Canada, the 51st State? B. Lorraine Smith on National Identity, Tariffs, and the Illusion of Borders

Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. I'm your host, James Barry. What is a life-affirming economy? Can you imagine that? The economy that is actually designed to affirm our lives versus just take our money, to sap all of our energy. Well, my next guest is Bea Lorraine Smith, and she has a gift for reimagining economies, agriculture, and business through a regenerative lens. She is a perfect fit to bridge ancestral values with future-forward regenerative thinking, because regenerative or regeneration, it isn't just for farmers, it's for boardrooms, cities, classrooms, and kitchens. And Bea Lorraine Smith, her mission is an economy that serves life, not just quarterly earning reports. So please join me in learning more and going deep with Bea Lorraine Smith. With B. Lorraine Smith. So I have to ask this first question, as you are Canadian, how do you feel about Trump and just in general, people starting to talk about Canada becoming the 51st state of the US? I know in general, a lot of Canadians, just the Canadian pride is like, you know, no way we're not going to let that happen. But you come at it from a totally different perspective. I'm really curious, like, what is your opinion as a forward thinker?

Yeah, let's start small, James. Let's, let's just tiptoe into these little tulips. I don't know how forward I am, but I kind of have maybe a different view of what's happening. First of all, I really do respect people's concerns and discomfort, and in some cases it's very real lived experience. So my sister, for example, runs an amazing microbrewery here in Northern Ontario. The tariffs and some of the sort of financial dynamics that are playing out between our 2 fine nations has a real everyday impact on her ability to run a profitable business. And I could, you know, play that scenario out in many people's homes right now. So it's, I don't mean to trivialize the severity and in some cases really challenging nature of what's happening. But if I stand back and think about what the difficulties mean between our 2 countries right now, I want to add a few things before we try to have one opinion on this. First is, This notion of Canadian pride makes me a little bit uncomfortable. It forgets some really important internal challenges. Forget interprovincial trade, which has its own tariffs and has for decades. It's a very strange trade environment domestically in Canada. Let's set that aside. I noticed that we have a whole nation within a nation called Quebec that considers itself in many ways a standalone nation. I lived in Quebec for many years and it took me living there as an Anglophone who speaks French And getting to know the dynamic there, that isn't just like, oh, there's a part of Canada that speaks French. It is a separate nation, period. And so this Canadian pride thing gets a little confusing when you cross over into Quebec. And then let us not forget that we are actually a nation of many, many nations, often called our First Nations, our indigenous communities, many of whom are alive and well. I go over a ridge just a few miles to grocery shop into the First Nation of Shiging. It's the closest—

Shiging.

village to where I live, and I see teachers, lawyers, farmers, regular everyday people who are of a different nation within this country who are alive in spite of, not because of, Canadian pride. So I have an uncomfortable feeling when I hear people talking about Canadian pride and forgetting the existing domestic opportunities for more grace and generosity across the many nations that are here. But if I get a little technical on an economic point around tariffs and the financial drama that's playing out, again, not to minimize the pain that it's creating, it's definitely creating some gain for others. Let's not forget. I'm really loath to see oversimplification with these things. Like tariffs have been around for a very long time, and I have talked to a lot of people, including economists and people involved in international trade. About tariffs over the years, and one consensus I hear is it's really complicated and nobody can explain the real effects of tariffs. We can talk about some of the basics. We can look at a little bit of cause and effect, but most of what we're dealing with here is drama, not real knock-on system effects. Anybody who tries to turn it into a kind of Canadian pride story Or we just have the wrong economic lever. I feel like that's an oversimplification that's maybe being fed by media propaganda. And if I can throw one last zinger in here, what I really think about borders is we made them up. It's a human construct, and any other species that we might collaborate with or be aware of, if they could speak our language, they might tell us how funny they are. One of my main mentors are migratory birds and other migratory species. And for them, the idea of borders is an absurdity. And I long for the day, and I think we might be moving towards it, where we become much more bioregional in our thinking and set aside this kind of jingoistic warmongering or whatever it may be, because I don't think it's really serving most of us.

I think this is one of the reasons I was so excited to speak with you is, you know, on this podcast, we're really trying to take these kind of ancestral values from the past and bring them forward, bring them into our present. And I feel like in many ways, that's what you're talking about. One of the words you use a lot is regeneration. And that's a word we see a lot in the, you know, the food systems here, regenerative. That's a really catch-all word right now. But what is the difference for you between regeneration and sustainability?

Sometimes the difference is honestly just the choice of jargon. Certainly in the corporate space, if you look at large food companies' disclosures or communications, you will see a lot of both of those words. Sometimes they're used a little bit Interchangeably. But if I were to say what I would like the difference to be, I'm going to be very literal. So the term regenerate proposes that something is created that wasn't there before. So there's a change of state going from, let's talk about soil for a moment, going from perhaps a soil that's very degraded, possibly even contaminated, that growing healthy, nutritious foods might be— very constraining, might not go very well. And then if we regenerate that soil through different practices, and there are lots of different practices to regenerate soil, we will see a change where that soil enables better, healthier, more continuous, perhaps even more nutritious food production or production of fiber or fuel or flowers or whatever all the fun things are that we might grow in soil. So something has changed when it is regenerative and In principle, it's changed for the better in terms of some purpose that we might be aiming to serve. Sustainability is, again, what it says on the tin. It's sustained. So then we could ask, well, what is being sustained? And it kind of proposes, if you go really literal, that nothing's really changing. It's just staying the same. So we're sustaining our ability to produce food. We're sustaining our ability to have a certain yield from a certain— crop or a certain acreage. And the word sustainability is probably one of the most misused in the English language. I used to work for a firm called Sustainability, and that seemed like a really gutsy name when I worked for them. And starting in 2012, I was the director of the New York office of Sustainability. And people used to say, that's kind of bold. You named your company The Field. It'd be like, you know, being a food company and calling yourself food, right? Like, that'd be a weird name for a company. But they made the point long before my time there that the company was founded when sustainability was like an avant-garde business term. They bought the URL for $200. So it was like, these are early days. So the word has slid around a lot. The meaning is what matters. So if I could encourage your listeners, which includes me, hi, future self, To hold one thought with the word regeneration, it's what has changed as a result of this regenerative activity? And is it better? Is it more desirable? And if nothing has changed, or if we can't tell, we probably need to go a little deeper. We need to inquire a bit further.

Well, and that's what a lot of businesses hire you to do, right? They hire you to go deeper for them and to really, I guess, in a sense, like look at the metrics because they're all very metric-centric. They're looking for you to provide not only how they're doing, so kind of give them a report card, but also how they should move forward, correct?

That is correct, although I'd love to put a slightly finer point on it. So in sustainability, we, somewhere along the kind of early 2000s, the, the 20-teens, another jargony term emerged to try to clarify sustainability because things were getting really jargony and a bit greenwashy and vague. So along comes another term, which some of you might be familiar with, ESG, environmental, social, and governance. And it's a weird term 'cause it's kind of an adjective, like you need to put something after it, like ESG reporting or ESG investing, right? But a lot of people just talk about ESG like a general thing. Again, a bit like we might talk about food. It's a big topic. What do we mean by food? But ESG is its own category. It's getting kind of beaten up in its own way these days. Sometimes I think for good reason, sometimes just out of reaction or like lots of triggers being pulled these days. So I grew up in the field of ESG. I entered the sustainability and what is now often called ESG field in 2003, so over a quarter century ago. Back then, the words were already a bit like, wait, what are you even talking about? It was very niche. Now it's super mainstream. If you have investments and you talk to your investment advisor, or you go onto the website to rebalance your 401, I'm fairly sure you'll see the term ESG somewhere in there. Maybe also ethical, maybe also sustainable, lots of fun jargon, but ESG's a big one. So for about 20 years, my focus was on enabling companies to apply best practice in ESG and sustainability strategy, disclosures and reporting, and increasingly looking at investor disclosures. But I wanna be really clear on what I do now because that's actually very different. It took me about 20 years. I'm kind of slow. I try to be respectful to my past self and to any other selves out there sort of working through career questions. We can't necessarily do it overnight. It took me 20 years to realize that even though there are very real frameworks with very real data, these are metrics that are based on true scientific principles, and you can see them with your own eyes and write them down and compare year over year. But even then, I saw that really companies weren't having a better impact. And remember that regenerative notion, like what is changing from what to what? And is it getting better ecologically? Is it making us healthier as humans or as communities and society? And over and over, I'd be involved in these strategy projects and engaging stakeholders from around the world. I'm kind of lucky that I speak a couple different languages, a few European and Brazilian Portuguese, so I could have quite a wide range of global conversations. And over and over I was hearing, we're trying really hard, we're setting up these amazing goals, we're measuring them, we're managing them, we're doing all the things we're told in business school and everywhere else, but things aren't getting better. And so in 2021, after a couple decades sort of realizing I was beating my head against the wall, I stepped away entirely and I gently fired all of my clients. At the time I was freelancing, And I had 7 projects on the go and I gently let them go. I'm still very good friends with most of the folks involved there. They understood. In fact, they agreed. And I invited myself to stop complaining about the problem and ask, well, if I could do things differently, if it were up to me, if I were scoping and budgeting and making all the decisions, what would I do differently? And so I set out on that course and that is what I do now. Which is, I should be very candid, it's different than companies calling me up and saying, hey, can you help us with these metrics? In many ways now, what I'm focused on helping people do, either within companies or others who've stepped away and are trying to innovate in different ways, still within business, I help them see why those metrics fail and what we need instead to be truly regenerative. And how do we apply our skills in discernment, our awareness of what's really happening ecologically and socially and make fundamentally different decisions so that business is a force for healing, that it's a force for wellness.

I feel like you're so privy to very global awareness due to precisely what you're saying. You know, you're working with businesses throughout the world in different languages and you're seeing in what I would say is a very holistic perspective, or at least you're striving towards, right? I know this is a very general question, but let's just focus on the food systems. Like, so what are you finding is broken and what are your thoughts on how to fix it?

Let me give an everyday example of something that I see that feels way bigger than me, but also really obvious to anybody who sort of decides to pay attention to this or becomes empowered to pay attention to this. I don't know what it's like where you are, but where I am, that grocery store, that's the closest grocery store that I could go to that has aisles and you could have a cart and push it. So I know grocery store could mean a lot of different things, and there's a lot of different places to get food these days, but let's just say the average person in North America who's going to buy food for themselves and their family, they're likely at some point in the week to be in a grocery store. Well, it's no headline that the way grocery stores are arranged is to Enable you to be more likely to buy certain products over others, right? And companies buy shelf space and they, they collaborate. That might be known as they incentivize the grocery store managers to put things at a certain height. You know, it's not by random coincidence that the really bright, shiny candies in very delicious, exciting packaging is right at the eye level of a toddler. Like, if it were based on health decisions, it would be way outta the eye level of the toddler where only the grownup could see it and make decisions. And you go a step further, like again, if I walk into the grocery store here, I have to sort of run a gauntlet of really unhealthy food decisions from just highly processed breakfast cereals and, you know, really sugary snacks, even the bread, which you'd like to think could at least be something viable there.

It's Not.

It's like all bleached flour, you know, very, very industrialized. So one of the biggest problems we have is that for everyday people who have a lot on their minds, like how many hundreds of thousands of decisions do most people have to make every day, that just to meet their basic needs, which, you know, eating is one of the only things we really do need to do, they have to make a series of very difficult decisions to wade through the store that's been set up to provide them with their food. And there's so many industrial forces in place to make that harder than it really should be. If our only priority as a society or as a food industry was to ensure we all have healthy guts and plenty of energy, we'd just be looking at an entirely different universe. So that's probably problem number one. Let me turn the table just for a sec, just to see where, What might be useful, because there's a lot I could say about what the food industry is doing, but I just want to check something. Have you ever heard of the expression, like, we're a bunch of lemmings? Is that familiar? Like we want to be—

Yeah, sure. Followers. Yeah. Just looking for answers.

Let's just say I just arrived from another planet, which sometimes I feel like I did. And I just heard somebody using that expression and you're my Earth interpreter. Thank goodness. And I'm like, hey James, they just used that expression about lemmings. Can you just break that down for me? What are they saying? What would you tell me?

Lemmings are individuals looking towards the given answer. They want the answer. They want to be directed what to do, where to go, what to eat, whatnot.

Okay. Maybe you're too smart for this question. I'm gonna, I gotta make it even simpler. Why lemmings? What's the story with lemmings?

Isn't it some animal that will actually walk off the cliff?

Perfect. That was invented by Disney for a film that That was positioned as a documentary. It is not real. Lemmings were gathered from their natural habitat and brought to an entirely different part of the north where the film was made and pushed or thrown off the cliff.

Why did you think they created that narrative?

Well, one of my rules of thumb is to not ascribe motive because every time I've done it, I've learned that there was something I just didn't understand. So I can't say why. It was an award-winning film. It did go on to win, and I believe it was understood to be a documentary. I'm gonna set aside the why, because I'd be speaking on behalf of others, which I'm not invited to do, and I'm not privy to the why. I'll tell you why that matters to me and why I raise it here, because we have so many ingrained beliefs about how nature works and even how human nature works. that are not only wrong, they were constructed to be understood a certain way that is wrong. So it's one thing to just not understand. It's another thing to be trained to believe something that is wrong. Disney's easy to pick on. And as one of the largest media companies in the world that has a tremendous amount of mindshare of my nieces and nephews, Disney matters. I'm gonna just set all of that aside. And although I've gone backstage on several of the largest media companies in the world in their ESG capacity, I've had a chance to see what we might call news or entertainment from a very different angle. And the result of that is for most of the last decade, I have taken in practically zero mainstream media, or if I do, I take it in as like an archaeological or anthropological artifact. The same way I'm interested in looking at a fossil or like understanding how a basket is made, but I'm not taking it like, oh, this is how I'm gonna educate myself, or this is how I'm gonna find out what's going on because it's quite simply very far from the laws of nature. This may sound very conceptual, but it's actually very relevant to how we eat and how industry treats us as eaters. The laws of nature aren't really up for discussion. I'm not gonna call it science 'cause I think that word is almost as badly abused as the word sustainability. And look out regeneration and heads up bioregionalism, you're next. But the laws of nature, use whatever words you want. I don't get to decide how a meniscus forms on a water drop surface. I may be able to affect it with chemistry. I may observe it or I may not, but it's just how nature works. And there are changes. Evolution has happened. It is continuing to happen. So things will continue to evolve. But even evolution responds based on nature's laws. These aren't arbitrary things, and they're definitely not up for industry to decide. But we, for the most part, as modern industrialized humans, have been protected from the laws of nature. Protected might be the wrong word there. We don't get to see them. We don't get to understand them. If we do, it's like a little field trip or like an eco-vacation. Oh, let's go to the cloud forest in Costa Rica. It'll be beautiful. Yeah, let's do that. There's nothing morally wrong. In fact, it's a longing we have. Where I do have some moral concern is that industry makes it hard and expensive for us to experience the laws of nature just as we go about our days, and then confuses us with broken laws over and over and over that are incentivized. And by that, I mean these companies make great profit. Or if they don't, they get in trouble from their shareholders and they adapt so that they do make profit. And I say this with all the love. It was a little bit of a trick question. If even you, highly educated, brilliant, wise, sage, grown-up human, didn't know that was a lie put together by a company that is respected and in fact loved by many people, how can we be begin to make proper discernment and decisions about what we eat. We're so full of mixed up, like meat is so bad. It's ruining the environment. No, you just need to eat meat. You know, soy is the devil. No soy. We need more soy. We need more protein. That's a bit of a preach about where we need help.

Well, this is a hot topic right now because this is really what we're talking about is like, so who's the expert? If we're looking to the experts to give us the answers, but the experts are following something that someone co-opted many, many years ago, and, and, you know, which you could argue everything has been co-opted. So you're either going back a few weeks or a few years for information, or you're going back even further. But either way, wherever the information is being pulled to garner your decision, You don't actually know if it's a pure source. You don't actually know if it's true.

Yeah.

You're just assuming it's true because it's being passed down from enough people saying it, or from someone who is labeled an expert, or someone who wrote a book, or has some tangible media that you actually watched, read, or listened to, that they are now this expert. And it very much could just be Like I said, either co-opted or just someone's opinion that they're passing off as expert advice. So this is something I've been thinking a lot about. So I'm really excited that we're delving into this and you're like the perfect person to bounce this off of. But the question then becomes, well, then what do you trust? Who do you trust?

I do have some answers to that in terms of how I guide myself, because you can make yourself a little crazy, like just trying to have breakfast, frankly, or trying to have a conversation with friends. But of course, I'm not the knower of all things, so I'll share my guiding principles on this, ever evolving. The number one that I have for discerning information that comes at me, and recall I did about 2 decades in mainstream ESG and sustainability. Well, I stepped outta that in 2021. It's 2025, so it's been almost a quarter century, very focused on corporate disclosure. Corporate communications and dialogue with stakeholders around the world across sectors. So a lot of food, a lot of forestry, manufacturing, including food and bev, energy. I've been in very deep trenches in industrial conversations and in boardrooms and factories and plantations, and then just researching, squirreling away. But one of my main sources has been the corporate disclosures themselves. So not what the journalists say, sometimes yes, but mostly What is the actual company saying? And I wanna just insert something very important here cuz it's very easy to dismiss, well, companies, they're full of shit. They're gonna say what they need to say, blah, blah, blah. Maybe, but rest assured, a publicly listed company, which is where most of my industrial expertise has been, they have very strict rules and they're very risk-averse about what they can say publicly. And I've been at those conversations with legal counsel. Like, if they're even slightly itchy about something, they do not want to get that rash. They will not publicly state something that they cannot stand behind. It doesn't mean it's good information. It doesn't mean we like it, but we can rest assured that it's at least true to them. They can back it up because if they can't, they do not want to run that risk. We're seeing some interesting greenwash cases in the In a few places. So that's gonna be interesting, but it doesn't mean the words they said weren't true. It might mean they're like misleading in various ways. But all to say, I actually believe most of the information that companies are saying. So how do I make a decision about what to do, what to buy, what to eat, what to trust? My number one principle is, can I discern if anything is changing? So what do I mean by that? If a company says, we're committed to environmental sustainability, that's why we are dot, dot, dot, right? Insert whatever amazing thing they're doing. But I can't actually see something changing as a result other than a kind of paper statement. We reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. Well, what changed as a result of that other than your electrical bill went down? Did you reduce just because you switched fuel sources? And did that fuel source actually reduce in your region, or did you just divest a bit, but somebody else picked up the rest? It could be both, but if you can't tell, then as far as you know, nothing changed. And so that's just blah, blah, blah. That's just letters on a page. But if you can actually see the impact of something, like real impact, that if you had your own eyeballs right there, you'd be able to say, oh yes, this soil now retains moisture. It's less likely to be in the path of fire because it will, like fire goes out when there's sufficient moisture, right? When we make tinderboxes in monospecies plantations and then call it a wildfire, we got the wrong word. We got to use our discernment. What is changing? And if you can't answer that, this maybe isn't as fun for everyone. I actually find it really interesting to try to find out, first of all, what do I want to change? I wanna be healthier. I want my family to be healthier. I want everybody I know to be healthier. I want the ecosystem that keeps me alive around me to be healthier. There's a few other things I want, but that kind of sums it up. And this company's telling me they're doing things around that. What can they tell me that actually means something Changed. And the vast majority of those disclosures, they're not out there. They don't exist because if they did, what they'd show that changed is, oh, we paved more roads. We made higher margins on lower food value products. We made it more likely that more kids are going to sit in straight lines in school and memorize a bunch of crap, right? Like those are our, those are the metrics, but I want to watch for what's changing. And look for where can I find that out? And I guess the punctuation mark on that is if I can't find it out through a company's own literature, I just try to sense it using my own mind and body. And so that usually brings me pretty close and pretty local.

Well, and I think that is what we're seeing a real uptick in, is that over the last few years where people were blatantly lied to and science was used against itself and Now people mistrust what government agencies say, what corporations say. There's just, there's just this overall sense of mistrust. Yet I think where people are putting the trust is in their own experience. Do I feel better eating this way? Do I feel like I'm helping the world by buying organic? You know, whether you have the proof of it or not, do you feel like it's working? That feeling, the feeling of something is taking over the actual proof. It's like a social proof now.

I super agree with that. I mean, one of the most powerful things we can do is change our minds, right? And it's kind of a cliché, mindset is really important. It's one of the highest points of leverage when we look at places to intervene in a system. There's lots of great systems thinking that looks at where can we intervene in a system? One of the highest places you can intervene is in the mindset, in the worldview in which we experience the system. I'm going to borrow myself as an experiment here, talking about the importance of feeling. For quite a while when I was very immersed in the sustainability world, I'd say I was sort of at peak enthusiasm. Like, we're going to do this. You know, these are leading companies. Name a food company that you might have heard of, like household names, food and bev, I probably worked with them and/or my colleagues sitting a couple desks away did. And these were like multi-billion dollar companies and they were ambitious. And I'm like, yes, we're seeing more and more really meaningful investor frameworks coming out. And I can talk more about the investor piece if you like. So I'm really enthusiastic. And I'm also going deep into food systems. I was living in the US at the time in New York City, and I'm horrified by industrial ag. I am just like, this is so not okay on so many levels. And in particular, the meat industry was just catastrophic from so many angles. Certainly the environmental impacts, the moral and ethical impacts, the impacts on the human workers. That's just gross. So overnight I went from a very omnivorous eater, very sort of meat-friendly to essentially plant-based. And it literally happened overnight. It was a very visceral feeling. I was like, I can't eat that. I feel like I'm eating my own leg. Like I just can't do it. And for the ensuing 10 years, I was very plant-based and I felt great. Meanwhile, in parallel, I also got back to serious marathoning. I got into ultra-marathoning. I ran a 5-day ultra-marathon as a plant-based athlete at age 50, right? Like, I was doing great. I felt great. And I think there's a lot of power in how your mind is. And I was eating clean whole foods for the most part. Your wonderful wife, Margaret, was a great guide in helping me navigate some health issues that emerged on the tail end of that plant-based decade. Fast forward, and I'll skip lots of very uncomfortable gastric experiences to say, then I changed. I don't judge myself for being plant-based in those years. It was the right decision for me at that time. I felt great. I achieved a lot. I'm proud of myself, but I'm also aware that there were certain elements of the way I was eating that I wasn't willing to talk about. And there were certain wider contextual things that I couldn't see at the time. For me, it was as simple as the meat system is catastrophic. I don't want to invest in it and I don't want to ingest it. And then as I was stepping out of mainstream sustainability and starting to see like, whoa, there's a lot more going on, which by the way, partly happened because I was on the ground in Brazil meeting a lot of very grassroots, what we would call regenerative farmers. They're actually just— People growing stuff who aren't in the news, who aren't on Instagram. They're just human beings living well, and they get missed by the mainstream system. And I was experiencing their approach and seeing so many things with my own eyes. I was like, oh, this matters. And in that context, along with some gastric evolution, I shifted back to practically a paleo diet now. And as much as I can, I'm grain-free. That's kind of hard But I work on it. Certainly processed grain-free if I can. So where I'm going with this is there was a lot of inner recognition, like re-cognizing things that I didn't understand, and I needed to experience them with my own body, with my own eyes, with my own trusted friends. Margaret is one of the most trusted people in my life, so she could tell me something that maybe would've been harder for me to hear from others. And incidentally, the sustainability community that I was very much in, the corporate sustainability community, when you aren't plant-based, it's a little bit like being a smoker, right? You're kind of quiet about it and, you know, you gotta step outside. Can I get some, do you have gravy too? Whereas when you come out as plant-based, oh, welcome. Thank you. We're so glad you're finally here. Right. It's a very kind of culty situation. And so—

Yeah. Very hypocritical as well.

Yeah. Right? I mean, there's a lot we could say there, but honestly, genuine, truly believing, as I did. I truly believed that I was making a positive decision for my own personal wellness and for anybody I cooked for and for my wider community. So a lot had to change in my own mind to realize like, no, you know where I really wanna get my food from? Farmer Nick, who's delivering a little. In fact, my ringers are all off, so I won't hear him. But he's going to be leaving the most incredible food at my front door from his biodynamic regenerative, give it whatever label you want, just real healthy, truly regenerative food.

What I hear you saying is basically that, you know, we only know what we know, and then we need to honor our process as we go throughout life, as we learn and, you know, and you just honor whatever that process is. But I have to think, I mean, you have been privy to sides of industry that most people don't know. I hear you saying that that is also dictating some of your choices. You know, sometimes it's moving you away from eating certain things and then, and then, you know, your own life brings you and your own health journey brings you back to where it needs to go. But is there anything Like, even if you pick 3 things in your 20 years, I know I'm asking a lot here, but are there like 3 things that you think the people listening or watching this podcast should know about these systems that will help them make decisions moving forward?

There's one that's really prominent for me. This is uncomfortable. Can I kind of go into an awkward space?

Ooh, that's all. That's the only space I like.

It's awesome. Okay. You have to take a deep breath, swallow your liquids.

Yeah.

I really encourage people to follow their money and it's actually more doable than you think. I appreciate why people say, oh, it's so complicated. I don't have time. I don't know where to look. Have you tried, like for instance, if you have a 401 plan or you have any, you know, an IRA or some kind of investment that's in the, let's call it the market. It's your money. It is yours. If you wanted to, you may, you may not want to, but if you wanted to, you have legal and fiduciary right to walk up to that institution or call them or get in touch in whatever way you do and say, I'd like it all right now, please. It's yours. And if you literally don't know What it is invested in, and let's be clear what investments are, they're money that somebody else is doing something with. What is changing? Awkward admission, I decided to follow my own, up here in Canada we call it an RRSP, a Registered Retirement Savings Plan, functions very similarly to an IRA or a 401, tax incentivized and all of the rest of it. I've only been in this field for 25 years, right? So last January 2024, I get the prospectus, it's like a frigging phone book lands on my doorstep. And I ignore it because like, oh yeah, good. Someone's doing their homework. Right. And then this little bell went off in my head as I was getting ready to pitch it into the recycling bin, which by the way, don't even get me started on recycling, which rarely gets streamed into any meaningful market.

Oh, the recycling in Portland gets shipped to China.

It probably doesn't anymore because they closed their doors. Well, that's another story.

It gets shipped back. Like, no joke. This happened when we used to live in Portland. They shipped the recycling to China and China sent it back because it had too much food waste on it.

That's right.

How that to me is like insane, you know, in the name of the earth.

Like, see also lemmings. I promise I'll come back to the investor thing, but I'll go on a 30-second segue here. We believe that if there's a recycling symbol and we put it into the right receptacle, something good is going to happen. We do not know that even, for example, in Canada, wealthy, well-governed Canada, At a minimum, 91% of recycled materials end up in landfill or incinerated. Only 9% is actually turned into something else, which is what the word recycling means. We believed the lemming story. Oh, they hurl themselves off the cliff every once in a while. We believed the recycling story. We are being lied to. That material is not being turned into picnic tables. It is not being turned into Patagonia jackets. It is going into landfills and ultimately leaching into our water or crumbling into our oceans. Right.

Which is why microplastics are such a huge thing.

And people jump on it. So let me come back to the investor thing real quick. I just—

I want you to hold the investor thing because I do want to just say this one thing because I'm curious about your reaction or your response to this since it has to do with recycling. I've always thought we're kind of shamed residentially, you know, and I, when I say we, I'm talking about people in general. We're shamed, like you have to recycle, you know, in your home. But in my judgment, in my, my experience, and to your point, it's meaningless that it's actually corporations that are moving the needle around, you know, planetary issues with energy and water, toxins in the air. That it's more them that need to move that needle first because the residential quarter wouldn't move the needle enough.

The real challenge, in my view, is even if all of us did it, there is no it for all of us to do. Here's the paradox there. The them there is corporations, but corporations are run by people and they're run by people who believe the lemming story. And think there is away. Like when you recycle, it goes away, but there is no away. Away is inside your body. Away is inside your, your river, your ocean, your seagull. We are away. Welcome to away. So the human beings that run companies, I've never met a company run by anything other than human beings. I'm in favor of companies being run by something other than human beings, like a river. A river would do a great job. And I don't buy the whole like, oh, now there's companies with rivers on the board. Sorry, but fuck that shit. When they run the company, call me. Otherwise, it's a little nominal, like, yeah, they get some stakeholder input. No, a river would run a company very differently and it would be like, what the fuck are you doing putting things in plastic? We have nowhere to put that. No, find something else. And it's very awkward, James. I'm one of your customers. I love Pluck. It's brilliant. But you, as the creator of this incredible product, you have to get it to people safely. Conveniently stored in some way that human beings can do something with. So we do have a very real challenge, but we are smart, smart people. And when we are told these are your design constraints, and by the way, they follow the laws of nature, which are the only laws we are all beholden to from birth to death and beyond, then we go, oh. Well, let's, let's think about that. But right now we're believing the lemming story. We're believing the recycling story. And our laws are like jurisdictional laws that human beings pretend to enforce, don't follow the laws of nature. One of the hints that we've still got the wrong economic paradigm is that we have laws. You don't need a legal structure. You don't need judges and all this whacked out private prison system. When you follow the laws of nature. That is a symptom of a broken paradigm. Let me just quickly underscore this point by following my own money, if I may. I took that prospectus and I said, you know what, if the human being who has over 2 decades experience creating and analyzing investor and ESG disclosures can't follow her own investment, then we have a problem. And I wrote about this, by the way, and I'm happy to make it available to anybody who's curious. I followed my own investment money. It was in one of the most ethical funds in Canada, Pioneers. All the language was around global sustainability, blah, blah, blah. Most of it you can't even see. You follow it and it goes to the IMF and the World Bank and all this, like Goldman Sachs, who then invests in Deutsche Bank. It's like very musical chairs-y. So that's already a big problem with the financial system, perhaps a chat for another time. But the ones where you could follow it, you could say, oh, here's an actual company name, and then you could go look at that company. One of them is an industrial ag feedlot company. It's like, wait, I felt sick. I felt sick. And you know what I did? So this is my one, I'm not, I could come up with more, but my one thing that everyone can do is be really honest about what you are paying for right now. When I saw that with my own eyes, with my own skillset going, yeesh, I divested from the whole thing. And that's not wise financial advice. Your financial advisor wants you to have as much money as possible. When you retire, which why do we retire? Like, we're tired enough. But anyway, I put it all into cash, which is financially dangerous for a whole bunch of reasons. But I was like, well, I'd prefer financially dangerous than walking around knowing I'm paying for the very system that I'm calling out and saying, I don't want this. I think we can do something better. So I believe, this is why I said it's uncomfortable. There's a lot of, yeah, but, but what about, but I got kids. And I got healthcare and I got, I get it. We have real lives that we are trying to live in the best way we can. But one thing I believe we all can do is make very honest, grounded in the change we want, decisions based on where we put every single penny we work hard to earn.

It is such a hard discussion for people. We get inundated with people saying, oh, Pluck is so expensive, all this stuff. We're literally right now creating this kind of map of savings just to inform people. Like, we are always trying to make it cheaper for people. The issue, and this is the truth, the issue is that if we charge you what we really want to charge you, which is the lowest we can go, we won't have enough money. To buy ads, to make sure that, you know, the product exists, to do the things that bring your attention to us. So we actually have to set it at a higher cost to ensure that there's enough money so that someone else doesn't come in. So this has to do with this competition, basically. We are protecting ourselves and our brand from, in a sense, like espionage, from someone coming in who has a lot more money Who can just like replicate what we do and then pay for ads. Because nowadays most small businesses, specifically e-commerce, are run by social ads or, you know, online ads. And the winner of that game is whoever has the most money. And that's the truth. Here's the other hard truth. When people say to us, this is so expensive, the thing I really want to say to people, and I don't, but what I really want to say is, well, why is this expensive? But yet your cell phone bill is not? Why is this expensive? But you're paying for 3 streamers that you previously never paid for. You know, remember we used to, people paid for cable and it was, let's just say $20 a month. Now they're paying $40 to $60 because they're paying for separate streamers. To me, when I hear someone say, well, this is expensive, what I really hear is I don't want to choose my health. Or, so that's me assuming that they think, you know, organ meats are healthy. Or the more accurate question could be, well, you clearly don't know that this is probably one of the best decisions you could make for your health. You don't understand the value of what organ meats could provide for your health. You haven't felt that yet. You haven't felt sick enough to know that your food choices matter.

Yeah. Yeah.

So there's lots of things, but the reality is, is priorities, right? It's the story we're telling and it's that mindset you're talking about. It's like the path that we have decided, this is what it is, this is what it means instead of, and, and I think you beautifully brought this up, that maybe what we think it is, is actually a falsehood or is a truth that someone shared a long time ago that was made up, but we've now converted that narrative into a truth and it never was.

Yeah, it's tricky. There's another layer of trouble. I'll just make sure your listeners aren't fully off the hook even when they're like, okay, I'll follow every penny, I promise. We have this saying in some of the kind of hardcore sustainability circles where you say it's hard to be a clean fish in a dirty ocean. So even if you say, okay, I'm going to make sure I only fund things that I truly care about. I'm gonna clean up my diet. I'm gonna do all the things and I'm gonna do my best to know the truth and I'm gonna do a pretty good job. You're still stuck in this world. As an entrepreneur, my business model was very simple before I fully stepped away. My business model was I'm a freelance consultant and I can be a hired gun on your ESG and sustainability consulting work. That was really easy 'cause demand was booming. And I could be as busy as I wanted, and I could, for the most part, pick my clients. That's an easy business model when you're not trying to disrupt anything. But now that I see my job as enabling business decision makers that might be folks in an executive role or in some role where they're implementing change, my real job is to enable them to not only think it's a thought, but to think it's a desirable thought that the economy works in service of life. That it follows nature's laws, that of course a viable business is one that makes us healthier within a healthier ecology. That's my job. And to do that job, I do a number of different things. Well, that's actually not what most people think they want. And so my own business model, I am actively this very week, I had to blow up something that was actually going really well, great feedback, but it was not profitable, was not serving my own ability to be sustained, much less regenerated. I function on planet Earth. When I do hike over the ridge and go to get groceries, I wade past all the toxic stuff and try to get some good local stuff. Or when I hand over my farm share amount to the amazing farmer Nick down the road, that's got to be in a fiat currency that they can recognize and exchange. I can't just be like, oh, I think really erudite thoughts. Give me some great food. I got to pay them. We are in a very exciting time. And folks who do not have a lot of excess cash, which is most human beings on this planet.

Oh yeah.

In fact, most don't even have excess, they have negative. Most people in this modern economy are in some kind of debt, at the very least a mortgage, if not other, like college or other debt. So we are cash scarce in an economy that's getting more expensive for day-to-day survival. And that's not by accident. And that is a constrained and kind of creatively crimping energetic space to be in. So we're like triply called. We have to figure out what the truth is, like what would be good food? What would be a good way to put my money? We have to have the kind of equanimity and serenity and calm to be able to enact those decisions. Those are already 2 really big missing pieces for many people. But then we need to find ourselves in a system that's at least got those choices, that isn't going to beat us over the head when we try to live that way or marginalize us or call us something really weird just for trying to be healthy and make choices that aren't what the mainstream industrial system that's very harming promotes, makes easy, and makes most profitable. So it's a bit of a triple whammy, but lots of us are working on it. And I think we're having more fun anyway. That's my view on this fine Friday anyway.

As we wrap it up, I feel like we have tapped into sort of the red pill of pulling back the curtain and just saying, hey, what you think may not be what is accurate, but at the same time, you have to find your own dignity of your life. You have to find your path. in this life with the idea that you are in a toxic soup and that things may not be what you think they are. As we close, like, is there something tangible? Is there something that people can walk away from this conversation with besides just pulling back the curtain, but something that they can actually do, given that you did say, okay, follow the money, but I'm talking, what's something that the minute they stop listening to this, what can they do? Then what's the next moment after listening to us that they can actively do that might help find some peace?

Yeah, what comes to mind for me is that in fact, there is a lot of amazing, very powerful regenerative work going on across systems, across regions, very locally and beyond. If I had one piece of guidance for folks, it would be use your amazing innate senses. We're all born with them, right? We are sensory and sensitive and Let your senses highlight one of those things that you have access to. It might be a great regenerative farmer that you've been thinking about checking out. How do you get a farm share? It might be a local gardening project. It might be your book project. There's no one thing, but whatever it is that when you bring it to mind, it offers that heart-opening, reaffirming, human health reinforcing, and/or ecological health reinforcing pathway and energize that. Put time to it. If it calls, put money to it. Like, it's happening all around us. That is, by the way, what wakes me up every morning and lets me sleep peacefully at night is this, except for the odd Very disturbing dream these days, but there is so much really, really beautiful stuff going on. And the more we energize it, A, the better we feel, but B, the more energy it gets. So just pick one of those things and bring your power, whatever that is, your attention, your pension, and let that be your gift today.

I love it. Yeah, that's such a great takeaway. And for anyone that is struggling to find that superpower or that beautiful thing around them, that is your work right there is to find the gratitude, even when things feel toxic or even when they feel like the world's on your shoulders kind of thing is to find some sort of beauty or gratitude in a moment, in a person, in an experience. that can carry you to the next moment. Lorraine, I realize that you, you've written a lot of fantastic pieces. Like where can people read some of these thoughts, these meditations you have shared in your 25 years? Where would they go to read some of that?

Thanks, James. I appreciate that. My blog, belorrainesmith.com. There's a blog there where I share my weekly letter. You can also sign up to get that weekly letter in your inbox if you like that kind of thing. So There's a place to sign up on my website at belorainesmith.com. And I really enjoy corresponding with folks who are on this path. I call it the path to industrial healing. So really the best place would be my website. And I'd love to see folks there and hear questions, comments, and also what you are seeing, because there really is so much rich stuff out there. So I'd love to hear people's ideas.

Yeah, you're a deep thinker and I'm deeply grateful for not only your presence in our presence in our life, but just that you exist, that you're out there. And then I think even how you delicately answered the Canada-US question really shares how you look at a situation, that you don't look at it from a very surface level. It's, you go as deep as you can with it. You brought up a lot of points that, uh, that even I wasn't thinking about or considering. Because I think it is easy to get used to the media trap, you know, if you're only hearing that perspective and forgetting that there's so many other layers to every topic that we're learning or hearing about. So thank you for bringing that awareness. Thank you for doing what you do. And thank you for joining me today. And thank you all for listening or watching the Everyday Ancestral Podcast. You know, we would love your support. So please subscribe, share the podcast. The more people that subscribe, the more you're communicating to us that you like what we're doing. And so it helps us get even more guests. It helps us spread that word, that ancestral word. So please stay curious and thank you for tuning in. Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's E-A-T-PLUCK.com. Tpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.