ReFi Generation
Ep. 6 Ecological Benefits Framework with Douglas Gayeton from The Lexicon
In this episode with Douglas Gayeton of The Lexicon we explore the nuances of regenerative agriculture and the lessons gleaned from the organic movement's pitfalls. We discuss The Lexicon's forward-thinking activator model, developed alongside Google, to create a universal framework for ecological benefits. This "Ecological Benefits Framework" is at the integration of sustainable agriculture, regenerative finance & indigenous knowledge.
We dissect the complexities of implementing blockchain technology in environmental initiatives, weighing its potential against its current constraints, and how it might evolve to support a more inclusive and multifaceted approach to ecological restoration.
Our discussion concludes by examining the complexities of blockchain in the food industry, with a case study on Sweet Greens' traceability efforts revealing the unexpected challenges of data sharing and privacy. We ponder the balance between technological reliance and the wisdom of natural systems as we look towards a resurgence and broader acceptance of indigenous knowledge.
Check out more about Ecological Benefits Framwork below:
https://www.canyouchangethefuture.org/
In this episode with Douglas Gayeton of The Lexicon we explore the nuances of regenerative agriculture and the lessons gleaned from the organic movement's pitfalls. We discuss The Lexicon's forward-thinking activator model, developed alongside Google, to create a universal framework for ecological benefits. This "Ecological Benefits Framework" is at the integration of sustainable agriculture, regenerative finance & indigenous knowledge.
We dissect the complexities of implementing blockchain technology in environmental initiatives, weighing its potential against its current constraints, and how it might evolve to support a more inclusive and multifaceted approach to ecological restoration.
Our discussion concludes by examining the complexities of blockchain in the food industry, with a case study on Sweet Greens' traceability efforts revealing the unexpected challenges of data sharing and privacy. We ponder the balance between technological reliance and the wisdom of natural systems as we look towards a resurgence and broader acceptance of indigenous knowledge.
Check out more about Ecological Benefits Framwork below:
https://www.canyouchangethefuture.org/
If I was to look at the crystal ball for you and tell you what's going to happen in 2024,. 2024 is going to be the breakthrough for Indigenous knowledge being mainstreamed. 2024 is going to be the year when we realize that all of the faith that we put in the convention ways to measure things, it turned out didn't get us to where we wanted to go, because we did not value the Indigenous knowledge of the caretakers that had preceded us for thousands of years.
Speaker 2:Welcome to ReFi Generation, the podcast that talks to experts and leaders in the new frontier of regenerative finance to examine how blockchain technology is creating the next generation of environmental and humanitarian initiatives. I'm your host, cash Upton. In today's episode, I had the honor of interviewing Douglas Gayton of the Lexicon. Since 2009, the Lexicon has been a nonprofit working at the intersection of food, agriculture and conservation. We covered broad topics while also digging deep. We discussed the hurdles facing MRV measurement, reporting and verification. We talked about blockchain barriers to entry and the social justice implications regarding the adoption of blockchain technology in the global south versus the global north. I especially appreciate it, douglas' push to look for technologies that further the democratization of society rather than ones that are exclusionary. I thoroughly enjoyed the thought-provoking dialogue with Douglas, and I hope you do too. Hi Douglas, thanks for coming on today.
Speaker 1:It's great to be here.
Speaker 2:I thought your last episode of the ReFi podcast with Monty was fantastic and I don't want to do a repeat of that. But I want to pull on some threads and give a broader picture of what the general ecological benefits framework is right now and then where you see ReFi and blockchain supporting that and then where some of the improvements can be. So yeah, a little overview of what I'd like to cover is just what the Lexcon does for our listeners to understand the components of the ecological benefits framework. Talk about your early work with the organic food movement and the blockchain supply chain that you had mentioned in the ReFi podcast, and then kind of where you see blockchain and ReFi needing to improve or catch up to really be a solid tool for ecological benefits framework.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're an NGO, we're based in California, we are it boggles my mind to say we're 15 years old, and when you're a nonprofit, that's pretty darn impressive, because nonprofits, by definition, don't make a profit. So, therefore, how are you keeping the lights on, from day to day and month to month and year to year? It's usually from grants. It's usually somebody sees that what you're doing is valuable and if that, they're willing to donate money to it. So you're constantly reaching out to get support, both in terms of financial support, but also support from the larger community once you work. So it's a big challenge, you know, but we're 15 years old.
Speaker 1:The area that we focused in for 15 years has really been the intersection of food and agriculture and conservation, and the lens in which we look at things traditionally has been climate change, but that's really broadened in the last few years, mainly because what we've done for the past five years with funding from Google has been an accelerator for good ideas, which we call an activator. It's a model we've created, which is how do you bring large groups of people together for a short amount of time and get them to align and reach consensus on how to approach really big challenges, and then how do you build the tools they can use to when they go out into the ecosystem? So, for five years working with Google, we've had about a thousand companies under NDA working on energy, from food as medicine, to regenerative agriculture and building all sorts of amazing tools. The funny thing, cash, is that they all had the same common denominator, which is that they cared less about certifications and cared more about are we changing the world? And how do you measure that? Like, how do you explain those positive impacts? What's really crazy is I went back to Google and I said I'm going to tell you this is crazy, but it's literally just six words. It's air, water, soil, biodiversity, equity and carbon. So Google and I we stress test that with a whole bunch of companies and that's basically how companies explain their ESG reporting.
Speaker 1:So we decided to apply that to carbon markets and that's where blockchain comes in, because really, if we're going to be gathering data in the most efficient way possible to capture just the wealth of positive impacts that are created by projects, we shouldn't be stopping at carbon. Carbon is a fractional, it's a piece of a larger whole, and that's where we're seeing that now. Cash. We're seeing that people are now talking about biodiversity, but you know, two years from now, you and I might do a podcast and you'd be like Douglas, let's talk about water, right. And then two more years from now, you'll be like Douglas, let's talk about air, right. Because turns out, all six of these things are equally important because they're all connected.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the carbon tunnel vision that has been happening in the space is one that I'm really glad to see ecological benefit framework breaking down. I really loved your Bluetooth analogy and the Repie podcast and the digital handshake for the planet. I thought that was a really interesting way to describe the framework that's being built so that other actors can come in and then build markets, build the data sets and the collection methods, but having a shared commonality.
Speaker 1:Well, you know it's really important whenever you introduce a new idea, you have to be very careful to present it. You have to be careful to present it as not a new idea. The more new, the more disruptive the idea, the more conventional you have to make it sound. In other words, you have to give people correlatives, metaphors that connect your new idea to things that they already know, that they've already accepted, that they already see as commonplace. And so, in the same way that we all have these different ways that we're trying to save the world, you know, what we've lacked is a common framework.
Speaker 1:Imagine if we would all Travel in whatever direction we wanted, but at least agree that we're gonna reach a common destination. Imagine how powerful that could be. And that's why I always use the metaphor of a Bluetooth, because when Smartphones were first invented, they were some flipped, some in a turn, some of it. They were of all different shapes and sizes and and you know, and you know different aspect ratios. They all were taken, but they all needed to talk to a smart appliance on the other side, and Bluetooth created that digital handshake that allowed any smartphone to talk to any smart device. And, ironically, that digital handshake, bluetooth, is a nonprofit organization.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I didn't know that until I heard your episode. That was really interesting.
Speaker 1:So when you think about that, you're like, wow, okay, well, that makes sense, though you know you would need to have some unbiased or, let's say, neutral party to judecate the relationship between Smartphones and smart Appliances. Obviously, you know, bluetooth doesn't tell you what kind of phone to buy. It simply says can we just agree on the handshake? And so all we've been saying to people is, in these, in the complexities of carbon markets that are fracturing and and trying to accommodate now biodiversity credits and and water credits and all these other things, and an ESG reporting and SGGs on the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, and all of these diverse ways of looking at how we explain the positive effects, well, one, can we just agree on a standard way to talk about it, so that they're all in the same, so that there's a parody, so that there's a, that there's a fluency and a shared, a shared language between them.
Speaker 1:That's what the ecological benefits framework is, and that's why I use the metaphor of Bluetooth, because what the electric, what the ecological benefits framework really is? It's just a digital handshake for the planet, which we Thoroughly need and that no one Previous to this had thought to do. So, instead of presenting it as this outlandish, grandiose, impossible idea. We just compared to something that everybody already knows and accepts it's. It's how every phone that they have their pocket works.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, that really is a good way to wrap your head around it and then it it. It also shows that it can be built upon, right? So it sounds like the lexicon is you were always saying how it's still in the develop, like it's still being developed, and On the webinar today, for the end of 2023. It really sounds like next year, in 2024, is when a lot of the the data, like collection methods or like how people are going to be Measuring each of those six different markers, is gonna be more developed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think if you, if you take the metaphor of the, of the, of Bluetooth, you know Bluetooth doesn't tell you what phone to buy, right? I think that the In 2024, the ecological benefits framework, is gonna really be looking at those six dimensions air, water, soil, biodiversity, carbon. How do we measure it? And when we, when we measure the, the amount of something, or the effort, the efficacy of something, how, who are you reporting it to? And how we're reporting it Then, how we verify? And verify that they call that MRV, right. And so how are we and what it basically means for somebody who's not, you know, in a carbon market and buying things? What it basically means is, when we talk about the impacts that we're creating Hopefully positive impacts, right, when we talk about them, how can we say with certainty that they've actually happened? How can we prove it? How can we win, how can we win your trust? And usually we do that by saying that we measured it. And there's two basic types of measurement. There's quantitative measurement, in other words, we have this data you know that we've measured with electronic devices or so on, so forth and then there's qualitative data, which means that we can observe there's an improvement qualitatively, like the grass is greener, the grass is taller right Now. That would be a qualitative assessment. So what we need to do is find a way to take the Quantitative side and the qualitative side and bring them together to help us better understand what these positive impacts are. It's super valuable, right?
Speaker 1:The problem with the quantitative part, the measuring part, is that it turns out that it's expensive.
Speaker 1:In many cases it turns out that it might require technical expertise that some people don't have.
Speaker 1:So suddenly, if you're in the global south, wow, you actually can't do that technical Measurement or you don't have the expertise to do it or the money to do it. So suddenly, even though you might be doing something just as valuable Assumming the global north the marketplace is not going to recognize you for the great things that you're doing, because the traditional ways of Establishing trust and verifying trust are all these things that you can't afford or you can't do. But you have all these qualitative methods that you can use to express and to warrant the value of something that you're doing. But if the marketplace doesn't understand what these qualitative measurements are, they can't value them. We need to help people understand that there's different ways for us to measure how we're creating positive impacts, and that's what we're going to be doing with the ecological benefits framework in 2024. It's really figuring out how we explain that so we can provide greater trust, greater value for people, regardless of the ways that they're using to measure things.
Speaker 2:That's really cool. Yeah, I especially loved what you said about with oral histories. Adjectives are how to measure and they're like a measuring stick. I think that is really valuable to not just be quantitative data numbers like number data but the qualitative side too, and then that brings into the picture a little bit more of the indigenous knowledge and those relationships in the global south.
Speaker 1:I think we're going to see. I think 2024, if I wish to look at the crystal ball for you and tell you what's going to happen in 2024, 2024 is going to be the breakthrough for indigenous knowledge being mainstream. 2024 is going to be the year when we realize that all of the faith that we put in the conventional ways to measure things, it turned out, didn't get us to where we wanted to go, because we did not value the indigenous knowledge of the caretakers that had preceded us for thousands of years. So we should not trust the tools that were derived from an extractive economy. We should trust the tools that have come out of thousands of years of curation and stewardship. I might want to look at those tools more closely.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really liked how you were asking how do we take the custodians of the world's biodiversity and reward them?
Speaker 1:Well, we're not doing that now.
Speaker 2:No, we're not. I really do want to pull on the MRV topic a little bit further because a lot of my past episodes that has been the roadblock that has been either monetarily not effective or too burdensome. So, as you're in the space talking to these case study projects that you've worked with, where is the MRV space moving? Is it the MRV decentralized? Is it reliant more on satellite and AI? Where do you see that progressing?
Speaker 1:Well, I think that all data is good up to the point where it stops you from being able to make iterative decisions. So when you become overly reliant on data, you're screwed. And I'll give you an example. When we did our first work in regenerative agriculture, we gathered all these soil scientists together to figure out how we were going to measure and explain the benefits of regenerative agriculture, and I kind of left them off to themselves to work it out. And a big mistake, because I came back and about a month in I realized they were talking about seven year test plots with transects and soil samples and they would come back to me in 10 years.
Speaker 1:And it was a problem because it was regenerative agriculture and we had, like, the largest food service companies in the world and Whole Foods and all these buyers ready to make purchases that had a stamp that's a regenerative on it. So too much data, it turns out, might not be a good thing. We don't have seven years to wait anymore. That would have been great in 1996. But now it's 2024, which means that we need to be thinking iteratively. In other words, we are going to make decisions based upon the data that's available and just start moving and be flexible enough to iterate, to pivot when we get better data. But we cannot be forced down a path of only using a certain type of data and only trusting data.
Speaker 1:Have you heard these people at gatherings talking about the sequestration of carbon, whether it's 99 or 999 years? I find all these conversations to be so hilariously so inane and so not understanding the disaster that we're in. These are the frogs that get boiled in the pot. We need to be doing actions now and be prepared to replace them with a better action when the better action comes. But we can't be waiting and arguing over what path to take without moving, making movements. We have to be moving forward, but not just in the area of carbon and the area of biodiversity loss, because the crazy thing about carbon and the myopia of carbon markets is that when we talk about biodiversity loss, each time it happens it's a forever event. When something's gone, it's gone. It's not like you rehydrated, it's gone. Of course, somebody will say to me yeah, but now we do cloning and genetics and so on and so forth and we can now eat pterodactyl hamburgers.
Speaker 1:But the point is that when we have these extinction events, it's gone. So you can't tell me that biodiversity loss is less important than climate change. We have to attack all of these things at the same time, working iteratively. The first way to do that is to identify what a positive effect is. Then the second way to do that, the second thing which you've done, that is, how do I then take that information and present it in a way that's attractive to a buyer? Then the third thing is how do I educate all across the different classes of buyers there are? How do I educate them to understand what it is that they are looking at, why it's valuable and why it would be reasonable to think that they would want to support that financially? So it's all things you've got to do in a sequential way that starts by first moving forward iteratively, right.
Speaker 2:I really liked the concept of impact and wanting to see the result of something. I liked your story about working in the early parts of the organic food movement. In the last episode you did you said your regenerative agriculture work was to address the wrongs you had done in the organic space. I'd love to just unpack that a little bit. Where has organic fallen short and how does ecological benefits framework readdress that?
Speaker 1:Well, first of all, if you and I were pushing a shopping cart down an aisle at the market and you said to me, hey, douglas, don't forget, you've got to get some peanut butter, I would reach for the organic peanut butter first. My 16-year-old is going to want the GIF, but you can't fight that. But I'm not even going to think about it. I'm just going to think my God, organic, it is so much better. Set of farming practices that leave better outcomes, water quality you don't have all of these pesticides that leach into waterways, and phosphorus and nitrogen that come up to Mississippi River and create dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, obviously, we're going to always choose organic food, but the thing about organic food is that it's very imprecise In that first of all, it asks you to do a series of practices all at the same time and then you get a certification. The reason why really at 1% total organic certification in American agriculture after 30 years of fighting so hard is because of the fact that asking somebody to do 19 things and then you get them a certification is actually not how the world works. How the world works is that I get a lot of money and I implement a practice because somebody can tell me how to do it, they have the expertise or I have the equipment to do it, or I'm going to get a price premium for doing it, and I keep on editing practices as I go, and that's called the path of continuous improvement. That's actually how human nature works, actually how farming works.
Speaker 1:Or, if you look at globally, like fisheries right, that's any sector of the food space where they try to create improvements. It's always an incremental set of improvements over time, which is called the path of continuous improvement, and so the organic movement never understood that you have to create an on-ramp for somebody to transition from what they're doing conventionally to something where they're going to get a reward and to take into account that's going to happen over time. They never figure that out. The regenerative movement is very misunderstood, and part of it is because it talks about a series of practices but again, they don't really get it. For example, what a lot of people don't understand about regenerative agriculture is that you can use Roundup. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:I had no idea.
Speaker 1:Well, sure, because organic agriculture is very clear about how you need to deal with weeds. You have to weed them by hand or mechanically, like whatever it is, but regenerative agriculture prioritizes not tilling the soil, in other words, not breaking that source of the soil.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and releasing the carbon.
Speaker 1:You've got to find some way to get rid of those weeds if you're not tilling, and so what people often don't understand is that you're actually doing that chemically right.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Yeah, I never thought about just pulling a weed out of the ground as being a method of tilling. It's very minimal tilling, but you're right, you are still, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm talking about the extremes. So then there's regenerative, organic, certified, right, but then that's even crazier because yet you're regenerative and organic. So if only 1% of farms are organic and then you're talking about regenerative, organic certified, that's going to be 0.005 of 1%. So we're not going to be changing the world with regenerative, like certification, right, we need to have different models. Now, what's ironic about all of those things regenerative, organic, organic, regenerative if you were using the parlance of software, that's middleware. That's all these orthodoxies that argue about different ways to do different things, but none of those are designed to explain the outcome and therefore what happened, the positive impacts that resulted, and that's why we need to really focus only on what are the positive impacts that resulted from our actions. It's almost like a by any means necessary taking into account that every farm and every geography is different, so everything should be place-based anyway. It's like taking into account that we need to focus less on the orthodoxy like these are the practices I'm doing, these are the practices you're doing. Let's argue about those practices. Instead of doing that, we should say let's talk about what are the positive impacts created by what we're doing? What are we doing that is healing the planet, how are we changing the world for better? And something like a necrological benefit framework allows you to show hey, these are all things I'm doing. This is how I'm improving air quality, this is how I'm improving water quality, this is how I am building healthy soil.
Speaker 1:It actually gets at the point of the whole thing. It would be like saying I want you to take this massive test in order for you to get into college and then it turns out that the score of the test is nothing matters. It just matters your penmanship. It's like you'd be like well, hang on a second. Why does the penmanship matter? What matters is how well I did on the test, what the score was and what it said. No, no, no, I just want to focus on whether you crossed your T's properly and dotted your eyes. I want to only focus penmanship. We're missing the point here. We're not seeing the larger challenge that we're facing, problem at hand, and that all of our activities should be focused on the positive benefits and the outcomes that come as a result of our activities.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, and I love that positive mindset. I mean, it is easy to get gloomy in this catastrophe, but to have that framework. I loved what you said about you guys don't do crisis pornography and your solution oriented right and the solutions explain the problem in it by saying what the solutions are. So I love the idea of yeah, you're choosing between two different organic peanut butters. Well, you can look at the ecological benefits framework and see that this one brand was actually able to increase biodiversity tenfold. It increased water quality and all the others. You can actually see metrics of how it had an impact rather than just saying yeah, it got the certification.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the problem. Originally we're called the lexicon. Originally we were the lexicon of sustainability, but the term sustainability is fraught with. It's very problematic. I'll give you an example. You could say that you're a sustainable food company and you could point to the fact that all of your farmers are using all of these practices that are really great in every way. And then your package is entirely plastic. But yet on the surface of things, that you're a sustainable food company because all these regenerative things that you're doing.
Speaker 1:And then it's like when you go and you buy these organic milks at the market that are a cardboard carton within a plastic screw at the top of the carton that you unscrew in order to pour your milk out. Well, that paper can't be recycled anymore. It's getting plastic in it. So therefore, you're literally creating a landfill object that is housing an organic milk. So why can't a holistic model be applied to that? I think it's, so we can explain that in a more holistic way. What are the benefits of our activities? There's something called the circular economy that starts to do that, but the circular economy, unfortunately, is, as is true, cost accounting. They're based upon identifying negative externalities and just doing less. Bad. But all of these models of doing less bad are not as powerful as a model of doing more good.
Speaker 2:Now I really resonate with that one. I'm locally in Santa Barbara, I'm the president of the Central Coast Green Building Council and we're doing a big push to do carbon lifecycle analysis and you have the operational carbon of a building once it's up and running, but you also have all of the ingredients and components and transportation costs to get into it. And I was thinking about how the ecological benefits framework would be applied to the building industry and it really makes you think about a lot of things like even in the solar industry, while you're doing massive solar farms in the desert and destroying biodiversity or you're putting them on existing rooftops, one's going to have a better impact on the environment than the other, absolutely, and I think also, you know, I think the built environment will probably be like the next large push of a VBF after the commons launches in the middle or maybe in the fall of 2024.
Speaker 1:The built environment really, we need to rethink how we look at the built environment and you know, the reason why we have these an architectural model and an urban planning model that prioritizes cars and doesn't prioritize public space is because we're not really thinking holistically in terms of you know, what are the benefits of clean air, of water, Like we're not looking at, we're not using principles like, let's say, biomimicry, to understand how to have a better built environment and a better relationship with nature, and I think that it's because we don't have the tools to express what those positive impacts are.
Speaker 1:We just need to change our relationship, not only, you know, with the objects that we buy and consume and the places we live, but also with ourselves, and we need to identify activities that we do that lead to positive effects, because we haven't done that before and it's amazing to me that we haven't. But I think that's also why so many different people have joined EBF across the spectrum of activities that were traditionally only focused on carbon markets but increasingly not be much more holistic in terms of how people are looking at the problems and the challenges that we need to address.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah, I think the EBF model does bring in a lot of people from a wide variety of spaces, and that's really exciting to see. Before we finish up today, I'd love to just talk a little bit about your experience with blockchain and kind of where you see blockchain. In the ReFi podcast episode, you talked about doing some food supply chain in the early days and I think you said right by L, right by L, yeah, yep. And so what was what did that look like and kind of what were some of those shortfalls that could be improved upon?
Speaker 1:First of all, I want to make clear that when we talk about blockchain, we're talking about the same thing, right? So blockchain for me, is just a pipe, a ledger, yeah, and so I don't have any romantic notion about blockchain as a cure-all. I would if it was ubiquitous, if it was, if it didn't have barriers to entry. The global south is not able to engage in activities that use technologies in the same way they're used in the global north, so I am really about technologies that democratize and technologies that are open. Yeah, having said that, in 2017, sweet Greens, which is a restaurant chain based on the east coast, but now they're all over the US. It's kind of like the fast, casual place where you can go and you can get a salad made on the fly, you know. And so, in the same way that Chipotle, where you go and you custom make your burrito, at Sweet Greens you can custom make your salad, right, and so all those ingredients are really best in class ingredients, and Sweet Greens is a very serious company, very serious about quality, and so in the Eastern Seaboard, specifically in Massachusetts, boston, they really wanted to have everything that was in that salad come from local farmers and they wanted to be able to tell the story of those ingredients so that their customers could really understand that, when they bought something from Sweet Greens, that they were buying ingredients that were validated in terms of what they were about, right. And so I was approached by RightBio, which was probably the first blockchain company in the food space, to help them map that out. And what they did was they made an agreement with Sweet Greens where they were going to take a set number of farmers in that area of New Hampshire and Massachusetts and they were going to blockchain and put all these sensors in the ground with all of the produce and to be able to track it from the ground to harvest, post-harvest farm and truck to the distributor all the way to the Sweet Greens.
Speaker 1:And a number of things were learned in that two year. First two years. One is that, wow, that's really expensive. Who knew? Two, hey, who's paying for all this stuff, right? Three, it turns out that Farmer A now has the ability to see when Farmer B plants his tomatoes, and so it turns out that data is a trade secret. So you had people not wanting to have their data known because it would give an idea of when they were applying fertilizer, how much water they were applying, when they were applying it, when they were planting, when they were harvesting All of those trade secrets that Farmer A had, farmer B could now see.
Speaker 1:And secondly, if you want to be in a program like that and you decide that you're going to pay for all the sensors yourself in order to make yourself more attractive to be bought by sweet grains, you're going to suddenly realize how am I going to recoup the cost of all of the data sensors that I put in the ground to gather the stuff of the blockchain?
Speaker 1:You're not going to want to recoup that. So are you going to sell your data? There's like how are you going to get that money back? And so when people say blockchain, they throw it out like a term as if somehow, and then we put it on blockchain without understanding that there's a cost in putting any data in any format that can be used by somebody else, and that data essentially lays bare to anyone who wants to see it how you're doing something and that might be a trade secret. So there is their data privacy considerations, data cost, all of these things. When people say to me talking about blockchain, I often just say to myself they don't have the slightest thing that they're talking about, because in the real world application of it it's expensive and it comes with a granting of information that might exceed the benefit that the person with that information derives from sharing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really love that nuance take and that's really great to hear that kind of like sober experience with it. I heard someone say recently, reading information on the blockchain is a public good, but writing to the blockchain is still a privatized action that you need to pay for.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you should also keep into account this too. You should keep it. You should take into account that, while we're sitting here talking about blockchain, these things are inevitable, right, it's inevitable that data will be armchained it's inevitable, right? It's inevitable that, in the same way that when a word processor first appeared, the maker of the typewriter might have said for the first six months, these type, these word processes are never going to catch on. We all have typewriters and then the typewriter disappeared, it's like when the first six months of AI and everybody's like AI, we're not going to allow, we're going to make all these rules. We can't use that. Give me a break, right? Genies don't go back in bottles, and so blockchain, of course, is going to be ubiquitous. It's just that it's not the panacea, right, it's not the solution, it's not just something you say well, blockchain therefore, okay, that's all worked out. Blockchain's expensive. There's all these data considerations to take into account, but we have not solved the problem of the data divide between the global north and the global south, and we shouldn't underestimate the importance of that.
Speaker 1:As I said to you at the beginning of our conversation, I think that 2024 is going to be the year of indigenous knowledge, where people finally start pushing back on the hubris of all of these Web3, blockchain, crypto people in the global north saying that they know more, like DMRV. Listen, I've had enough about DMRV. I want to know about IMRV, I want to know about indigenous measurement, and that's what's going to happen in 2024. It's going to be a massive, massive pushback against technology. Knows all. It doesn't know all. It only knows what it knows.
Speaker 2:I love it. No, that's a great perspective and the trade secret argument that you mentioned it kind of makes me think about that, the other side of it, with open source software and how is indigenous knowledge shared versus the privatized trade secrets? It seems like indigenous knowledge is something that is more. They want to share it, or I mean there's a need to share it, but how it gets shared, I think will be interesting to see, and how we do reward the stewards of the earth that are doing the good work on the ground.
Speaker 1:It's going to start happening in 2024. It's starting to happen now. It's like open source Things are open source until there's money. Then, all of a sudden, they're not open source anymore, and so we have to examine all of these things that we've held as kind of truths, and we have to realize that everything is iterative, that everything's on the table and we're in a time of tremendous tumult and we need to not consider anything to be settled, science or a subtle way of doing things. Everything's on the table. Everything's on the table and the best ideas are going to win, and the way that the best ideas win is and how the bottom takes over the top in the system. It turns out that Uber was not created by a bunch of taxi company executives and had a different idea for taxi cabs, just as Airbnb was not created by hotel executives that had a better idea for hotels. If we're thinking that OPEC nations, if we're thinking that oil companies, if we're thinking that large financial institutions are going to solve the climate crisis, then we're idiots.
Speaker 2:All the money.
Speaker 1:And we're crazy. It's going to be these rogue ventures that come from the bottom that completely ignore the existing systems that everyone is bought into and created a completely different model that everyone understands to be simple and clear and straightforward and replaces what preceded it. But it's going to start from going to the guides that we can learn from. Whether it's from nature, looking at bi-memcry, whether it's looking at indigenous people who have 5,000 years of understanding how to steward natural resources, I would bet on them. That's who I bet on.
Speaker 2:Hey man, I love it. Now, that's very well said, and I always wanted this podcast and not just focus on blockchain, as the end will be. Also, I really appreciate that thought and that is something that I'm going to want to continue to focus on Hopefully be falling along with EBF over this next year and hopefully talking to more of the players that are not just looking at blockchain but the holistic tool set.
Speaker 1:Great. Well, it's going to be a journey, I can tell you.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, I'll direct our listeners to the lexicon and put some links in the show notes. Anything else that our listeners can do to support the work you're doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always end every conversation by asking people can you change the future? So, when we launched EBF on the web, it's at can you change the futureorg. Because really that ends up being the ultimate question, because if you're not, then you might want to reconsider what you're doing. If you're not trying to change the future, who else is going to do it? Because we already know that the people that preceded us turns out they haven't changed the future. When gasoline is $5 a gallon, then you know that there are certain people who we are looking to that are going to help guide us into the next stage of our evolution. They're actually not, so there is no one coming, it's just us. And so we need to discard these models that have proven to be wholly ineffectual and we need to embrace new models that are going to lead us out of the state that we're in and start to regenerate the systems and replenish the systems that we've so thoroughly depleted over the past 12,000 years.
Speaker 2:I love it. Yeah, the ultimate human podcast that I just started listening to quote he has is aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort, and we all need to be happy with being a little uncomfortable to push the needle. And I'm glad you're on the refight generation because we are going to the next generation and it's been really exciting to talk to you today, douglas, so thanks so much for your time.
Speaker 1:All right, absolutely Thank you very much.
Speaker 2:Thanks to Matthew Patrick Donner for the refight generation production, including the music mixing and editing. As a reminder, none of this is financial advice, and feedback is the breakfast of champions. Please subscribe to our show and send your thoughts, critiques and ideas for future content. Be well, take care of each other and do something good today.