Where Do Climate Solutions Come From? | Climate x Investing Part 2

Marcius continues his conversation with physicist, engineer, and investor Tom Chi. They discuss building a climate discipline that can span generations, try to explain climate investing at a grade four level, and wrestle with the consequences of lack of cultural diversity in climate conversations.

Videography: Stefano Dozza, fourthact.xyz

Show Credits:
Vishrudh Sriramprasad, Producer
Claire Davis, Theme Music (Long Gone, Get It Right) | @clairedavismusic

Kheya Patel, Art | https://kheyapatel.com/

Contact: podontherise@gmail.com

Transcript

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And I made this point in a recent talk, but I think it's useful to share here, which is most of the scale that technology is obsessed with is scale in space. Right? Oh, we distributed everywhere in the world or monetary scale. Oh, we we you know are doing billions in top lines this year, right? But the type of scale that that society has not been good at recently is scale and time, right? Goals that we want to pursue for four generations. We don't have many of those recently. Now, look, there's many indigenous cultures and many earlier, you know, cultures where just stuff took longer to do, right? Like pyramids weren't built in one generation. A lot of things weren't built in one generation. So like we certainly are a civilization that's capable of doing multi-generational goals. We just haven't touched one for a while. Hello, my friends. Welcome to the On the Rise podcast. I'm your host, Mark Ecdavore. In today's episode, we pick up part two of my conversation with Tom Fee, scientist, turned engineer, turned product developer, and climate investor, or planet positive investor, as you would put it. What is a planet positive investor? Tune in to find out. Now, even though I am mildly skeptical about whether venture capital investing can even be useful for a lot of climate solutions at all, I went into this conversation curious and with an open mind because I really respect the way Tom approaches it, and I think he's really on to something with his approach at his firm at one venture. So here's my conversation with Tom Phi, part two. We need to think about the cultural aspects of things and cultural continuity over several generations. Because like and and I made this point in a recent talk, but I think it's useful to share here, which is most of the scale that technology is obsessed with is scale in space, right? Oh, we distributed everywhere in the world or monetary scale. Oh, we we you know are doing billions in top line this year, right? But the type of scale that that society has not been good at recently is scale and time, right? Goals that we want to pursue for four generations. We don't have many of those recently. Now, look, there's many indigenous cultures and many earlier, you know, cultures where just stuff took longer to do, right? Like pyramids weren't built in one generation. A lot of things weren't built in one generation. So like we certainly are a civilization that's capable of doing multi-generational goals. We just haven't touched one for a while. So to give you a sense of things, like, you know, I I work with a bunch of you know environmental and social entrepreneurs, and I was doing a bunch of work in a lot of communities in the developing world, and I was at uh some some stuff in Latin America, uh, and they had this whole series that was called fuck up nights. And it was basically just entrepreneurs getting up and there'd be like three speakers in a fuck-up night. Yep. But they wouldn't talk about their huge win, and here's how we got the funding, and here's why the exit. They would just talk about one of their biggest fuck-ups. Yeah. And it just created such a, you know, an honest and connected sense of community in that entrepreneur group, right? Because the people that are going up there are talking about their biggest fuck-ups, but we also know that all three of them have had some great successes too. But by leading with the fuck-ups, they were basically kind of creating a cultural moment. And they and this was like a whole series. It's like once a month, it would happen, like kind of over a happy hour type setting. People would talk about their biggest fuck-ups, and it like created this enormous kind of um momentum in that entrepreneurial community. And I can imagine something like that lasting a whole generation, for example. When you talked about expanding in scale uh in time. In time and in space, I thought you were gonna say the third dimension was culture. Oh. Or no, you talked about you talked about the level of monetary value, you talked about space, ubiquity of solutions or gadgets or whatever, and then you talked about space. I thought you were gonna say culture. And but you said time, and I think you sort of reference culture in another way. But like just Well, culture is the thing that makes the time possible. Here is sort of a while you were saying that, I was having this thought that, oh yeah, you know, I think he's right, because you know, I've I'm familiar with the physics, bring it back there, the physics community for a while, where I know who my sort of intellectual ancestors were. Absolutely. Whereas I don't have that exact same feeling and climate and we can develop it. Like for instance, you know, my supervisor's name was Joseph. Yep. And his advisor was called Lena. But he also had another advisor called Alan. Yeah. And Alain won a Nobel Prize a few years ago. Yep. I don't really know Alain that well. I don't know him personally, but I was happy for my advisor, yeah, my sort of academic parent, because I knew he would be thrilled that his academic parent, my academic grandparent, as people say, Absolutely, you know, had this major award. And even though I don't have a personal connection, I felt something that day and I wrote my advisor. Hey, Joseph, look at that. Congratulations. Isn't that amazing? Right. You must be thrilled. I'm happy for you, I'm happy for myself, even though you know I'm part of the tree. And uh wouldn't it be cool if we could develop that in, you know, technology for climate or nature and innovation. Well, actually, I wouldn't I would say not only would it be cool, but I actually think it's an explicit prerequisite. Look, like, look, I mean, imagine computer, you know, computer science and computer engineering and software engineering never developed a culture. Yeah. Right? Like we would just have fewer of the folks. Interesting. Like, you know, like and culture includes things that that uh affect quality, like pair programming, code reviews, you know, like how you do your bug system, all that kind of thing. Those things get into culture as well. Because when I was talking about the fuck up nights, they were teaching something about entrepreneurship there. They were actually deepening the discipline and something that they wanted more people in Latin America to be able to interface with. And we need the sorts of folks, uh and I'm actually writing a book now, and I talk about uh the four C's of the 21st century. Okay. Because uh look, I have a career where I've built lots of robotics, uh, you know, worked on worked on AI or what people call AI now, it doesn't matter so much. It's because they're calling everything. I'm gonna ask you that in a minute. Yeah, we'll talk about that in detail in a second. But long story short, because of that, I know that robotics and AI absolutely can displace jobs. I personally have built things that I know have displaced jobs. And we can get into if you want, but whatever. I I know what they are. And given that, I came up with the four C's as basically here are the things that we're going to likely design our jobs around, because these are the things that robots and AI are just not gonna be as good at for a long time. And this is basically compassion, community, creative thinking, and uh critical thinking. Right? Now, so some people are like, well, they're really creative, they can paint anything now. No, no, no. They they can paint from trained things that they don't just go and say, like, I'm gonna go create cubism. Isn't the OpenAI 01 model, wouldn't they call that a version of critical thinking? Like that seemed like perhaps the softest of your four C's, just my first time thinking about it. And also critical thinking means the kind of things where you just re like the most important critical thinking is when you change the roles of the system. Like most things in AI still exist in a system where they basically say, hey, I'm a generative AI that's set up in a chat interface where we go back and forth through the chat interface. A person that can critically think will be like, no, chat's the wrong format. And actually, I shouldn't be interacting with you like this. I get you. Right? Right? Like completely skip out and reframe the whole thing. Like, you know, AIs don't typically do that. They do something closer to uh kind of pattern matching and and kind of the synthesis of things that are in a particular pattern design. And that's not that's not bad. That's still a creative act. There's there's craft people that that just do pattern making. Sure. Right. And even that's more creative than what AI does. But but I'll I'll just say there are crafts that are less like the the high art crafts, they're just the the do-in crafts. And and I expect AI will do some of those do-in'crafts. Yep. But like when you're talking about the things that where we're really changing direction, and the the reason I brought up the four C's is community is central to that. Yeah. Right? We're gonna need to build lots of different forms of community, and community is where most of what we've been missing in the technological revolution lies. And I this is a way longer topic, but uh but you know, before I started the firm, I spent a lot of time traveling the world both to go look at the front lines of the ecological damage, but also to spend time with communities that are living on a dollar or two a day. Yeah. And what I came back with was these people are so much better at the technology of community than we are over here, right? It works in so many explicit ways out there that it replaces most of the tech. And I and really, you know, I'm saying this backwards on purpose, but like you pop over here and you get to the world where it's like, oh, we replaced all those aspects of community with tech, and now we feel terrible. Now we're wondering where they are and why we feel this way. Yeah, and and look, there's been sociological studies where they they surveyed people for the average number of close friends that they had. And it's down by a factor of two or three from the 80s. So over the last 40 years, because of technology, people have like one-third as many close friends. That's terrible. I told you this, I just moved to a new town, uh, it's a smaller place, I don't really know anybody there, and like all my friends are on my phone now. And so it's really that's not a new phenomenon. I had some life, real life friends, of course. Well, not of course, I did, but now I don't. Yeah. And I'm really noticing it. I love texting and whatever with my friends, but like it's just a phone, right? Right. And and when real community exists, that it it is qualitatively different on so many levels. Look, I mean, the way we've created technological community, it works fine enough in the in the medium of attention. Sure. And commerce as connected to attention. And like, whenever you think about technology, you should think about the primary medium it's mucking with. Right? Now, when you are just trying to get attention, that is not all that is needed to create great community. Imagine a community where like the person that was putting the community together just only wanted your attention. You'd be like, this guy sucks. Yes. It's like these, you know, personifications of, you know, you'll see like funny videos of people trying to personify social media platforms. And it's like good for a gag online. Like Instagram would be like, this is a person, TikTok would be like this is a person. But the net or like the through line is they're all really annoying examples of people that you would never want to be around. Exactly. Just showing us that the way we're pushed into act, this is not a novel thought. I need your attention. Something really important. This ad. You know, like the fuck? Why am I with this person? This slot. Right, right. Exactly. It's like so like think about the medium it works in. And when human beings create community, they intrinsically touch this the richer medium, right? The the the superficial, you know, like unsatisfying medium is attention for the purpose of commerce. Yeah. And we kind of built the whole cathedral out of that right now. I think everybody in the world knows that that is not the totality of what matters in human life. And they're longing for the things that are missing from the four C's. Now, look, I expect robotics and AI to fully take over most repetitive physical and cognitive work, right? Like the big move with AI was that now we're taking on repetitive cognitive work too. Before we had robots that would do repetitive physical work, that's fine. And but I actually think that's not necessarily a problem. Like the human mind, you know, if you if you force it to do the repetitive thing for 30 years, it can. But I I think you rare would be the person that would say, like, that's the highest use of the human mind, right? So I'm not against the idea that physical and cognitive repetitive labor goes to these things. Or even the occasional like creative flourish, go for it, right? But like when you need those big reframes, then you're gonna have a human for it. If you need want to build a robust sense of community, you're gonna have a human for it, right? Like, and if you understand that the four C's are going to be central for so many jobs in the future, then one can actively train into those skills. Just like I was saying, there's a whole skill relative to the physical landscape compared to the emotional psychological landscape. One needs to build skills to be good at this. Similarly, one needs to build skills to be good at compassion, to be good at community. Let's talk about AI and climate. Or let's talk about, let's say, the broader intersection between digital world, new digital tools, and nature, climate. Maybe you can throw energy in there. I'm grew up as more of a hardware person, physicist, working in lab, was a quant briefly, then have sort of worked in innovation management, some policy, some government work, some private sector stuff, but usually more of a hardware person than a software person. Now I find myself in a happy position to be really actively leaning into new digital tools, AI, but really it's like data engineering with some machine learning, also creative tools like design. So I'm exploring, and I came in a little bit skeptical about I'm used to steel on the ground, so to speak, and hardware, and I tended to see software as great, great to make a business, but you're fundamentally nibbling around the edges, you're not gonna get to the core of the problem. But now I'm starting to re-evaluate. So I'm curious if you see, let's call it AI as a name for modern digital technologies, some of which are actually AI, some of which are other things, and climate and conservation and nature. Do you think it's gonna be a fundamental unlock of new avenues of opportunity and solution? Or perhaps a force multiplier that just makes everything a little better and easier in the way we described, you know, repetitive task, cognitive or mental or physical. Or maybe some other thing. How do you imagine this might develop in the next two, three, four years? Yeah, I have a real near term and then a real long term, and I think those probably the most interesting spots to talk about. So the real near term is that um yeah, it's it's very straightforward how AI and technologies that are broadly being called AI, you know, can make a difference right now. And specifically around these physical businesses, we talked about matter, energy, time, space, right? So to the extent that you know you can um use, you know, like robotics, AI, new material science to go dramatically reduce the amount of matter that you need. Yes. Because maybe you're mechanically handling the matter in a more skillful way through robotics or energy use, feedstock costs, shipping, transportation. Yes, right. So so um so fantastic. Well, then obviously that sort of technical innovation is directly in line with the with the reduction in matter, the dematerialization of that industry. Okay, and less mined material coming on the ground generally drives, you know, improved you know, um ecology just from the reduction in what needed to be dug out or mountaintops to be blown off, right? Um, so and then same sort of thing on energy. If you have algorithms that are bringing down the op ex, you know, energy-wise dramatically, then or if you have you know robotic systems or um or new plant designs that go and reduce that dramatically, then fantastic. Now, some of that is just straight up old school mechanical. Well, there's really five types of making electrical, mechanical, chemical, biological, software, right? So, like, you know, some of it is just like regular blocking and tackling like those five disciplines, you know, in various forms. And some of them are are touching like techniques that we call AI that's getting in the loop. At the end of the day, it really is still the classic five build disciplines, but it's really just like, well, how is AI taking out some of the repetitive physical or cognitive tasks? And how is it addressing a reduction in energy matter or time and space? Is it possible that even something called generative AI could represent a sixth way or modality of building? Is it I I I'm not sure if I believe that, but I'm just probing. Is it possible that some new combination could emerge? Like I can't think of anything about it. I'm talking types of about types of engineering. Sorry, but I think what I was asking, I think what you were saying, Craig, is there's five types of engineering, five ways to make stuff. Yeah. And AI is gonna sort of unlock or stimulate uh one of those five. Well, generative AI in particular is a well, it is doing Could it create a sixth way to make stuff? I I don't consider that another way to make stuff because most of generative AI has been like uh just aesthetic variation. And when you make a thing, because like if I was generous What do you mean by that? Aesthetic variation. Aesthetic variation is like, oh, I looked at uh 20,000 painters with different styles, and now you want to make a colorful, a variation of a colorful style with blah blah blah, right? With with a large object in the right, and then you go for it, right? Um but that to me is like it it would be overly generous to say that it's designing something. Because I know that design is a way deeper discipline than aesthetic variation. Sure. So, like, so as much as I almost want to give it like, okay, it's not an engineering discipline, because when I talked about those five types of things, those were all engineering disciplines: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, bioengineering, software engineering. Correct. They're not design disciplines. Now, if I was really generous, but I I don't think that this is appropriately generous, I could say, well, generative AI is somewhere down the track of uh doing useful in a design discipline. But it is not, it's not designing something. It's not as deep as the discipline. Yep. Now, at the at the end of the day, can it be a fantastic tool for designers? Can it be a fantastic tool for people that are doing aesthetic variations? Absolutely, right? That aesthetic variations is one of the things that visual designers do, right? Like, you know, like um permutations on interactivity is something that interact interaction designers do. Yep. That's totally fine. So to the extent that I can dialogue with an AI and then go kick out some variations for me to go muck with, then great. But if I just like cargo cut that and just drop it into the thing, you you're not, well, number one, you're not being a designer. And number two, you're likely gonna have a bunch of the problems, like the guy with the that was trying to use it for for like a legal brief and like it made up all the case law, right? Yeah. You're like no, this is gonna be a problem. Like you would have like at the end of the day, like uh art is about freedom, design is about constraints. And the discipline of being a good designer is being skillful about constraints, including constraints that are non-programmatic. Right? Some of the constraints are about teamwork, for example. Those are non-programmatic constraints. A fantastic designer does amazingly in the full set of constraints. Now, obviously, in AI, if you go program an objection, objective function or loss function, you can go within a specific constraint, go and lock it in. Okay, seriously. You get it, right? But how about the how about the non, you know, uh the non-quant constraints? As a designer, you run into them all the time. You also have some quant constraints, that's great. And maybe some of those are trainable, but they're only trainable if enough people have done projects that are kind of close enough in the past. Otherwise, you'll train it on what has been done, it'll just generate something roughly in that ballpark. They're not gonna go a thousand miles away. Where even if it did, you'd be like, the hell's that? Let me ask you a related kind of AI or digital technology question. And this is the one I hear probably the most, and I I might have told you before we started taping, but I was trying to describe, I'm working now at Ode, and yeah, we're combining design and digital technologies in service of environment broadly. And my cousin said, I thought AI was bad for the environment because of all these data centers. So, like, what are you talking about? So I guess the question to you is is it an oxymoron to talk about AI for nature and climate? Or maybe explain why this could possibly go together or why it's not not we shouldn't only think about energy use of data centers. Yeah, I mean, we talked before about accuracy and language, and I'm a person who is oftentimes listening to how people are talking about things and just kind of permuting the language in my head a bit. Because here's the thing when people say, is AI bad for the environment? Well, it is specifically the sub route of algorithms that are runtime algorithms and data centers that need to go over and over. Now, there's a lot of AI, which is a single run pre-compute. In which case it's like, I don't know, uses energy, but that's not the kind of thing you're talking about. You're not freaking out about a single run pre-compute. Yeah. Or like once every three months retrain a pre-compute. You're not freaking out about that. So, like, even details of whether it's a uh precompute or a runtime are not in the conversation. But to me, like, well, that's in that's already a binary change in the conversation. Yes. It's also an example of a level of detail that the average person is not aware of. Right. That they're because we're aware of like what we see is I don't know, Google is trying to get us to gener it's generating search results. Uh and I don't think to the average person, they're not seeing so I'm sensitive to what you said, but I can understand what you're doing. Well they're not they're not parsing it out as pre-compute versus runtime versus what have you. Here's the thing. Like if I would do anything in society right now, it it would be really to have people just get a little clearer on the conversations, you know, that they are in. Because at the end of the day, there's basically the thing. I mean, there's a lot of people that can go have opinions about a thing. And if they if they have no expertise like scaling server systems or building AI or building the algorithms or, you know, robots that they're saying are using AI now, whatever, though we used to call it like path planning and obstacle avoidance and machine vision and that sort of thing. But whatever. Like all these disciplines I have a background in and all call it AI now, it's totally fine. It's fine from your perspective because you know the difference and you can roll with it without getting hung up on the. I'm not getting hung up on it, but it in terms of the accuracy of the language, it's becoming a problem for the world. I see that. Because, like, look, some things you like um like a path planning algorithm is not going to become sentient and go take over the world. Right? It's it's like we're just not even and uh a thing that is a pre-compute is not going to be a big environmental load, right? It's just like unless we have a little bit more nuance in this thing, we're not even having the conversation. So I oftentimes, you know, first give a conversation a rating of the signal to noise. And most conversations in society are like 95% noise, which is in the band where you don't even want to listen to it, right? Like it it will absolutely increase your noise percentage. There are definitely things and topics, videos I watch that I'm not proud of, but I can sometimes break away by realizing this might be making me stupider. Yeah. Or like it's really what I mean is it's reinforcing a connection or a thought pattern in my mind that I'm pretty sure is wrong or not helpful, or I don't want it. And let me I I this thing has power over me, so maybe not consume that too much because I want to stay in this other groove or re-establish other groove. Like I've noticed that in myself. Yeah, and and there's actually three types of truth. And if people would just like put the stuff in the right category to start, they would already have a better conversation. Okay. So the first type of truth is physical truth, right? The earth goes around the sun, it rotates, we have a moon, you know, like all these sorts of things. Water's wet. Right, water's wet. This is physically true, no matter whether people exist or not. No matter what people think or feel or whatever. Objective reality, objective truth. Right. And and that is the sort of stuff like, hey, does this vaccine do something to this pathogen in this cell? That is objectively happening or not, right? So like there's a realm for that, and that will happen regardless of anybody's opinion on it. Then there's a second category where the opinion is the thing. Like, is Madonna one of the best pop artists in history or not? That's right. Well, if nobody had ever heard of her, then the answer is absolutely no. Michael Jordan or LeBron James. Right. Yeah. If a lot of people have heard of that person, and and you know, whatever, um, 10 million are Jordan and and like 10.5 million are LeBron, then great. There is a way to say, like, okay, in terms of public opinion, sure. And this is actually a topic for public opinion. That's right. People are oftentimes interchanging these. Are they based, still countable in a way? So many people are agreeing with me with my crazy podcast that it means that the science isn't right. It's like you guys are just this is a category error. You're you're actually having the argument in the wrong category. And I'm not against you fighting for, oh, I think Madonna is the best pop artist, or I think so-and-so, right? That's you just kind of collecting votes, if you will. What's the third type of truth? Oh, the first the third type is personal truth. Uh right. So personal truth, like let's say you might be a queer person that grows up in a family where nobody is queer. So, like, the social truth within your family is like we all vote that you're not queer. Right. And then the person's like, uh, maybe I am because uh your vote doesn't count in this third category. I see. Now that said, people mixing up all those things, right? People are like, well, my personal truth is hate these immigrants, so I'm gonna go make the social truth, right? That immigrants must be ruined the country. And it's like, oh, well, that's not how that works. I think I love that sorry. Well, I mentioned it because the politics are so off. Like, immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than the existing population. So, like, you must have taken a personal feeling about a thing and tried to assert it as a second type of truth, but you didn't actually get interested in the the statistical reality of whether that's true or not. We're gonna have to do another episode on your book and on truths or something. All I'll say is it it it you said there's a category error sometimes. Yes. I often wonder, and I'll just leave this dangling, if it doesn't it I think there are category errors all over the place, especially with language. However, does it also suggest that there's a hierarchy of truths? In other words, are we in a moment now where the society has decided personal truths are more important, hypothetically, than physical truths? And I'm or what it means is I'm gonna value those. So if there's a conflict between the truths we get from the different truth systems, maybe we value one or the other. I don't know. I'm sort of you you can enforce whatever hierarchy that you want, but life works better when you reason in the right category. I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying. Because like you might say, like, hey, my personal truth is this, and I'm gonna go make everybody around me miserable for it. Yeah. Then it's like, no, everybody's life is gonna be worse for it. When I hear things like personal truth or my truth, there's a part of me that understands what those are right away because I experience that in my own life, as we probably all have. But there's another part of me that gets nervous because I think, oh no, is an attack on objective physical truth coming. That's just sort of my bias when I hear that. But I see people very often. But we should also build the skill of getting people out of the wrong category. So if somebody starts saying, like, oh, it's my truth that the vaccine's not right for me. Right. Then I'll be like, oh, well, let's talk about it. That's right. Right? Because like, it is it, you know, let's talk about like the way you think. And it's like, and if they start telling me, well, it b because of my beliefs, the science doesn't work, I'd say, okay, well, there's a category issue here. Or like a phrase maybe that encapsulates some of this that you hear people say is two things can be true at the same time. That's true. Which can be true. You can have your personal truth better. So there's a subjective truth. But then the science can it can also be intention. Right. The science can be that it's effective against a specific pathogen, and your personal truth could be that you're still not going to go take it. That's right. That will lead to subsequent consequences. Right. You know, they can coexist. Yeah, you know, Herman Cain has got some things to not say about that. Um, but like, you know, like at the end of the day, like you still get to make choices in your life. It's really just you will have a life of more consequences that were not necessary. Two more quick things, and we'll get you out of here. Why is climate so white? What I mean is you've noticed maybe, I certainly have noticed when I go to a climate meeting, a conversation, where the phrase climate change, climate crisis, conservation, maybe even nature, energy, I'll put in a slightly different category because I don't quite experience it in those spaces. Um extremely white. Uh some of my best friends are white. Okay, that's what I'm saying. It's like why is that the case? Now we know there's a traditional history of like some of the intellectual earth science coming from northern western Europe and from North America, places like Canada and United States. We know that, coastal United States, especially, but not exclusively. But uh it's just something I can't help but notice. I was reflecting on it this year at Climate Week because I was in some extremely cultural diverse spaces, and then more traditional climate spaces. So and I just started asking people this question. So that's a question to you. One, do you agree that that's a thing? And two, and this is really my question, does it matter? Maybe in our truths framework, like is does it matter only in the interpersonal? Because I feel a certain way, if I'm the only black dude that shows up to a meeting and I'm thinking, where is everybody? But I'm also sort of used to that, and I've become accustomed to being the only one or one of a small number of whatever. Yeah. Does it matter? Is it holding us back? I worry that we're not making the conversation inclusive enough. But I also think I'm biased because of things like engineering and physics and climate. Um certainly don't have a ton of black people in them in North America, but they're also not the most culturally diverse. I mean, engineering again, a bit different. Um, most people I went to engineering school with were first generation or second generation immigrants like me. So that was like everybody's right, absolutely all over the place. Climate in particular, yeah, and nature conservation. What do you think about that? What have you noticed? Does it matter? Yeah, uh, I think it it does exist, and it does matter in a bunch of cases. And to give you a really concrete story, I was at biodiversity cop um in Montreal, COP 15. Yeah. And that was the one where last year, right? Yeah, uh, it was like a couple years ago. Two years ago. Yeah. And and um that was the one where they said, oh, we're gonna go protect 30%. 30 by 23. Right, by 2030, 30 by 30 was the big pledge that came out of it. No So this whole, let's just spell it, it was like 30% of the world's Right, like like land should be protected for biodiversity by 2030. By 2030. Got it. Yes. Nice easy tagline. Now um the most potent event that I went to on it uh during that that event was not an official event. It was actually like off campus, adjacent to campus, right? There's like a campus of buildings where most of the events are happening, and then kind of adjacent to campus, like you know, five ten-minute walk. Um, all the indigenous people on one of the nights basically held like a you know three, four-hour event. Yeah. And the main thing from that was like the 30 by 30 is crazy because we're already doing it. Like the main thing that's happening right now is they're working out the way to attribute it to white people doing it. Interesting. And and I was like, fair enough, right? No, because like these this was the indigenous gatherings from many, many folks from all around the world. And like they were getting up and literally talking about how they were already doing it for huge swaths of land here, here, here, and here. And I was like, yeah, no, that actually just sounds like that's factually right. Now, the thing is is that they're not in the conversation. It's not like they never get to be on stage during COP, but they're just kind of like a little bit colorful spice, you know, on a channel. Totally. Or like pulled in to like give a comment on a thing. Totally. They're not the people that are designing the design of you know of the of the conference. They're not the ones that are saying the big goal should be 30 by 30. Like the there's a real danger that we create like an additional wave of colonialism. Because we had a wave of colonialism where we just like grab the people for slavery. And then later on, we had, you know, a well, kind of concurrently, we had a wave of colonialism where we took all the land and said, like, well, you're our colony now. And then later on, we had the colonialism, economic colonialism, where it's like, hey, you got a lot of minerals in the ground, so we're gonna go give your government a bunch of debt, and you're gonna give us all your minerals, and you'll pay us back on the debt. It's like, wait, isn't there anything that you leave in there? I know. No. All these three things are still happening, by the way, as you know. But yeah, like the dictator will get some fancy cars. That's the only thing that's left on the ground out there. And this might be just that next wave of colonialism, where instead of coming in and like saying, Oh, the mineral resources belong to me, here's the debt, da-da-da. You come and say it's like, oh, there's a nature-based project here, so this forest belongs to me. Yes. And really, I'm in charge of bringing back the carbon or biodiversity. And you're welcome. Right, exactly. Now, of course, the indigenous people who are out there, it's like, we already hit the goal, so what is this conference about? Yeah, interesting. And it's just you guys aren't talking to us in a real enough way that it fits in your accounting. For me, one of the most jarring things that I see is that it can start to feel performative anytime someone is standing up and saying, I am here to defend the rights of them. Uh-huh. I'm here to defend their virtue, their opportunities, their rights, their whatever, which at one hand is a beautiful altruistic feeling. Yeah. On the other hand, it can just be as they, you know, just centering yourself. And it's like, how about we just get Mrs. So-and-so up on stage? Maybe she's not a few. No, the indigenous people were very articulate. I mean, even though some of them had translators, it was all very articulate. Right. They know how to do the restoration of these lands. They've literally, depending on the tribe, thousands of years, some of them hundreds of years, but you get it. Way longer than, you know, our country's like trying to get to 250 years. I'm not done with this topic. I will pick it up another time, but I want to scratch in it because it's something I don't hear come up in, you know, like I had this experience in Climate Week where I was in Manhattan office towers for the official meetings, and then I was, just like you said, at an unofficial side event, and it was like, oh, this is where people are, this is where the community is, not just people that have the right badge to get through six escalators in an office tower. And just to get really crisp on this, it's not like people should do this as like a rote, you know, thing, like, oh, I just have to do DEI for because that it's somebody told me to. No, it's like there's a number of settings where it's a materially different outcome. Yes. Right? Because like if the indigenous folks have already achieved the goal, why are we designing the goal in 2022? Why are we designing a goal in 2022 that's already accomplished? And why are we moving the money piles around and just awarding a bunch of white folks that are are operationalizing the measurement? This is the this is for me the scariest part about the DEI sort of attacks is like, yes, is there a bit of like BS that's inside of part of the broader DEI ethos? I think there can be in some places. I'm not opposed to let's look at some of that. Fine. Yeah, that that as a discipline should also improve our videos and do everything right. Absolutely right. Yeah. But if it's used as just an excuse to sort of just silence voices or like not even raise these concepts or these topics for discussion, um, then that's is where I think like we're we're going in the wrong direction here. Look, you can get a lot from a lot by just saying who's in the room and what's the medium they're working on. So before we talked about like, yeah, we have all this AI and it's just working on attention as a medium, and that's why community sucks, right? And similarly, we have, you know, cop, biodiversity cop, we have climate cop. And a climate cop, it's mostly oil and gas companies have the seats inside. Increasingly so. And you're like, okay, wrong medium, like conversation is not the medium, yes, right? And the wrong people in the room. And similarly with the with biodiversity cop, well, it's not that the indigenous people weren't there at all, but they were just like kind of sprinkled in on the side at different sessions, and this was the only session that they could just come together and their voices were central on the thing. And that's like, well, in that room, that was like almost a completely different conference. Yes. That was the conference of the people that are doing the work. Uh-huh. Before I had a bunch of conferences about people trying to financialize and financially enclose the work. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not saying there isn't any work to do there, but I'm just going to tell you the actual restoration of the ecosystem is a lot more doing than the financial enclosure. Financial enclosure is like a month of entity work with lawyers, right? The the ecosystem restoration work is 20 years and like paying attention to how different aspects of the soil is changing and how hydrology is moving over the landscape and how the different species, the the how the how the the fauna is coming back and supporting seed spreading, all that kind of thing. It is most of the work. And what I'm seeing from a lot of these project designs is the folks that are financializing it are taking most of the profits. Correct. Well, that shouldn't be how that works, right? If and look, this is going back to a very early question, and this is probably three more podcasts, but but like when you talk about like where the money actually goes, right? Like the creative folks are losing out. Like in Spotify, same sort of thing. Yes. It's way harder to write a song than it is for you to go ramp QPS on a server, right? And like, and actually you only need to do that, do that once, and it'll literally serve every song. It's just like to make this analogy, right? Like it's already being seen as extractive. You can you can find, go online, you can find zillions of personal posts by artists, creative musicians, talking about how the funding formula works, how little they get paid per stream, and it feels to them just like I'm just putting out my art in the ether and I'm getting either negative returns or sort of insultingly low returns. It's really maximizing the benefit for people that own the enclosure. Correct. And like the people that create the value, honestly, whether it's all the artists that train the AI, or all the artists on Spotify, or all the folks that are are doing the work of ecosystem restoration, yeah. It's wild to me that they work on it for 20 years and then some finance person like did like five emails and they get like 10 times more gain from it. But they have such a cool blazer and hip sneakers. Oh, and they gotta afford shit in Midtown, and you know, right? Like so somebody's gotta make that money. Last thing. I want you to pretend you are speaking to a child. Yeah. Under 10. Try to let's play it a game. I'll take a swing at a couple of these too. Um what does it mean to be an investor in making the planet better? Yeah. So investors help to make new things possible. And relative to the future of the planet, we gotta remake a lot of how industry works. So basically, the way that we make things, we need to remake it so that we can stay on this planet for a long time. Cool. I think I would try something like investors are people that uh essentially lend out money and hope to get a bit money back. And they can also make decisions about where money gets spent or invested or lent. And a climate or a nature or a planet positive investor is somebody that tries to direct the money to things that will help develop our planet or our climate or environment, and certainly away from things that will try to rip it up. Absolutely. Um last one. Um how can an environment-oriented company also actually be a good business? Explain this to your nine-year-old kid in your life that's in like business club and grade. What does that mean? So in business, your profit is basically what's left over between your sale price and your costs. Now, the the cost uh structure of basically any business, any physical business in the world has three components. There's the materials that you use to go make the thing, there's the energy that you use to go process it, you know, those materials into some new form. And then there's the transport logistics, both to move the materials to the spot where they get transformed, and to move the transform materials to the place where they get used. Now, um, through the types of investing that we do, we're able to use advanced technology to go reduce the amount of physical material. And in the process of reducing the physical material, it is both cheaper for industry, because that's one of the three major cost drivers, and it's also better for the environment because less material that's required. In reducing energy, quite similarly, we reduce the cost for the business, because one of the three major cost drivers, and also better for because right now most of our energy sources are carbon emitting. Okay. In the future, if we have a completely decarbonized grid, it will matter a bit less, but I think energy will always still be worth something. So you wouldn't want to be completely wasteful, but in terms of planetary damage, it will matter a little less. And when you win on time and space, transport logistics, basically, then obviously you're reducing the cost because you people don't need to move shuffle all this stuff around so much. Um, but you know, because you've reduced the cost, you have less transport emissions, right? And you have less overheads related to all that. So all those things are just directly beneficial for the environment as well. Cool. I think uh I haven't thought about this before, but I'll try to answer it by channeling uh Noah Harari. Yeah. He would probably say something like we usually think about businesses as a bunch of people getting together to try to do something to make money. Yeah. And that's a part of it. But another way to think about a business is just a story that we all agree to that helps us collaborate and cooperate and work together. And so if a business is just a thing that allows people to cooperate and work together, why can't we have a business that, yes, makes money to support itself and maybe have extra to save or invest for the future, but that's focused on cooperating to help clean up or develop technologies that reduce pollution, or et cetera, et cetera. That's great. I think the framing of talking to kids is great. Yeah, that's a little different stuff with actual kids. Tom, this has been so sweet. Oh, you've been very generous. It's 1204. Okay, you need to get going. Do your thing and we will scram. But thank you, Tom. Perfect. Yeah, amazing. Yeah, thank you for listening. There you have it. Planet Positive Investing with Tom T. Now, if you've made it this far, you might be asking yourself, if we have these great solutions, why do we need to keep investing in new technologies again? Why do we need to keep thinking about innovation? Is this just VCs tasting tiny things? So we actually get there are two reasons that we absolutely cannot take our focus off of innovation. The first is that uh the current solutions we have are great. We have a ton more runaway to use and deploy them, for instance, solar. But if the problem is at an eight, nine, or ten out of ten today, the level of solutions is maybe six or seven, like the frontier capabilities. Maybe our deployment is only at one or two. We're actually kind of just scratching the surface, starting to deploy this stuff for real. But we still need, in Tom's words, better, faster, cheaper, and greener, not just to keep deploying what we have, but to keep pushing the frontier to get to where we need to go, to make this relevant to solve this problem. The other reason we need to think about innovation into the future is, and we have to be humble here. We just don't know what unintended consequences massive deployment of a new technology will have. I grew up fascinated by solar, I got to work in it, and now it's a part of my professional life. But even as a biased solar person, I can say we just don't know. And this is what we have we have to be humble about this as technology people. This is the history of technology, unforeseen consequences, and we just can't expect that to change. Now, let's stick with solar a bit longer, because on the theme of how did we get to this place and where are we going, I want to give a quick breezy tour of the history of how we got to solar panels that we have today are technologies. Where did it come from? From a science crazy high-risk idea through to something that now roofing companies can install every day all around North America and parts of the world. In 1905, people observed that if you shine light, yeah, we're going all the way back to 1905, you shine light on a metal, an electron pops out. It was a crazy scientific result at the time, and Albert Einstein wrote up a paper in 1905 explaining it. He called it the photoelectric effect. Basically, explain the physics happening inside the material. People used that idea, and 35 years later, 1939, beginning of World War II, Richard Ole, I mean Russell Oh and other people in the United States invented something called the PN junction. It's a technical term, you never hear it, but it's two semiconductor crystals stuck back to back. And it turns out some incredible physics happen when you do that. Specifically, that's the cornerstone device behind the lasers that power the internet, the LEDs on the screen that you're watching this on, or the chips that are in uh the device you're listening to this on. It also explains uh the basis for solar panels, as well as light detectors. So that key innovation of 39 was a big deal. Cut to the early 70s, if you're into the Strait of Hormuz, you're following the conflict in Iran between between Iran and the US and Israel and the Middle East and everything, you'll recognize these patterns. There was a huge oil price shock in the early 70s. The price of oil went up by a factor of four or five in a matter of weeks. And this caused everybody to not only freak out and a geopolitical crisis, but to start seriously thinking about what alternatives are there. That was the first attempt to really deploy solar at scale commercially. It failed. It failed again in the late 70s, early 80s, mid-80s. But in the 90s, we started to get stuff that worked. Big public subsidies in Spain and Germany called feed-in tariffs helped bring down the cost, but they ultimately were not that successful in the end. And then finally in the 2000s and late 90s, there was a manufacturing revolution in China, and that is what brought us, has brought us the solar panels that we use today. All the way to the present day, probably the biggest climate story of last year, 2025, was the organic installation of home, solar, and battery systems in Pakistan. This is an amazing story. It wasn't socially planned, no agency said this, no big green group came in and organized it. Normal people just noticed that their neighbors were buying cheap panels on AliExpress and other places from China, importing them cheaply and just installing them at home. If you've ever visited Pakistan, I got a chance to visit a friend's wedding there in Karachi. The power quality sucks. No disrespect to Pakistani people, it's weak. And so anyone that can afford it is looking for more reliable power. And this is an amazing story where this idea just spread, not because people were waving a climate flag or going to green marches, but because it just made sense and it was something people people could do and the price was right. Now, zooming back out. Today, solar is still a pretty small part of the energy mix. It's like single-digit percents of the total electricity we generate. But it's getting cheaper every day, and it's the fastest growing source of new installed electricity in the world. And that trend is accelerating. But thinking back to this history lesson I just gave, 1905 to 2025, 120 years, and we're still going. We're still not perfecting it. 120 years is too long to wait for the next innovation cycle. So we want to shrink that. And venture capital is an important tool worth considering as we try to do that. Remember that as we keep rolling this out, we don't yet know exactly what problems we're going to face with solar or any other climate solution as we roll it out at full scale to really take a bite out of this climate problem. But one thing's for sure, if we keep our eye on innovation and keep that innovation muscle strong, I think we give ourselves the best possible shot to actually build that better future. That's the end for today. Thanks very much for tuning in. Find us on Apple, on Spotify, on YouTube, and join our Substack. We'd love to hear from you at podontharize at gmail.com. We really want your feedback and your opinions. What do you think about all this? Thank you to my producer Vish. Thank you to Tom Chi for doing this. Thanks for letting him letting us film at his place in San Francisco. Here is the music of Claire Davis to take us home. More soon, y'all.