A Climate Change with Matt Matern Climate Podcast

It’s nice to think that we might be able to build some robots that just get on with the business of restoring ecosystems, whether we’re paying them or not. It’s actually not harder to go make ecosystem restoration drones than it is to go make drones that sniff for mines in the Strait of Hormuz. But we have a huge amount of economic incentive around one of those things, and almost no economic incentive around the other. The folks that purport to be advancing AI the most are wealth hoarders. There almost is no scenario that people see on this current trajectory where the big guys win and we succeed, basically.

You’re listening to a. This is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got a great guest on the program, Tom Chi. Tom is founding partner of At One Ventures. He’s an author of national bestseller, Climate Capital: Investing in Tools for Regenerative Future. He’s the founding member of the team that created Waymo. Also worked at Microsoft on Outlook, Yahoo. It’s worked on like 75 different patents. Amazing resume. Without further ado, welcome to the program, Tom.

Yeah, it’s great to be here.

So I listened to one of your TED broadcasts or TED talks was army of autonomous robots, which restoring nature, which I thought was fascinating, and you talked about different companies that you’re working with that are replanting, say mangrove groves and things like that. How does that tie together to the work that you did in the book Climate Capital?

Sure. Yeah. Kind of. I’m throwing everything that I got at trying to go and solve these problems practically, and you know, I’m longtime inventor. As you mentioned, I’m a named inventor on over 75 patents. I’m formally trained in physics and electrical engineering, which has included building a bunch of autonomous robots, including contributing to things like Waymo and also the factory robots that run. You know that are now called Amazon Robotics. They they’re in all the fulfillment centers and a bunch more stuff. So my my background has been creating sort of robotic automations like this.

And in the book, I do think a lot about and I talk a lot about what are some things that we might be able to go do differently than the current economic system, and relative to this invention skill, the normal thing that happens is you are either you either are this type of inventor or you raise enough money to hire inventors, you know, like myself and the type of people that I worked with throughout my career, and we’ll go build you something that provides economic value, and maybe that allows you to go exit your startup for a bunch of money. And this is great, like everything that fits in that system that we can go point at problems that are actually important for the world to solve. I think that’s great. But one thing that kind of came to mind as I was working with Dendra, which is the kind of flying drones that restore mangroves, and on ReefGen, which is the the drones that restore coral reefs and seagrass beds.

Is that a lot of the economic stuff was actually slowing it down, right? Like basically, in order to go get any of these projects approved. Then you need the permission of the landholder. You typically need to be working with environmental consultants to make sure that you’re planting the right stuff. If you want to get you know carbon or biodiversity credits, then that’s like three or four more parties that you have to loop in. So it’s a lot of paperwork and handholding, when in practice the robots actually just do the damn thing already, and it basically led to this thought process of how far can you get into autonomy with yeah, especially now that we’re talking about AI and we’re trying to talk about AI as like agents or entities, all that sort of thing.

What is the entity that is this robot? What does it want to do? Now, at the end of the day, the robot doesn’t want to do anything more than its programming, which is in this case to restore ecosystems. And to the extent that you can make that a very low cost, even if it requires a bunch of robotic labor, a very low cost operation, then the more that you can actually put it almost outside of the economic system. Now, this is not for me to say that I want everything to be outside the economic system, but I’ll tell you that it’s nice to think that we might be able to build some robots that just get on with the business of restoring ecosystems, whether we’re paying them or not, and I think that as a prompt is already a pretty powerful thought process for us to be considering because our current thought process is why don’t we destroy everything using our economy, and then let’s have some philanthropists throw a couple dollars at protecting some hectors.

And I’m just going to say that overall thing doesn’t work. Right, we’re we’re using more and more advanced technology to go advance the destruction of the planet, and we’ve been stalled out on the quality of the technology that restores the planet, and you know, and it really has been through which things have a lot of economic incentives and which ones don’t. It’s actually not harder to go make ecosystem restoration drones than it is to go make drones that you know sniff for for you know mines in the in the Strait of Hormuz, right? But we have a huge amount of economic incentive around one of those things, and almost no economic incentive around the other.

Well, one of the things that I thought was really powerful that you described in your in your TED talk was kind of a lot of us look at it being the economy versus ecology, and that if you do something to help ecology, you’re hurting the economy. Whereas you say that actually the economy is a subset of ecology, and everything’s mined or ground, and if you know if we take care of the ecology, we’re going to take care of our economy, and I think that’s kind of like we need to start changing the the way we’re framing the The debate so that people understand. Hey, protecting ecology is a is a winner argument. You know, we all we all are behind that one, right?

Yep, and I think for for technical things, we understand the idea of infrastructure. We understand that if we build a bridge over this span, then something that would have taken like three hours to go cross because you got to go drive upriver to a place where there’s another crossing and then back down might take 20 minutes to cross because you’ve built a span there now. And I think we understand the idea of infrastructure when it comes to human built things, but when it comes to natural built things, I think we’ve been very remiss here because effectively the planet has been operating on really valuable infrastructure.

The the health of the soils and the mycorrhizal networks inside of them is important infrastructure. The health of our hydrological cycles and being able to go deal with a bunch of rain coming at once, or be able to survive through periods of long drought-that’s part of the infrastructure, hydrological infrastructure that a landscape might have, and so on and so forth. And very similarly to the way that a piece of bridge infrastructure might save you a lot of time, money, energy, effort. You know when it exists compared to when it doesn’t. Very similarly, there’s a lot of things that we’re able to currently take from nature in terms of, and this is this point is made in the talk. Literally, everything in the economy is either mined or grown, which means it comes directly from nature.

Now, how hard do you want it to be to get that stuff from nature? If you destroy natural infrastructure, you’re making it way harder. You know, imagine you know, in order to go maximize outcomes, and let’s say somebody wanted to go use you know some sand and gravel for some project that they’re going to do, maybe to go pour you know some concrete in some other spot, then it would be foolish for them to go and disassemble the bridge in order to go grab some sand and gravel. But that’s basically what we do with nature all the time.

We destroy the infrastructure that makes nature healthy, and because of it, it’s actually way more expensive for us in the future to be able to go do anything with nature, if we were smart, we’d be thoughtful about investing in that infrastructure in the same way that we invest in road infrastructure or bridge infrastructure. These are things that make it easier and cheaper for everybody else after us. So it’s a pretty simple concept, actually. We do understand it when it comes to industrial infrastructure, but we don’t seem to understand it when it comes to the place where most of our wealth comes from, which is nature itself.

Well, it’s it’s kind of this fundamental misperception of the natural world, and and Adam Smith and writing about economics back, you know, 250 years ago, there wasn’t much or any value placed upon natural systems because it was essentially seen as endless, limitless. We couldn’t destroy it, you know, almost. And we now know that that’s not true. That we now have the human capacity to. To affect negatively our our infrastructure, as you said, and and we need to value that. And unfortunately, the current economic models like GNP and stuff like that don’t value the current infrastructure, you know, of nature in in any way, it’s it’s kind of mind-blowingly poor economics on our part.

Yeah, that’s correct, and I think everything that you said is correct, and it’s how we got here as well. Because there was a point where the infrastructure that nature had created was so healthy that it was very difficult to imagine like fully succeeding in cutting down an entire forest. That’s crazy, right? Like, like the forest is growing back so quickly. We’re only taking you know 500 logs a year. There’s no way we can keep up with how quickly the forest is growing, and that’s was the state of humans for a long time. And given that the Adam Smith’s original understanding was not wrong, right?

Because nature effectively was infinite, you know, at least at the pace at which we were taking, and the fact that we had not destroyed a lot of that core infrastructure yet. Now, if you go upstream and you dam up the river that feeds that that forest, you will kill that forest, right? And that’s you changing some of the hydrological infrastructure, and that is something that we couldn’t do at huge scales before. But as soon as we learned how to, we started to understand that we could very much change the fate of large landscapes, not just take 500 logs a year and build all the houses that that this village needs and all that sort of thing. So Adam Smith was not wrong for his time. Now that we have more information and we’re understanding more of where the the wealth from that natural infrastructure came from.

Then it’s now time for us to make smarter and better choices in the presence of good information. I think all economic theory would suggest that in the presence of better true information, you should make better choices. We just haven’t decided to make better choices yet. So, kind of going back to something you had said earlier, which essentially. my my take on is that certain jurisdictions have a lot of regulations which slow down ventures that you you know you’re involved with, such as replanting the mangroves.

And I’ve heard that you know from companies I’ve talked to that were replanting, say kelp along the California coast, you had to get 16 different governmental agencies to sign off on it before you could do it. So they ended up going to like the Philippines, where you could get approvals much more quickly to to do the work. So I guess where are you finding that you can start kind of doing this work with governments that maybe are a little bit more, you know, a little less regulation to get the process started, and hopefully the latecomers will see the value of the work being done, and it might lead to faster regulation or you know less regulation when you do the next project.

So, if you want to do very large projects, so like 100,000 hectares, a million hectares, and beyond, then you almost cannot help but intersect with some of these governmental bodies, and you will need to work through that level of paperwork, though, I think, as people can see on the other side of this, like how much the landscape health function, you know, that natural infrastructure is improved by these sort of interventions on the landscape, then I think it should get easier over time because most of those regulations were created to prevent people from damaging the landscape, right?

So if you basically show, yeah, no, actually, every project we’ve done, biodiversity is up, like total biomass in those ecosystems is up, the function of these natural metabolisms are all working better, then I think we would have met the spirit of the law quite closely, which is let’s not accidentally do things that harm the land. That’s where those regulations largely came from. So I think this can clean out a bit as we have a little bit more repetitions, you know, behind us, basically. But if you’re working on a smaller project, so let’s say you are a independent landholder in the American West, and you have 10 acres to your name or 50 hectares to your name. Then, yeah, a lot of those folks could just use cheaper tools that are currently being produced to just effectively do it themselves, right?

They’re a private landholder, they have the ability to go and do certain changes, you know, to in land management to the lands that they own, and if people are now making it incredibly cheaper to be able to go manage that land through drone automation, so that they can get big changes done or strong improvements done in a 10th of the time for a 10th of the cost. Well, great.

That will just be a interesting thing that those folks will now have access to, and will likely to start employing as the as the cost continues to come down. But both in Dendra, which is the the terrestrial ecosystem planting drones and Reef Gen, which does kind of underwater ecosystems, then we have been witnessing something that is akin to a Moore’s law for ecosystem restoration, that the cost of ecosystem restoration keeps on coming down by another factor or two, and another factor of two, and another factor of two, just because we’re spending a little bit of time on it and kind of building off of our learning in the same ways that some of these other exponential curves had done, and this is in comparison to a very long history of conservation tools not really keeping up with technological times. Like, like if I were to go and stop like a park ranger back in 1926 or something, 100 years ago, and we ask them about their core tools for helping, then you’re going to see they have a jeep and a map and binoculars and a little clicker to be able to go count how many of each species that they see, and a and a thing called a quadrat, which is basically a square.

I think what we’ve been seeing is that there, if you actually stay with these problems, you can help create something like a Moore’s law for ecosystem restoration, where every couple years the cost of ecosystem restoration per hectare comes down by another, you know, factor of two, another factor of two, another factor of two, and we’ve seen this with a bunch of technologies, especially given the digital technologies that we’ve invented in the in the last 4050 years. That when applied to areas where there had not been much of that effort, that there’s oftentimes big wins, and this is what we’ve been seeing in practice by using robotic automation to be able to go do this work with higher precision, less labor, you know, programmatically more sophisticated, higher consistency. It’s just getting better and better on all those fronts. If you compare that to what we have been doing on conservation, then we’ve mostly been using the same tools as we had 100 years ago, right? If I looked at somebody who was a park ranger 100 years ago, they’d have a jeep and a map and binoculars and the little clicker counter and a quadrat to be able to go count species in a square meter. And if you look today, it’s all the same tools except for maybe we’re using a digital map.

And that to me, is like a major failing in effort and imagination. Right? Think about every other industry and how much it’s advanced in 100 years, and we just never took the time or attention or tools to the task of ecosystem restoration, even though that is foundational to the health of the larger economy. Because, as mentioned earlier in the call, the economy is the subset of the ecology.

Yeah, I think that gave me some wind in my sails. Just kind of listening to what you were saying in your TED talk, which was positive, and saying, “Hey, here are the role of say robots and technology that can improve the way we’re dealing with ecology, and I think we need more business leaders in this space because ultimately, I think we need to make it make monetary sense in order for it to get adopted and and be the solution. So, to that end, where do you see your technology, the companies you’re working with, their technology being adopted? Which areas, which countries are actually using this and in being proactive about you know using the technology to improve the ecology.

Well, you know, concretely, the projects that I’ve worked on, you know, Dendra Systems, you know, was used to go plant over 20 different types of ecosystem across four different continents. So it’s actually a pretty large, you know, variety of of folks that have engaged with it, ReefGen has done 18 different deployments around the world for a couple different use cases. So, I think you know we’re in the process of people starting to get to know that these sorts of things are possible. But I did want to go weigh in really quickly on something that you had just.

Said in passing a second ago, which is, hey, we got to keep on iterating on this stuff until it makes economic sense. And look, if you can get there, that’s amazing. But what I’ll also tell you is, really, what robots, because robots don’t get paid, and you know, take their salary, you know, and pay rent and do all these sorts of things, they’re actually not economically motivated actors the way that people are, right? The main thing that robots are trying to get done is to manipulate a physical thing with within physical constraints, and given that they don’t really need anything else to be able to go motivate them to go do that.

So, to me, the task of inventing these robots is less an economic task; it’s more of just a physics and engineering task. If it can physically do the thing using the engineering that you’ve given to it, then the robot is successful. Now I mention this because since robots don’t need to get paid, then you could imagine a world where you have a bunch of effectively ecosystem laborers that are kind of working for free, I mean, you got to charge them and stuff, right? But you know, for a marginal amount of of cost, which is just the cost of electricity, dramatically less than than you know paying a bunch of labor, then yeah, you could get a bunch of this stuff built, and and just to put something provocative out there, right?

Because one of the things that is kind of breaking our current economic system is we have iterated, and the cost of food, you know, and availability of food is higher than ever. Not that we’re distributing it at all perfectly, because there are still people starving in the world, but at least the cost of production of food is down quite a bit. But we’ve made the cost of housing insanely high. But imagine, like back in the day, houses used to be made of hay bales and rammed earth and mud bricks and a bunch of things, and those sorts of things. What’s true about all the materials I just listed is that they’re readily available in the environment. So imagine you made one robot that goes and takes you know mud from a muddy lake, and then another robot that turns those that that mud that’s been pulled out into mud bricks, fires them into mud bricks, and then a third robot lays, you know, effectively the masonry work on a house.

Well, now you’ve done something where a huge percentage of the economic value and the construction ever of a house has effectively been automated in a way that does not need to be economic, and you could potentially bring down the the cost of new housing by a factor of 100 right? Not by a factor, not by 20% or a factor of 10, like a factor of 100 Now, what what happens to your economic system when you create a bunch of actors that don’t need to be paid, but they actually create something of economic utility, right? What what I’m hoping for is that these robots get cheap enough.

And to be to be clear, the robots I’ve iterated on to do ecosystem restoration are pretty cheap robots as things go. You know, like on the order of $10,000 which is obviously more than you want to like pay just on a random Tuesday, but is quite cheap in the grand scheme of how much robots in industry cost. But that’s where they are right now. One could imagine 10 years from now they’re 1000 bucks, and imagine for 1000 bucks, you and a couple friends could pick up a couple robots, and they’re just busy restoring your ecosystems, you know, 24/7 and making things richer around you, and you don’t pay them other than charging them up at night.

That’s an incredible possibility, and I, you know, I hope that more money is flowing to at one ventures to fund these activities or fund these companies that are doing this work because that that is a way to truly restore our ecology and you know and solve social problems at the same time. So it’s it’s it’s incredible what the potential, the positive potential for kind of this robotic AI revolution could be, yeah. Right now we’re at a very dystopian moment, because the folks that purport to be advancing AI the most are folks that you know are are wealth hoarders. I mean, I don’t know that there’s a better framing for it, right?

So, given that, I don’t think that people feel particularly optimistic that even if these folks succeed, that the world is better off. You know, they’ve shown that they mostly hoard their wealth. So, there there almost is. No scenario that people see on this current trajectory where where the big guys win and we succeed basically, but I’ll tell you that in the wake of the big guys making the big moves that they’re making, then everything else gets cheaper in the wake of it.

o look, I mean, we we built a bunch of these robots off of you know drones getting cheaper. We built a bunch of these robots based on microcontrollers getting cheaper. We built a bunch of these robots based on cameras and various sensing systems getting cheaper because they everybody wanted better sensors for their cell phones, right? And because of that, then this has gotten to be a incredibly inexpensive thing that we can now do, and really a lot of it is about the inspiration, like just letting people know that you can go and take these cheap components and go innovate in this way.

Similarly, there are these big frontier models, which I think are-I don’t want to say creaking to a standstill, but I’m not seeing like leaps and bounds improvements anymore. Who knows? Maybe something different happens, and if they start moving in leaps and bounds again, but it just hasn’t been right. The main stuff that we’ve talked about as improvements are honestly damaging, scary things. Like maybe it’ll make all the computer system’s insecure, or maybe it’ll do deepfake so well that nobody will be able to tell if anything’s true. I mean, we shouldn’t want any of that stuff, right? Like, why is this the exciting new stuff that this can do?

This is just society annoying, you know, somewhere between a society annoying to a society destroying stuff. So, why in the world pay this crazy money or invest this crazy money into folks that are effectively creating stuff that doesn’t not useful for society? And what’s going to happen in their wake is there’s going to be way cheaper open source models. There’s going to be way cheap, and there already are. There’s going to be a bunch of models that that appear in the wake where people are able to go run that for more like $500 locally, and then run it for their entire community for the year for $500 and something like that. That’s when the stuff becomes interesting.

I think this time period where all of it’s captured and everybody’s pretending that they’ll get to AGI ASI, which which I’m pretty sure they won’t. Then this is the worst timeline. This sucks, right? But the stuff that happens in the wake, where it’s like, oh, it’s so cheap now to go and train this model. Oh, it’s so cheap to go grab these microcontrollers and sensors and do something that can help this endangered species, then yeah, I think once the power goes back to just regular people that care about things, as opposed to a tiny group of people that only care about hoarding money, then yeah, life comes back to normal actually.

So how do we ride out the wave of these wealth hoarders who are kind of currently at the helm of the AI revolution. You know, is there is there a better way than kind of just letting them go at it willy nilly? Make you know, creating as many data centers as they possibly can, and is there is there a better methodology to this? Kind of, I was thinking about like Manhattan Project.

Is isn’t it better if there was a Manhattan Project type of methodology for working on AI? It seemed like that was a reasonable construct for dealing with a potentially dangerous technology, nuclear, and you know, keeping it under government auspices, and we somehow made it work. Similarly, with NASA, you know, is it? You know, a lot of people on the other side of the spectrum might say, “Well, you know, you’re not. We don’t want to trust the government with this type of thing, but we have trusted it with NASA. We have trusted it with with atomic revel regulation. So, curious as to your thoughts.

Well, there definitely is some need for regulation because you can look. You don’t even need the AI to be super intelligent. You can just put an AI that is able to defeat the 30% dumbest people, right? You don’t need to beat the smartest people, right? You could ruin society by confusing the 30% you know, least informed people. And I think we should be really careful. Like we we are sitting here pretending as if we need to get to AGI ASI, but you put the wrong tools in the wrong places, and you can kind of end everything, whether you meant to or not. And we’re kind of at that moment right now. We should like as much as the U.S. is saying.

Oh, we need to get rid of all our regulations to go compete with China. They’re not paying attention because China actually is using a bunch of regulatory against their AI sector, right? And really, you might be better off if you’re thoughtful about how you do your AI sector, so it doesn’t throw your economy into a tailspin. This is actually one of the stories in the book where I talk about Singapore and the self-driving car. They they had analyzed that the largest group of people in Singapore that were consistently low paid were cab drivers, and all the way back in 2013, they were already telling me that they had created retraining programs so that anybody that wanted to kind of you know graduate economically out of cab driving to something that’s more lucrative, that they already had free educational options to go do that, and what the Singapore government wanted to do as was as those efforts become successful and the total number of cab drivers in Singapore starts to go down. They wanted to backfill the shortage of supply with self-driving cars. Now all they did was reverse the order.

Right in the U.S. we say, “Well, self-driving cars are coming, and 3% of all jobs in the U.S. are driving trucks. So get ready to have you know unemployment spike by at least another 3% against the backdrop of five. That by itself would capsize a bunch of our, you know, capsize a bunch of our economy. And in the U.S. we’re like, well, sorry guys, technology is coming. I hope you get out of the way in time, or you know, I hope you find some safe place to go economically in time. And in Singapore, they are basically like, no, technology is coming. We’re not going to be luddites about it, but we got to go take care of people. And as people, you know, find these better outcomes, yeah, let’s backfill them with technology. Sounds great, but it doesn’t really take that much. I mean, people talk about this as it’s like some profound shift, and you know you have to whatever.

There’s folks that are hoping to go bring executives to the jungles to go do ayahuasca to have some deep shift in their consciousness, or it’s as simple as it’s stupid to go destroy the you know your citizenry because it’s just very expensive, and as much as you might be saying, “Oh, we’re helping private businesses by not regulate regulating at all, or paying attention to our citizens’ health, you know, welfare, you know, wealth, that kind of thing, then it ultimately is more expensive. Even in the medium run, it’s not even actually. It’s probably more expensive in the short run. Even it’s just people are ideologically attuned to caring about businesses. A lot of folks are ideologically more attuned to caring about businesses than people. And at the end of the day, money’s coming out of the same pots, guys. Like you just you’re just bleeding money into a different direction and leaving a lot of your citizens, you know, high and dry.

Yeah, absolutely. We can certainly be a lot more proactive about this coming AI change and revolution, and how are we going to transition people out of those jobs that are going to be taken over by robots? And and historically, generally the people did graduate out of certain jobs into more you know higher paying jobs over time, but we need to be probably more focused on it because this is a a wave that is like no other. You know, kind of curious as to your thoughts about expanding the the capital to environmental entrepreneurs and and bringing capital to them so that they can build out some of these ideas that you’ve talked about in your book. And what are your thoughts about how and work.

I think you know a couple different things are going to happen, and and this is actually related to your Manhattan Project idea as well, which is I do believe there are some things that at the high intensity end should be regulated as we spoke about before, but unlike the Manhattan Project, I actually expect a lot of these technologies to be, you know, grappled with at the in the broadest group of people possible, and that’s actually the best thing that you can ask for.

Actually, because there’s 8 billion of us, and there’s a lot of ecosystems around the planet that have all these little local nuances and all that sort of thing, and we’ve seen from the ways that many indigenous you know folks have cared for landscapes really successfully over hundreds, 1000s of years, depending on the landscape. That there is a huge amount of utility for just having a wide enough aperture of care for a specific environment to be able to go hear how it’s evolving and to be able to do the thoughtful interventions based on how it’s evolving.

So one should be thinking not just about the technology, you know, the technological tools and the next frontier on those tools, but one should be thinking about the the width of the aperture of care. How many people are getting to express care through those tools, and what is it being pointed at? I think to the extent that the cost of a lot of these tools coming down, down, down means that there’s a lot more people that can apply their care to like a local aperture of care that helps a lot of useful things to start to repair in their local ecosystem and community, and that’s ultimately what the book is about as well. It’s not for a handful of tiny power brokers in a Manhattan, you know, project sort of setting to be able to go argue something about regulatory or whatever.

It’s actually to say that if we’re going to come out the other side of the 21st century in a really skillful way, there are tools, there are techniques that are there skills that all of us can develop or already have access to that can be big difference makers, and a lot of what needs to be repaired here is less about the perfect restructuring of a system from a top down, but more you know about the expansion of an aperture of care that allows us to use care as the way that we create a new compass for how we move forward, as opposed to power as the compass that we use to move forward.

Well, I kind of I really like that in terms of it’s like a small D democratic type change in getting people to it make it part of their lives versus as you said a top down approach. We’re actually looking into creating like a TV show to focus on environmental entrepreneurs to kind of bring it, as you said, a wider aperture of getting people and kind of investors, you know, coming in in maybe smaller chunks than mega investors, but just to get people interested in these companies and buy into things that they can do, and the average American or average person out there in the world can can help the environment in in lots of different ways.

Yeah, and if people want something really concrete, if you are older and you have a bunch of savings, and they’ve just been invested in index funds and all sort of thing. You might say, “Hey, let me take 10% of my my savings and investments, and ask myself what are the things that are a little bit more about the local community and local environment. Like, what are the things around me that I could be invested in, and just a small little tweak, right?

But so much money goes blindly into these huge index funds, go blindly into these market mechanisms that seem squarely out of control, right? There’s no way that a company should be valued at 2 trillion that loses billions a year. All the other companies around it, right, that are valued at 2 trillion, make 100 billion a year or more. So the idea that you’re going to lose billions a year and sometime somehow be in the same category, I think everybody should be suspecting stock market a little wonky right now, and maybe it might be useful to take 10% of how I’m investing and do it in my local community, even if it doesn’t have the same return profile, you can look at real things that have changed, right? This school was able to go fund an important trip, you know.

This you know landscape, this park was able to be cleaned up, right? These folks that that work on doing beach pickup, hey, all summer season it’s been beautiful, right? Go spend some money on that. Those are the things that that start to bring your aperture of care back to the areas and peoples around you and the environments around you. And I think that’s the first step for a lot of great things afterwards.

Matt 39:15
Well, Tom, great having you on the show. I know you’re a busy guy, so we let you get back at it, but pleasure to have you, founding partner at One Ventures. If anybody wants to check out the book, I highly recommend the national bestseller, Climate Capital: Investing in Tools for a Regenerative Future. Great work, and I really applaud what you’re doing, and look forward to kind of following you and maybe have you back on the show to let us know how things are playing out.

Well, thanks so much.

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