November 19, 2025 • 48 mins
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.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
riverside_rob_avis_raw- (00:12):
Welcome to the podcast where we
celebrate innovation for a happyplanet.
I am your host, Abigail Carroll.
This week we are traveling toAlberta, Canada to speak with
Rob Avis, co-founder of FifthWorld, a Canadian startup
focused on regenerative livingfifth world designs and build
self-sufficient homesteads,greenhouses, and food, water,
(00:33):
and energy systems that enableall of us to live and work more
synergistically with nature.
Rob has powerful backers and bigambitions his end goal is to see
planetary regeneration withinone generation.
But to do that, he must create amovement.
Let's hear it from Rob.
Abigail Carrroll (00:56):
welcome to the podcast, Rob.
Rob Avis (00:59):
Thanks for having me.
Super stoked to be here.
Abigail Carroll (01:01):
Well, I'm really excited to speak to you.
You're an expert in regenerativeliving tell me what that means.
Rob Avis (01:09):
To really understand this, I have to go back a couple
of steps.
There's three main narratives inour society right now.
The narrative that representedfrom the beginning of the
industrial revolution probablyuntil the mid nineties was this
narrative of kind of business asusual capitalism.
Raising GDP every single year,raising earnings shareholder
(01:33):
value.
We still have a lot of that inour society right now.
It's the foundation layer of, ofthe capitalist system.
And you can really summarizethat narrative into how do I get
more stuff?
It's very mechanistic.
It's got very clear lagmeasures.
It's a very simple.
Goal to, for people tounderstand, which is why I think
(01:54):
it, it really captured the mindsof a lot of people.
And in a lot of ways, it's thebest system that humans have
come up with.
In all honesty, the secondnarrative that kind of started
to emerge in the nineties wasthe sustainability paradigm.
And if you came to me, Abigailand said Rob, how's your
marriage doing these days?
And they said, oh, it's prettysustainable.
(02:15):
You'd probably feel pretty badfor me.
And so.
I would argue that thesustainability narrative
actually is our end state andnot our, our current state.
And the problem with thesustainability paradigm is that
and, and pretty much pretty, I'msure all of your listeners and
even you have thought aboutthis, but have never put words
to it.
The words that we use todescribe the sustainability
(02:37):
paradigm are things like netzero zero escaping.
That's when you take your frontyard and cover it in landscape,
fabric and rocks, or maybe evenyou're putting plastic lawn on
there.
It's trying to minimize ourfootprint.
And so if you kind of take thosewords to its logical endpoint.
The only conclusion you canreally draw from the
(02:58):
sustainability movement is thathumans are inherently
destructive.
That's the statement you'venever put words to.
And at best we can minimize ourfootprint.
And I think this is a really badvision.
I think it's horrible and Idon't think it's
Abigail Carroll (03:13):
Dsmo, that's for sure.
Rob Avis (03:15):
Dismal.
Yeah.
And so the regenerative livingmovement needs a little bit more
context to really understand.
So every species on earth.
Has innate characteristics.
So if you think about a bird abird is genetically designed and
it has the maps in its mind tofly.
(03:36):
It doesn't go to university tolearn the Bern Newi principle
and to learn theories of, youknow, aerodynamics and how to
flap its wings.
It's just, it's built into it.
And you can go through everyspecies on earth and kind of
figure out what its innatecharacteristics are as a farmer.
We see this all the time when wehave young animals show up on
(03:57):
our farm.
They just do things like,they're not taught to do them,
they just do them.
And so that got me thinking intolike what if, if humans are part
of that ecology, which I believethat they are, I believe we're
just one mammal in, in acommunity of species.
We have unfortunately, memes inour society that.
Make us think that we're somehowdifferent than, than the species
(04:21):
that we live amongst which Idisagree with.
I think we are one of one of thespecies in the, in the circle of
life to quote the Lion King.
What is it that if, if birds aremeant to fly from a very young
age, what is it that little kidsdo?
Innately without ever anybodyever having to tell them to do
it.
(04:41):
we make chaos.
And so if you have ever had kidsaround you for a long period of
time, they just destroyeverything.
Like you'd never have to tell achild to not destroy something.
They just, they just do it.
When we were first gardening inour house in Calgary, we had to
create a chaos zone for ourkids.
So they didn't destroy ourgarden.
They were allowed to do whateverthey wanted to that chaos zone,
but they couldn't destroy ourgarden.
(05:03):
Humans are actually disturbancecreators.
We create disturbance.
We, we mine rocks.
We harvest forests, we farm landand every time we do that, we
create a footprint.
We create disturbance.
Now let's, let's take a, a quicksidestep over to the beaver.
'cause I think the beaver isactually closest to humans in
terms of the disturbance patternthat it creates.
(05:24):
It cuts down trees to theuntrained aisle.
When you walk up to where abeaver is working, they'll say,
this beaver is making a completemess.
It's destroying this ecosystem.
But what's actually happening inthe background is it's moving
trees into the water.
It's harvesting mud from thebottom of the creek.
It's sealing a dam.
It's storing millions of gallonsof water.
(05:45):
And as a result of that, itincreases the background
biodiversity in that micro zoneby 28 times.
So its footprint is creatingmore life and it does so through
the through disturbance.
And so if humans are.
The ultimate disturbance makeryou could argue, which is where
the sustainability movement thatwe are destroying the earth.
(06:07):
And I think that there's a lotof evidence to that end.
And it's because the disturbancethat we create is out of scale.
We're doing too much too quicklywithout an understanding of how
ecosystems function.
And it's only in the last ahundred years since we've put
satellites up into space that wereally have the information that
we need to be able to makebetter decisions.
(06:29):
And so if disturbance is notinherently 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 isone of regenerative living.
So how do we actually.
Act like the beaver and makesure that every one of our
footprints is actually enhancingthe ability for life to thrive
(06:50):
around us.
What does that look like?
And part of that is like, isgetting rid of our guilt.
It's like acknowledging that weare part of the circle of life
that we do have a contributionto this planet as a species.
And that it's up to us to decidewhether that footprint leaves
where we live better or worse.
And we do that by the creationof human habitat.
(07:14):
And that human habitat is theway we build our houses, how we
manage water, how we grow ourfood, or how, where we get our
food from how we interact withour community.
Even the money that we make andthat we use amongst each other.
All of these things influencewhether the disturbance that we
create as a species is going tobe.
Without any religiousconnotation, pro-life or the
(07:37):
opposite, which is allopathic.
We, we get to make that decisionand we decide every single day
when we wake up.
So regenerative living is aboutoptimizing human wellbeing by
the creation of regenerativehuman habitat Time.
Abigail Carroll (07:51):
Wow.
There's a lot to unpack inthere.
But I find it interesting alsobecause I think when we talk
about what you do, you're acreator.
So it's interesting this, thisdestruction that the humans are
doing coming from, you know,talking about that and, and
having that be part of a, a pi aparadigm when you are like
(08:13):
fundamentally, you know, anengineer at a, a farmer and a
creator.
But I suppose all of thoseactivities are inherently
destructive on some level.
You have to kind of break downto build.
Rob Avis (08:26):
Yeah.
Abigail Carroll (08:27):
so, so.
You have this of regenerativeliving and this idea of
destruction leading to creation.
(09:11):
How does this manifest in yourbusiness?
Fifth world.
Rob Avis (09:16):
So Fifth World's mission is planetary
regeneration within ageneration.
It's huge.
And what that looks like on aday to day today is that we
design regenerative.
Estates, landscapes, farms andproperties for individuals that
leverage regenerative foodsystems water harvesting
(09:38):
renewable energy systems, lowenergy buildings.
Basically showing or providingthe, the infrastructure, the
tools and the techniques forhumans to exist in a positive
relationship with theenvironment around them.
And we do that.
Through consulting and throughhelping folks to build those
things out long term, we wantto, or I would say medium term,
(10:01):
we want to accelerate theadoption of decentralized food,
energy, and water systems.
Fifth World has no intention ofowning all of that or like that
niche per se.
And so we actually are trying tofigure out.
How to create the rails toinspire an entrepreneurial
revolution because it's gonnatake literally billions of
people to achieve this goal.
(10:22):
Which means that we have tocreate thousands, maybe even
millions of nodes around theworld where individual
communities can start to takeresponsibility for their f
footprints and make sure thatthey're positive.
And so we wanna make sure thatthose people have those tools in
order to enable that.
Abigail Carroll (10:40):
Interesting.
You're in Alberta where I'vebeen a few times now and and the
landscape's very different.
It's also politically removedfrom the rest of Canada.
Are some of those differences,are they they part of what has
inspired you?
Is there, is there somethingabout being in Alberta because
it's like sort of the off thegrid now.
(11:01):
I, I love the off the grid.
Movement, but so many of thecomponents in the United States
are considered, you know, blueState, you know, philosophies
and, and yet for me, I wouldthink of like, you know, I, I
think that the, the, you know,being off the grid and, you
know, having your own farmingand having your own, you know,
(11:23):
electricity.
These are fundamentally, youknow conservative ideas that I
would think with, that I wouldnormally associate with, with
the, you know, rural states.
Is, is, is Alberta a little bitof more accepting of renewables
than maybe some of American redstates?
But still, you know, holdingonto some those conservative
(11:46):
ideas is, is, does that haveanything to do with this?
Rob Avis (11:51):
it's interesting because yeah, being off grid or
having your own food or havingyour 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 Ishould just clarify, I'm not
actually advocating forself-reliance or complete off
(12:13):
grid or,'cause there's no suchthing as that.
We, we live in a highlyconnected society.
Humans are a social species.
And so, where we are today,which people would argue is kind
of more pro-social, maybe they'dargue that is really not
pro-social at all.
We have highly centralized gridsthat are super susceptible to
(12:33):
failure, like they haven'treally been invested in for
many, many years.
These grids are predominantlyowned by monopolies whether
they're water, whether they'regas, whether they're electric.
Our food industry isconsolidating at breakneck
speed.
Every time I walk into a grocerystore there's almost no food
available to buy there.
(12:53):
It's all hyper processed.
It's in plastic, it's covered inmicroplastics.
You have no idea where the beefor the chicken or the fish has
come from.
You have to rely upon a trustmechanism that's suspect at
best.
Sometimes it's better thanothers.
And so yes, freedom could be onekind of aspect.
And I think freedom is a superimportant.
(13:14):
I mean, freedom and liberty isthe foundation of Western
civilization.
And we're moving rapidly awayfrom that due to the
centralization and, andconsolidation of the businesses
that support our very basicneeds our very basic supply
chains.
So yes, there is a libertariancomponent, but we can also look
at it from an environmentalcomponent as well.
(13:36):
When I produce my own power onmy property.
I don't have the line lossesassociated with sending power
from a power grid.
And then when I have surpluspower, 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 rainwateron my roof in an urban or rural
(13:58):
environment, I'm reducing theamount of storm water in a city
specifically.
That the city has to deal with.
So I'm reducing the, the burdenassociated with those
centralized infrastructurepieces.
Rainwater's, also the cleanestdrinking water on earth.
And so I'm improving my ownpersonal health, which reduces
the burden on the health system.
In fact, rainwater, whenstudying in Australia, rainwater
(14:19):
drinkers had better healthoutcomes than people drinking
main's water because theyweren't ingesting fluoride and
chlorine.
And then when I grow my ownfood, in my backyard.
It's not traveling from Mexicoor from California.
It's coming right outside mybackyard.
It's loaded with microbes, whichis very good for my, the
probiotics in my gut.
I'm literally eating it minutesafter it was harvested.
(14:41):
I'm able to recycle the wasteproducts from my house back into
the garden.
And so I find it reallyinteresting because as a
company, we're always trying tobalance.
Our messaging with regards tothe client that we're talking
to.
And so if somebody's reallylibertarian, sure, we'll set you
up with a system that supportsyour libertarian goals.
And almost like Trojan Horse,the environmental benefits,
(15:04):
'cause they're not really asinterested in that.
And if somebody's anenvironmentalist and wants to do
what's good for the planetthey're gonna get all the
environmental benefits and yeah,they also get a little.
Topping of freedom on there aswell.
And Wendell Berry said that whenless than 3% of the population
farms, you can't have afunctional democracy.
And so having distributed powerby empowering individuals with
(15:28):
food, energy, and water,actually, I would argue is the
foundation of a functionaldemocracy, because now you don't
have people that are like we sawin COVID.
Beholden to a, a fragile system.
And this kind of leads into, wetalked, started talking about
regenerative living.
The foundational layer ofregenerative living is actually
(15:48):
anti fragility, which we cantalk about next if you'd like
to.
But we live in a very, a societythat is, that is sitting in on
an upside down pyramid right nowbecause, and that, that point at
the bottom of the pyramid is ourpower, our food and water.
And we actually have to reversethe pyramid in the other
direction.
And never in the history ofhumans have we had the ability
(16:09):
to, or humanity or orcivilization, have we had the
ability to actually invert thatpyramid in the way that we do
today.
Abigail Carroll (16:17):
Right.
Thanks to tech basically isgonna let us do that.
Although some of the thingsyou're doing are, are somewhat
low, like the collecting ofrainwater, that's something that
people have been doing for, formillennia.
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 mostlygravitating 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'spriorities today?
But first, let's go into thefragile living.
Rob Avis (16:53):
So I think it's really important to understand like why
I use the word fragile oranti-fragile, and it's nice to
have an analogy for that.
So if I was to ship you a wineglass in a box and I put the
label fragile on there, whatdoes the subtext say underneath
that label that says Fragilehandle with care?
So we can say very broadly thatfragile systems do not benefit
(17:16):
from volatility.
And then if we go one step upresilience would be kind of the
middle ground.
And so we can think of asidewalk as being resilient.
If I chip a bit of concreteoutta the sidewalk, it still
functions as a sidewalk.
Yes, it's not.
A whole sidewalk anymore becausethey took a chip out of it.
But it's resilient tovolatility.
And so then if fragile ishandled with care, and I'm
(17:38):
shipping you something inside ofa box that's anti-fragile, what
would the subtext on that say?
Apply volatility.
Right?
And so we can look at everysystem that humans rely upon and
we can rank them in terms ofwhether.
They are fragile, resilient, oranti-fragile.
And you can do that reallyquickly, like pretty
(17:59):
qualitatively just through aconversation.
And just to kind of build outthe anti-fragile piece a little
bit more the best example of ananti-fragile system is the human
body.
So if I lift weight in the rightdosage, my muscles get bigger.
And so anti-fragile systemsactually require volatility to
be healthy.
(18:19):
But if you apply too muchvolatility, if I lift too much
weight too often, I can teartendons and rip muscle and, and
set myself backwards.
If I choose to sit on a couchfor the rest of my life I'm
gonna atrophy and I'm gonna getsick.
And so most of.
The systems that we depend uponare not resilient to volatility.
(18:41):
Like I think we could say prettyclearly that as the food system
consolidates like most citieshave about three days of food in
it at any given time.
And we have about 18 months ofgrain stored on planet Earth.
And we produced the most amountof grain per capita back in
1986.
And speed dec declining beingdeclining ever since.
Every calorie of food that weconsume takes 30 calories of
(19:04):
hydrocarbon to produce it.
These are all things that, thatfeed into the fact that our food
system is very fragile.
And I do believe if we don'tchange course, that we will
witness a giga famine in mylifetime, which is more than a
billion people starving.
At the same time we can look, dothe same thing with the power
system, with our heating systemsand with our water systems.
(19:24):
I was watching a guy talk aboutsolar flares the other day.
This just completely floored me.
I just, I just actually wrote apost on LinkedIn about this.
It hasn't gone up yet, but ifall the power on Earth went out,
there's literally no, almost nosurface water on earth that
humans could drink that would beclean enough without filtration.
Like, that blew my mind that we,that we've like.
(19:46):
We've, we've polluted so much ofour water that we can't even
drink it anymore without movingit through machines.
And so we can look at thesethings without going into a
bunch of detail and say like,we've ized the very foundational
layers of civilization.
They all require energy in orderto operate.
And so we need to be aregenerative living system,
(20:08):
whether it's on your property orin a city, or a town or a
community.
We actually need to think abouthow we design these systems so
that they operate in normaltimes very well, but they
actually get more valuable.
They operate better, theyfunction more effectively when
volatility is applied to them.
(20:28):
And, I would say with confidencethat most of the systems we've
talked about thus far would,would not fall into that camp.
The good news is, is that we canswitch it very quickly.
It's, it's actually a reallyquick turnaround when people
kind of wrap their head aroundit.
The biggest shift that weactually have to make is the
paradigm shift.
The technical moves that have tobe made are actually very quick
and, and quite simple to makeonce people understand the
(20:50):
concepts.
Abigail Carroll (20:51):
So you just need to, spread the word who is
your client and what are theyasking for?
Like, who, who is sharing thisworld vision?
Rob Avis (21:01):
We have a few early adopters.
So these would be individualsthat kind of see the fragility
writing on the wall, and they'rewilling to put their money where
their mouth is or where they'rethinking anyways.
And so these would generally bepeople that own.
Small to medium to large farms.
They're designing like passivehouses you know, solar
(21:21):
microgrids their own gardens,greenhouses, food forests, and
livestock systems.
That'd be one kind of clientprofile.
We also work for like colleges.
So we did a, a full.
Designed for a local polytechnicin Calgary where they,'cause
they have a culinary program andso they, they wanted their chefs
(21:43):
to basically have access to realfood so that they can have a
differentiated educationprogram.
We put a bid in for a localAlberta community to do a
hundred year plan, and we weregonna be part of their
ecological.
Footprinting like how do theymanage storm water?
How do they manage rainwater?
Those sorts of things so we canhelp kind of longer planning.
(22:05):
We get people asking us just fora really quick rainwater
harvesting design where we helpthem to think through how to
harvest the water off theirroof, put it into tanks, and
then use it inside their home.
What's, what's another reallyinteresting one that we've
worked on recently?
LA largely, I would say farmseverything from like the urban
lot all the way up to the farm.
That's kind of who we'reprimarily targeting right now.
(22:26):
On our work.
Abigail Carroll (22:27):
And how did you.
Get involved in all of this.
You seem like incrediblypassionate and you've a bit of a
philosopher about how you'reapproaching this.
Where, where does this comefrom?
Rob Avis (22:41):
I get so many emails and messages weekly asking how
the people can join.
People want to be part of thismovement.
Unfortunately, the.
Environment is not currently onthe balance sheet, so we have to
figure out how to solve thatproblem.
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 chocolatefactory.
(23:03):
We would make a hundred thousandcakes a day.
I got, you know, by the time Ileft that I we started.
Thinking, I didn't want to evereat processed food again because
of all the kilometers that ourpipes would have to travel
through in order to get into thepan.
And then I went into industrialenergy.
I was an oil and gas engineer.
And I started, I started mycareer off as an engineer
(23:23):
bringing gas to gas facilities,natural gas and oil, and then
building those facilities toprocess that gas.
And I was actually.
Cutting down hundreds, thousandsof acres of forest in order to
do this.
And it really hurt me, like Ididn't enjoy it, but I couldn't
criticize the industry because Iwas using natural gas to heat my
(23:44):
home.
And I was driving to work.
And so I, I was in this paradoxof I don't want to be a hardcore
environmentalist and activist.
Depending upon the veryresources for my livelihood that
I'm trying to fight against.
And so we quit our jobs.
My wife and I, she's also apetroleum engineer.
(24:04):
We traveled to Denmark.
We lived there for six monthsstudying renewable energy.
'cause understanding energy.
That was the next step for us.
Like, is there another way topower the world?
And then we figured out thatDenmark was rapidly on that
path.
And then we started thinkinglike, how do we feed the world?
In fact, like what we eat everyday is hyper destructive.
Every ton of grain that'sproduced right now generates
(24:25):
eight tons of, of soil erosion,which is why we have all these
dead zones in the world.
Our, the nutrient density of ourfood in some of the nutrient
classes, micronutrient classesare at zero relative to where
they were a hundred years ago.
Okay.
And so we're literally eatingthe planet to death.
But the story that gets told islike, well, cows are bad.
You know, we should all be veganor vegetarian.
(24:47):
Well, that's not really thewhole story.
That's just a really small bitof how a, a complex system
works.
And so we actually converted avan, 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 calledpermaculture, which is what the
reason I actually quit my jobwas I got this three minute
(25:09):
video in my inbox when I wasgetting ready to cut down a huge
swath of forest.
And I was like, oh my gosh, likeI've got 600,000 hours on this
planet.
I took my calculator out andfigured that out.
I've burned through about athird of them.
What do I wanna spend the nexttwo thirds of my hours doing?
And, and so that's, that's whenwe quit the job.
And then I ended up in Australiafor six months Africa for a
(25:30):
little while and didn't go backto the patch.
My, my wife did for a while tosupport us.
And then we started Vergepermaculture.
We've taught about 10,000students around the world in
permaculture and permaculturerelated subjects over about 15
years.
And then I ended up designing aproperty for one of our
co-founders in British Columbia.
And he said.
(25:51):
This is amazing.
How do we scale this up?
And and so Fifth World was bornout of that.
And the concept of Fifth Worldis that we live in the fourth
world today.
We know a better world ispossible, and humans are
builders, we're creators.
We we're problem solvers.
So what are the foundationallayers, the sedimentary layers
that are required that willusher in a fifth world, a world
(26:15):
where humans can coexist withecology?
And it's in our best interest todo this.
This is, this is the crazy thingright now.
Like I'm, I'm having a lot ofcognitive dissidents right now
reading this memo that BillGates just wrote about climate
change not being a problemanymore.
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 notbe the thing that you think is
interesting to me.
What I'm realizing is that the.
The PR movement is reallystrong.
And so somebody's lying on oneside or the other, and in fact
it doesn't really matter whichone, and I like trying to find
the middle ground in thesenarratives to like what's true
(26:56):
regardless of whether one or oneor both of these narratives is
false.
And as a mechanical engineer,before I got into all of this, I
did a little bit of HVACengineering as well for, for
commercial buildings.
And ashrae, which is theAmerican Society for Mechanical
Engineers, says that in abuilding you can't, the code
(27:19):
that they stipulate is that youcan't have the air in the
building have higher, like morethan 800 ppm of CO2 higher than
the outside air.
So our global PPM right now is420.
And so by logic.
An engineer can't allow the CO2levels in the building to go
beyond about 1200 ppm.
(27:39):
Now, it turns out that after athousand pp m of CO2, we end up
in permanent brain fog ashumans.
Yeah, like you need more oxygenthan 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 CO2concentration went up by, I
think four PPM last year.
It's accelerating.
And, and so like, and I have twolittle kids by the time they're
kind of in their middle to, tolate adulthood, assuming it's
gonna continue to acceleratewe're getting awfully close to
(28:13):
that number.
At which all humans are gonna beexisting 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 climatedeniers, but like, I hate that
word actually, but people thatare arguing, we gotta burn more
fossil fuel.
We've got like, there's nothingwrong with it.
(28:34):
Humans have nothing to do withclimate change.
Fine.
You guys believe that.
You can believe whatever youwant.
The consumption of theseproducts in the way that we're
consuming it.
And I'm not, I'm not saying weshouldn't consume fossil fuels.
They are, the fossil fuels arean amazing resource that we have
to steward.
What I'm saying is that thecombustion of those products is
com is actually a competition toour ability to breathe on this
(28:56):
planet.
And it's, we either need toplant a lot more trees, and
there's a lot of hope in all ofthis.
If the US planted took away itscorn, soy, and wheat from, from
North Dakota, south of the Gulfof Mexico, east of the
Mississippi River and planted itback to perennial grasses and
started grazing cattle the like,properly using amp grazing
(29:18):
methods.
The US would be carbon neutralovernight 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 bisonroaming the planes in America
400 years ago than there arecows today.
Right.
And so the and and actuallywhat's really interesting about
methane is that there's amicrobe on properly managed
(29:46):
pastures called methadones, andthey consume the methane.
The problem is with cows is thatwe put them into confined animal
feeding operations.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
And, and so like there's verylittle physics being applied to
the food problem that I findthat it really irritates me and
it's, it's because it, our worldis full of so many complex
(30:08):
domains.
It's hard for one individual toreally wrap their head around
all of it.
So I understand where that'scoming from, but what's really
interesting about, if we wantedto, to kind of create the most,
the most positive.
Footprint from a dietperspective, for a city dweller
that wasn't growing any of theirown food, they would eat a 100%
grass fed beef diet, not avegetarian or vegan diet.
(30:32):
And here's how the, here's howthe physics works.
So a cow, when it consumes,let's just use some simple
numbers, a hundred pounds ofgrass and a hundred liters of
water, or a hundred gallons ofwater, they, they don't consume
that much.
Necessarily in that ratio, butlet's just use those for simple
numbers.
90% of what that animal consumesin water and feed ends up back
(30:53):
on the ground.
10% of it actually gets absorbedinto its body.
And so there's an old farmer'sadage that you should never sell
anything off the farm, that youcan't, that can't walk off the
farm because 90% of what thatanimal consumed on that farm
gets left behind when I grow acarrot.
100% of what that carrotconsumes, leaves the farm
Abigail Carroll (31:19):
Interesting.
Rob Avis (31:19):
ne and never returns.
And so, and then we eat it in acity, we defecate into drinking
water, which is crazy, and thenit ends up in a sewage treatment
plant.
And at best, maybe that biosolidthat gets accumulated in that
sewage treatment plant goes to ahundred mile radius around the
city.
Which by the way also containsall the toxins from the
automotive industry andeverything else that that sewage
(31:41):
treatment plant is processing.
So that land actually getspolluted around the city because
of those biosolids.
So.
Cows, when you, when you lookat, if you draw the boundary
around the cow itself and youfocus on its farts.
Yeah, sure.
It's emitting methane.
But when we draw the boundaryaround a properly managed
regenerative farm, this comesback to regenerative living and
(32:03):
we look at the, the grassland inthe cow is one system, then it's
a totally different set of math.
And, and so I worked at theSouthern Alberta Institute of
Technology in their greenbuilding.
Technologies departmentspecifically trying to design
the carbon neutral standard forCanadian homes.
And the problem with the carbonindustry is that it's one metric
(32:25):
trying to understand a hypercomplex system.
And as a system scientist youstart realizing that the outcome
of a policy or even of acalculation or design.
Has a lot to do where, withregards to where you draw the
boundaries and you can cherrypick that boundary selection in
(32:48):
order to communicate a messagethat fits your bias.
And so what I would say is thatmy bias and we all have them, is
(33:32):
more life climate and ecosystemstability.
Human thriving.
So how do we get the mostnutrient dense food?
And how do we, instead ofputting all of our resources
into going to Mars, how do wemake sure that planet Earth,
spaceship Earth has the bestchance of supporting human life?
'cause it'll always support.
(33:52):
Ecosystem life, the nature willgo on.
I'm actually a humanist when itcomes down to it.
So how do I make sure that mykids, their kids, seven
generations down the road,actually have a really good
chance of thriving on thisplanet?
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 leavingyour farm that's got more than
10% of the inputs.
So interesting.
So, so let's get back to.
Fifth world, what stage of thiscompany are you at today?
(34:31):
And like, and how, how are yougrowing it?
What do you need to, to take itto the next level?
Rob Avis (34:39):
Whew.
So we're a startup.
We've just recently come out ofVenture Studio mode, so we had
about three years of justrunning massive experiments in
various domains.
We built a piece of softwarethat we call internally Fitbit
for Planet Earth, so we canmeasure any ecosystem on earth
and tell you how healthy it is.
Whether it's trending up ortrending down.
That was one of our experiments.
(35:00):
We have this consulting thing wedo.
We used to do education.
We put that on hold For now, Iwould say that we're primarily
consulting, but we're huntingfor a mechanism to create the
rails for an entrepreneurialrevolution.
And so one of our co-founders isthe co-founder of Ethereum, and
so we think that there's anopportunity to bring.
(35:22):
The world of the atoms.
So physical things together withthe, the world of the bits.
We don't know where thatintersection exists yet, and so
we're, we're hunting aroundtrying to figure that out.
What we're looking for can comein a number of different ways.
Number one, I guess clients,like, we want people that are
acting in their own, what Iwould call enlightened
self-interest.
(35:43):
So enlightened self-interest isplanting a tree whose shade
you'll never be able to situnderneath.
And you do it because you knowthat it's good for your kids and
their kids and their kids.
You also do it to make sure youhave a stable food supply that
you have.
Like, you hear all theseinfluencers on LinkedIn talking
about, you know, you gotta eatnutrient dense food.
It's like, well, where does thatcome from?
There is no nutrient-dense foodavailable to buy.
(36:06):
So people that want nutrientdense food that have the
resources to put these systemsin and, and either manage them
themselves or hire someone elseto manage them landowners we
want, we want to, like, we haveall the tools and techniques.
Available to regenerateecosystems at breakneck speed.
Nature wants to come back.
We just have to get out of ourway, and it's in our best
(36:28):
interest to do so.
So just more people that want toand, and like, I don't want the
message that I think is reallyimportant with Fifth World and
something we've really tried tocurate is it's not about guilt.
It's not about fear, this is abetter way to live, whether
you're in a city or on a ruralacreage living amongst living
(36:50):
systems.
We know that forest bathing isgood for you.
We know that nutrient dense foodis good for you.
We know that drinking cleanwater is good for you.
All of these things areavailable to us right now, and
they're really not all thatexpensive.
I mean, we're willing to drop ahundred thousand dollars on a
Mercedes-Benz.
What if the new status symbolactually becomes clean water and
(37:11):
the most beautiful food you canever possibly imagine, and a
utility bill that's actuallypaying you money, like there's
money coming into your bankaccount because you are able to
arbitrage the system.
Like with all the AI datacenters coming on in the US your
power bills are gonna be 30 to60 cents a kilowatt hour within
the next five years.
On 30, like the average houseuses about 30 kilowatt hours a
(37:34):
day, so it's gonna be like$18 to$30 a day, somewhere in there
just to use the electricity thatyou're used to, the time to stop
investing in the markets.
Put some of these things intoassets, you can wear that.
And this is the concept of antifragility.
Like you can buy solar cheaperthan you've ever been able to
buy it today, and you'rebasically buying 30 years of
(37:57):
fuel.
And if you're an investor,you're arbitraging future energy
requirements.
And so your ROI is gonna bereally quick as the power price
goes up.
We know that we're probablygonna have a food crisis
sometime in the next 30 years,either for water, like there's
only 60 crop cycles left onplanet Earth.
(38:17):
Like wrap your head around that.
We only have 60 years left ofsoil left on this planet.
And so you can arbitrage thefood system, and by doing that,
you're actually making itbetter.
And, and same with water, likethe, you know, your water.
I mean, think about all this,the municipalities in the US
that have toxic water, likeMichigan and, and places in
(38:39):
Detroit.
They're charging you for waterthat's making you sick.
You can solve this.
It's a very simple thing tosolve by putting a rain tank on
your roof.
And the time to invest inourselves is today.
And it's never been moreaccessible.
I,
Abigail Carroll (38:54):
What advice do you have for listeners who.
Are listening to this and whoare seeing it.
We're seeing how fragile ourcoastlines are.
Like I live on the coast, youknow, we're seeing we know our
food is, is terrible and butone, we're getting so much
different information.
It's really hard for the normalfor, for me, you know, and I,
(39:15):
and I read a lot about this kindof stuff let alone people who
don't have time or the focus toread about, you know, spend
their time reading about thisstuff.
What advice do you give to thejust people?
How do, how do they start?
Where do you start?
Rob Avis (39:29):
Sure.
So number one I, I think youstart in, in your head actually,
and so we, there's a mentalmodel that I think is really
important, which is that youneed 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 orwhatever problem, like everybody
has a different bias and focuson what they think the problems
are.
No individual.
One of us kind of has the sameproblem matrix, if you will.
So when we start with a client,we always try and understand
(40:05):
what.
They're concerned about.
And then we build our designaround trying to, to create
anti-fragile systems that allowthem to not think about those
things anymore.
So if you think about ourservice, we're, we're kind of
like a bespoke insurancecompany, but you don't pay us a
monthly fee.
You pay us to build yourinsurance policy and then you
(40:25):
manage it.
So really get clear on yoursphere of influence and your
sphere of concern.
And the reason that this isreally important is that social
media pulls us out into oursphere of concern constantly
daily.
And it, it.
I was just reading about aboutthis actually, I, I thought
social media was actually givingme dopamine hits, but what it's
(40:46):
actually doing is it's creatingcortisol drops and so you get
addicted to the reduction instress.
I think some things if you'rereading, will probably raise
your stress more, but over timeit actually, your amygdala
actually starts to grow as aresult of social media
consumption and your amygdala iswhat actually is the fear center
of your brain.
I would argue that every singleone of your listeners probably
(41:09):
has a one or two hours that theycould create surplus in their
day and for sure within theirweek by just deleting social
media off of your phone, leavingyour phone at work or somewhere
where you will not touch it atnight so that you can improve
your sleep.
Your thinking will get betterwhen you improve your sleep.
Getting physically fit, that'slike.
(41:31):
Step number one, you need to getinto 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 reallyimportant in terms of your
health outcomes.
I think what we're gonna find inthe next few years is that what
you consume mentally is just asimportant as what you consume
(41:54):
physically.
Abigail Carroll (41:55):
Totally.
Rob Avis (41:56):
then start a small garden like this is really
inexpensive, you know, and, andthere's a great book out there.
You can buy it for three bucksfrom 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 successfulgarden on year one.
And as you kind of become more,you, you build from small
(42:18):
successes then you can start tofreestyle it a little bit more.
And my mother-in-law used toalways say that, you'll, you'll
overestimate what you can do ina year, but you'll underestimate
what you do in five.
And so the hardest part is thatfirst step.
And it's the first step in ajourney of millions of steps.
You just have to start.
(42:38):
Go ahead.
Abigail Carroll (42:39):
I just love that.
The first step starts with sleepand, and moving, getting
physically fit.
Like, it's like, you know, we'retalking about architecture and
ecosystems and, and yeteverything comes down to this
essence, which is you have to begood in your body to be able to
take the steps to protectyourself and to make change.
(43:02):
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 aregenerative way, what are the
lead measures?
I know that when I don't hop onmy bike in the morning or lift
some weight in the morning, Idon't have a good day like, and
so if a good day is my lagmeasure, my lead measures are
proper nutrition, proper sleepand movement in the morning,
that builds a foundation for therest of the day.
(43:26):
And I've had a good day and mymind is in the right place
because we know that physicalexercise releases endorphins and
all sorts of chemicals in yourbody right now more than ever
in, in our entire history.
I think we need a balanced mindbecause there's so much shit
coming towards us every daybetween AI and climate change
(43:47):
and all of the negative 24 hournews cycle like you need.
You need to create a barrierbetween that.
We all have different strategiesthat's mine and that's been
really effective at allowing meto 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 asine wave and, and we all have
our peaks and our troughs.
And this comes back down to kindof getting your mind right.
I mean, meditation is anotherthing that you can do to help
smooth out the peaks and thetroughs and kind of take things
(44:26):
kind of in more of a meta level.
The reasons that I'm optimisticis that we don't lack money,
even though money's not on thebalance sheet.
Nature's not on the balancesheet yet.
We don't lack the knowledge,it's all available to us.
AI has actually, in some ways itcould facilitate the mass
adoption of some of thisknowledge.
(44:47):
Where, where I'm pessimistic orwhere I lose hope is that
paradigm stuff.
It's convincing people in spiteof the fact that Costco shelves
are full.
The lakes look like they stillhave water in'em.
The farms still look likethey're producing food.
There's a cognitive dissonancebetween what I'm saying and what
people interpret when they seethings.
(45:09):
And there's a shift that has tohappen with regards to what
healthy looks like in anecosystem like big wheat fields
and corn fields.
That's not healthy.
That's a destroyed ecosystemthat's growing one crop and.
It's doing.
So basically it's doing it in atotalitarian way.
It's like all other life isunwelcome here except for this
(45:29):
one thing.
This is my fear of, of veganismand vegetarianism actually, the
concept that we can just kind ofturn planet earth into one giant
vegetable farm means that noother life is actually allowed
to be there because those areour vegetable.
That's not growing in abiodynamic or, or you know,
(45:49):
pro-life.
Again, no religious connotationthere, pro-life, life way.
We, we need to kind of startlooking at our food systems
again as part of a largercommunity of things.
And so it's the climate betweenour ears that has to change the
most quickly.
If we do that, we can solveclimate change, we can solve
soil erosion, we can solve.
(46:10):
Water pollution, we can solvethe energy crisis.
You know, humans have donecrazier things in the past in
terms of like overcoming biggerproblems.
But we need that collective willto kind of push the system
forward.
Abigail Carroll (46:24):
Beautiful.
Well, thank you.
Is there anything I didn't askyou 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 thanthe system that exists today.
And so for the change makers outthere that are listening to this
we have to kind of come up withTrojan horses that like I said
earlier, whether they'relibertarian or environmental
doesn't really matter.
The solution is largely thesame.
(46:53):
So how are you gonna Trojanhorse regenerative living into
the work that you do?
And that might mean not usingthe word regenerative living.
It might just mean changing somespecs on your design and letting
your ego stay at the door andknowing that even though you
didn't get credit for thatregenerative solution, or maybe
you can take credit for it inyour work somewhere else, but.
(47:14):
The customer's getting a betterhome.
It has better indoor air qualityit has better end of life
characteristics.
It uses less energy.
All of these things are supervalid, whether you, it doesn't
matter what you call them but wehave to, as design
professionals, we have to startbuilding these into our systems
and finding the, the low hangingfruit that doesn't cost a lot
(47:36):
more, and sometimes it's evenless.
It costs less money to put someof 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 thecollective will to do it.
And I think there's gonna becertain leaders in society that
lead this charge and designprofessionals are one of those
classes of leaders that can kindof 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 delightand I wish you well with the
venture.
Rob Avis (48:08):
Yeah.
Thanks so much, Abigail.
Welcome to the podcast where we
celebrate innovation for a happyplanet.
I am your host, Abigail Carroll.
This week we are traveling toAlberta, Canada to speak with
Rob Avis, co-founder of FifthWorld, a Canadian startup
focused on regenerative livingfifth world designs and build
self-sufficient homesteads,greenhouses, and food, water,
(00:33):
and energy systems that enableall of us to live and work more
synergistically with nature.
Rob has powerful backers and bigambitions his end goal is to see
planetary regeneration withinone generation.
But to do that, he must create amovement.
Let's hear it from Rob.
Abigail Carrroll (00:56):
welcome to the podcast, Rob.
Rob Avis (00:59):
Thanks for having me.
Super stoked to be here.
Abigail Carroll (01:01):
Well, I'm really excited to speak to you.
You're an expert in regenerativeliving tell me what that means.
Rob Avis (01:09):
To really understand this, I have to go back a couple
of steps.
There's three main narratives inour society right now.
The narrative that representedfrom the beginning of the
industrial revolution probablyuntil the mid nineties was this
narrative of kind of business asusual capitalism.
Raising GDP every single year,raising earnings shareholder
(01:33):
value.
We still have a lot of that inour society right now.
It's the foundation layer of, ofthe capitalist system.
And you can really summarizethat narrative into how do I get
more stuff?
It's very mechanistic.
It's got very clear lagmeasures.
It's a very simple.
Goal to, for people tounderstand, which is why I think
(01:54):
it, it really captured the mindsof a lot of people.
And in a lot of ways, it's thebest system that humans have
come up with.
In all honesty, the secondnarrative that kind of started
to emerge in the nineties wasthe sustainability paradigm.
And if you came to me, Abigailand said Rob, how's your
marriage doing these days?
And they said, oh, it's prettysustainable.
(02:15):
You'd probably feel pretty badfor me.
And so.
I would argue that thesustainability narrative
actually is our end state andnot our, our current state.
And the problem with thesustainability paradigm is that
and, and pretty much pretty, I'msure all of your listeners and
even you have thought aboutthis, but have never put words
to it.
The words that we use todescribe the sustainability
(02:37):
paradigm are things like netzero zero escaping.
That's when you take your frontyard and cover it in landscape,
fabric and rocks, or maybe evenyou're putting plastic lawn on
there.
It's trying to minimize ourfootprint.
And so if you kind of take thosewords to its logical endpoint.
The only conclusion you canreally draw from the
(02:58):
sustainability movement is thathumans are inherently
destructive.
That's the statement you'venever put words to.
And at best we can minimize ourfootprint.
And I think this is a really badvision.
I think it's horrible and Idon't think it's
Abigail Carroll (03:13):
Dsmo, that's for sure.
Rob Avis (03:15):
Dismal.
Yeah.
And so the regenerative livingmovement needs a little bit more
context to really understand.
So every species on earth.
Has innate characteristics.
So if you think about a bird abird is genetically designed and
it has the maps in its mind tofly.
(03:36):
It doesn't go to university tolearn the Bern Newi principle
and to learn theories of, youknow, aerodynamics and how to
flap its wings.
It's just, it's built into it.
And you can go through everyspecies on earth and kind of
figure out what its innatecharacteristics are as a farmer.
We see this all the time when wehave young animals show up on
(03:57):
our farm.
They just do things like,they're not taught to do them,
they just do them.
And so that got me thinking intolike what if, if humans are part
of that ecology, which I believethat they are, I believe we're
just one mammal in, in acommunity of species.
We have unfortunately, memes inour society that.
Make us think that we're somehowdifferent than, than the species
(04:21):
that we live amongst which Idisagree with.
I think we are one of one of thespecies in the, in the circle of
life to quote the Lion King.
What is it that if, if birds aremeant to fly from a very young
age, what is it that little kidsdo?
Innately without ever anybodyever having to tell them to do
it.
(04:41):
we make chaos.
And so if you have ever had kidsaround you for a long period of
time, they just destroyeverything.
Like you'd never have to tell achild to not destroy something.
They just, they just do it.
When we were first gardening inour house in Calgary, we had to
create a chaos zone for ourkids.
So they didn't destroy ourgarden.
They were allowed to do whateverthey wanted to that chaos zone,
but they couldn't destroy ourgarden.
(05:03):
Humans are actually disturbancecreators.
We create disturbance.
We, we mine rocks.
We harvest forests, we farm landand every time we do that, we
create a footprint.
We create disturbance.
Now let's, let's take a, a quicksidestep over to the beaver.
'cause I think the beaver isactually closest to humans in
terms of the disturbance patternthat it creates.
(05:24):
It cuts down trees to theuntrained aisle.
When you walk up to where abeaver is working, they'll say,
this beaver is making a completemess.
It's destroying this ecosystem.
But what's actually happening inthe background is it's moving
trees into the water.
It's harvesting mud from thebottom of the creek.
It's sealing a dam.
It's storing millions of gallonsof water.
(05:45):
And as a result of that, itincreases the background
biodiversity in that micro zoneby 28 times.
So its footprint is creatingmore life and it does so through
the through disturbance.
And so if humans are.
The ultimate disturbance makeryou could argue, which is where
the sustainability movement thatwe are destroying the earth.
(06:07):
And I think that there's a lotof evidence to that end.
And it's because the disturbancethat we create is out of scale.
We're doing too much too quicklywithout an understanding of how
ecosystems function.
And it's only in the last ahundred years since we've put
satellites up into space that wereally have the information that
we need to be able to makebetter decisions.
(06:29):
And so if disturbance is notinherently 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 isone of regenerative living.
So how do we actually.
Act like the beaver and makesure that every one of our
footprints is actually enhancingthe ability for life to thrive
(06:50):
around us.
What does that look like?
And part of that is like, isgetting rid of our guilt.
It's like acknowledging that weare part of the circle of life
that we do have a contributionto this planet as a species.
And that it's up to us to decidewhether that footprint leaves
where we live better or worse.
And we do that by the creationof human habitat.
(07:14):
And that human habitat is theway we build our houses, how we
manage water, how we grow ourfood, or how, where we get our
food from how we interact withour community.
Even the money that we make andthat we use amongst each other.
All of these things influencewhether the disturbance that we
create as a species is going tobe.
Without any religiousconnotation, pro-life or the
(07:37):
opposite, which is allopathic.
We, we get to make that decisionand we decide every single day
when we wake up.
So regenerative living is aboutoptimizing human wellbeing by
the creation of regenerativehuman habitat Time.
Abigail Carroll (07:51):
Wow.
There's a lot to unpack inthere.
But I find it interesting alsobecause I think when we talk
about what you do, you're acreator.
So it's interesting this, thisdestruction that the humans are
doing coming from, you know,talking about that and, and
having that be part of a, a pi aparadigm when you are like
(08:13):
fundamentally, you know, anengineer at a, a farmer and a
creator.
But I suppose all of thoseactivities are inherently
destructive on some level.
You have to kind of break downto build.
Rob Avis (08:26):
Yeah.
Abigail Carroll (08:27):
so, so.
You have this of regenerativeliving and this idea of
destruction leading to creation.
(09:11):
How does this manifest in yourbusiness?
Fifth world.
Rob Avis (09:16):
So Fifth World's mission is planetary
regeneration within ageneration.
It's huge.
And what that looks like on aday to day today is that we
design regenerative.
Estates, landscapes, farms andproperties for individuals that
leverage regenerative foodsystems water harvesting
(09:38):
renewable energy systems, lowenergy buildings.
Basically showing or providingthe, the infrastructure, the
tools and the techniques forhumans to exist in a positive
relationship with theenvironment around them.
And we do that.
Through consulting and throughhelping folks to build those
things out long term, we wantto, or I would say medium term,
(10:01):
we want to accelerate theadoption of decentralized food,
energy, and water systems.
Fifth World has no intention ofowning all of that or like that
niche per se.
And so we actually are trying tofigure out.
How to create the rails toinspire an entrepreneurial
revolution because it's gonnatake literally billions of
people to achieve this goal.
(10:22):
Which means that we have tocreate thousands, maybe even
millions of nodes around theworld where individual
communities can start to takeresponsibility for their f
footprints and make sure thatthey're positive.
And so we wanna make sure thatthose people have those tools in
order to enable that.
Abigail Carroll (10:40):
Interesting.
You're in Alberta where I'vebeen a few times now and and the
landscape's very different.
It's also politically removedfrom the rest of Canada.
Are some of those differences,are they they part of what has
inspired you?
Is there, is there somethingabout being in Alberta because
it's like sort of the off thegrid now.
(11:01):
I, I love the off the grid.
Movement, but so many of thecomponents in the United States
are considered, you know, blueState, you know, philosophies
and, and yet for me, I wouldthink of like, you know, I, I
think that the, the, you know,being off the grid and, you
know, having your own farmingand having your own, you know,
(11:23):
electricity.
These are fundamentally, youknow conservative ideas that I
would think with, that I wouldnormally associate with, with
the, you know, rural states.
Is, is, is Alberta a little bitof more accepting of renewables
than maybe some of American redstates?
But still, you know, holdingonto some those conservative
(11:46):
ideas is, is, does that haveanything to do with this?
Rob Avis (11:51):
it's interesting because yeah, being off grid or
having your own food or havingyour 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 Ishould just clarify, I'm not
actually advocating forself-reliance or complete off
(12:13):
grid or,'cause there's no suchthing as that.
We, we live in a highlyconnected society.
Humans are a social species.
And so, where we are today,which people would argue is kind
of more pro-social, maybe they'dargue that is really not
pro-social at all.
We have highly centralized gridsthat are super susceptible to
(12:33):
failure, like they haven'treally been invested in for
many, many years.
These grids are predominantlyowned by monopolies whether
they're water, whether they'regas, whether they're electric.
Our food industry isconsolidating at breakneck
speed.
Every time I walk into a grocerystore there's almost no food
available to buy there.
(12:53):
It's all hyper processed.
It's in plastic, it's covered inmicroplastics.
You have no idea where the beefor the chicken or the fish has
come from.
You have to rely upon a trustmechanism that's suspect at
best.
Sometimes it's better thanothers.
And so yes, freedom could be onekind of aspect.
And I think freedom is a superimportant.
(13:14):
I mean, freedom and liberty isthe foundation of Western
civilization.
And we're moving rapidly awayfrom that due to the
centralization and, andconsolidation of the businesses
that support our very basicneeds our very basic supply
chains.
So yes, there is a libertariancomponent, but we can also look
at it from an environmentalcomponent as well.
(13:36):
When I produce my own power onmy property.
I don't have the line lossesassociated with sending power
from a power grid.
And then when I have surpluspower, 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 rainwateron my roof in an urban or rural
(13:58):
environment, I'm reducing theamount of storm water in a city
specifically.
That the city has to deal with.
So I'm reducing the, the burdenassociated with those
centralized infrastructurepieces.
Rainwater's, also the cleanestdrinking water on earth.
And so I'm improving my ownpersonal health, which reduces
the burden on the health system.
In fact, rainwater, whenstudying in Australia, rainwater
(14:19):
drinkers had better healthoutcomes than people drinking
main's water because theyweren't ingesting fluoride and
chlorine.
And then when I grow my ownfood, in my backyard.
It's not traveling from Mexicoor from California.
It's coming right outside mybackyard.
It's loaded with microbes, whichis very good for my, the
probiotics in my gut.
I'm literally eating it minutesafter it was harvested.
(14:41):
I'm able to recycle the wasteproducts from my house back into
the garden.
And so I find it reallyinteresting because as a
company, we're always trying tobalance.
Our messaging with regards tothe client that we're talking
to.
And so if somebody's reallylibertarian, sure, we'll set you
up with a system that supportsyour libertarian goals.
And almost like Trojan Horse,the environmental benefits,
(15:04):
'cause they're not really asinterested in that.
And if somebody's anenvironmentalist and wants to do
what's good for the planetthey're gonna get all the
environmental benefits and yeah,they also get a little.
Topping of freedom on there aswell.
And Wendell Berry said that whenless than 3% of the population
farms, you can't have afunctional democracy.
And so having distributed powerby empowering individuals with
(15:28):
food, energy, and water,actually, I would argue is the
foundation of a functionaldemocracy, because now you don't
have people that are like we sawin COVID.
Beholden to a, a fragile system.
And this kind of leads into, wetalked, started talking about
regenerative living.
The foundational layer ofregenerative living is actually
(15:48):
anti fragility, which we cantalk about next if you'd like
to.
But we live in a very, a societythat is, that is sitting in on
an upside down pyramid right nowbecause, and that, that point at
the bottom of the pyramid is ourpower, our food and water.
And we actually have to reversethe pyramid in the other
direction.
And never in the history ofhumans have we had the ability
(16:09):
to, or humanity or orcivilization, have we had the
ability to actually invert thatpyramid in the way that we do
today.
Abigail Carroll (16:17):
Right.
Thanks to tech basically isgonna let us do that.
Although some of the thingsyou're doing are, are somewhat
low, like the collecting ofrainwater, that's something that
people have been doing for, formillennia.
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 mostlygravitating 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'spriorities today?
But first, let's go into thefragile living.
Rob Avis (16:53):
So I think it's really important to understand like why
I use the word fragile oranti-fragile, and it's nice to
have an analogy for that.
So if I was to ship you a wineglass in a box and I put the
label fragile on there, whatdoes the subtext say underneath
that label that says Fragilehandle with care?
So we can say very broadly thatfragile systems do not benefit
(17:16):
from volatility.
And then if we go one step upresilience would be kind of the
middle ground.
And so we can think of asidewalk as being resilient.
If I chip a bit of concreteoutta the sidewalk, it still
functions as a sidewalk.
Yes, it's not.
A whole sidewalk anymore becausethey took a chip out of it.
But it's resilient tovolatility.
And so then if fragile ishandled with care, and I'm
(17:38):
shipping you something inside ofa box that's anti-fragile, what
would the subtext on that say?
Apply volatility.
Right?
And so we can look at everysystem that humans rely upon and
we can rank them in terms ofwhether.
They are fragile, resilient, oranti-fragile.
And you can do that reallyquickly, like pretty
(17:59):
qualitatively just through aconversation.
And just to kind of build outthe anti-fragile piece a little
bit more the best example of ananti-fragile system is the human
body.
So if I lift weight in the rightdosage, my muscles get bigger.
And so anti-fragile systemsactually require volatility to
be healthy.
(18:19):
But if you apply too muchvolatility, if I lift too much
weight too often, I can teartendons and rip muscle and, and
set myself backwards.
If I choose to sit on a couchfor the rest of my life I'm
gonna atrophy and I'm gonna getsick.
And so most of.
The systems that we depend uponare not resilient to volatility.
(18:41):
Like I think we could say prettyclearly that as the food system
consolidates like most citieshave about three days of food in
it at any given time.
And we have about 18 months ofgrain stored on planet Earth.
And we produced the most amountof grain per capita back in
1986.
And speed dec declining beingdeclining ever since.
Every calorie of food that weconsume takes 30 calories of
(19:04):
hydrocarbon to produce it.
These are all things that, thatfeed into the fact that our food
system is very fragile.
And I do believe if we don'tchange course, that we will
witness a giga famine in mylifetime, which is more than a
billion people starving.
At the same time we can look, dothe same thing with the power
system, with our heating systemsand with our water systems.
(19:24):
I was watching a guy talk aboutsolar flares the other day.
This just completely floored me.
I just, I just actually wrote apost on LinkedIn about this.
It hasn't gone up yet, but ifall the power on Earth went out,
there's literally no, almost nosurface water on earth that
humans could drink that would beclean enough without filtration.
Like, that blew my mind that we,that we've like.
(19:46):
We've, we've polluted so much ofour water that we can't even
drink it anymore without movingit through machines.
And so we can look at thesethings without going into a
bunch of detail and say like,we've ized the very foundational
layers of civilization.
They all require energy in orderto operate.
And so we need to be aregenerative living system,
(20:08):
whether it's on your property orin a city, or a town or a
community.
We actually need to think abouthow we design these systems so
that they operate in normaltimes very well, but they
actually get more valuable.
They operate better, theyfunction more effectively when
volatility is applied to them.
(20:28):
And, I would say with confidencethat most of the systems we've
talked about thus far would,would not fall into that camp.
The good news is, is that we canswitch it very quickly.
It's, it's actually a reallyquick turnaround when people
kind of wrap their head aroundit.
The biggest shift that weactually have to make is the
paradigm shift.
The technical moves that have tobe made are actually very quick
and, and quite simple to makeonce people understand the
(20:50):
concepts.
Abigail Carroll (20:51):
So you just need to, spread the word who is
your client and what are theyasking for?
Like, who, who is sharing thisworld vision?
Rob Avis (21:01):
We have a few early adopters.
So these would be individualsthat kind of see the fragility
writing on the wall, and they'rewilling to put their money where
their mouth is or where they'rethinking anyways.
And so these would generally bepeople that own.
Small to medium to large farms.
They're designing like passivehouses you know, solar
(21:21):
microgrids their own gardens,greenhouses, food forests, and
livestock systems.
That'd be one kind of clientprofile.
We also work for like colleges.
So we did a, a full.
Designed for a local polytechnicin Calgary where they,'cause
they have a culinary program andso they, they wanted their chefs
(21:43):
to basically have access to realfood so that they can have a
differentiated educationprogram.
We put a bid in for a localAlberta community to do a
hundred year plan, and we weregonna be part of their
ecological.
Footprinting like how do theymanage storm water?
How do they manage rainwater?
Those sorts of things so we canhelp kind of longer planning.
(22:05):
We get people asking us just fora really quick rainwater
harvesting design where we helpthem to think through how to
harvest the water off theirroof, put it into tanks, and
then use it inside their home.
What's, what's another reallyinteresting one that we've
worked on recently?
LA largely, I would say farmseverything from like the urban
lot all the way up to the farm.
That's kind of who we'reprimarily targeting right now.
(22:26):
On our work.
Abigail Carroll (22:27):
And how did you.
Get involved in all of this.
You seem like incrediblypassionate and you've a bit of a
philosopher about how you'reapproaching this.
Where, where does this comefrom?
Rob Avis (22:41):
I get so many emails and messages weekly asking how
the people can join.
People want to be part of thismovement.
Unfortunately, the.
Environment is not currently onthe balance sheet, so we have to
figure out how to solve thatproblem.
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 chocolatefactory.
(23:03):
We would make a hundred thousandcakes a day.
I got, you know, by the time Ileft that I we started.
Thinking, I didn't want to evereat processed food again because
of all the kilometers that ourpipes would have to travel
through in order to get into thepan.
And then I went into industrialenergy.
I was an oil and gas engineer.
And I started, I started mycareer off as an engineer
(23:23):
bringing gas to gas facilities,natural gas and oil, and then
building those facilities toprocess that gas.
And I was actually.
Cutting down hundreds, thousandsof acres of forest in order to
do this.
And it really hurt me, like Ididn't enjoy it, but I couldn't
criticize the industry because Iwas using natural gas to heat my
(23:44):
home.
And I was driving to work.
And so I, I was in this paradoxof I don't want to be a hardcore
environmentalist and activist.
Depending upon the veryresources for my livelihood that
I'm trying to fight against.
And so we quit our jobs.
My wife and I, she's also apetroleum engineer.
(24:04):
We traveled to Denmark.
We lived there for six monthsstudying renewable energy.
'cause understanding energy.
That was the next step for us.
Like, is there another way topower the world?
And then we figured out thatDenmark was rapidly on that
path.
And then we started thinkinglike, how do we feed the world?
In fact, like what we eat everyday is hyper destructive.
Every ton of grain that'sproduced right now generates
(24:25):
eight tons of, of soil erosion,which is why we have all these
dead zones in the world.
Our, the nutrient density of ourfood in some of the nutrient
classes, micronutrient classesare at zero relative to where
they were a hundred years ago.
Okay.
And so we're literally eatingthe planet to death.
But the story that gets told islike, well, cows are bad.
You know, we should all be veganor vegetarian.
(24:47):
Well, that's not really thewhole story.
That's just a really small bitof how a, a complex system
works.
And so we actually converted avan, 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 calledpermaculture, which is what the
reason I actually quit my jobwas I got this three minute
(25:09):
video in my inbox when I wasgetting ready to cut down a huge
swath of forest.
And I was like, oh my gosh, likeI've got 600,000 hours on this
planet.
I took my calculator out andfigured that out.
I've burned through about athird of them.
What do I wanna spend the nexttwo thirds of my hours doing?
And, and so that's, that's whenwe quit the job.
And then I ended up in Australiafor six months Africa for a
(25:30):
little while and didn't go backto the patch.
My, my wife did for a while tosupport us.
And then we started Vergepermaculture.
We've taught about 10,000students around the world in
permaculture and permaculturerelated subjects over about 15
years.
And then I ended up designing aproperty for one of our
co-founders in British Columbia.
And he said.
(25:51):
This is amazing.
How do we scale this up?
And and so Fifth World was bornout of that.
And the concept of Fifth Worldis that we live in the fourth
world today.
We know a better world ispossible, and humans are
builders, we're creators.
We we're problem solvers.
So what are the foundationallayers, the sedimentary layers
that are required that willusher in a fifth world, a world
(26:15):
where humans can coexist withecology?
And it's in our best interest todo this.
This is, this is the crazy thingright now.
Like I'm, I'm having a lot ofcognitive dissidents right now
reading this memo that BillGates just wrote about climate
change not being a problemanymore.
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 notbe the thing that you think is
interesting to me.
What I'm realizing is that the.
The PR movement is reallystrong.
And so somebody's lying on oneside or the other, and in fact
it doesn't really matter whichone, and I like trying to find
the middle ground in thesenarratives to like what's true
(26:56):
regardless of whether one or oneor both of these narratives is
false.
And as a mechanical engineer,before I got into all of this, I
did a little bit of HVACengineering as well for, for
commercial buildings.
And ashrae, which is theAmerican Society for Mechanical
Engineers, says that in abuilding you can't, the code
(27:19):
that they stipulate is that youcan't have the air in the
building have higher, like morethan 800 ppm of CO2 higher than
the outside air.
So our global PPM right now is420.
And so by logic.
An engineer can't allow the CO2levels in the building to go
beyond about 1200 ppm.
(27:39):
Now, it turns out that after athousand pp m of CO2, we end up
in permanent brain fog ashumans.
Yeah, like you need more oxygenthan 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 CO2concentration went up by, I
think four PPM last year.
It's accelerating.
And, and so like, and I have twolittle kids by the time they're
kind of in their middle to, tolate adulthood, assuming it's
gonna continue to acceleratewe're getting awfully close to
(28:13):
that number.
At which all humans are gonna beexisting 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 climatedeniers, but like, I hate that
word actually, but people thatare arguing, we gotta burn more
fossil fuel.
We've got like, there's nothingwrong with it.
(28:34):
Humans have nothing to do withclimate change.
Fine.
You guys believe that.
You can believe whatever youwant.
The consumption of theseproducts in the way that we're
consuming it.
And I'm not, I'm not saying weshouldn't consume fossil fuels.
They are, the fossil fuels arean amazing resource that we have
to steward.
What I'm saying is that thecombustion of those products is
com is actually a competition toour ability to breathe on this
(28:56):
planet.
And it's, we either need toplant a lot more trees, and
there's a lot of hope in all ofthis.
If the US planted took away itscorn, soy, and wheat from, from
North Dakota, south of the Gulfof Mexico, east of the
Mississippi River and planted itback to perennial grasses and
started grazing cattle the like,properly using amp grazing
(29:18):
methods.
The US would be carbon neutralovernight 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 bisonroaming the planes in America
400 years ago than there arecows today.
Right.
And so the and and actuallywhat's really interesting about
methane is that there's amicrobe on properly managed
(29:46):
pastures called methadones, andthey consume the methane.
The problem is with cows is thatwe put them into confined animal
feeding operations.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
And, and so like there's verylittle physics being applied to
the food problem that I findthat it really irritates me and
it's, it's because it, our worldis full of so many complex
(30:08):
domains.
It's hard for one individual toreally wrap their head around
all of it.
So I understand where that'scoming from, but what's really
interesting about, if we wantedto, to kind of create the most,
the most positive.
Footprint from a dietperspective, for a city dweller
that wasn't growing any of theirown food, they would eat a 100%
grass fed beef diet, not avegetarian or vegan diet.
(30:32):
And here's how the, here's howthe physics works.
So a cow, when it consumes,let's just use some simple
numbers, a hundred pounds ofgrass and a hundred liters of
water, or a hundred gallons ofwater, they, they don't consume
that much.
Necessarily in that ratio, butlet's just use those for simple
numbers.
90% of what that animal consumesin water and feed ends up back
(30:53):
on the ground.
10% of it actually gets absorbedinto its body.
And so there's an old farmer'sadage that you should never sell
anything off the farm, that youcan't, that can't walk off the
farm because 90% of what thatanimal consumed on that farm
gets left behind when I grow acarrot.
100% of what that carrotconsumes, leaves the farm
Abigail Carroll (31:19):
Interesting.
Rob Avis (31:19):
ne and never returns.
And so, and then we eat it in acity, we defecate into drinking
water, which is crazy, and thenit ends up in a sewage treatment
plant.
And at best, maybe that biosolidthat gets accumulated in that
sewage treatment plant goes to ahundred mile radius around the
city.
Which by the way also containsall the toxins from the
automotive industry andeverything else that that sewage
(31:41):
treatment plant is processing.
So that land actually getspolluted around the city because
of those biosolids.
So.
Cows, when you, when you lookat, if you draw the boundary
around the cow itself and youfocus on its farts.
Yeah, sure.
It's emitting methane.
But when we draw the boundaryaround a properly managed
regenerative farm, this comesback to regenerative living and
(32:03):
we look at the, the grassland inthe cow is one system, then it's
a totally different set of math.
And, and so I worked at theSouthern Alberta Institute of
Technology in their greenbuilding.
Technologies departmentspecifically trying to design
the carbon neutral standard forCanadian homes.
And the problem with the carbonindustry is that it's one metric
(32:25):
trying to understand a hypercomplex system.
And as a system scientist youstart realizing that the outcome
of a policy or even of acalculation or design.
Has a lot to do where, withregards to where you draw the
boundaries and you can cherrypick that boundary selection in
(32:48):
order to communicate a messagethat fits your bias.
And so what I would say is thatmy bias and we all have them, is
(33:32):
more life climate and ecosystemstability.
Human thriving.
So how do we get the mostnutrient dense food?
And how do we, instead ofputting all of our resources
into going to Mars, how do wemake sure that planet Earth,
spaceship Earth has the bestchance of supporting human life?
'cause it'll always support.
(33:52):
Ecosystem life, the nature willgo on.
I'm actually a humanist when itcomes down to it.
So how do I make sure that mykids, their kids, seven
generations down the road,actually have a really good
chance of thriving on thisplanet?
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 leavingyour farm that's got more than
10% of the inputs.
So interesting.
So, so let's get back to.
Fifth world, what stage of thiscompany are you at today?
(34:31):
And like, and how, how are yougrowing it?
What do you need to, to take itto the next level?
Rob Avis (34:39):
Whew.
So we're a startup.
We've just recently come out ofVenture Studio mode, so we had
about three years of justrunning massive experiments in
various domains.
We built a piece of softwarethat we call internally Fitbit
for Planet Earth, so we canmeasure any ecosystem on earth
and tell you how healthy it is.
Whether it's trending up ortrending down.
That was one of our experiments.
(35:00):
We have this consulting thing wedo.
We used to do education.
We put that on hold For now, Iwould say that we're primarily
consulting, but we're huntingfor a mechanism to create the
rails for an entrepreneurialrevolution.
And so one of our co-founders isthe co-founder of Ethereum, and
so we think that there's anopportunity to bring.
(35:22):
The world of the atoms.
So physical things together withthe, the world of the bits.
We don't know where thatintersection exists yet, and so
we're, we're hunting aroundtrying to figure that out.
What we're looking for can comein a number of different ways.
Number one, I guess clients,like, we want people that are
acting in their own, what Iwould call enlightened
self-interest.
(35:43):
So enlightened self-interest isplanting a tree whose shade
you'll never be able to situnderneath.
And you do it because you knowthat it's good for your kids and
their kids and their kids.
You also do it to make sure youhave a stable food supply that
you have.
Like, you hear all theseinfluencers on LinkedIn talking
about, you know, you gotta eatnutrient dense food.
It's like, well, where does thatcome from?
There is no nutrient-dense foodavailable to buy.
(36:06):
So people that want nutrientdense food that have the
resources to put these systemsin and, and either manage them
themselves or hire someone elseto manage them landowners we
want, we want to, like, we haveall the tools and techniques.
Available to regenerateecosystems at breakneck speed.
Nature wants to come back.
We just have to get out of ourway, and it's in our best
(36:28):
interest to do so.
So just more people that want toand, and like, I don't want the
message that I think is reallyimportant with Fifth World and
something we've really tried tocurate is it's not about guilt.
It's not about fear, this is abetter way to live, whether
you're in a city or on a ruralacreage living amongst living
(36:50):
systems.
We know that forest bathing isgood for you.
We know that nutrient dense foodis good for you.
We know that drinking cleanwater is good for you.
All of these things areavailable to us right now, and
they're really not all thatexpensive.
I mean, we're willing to drop ahundred thousand dollars on a
Mercedes-Benz.
What if the new status symbolactually becomes clean water and
(37:11):
the most beautiful food you canever possibly imagine, and a
utility bill that's actuallypaying you money, like there's
money coming into your bankaccount because you are able to
arbitrage the system.
Like with all the AI datacenters coming on in the US your
power bills are gonna be 30 to60 cents a kilowatt hour within
the next five years.
On 30, like the average houseuses about 30 kilowatt hours a
(37:34):
day, so it's gonna be like$18 to$30 a day, somewhere in there
just to use the electricity thatyou're used to, the time to stop
investing in the markets.
Put some of these things intoassets, you can wear that.
And this is the concept of antifragility.
Like you can buy solar cheaperthan you've ever been able to
buy it today, and you'rebasically buying 30 years of
(37:57):
fuel.
And if you're an investor,you're arbitraging future energy
requirements.
And so your ROI is gonna bereally quick as the power price
goes up.
We know that we're probablygonna have a food crisis
sometime in the next 30 years,either for water, like there's
only 60 crop cycles left onplanet Earth.
(38:17):
Like wrap your head around that.
We only have 60 years left ofsoil left on this planet.
And so you can arbitrage thefood system, and by doing that,
you're actually making itbetter.
And, and same with water, likethe, you know, your water.
I mean, think about all this,the municipalities in the US
that have toxic water, likeMichigan and, and places in
(38:39):
Detroit.
They're charging you for waterthat's making you sick.
You can solve this.
It's a very simple thing tosolve by putting a rain tank on
your roof.
And the time to invest inourselves is today.
And it's never been moreaccessible.
I,
Abigail Carroll (38:54):
What advice do you have for listeners who.
Are listening to this and whoare seeing it.
We're seeing how fragile ourcoastlines are.
Like I live on the coast, youknow, we're seeing we know our
food is, is terrible and butone, we're getting so much
different information.
It's really hard for the normalfor, for me, you know, and I,
(39:15):
and I read a lot about this kindof stuff let alone people who
don't have time or the focus toread about, you know, spend
their time reading about thisstuff.
What advice do you give to thejust people?
How do, how do they start?
Where do you start?
Rob Avis (39:29):
Sure.
So number one I, I think youstart in, in your head actually,
and so we, there's a mentalmodel that I think is really
important, which is that youneed 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 orwhatever problem, like everybody
has a different bias and focuson what they think the problems
are.
No individual.
One of us kind of has the sameproblem matrix, if you will.
So when we start with a client,we always try and understand
(40:05):
what.
They're concerned about.
And then we build our designaround trying to, to create
anti-fragile systems that allowthem to not think about those
things anymore.
So if you think about ourservice, we're, we're kind of
like a bespoke insurancecompany, but you don't pay us a
monthly fee.
You pay us to build yourinsurance policy and then you
(40:25):
manage it.
So really get clear on yoursphere of influence and your
sphere of concern.
And the reason that this isreally important is that social
media pulls us out into oursphere of concern constantly
daily.
And it, it.
I was just reading about aboutthis actually, I, I thought
social media was actually givingme dopamine hits, but what it's
(40:46):
actually doing is it's creatingcortisol drops and so you get
addicted to the reduction instress.
I think some things if you'rereading, will probably raise
your stress more, but over timeit actually, your amygdala
actually starts to grow as aresult of social media
consumption and your amygdala iswhat actually is the fear center
of your brain.
I would argue that every singleone of your listeners probably
(41:09):
has a one or two hours that theycould create surplus in their
day and for sure within theirweek by just deleting social
media off of your phone, leavingyour phone at work or somewhere
where you will not touch it atnight so that you can improve
your sleep.
Your thinking will get betterwhen you improve your sleep.
Getting physically fit, that'slike.
(41:31):
Step number one, you need to getinto 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 reallyimportant in terms of your
health outcomes.
I think what we're gonna find inthe next few years is that what
you consume mentally is just asimportant as what you consume
(41:54):
physically.
Abigail Carroll (41:55):
Totally.
Rob Avis (41:56):
then start a small garden like this is really
inexpensive, you know, and, andthere's a great book out there.
You can buy it for three bucksfrom 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 successfulgarden on year one.
And as you kind of become more,you, you build from small
(42:18):
successes then you can start tofreestyle it a little bit more.
And my mother-in-law used toalways say that, you'll, you'll
overestimate what you can do ina year, but you'll underestimate
what you do in five.
And so the hardest part is thatfirst step.
And it's the first step in ajourney of millions of steps.
You just have to start.
(42:38):
Go ahead.
Abigail Carroll (42:39):
I just love that.
The first step starts with sleepand, and moving, getting
physically fit.
Like, it's like, you know, we'retalking about architecture and
ecosystems and, and yeteverything comes down to this
essence, which is you have to begood in your body to be able to
take the steps to protectyourself and to make change.
(43:02):
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 aregenerative way, what are the
lead measures?
I know that when I don't hop onmy bike in the morning or lift
some weight in the morning, Idon't have a good day like, and
so if a good day is my lagmeasure, my lead measures are
proper nutrition, proper sleepand movement in the morning,
that builds a foundation for therest of the day.
(43:26):
And I've had a good day and mymind is in the right place
because we know that physicalexercise releases endorphins and
all sorts of chemicals in yourbody right now more than ever
in, in our entire history.
I think we need a balanced mindbecause there's so much shit
coming towards us every daybetween AI and climate change
(43:47):
and all of the negative 24 hournews cycle like you need.
You need to create a barrierbetween that.
We all have different strategiesthat's mine and that's been
really effective at allowing meto 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 asine wave and, and we all have
our peaks and our troughs.
And this comes back down to kindof getting your mind right.
I mean, meditation is anotherthing that you can do to help
smooth out the peaks and thetroughs and kind of take things
(44:26):
kind of in more of a meta level.
The reasons that I'm optimisticis that we don't lack money,
even though money's not on thebalance sheet.
Nature's not on the balancesheet yet.
We don't lack the knowledge,it's all available to us.
AI has actually, in some ways itcould facilitate the mass
adoption of some of thisknowledge.
(44:47):
Where, where I'm pessimistic orwhere I lose hope is that
paradigm stuff.
It's convincing people in spiteof the fact that Costco shelves
are full.
The lakes look like they stillhave water in'em.
The farms still look likethey're producing food.
There's a cognitive dissonancebetween what I'm saying and what
people interpret when they seethings.
(45:09):
And there's a shift that has tohappen with regards to what
healthy looks like in anecosystem like big wheat fields
and corn fields.
That's not healthy.
That's a destroyed ecosystemthat's growing one crop and.
It's doing.
So basically it's doing it in atotalitarian way.
It's like all other life isunwelcome here except for this
(45:29):
one thing.
This is my fear of, of veganismand vegetarianism actually, the
concept that we can just kind ofturn planet earth into one giant
vegetable farm means that noother life is actually allowed
to be there because those areour vegetable.
That's not growing in abiodynamic or, or you know,
(45:49):
pro-life.
Again, no religious connotationthere, pro-life, life way.
We, we need to kind of startlooking at our food systems
again as part of a largercommunity of things.
And so it's the climate betweenour ears that has to change the
most quickly.
If we do that, we can solveclimate change, we can solve
soil erosion, we can solve.
(46:10):
Water pollution, we can solvethe energy crisis.
You know, humans have donecrazier things in the past in
terms of like overcoming biggerproblems.
But we need that collective willto kind of push the system
forward.
Abigail Carroll (46:24):
Beautiful.
Well, thank you.
Is there anything I didn't askyou 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 thanthe system that exists today.
And so for the change makers outthere that are listening to this
we have to kind of come up withTrojan horses that like I said
earlier, whether they'relibertarian or environmental
doesn't really matter.
The solution is largely thesame.
(46:53):
So how are you gonna Trojanhorse regenerative living into
the work that you do?
And that might mean not usingthe word regenerative living.
It might just mean changing somespecs on your design and letting
your ego stay at the door andknowing that even though you
didn't get credit for thatregenerative solution, or maybe
you can take credit for it inyour work somewhere else, but.
(47:14):
The customer's getting a betterhome.
It has better indoor air qualityit has better end of life
characteristics.
It uses less energy.
All of these things are supervalid, whether you, it doesn't
matter what you call them but wehave to, as design
professionals, we have to startbuilding these into our systems
and finding the, the low hangingfruit that doesn't cost a lot
(47:36):
more, and sometimes it's evenless.
It costs less money to put someof 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 thecollective will to do it.
And I think there's gonna becertain leaders in society that
lead this charge and designprofessionals are one of those
classes of leaders that can kindof 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 delightand I wish you well with the
venture.
Rob Avis (48:08):
Yeah.
Thanks so much, Abigail.
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