410 Paul Hawken – Carbon is life, not the enemy

Carbon is life, not the enemy. And in this wide-ranging conversation with the legend that is Paul Hawken, we get into all of it. Paul is an activist, entrepreneur with Project Drawdown and Project Regeneration and prolific writer who started a natural food brand back in the 1970s. We trace his journey through writing Drawdown, Regeneration, and Carbon: The Book of Life and why people loved Drawdown so much even though that was never really the point. Regeneration got closer to the core. And Carbon is chuck-full of nuggets of wisdom about the magical, magnificent role carbon plays in our lives. Yes, there’s too much of it in the atmosphere, but there are also many places it can go, quickly and safely.

We talk about his work with large food companies, and the pure joy of bringing top executives to real regenerative farms and watching the lightbulbs go off, followed immediately by the panic of realising just how far their current supply chains are from anything like that. We get into food as medicine, and how furious Paul was with the healthcare and food system after he cured his lifelong asthma at 18 simply by changing what he ate. He had never taken a full breath of air until that moment. And we talk about his genuine excitement about the new generation of scientists coming up.

One advice: just go outside for as long as possible, and listen to this episode somewhere beautiful and alive.

More about this episode.

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Transcript

Go Outside And Set The Frame

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Wow, wow. Another legend alarm. Go outside. The advice of Paul Holken, the writer of Drawdown. For anyone interested in the future of this planet, regeneration, carbon, biodiversity, investing, etc. Go outside for as long as possible. So I hope you're listening to this episode, somewhere beautiful and full of life. And carbon is life and not the enemy. Join me in this fascinating and super wide-ranging conversation with the legend that Paul is. Activist, entrepreneur. He set up a food company and brand in the 70s. And of course, prolific writer. We talk about his journey and writing the books like Drawdown, Regeneration, and now Carbon, the Book of Life. And why people love drawdown so much? Because it was full of lists and priorities. But that was not the point. Regeneration already came closer to the core of what needs to happen. And then came carbon, the book of life. And if you haven't listened to it or read it, it's chucked full nuggets of wisdom around the magical and magnificent role carbon plays in our lives. And yes, we have too much of it in the atmosphere, but also we have a lot of places it can go quickly and safely. We talk about his work with large food companies and the joy of bringing the executives to real regenerative farms. And then see the light bulbs go off. And of course, the panic in their eyes when they realize how far their value chains are removed from these real deep region farms. We cover food as medicine and how pissed Paul was with the healthcare and food system when he cured his lifelong asthma when he was 18-year-old with food. He never could take a full breath of air until he was 18. And his excitement about a new generation and a new wave of scientists, and so much more. So enjoy. Go outside, lay under an ancient tree, and soak it all in. This podcast is part of the carbon series supported by the OGCR project, which aims to create a trusted open source framework and make sure the benefits of carbon are shared across generations. 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. Welcome to another episode. Today with a legend, and I say that not lightly, activist, author, entrepreneur, environmentalist who started Drawdown in 2013, wrote Regeneration in 2021, and of course now Carbon, the Book of Life, in 2025. Welcome, Paul.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Thank you so much, Clint. Nice to be here with you. I would love to actually live in the Netherlands.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

I love that country. I love my friends there. It's so sane compared to where I am right now. Depending on the political week, it's interesting as well. Yeah, yeah.

Carbon Is Life Not Enemy

SPEAKER_02 2:43

We all live in um, let's say, interesting places these days. And so it's uh yeah, a pleasure to discuss that on a global space. I've been out of the Netherlands for a while and also back a lot, and it's very interesting to see regeneration taking hold. I've been following that space for 15 years now, and it's becoming a thing, or it's a thing, which of course you partly helped create with writing such a coffee table book on the topic and then going uh a few levels deeper. But just to rewind, we always love to ask a personal question. And in this case, I'm not gonna repeat your or ask you to repeat your origin story in that sense. How did you get into environmentalism? But I want to focus more on the carbon piece. Why did you decide to write specifically a book on carbon and to double-click on such a decisive word in that sense, which it could also mean just stay away from it, because you wrote a proper book on a word that we're fighting a war against, it seems. Like why that? Why do you spend so many waking hours on that?

SPEAKER_01 3:44

That's a good question. What I have seen, and I think you see it too, is that carbon's been fetishized and isolated as and even demeaned as a problem, as a bad boy, as a pro and if we can just fix carbon, then we're good to go as a civilization, as an economy. And to me that's emblematic, is representative of the mindset that's caused the problem, which is to other separate, make distinctions that aren't true. And so I felt in the process carbon became something that we fought and that we removed as if you could remove carbon. And using these verbs and other things to basically make a lot of money. And that's what comp companies are doing for insetting and basically carbon removal and all these terms, and then selling it to Microsoft and other companies to offset their emissions. So it's just when we step back and look at it, it's hilarious, uh ridiculous and absurd. The math, the physics, all of it, the biology is just simply bizarre, really. But in writing carbon, what I want to do is not to go on a rant like I'm doing right now.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

There's no we get we get past the rant, the word.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, okay, okay.

From Drawdown To Regeneration Thinking

SPEAKER_02 5:04

Let's stop the rant. It's fair enough because we all we've seen this funny pictures of the carbon funnel, like we only focus on that one piece, and I'm doing things with my hands now, nobody sees that. But it's I think many people get into this because of climate and carbon, and then slowly realize that's not carbon is in the wrong place. That doesn't mean it's the enemy and it's ridiculous because we're made of carbon and it's such a it's life, and but that realization comes over time. We all most of the people in the space are well-meaning and really think that what are you building is a generally piece of the puzzle, and then they realize, oh, oops, uh not using our shit, it's much bigger than that. Well when did that happen for you? Or when was that also a process over time? Or is it was it already embedded in drawdown in that?

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah, well, I did draw down, but before I wrote the book, I had already decided to write regeneration. And one of the rules about writing a good book is to write that book, and not to think because you're an author, you can go blah blah and go into segue into other types of uh focus for a fossil for a book. And so I I I wrote the outline for regeneration before I wrote drawdown. And I felt like with drawdown, it was because there was a an absence of people understanding what to do. That was the thing. What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? And it was really hilariously symbolized by 2015, the Conference of the Parties in Paris. And that was the big, big one in terms of making pledges and all that sort of stuff. But anyway, my staff went there and we went around to the blue zone and green zone, and but mostly the blue zone and asked people what are the top five solutions to reversing global warming? Simple question. Nobody can answer it, and they and those who tried answered it wrong. There was nobody there. And oftentimes they would say, oh, let's see solar and recycling. They got that too, and then they'd look at things and they got lost. They wouldn't understand. It wasn't there wasn't electric cars then and so forth. And that was stunning. That meant why we did draw down. Okay, I did it because say, Well, there's a whole bunch of solutions out there and so forth. But at the same time, I knew that really looking at the atmosphere that way was still part of the problem that we're gonna draw down carbon and and return it to its source in some gaseous form, and that's why regeneration was created, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

And then after regeneration, what felt unanswered or what felt in like unspoken about enough to demand another book, to demand a proper book, diving really deep into the C word.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

Drawdown appealed to people's idea of a shopping list of here's what to do, and numbers, percentages, and we got this and regeneration, it's interesting about the two books because I would say Drawdown sold maybe five times as many books as regeneration. What regeneration did not have is listing, ranking, percentages, and on purpose, of course, how could you? But drawdown did, and because there was much talk then and now, of course, about net zero, 2050 being the goal, which is also, by the way, with all due respect, in a completely absurd goal, which is unattainable. And but that was the focus. And for the IPCC, obviously for the conference of the parties, and then businesses began to get on board and say we have to do our part. And so it was always into measurement, metrics, how much, where, all that sort of stuff, which really appealed to a technocratic society, right? But life is not a technocrat. And so the biosphere creates the atmosphere. And so the interactions and the intricacy of those interactions is just extraordinary science, an extraordinary exploration, extraordinary understanding that goes back also thousands of years, but also is really how I see the science I'm looking at. I see science really blooming in a new way. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of that has to do with understanding what we don't know as opposed to trying to pin something down and we know this. And I love you mentioned Toby Cares, but I love the scientists and many others and so forth who are revealing Zoe Slander in her book, The Light Eaters and the Botanist she interviewed, about how the intricacy and uh of the light eaters, by the way. It's yeah, yeah, the complexity of the world is astonishing and beautiful as opposed to it's a thing that we gotta fix.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:04

And does that make you optimistic? There seems to be this whole wave of science almost catching up to the indigenous worlds, catching up what we knew or know, and proving. I remember a book It's a couple of years ago on trees from an Irish author and scientist that I moved to Canada, but she was the last one that got all the traditional indigenous knowledge of Ireland and then proved her whole career was basically proving out what she learned from her from the elders there, and then making sure she could write peer-reviewed papers on them. Nothing to say that's easy, by the way. But do you see that wave? Do you is there a step change? Is there you say blooming? Is that something of the last couple of years? What do you see as you've been so close to say the carbon and living world science over the last couple of years?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Yeah, I I'm a this is a guess. Okay. A guess is that my daughter got her PhD at Yale, she's a scientist, and so I actually gave a commencement speech at Yale. And so what I see is younger scientists, we're creating them all the time, right? That's what the schools do from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, whatever. And but they have been basically inundated with science, papers, peer review, the whole process of getting science basically sanctioned as being true by other scientists, usually scientists who are older and very committed to paradigm, paradigmatic ways of thinking about the whatever the subject is. And uh what I see is young people coming and looking at the world, looking at the crises we faced, the thinking and the rhetoric that is comes at us about it, and saying, what this isn't interesting to me. Uh what's interesting, interesting to me is X, Y, Z, whatever, and looking at it with new eyes. I think what's happening is that the methodology of science in terms of observation, that part of it, observation, acute observation. Darwin did it, for goodness sakes, with plants. So this is not a new thing. But and then really the intermixing, interrelationship of the understanding, the people who have lived here for thousands of years, we call them indigenous, uh, that's a great word, but and because it means original inhabitant, by the way. So that's a good word and a good thing. And actually their understanding and their knowledge, combined with the methodology or the rigor of Western science, if you will, is creating the thing, observations in that are in carbon in the book, which is wow. And so I just feel we need a sense of wonder instead of a sense of doom. The facts are the facts about what's happening in terms of global heating. But every almost all the information that comes out is like things are getting worse. And and if you measure it just from that point of view, using those parameters, no question, I agree. But those parameters are very narrow.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

And I think what it does to me, but I'm curious what it does to you, is all this the immense speed of regeneration as well. If nature does its work, which is not the right terminology, but if we allow it, if we facilitate it, we have an active role, and we are a keystone species and quite an impactful one negatively at the moment, but that doesn't mean we cannot take a positive one, and we have done that in the past, the speed is quite astonishing. So, yeah, we're we're deep, you know, we're 10-0 behind or more if we want to do a match one, at least we're serious severely degraded, let's say. But we also have seen a lot of examples of in super fast recovery or super fast regeneration to to relatively health. And as long as as as soon as we start to understand the science behind that more and more, we means we might be able to replicate it, which of course is super difficult because you're not gonna bring a landscape to a lab. But does it give you hope looking deep into that science of regeneration, basically?

SPEAKER_01 14:32

It brings me a lot of delight. Uh hope is not a word that I'm in favor of. Huh? Delight is nice as well. Oh. Delight and wonder and curiosity and lots of beautiful emotions. Hope to me, just so I can digress a little bit, when I was in my Buddhist training and in both here and in Japan, my teachers were very dismissive of hope.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

And I said, Why?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

And they said, because it's the because it depends on fear. And you why would you be hopeful if you if there wasn't something you didn't want to happen? What are you hopeful about? What's the hope about? What's always about something? What? And so what they encouraged us to be is to be fearless, not hopeful. That's again, go upstream. What's the problem? Fear. It's not that people's concerns are irrational, they're irrational. But but then what how do you incorporate and integrate that and then lead a life of meaning? And you don't do it by being hopeful, you do it by being fearless. And that means and do stuff that will fail, do stuff where you'll be criticized, do stuff that may put you in opposition to the conventional thinking, all that sort of stuff. That's courage. That's what we need right now. We have it, it's there, it's happening everywhere in the world, but as opposed to being hopeful. So just a digression on that word. I think that what it's people is what is makes me delighted. And what I see every day for me, I'm researching a new book. Every day is really about wow, and as opposed to, oh my God. I I read that stuff too, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

We talked about that. Oh shit. He said what? He did what?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah, yeah, it is what it is. And uh, we're going into a proto-fascist era. And we've done it before, we being the northern European countries in the United States and Japan, that whole axis. But so it's happened before. My wife's Italian, and we go back to Mussolini and what that was like during the war. That's a horrible thing, but there is something much deeper, more profound occurring at the same time, which is I think the discovery of our species, Homo sapiens that were inhabitants. This is our home. And that in terms of regeneration, we are innately regenerative every millisecond, okay, all our cells in our body. But in terms of the earth itself, what we do can do as species is to create the conditions for regeneration. We can't regenerate a deer, a forest, an ocean, a wetland. We can't do that. We can create the conditions for it to regenerate. And so even in agriculture, maybe we'll get to talk about foods, this idea that, you know, and we can talk about that. People are claiming, even pepsicola, oh, we do regenerative corn, regenerative this, and you just want to go, oh my God. That's just crazy. So that word has now been bastardized as I call it a weasel word. A weasel in English is it's I shouldn't say it, weasels are really great creatures, but the point being, sustainability is a weasel word. Regenerative now is a weasel word, it has no meaning because it means anything to anybody whenever they want to use it. So that's not a good word. And so we'll talk about it, and that's what we're doing, but I just want to say that I've seen regeneration when I started thinking about it in 2015 and doing the book and all that sort of stuff. It wasn't really prominent as a term at all. And it's become prominent, become really vastly misused by business for sure, but also in many other aspects.

SPEAKER_02 18:14

And it's definitely let's say has seen a rise in region washing and or whatever we want to call that. But that that's happening absolutely. And at the same time, it's drawing in people somehow from different angles, from different I keep calling them like they're being bitten by the soil bug somehow. It could be health, like them, or uh people in their family. It's a very common angle. It could be carbon, like climate change, and discovering that there used to be a lot more carbon in the soil and in living ecosystems, it could be water, it could be biodiversity, it could be birds in general, and like whatever angle on inequality, land ownership, of course, is a big one, like whatever. But a lot of people are starting to be drawn, it seems, to the food system or the land use system, let's say. And sea as well, but slightly less, or it seems less so in terms of oceans. And they all look for that connection with, and I know like the separation, which Charles Eisenstein writes about a lot. Like somehow food and agriculture feels that the easiest way of reconnecting with nature because you interact with it so much. As a farmer, as a gardener, as anything, you you are like it's impossible not to be humble almost, especially if you're going the region path in terms of practices, etc. Like you're facilitating, literally facilitating. And the great farmers I know are more humble now than they were a couple of years ago because they discovered how much they don't know. For anyone out there not going deeper into gardening, agriculture and food, how do we not get them because that's not the right term, but realize they're part of nature? It seems such a big and fundamental switch. And yes, you can take mushrooms and you can do all kinds of things or meditate a long time, but what are pathways you've seen and successful ones for people to almost make that switch or come to that realization? And from that moment on, it's it should be facilitation and not domination.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Well, the first thing is get out of your head and go outside and stay outside, not just fundamentally. You look at uh Barry Lopez, the great writers, you know, about nature, Gary Snyder, I can name them all. They spent a lot of time outside, and they didn't send they spent time on yeah, they weren't on screens. And so we are very much accustomed to getting a lot of information, even our quasi-experience, not really, through screens to vicariously through other people's eyes and experiences, and nothing substitutes for going outside and being outside. And and what I discovered young is I didn't know what the hell was going on outside. That was really in so the back story to that is that I lived in a home which was not a home. It was not safe to live in it. It was not a safe place inside it was not safe. It was a bad place to live. And so I went outside and stayed there as much as I could. And where inside the refrigerator, this is where this is, you know how you can master the inside of a home really quickly if you're three, four years old. But you won't master the outside if you live for three or four generations. And so it it's a real figure-ground shift in terms of one's sense of understanding and knowing, but at the same time, it's one of just like endless fascination. And so for me, although I'm not a botanist and I'm a biologist, I didn't study that in college, I'm not those things, but I am curious and always have been from a very early age. So a lot of the carbon, certainly that, but a lot of my writing in regeneration too comes from curiosity, both experiential from actually reading, from meeting and being taught by great people like Charlie Massey in Australia in terms of regenerative agriculture. There's so many. And so for me, I'm just I'm a collater. You know, I gather, just like you gather acorns if you're a squirrel in the fall, I gather information and connections and try to put it together in such a way that people will turn the page. People ask me what makes a good book. I said there's only one thing that makes a good book turn the page. If you don't want to turn the page, it's not a good book. And so you whether it's this or that, I'm always thinking about the readers while and I just feel like if anything that deserves a page turn is the living world. It's so extraordinary and beautiful. We've said this already, but and we exposure to that gives One a very different sense of what's possible also gives you a sense of how tragic it is that we're using things like AI is okay, it's gonna figure out about what do we do about forests and soil and land and wetlands and AI is coming to rescue us from climate change, all that kind of stuff. And yeah, really. And so yeah, all my experiences really about uh carbon and so forth really come from being a farmer, from being starting a food company that depended entirely on at that time organically grown food, as the term was used, and meeting farmers and walking the land with them and hearing their really generational wisdom about what they had learned, being the farmer on the same land, being the son of the father, of the grandfather, of the great-grandfather, that generational wisdom that had passed down to them. So that's where this comes for me. And so when I think of like people today, and I realize the constant urbanization of the world really for fence against that re-prevents people from having those kind of experiences. I'm so fortunate the ones I had. And so anytime I'm writing I'm trying to pique people's what? Curiosity or really? I didn't know that. And and I could say, either did I. And so I'm sharing that's why I'm sharing it with you, as opposed to being didactic and I know you don't listen up, which is so many books come out about climate, which is I'm the expert, and and I'm not the expert. I'm the curious curry, curious little boy who wants to share.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

And how did it land compared to the other books you mentioned? You want to write a page turner, literally, you want to get people in and then hopefully get them out after they they're done with whatever pages they need. If you said regeneration sold a lot less because maybe there weren't lists, carbon definitely doesn't have any lists in them. Oh, let's do this and this now. How has been the reception from your audience, the ri uh responses you get? Are people moved by it? Because that's I think at the end, uh, as a writer you want. Also in places maybe they're not so common for a book like this to land. Like how's been how's carbon been landing since it came out?

Finance And The Limits Of Offsets

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Uh it's the best book I've ever written. It's uh so far the lowest sales. It's in eight languages, but already. So it seems been picked up more quickly than other books in terms of other countries, but I won't name the countries. But I think the thing about going back to Drawdown, Drawdown appealed had high sales because it had these ranking and there was the birth of ESG, which is another crazy term, but by businesses committing to ESG. And so they love businesses love the book because it was calibrated, it was numerical, uh there was lists, there was ranking. Yeah, yeah, they love that. Regeneration didn't have that. It shouldn't, it couldn't. And so I think that required a lot more involvement with the book, the content. And it said things like, really went after the food industry, went after war, said the biggest industry, the most destructive industry in the world today is war. And but it's close with agriculture. Hard to say, which is worse. It took after took on the things that were being occluded, you know, to build out climate and net zero and so forth. And I say, what about the hundred and I don't know how many was thirty standing armies and just ridiculous kind of things that we're doing. And you can see it now with the Venezuela kidnapping of Madura in Venezuela. You see what the United States had to get one person billion dollars there, that billion dollar operation. So I think that carbon for me was really just a sharing about how to see the world differently. And and that's what there's a chapter called Bucky and Bing, and it's about Buckminster Fuller and Ling Ping Hu. But um the reason I put paired them together, because they're incredible inventors, very different in terms of what they invented, and uh obviously Buckminster Fuller is a past, but but they'd all started with how they saw the world. They just saw the world differently. The same things that you and I see, they saw with a different lens, which is available to all of us. We can all do that. And that's why I said go outside and look. See what and what happened with both scientists, by the way, Ling Bing Hu and Buckminster Fuller, is what they saw made them curious and they realized they didn't know something, they couldn't understand something. And so their inventions derive from why are bubbles round? How many billions of people had seen bubbles before Buckminster Fuller and didn't ask the question? Maybe they asked the question, but that's it. Oh, I wonder why, and then forgot about it. He didn't forget about it, and said, Why are they around? And that was really the seed source of all obviously the zigdomes, but so much of his understanding came from asking that simple question. And so that again, you're a buck, Mr. Fuller, you are a link being who you are somebody, you know, who outside can look and see and ask a question. Like, how does that work? Or why are all the birds drunk on pyrocanthus? And why do they eat it? And how do they are they inebriated just like we get inebriated? I mean, it's just these things, and that is a world that's so different than the world that we have we are in it uh uh engaging in right now, which is a world of enormous connectivity, but it's uh it's an artificial world of electrons going through screens and channels and all this sort of stuff and connecting that way. But it's a c there's a connection that we all need more of. And in that connection, take our children, take our classes. There's four schools now, I don't know if you have them there. They don't have any classroom at all. They have tarps so the kids don't get rained on, but they never go inside and they don't use a textbook. Ah, and these kids are amazing. They know more about binomials by the time they're eight years old than I'll knew in my whole life. And identification and understanding and observation and so forth. That's the school of regeneration, that's the school that creates extraordinary scientists that we have today.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

And what would you say to the listeners let's say in the financial world, which of course has all the tensions of being extractive, has all but also a lot of resources could be put to work in our forestry systems and restoring and regenerating. And it always feels and with the podcast, we're always dancing between say the permaculture garden and the city of London, to put it very black and white. If you if there was one message you would like to give to a more financially focused that either managing your own money or or other people's money, pension funds, etc., to look at regeneration, to look at carbon differently, what would be that seed you would like to plant to something because let's say we do I like to ask this question, we do it in a theater, in on stage, of course, a lot of nice imagery, people are very moved, people forget things. The next day they're at the office, they are at their desk, they open the laptop or whatever, hopefully outside, but let's see. What should they remember from that evening and should they remember from the conversations we had? What is a seed you would like to plant in more the finance-minded or focused people?

Soil-First Regenerative Agriculture

SPEAKER_01 30:32

Well, they're gonna have to understand at some point that they are involved with a economic system, a capitalist eco system that depends entirely on extract extraction and destroy destruction, always has from the very outset, no change. And that businesses have tried to figure out. I think people are some people are very sincere. Some businesses are afraid if they don't do things and say things and sequester carbon or do whatever, that they will lose consumer approval. In other words, that they'll be censured in some way, or that family funds and other sources of capital won't invest in their stock, won't buy their stock. They have to step back and look at the system because the system creates the conditions for destruction. And putting trying to patch that up with regeneration or this and that is a nice thing unto itself, but the system itself simply grows. Um and m Microsoft is the biggest purchaser of carbon credits in the world. They're also their biggest client is oil companies. Okay. So yeah, how can you buy a credit for the Permian Basin? So I I'm not a big fan of big business trying to make themselves look like they're helping.

SPEAKER_02 32:06

Smaller businesses, like what are you on the mycelium side, on food as medicine, food company, you've been a food company entrepreneur today. What do you see? I think the stock market is its own beast in that sense. But economic activity, not necessarily hyper-capitalist growth focused, has a lot of energy behind it, let's say, and a lot of interest. And even most farms are a small or medium-sized company in that sense. What do you see there?

SPEAKER_01 32:35

You have to really break it down from big food companies and then big farms and then let's call them family farms for lack of a better term. I mean just but tiers of agriculture. And I was consulting with a company and they do a lot of reporting on carbon and setting. And I looked at their verifiers, all the companies that verify their carbon removal and so forth. And I just went over them. There's eight or nine of them. And what I pointed out is they all allow glyphosate, none of them prohibit chemicals, and they all say they're supporting regenerative agriculture. And I'm going, wow. I don't think the company two cover crops are something. Yeah. Yeah, they do cover crop and then they put an herbicide on it, and bye, we're good to go. And they can measure s they can may measure some differential in terms of carbon in the soil, or if they measure at the right time. So I feel like the big food companies are at sea is as the English word, in other words, out out to sea and struggling because big food companies buy from big producers and big farms and all that sort of stuff, so it goes up and down. And there there isn't a way to get from the mindset of agriculture to the mindset of regeneration without understanding that modern agriculture was about feeding the plants. Okay. That's what Haberbach's discovery of cheap affordable nitrate nitrogen did. It wasn't feeding the soil, it was feeding the plant. And so every agricultural innovation and then chemical and technique and so forth is all about the plant. More plants, stronger plants, healthier plants, get rid of the and they're not really healthier because they're subject to infestation, to insects. Oh, we need pesticides, then we need this, we need that, okay. Soil's degenerating, so now we need things to help the soil, all that sort of stuff. But it's not the soil, it's really the plant. And so regeneration is just a figure ground shift, which is it's all about the soil. All about the soil. And to understand the soil is an ecosystem as complex as anything we know of on earth, that literally all life comes from the soil. Not some life, not our food. That too. But all life on earth comes from that thin mantle of soil. Okay, and always has. Except we go back four or five hundred million years into the oceans. But in terms of animals, habitat, people, insects, pollinators, etc., it all comes from the soil. So really our focus in regeneration has to be on the soil. And then it's really about how do we create the conditions again for soil to be regenerated and thrive and grow. And again, it's not like we will ever know what's going on down there. It's so intricate and beautifully complex, but we know a lot now, and we know what creates healthy soil and what does not. And so to me, regenerative agriculture is making that transition from agricultural techniques that were did produce a lot. They were bountiful in one sense, at the expense of the soil. And so we're reaching that end of the road, which is wait a minute, we need to actually we need more food and and our oceans are getting poisoned by runoff and all the symptomat symptoms, workers are getting poisoned by pesticides and herbicides. We're taking the into consideration all that, but what I'm trying to do, and I work with big food companies, I do, and what I'm saying is that basically the if you don't shift, you're not gonna have a a a food supply. You're not. How does that land?

SPEAKER_02 36:28

Has that changed? Sorry to interrupt, but like you're called into big food companies. For sure, you tell them I'm not gonna bring you a very popular message. Small changes are not gonna be enough here. This is a radical shift in focus. You might not be able to make that shift just as energy companies are not making the renewable energy necessarily. How does that and has that changed over the last years? I see more shift and more it's less of a CSR discussion, more CFO now because of the supply chain issues and the failing agriculture system. But what have you seen from inside some of these bigger ones?

SPEAKER_01 37:03

You're seeing, you know, a big company has a lot of different departments and people and responsibilities.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

Are you talking to procurement and to people that are making real business decisions or most of the project?

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Talking to CEOs. Talking to CEO CEOs. And then what's their feeling? They're all struggling because they have a huge company. And so there's no CEO who doesn't. But what I'm talking about is forget the word, regeneration, just put it aside. You're the CEO, it's a big company, you have shoulders, you have workers, and we want to focus on resilience and pragmatism. You want to be practical and you want to create a system that's resilient in the face of what's happening coming at us in terms of climate, weather, and you have no control over that whatsoever about water, about heating, and about drought, and about floods and atmospheric concentration of water, by the way. And so you have no control, and you will not have any control as long as you're CEO. So let's put that aside. What do you do on the land in such a way to create responsiveness from the soil and from the soil in its manifestation, which includes, of course, canopies and other plants and insects and creatures. But what can you do to move towards one where you know you're creating a hydrosphere? Because you can't control the atmosphere, but you can control the hydrosphere. And the hydrosphere is at 10, 20 feet above the soil, above the land, which is cooled by moisture. And that you want moisture in the soil, much more moisture, and you want that moisture going out of the soil to cool a canopy. If there's no canopy, then it's safer for your workers, perhaps, but you haven't really closed the loop. And so when we think of soil, we think of it as 99 people have 100 soil, they'll see something dark or brown or black and crumbly, and that's soil. Soil has always been symbiotic with a canopy, plants, weeds, we call them weeds, grasses, whatever, it can be trees, can be brush, can be this, and so forth. And that relationship between uh the soil, if you will, and that canopy is the core of regeneration. Because what's happening is this idea of insetting and removal, like remote, it's just a it's hysterically funny. Yes, you want more carbon in the soil because it's a sign of life. Of course, it's a measurement of how much life in the soil. But actually, carbon is a cycle. It's supposed to go out of the soil and back in. It's a cycle, it's not just fixed there down there and say, stay there, don't go anywhere, we're gonna add more carbon. That again is such a mechanistic, stupid mindset. And so the carbon is the soil is always breathing gas, carbon dioxide. And the carbon dioxide is down there to make nutrients available, nitrogen, phosphorus, and so forth. And it goes out as a gas and it wants to be captured by the canopy. Okay, because plants eat carbon dioxide. That's what they eat, that's their food. And so then the those plants actually grow more, send roots down more, and now you have symbiosis in the soil and the plant world, but not necessarily the crops you're gonna grow, that'll happen too, but on this canopy, and then you grow in the a canopy with other plants and so forth, as opposed to isolation as we know with industrial agriculture.

SPEAKER_02 40:30

How does that land? Absolutely. No, we focus a lot with the broadcasts, one of my pethiefs, on on on water and on the small water cycle, and on the interaction between living landscapes and living farms and living fields, all the way down to living square meters. And the the meters more than that, above that in terms of the air column, let's say. And which absolutely fascinates me because it gives you a lot of agency and a lot of yes, you cannot control the weather, but you can definitely influence a lot what happens around and above the farm to a certain extent. The bigger you are, of course, but the more influence you have and the more life you have, the more that happens. But that's a I have noticed that's a huge like when you as soon as you say water to someone in the food space, everybody thinks of irrigation. How does that land when you say that? And nobody thinks of the interaction between vapor going up and down and different monocles and triggering rain and triggering forest triggering the rain season and all of that. That that concept of actually water is potentially more interesting than carbon. How does it land in at a CEO of a food company?

SPEAKER_01 41:33

With difficulty, because they're very well trained in getting the foodstuffs that they want all over the world in some cases, and have systems and people, really good people, nice people, caring people, who basically facilitate that process, the agriculture, that if it's being dried, if it's being this, if it's being harvested, all that sort of stuff, and packaged and this and that, and sent and remanufactured into something. Okay. So they do that really well. And that's a system, and it's a complicated system, and there's always things that can go wrong within that system. And they're very obviously they wouldn't be where they are if they weren't experts and weren't good at hiring experts and managing them to do this all over the world. Okay. So what I do is say, okay, what I'm doing is saying, yeah, okay, but that has a short, that has a half-life. That's not going to keep working given the fact that the climate models all broke in 24. We don't know why now the heating is increasing from a model that worked for 20 years. We're seeing as every tenth of a degree centigrade, the temperature goes up and so forth, there's 1% more water. Now there's 10% more water than there was 50 years ago in the atmosphere. What happens? It comes down. And you have these floods, in other words, and you eroding soil. Or interestingly, when there's more water in the atmosphere, which there is, it creates droughts, which is counterintuitive. So you get very dry periods and you get too much water too soon. On and rather than being absorbed by the land, it repels it because it's too much too soon. And then you get erosion, you get floods, you get river channels that have been blown away, that have been around there for hundreds of years. So what I'm saying to them and so forth is let me take you to, I call them climate farmscapes. I don't use the word regeneration, but they love the word climate. But anyway, farmscapes, I'm gonna take you to the farmers who know. And they'll tell you the story. They'll tell you what they do, because you can't say, oh, this works on Australia, New Zealand, Chile, France, and Japan. One one size fits all. It does not. And the crops, the people, the soil, the moisture, the atmosphere, the heating, all those things are different. And and to actually take their top agricultural people and them, if possible. Yeah, and say, here, I'm just the go-between. I know this person and they've done it for nine years. They made the transition, they're a father-son. It was difficult. They'd be the first to tell you. Even got basically disapproval from their neighbors. They were gossiped apart, gossiped about uh about. And I've I said in the United States, I don't know about uh other places everywhere. It's the coffee shop is the most difficult part for the farmers when they're making a change to be shunned in the coffee shop which they go to every morning in these little towns and long.

SPEAKER_02 44:34

Or their children are no longer invited for soccer practice or selected for the team.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

It's terrible. It's terrible. The authorization because it threatens people's they feel it as a threat. And to but to take them to meet them and then listen to the learning, whether it's In the mountains, or whether it's on the plains, or whether it's in cold environments or highly humid environments, different crops, different people, different farmers, and so forth, and say, that's it. This is what they know. This is this they've created the conditions for healthy crops that actually do not depend on any external inputs. That's so shocking to them that a 8,000 acre, 800, 500-acre farm could have no inputs. Except it does have an output. It's called the crop, the seeds or grains or the vegetables. And that's just paradigmatically like astonishing. And then what happens? Like how does okay the shock is one shock and all, but then how do you internalize? And then how does that I don't know, I'm in the process of doing that. So uh come back to me and I'll report to you again.

Nutrient Density Food Industry And Health

SPEAKER_02 45:41

Please do, because we I think many listeners have those experiences because many people in the food system don't visit farms, first of all, and definitely don't visit advanced farms at all, or future-proof or climate escape, whatever we want to call them. Real regeneration. I don't care about the term agroecology. As long as you go there and you're like, oh wow, and I've seen it multiple times, like very high people in in the financial world, the food financial world, and the food system, and they are shocked of what is possible because a lot of things they thought were not possible actually are, like growing food with very little input or very advanced compost systems at very large scales, like actually proper, not just a half an acre market garden that we all know. And but then translating that into action because there's another like a lot of these food companies are super dependent on very cheap ingredients coming from very chemical value chains and very unhealthy value chains, which makes us all sick because that's the food, unfortunately. So switching that, that's such a monumental, and consumers are starting to ask a lot of questions about ingredients, and so there's they're in trouble not only because of weather, but they're also in trouble because of actually market share that's going down, and people picking other things and going deep in on YouTube on health and food and discovering what kind of crap we've been eating. And so there's a dual push, and but then the question is okay, what's the action? Okay, are we gonna set up a food as medicine brand? Or what are we gonna do with our current situation once we've seen the sort of ideal paradise situation?

SPEAKER_01 47:09

Well, yeah, you've I uh brought up a whole bunch of things that uh ideal with yeah. I remember one meeting, this is a big food company, and I was with a lot of executives and so forth and scientists, and I mentioned that regeneratively r really healthy soils produce plants with different nutritional profiles. In other words, they're it's talking about nutrition, not just about function or production or and boy, one scientist just said, Oh, just tore into me and said, You probably believe in the tooth fairy too, right? And it was a belief system. I know. It was really attack. Yeah, it was a total attack. And in fact, his his uh expertise was water and nothing to do with agriculture. And I said, and I I laughed it off and so forth. I was I didn't take I didn't take offense, but I did mention the fact that the Rockefeller Institute has a whole food program and they're studying nutrition. And the I I was talking to them uh uh uh uh re not so long ago, and the gentleman at Royce Steiner was saying chard has actually about 10,000 ingredients. Chard. He said kale has about the same number of ingredients. Okay. He said there's a 10% overlap. In other words, we don't even know what we're eating. And we don't know obviously those most of those ingredients are in very small amounts, but the plant thinks they're all important. And so we don't even know what's in our food and what i constitutes nourishment, really. And so we're at the threshold of discovery here again, not not just I don't want to say look at it as ignorance, I want to look at it as discovery, which is we have I don't know what you have, but we have the the sort of periodic table of diet, what people should eat, and this and that so forth. And it's like we had five we had five parts, like it was a circle. Yeah, you had five, we had a pyramid, and that's being changed by Maha and Robert Kennedy. It's not upside down, yeah. I saw something. But that's so b both missing.

SPEAKER_02 49:13

At least there's a discussion, but at least there's a as an in I think even the fact, the simple notion of a tomato is not a tomato, and a car, like a kale is not a kale, it really depends, of course, on seeds and on how it's grown. There's a there's a it's not just oh five percent more, ten percent more. No, there's a massive, like we've seen our research. We had Herb Young on citrus, ex-Bayer scientist, by the way. He's now in his retirement growing citrus, and his citrus got lab tested eight times, like nutrient-dense, like eight eightx, not ten percent or fifteen. Like it's another product, like you don't even call it the same. But that notion that growing is so fundamentally important on the quality is still very I keep shouting it on every episode, but like very little known that it really matters how you grow. We know it when we taste it, like how this tomato gets different, whatever. But uh it's and so we know it with wine, maybe, and maybe coffee to a certain extent now is the whole coffee boom. But that's it. And that notion of it really matters how where your milk, like how your milk was grown, or how your tomato. There's a fundamental and all those elements are important and they might be important for your brain function or they might be important for your children. And so I think that notion is still it's in our little circle, yeah. Of course, what your food ate. We already book of Anne Bickley and David Montgomery, and but it still surprises me how many food people in the food space just completely dismiss it, like the water guy you talk to, like, of course, nobody's tomato, it's all the same. And it's completely focused, but we haven't really caught up in terms of public knowledge on that at all, that it can make you feel really shitty or very good compared to how it was grown.

SPEAKER_01 50:47

By the way, just digression, I would love to have the name of that person from Bayer who is growing citrus in the city. Absolutely. Okay, it's I will send it to you. Okay, okay, great. What's his how do you spell his surname? Y-Just like Young person, I think. Okay. I mean Y-O-G-G. Okay, squeeze citrus. I will put it also down. Because it's interesting because the company I work with and consult to call Oath Soil Life is a amazing microbial mixture, and not just microbes, but developed over 20 years and so forth. It has fantastic effects, impacts on everything, whether it's corn, wheat, rice, co coffee, or whatever. And in and very quick too, within uh one growing cycle. And but the person who's coming to lead the company is X buyer. X buyer.

SPEAKER_02 51:40

And and I can't speak for him, but I think his thing is I can't get out of here fast enough with Herb, because he was saying we had a long conversation on it on the podcast, and even my my ex-colleagues now think I'm crazy. They come to the farm and they say, Oh, the plants look a bit like this. Let's add something, let's do something, let's make them grow fast. He said, Of course they grow slower. This is only the third year. Citrus in terms of production is not because he did a conventional uh plot as well, just to compare. But he said, It's just another world. Like I'm trying to grow everything out. I'm trying to, but he said, We never we really thought in Bayer and other places, we really thought, uh, like we are saving the world and feeding the world. Yeah, and he said we never got exposed to soil life. He retired and wanted to grow citrus and said, Let's do it organic because there might be a premium. That was his and then he went down the rabbit hole of Joe Kemp's podcast. And he said, For a year, I listened to everything, I read everything, and then I planted my first tree. And but I went through that learning. It took a year. He said it took a year for me to unlearn and relearn for my four 37 years of air, which I really thought I was doing a good thing there, but I just never got exposed to, so it was alive.

SPEAKER_01 52:43

Just of course, think of a conventional school system or whatever that is. No, just a children's school, kind of kindergarten, first and second grade, all that and ninth grade. And so all the teachers think they're doing a good job. Okay. They wouldn't be there. I mean, you know, all of them, but let's say they do, and the principal and this and that and so forth. And they're teaching the children bullshit, basically, in my opinion. Because they need to go to school this year.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

Don't tell me these things, Paul.

SPEAKER_01 53:10

But yeah. Yeah, no, but which school? Which teachers? That's the question. There's great schools out there. Don't get me wrong. I went I sent all my kids to Waldorf schools because just for that reason. I want them to be schooled and be with their classmates. But I'm just saying, buyers the same thing, which is all the people that are thinking they're doing a good thing because they've taught, they're making things grow, they're pr protecting the plants from being eaten up by insects. Just yeah, feeding the world, destroying pollinators, right and left. Pests, pests, echo calls. Excuse me, I'm sorry. Yeah. I got the right. See.

SPEAKER_02 53:42

But I'm always curious what they feed their children. Like I would love to look in the fridge of buyer executives just to see what they eat with what they know. Or any other syngenda. I'm not this is not to pick on, but I'm just curious. Like if you're that deep, do you drink the Kool-Aid or no? Or spray it? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 54:01

Anyway, that's I yeah, I uh there's a CEO of a very big company who I got to know over years and he got it. He got it. Got but the company he was the CEO of came out with the new cereal, which was just absurd. Nutritionally absurd. And a lot of people inside were upset about it, and people were defending it inside. And I was talking to him about it, he said uh he was upset about it. And he said I had to put it on the very I took a box home, very top shelf so my daughter wouldn't see it. That's the system that's the system we're in.

SPEAKER_02 54:40

That's the system of Gerald or three.

Farmer Education And Practical Action

SPEAKER_01 54:43

Yeah. Sun's coming up. Yeah, yeah. Which it goes to what you're doing here, and I'm really in admiration so forth. This is i this whole system is in ferment. It's it's not fixed anymore. And there's a lot of questions, a lot of queries, a lot of problems, and a lot of external externalities. And the externalities are both the weather and the other externality is people just saying, No, I don't want that, I won't buy that and or people realizing that their health and what they've been eating and drinking has a profound effect on their brain, their thinking, their nervous system, their internal organs and their life longevity. Other than that, it's fine. So you're seeing this awakening of people realizing that the food system they've taken for granted and were sold advertisements and all that sort of stuff, nonsense, nutrition is in question. And so it's really a beautiful time. And I I think what your podcast is spot on in terms of really focusing on that because it's really the source of so much else. We have a a literally a five trillion dollar healthcare system in the United States. It's the third biggest country in the world, if it's to stood alone, third biggest country in the world. And it is so absurd. And if you watch television, which I do sometimes, and you're right, yeah. See, yeah, yeah, right. CNN, and then you see these drug advertisements, and then you say, Well, I've never heard I've never heard of that disease. I'm really never, I'm not illiterate there. And then here's the drug for it, and and here's the side effects, by the way, you have to name the side effects and contraindications if you and if you experience this, and that's just like a horror show of potential side effects. And why would they be advertising on CNN if there wasn't a big market for it? There is from a disease you and I have never heard of. That's where we are. Five trillion dollars a year in the United States alone.

unknown 56:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:40

And that's actually a lot of people are arguing in the regeneration space we need to go after the health angle. That's the where because we can talk about soil carbon and biodiversity and pollinators, but there's a small group that really cares about it. But health seems to be a bigger uh issue for more people and or their family. And maybe selfishness like that moves people more than uh let's say the ecosystem they're part of. And there are a lot of opportunities there. There are a lot of like it really food is a huge lever in health, 70-80%, depending on what you count in terms of disease, are preventable or let's say reversible to a certain extent. There's and with not with costs that are a third, a tenth, or whatever of what we're currently paying for the health system, probably less, and we can pay farmers properly with that. And what would you do if you go back to your because you led a food company a long time ago? We like to ask this question, not because I think anybody should have a billion dollars in terms of concentrated wealth, but let's say that happens. Tomorrow morning you wake up, it's on your account, but you had to put it to work. Like it has to be given away, lobbying, but it had to be put to work. And we've had all kinds of answers to this question, obviously, in the 400 episodes we've had. But what would you do if you have the comfortable or uncomfortable task of putting something with nine zeros to work? Could be very long term, obviously. But what would be your prioritization? What would be your big buckets you're look you would be looking at when you had that kind of resources?

SPEAKER_01 58:08

There's just one bucket really, which is to create modalities of education in countries all over the world so farmers could get a stipend to come and stay for a week or whatever, and listen to other farmers doing exactly what I'm doing with that, which is people learn from their peers. They learn from people they respect, and not as opposed to experts. And the farmers who, you know, and the David Montgomery's as well, but and Anne, and uh there's just so much wisdom out there, and it's really inaccessible. You are accessing it and making it available, okay. But how can a farmer, how can he or she find the time or the money to actually immerse themselves into being taught by farmers who have all the same problems and face all the same issues that they do and aren't experts in that sense, they are, but experts because of pre of learning. They learned on the job, and the job was being on this farm and then just sharing, sharing. And that is what I wanted to see created in this country. Um, and I like to see it everywhere from Australia, New Zealand all the way through Africa. And because people are very open to farmers are very open in that sense. If it doesn't isn't a threat, if it actually helps them have a healthier family and they're not using pesticides, if it's better for their children, if it lowers their costs, which it does, by the way, lowers their inputs, if it increases basically crop health, if it increases the value, if it increases the taste, if it increases the the sustainability or viability of their farm, if they can stop having chemicals stacked up in the barn, all those kind of things are really farmers are very open to it. They really are. I would say the only farms that aren't usually are industrial because there is no farmer. There are like 10,000, 50,000, 20,000 acre farms owned by some company. That's a harder, that's a harder reach. But most farmers aren't that way. And as I said, I by the time I was, I don't know what I in my twenties, I had 35,000, well, not quite, but 30 plus thousand acres under contract, organically grown food. And I did so by finding these farms, which actually weren't difficult to find, but actually going to the farm and walking the farm with the farmer and getting the family history, the crop history, what they've learned, and so forth. They taught me, I didn't know anything about my grandfather's a farmer, but I didn't learn anything from anything else except these people. And that mode of learning is ancient and effective, and we don't have it right now because the ag schools got turned out, the buyer people that were basically skeptical of Herb Young, right? And so you that's what I would do with the billion dollars. And obviously at some point they have to be self-sustaining, but but you can go a long way with the billion dollars because education is really relatively inexpensive, yeah, and it's not a capital sink. And that's what I do, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:19

And to a younger self, in that sense, would you start another food company in another in in this era if you had your hands free and you had say that energy and time, etc., would that be something like you did back in the day, or is that something that is not exciting at the moment? Because we're in that exciting time with consumers shifting, big food companies under a lot of pressure, which means opportunity as well. A lot of farmers are switching, they need places for their differently grown ingredients to go. Is that exciting with your entrepreneur hat on?

Closing Reflections And Listener Requests

SPEAKER_01 1:01:49

What's exciting to me is to see what's going on, just in terms of the c food companies, literacy, care, whether it's retail or wholesale or direct, I'm pretty blown out by the rate of understanding and adoption by consumers and customers that's going on in the world right now. Obviously I see through my own lens, I shop at those stores, I go to those places. So I have a buyer's point of view. Yeah, I got my bubble. But at least I had the sense of having helped create the bubble in my life. And and I'm just wanting to make the bubble bigger. And so I find that that's what really and I do it by speaking, writing, and consulting, and I don't think I have some magnificent effect, but I have effects that will uh that do ripple out in ways that you know nobody no one will ever know, that do affect everything from infants to farmers and people and people who are downstream from farms, which are usually toxic in commercial areas. But at the same time, I just feel like the soil, if you will, is actually a doorway to understanding the entire system of Earth, uh, the biosphere. Because oftentimes we see bios biosphere as diversity, and we think different birds and different animals and this and that and so forth, and they're perishing and and so forth, which is true, and the oceans too. But I actually think that if you unw if you give right back to source, that's the highest leverage point. And uh so it's not just the soil of the farm, it's the soil of the forests, what's happening there. And the this idea that you should plant a trillion trees and somehow you're going to capture more carbon is oh no, don't do that. You plant forests, not trees. And you plant them as you create the conditions for forests, so you don't create plantation forests and so forth. So just getting that kind of you're so familiar with this, so I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's as literate or more so than I in this area because you have such a broad sweep. But but really get down to basics, which is human well-being. I started all this because I had asthma on my life until I was 18, and I changed my diet and my asthma went away, and I was shocked and mad. I was shocked that it went away. It didn't come back. I was shocked that the medical establishment had not done the damn thing for I had it from six months, old the youngest recorded case of asthma in the county I lived in. And I just thought, oh, give me a break. I went from X to Y in terms of diet, and I don't have asthma, and I had been taking pharmaceuticals for all my life. And when I got the teenager because I like to play sports and breathing is important, I had to take three times the maximum daily dose of aminophyl and ephedrin, which is like speed, and to actually breathe one day, and I recommend to everybody who has good lungs, breathe and just feel that. And I never felt air in the bottom of my lungs until I was 18, 19 years old. Never felt it. I had no idea what that experience was like. So for me, that it was like, you're kidding. It's so simple. It was so simple. Food. And so Erlon, my food got me started because it was so hard to get the food. You had to go to different Chinatown, Japantown, the farmers market, the Quaker Mill, you had to go around town for spend the whole day w once a week to find the food you wanted to eat. But and so I thought it should be available m more conveniently to people. But this the this connection w with what w we eat, I've been healthy, I've been I've never I knock, I shouldn't say this, but I haven't had a disease or sickness since then. Okay. And people say, Well, what's your secret? I said, There's no secret at all. And so what do you eat? What do you re suggest? I said, The reason uh isn't because of what I eat, it's because of what I don't eat. I'm healthy because of what I don't eat. I y you could figure this out for yourself what you do want to eat that's healthy for you. But the fact is that most illness and sickness and pathologies in the world come from what people are eating and imbibing drinking or breathing in many cases too, of course. And so it's not so complicated. It's not here's the diet, this is works for you. No, it's not that way. It's get rid of all the other stuff and make that transition. It's just like farmers make a transition, getting rid of stuff, and they're doing things that are uh creative, procreative. And so each of us is the same as the farm. We've been putting junk down our mouths without knowing it in some cases, sometimes knowing it, doesn't matter which. Do the survey, do the understanding, look to others who are before you, that is the Have already made this transition, learn from them, and then you'll figure out what to eat and you'll figure out what not to eat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:56

I think it's a perfect one to wrap up with. I want to be conscious of your time. We quote unquote used quite a bit on end with a deep breath with everyone that can do that. And of course, the wonder of why spheres are around or why drops are around. And to wonder, go out. Hopefully, you listen to this on a run, on a walk. Um, I know a lot of people listen to this while being in a tractor, if they're on a farm picking eggs or grading eggs, being in a garden somewhere, long walks. I hope that this is not behind the screen, because that would be counterintuitive in this case. I want to thank you so much all for all the work you do and you have done, and of course for taking the time to come here and share some of that. We could do this for hours. I'm very curious how the water and hydrosphere message is landing with food co with food executives. We'll check in uh in with that at some point. And yeah, thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:48

Cool, and thank you. And actually, I the work you're doing is so inspiring to me. There was it was a desert 50 years ago. And to know that somebody like you is doing what they've done 400 times with the people that you invite, and with that kind of literacy and understanding, compassion as well, is wondrous and makes me happy and makes me very grateful to you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:19

So, how did that make you feel this passionate plea for being outside a lot? It definitely makes me think, even though I would love to, I just don't spend enough time outside as I spend a lot in front of this marvelous machine that's called a laptop and a microphone, and talking to all of you. Sometimes we get to do that side, but not enough. And and what does it make you for me? Really, what left with the conversation with Paul is the energy. At that age, I would love to have that 10% of that energy, the optimism, but also that because of all of he has seen and the people I've talked to, like you it's very easy to slip into deep pessimism. Of course, he doesn't do optimism, he says lack of fear from his Buddhist practice, and engaging with the food system, even though he knows how much work there's still to be done on that side, still deeply engaging with executive, food executives, large companies, and bringing them to the most extreme examples and seeing how that lands and how they are moved by that and hopefully getting to action, which of course is the most difficult piece. So easy to be inspired by an amazing farm, it's so easy not to not do anything with that. We've all seen that probably. But it it reminds me again of how powerful it can be when it works well. So I really hope you enjoyed this. I hope you enjoyed it somewhere outside, and hopefully you can stay a bit longer outside also after this is done. Maybe listen to something else, maybe not listen to anything. Just listen to the wind, the trees, the grass, the cows, the insects, whatever you are surrounded with. See you or hear you at the next one. This podcast is part of the Intergenerational Open Geospatial Carbon Registry, OGCR, project, which is funded by the European Union that is working on the development of a carbon registry, of the modeling of carbon reduction and carbon farming future scenarios and the demonstration of business cases. The goal: empowering farmers, policymakers, researchers, business managers, investors, and communities across Europe and beyond. OGCR helps to ensure carbon benefits that are shared fairly today and for the generations to come. If you're curious to learn more, you can visit ogr.eu. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/slash posts. If you like 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 Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.