Episode 24 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
One of the tenets at Nori is Find, Don’t Whine. Rather than complaining about the complexity of reversing climate change, the startup believes in actively seeking out solutions. At the end of April, we took steps to engage a diverse group of stakeholders through the Reversapalooza Summit, inviting academics, influencers, policy-makers, potential carbon removal certificate suppliers and buyers to come together and initiate a conversation around incentivizing carbon removal by way of the blockchain.
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Full Transcript
Announcer: 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: He's typing on his computer, yeah. Alexsandra Guerra.
Alexsandra Guerra: No. [unclear]
Ross Kenyon: What do you mean?
Alexsandra Guerra: You're like Alexsandra Guerra. Guerra.
Ross Kenyon: The green goes here. I didn't roll properly. Guerra. Guerra. Guerra.
Alexsandra Guerra: There you go.
Christophe Jospe: Wait, will you say it for us?
Alexsandra Guerra: Guerra.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. Well, we just finished Reversapalooza. You did it. We showed up to it. It was a very fun thing to show up to. Are you feeling relieved now?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Should we give context as to what the heck Reversapalooza is? It's a hashtag on Twitter. That's all I know.
Christophe Jospe: And probably Instagram too. Yeah, why don't you introduce it?
Ross Kenyon: Wait, I'd actually like to take a step back 'cause this is the first time we've had Alexsandra onto the podcast. And so how about we let her introduce herself first and what do you do at Nori? And then what were you doing at Nori? Part of that was Reversapalooza. So then start there.
Alexsandra Guerra: Hi everybody, this is the first time on our podcast. My name is Alexsandra. I am a co-founder. We've got seven co-founders at Nori. So I've been working behind the scenes. My title is Director of Strategic Planning and really focusing on biz development.
Real quick, my origin story is when I was 17, I saw Klaus Lackner on TV on the Science Channel talking about these artificial trees that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. And it kind of blew my mind. The next year, I knew I was going to be applying to college. Really thought, "Oh, how great would it be if I met him and if I got into Columbia?" All those things happened. I studied [unclear] Klaus. He mentored me. He wrote recommendations for grad school. I got into PhD. I dropped out of PhD. I met Christophe. We chatted, found out we were entrepreneurial. Long story short, 11 years later, here we are co-founding Nori to reverse climate change. Klaus is one of our advisors. So kind of definitely this weird full circle that's happening and really excited. So at Nori, I've been event planning.
Ross Kenyon: lose us. Let's go back to our first.
Alexsandra Guerra: It was a strategic event and it was strategic planning to plan an event, Director of Strategic Planning.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. It sounds like a Stalinist bureaucrat. Five year plans. How much [unclear] you need. I think there's some dissatisfaction with titles in general. None of us are totally at ease with them.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, let's be real guys. We're co-founders of a company, a startup. We wear so many different hats all the time. So like Paul is CEO, but then like sometimes secretary and like and IT and IT and chauffeur and chauffeur and like random like script maker for text files of contacts that we want, like it's just, we're all just constantly doing different things. That's what he watches the [unclear].
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, he watches the levels over here, the least glamorous job there, but uh, make you sound good.
Paul Gambill: It makes me sound good.
Ross Kenyon: And then whenever you chime in, did I ever compare it to your like the silent Bob of the podcast? Like you hardly ever speak, but when you do, it's like the profound lesson of the podcast. Okay.
Paul Gambill: Okay.
Ross Kenyon: So I derailed everything. You were talking about your job at Nori.
Alexsandra Guerra: We do everything, a lot of hats. Oh, let's talk about Reversapalooza.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, Reversapalooza. That's like the whole point of this podcast.
Alexsandra Guerra: Right, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: So Reversapalooza, what a great name.
Alexsandra Guerra: Today is April 27th. Yes, Friday. And we're sitting in this beautiful corner view room at the Marriott waterfront looking at the sound. We are watching a ferry cross the water and a boat. Gorgeous, and the sun's out. I actually looked up what these clipper ships are here for and they're finishing an around the world race.
Ross Kenyon: Oh really?
Alexsandra Guerra: They're literally docked right outside. So we had just beautiful weather and we had about 105 people come to Seattle or within Seattle to our summit. And it was a summit. It was this large conversation that we had with a variety of stakeholders in our marketplace. So, in our marketplace, we have people who are going to be supplying carbon removal or certificates. We have people who will be buying them, influencers, academics, policymakers. So, the room, I think, reflected that. It was super diverse and the whole point was to demo what we're thinking, what we're doing.
We sent out our white paper to all the attendees. They were the first ones to kind of see our white paper. We got feedback from them and the whole point was, okay, look at what we're trying to do. Give us your feedback because software companies, you got to close that feedback loop somehow. That's what the summit was so that we can make sure that we're iterating in the right direction and making sure that we are building the right solution in a way that the users that we're hoping will use it will actually do that, so that we can reverse climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, we got a lot of good notes on that. And I think people like that general spirit of the event too, where I don't know how many conferences y'all have been to that have been lectured at the entire time. They aren't very fun. Oftentimes I feel bored. Most of the fun things they do at conferences are hanging out and talking to the attendees anyways. So I think that they got to do that in the room where it was actually a direct value to us and probably their own projects was in everyone's interest.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we didn't even have that packed of an agenda. There was something to do. We had a good amount of things that we talked about, but it was almost like tease them with conversation, have this panel, lots of Q&A, and then another collaborative networking break where people just ate food and talked to each other. And it was really hard actually to start the next session because everybody was talking and having a great time, which I loved and I felt kind of torn between cutting up those conversations and continuing the agenda so that we didn't go on till midnight.
Christophe Jospe: Sorry, I'm getting caught up. What's Q and A?
Ross Kenyon: Everybody knows what Q&A.
Christophe Jospe: That is just a simple one.
Ross Kenyon: That was the most beautiful meta moment that I've ever heard on the podcast.
Christophe Jospe: Questions and answers.
Ross Kenyon: Christophe wins. There are some acronyms that are just so obvious.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, all right.
Ross Kenyon: You think you can make a parody of yourself?
Christophe Jospe: Ross called it a conference, but it was a summit. So summit up for us.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my God.
Christophe Jospe: I did that.
Ross Kenyon: I've been waiting for you to use that one.
Christophe Jospe: How did it start? What went down at Reversapalooza?
Ross Kenyon: I'm surprised I didn't see that summit up coming. I spent so much time with you, Christophe. I shouldn't see that. You looked a little smug in delivery, so you got a spot.
Christophe Jospe: Oh my gosh. Okay. Summit hit up.
Alexsandra Guerra: Again, we wanted to get people's feedback. And so we had sessions from all over the board. We started off, this was crazy, with the conversation of carbon markets and asked the question. I think Ross, you moderated this one, asked the question, like, you know, what are carbon markets and like, does anybody even know what they are? So setting that stage and Aldyen Donnelly and Josh Margolis from EDF, who's worked on carbon markets, both of them are experts and worked on this for decades, kind of just laid the ground for us. We have to bring it down to a pretty basic level. Oh my gosh, Josh got out of his chair down the stage and then like grabbed another chair and then laid on the floor and jumped up on the chair to like illustrate the differences in emissions policies.
I loved that he did that and it was the first session because that's exactly the energy that we wanted in Reversapalooza. And I was able to grab it on my phone and put it to our Instagram story and I loved it. I was like, yes, this is exactly what we're going to be doing. And if you would like to see it, all of this will be available to view at a later date. Actually, if you wanted to see like the full agenda and the speaker bios, it's still up at nori.org/reversapalooza.
Ross Kenyon: By the time this airs, the videos might even be up.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, that's true. And then we also have these amazing, we had a live illustrator who took notes in all the sessions. Catherine was bomb.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, that was the best part.
Alexsandra Guerra: [Twitter plug cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio.]
Christophe Jospe: Oh yeah, well just to kind of speak to Josh's theatrics, he had a chair and he stood on top of the chair and he said, "This is where we are with business as usual." And then he got off the chair and that was, this is where we are today, emissions. And then he sat on the chair and he's like, this is if we did everything that people are committing to. And then he laid down on the floor and he's like, and this is where Nori wants to get you.
Ross Kenyon: You said scientists wants to get you.
Christophe Jospe: He says, this is where scientists want to get you and they want you to like it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fine.
Christophe Jospe: Selective memory.
Alexsandra Guerra: all sources of emissions is just fantastical. There's absolutely no way that's going to happen. And so I thought it was a perfect signal for the start of our summit because it was really explaining that the philosophy that we're trying to make here is that we treat greenhouse gases like a waste product, and we pay for collecting that waste and we still get to enjoy the luxuries that make life worth living. That was said throughout the whole summit was that carbon is not the enemy here, right? We're made of carbon, we eat carbon.
Ross Kenyon: And it cycles.
Alexsandra Guerra: But I don't want to lose track of that thread, that was what is the summit and what else did we talk about? We started off with carbon markets. Then we had a great panel about general methodologies for carbon dioxide removal, from really nascent technologies like managed mine tailings to direct air capture. We had Greg Dipple and Klaus Lackner and Ethan. And who else was on them?
Ross Kenyon: David Montgomery.
Alexsandra Guerra: David Montgomery. So all four of those were on previous podcasts. So you're welcome to go back and listen to some of those episodes to dive a little deeper. And then we had a Nori trading game.
Ross Kenyon: Oh my God, that trading game was such a great idea.
Alexsandra Guerra: Katie Aretz had suggested it and we had contracted her to help her with the development of the program and she was so useful and that idea was brilliant.
Ross Kenyon: So we simulated the Nori marketplace. We put a thousand stickers on a thousand poker chips that were Nori tokens and we printed out CRCs and had ledgers and had people act as buyers and suppliers. Paul and Katie and I were bankers. The people when the price would change after every simulated quarter in the game would run over to us trying to sell or buy or do their own stuff. My favorite part was we were standing outside at a counter where people would come up to us and whenever the price would change we would hear loud cries of joy or groans of misery.
Paul Gambill: Welcome to crypto.
Ross Kenyon: I think we learned a lot from it and I'm ready to go on the road and start doing this like universities and places and you know let's get in some game stores so people can start buying the Nori trading game.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we've got our legit like poker metallic briefcases.
Paul Gambill: I had a lot of people come up to me and say that they really enjoyed the game. They thought that it was really engaging and interactive, and they clearly all had a lot of fun with it. But most of all, it helped them really understand what these two different assets, the carbon removal certificate and the Nori token are, and why you pay for the carbon removal certificate with a Nori token, and how the value of the Nori token fluctuates depending on what the market demand for it is, really is kind of the nature of the whole thing that we're building. And I think it clicked for a lot of people. So it seemed to work well.
Christophe Jospe: Two things happened, right? It clicked for people to do actually have enhanced rudimentary like Nori tokens, right? Obviously these are going to be digital assets. So they understood what we were getting at, but then we were able to learn from them and highlight some of the things that we need to look at. And we were just discussing earlier, which is like the difference in the price of Nori and the difference in price of carbon dioxide removal. It did these two things.
Ross Kenyon: When you say price, do you mean the cost of removing carbon dioxide?
Christophe Jospe: Yes. Yeah. So let's put a pin in that conversation for another time. But I just, like, Paul, if you could. So, succinctly summarize what is the most important thing that people were supposed to learn from the game.
Paul Gambill: For suppliers, the optimal strategy when using the Nori marketplace is to get your CRCs listed for sale in the queue as soon as possible because when you sell the CRCs and you receive Nori tokens in exchange, well now you have optionality. You can go sell those Nori tokens for dollars or some other cryptocurrency or you could hold on to them and choose to sell them or trade them at a later date. And we're decoupling those assets so that you have the choice, you have the freedom to choose, do you need the cash flow now? Do you want to trade these or invest these? It's up to you. And that's really what I wanted people to get out of it.
Alexsandra Guerra: All right, [unclear], we went into the demo. So Paul went into a demo of our platform after I tripped over the wires and totally ruined it.
Ross Kenyon: Which by the way means I didn't get to record the screen.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we do that. It's okay. Actually, that wasn't the first mess up. The first mess up, which was hilarious to me, was in the very first session with the carbon markets that you were recording, Ross. So you know how people put mics on and they talk? Well, I didn't do that. I had set up the conference and kicked it off and you guys were passing around a handheld mic. And I was like, oh, it's fine, it's fine. And I realized that that handheld mic was supposed to be for questions and answers that I would walk around the room. And I realized that halfway through and Christophe's looking at me. So I go up on stage while Ross is talking, just stops and everything just looks like a hot mess. And I speak into one of the microphones, I'm like, "All right guys, I studied environmental engineering, I'm [unclear] event planner." And the whole room just like laughed and it was really fun. It was such a good crowd. Cause I just kept doing things like tripping over the cord and ruining our demo.
Ross Kenyon: I was going to endorse you on LinkedIn for event planning, but now I'm not.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, damn it. I don't care. Anyways in the demo, I think in the Q&A, I really liked that people. And then we're talking about, well, how do we use Nori token in retail? How do the suppliers start using their Nori token for purchasing things that they need?
Christophe Jospe: Those are some of the conversations that emerged from the game from people naturally playing it. And I think that we wanted to be in listen mode to start understanding what can we learn from how this whole thing might operate.
Alexsandra Guerra: So...
Ross Kenyon: Paul showed a demo of the platform and walked through what it would be like for buyers and suppliers to either purchase or sell carbon removal certificates in the Nori marketplace. It's really the full life cycle of a CRC from point of creation, how you would go about entering data for our first methodology being soil carbon removal, how you would go about entering data with one of our data aggregator partners like Comet Farm, and pull that in and see your carbon removal certificate get verified and then those CRCs be listed for sale on the queue. And then from the buyer end going through and simply purchasing however many you wanted to purchase.
Christophe Jospe: software demos are awesome. It makes it that much more real. And I think to quote Paul too, who's on the keys behind us, you can do anything in software, anything you imagine, and it really goes to show we actually can and it's so much easier to build software products solve climate change than hardware products.
Ross Kenyon: Well, no, it's actually really hard to find software products that can solve climate change and that's why he's our CTO and super excited about Nori, right, Paul? Right there? Yeah, he is. Two thumbs up. When you said you could do anything with software, the asshole philosophy part of my brain said, "Can you make a square circle?"
Christophe Jospe: That was my first thought, make a burrito so hot that you can't eat it. Paul too says yes, you can make a square circle, [unclear].
Paul Gambill: Challenge accepted.
Alexsandra Guerra: So that took us into one of those nice mingling network-y things. And then it was day two, what happened today?
Ross Kenyon: What happened today? I don't know, my brain just farted.
Christophe Jospe: So what happened today was a little shorter, but we went deeper into the weeds a little bit. We talked about-
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh my gosh, we did Blockchain 101. So Jay Carpenter from Desert Blockchain came out and did a really great workshop for like 25, 30 minutes with newspapers and had different people in the room act as nodes in the blockchain and miners in the blockchain and then illustrated the difference between the blockchain as a technology and the ledger and the cryptocurrency.
Christophe Jospe: So you were maintaining this thing in a trustless system that you could verify with everybody there. But then you were getting rewarded and paid for in a cryptocurrency. So there's a difference there between the two.
Ross Kenyon: So we love our listeners and they're very savvy, but sometimes we throw some terms out like...
Christophe Jospe: Did I throw a term out?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What's a node?
Christophe Jospe: Like Q&A. Is that one that we use?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Paul Gambill: In a blockchain, you have nodes which are operators of the ledger. So a blockchain is simply a ledger of transactions that are grouped together into blocks and then they are linked in a chain. That's literally the [unclear]. A node is someone running a computer program that has a full copy of the ledger. As each new block in the chain gets added, they update the ledger that they maintain on their computer. And a node is not necessarily the same thing as a miner, although a miner is a node. A miner is someone who is participating in the Bitcoin consensus mechanism. A miner is the node that is performing the proof of work algorithm to try to find the next transaction, the next block. And we simulated that and simulated how the miners receive a reward for finding the next block.
Christophe Jospe: course the question, the question, which is important, came up that we knew was going to come up was how do we have an environmental blockchain and still be able to hold our heads up high.
Paul Gambill: Bitcoin and a lot of other blockchains use a proof of work mechanism, which is what I just described. If you're a miner, you're running a lot of very hot, very energy intensive computing equipment to find the next block. And there's a constant arms race going on between different miners to add more computing power to outcompete each other in order to have more of a chance of finding the next block and earn that money. If you're finding a Bitcoin block that's like $100,000 that you get and there's a new block found every 10 minutes, so it's serious money at stake.
Stake is an interesting word because the Ethereum blockchain, which we're building Nori on, is in the process of getting close to beginning the transition over to a proof of stake mechanism, which works differently. It sort of simulates that process and drastically reduces the energy usage of the network to something negligible in comparison to the proof of work. So one of many reasons we like Ethereum. In the near future, running transactions on that blockchain will not be anywhere near as carbon intensive as it might be right now.
Christophe Jospe: To sum it up, Nori is not going to be emitting a ton of carbon into the atmosphere to remove more carbon.
Paul Gambill: Or even if we were, we would just spend some of the Nori tokens just to offset.
Alexsandra Guerra: Pay for your waste product. That's the whole point. So the other session that we did within Reversapalooza that was really fun was this open source technology one. And we have Lorraine Smith and Andrew Himes, Kyle Burchard, and Greg Austic there. We kind of went from this technology focused summit conversation to the value of transparency and open source and then this idea that we have to have a paradigm shift board. So from this hard software side to this human side, this intangible thing that needs to occur in our mentality as a society where we shift from scarcity thinking to abundance, right? There's no competition between us and our partners, it's more shots on goal. And Christophe has said this before so many times, and I completely agree. And the idea is this is a global problem. Global warming is global climate change.
We need everybody on board to try and figure this out. And there is just a complex problem. So we need to address them holistically. And if we, from a day-to-day aspect, think about how we can start thinking with abundance mentality, that that would shift the way that we work and the way that we build our teams and the way that we are building our solutions. And that seemed to resonate with a lot of people. I got a lot of feedback on that one.
Christophe Jospe: One of the things for me that really resonated about the open source panel is you can just open the doors so that you have the input at the right time that something kind of creates this input to benefit the commons. I think that's a really important point. And so it was really heartening to see all of these disparate, seemingly disparate efforts somehow come together that their underlying motivation for doing this is hey, we need to manage the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And we're working on these different pieces, all of which need to set the foundation so that they can talk to other pieces in a way that won't block them.
Lorraine used what is now my new favorite analogy for talking about open source technology, which was the alphabet in any language, pick any language, is something that people sort of have agreed upon over time. There's spontaneous order developing out of chaos. And we all agree on this, but it's not like there's a single defined centralized source that is telling us that we have to use the alphabet. And not only that, but it exists in this decentralized way, and it's open and free. And if you want to change it, you can. You are free to. It's just unlikely that people will follow you, but it does allow for evolution and iteration and I am totally going to steal that in the future.
Ross Kenyon: I thought the same thing. That is now my new analogy for open source technology. All the alphabets are often centrally planned like St. Cyril and Cyrillic alphabet. Like languages though is evolutionary. But those things are often planned kind of centrally.
Christophe Jospe: or we can say that, we can say that in English though that's not the case.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I don't we want to go down this rabbit hole. I don't know, sometimes I put a pin in it.
Ross Kenyon: I like it when we do put a pin in it.
Alexsandra Guerra: That's our saying. Like, interesting to discuss, I have to put a pin in it. So like I kept saying that and like a month in Christophe finally goes to me, goes, "Alexsandra, [unclear] exactly do you mean by put a pin in it?"
Christophe Jospe: A nice, a nice butterfly that you just know. I wasn't sure, she was pinning like five things and said in like the course of ten minutes and I was not sure when these things would get unpinned or like what I was telling you to can it. Now we have like, are we put our head in the air and we like pin it and we unpinned things.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, because if you're talking about five very complex ideas in five minutes, yeah, you gotta put pins in things and finish the thread.
Ross Kenyon: Anyway, so what else did we do at Reversapalooza?
Christophe Jospe: Sounds like that thread was finished. That's what you were trying to say.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Then we had a couple more sessions that were more specifically focused on soil carbon removal.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, we did. We had two of those. The first one I also moderated and it was a little bit higher level. It was talking about returning carbon to the ground and why that's important. And we kind of tied it into some of these like ideas of what exactly is regenerative farming and what the scale is in terms of how many people are adopting it and what are the things that we need to do in order to get more of it. And it's really like we need to incentivize farmers further. There's a lot of policy in terms of insurance, crop insurance that just is not making it an even playing field and it's really at the detriment of society and our land to not have things incentivized for us to have more fertile land by adopting these regenerative and conservation practices.
Christophe Jospe: Totally. And I think a big takeaway for me was a comment made on that panel, which is don't tell farmers what to do.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, yeah.
Christophe Jospe: Don't bribe them. Yeah. Really don't tell them what to do and don't sound like it. By the way, don't make it about climate change. Make it about the health of your soil. And I think it's fascinating because it still totally works with what you're doing. Oh, by the way, if you can measure your carbon content in your soil and you're willing to play in the Nori system, you can get paid using this.
Alexsandra Guerra: I forgot, guys. We started off our whole summit, Amanda Ravenhill from Buckminster Fuller Institute introduced Paul. Paul gave this very inspiring, like what is Nori's mission in reversing climate change? And then we debuted our explainer video, which you guys can check out. And I love at the end of that explainer video, we say, you know, what we're reversing climate change is about, incentives and solutions.
Christophe Jospe: And I thought about that when we were in that panel for returning carbon to the ground because it really is about incentivizing these new practices so that we can have this huge co-benefits happening where we are improving our land and reversing climate change putting carbon away somewhere.
Alexsandra Guerra: Totally.
Christophe Jospe: And we're big fans of Amanda and she works for the Buckminster Fuller Institute and you know, Bucky is known for saying that to make things work for 100% of humanity and we couldn't agree more.
Alexsandra Guerra: And are you intentionally leaving out the last?
Christophe Jospe: No, I'm actually waiting for you to say something about it because you moderated it.
Alexsandra Guerra: Go ahead, Christophe.
Ross Kenyon: The moderation was kind of forgettable, is what she's trying to say.
Christophe Jospe: I guess. We're all. I feel like you're being a little bit adversarial on this podcast.
Ross Kenyon: So tell us what the point of the last panel was.
Christophe Jospe: So the point of the last panel was to discuss how do we verify that the carbon was stored in the soil.
Alexsandra Guerra: Christophe, you want to talk a little bit about what was discussed? It was a pretty intense panel. It was an incredible way to end the summit.
Christophe Jospe: I kind of feel like Will Ferrell in Old School, like what happened? I blacked out.
Ross Kenyon: Seriously though, it went...
Christophe Jospe: I thought it was important and it brought three really important perspectives to the stage, one of whom is Karen Haugen-Kozyra. She had done some really important work in the Canadian Soil Reference Core Network, which is critical because essentially you understand all these different soil types from the core samples and are able to use that to help farmers get paid and incentivize these practices which ultimately sequester more carbon in the soil, albeit not through a market mechanism that's directly paying for the carbon removal, but one that's able to measure that. And obviously, measurement is the crux of what we're doing.
Keith Paustian, who is at Colorado State University and also Comet Farm is a key part of some of the funding that he gets through the United States Department of Agriculture. He was sitting on the panel as well and Keith is a top modeler. So what basically happens on the Comet Farm tool is they will have inputs from different farming practices for conservation agriculture. Inputs essentially tell you ask how do you manage your land? What are you doing? Are you doing no till? Are you doing low till? Are you planting different cover crops? What region? What bio region are you in? All of which basically can create a carbon estimate of how much is now being removed. We think that's exciting.
We're very excited to have Landua on that panel as well. And Greg is part of the Regen Network and there's a future podcast coming out about that where we can learn more about Regen Network. Essentially, they are also a fellow traveler in the blockchain space and looking to create verification protocols for ecological services, one of which is carbon removal. So very much aligned and we're super excited to see that project develop. And I think the questions that came up on that panel were very much starting points, not saying we know exactly how this is going to work. But here are the key considerations that we need to take into our various ideas around how indeed we can measure and launch our first methodology that can help ultimately monetizes activity.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and those questions, I don't think we should talk about them here. Not that you were going to on the podcast because we can get in the weeds, but we are going to be sharing the recordings of the sessions. So those will be available. And we'll also be showing some of the illustrations that we had from our visual note-taker, Catherine, that we mentioned earlier, who was just fantastic, kind of sums up some of the things that were discussed in each session.
So the dust is now barely settled. And it's probably not fair to ask this question, but Reversapalooza just ended. What's next?
Alexsandra Guerra: It just ended like a couple hours ago.
Christophe Jospe: Your music festival, right?
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh yeah. Next year he wants to do Reversapalooza like one day, the summit, and the next day.
Ross Kenyon: Guys, it's not my music. First of all, our music festival.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, but you promised you were the one who was going to organize the music part.
Christophe Jospe: So we're all kind of hitting the road for the next few weeks and it's going to be out traveling, meeting a lot of different people. I think that there's a lot of feedback that we got on our white paper and throughout the summit that we need to think about and incorporate and continue some of these conversations with the people that were in the room now offline. There's a lot that we need to do in terms of product development as well as business development to make sure that we are coming up with a good verifiable way of showing that carbon was in the ground, there's a lot of questions that need to be answered. So just keep moving through and talking to people, making sure that they're kept in the loop, that we are answering the right questions.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that's a very great summation. I couldn't be happier with how the summit went. I will endorse you on LinkedIn for event planning.
Alexsandra Guerra: Oh, great. Thank you.
Ross Kenyon: You've got to change apart on the podcast.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yep. Honestly guys, you started off saying I did it, I didn't do it.
Ross Kenyon: You and Katie, are you settled for that?
Alexsandra Guerra: No, so no, I won't. I won't because it was such a team effort and Christophe here, killing it business development wise, like finding leads, reaching out to people, like more than half that room was because of Christophe and his like VIP status and networking. I learned so much from him all the time.
Ross Kenyon: He is Mr. Networker.
Alexsandra Guerra: He is, but the whole event was, I mean, come on. Ross, you were helping, everybody was involved in Reversapalooza. I was just orchestrating and keeping track of a Trello board. But it was interesting and it was great. I'm really proud of all of us. It's exciting. This is the first one and there's going to be more.
Ross Kenyon: There was actually a conference the day before in the same space that was something about wood. I don't remember exactly. I saw them in a bar. It was their 104th annual conference. Well, who knows? So there's something to shoot for.
Alexsandra Guerra: If I can end it on a light note, I think everybody there was super happy to be there, so many thank yous for having them, like inviting them to be there. And that was just so much joy and made me really excited and inspired because these people were still the people who were giving us really a hard time.
Christophe Jospe: There was a lot of optimism in the room and a couple of people came up to me and said how excited they were to be in a space around other people who actually had reason to hope.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. about hope, but we have to try, right? So at Nori we have this saying where it's "find, don't whine." So find a solution, don't whine about it. And everybody in the room was doing that. They were bringing up concerns and talking through how do we find a solution to this issue and not whining about it. And that was really productive. And it was mixed with this optimism and inspiration and collaboration that was just five stars.
Ross Kenyon: It was awesome. I'm feeling really excited because I think that with this network of people that you brought in, Christophe and everybody in their networks, we're going to do this. I'm really freaking pumped. All right, great. Thanks for finally making your appearance.
Alexsandra Guerra: We are saving it for this occasion.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, look forward to catching up with everyone soon.
