Can we have a regenerative planet within a decade? Rob Avis, Co-Founder 5th Generation

Welcome to the 70th episode of Happy Planet podcast. This is the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet.

This week we are traveling to Alberta, Canada to speak with Rob Avis, co-founder of 5th World, a Canadian startup focused on regenerative living. 

5th World  designs and builds  self-sufficient homesteads, greenhouses and combined food, water, and energy systems we can live and work more synergistically with nature. Rob has powerful backers and big ambitions. Their end goal? Planetary regeneration within a generation. 

https://5thworld.com/

Transcript

riverside_rob_avis_raw-audio_rob_avis_0002: 0:12

Welcome to the podcast where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. This week we are traveling to Alberta, Canada to speak with Rob Avis, co-founder of Fifth World, a Canadian startup focused on regenerative living fifth world designs and build self-sufficient homesteads, greenhouses, and food, water, and energy systems that enable all of us to live and work more synergistically with nature. Rob has powerful backers and big ambitions his end goal is to see planetary regeneration within one generation. But to do that, he must create a movement. Let's hear it from Rob.

Abigail Carrroll: 0:56

welcome to the podcast, Rob.

Rob Avis: 0:59

Thanks for having me. Super stoked to be here.

Abigail Carroll: 1:01

Well, I'm really excited to speak to you. You're an expert in regenerative living tell me what that means.

Rob Avis: 1:09

To really understand this, I have to go back a couple of steps. There's three main narratives in our society right now. The narrative that represented from the beginning of the industrial revolution probably until the mid nineties was this narrative of kind of business as usual capitalism. Raising GDP every single year, raising earnings shareholder value. We still have a lot of that in our society right now. It's the foundation layer of, of the capitalist system. And you can really summarize that narrative into how do I get more stuff? It's very mechanistic. It's got very clear lag measures. It's a very simple. Goal to, for people to understand, which is why I think it, it really captured the minds of a lot of people. And in a lot of ways, it's the best system that humans have come up with. In all honesty, the second narrative that kind of started to emerge in the nineties was the sustainability paradigm. And if you came to me, Abigail and said Rob, how's your marriage doing these days? And they said, oh, it's pretty sustainable. You'd probably feel pretty bad for me. And so. I would argue that the sustainability narrative actually is our end state and not our, our current state. And the problem with the sustainability paradigm is that and, and pretty much pretty, I'm sure all of your listeners and even you have thought about this, but have never put words to it. The words that we use to describe the sustainability paradigm are things like net zero zero escaping. That's when you take your front yard and cover it in landscape, fabric and rocks, or maybe even you're putting plastic lawn on there. It's trying to minimize our footprint. And so if you kind of take those words to its logical endpoint. The only conclusion you can really draw from the sustainability movement is that humans are inherently destructive. That's the statement you've never put words to. And at best we can minimize our footprint. And I think this is a really bad vision. I think it's horrible and I don't think it's

Abigail Carroll: 3:13

Dsmo, that's for sure.

Rob Avis: 3:15

Dismal. Yeah. And so the regenerative living movement needs a little bit more context to really understand. So every species on earth. Has innate characteristics. So if you think about a bird a bird is genetically designed and it has the maps in its mind to fly. It doesn't go to university to learn the Bern Newi principle and to learn theories of, you know, aerodynamics and how to flap its wings. It's just, it's built into it. And you can go through every species on earth and kind of figure out what its innate characteristics are as a farmer. We see this all the time when we have young animals show up on our farm. They just do things like, they're not taught to do them, they just do them. And so that got me thinking into like what if, if humans are part of that ecology, which I believe that they are, I believe we're just one mammal in, in a community of species. We have unfortunately, memes in our society that. Make us think that we're somehow different than, than the species that we live amongst which I disagree with. I think we are one of one of the species in the, in the circle of life to quote the Lion King. What is it that if, if birds are meant to fly from a very young age, what is it that little kids do? Innately without ever anybody ever having to tell them to do it. we make chaos. And so if you have ever had kids around you for a long period of time, they just destroy everything. Like you'd never have to tell a child to not destroy something. They just, they just do it. When we were first gardening in our house in Calgary, we had to create a chaos zone for our kids. So they didn't destroy our garden. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted to that chaos zone, but they couldn't destroy our garden. Humans are actually disturbance creators. We create disturbance. We, we mine rocks. We harvest forests, we farm land and every time we do that, we create a footprint. We create disturbance. Now let's, let's take a, a quick sidestep over to the beaver.'cause I think the beaver is actually closest to humans in terms of the disturbance pattern that it creates. It cuts down trees to the untrained aisle. When you walk up to where a beaver is working, they'll say, this beaver is making a complete mess. It's destroying this ecosystem. But what's actually happening in the background is it's moving trees into the water. It's harvesting mud from the bottom of the creek. It's sealing a dam. It's storing millions of gallons of water. And as a result of that, it increases the background biodiversity in that micro zone by 28 times. So its footprint is creating more life and it does so through the through disturbance. And so if humans are. The ultimate disturbance maker you could argue, which is where the sustainability movement that we are destroying the earth. And I think that there's a lot of evidence to that end. And it's because the disturbance that we create is out of scale. We're doing too much too quickly without an understanding of how ecosystems function. And it's only in the last a hundred years since we've put satellites up into space that we really have the information that we need to be able to make better decisions. And so if disturbance is not inherently a negative thing, it's how you apply it. It's based on scale, time, placement and form, then the vision that we have to create is one of regenerative living. So how do we actually. Act like the beaver and make sure that every one of our footprints is actually enhancing the ability for life to thrive around us. What does that look like? And part of that is like, is getting rid of our guilt. It's like acknowledging that we are part of the circle of life that we do have a contribution to this planet as a species. And that it's up to us to decide whether that footprint leaves where we live better or worse. And we do that by the creation of human habitat. And that human habitat is the way we build our houses, how we manage water, how we grow our food, or how, where we get our food from how we interact with our community. Even the money that we make and that we use amongst each other. All of these things influence whether the disturbance that we create as a species is going to be. Without any religious connotation, pro-life or the opposite, which is allopathic. We, we get to make that decision and we decide every single day when we wake up. So regenerative living is about optimizing human wellbeing by the creation of regenerative human habitat Time.

Abigail Carroll: 7:51

Wow. There's a lot to unpack in there. But I find it interesting also because I think when we talk about what you do, you're a creator. So it's interesting this, this destruction that the humans are doing coming from, you know, talking about that and, and having that be part of a, a pi a paradigm when you are like fundamentally, you know, an engineer at a, a farmer and a creator. But I suppose all of those activities are inherently destructive on some level. You have to kind of break down to build.

Rob Avis: 8:26

Yeah.

Abigail Carroll: 8:27

so, so. You have this of regenerative living and this idea of destruction leading to creation. How does this manifest in your business? Fifth world.

Rob Avis: 9:16

So Fifth World's mission is planetary regeneration within a generation. It's huge. And what that looks like on a day to day today is that we design regenerative. Estates, landscapes, farms and properties for individuals that leverage regenerative food systems water harvesting renewable energy systems, low energy buildings. Basically showing or providing the, the infrastructure, the tools and the techniques for humans to exist in a positive relationship with the environment around them. And we do that. Through consulting and through helping folks to build those things out long term, we want to, or I would say medium term, we want to accelerate the adoption of decentralized food, energy, and water systems. Fifth World has no intention of owning all of that or like that niche per se. And so we actually are trying to figure out. How to create the rails to inspire an entrepreneurial revolution because it's gonna take literally billions of people to achieve this goal. Which means that we have to create thousands, maybe even millions of nodes around the world where individual communities can start to take responsibility for their f footprints and make sure that they're positive. And so we wanna make sure that those people have those tools in order to enable that.

Abigail Carroll: 10:40

Interesting. You're in Alberta where I've been a few times now and and the landscape's very different. It's also politically removed from the rest of Canada. Are some of those differences, are they they part of what has inspired you? Is there, is there something about being in Alberta because it's like sort of the off the grid now. I, I love the off the grid. Movement, but so many of the components in the United States are considered, you know, blue State, you know, philosophies and, and yet for me, I would think of like, you know, I, I think that the, the, you know, being off the grid and, you know, having your own farming and having your own, you know, electricity. These are fundamentally, you know conservative ideas that I would think with, that I would normally associate with, with the, you know, rural states. Is, is, is Alberta a little bit of more accepting of renewables than maybe some of American red states? But still, you know, holding onto some those conservative ideas is, is, does that have anything to do with this?

Rob Avis: 11:51

it's interesting because yeah, being off grid or having your own food or having your own energy on your water can be construed as libertarian. That's one way to look at it. But it can also be, I'm, and I should just clarify, I'm not actually advocating for self-reliance or complete off grid or,'cause there's no such thing as that. We, we live in a highly connected society. Humans are a social species. And so, where we are today, which people would argue is kind of more pro-social, maybe they'd argue that is really not pro-social at all. We have highly centralized grids that are super susceptible to failure, like they haven't really been invested in for many, many years. These grids are predominantly owned by monopolies whether they're water, whether they're gas, whether they're electric. Our food industry is consolidating at breakneck speed. Every time I walk into a grocery store there's almost no food available to buy there. It's all hyper processed. It's in plastic, it's covered in microplastics. You have no idea where the beef or the chicken or the fish has come from. You have to rely upon a trust mechanism that's suspect at best. Sometimes it's better than others. And so yes, freedom could be one kind of aspect. And I think freedom is a super important. I mean, freedom and liberty is the foundation of Western civilization. And we're moving rapidly away from that due to the centralization and, and consolidation of the businesses that support our very basic needs our very basic supply chains. So yes, there is a libertarian component, but we can also look at it from an environmental component as well. When I produce my own power on my property. I don't have the line losses associated with sending power from a power grid. And then when I have surplus power, I can actually inject that energy back into the grid, which actually supports the foundation of the grid, especially if it's combined with batteries. When I harvest my own rainwater on my roof in an urban or rural environment, I'm reducing the amount of storm water in a city specifically. That the city has to deal with. So I'm reducing the, the burden associated with those centralized infrastructure pieces. Rainwater's, also the cleanest drinking water on earth. And so I'm improving my own personal health, which reduces the burden on the health system. In fact, rainwater, when studying in Australia, rainwater drinkers had better health outcomes than people drinking main's water because they weren't ingesting fluoride and chlorine. And then when I grow my own food, in my backyard. It's not traveling from Mexico or from California. It's coming right outside my backyard. It's loaded with microbes, which is very good for my, the probiotics in my gut. I'm literally eating it minutes after it was harvested. I'm able to recycle the waste products from my house back into the garden. And so I find it really interesting because as a company, we're always trying to balance. Our messaging with regards to the client that we're talking to. And so if somebody's really libertarian, sure, we'll set you up with a system that supports your libertarian goals. And almost like Trojan Horse, the environmental benefits,'cause they're not really as interested in that. And if somebody's an environmentalist and wants to do what's good for the planet they're gonna get all the environmental benefits and yeah, they also get a little. Topping of freedom on there as well. And Wendell Berry said that when less than 3% of the population farms, you can't have a functional democracy. And so having distributed power by empowering individuals with food, energy, and water, actually, I would argue is the foundation of a functional democracy, because now you don't have people that are like we saw in COVID. Beholden to a, a fragile system. And this kind of leads into, we talked, started talking about regenerative living. The foundational layer of regenerative living is actually anti fragility, which we can talk about next if you'd like to. But we live in a very, a society that is, that is sitting in on an upside down pyramid right now because, and that, that point at the bottom of the pyramid is our power, our food and water. And we actually have to reverse the pyramid in the other direction. And never in the history of humans have we had the ability to, or humanity or or civilization, have we had the ability to actually invert that pyramid in the way that we do today.

Abigail Carroll: 16:17

Right. Thanks to tech basically is gonna let us do that. Although some of the things you're doing are, are somewhat low, like the collecting of rainwater, that's something that people have been doing for, for millennia. But

Rob Avis: 16:28

Yeah, I would say science. And like, and knowledge.

Abigail Carroll: 16:32

So let's talk about the fragile living, and then I wanna hear what. What people are mostly gravitating to out of all these options that you've, you know, your homestead does everything but of all the options, these, you know, that, you're proposing people, what are people's priorities today? But first, let's go into the fragile living.

Rob Avis: 16:53

So I think it's really important to understand like why I use the word fragile or anti-fragile, and it's nice to have an analogy for that. So if I was to ship you a wine glass in a box and I put the label fragile on there, what does the subtext say underneath that label that says Fragile handle with care? So we can say very broadly that fragile systems do not benefit from volatility. And then if we go one step up resilience would be kind of the middle ground. And so we can think of a sidewalk as being resilient. If I chip a bit of concrete outta the sidewalk, it still functions as a sidewalk. Yes, it's not. A whole sidewalk anymore because they took a chip out of it. But it's resilient to volatility. And so then if fragile is handled with care, and I'm shipping you something inside of a box that's anti-fragile, what would the subtext on that say? Apply volatility. Right? And so we can look at every system that humans rely upon and we can rank them in terms of whether. They are fragile, resilient, or anti-fragile. And you can do that really quickly, like pretty qualitatively just through a conversation. And just to kind of build out the anti-fragile piece a little bit more the best example of an anti-fragile system is the human body. So if I lift weight in the right dosage, my muscles get bigger. And so anti-fragile systems actually require volatility to be healthy. But if you apply too much volatility, if I lift too much weight too often, I can tear tendons and rip muscle and, and set myself backwards. If I choose to sit on a couch for the rest of my life I'm gonna atrophy and I'm gonna get sick. And so most of. The systems that we depend upon are not resilient to volatility. Like I think we could say pretty clearly that as the food system consolidates like most cities have about three days of food in it at any given time. And we have about 18 months of grain stored on planet Earth. And we produced the most amount of grain per capita back in 1986. And speed dec declining being declining ever since. Every calorie of food that we consume takes 30 calories of hydrocarbon to produce it. These are all things that, that feed into the fact that our food system is very fragile. And I do believe if we don't change course, that we will witness a giga famine in my lifetime, which is more than a billion people starving. At the same time we can look, do the same thing with the power system, with our heating systems and with our water systems. I was watching a guy talk about solar flares the other day. This just completely floored me. I just, I just actually wrote a post on LinkedIn about this. It hasn't gone up yet, but if all the power on Earth went out, there's literally no, almost no surface water on earth that humans could drink that would be clean enough without filtration. Like, that blew my mind that we, that we've like. We've, we've polluted so much of our water that we can't even drink it anymore without moving it through machines. And so we can look at these things without going into a bunch of detail and say like, we've ized the very foundational layers of civilization. They all require energy in order to operate. And so we need to be a regenerative living system, whether it's on your property or in a city, or a town or a community. We actually need to think about how we design these systems so that they operate in normal times very well, but they actually get more valuable. They operate better, they function more effectively when volatility is applied to them. And, I would say with confidence that most of the systems we've talked about thus far would, would not fall into that camp. The good news is, is that we can switch it very quickly. It's, it's actually a really quick turnaround when people kind of wrap their head around it. The biggest shift that we actually have to make is the paradigm shift. The technical moves that have to be made are actually very quick and, and quite simple to make once people understand the concepts.

Abigail Carroll: 20:51

So you just need to, spread the word who is your client and what are they asking for? Like, who, who is sharing this world vision?

Rob Avis: 21:01

We have a few early adopters. So these would be individuals that kind of see the fragility writing on the wall, and they're willing to put their money where their mouth is or where they're thinking anyways. And so these would generally be people that own. Small to medium to large farms. They're designing like passive houses you know, solar microgrids their own gardens, greenhouses, food forests, and livestock systems. That'd be one kind of client profile. We also work for like colleges. So we did a, a full. Designed for a local polytechnic in Calgary where they,'cause they have a culinary program and so they, they wanted their chefs to basically have access to real food so that they can have a differentiated education program. We put a bid in for a local Alberta community to do a hundred year plan, and we were gonna be part of their ecological. Footprinting like how do they manage storm water? How do they manage rainwater? Those sorts of things so we can help kind of longer planning. We get people asking us just for a really quick rainwater harvesting design where we help them to think through how to harvest the water off their roof, put it into tanks, and then use it inside their home. What's, what's another really interesting one that we've worked on recently? LA largely, I would say farms everything from like the urban lot all the way up to the farm. That's kind of who we're primarily targeting right now. On our work.

Abigail Carroll: 22:27

And how did you. Get involved in all of this. You seem like incredibly passionate and you've a bit of a philosopher about how you're approaching this. Where, where does this come from?

Rob Avis: 22:41

I get so many emails and messages weekly asking how the people can join. People want to be part of this movement. Unfortunately, the. Environment is not currently on the balance sheet, so we have to figure out how to solve that problem. So how did I get into this? I'm actually an engineer. I I grew up in a cake factory. I'm Charlie in the chocolate factory. We would make a hundred thousand cakes a day. I got, you know, by the time I left that I we started. Thinking, I didn't want to ever eat processed food again because of all the kilometers that our pipes would have to travel through in order to get into the pan. And then I went into industrial energy. I was an oil and gas engineer. And I started, I started my career off as an engineer bringing gas to gas facilities, natural gas and oil, and then building those facilities to process that gas. And I was actually. Cutting down hundreds, thousands of acres of forest in order to do this. And it really hurt me, like I didn't enjoy it, but I couldn't criticize the industry because I was using natural gas to heat my home. And I was driving to work. And so I, I was in this paradox of I don't want to be a hardcore environmentalist and activist. Depending upon the very resources for my livelihood that I'm trying to fight against. And so we quit our jobs. My wife and I, she's also a petroleum engineer. We traveled to Denmark. We lived there for six months studying renewable energy.'cause understanding energy. That was the next step for us. Like, is there another way to power the world? And then we figured out that Denmark was rapidly on that path. And then we started thinking like, how do we feed the world? In fact, like what we eat every day is hyper destructive. Every ton of grain that's produced right now generates eight tons of, of soil erosion, which is why we have all these dead zones in the world. Our, the nutrient density of our food in some of the nutrient classes, micronutrient classes are at zero relative to where they were a hundred years ago. Okay. And so we're literally eating the planet to death. But the story that gets told is like, well, cows are bad. You know, we should all be vegan or vegetarian. Well, that's not really the whole story. That's just a really small bit of how a, a complex system works. And so we actually converted a van, a Volkswagen van to run on vegetable oil. We drove through Canada, the US, and Mexico going from farm to farm. And learning this thing called permaculture, which is what the reason I actually quit my job was I got this three minute video in my inbox when I was getting ready to cut down a huge swath of forest. And I was like, oh my gosh, like I've got 600,000 hours on this planet. I took my calculator out and figured that out. I've burned through about a third of them. What do I wanna spend the next two thirds of my hours doing? And, and so that's, that's when we quit the job. And then I ended up in Australia for six months Africa for a little while and didn't go back to the patch. My, my wife did for a while to support us. And then we started Verge permaculture. We've taught about 10,000 students around the world in permaculture and permaculture related subjects over about 15 years. And then I ended up designing a property for one of our co-founders in British Columbia. And he said. This is amazing. How do we scale this up? And and so Fifth World was born out of that. And the concept of Fifth World is that we live in the fourth world today. We know a better world is possible, and humans are builders, we're creators. We we're problem solvers. So what are the foundational layers, the sedimentary layers that are required that will usher in a fifth world, a world where humans can coexist with ecology? And it's in our best interest to do this. This is, this is the crazy thing right now. Like I'm, I'm having a lot of cognitive dissidents right now reading this memo that Bill Gates just wrote about climate change not being a problem anymore.

Abigail Carroll: 26:32

I saw that. I didn't read it, but.

Rob Avis: 26:35

well, the thing, the thing that's like, it thing that's interesting to me may not be the thing that you think is interesting to me. What I'm realizing is that the. The PR movement is really strong. And so somebody's lying on one side or the other, and in fact it doesn't really matter which one, and I like trying to find the middle ground in these narratives to like what's true regardless of whether one or one or both of these narratives is false. And as a mechanical engineer, before I got into all of this, I did a little bit of HVAC engineering as well for, for commercial buildings. And ashrae, which is the American Society for Mechanical Engineers, says that in a building you can't, the code that they stipulate is that you can't have the air in the building have higher, like more than 800 ppm of CO2 higher than the outside air. So our global PPM right now is 420. And so by logic. An engineer can't allow the CO2 levels in the building to go beyond about 1200 ppm. Now, it turns out that after a thousand pp m of CO2, we end up in permanent brain fog as humans. Yeah, like you need more oxygen than what's available when you have a thousand.

Abigail Carroll: 27:52

on the planet.

Rob Avis: 27:53

problem. Yeah. And so our, our CO2 concentration went up by, I think four PPM last year. It's accelerating. And, and so like, and I have two little kids by the time they're kind of in their middle to, to late adulthood, assuming it's gonna continue to accelerate we're getting awfully close to that number. At which all humans are gonna be existing in an atmosphere where we have permanent brain fog, because we're literally, you know, and it's, it's funny, although like the people, I don't wanna call them climate deniers, but like, I hate that word actually, but people that are arguing, we gotta burn more fossil fuel. We've got like, there's nothing wrong with it. Humans have nothing to do with climate change. Fine. You guys believe that. You can believe whatever you want. The consumption of these products in the way that we're consuming it. And I'm not, I'm not saying we shouldn't consume fossil fuels. They are, the fossil fuels are an amazing resource that we have to steward. What I'm saying is that the combustion of those products is com is actually a competition to our ability to breathe on this planet. And it's, we either need to plant a lot more trees, and there's a lot of hope in all of this. If the US planted took away its corn, soy, and wheat from, from North Dakota, south of the Gulf of Mexico, east of the Mississippi River and planted it back to perennial grasses and started grazing cattle the like, properly using amp grazing methods. The US would be carbon neutral overnight without changing any of its behaviors. Like that would

Abigail Carroll: 29:24

all the cow farts?

Rob Avis: 29:26

Cal Farts are. Bullshit. So like there were more bison roaming the planes in America 400 years ago than there are cows today. Right. And so the and and actually what's really interesting about methane is that there's a microbe on properly managed pastures called methadones, and they consume the methane. The problem is with cows is that we put them into confined animal feeding operations. That's the problem. Yeah. And, and so like there's very little physics being applied to the food problem that I find that it really irritates me and it's, it's because it, our world is full of so many complex domains. It's hard for one individual to really wrap their head around all of it. So I understand where that's coming from, but what's really interesting about, if we wanted to, to kind of create the most, the most positive. Footprint from a diet perspective, for a city dweller that wasn't growing any of their own food, they would eat a 100% grass fed beef diet, not a vegetarian or vegan diet. And here's how the, here's how the physics works. So a cow, when it consumes, let's just use some simple numbers, a hundred pounds of grass and a hundred liters of water, or a hundred gallons of water, they, they don't consume that much. Necessarily in that ratio, but let's just use those for simple numbers. 90% of what that animal consumes in water and feed ends up back on the ground. 10% of it actually gets absorbed into its body. And so there's an old farmer's adage that you should never sell anything off the farm, that you can't, that can't walk off the farm because 90% of what that animal consumed on that farm gets left behind when I grow a carrot. 100% of what that carrot consumes, leaves the farm

Abigail Carroll: 31:19

Interesting.

Rob Avis: 31:19

ne and never returns. And so, and then we eat it in a city, we defecate into drinking water, which is crazy, and then it ends up in a sewage treatment plant. And at best, maybe that biosolid that gets accumulated in that sewage treatment plant goes to a hundred mile radius around the city. Which by the way also contains all the toxins from the automotive industry and everything else that that sewage treatment plant is processing. So that land actually gets polluted around the city because of those biosolids. So. Cows, when you, when you look at, if you draw the boundary around the cow itself and you focus on its farts. Yeah, sure. It's emitting methane. But when we draw the boundary around a properly managed regenerative farm, this comes back to regenerative living and we look at the, the grassland in the cow is one system, then it's a totally different set of math. And, and so I worked at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in their green building. Technologies department specifically trying to design the carbon neutral standard for Canadian homes. And the problem with the carbon industry is that it's one metric trying to understand a hyper complex system. And as a system scientist you start realizing that the outcome of a policy or even of a calculation or design. Has a lot to do where, with regards to where you draw the boundaries and you can cherry pick that boundary selection in order to communicate a message that fits your bias. And so what I would say is that my bias and we all have them, is more life climate and ecosystem stability. Human thriving. So how do we get the most nutrient dense food? And how do we, instead of putting all of our resources into going to Mars, how do we make sure that planet Earth, spaceship Earth has the best chance of supporting human life?'cause it'll always support. Ecosystem life, the nature will go on. I'm actually a humanist when it comes down to it. So how do I make sure that my kids, their kids, seven generations down the road, actually have a really good chance of thriving on this planet? That's my bias.

Abigail Carroll: 34:07

I love how what's old is new. Again, I love this old adage, it's about the 90%. You don't want something leaving your farm that's got more than 10% of the inputs. So interesting. So, so let's get back to. Fifth world, what stage of this company are you at today? And like, and how, how are you growing it? What do you need to, to take it to the next level?

Rob Avis: 34:39

Whew. So we're a startup. We've just recently come out of Venture Studio mode, so we had about three years of just running massive experiments in various domains. We built a piece of software that we call internally Fitbit for Planet Earth, so we can measure any ecosystem on earth and tell you how healthy it is. Whether it's trending up or trending down. That was one of our experiments. We have this consulting thing we do. We used to do education. We put that on hold For now, I would say that we're primarily consulting, but we're hunting for a mechanism to create the rails for an entrepreneurial revolution. And so one of our co-founders is the co-founder of Ethereum, and so we think that there's an opportunity to bring. The world of the atoms. So physical things together with the, the world of the bits. We don't know where that intersection exists yet, and so we're, we're hunting around trying to figure that out. What we're looking for can come in a number of different ways. Number one, I guess clients, like, we want people that are acting in their own, what I would call enlightened self-interest. So enlightened self-interest is planting a tree whose shade you'll never be able to sit underneath. And you do it because you know that it's good for your kids and their kids and their kids. You also do it to make sure you have a stable food supply that you have. Like, you hear all these influencers on LinkedIn talking about, you know, you gotta eat nutrient dense food. It's like, well, where does that come from? There is no nutrient-dense food available to buy. So people that want nutrient dense food that have the resources to put these systems in and, and either manage them themselves or hire someone else to manage them landowners we want, we want to, like, we have all the tools and techniques. Available to regenerate ecosystems at breakneck speed. Nature wants to come back. We just have to get out of our way, and it's in our best interest to do so. So just more people that want to and, and like, I don't want the message that I think is really important with Fifth World and something we've really tried to curate is it's not about guilt. It's not about fear, this is a better way to live, whether you're in a city or on a rural acreage living amongst living systems. We know that forest bathing is good for you. We know that nutrient dense food is good for you. We know that drinking clean water is good for you. All of these things are available to us right now, and they're really not all that expensive. I mean, we're willing to drop a hundred thousand dollars on a Mercedes-Benz. What if the new status symbol actually becomes clean water and the most beautiful food you can ever possibly imagine, and a utility bill that's actually paying you money, like there's money coming into your bank account because you are able to arbitrage the system. Like with all the AI data centers coming on in the US your power bills are gonna be 30 to 60 cents a kilowatt hour within the next five years. On 30, like the average house uses about 30 kilowatt hours a day, so it's gonna be like$18 to$30 a day, somewhere in there just to use the electricity that you're used to, the time to stop investing in the markets. Put some of these things into assets, you can wear that. And this is the concept of anti fragility. Like you can buy solar cheaper than you've ever been able to buy it today, and you're basically buying 30 years of fuel. And if you're an investor, you're arbitraging future energy requirements. And so your ROI is gonna be really quick as the power price goes up. We know that we're probably gonna have a food crisis sometime in the next 30 years, either for water, like there's only 60 crop cycles left on planet Earth. Like wrap your head around that. We only have 60 years left of soil left on this planet. And so you can arbitrage the food system, and by doing that, you're actually making it better. And, and same with water, like the, you know, your water. I mean, think about all this, the municipalities in the US that have toxic water, like Michigan and, and places in Detroit. They're charging you for water that's making you sick. You can solve this. It's a very simple thing to solve by putting a rain tank on your roof. And the time to invest in ourselves is today. And it's never been more accessible. I,

Abigail Carroll: 38:54

What advice do you have for listeners who. Are listening to this and who are seeing it. We're seeing how fragile our coastlines are. Like I live on the coast, you know, we're seeing we know our food is, is terrible and but one, we're getting so much different information. It's really hard for the normal for, for me, you know, and I, and I read a lot about this kind of stuff let alone people who don't have time or the focus to read about, you know, spend their time reading about this stuff. What advice do you give to the just people? How do, how do they start? Where do you start?

Rob Avis: 39:29

Sure. So number one I, I think you start in, in your head actually, and so we, there's a mental model that I think is really important, which is that you need to be able to differentiate your sphere of concern. From your sphere of influence.

Abigail Carroll: 39:44

Hmm.

Rob Avis: 39:45

So when we think about climate change and peak oil and like food system collapses or whatever problem, like everybody has a different bias and focus on what they think the problems are. No individual. One of us kind of has the same problem matrix, if you will. So when we start with a client, we always try and understand what. They're concerned about. And then we build our design around trying to, to create anti-fragile systems that allow them to not think about those things anymore. So if you think about our service, we're, we're kind of like a bespoke insurance company, but you don't pay us a monthly fee. You pay us to build your insurance policy and then you manage it. So really get clear on your sphere of influence and your sphere of concern. And the reason that this is really important is that social media pulls us out into our sphere of concern constantly daily. And it, it. I was just reading about about this actually, I, I thought social media was actually giving me dopamine hits, but what it's actually doing is it's creating cortisol drops and so you get addicted to the reduction in stress. I think some things if you're reading, will probably raise your stress more, but over time it actually, your amygdala actually starts to grow as a result of social media consumption and your amygdala is what actually is the fear center of your brain. I would argue that every single one of your listeners probably has a one or two hours that they could create surplus in their day and for sure within their week by just deleting social media off of your phone, leaving your phone at work or somewhere where you will not touch it at night so that you can improve your sleep. Your thinking will get better when you improve your sleep. Getting physically fit, that's like. Step number one, you need to get into the gym. You need to get on a bike. You need to move. So sleep and movement with, and, and in the same way that like we know that what you eat is really important in terms of your health outcomes. I think what we're gonna find in the next few years is that what you consume mentally is just as important as what you consume physically.

Abigail Carroll: 41:55

Totally.

Rob Avis: 41:56

then start a small garden like this is really inexpensive, you know, and, and there's a great book out there. You can buy it for three bucks from a used bookstore called Square Foot Gardening. If you've never gardened before, this is the book I always send people to because it's like, it's very mechanistic in its approach. It'll give you a successful garden on year one. And as you kind of become more, you, you build from small successes then you can start to freestyle it a little bit more. And my mother-in-law used to always say that, you'll, you'll overestimate what you can do in a year, but you'll underestimate what you do in five. And so the hardest part is that first step. And it's the first step in a journey of millions of steps. You just have to start. Go ahead.

Abigail Carroll: 42:39

I just love that. The first step starts with sleep and, and moving, getting physically fit. Like, it's like, you know, we're talking about architecture and ecosystems and, and yet everything comes down to this essence, which is you have to be good in your body to be able to take the steps to protect yourself and to make change. So I think that's really

Rob Avis: 43:04

The like, if the lag measure is regenerative living, like you're actually living in a regenerative way, what are the lead measures? I know that when I don't hop on my bike in the morning or lift some weight in the morning, I don't have a good day like, and so if a good day is my lag measure, my lead measures are proper nutrition, proper sleep and movement in the morning, that builds a foundation for the rest of the day. And I've had a good day and my mind is in the right place because we know that physical exercise releases endorphins and all sorts of chemicals in your body right now more than ever in, in our entire history. I think we need a balanced mind because there's so much shit coming towards us every day between AI and climate change and all of the negative 24 hour news cycle like you need. You need to create a barrier between that. We all have different strategies that's mine and that's been really effective at allowing me to operate in this crazy world that we live in right now.

Abigail Carroll: 44:02

Amazing. Are you, are you optimistic?

Rob Avis: 44:06

I'd be lying if I said I'm always optimistic. I feel like life is a bit like a sine wave and, and we all have our peaks and our troughs. And this comes back down to kind of getting your mind right. I mean, meditation is another thing that you can do to help smooth out the peaks and the troughs and kind of take things kind of in more of a meta level. The reasons that I'm optimistic is that we don't lack money, even though money's not on the balance sheet. Nature's not on the balance sheet yet. We don't lack the knowledge, it's all available to us. AI has actually, in some ways it could facilitate the mass adoption of some of this knowledge. Where, where I'm pessimistic or where I lose hope is that paradigm stuff. It's convincing people in spite of the fact that Costco shelves are full. The lakes look like they still have water in'em. The farms still look like they're producing food. There's a cognitive dissonance between what I'm saying and what people interpret when they see things. And there's a shift that has to happen with regards to what healthy looks like in an ecosystem like big wheat fields and corn fields. That's not healthy. That's a destroyed ecosystem that's growing one crop and. It's doing. So basically it's doing it in a totalitarian way. It's like all other life is unwelcome here except for this one thing. This is my fear of, of veganism and vegetarianism actually, the concept that we can just kind of turn planet earth into one giant vegetable farm means that no other life is actually allowed to be there because those are our vegetable. That's not growing in a biodynamic or, or you know, pro-life. Again, no religious connotation there, pro-life, life way. We, we need to kind of start looking at our food systems again as part of a larger community of things. And so it's the climate between our ears that has to change the most quickly. If we do that, we can solve climate change, we can solve soil erosion, we can solve. Water pollution, we can solve the energy crisis. You know, humans have done crazier things in the past in terms of like overcoming bigger problems. But we need that collective will to kind of push the system forward.

Abigail Carroll: 46:24

Beautiful. Well, thank you. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you'd like me to ask you?

Rob Avis: 46:31

I, I would just say, we have to make this taste better. It has to be more fun. It has to be more enticing than the system that exists today. And so for the change makers out there that are listening to this we have to kind of come up with Trojan horses that like I said earlier, whether they're libertarian or environmental doesn't really matter. The solution is largely the same. So how are you gonna Trojan horse regenerative living into the work that you do? And that might mean not using the word regenerative living. It might just mean changing some specs on your design and letting your ego stay at the door and knowing that even though you didn't get credit for that regenerative solution, or maybe you can take credit for it in your work somewhere else, but. The customer's getting a better home. It has better indoor air quality it has better end of life characteristics. It uses less energy. All of these things are super valid, whether you, it doesn't matter what you call them but we have to, as design professionals, we have to start building these into our systems and finding the, the low hanging fruit that doesn't cost a lot more, and sometimes it's even less. It costs less money to put some of these things in when you're getting it on the front end. Excuse me. We have the ability to do this. We just have to create the collective will to do it. And I think there's gonna be certain leaders in society that lead this charge and design professionals are one of those classes of leaders that can kind of take this charge forward.

Abigail Carroll: 47:56

A healthier planet seems like something we should all be able to agree on.

Rob Avis: 48:00

Yeah. Yep.

Abigail Carroll: 48:02

Well, thank you so much, Rob. It's just been a real delight and I wish you well with the venture.

Rob Avis: 48:08

Yeah. Thanks so much, Abigail.