Today, Jon sits down with Ross, Christophe, and Paul to share the idea behind Starfish Mission and explain his interest in both blockchain technology and ecological projects. He discusses his vision for a regenerative economy that functions appropriately rather than dumping an expense (e.g. nuclear waste disposal) on the rest of us. Jon offers insight around the potential to regenerate and flip land, the restrictions on silvopasture in the US, and the need for inclusion in the blockchain/ecology movement.
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: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We are in Starfish Mission in San Francisco. It is a very cool blockchain hub, co-working space, a lot of other innovative ways of connecting tech people. It’s a very cool spot. We got to hang out in here a little bit before you arrived here, John, and got a look. It’s a cool space. Christophe, why don’t you introduce our guest?
Christophe Jospe: This might be the first soundproofed room we’ve recorded in. Also with a trippy light that’s changing colors. So that’s cool. Sitting across from us is John Connors. He’s community management at Starfish Mission here in San Francisco. I’m really excited to have this conversation because John kind of checks all the boxes. He’s involved with blockchain. He’s involved with pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through the regenerative economy. And he’s involved basically saying this is a non-rivalrous, like let’s all do this together. We’re all on the same team, which totally aligns with our philosophy and the Kool-Aid that we like to drink.
Ross Kenyon: Can we guarantee that he isn’t pandering to us right now? It’s a little too accurate.
Christophe Jospe: A little too weird. Yeah.
Jon Connors: Okay, great question. The genesis block of Bitcoin was started because of the failure of the banking system in 2008 slash 2009. And I got my master’s degree in financial statement analysis and securities valuation. And my second week of school, Lehman Brothers collapsed. So all the money I took out that $50,000 for an executive program to become a banking analyst in Wall Street, there’s 40% less analysts today than when I started. So the same genesis block that turned, you know, cypherpunks into... So, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: And now you feel like you have a little bit more control, more agency. You have this hub going up here. You feel like it’s inspiring you to know that there are things you can do and specifically to do within the intersection of blockchain and ecological projects.
Jon Connors: Yeah, well, I’ve been an activist. Yeah, not much of what you said is not totally untrue or unfair.
Unknown speaker: Ooh, John laying the bait all over the place with that comment. Where do you...
Christophe Jospe: You want to go from there. I have a question. You used the big word, disintermediate. What does it mean? Why does it matter?
Jon Connors: Well, it’s taking out the middleman. I’ll use the example of the Pentagon and their issues with the budget. If the Pentagon, behind every single node and a bunch of bases around the country, decided to keep their budget on a hyper-ledger blockchain, They wouldn’t have $21 trillion gone that we can’t find anywhere. So the intermediaries in this instance potentially are corrupt agents who are siphoning from our taxpayer base due to a perpetual warfare-based game. And blockchain could at least check and balance those intermediaries, if not completely eliminate a bunch of administrative staff, leading to a much more transparent system and a Pentagon that works for us all.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a tough act to follow. You got a lot to say. Okay, let’s go back to the basics. We’ll come back to this. What is happening here at Starfish Mission? Why does it get you out of bed every day? What do you like about it?
Jon Connors: That’s a great question. So it is a little Jedi temple. This place has had 84 events in five months. We’re the antithesis of a 2017 ICO. We get the job done on a super small amount of capital, and we actually observe things first. We don’t centrally plan decentralized economies. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Hard to get any traction with that origin paradox.
Jon Connors: Yeah, no question.
Christophe Jospe: I was just going to add, it feels like you’ve got the Silicon Valley mentality that sort of let’s incubate startups and see how they work first and not just throw people out into the wild.
Jon Connors: Yeah, build, measure, learn. You know what I mean? Token ecosystems may take on a complete different life of their own. You know, we’re not a speculative space. We’re not a place where people come and just talk about their speculative instrument. We’re a developer-focused community hub. And we have conversations about real limitations of the technology, about real philosophical perspectives of the space. I’m one of the more radical members here. Other people are a little more middle of the road, but we’re all tied together to create a better world with using this technology.
Ross Kenyon: And then where does ecology fit into this? Where regenerative agriculture and regenerative economy?
Jon Connors: Yeah, great question. So ever since I got my master’s degree in basically reading company financial reports, if I pulled up a financial report of a nuclear company and I look at their balance sheet and nowhere in their balance sheet shows me a 10,000 year expense with which they’re going to hold their nuclear waste for a 10,000 year period. I see a whole lot of bullshit profit because they have a huge loss with an expense that’s off the balance sheet and put on the rest of the world. So when I heard about blockchain, I heard about the possibilities and started to understand it from a business analyst perspective.
I was like, oh my goodness, we can actually take externalities, at least with positive players first, put them back onto the balance sheet of goods and services of probably better players first, like the eco-elite purchasing regenerative products or something like that, and got really excited about the possibility of having an economy that actually functions, not one that dumps expenses on the rest of us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you were saying that you went on some bike trip and you were looking at ground that was fallow and saying, so what’s the turnaround to rehabilitate land that’s been depleted of carbon and other nutrients?
Jon Connors: First, I’ll give some context on the bike ride. It was called Cycle to Evolve. After going from finance to activism in New York, I didn’t have a lot of capital and I was sick of New York. And so I got on a bike, lived off 15 bucks a day, went across the US and landed on a permaculture farm in Ojai called East End Eden. After being there for about 11 weeks, I’ve had a few bucks to my name and decided to research as just a business school kind of research project, the real estate prices of Central Valley to see if we could use these permaculture slash regenerative agricultural techniques and flip this land from crappy fallow land, as you mentioned, to lush, beautiful land.
It would depend on the actual location of land, how much water there is, as far as exactly what type of crops or whether... We’re going to go silver pasture or what type of techniques we’re going to use as far as how long of a time horizon there’d be for flipping it from a fallow land. But between seven to 10 years would be a reasonable expectation where you could take land that’s about $15,000 an acre, at least those are 2016 figures, and potentially flip them in a 10-year time horizon plus inflation at around a $30,000 an acre price.
So double the price, but not a huge VC price. Return on investment, you know what I mean? But something that certain private equity funds might be interested in.
Ross Kenyon: How would you even begin that? And what’s Silvopasture? And how do you use these mechanisms and techniques for rehabilitating land?
Jon Connors: I’m more the business guy, the business analyst figuring out the business use case than I am the farm expertise guy. I have enough passion and enough connections in the farm expertise side and the best organization doing it is called Farmland LP. They’re taking industrial ag land and making it somewhat profitable slash manageable until it flips to organic land, which usually there’s a three-year time horizon for that. So I was taking their perspective for organic flipping and using instead a regenerative perspective where we can actually increase the soil carbon, we can increase biodiversity on the edges, and we could also increase water in the water table.
Ross Kenyon: Did anything come out of it or was it more exploratory?
Jon Connors: I had hoped something would come out of it. I finished the bike ride and ended up doing a webinar with not a huge attendance and chose to put that project down as I needed to get a bite to eat.
Ross Kenyon: You learned that maybe that wasn’t the best use of your time. You had to find ways to say no to things. There’s nothing but opportunities to say no to. We’re very careful with our time too. So maybe you did the right thing there. I hope so. I also like those bike trips. When I moved to Los Angeles years ago, I rode my bike from Phoenix. That was the longest bike trip I went on.
Jon Connors: That’s a hot one. That’s through the desert.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was pretty hot. Some of those days I had to leave super early in the morning, like three or four in the morning. I was riding on these spooky two lane roads in the middle of the desert in California. I was listening to The Handmaid’s Tale. I had to turn it off. It was too scary to listen to.
Jon Connors: Were you alone?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was alone. I was carrying everything too. I still miss it. Those days of bike riding were very peaceful and pleasant. I’m sure you have a lot of nostalgia for that.
Jon Connors: Yeah. And getting to see different bioregions and sleep in the dirt. And I thought I could forage, but I could forage in the Northeastern ecosystem. And now that I’ve been here two years, I can forage a little bit in the Western ecosystem. I didn’t plan how much wisdom and knowledge would be needed for different ecosystems along the way. So I was like, I can’t eat these plants. I have no idea whether I’ll die or not. There’s only one way to find out.
Ross Kenyon: Build, measure, learn, right? Yeah. That’s a tough one to apply that paradigm to.
Christophe Jospe: You’re still here, so that’s good. It worked out. So you mentioned silvopasture. That is the introduction of animals on cropland. Yeah. And it can look many different ways. Actually, I hadn’t known about it until I read Project Drawdown and saw that as one of the solutions that they talked about. It makes a lot of sense. Sometimes people call that agroforestry, which can get a little confusing, but let’s add the I was on a farm a couple months back in Minnesota, and it was tree-range chickens. So you basically had chickens going around on the farm.
They were... Defecating and improving the content of the soil and increasing the soil organic carbon. One of the interesting problems though is the chickens are killed by bald eagles and so the bald eagles- The trees give the bald eagles a place to nest and root. The trees give them a place to nest and like, So it’s this wonderful thing, but it’s like, it’s not all rosy in the regenerative space, right? Sometimes eagles will just come down and kill your chickens and it’s, you’re trying to do the right thing. And so maybe you’re better off keeping those chickens in a coop, but we don’t like that because that produces all other bad environmental challenges.
So it’s just one of those things. You got to pay attention to all of the inputs and outputs and see where you’re going with this.
Jon Connors: And then, okay, well, if we can account for this in a I don’t know about that piece, but the one thing about Silvopasture I have a real issue with is the FDA has kind a way of preventing... So silvopasture is far more profitable.
Unknown speaker: Sorry, so we hate acronyms. That’s the Food and Drug Administration.
Jon Connors: Food and Drug Administration. Thank you. Thank you. Great call. So the FDA makes it where if you have animals underneath your tree crops, they have to wait nine months before the crops are harvested because they’ve stated it could potentially be a biohazard for that very lush and fertile poop. That’s going into the soil to make the soil carbon much more rich, to fertilize the soil. But you can spray shitty chemicals and fertilizers the day before on your orchard before harvest and there’s no sanctions on that such behavior. So silvopasture is a very profitable way of running an orchard because you have both the orchard crops plus the animal meat, potential milk if you’re using milk and or eggs if it’s chickens like you said.
And then if you have to have an orchard with nine months of time where you don’t have those extra inputs, you’ve decreased the profitability of it. And I wanted to do like a straight up people’s campaign to legalize silvopasture, you know what I mean? But no one gets it. Yeah, you want to eat food grown in poop, you freak.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Hell yeah, I do. Straight nasty. It’s beautiful.
Paul Gambill: So wait, does that mean that people are not operating silvopasture farms in the US? They are either going under the radar and saying F the rules or they’re waiting the nine months timeframe with which to- So they remove the animals from the land, at which point- For a significant portion- Wait, I wouldn’t call it silvopasture anymore at that point. It’s just farming then, right?
Jon Connors: Well said, yeah, yeah. Three months at silvopasture.
Paul Gambill: So silvopasture is not legal.
Jon Connors: Full 12 month Silvopasture.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, no, it’s not legal. For anything though, it’s not just related to the organic label or something like that, or you can’t do a CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, you can’t do something like that.
Jon Connors: I was more involved in understanding the subtle nuance details in 2016, 2015. I’ve been more immersed in the blockchain side of things lately, so I don’t have those details.
Ross Kenyon: You’re a very generous redirector too. You’re like, I don’t know enough about this particular thing, which is a good quality. No one likes a BSer. I think everyone can tell when someone’s just rambling.
Jon Connors: Thank you, Russ. Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: We’ve certainly met our fair share already in San Francisco. Here we are at the Global Climate Action Summit. Oh, okay.
Ross Kenyon: Transition to blockchain.
Christophe Jospe: What’s blockchain for ecology? What’s that all about?
Jon Connors: Well, actually, the first blockchain for ecology, we had you on, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. This is my second time here at Starfish.
Jon Connors: Yeah. Welcome back, bud. Basically, I was using the permaculture principle of capture and store energy during the Regen 18 conference. And I was like, oh, I want to do a blockchain for ecology event during that conference while people are in town hanging out. And I gave Regen Network. I gave you guys at Nori. I gave Black Sheep and New Mundo, 15 to 20 minutes to speak about their visions here to an audience of about 75 people, I think, came up.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, sounds right. Yeah.
Jon Connors: And it was really intrigued by your guys’ vision. It was before you put together your very unique raise strategy. I haven’t seen anyone in the space doing what you guys are up to. But yeah, and the consistency with Blockchain for Ecology, it’s more like a marketing vehicle with which people can understand unique organizations that are solving ecological problems using blockchain, which like I’ve told you before, Nori’s organization, you guys are The most fundable, the most understandable Blockchain for Ecology play out there.
Paul Gambill: Let’s put that quote review right on our website. Nori, the most fundable project.
Ross Kenyon: Can we go through those other projects you’ve named? I’m not sure. We’ve discussed Regen.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, we’ve had Regen on and we’ve partnered with Regen and very much fellow travelers specifically.
Jon Connors: I think they have the best thought leadership on taking ecological data and putting it into a digestible format for programmers. Black Sheep is kind of like an agroforestry project with legitimate on-the-ground projects happening. I don’t know if I can speak to their value prop any better than that at this moment, but they’re an actual implementation play. And then New Mundo is kind of like a community human resource, humans and land interaction, as well as humans living in community kind of an organization. Really talented people with nodes all around the world.
Ross Kenyon: One of the things I love about life is I never would have imagined myself working in agriculture or have a connection in any professional capacity. And now I’m hanging out with farmers and thinking about soil and scientists and life throws you some curveballs and I’m grateful for it. It’s very stimulating. And I love this intersection of ag and tech, people outside of the field. I’ll use myself as an example. You tend to think of it as very low tech, very old school, almost like the old McDonald’s farm. Of course, it’s not like that.
Or you think of just like giant mega monoculture farms. But There’s a lot of really interesting stuff that’s happening. And even with permaculture, which I associate very strongly with some of my friends who are more on the hippie side of things, but are also like super tech friendly and are using a lot of really interesting devices and ways of measuring data. And there’s a lot of innovation happening in ag, which if you’re not in it, might seem a little, I don’t know, outside of your wheelhouse, but it’s very exciting.
Jon Connors: Well said.
Ross Kenyon: Except for the end. I didn’t close up the comment as nearly as I intended. Do you have a question there, Rob?
Christophe Jospe: Yes. That was very nice of you to say. I have a question. You were talking about visions and you said you like Nori’s vision. I’m interested in your vision.
Jon Connors: I’m a tinkerer. So because I really honor and revere my teachers in a way, I consider the Regen Network team one of my teachers. And I’m giving a talk on October 4th at the Hilton, I believe, at a Blockchain for Social Impact event. And I’m taking the thought leadership of the ecological contracts of the Regen Network team. And I’d love if this does get funded to give them compensation for it because they’re badass at what they’re up to. And instead of building a whole new blockchain, which I think was kind of the...
I’m looking to take their thought leadership and build it on top of Stellar or Ethereum or an existing blockchain that currently has developed resources attached to it and could potentially kickstart what I think is a trillion dollar industry, which is regenerative agricultural food and fiber.
Christophe Jospe: And at the end of the day, just to sort of get redundant again, build, measure, learn, right? What can we build on? How are we measuring it? How are we learning from that? And how is that pointing the needle and making us move as quickly as possible? You know, we kind of, not to get all doom and gloom, but... Clock is up. Clock is definitely up. We need to remove carbon dioxide as quickly as possible, as fast as possible, and in the most responsible way that has clarity on the data.
And if the data is no good, it’s kind of garbage in, garbage out. You need to wait for that system to even accept the data. Maybe there are ways to start collecting the data in non-blockchain ways or blockchains that already exist. And so how can we learn and share this? We’re big fans of... One of our advisors, Ramez Nam, who always kind of goes around talking about knowledge as the infinite resource because it’s non-rivalrous, right? I could give you a piece of information. You could go off with that information and do something with it and then learn and say, oh, Christophe, like I learned this thing you told me and now we’re just sharing this knowledge.
So that’s a really interesting thing for us. I would be curious. So here we are at a sort of incubator. How do people share knowledge here? How do you see this sort of melting pot driving the blockchain ecosystem?
Jon Connors: This is a little, you know, haven for deep conversations and connections. So we obviously have this podcast room to share information for people outside these walls, you know, and it’s not a resource that we’re utilizing as much as we should. So thank you for coming out and helping us with the microphone and getting the word out with your great vision. But we have had 84 events here. All are blockchain-based besides the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. That’s not blockchain-based, but we have them come in every month. Not yet. Yeah. Yeah, indeed.
So by having about 65% of our audience that are full stack developers and having like crypto enthusiasts and having most of our, I think 75 or 84 events have been free. Done a few investor events and more VIP stuff that was closed off to the public. But by getting people in the room together and constantly conversing and then our peer-to-peer education circles that happen on Saturdays is just an influx of great ideas and great talent with which could implement those ideas. So like I had said about what I was doing on October 4th, I wouldn’t have this vision of what I’m doing on October 4th.
I’m going to create this clickable prototype, present it on the stage, see if I get feedback and excitement, and then come back here to one of our Saturday groups and try to get developers excited to help me build the thing because I’m not a developer myself. So there’s this little pool of wicked talented people at our disposal that we can build, measure, learn a ton of solutions that’s a resource for the San Francisco Bay Area.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, that’s so awesome. I remember 2016, 2017, I was living in New York City as well at the time. I was going to all sorts of blockchain meetups, just like, what’s this thing about? And half of them were people who were like, all right, what’s the next coin I can buy? Like, how can I speculate and make a bunch of money? And I’m tired of that. It’s like, no, it’s not just about the speculation. It actually doesn’t even need to be about the speculation at all. It’s the underlying technology and let’s build on it.
And then if there’s a token associated with it, building on it will actually give that token value because you’re producing something that’s worth something.
Jon Connors: Roger that. Giovanni Hudson, one of our product developer out of the space. Tavani, I think is the name of his brand. And he said today, actually, as we’re talking about a very unique vision that he and I are going to work together on, he said, it’s amazing what you can do with crypto when you take greed out of the equation. I think that as we see as of yesterday, this fall from Bitcoin’s peak to today was now larger than the crash of the financial crash in 2001, the dot-com bubble burst.
Unknown speaker: By percentage, you mean?
Jon Connors: By percentage, yeah.
Unknown speaker: Oh, okay.
Jon Connors: So it’s the worst crash, maybe worse than 1929. I’m not quite sure about that.
Unknown speaker: Oh, okay.
Jon Connors: So the speculators are leaving. They fortunately were never really in these doors. The real builders who are going to attach their values to a new society are where we’ll find the real upswing for the next time around we have a ride up to 20 grand plus. It’s going to be because we actually solve real problems like we’re sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and putting it into the soil and rewarding people for kick-ass behavior like that. And then we’re going to be rewarded financially from doing really good stuff.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s nice to hear people that care about the actual underlying technology. It definitely gets boring. When we first got really into it, even years ago, that was the main driving thing, of course. You’re doing all the technical analysis. You’re watching the markets. You all got your system, your magic eight ball that you can shake in your living room. I don’t really find that to be as rewarding as actually building a product. In fact, I think we all just collectively stopped watching the markets like we used to. Except when we have to eat.
Paul Gambill: Absolutely that but it was also a little too sad so it’s not as exciting anymore when it’s not just like skyrocketing upwards and now in a way this is good because it allows us the time and energy to focus on like building what we’re trying to build.
Ross Kenyon: Crazy, bullish and moving up. I think I would still check it once in a while and be like, oh, right.
Paul Gambill: I certainly wouldn’t have time anymore. I mean, before starting Nori, I was reading every single possible post on Reddit that I could find, everything on Twitter. And I was scouting around for all these different ICOs that were happening. And as soon as Nori started, that ended. I had no time for that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. You have a real job now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. But that’s exciting. Yeah. And you know, Nori’s whole thing is you take people who are motivated by greed or at least that’s the bare minimum, right? You can assume for greed. And if you have some like non greedy people on top, that’s great. And I’m happy they’re there, too. If you can channel that into some sort of productive, socially beneficial process, then it seems like that’s scalable. That’s how you can make these things work.
Jon Connors: Hell yeah. Yeah. That’s actually why I love the vision so much is because like ExxonMobil, which when I look at them in the market that exists and I think markets are like gardens and we can pull up weeds and burn them if they need to be burned, like the for-profit prison system for instance. When I look at ExxonMobil, I think that way, but when Nori is a possibility for ExxonMobil to clean up some of their nasty behavior, then it’s like, all right, you know what I mean? It becomes less of a, I’m going to rip you up from the garden, and maybe you can fertilize some of your bad activities with Nori tokens and grow from there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think offering people, and this is a little too messianic or a mannequin or one of these things, but like trying to redeem these people. Redemption’s beautiful. Yeah. Or just everyone likes to think of themselves as good. I think, I think people like to think that they, What’s that?
Jon Connors: And then typically, higher IQ people succeed, and higher emotionally capable people succeed. So right now, the incentives are fiat dollars that might have some Syrian children blood on them. And if we actually switch the incentive from fiat dollars to a token that actually reflects ecosystem health, then I want those smart people, those emotionally talented people, those Ivy Leaguers on board to help build the real society, not this one we’re living in.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s the whole benefit of the token economy, right? Is you can incentivize new types of behavior that maybe the fiat system doesn’t adequately serve. You’re giving people a system with incentives that actually are beneficial. Rock on.
Christophe Jospe: You know, here we can sit and pontificate and say we’re changing the world. But I just want to like reality check. We’re four white guys.
Unknown speaker: Oh, hell yeah.
Christophe Jospe: When we’re talking about changing the world, like fundamentally one of the biggest risks, and this is really I recall to anyone who is not a white guy listening to this podcast, get in the game because it has to be a diverse movement. And specifically, I was watching a live stream of a conference that happened to kick off the Global Climate Action Summit. It was soil, not oil. And I happened to tune in to a live stream where someone from the indigenous nations was talking about, well, we need to improve the health of the soil.
And he’s speaking the same language about soil, organic carbon. And then he says, but we cannot use carbon markets. Well, I disagree with that and I would say there is a way to engage people who have this very deep connection to the earth in a sustainable and a manageable way. And I think the only way that this is really going to succeed is if this movement is as widely inclusive as possible.
Jon Connors: Keep going with that. Testify.
Ross Kenyon: Is the problem with a lot of those offset projects, though, is that they’ll be in places around the developing world where these people don’t have property rights in their land, their families have lived there for who knows how long, hundreds of years, thousands of years, maybe in some cases. These projects will get set up there and they don’t have adequate title. They can’t protect themselves. They’re not seeing the benefit. A lot of the opposition from indigenous rights group stems from badly managed offset projects. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
I’ve read some things.
Unknown speaker: I don’t think feudal lords exist in today’s day and age, but yes, they definitely do. Yeah, well, sure, but they may not call themselves lords. But it’s effectively that, right? Maybe.
Christophe Jospe: We don’t want to just set up a system that enables sort of feudal lords to build even larger moats and have more serfs. But we actually want to ensure that the people doing the work of removing carbon have an equitable way and the transparency of how they might get paid for this work. All occurs. And hey, what do you know? Like blockchain transparency, like it all.
Paul Gambill: I mean, that’s really what the blockchain movement is all about, right? We’re not sort of central planners who are saying like, you must do things this way. What we’re doing is we’re building tools. These are tools that people can use and they can use them the way that they want to and it’s going to benefit them the most. And if they don’t like the tools, they won’t use them.
Ross Kenyon: The benefit of the blockchain, right, is that you have easy rights to opt out, right? You don’t like the project? Fork it. You don’t like even that? Go to some other chain. Start your own. It’s a permissionless innovation. And that’s one of the things that gets me really excited about it.
Jon Connors: Awesome. To go back to the statement about not just cookie cutter white men in a room, Giovanni Hudson and I are talking about a potential, another vision, another experiment would be not ecology based, but called the Good Works Network. And Good Works Network is going to So since we’re not 10 times better than cash, if cryptocurrencies are trying to get white We should instead be going after those who don’t have resources and the value of a cryptocurrency that is more in circulation, it actually increases an airdrop.
Unknown speaker: We trained you well.
Jon Connors: Point of sale machines that would actually accept the crypto even if it takes five minutes. This subset of the population who has very little resources would wait five minutes. They wouldn’t care. I’ve polled a few of them on my way to work. And I think that we could have a for-profit workers cooperative dedicated to that particular population I just spoke of.
Ross Kenyon: How exactly might this work? How do you distribute it as paper wallets where they have like a QR code or something?
Jon Connors: Well said. You nailed it. So Giovanni actually is a paper wallet producer. So that’s what Giovanni is all about. And he has a waterproof paper wallet capability.
Unknown speaker: Like a laminated kind of card?
Jon Connors: Yeah, I don’t know the exact technology. He’d be better at speaking of it. But we could also run an A-B test where the majority of that population also has these Obama phones, which are like some crappy Android phones, but may have the potential to create a wallet on the phone, on the device as well. So we’re going to check to see build, measure, learn style. If we get the right enterprise connections and contacts, we could partner up with a nonprofit for the actual distribution portion of the tokens and Yeah, that sounds great.
Ross Kenyon: I hope that works. And I’d be very curious. I’d even be willing to have you back on if you want to report back or your partner wants to report back.
Jon Connors: Yeah, why don’t you have any on if we do talk about that for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah. I’d like to hear how that actually goes because people talk a good game about projects like this, but I haven’t seen too many that have really got us amped. We really like a book called Rethinking Money. Have you ever read that one? Paul was telling me about that.
Unknown speaker: Oh, yeah. I remember.
Ross Kenyon: Paul has never not told someone about it. I would go on Reversing Climate Change bingo too.
Unknown speaker: I mean, Paul talks about that.
Paul Gambill: You’ve always claimed that you should get some royalties for all the copies of digital gold that you’ve sold.
Ross Kenyon: Amazon stopped letting me give it out for free. Yeah. Yeah. First time receivers. They’re like, you can’t do this anymore. Rethinking money is that for me. There’s great ways where you can use new currencies to get people to do something good. And at the worst case scenario here, you’re just giving people.
Paul Gambill: And the cool thing is they don’t even have to be like, well, Widely used. You can just get like a couple local store owners to start accepting this thing and some people who live in a three block radius and that’s actually providing real value and then it can grow from there. Or you could have a different one for each different like sub neighborhood. They’re still really useful in that way. And the problem is that our monetary systems today don’t ever consider the small scale like that. They just think we have to have this single Overarching solution that serves all these things and ends up just being the least common denominator.
Jon Connors: Well said. And I would think that’s the Web 2. 0 perspective. The Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles, the walled garden approach. The narrative of GoodWorks Network is to evangelize to the Web 3. 0 companies that we can scale this movement together and let’s actually continue. Create real user base and let’s create real use cases. There’s only four stores I can buy things with crypto in San Francisco, California, the hub of technology. Four stores.
Ross Kenyon: Wow, that’s surprising.
Jon Connors: Yeah, I’d love to double that with just corner neighborhood bodegas, as you said, Paul.
Ross Kenyon: Well, this has been maybe the most philosophical, the one where we got the headiest of any of our podcasts. Do you do that with people you talk to?
Jon Connors: That’s why I love this place. This is the kind of thing we do every day here.
Ross Kenyon: I think if we lived nearby, we would come hang a fair amount. Well, thanks for being on the show. We had a lot of fun. Let’s maybe talk in the future if you guys have stuff to report back on those projects. But thanks for being here.
Jon Connors: Thank you very much. I really appreciate your team and what you guys are up to.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, likewise. And we appreciate the work. I want to say it’s not you appreciating our team. Like we are all on the same team.
Jon Connors: Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah, Crystal.
Christophe Jospe: I look forward to hearing how your presentation goes in October and keep it up.
Jon Connors: Thanks, bud. Same. Look forward to, you know, I’ll probably throw a few bucks. I don’t have a lot of fiat myself because of my activism days, but I’ll throw a few bucks to your Reg CF for sure.
Paul Gambill: Let’s let this be a reminder. Thank you, John, that if you go to republic.co slash nori, you can see all the details about our crowdfunding campaign that is going on there. So please go visit that.
Jon Connors: And one of the most unique things about it as far as being in the space for a while, For those who don’t know who are listening, Reg CF is you’re allowed to raise $1,070,000 from an audience who’s not an accredited investor. So you can have regular people on the street invest in your product and service. The Nori team has issued a small amount of their tokens for that portion, and they also have the Reg D. Which is a larger portion for the accredited investors. So you give the opportunity for both the regular person as well as the centralized finance regular status quo person to invest in this carbon restoration and renewal marketplace.
So you guys rock.
Ross Kenyon: Awesome. Thank you. Someone did his homework. Yeah. I had a couple of times this week where people will start saying things like that. I’m like, wow, you clearly did your homework and no Nori. And it was like some of the first, I’m not going to put this label on you, but like fan experiences that we’ve had. I’m like, oh, wow. Thanks for taking the time to read up on all that.
Jon Connors: Well, it’s because first Paul’s presentation here and the relationship that was started back on May 3rd. And then, you know, yeah, watching you guys grow and Sandra giving some poking insights and stuff really kept up on the project.
Ross Kenyon: I am flattered. So thank you. Let’s call it that. Thanks a lot. Thanks.
