Recognizing Interconnectedness As a Pathway to Redefining Tomorrow with B. Lorraine Smith #16

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may help you to redefine your future, that may help you to redefine or how we as society live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider. A quote that I've lived by since I think it's been when I was 12 is, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. Today. We're going to be redefining tomorrow by exploring the topic of recognizing interconnectedness as a pathway to redefining tomorrow. We have with us today Lorraine Smith. How are you, Lorraine?

I'm great. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me on the show, David.

I love having you here. Very quickly, everybody who's listened in knows that gives very short introductions. You can look it up online. Is that Lorraine is a consultant, heavily involved in impact and SDGs, sustainable development goals in that space. She's lived all over the world in multiple countries, so she brings a very global perspective. And a short little intro is I had listened to Lorraine speak on another program, and I was fascinated by the approach she had, and I thought that we could dig deeper, find more, and explore more together. So do you have an outline for us today, Lorraine?

I sure do. It's got four parts.

Okay. Can you please give them to me?

Yep. So the first one is the shortest one. I'll just set expectations. So the first one is the current economic model incentivizes harm. Economic.

Model incentivizes harm.

The second one, the linear analytic mindset, is how most of us have been trained.

Hold on. Mindset is how most of us have been trained.

This is still part of the second one. So we struggle to see the whole and the causes.

To see the whole and the causes. And I was known for not being brief. Okay. Number three.

Yeah. We need to let go of the old model and allow for a holistic mindset to replace it.

We need to let go of the old model and allow for a holistic.

Mindset to replace it.

Holistic mindset to replace it.

This is still part of three 1. Notion of stewardship and connectedness.

Connectiveness. Okay. And we're on to four. Okay.

This will require reconciling past wrongs.

Reconciling past wrongs.

And understanding new rights.

Understanding new rights.

And we are more than capable.

More than capable. Okay, you win the prize for the longest outline in history. Let's start with number one. Current economic model incentivizes harm. Help me understand this.

Yeah, actually you know just this morning there was a great Twitter thread that took. It was long. You think my outline was long. I think this was a 30 part Twitter thread that looked at how the current. Some of the largest actors in the stock market. So largest publicly traded companies, how many of them and these are all household names. Coca Cola, Microsoft. Like you, you'll recognize these companies have paid millions to their CEOs and bonuses millions in stock buybacks and, and laid off thousands and in some cases tens of thousands of people and also showing where the market is booming. Dan Price was the tweeter. He's a CEO sort of known for having given himself a big pay cut.

Was paycheck or pay. Something's the name of the company?

It's a good question. I don't know what company.

I think it's pay.

His Twitter handle is Dan Pricier.

So yeah, he's got a payment company. Payment processing or payment system company. Yeah, I've heard.

Yeah. So he, you know, he's definitely making noises in the area of where we've gone amok with our current economic model. But I mentioned this to say, you know, the numbers of the market being pointed in so called the right direction. So increasing stock values going up, which is the reward. Right. So the incentive for buying the right stock, if you will, is that you make more money. But actually what's happening is the people who are working those jobs are laid off. It's a very small number of people who are aggregating that new so called wealth while the majority of people are not receiving that wealth in any way. So our current economic model incentivizes social harm. It also incentivizes drastic environmental harm. I mean we're aware, I think, I'm pretty sure most of your listeners would be aware of the climate challenge we're facing and it is on track for a pretty accelerated catastrophe. There's lots of people working on amazing solutions so we can get to that in a bit. But at the moment even the so called best practice. So companies who have fairly ambitious climate goals are still mostly ambitious because their goal is to do less harm, which is not net good. And these are companies who are profitable and a lot of them would be in that Twitter thread of Dan Price is looking at some of these companies who are making money.

Do you know, because I'd like to add it in here. Do you know about Dan Price and what he did so that the context is taken from why this individual is important?

No, I just have.

So I'll add it because it might be useful to you. Dan grew up listening to, and this is not an indication or a derogatory statement against the group, but he was very, very much in line with conservative perspectives. One of his fans, he was a huge fan of Rush Limbaugh and he was building his business. He got it to a point that he said, look, I've got to make this work. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut my salary for millions and that everybody in the company will earn. I believe the baseline was US$70,000 a year. And he was proud of that. He was proud enough that when Rush Limbaugh called him, he went to the show and Rush asked him a ton of questions. And at one point he said, see, this is socialism and this business will fail. It will go nowhere. And this is what you have to. And was more of a listeners beware of this model. What happened was his company grew by four, five, six times. I don't know the exact number, so don't quote me on it. But it grew so much that if you actually look up Dan Price, he's been fighting that Rush Limbaugh statement for years because that's what comes up is that his business is gonna fail and it's socialist. But the reality is it's been phenomenally successful.

Right?

Yeah. That probably adds a little context to it, is that this guy is, he's not, he's doing it because he, his idol tore him down and he asked to be back on the show again. And Rush would never ask, let him back on again because he was successful.

Interesting. Well, yeah, and it's, I mean, it's an interesting case study and he continues to use his voice, so I'm more familiar with his voice. And that tweet just happened to catch my eye this morning as something that really spells out the disparity that we see. So we talk about accruing money as being a desired outcome in a lot of instances, as individuals, as companies of, as organizations. And yet we don't recognize that that incentive to accrue money is causing harm. It is literally causing a lot of social harm and a lot of environmental harm. So that's my sort of basic premise, is that the current economic model fundamentally incentivizes harm. You can look at a pretty simple technicality in economic terms, which is to talk about externalities and up until now, not up until now, lots of people have been talking about this for a while, but it's pretty normal to look at so called non financial impacts, be they social Environmental or, you know, often it's a combination and describe them as external or as externalities. So they're not really on the books, even though they may have very significant impact. And so this is the current model and the project is to. To change it. We designed it and so we can design it in a different way.

So with. With your perspective as a global lens, multiple countries, you've lived in Australia, you've lived in parts of Europe. When you look at it on a global scale, do you ever rate some countries that much better at moving to a different direction as compared to those that are not? Do you have any other type of metric you're using when it comes to this economic model working and not working or changing and not changing?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I tend not to think in terms of countries and maybe I'll just give a bit of context in terms of where I've been and what I've been up to in that. So I'm coming to you today from Montreal, Canada, and I'm Canadian.

We can hear it about.

Yeah, I promise. I recently came back to Canada. The 10 years prior I was living in New York City and at various points I've lived in different places. Brazil is a place that I've spent a fair bit of time in. Also spent a fair bit of time in Germany. My work these days, and really for the last 20 years has been focused on working with mostly large companies, usually publicly traded, not always, but generally large corporations across different sectors. So that can be mining, energy, footwear and apparel manufacturing, financial services, pharmaceutical, kind of. I'm not sure there's a sector I haven't worked with, so done a lot of work over the years in the field of what we would call sustainability. And that's. I put that in kind of air quotes and we'll talk a bit more about where the evolution of that is going towards regeneration. But my focus on sustainability with companies has been to help them set meaningful goals and apply meaningful strategies to achieving those goals so that they not only minimize the negative impacts of the businesses they run, but ideally maximize the positive effects. And that's where we're starting to see a shift in the dialogue from sustainability, which has been sort of really focused on harm reduction or risk reduction in the investor conversation and trying to amplify the recognition that we need to not just go more slowly towards a cliff, we need to not go towards a cliff. And that would be taking a more regenerative approach and looking at how can companies, by dint of their business Models, not some side project or initiative or you know, a little pilot program, but actually by dint of existing, delivering the products and services that are at their core. How can they be part of realigning with natural systems and enhancing the social fabrics? So to your direct question about countries, most of the companies that I work with are really very global. Either their market segments that they're delivering to and, or quite often their supply chains are very global. And so I tend, I tend to think more like a migratory bird species than a human when it comes to borders. Borders are artificial. We put them there, we've moved them around a number of times, even in my own lifetime. And we'll keep moving them. Maybe eventually we'll will see that they.

They only serve they, they will never be removed. There's just no way. Humans have to. You have your property line.

Not in every country and not in every culture.

Not in every country, not in every culture. But there are property lines, there are religious lines, there are many, many lines that we draw. And I, I don't foresee, that's my take. I don't foresee in the next few hundred years could be thousands of years. I don't see the next few hundred years that that modality can be eliminated easily.

Right.

Yeah, it's from the agricultural revolution. Agriculture created lines. Once you own something, once you had a possession of something, you now defended that position. Before when you were migratory, you didn't own anything. You just, you grabbed what you had, you went to the next place and you did whatever you needed to be able to survive and then you went to the next. So I think part of that is we've got thousands of years of this type of belief structure.

Yeah, it's an interesting, Talking about land rights is a very interesting piece of the sustainability and regenerative conversation. I will just reflect a bit on some differences I see culturally. So I'm going to just cherry pick Canada and Brazil for a moment because they're countries that I've spent a lot of time in. There's a lot of easily comparable similarities. Like land mass wise, they're both a couple of the biggest countries in the world and what we might call resource rich. Although I, I also put resource in air quotes because that's a very human linear mindset to say like there's some stuff that's for us to take for our resources. But certainly Canada and Brazil have, have a lot in common in terms of their resource based economies. And I think there's also some really interesting distinctions that show up as Providing possibilities and what comes next. And I say this with a very hopeful tone, and I don't mean to trivialize what's actually happening, but to say what I think could possibly be happening in the future if we shift our understanding of our role as humans in the wider web of life, or if we change our mindset in a way that allows a change in economic norms. So Brazil has actually a very diverse population. It was obviously colonized by Europeans, predominantly Portuguese. So there's that European influx, however, that happened a little earlier in time than in Canada. So there's more generations of sort of colonial heritage that obviously has some huge baggage, you know, called genocide and land theft and all kinds of nasty things. It also has a degree of diversity. So there was also. Brazil was also the largest country for the human slave trade. So African slaves, the numbers are the largest. That is, of course, an atrocity that.

Defines the slave triangle.

The slaves were brought from Africa to Brazil to work the plantations, which were really the beginning of the. The industrial revolution. A lot of people look to Europe or northern economies and talk about the engineering innovations that took place. The steam engine, the cotton gin, et cetera. And those are obviously important and had a big effect on industrial activity. But without the plantation economy that was arising at the same time, there wouldn't have been much to move around in those trains or to put into those cotton gins. And those plantations were. And almost entirely slave labor produced so that, like, without the free labor and the stolen land, there would not be the industrial revolution. So I'm saying all kinds of bad things. This is going to lead to something that.

No, it's okay because you're framing it, because I have not. I've written about the cotton gin, and I've said that the cotton gin was not created to eliminate slave labor. It was created to improve quality, decrease cost, and increase speed, but it wasn't to eliminate slave labor. It was a means to an end of an economic model more than it was the elimination of something that was considered today. Individuals might say in parts of the world that that was a horrific time.

It was beyond horrific. Yes.

Well, I'm Jewish, so we were slaves for thousands of years in Israel. So if we. I love the comparison, but yet it's. No, it's very infrequently that someone will say, yeah, but those Jews, yeah, they were slaves for thousands of years.

Oh, well, humanity has a. Has a sordid past in terms of the atrocities we've carried out. But what does that mean for what's happening today? In Brazil, I'll reserve comment on the current political climate and just observe the, the potential that is all around. So you have the descendants of Africans in Brazil, you have the descendants of Europeans, you have indigenous communities, not all destroyed yet. And then you also have, of course, a more globalized economy today where there's lots of people from all around the world. There's also a very large Japanese population, large Italian population, so all kinds of ethnic diversity in Brazil. And you also have the most biodiverse country in the world. So you have an incredibly rich sort of foment of natural diversity and human diversity at a time of global crisis in terms of social justice and environmental justice. And you've also got. And a lot of people would not think this is true, but I believe it's true. And I been there and talked to a lot of people and seen this myself. You've got some of the most incredible leadership in terms of business model innovation, in terms of biomimicry, which is sort of letting nature be the teacher, the industrial innovator, if you will. You've got some really amazing forward thinking initiatives around how to collaborate as industries within a shifting social and environmental dynamic. And so when I think about, you know, are there differences among countries in the sustainability conversation? Yeah, there sure are. Because the potential for innovation and leadership and meaningful change, I think is very, very rich in Brazil. Whether that, you know, whether that plays out, whether the darker forces rule, how hard the lighter forces have to work to thrive and be the dominant paradigm, I don't know the answer to that. That's a future observation to be made. When I compare to my home and native Canada, I would say ironically, although if you ask the average person walking down the street in Manhattan, where do you think the challenges are bigger environmentally and socially between Canada and Brazil? I think most people say, oh, Brazil, I think they're burning down the rainforest. Canada. They got that Trudeau guy right. He was in vogue, wasn't he? He's nice. Without realizing that here we continue to have very serious racial, I would say, atrocities committed against our indigenous communities. It's not widely reported, but for example, this time last year. So we're having this conversation in February 2021. In February 2020, just before the lockdown and the pandemic really became a global conversation and really hit North America. And certainly Canada, Canada was experiencing, I don't know if your listeners would have recognized the hashtag shut Canada down. Canada was shut down not because of a pandemic, but because of road and rail closures across the country by protesting indigenous communities and their allies because of an illegal raid by the rcmp, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Wetsuweten territory in what we call British Columbia out west. And the raid was, I won't be the right person to tell you all the details, but it was considered illegal. It was a breach of territorial agreement, and it was connected to pipeline development. So oil and gas infrastructure development. And details and opinions aside, Canada was like economically practically ground to a halt because trains and trucking traffic could not move or could not move as much as it would normally. And so there were shortages and there were very real concerns across the country about how to handle this. And that didn't come out of, you know, a couple folks being a little bit grumpy. That comes from centuries of absolutely horrific treatment, I would say, beyond apartheid level. The apartheid regime in South Africa that we all, you know, thought was bad and rejoiced when Mandela was released from prison and they ended apartheid. The laws that are apartheid that were applied in South Africa were basically a cut and paste from the Canadian laws that were put in place by the same colonizer, right? English, the same set of laws. The difference is in England they ended apartheid, and in Canada we haven't really. But people don't notice. People don't realize what's happening here with our indigenous peoples. So it's pretty terrible. And then I would also say our resource use, if I can still use that very linear take, make waste terminology in Canada, the news doesn't really show that our forests are burning down. I would say the key difference there is, it's because we removed most of them a lot sooner. So when I was growing up, the idea of seeing old growth forest in Canada was just almost impossible. You could, you know, I was growing up in the 70s in Toronto. You could still do it. There are still places and there still are places today that you can go and see old growth, original unlogged forest. But it's few and far between. It's very, very, very unusual to stand among native forest in Brazil. It's not unusual because it's a lot of it's still there. So the difference is we removed our native forest before I was born, before there was an Internet, before there were cover, you know, color magazines to show color photography and magazines to show what was going on. It happened quite swiftly in an earlier time. And so I would. And I love Canada and I'm, you know, there's a lot of things to be very proud of and feel good about. But I'd like to kind of throw the usual paradigms up in the air and say, like, really, you really think Brazil's burning down the rainforest and Canada's protecting our forest? You sure about that? You really think we're a more democratic nation that upholds human rights and Brazil isn't. Let's give that a little bit more thought.

Yeah, it's often perspective. It's often the culture in control. The. And I won't say the media, because media is given a bad rap for everything. Yet there is media of many different types. There are individuals who do do who believe the truths that they say, and there are people who tell lies in all different types of media. Yet if you were. I remember when I arrived in Hong Kong, we would see these domestic helpers and I would hear horror stories about some of the domestic helpers. And there's thousands, several hundred thousand domestic helpers from Philippines and a few other countries. And I would say, okay, so slavery, I mean, domestic helping. And people would laugh because they knew that there was a form of slavery. Now, on the flip side, that money was more money than they were making in the Philippines, which was helping that society grow. So to one it was bad, to another it was good. So there was a justification for it. And I don't know if there's any way to articulate what you just said about land use or Brazil and Canada because there's narratives that are underlie. Are already created to defend against the realities. Better way to say it.

Yeah, well, yeah, so let's use that word land use as a fun little red, you know, little, little red dot of ink and watch it move through the system here. Because so I mentioned off the top that I think the linear and analytic mindset that most of us have been trained with is part of the problem. And we have an opportunity to shift that to a much more holistic mindset. So let me explain what I mean.

So can I. Before you get to that was. That's number two. I just realized, because I looked over at the outline and so that's number two before you do, because we won't forget this number two because it's on the list when individuals. I hear impact or social investment, I think of an XY axis and I see the arrow going exponentially up in terms of destruction of land. Challenges with the oceans, very, very high. And when individuals. What I hear is individuals are talking about is reducing that number. And that's great. We want to bring that down. But my reality is it's not a reduction in the number we actually have to do the exact exponential curve going the other way, completely down to even bring it close to zero. So it's not about reduction, reduction. It's about a transformation to make the arrow go down. Do you see around the world, do you see places where the discussion is not, well, I'll get tax credits or I'll get credits for my sustainability because I bought them to actually the full logarithmic down or exponential down. Know what I'm asking?

I do, yeah. And I'm glad you're, you're hovering here, because first of all, just to emphasize the point, I think that is what's needed. So we do see a lot of activity that reduces the harm, but we need to not just reduce harm. We need to increase wellness. And the incentives need to be in place so that you are rewarded for doing that. It's quite possible that your company will be punished. I mean, you know, your example or your context around Rush Limbaugh saying that that company would, would fail because it was taking a more holistic approach to treating staff well and to executive pay. Unfortunately, he's probably often right. And I don't. I'm glad he wasn't. And I'm fully in favor of the approach that was taken.

Taken.

But that's not coming from nowhere. Right. Like the incentives are not well embedded to reward companies or individuals for creating more wellness, or you're incentivized to be more sick. Especially in the United States, it's very profitable to have a really unhealthy population. Right. So how do we turn that around so that curve doesn't just bend towards less harm, it swoops up exponentially towards more good.

Right. In my case, it would be on the chart going down just as fast as it's going up.

Right. And I'm personally in favor of a mental construct that shows an increase of something desirable versus a decrease. And it's just my personal bias. I feel like we, you know, a goal of zero is kind of this, like, unthinkable thing. And striving for un is like, mentally problematic. Whereas striving for more of something we do want creates a sense of abundance or openness or the ability to create.

Versus we call it infinite age of infinite, which is the other podcast.

Exactly.

Infinite possibilities. And you're right, most of the, at least in my opinion, most initiatives are a reductionist or the redacted or they're negative. You can't eat that. You can't do this, you can't do that. Don't do that. And the only way we'll get there is if all of these things are punished.

Right? But we're really, well, what can you have? And it's like, you know, if you're trying to eat well, you've just taken everything off your plate, which is a terrible way to live, versus saying, oh, look at what I can have, and I can even have more of these. And, oh, my gosh, I've never even tried these. What's this like? You know, and suddenly your plate is overflowing with abundantly delicious things that will make you well and connect you to the wider food web, just to, you know, push the food analogy. So I prefer a kind of construct that says, you know, what does it look like when we bend the curve up exponentially on the side of the chart we want to be on? However you want to model it. And your question was, do I see that happening? And the answer is yes. And that's where I put a lot of my time. So I mentioned earlier that I work as essentially as an advisor with large companies, looking at their goals, their strategies. I also do a lot of transparency and report. So esg, or Environmental, Social, and Governance reporting, it's an area of. It's actually something I was sort of winding down, but in the last few years, it's become so in such high demand that if you are familiar with the global frameworks being applied in ESG reporting, you suddenly kind of get pulled back into the corral. And so that's how I kind of turn my lights on and keep my, you know, keep my roof over my head. And I learn a lot. And I work with some pretty amazing people and teams and companies. And then in my. Let's call it, spare time, I go on field trips. And some of them literally, I literally go into the field and listen and learn from people doing different things and sometimes a bit more virtually these days especially. And those field trips are really targeted at understanding, well, where is it different? Where is it emerging to be those better incentives that are what we want to see more of? And I would say I'm seeing inklings of it all around. Not yet anywhere close to enough in the mainstream corporate community. I mean, if I were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company right now, I would go to bed thinking we might not exist tomorrow. Like, the tidal wave of change is coming. And, I mean, we know the Fortune 500 list changes all the time. I think it's about to change a heck of a lot quicker, as current business models are shown to be sort of the Emperor with no clothes. But in the non Fortune 500 universe, I see amazing emergence. I see new accounting models. I see new ways of recognizing success and incentivizing and collaborating. So definitely there's a lot emerging. That's what I try to. So I have a blog on my website. It's a pretty quiet little corner of the Internet, but whenever I discover examples that I think are promising or that show meaningful information in that direction, I try to write it up as detailed as I can and sort of say, you want to know what it might look like Here? Here's examples that are, they exist. These are people, you can call them. Here's how you find them. Because it's hard to imagine sometimes.

Well, and I've had a lot of these conversations also with individuals. And I've seen, just like you, living around the world, I've seen all sorts of different narratives that have happened. One of the challenges in my mind is when I speak to these individuals and I hear about pockets, you'll hear, and they over, they oversell them and they'll say, well, we're solving it. And then I'll say to them, I understand exponential growth, I understand network analysis, I understand all of this. So given that you feel you're solving it, give me the timeline when it will be solved. And they say, what do you mean? I said, well, you just said you've solved it. This is it. How? What's the timeline? Will you have solved the global, I mean, 7.5 billion people, the entire Earth planet, in a timeline, say, oh, David, come on, that's unrealistic. I'm saying. No, it's a serious question. If you believe that there is social unrest, or you believe that there is resource depletion, or you believe climate change is happening, or you believe any of these narratives and you say you're solving it, then just give me the date. And it's, it's a disconnect. It's a, it's two parallel universes. Is, we're building and this is fantastic. And we're getting opportunity and we just got funding and we're going to be making money and we're going to be growing and we're going to be building, but the connection has to be, if you're solving it, just tell me the date. Yeah, and I've never ever had anybody say 2040. And I can tell you why. They always can say, oh, no, but it's like 2080 and you're going to be dead. So, okay, give me a timeline in your lifetime. 2060, tell me what will happen in the next 10 years. Oh, David, that's impossible. We don't know what will happen. So you didn't really solve it. You have a potential solution that could. If in fact not shut down by a government, if not shut down by big business, if not shut down by. Or if you don't get funding in your second round, you won't get there. Well, David, you're making it complex. I'm not. I'm asking a simple question. You told me you're solving it, so I brought it up because it was under models and you talked about models in the linear. Linear. And so I think maybe this is useful to you is when you're speaking with these individuals and they promise utopian solutions. Just ask them. Okay, you've said you've solved it, so when is it going to be done?

Right. Well. Well, actually I would say the folks where I see the greatest promise are not the ones suggesting the utopias, they're the ones. So I'll give you a concrete example of a model that I see having a lot of promise. And. And, yeah, so I'll just describe.

Okay, that's where I'm actually looking for that. Because you just said they're on the blog. I'm not going to be reading your blog, so I'm not saying that to be mean. I just have a lot of things going on, so I'd love to.

Yeah, I gotcha. So here's an example of a company that exists in real life. And the truth is I haven't been able to circle back to them for the last 12 months, so I'm not sure how they're doing now. So I'm going to describe what I saw when I saw it, and recognize that life is pretty dynamic all the time. And seemingly especially these days. It's a company called Legado des Aguas, which means the Legacy of the waters. It's held by a group, so an industrial conglomerate called Grupo Voter and based in Brazil. And the conglomerate owns a big cement company, a big energy company, a bank, an orange orchard company. This is like your big industrial conglomerate, not known for its innovative business models. But now it is, because about six years ago now they made a decision to leverage the largest reserve of Matatlantica, which is the Atlantic Forest biome. Most people know about the Amazon biome, but very few people outside of Brazil know that there's this whole other really amazing forest biome called the Atlantic Forest or the Mata Atlantica. And the vast majority of that biome has been removed so if you can kind of picture in your mind's eye where the Amazon is, the Amazon basin, kind of in the north center of the South American continent, the Matatlantica would kind of wrap around the southeast of that. So picture where Rio Sao Paulo, sort of making its way along the coast and inland quite a ways before bumping into the cerrado or the other other biomes there. It's an amazingly biodiverse rich region. It's also where most of the country.

Was settled and populated down that the southern border, if you want to call it going.

Right. So it got decimated, basically, and less than 7% of the forest is still standing, kind of like the boreal forest in North America. But I digress. So it turns out that Grupo Voderencim is the owner of the largest reserve of Atlantic forest in Brazil. And I believe in the world, some of the Atlantic forest goes outside of Brazil, but most is there. And the reason for that is because in the early part of the last century, when they were developing their aluminum production, so one of their big industrial concerns, they required a lot of electricity. Aluminum production takes a lot of power. And they decided rather than relying on a kind of newly evolving electrical grid, they would just build their own, as one did when one kind of owned stuff. And so they built a hydroelectric plant and product hydroelectric generation facility just a couple hours outside of Sao Paulo in the Atlantic Forest. Taking advantage of a series of essentially waterways and waterfalls that pass through elevation, they created this hydroelectric facility and produced aluminum. And then over time, the aluminum production kind of moved to other places and the hydroelectric requirement was much lower there. And so but they just kept the land. And they realized in the production of hydroelectric power, they realized that they needed to keep the forest standing because that is why there was water there. So they realized almost a century ago, when you take the forest away, you take the water away, and therefore you take the ability to generate power away. So they preserve the forest in the interest of making this aluminum. Fast forward a century or give or take. And some of the more innovative progressive thinkers within the company, who, by the way, were already doing pretty interesting things around sustainability, your kind of standard garden variety corporate sustainability stuff. But a bunch of them said, we've got this amazing asset, this incredible large reserve of Atlantic forest. Why don't we do something with it that isn't hydroelectric power generation for aluminum, but rather really thinks about the future and what is possible with this legacy or this legacy of the waters? LEGADO DE SABOS so they put their heads together and thought what would a business model be that would improve the biodiversity and what would that look like to make that the business? So easy things come to mind, like ecotourism done well, and they certainly did go ahead and create an ecotourist facility there. And it's absolutely stunning. Like, if you ever have a chance to go there, you're. It's just amazing. The facilities aren't fancy at all, but the natural surroundings are just incredible. The bird life, et cetera. But ecotourism is really difficult to scale. If you scale it, you start to hit some issues. So, yes, it's possible to make a profit, but that's not really, you know, their realm. A little niche business of weekenders having fun biking in the trails. So then they had another idea, which was that there's a lot of need for as cities are looking at regreening and looking at resilience and all the things that cities are trying to figure out right now. They realized that there's a lot of endemic species within the forest that they can be part of cultivating. And so they created a series of greenhouses and tree nurseries that cultivate the endemic species from within the Matatlanchica to help cities that are situated in Matatlantica biome but have kind of devastated the forest and have been part of an amazing movement to bring back the native species into these cities. So that's another way that they're making money, which is to say they're going to cultivate more of these seedlings and collaborate and work with cities and regions outside of the reserve. And there's definitely money to be made there. And that's a bit more scalable, although there's still some constraints on the scale. That's one of the second part of their business model. But things start to get a bit exponential when you look at the third part of their business model, which is to recognize that along with the trees and plants that they can help others grow. There are molecules and genetics within that biome that aren't found anywhere else in the world. There are orchids. I forget the number. It's like hundreds of orchids that are unique to this biome. I mean, your mind just goes bonkers. You don't even have to read the blog post. But if you want, go have a look at just the COVID photo that has the. You're inside the orchid greenhouse and you're just surrounded. It's like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. You're just surrounded by different orchids. It's phenomenal. So why does that matter? From an industrial and business model perspective, well, the food and flavor and fragrance industry pays a lot of money for molecules and for genetics because likewise the pharmaceutical industry, by the way, the potential for genetics at a, at a tiny, tiny scale in terms of the volume. So the extraction impact, unlike mining or oil and gas or other big industrial activity, the extractive impact is negligible if done with respect and done correctly. Whereas the potential impact on the consumer or the drug company or whatever it may be is potentially enormous. So there is large money at stake there. So this is an example of a company that exists. It's held by guru Puvotaran Chim. It's an independently run company, at least it was a year ago. And I do have to double back and see where they're at and they may fail. It's an experiment. They're working with local indigenous communities that live within the community as well as non indigenous communities. They're working with scientists and other industrial collaborators to think about, you know, how to make this work. And if they get that right, the net impact on that area is improved biodiversity, protected waterways, appreciated species, because to even be there, you are interacting with these species and the biome. So I see that as a model. It probably sounds a bit woo woo.

But it's actually, I will say I'm looking on your blog and I typed in grupo. I've typed in Brazil and I'm not getting anything.

It's called you know it when you see it or something like that. That's the name of the blog post.

So it's got to be tagged.

Somebody will have to do that for me.

Yes, I know I'm the same way. People, people want me to do so many things with the podcast. So. Okay, I get it now. I'm going to throw one thing out because it's still on this business model side before we get to the next was I like. There's a lot of talk about business model iterations and that's part of the future. And we've moved to instead of business models are now being thought out much differently than were even just a decade ago. There was just recently and I'd have to pull up the article that the United nations put out a report that said there is no way a company can be profitable if they took into consideration all of the sustainability issues at hand.

Yeah, totally.

Okay, where do we go with that?

Well, so you know, that's back to point one, which is the current model incentivizes harm. And if you. So if you may, we proceed to.

The second One, I just, I wanted to throw that out there because it's part of. If in fact you cannot be sustainable under the current model, then what is that new model? And I wanted that, I wanted that tossed in before we got to the next one. So we've covered the two that I thought were relative. So let's get to number two, the analytic mindset.

Yeah. So it'll segue in a way. 2 and 3 are connected because it's so long.

The linear analytic mindset is how we, most of us have been trained. So we struggle to see the whole. And the cases, causes.

That's right.

I just want to say it again because it's not an easy one to remember.

So that's why the UN can say, by the way, based on where we are now, no business would be profitable if it actually weren't founded in this linear analytic mindset. So let me explain a bit more what's meant by that. So lots of people have had different experiences, but the vast majority of people that I've met and worked with and studied with would describe some version of the following. As you grew up, you went to school. The school was a building that was divided into classes that had teachers who told you things you were supposed to remember. Probably write down, repeat in a test, try to get the highest mark you could so that you could move on to the next level. And at a certain point, the next level was outside of school, where you were supposed to get a job. That job was supposed to pay you as much as possible. And as you went through that process, you were encouraged to analyze things, solve problems, break things down into units, and kind of figure things out. And in many ways we could say that's, that's not a bad thing. Lots of good things happen from going to school. And I'm proud of the education I got and I'm pleased that I know the things I learned there. What most of us didn't learn through that classic education process, including the really expensive educations that a lot of parents worked hard to get for their kids, was how to understand life, how to really recognize interconnectedness and systems thinking and dynamic living systems thinking, even though it's actually really simple. So I'm going to apply a linear analytic mindset for a moment to what I mean by systems thinking. So a system can mean lots of different things. It can mean a school, it can mean a kidney, it can mean a business, it can mean a whole planet. It can mean bigger, smaller things. It can mean human things and non human things. But any System, when we talk about it, depending on where we put the boundaries, has three elements. It has a purpose or a goal, it has elements, independent pieces of itself, and it has interactions between those elements. In the case of a school, the purpose might be depending on the school and the culture. It might be to have the greatest percentage of graduates be employed within a year. It might be to have people be happy. There might be multiple goals, depending on who you ask. Generally speaking, that school is going to have some kind of objectives driving it. In the case of non human systems like say your kidney, it has a purpose, but it wasn't decided by anybody. It's just the way our kidneys evolved over time. And I think the kidney's job is to clean the blood and eliminate weight. I may be a little vague there.

So that's okay, you're good.

But so each system has these independent elements or individual elements, a purpose or goal and interactions in between. And a lot of systems thinking even kind of stops there. It looks at like, okay, how do these things interact? Okay, this reinforces that, this takes away from that. We, you know, we have these amazing systems maps. I've seen some of the most lazy linear thinking happening in systems analysis, where people try to break everything down to its smallest part. And what's missing is the ability to recognize that even if you don't understand it, it's still true. So even if you don't understand how dynamic a given living system is that you are in and part of, and even though you may not have put it into your books as you were doing your finances and thinking about how you want your business to grow, it's still true. So, for example, planetary boundaries. People talk a lot about the Stockholm Institute and their planetary boundaries. There are, I believe, nine of them. They look at things like amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, amount of nitrogen, different chemical buildup in the environment, et cetera. So there's sort of a range of boundaries and we, you know, there's continued science that will evolve and we'll come to know more things. But they're basically agreed there are certain boundaries within which we can, we humans and other living species can survive and even thrive. And beyond those boundaries, we are not likely to thrive and we're potentially likely to die. And those planetary boundaries aren't really up for debate other than the refining of the science. But if you go back to that UN report that you just referenced, very, very few companies, I'll go out on a twig and say no company of any large scale, certainly publicly traded in our markets today uses planetary boundaries as a strategic input to develop and revise their business model.

No, they don't.

They may. At best they may be looking at a couple of them. Certainly climate is on the radar. And if they're in agriculture, they might be looking at nitrogen, et cetera. At best, they may be looking at a couple of those boundaries in terms of their enterprise risk management and therefore potentially in relation to their mandatory investor disclosures and then increasingly in their voluntary investor disclosures. And that's back to the ESG or environmental, social and governance disclosures that I'm involved in by day. So it doesn't mean that they're totally ignoring them. In some cases they are, but in some cases they're not. It does mean that they're not taking them into account in a holistic way that says, well, what does this business do? We make shoots or we, you know, produce corn based ethanol or we, you know, insert. We're Google. Right. What does Google do? Google. The vast majority of Google's revenue is generated through advertising. So Google, to be blunt, sells advertising. To you and me, it's a thing we use to search, but to the company itself, the system, it is a vendor of advertising. That's where the vast majority of its money comes from. And so if you were to ask if you and I were given the task. Hey, David, Lorraine, wipe your slate clear. You thought you were doing something, but this just in. Next week what you're doing is reinventing Google's business model. Nothing's in the way. You have all the money you need and all the resources. Don't worry about it. Next week you're going to reinvent Google's business model in alignment with the planetary boundaries, or another way to put it, is in alignment with how life works. Have at it. Well, I don't know about you, but I think the last thing I would do is think, I know we should make more money through advertising. Stuff like that, more people are going to buy. It's just not what we would do. But because most people have been incentivized, trained and rewarded and even lauded and had movies made about them for being good at kind of solving one thing with a very linear focus, that's the way we've gone and it is causing us harm and it's the thing we need to evolve.

What you're describing to me, and it's maybe not clear the way I'm going to say this, but I'm going to try, is that the Venn diagram, the three circles with overlap has a few components in them. One of us, the incentivization model. And when you introduce the nine, let's give the nine planetary boundaries, what happens is for the organization, for the organism, whatever it may be, to cross over. To do that, so many other interconnected variables also have to evolve and change simultaneously. Otherwise it can't thrive. So you could move Google over to the nine. The challenges, the market, the valuation, the user, the advertiser, and all of those necessary evils. In the case of the way it's described here, or necessary nutrition, food is the payment, all of those things would disappear and it would collapse. So how do you move an entire ecosystem, an entire economic model at a fast enough pace so that the iteration that's being developed can thrive?

Yeah, it's a great question. I'll just highlight that two things related to collapse. One is there's a lot of folks around the world who would tell you that the collapse already happened. So if you are in an indigenous community or other communities that were on the very short end of the atrocities of the colonization stick, they would note that their society has already collapsed. And so living through that has been a lived experience, multi generational, that continues. So when I hear people talking about collapse and then I think of my indigenous friends, I'm like, yeah, well, been.

There, done that scene.

Exactly right. And I mean, that's kind of sad and harsh, but it's also true. It's like talking about the apocalypse. Like this kind of, you know, meme about the zombie apocalypse. It's like, yeah, exactly. Been there, done that.

Yeah, it's been happening for centuries. You just missed it because you weren't paying attention.

Yeah. Because you were benefiting from it. Right. To be even more.

Well, it depends. Some people weren't, but they were still part of it. And I'll give an example. What? I was in Athens and I was given a tour by this one individual and she's talking about how horrific the Romans were when they destroyed the Greek artifacts. And I said, first of all, there's Syria happening right now doing the exact same thing. Second, you're being very singular and focus. You're saying the Romans came and did this. Are you trying to tell me in those years there weren't people who were doing it, who weren't saying, I can't believe I'm doing this. This is horrible, this is terrible. We're eliminating this whole culture from the planet. But if I don't do it, I will die Roman. You know, I'm part of the Roman Empire and My family will die, so I'm going to do this. But I feel terr. I said there are people back then who feel the same way then as they do now. Yeah, we're living through these same experiences over and over and over again. The Syrian destruction of their entire history. And that's entire. Their history. There are people horrified today and there will be people 100 years from now saying, can you believe they did that? No, there were people who were horrified.

Yeah, yeah. It's scary what we're capable of doing to one another. So that's one piece of collapse. The other piece of collapse, I would point out is you're asking a very fair question. Can we make the kind of change to every industry as quickly as we need to? Because so many things would have to change. I hear that question, and with respect, I say it's actually the wrong question because it's like a lighthouse. It's like a ship arguing with a lighthouse. Like, I'm going this way, says the ship. And the lighthouse says, well, if you do, you're going to crash into me. So. And I'm here to guide you. And the ship's like, no, I'm going that way, I'm going that way. I'm going that way. And the lighthouse like, well, okay, but I can't change my course because I'm a lighthouse and you can. So you might not like it. It might be hard to do. It might not be where you thought you were going. You may not understand what happens if you turn around. Those are all very legitimate issues. You can talk them through with your therapist. But. But I'm a lighthouse. I can't change my direction. And so I say that because when I hear that kind of questioning, it's like questioning planetary boundaries. It's like questioning life's principles. Like, well, sure.

Go. Go a little deeper. The question is about the fact that humans by nature are willing to go to the point of destruction where there is no recourse, no turning back to the demise of themselves before they're willing to even acknowledge it. So let's take smoking individuals. There's a lighthouse. They'll be telling you it's horrible for you to do. You're gonna crash and burn. But it won't happen to me. It's not me. It's not happening. Society. No, no, we don't. We need this. We need this water. We need to drain the land. We need to put up the damage we have to be able to. Otherwise people will say, oh, you mean we destroyed our only boat? To get out of here in terms of making the fire. Oh, shit. I've never said a swear on one of these podcasts ever in over 200. But that would be like, this is a real big issue. So I do understand, take it from a different perspective that, yes, you said we went so far, but there's a point when you can't return.

Yeah, I mean, I can really only speak for myself. Although I observe what you're describing. I don't disagree that that does tend to be a human tendency. And then at the same time, I say, well, I'm committed to imagining and contributing to a different way. And we do have choices. We do make choices every day. We collectively humans made the choices that resulted in the stock market that we have today. We didn't have that stock market even the way it functions now, 40 years ago it functioned differently, 80 years ago it functioned differently. And 200 years ago, it was essentially non existent. Seeds of what it is now. There are seeds of what will be being germinated now or already sprouting and growing. And so the questions I ask are, what, what can I do now to understand and energize those seeds that create the potential for us to thrive? Whether it's because we got to the brink and, you know, all the other things I think matter, I think it's important. And I'm not totally blind to those aspects of what's unfolding. I don't mean to be Pollyanna or just put blinders on. I do mean, it's quite awkward, by the way, David. So I, you know, I mentioned that I mostly work with large publicly traded companies. It's. It's awkward. It's very awkward to be in dialogue with people whom I respect and like very much, by the way. I mean, there's some, there's a lot of great people out there and I get to work with a bunch of them and many of them are worth working very, very hard. These are not people sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They're working very hard to do the best they can on sustainability objectives and on reporting and disclosing as much information as possible to investors and all kinds of stuff. And here comes this annoying Canadian girl saying, okay, but that's still going a little bit more slowly towards the cliff. Right? And we need to not go towards a cliff. We need to turn around. Right. And so your business model is sort of the problem. Right. And often, by the way, I'm not paid to say that. I'm paid to help create the investor disclosures or to develop content that explains what's currently.

I understand. I do the exact same thing. I walk in, they pay me, they think they're paying me for one thing. And I said, no, no, no, no, I have to get rid of 20 brands. And they say, what do you mean? How could you walk in on your second day and say, we have to get rid of 20 brands. We've been doing this for 50 years. You're gonna die. Yeah, that doesn't make sense to them. So I completely understand the narrative, but you're also coming in with your perceived ideas of what are the solutions. So how do you choose? Because you are choosing. How do you decide which is the winning model and which is not even. You could be complete and not. You could be completely right, you could be completely wrong. How do you know?

Yeah, to be transparent, I don't come in with a proposed model. So I'm not currently being paid by anybody to propose an alternative business model. That's just not the work that clients hire me for. I'm paid to do work on existing strategy, existing transparency commitments, et cetera. So I'm sort of helping RO in the direction already agreed while learning about that. And then in my unpaid work. So nobody pays me to blog. And I do a lot of, I do a lot of, I guess, mentoring or speaking or, you know, having conversations like this where I'm aggregating and sharing what I'm seeing and learning. And I am in an experimental commercial relationship with a large forest products company right now where they've asked me to guide them on their ESG reporting and I'm, I am literally guiding them to engage non human stakeholders.

So let's take this. Because I am hired for that overall strategy. I am hired to come in and take a look. I am that person who says to the CEO privately, you're going to die. So that's my role. That is the big picture. Whether it be 150,000 employees, 200, a million, it doesn't make a difference. I'm called in for that question. So mine comes down to in your blogs or wherever you're going, I'm asking you, so I know. How would you pick the model? How, how, how, how can I do a better job?

Sure.

Yeah, that's kind of, that's where I was going with it. And I didn't say it that way because we didn't lead towards that. I want to know which model.

Sure. Well, I would say you don't need to know which model. You just need to know how you know it. When you see it. Okay, so what I mean by that.

Is hair goes up on the back of my neck is. How did you pick that one? Hair went up on the back of my neck.

Okay, well, well, because what we're looking for is not one construct. We're not looking for one model that we can cut and paste and cut and paste and cut and paste. And by the way, nature doesn't work like that, right? If you go into a forest that's relatively native, even if it's secondary or tertiary, and it's kind of reformed itself and have a chance to go into old growth that hasn't been messed with, you'll notice that, you know, there are different species at different heights and, you know, doing different things with one another over different times. And that's, that's how nature works. Nature loves diversity and thrives with that.

And by the way, my background is, I was a biology major. That was my. So all the growing up, I was involved in all of this. So.

Yes. So then I would ask, how would you know when you see it? How would you know a model is working if it isn't just one model? And there I would look for. I'll give three characteristics that, that I look for and they're a bit squishy, but I would still say you can know them when you see them, if you know how to look and you stay quiet long enough to listen to the information. The first one I would say is around climate. And I am going to use some fairly linear terms, by the way, because we're speaking English and I'm going to try to make sense. But everything I'm about to say has a lot of dynamic stuff hanging off of it, that I wish we had nothing but time and interactions to break this down. But I look for three things. I look for climate, ambition, and then action, like really actually doing things, which means changing things that recognizes we need to do more than reduce emissions. We need to net reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, which probably means net sequester. And it's beyond CO2. So it's greenhouse gas emissions. So carbon is one, but there's nitrous oxide, there's methane, there's. There's a range. So when I see an organization grasping that the object of the game isn't just to publish GHG emissions and have that number be lower than it was last year, that is not an objective. That's just.

It's the chart that I talked about.

Right.

It's going to guess.

So you'll Know if somebody. And it can be different, it's going to be, it's going to have to be every industry, by the way. So if an organization has grasped that whatever their changes are in relation to climate are laser focused on reducing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, then you're getting somewhere. The second thing I would say is that, and by the way, this is through their core business, not an initiative, not something that, like they've got a little idea. This is.

Normally when I'm brought in, it is to look at the entire organization, no matter how large it is.

Cool. Okay. So then the second thing I would look for, and this is very rare, let me know when you see it. If you want to noodle a bit more on how we might drum it up, I'd be happy to. But the second thing I look for is that as a result of this business existing. So let's say the new magical Google that you and I create next week, biodiversity increases. Not they stop doing harm, but they actually enable species to rebound. We are in a, a process of massive species loss right now. A billion birds a year. A billion birds a year, David, crash into buildings on migratory routes in North America. That is North America alone. That is not even global. And the number is going down, but that's because the populations are going down.

They're reducing. Yes.

There are fewer to crash into buildings. So what we are doing to birds, bats, insects alone, I can't even hold it, like my cells. My body doesn't feel good when I use these words. It's beyond catastrophic.

And the size of the bat population is absolutely phenomenally beyond imagination.

It was, and it's not pointed in the right direction. And people say, well, birds, bats, whatever, I like nature. It's like, no, you are 100% dependent on nature. No birds, no bats, no people. It's a basic, very simple. So your business that you're looking for, that's found the model or that you help develop the model, by dint of existing, by dint of creating whatever value it portends to create is increasing biodiversity, period. And then the third thing I look for is net social cohesion increased. So by dint of existing, they are increasing quality of life. They are removing racial injustice and social barriers. So more people thrive because this organization exists. And obviously no unthriving happens. So no, you know, no devastation, no continued white supremacy, no continued breaches of human rights or slave labor or things that are shockingly common in our current model. So that, you know, there are lots of ways that nature and we are humans and we are part of nature. There's lots of ways we attain that. There are many beautiful, elegant examples possible that are nascent, that already exist, that are being conceived. And lots of people are doing great thinking on, you know, if you were starting a business today or if you were reimagining a business. Folks like Daniel Christian Wall and his book something like Creating, Creating Regenerative Cultures, which puts forward a series of questions and exercises that you would ask as you're developing that business model. Somebody like Michelle Holiday, who talks about dynamic living systems and how you build that in for thrivability. Great book. With existing case studies and examples of how you go through that. And then far more widely recognized folks like Kate Raworth and her Donut Economics, where she sort of breaks down the principles that you need to see in place for humans to thrive within a thriving biosphere without breaching the social contract. You know, what would that look like? And she's got some great principles in her book Donut Economics, that are, you'd say they're kind of concept level. And then she gives some really interesting examples of where that's popping up and others as well. So I don't know if that helps you.

As you know, those are, I think by nature you would assume, through knowing me, that I have an intention behind questions I asked there. It's. I'm trying to learn from you. That's the objective of the podcast, is to learn something. And so I'm comparing what I do on the, on the Goldsmith Organization side, and we have patents and cell phone and all, all sorts of things on that. But we also have the Project Moonhot foundation. And our six mega challenges that we are addressing are climate change, mass extinction, resource depletion, displacement, social and physical. It is exponential impact from things such as overfishing. And there is conflict such as political unrest. And all of those six mega challenges are to a degree, embedded in what you've been saying and how we want to overcome them so that we can have some of the other benefits for all species on this planet? So it's not completely the same words, but I'm trying to say to myself, how do I, being responsible for an organization, a foundation, how do I make sure that maybe the language is changed or the. Or an added layer is put within the structure so that there's clarity of purpose and direction?

Yeah. Okay, so I love the call out on language. Can we come back to the red dot I put on the word land use? Yep. So, and this is going to bridge Us, with permission, between the second and third piece of the outline. So this would bridge from this linear mindset that I'm fetching about and saying it's, it's part of the problem that has taught us to build in harm into our incentives and our norms. And it'll bring us to, well, what does it look like? When we get that right, we let that old model go and we embrace a way that really takes a holistic mindset, that we replace it with a sense of stewardship and connectedness. So what does that even mean? Well, let's borrow the word land use that came up a bit earlier in this conversation. And land use is used a lot. It's. If you look at the climate change science, for example, and the. I'm sorry, I'm bad with remembering acronyms on the fly, but the UNPCCC or.

Whatever, don't worry, just describe it. Because we all have our challenges. Just the global climate science crew that.

Publishes information and gathers more at the, at the COP meetings that happen every couple of years. If you look at their science on different things that affect climate change, one of the bigger conversations that's certainly very emergent in the last few years looks at land use. And I'll frame it and then I'll blow it up. So framing it is. We've come to realize there's tons of buzz about regenerative agriculture. We've come to realize that along with needing to stop burning fossil fuels, which is the major contributor to greenhouse gases, at least to CO2, we also have the opportunity to both stop harmful land use practices like the removal of native forest, and very extractive agricultural practices that destroy the soil ecology and put a lot of fossil fuel inputs into the farming practices. We need to stop doing those things, but we also need to start doing things that allow the land to sequester CO2, either through different forest circumstances. I was going to say practices. But it isn't always something humans need to do to the forest. Sometimes it's what humans need to not.

Do to the forest. Let it be, it'll do it.

Sometimes it isn't quite as simple as that, that will sequester, but sometimes it is, but also in agricultural practices. So there are a lot of known agricultural practices, some of which have been around for a long time, some are kind of gaining new traction that can net sequester CO2 in the soil. And by the way, big asterisk beside that, because there's all kinds of brouhaha these days about yes, it does to work. No it doesn't yes, it does. No, it doesn't. Well, as with so many things in dynamic living systems, it depends. But there really are ways to do this. Well, and just because it isn't cookie cutter and you can't say, take this, that worked over here in Idaho and apply it in Botswana, okay? It doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It just means it works differently in different places, okay? That's a big part of the land use conversation. So that means that when we look at changes in land use, that's something companies pay attention to, because in their reporting, in their ESG report, they often are required to or encouraged to disclose how they have or haven't had an influence on change in land use. And it's also important because it influences things like forest cover, water runoff, and other things that are very important in the environmental conversations that are underway. So why am I blowing it up? Because the language tells us that we are still in a paradigm that says, that's land, and we use it. And when you change that one little phrase, land use to land relationship, you suddenly have a very different opportunity to experience how we live.

It's very indigenous.

That's one way to interpret it. Another way to interpret it is it just makes good sense. And what we think of as indigenous communities or traditional knowledge haven't let go of that. They didn't embrace the linear, analytical, mechanistic mindset when we Western Prussian educated people did. And so we can call it indigenous, and I think that's an accurate way to tag it, or we can say it's holistic, it's embracing another way of understanding. And you could still say, you know, Lorraine, why does that even matter? Like, we do need to look at changes in land use. And I say, okay, yeah, there's some things that are worth analyzing. Like, we shouldn't let go of our ability to analyze, but we need to embrace our ability to sense and holistically grasp that we are all connected and not just humans. We're connected to everything. And so when you think about land use, you break that. You sort of decide, are we going to.

It's a poor. It's. It has meaning, and every word has meaning, whether we like it or not. I use this example. Would you rather be pulled by a magnet or pushed by a magnet? And everybody has an orientation, and then they think they want to know about the magnet. What does this mean? And I said, it has nothing to do with the magnet. It has to do with every single word you use has an emotional reaction to the Other person. Person.

Right.

You don't know what that is. So the word indigenous to me translated back to, for example, the American Indian construct of Mother Earth. And you don't harm and you don't do. And so it was not a negative. But yet for many individuals, the word indigenous is almost like going backwards. So holistic is a 2020 word that would be. Oh, yeah, yeah, now I get it.

Right.

But, yeah, you say the same thing.

Yeah, right. And it's gonna depend on people's context. I, you know, I had a really funny conversation with a good friend of mine who is indigenous. She's actually a Mohawk farmer. And, you know, if we had nothing but time, we'd go back to the land rights thing, because Mohawk farmers have a very different view of property rights. But that's another story. And we were. We were talking about this concept of decolonization, which. Which is pretty trendy in the sustainability community these days, to really look at the impact of colonization and certainly in the Black Lives Matter and racial justice movement that's really taken on new energy in the last 18 months. The decolonization conversation is very important there. And we were sort of joking because we're now getting to where we need to decolonize. Decolonization. Because the conversation about decolonization is really being promoted by, I would say with good intentions. And, you know, this isn't. I'm not gonna judge that it's a good or bad thing, but it's really being promoted by a lot of white people trying to figure out how we screwed things up so badly and what the legacy of colonization is. So there's merit to that conversation. But it's become so trendy. And so, like, the number of webinars I get invited to about decolonization, and it's kind of colonizing. And so we're setting up a talk that she's going to be presenting in. And I was giving her the framing. You know, it's like, well, we're trying to decolonize the regenerative agriculture conversation, which has just blown up in white North America. And yet that's kind of problematic because they're missing. A lot of people are missing that some very regenerative practices have been underway for decades, centuries, millennia, that haven't been called regeneration and in fact, have been kind of brought to the brink of destruction and extinction. And here comes the Regen Ag crew, all bearded and cute with their, you know, hoisting their little kids above the farmer's field, missing that. Regeneration is already underway. If you get out of the way and let it happen. And so I couldn't agree more. Words matter a great deal.

I'll add to that. If you look at the space industry, one of the things I think you've heard me say, I'm not a space person, but there's two words that are used all the time, colonization and settlement. And I say to them, those are terrible words because to many populations around the world, they were harmful. We call it the Moon Hut. It's very simple. It's a home. And I just had a podcast with a guy. We talked about sex and sexuality and how you can never get into space without it. And I thought he was going to go in the direction first of biology, but he didn't. He started off with the norms that you bring with you, the beliefs that you have. If you go to another planet, you will bring American, European, Asian, whatever country, you bring them with you. And they have a tremendous amount of baggage. So it's this. I think that this is a tough, tough word for people to get over because it's embedded in their evolutionary growth to who they are at this moment.

Yeah. And I think you're bumping into something that's really fundamental to this. It's partly the language, which is full of clues and signals and signifiers that we essentially agree upon. There's always going to be variation, but we're, we're. You and I are talking English and we're hopefully making sense to one another.

You should see my notes. You'd say, what is he writing? It doesn't make any sense.

But. So we're, we're using language, and the language really matters. And we're talking about an evolution in consciousness, in a way of understanding, in a way of being, in a way of saying sensing. And those things go hand in hand. So I don't think there's one way. I don't think there's one change or something that I need to convince you to agree with me, and then we're going to do it that way. I do think over time, we are sensing a need to be differently in relation to one another and in relation to all of our relations, as my. My indigenous friends would describe, which is everything from the mountains and the rivers and the trees to our cousins and aunts and siblings, we will change how we are in relation to our relations. And the question is, what is my role in that change? What changes? What I like to embody. And so that's why I present as the third part in my outline, this opportunity, this invitation to Embrace another way of being, to let go of what isn't working, which is this. I don't care if you're a lighthouse, I'm going that way anyway. Well, that's a crash, right? That's a destructive, linear way of trying to control that which is not to be controlled. Letting that go is something I invite myself to do. I was trained that way. I analyze, I try to get things done. You know, I want to manage and to control a lot of things, and yet I can see in myself that there's a lot there to let go of. And at the same time, while inviting that letting go, I invite the letting come, the embracing of another way of being. And that way is recognizing interconnectedness and not just recognizing it. Like, oh, yeah, everything's connected. Which Covid has kind of put a big, like, duh, exclamation mark. But actually feeling it, and I really.

Do feel it like you do. Yet I speak to people all over the world, and they don't. And there's a them and we. There's a distinction. Well, you're in the United States and look at the mess. And I say, yeah, but if you took all the countries in Europe and put them together into one whole, the numbers in the United States and the numbers in Europe are almost the same. Yeah, well, I'm in Japan, and we don't have that same issue. Or Korea, because my days, like yours, are probably very international. So I understand that the individual letting come and letting go. The reason I do these podcasts is so I learn and hopefully can make those transitions. But at the same time, it's also when you push a society or an individual, let's start with them. And then a society to say, you can't have, you can't do. And it is part of their being, it becomes so much more difficult to overcome. Talking about timelines, which I talked about earlier, how fast, when is the solution, and I'll give an example. And I could use many countries or examples, but I'll give three. In Argentina, eating meat is very, very cultural. In Kazakhstan, it's part of their culture. And let's use Texas. It's not a country, it's a part of a country. But eating meat is so much a part of their ritual that how do you get. Going back to that Venn diagram, how do you get the cycle to go fast enough? And I do eat meat, full disclosure, I do eat fish. I do eat chicken. But how do you get that conversation to go fast enough to do the things that we've Talked about that improve the quality of life for all species on this planet.

Well, first I would encourage you to let go of the notion that the world has to stop eating meat in order for us to solve the challenges we face.

I don't. But that's the narrative that I hear.

Right. So well, let's blow that up. And I say that as a largely plant based eater. So I don't eat meat. I do eat some local sheep and goat dairy and eggs. I haven't eaten meat for a number of years and there's lots of reasons behind that, but I don't do that to think I'm going to fix the world. I don't actually think the world needs fixing. I think individuals, I think I need fixing. And so I'm working on myself.

Agree with you.

And I would also just drop in that in the time of letting go of meat and I used to eat everything. I used to have steak for breakfast. I was like, like I was, I melted cheese on everything and ate nothing but red meat. And in the time that I've let.

Go, that's not me.

In the time that I've let go of that diet, not only am I leaner and feel better, but I took an hour off my marathon time and ran my first ultra marathon last year. So I'd say like for me as an individual that has just been an easy and obvious improvement. Improvement. And to not even talk about the financial. Like I just put a bunch of money back in my pocket. But that's, that's.

My wife actually was a vegetarian and she, when she doesn't eat meat, her hair is so much thinner. She doesn't have the energy. There's also. And she was big on eating all the right legumes. She was doing all of those things. But she, she also, which is interesting, she can smell myself and my youngest son. She will say, you need meat. And I'll say what? She says, I can smell it. Your body changes almost like you have a weakness that whenever you're given it, it's solved. But she could smell it on me. She'll say, oh no, no, no, no, you have to have this today. Like really not interested in it. No, you got to have this. And we're not big meteors at all, but we and I come from a whole line of German cattle dealers going back about five century, five generations.

So to come back to what I would look for in the model that works and this is, let's, let's take cattle production and actually let's, let's Use better language. Let's raise living animals from the bovine community and at a certain point in their lives, let's kill them and eat them. So let's say that's our business and we'll remove the euphemisms like cattle and production and whatnot. So that's what we're doing. There's, there's, I'm going to use two very diametrically opposed models just to make the point. And, and this is neutral for Argentina and Texas. And was it Armenia?

No, Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan. I'm sorry to confuse those two countries.

That's okay.

So this could be true in all three of these places. It will be more or less true today in some versus others. Model 1, animals are functioning more or less the way their natural tendencies would have them function. They're social, they are sentient, they live and die, they give birth, they mate, they do things that animals do. They are domesticated. So these are not wild bovines. These are domesticated cows of a various breed that makes sense for the region. So they are handled by humans and they interact with humans in a way that, in relation to these humans, in a way that is deeply respectful and that honors how they thrive. And then at the right moment in the various points of existence, some die and are eaten. And in the model that we look for, where the climate is considered and biodiversity is considered, and social cohesion and racial justice is considered, all of those things are possible through holistic grazing and inter integrated agriculture. And it could be silvopasture. There's all kinds of ways that cows and steers can be raised in such a way that it is climate positive and biodiversity positive and socially positive. Let's go to another model where we take thousands of animals and we put them in conditions that are beyond horrific, confined, able to express none of their natural tendencies, able to experience nothing even close to thriving from the second they're born. In fact, from before they're born to the moment they die, that all of the byproducts that come from them are commodified as either a product to be sold totally disaggregated from the consumer, or a pollution to be managed and a risk to be reduced. Biodiversity is threatened, air quality is threatened, climate is harmed. Humans involved in those relationships, their job is to oversee and then kill in conditions you would not wish on anybody you know. And the food item that makes it to the consumer's plate is depending on a bunch of things of marginally, of marginal nutritious value. Whereas in the first model the potential for nutrition is very, very high. So people say, oh, I do eat meat, or I don't eat meat. And I would say that statement is either just personal, like, oh, thanks for sharing, or irrelevant, because you're not saying I do invest in and ingest from a model that is regenerative, or I don't. And chances are the vast majority of people who are saying I do eat meat or I don't meat don't know, don't have a clue. Because we're not incentivized to know. We're not trained to understand the holistic nature or our role in being stewards of life. And so we just don't know. So we make these silly claims like, oh, I'm. I'm doing my part because I'm vegetarian. It's like, well, maybe you're eating toxic.

Maybe you're eating product that come. Not a vegetarian food is all good. It's pesticides, a treatment. And it's interesting as you're going through this because again, I brought it up earlier, being Jewish, I'm a little bit more cognizant of kosher meats are treated differently. The animal is respected in a different way. And because when an animal is killed, there is a toxin given off if it's done a certain way, meaning if they're scared, they're frightened, they will give it a Jewish. What's called a shulchet. He will. There's a technique. I don't know. I've never been killed this way, but it's been said that they do it in a way that's instantaneous, so that there's a lack of pain and there's a lack of that toxin that's released into the body. I may be making this up, but this is what I've heard my whole life. So I'm a little bit more cognizant having. Growing up, my. My grandfather would bring a side of beef into the house. And in our basement, my father, my grandfather, and myself, he would prepare the meat, cut the meat. We'd have three freezers and we'd store all of that. But he got the meat that was the best meat killed a certain way, and we prepared it a certain way so that we didn't get hamburger. That was a mix of everything. We knew what was being made. I saw it. We had a grinder machine, right? Yeah. There was a little bit more in my history, and I'm not. This is not a defense. It's an awareness that I think my mind actually goes to some of that being possible.

Oh, yeah, it's more than possible. I mean, this is what. This is where I land. And, you know, may I mention the fourth piece of the outline?

Yeah, you do anything you want. This is your show. I'm along for the ride. People don't understand. These shows are.

Well, I tried to advance to number two, but you pulled me back to number one.

Well, I did because I had questions. And that's. That's the thing about. The thing about the show that individuals don't realize is that you actually create the show and you determine where we go and you determine the content. I don't.

All right, well, let's go to number four, because I say to get where I believe we're headed, it will require reconciling past wrongs and understanding new rights. But we are more than capable of getting there. So let me say a bit about what I mean there. I think I start there. I started with reconciling past wrongs, not to dwell in the ick, but to state quite openly that I don't think we can make fundamental holistic changes for the better if we don't reconcile and recognize what is structurally not okay about what's happening right now. So some of it I think we hear pretty frequently, like that Twitter thread I mentioned off the top, where Dan, Right. Is saying, here's some big disconnects in the stock market. Okay. I think that's not shocking news for most people, and it's not all that sensitive. You may agree or disagree, you may be surprised by some of the numbers, but it's not like, ooh, let's not go there. But if you were to do that same Twitter thread, but instead of talking about the disconnect in executive pay and stock buybacks and layoffs, instead, you decided to put a white supremacist lens on the corporate behavior, it would be awkward in a lot of circles. And yet it's a necessary conversation. And you know what? What boiled over last year in the United States in the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the death of George Floyd and others was not an isolated incident like this Wasn't like, oh, my God, how did that even happen? It's like, where have we been? And that's one very important piece of the conversation. The legacy of the human slave trade that took place quite actively and is at the foundation of so much of our economy, of our global economy today. And that's one part of it. Other parts include the erasure and genocides perpetrated against indigenous people. Another part Includes the theft and really brutal treatment of the land, the plantation based economy, the removal of native forests, the poisoning and redirecting of rivers, the devastation of fish stocks and, and I mean, I could list a bunch of things that are really awful and it's not a very fun conversation. I don't say them to sit us in the mess, but to say, just like I'm sure if you or any of your listeners have done any inner work, you know, spent time with a therapist or done any deep personal development work, you generally do have to in some way understand to the best of one's ability in a given moment and make right or make peace with the causes of the trauma. And I can say, you know, well, I was born in 1971, so I wasn't really part of the slave trade, like, okay, but I benefited from it actually. And I am a taxpayer in a country that continues to propagate a very, very racially divided norm with regard to our indigenous people here. So I can, I can try to distance myself if I want, but I think I'm better to really understand. And that comes through reading and listening and reaching out, meeting people as best one can, becoming an ally, an actual ally, not just tweeting stuff. You know, that reconciling past wrongs part I think is we have a great opportunity to do that because stuff is boiling over. And I'd say in parallel to that, so it's this kind of yin yang thing happening. We have an opportunity to invite new rights. And by new rights I mean new ways of being. These new models that are emerging that you and I are watching for and encouraging. And those things are going to happen in parallel. And I, I propose that we are infinitely more capable than we often allow. And that's why I run ultramarathons. If you could see me, I'm a very average person. I was not an athlete in high school. I'm not a particularly fast runner. I really am kind of average physically. Like, I wear a medium, you know, But I decided to try to unleash my potential as a runner.

Just to let's be clear, it's a Western Tier 4 country medium.

Sure. Yeah. I realized two sizes are all over the map. I think actually living in New York, I think I was like a triple zero or something, right?

You were negative. You were negative. They walked in and said, do we have anything that actually goes inward?

Yeah, but I'm actually, I'm just kind of lean because I run a lot and I eat mostly plants. But anyway, all to say, when you asked earlier, like, what's the timeline and how does this go? I don't know the future, but I do feel in this present that there is an opening for that reconciliation, that recognition and awareness. And I'm hopeful there's also an appetite for this potential for sensing new rights, not just kind of fixing what's broken, but actually sensing into what's possible beyond the broken.

I love the aspirational side of it, and I'm challenged so often with the narrative of the awakening and this commentary. And I'm not picking on you, I'm just saying it in general. I have. One of the companies we're building is a dao, a decentralized autonomous organization in ZOOC in Switzerland. And it runs under a different type of model and structure. So by being involved in that, I am now listening and spending more time. Blockchain, crypto, bitcoin. And I sit on these calls with 20 to 150 people trying to learn the industry. It's really complicated, but one of the trends or things that I have found is that about 50% of the people on the calls are former or are investment bankers. And they're not there for the original orientation of decentralized finance. Helping the world become so much of a better place, making sure I don't need as much. Everybody should share in the wealth. It is. I need to know where I should invest, where would the money be? How can I capitalize on this? How can I do.

Same model.

Yeah, it's the same model. Being that it's a. If you look, there are around, there are people. It's a distribution, redistribution of wealth. But some of these people have billions of dollars, and they're not releasing those billions to do as much with. I think there's 2,850 billionaires in the world today. They're not sitting there on the line saying, you know, I make 150, I make 100 grand. I have a nice home. I'm happy. What I want to do is raise money for X. Now there are people, they're visible. But on these calls, absolutely not. It is. I need to get on this gravy train. I want to make more money. Where do I go? Yeah, so it's a. It's a. Like you just said, it's a transference of the exact same economic model with incentivization now in a different currency. Cform.

Yeah, I see that a lot as well. And I, you know, I see that in the ESG investing space, and I'm not sure that's Coming up. And one. So one of the things I'm trying to do, one of the things I'm doing in my spare time is imagining how we might shift that ESG conversation. Because I mentioned that, you know, by day usually I'm, I'm doing paid client work around things like ESG reporting and disclosures for investors. So I'm very, I'm very versed in, excuse me, I'm very versed in ESG disclosures. I'm also bombarded with articles and, you know, friends and peers saying, oh my God, this ESG thing, it's a real thing, it's happening. Look at the trillions of dollars going into it. So I see this and I imagine a way to take an existing set of companies whose ESG data is public. A lot of ESG data is public. It might be hard to find it and there's people you can pay to sort of aggregate it and do research on it, whatnot. But the vast majority is actually findable if you know where to look. And I imagine this exercise that I'm kind of tinkering with on the sidelines with some collaborators where we take the publicly available ESG data, organize it in a format that allows you to compare what is with what would be needed in order to be truly regenerative. And needless to say, that so called report card, the vast majority of what we see is not even close. It's not even nested in the context of what would be needed. It's like, what do you mean what would be needed? This is what we're doing and it's pretty great. And it's better than what we did last year and it's better than what our people, peers are doing. So we're not doing it.

We're not as bad as the guy next to us. So don't focus on us.

We're trying in context. You can go, I mean there's CSR, CSRwire.com I think is one of the easier ESG data aggregators to look at. You can look up any publicly listed company and see their aggregated ESG score. And it varies day by day. These things go up and down. But not long ago I actually, it is probably about two years ago now, I was looking up the company Vale, which is one of the largest mining companies in the world, headquartered in Brazil. They had recently had a dam failure, a catastrophic tailings dam failure that flooded their facilities and killed nearly 300 of their staff. This wasn't a mining accident. It was a catastrophic failure of a tailings Dam that killed their employees basically who were having lunch in the canteen and killed other people and killed lots of animals and made a terrible mess of the area. And they're at the time it's gone down and went down further and I think it's coming back up. But at the time their ranking was something like 72%, which if I got 72% on a math exam in grade 10, I'd be like, okay, I didn't ace it, but I'm still in the game. It's like, no, you just killed your people. You just killed your people and you killed them as part of an industry that has run amok. It rips holes in the ground and best practice is kind of plugging those holes back in afterwards, but not as well. And like not killing too many people. I mean, to go back to, what are the three things we look for, you know, really? Climate smart, nature aligned, climate marred, biodiversity restoring and net improving quality of life and social cohesion. Like you should get about negative 10%. You know, like, why are you 72% so. And BP, you know, British Petroleum now, you know, these rankings change all the time. I didn't look at them right before, but you know, there was a point right around the time of their unbelievably uncontained spill in the Gulf of Mexico where they were 86%. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not right. So my vision is to allow for ESG data to actually illustrate meaningful information so that perhaps all those 150 people around that conference call may still take a while to get it. But the two or three that do their homework, if they do look at the ESG data, it's revelatory because right now it is not revelatory. Right now it's like, oh, wow, they got a great score. Cool.

What it's doing is it's meeting the old standards of the incentivization of model. And even I know there's the big movement for the B corp. And yet I've looked at the B Corp standards and I've said a company can falsify this. These are arbitrary, we have to prove it. But it's not as simple as it sounds. And you can get a decent rating by doing subpar change.

Totally. This is the puzzle. And change, I think is the key word you just offered there what we need. We don't need more companies to share more about what they're doing that isn't working. We have plenty of that if you know where to look. We need more companies to say I get it, I have to change something and it's big and actually we don't really know how to do it because it hasn't been done before. Regenerative mining, what does that look like? I have some ideas. I actually quite actively dream about that. And I, you know, I say what I say about valley because this is all public knowledge. Anybody who wants to do their homework on valet can look at it.

I ran a rock quarry when I was younger.

Oh wow. So yeah, you know What?

We drop 22,000 ton of stone a day, which is a road 4 inches tall, about 6, 5, about 10 centimeters and it a mile long. So that's what we dropped every single day. Wow.

Where was that? What part of the world?

It was right outside of New York City. So we were, we had 250 semis, American sized semis and upwards of 20 scows with a thousand ton each going down the Hudson River.

And where were you digging the holes if I may ask?

Tompkins Cove in Havistra, New York, which is right, right in the Hudson Valley ish area. So it was up the river on the right, on the left hand side. And extremely successful as a quarry. We were dropping a lot of stone. A lot of stone. So.

And you were paid to do it. I mean those were the incentives. Right. You weren't paid to restore the biodiversity.

You were probably paid British Tire and Rubber hired this guy, John Gillespie, who to me is an amazing individual in terms of achievement. Whether he's what he was achieving is a different story. But he took a quarry from zero. They were doing nothing. That was a demolished old quarry and in five years became the number one supplier of all stone. Close that 80. Close to 90% of all stone going to New York came out of his quarry.

Wow.

In five years. Which is a phenomenal transformation. But I never thought of regenerative mining.

Well, so imagine if you apply the three principles I talked about earlier to mining. I mean it just completely upends the industry based on how it is now. And I hear people saying, well Lorraine, that's kind of fantasy land. Right? And I'm like, I don't think it has to be fantasy. I quite like the idea of recognizing that crashing into a lighthouse is not a viable route plan and then we navigate ourselves in a better way.

I would play it in a slightly different way. I would say that I think then the human nature is we take all three and we try to solve all three. And if there is a movement in one direction where there's a new technology, a new advancement, a new concept, a new construct that is put together, then other quarries around the world could be taking on that. If another quarry finds it in another one of them, then that could be shared and created, cross fertilized, cross pollinated. So it's not that one group of individuals can sit down and create. They might be able to, but one could solve every one of the challenges of the three. But the conversation is the change, right?

And I'd say that the change leads to a different paradigm. So what I mean by that very specifically is regenerative mining doesn't rip holes in the ground anymore. It isn't that one quarry or one mind figures out how to do things a little better and then shares it, which is, by the way, already going on. And Valet, I should say. I know some of the executives at Valet and I have deep respect for them. And I know a lot has changed in the last two years since that accident. No, accident's the wrong word. Catastrophic failure. And so I say this with tons of respect. And my, you know, my grandfather was a metallurgical engineer who worked for Incoherent, which was, is now valet. So I have family history in mining. I have done a lot of work with mining companies. And I say not lightly. The future of mining, like every industry, is regenerative, which means it has had a chance to look back, look, stand back and look at what is it delivering into society, what is the value it is offering? And at the moment, it is basically metals and minerals and they go into all kinds of things, including the devices we're using to have this conversation and so much more. Well, needing metals and minerals is different than needing to rip holes in the ground. And we're pretty smart people. So there are ways, many, many ways from just closing the loop on all the metals and minerals already above ground. That's one very obvious way. Low hanging fruit all around the world, landfills galore, scrap galore. That's an obvious way. Another obvious way. And this is like another rung of the paradigm. So like when people say, what does it mean to shift paradigms? Here's what it means. It means not valuing things that aren't valuable and so you don't need to rip those holes in the ground. So when we, when we wake up on gold and diamonds and recognize that they're only valuable because we decided they are, yes, there are some industrial applications, but again, we got lots above ground, so we've solved that.

We can also make diamonds today and.

We do not need to rip holes in the ground. And so because some bright spark one day decided and spread the rumor and it caught on that gold is valuable and rare and so we should value it and then rip holes in the ground and kill each other and kill our rivers and kill populations. And diamonds are special and twinkly. And if you didn't give a big enough one, you don't love your fiance enough.

These rumors or roses are given on Valentine's Day, which doesn't mean that you love them any more or less.

These are mental constructions that we agree to. And these are among the current, I'd say, characteristics of our industrial paradigm that I would say we have an opportunity to let go of. And when we do, at an industrial scale and at a strategic planning scale and a business model scale, things start to look very different. So it isn't one quarry sharing best practice about health and safety and site remediation with the other quarry. It's one quarry owner talking to another one saying, wait a minute, what are these roads for? And I mean, I don't know. I don't have the answers to this, but it's radically altering our understanding of what we're using the mined minerals and metals for.

You're asking a completely different question. If I may. The book paid to think that I had written. One of the areas in there is called Redefining. It's called a tool called Redefining. It is that the question that's being asked is not the right question. And what you're asking individuals to do is often asking a question they don't even know that they need to ask, how to ask or where to get to. So as much as it's easy to say, why don't we just get together and talk, ask these questions. The people that I talk to and probably you talk to don't even know that question exists.

That's right.

And so the hardest part of this narrative is to get that question asked. I'll give you an example. I did a Marie Baja did a podcast, and he wanted to do it on space debris. He's an expert in space debris. And I said to him, I'm not interested. And as you know, I do podcasts that I like to be interested in. And we spoke just like I did with you for maybe an hour and a half, and we came up with space environmentalism. Now, that's a completely different topic than it is space debris, but it took a long time to get to that title. And so the challenge here is not, I don't always know if it's the three, which is helpful, but the individuals don't know what questions to ask. And that tool would be 10 times better than the metric.

Oh, yeah, totally.

And that's the. I would say, from what I've been hearing from you, is how do you get that question asked in a way that redefines the future, Redefines tomorrow, which is our podcast.

Yeah, yeah, I, you know, I don't have one answer to that, but I'll tell you, I have a few ideas. I'm sort of constantly tinkering with the question itself. And one idea that connects to what I mentioned, where I'm collaborating with some folks around imagining ESG data being revelatory as opposed to this kind of just part of the old paradigm and everybody jumping on the bandwagon. So how does that relate to what you just put forward that people don't even know to ask the question? I came to realize that the ESG data problem is both a supply and demand problem. And I'll explain what I mean by that. And then the demand piece is where I'll hover. So right now an investor can use ESG data and they can pay a research house, or that there's all kinds of ways that people can access ESG data and use it to inform their investing decisions. And more and more people are doing this. So. But there is a supply issue with the data when it comes to regeneration, which means that the data that gets supplied either publicly by companies or through the research houses or through the Bloomberg terminal, all these different ways in which this data flows through the ESG pipes, it is almost 100% conceived in this old paradigm of reducing harm, reducing risk, lowering emissions, et cetera, based on many frameworks and all kinds of things. So the data that's produced wouldn't demonstrate regeneration even if it were happening. And that is a fundamental problem. If an investor actually were awake and saying, no, no, we really want to see climate Smurf, biodiversity and social cohesion, they would be sol, because it's just not in the supply of the data. Now that is starting to shift. And there's examples where not so much in large corporate ESG context, but on the fringes of it, and various folks, myself included, trying to encourage that data to flow into the pipes. That's the supply challenge, which is very big and very real. That is complex to overcome. But even if we overcame it, we actually have, I think, a more fundamental problem, which is a demand problem. And that is your point where you say, you know, people don't even know to ask this question. Even the most actively engaged ESG investors are not requesting data that reveals whether or not a company is on a regenerative track. A few folks would very rightly argue, well, hang on, Lorraine, what about impact investing, which is kind of a subcategory or a standalone category, really cousin to the ESG universe? And I would say there, it actually really depends. There's a lot of very deep due diligence and meaningful ways of getting at information. And I think it's quite possible there that investors are digging up information that reveals whether or not something is. Is net. Call it net positive or regenerative or all kinds of ways to describe it. Usually, though, with impact investing, the mandate is narrow, it's not holistic. So they'll maybe take a particular bent towards a social impact or an environmental impact, or the mandate will be quite specific. Not always. And there are really interesting and innovative things happening there. But when we talk about ESG investing, where all the buzz is these days, I have not met somebody involved in this space who has proactively asked, yeah, how would we know if something is regenerative if we wanted to? And when I've put the question to them, I've done some engaging with investors and others in the space to say, so what if we had that data? Like, what? Then there's this like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't even get to see that, do we? Huh? I wonder why not, you know, and there's resounding agreement that that would actually be very useful and it is missing. So I don't have an answer. I kind of.

It's you. You actually described what I have often described very in a different way, which I love is I know individuals on the full spectrum of where they believe these challenges are. One individual, two in particular, one very big in saving the oceans, yet flies all over the place, always wears new clothing, always spending on things that are definitely not positive for the environment. And yet at the same time, we'll say, well, look at, I was cleaning the ocean and has been very well known for the work that they've done. But yet in the private side, their life is completely the opposite. Another scenario, I went a person who's very big into the circular economy. We went out to dinner with her and her husband and I I not I like when other people order meals. I just say, you ordered. She ordered a chicken, a fish and a meat dish and we had all sorts of food. And I said to her at one point, at the end, I said, you know, I would believe you're a lot more of this person that you. You proclaimed to be and was very nice. We've been friends for a long time. And I said in my own way, I tried to share with her, but you didn't ask how this restaurant handles any of the things that we were eating or doing. You just ordered it as if it didn't matter if they had plastic containers, if they were tossing it out the back, if they were. And this was in Asia. So I there in the environment we were in, I know that they were not being environmentally conscious. And yet there was no concern in today's meal. And not that everybody has to be that way, but it is a disconnect that as you're saying this isn't regenerative. Are they doing. So I went not as far as you did, but to be able to get that data. Now, I don't know if their behavior would change. For example, I never look at a cans label. What's in it. I can't remember last time. I have. Even if you put it on every label, I don't know if I would see it.

Well, I think it also depends sort of where you are in the ecosystem. Like, you know, I have been verging on madness for a long time. When I let my mind run.

Well, they let you out. I know they let you out for this.

That's right.

Well, you're right. You'll go back into the room when you're done, you'll put on your jacket.

Yeah. See what's around. Off camera. No, but. So for real, like when I. For kind of as long as I can remember, long before I was professionally involved in sustainability or regeneration or investor disclosures, I had a strange awareness of interconnectedness. And the easiest analog I can describe is as a kaleidoscope. So I would go into a grocery store, for example, and you know how the way a typical grocery store is arranged, You've got shelves and on the shelves as a product, and behind a given product is more of that product. Right. So it's like you've got your box of cereal or your, you know, bottle of milk or whatever, and behind it is the same thing. And I would have this very strange awareness of these things, almost like coming at me and then also going away from me and rote, like I say kaleidoscope, because then also like turning and spinning so that every single product was connected to all these other things behind it, like how the package was made and where it came from. Not in a. In a Worried way. Not like, oh, no, the climate, oh no, the people. Just more like a fascination.

You just, you saw the network behind it.

Yeah. Without really knowing, like, I, There's a lot I didn't know.

There was a label and there was printing and there was a package and.

There was a metal and those. And as I grew up, I got more and more switched on. So through university, a couple university summers, worked as an industrial tree planter in northern Ontario. And that's a really intense job. That's a whole other podcast. But it kind of woke me up to like, oh, like, people think this is all forest up here, but it's actually managed plantation. And then it's clear cut. And then people like me put a tree in the ground every six feet. And then a couple decades later we cut it down. And so seeing that and then experiencing paper and cardboard and lumber and whatever, it's like, oh, okay, that's. And then seeing those trucks on the highway. So I say all that to say for a very long time, like, and you know, you know that I knit well. I also spin and I, so I spin with a spinning wheel and I know shepherds and I've processed fiber from the beginning. I've unreeled silk, I've used recycled pet polyester. Like, I, you know, I've had my hands on a lot of very basic raw materials. I've been in mines, I've been on plantations and farmers fields. I've been in a lot of different industrial environments. So I have both personally for a very long time and then professionally through my work, traveling around the world and working with different industries, had a lot of exposure to the stuff we're talking about here. Like a weird amount of exposure.

And you had an exposure, but that wasn't it. It was the ability to see the interconnectedness. Because I would say that I've had, I do see the interconnectedness in certain areas and not in others, but you pay attention to it.

Okay, so. Well, fair. And so what I'd like to note about this is I could drive myself.

Crazy, er, by worrying and they're coming for you afterwards.

Yeah, that's right. By worrying.

And you can get off the couch.

Whenever you'd like, but I could drive myself crazy. Like that scenario you just gave of the restaurant. Like, I've been that person, you know, back when we went to restaurants, I've been that person in the restaurant where I don't ask a single thing. I'm like, this looks yummy, I want that. Please bring that to me. And I will eat it. And part of me still that kaleidoscope. Like, I wear glasses, but my lenses are those kaleidoscopes. I'm constantly feeling that stuff. And part of me has had to allow myself, the inner stillness, to say, that's not for me to do right now. There are things that are for me to do right now. And like, I'm the CEO of myself. I'm not the CEO of Citigroup or Coca Cola or, you know, David Goldsmith. And so as the CEO of myself, what are the things that are for me to adapt? And very high on that list are things that are just about me, you know, that aren't about other companies or other people or other people's decisions. They're just me, you know, finding stillness, finding awareness, breathing, changing my own ideas. I think some of the most profound experiences I've had that I'm most honored by have been things that changed how I understand versus things where I changed how somebody else understood. I don't feel proud about changing other people's minds. That's not why I'm here. I do feel proud about where I've changed my own mind and understood something differently. So when I think of your example, and I remember too, when we chatted, and I've heard in a couple of your episodes too, where you mentioned your. The colleague that, you know, who, you know, takes really long showers and says, well, you folks in the, you know, the Western world have been consuming like crazy and, you know, I just want my hot showers. I listen to that and I resonate with it on a couple levels. One is I joke. It's probably not funny, but it's true that I take illegally long hot showers. Like, I don't want to get out of the shower. I love, I go for these, you know, four hour runs and then I'm like, I'm in the shower. I'm like, it's so nice in here. So I'm just like that person. I do not take short showers. And I also say we aren't all here to solve everything for everybody. And so not to be irresponsible, say I forget it. You know, I should just. By the way, I'm conscious about the showers.

I'm thinking just, I want you to continue. Remember that thought. Part of what I'm saying with the initiatives we're working on is why don't we create the technology that allows that shower to be able to happen and it doesn't harm the earth? That's the negative. That's where I said in the beginning, we asked people to. No, no, no, it's negative, Negative. You can't do. You can't do. But what if there was a technology that would allow that to happen? Then people can take long showers and they'd feel better about themselves.

Well, here it is right now. And please, anybody, take this, patent it, make billions on it. I will be a customer and I require no licensing cut or anything at all. If there were a machine that I could pedal for four hours to heat the water for my shower, I would do it. Like, it's not that I don't care, it's that. And by the way, I can of course take shorter showers.

It's interesting that you went to the heat, because I don't, I never think of the heat. I only think of the water, Right?

Oh, yeah, that's because. So I. My showers are so hot that when.

Like, you know that you need to pedal.

Yeah, well, and also when, like, if, you know, I've left the water running for like, you know, when we're up at the cottage or whatever. And my mom used to get us all like, okay, kids, like, cycle us in, cycle us out. And the water would be so hot that my siblings be like, ow, ow. And I'm like, what do you mean it's perfect. I can't, you know, I can't turn it on. So I know that heating takes a lot of energy.

So what if you think, thought, what if you just for a minute imagine that you lived on the moon or in space and in order for you to live, you would need shower, a shower system. And your job or an engineer's job is to create a completely circular water system. And that's where Project Moon Hut falls in, is to say, in order to live the lives that we, we've become accustomed to, we need to create off world paradigm shifting thinking that in turn would change on world activities because we have to solve, we have to solve showers in space and keeping clean. So what if that was the. Because if we use human or on earth thinking, we always use the same paradigms. We have to create new.

I love it and you know, it's not quite the same, but I did spend some time living. So my family has a long history on Manitoulin island, which is in the northern part of Lake Huron in Ontario in Canada. And my sister in the early 90s built on our land there a log cabin that had no running water, no electricity. And over time it's evolved and gotten a bit more hooked up and whatever. But at the time it's totally off grid and all the water we used, we hauled from the lake. And so I have actually experienced being responsible for carrying all of my water and heating all of my water. We heated with wood and I, you know, you had to cut the wood, et cetera. So in a very micro, cosmic way, I've experienced that. And you know, even as I'm telling you this, and this, this will come back to the point we put a pin in. I'm aware that I'm describing something about myself that I'm capable of changing, changing if I choose. And so I'm kind of being a bit funny or glib about it, but I'm aware that it's actually not that funny and it's something that, that I'm responsible for and that I have the power to change. So I would say there's, there's a few things that I look to, and it's really sort of embedded in my, my fourth outline item, which is both recognizing what's not okay. And I mentioned some really macro things like, you know, genocide and colonization. But there's micro things too, like things that I'm doing that, you know, may be harmful for myself or my family or my community or, you know, and doing my best to recognize them. And there's debate, right? Like maybe a hot shower actually isn't a problem. We have ample hydroelectric power here. We, you know, we have ample water, you know, or maybe it is, you know, maybe I'm paying way too much on my hydro bill. I don't need to pay that. It's up for discussion. What really are the wrongs that, that I as an individual ought to recognize in myself, in my day to day practices, in my own personal history, my family, my family's family. Where are there places that I can recognize with openness, not with judgment, but with understanding and do my best to be aware? And then where is an opportunity for me to make changes and do things differently and you know, showering a daily habit, that's a, it's kind of an easy one to pick on. And then there are of course, much more fundamental things. How do I apply my, my intellect? How do I apply my energy? What do I spend my money on? You know, where do I, where do I choose to spend my time? Who do I choose to spend my time with? And these are things I can influence.

So, quick question. Do you, you break things apart and see the interconnectedness when you take the shower? How interconnected do you get?

I mean, this may sound strange, but like I literally Picture the plumbing infrastructure that goes through.

That's why I'm asking, because upstream, the manufacturer of those devices, I've been in the factories, I know what they're like. I know how the wet labor is. I know where the chemicals go, you know, solid, the coatings that happen to them. And they're lots and lots and lots of parts.

Welcome to the inside of my head. And so I live in Montreal. I live very close to the bank of the St. Lawrence river, an absolutely beautiful river. And so I picture the pipe infrastructure in the building. I'm on the fourth floor of a kind of reed refurbished condominium building I rent. And I'm very close to the water's edge. And I'm aware of some very structural and infrastructure issues that Montreal has with plumbing, with sewage infrastructure. They still release raw sewage into the St. Lawrence river, which is.

Oh, the United States has 12 billion gallons of solid waste runoff that goes into the ocean every single day. 12 billion. That's 300 million bathtubs and 6,000, 600,000 swimming pools. But Europe is bigger, 750 million, including the Russian side of it. India's bigger, China's bigger. So just I just named a few different regions. That's 50 billion gallons of solid waste runoff going into the oceans every day.

Which is very unfortunate, by the way, because if we.

Yeah, really.

Well, it's unfortunate because it sucks, but it's also unfortunate because we're losing value. So nature doesn't have such thing as solid waste. And again, this is, this is our verbiage, right? So I remember attending a really interesting sort of a conference about water. And there was this amazing presenter and I've been, I've been trying to follow this thread. One of these days it'll pop up a. And I'll have more time or not somebody else is doing it or will do it. But it was a presenter from the engineering firm Viola Veolia, and they talked about the sort of paradigm shift of the concept of waste. Let me get this right. Wastewater resource, wastewater recovery or something like that, which was like dealing with wastewater, what we're describing here, sewage, et cetera, Waste, waste, waste. To reframing it as water resource recovery. Because sewage is water, it is nutrients, it is heat, and it is, you know, other solids and byproducts, all of which have a role in life, have a value. And when you look at it that way, you. First of all, you stop doing crazy things like using potable water in toilets. Like, it's so crazy that the same thing that comes from the tap that I can go drink is the thing we use to flush our eliminated.

It's not a, it's not a separate line that doesn't have to be cleaned the same way.

Just bonkers. It's also bonkers that we then flush all that sometimes into rivers and oceans and we don't do anything with that. And if you know anybody who lives with a composting toilet, which is lots of people, they will tell you how useful their composting toilet is. And it's kind of weird that people are like, oh really? It's like, yeah, really, really. That's how life works. Like it's, it's pretty amazing when you stop breaking natural cycles and you embrace them and you look at how to incorporate them. And if you imagine what would that mean for architecture, you know, what would that mean for urban infrastructure, what would that mean for the river? And if you ask the St. Lawrence river, which I do quite regularly, I very sincerely think it's important to engage with our non human relations, talk about stakeholder engagement and companies and I quite literally encourage companies to ask their non human stakeholders. If you ask the St. Lawrence river what it thinks about how humans might better handle their so called waste, the answer's obvious. It's like you don't have to speak river. It's not a language. You just have to pay attention and you have information that equals innovation and captured value. It's going to take a lot to transform our systems, but it's more than possible and a lot of places are already doing it.

A suggestion then because you've tapped on it yet. I think it would be extremely powerful is create 50 top questions. Create 100 top questions that an individual can ask that is not overbearing. Let me give you an example of how powerful this is. My aunt Dorothy created 100 questions to ask one of your parents to do a video, a life video of their history. And she, Martha Stewart called her in, she did all sorts of celebrities. And they were 100 questions that you asked your parents. Now I took my father and sat him in my old room and I put a camera behind me and I was told they normally go 45 minutes to an hour. My father went for three hours and it was questions.

Why doesn't that surprise me, David?

Well, my, but was my father was saying, saying to me, I would say what one of the questions was, what's the first memory you have? What is the, what's the, what experience did you have when you were about this age? And they were very specific questions. They were very open ended. And my father's telling me about in 1950s he's earning $600 US dollars a week as a captain, he's a dentist in the military living in Germany where the value was unbelievably over the top. He had a car and he said I was the guy who'd walk into a bar and I'd say drinks are on me for the night. Now I never knew that from him. My entire life I didn't know this. And if I had not asked that question he would have never shared it in his entire life. So a thought because a lot of what you're saying comes down to the right question. Question is not that you have to give the full answer but you could say ask this, try this technique, ask the river, ask the tree, ask the whatever where you feel impact and ask them how you feel or what would you do or what. And if that outline distributed properly, don't know how I'd have to think about it would have more impact than the.

Tool.

To be able to measure. And you can do it. I'm going to say it'll take you about three months to make it. Why three months? Because you'll come up with the first and you come back in the back and back and back in the back until you finally get some really good answers. You'll test that, you'll try it, but at least three months and that will do more than that other tool you're trying to build because it'll help the individual say river, we dump our pesticides in into you, what should we do? And they would never have asked that question. So if you. My take is that's your one of your levers because you've thought about it and you see the interconnectedness, that it's not common. And we can't assume that others see the interconnectedness and we can't assume that they even understand that they need to ask the question. So therefore you become the question and that's the, that's your power, that's your superpower. Making us aware of the question that demonstrates to the interconnectedness which then creates new answers that we never had asked or never had considered in the past.

Yeah, that's interesting. And that's basically what I'm doing organically with this client I mentioned in Brazil, like getting them to talk with non human stakeholders. And I haven't formulated it. There's a few things that come to mind on that. One is that in many ways Daniel Christian Wall's book that I Mentioned is that, like, it's basically a series of questions not so targeted to the non human stakeholder, but. But it's an interesting variation on that. So just in case people are like, interested.

Well, this is. I, while writing Paid to think, which took 12 years, I ran into several challenges. And at one point I said, let me make a verbs list. A list of verbs, because I needed to come up with ways to make things actionable. And we tend to have our own vocabulary. So I started to create this list that has maybe 150 verbs. And whenever I'm talking to somebody and we're having challenges or trying to create bullet points that are actionable, I'll say, let me send this to you. And they'll look at and say, oh, wow. Because they hadn't considered that verb. And it sparks a new ideation. It's one page. So what I'm suggesting is if you said to me, read that book. I'm reading a book on Buddhism right now.

I see what you're saying.

Got this book on power and force.

Yeah, yeah.

This other one. And I. When do you want me to fit this in? But if you had said to me, david, let me just send you over this list and I'll go over it. It'll take me three minutes. Just start asking yourself these questions. You'd say, oh, I would say, huh, let me leave this open. Let me put this on my wall.

Yeah, cool. All right. It's a wonderful suggestion. I thank you for it. I think part of my resistance, but this is probably something I have to let go of. But let me set. Let me name it at least before I let it go, which is in some ways you could accuse me rightly, of appropriating indigenous ways of being. Right. And I am not of a First nations tribe. I was not. I was not raised in an indigenous community. I'm kind of learning to articulate what I'm experiencing and trying to translate it in a way that may be meaningful, particularly for a corporate audience where decisions are made that have significant outcome and impact. So I'm a little bit hesitant to, like, go that route because I feel like it's not really for me to tell people how to talk to the river. No, no, you don't.

You just asking.

I just put the questions. Yeah. No, no.

Right. And I'm so. I hear you challenge. So let me ask you a different question then. How would you make sure if you had had to create this hundred or 150 or whatever, that it was more inclusive and it wasn't Dictatorial in approach. How would you do it?

Yeah, it's a good question. I probably have to give it a little bit more thought. My first instinct says it's not 150 questions, it's 10.

Okay.

And that it's framed in such a way that it recognizes my mentors and my influences and sources. So it's more like, I'm not the creator of this. I am the conduit and coalescer of some of it. Translated for my people who are linear, analytical, like trying to build a bridge between.

You have a. You have a fear that's coming through. I didn't create the verbs. I didn't create the verb. The verbs. I just put them on a sheet. What's wrong with creating questions? You don't have to reference everybody.

Right?

Yeah, it's just. It's just a list. I mean, it's not going to dominate your life. It's a page or two. And might you consider to ask five people from around the world who have different perspectives to maybe give you their questions that they might think?

Yeah.

And then. Then it's not you. So you don't have to take all the burden on it. But you. You gave a tool. Yeah. Biomimicry. You used the word biomimicry. You didn't credit it to somebody who invented biomimicry.

Right.

Or Jugad or any of these others. You have the knowledge and you want to affect change. Make it simple. But 10, I think would be a little in my mind is like, okay, I'll look at it. I'm done. It's got to be a tool. It's got to be something that I would pull out, like the verbs list. Yeah, this is a great list. I would use this. And there are things such as how to create the right title. You've probably seen them. 100 Ways to Write the right title, and they give you 100 different titles. They were surprised when they found out I played the piano. Hmm. So look that up. The Jay Abraham has a list. There's a bunch of them out there. But a hundred of the best titles ever written, and no one gives credit to where they from. But if I said to you, you're raking a title, and the title said 100 of the best. They were surprised when I started to play the piano and you were making an ad campaign, you would say, huh? They were surprised to find out that creating Sustainable X does this. Well, that's a start. That's all you're doing is you're giving that nudge without being overbearing. So I think. I think you're talented in a way that you could do this without. But the fear of you being the person. I. I took all those verbs, I stole them from all those people. I put them on that page, and I should have credited each one of them. So I wanted to say, I don't know if there's anything more you want to add, but I think this was great. I really do. I think.

I appreciate the free consulting advice as well. I will definitely give that some more thought. Along with taking seriously the need to take shorter showers.

Well, actually, Project Moon Hut is about solving these challenges. So I don't think we're going to stop enough people to do the taking the showers. So let's ask the question, how can you take showers that are continuous? Maybe there's a filtration system in your home that as you take the shower, it filters it enough where you're willing to take and use that water over and over again. It's not much different than a dishwasher.

Yeah.

And maybe it's a. It takes out the particles fast enough so that the water can then be recycled and you reuse it again, which is no different than sending it to a treatment plant.

Yeah.

Why doesn't it just recycle back in? And that's what a international space station or a showering on the moon or whatever would do. That's the way I thought about it, is if I was going to live on it, I have to have a quick recycling system. So I do want to do a shout out to our good friend Robert Rubenstein and TBLI Triple bottom line investing or impact. He's a good friend of both of ours. I had discovered you on one of his programs. And if anybody is interested who's listening in, it's a good place to meet individuals who are thinking differently. I'm not gonna say they have solutions. I'm not gonna say they're better or worse. They're just thinking differently and they ask different questions. Good way to say it.

Yep. Yep. Couldn't agree more. I think of him as Bobby R. And he's one of my heroes.

Well, everybody out there, I would like to thank you for taking the time to listen in today. And I do hope that you learned something today that will make a difference in your life. The lives of others, the lives of the ecosystem in which we live. So what is the best way, Lorraine, for individuals to get in contact with you if they wished?

Sure. Yeah. There's a few different ways to contact me. Through my website, which is bloranesmith.com so B for Bonnie and then Lorraine L O R R A I n e smith.com that'll link you to my LinkedIn, which is also Belarane Smith. And yeah, be happy to hear from anybody.

Well, once again, I really appreciate that. I think this is a great conversation. And remember, for all of you out there, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. If you're interested in contacting me, you can reach me@davidavidgoldsmith.com Instagram is mrdavidgoldsmith. On Twitter it is oldsmith, LinkedIn, Facebook. I'm there. You can reach me in any way you would like. That said, I'm David Goldsmith, and thank you for listening.