To date, the environmental movement has relied on fear and shame to persuade people to change their behavior. The problem is, guilt is not a lasting motivator. What if we used a different approach and incentivized positive action instead? What if people were rewarded for pursuits that benefit the climate AND humanity?
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. Hey, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I’m starting over.
Christophe Jospe: No, no, no, no. Let’s keep going. The face I made was because you didn’t say hello.
Ross Kenyon: I know. It’s because there’s a nice rhythm to it. And starting is the hardest part sometimes. So I have a thing that I say. It’s a And actually, Ross has said hey before, and those are usually the ones we cut out, but we’re going to keep this. So welcome, everyone. This is Ross Kenyon to my left. I’m Christophe Jospe. We’ve got producer Paul on the levels. Sitting across from us is Gaia Rashan. She is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Dashboard Earth. I’m sure we’ll learn more about that.
We’re still here in Starfish Mission. We’re still in a soundproofed room with a light that is changing. All the colors of the rainbow. That’s a lot.
Christophe Jospe: They’re actually not going to let us out.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s really illuminating this lively discussion. Gaia is also someone who listens to the podcast, so she knows what she’s getting into. She agreed to come on. She knows how mean we are. We grill people. We say nasty things. We get them to say things that they thought they weren’t going to say before. And it’s like that. What is it? Priming? Is that the word? Most guests actually end up crying after it finishes. We haven’t heard that before. Or at least like they walk out and we see them like calling their like psychologist like, OK, I’m going to need an extra one.
Okay, no, we’ll stop with all that. Gaia, we like to start with people’s story and really their motivations, like how they got into wanting to do something that in some way, shape or form relates to Reversing Climate Change. And somewhere on your website, I think it says that. So it’s like, cool, we’re on the same team. Let’s make it happen. But how did it all get started for you?
Gaya Roshan: We are definitely on the same team in that respect. And I’m very happy to be here. So thank you. I was raised in a family that was very focused on environments. But my stepfather actually made one of the very first films on climate change in the 80s, in the early 80s. So it’s something that’s been very prevalent in my psyche for a long time. But I think rather than taking a kind of activist approach, which I definitely, I work with a lot of activists all over the world, but I really have always felt like I wanted to look at the kind of larger picture.
And so for me, I’ve been very focused on how our beliefs and our identities shape our relationship to nature and climate. But it really goes back to early days. I did not go to school. I have no high school diploma. No, I shouldn’t. See, you’re already getting me to say things that I shouldn’t be saying. Can you edit it? Can you edit it?
Christophe Jospe: I think that’s cool. You don’t have that formal education, but you’ve accomplished things. So keep going.
Gaya Roshan: I grew up literally, okay, maybe I’m old enough, but it’s a point of pride. Okay, I’ll accept that. But I grew up incredibly rurally. So everything, there was no structure, there was no form, and there was me and horses and trees.
Ross Kenyon: Where was this?
Gaya Roshan: Well, I grew up about five years in Sri Lanka. My father’s Sri Lankan and most of my childhood in Scotland on the West Coast, on the Mall of Kintyre. So it was islands and it’s a beautiful, stunning place to grow up. But not a lot of humans, a lot of nature.
Ross Kenyon: Dashboard Earth, is this a reference to Spaceship Earth?
Gaya Roshan: You know, when we first started, we really wanted it to be a nonprofit. And actually the Buckminster Fuller Institute was our fiscal sponsor. And their whole thing is Spaceship Earth. And so I’m sure it’s connected to that in some way.
Ross Kenyon: You just had that, like the rhythm of that phrase, like deep inside of you.
Gaya Roshan: I did. Yeah. And my partner is in the big data world. So he does data visualization. And a lot of the inspiration was we just have volumes of data. And is there an opportunity to get some of the right data at the right time Awesome.
Ross Kenyon: I’m going to derail this conversation a little bit because Ross went somewhere that I didn’t want to go yet. I want to know about Dashboard Earth, but I want to know about you, Gaia. You have a fascinating story. So you grew up with nature and horses. At some point, you made some films. That’s cool. That must maybe inform what you’re doing now. Can you tell us about that?
Gaya Roshan: Yeah, so I grew up in a family of filmmakers and it’s been a very kind of hot and cold feeling of not really wanting to do it, but feeling that there’s a real reason for changing our minds about things. And that’s just seemed like the most reasonable way to do it. I’ve made several features at this point and a bunch of TV and I go in and out of like wanting it as a career. Again, way too much information. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We won’t tell anyone this. This will exist on the internet. But we won’t tell anyone.
Gaya Roshan: I love filmmaking because you learn a body of work. So in order to make a feature film particularly, that’s years of your life. You might read 200 or 300 nonfiction books. You interview the most important experts in a field and you learn something really deeply. And so the other part of my work is consulting where I help people tackle the kind of issues that I make films about, which are all environmental issues.
Ross Kenyon: So at some point, though, you made the jump to tech. That was like yesterday.
Gaya Roshan: Like yesterday? I don’t know. We’re still really working out whether that’s a good move. Yeah, it’s interesting. I think a lot of people were inspired by Trump’s election and the need to just do things differently and step outside of your comfort zone. I started working in Northern California in the late 90s and I felt there was this immense sense of potential at that point. The world was being remade in front of us and nobody knew what it looked like. I mean, I remember filming at the Webby’s when, you probably don’t even know what the Webby’s is, but the Webby’s when Google won.
It was like these ridiculous kind of times, but you had this feeling that in 10 years, nothing was going to be the same again. And it wasn’t, but it kind of wasn’t in the way that we sort of thought it was going to be. And I feel like there’s this moment now where it’s that same feeling where technology is literally melting the systems that we are used to living in as humans. And I think that there’s a real potential to build those systems in the way that you guys see at Nori and the way that we’re trying to do at Dashboard Earth and I absolutely love Regen Network.
And there’s a lot of companies in this space who see that same potential. And I feel like I’m ready to, I’m embracing it. I’m technophobe, honestly, basic level. I don’t really have any apps on my phone. I’m building an app. But in some ways, I’m a very, very difficult audience to please. And it’s helped me to just get to the point where we can leverage something that is Really setting the world in a very, very different course. And we can leverage it in the right direction. Otherwise, it’s kind of a dystopic nightmare.
I was going to use the F word, but I restrained myself. Good job.
Ross Kenyon: It hasn’t always happened on the podcast. It has. It occurs. It has occurred before. That’s great. So what exactly is the app? How does it work? How did you get the idea? How are you building it as a technophobe?
Gaya Roshan: You can ask my team that. Yeah, no, I don’t know.
Ross Kenyon: No, I think it’s probably a fresh look too since we all swim in this stuff all the time. I don’t have as fresh eyes, you know. I’ve worked in video too and sometimes you just get so sick of it and you’re so over something and you need to have someone who hasn’t seen it at all before. So maybe that’s you. Ross also lived in LA so he’s sort of blase in how it was about life. I don’t know if you get that.
Gaya Roshan: Do I look blase?
Ross Kenyon: I love that. Didn’t care for that. I’m not blasé. Maybe a little. How did Dashboard Earth originate? What inspired you? The philosophy behind that I find very interesting and also quite parallel to how we think about this.
Gaya Roshan: So I’ve always been intrigued and probably because of my lack of formal education, I’ve always been intrigued at how things fit together rather than I’ve never really had an opportunity to be siloed in that way. So for me, I mean, there’s so many different genesis to this. On the one hand, it is incredibly disappointing as somebody who communicates and works in communications as a consultant and a filmmaker. It’s incredibly frustrating that the environmental movement chooses to Only use the levers of guilt, shame and fear to motivate people around things that are very, very important.
And it was increasingly frustrating trying to sell and distribute content that didn’t fit the kind of general genre. And for me, it became incredibly important to relay the fact that we’ve reached a tipping point in the climate movement. This isn’t a doom and gloom story anymore. We actually have all the solutions that we need to get through this. All the thinking has been done, the technology exists, and there is a groundswell of people who are ready to act. But we still build our lives in a system which basically incentivizes all the wrong behavior and all the wrong things constantly.
So for me, what this new technological landscape represented is an opportunity to essentially Create value where there wasn’t any previously. So what we do at Dashboard Earth is match really unmet needs to unused resources. And we do that in a way that is positive and fun and using supportive frameworks and that’s optimistic. And what we try to do is that we go city by city, crowdsourcing every solution in a local area, or at least the widest possible range of solutions in a local area. And we use machine learning to get each individual the Solution that they’re most likely to take and we reward every action taken with a coin that’s redeemable for goods and services.
What the platform enables us to do as climate stakeholders is whether you’re a city with incentives in your system, whether you’re a corporation with a green product or whether you’re a human being with time or attention that you have, we create a marketplace that basically enables value to be created in exchange. It’s not particularly original in some ways, but it is this Uber for climate. There is a transactional... Layer that we’re creating that allows us to verify, validate and reward actions. And we create a marketplace that enables anybody to create an exchange value in that respect.
And I know you guys know all about this from a different kind of side of the portion, but it is, it’s a marketplace situation, but it’s meant for the moms and the millennials primarily who are like willing to do things.
Ross Kenyon: I’m a little creeped out. Did you steal our IP? Yes. Do we need to get our lawyers in here? I love that. Where did you guys meet again? That’s one of my favorite things when we meet people were many of those words felt at home to me. We met on the internet. She filled out a form that we had from a newsletter. And that’s right. I actually heard through the grapevine that someone named Gaia was talking very favorably about Noria. I was like, who’s Gaia?
Gaya Roshan: Oh, that was Evan.
Ross Kenyon: So that’s cool. So I was like, okay, there’s a fan out there. But I just want to comment. You said a number of things just now that really resonate. I mean, I think, yeah, guilt and shame. Well, they are motivators, not lasting motivators. I think it’s optimism. And I’m a self-scribed perpetual optimist. I actually got a fortune. I’d like to say that Kristoff has resting smiling face. It’s true. I’m actually happy. I got a fortune cookie once that said perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. And that’s totally it. I think you should maybe have that fortune cookie for your startup dashboard Earth.
I think it’s really cool also that you’re starting at the city level and giving the everyday people the agency to connect to solutions. And from a go-to market strategy, really cool that you’re piloting in one small little place and then saying, okay, we’re going to test it on this micro scale and then scale it out from there. And so can you talk to us a little bit like how it works? What are some of the solutions that you’re talking about? What qualifies as a solution? Who are you to judge of what a solution is?
Gaya Roshan: I feel like one of the most important things in the climate movement right now is to decouple climate from energy. Because it’s not where the conversation is. We have a very, very well developed renewable market. And actually, as an environmentalist, I think probably the most important thing you can do is stop talking about renewables and let it become a bipartisan thing. The free market is very good at certain things and renewables are at a stage where the free market is going to do exactly what it needs to do. So for me, it’s one of my pet peeves among obviously many that we have to really understand it as lifestyle behavior and consumption.
So when we talk about solutions on Dashboard Earth, we talk about solutions that are the widest possible range. So it could be, I know whether you walked, I know whether you took a bike, I know whether you did an Uber pool or a Lyft line, I know whether you took a bird. I know what food you bought some of the time. I know whether you’re composting. These are all the widest possible. Literally, I’m like, if you’re going to shop secondhand, if you’re going to shop on eBay secondhand, like for me, these are all solutions.
These are consumption. Sounds like big sister to me. You know what I call it? It’s not big brother. It’s big mother. No, I don’t. I can’t believe I just said that.
Christophe Jospe: All right. That’s your new tagline now.
Gaya Roshan: But it is, we’re tracking all of this information and we’re giving it to advertisers and we’re not getting paid for it and we don’t generate any meaning from it. For us, if you go to your farmer’s market, that’s a meaningful activity. There is as many solutions in a city as there are people in a city. One of the cities that we love what they’re doing, I mean, Epic Climate Goals, And have been great in advising us is City of Santa Monica. But definitely one of the jokes is, you know, Gaia, if I go and if I spend the day in bed, can I get points for that?
Ross Kenyon: I’m like, yeah, why not? One per hour.
Gaya Roshan: If you stop breathing.
Ross Kenyon: Stop breathing. Temporarily stop existing. This project sounds really cool. I’m quite terrified. On that. So pretty cool. Is there more to explain at that point? One thing I wanted to say too is that I like how personal this feels. One of the criticisms we’ve gotten, we’ve talked about this, is that in commoditizing carbon removal, people don’t want to buy a barcode necessarily. And so having these activities that are built into your life that you’re monetizing that do have a net benefit for humanity in terms of climate outcomes. That gives me like a different kind of sensation or a different kind of feeling.
I imagine people would respond to that, especially I imagine you’re spending a lot of time on the front end of the app, making sure it’s very enjoyable to use.
Gaya Roshan: Yeah, we’re trying to make it as simple as possible and as fun as possible. We work with Aura Systems who do dimensional data visualization. So their work is to take complex data sets and make them into visualizations that have instantaneous meaning. So One of the core pieces of our app is this tech, which is essentially giving you real-time feedback on your actions on and off the app, which is cool. And I think that’s definitely an important part of it. And on the solutions front, we really want to be able to draw from as many different ideas of what a solution is as possible.
And as we go through the process and the more data we have, the more we can do to actually measure the It’s like a like Viktor Frankl kind of kind of thing. I guess I feel like we’re a little lost and that purposeless. And actually one of the amazing things about climate is that it gives us meaning. It’s like there’s a moment in history where we actually have an opportunity to be heroic, you know, and that is an extraordinary moment. It’s not just for us. I mean, I probably care slightly less about, I’m actually not even going to make that statement, but we have an opportunity to affect our The entire biosphere and everything that currently exists right now.
And that is an extraordinary capacity. And I think humans throughout history have been this keystone species that really affect the environment around them. And there’s incredible studies done in the most biodiverse parts of the world. They’re actually the parts with humans living in them. You can go into a forest with an ethnobotanist and look in every direction and they’ll tell you how it is that Over the course of time, it’s humans that created that biodiversity. And I think that as a species, we have this extraordinary capacity for healing and for some meaning.
And instead, we’ve been robbed of that and been made into consumers and kind of miserable about it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we don’t have a great war to fight in.
Gaya Roshan: We don’t, but we kind of do, right? We do. And that’s why he is so... Look at his smiling, resting face right now. Because he knows...
Ross Kenyon: We’re going to get it right. I mean, we maybe are going to go in cyclical moments of pain and whatever. It’s part of the learning process, but we are going to get it right. One of the things that I love about what you’re doing is you’re sort of tapping into an almost infinitesimal amount of data. All this data is collected and you’re saying, wow, if we could just gather it in a way and realign that incentive structure... Are you saying it’s a very small amount? No, infinite. Almost infinite. Did I say infinitesimal?
Yeah. When I meant to say infinite? Yeah. I was just trying to sound smart using words that I don’t actually know what they mean. Okay, I said penultimate once, meaning ultimate, and I got smacked so hard. I know. But you were only off by one. Oh, yeah, that’s true. Yeah, I was just adding more. Okay, so there’s an almost infinite. I think I know what infinite means, right? That’s like...
Gaya Roshan: What does infinite mean? To say my three-year-old uses the word infinite all the time. This is getting real bucky now.
Ross Kenyon: All right, let’s go again. All right, ready? I had a question. The question was, there’s a whole bunch of data, almost infinite, and you’re tapping into it and you are tokenizing it in a certain way through an incentive structure. How do you determine the value of a solution based on how much reward someone gets?
Gaya Roshan: That is a really good question. And it changes depending on... The growth state in the company, because early on, honestly, it’s my opinion on everything, or at least the team’s opinion. Benevolent dictator. Yes. We’ve been talking with incredible groups on the data side. I mean, like one of our early connections was with Yale Data Driven, who are amazing. And groups at Stanford, there’s a lot of people who Are willing to take this data and pass it and make meaning from it. In the early stages, it works without any money in the system.
It’s a rewards program. It’s not a financial element. And we record every action on a blockchain, but we don’t really consider ourselves in the crypto space. However, what we would like to be doing down the road is be able to measure, give meaning to every one of those actions, class them in the way that we record them, and then float a currency that would basically be funded by downstream entities. So there’s a lot of downstream entities like reinsurers and cities who are exposed to risks. And what we want to create is a way for those people to get the cash into the present because it’s the mitigation, the adaptation has to happen.
And so we’re just trying to find a mechanism to bring that money out of the future and into the present. I don’t know if that, did I answer your question?
Ross Kenyon: Perhaps not. Well, do you imagine that this currency once it existed would be trading on some sort of secondary market like other cryptocurrencies or are you kind of skipping that step and it’s going to people who are really scared about cities going underwater like insurance companies and reinsurance companies and stuff like that?
Gaya Roshan: That is a really interesting question. Because it’s not a question I have to deal with right now, I’ve thought about it in lots of different ways. And there’s a team of people in the company that deal with the ecosystem as it could be, but it’s undecided. For me personally, in my early 20s, I was very influenced by a gentleman called Bernard Lieter, who was one of the architects of the Euro.
Ross Kenyon: That’s the guy who wrote Rethinking Money, Paul.
Gaya Roshan: Yes, one of my favorites.
Ross Kenyon: We can never remember his name, but that is him.
Gaya Roshan: That is him. And so by the time I met him, he was like, you know, done with the euro, became a proponent of complementary currencies and time dollars and all the rest of it. And really for me, instituted this idea of unmet needs and unused resources and how you connect those up. He has some incredibly interesting philosophies around money, one of which is that there are yin and yang currencies. And if you look back through history, You see civilizations which have lasted the longest actually have multiple forms of currency. So our hopes for survival maybe are increasing with the crypto craze.
But unfortunately, from Bernard’s perspective, and which is a perspective I share, most cryptocurrencies in this space are essentially identical to the rest of fiat-based interest-bearing money, which is essentially what he calls a yang form of money. It’s a directional growth-oriented and Destructive unless it’s balanced by a type of a currency that has different qualities that is meant for sustaining. So I’m not totally sure how it works, but I know that there are ways in which there are mechanisms that a currency can have that give it sustaining capacity, like demurrage, having a fee, keeping it in circulation.
These are all things that are very, very interesting to me, but we’re at the very beginning stages of figuring that out and we don’t have to figure it out for at least another two years.
Christophe Jospe: They’re all the right questions. For once, I didn’t have to make the recommendations that I booked, so thank you. I literally talk about this book like almost every episode. It’s the best book.
Ross Kenyon: Our listeners will not hear it twice, two weeks in a row. Yeah, we just talked about it on the last episode. I was on his Wikipedia page not too long ago and I couldn’t find anything recent. And then also Rethinking Money only came out. Fiverr? 2014. 2014. Okay, even sooner. We were wondering why cryptocurrency didn’t make an appearance in there as opposed to something more analog. I guess is that why? He’s not a fan in general. Oh, like actively hostile generally?
Gaya Roshan: No, he works with Bancorp. So there’s definitely parts which he feels are more valuable than others.
Christophe Jospe: So I think your hypothesis the other day that it was 2014, there really wasn’t anything beyond, I mean, there were Bitcoin clones, but there wasn’t anything in the way of what we’re seeing. So I’m going to display my poor vocabulary again. He used a word that I’m not familiar with, demirage.
Gaya Roshan: Demirage. Yeah. Wow. Do I have to define that?
Christophe Jospe: We can do it too. It’s the value of your money decreases over time. So it encourages you to use it. If you just let it sit there, then the value decreases.
Ross Kenyon: Got it. So basically, Paul, what you’re saying is I need to finally read that book that you’ve recommended to me. Oh my God. Yes.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah.
Gaya Roshan: You absolutely do. I think everyone should be forced to read that book.
Christophe Jospe: I have been pushing this to every person at Nori since day one.
Ross Kenyon: I had such mixed feelings reading it too, though, because I know this isn’t totally fair, but I associate damage with inflation. I know they’re different, but also I’m like, I don’t want the money that I earn to just lose its value if I don’t spend it. What if I’m saving up for something nice and tasty later?
Christophe Jospe: You can build like parameters into it. Like you might have a free year. The year starts ticking when you receive the money. And then if you don’t use it within a year, then it starts degrading.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m sure there are cases where that’s quite useful to have. I’m stuck in a certain paradigm where I’m like, it’s my money. Why are you inflating the value away from me?
Christophe Jospe: Well, we talked about like the power of exit. Like if you don’t like using that money, use a different money or a different currency rather, because that’s not the same thing.
Ross Kenyon: So you said you don’t need to figure it out for two years. That means you’ve got some kind of a timeline. Something’s happening. You’re proving things right now and testing it out. You’re doing things in Santa Monica, perhaps. So what do you need to prove and test out? How is all this going to scale?
Gaya Roshan: It was a good, well beyond a year of just research and understanding the pain points of these different stakeholders and just questioning what’s the model, why we want to do this, how we can do it. And then In March, we finally incorporated as a B Corp. In April, we did our first round of financing. And in April, we did a test at Stanford.
Ross Kenyon: What’s a B Corp? Is that the Impact Corporation?
Gaya Roshan: So it’s a Benefit Corp. We’re actually not a B Corp. We’re a Benefit Corp.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, how does that work?
Gaya Roshan: It’s interesting. It’s essentially using the B Corp framework. But what it does is protect you from your investors in your articles of association. So you are protected by your mission. If you choose not to pay your investors, you can just sort of.
Ross Kenyon: Literally just flip me the bird on my own podcast.
Gaya Roshan: Oh no, don’t say that. I have to raise money. That’s not.
Christophe Jospe: It just means that if your investors want you to do something that’s not mission aligned, then you can say, no, we’re going to stick to our mission.
Gaya Roshan: And that was particularly important for us because of the amount of data that is involved and the complete lack of morals that anybody dealing with data seems to have in this country. So it’s a way of, you know, not turning into...
Ross Kenyon: And as I understand it, the difference between Benefit Corp and B Corp is the B Corp you’re also reporting on metrics beyond just the bottom line to your shareholders.
Gaya Roshan: Yes.
Ross Kenyon: Come up with what those impact metrics might be and you refine those. I derailed us being a definitional pedant. So why don’t we go back? You mentioned a test that happened at Stanford.
Gaya Roshan: Stanford. We still did it with a bunch of kids at Stanford University and Tested primarily our backend and then we’ve been in six months of just designs over and over again. And then we have a pretty small test of our MVP, like 100 people coming up in October. And then shortly thereafter, our beta goes live is the timeline right now, which is kind of shocking. But we have amazing relationships in the field with the SDG Compacts and the Bloomberg folks and C40. These are all basically focused on the kind of 94 biggest cities.
So if we can get our tech to a point where it all makes sense in one city, then we hopefully have the opportunity to have a sort of dropped in infrastructure for this type of exchange that should work.
Ross Kenyon: Which city might be the first?
Gaya Roshan: LA will be the first. We’re losing 40% of our tree cover right now. There’s some 40%. Wow. Ways for people to get paid to take care of the trees outside their homes. That’s some basic level actions for you.
Ross Kenyon: So if you just like taking care of trees, you find some way to, like this tree needs some help, make it a little like, what are those things you put on the trees that keep them warmer?
Gaya Roshan: Do you, I know. Just hug the tree. They’ll get better just like that.
Ross Kenyon: When they do yarn bombs on them. Yeah, right, yeah. You have to do that. I like talking to my plants. We have a tree in our apartment and plants and I. I do a little chat. What do you tell it? What do I tell it? Well, it’s a very, very good little plant. I’m hitting those plants. You’ve been real sassy with me on the show. Do you just play episodes of this podcast to them? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: They can hear your voice and not be scared when you leave.
Ross Kenyon: Daddy’s not home right now, but yeah.
Christophe Jospe: You get home, you kiss your wife, you pet your dog, you give a big old hug to your tree.
Ross Kenyon: No, it’s one of those, oh, the fig, what are those types? You know the name of it. The what? It’s like the fig tree that everyone has inside. Like a ficus tree? No, it has some other name that’s kind of similar to it. It bears fruit? No, it doesn’t bear any fruit. Oh, so this is all pointless. Let’s move on. This is one of the worst tangents that we have. This may be one of my favorite episodes though. I’d like to draw the link between Dashboard Earth and Nori. So you’re talking about incentivizing people to plant trees.
Trees do this wonderful thing called photosynthesis. Probably the reason that we’re living, right? Because as trees grow, they consume carbon dioxide and they emit oxygen. And the consumption of carbon dioxide sequesters it in the biomass. And hey, what do you know? We’re helping to make an open source carbon removal certificate methodology. And it could just be that people who are planting trees and Are getting incentivized for that behavior through producing some kind of currency might also be able to monetize the carbon removal certificate from those trees. Wow. That’s cool.
Gaya Roshan: Absolutely. Did I just do it? Did I just link our companies? Absolutely. Cool. Let’s do it.
Ross Kenyon: Urban tree planting is actually a really important thing because it gives people that sense of hope and agency and there are a whole bunch of great things about trees that I think we don’t realize. Like trees along the side of the road actually cause people to slow down when they’re driving. And that causes fewer accidents. It actually increases serotonin levels. So people are happier when there are more trees. Not to mention.
Christophe Jospe: Touching them too. Like having like real physical interaction with them makes a difference.
Ross Kenyon: I didn’t know that. Yeah. Animals come back. So you’re creating a habitat. All this is great. Shade. I’m sure in LA, something like that matters.
Gaya Roshan: In LA, it’s massive. Yeah. I can’t remember how many millions of dollars last year, but I think that quite a few LADWP had to just get people to plant trees in their yards because it brings down their powers.
Ross Kenyon: Department of Water and Power.
Gaya Roshan: Thank you. LA resident. Former.
Ross Kenyon: I still know. I feel like there’s a force against that, which is, I don’t want a tree in my house. It’s going to ruin my view. In your house? I mean, a tree outside of my house. I can’t see the TV from the couch. Yeah. I wouldn’t blame someone for not wanting a tree in their house necessarily.
Gaya Roshan: LA is so many single family homes that generally increases the value of the property.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I like it. I like it for sure. Where we’re staying right now in San Francisco, there are houses that are built like up into the hill and they seem to be fairly new, but there’s no trees there yet. And something about it just looked wrong to me. I was like, it feels fake. It’s not fully built.
Christophe Jospe: This whole city. Yeah. I come to San Francisco all the time now. And the thing that always strikes me as weird coming from Seattle, where the tree cover is just massive, is just that there’s so few trees here. And the trees that are here are very small or very young.
Gaya Roshan: They don’t look very happy.
Christophe Jospe: No, they don’t. No, it’s not like integrated into nature in the way that other cities feel.
Gaya Roshan: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: We let San Francisco have it here.
Christophe Jospe: Rip down it a little bit.
Ross Kenyon: Get your act together, San Francisco. That was as nice as fall can be. That was very much the polite version. Is there anything else we should get to here? I feel like we goof around for a long time, but I could also see us putting a cap on it and having a solid episode there. I think it was quite substantive. Did I use the right word? Yeah, you did.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, sure.
Ross Kenyon: We just made him so self-conscious. We beat up on everyone here today. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for being here. I love all the things that you’re doing. And also philosophically, it’s happy to meet fellow travelers who are not focusing primarily on the levers of what was it? Fear and Shame. Shame. Guilt. Well done. There you go. Any project that’s working in the climate space that’s doing that, I think they’re a friend of Nori just until they’re proven otherwise. So thanks again for being here.
Gaya Roshan: That sounded like a threat.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I had a massive threatening tone. Coming on my own podcast, threatening me. Check out dashboard. earth. That’s their website. Please go there. Follow what they’re up to.
Christophe Jospe: And while we’re throwing URLs around, I’ll jump in with my regular obligatory. Nori is conducting a crowdfund campaign. You can find out all the details about that and invest in Nori at republic. co slash Nori.
Ross Kenyon: If you like what we’re doing here, please give us a good review in your app for podcasts. If you’re on iTunes especially, share our content. Be a good fan out there for us. We would definitely appreciate it. And thanks for listening.
Gaya Roshan: Thank you.
