What if we could develop a currency backed by the living health of ecosystems? A sort of ‘life currency’ with a robust verification system that would incentivize practices that promote ecological health? What if we could use technology to regain the capacity to understand the consequences of our day-to-day decisions and act for the health of planet Earth? And what would it take to build this infrastructure—a kind of Subway to Regeneration?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, this is the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon, producer Paul at the helm over there, Christophe Jospe with me as always. This is the second post-reversepalooza podcast. Christophe, introduce our guest.
Christophe Jospe: Still kind of basking in the Reversa Palooza glow. Feels great. I hope we’re all feeling it. Sitting across from us is Gregory Landway. He is the founder and CEO of the Regen Network and also of TerraGenesis and really a leader in the field in the regenerative agriculture space and very much a fellow traveler in the blockchain world. So we’re super stoked to have him here on the podcast, learn more about Regen Network and kind of how that integrates into what Nori is doing and how it aligns with Reversing Climate Change, which...
We had the pleasure of first learning about Gregory when we were sadly not at DevCon in Mexico, but he was. And he presented Regen and we’re like, whoa, this is cool. How can we work with these guys? And funny enough, it just so happened that we were in New York City at a consensus gathering for the Blockchain for Social Impact Coalition. We had recently won a hackathon and we bumped into him there. And since then, we’ve been in touch and figuring out how to make all this fit together. So without any further ado, Gregory, I’d really like to start with your story, because here you are on a very similar mission, but how did it all get started?
Gregory Landua: That’s a good question. I mean, I think in terms of this intersection between distributed ledger technology and regenerative agriculture, I was thinking a lot about A year ago, as the crypto markets were starting to surge, I had made a couple investments earlier, maybe a year before that, and I was taking paternity leave for my little guy who was born in April last year. And I was thinking a lot about what would it look like to have a currency that’s backed by the living health of ecosystems in such a way that by transacting, And participating in an economy and exchanging and increasing the value of that currency, you actually created some sort of synergy whereby the living health, the soil, the biodiversity, the water quality was also increased and augmented and grown.
And wow, it seems like such a beautiful potential, right? I was really interested what would it look like to have kind of a holistic lifestyle. And what emerged was a really deep, Yeah. And then I started really digging in and already had a pretty solid understanding about monitoring ecosystems and agriculture through my livelihood for many years has been in the regenerative agriculture space, consulting and design and working with companies and Monitoring metrics is a core part of that. So I had a pretty solid foundation, but I just really dove in to what would a decentralized approach look like to creating trust in ecological health in order to then be able to exchange with that.
The positioning and utility of region network has evolved a lot. We are no longer sort of singularly focused on creating a cryptocurrency that’s backed by ecological health. Instead, what’s emerged is sort of the decentralized protocol layer that makes that kind of cryptocurrency possible. Right. Not in an immediate that’s going to happen today, but in a it’s actually something that could be conceptualized and executed by a team, whether it’s us or other people. And I think that’s where we’re really so excited about. Nori, because what we dug into and started working on, it sort of provides value to what you all are doing too.
Because if we have this robust verification protocol layer, it just makes the Nori token more valuable and more wanted and more useful. And so I think that’s why we’re all sort of sitting here today after the amazing time together at Reversipalooza having a conversation by the waterfront here.
Ross Kenyon: I’m very curious. I’m sure the listeners are too with how a currency or financial instrument can be backed by something like ecological health because we don’t have very much experience with things being backed by anything. Certainly not. Currency is basically a And then besides that, I guess there’s bank notes that were issued. Those are also a form of trust with the bank that issued them. There are things that are asset backed, like the US dollar used to be gold backed in various incarnations. But how could you back it?
Unknown speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Gregory Landua: Right. Because then you get to the place where you’re dissecting the living health of the system instead of improving it. But I think what you were saying there is true. You know, the value of the US dollar, what does it represent? Anybody want to take a crack at that?
Unknown speaker: Debt.
Gregory Landua: So to me, the US dollar represents the continued ability for the US military to exercise hegemononic control. Excuse me, I’m bumbling all over my- Hegemony. Hegemony. Over scarce natural resources, mostly oil. Totally.
Paul Gambill: In order to back then a debt and asset The dollar exists to enable the payment of income taxes, the resources which are then used for activities like that.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, I mean, it’s complex. I would argue that the petrodollar is what makes the dollar worth anything. So its ability to exchange against petroleum reserves that are controlled nominally by the kind of, I don’t know, cabal or whatever you want. We have trust that system is going to be around tomorrow. So if I give you a US dollar, that’s still going to be true because a lot of things would have to change. Although, you know, those things may be changing right now. Lots of geopolitics and craziness happening. But for the time being, we all sort of think, yeah, it’s probably going to continue playing that way.
And even enemies and allies of that system think that it’s going to continue happening. And so we all just sort of continue with the trust. And then we have this whole debt and asset system and taxation system and all these other things. I guess the hypothesis around starting to link trust in ecological health, I think that’s the key is I can’t actually go get anything for my US dollar other than a service or a good. There’s not gold. I can’t dig around and get like a bullet or something that’s like what my hypothesis is, is that creates the trust.
Ross Kenyon: You can pay your taxes though with it. That’s like the one main use case, right? Yeah. It’s so useful. That’s the use case for the...
Gregory Landua: So useful. Well, those taxes are what maintain the system.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. I would take it further and I would make the argument that virtually all of our social problems boil down to really bad monetary policy.
Gregory Landua: Yeah. Well, I think that’s the key and that’s the beautiful potential that this new decentralized cryptocurrency revolution offers is for a lot of smart people to be thinking about monetary policy and to have mechanisms to create financial instruments, instruments of exchange that have different rules and are backed by a different form of trust.
Paul Gambill: And I think the most interesting and exciting thing is we’ve been talking about this the last couple of days at Reversa Palooza about monetary policy and how that affects the actions in the network. And when you look at the policies that are employed by the central banks of all of the developed countries in the world, they’re all pretty much the same. And there’s very little experimentation happening. And so we’re subject to the same bad situations like depressions and crashes and so on. The beauty of cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications and all these different companies that are starting up and trying to build new networks that are doing new and different things is they’re all trying stuff that’s slightly different.
And so there are all sorts of new innovations that we can pick and choose and learn. Yeah, we sort of got into this Right.
Gregory Landua: And I was sort of saying, yeah, and, you know. Yeah. Is that it’s sort of conserving the status quo and the interests that already have control and we get to go out and do our best to create systems of trust and incentive that are firmly rooted in the health of, in our case. So that’s getting back to the original question. What does it mean to be backed by ecological health? I think it means that we trust that the stewards of our lives. We’ll continue having incentive to make those landscapes healthier and healthier so that we as members of the same living system, the same commons, the same planet Earth, the same Pale blue dot in the sky that has this amazing ocean and soils is going to get healthier and healthier and healthier.
That’s what it would be backed by. Not the ability to sort of dissect that value into a fungible, exchangeable commodity per se, but that the stewardship will continue.
Ross Kenyon: Wendell Berry quotes Aristotle as originating this dissection of nature and attributes a lot of mistakes to it. For better or worse, you can disagree with Wendell Berry. He at least keeps things interesting. I never know what to do with the man, if you’ve read him before. I love Wendell Berry.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, yeah. If we could get Wendell Berry to give us some sort of at least a wink and a nod or, you know...
Unknown speaker: Cool kids would like us.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, well, and it would mean a lot to us, but I have the idea that he probably wants nothing to do with the high-tech solutions represented by, you know, the decentralized crypto revolution, but...
Ross Kenyon: You got to say human scale more often. I don’t know. I think there’s things to like about it. And it’s funny that, well, maybe Keith took that attitude with it or whoever came in with that. You said it was Keith that was talking about that.
Gregory Landua: And part of the walkthrough of what is a blockchain and how does it function and the thesis that it’s an adversarial system that then generates some sort of coordinated trust as the emergent property.
Unknown speaker: When people say stuff like that, I never know where Paul’s going to end up on it. Say the joke, Ross.
Paul Gambill: You know what I’m talking about.
Ross Kenyon: There’s an old joke in these circles. What’s the difference between a libertarian and a narco-capitalist? The answer is about two weeks.
Christophe Jospe: So another important sort of libertarian concept, if you will, and you’ve said this word several times already, which is decentralized. Why does that matter for what you’re talking about?
Gregory Landua: How is that relevant to the blockchain? It’s all about trust, right? I think I was trying to hammer this point home harder during the conference. But let’s just say, if we’re talking about trusting ecological outcomes and stewardship as the foundation for a new restorative regenerative economy. And a million different ways that we can create incentives and financial structures and other things that feed that. Trust has to be fundamental and we have to trust the stewardship and we have to trust the information and how we generated that information and the instruments that give If we think about where the high tech industry has gone in Silicon Valley and globally of late, we get interesting things like what happened with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and the last election, which is all about trust, remember?
Elections and democratic process are all about do I trust to exercise my vote, etc. , etc. We have this mass manipulation of big data. And what we’re talking about, if you want to trust what’s happening across the globe where a farmer is producing food for their community and a commodity market, and we’re wanting to create incentives for them to also ensure that carbon is being sequestered into the landscape so that we can turn the tide on global warming, atmospheric carbon drawdown, etc. , We have to be able to trust the flows of data.
That’s fundamental. And when you have a large centralized big data monopoly that’s generating the certifications of trust that are then being used as financial instruments. If that’s the case, then my thesis is or the hypothesis that I’m working with is that actually if we have centralized control over the means to monitor and generate trust about what’s happening. We will have things like Cambridge Analytica manipulating the election happen in agriculture, which means manipulating the very base layer of livelihood, food, and ecosystem health in order for the profit of a few people.
And the fraud will be Yeah, I think that there’s more to add to that. It’s trust can be earned or gained.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. That’s right. And that’s what both of our organizations are so focused on is trying to figure out it’s not that difficult to prove that once the data is stored in a digital form on the blockchain, that’s easy. That’s a trivial problem. That’s what the blockchain solves for us. That’s not an issue. The problem is how do we get the real world data into that digital form and prove that transfer?
Gregory Landua: Right. Which in the blockchain world, there will be people listening who are jumping up and down and going, that’s an Oracle problem. That’s an oracle problem. Well, that may be true. It’s also a people problem. What the distributed ledger really does here is it creates a directory whereby we can trace back who said what and have accountability. Basically, at the end of the day.
Christophe Jospe: We like to define things. What’s an oracle?
Gregory Landua: To me, what an Oracle is, is it’s the interface between the real world and the blockchain. And so it’s a device that we trust, or I suppose it could be a person as well, that we trust to create a signed, timestamped attestation onto the blockchain that then other people are going to use for a variety of different purposes, like smart contracts.
Paul Gambill: I can give you a good example. There’s a blockchain called Wager. They’re a sports betting platform, and they enable people to make peer-to-peer bets against each other on the outcome of a sporting match. They have oracles that are incentivized to pull data from like ESPN.com and other sports stats websites and then upload that into the application that they’ve built. And so those people are supposed to maintain a certain amount of server uptime and that sort of thing. And they’re paid by the network to do so. So the idea is that they’re taking this data that exists somewhere else and they’re getting it into this application so that they can do all the decentralized stuff.
Gregory Landua: That’s right. And in the context that we’ve been just swimming in and that’s been amazing here at Reversa Palooza, we talk about sentinel farms or in the farm OS language, regenerative farm observatories. These are places where you’re creating sort of a hybrid. Highly monitored representative slice of land on a farm where different practices can then be extrapolated out for much less expensive remote sensing and modeling to be able to have trusted attestations on the blockchain to then be able to do things like make a Nori coin or the carbon removal credit.
Paul Gambill: On the last episode, Keith called this precision agriculture. Is that the same thing?
Gregory Landua: Well, I think precision agriculture is this concept applied to extracting every penny from a landscape. This is my bias shining through. So probably there’s a lot of people that it means something different. But when I hear precision agriculture, I think of Monsanto and John Deere and giant swaths of GMO monoculture maze in the Midwest and they’re collecting a whole lot of data and they’re doing it in order to ensure that they can extract every last penny so that their very slim margins on those size of operations are maintained. And they can keep the economic engine pumping.
And so that’s what they’re concerned with in terms of collecting data for precision agriculture. Interestingly enough, we’re bringing to the field many of the same sensors and technologies, but we have a The aim is not around the extraction of the value from the crop per se, it’s around understanding how farmers can steward the holistic health of the farm itself, out of which... The crop is the fruit. To agriculture as kind of the act of stewarding a living system of which we are a part that then becomes the foundation for many businesses to interact with.
And so there’s sort of like how we think about living or natural capital and stewarding that living or natural capital and how that is the future resource base upon which great business can thrive and To me, I think there’s a really deep and fertile exploration, you know, speaking of libertarianism and anarchism between the relationship between the commons and the marketplace and how management of commons and management of markets are deeply intertwined and related. And there’s not really sort of like a, there’s a tragedy of both of them.
Paul Gambill: Anyway, so I used to get really hand wavy and say that what I really love about decentralized applications is that you can solve the tragedy of the commons if you work at it hard enough.
Gregory Landua: And I get hand wavy and I say you can solve the tragedy of the marketplace.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. Did you ever read Eleanor Ostrom? No. Her and her husband died recently, but she’s a Nobel laureate for economics. Her big thing was thinking beyond markets and states. The actual rules that are specific to the institution we’re looking at are really more important than just is this privatized or a public thing?
Gregory Landua: That’s right. Because we consider what we’re doing basically to be a public utility. Essentially, like what we’re creating, it’s like a subway or a road, except for it’s a subway to regeneration instead of a subway to Manhattan. You know, that’s going to be the title of this, right?
Ross Kenyon: You can’t just pitch them over the plate like that.
Christophe Jospe: I’d like to take a step back because we’re talking about regeneration and we’re talking about kind of states or practices or degenerative applications or kind of forces which are causing real problems. So at Terra Genesis, you have all this experience where you’ve taken degraded lands and improved them. Mm-hmm. Obviously, that experience has informed Regen Network because it’s totally aligned. And you mentioned some large companies which are causing problems and are squeezing farmers for every last penny.
Gregory Landua: And just to be clear, if anybody from Monsanto is listening, you know, happy to talk. Go ahead.
Christophe Jospe: Right. And we had someone from Monsanto at our event and actually the doors open for Monsanto to figure out how to insert themselves in this whole space and do the right thing, which I think there’s ample room to do.
Paul Gambill: So we’ve got farmers who... If you could paint a picture for us of how you see all this going down.
Ross Kenyon: Have you got to check in with I’m at the chicken with our PR staff and make sure we don’t go off the rails here.
Gregory Landua: Nothing’s wrong with the world, but there’s plenty of opportunity for evolution and growth always. My apologies. This is not a neatly packaged, like I’m just going to pitch region network here, but this is what I honestly think and believe in the way that I hold this question. So I think Humans have an intrinsic capacity to understand and relate to the landscapes, the soil, the water, the air, the animals, and each other in a health And that culture through a variety of processes over the last at least 10,000 years has been more or less ripped asunder and liquidated on the free market.
And there may be ways that’s been a positive developmental, you know, march towards manifest destiny and glory. And there may be ways that it’s not been. It’s probably both and. But my hypothesis and what I honestly think is that we have this intrinsic quality and capacity as humans to understand that what’s good for the planet is good for us and to act accordingly. And like I said, we’ve lost that at any given individual in our Western civilization. Our society doesn’t normally exhibit those capacities day to day, myself included, because we’re put into places where we’re making decisions that are overwhelmingly complex and we make the best decisions we can in order to protect ourselves and our family and our businesses.
Those don’t necessarily line up with the health of the community and the planet. There’s a vestigial capacity or organ of care for the earth that humans once had. And what Region Network is trying to do is create the technological training wheels to regrow our ability to have that capacity again.
Paul Gambill: That’s beautiful.
Unknown speaker: I love that. Basically, in a nutshell. That was a long nutshell.
Gregory Landua: But what we’re doing is creating the silicon neurological network of connectivity between the human economy and the So that we can deeply understand the consequences of our day-to-day decisions in farming and in oceans and in forestry and all of the other places the nature the world. So it’s like if it were easier for people to...
Paul Gambill: Care for and provide stewardship for planet Earth, then they would do it.
Gregory Landua: I think so. I agree. In a way that reconnects and creates a new sort of culture in which technology is in service to understanding and technology is in service to reconnection instead of technology just being in service to consumption and distraction.
Paul Gambill: We were talking about it earlier at the summit today that it’s the difference between... Society that values or cares about or deals with scarcity as opposed to abundance. And that’s what I think is beautiful about decentralized applications is that we’re creating new abundance for all to share in.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, but I mean, that’s an interesting thing because to me, abundance emerges after you understand the limits of scarcity and then operate within those to grow the abundance. Right, yes. Which is sort of, it’s a paradox.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was going to say something similar. I was worried you’re getting into post-scarcity territory and I was going to finger wag at you.
Paul Gambill: Yes. But yeah, it’s sensible. It’s abstract. This is a weird concept. And if you’re not like deep into thinking about this, this probably doesn’t make sense to you listening right now. Let’s make it more practical. What is Regen working on right now?
Gregory Landua: I’m sure the listeners are sort of familiar with the Nori tech stack and we sort of fit right in there. And what we’re working on is high quality, inexpensive, decentralized verification of ecological outcome. That can be used to do things like improve the quality and assuredness of a carbon removal credit that carbon has in fact been sunk into the soil and that the farmer is enjoying the benefits. Soil health. Yeah. We’re working on like that protocol layer of information about Earth.
Paul Gambill: The use case between Nori and Regen and how we kind of complement each other really well makes a lot of sense. What other sorts of complementary partners have you envisioned or are there?
Gregory Landua: Well, yeah, supply chain applications are numerous. So there’s a lot of people working on just chain of custody blockchain applications so that you can get data about transactions and who did what, but then you need to be able to track that back to the earth and what’s happening on the earth and be able to trace that sort of Yeah. So that’s another place where we’re really excited. FarmOS, which does decision making tools for farmers, where they’re basically creating operating systems whereby farmers are monitoring their own farms, not to be able to prove So that’s another example of a group that we’re really excited to be partnering with and where there’s real world application right now.
The main areas where there’s sort of clear market pull for what we’re doing, it rests in the smart contracting layer of what we’re doing. We have these ecological state protocols that can bring data forward and model it and then say this happened or this didn’t happen that can then move up into a smart contract that can say, like in the land to market example, I envision a smart contract in which a customer can say, I’m going to pay five cents more because the regenerative outcome is on the package. And I’m entering into that smart contract with the company for the next year.
Because I really believe that needs to happen. Or there’s a smart contracting framework in which traders in New York City could buy futures on the soil carbon sequestration potential of the Midwest. Because we could create a smart contracting framework about that and have the models and all these other things. You know, and so that’s where there’s all this excitement. I was recently researching the monetary value of planet Earth. You guys ever done that before?
Unknown speaker: Can’t say that I have.
Gregory Landua: There’s some pretty wild stuff out there.
Paul Gambill: Are you talking about trying to value everything that exists?
Gregory Landua: Gajillions and gajillions of dollars.
Paul Gambill: Just value everything in sum total? Yeah. I have seen stuff like that and it’s difficult. And I think if you look at from a traditional financial asset sort of perspective, the derivatives of everything are like vastly dwarf anything else. It’s infinite, I’m sure. It’s pretty impossible to calculate.
Gregory Landua: Long story short, it’s priceless. But the derivatives, the fruit, the emergent properties, and you know, I’m an ecologist and I’m a systems thinker. So I think I would say it’s the emergent property that you could value, right? It’s the surplus that’s created by the healthy living system. So the food and ag industry in 2018 is estimated to be $8. 1 trillion. That’s really large. That’s huge. So if you combine that with forestry and fisheries, ocean, I think fisheries may be included in that food and ag, I’m not sure. We’re talking about definitely upward beyond $10 trillion.
Certainly. And then if you think about the intrinsic value of Yeah. And open protocols and a decentralized, tokenized system incentivize and create more disintermediated and liquid exchange that increases the health of the systems that are creating those markets.
Christophe Jospe: You’re just throwing all the right words out there. I want to pick up another word you used, which I think is a really important one and kind of key to why blockchain for all this, which was interoperability. Why does that matter? And how could that work?
Gregory Landua: I wish I could channel our CTO Aaron, who’s brilliant and really been digging in on that front. I mean, there’s some way smarter people than I am thinking about interoperability between blockchains. And I think it’s a falsity to say like blockchain equals interoperability because you can have blockchains that don’t talk to each other. That happens a lot right now. Most of them.
Christophe Jospe: And you can have interoperability without blockchains.
Gregory Landua: Correct. So what needs to be true in order for interoperability to exist is There has to be either A, a standard, like a standard logic and schema. Like, you know, we’re all speaking English right now. We have a common language. We can communicate with one another. We can make deals. We can tell stories. The same is true both on the language, but also on how we structure data. So either that or you need sort of like a universal Rosetta Stone approach where you’re considering that there’s going to be a million different ways of doing things in a million different languages, but somehow you figure out how to translate all of them.
And that’s where there’s projects like Cosmos and Polkadot that are sort of working on that level. The tack that we’ve taken is, okay, that’s great. They’re working on that. Brilliant. We want to understand what would a common... Schema for data and ecological protocols and smart contracting look like that would be the most effective state of the art language for running all of those systems that when it’s Operational everybody’s going to go wow that’s really great and then look at the translation points in order to pull things because not everybody’s going to want to jump on so then after we create that we can look at sort of building the bridges with other data silos to run through that so that’s the short answer the long answer is You know, read the white paper and upcoming, we have a paper coming out on the Ceres language.
So we’re actually working on a new language, a new programming language that will basically be ecological data domain specific.
Unknown speaker: You call it Ceres?
Gregory Landua: Ceres. The Roman goddess, not Ceres. Ceres. Our team pronounces it both ways.
Ross Kenyon: Not in hegemony, just getting you all day long.
Christophe Jospe: Talk to us about your team. It’s the Regen Network that all around the world decentralized.
Gregory Landua: We’re a distributors, decentralized team, yeah. We’re actually working on spending a lot more time together. Yeah, there’s I think eight of us working full time right now, three developers. I mean, I sort of dip my toes into that world and guiding from the sort of protocol perspective because I do a lot of work in agro ecosystems and monitoring and things like that. So I’m sort of pretty involved in those conversations, but I’m not a developer myself. We have sort of a chief science officer who’s really managing the protocol development and understanding the variety of different monitoring and protocol systems that are out there, verification methodologies, new technologies that are out there, etc.
And, you know, we have the usual branding and marketing and folks who are helping us communicate the message and Actually, one of the things that I’d love to talk about with region network is our governance model, which I think is really interesting. So we’ve decided after a lot of scratching our heads to not go with A. A, an existing public blockchain like Ethereum, because we really feel like we need to have kind of a domain specific. We’re going to drill in and work on all of the challenges in ecological data and figure that out and then be able to invite people We’ve created a consortium model.
I know there’s some other folks doing it. Most of the consortiums out there, though, are private, like bank consortiums that are sort of running private blockchains. And what we’re doing is sort of a public-private hybrid and proof-of-authority, proof-of-stake hybrid in which we have a limited number of validator nodes so we can keep things quick, but we can also keep them decentralized and trusted. And we can basically invite all the appropriate academic and science institutions, companies, even governments to basically sit in the consortium and have a vote on the state of the blockchain.
And in so doing, we feel like we have the opportunity to create kind of the ecological platform. Absolutely. And have that sense of ownership of it. I think that’s one of the beautiful things with these sorts of consensus models.
Ross Kenyon: I’m trying to wrap my head around and I wonder if maybe this model is maybe just inappropriate for this new tech because a utility, they’re classically like you can’t exclude people from them, right? No one wants a million different poles for power lines going up, but it seems like the Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Paul Gambill: I do understand what you’re saying. I would disagree with Vitalik in the Ethereum model specifically. In fact, he goes way out of his way to try to remove any power and sway that he might hold over the community. I think Ethereum is one of the interesting ones in that the issue I see here is that the networks that we’re talking about, when they initially start out, of course, the founders of it are going to be in the most control when they’re using a consensus mechanism like that. And the only way to move beyond that is for it to get large enough where it is actually decentralized.
This stuff just hasn’t been going on long enough really for anyone to get that far. I think Ethereum is the furthest along. Bitcoin is also, but it’s also completely broken in other ways. So I don’t know if that’s a fair example either. They’re sort of unique and on their own little island. The strategy right now is just do the best you can and time will tell and then be able to adapt as we learn more because no one really knows yet which way is the most effective. And there is no true most effective.
It’s going to be most effective by what criteria?
Ross Kenyon: These are all closest to commons, it seems like. That’s how you say. And by public, they’re permissionless. You can just join or you can quit. You can hard fork off. Right.
Gregory Landua: And we don’t have a permissionless blockchain solution.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s right. Okay. Interesting. Okay, I’m just trying to wrap my head around exactly what you’re describing.
Paul Gambill: That’s really useful for getting parties interested who are otherwise concerned about going totally open source, totally free, totally decentralized on these new networks and getting participants like you talked about $8. 1 trillion food and agriculture, like there is an Mm-hmm.
Gregory Landua: The only thing that people would see is the attestations on the blockchain that they’re choosing to make public about outcomes or whatever else they need to use for smart contracts. Alternatively, we are working and have relationships with the open source and open technology. So we’ll be running everything in an open way and the foundation will be investing huge amounts of money and time into open protocols because we actually think that will be more competitive and more interesting and more useful. We want to be able to run both parallel and give people the choice because, you know, we were sort of digging into this conversation a little bit today with the open source panel at Reversa Palooza, where just the distinction between open source, which you’re talking about the code, right?
The how you build things and how you know how it’s working and open data. And those are not necessarily the same thing.
Paul Gambill: And I would add a third, which is open transparency about your operations and the way that you’re going about it.
Gregory Landua: Governance, decision making. We’re operating an open governance, like a transparent governance system, but a permissioned data system in which you choose what you share and how and with whom and open source code and blockchain. All the source code is all open. If somebody wanted to just clone it, they could. And audit it. Exactly. And the auditing is the key, right? But also, if our thesis is incorrect, but there’s a bunch of good things about what we’re doing, people should be able to fork it and create something that has a better governance model or a better incentive model or whatever it is.
That’s an important part of the decentralized revolution, I think.
Christophe Jospe: So saving a tough question for the end.
Gregory Landua: Oh, great.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, I feel like these have all been kind of tough questions.
Christophe Jospe: We’ve gone deep, but you’re a farmer, correct? I am. And you probably know other farmers. I do. I want you to imagine that I’m also a farmer and I am the most anti-technology, like don’t even talk to me about blockchain. I don’t trust cryptocurrencies. This whole thing is a scam.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Imagine you like a Mennonite beard. Mennonite beard.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. And yeah. Rural Pennsylvania. Sure. Sure. All of that. Convince me why I should care about region network.
Gregory Landua: I mean, first off, I probably don’t want to convince you.
Unknown speaker: That was a great episode. Thanks so much for being here.
Gregory Landua: But I’ll give it a try. I mean, my job isn’t to convince anyone. Really. And, and there’s gonna be, you know, those recalcitrant folks, they have every right to distrust technology. And a lot of times I’m right there with them. So I don’t really want to put myself in an adversarial like evangelist mode here. That’s The reasons why I think it’s going to be beneficial for farmers to be thinking about technology and about how they monitor their own fields and about participating with markets like Nori is that... We need to figure out ways as a society to create more value streams for farmers than just like cheap commodity produce.
When we only value cheap commodity produce, there’s only ever reason for them to extract as much value as possible. And farmers get that. If there’s other value streams such as Somebody could pay you for your data and someone can pay you for your carbon. Then there’s a real business case to start to shift your business model so that you’re behaving in such a way that you’re a creating quality data and be stewarding the landscape for. So what we’re asking is not that people... Yeah. I don’t know how that was.
Unknown speaker: I’m satisfied with that answer.
Paul Gambill: I totally agree with what you’re saying. I think that when we’re talking about this sort of thing, when you’re starting a new business in a totally new way and you’re trying to completely change an industry, you don’t go after your fiercest critics first. Those aren’t your first customers. You go after the people who want to support what you’re doing and then you use them as evidence to say that, look, this is working. This is something that can provide real value to you. Now, maybe you might want to try it because there are other people who have gone in first.
Gregory Landua: What’s the name of that curve where you got the pioneer and then the early adopter and then the general sort of public and then you have the recalcitrant, you know, I’m never going to do this. And then the people who like are super conservative and This has been a great podcast.
Christophe Jospe: I think it’s exciting as our relationship blossoms together. I think to Paul’s point, starting with those who believe in this possibility and are willing to suspend disbelief to say, let’s try this system. And I think it’s pretty obvious. It’s obvious that as Nori advances and as Regen Network advances, we can set something up that has people paying for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and it’s a data query in your system. Using that as evidence to dramatically expand and scale on both fronts, I just think is going to be really exciting.
Gregory Landua: Yeah, totally. It’s super exciting. I mean, I have to say, I’m kind of jealous because the one ton equals one ton equals one ton in the soil or however is just great, simple marketing material. And I’m talking about a whole new vestigial organ of humanity and it’s like, it’s just, man.
Unknown speaker: That was intentional.
Gregory Landua: Thanks guys. Thank you.
