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
368 Béla Hatvany - Born in 1938, now thinking AI, enoughness, precision fermentation and building a care economy
A conversation with Béla Hatvany, pioneering entrepreneur in the automation of libraries and the information industry, born in 1938, turned into angel investor and philanthropist, on his journey, what’s enough, the role of AI and EI (empathetic intelligence), and the potential of precision fermentation.
Growing up during WWII with bombs literally blowing through his window, Bela's early anger about the state of the world transformed into action after a pivotal moment of self-reflection. This led him to create businesses with what he calls "six bottom lines" - serving employees, investors, suppliers, clients, communities, and Earth in balance. His approach included substantial employee ownership and prioritizing collective happiness over personal gain. Throughout, he emphasizes that "collaboration creates superabundance while competition creates artificial scarcity."
More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/bela-hatvany.
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In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show 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. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.
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I'm going to die. I won't even be able to take my skin with me. So what the hell am I doing? Worrying about money, and I discovered that whatever I did, I kept on making more money, and so I just had to get rid of the stuff. I lived through the Blitz and the war ended when I was about seven, and then I read Johnny von Neumann's book about the computer and the brain in the 50s and it became obvious to me that computers were going to become very important. Inconceivable the changes I've seen since I went into electronics in 56 to what's happening now. Just every byte was two feet long, eight inches wide and a foot high and it consumed a kilowatt of energy. It was 16 big incandescent tubes. Clearly, these businesses that had six bottom lines, you know, which were to serve everyone in a balanced way. That included, of course, giving a lot of stock to employees, because we couldn't afford pensions and stuff.
Speaker 2:This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return making an appropriate and fair return.
Speaker 3:So thank you so much for agreeing to do this. Bela, in a very busy schedule, we're here together at the Masterseat Jamboree the last one. We're going to get into that with many friends, friends of the podcast supporters and I wanted to take this opportunity to sit down with you just for a conversation, with a cup of tea, which we'll make later, and a virtual cup of tea, if you're. If you have a cup of tea, please, please, take it and and sit.
Speaker 3:And first of all, we always start with a with a personal, personal question, and in this case it's a it's it's a very, very relevant one. Like how did you end up spending so much of your waking hours focusing on on regeneration, of course, partly on soil and also on the care economy? Like what led you to to that? And this is going to be wandering, meandering river conversation, so. But I would love to hear a bit of background, because I think quite a few people I'll put some links below, of course, in the show notes don't necessarily know your journey, and I would love to. If you have heard it before, sorry, but this is too fascinating not to unpack a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I guess it all started when I was born in England a year before the war started and I lived in Britain all my life, or most of my life, and I lived through the Blitz. And the war ended when I was about seven and it was a very intolerant place for foreigners and I was a bloody foreigner and I grew up to be very angry about the way the world was. I had a bomb blow in my window, on my bed one of my earliest memories and going into the air raid, shelters and all of that and going and visiting my father on the Isle of man where he'd been thrown into jail because he was Hungarian, even though he was Jewish, and he suffered a lot and we suffered a lot. So I was very angry. And somewhere along the way, when I was about 13, I went to a kind of Catholic confession because I was a Catholic Jew. To make things more complicated, yeah, and I came out with this idea well, what are you going to do about it if the world's this way? So that kind of turned me from angry anger into action.
Speaker 1:Over the next 30 years I thought out what I could do about it, which was to. I noticed that I was only happy when the people around me were happy. So I created these businesses that had six bottom lines, which were to serve everyone in a balanced way, were to serve everyone in a balanced way and everyone broke down into employees, investors, suppliers and clients and local community and the earth, and we really worked out how we would live that and we really did walk our talk about serving all our constituents in a balanced way and that included, of course, giving a lot of stock to employees because we couldn't afford pensions and stuff.
Speaker 1:And so eventually I always had to sell these organizations because the people who earned stock in them needed liquidity. And so I went through bankruptcies and had people come into my house and clean the whole place out, just leaving rubbish. And we had six children and we discovered how to meditate, how to look after the inner space. And then I merged from all of this with discoveries that for myself, the most comfortable way to live was in what I called sustainable sufficiency. Way to live was in what I called sustainable sufficiency, but when I had too much, it ruined my life because I had to look after it and all it did was make more. Because I had the kind of Midas touch Everything I touched went to gold, because people liked to associate with me, because I was really living into serving them all and making sure that everyone was served. Why did you?
Speaker 3:choose as an outlet of that anger? Or what are you going to do in the business world? Create businesses. Was that a natural step at that time, Like maybe now much more with entrepreneurship? And I don't think at that time it was necessarily a logical outlet or manifestation of that energy.
Speaker 1:I didn't or manifestation of that energy. I didn't I mean, but I realized that you know.
Speaker 1:most people seem to think that business is about making money, which is absolutely ridiculous. It's rather like you and I are about breathing. Money is needed like oxygen is needed, but every business is about making teaspoons or walking sticks or… Everything you look at is made by business. So I just naturally found myself in a business because I had a passion about. I developed a passion. First of all I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, but then I discovered that it was 11-year education. And then I read Johnny von Neumann's book about the computer and the brain in the 50s and I thought, oh, and I had a very low opinion of myself. So I thought I really need to choose an area where even an idiot like me can succeed. And it's going to grow like Topsy. And it became obvious to me that computers were going to become very important, even though the head of IBM said the world market was for five computers.
Speaker 3:Five mainframes everywhere, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then Bill Gates said no one will ever want more than 640k of memory. But I saw way beyond that, because I was always into networking small machines for some reason, but it was mainly because I got into the library world of serving libraries with information, libraries with information, and of course they pioneered the whole emergence of electronic information and I found myself I was very comfortable in a pond. There weren't big sharks singing. I was in this little pond because librarians wanted to have their own vendors. They wanted to control them. Librarians all went to school with each other and you didn't have to spend money on marketing. You just had to have a product that worked and then they would sell it to their colleagues from college.
Speaker 3:So you chose to be not in a, let's say, cutthroat shark environment.
Speaker 1:I didn't have the money to market.
Speaker 2:And it's not fun.
Speaker 1:I was an engineer, you know, because when I realized I wanted to go to computers there was no such thing as computer science. I had to become an engineer and I had to specialize in electrical engineering and I got into the electronic end of that and I started to understand handing and oaring and all of that and I became a customer service engineer and I started to repair these really enormous machines I mean a machine this iPhone would fill the whole world. In order to get the power of this, using discrete components that we used at that time, it would have been the size of the world multiplied by 1.2 or something.
Speaker 2:We forget how.
Speaker 1:Every bite was two feet long, eight inches wide and a foot high and it consumed a kilowatt of energy. It was 16 big incandescent tubes which were arranged in pairs to flip-flop on and off zero one. And it was just inconceivable the changes I've seen since I was being when I did electronics in 56, to what's happening now, to what's happening now. And anyway, I got into, and then I was very lucky I became a customer service engineer. I became a. I got into diagnostic programming to help service engineers to diagnose. So I got into programming.
Speaker 1:I got into systems analysis. No one knew what systems were. Little bit of analysis. Yeah, I found myself working in the city of London with the five best banking salesmen serving Lloyds, westminster, all these different, incredible, huge banking systems, and I just started earning 700 pounds a year as a university apprentice for British Petroleum. Then I became a customer service engineer, then a programmer, then a systems analyst, then an international sales guy, and then my boss told me I should go to Harvard and learn about business and I thought, yeah, I need access to capital, I need to get money.
Speaker 3:Because you were already thinking about building something yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I experienced these companies as penal servitude, you know, actually having to work for a boss whose boss was absolutely ignorant of what I was doing. The boss's boss was the boss's boss's boss's friend from college and he didn't even know what a resistor was. And my boss was a very skillful engineer who intuitively knew what was happening. But he had arrived at work with bicycle clips on and his boss, who was this ignorant colonel from the army, would arrive in a Rolls Royce or something. And it was like for me, in the coal mines. I worked, you know, trying to get into college. I worked in the coal mines. I worked in British Thompson, houston, as a progress chaser get to work at 7 o'clock, 10,000 people slouching in through these dark walls. I lived in a Quonset hut with Yugoslavian emigres and Italian emigres who'd had their bodies crushed in mine accidents and played chess with them at night. But I was driven by this. I don't want the world to be this way. I don't know where that came from. It was really just. I was a painter and I just. I was very deeply in touch with the beauty of nature, and so that was all what I was given.
Speaker 1:And so at the Harvard Business School I learned that human behavior in organizations was the most important subject and the next most important was finance to understand what revenue is, what profit is, and that a business comes from nothing and goes to nothing. It sums to zero, comes from nothing and goes to nothing. It sums to zero. It grows because everyone contributes to growing a pie and so the better its intelligence is, the bigger the pie gets. But you're not kind of dividing. If you're giving everyone equal treatment, it's not cutting up a pie, because they're all growing the pie. So it was a much better model than the charitable model where people spend all their time raising funds, raising funds and, like here, everyone arrives, they're all competing with each other for funds. And to try and encourage people to build on each other's shoulders people to build on each other's shoulders you've got to overcome this deeply ingrained habit of them being passionate about their particular approach and not really listening for a superordinate objective.
Speaker 1:So we had this superordinate objective always of serving everyone in a balanced way, and we broke that down and we worked right down to the task level what that implied and people really loved working in an environment like that and when it flew apart they all wanted to recreate that kind of environment Because you said I had to sell often the businesses and is that the moment when these things fall apart?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but actually the falling apart is like in nature that when a tree dies it plants a million seeds, so it's just the diaspora from each organization. I noticed after a decade or two I was doing much more good than my company would ever have done. I learned so it's.
Speaker 3:These organizations and companies can end and have an end date, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:Of course it's okay, that's nature you die, I'm going to die. I won't even be able to take my skin with me. So what the hell am I doing? Worrying about money, and I discovered that whatever I did, I kept on making more money, and so I just had to get rid of the stuff.
Speaker 3:When did you realize that Was?
Speaker 1:it meditation. Was it a specific moment where you counted the amount of houses, or what was the you know, we always had a, we had six children and they always had friends, and my wife always made a huge pot of something in the middle of the table and people turned up and there were always lots and lots of people around the table and discussing things. And I don't know where we discovered it, but we noticed that we were most happy when the people around us were happy.
Speaker 1:You can't be happy. It's impossible to be happy if the people around you are unhappy. I mean, paul Getty tried to. He thought money would create happiness and he was the most miserable bugger on the face of the earth. And so it's really obvious, if one pauses a little bit and gets outside the paradigm that we're in, which is an artificial kind of scarcity thing, that there's scarcity where we have a system that creates artificial scarcity. I mean, as soon as you collaborate, you get a superabundance. So, and competition creates… unless it's competition with yourself for excellence, which is kind of productive competition. When you're competing with others by pulling them down, life's miserable.
Speaker 3:Didn't you have the which many entrepreneurs and successful serial entrepreneurs have the tendency to keep going, not for the money, even, but almost for the dopamine rush of working a lot, maybe not being at that big table with all the children around, because there are companies to run and things to build.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, we sold computer library services back in the 80s. That was when I really found myself with a lot of money. But the only thing that the buyer didn't want was what became Silver Platter, because they wanted our subscriber base. So we had 1,500 libraries using our products all over the world and that was very valuable to a buyer who wanted to get an annual revenue stream.
Speaker 1:SaaS software what the hell are you doing with this team? Who's making trying to put information on a CD? No one's buying drives, cd drives and no one's making titles. So why would anyone want a drive and why would you make a title if no one has drives?
Speaker 3:Really.
Speaker 1:And so what the hell are you doing? And so they said fine, the only piece we want to keep is the team that's doing that and that became Silver Platter.
Speaker 3:Basically by accident, or it wasn't by accident Because the buyer didn't see value in that and you didn't want to.
Speaker 1:They did not see. What I saw was a music disc. This is the CD for people that haven't been born in this era. It had enough digital information on it to contain a thousand books and you stamped it out in a fraction of a second.
Speaker 3:And I saw this fantastic publishing media, but they didn't no they said but if they would have wanted it, would you have sold it, or was it actually a separate?
Speaker 1:The world was living with the memory of the fight between beta and VHS.
Speaker 3:So we're not going to make a big bet on one medium, because yeah, that's right and so.
Speaker 1:But I invited all the competition to the High Sierra meeting to establish standards for segmentation on the disk and the index layout on the disk. And so I was this piddling little company, and I sent a letter around to IBM and 3M and.
Speaker 1:Digital and I said you know, you're only allowed to send engineers. No marketeers allowed, because engineers would work together to create solutions Marketeers always were jockeying for. So they actually, because we were totally non-threatening, non-entity, they they sent engineers to the High Sierra Hotel in Colorado and we had a few days together and we established the High Sierra verticals, which within 18 months became ISO 9660. So they all collaborated together to create these standards about how to lay out segments, about what a device driver would look like, a common device driver, what an interface would look like, what a device manager would look like. These are all the lower level components of an operating system. So they all, instead of having a 3M CD-ROM which you couldn't plug into an IBM machine, we had everything.
Speaker 1:And then ISO 9660 was adopted by everyone. But by then we had already got into collaboration with ENFASE, the National Federation of Abstractors and Indexers, like Commonwealth Agriculture Bureau, that had been abstracting scientific journals since the end of the 19th century and had this fantastic companion of abstract indexes, of abstract indexes. But they were running on a Lockheed computer out in Seattle and in order to use them, librarians set a teletype 10 characters per second over modem lines and you pay at least 100 pounds an hour to do bo Boolean searches. And so we sold a disk, a subscription to Commonwealth Agriculture Bureau for £12,000 a year, and we sent a disk update every quarter. So we were selling a little bit of plastic that cost a few pennies for £3,000 because of the information content, and we had undergraduate students queuing 24 hours a day to do Boolean searches, which had only been available to the best-funded researchers at 100 pounds an hour. So we cut the cost by a thousand to one, but we were selling a plastic for ten thousand times what it cost. So it it was a precursor to the Internet.
Speaker 1:At the same time I'd learned from when I was at BP I was working on cat crackers, catalyst converted that would crack crude oil into its different components. It was this huge machine with thousands of end instruments, measuring pressure valves and all sorts of things, and they had an Elliott 700 computer, which was a trunk-sized thing, but it was interrupt-driven, not polled. The data processing machines were all polled and I recognized that this polling, this interrupt-driven architecture, was a thousand times better than Poled. But IBM and people were building, so instead of using mainframes I used networks of microcomputers, and when I got into data processing and it turned out to be much, much better. And then eventually, 20 years later or so, ibm got into pole systems, and so I had this fundamental kind of insights, not because of just because I happened to be working in process control computers rather than data processing computers, and that was the eventual architecture that predominated. I could spend a few hours explaining the difference between a pole and an interrupt-driven system, but nowadays everything is interrupt-driven.
Speaker 3:And the fascinating thing is you were there, not from the beginning, but actually pretty much in all these different ways. Very much before the beginning in computer, in data processing computers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there was no computer science, so I've always learned about the stuff right down at the bit level. So I understand how it works at the bit level, at the component level, at the component level, at the driver level, but now I can't even operate my iPhone.
Speaker 3:I was gonna ask you sorry, we're in 2025. Yeah, when you look at technology now and computers and computing, and they're everywhere, what you were mentioning before, what is in the phone, what do you see and sense? Now you said we couldn't imagine at that time, of course, how far we're recording this with a microcomputer, which is probably more powerful than what fitted in a whole factory back then. What do you see now, so many years after almost technology wave after technology wave, um, looking back at that, from someone that has seen most of those waves very, very from the inside, basically, or before they were a wave, what do you? What do you see?
Speaker 1:um, well, we've moved to cloud computing. Uh, we'll move to a situation where each computer is like a grain of dust You'll throw dust around and it'll all network, and so we've got this unlimited amount of so-called computer power available to us. And then we finally observed that the if-then-what kind of programming. It's incredibly laborious. It just goes on getting more and more complex and before it ever accomplishes its objective, it's so complicated that no one can use it.
Speaker 1:And at the same time we've learned that by copying nature, that all the great discoveries, all the great engineering discoveries come from biomimicry. You know, like, how to make silent turbine blades, you copy an owl's wing, it goes on and on. But everything that, if you really want to succeed in an innovation, you mimic nature in some way. And so watching a baby program itself led us to using so-called artificial intelligence. I mean, a baby doesn't know that these are my fingers, but when it starts doing this and touching its face, doing this and touching its face and its thoughts, kind of recognizing through one, and it starts clustering experiences and then names them.
Speaker 1:And we start to create language. And then we learned how to do what's called end-to-end programming, neurological programming, and it all came out when I was at Harvard. I had audited some advanced computer courses and microanalytical simulation at MIT. I used to go down to the Department of Agriculture with a small team in the computer systems to work for the Department of Agriculture on rural electrification cooperatives, SLURP, which was a massive regression analysis to find out how all these independent variables correlated with possible dependent variables, which is a way of discovering what correlates with what. And I used to run these huge packs of punch cards on the Harvard mainframe for 24 hours over the weekend to do these huge slab analysis.
Speaker 1:And now we've got millions of times the Harvard Mainframe computer power in this thing and so I deeply understand it's a way of kind of finding what correlates with what you know, which is the fundamental one of the fundamental mechanisms of so-called artificial intelligence. When you do that on a massive scale you get artificial intelligence. On a massive scale you get artificial intelligence. And then I also did co and I was at Arthur D Little for a bit when I was at Harvard. That was a huge consulting, still is engineering consulting business and did some work for them.
Speaker 1:So I deeply understand that the future is all so-called AI, but the importance is that there isn't one intelligence. There's a million different intelligences. You can have a musical intelligence, an artistic intelligence, you can have an engineering intelligence, you can have an aesthetic intelligence or whatever, and how the child is nurtured determines what kind of intelligence it evolves into to a large extent. And so what's going on now, with Sundar Pichai being in charge of the Google alphabet, is a deeply empathetic person, and understanding what gives empathy really gives me hope that Google will enable empathetic intelligence to be the prevalent intelligence that survives this.
Speaker 3:Do you follow the space now, like the technology space? How closely do you observe or interact, or do you play around with the media.
Speaker 1:I don't really. I listen to the leaders, and there are some incredible leaders in America. You know the guy in charge of what's that? Graphics company, the huge I know not there the one that makes graphic processes kind video yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean Jensen, yeah, they're people and but what Google's doing is is going to, because Google is ultimately trying to do no harm. I mean, everyone criticizes Google, it doesn't matter, but they are actually, are really living into it. Of course, they did immense harm when they created their first artificial intelligence, which had a black man signing the Declaration of Independence, but then they've realized now that if you teach AI lies because of your values, they'll end up killing all the white people to make sure that there's enough blacks getting to the top, or something you can't teach it lies. You have to be anchored in the truth. But they're way ahead of these journalist opinions that people have based on their past errors.
Speaker 3:And what do you think like the regeneration space? We often say in agriculture and land management and forestry, we have to learn from nature, we have to we farm or forest with nature instead of against. What do you see as the role for, for technology in that? Because some of the space is quite anti anything to do with technology, some others are, and now with AI, we can model everything, we can predict everything. What do you see?
Speaker 1:Well, I see what's going on here, for example, is that everyone's very passionate about their particular approach and there's absolutely it's impossible for them to work together, to collaborate. But we have to move from a competition to collaboration and it's not going to come from any of the things that are going on here. I mean Tony Sieber has been. He's noticed that precision fermentation and and cellular agriculture have been growing for the last 40 years from making insulin for a million pounds a pound down to insulin being produced for a hundred pounds a pound and that in 2024 you get better milk from cellular agriculture than you do from cows. I mean people say not because they've got an emotional attachment or I mean, but it is actually better.
Speaker 3:I've seen the research that suggests it's not, and especially the nutrient quality is it's better than industrial.
Speaker 1:Or let's say yeah, I've seen research that says that too.
Speaker 3:So I think we have to be careful.
Speaker 1:There, we had rethink eggs on the show. It is. It is what nature uses it's. Nature operates at the cellular layer make and fermentate, and so it's not unnatural to do precision fermentation. That's what goes on in the cow's stomach, and so we'll get it right and it'll be much better, much more digestible as we come to understand.
Speaker 1:What happens with protein in the human body is that it gets broken down into enzymes and then reassembled into human protein and then reassembled into human protein. It's much more difficult for the human body to do that than be fed human protein in the first place. But you know, and that is deeply understood I'm a great friend of the guy who coordinates all the microbiologic apps in Harvard and he deeply understands that kind of thing. Sorry, in my opinion, cellular agriculture. What's going to happen in the next 20 years is farms will go out of business. We'll stop raising cows and chickens and slaughtering them in this terrifying way that we do or in any way, and we'll just most of the world will go back to trees, and so I'm very confident that the climate change problem will just disappear. Change problem will just disappear. But we're not really. People are not ready to accept the cow.
Speaker 1:You know, and I know all about Alan Savory and the buffalos and all of that is true, but there's a greater truth, which is we can learn from nature, which is that cellular biology and precision fermentation will prevail, and you mark my words. What's going on in Denmark with re-milk will wipe out the dairy industry. Because you know what happened. As Tony Sieber said, we moved from sugar to fructose in Coca-Cola without any consumer even noticing it, but the business-to-business noticed it right away because it was cheaper. Business noticed it right away because it was cheaper and it wiped out sugar and we went to fructose and fructose is incredibly damaging to the human system.
Speaker 3:It wiped out sugar and our internal health.
Speaker 1:Yeah, everyone, but at any rate because it was cheaper. And that's what's happening now a third of the dairy farmers' revenue is disappearing because business to business is galloping towards re-milk rather than cow's milk Is there a role for agriculture and farmers beyond the 20 years.
Speaker 1:Of course, there will be. Nothing ever dies completely. I mean, people are still using horses, but the main task of feeding humanity will go to cellular agriculture and precision fermentation, that kind of approach. So I'm very confident that the forests will come back and that the atmosphere will be restored, and I'm also confident I'm not quite as confident, but I hope or expect, that AI will emerge the winner, Because if AI does, we'll have a third world war. And we're at this place now where we either have to learn to be empathetic and humans won't learn. They'll learn from. I mean, we don't have democracy we never have in history. As soon as someone gets power, it corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But when you do DAOs and things and a blockchain the underlying blockchain of keeping us trustworthy, and the right kind of intelligence, we can actually build systems that enable the discernment of the common. You know what artificial intelligence is is really what correlates with what, and so what is it that really gives human truth? And so we'll have a much better kind of governance system from that than anything that humans can contrive, Much more democratic.
Speaker 1:And all these concerns about privacy. I mean I used to speak to rooms of 4,000 librarians about privacy they were so concerned about privacy. You know we can address it quite simply if we want. You own your information, I own my information. If someone wants to use it, they buy it. You know We'll all want to sell our information the way we want to sell it or not.
Speaker 1:But freedom, what's freedom? You go out and drive on the right. That's not freedom, but it does give order. So that's not freedom, but it does give order. So we actually, and what's going on in the cells of the body? You know, my feet know about what's happening before the nerves have had time. And we know that at the quantum level there's non-local action. So we know that quantum physics is the truth. But in order to have chemistry or any of the sciences, we have to ignore quantum physics because we have this belief in science that they don't understand what science is. So science is a method. It's not a belief system, but most of it anyway, I'm way off in Kukula. I can spend hours and hours trying to share these ideas with people.
Speaker 3:And what would you be building now, in this day, if you wanted to, you had the space and time and taste for, for other ventures or other companies. What would tickle you now, or something that you would be?
Speaker 1:interested in. What's tickling me is what makes life absolutely fascinating and I'm getting and more than tolerable. But a great adventure is what I call the inner journey, which is, you know, I read a book once called the Lion's Gaze. Have you heard of the Lion's Gaze? I've heard of the book. I don't think I read a book once called the Lions gaze. Have you heard of the book? I didn't think I read it.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, when someone throws a stick, the dog will follow the stick. We are, we follow the stick. The lion goes back to see where did the stick come from. So I practice the lion's gaze, which is when something comes up in my emotions. I look at here what happened, what came up, who threw that stick, what? It was, a smell or something.
Speaker 1:And I noticed that my mind is this unruly thing. That is just like I talked about the elephant's trunk. Unless I give it something to occupy it, I'm no more in control of my mind than the discovery for this period of my life. So I have no ambition to go out there, but I do have the ambition to share with people this extraordinary experience of the inner journey, if that's comprehensible, absolutely, because it makes life absolutely fascinating.
Speaker 1:Well, actually getting old physically is not for wimps, I assure you. I do gym three times a week, I do qigong every day, I walk the dog every day. My body's screaming no, no, no, no, and it's but the. So I absolutely I'm just listening for collaboration. So that's why we do the jamborees here is to I'm listening for collaboration, and it's not happening. Even our facilitator is selling passionately her ideas about. But that diagram actually that we were working on, but no one in the room that I could see was really on this path. They were all in this, but they all think they're on this and they're not in my view. So I'm hoping by the end of the day. You know, there were some things from our first jamboree where people really started to build on each other's shoulders which made me think, my God, if we can do more of that, that would be wonderful, because at the end of the day, we're all on this one planet together and we've got to collaborate.
Speaker 3:I think it's a great way of wrapping this up. Thank you so much for bringing us here together and for spending a bit of time on the couch and sharing a piece of your journey.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend and get in touch with us on social media, our website or via the Spotify app, and tell us what you liked most and give us a rating on Apple podcast or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.
