the soil and where the biome, the ecosystem, has had time to evolve a very, very intricate network of organisms that filter the water. Later on, studying with colleagues in a project that was partially funded by NASA, with colleagues in a project that was partially funded by NASA, is studying the transport of nutrients airborne. There was this discovery that the Sahara Desert exports dust across the Atlantic and part of the year it lands on the Caribbean feeding the coral reefs in the Caribbean, and part of the year it bends south and entering the Amazon through the trade winds and the flying rivers. And these clouds of dust have nutrients. So the the you know sand from the sahara had salts and and oxides of iron, aluminum etc. But also nutrients calcium, potassium, magnesium, etc. Nutrients calcium, potassium, magnesium, etc. And phosphorus especially, which is a limiting nutrient in the Amazon. And as it moved into inland in the Amazon it got washed out. This dust aerosols get washed out from the air and percolating through the forest and hitting the litter layer, let's say this mattress of fungi and roots and all sorts of organisms, and get filtered.
Speaker 2:An experiment done with marked isotopes I'll say tracers years it was like in the 70s. They're using radioactive tracers. Calcium and phosphorus Showed that from leaves marked leaves that had this tracer, radioactive tracer it was 100% sucked up. Nothing leaked into the soil or into the water table or into the stream, wow. And from the water percolating through like rainfall you know marked traced rainfall it was like 99% was taken out were incredibly efficient in you know, picking, almost plucking atoms and molecules from the water, the rainfall percolating, and from the organic matter, and even the organic matter before it decomposed, the nutrients were recovered to the biological milieu.
Speaker 2:So you had a system that was basically reliant on the capital. I heard Anastasia speaking about water as a capital. I can speak now of nutrients as capital. I can't speak now of nutrients as capital. You get this capital of nutrients kept within the live biomass, cycling, cycling and cycling. What happened then? When you cut down the forest and burned it, nitrogen got evaporated and all the the region's nutrients phosphorus, calcium, magnesium, potassium, etc. Become ashes, and ashes got then diluted by water and percolated in the soil in the first year. That's what that professor, the misguided research, showed earlier that when you had fascia. Ah, that was the effect. Yeah, it was basically squandering the nutrient capital that once stood in the wonderful life dealings of the forest. Now it's released as ash.
Speaker 1:But because it wasn't measurable in the soil before his conclusion was that the forest was burned.
Speaker 2:the ashes, yeah, the forest kept everything on board, Basically life-born. All the nutrients were trapped in this wonderful network.
Speaker 1:Is that true of other forests as well? Like most of the life and most of the value most of the activity is above ground than compared to underground.
Speaker 2:Yes, some more, some less. You can use the litter layer as a dial, so to speak. You can read the nutrient status of a system by looking into the little layer, even in tundra. You go in a tundra that is half of the year is frozen and you have permafrost underneath, but you have the speed above it, which is basically accumulation of organic matter accumulation of organic matter.
Speaker 2:It's not decomposed because it's quickly frozen. But if you go to a place where you have a volcanic soil and you have lots of clay, minerals and you have lots of nutrients available, usually you don't have this development of this trapping filtering system as efficient as you do in a rainforest and in the tropics. But you have rainforests in Vancouver, in Canada. You have rainforests in other places which are not necessarily tropical or equatorial, are not necessarily tropical or equatorial. The fact is, ecosystems will evolve to cope with the environment in ways that we hardly understand before a lot of studies. I told you about the sand dunes in the Amazon and later I understood what they were. They were remnants, relics from Gondwana. Gondwana was this big continent connecting South America, Africa, Madagascar, India, Australia and.
Speaker 2:Antarctica. Okay, it was basically two continents, eurasia and Gondwana, and before, 500 million years ago, there were no trees, so sharks are older than trees, the beings in there. You had life, lots of thriving life in the oceans, but the lands were barren. And then, over a course of 400, 500 million years, the cyanobacteria that drove in the oceans started migrating inland and you start getting first aquatic plants, then mosses, then pteridophtha and then etc. Until you got trees. Trees are basically an array of cyanobacteria suspended. It's like a suspended ocean. You have to explain that okay.
Speaker 1:Why is that?
Speaker 2:because it sounds amazing, but I don't really understand what it is well, uh, you know, the green stuff in in any living uh plant is basically a collection of chloroplasts. Chloroplasts is an incredibly sophisticated and evolved organelle or organ of cells, plant cells that are able to do a magic, a chemical magic. What is the magic? Chemical magic what is the magic? Using nothing but uh, light and water, it can get a inert substance carbon dioxide, co2 and uh. Combine with, with uh, a glue taken from water, hydrogen, and it glued CO2, six CO2 glued together produces one molecule of sugar. That's the magic.
Speaker 2:You go from an inorganic substance carbon dioxide using water and light, and you produce sugar. It's a fantastic machine. It's like you have the fantastic chocolate uh factory.
Speaker 2:You know that the the one uh yeah, really well, exactly, uh, you have the fantastic machine of photosynthesis in nature and and this was invented by this unicellular bacteria called cyanobacteria. Actually, now this is pushed back in time, it's like more than 4 billion years ago. It was invented Before that, organisms existing in the ocean. They had to take the to to to manufacture the energy using chemicals in the in the bottom of the sea and they couldn't use the energy in the light sunlight. So the cyanobacteria was the first bacteria who used, invented a way of trapping energy from sunlight which multiplied by thousands the capacity of it to harvest energy from the surface.
Speaker 2:So this is one could develop a thesis or write a full book on investment. I heard anastasia speaking about water investment. I spoke a little bit about nutrients, capital and how the cycling of this capital is allowing ecosystems like the rainforest to thrive and to be luxurious, etc. But you could go back to the origin of life on Earth and you could see this development of economic system from a natural perspective, what we call ecological system, the same oikos root of the word.
Speaker 1:It comes from the same word, yeah the same word. There back in the beginning. We forgot about that recently, but, yeah, it's time we bring that back together. It should be, because they come from the same root.
Speaker 2:Actually, it would basically mean that if we as economists if I am an economist and I look to ecological system, I'm not looking back. And I'm not looking back. I'm looking forward because I am getting to the most sophisticated economic system conceivable, the one that has proved again and over and again over billions of years, is a system that keeps a ball, a stone ball. Earth is a stone ball. Right, it's a rock, 12,000 kilometers diameter, speeding in space at 30 kilometers per second, which is basically 92 times the speed of sound. This is the velocity that Earth, the whole system, moves around the sun I just want, I just want people.
Speaker 1:I want people. Then we go, I want people, just because they're listening, maybe in the car, maybe they're gardening or cooking or cleaning or whatever, just to just to pause for a second and think about that, a rock that's speeding with 92 times the speed of sound through space. That's where we're now. And um, with this magic of turning like and basically in, in, like a very hospitable not a very hospitable place, stable into a place.
Speaker 2:It's a paradise earth is a paradise and I tell you, uh, I know two astronauts. I had this connection. I did my PhD in the US, funded by NASA, and then, when I went back to Brazil, I went to work in the Brazilian Space Institute and I had a connection with this area of science and technology and you know, there this is phenomena called the overview effect, that heat on on astronauts. Usually, as to become an astronaut, it's less and less, but in the past, to become an astronaut, you had to be someone really, really serious and you had to dedicate yourself. The heck you know it was, it was so hard and you had to train yourself. The heck you know it was so hard. And you had to train for 10 years and then go through a funnel, a big funnel. To hop on a rocket was very, very few people were, you know, distinguished with this victory. It was like a victory and they were really hard work people with this victory.
Speaker 2:It was like a victory and they were really hard work people and they're not the kind that you usually see getting marveled with fairies or philosophical or religious in any way, and what is described.
Speaker 2:You can go in Wikipedia and read about the overview effect. It's just amazing. Most of them, most of those humans 600 humans who ever left Earth and I think like 24, who reached the moon and looked at Earth back, and they are instantly converted. Instantly they become people who have this sense of wonder. They basically look back to this shimmering blue-green emerald ball, bright, shining, hanging in nothing. We're hanging in the blackness desert of space and they know, of course, how harsh space is. And they know because if they are not wearing their spacesuit, they are dead in less than a minute. And the spacecraft? Would you like to go to space? No, me, no.
Speaker 1:Would you like to go?
Speaker 2:Oh, I would love this is like a dream I actually do, because you have mentioned a couple of times about in your awake time. I do it when I am not awake.
Speaker 1:You're waking. I've been corrected by a listener. It's waking hours.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to improve my English.
Speaker 1:But anyway would you like to, because now it seems to be becoming more accessible because of some rich billionaires that are pushing the boundaries of space. But from an engineering perspective it's never been more exciting, I think, to go to to see what's possible and maybe what you mentioned before. If, let's say, the 600 people become 6 000 or 60 000, not saying let's go to mars with 1 million people, I think it's it's nonsense. But if all those people have that experience as well, especially people in power and in positions with a lot, saying let's go to Mars with 1 million people, I think it's nonsense. But if all those people have that experience as well, especially people in power and in positions with a lot of, let's say, resources, and have that overview effect suddenly of this ball floating in nothingness, that could be quite interesting from everybody that's on Earth.
Speaker 2:Let's say there is a famous quote by an astronaut. I forgot his name. There is a famous quote by an astronaut I forgot his name. He took a picture from the surface of the moon, looking back to Earth. It was an Earthrise and he was basically wanting to bring a politician, grabbing a politician by the neck and bringing it to the moon and basically saying look what you're doing. You're a son of a bitch, you know with the planet.
Speaker 1:Let's bring Elon, let's bring Jeff Bezos, let's bring Bill Gates, let's bring a few other people.
Speaker 2:Those guys are already captured by this agenda because they are the trendsetters.
Speaker 1:Yeah but they haven't seen it yet. Yeah, but I think, think let's say, their actions haven't reflected that they are part of a bigger system, that they're part of nature that we are very fragile exactly that we, we should take care of.
Speaker 1:So I'm I'm hoping that because they're so not greedy, but because they, from the engineering perspective, they want to go to mars, they want to go, etc, etc. Maybe they go, they look back or they they go into space, at least they look at this, this blue green ball, and are so in awe that they finally start taking it seriously, let's say, the work we need to do here, and not just, oh, it's very fancy to build, uh, whatever moon base or mars space anyway, but it's just a side note. But would you go if you had the possibility?
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely the next day. I probably would not qualify medically because I've had some problems heart et cetera but if I could I would absolutely go. What I have done instead, once it's so hard to qualify to go to the space, is to travel through the imagination. And I tell you, I have had this experience with the Amazon rainforest and being inside the Amazon rainforest, above the Amazon rainforest, and being inside the Amazon rainforest, above the Amazon rainforest, and studying the Amazon rainforest and later in the Space Institute, using satellite imagery and interacting with those guys, inclusive of two astronauts I knew. Two astronauts I knew gave me the projection, the overview effect. I am a beneficiary of the overview effect because when I start thinking about this, I start developing this concept which I am calling now utopia. Earth is a utopia, while what Elon Musk is proposing for Mars is a dystopia, because dystopia is a dystopic reality. You just watched that movie with the famous one. The guy was growing potatoes in Mars. Ah, yeah, With Matt Damon. Matt Damon, yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's engineer the hell out of this. Yeah, exactly, it's a dystopic.
Speaker 2:It's a dystopic. To go to a place like Mars and build a paradise like Earth is already and has been for so many hundreds of millions of years is a complete utopia. You wouldn't conceive how to do this. You know to go a place that you have a poisonous soil the case of Mars you have one hundredth of the atmosphere that Earth has. You have only CO2, basically on the atmosphere. You have minus 63 degrees of atmospheric temperature on the surface average and you have all sorts of incredible challenges and, uh, it's hell. Basically it's hell.
Speaker 2:If you go in one direction, you have mars hell, frozen one. Uh, if you go in the other direction, you have venus hell, a hot one. You know, in venus you get 470 degrees C temperature at the surface, you can melt lead on the rock and you have rainfall of sulfuric acid and you have 100 times the atmospheric pressure as you have on Earth. And so these are our two neighbors, cosmic neighbors. And here we are in this incredible shimmering blue, red, green piece of paradise, and it's kept this way for so long, for billions of years, and that's the only reason why we exist in the first place. And everything that is happening is behind the walls. It's like you go into a very evolved aircraft and you are not aware the aircraft is flying. An aircraft has this incredible number of machines and equipment and systems and sophistication and incredible, incredible things happening behind the walls.
Speaker 1:But no windows.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if you don't have windows, you are sipping a glass of champagne and you are totally, you are totally oblivious what the aircraft is actually doing, and that's earth. Earth is has this incredible, incredible machinery let's put this way I don't like the expression machinery because it it diminishes the, the, the actual complexity that we find but it is doing this and without we ever realizing it. In economics we call this, we call this when something you cannot put in your accounting externality, exactly, it's an externality which we don't process, we don't realize, it's not in our awareness. And I love to make a comparison with our own body, because we, a human body, a human being, here on Earth, we are composed of an incredibly complicated system and until we end up in a hospital, we are not aware, we are totally oblivious about what is happening, for example, in our minds. Our minds basically extracted their activity from a condominium of cells, 37 trillion cells. These are only our own cells, but then there are the bacteria that live inside us, another 50 trillion cells of bacteria, and those are composed in an exquisitely sophisticated and unbelievably marvelous symphony of systems operating together, and they have a capacity called homeostasis, which is a capacity to self-regulate. We self-regulate temperature. If you go in a room that's cold, you start shaking. If you go in a room that's hot, you start sweating. And your body is doing this continuously, all the time. But our minds thrive in this condominium of cells, without knowing it, without realizing it, without being aware. We are not aware that all those systems are operating and because they operate in a miniaturized fashion, they basically deal with atoms and molecules. It's too small, we don't see with atoms and molecules. It's too small, we don't see. And because it is fully automatic, it's the automatic, it's out of mind, out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind. Right, we are completely unaware. That's why we called it externality. We don't have to worry about it, and our brain has developed this.
Speaker 2:When hosting our minds, we operate in a way that we start to ignore our own body. Take a, for example, when you are dedicated, watching a movie or a video or doing something in the internet, you forget to eat, you forget to sleep, you forget even to go to the bathroom. Imagine this Imagine you having a giraffe or a deer or an elephant or rhinoceros that forgets to attend the fundamental demands of the human, of their bodies. It's unthinkable. That's how powerful the brain is.
Speaker 2:Yes, but we have developed this anomalous behavior because we have forgotten our own body. I call them mother body because our body is our mother for our brain. Mother body because our body is our mother for our brain. It produces bloodstream with sugar, with oxygen, with nutrients all sorts, and then it harvests all the garbage from the metabolism of the brain and keep it functioning. So our minds thrive on top of a body which is completely oblivious about it. We are not aware of our own bodies, and this unawareness of our minds to our bodies is equivalent to the unawareness that humanity has about the body of Gaia, the body of Earth. Earth is a living entity, which is probably the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a fractally much larger organization, but it's the same phenomenon. We are ignoring that Earth has all those incredibly complex systems that keep it functional and inhabitable. So, responding to your question, I would love to go to space and I wish 8 billion humans could go to space, because then we would have solved all the problems like we do when actual astronauts go to the space, undergo the overview effect, come back to Earth and become activists. Most of them become activists and basically they say we have to protect Earth. Now, going back to the investment part and money, I used to think of money as a like you having. You know I don't know the name in English that the Chinese invented this artificial fire that you turn on fireworks, yes, uh, to have fireworks, uh, if you use fireworks I really didn't know where you were going with that sentence.
Speaker 2:By the way, I used use uh money as a store of energy, like uh, like powder, you know, like uh, dnt gunpowder, and you can apply it to constructive things. Or you can just blow it in the air, you know, or you can blow on your face, or you can do anything and a lot of. Get a sawmill in the frontiers of the Amazon, a sawmill that today is cutting big logs from the forest, you know, and slicing it into planks and selling it with a very low efficiency, etc. And you can convert this sawmill into a composite industry, a mini industry, like you have in the Scandinavian countries, you know in Sweden, you have in Canada as well. The wood industry in the Scandinavian countries has about 98% efficiency. The wood industry in the tropics is around 16% efficiency. So you are throwing out.
Speaker 1:What makes the difference? Well, it's basically primitiveness.
Speaker 2:In the Scandinavian countries they have developed the technology. They use every part of the log to build composite laminated glue material et cetera, and in the tropics it's basically extractive.
Speaker 1:Are you suggesting a regenerative way of doing a forest? Is possible, it is. Is that an angle?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I call it syntropic silviculture. It's not agriculture but silviculture. We go into degraded land and you use species from the forest to grow and produce fiber and use a short cycle, small diameter hardwoods. You can grow mahogany, you can grow all sorts of hardwoods, tropical hardwoods and then you have a very I'll say, five, six centimeters diameter it's very skinny trees and and you pass it through a machine, you produce, produce a prism, and then you make finger joints and you produce a long one and you glue together and then you produce any kind of glue, laminated wood from silviculture, not from extraction. You leave the forest alone. You protect whatever is left, you restore forests where they have destroyed them, but also you use some land for producing timber and producing this using technology that's available, that's used, that's a common thing. You go into IKEA and you can buy all the wood stuff from the kitchen appliance not kitchen tools, countertops.
Speaker 2:Countertops et cetera from all made using this technology. Why we are sawing 1,000 years old mahogany tree in the rainforest, which is incredibly important for the functioning of the rainforest. We should not be touching that. And so imagine now to do this, you need to be bold, to be creative. Like Elon Musk, like the Chinese, you have to get to first convince yourself that this is a good thing to do.
Speaker 2:That's where Maybe go to space to yeah, exactly Someone invented and built and perfected the rocket so that we can go to space. The same thing we can do for the rainforest or for anywhere in the world we can go. Now we are making solar panels, now we are making electric vehicles. We are making so many things that require investment, many things that require investment. You cannot start any of those things without investment, without having this original capital to start to have this jumpstart, these new industries.
Speaker 2:I gave an example that you can go to the frontiers of destruction in the rainforests in Africa, in South America, in Southeast Asia, and promote an enlightened industry that won't attack the forest anymore and will rely on syntropic silviculture, syntropic restoration, as Anastasia was saying. Why syntropic? Syntropic is basically meaning you are learning with nature. It's the opposite of entropy, it's syntropy, it's the opposite of entropy. That's the magic of life. And then, with this kind of resources, you can go there and reinvent a very destructive industry that these days are very destructive Reinvent Some time ago. I was giving a talk years ago to the Brazilian oil in Petrobras, which is the largest oil company in Brazil Petrobras, which is the largest oil company in Brazil and they were very concerned what was going to happen to them, because they understood that burning fossil fuels will end at some point and that I was basically speaking about protecting life and the Earth's climatic system.
Speaker 2:And they thought that I was against them and I said no, I'm not against you. I think you guys can reinvent yourself. You thrive on an economy of solar energy. They said no, we don't. We thrive on the economy of carbon compounds. And well, carbon compounds were energized 300 million years ago by sunshine.
Speaker 2:You know, photosynth is the same. You just have to take the c out of the equation and go to full, full force to solar. And then someone came after my talk and and came to me and said what should I do? Then I said what do you do? I said I am an expert on drilling. I said, well, drilling. So you cannot do solar energy drilling, but you could certainly do geothermal. Go to East Iceland, go to see what those guys do with geothermal. Geothermal is a frontier area and there are people already involved in startups in geothermal topping, geothermal energies.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it all depends on goodwill.
Speaker 2:If we have goodwill, we can find a way to overcome. Some time ago, people said impossible to stop the rhythm of the economic machine. The global economy cannot stop. I'm I'm sorry, this is paris agreement yeah, paris agreement, but we cannot.
Speaker 2:This is the best we can do. And then kovid came, okay, and 2020. And then all the humanity stopped, all the airplanes were grounded. So it wasn't true that we cannot stop. We can't stop when we have to, and right now, we are in the verge of uh entering uh, multiple organ failure. This is what you in a hospital, when you have intensive care units, someone is really, really bad at the brink of departing.
Speaker 2:Collapse? Yeah, collapse, that's a multiple organ failure and this is happening because we are destroying ecosystems all around the world and besides of polluting the environment, right, and so if someone is a drunk and someone drinks too much alcohol and is polluting his own body, this person has the liver working day and night to you know, disassemble the alcohol and get rid of the toxins and the poison. Now imagine an organism where a person is drinking and the liver is slashed with a chainsaw and taken out. So that's what we're doing with the global, the gaia organism. We, we have a system alive that's self-regulated, that's incredibly sophisticated and unbelievably complicated, and we are chainsaw. We are, we are using chainsaw, destroying the organs that keep the system functional.
Speaker 2:Usually, people don't have an idea of the size of this complexity, and I saw this on the internet and then I went to check, I did some verification calculations about whether this was true and I confirmed that in, in in one cell in our body we have about it's a cell is about 20 microns in in diameter, so really, really tiny, like one-fifth of the diameter of your hair, you know your hair strand and you, if you unwind the DNA that is in our chromosomes in that cell, you have about two meters of DNA, two nanometers width and two meters long and two meters long.
Speaker 2:If you add all this DNA, you know, end to end for a human body, you have a distance for one human body. You add, you produce a strand that is long enough to go back and forth, forth and back to the sun 600 times. You can go to the sun. It's 158 million kilometers to the sun. Now, this is miniaturization that has a cosmic dimension. If you get the humanity and do the same, you get DNA of humanity. And end to end you can go back and forth 30 times to our neighboring galaxy, andromeda, which is 2.5 million light years away.
Speaker 2:And this is all within our small country, our small planet. You know, in our body, and this kind of complexity is completely invisible. We don't see it, we are not aware that we have. That's why the indigenous people they say we have the universe inside our breath, our body, the, the universe inside our breath, our body, the universe is inside our body. Because that's indeed, when you get to this level, my atomic level, you are talking about astronomical distances and it's not just a distance. It's a distance with incredible number of information.
Speaker 1:Intelligence yeah, it's incredible information.
Speaker 2:So imagine the economic system. It goes into fluctuation, right? So sometimes you have production and sometimes depression and it fluctuates and it's very complicated and there are many frailties in the economic system. Now, when you have a situation like happened in 2008,. You had a crash in the stock market, what did the governments of the world did? Most of them not all, but most of them Bailed out the bank. Bailed out the bank. They basically dropped money from a helicopter to the Asians.
Speaker 2:There's this famous phrase that says if nature were a bank, it would have been saved already. I just imagine, for example, one project going the frontiers of the Amazon and convincing some of those guys running a sawmill to change and to produce, to become an industry and no longer a predatory sawmill. One missile, one missile sent by IDF, the Israeli force, into Gaza. One missile would pay for a large project of repurposing sawmills in the Amazon. You know the cost is there.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening all the way to the end of the first part. I hope you are as excited as me about the second half, where we start with how Antonio would invest $1 billion and it has something to do with nature unicorns we go deep into water cycles. The biotic pump and why the biotic pump? Knowledge combined with Centropic Agroforestry is a match made in heaven. Plus so much more, for instance the latest on genome research.
