VDAO Ep 10 Humans as a Keystone Species: Regeneration, Crypto & the Meta-Crisis | Gregory

Transcript

Hey, Gregory. Welcome to the podcast. It's great to see you. >> Yeah, it's so great to be here, Chris. I'm I'm stoked. >> Yeah. So, you're uh a very familiar space face in the the regen space in crypto and like super excited to of get into the these this topic of resilience with you. And for all the the guests we've had on this uh guest series on the green build pod, we we start off with this question of their why. And I'd love to to put this question to you as well.

So yeah, what as a builder, what is your why? What motivates you? >> Yeah. Well, I think there's a couple of different levels to that. I I think kind of the top level why, you know, my north star is a an intuition, a belief um that humans can and should be a keystone species, a planetary keystone species. and that many of society's issues and and even in issues that individuals have the meaning crisis, health issues, uh issues with pollution kind of stem from

a disjointed relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere, the rest of the planet. And I happen to believe that a lot of those problems uh work themselves out pretty naturally when we establish that like pattern of keystoning of a keystone ecological relationship with the planet. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that concept, a keystone species um is a species in an ecosystem that whose presence makes the rest of the ecosystem healthier, which increases biodiversity, which increases resilience, which even increases anti-fragility. Like it makes

the system respond well to disruptions. disruptions become something that can drive increases in evolutionary capacity and capability. And that's all kind of abstract. So what does it look like for humans to be a planetary keystone species in a mac micro scale? I think it looks like permaculture essentially. looks like um using design science to increase such that you know human when humans are extracting value from an ecosystem through agriculture um through industry there's sort of the the reciprocity of that energetic relationship is that the system is

actually getting healthier not being undermined. So that's you know examples of that are like regenerative agriculture when soil health is being built. Examples of that are you know catching and storing lots of water and rehydrating landscapes. But I also think there's increasingly uh examples of that in you know finance or economics or governance in which we sort of can apply those same principles to kind of the the human cultural technological realm to ensure that there's this sort of like tight feedback loop with the ecosystems that we're sourcing our energy from and our food from. And at the end of the day, I guess from a philosophical

perspective, you know, we're sourcing our meaning from like our place is to serve the health of the planet. And when we do so, we're happier, we're more joyful, we're more convivial, we have cultural rituals and processes that feel really great. And when we're not, we feel alienated. We feel, you know, confused. We feel isolated, alone. And that precipitates trying to fix those problems often times with, you know, whatever it is, consumerism, ideologies of different sorts, extremism, all sorts of different things that in my mind, I mean, this is maybe too simplistic of an explanation, but I think it does. I

think it has some truth to it. In my mind, many of the um sort of symptoms of the poly crisis or the meta crisis boil down to humans as individuals and as a as a society not having that connection to our planet, our home and the other species and systems and being able to say ah this is my role. My role is one of a custodian of a steward of um of be exercising my creativity to make the system healthier.

>> It sounds like the the relationship between humanity, human beings and the natural world is like super super important to you. And uh you also also mentioned in there about like resilience and anti-fragility and I guess also like the the abstract nature of like some of these this area that we're operating in, right? Like how it can be abstract and you were trying to like bring it back to the the kind of here and now and every day. I'm wondering like in relation to these terms like the term like resilience anti-fragility like what does this this mean to you?

Like how how do you understand these these terms? >> Yeah. Well, starting with resilience, I guess I would, you know, in kind of a technical way, understand resilience as a systems resistance to change. You know if if something disrupts and a system is resilient it's likely to bounce back to normal right so in a human body your resilience might be you know your ability to take a tumble and you know not break something right and and resilience goes down over time with humans as we age bone density strength all these other things anti-fragility on

the other other hand is in some ways I think a little harder for humans to wrap their head around with personal experience. Like that was a concrete kind of personal example. But anti-fragility is actually when disruption happens, it actually makes the system grow and become more complex and more robust. Um so not just resistance to change but actually sort of adapted to change and growth from that disruption or change.

You know I actually think in ecosystems fire ecologies are sort of antifragile. When the disruption of a fire comes through it is actually increasing the health of the system and the diversity of the system. And you see that a lot in in ecosystems. And you know when you take that away they start to sort of degrade and they actually become more fragile that they lose both anti-fragility and resilience at the same time. So yeah that's kind of what they mean to me uh in a nutshell. >> One of the the main themes of this this podcast series has been like how do people apply the like resilience and antifrogility into their everyday lives and like how they they apply these

principles. And I really I want to get into that topic with you as well. But since we're having this opportunity to have this conversation, I also want to like just kind of acknowledge the the time that you've been in this this space like in this a regenerative permaculture space. And I'd love to if you're up for it just kind of you could take us back to like when you first got into this this space because it's it's been a while, right? like and um in a little while and I'm even I'm talking about like the pre-crypto days, right? Like cuz you you have this whole >> uh aspect of your life which is like before crypto where you were developing your your skills in permaculture you were working with land stewards and I

think also you had this this keen interest and and even developed this term like the a forms of capital and then published a book on on that topic. So yeah, I wonder if you could just like take us back to those days, like how what was it like back then? Like how did you get into this? And like Yeah, maybe just >> back in the back in the back in the the the early uh early change just after the change of the millennium. Um >> yeah. Well, um I think my whole life I've been pretty passionate about the, you know, the environment in quotes and ecosystem

dynamics and watershed health. Um I grew up in Alaska. I studied environmental science uh in college. Um, I put myself through college, uh, with a variety of jobs. Um, that included being a fisherman, well, commercial fisherman in Alaska, that in working for the watershed forum, uh, working for fish and game. So, I sort of did all these jobs all around the fishery, the uh, wild Alaskan salmon fishery. Um, so I think that informed my kind of my understanding and also frustration with how humans like with the human part of like how we interact with the natural

world because you know it's an you know in quotes resource management problem and so I think that was really foundational uh to me and then as I was studying environmental science in college you know that it's pretty dismal it was a dismal topic because a lot of it was focused on the science of negative human impact on the at planetary scale and at local scale watersheds pollution um you know mine tailings and super fun sites and atmospheric science and all of those things especially in that time

period and and I think still to this day that that discipline primarily focuses on and I think kind of to the detriment of the discipline, the negative impacts that humans had. And at a certain point I was like got really bored and frustrated with that. Um, even though environmental science as a discipline is pretty interdicciplinary, you're kind of like weaving together sociology and anthropology and economics and ecology and biology and atmospheric science and oceanography all into you know kind of studying the environment and the human relationship to the

environment. So that's a very rich academic space. But again, it was pretty depressing and the bias like the academic bias tended to be kind of like this like version 1.0 environmentalism which many people are allergic to which sort of has this paradigm of you know humans are sort of a cancer on the planet and the world would be better off without us and that never resonated with me. Um, I do think that humans have been messing up a lot. And I think our culture has some atonement for sure, but you know, people are amazing. People are beautiful. Uh, civilization, technology, um culture um, is astounding and beautiful and so

is rest of the world, ecosystems and and nature. And so, at a certain point in my environmental science studies, I was like, screw this stuff. I need to find some hope. I need to find a community that believes that humans could be good and can be declarative about what that might look like. And not in a at least at that point in my life, you know, I felt a lot of religions and a lot of other ways that people were answering these questions didn't really fit the moment and didn't fit my perspective.

And so I wanted something more practical. And I found permaculture essentially, you know, like in my search in the search space. I started looking, this is probably in like 2004, 2003, 2004. I was just like, what who who thinks that we could do a great job and has examples of people doing a great job and like you know um yeah permaculture and the eco village movement, those two I found kind of in parallel. So one is a model of kind of humans living in community uh in place you know experimenting with new ways of governance and new um economic approaches to livelihood and other things and very yeah sort of like

avantguard experimental expressions of of uh communes and intentional communities and all sorts of things. And the other have you have permaculture which there's a VIN overlap of course but permaculture is more traditionally sort of like homesteading maybe uh no till market gardening agroforestry forestry m you know people doing little mushroom farms or you know copus systems um you know uh food forests um but tends to be you know permaculture as a community and a vibe it's a little bit more, you know, like the people that we venerate the most in

the permaculture movement oftentimes have like their own homesteads >> or their own sort of singular. They're not necessarily innovating much on like what's the family constellation and how far do I extend my definition of community whereas the eco village side that's what they're mostly working on and they don't get a lot of done a lot of work done on the um sort of nature farming side of things. Um, and I was kind of interested at the the center point of that, like the VIN overlap in which >> there's design space and obviously on both sides of that there's people who are excited about that overlap too. Not to say that, but um, yeah. And so I found

the local permaculture movement in uh, and I was going to school in Oregon. I went to college at Oregon State University and I started like I went to a few talks. I went I went to uh Toby Himmingway who passed away but wrote Gaia's Garden um which is a really cool uh permaculture book and he lived not that far and he went to a talk he gave a talk um I went to and I was really inspired and excited and so I just started reaching out and going to meetups or going to things or volunteering doing perma blitzes and um kind of plugging myself in because I was like wow I was like there's a group of people and they're kind of optimistic

about the world if we like look at the things we could do. We could we could build herb spirals. I mean, you know, come on. So, that's kind of the genesis moment. And then from there, I kind of just settled on that as a vocation in a way. I iterated through, you know, I did my um permaculture design course and then I started volunteering at the local permaculture education center and then I got a job at the local permaculture education center and then I started running programs. So I sort of went from you know apprentice to journeyman to master along sort of a pathway of just working with people and continuing to work. And at a at a certain point two

things happened. I started running I I sort of became the program director, educational director at the Eco Village training center uh on the farm in Tennessee, which is kind of a legendary very old permaculture and eco village education center in the United States, one of the original ones um in a lot of ways and so I took over managing the program which was like a mix of teaching some courses but also just organizing things and you know just like making sure everything happened and instructors came and students came and da da da it was a lot of different things and um also at that point I started experimenting with

doing consulting and design work a little bit and actually getting out um in addition to the work that we were doing there locally and managing the you know because we had a garden and an orchard and doing natural building projects and we were just like doing a lot and then kind of building out advising and support capacity And um that happened for a little while and um towards the end of that arc um a group of a group of us came together that had you know different moments of organizing courses and um back in so there's a couple key moments maybe uh that are important to call out

is back in 2009 I worked to convene the 10th uh continental bio regional congress in North America. Um and that same year we also did the second financial permaculture course. So the previous year we' done the first financial permaculture course that just like exactly coincided with the 2008 financial >> um >> and the and the Bitcoin white paper. Right.

>> Exactly. So in 2009, I remember sitting around with the bio regionalists around this campfire talking around about the bio the the Bitcoin white paper and talking about what would it look like? Like we were like founding scarcity on like mathematical abstractions is cool but seems sort of dumb in a way. like but what could we be like how might we engineer some sort of bio regional regeneration currency? What would that look like? I remember vividly having these really interesting conversations around the campfires there. So yeah, it

was just a very fertile moment and I mean convening getting lots of people together having that sort of you know deep rich set of interactions around all of that was really foundational. So in 2009 um I co-founded this uh permaculture design firm called Terraogenesis International uh with uh Ethan uh Roland Soivv and Mary Johnson and Eric Tonsmeer and Christian Sheerer.

All amazing talented people. Eric Tonsmeer is a legend. He co-wrote Edible Forest Gardens with Dave Jackie and uh has just done so much for the space really and and just everybody just amazing people. And we founded Terra Genesis International with this kind of goal of we're going to use this as a vehicle to only take the most world changing broadacre ambitious people have not done this stuff in permaculture before right we wanted to be you know we were taking um a page out of our mutual teacher Darren Dohert's book who's done amazing broadacre work all around the world and is the founder of the regrarians platform super professional and just was always a big boost booster

and you know big inspiration, big help and support support. We're like you know we want to go big. We want to be working on establishing thousands of hectares of agroforestry. We want to transform supply chains. We want to you know we want to see how much change we can make with this sort of this foundation of permaculture and regenerative design. I think it's also worth noting that during that whole period from about 2005 or so 2006 to 2009 2010 I was also doing a master's degree program with Gaia University um in integrative ecosocial design and regenerative business

uh which was amazing which was super cool and the projects it was all project learning so I um was like founding terraenesis was part of the project work and I was sort of doing metalarning cycles while I was founding that and um yeah I mean it's been a whole journey back then I got a set of like master planning jobs with um permaculture with the permaculture community and then also we took as a team we took this amazing uh job working with my now dear friend Ian McNeel down in Barbados um restoring a sand quarry that was at the end of its life

cycle of extraction and regenerating it into a living food forest and sort of a multi-enterprise um local regenerative hub that does all sorts of education and ecoourism and glamping and produces food and has a whole wildlife refuge and has all these different things going that um they recently actually just won this regenerative tourism prize this year and it's like a you know it's like that was more than a decade >> still alive now. That's great.

>> Yeah, it's still cranking and still doing amazing things. >> I want to get to the topic of the forms of capital in a moment but like I also want to pick up a couple of threads just like cuz as you know we're like my background is also in permaculture. So I I like whenever I meet with someone that's been in the permaculture space for this long I always look to like pulling these threads like one is like the question of optimism like that seems to be a big driver for you right and I think it was for me too like permaculture in a way is this very solutionoriented solution oriented uh discipline and it pulls together all these different elements, right? Like uh

in the like when it was first developed, right? They were like looking at how factories operate and trying to bring in like different efficiencies from factories, but they were also looking at like in Tasmania like different indigenous cultures and how they were uh relating to their natural ecosystem. So, it's a very like exciting if if you're if you're grappling with this problem of ecosystem degradation. uh and the human relationship with nature. I think it it it it feeds the minds of people that are in that space where they're just like I don't know what to do. And and but what you also described there is like this pool or like you mentioned like different

religions and like spiritual spiritual there's a spiritual domain to this right and sometimes people go in that direction and you also mentioned like the need for hope and I I I think um sometimes and there there's like this more like activist like humans are a cancer side to the environmental movement as well. Um so I just wanted to highlight all that and and say like this is something that um I myself have been trying to make sense of and I think some of the critiques from outside the space seem to focus on these points right like hey this is this is just like woo woo spirituality or this is like

just activist communist or this is but like what you describe is actually like at its core very solutionoriented entrepor reneurial here you are like talking about something that you built like a dec decade or more ago and it's now like grown into this thing. So like basically I'm wondering like what's your take on all that? Like what what do you make of all this? >> Yeah. Well, no I it's a great question space. It's a really important and you know and I've had some really fun conversations with a number of different people in the space and the green pill community about this. I also think this is a very much a living

conversation that's happening like in the broader region movement as it were and you know maybe we'll pull on the thread a little bit later but I think this is part of the kind of like conversation and invitation that people are digging into in region commons and there's sort of like there's a whole set of things here. This is like how do you knit together regenerative accelerationism >> as a as a a counterpoint even I think to to decentralized accelerationism or effective accelerationism. What does it look like to have that deeper tap routt?

>> Yeah. in which you're you're you're linking, meaning making, uh pragmatism optimism hope um and you know, like getting done and not being a complainer. Just not just hating on everybody, but actually being willing to be courageous and try to do new things and and try and fail. bringing in all of this sort of like inspiration from some of the best parts of kind of like western capitalist entrepreneurship which has all of these amazing attributes of people learning and growing, sharing information, developing new ways of doing things,

getting out and grinding and building something new. I think that there's a lot there that's important as a counterpoint and counterbalance to the sort of like doomer pessimistic activist. You know, I'm going to look at the negative of all these things and be pessimistic about it and and kind of hate on all of it. Um, so I yeah, I'm just sort of like agreeing with the weave that you're setting. And I happened my personal orientation around sort of like the concept of regen.

>> Yeah. >> You know, and I've been working self-identified as a regenerate or uh a regen or a regenerati or a member of the regenerative movement or a regenerationist or whatever it is and to to whoever it is. But then that sort of sphere and that cloud. Yeah. now since you know 2004 probably when I was like regeneration >> this is this is it you know this is >> this is it and early on even in my permaculture career I was like >> I don't really identify with like the permanent like I like the >> erection but I want something more alive

I want something that's more evolutionary I'm not going for sustaining I'm not going for permanence necessarily I mean we want dur ability. We want we want resilience. We want but we're also, you know, trying to bring in this activating force that, you know, maybe healthy accelerationism like, hey, like let's go. Let's go. Let's let's make it happen. So, um, I consider regen, you know, as a movement or a community. I don't I don't even know if I'd call it either community or movement, but you know, broadly in a handwavy way as an instinct maybe region as an instinct to kind of be a third way

>> that doesn't fall in into the sort of woke >> Yeah. >> Uh progressive critique of everything and everybody um you know, but can hear it and understand that there's truths there. There's realities. There's >> that's not all crazy. But if you overindex for it and you over amplify it, it does it's not not useful. So on the one hand there's that and on the other hand there's this sort of like blind usually pretty narcissistic, you know, I can do anything I want.

Anything that I'm capable of doing is okay to do and I'm just going to like go for it. And it just sort of like pure power accumulation on on the right. there's like the dark side of these two elements of the political spectrum and I kind of consider region as a third way that is practical and pragmatic and optimistic and grounded in you know realities of of our planet and our society and ourselves and is just saying let's make systems that are healthy for us >> like that's the foundation let's do that >> common sense common sense relationship So common sense.

>> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I think from that point of view, it's very difficult to argue with because you you see people across the right and the left adopting these systems, right? Like it's not it's not like the systems in and of themselves are political, right? Like they're just it's just about our relationship with nature. We're all human. We've all got our relationship with nature. >> It's it's almost like before the political even comes into play that Yeah. You could be a neopagan. You could be a Catholic. You could be a Muslim.

You could be Hindu or Buddhist. You could have any >> any path or orientation towards your spiritual process. >> Yeah. and still find concrete, clear um instructions, I would say, from, you know, many of those different places that end up pointing to how important it is to have tools to develop a right relationship between the individual human and the community of humans and the place that they live and the larger planet. And just like it's pretty straightforward. It's not that crazy. It it is I think it's pre-political probably and I think you

know like in in in the America of 2026 I mean look USDA just did a whole thing on regenerative agriculture right and it wasn't enough it didn't go far enough but they know that that's a set of political um words processes um needs that resonate with real people in real places and you know and I'm not a I'm not so much a cynic. I'm like, great, awesome. That sounds great. Let's keep going. Do better, but sweet. Let's celebrate it. Let's celebrate that that's happening and then and then keep going. And I So, yeah.

>> Yeah, that makes total sense. And what's your take on like the the point of view? I'm sure you'll have seen it over the years like within the the permaculture space about like uh a more kind of primitivist view on the solutions to the this problem in terms of ecological degradation. So sometimes uh refer to or like it's kind of developed into this idea of degrowth and like we need to just like go back to like very primitive tools and like like looking at technology more as a as within the lens of that cancer kind of view that you mentioned earlier and also I guess like I think it's fair to say and maybe I I

don't know if you would agree with this but like from my point of view like the origins of permaculture It grew largely grew out of like this peak oil movement, right? Like and I would say to some extent the eco village movement was the early in the early days it was like a response to like look look like like society is going in this direction like oil is going to run out and society is going to collapse. We need to be prepared for that. So let's develop alternative ways of living together. And very often the approaches they took were like uh primitive is maybe a bit extreme because they adopt like solar panels and stuff right like in and more recently more so but like definitely like low tech low energy prepare like preparing

for um a kind of collapse scenario like what's how how do you relate to that part of the the space in your work? It's a great question. I am not personally my my personal dominant motivation is doesn't come from like a prepper mentality. >> Yeah. >> So much. Um however that said I definitely like there's a couple of things like one is I definitely am a big believer proponent and practitioner of you know

p practicality and localism when it comes to being you know appropriate prepare appropriately prepared for different levels of disaster um and for different potential future scenarios. So to me that's sort of common sense. I don't source from that though as sort of an ideology or religion. And I I think I I find it pretty counterproductive because I what I see is a lot of people sort of projecting a a set of I think kind of quasi religious beliefs that are sort of like neoapocalyptic neoapocalism and and then sort of like

putting sort of a pseudoanalysis of peak oil or whatever it is into that as the sort of like rationalization of what I think are actually fundamentally, you know, essentially sort of like a religious dogma about the end of days and or whatever it is. >> Yeah. >> And um that's not kind of personally my orientation and there is some amount of important observation from a lot of those different communities. So, so that's sort of like a well I was just going to say like degrowth I don't particularly feel motivated. I I think regrowth is what we should be going for and you know I think there's

what do we quantify how do we quantify it what is quality how do we qualify it how do we link those two activities in an evolving flexible way to the health of our soil and water and ecosystems themselves in a way that isn't tyrannical in a way that isn't dogmatic in a way that's alive and reflexive and and responsive. Um that feels like it's like the prime directive of our moment in history right now is to get good at that and to take joy in kind of putting our problem solving into that space whether it's through protocol design, mechanism

design, you know, garden design, you know, landscape design, governance design, um new economic primitives, new financial primitives. There's just a huge amazing exciting design space right there. Um I think it has to be pretty practical and pragmatic and you know there is danger around naivee with the power of theological tools that we possess and that's where there's like we can't just push away the critiques. >> Yeah.

>> Like I have um whatever it is technology what what's the name of uh Uncle Ted's book there? Uh anyway, I was just looking on my shelf. I can't I can't find it, but technology and its slaves or something, you know, whatever it is. >> I mean, you can't you have I I think you have to understand >> and think critically about those critiques. >> Yeah. >> Um >> deed the degrowth movement. >> Yeah.

>> Anarch primitivists. I personally though never resonated like I've sat around like I look I went to school in Oregon in the early 2000s like I knew Julia Butterfly Hill. I know I knew a bunch of the deep green resistance people and and >> activists and anarcho primitivists and people >> like I I haven't just like read that stuff like I know. >> You've lived it, right? You've you've been there. And you know, I've been to a rainbow gathering. I like I've been in the mix of that world and there's elements of it that I find sort of like aesthetically appealing and there's elements of it that I also find kind of

repulsive because >> at the end of the day there's >> a perspective there that's sort of more common than not that falls down to sort of like a a self-loathing of humans. Yeah. Yeah. And I doesn't resonate with me and and I'm maybe an odd and weird duck because also I do embrace a belief of history that a lot of terrible things have happened and some of my ancestors have been complicit or responsible in different moments for for things.

>> Yeah. >> Um but I don't you know and and I also feel like I'm kind of a realist like there are dark triad people. There are people who are something like evil and they do up things. Like that's all true too. Yeah. Right. Um and nonetheless, you wake up in the morning and like >> let's make the world a better place. Let's try to learn from the mistakes. Let's try to do a better job. Let's find grace and pleasure in the simple things like a >> great salad that you harvested from your garden or planting trees for future generations or you know whatever it is.

Um, >> I love that open-mindedness with which you approach these these communities and and I think that's something in a way that gets lost in this culture of polarization and social media. It's like everyone is either in one camp or another camp like like if you want to live off the land and be a land steward and living community or like some like commie primitivist like crazy person or like on the other extreme like you have people on the right that are living like with guns and like all that. It's like polarization. and you're like in one camp or you're in one another camp rather than taking the time to think about like okay what is the critique that is lead these

people obviously genuinely believe this otherwise they wouldn't have made such radical taken such radical steps in their own lives to change their their way of life and I think that certainly being something that I've felt I've learned a lot from being in these communities that doesn't mean that I um uh like drinking the Kool-Aid and suddenly it's like you don't have to join cults to look at I mean look at society the way that society is it's clear that there's some big issues right like like the metacar crisis thesis is is kind of pretty strong in my in my view there's a lot of evidence to back

it up so in that if you take that viewpoint that and you take an open-minded approach like you describe It then opens you you start seeing different critiques and you start trying to understand okay what is this group or this person this community trying to what's their response to the meta crisis basically I and and I like that approach because I think that's what's going to yield solutions ultimately um and and I think personally the more experiments we can have in this in this area the better. Yeah. And that's always what I found. I mean, the Eco Village movement certainly sort of by and large embodies I think what most people would consider

expressions on the left hand side of the political spectrum in terms of like >> just how governance and community and politics end up. But I think increasingly the I would say in like the world today, at least in the United States, I actually think the dominant um demographic and worldview of like the next generation of Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen Z, like millennial and Gen Z, uh back to the land communities. I think the dominant worldview and politics of those people is probably farther right than I am.

And I I I don't know where people would actually put me on the political spectrum because I'm like a weird person, but there's a lot of religious there's a lot of sort of like religious revivalism. Yeah, there's a there's there's communities that are more sort of like trad there's a bunch of trad like traditional Catholic back to the land stuff happening and I'm like great. >> So yeah, but like like let's have a potluck. I'm that's amazing because fundamentally what it says to me like you're saying is that people are looking >> are sensing are opening themselves up to understand that that the moment requires

them to make some commitments and decisions in their life that may be different than just like the standard consumer materialist like worldview that there's lots of energies that go into for better or worse kind of like keeping people in a sort of a stasis of consumption and passivity and not making radical changes in their life one way or the other. >> And when people wake up and they're like, "Oh no, for the health of my kids, for the my personal health, for the health of my community, I need to take responsibility and I'm going to I'm going to change. I'm going to try to effort to change something." I'm like,

"Sweet." all those people. I just kind of consider all of those people by and large and there's some on there's some expect have on either fringe that I'm like whoa too much for me that's too far like I you know um but but almost everybody like 99% of that I'm like great that's amazing my people can we like swap >> you know recipes or you know take our kids sledding or whatever it is like great let's be neighbors I'll help you out >> with your thing I got to character, I'll pull you out of the ditch. I mean, just like basic stuff. And and you know, on a brief rant, I mean, I think that's one of that to me that's one of like obviously pluralism

um has has its downsides or its limits. Like you got to kind of you do have to find some common denominator and have some basic kind of like decorum and rules. And if people are outside of that, you do kind of have to be like, uhuh, that's not going to happen, right? Um, so, you know, as a society, we have to figure that out. It's a hard problem. It's not an easy one. And and what we decide falls outside of that is going to change and it's going to evolve over time. And different communities are going to have different answers for that also. There's like a meta pluralism process, too. But just by and large, that's one of the reasons why I'm a pluralism maximalist in a way. It's like, yeah, I I want to live in a world in which it's like I'm going to pull you

out of the ditch and I kind of don't care like what you look like or what your beliefs are as long as you're as long as there's some basic fundamental respect >> um care and if there isn't that then I want an efficient effective way to like boot you out of the system >> basically. And I I actually think in a way weird way and this is like gonna come across as strange in today's political climate, but I actually feel like we're not doing that bad. Like things things are moving. We're adapting. People are both deepening spiritual connections in different ways.

People are in active thought process. There's some lines of evolution. Sure, it could go wrong. There's hazards. There's dangers. There's some people are off their rocker and are are are are calling for things that I think aren't great, but but taking a step back and looking at the pattern, the patterns in permaculture, we're always trained and looking at patterns. What are the patterns, the generative patterns that are taking place? All of those are, you know, by and large at a at a broad look, there's a lot of healthy things. Things are moving. The world is starting to shift. And again, there's hazards. I don't I don't want to be polyianish here and just be like hey

it's all good fine but just to sort of note that the big sort of like the great turning that's taking place right now it it's that that the shift and the evolution of the processes actually is healthy. So instead being terri, this is why like regenerative accelerationism. Instead of being terrified and trying to like constrict and like be like no, we just want to keep everything in the 1990s or whatever. It's like no, no, as a as a planetary civilization, as local communities, the green pill movement, the region movement, like we kind of all have to roll our sleeves up and accept, you know, we got to surf the wave. The wave's coming it. The wave's here. The question isn't like you can't make it go

away. We have to figure out how to go with it and we have to have some fun with it. Like this is happening. Let's go. And I think that where sort of like the region memelex, the region thoughtcape and sort of intuition that we're all anybody who's listening to this is there. You and I are there. We know many people are there. We have this intuition. Um that's that's what we're up to. is is saying yes. I think yes and yes and I'm going to be thoughtful. Yes, and I'm going to use the best tools I have to design whether that's AI or uh blockchain technology. Um I'm going to lean in and I'm going to sort of engage

>> one of the things. So I I really want to get onto this topic of uh like resilience and anti-fragility as you have applied it within your own life. Um but before we go there um I'd love to just touch upon uh yeah this book that you wrote about the eight forms of capital. Um obviously um trying to move beyond just the concept of finance as being like the most dominant or the most important forms of capital. Opening up the the view of what uh what capital is and applying it to different domains. And I think there's something very useful about that in and particularly I guess in in this time of

AI where perhaps there are who knows how it's going to play out but there are many people who would speculate that it's going to impact on employment maybe like uh earning money in a traditional way is going to change if AI and automation comes into to play. So I'm wondering like if you could just explain a bit about that book and what you were thinking about there and maybe also whether you think it has a role to play now at this point in history where there is a very there I would say there's a movement to start kind of thinking more about what capital what different forms of capital humans can be developing and building

beyond just uh financial capital and uh gainful financial employment. >> Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So, it I think we published in well the the eight forms of capital as a framework was first published Ethan and I published that I think in 2008 the first time um during it was and and it was an outgrowth. It might have been early 2009. It was an outgrowth of the financial permaculture course. And so just a brief sort of like where did that framework come from? So that framework came from us convening this participatory design cheret around local regenerative economics in Hoenwald, Tennessee, a deep red

southern county in middle Tennessee. We had several state representatives from the legislature, Tennessee legislature. We had the mayor of Honewald involved. We had all of the local business owners and we brought in experts in renewable energy and ethanol uh production in bioeconomy stuff in permaculture and agriculture stuff and we just sort of like smashed everything together for like three or four days and people came from all over the country but also there was like the strong corp local participants and over the course of that workshop which was super fun and really

amazing thing and you know maybe I someday I kind of want to get back into doing those sorts of things because I actually think >> especially in the era of AI I mean boy what you can do with a group of people and the tools that we have now and everything I mean >> it's just I'm very enthusiastic about all that >> and people like I love that you were talking about the diversity of people that come to permaculture courses like I think there's this myth that permaculture courses are all full of people that are like super like earth earthy people but you get every people from all walks of life like business people like they the environment and the relationship to nature can affects humans regardless of what their background and beliefs are.

>> Yeah. Yeah. I think we had a pastor, you know, we had all we had all these all sorts of young people. There was a group of inner city kids from Nashville that was participating. I mean, it was crazy. It was super fun. I there's a video I think you could probably go on YouTube and and like Google financial permaculture 2008. It might have been the 2009 one. I think it was a 2008 one and I'm pretty sure there's like a 30 minute video and it's crazy and you'll see a young Gregory up there like you know facilitating sessions and stuff and anyway it was super fun and during the that course during that workshop and it was you know it it was a mix of education and participatory design Ethan

and I um who were both getting our master's degrees at that time so we were sort of studying we kind of did you know an ethnographic survey in which we asked all of the people we could get to step aside for a moment to to elucidate their perspective about the different forms of value that they thought were important to keep track of. And so we just did this survey and out of that we distilled the eight forms of capital. So it was very much like a folk economics framework. We didn't do a big lit review. We didn't do some big abstract academic process. We literally like in a convening of people getting together to design local economic resilience. In

that moment, we just asked everybody that we could talk to, what are the forms of value that you think are important to grow and keep track of and then we distilled that into this this framework called the eight forms of capital. We published it on um the Apple Seed blog which was Ethan's uh permaculture um consulting and design agency uh which I worked for from time to time as well. Um and then from there we took that framework and we developed it and we did more work with it and we published a book called Regenerative Enterprise version 1.0. Uh and we published that book I think like early January of 2013.

So, we were sort of writing it in 2012. Um, and that had other frameworks as well that had a set of other tools and frameworks. It's a cool book. Um, I think I'm going to try to write version two this year. Uh, I feel like a lot of energy right now to just like distill and share because so much has happened over the past now more than 10 years. >> But anyway, it's a cool book. It was designed to be read in less than an hour. It was meant to be just like super practical, super distilled. Can you pick it up and flip through it? And could anybody It was meant to push and challenge business people and anti-b businessiness people.

>> And that's kind of what the eight forms of capital ended up being was a tool to kind of provoke thinking both from people who are like money is the devil and it's evil and I don't want to know anything about business or accounting or whatever. And so they're like, "Capital, right?" But then other people are like, "Money is everything. It's the lifeblood of the world." And they're like, "Wait, spiritual capital? What?" You know, it kind of is designed to provoke both sides of this extreme and try to bring people into a practical dialogue and relationship with what does it look like to take some responsibility

to design a relationship around accounting for and growing different forms of value and thinking of them like capital. My definition of capital would be this sort of like stack of abstractions legal economic societal cultural that allow us to bring value from the future into the present >> or grow value in the present into the future. Mhm.

>> And applying that thought, what does it look like to think about that culturally? How are we growing cultural value as a community? What's its role? What undermines it? What doesn't undermine it? Or spiritual as an individual. What does it look like for for me to have a deeper and more robust, more resilient relationship with my interiority, my perspective of the eternal, of what's beautiful, of God or or the universe or whatever it is that we choose to define it kind of like it can it can be it can be abstracted and used we think by sort of like anybody whether they're atheist

or whether they're you know um fundamentalist. right, of some particular religion. Like, so that kind of provocative spirit of like this is a design tool. It's not meant to give you any answers. It's meant to allow you to ask better questions. Um, as a as a business owner, what are you optimizing for as a community? What are you optimizing for? Um, and how do you measure it? Right? It's easy to measure financial capital. You know, it's like how many dollars do you have in your bank account or how many euros do you have in your bank account or how many pounds do you have in your bank account? What you know, what's the unit of account of your society? Inflows and outflows. There's a whole world of accounting. What does it mean to account for your living capital?

You know, h how how would you go about as a farmer thinking about soil health and water quality and your the the health of your genetic stock of the you know productive species you're managing? How do you grow that over time and and what are the functional relationships between that and the other forms of capital? It's meant to be a design tool. It's not again it's not meant to provide answers. It's meant >> to provoke better questions, better design conversations.

>> I think it does. Like I've seen like I don't know if I imagine this is the case in the US, but certainly in the UK it's used a lot on permaculture design courses to kind of encourage people to go when they're doing like their personal design process. They they'll think about like they'll apply that framework to their own lives or to their communities and think about that like and I think it can It just broadens perspectives beyond just the narrow uh domain of financial capital. But um I guess when when you started talking about like uh measuring like like farmer like capital and farms and stuff, it

mean it started making me think about regen network. So I want to like get into that topic as well. Just briefly before we really go into this topic of personal resilience and um yeah maybe just briefly like if you can touch on region network what's like like what was the evolution out of your work in permaculture eight forms of capital and then region network and uh very briefly I've I don't know if this this is accurate or not but I've heard this lore about the start of region network where like you were like in the jungle like in Latin America or like South of America or something like on this like field work and then you like decided like you

had this kind of like I don't know like maybe you can tell the story but I think there was you were in the jungle or something when you decided to start this this crazy crypto project. Uh I I wonder if you could just like maybe give us an over give us a lore. >> I think uh yeah I know just the I know just the circumstance. I wouldn't personally point to that as like the real origin. That is a little postfounding, but it was part of the the like the first iteration of what was

becoming region network. It's very early. This is very early. Um I mean I didn't talk about so this like there's requires a little bit of context in storytelling. I didn't tell this part of the story yet in this podcast that one of the businesses that I started back when I was uh the same basically the same time period that I found founded uh with my colleagues um Ethan and Mary and Eric and Christian we co-ounded Terra Genesis. I also founded uh a chocolate company at that same time because I wanted to do an experiment in direct trade relationships. Uh I I was really enthusiastic about doing sale trade and

like sailing stuff back from Latin America. And uh uh I wanted the the community in Eco Village that we were living in to have some like light m like stuff to do like jobs for people to do and not just like education. And I was sort of sick of the education mill and wanted there to be something more grounded. So I was like, "Oh, like" and there's a whole story and this is a for another time. I had this whole crazy story about founding that chocolate company cuz I literally kind of like got conned into it by this hippie and it was, you know, there was like Sandinista rebels involved and it was like this whole crazy there's a bury gold, there's treasure, there's like a whole crazy

story. But anyway, fast forward. I had founded this chocolate business. I sold that chocolate business to some entrepreneurs uh in Boulder, Colorado. And I used the money that was generated from that sale to buy a cacao farm in one of the communities that we were sourcing from after sort of the village matriarch in that community came to me and said, "Hey Gregory um there's a farm for sale in the community. we don't really want somebody from the outside to buy it. Would you will you buy it? And I didn't really have money and it all sort of came together in a way that like the business sold and some other people came in and

we bought it together and we created this kind of cooperative cacao agroforestry initiative in Ecuador. Um it's really beautiful down there. And that was one of the places. Yeah, we went there. my young family. Um, some of the other co-owners, there was there was, I guess, four families with little kids and some other it was crazy. We didn't have the toilets. We didn't have running water worked out. We were building composting toilets and like harvesting rainwater and and >> proper trying to keep on top of some income like design, consulting income to keep things moving economically. and we were doing the foundational design work

for region network with one of the early investors who came with us and he was there and we were all like grinding and trying to figure out what did it look like to launch region network. So that gets us to that's sort of the lore drop on re one of the lrops on region network and that gets us to what what the heck is region network? Um you from the eight forms of capital perspective, region network has been an attempt to build a living capital accounting system essentially. Um, and there's some practical things, you know, in my career in permaculture. Um, at a certain point around 2012

or so, this is all tied up with the the chocolate company. Like after I sold that chocolate company, I had all this experience doing supply chain work, import export, dealing with farmers, running on the ground regeneration programs with farmers because we were doing all of this really cool permaculture stuff. We were building water systems, composting toilet systems, living terraces, soil work, biodiversity work. We were doing all this stuff. It was small company, but we were just like all in in this amazing magical way. I'm just such a big believer in small enterprise like little groups of people like it the flourishing in Dows shows this too. You get a small group of talented people together and you just go for it. You can do so much

beautiful stuff. So anyway, we're doing all this great work. I sold the business, ended up with that cacao farm. That's what I got out of it basically is being a co-owner in that cacao farm. Um but I ended up starting to do a bunch of consulting and design work in supply chains and at that time started to really focus on incepting regeneration and regenerative agriculture into the natural food industry. Now it's a movement and uh those who know know there was a small group of us. We worked really hard and we got a bunch of really influential people to basically like go all in on it. Um and part of my work and that was

working with a bunch of really cool groovy brands that were you know sort of like beyond wanted to go beyond fair trade and go beyond organic and be regenerative in their sourcing. um uh Lush cosmetics for instance. I worked for uh many years with Lush um and others doing this sort of like regenerative supply work. During that time, what I started to realize is even if you stack good intentions from a consumer all the way to a producer, given the current economic conditions, given the current legal conditions, almost always there's going to be some economic pressure, some market

distortion that causes that chain of good good intentions to collapse. and the end ecosystem. Essentially, the soil and the farmer, those are the two that have the least power, that have the least agency, and get screwed. And it's just structurally, it just happens time after time after time after time. Doesn't matter how good your intentions are. It doesn't matter how great big of a heart >> and the same for companies. The same for the companies as well, right? Like they can be very well-intentioned companies, but at the end of the day, if they're going to go out of business, >> they're scripted. Like, >> exactly. And you get this all the time

is like, if I keep doing in quotes the right thing, I'm going to go out of business. So, I have to do in quotes the wrong thing right now. >> Yeah. >> And that's the way of that's in quotes that's the way of the world. And obviously, the realization of that is something that a lot of people get upset about, and that leads people to particular political >> Yeah. uh perspectives which I can totally sympathize with in c circumstances although I also sympathize with the fact that like business is hard. >> It's not that people are doing bad things or trying to be greedy even necessarily. It's just things are hard and you >> there's a set of structural incentives.

>> Yeah. There's also a bit about like you mentioned earlier that in a way when we're talking about value creation when we borrow from the future like that's a debt based situation and I think our economy is a debt based economy. So when we're borrowing from when we're degrading soil and we're degrading ecosystems we're kind of taken from the future in a way and I think we're getting to the point now where some of those debts are getting are becoming due. So like maybe there's more it's it's clear now what the business case is. I mean I'm maybe being overly optimistic here but I think that that will I as

ecosystems degrade more and more and more there comes a point where like like you either lose everything or you shift your practices and it sounds like um in the niche and maybe correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding of region network is like your niche was like trying to quantify measure and display for businesses to see like this is like just basically put into language that they can understand like this is the um value of this ecosystem here that you're uh operating in.

>> Yeah, that's one of the that's one of the sort of necessary but maybe not quite sufficient things that has to happen. But yeah, I mean what just to relanguage what you're saying, I think by and large one of the drivers of the growth of of the financial capital over the last couple of hundred years has been the degradation of and extraction from living capital. And that's not universal and that's not the only way that value is produced, but that's been one big way that value has been produced. Um, and as you're saying, that degrades when you degrade living capital, you degrade your ability to continue farming or drinking water or breathing

air or many other things in the future. So you've basically borrowed from the future to get things done now because of some existential need whether it's a war because you have to cut this corner because if you don't you know terrible things are going to happen or and I think that war mentality then gets parlayed across domains that maybe it doesn't it's not truly that urgent and we could be more thoughtful in many situations. But um so as you start getting practical about changing macro and microeconomic relationships such that living capital grows instead of being degraded.

One of the things like you're saying you have to do is start to have a ledger of regeneration. When is our action increasing soil health and when is it degrading it? And then you need to create mechanisms, financial mechanisms to value that new legibility. And some of the earliest ways that this has been happening that there's many billions of dollars of markets that do just this. This isn't just sort of like a fringe crazy concept. like you know I think we're talking about 300 billion to500 billion dollar a year annual transactions in these markets most of the the dominant source of these

transactions is carbon credits. There's also habitat banks and biodiversity payments, conservation payments, payment for ecosystem service, water credits. There's a whole domain. There's a whole world natural capital ecosystem services. There's whole academic departments that are dedicated to this kind of like monitoring, quantifying and paying for what are generally called ecosystem services. Region Ledger or Region Network has has been and still is an attempt to use a public blockchainbased accounting system to get that done in such a way as to center the land stewards as much as possible as

co-owners and co-governors of the rules. So, you know, our premise was always, hey, if there's going to be sort of like a New York Stock Exchange for nature, you know, not only should nature be one of the owners, but the land steward should be one of the owners because if we do it some other way, it will create market distortions and one of the likely outcomes is that the the process of quantification actually ends up further degrading the living capital and turning it into financial capital. That is one of the hazards and it's one of the commonly um it's one of the common critiques of this whole space from activists. And so from day one, we were really trying to

sort of take that critique seriously, really seriously, and design a system that sort of by its nature was operating in a different way, in a different paradigm so that the competitive landscape is really truly are you regenerating the ecosystem? And if you are, you're succeeding financially. If you are, we're linking profit. We're linking success to that fundamentally and we started with a focus on uh carbon, biodiversity and water crediting. There's also other types of valuation schemes and processes that that happen. We have uh I think over 12 different ecorediting protocols

live and in use right now. There's um nearly a hundred different projects around the world. Um, there's something like I think historically, I just did a report on this, but I think historically, and apologies, my memory is sort of like Swiss cheese, but I think we're at about historically about $12 million of um value generated and transacted that's secured by region ledger. So, you could think of that as like TVL, like total ecological value locked. And there's something like $2 to $3 million and increasing per year that is sort of like generated. And that's

real world. Those are like real world assets. This is essentially non speculative. This isn't just secondary trading. This is sort of like remittances for value generated processes that that take place. >> Super interesting, man. And I think like it makes me think about it reminds me of what you said earlier about this group of people that you had together when you started your business in like 2010 11 was it like the that when you were like yeah when you were like we want to go big like we're not just going to go and like live off grid and and live our chill lives. we actually want to affect some

change as it relates to the human relationship with the natural world and and and and it sounds like also and you wanted to generate lots of agroforestry and were really tangible uh ways. Um but it sounds like you also had quite strong business sense as well. tried to and tried to be practical. Developed I think developed business sense um said yes to big things, continued to evolve, continue to make mistakes um and learn from them and like be honest when we make mistakes and then you know and I think region network was an attempt to even be more ambitious in a way. I think of it

>> if you've ever seen the upward spiral by Paul Graffle. >> Yeah, >> it's amazing movie. Listeners should go. It's on YouTube. Um, there's this amazing adorable dorky uh, older Quaker guy who's lovely. He's an amazing person. And he put together this movie called The Upward Spiral. And it just shows him going through this process of learning to go up the watershed to repair the watershed. And with a little trow, if you go high enough in the watershed and you make a little swale that just diverts the water from going into the gully and you do that at the top of the wershed instead of down where it's raging and flowing and ripping the soil out and taking it

out of the ocean, you can make miracle happens. Miracles happen. It's transformative. The landscape can transform, but it requires you to think and go further upstream and take and be in a way ambitious and modest and humble at the same time. >> And you're working with a little tri. You're making a little change. You're not standing in the middle of the raging torrent like yelling at the water to stop. It's not going to happen. >> Yeah. >> And you know, I think us starting and there's that's the sto that's my personal story. How I make meaning of my personal story as a career permaculturalist, right? A career regenerationist is that, you know, I started in education and then I moved

upstream to try to do broadacre permaculture and succeeded in both of those to some degree. But when I s as I succeeded, I realized the limitation of that intervention. >> Yeah. how many people, what was happening, you know, and so when you're a teacher, you're limited by what agency your students have. >> Yeah. >> Right. Which is the there's miracles can happen, don't get me wrong, but that's the limit, right? >> When you're scale scale of your impact to influence. Yeah. >> Exactly. And and and when you're a designer and you're a consultant, your clients limit your scale and your impact. you know their ability to implement your advice, their ability to manage the system is the limit of agency

that you have right when you move up as we moved up to work with corporations with companies who had supply chains. Um at that moment that the agency of the company but also at that moment it became clear to me that there was a systemic limitation to the regenerative agency that the economic system itself was structured in such a way as to make most of the intentions of everybody involved like and this is this is the thing is like every single human the the consumer the sorcerer the corporate leader the everybody the the farmer, us, everybody. Actually, you got down and you said we want a system. We want

relationships in which everybody individually and as a whole and and the soil that we depend on and the water that we depend on is getting healthier every time somebody eats that chocolate bar or uses that soap or drinks that tea or drinks that coffee or whatever the the economic relationship is. And that's a beautiful thing that that meme is strong enough and people can say yes to that. But in order to get there, there has to be a systemic shift because >> the economic system has to value that regenerative outcome such that that is a competitive advantage in the market because otherwise you're all just being crazy.

>> Yeah, I think that's you hit the nail on the head, right? Like that's it. And I think at the moment it's kind of a it's a competitive disadvantage and there's a bit of like game theory playing out there and and and >> well maybe it is it isn't I would just say maybe I would push back I think >> it can be a competitive advantage if and only if you can use it to create meaning and >> and uh loyalty.

>> Interesting. Yeah. And so there are brands that do achieve this and then parlay that into a customer's lifelong willingness to to pay more money. >> Yeah. >> And to be a and to continue to continue to be in relationship. But the thing is is not every every company can do that. And so if we're going to shift the system >> Yeah. Right? Then this then we actually have to create a competitive playing field that's based on the regenerative outcome itself, not on the storytelling >> of the brand.

>> And that shift is what region network has been trying to engender. is like can we create a big enough economic engine in which a critical mass of humans are placing economic value >> y >> unit by unit on on regenerative ecological outcomes can that take place if you hit a critical mass all value is a social construction is my belief >> right there is no store of value or unit of account that doesn't at the end of the day boil down to means right and and dogecoin and you know or she enu or even bitcoin or ethereum they all make that really clear but even the US dollar at

the end of the day it's sort of like it's all based on this social construct US dollar is like this mix of you know the US military's ability to control the petrod dollar world and the confidence in the fed and the confidence in the US constitution and the rule of law all that kind of come together that's all memes that's all beliefs in in a way that things are and going to continue to be. The euro has a different set of compatible interlocking beliefs. The pound does as well. Bitcoin is a great experiment in in belief in something else in sort of a digital accelerationism.

Ethereum something else adjacent regen. The attempt has been what if we created a robust community social construction of value process that's transparent, auditable, clear and rooted in regenerative land stewardship and such that value is seen to be derived from our success in local and planetary regeneration. And to do so, we're very practical like okay, we got to like have something to sell.

there's carbon markets, there's, you know, and it wasn't because we were like, yay, we love carbon credits. No, it was because, oh, there's people who want to buy carbon credits. That's a place to start to build momentum. But we've always had this deeper, you know, vibe, lore, alignment, desire to transform that systemic reality. >> It's very interesting. I think there's some parallels here with like this the this attempt to bring these more regenerative approaches into um the world like leveraging crypto primitives like what you've done with region network and crypto as a whole crypto as a whole is

in a way I see as a par is like a attempt to shift paradigms you know like it's attempt to to apply self- sovereignty ultimately to to finance a disintermediate finance. And yet we're now at this point in history where fintech is really coming in and and and in a big way. And there's some there's many people in the crypto space that are concerned that that's going to like swallow crypto and maybe some of those original values around disintermediation, self- sovereignty uh and so on are being eroded somewhat and questions around product market fit like is the only thing in crypto that has

product market fit like a trading product and I think in a similar way like this is playing out in the region space as well like how do you shift these bigger systems But not to be cynical. >> It's such an interesting question also markets I mean markets are irrational. >> Yeah. >> For those who believe in rational market theory. I've got news for you. It's not it's totally magic. At least in 2026, right? It's like we're post reality. We're post truth. we're somewhere down the realm and it's like there's no real connection.

Uh and I mean in a way that's sort of depressing in a way maybe that's liberating. Certainly for you know like rabid accelerationists that's going to be like sweet we can >> we can kind of do anything we have all this agency we can make all these things happen. You know, I sort of lament, you know, it's like region, if you look at region's market cap right now, you'd be like, "Wow, that's a failed project. That's a abject failure." Like there's no product market fit there.

But yet the market cap is like this and the, you know, exchange value generation is, you know, like this. >> Yeah. and the community engagement is, you know, pretty high and there's and so that leads me to believe that there's like in the same way it's like what is Doge worth? >> Yeah. It it's enough to keep you're still here. You're still you're still like building. You're still like you're still here with your values, keeping it real and trying to take this to to the next level. And and I think that's what that's what that's what's needed more people in that situation. not just for regenerative projects like yours, but

just for crypto in general terms of self-s sovereignty because otherwise I think the danger is that it will be kind of subsumed into into the traditional finance system and maybe even make that more efficient. So >> I think there's going to be no matter what I think no matter what crypto is going to have fundamentally transformed the financial industry because there is no future scenario in which it's as impossible as it once was for an entrepreneur or a small group of entrepreneurs to to roll up and have access to a set

of tools that allows them to bring something transformative into the marketplace of ideas. >> Yeah, >> that's now that ship has sailed. Now what the adoption curves look like and what actual humans end up, it becomes a cultural thing, not a technology thing. And I think that's um the values, the culture, the lifestyle, the aesthetics that we choose to embrace as a community >> is that's that's where the long tale of like what's actually going to happen here >> is up in the air. And I think it turns into more of a of a preference >> question than a technology question in

my in my opinion. Well, we we've covered a lot of ground here and I've loved like to to learn about your journey. Um I do I don't want to wrap up without asking you about your own personal resilience though. So although I've eaten up all the time asking all these questions about the region network and your background and so on. >> It's been fun. Yeah. Like I want to give you the chance to talk about like how do you apply these principles just to kind of as we bring things to a close like how do you apply everyday resilience in your own life like what what do you do to make your uh to to become more resilient and more antifragile in your local community like in in your own life?

>> Yeah. Well, so personally um yeah it's a great question. Um, I'd say there's a number of different dimensions here. Um, personally, I I live out uh in the countryside. I I live on um a couple hundred acres of beautiful forest with my uh wife and kids um in a pretty tight-knit community um of larger uh a pretty tight-knit larger community. We're slowly working on building kind of community on our property and that's like proceeding slowly but is an aspiration that is part of our sort of

resilience and health strategy because it's way more fun to be with people because there's a lot more work than we can do because uh yeah I I think it's just more fun than you know to have people around to be collaborating with Um, we have a landbased business that we run which is a maple sugaring operation um called Berkshire Sweetgold. Berkshire Sweetgold US. So we produce maple syrup every year.

We're coming up to sugaring season right now. Um, so out trumping around with snowshoes, tapping uh tapping the trees and trying to keep the pumps and the, you know, all the stuff working and doing that with a a little team of friends. um and trying to build kind of a um associative economic kind of membership club with access to the property >> um and access to the produce and and extending that on to um other farms and farmers and spaces. We're really blessed here. We're backed up against >> uh several thousand acres of of

protected land. Um, and there's mountains here. And there's, you know, bobcats and gray and red foxes and bears and, uh, moose and all sorts of cool critters, beavers. Got a beaver dam on the property and it's just really lovely. So trying to build like recently I've been really into this uh concept called I think that would actually be cool for you to look into more deeply and your listeners as well called cooni which is uh the Japanese word for nation and it's this movement in Japan the cooni movement around a deep reconnection between urban and rural communities into

a single hole and they and they actually practice this this like membershipbased economic relationship that kind of looks like a CSA where you get a mix of products uh and sort of like access rights and especially in Japan they're a land of many natural disasters. They like they live in a world in which tsunamis and earthquakes are are regular and so their social consciousness has this concept of like if something happens we want to have prepared to know where to go.

>> Yeah. >> Right. And so the rural community, it's like a revitalizing the rural landscape by by giving urban professionals and families the opportunity to not just be tourists or whatever to actually kind of become community members. And so you pay sort of an annual fee, you get produce, you know, in our case, we're develop maple syrup and, you know, other produce, but also sort of developing like, oh, there's tiny homes that when you're not here, maybe there's people using for other things. So, it's a way to build what what I see as sort of like this deep resilience and set of relationships that in times of disaster or prepping that's really, you know,

it's like the strength of your relationships. Um, it's not just like the amount of ammo and tuna you have in your basement. Um, you you do you have to have friends and colleagues and relationship and a capacity to deal with things. And that's what makes anti-fragility, right? Like I think just go going for a moment on anti-fragility and my my opinion around this some natural disasters you look through literature and even maybe have experience ourselves. I have this experience.

It's like they're the best moments of our lives. The moments in which we as a comm and those are the moments in which humans come together as a community and surmount the imposs and we come together and some thing happens and we bind together as a community and we help each other out and and it's transformative and it brings people together in a beautiful way. Now we don't need to go looking for disasters. The disasters will happen. We live in a destabilizing world. We live in a world in which that's going to happen. The question is, is your community capable of stepping up and having that experience be be one of,

you know, of course there may be grief, there may be, you know, trauma, there may be challenges, but it's sort of like the difference between post-traumatic stress disorder and posttraumatic stress evolution, >> right? And there is a concept and I I don't know that evolution is the right word but there's this concept of >> do you sort of regress and constrict because of the trauma that took place or is it something that trans that like brings you out and transforms you and I think as humans we're social creatures culture society community how do we build strong robust communities in which we rise to the occasion together and so in that little way this sort of concept

cept of the Burk Shuni. We work with our local um one of our local centers Shantagar over the hill that's kind of a little retreat center and other people and it's very early you know I mean we have our own business it's been going for some years but this idea of starting to invite membership I recently just bought an adjacent piece of property and started sort of with the idea of starting to build this um vision out a little bit more. Um, so it's just, you know, it's nent, it's still early, but that's how I'd answer the question on kind of a personal level about like local resilience and local anti.

>> So pretty interesting. And it's it's a thread that's come out in this in a theme that's kept coming up in this podcast series around like resilience. You're not the first person that said that. Basically like resilience is in the community, the local community. It's not just how much I can survive on my own. It's not like a survivalist kind of thing. It's more about like yeah leveraging the community to kind of transcend the challenges that the community faces and that we as individuals may face. So just to kind of pull things that close, is there are there any final things you want to add?

Anything you want to share before you wrap up? Yeah. Well, I think I think I would just take the opportunity to I guess kind of make an invitation and I don't know how this is actually going to um all pull together, but you know, I have an instinct right now. I mean, times are tough, right? Times are tough in the crypto world, the crypto forgood world, the region world, the refi world, globally, the geopolitics are tough. there's economic challenges, AI disruption, transformation, societal things. And I think that means that it is although those crisises aren't like

oh my neighbor has a flood where you can where the best in human nature usually most people you see somebody who needs help you help them. Like that's that almost all humans respond that way, right? Which is a beautiful thing. But it's harder for us to respond that way, especially with the attention fragmentation and the all and the confusion like how do you show up? Because they're like these long crisises. >> They take place over weeks or months or years.

>> It becomes hard to grasp. So, I just kind of want to give an affirmative invitation to to like be in this together, be in this moment together, to step up and help each other to and also to ask for help. >> I I think, you know, in I think Green Pill is part of Regen Commons. That's amazing. You know, things are happening there. I I think there's a vehicle there to kind of like create some of the community capacity and membranes and usness that I I think are kind of required in a non it's like not the place to do the startup work. It's the place to do the kind of like

>> culture culture >> culture building weaving the culture. >> Yeah, exactly. And I also I would totally if there's if there's listeners out there um you know um if VOW wants to collaborate I mean I'm really blessed over my career to have um been successful enough in different eras of my entrepreneurship to to have the capability to be an owner and a steward of different land different land projects. this one in Ecuador, this one in Massachusetts.

And I'm really always have been all in on the concept of um co-inhabitation and co-management and like having like it's too much for me. I I don't need need that much at all. Um so I think there's a really interesting opportunity right now to ground some of the as yet flighty visions of a movement that have been, you know, that maybe we get a little lost in protocol design or mechanism design or, you know, new financial

mechanisms or new capital allocation protocols and all these different things. Um, and you know, I I applaud Greenpill Community as one of the ones. It's like there's local chapters, there's people doing real work, there's people doing real things, that's amazing. Um, we should all be doing more of that, we should be helping each other do more of that. And if there's people who are in New England or want to be around in New England, you know, hit me up. Um, if there's people who want to be doing agroforestry, regenerative agroforestry stuff in Ecuador, hit me up. Um, and if there's ways to, you know, I think I think what we're iterating towards with region commons, region network, region coordination,

refi dowo, green pill network, um vow and beyond, you know, ethic hub, there's all these amazing projects and protocols and people. We kind of all have started to know each other. We see each other. I think we're starting to see the possibility of what uh people would refer to as a network nation emerge, right? where there's, you know, where you can sort of opt in and have multiple home bases, where you can travel without leaving home, where you don't just have to be like, you know, and you see pop-ups, you see communities form, you you know, Edge uh is doing this kind of work, but it hasn't yet sort of fully

rooted necessarily. I mean, I guess there's a the traditional dream factory in in Portugal, the cool example of this. So, you see it, it's happening. Antonio uh with Rei Siccilia and the work they're doing. It is here. It's there, but we're not quite seeing it like the mcelial um loose but connected. Hey, we're the right amount of plurality. Like it's doesn't need to be everything to everybody, but it's but it's connected enough to be resilient. It's connected enough to be anti-fragile. It's not isolated and disconnected. And there's like a really fun vibrant opportunity and conversation I think that grounds people in places that gets people

working in real world you know uh land stewardship processes but also finds the bigger mission right in which we're trying to you know create that interconnected network that is capable of creating systemic change that isn't that's the anti-fragility that like when we like if we as a movement can absorb the disturbance of this moment and be anti-fragile in the face of that I think that will be our ability to absorb that energy and redirect it towards systemic change that is that really you know hope punk um solar punk

regen punk you know like oh this energy is coming in where iikidoing it up and all of a sudden there is a planet a regenerative vision for our planet in which humans and AI and nature are we're like oh yeah this is good I'm stoked I see this going in a good direction because I feel like I have agency >> in making you know in practical ways to to make good things happen I I think that's only going to be possible with some pretty significant level of coordination and cooperation at the right level. And I, you know, I think some part of that is some smart contracts and some capital allocation protocols, but I also think a bunch of

it is getting done in local places, having local resilience, doing good permaculture work, having local businesses, and just like the m the imminence of of real world regeneration processes being accessible to inform people's everyday experience. Yeah, it really feels like we're we've come full circle here. Like from the beginning when you were talking about like the keystone species and you're talking here about like uh transcending the meta crisis or ultimately building out like coming out of the meta crisis in something better than what was before in terms of our relationship with nature

and just our relationships with the systems we all depend upon. And uh yeah, I think I that's a hopeful message. >> Region is the root solution to the meta crisis. That's my belief. Full spectrum region is the solution to the metacar crisis. And you know that's place-based re regeneration of self and community and soil and forests. It's also willingness to be a techno region and design new protocols and get involved in different things and yeah I mean I think it it's uh it can be fun to surf the wave. It doesn't and and you know it's fun and terrifying but it can be fun to

surf the wave. >> Thanks a lot Gregory for for joining us. It's been really a great conversation and yeah I uh look forward to to chatting again soon. Yeah, thanks Chris. This has been super fun.