In this episode, we speak to Paul Gamble, CEO of Nori (a carbon removal marketplace). Paul brings to light the flaws that previous marketplaces have suffered from and believes he has found a way to allow for genuine change to take place.
On this episode, recorded on the 27th of March 2020 I spoke with Paul Gamble, CEO and co-founder of Nori, a carbon removal marketplace. In his past, he was a software product manager at Deloitte Digital and started the world's first networking group for carbon removal In 2015. I first discovered Paul and Nori when I read his article medium titled How to save the planet and make climate change "just go away" using blockchain and cryptocurrency as someone who spends his life trying to explain complex things simply, I really appreciated that article. It helped me to understand some of the complexities and challenges of existing carbon offsetting solutions and at the same time explaining how he, and the rest of Nori, believed their solution can just make climate change "go away".
Putting the environment first: Nori is not the first marketplace to try to help take CO2 out of the air, yet there is a clear problem with previous methods that Nori has found the answer to.
Soil is the answer: Due to its simplicity and scalability, soil sequestration is the answer to removing CO2 from the air. Paul breaks down how this is possible and why it is most likely to be accepted and adopted into the world on a global scale.
How we should measure change: Conventional wisdom says measuring climate change through temperature makes the most sense. But, there are other factors that can also impact overall temperature. A more accurate measure of effectiveness is described by Paul.
Summary
Paul Gamble is the CEO of Nori, a carbon removal marketplace that is looking to make a genuine impact on the environment. He believes that climate change can not only be reduced but removed as an issue altogether. “Climate Change is simple, too many greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere” says Paul, a simple perspective on the problem that he believes he has the solution to. Nori aims to pull CO2 out of the air and continue to keep pulling CO2 out of the air. While previous methods have largely failed for a multitude of reasons, the environment hasn’t seen a whole lot of benefit from previous ventures. This is often because carbon credits are tradeable, great for PR, not so great for the environment.
While offsetting is important, it’s focus is on the future. Nori aims to deal with the build up that has been accumulated. “Even if we stopped all CO2 releasing activity we’d still be screwed due to how much CO2 is already in the air” said Paul. Not only do Nori aim to deal with the here and now, they aim to bring transparency to the opaque world of carbon removal.
Nori merges cryptocurrency with carbon removal. A nori token is used to pay for 1 ton of CO2 removal. The person that purchases the token can rest assured that they have made a positive impact on the environment and that their carbon credit has been instantly retired. The token itself can be sold into the exchange market to be turned into cash. The current landscape is quite confusing for the average person who wants to help reduce their carbon footprint, Nori aims to change that by making the process as user-friendly as possible.
Soil sequestration itself can play a significant role in helping with climate change. The act of tilling causes significant damage to soil as well as countless amounts of fertilizer being used. Through the partnerships with farmers around the world, we can significantly reduce our carbon footprint. 1 acre of land equates to around 1 ton of CO2 per year. This therefore means the US has the potential to sequestrate half a billion to a billion tonnes a year. Globally 5-10 billion.
Speaker 2: wait. Come to the climate fix. My name is acid. On this show, we shine a spotlight on nonprofits, academics, corporations, startups, anyone working on a solution to the climate problem. On this episode, recorded on the 27th of March 2020 I spoke with Paul Gamble, CEO and co founder of Nori, a carbon removal marketplace. In his past, he was a software product manager at the Lloyd Digital and started the world's first networking group for carbon removal. In 2015. I first discovered Paul and Norrie when I read his article medium titled How to Save the Planet. I made climate change just go away, using Blockchain and Cryptocurrency as someone who spends his life trying to explain complex things. Simply, I really appreciated that article. It helped me to understand some of the complexities and challenges off existing carbon offsetting solutions on at the same time explaining how he and the rest of Nori believed their solution can just make climate change go away. I had a wonderful time speaking to Paul. We covered a lot in a short space. He's very knowledgeable and dozen waste time getting to the point. However, I did have a bear, a stuffy nose on the day, so my pronunciation might be difficult to understand sometimes. But I do believe I got my point across. Let's dive straight in. Hi, Paul. Welcome to the show. What's the climate problem that you're solving?
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me a scene. Well, I think climate change is actually far more straightforward than most people think. Which is to say that the problem is there are too many greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And I think the solution is to pull those gases back out and store them safely in the earth.
Speaker 2: That's a pretty simple in an important problems, so, yeah, to tell me, how is Nori helping to solve this problem?
Speaker 1: So Nori is a marketplace for carbon removal from the atmosphere. Um, this came out of a recognition. I started investigating this back in 2015 trying to understand what were the different ways that we could draw down carbon and sequester it. And what I found was that we already have all of the tools and processes and technologies that we need in order to drawdown massive, massive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But they're not happening at any scale. So what Nori is addressing is creating that financial incentive that we need in order to, uh, make sure that people can get paid or drawing down carbon in a verifiable, incredible way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that sex that I saw a comet if it was on your website with someone of the articles, You describe yourself as the second generation off carbon offsets or the next generation of carbon offsets. So how is it different?
Speaker 1: Well, um, in the past Ah, the approach is that people have taken, uh, designed carbon markets where they're both voluntary and compliance markets. And in general, you have what are called registries, which our bodies that approved and provide standards for measuring and verifying carbon offsets. Now, I want to distinguish that carbon offsets almost always that term means to avoid future emissions. So this could be like building renewable energy or a dairy digester or something that is reducing the amount of emissions that are gonna be admitted in the future. Whereas carbon removal is about removing, it passed emissions that are already up in the air. And the reason that that distinction matters is because even if we were able to magically and miraculously turn off all of our emissions around the world. Ah, unilaterally. Tomorrow we're still screwed. There's still way too much carbon Ellery up in the air. We need to remove over one trillion tons of CO two from the atmosphere, so there needs to be some emphasis put on that. Now these markets that have happened in the past have been around for like 15 20 years or so and typically the way it works. If someone does a project and they get it verified and then they're issued carbon credits and those carbon credits each one represents one ton of CO two avoided. And usually the project developer is not necessarily a company that's used to doing sales that sort of thing. So they almost always will work through a broker, and that broker will then resell the carbon credits and then maybe someone else. Results of carbon credits and these credits gets sold many, many times, uh, as they go through their life cycle until someone maybe eventually chooses to retire. And I'm using air quotes around that retirement of carbon credits means to pull it out of circulation and say that it's no longer available for sale. Well, I think it's kind of crazy that the carbon could be resold many, many times over. Uh, not only because that enables large scale fraud and manipulation to happen, which certainly does happen. And they're very high profile cases of this. But I think it's just crazy that you have all this money being spent that is not resulting in a net new ton of CO two either avoided or removed. So we were differently by enforcing immediate retirement. That's our big distinguishing factor.
Speaker 2: And from what I understood from one of your articles, which I will mention, they don't run the show notes the It's sold repeatedly, but it can also be reported by a company in one of those intermediate stages before being actually retired as the carbon removal solution. All strategy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's unfortunate that just this is a very opaque industry that mostly people don't really have any insight into, and part of the reason is because the people who are involved in putting on these markets haven't put as much emphasis on transparency, which is a really, really core value that Norrie has. So if a large multinational company chooses to buy carbon credits from whatever different, and they're all sorts of different types of carbon credits and that sort of thing. But just let's say that they buy some well, they gonna hold them on their balance sheet. That's an asset that they have, that they can then resell if they need Thio. But in the meantime, they could say that they follow its carbon credits is that they could do whatever PR brats, And no one's really going to hold on account to account for that, Um, and that's also what enables the fraud and manipulation because you can have parties doing swaps with each other back and forth, marking to market at a much higher cost on their balance sheet while they're in actuality, only paying each other like pennies on the dollar kind of thing.
Speaker 2: So they're saying these carbon offsets I have a worth $100 per, and then that's kind of making it look like they have more money in their books and they really
Speaker 1: have yeah, and it also makes it look like there's more trading volume. And if you're a commodities trader, one of the signals you look for is how much volume there is on this asset being created. So if they're passing the assets back and forth between each other and they're saying that it's trading a $10 But in actuality, it's $1. Well, then that volume is a lie.
Speaker 2: Have you detected much of that happening in the markets, or is it known to happen quite a lot?
Speaker 1: It's known toe happen, but it's really, really difficult to, uh, show it happening. The effects air really most often realized in the ways that past carbon markets that have been set up have crashed, Uh, for you can look at most examples of carbon markets and emissions park. It's in the past and within a short period time. It turns out that almost always the highest price paid for one of these underlying assets is in the earliest days. And that's that's why there's a sort of death spiral for some of these markets that they've attempted in the past. And we think that really, the core problem here is that the carbon asset is the thing that they end up trading and not that commodity trading is bad. It's actually really, really good. We want that as well, and you get benefits from that like, uh, increased liquidity and reduced price volatility just gives people the ability to better forecast how much this is going to cost. I'm just gonna be worth should they invest in this now, that sort of thing, so that those are beneficial things. But we shouldn't be trading the carbon over and over again. So Norrie has a unique model where we've separated out the carbon asset itself from the mechanism that gets traded the medium of exchange. So in our market, uh, nori token, where one token is always pegged to one ton of CO two is the method that's used to pay for the carbon and vast the asset that gets traded. So it's sort of like get a gift card or a coupon for a tendency to
Speaker 2: Ana Nori token could be sold again. Again. Again.
Speaker 1: Yes. Yeah, The Nori token is a multi use. It's not retired, but when the life cycle is, a buyer pays a supplier, uh, one token and they receive one ton of CO two, and then that time of CEO to is immediately retired, and that buyer owns it forever. Now the supplier has the token, and then they can go resell that into the exchange markets and turn that into cash. And then the token continues to circulate around. Okay,
Speaker 2: so as a buyer, if I want to to, let's say, offset something, I would then get one of these. I think it's called a nori carbon removal and R T token. On When that is, mind dies my evidence that I have see question yes, one ton of carbon. And then that turns into a nori token for the seller that personally sold it to me that they can sell on another market. Who's buying these nori tokens, and why are they buying them?
Speaker 1: We there's a There are individual consumers who are buying these for altruistic reasons they don't want to be. They want to remove the emissions from a flight that they took or something else as part of their lifestyle. And
Speaker 2: then there are
Speaker 1: corporations. Corporations that are choosing thio offset their emissions because their customers, their shareholders or employees are pushing them to do so. There are companies that are doing it for compliance reasons. For instance, the airlines are about to be regulated next year under the Corsi, a program where all international flights will have to offset or remove their emissions that go beyond today's baseline. Um, and then there are This is, I think, the most interesting and what we're trying to build for. Is there the companies that want to offer carbon removal to their customers as a part of their product in their platform? So you can think of what Nori is doing as building the infrastructure that makes an A P I for carbon removal possible. So, uh, say uber lift what you take an uber ride. And at the end of the ride, um, media sponsor pays for removing the emissions from your ride in real time, and they're just paying for verified carbon removal through nori.
Speaker 2: So I see because if I want to go right now on offsets and Carbon, I will then have to go on look of various different programs and roll different. Yeah, Andi, there's no law fun. Gibilisco, Let's say between them, but with the Norton was completely fungible.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah, we think that the only thing that matters is that the carbon comes out and then it stays out. It doesn't matter how it happened or where it happened. And so we're trying to really commoditize the carbon itself. And what you just described is reality. Like if you were to go into one of these platforms that offers, like consumer level offsets, you might see like a dozen different projects, you have no idea which one is more valuable. They'll be priced differently. They might have different impacts. They might have different. We're called co benefits for the people in the local community where that project is happening. But I guess a buyer those things shouldn't, uh, shouldn't matter. And often, uh, there is. There's just that, like, behavioral economics problem of If you have, like, 36 brands of peanut butter, you're probably less likely Just buy peanut butter than you are a figure one out. Choose it. So we're trying to make this incredibly simple s. Oh, that's how we make it more scalable
Speaker 2: because I was one of the questions I get asked fairly often from people, which is like, How do I do what I do? Where do I go? I hear of all these problems. Which program do I use? Um, I usually suggest a cup of the main offsetting verification platforms, but they don't particularly care about that. They just want to make sure that they're gonna spend some money. Some carpets gonna get removed. Exactly. Exactly. So the way you're doing is also quite interesting. Or your initial approach right now, it seems, is you're working with soil. SeaQuest rations, I think, is the correct term. Is it
Speaker 1: the train
Speaker 2: on you even written somewhere that essentially soil seaQuest rations all by itself can help has reached a two degree goal.
Speaker 1: Um, I don't have to think about the numbers in terms of how it relates to two degrees. You know, what's what's interesting is I I think that the temperature targets are a fool's game and we shouldn't be using those and instead the targets that we should be shooting for our what is the Global co two concentration? So today it's around 415 parts per 1,000,000 most scientists believe 350 is probably the max safe level. And if we really wanted to do the job right, we would take it back to 300. So any other number like doesn't really matter. Uh, it's what some line, I say sometimes it is like trying to find an average global temperature is like trying to find an average global phone number, like you could do it. But it doesn't really tell you a whole lot. Um, I think that the the carbon metric is the one that we should be pursuing.
Speaker 2: That's a really good point, is all because temperature is also driven by other factors as well as just carbon. And then you can get confused in getting embroiled in that conversation about what is actually driving temperature increases, whereas a carbon I love that. That's fantastic. Yeah, great point there.
Speaker 1: But you're so you would ask me about can soil help with that? Other numbers that I can give you are that, um the way that soil sequestration works is farmers who are growing commodity crops, corn, wheat away, rights, whatever, um, can choose to adopt practices that air typically called regenerative agriculture practices. So this might be like no till or reduced tilling planting cover crops.
Speaker 2: Telling is the process of turning soil over a subtle
Speaker 1: Yeah, ploughing s o. So what happens in conventional ag? And it's funny that we call it conventional. This is really only the case since World War Two, where you will plow the, um, the field of the beginning of the season because you want to have a perfectly uniform soil for planting, and then you'll run your combine through. You'll feel plant and on. Then you'll go girl your crops. And as the crops are in the ground, they're putting roots down and those roots air feeding nutrients to microbes and fungi in the soil. And then at the end of the season, you harvest your crop and you are no longer providing nutrients. You have to use a lot of fertilizer in the process, and that number is increasing every year. And so it takes more and more fertilizer to produce the same amount of yields. So what's happening is by doing these conventional practices, soil has been eroding the ability to grow. Food has been decreasing. It's becoming more and more difficult, more of our expensive to d'oh. So for farmers, what What this happening is this regenerative movement is saying instead of, uh, plowing the land and where you're turning over the soil and exposing all of that organic matter to the air you should try to leave it pretty still in directly inject seeds and do a minimal amount of tillage to get them in. And then you should use less fertilizer. And, ah, once you get to the end of the growing season, you should plant cover crops. So that's like low lying, like beans or alfalfa or something like that. And what that's doing is that keeps roots in the ground. And that continues to provide nutrients to the organic matter because that organic matter those microbes in that fund guy, that is the carbon so that Zeus that's how we that we get this process going and, uh, croplands when they convert to these practices can. On average, rough rule of thumb is sequester about one ton of CO two per acre per year. So that's significant. That's a lot because that means that American crop lands in sequester between half a 1,000,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 tons of CO. Two every year and globally, that number might be between five and 10 billion. Oh, so that's that's an enormous amount of carbon sequestration, so style sequestration is by far the most affordable method of carbon removal, and it's the most scalable today, and we benefit from the fact that the industry is already trying to move in this direction because it's just better for their soil.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's a win win. So it's better for the soil. Yeah, and is better for the environment. It would seem that this is a no brainer, right?
Speaker 1: You would think so. Um, some of the challenges that exist today are the all the big food companies want farmers to do these practices. But if they're going to incentivize them in some way, they need to be able to verify would prove that they're doing it. And you could go, uh, you could go to different routes of doing that. So, like the way organic certification works is this practice based? So you have to be doing these practices for at least three years. That's to be verified. Um, but were our purpose is, what we're doing is outcome based. So we are partnering with a platform in the U. S. Called Comet Farm, which is funded by the USDA and comment. Farm is a platform that takes in different models and, uh, information about your particular farm in the practices that you're doing and then can come back with a number of this is this is how much carbon you're putting in the ground relative to what would have happened if you had kept going with conventional practice.
Speaker 2: Oh, okay, so that's the way of verifying the outcome and actually associating that with an actual number. A tonnage of carbon as well. That's right. Amazing. So let's talk for a little bit about nor yourself. So what stages Nori at as an organization?
Speaker 1: We've been around for about 2.5 years. We have 11 people on her team. We're headquartered in Seattle, Washington. And we we went through Techstars Sustainability Accelerator last fall. And as we're going through that, that was when we officially launched with our first perfect concept. So we spent about a year and 1/2 developing our methodology for a soil sequestration and measurement of verification. With that and since we launched, we've secured some pretty big partnerships with large agricultural companies to bring in more farmers. We have a pipeline of over half a 1,000,000 acres of committed croplands to join this market, and right now we're at the stage where we're trying to scale this up. We're constrained Maur by operational challenges, just in terms of we have to get a lot of data from the farmers and that has to be processed through the platform. So it's just like, you know, a normal engineering resource problem that putting up resources on it. I think it's all so that's a stage we're at right now. Is trying to really scale up on the supply side, but we have more inventory available for buyers.
Speaker 2: Fantastic. So you've actually got people willing to use their farmland and to see question carbon from the atmosphere. It's an engineering problem right now. You say Yeah, or like an engineering operations, right? It's a great place to be. I think it sounds like you just need Thio grind away. Then you'll get the way you want to be, right? That's right. Yeah, so this is maybe a question where you may or may not want to answer. It's feel through a cut out. But who the customers are partners that you need to get from where you are now, too, a scaling point. We're making Riel Impact's real meaningful impact on the planet
Speaker 1: Well, because we're a two sided marketplace. That answer is gonna encompass both sides of that. So on the supply side, um, what we found to be most effective is sort of top down partnership relationships where we, uh ah, good to know and develop a relationship and collaborate with large groups. So we have partnerships with granular, which is a farm management software system with Locus AG, which is a large seed company, And, um, and others Pacific Northwest, artsy associate association. These air like farm groups where they have lots of farmers who are participating in them. And so the leadership of these organizations can then go to their customers, their partners, their suppliers or collaborators whoever and say, Look, we have an opportunity now to work directly with nori s so that you can start a doctor's practices and monetizing uh, what you're doing. Um, so that's that's how we scale up. And so scaling up just means continuing to develop new partnerships and collaborations with ever larger companies. And many the largest food companies in the world are interested in this sort of thing. So it's just a matter of improving this out to them. On the demand side, um, it we really want to demonstrate and get to the point where we have a very easy AP. I like. We sometimes call ourselves like stripe for carbon removal and striped really changed the game when it came to credit card payments. And so they have an easy F D. K. You just drop in a little code to your E commerce site and you're able take credit card payments. We want this to be the same thing. So, for instance, we could build a shop if I plug in that any Shopify merchant could incorporate so that carbon removal required to deliver the products to the customer's door could be taking care of automatically. So we wanted to develop more relationships with large scale Uh um, organizations like that that have massive reach and impact in terms of how mitt the volume of carbon removal demanded my beak like I really think that the future of this is not necessarily in like Fortune 500 companies buying offsets, but rather in micro transactions.
Speaker 2: Mmm, interesting. Wow, that's a much broader vision than I thought nor had in the first place. So, are you building or do you already have a software developer care or on a P I or something along those lines. That's not something on the road map. In the future,
Speaker 1: it's It's on the road map. We've we've preliminarily sketched out some stuff on how to do that. But the bigger challenge of the moment is more on the supply side and making that really easy farmers to get enrolled. So once we get that going, then we move on to the making it easy on the demand side.
Speaker 2: Oh, brilliant, fantastic. That's really exciting. As an engineer have to say, I'm really excited of other. Yes, to come out now I'll be I'll be hacking away in a couple of solutions there. So talking about kind of your roadmap like what we'd be doing the coming 18 months again. What does that look for you as an organization?
Speaker 1: Well, our target is tohave one million tons of CO two verified on removed by the end of the year, um, available for sale, um, cumulatively, and and then getting to the point where we're scaling the solutions for that FBI immigration, that's that's really the the key, so kind of everything that I just described. That's really our next world to 18 months.
Speaker 2: My stuff is most sometimes state. It's not that kind of ask you about kind of how you started this firm and especially what inspired you to start Nori? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about Jenny.
Speaker 1: Well, I might Background is in software engineering and development and, um, and then project management. And I was working as a product manager for Deloitte Digital Building Mobile laps for big brands. And I left that in 2015. And I read a a magazine article about how climate scientists were becoming very depressed because no one was listening to them. And I got very curious around. Is there a way to like, who's who's working on solving this? Like, I keep reading things about how this is going to become less bad, how to mitigate this and adapt to it, but, like, can we just make it go away? Is that possible? So I started a meet up group networking group here in Seattle to meet other people who were interested in this, and I really just wanted to find cofounders. I didn't know what business model was out there, but I wanted to develop one, so I spent a couple of years running this group, Um, and through that met pretty much every other group in the world that was doing the same thing. There were relatively few at the time, and we were mostly educating reading white papers, articles about these different methods of carbon removal. And then, in 2017 my first co founder, Christoph John's Bay, and I had known each other for a little while. He has been working up a center for negative carbon emissions at Arizona State University, which happens to be my alma mater. They set this up a couple years after I graduated, so it's a really weird coincidence. And, uh, we just decided Thio jump in and, uh, run down this business model. I've been interested in Bitcoin Blockchain since 2011 when I learned about it, and, uh, I've been paying attention to that growing, and it just everything kind of clicked and made sense in in early 2017. Okay, now we have the tools that Kim transparently and verifiably prove this stuff while also creating the financial incentive. So let's build a market for this. So we we put that team together on and Then we entered a ah ha ha Capon competition with one. And I was about for us to start the company and get going.
Speaker 2: Oh, fantastic. Is anything you wish you had known when you first started out that you now know that would have helped you on this journey?
Speaker 1: Um, one of the challenges has been Maur on the block chain and Cryptocurrency side. So I talked about this token, this method of payment, and it's absolutely the right solution like this. This is only possible because we're combining two very different industries together to create something novel. Um, one of the things that we did last fall was decide that we have been going to companies and saying, Hey, you should buy these tokens at a discount from us and you could use them to pay farmers later. No one was really understanding it, and eventually it just clicked for us that we just need to sell these for cash and let's start with cash and then we'll integrate the tokens into it. The token is important because it's a price discovery mechanism in the future. But for now, the farmer consent is on price, and we'll go from there. So I think being more willing to experiment with, um, slow stage rollout of the final technology that we want to get to think. If we had a doctor about faster, we'd be a little bit further along than where we are today. So that's that's probably the biggest lesson we've learned so far in this.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, I go back to your point. I think one of my quotes they love no quote from me was creativity is connecting the seemingly unconnected. That's what you did was you took two areas that for no people wouldn't normally have thought connecting. You connected them on DATs a definition of creativity for me. So yeah, exactly. So what you're doing is hard, I think one of things I've noticed, but any everything in the climate space is hard. It's hard emotionally. And this is just giving with them with people on all sides to ah, perhaps not supportive is it could be. So how did you stay? Motivated? You being this basic? Quite a long time. It sounds like it's 2015. You'd be looking at this stuff is not 2020 for our listeners. What some ways you stay motivated or inspired throughout time.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm motivated by the fact that I see large scale cultural change happening. Um, to me in 2015 it seemed obvious that the that not only where they're going to be many people interested in working on this in the future, but that, like I still think it's obvious day. There is no future scenario in which the world does not remove massive amounts of carbon from the air. Of course, that's going to happen. It's just a matter of how and win. So I've been really encouraged ever since late 2018 when the IPCC report came out, Uh, with kind of a new update on the way things were going in the office here. We've seen large scale cultural change, big corporations making enormous commitments financially and otherwise. Thio support carbon sequestration, uh, policymakers talking about it in a way that had never happened before. Big cultural movements like but what gratitude Berg has inspired a swell as sanction rebellion at sunrise move into, and all these groups have their own different, um, motivations and even ideologies to them. But not is not necessarily like those movements themselves. It's just that writ large. We're seeing lots more people talking about this. A lot more people care about this, and, uh, that trend is going to continue because there's no way it doesn't. It's gonna keep getting warmer. So of course, people are going to keep talking about that. Yeah, So I find that motivating that were, you know, we were a little ahead of the curve and we're riding that way about So our timing is perfect.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. And I describe it as a wave. I do see it as, ah, broad movement that's happening now, even necessary, led by particular people. It's just I don't know how to describe. It is everybody just decided one day that this is important and I also agree with you. Yes, we are gonna have to deal with this eventually. And for me, the world is just going to get a lot worse, and then it's gonna get better. And what we try and do now is we're just trying to make it not get really, really bad right before. It will get better. And that's what it's all about for me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and complex systems have ah, really interesting and unique way of Ah, um, changing on a dime. Uh, and it doesn't seem obvious until it happens, and then it's incredibly obvious that it was going to happen. So, um, we just want to push that little bit faster ourselves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have a power of hindsight. This is the last question. Is there anything inspirational? Perhaps something you read recently? A personal Listen, this that follow. I thought you had something to leave with the audience. Something to help them inspire them.
Speaker 1: Well, I You know, when I started this, uh, journey, I have an engineering background. The things I was gravitating to, where one of the cool like industrial and engineering type solutions for this, like, what kind of technology can we build? So directed Our capture was always really fascinating to be in. Still, it's but it's it's very expensive and is not really scalable today. If you had asked me two years ago, if I thought that I would be working in agriculture today, I would've laughed. I just definitely would not have predicted that And what I have found incredibly inspiring. It's just getting to know farmers and working with these people who are so close to the land. And, um, agriculture moves at the speed of trust, as they say, And that means that we literally, like, get to know our suppliers by sitting down at their kitchen table and, uh, and spending time with them face to face. Um, I I love every opportunity that I get to go do a farm visit farm tour. Um, these people work harder than anyone I've ever seen before, and they're so proud of what they produce. And, um, there's just there's just like something innate in all of us. I think about wanting to be a little bit closer to the land. It's maybe it's like an evolutionary thing. Um, so So that's what's best I find Inspiring is getting to work with people who are really curating the land and carbon farming. Now, um, and they're really great people to work with, and I'm enjoying that quite a bit.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, that's a great point. That's a fantastic point when I think of the land also, it's an act of creation. That's what's happening all the time. Things were growing, the creating, that coming out the so thousands and thousands of years we used to think there's a magical process and, yeah, that is really inspiring. Now that I think about. In fact, we're spending the weekend at the Hossein household digging out the back garden, going planting those seeds. I don't want those and things like that. So you have to really get get back to nature. And,
Speaker 1: yeah, it's it's very fulfilling.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Paul is a really, really fascinating conversation hearing a lot more about Nori on the great work that you're doing over there.
Speaker 1: Thank you. A scene that was fun.