February 2023 Jonah Wittkamper video conversation Kin's Domain Economics and Funding On Biodiversity Credit Futures (takeaways in bold) Link to the Takeaways Hey everybody Gabriel Miguel here founder executive director of the Anastasia Foundation and today I have a very special guest, a dear friend mentor father figure just a great person in my life who I'm very glad to have Jonah Wittkamper and one of my best friends in the world, his brother Wesley Wittkamper. This is an incredible dynamic duo here - you guys may know Wesley from some of our previous videos and events and things but Jonah this is his first time here hopefully not his last I'll do my best to make it attractive for him to come back but Jonah is the co-founder and president of Nexus which you guys may have heard me talk about before and the Amazon Investor Coalition, the Global Governance Philanthropy Network and the Healthy Democracy Coalition. So Nexus is a global movement of over 6000 young people from 70 countries dedicated to bridging communities of wealth and impact, it's an incredible Network, they've done so many great things in the world and you guys will see that a little bit later the Amazon Investor Coalition advances forest friendly economic development of the Amazon region of South America, the GGPN unites funders to collaborate on transnational issues and the Healthy Democracy Coalition connects funders to collaborate on U.S policy. The various networks involve people from many of the world's most philanthropic families. Jonah has organized global networks of young philanthropists for more than a decade now and has inspired a lot of new charitable activity for many wealthy families, and so Jonah, thanks for taking the time to be here. Welcome. Jonah: Great to be here. Gabriel: I would love for people to know a little bit about your story and how you got into all these things and then we can probably talk about Nexus, your current work in the Amazon - and so for everybody watching, Jonah has a huge amount of experience and knowledge of philanthropy at the highest levels and has lots of things to share about how we can make the Ringing Cedars movement more successful by emulating some of the things that he's done or that he's seen in the past and that he's doing now, so I think his experience is really gonna do a lot for us, so stay tuned. So Jonah if you want to just talk a little bit about like how you got into all these things, that'd be awesome. JONAH:  So I consider myself to be an activist, someone trying to make a a systemic change in global affairs away from the pathway of unsustainability towards one of collaboration with biodiversity and human thriving. My know-how for organizing people really started when I was 15 years old so when you say how did I get started and I go back to a story when I was 15 years old I was living in New York City. I didn't have too many friends - I got to go to this international summer camp called Camp Rising Sun where I met young people from 35 countries and I realized there that the future of the world could work not despite diversity but because of diversity. I learned the art of celebrating diversity - another way to describe it is the earth of inclusion because I as a high schooler had been ostracized and by being in a community where I felt included I wanted to include everyone else in the world and when I got back to school I decided to be one of those students who knew or who learned the first and last name of every other student in the school so that I could help include those who had been ostracized like me and that pattern of inclusion and 'building bridges' and helping to facilitate collaboration and diversity has been the pattern that I have sought to express globally ever since. I ran into some streaks of luck - I picked up some cute computer skills at school and I was able to apply those to the emerging youth movements in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I co-founded a global association of youth organizations around the United Nations in January of 2000. It was called the Global Youth Action Network and soon our website was the largest on the internet for youth activism and by our third year we had mobilized a million people and I realized that young people represent a strategy for transforming the world - when young people participate in a process they learn about the process whether it's politics or identity development they learn about the flaws in that process. In many cases they can then spend the next few decades of their career improving the process so that the political process can become better or the identity development process can become better etc, letting people represent a very key entry point for creating global systemic change. Along the way I met young people from dozens of wealthy families who wanted to get involved in non-profits and didn't know how or where and because our Network had contacts with young change makers in basically every country in the world we became very useful in helping people get connected and that plays into this pattern of helping people feel included so instead of people being ostracized because they are wealthy many of them would participate in networks like this without identifying themselves as coming from wealth, but by creating elements or creating environments where they felt included they could show up with their own strengths they could show up to be a journalist or a fashion designer what whatever it was that might be their passion and money would come along for the ride as sort of a secondary follow-on effect of the way that they could make a contribution to whatever movement they were getting involved in this process. I fell in love and moved to Brazil and got married, my wife worked at the Kellogg Foundation which at the time was one of the larger grant makers in the country, in Brazilian philanthropy and so I became a little bit familiar with that territory and so I was in this unique position of helping young people from wealthy families understand what philanthropy is but also having some access to institutional philanthropy and then realizing that there was a spectrum that for every family in the world that gives away a million dollars a year there are 500 other families that could afford to do that but have not yet started to figure out how. So it's not that those 499 out of every 500 don't want to, they just don't know how to have the relationships to have access to the knowledge of suffering around the world and so if we could improve that on-ramp and we could bring dozens of new families into this process of how to make impact where money is part of the story. In 2007 I got an opportunity to help build technology for Obama I realized that if I could collaborate with the White House it would be a means towards an end to get the White House its first young philanthropy summit so I took the job and helped build a text messaging platform used by the 2007-2008 Obama Campaign - Obama won - all these doors opened up to me I was able to get the Obama White House to host its first ever young philanthropy Summit, then I used that as a galvanizing moment to get all of these disparate philanthropy networks that exist around the world to nominate people to go to the white house and then I brought that Network to the United Nations the following year and it became the first U.N Global young philanthropy Summit. We created the brand NEXUS to surround that first event - had 300 people participate - the next year we had events in Europe and China - next year after that it was a couple more countries and for the first few years we were doubling in size almost every year. So the formula for Nexus events is two-thirds people from families that have had success in business wealthy families to one-third young change makers and that represents a bridge between communities of wealth and communities of impact. A systemic problem in philanthropy historically has been wealthy people talking to wealthy people about how to solve problems of the world and that does not democratize philanthropy, by creating this bridge between young change makers and young wealth holders suddenly it helps democratize the conversation about how to use money for impact. Another thing that needs to be mentioned about Nexus is that as an organization it has a non-solicitation policy so it's off limits to just go into the community and start pitching everybody for funding - hey make a donation to me - that poisons The Well of a generative conversation. Instead of a community dedicated to transactions, which is what it would be if that pitching was encouraged, it instead is a community dedicated to relationship development - we say it's a relational event instead of a transactional event and that innovation in the philanthropics education sphere has allowed it to really spread. About five years ago - Nexus by that point in time had several thousand people and families involved - I reduced my role to start creating new platforms for intergenerational philanthropic learning and collaboration I discovered that there are older Generations that have the wealth - maybe some under some awareness of impact, and the younger Generations - they travel the world, they might be aware of some of this suffering that exists overseas - they want to do something about it - there's this tension - Grandad has this one vision of the world limited capacity limited time - son or grandson might have more time and new vision. Nexus worked because it attended to the needs of a generational demographic, but moving the needle on the global common profit question was limited because there's limited intergenerational collaboration so I created these three new platforms to facilitate cross-generation philanthropic learning and collaboration - one for US democracy - one for global governance reform and now most recently - the Amazon Investor Coalition and I can get deeper into that because it has a significant overlap with the Anastasia Movement in terms of nature preservation.   Gabriel: one thing that I would shed more light on as far as Nexus is concerned - so in the same way that you were talking about your early experience in high school, going to this camp with people from around the world - that diversity has been translated to the Nexus community. So the Nexus Community isn't just wealth holders it's also young social entrepreneurs, it's people from every single socioeconomic background cultural background and this biodiversity culture allows resiliency and makes for a great learning platform in the sense that of how traveling is probably the best form of education, you go to a Nexus conference and you're traveling around the world because of the number of people who are coming from around the world. The Amazon Investor Coalition is creating the reforestation economy and this is what really dovetails with the Anastasia movement, right?  Listening to your story it's very interesting how this idea of inclusion has always been there and that is one of the things that I love about Nexus in general is also the non-solicitation policy because you keep it as you've created this space where people feel safe and free to be who they are and to exchange with each other and relate with each other freely and openly without any pressure about their money or where they come from or expectations about anything and it's a unique space in the whole philanthropic world because in most other places you go it's kind of trying to get money or whatever it is... I wanted to tell a little story about something that I witnessed there to help people understand the impact of that work and what Nexus actually does so I remember I was in a session at one of the summits and it was the the New York Summit, .. no it was DC and it was like 600-700 people... and there was a session - there was a lot of indigenous speakers there, indigenous people to North America South America ... and at some point during the session there was a man who was a a wealth holder from a family that I believe had a lot to do with the railroads in the U.S. I'm not going to mention him by name you probably know what I'm talking about and I remember that he's in front of all these wonderful inspiring indigenous activists and he basically just starts to cry and he says I recognize the harm that my family has done to all of your people and I'm so sorry I don't even know what to do to begin repairing this can you help me and he's sobbing in front of this room and a few of the indigenous people they come and they embrace him and it starts this beautiful relationship, so this is someone who comes from a really wealthy and powerful family talking with people who are at the front lines of their people and their society and trying to make change on that level and having that super authentic connection and also helping transmute some of this old karma into something new and positive and regenerative going forward - and so I wanted to share that so people can get a sense of what happens there - it's a beautiful space where things like that can happen and it's very unique. Jonah: hearing your story reminds me of an experience I had in Japan maybe about five years ago. I was in a conversation about wealth and philanthropy with some powerful families and some people from the media and there was this question of the culture of philanthropy and the question was - shouldn't the government just solve all these problems why depend on private people - and my response was governments don't have emotions, human beings do - and look at that transformational experience of the Next Generation wealth holder talking about his family Legacy and the criminal perpetrations that happen and the pain that resulted in indigenous communities and that extraordinary bond of someone willing to be vulnerable and make new friends and figure out how to use that Legacy money for a more adjusted sustainable future right - that the government can't do that. So, our society even our economic system depends on human relationships and the emotions behind those relationships and when we create these mega systems that create derivatives of new financial products that make things wealthier or more valuable through the undermining of human relationships we lose our connection to the base we lose our connection to nature and our stake in the nitrogen cycle and you name it. So that testimony you mentioned I actually hadn't heard it before - it's really amazing.   Gab: that was one of the most powerful things I ever saw at Nexus, it really moved me permanently. Jonah:  well yeah I remember that - there are dozens of stories like that in the network of people having these transformational experiences and then changing the direction of their lives as a result which is one reason why Nexus is spread all over the world and it's become so popular because it really fills a niche in this quest to figure out how to use money for impact and in the quest of individuals and figuring out how to disentangle yourself from the disease and materialism that seems to plague some of the ultra high Network families. Gabriel: God it's so well said, and one thing that I wanted to highlight for people is that it was very interesting for me in my experience to be part of Nexus. I worked with Nexus for a couple years and participated in a bunch of the events and so forth and to be able to witness the fact that we have a lot of misconceptions about people who have wealth some people may assume that all people who have high levels of wealth all have malicious intent or they operate from this extractive point of view or you may not even know or be aware of the very interesting family dynamics where usually it's the next generation of people that the children of that family who are trying to change the legacy of the family and trying to repair all that past harm and people who actually have really benevolent intent but really just need guidance and until we can kind of see these things we need guidance we need inspiration we need to feel safe we need all these things which Nexus so amazingly provides for all of us and so that's just something I want people to be aware of because what I really want everyone to understand is that like through these authentic real connections with human beings we can really make these changes. Jonah, you have so many stories I think you had a story where you went to dinner with a group of Brazilians and one of them was from a wealthy family and basically over dinner that person was inspired and that led to a large amount of giving I know you've told me this story more than once but like something like that just can you can you tell a little bit about that? 21:00 JONAH: there have been a bunch of stories like that but for someone who is really scared for the future of humanity, for someone burdened by having a lot more wealth than everyone else and having a lot of uncertainty "why me" and then creating a moment where that person feels as though they are part of something greater and they can contribute with their unique strategy because maybe their family made money in the film industry and so they have access to film distribution or that person's an extraordinary writer and the story that exists in Portuguese that could change the world and it's never been written in English and that person has the ability to do it and in addition to that that person's ability to create and to be a part of some sort of systemic change process and their family resources can accelerate it. When people feel as though they're more than just their money, they get involved in a more deep way and in very many cases it's a very emotional process and so when they are really concerned about the problems of the world and the person they are talking to or having dinner with has the most convincing strategy for stopping that kind of suffering or environmental devastation they're so concerned about and they feel as though they're part of the team, that perfect combination can inspire first of its kind generosity like giving away half the family's wealth - its seldom that severe - but usually making the largest donation that they've ever done - or, and this is more often than not, just making the first donation ever. You've heard numbers "for every family that gives a million away a year there are 500 others that could" - so its hard to figure out how, it's just getting people started, how's the adage go, "any good journey begins with one step" - so the quick story you told in Brazil is something that gets played out globally and those are sort of the elements of the transformational process. 23:40 Wesley:  what I would add to that is if anyone has seen the documentary Born Rich by Jamie Johnson - who's been to Nexus - that documentary really encapsulates the burden of wealth and how insulated these kids are growing up from the normal world of existence and the analogy that we always use at Nexus is think about money or currency as water and if you have a stagnant pool of water it just rots but if you circulate water it brings life and that's what the monetary system can do is provide life to places where otherwise it doesn't exist and it's been so extracted from areas that there's no way for them to get back up under their feet without an infusion of capital from the West. Gabriel: that makes a lot of sense - and so Jonah you we've known each other for a while now at this point and it's interesting because the first time I came to your house for one of the first Summits that I was involved in your wife had the whole Ringing Cedars series laid out in the living room and I that was such a crazy universal sign and confirmation for me that I was in the right place and I was with the right people and I was getting involved in the right thing yeah look at that they've got the whole series right there, and so Jonah you and I have had a bunch of discussions for a long period of time about these ideas and you know I know you're a big believer in in the Kin's Domain idea what it can do for the world and Anastasia's philosophy and all these things in general and like .. what do I want to say here. I would really love and maybe this can also tie in with the work that you're doing in the Amazon but I would love it if you can share some ways that people can make this more successful - how can people start to get in front of these communities that we're talking about - how can you connect with someone in an emotional way that would inspire them to want to support this. So I remember when I was at Nexus I was talking to a lot of people about this idea and a lot of people gave me their verbal support - dozens of people would want to be involved in something like the development of Kin's Domains or giving some of their family land for it - we weren't in a position to do anything with that interest at that time unfortunately - but basically there is a lot of people there who believe in this idea and this way of life and their mind was completely blown when I described it to them - "it solves all the problems of the world, it's not just clean water and basic human needs, it's an entire societal transformation, it's a new paradigm, it's a new way of living for everyone, a new Consciousness and a lot of people really understood that and what I would love for people to see how can we start to tap in to meet those people who really deeply care about the future of the world and want families to live happily and on their land and all these things and want to make an impact and want to change - how can that start to happen? Jonah: So you mean specifically how to access the wealthy families? So my access did not come from me being a peer in giving away a million dollars. So how does a guy who isn't giving away a million dollars able to convene a group of people who are, and the first step was me being useful to them so some of them wanted to give away money - they wanted to know who and where and how and I had hundreds of pre-existing relationships with change makers who were leading transformation in their given territories so how to access those people first - be super useful to them - you know a lot of them have operating companies that might want to buy from the region where a Kin's Domain is producing - many of them might be investors who want to get involved in the new biodiversity market and there's a standing forest near a Kin's Domain that is in threat of getting cut down and so the community can come up with a project that can make it qualify for carbon credits or biodiversity credits because they're going to be protecting instead of cutting it down and that would that would be interesting to the investors in this circuit you know the the circuits of wealthy people - and then they're the philanthropists who are trying to figure out how to have the biggest bang for buck and usually you can't access them directly, often they will have a professional Foundation that does have a public door that you can knock on or maybe you have a friend in common and sometimes you can have a blank slate - there's a family that wants to start giving and they don't know what to and maybe you can be the very first beneficiary, whatever calls, but that's a very very rare circumstance to find yourself in. Usually they've started a little bit or they've started something and in many cases you just have to have the best project out there that, as you mentioned, is solving all the problems of the world simultaneously - having a program or a series of programs that appeal to all three of these interests. The corporate operator that might want to buy produce  - the investment vehicle that might want to have a return on investment for something that's related - and then the philanthropic investment that can have some outside impact. So how to access them - often it helps to take your phone, go through the list of everyone in the phone you have a good or big relationship with figure out who those might be that have extra access to wealth or who work in organizations that have extra access to wealth - work on building a relationship with them, work on understanding what resources are at your disposal to have an outside impact for a corporate buyer an investor or a philanthropist and then start with a small dollar request. If you meet a millionaire and you ask for a million dollars you're going to get a no - asking for one dollar that's an easier yes so begin small demonstrate your utility to the family or the institutions or the company that's involved - scale up from there become the most useful partner that they've ever had and then once you've done that with multiple families a lot of these families are kind of isolated they might be the only wealthy family in that city of Siberia and there's real great value in them connecting with a another family a couple of cities over and so if you design this connectivity that creates opportunities for those families to convene especially for the next generation to sort of find identity and understand what struggles they have in common in ways that they can collaborate then you as a convener of them are suddenly in this super useful position where they want more of you and and then you're able to kind of spread that pattern of usefulness and convening in a safe way that's not about their corporations competing with each other but about making the world a better place suddenly become useful for them and you're able to spread that pattern elsewhere. Gabriel: you just gave me a a great idea for something that our foundation can do going forward as we start to meet these people and we can play that role of connecting the wealthy readers and people who want to do that. I already think of someone who would be part of that group but that is a very interesting answer and these are new ways of thinking for a lot of people - and what I want to ask is so normally when I think about Kin's Domains and I think about settlements and things - and I'd love both of your thoughts on this - I don't necessarily see it as there will be much of a return on investment because there's going to be like families living there and it's more about the legacy of those families over time and so do you see the possibility of people -  just how often does it happen that someone just gives a gift of money or land and they don't expect anything back or they just get their payoff - is less a monetary thing and it's more "I've created a legacy and an impact" - does that happen ....   Jonah: it does happen I don't have any statistics about what happens more than something else or how frequently it happens.... one pattern that I can say is real is the more involved the family is the more likely the generosity - and I want to name a couple of new things and I'll talk a little bit about the Amazon - please there are people out there who study the cost of the loss of nature, biodiversity loss does between two and four trillion dollars in damage to the global economy every year for deforestation and carbon emissions, it means desertification and the loss of arable land and in many cases that leads to human migration and increased poverty when you have large concentrations of people in areas where there are not enough jobs available or septic systems. In terms of biodiversity laws just to give you a couple of examples back in the 1980s there was a popular statistic that 25% of pharmaceutical drugs were derived originally from research on tropical forest species, if you telescope today the global pharmaceutical industry maybe it's about a trillion dollars I don't have the numbers in mind that means 250 billion dollars a year in wealth that cycles each year that originally stemmed from biodiversity - the most effective way to solve our carbon problem is to plant trees and to, well actually what's even more effective than that is to prevent the cutting of nutrients. There is a book that I recently read called Restoration Agriculture and it puts out some numbers - basically a farmer is a solar collector and if you have a monoculture let's say it's corn and it's all the same height it's going to be effective at producing that monoculture but if you have an agroforestry polyculture where you have low-lying species and high species you can collect up to eight times as much energy per unit of land in terms of sunlight because sunlight bounces, and there are shade tolerance species and sun hungry species and only by having that diversity of plants can you really maximize your production and by maximizing your production you can produce a heck of a lot more and by prioritizing a agricultural system that has trees in it you can sequester tons of carbon because you know that tree could and might be around for the next 300 years. So the world just in November and December had these landmark events - the meeting of the UNFCCC - the U.N Panel on climate change - and the meeting on the Convention of Biological Diversity - one was in Egypt the other one is in Montreal Canada....   The capital markets are in a panic, they realize that the world is reaching this Tipping Point when it comes to biodiversity and deforestation and if we overrun that Tipping Point then we will lose the fight against climate change - and/or we need pollinators in order to keep these plants alive and if we destroy too many habitats the pollinators, the birds the bees the insects they're going to disappear - there already is massive insect collapse and massive amphibian collapse. So, Kin's Domains that are integrated with biodiversity and agroforestry strategies represent not only a strategy for carbon sequestration and greater biological diversity and global food security and the restoration of the water cycle because trees are much better for the water cycle than low-lying annual monocultures, so advancing this new economic pattern is also gonna be, more and more every day, super interesting to the global capital markets because there's all of this accumulated wealth trapped in oil futures and the biggest industry of the future is going to be biodiversity preservation and carbon. Read the book The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. He lays out a very dramatic prediction for what the future is going to look like, how he predicts in that book it's a novel so he estimates in a fictional way that Saudi Arabia is going to raise its hands and say nope we're not going to pull this carbon out of the ground, we're going to use this well to restore nature of the world... so a lot of money can be made through nature restoration and through economic activities in partnerships with standing forests when there are accompanying pledges not to cut down those forests - that's where in my analysis the world's greatest future economic frontier is. In the future you will be able to make a heck of a lot more money preserving and restoring nature than cutting nature down, and unless you're at the forefront of making that happen in your entrepreneurship you're going to miss the boat and your family that has a lot of assets tied up in oil is going to lose it in a couple decades. Gabriel:  can you explain the idea of making more money by preserving nature than by cutting down and extracting from nature - where are the opportunities for people to make that money. In the kin's domain model, two and a half acres of land, there's a living fence of trees planted all around the perimeter, 50 to 75 % of that two and a half acres is a mixed poly-culture food forest of all the various levels that you're talking about plus a pond a house multiple beehives flower garden and all these things massive amount of diversity that's being tended basically for free by the family so there's no expenditure for the labor to take care of it and then that's being done at scale where it's a couple hundred families doing it. We did an interview a couple months ago with a family in Russia and they told that they're planting a couple hundred trees per year on their domain and that's just one two and a half acre piece and they live in a big settlement with like a hundred other families and so where are the opportunities for people -  where is all this money to be made in the preservation of nature? JONAH: I'll speak to the things that I know which is about picking Amazon, so there have been 70 million hectares of the Brazilian Amazon deforested since 1970.  On average there are 500 metric tons of carbon in one hectare of biomass above ground - if you reforest that - I ran these calculations a few months back - if you reforest that 70 million hectares to that natural capacity of 500 metric tons per hectare and you're paying 80$ per metric ton which when I did the research was about equivalent of almost 80 Euros - where you can get 80 dollars per metric tonne in some European carbon markets have been paying at that rate. That reforestation of the deforested Brazilian Amazon would be worth 2.8 trillion dollars so where on Earth can you find that kind of money - who's willing to pay that. Right now - there is way more money pledged for biodiverse rich carbon removal than is available - the high integrity carbon products projects are in way under supply. 10 years ago - way oversupply prices - way down now. Every day more and more corporations are saying, "I'm going to become carbon zero - I'm going to become carbon zero" - carbon for carbon alone is actually a dangerous story. G: How so! J: If we say to a nation we're only going to give you this carbon money if your forests are under threat for the past five years, which is what has been being said, then a lot of other countries are going to say oh well the only way we can qualify for that carbon money is by putting our forests under threat so let's start cutting them down now maybe in 5yrs we can get that money. So carbon alone and these low integrity carbon projects are actually a whole danger to the system and that's what John Oliver and the whole anti-carbon offset movement has been pointing out there are flaws in the system - rather than carbon being in the lead of this new market development biodiversity should be in the lead of this whole market development process, so the UN made a call to action during the convention on biological diversity saying biodiversity markets is where the future is - how many biodiversity credits are out there - there's an organization called the Biodiversity Credit Alliance which is brand new it's got a couple dozen organizations involved. The Anastasia Foundation should be one of those. You guys could be at the very Leading Edge of Designing a new global economic system that really worships biodiversity over extractive culture.  And the tens of trillions of dollars that are trapped inside of oil futures which you could call a sort of carbon suicide economic plan of the future they want a new place to land and if there are governments that come on board saying yes we're about rewarding outcomes we're about economies that prioritize biodiversity then you know that can be the new oil markets of the future, the place where the big money opportunity is. Gabriel: I love that you just brought up like the whole anti-carbon offset thing because I I definitely thought that there are some flaws with that model as well, so you're saying instead of contributing to that whole carbon offset thing - taking that money and putting it into just biodiversity, right - and so is it a thing where it winds up being like biodiversity credits - but basically if we were able to present the idea of kin's domains and settlements - show the scale of the movement show the fact that all these families are going to be doing this all on their own - would this be a vehicle for people to say like instead of doing carbon offsets they're investing in these settlements or this way of life and these projects to increase biodiversity - to get all these benefits, right? 47:45 JONAH: yes the real opportunity here is to get involved in the design of the new markets- so there are two major global level efforts that are transforming the global financial system -  there's an institution called the Financial Stability Board that is tasked with making sure the global financial system doesn't fall apart, and they have basically given birth to something called the task force on Climate Financial Disclosures and then more recently the task force on Nature Related Financial Disclosures. In every country around the world - also every member of the United Nations has been also tasked with the process of making a review of the ways in which it accounts for nature in its economic system - so the White House has been putting together an initiative called - it's like the the task force on Nature Accounting Standards - that's not the name but if you Google that you'll find it - so the world and the financial markets are in this process of figuring out how to rejigger the balance sheet so that we can save ourselves from the carbon problem that's facing us and from the biodiversity loss problem that is facing us, and these institutions are the task force initiated financial disclosures is talking with hundreds of banks and others and they are searching for solutions - the solutions are underdeveloped - the carbon solutions are more mature they've been around for 15 years - the biodiversity market is brand new - the rainforest X prize has a 10 million dollar prize out for the best technology for biodiversity monitoring. There are several dozen companies that are designing drones that can fly around and measure biodiversity - the industry is following to make these biodiversity markets viable and they're underdeveloped but there's billions of dollars that is already pledged to make them valuable for the future, so getting involved in the design of those is a way to sort of lead the process of that new wealth creation opportunity. I'll just give one statistic - last year the powers that be that are involved in carbon financing made some conclusions - carbon financing projects that that exist in a kind of isolation are not nearly as effective as carbon projects that are part of a jurisdictional or statewide wide strategy because then instead of just favoring the best carbon project in one small area you favor a constellation of them working together with State policies for enforcement and things like that in the process..  I see Norway and Germany and UK and the United States four countries maybe even more and 20 global corporations hold their funds and they announced a billion dollars through the Leaf Coalition that is going to be available for new carbon projects that have jurisdictional awareness - so there's a billion dollars available and Indigenous Nations can qualify for this money, it doesn't have to be a state government, it can be a Federation of indigenous people that can get it. I think they need to be recognized by the federal government as sort of being a sovereign entity but the opportunities are there to basically make these new markets, make them high quality, make them high integrity and to lead to lots of New Wealth opportunities, and the financial markets want to do it as well and don't really know how so they need partners like the Anastasia Movement to get involved in the process and to design the new portfolio - If you guys can aggregate a couple hundred families that can have these great biodiversity outcomes and they can work in tandem and measure the process you might be able to qualify for a multi-billion dollar agroforestry bond that has biodiversity credits and carbon credits embedded in it. You do that by getting involved in the process of Designing it - Biodiversity Credit Alliance is one of those groups that you should look up - the Leaf Coalition is one of those groups that you should look up… I can share with you the names of several dozen organizations and financial players - you can name the largest banks in the world Citibank UPS HSBC they all have staff inside their teams thinking ”I don't know how to do this biodiversity thing, how am I going to set out this amount of land, how am I going to find 500 forest entrepreneurs who will pledge to do reforestation and biodiversity, I don't know how to do this, how am I going to do the accounting for it” -  it's possible to arrive at the table with those people and I can introduce some of them and talk with them about the opportunity…. Gab: wow this is so mind-expanding - Wes you're gonna say something? Wesley: yeah one thing that I would add is that there are these major trends that the financial powers are pushing towards and one is the conservation or preservation of nature which you're just allowing the destruction that we've created to continue what you know grow whatever is left whereas the Anastasia model it's not conservation it's stewardship of nature so literally you can infuse that biodiversity through our networks and through our seed banks the other movement that the financial powers are pushing towards is the commodification of nature or the tokenization of nature and this is something else that is coming down the pipe pretty fast, but if you move to the Anastasia model it's all about being local it's all about morals and family and the stewardship of your hectare and to scale that into a community - that model is hands down going to be far superior than just oh we're going to leave that forest exactly how it is and let it grow how it is and you know it's been ignored and if you continue to ignore it it's not gonna grow into the civilization that we know we can create as we include ourselves with nature - one of the big movements right now is the rights of nature - what we have to recognize from now-on is that we are part of Nature and we are the stewards of nature like the Anastasia teachings explain - so creating this model with the human interaction and the foresight and the love and consciousness that we can bring to the plants as they look to us for leadership this is going to be far superior than you know just preserving hundreds of acres and preventing human contact with it... JONAH: I just want to riff off that in the situation of the Amazon….bang for buck wise… it is much smarter to protect than to just reforestation because many of these trees are hundreds of years old they've got hundreds of years of carbon in them and so it's very interesting if you are spending a thousand dollars on regenerating that cattle pasture that was cut down for cattle years ago or you're spending a thousand dollars on creating a permanent Nature Preserve or helping an indigenous Community get sovereignty and land ownership - that thousand on the Nature Preserve Indigenous Sovereignty is gonna bang for buck better for the carbon story better philanthropic spend etc. That reforestation process can follow a for-profit model - making the standing forest more valuable than the cut forest is challenging and there are business models that can do that - this may not be relevant for Siberia but it is absolutely relevant to the Amazon and indigenous people are really at the very center of this. There's a narrative in Brazil and in the Amazon at large that the indigenous people want to cut down their forests as they want Economic Development like the rest of us. That is true for maybe one percent of the Indigenous Community not the 99 that are well organized in the articulation of indigenous people of Brazil or the coordinating unit of indigenous people of the Amazon basin etc, so the language and the semnatics and the rhetoric that surrounds this is important at a political level - indigenous people are so key because historically over a 50-year period of making these numbers up they only deforest one percent of their land whereas the western civilization descendants that set up shop in that area who stewarded the same kind of geography that was originally the same biology - they deforested 65% right? Indigenous people are the most effective at preserving nature and therefore they really need to be at the front of this new biodiversity market design and preservation and rewarding process and that's why many of the largest map makers who spend decades developing their strategy - when they enter the carbon market they're like "oh no the present strategy is not the new technology the present strategy needs to be prioritizing indigenous participation in these international events" so that this narrative that they want to cut it down for us is invisible or is out competed by the Narrative that actually indigenous people want to preserve things and that's bang for buck right - we have limited money in the world, bang for buck the best thing we need for our sustainable future and our biodiversity preservation is leadership of indigenous people and preservation of existing lands that are super biodiverse. 59:30 Gabriel: Wow and and what you're saying here about the indigenous people being like the main force behind it kind of makes me think about particularly North America and what's happening with the Ringing Cedars movement because you have basically tens of thousands of willing families and hundreds of thousands of willing people that want to go on the land, want to plant all these trees, want to steward all this not for any financial gain but simply for the the peace and well-being and health of their family, right - and so it's a very interesting thing because they're not necessarily motivated by right economic gain or anything, they're self-motivated, they don't even require much funding, they're hungry to do this and so what I hear you saying is how can we present this model that is so regenerative so biodiverse so really not that expensive and laborious to manage or even do, to these new markets these investors and these people that want to see like biodiversity in the future ... and so something that we're working on.   I don't know if Wes has told you about this but we're working on a pitch deck - there's like a group of six of us really diverse thinkers and talents and skills that are figuring out how to take someone who doesn't know anything about what a kin's domain is or what it does or its impact on society and walk them through you know like a pitch deck about what it is, the problems that it solves and the family aspects behind it and all these things and so we're working on that right now and I hope to have a first draft done by like the end of January and it's shaping up to be pretty good ... My concern is - do people see these things as a for-profit way of making money because maybe your perspective can help widen my horizon here because I keep seeing it as these are families who want to preserve and just have a happy life and grow their garden and have children and live freely but then there's also people who want to see an increase in biodiversity in the world and they want these things to go but does everyone look at it from the perspective of making money off of this activity like this intrinsically you know family motivated kind of thing - does this make sense? 101.00 JONAH;  certainly not everybody looks at it as a way of making money - it's valuable to look at it as a way of making money simply because of where money is available. The American philanthropic spend per year is 400 billion dollars but the gross national product is, I don't know what, 20 trillion dollars so the investment money is dozens of times if not hundreds depending on your geography hundreds of times larger than the philanthropic money in terms of an individual family like I've got a house and an urban center and I can sell and have a little bit of money available and I can survive financially by going to a Kins domain whether it's philanthropic or for profit doesn't need to enter the equation of that family  - but if you really want scale and you want to mobilize not a million product(?)strategies but instead a billion then if you make a for-profit strategy out of it and you're able to demonstrate that model then a bank might be able to give you a billion dollar loan or an operating business that pledges to buy the next three decades of sustainably harvested wood that you're going to produce or if you're able to get Home Depot to sign a long-term purchase agreement you know that can be turned into a bond a corporate bond or you know an agroforestry bond or something like that... and so we need the people who design interesting products to get involved in this process and as the new biodiversity money and carbon money becomes available it's going to sweeten the deal and make those things that could be financially self-sustaining actually far more successful because the Future Money wants to chase a biologically diverse and rich future. Wesley: I definitely agree and there is a way to tame the beast system and use its tools to create the future that we want and what this reminded me of is book one Anastasia where Megre compares the dacha gardens to the conventional farming of Russia and how the dacha gardens out produced the industrial farming and I think if we were to do that here in the west and keep the numbers and keep the proof of it this is exactly the type of evidence we would need to go after this institutional money - 104:30 Gabriel: that brings up a great point - so Jonah like one of the things that I could see large businesses being interested in is like the the excess food and produce and everything that's produced on these domains like usually what happens is the families wind up selling whatever left over they don't consume themselves and that winds up being a large amount of the highest quality produce available because two and a half acres once it's fully productive is way more than any family would ever need and then you have what 300 families on that settlement doing the same thing and then maybe that's a deal that can be organized like you know this company decides to buy all this produce exclusively over this period of time - does that make sense? 105:30 JONAH: yeah absolutely and this is where NEXUS and the Amazon Investor Coalition are important partners - many of the families that created some of the world's largest companies are in these networks and they don't want to buy more of the same they're super interested in buying .... like if you have food A and food B and they have an equivalent nutrient profile and they have an equivalent price but one has this amazing biodiversity restoration story behind it you know any corporate buyer is going to opt for that one because it's better for marketing it's better for health it's better for the planet's future etc, so by designing these future farms in collaboration with a guaranteed buyer - that social responsible food company that wants to diversify a cereal with hazelnuts - that you are going to produce in five/ten years from now work in concert - you help the many companies fearful that the carbon bomb that's coming is going to eliminate - the sea level is going to rise, it's going to eliminate all the future markets that it has present access to, and so if you develop a long-term strategy with them about a business that is preserving nature and sequestering carbon and ensuring food security for that region, they're gonna abandon their monocultures and join your polycultures and everyone's going to make more money in the process. Wesley: it kind of reminds me of our friend Jim Gale in Food Forest Abundance they didn't start too long ago and they've grown quite quickly but I think a couple years from now when they've created a lot of these foods for us in people's yards we're gonna see how effective that is to the finances of those localities because you're not going to have to eat the conventional tomato anymore you're going to have your own homegrown tomato and be able to circulate with that within your local community. I was trying to remember one other thing because I said tomato - the Barataria Community in the Ozarks has brought back a tomato thought to be extinct and so now there's a documentary Building Bertaria part 3 if anyone wants to check that out - they found some little old seeds from 50 some years ago and they were able to get a couple to germinate one survived and from that plant they were able to reintroduce this tomato so you want to talk about the creation of the biodiversity it is literally happening in some of these small eco-minded communities Gabriel: this makes me think of the existing model of the carbon offsets - a lot of businesses pay a certain amount of money in order to plant a certain amount of trees to offset whatever carbon they're producing but what if that was invested in something like the hundreds of families on one Kin's Domain settlement who are all planting hundreds of trees over a period of time I think that would be a more interesting and attractive investment for people - that's another potential avenue. 109:40 JONAH: Kin's domain or not kin's domain, if you can aggregate agroforestry entrepreneurs as a team to do things in a regionally intelligent way with some carbon and biodiversity outcomes wrapped in whatever brand you want it's going to be attractive to the carbon offset market. I want to say one more thing about the carbon offset market there is an argument that the carbon offset market is destructive because it allows some polluters to get an out of jail free card they can can keep on polluting just keep throwing money at this carbon offsets. The way that the Leaf Coalition has dealt with that is they put restrictions on who can buy those credits - a corporation has to have an internal plan where they're getting as sustainable as possible before they're eligible to buy those credits in the biodiversity offset market. We're in the beginning we're in the very early ages of a brand new industry of many brand new industries that the world has never seen them and when many things get started there's a lot of chaos and things go wonky but theoretically they continually iterate and the voluntary carbon market is a space for that to happen. The compliance carbon market which is hundreds of times larger, which is basically the regulated carbon market by a state like a cap and trade system or something like that represent a way to take the patterns of high integrity that you figured out and to really scale them - and so just for those of you in California - California did develop a protocol for a high integrity carbon market that can finance tropical forest preservation, it's called the California Tropical Forest Standard and it has built within it strategies for FPIC (free prior and informed consent), this is the way that you're supposed to appropriately involve indigenous people in the consultation of the design of carbon products in terms of future advocacy and if you're caring about these carbon offset markets please push California to integrate its California tropical core standard within the state's cap and trade system, the dividends that can feed the Amazon rainforest are super needed and high integrity. Gabriel:  and speaking of the Amazon I know you're involved in so much work down there can you share some of the the models that you think would translate or Inspire the people who are listening to this that have been successful down there like some of the initiatives that you've seen or that have been successful. JONAH: So there are dozens of commercially viable Amazonian plants and if you were to grow them instead of cattle you could earn a lot more and have better ecosystem services and bio biodiversity. I'll just share a few numbers with you so cattle which is the leading economic driver of deforestation earns on average just 250 dollars per hectare per year whereas mahogany whether it's Brazilian mahogany or African mahogany can earn in a sustainable long-term way eight thousand dollars per hectare per year that's literally 40 times as much per hectare per year and then there are all of these products in between cashews guava other kinds of timber rubber coffee cocoa many of the world's largest commodities palm oil can grow in polycultures they can grow as trees they can replace cattle and create a better much better economic story for the region we've run some numbers here - what we've come up with we estimate that your average agroforestry polyculture could earn 3,750 per year whereas your average cattle hectare $250 per hectare per year, soy just a thousand dollars per hectare per year, so these things can earn more per hectare per year than soy, there is an increased labor story, here are a couple numbers. It takes seven farm hands to steward 5000 hectares of cattle so a 5000 hectare farm of cattle creates seven jobs, doesn't that sound exciting, a 5000 hectare farm of a polyculture and this has been really well documented for oil palm creates how many jobs - 800. Think about that it's more than a hundred times more buddy! And to break down how their current deforestation economy works. So 90% of Amazonian deforestation in Brazil - which is where a lot of the statistics come from and where the highest deforestation rates are - 90% of the Amazon deforestation is deemed to be illegal, about half of that 90 percent is driven by authentic attempts at poverty alleviation. So someone of the family is sick you need to bring them to the doctor the money doesn't exist for the transportation you cut down the trees you expand the cattle production you get your mother-in-law the medicine she needs. So economically you can forgive those people and give them a new kind of job and we'll talk a little bit about that, but there's a lot of that there. The other 50 of that 90 of illegal deforestation is driven by organized crime so there are gains many of which are tied into narco trafficking, the illegal drug trade that go into the cities they get people to sign documents they then use those names to get land that has been illegally deforested and occupied often on government land they use those names to then beg for land titles - oh look at this name this person's not a land holder they're poor give us these 50 acres - reassign give them amnesty reassign it from government land to privately owned land - all of a sudden you have an asset that has been organized and deforested and managed with illegal money and all of a sudden they've gotten this amnesty - in many cases there's corruption they've lobbied some politicians who's then pushed for that amnesty - correspondingly that land is now legal and it can be sold and so there's a land grabbing and money laundering story in the Amazon and that needs a lot of philanthropy to get in there and digitize the land - land registries needs greater law enforcement - the local indigenous populations that are often on the suffering end of that need technology and training in GPS enabled cameras and drones to monitor this - they need a direct line of communication with local public prosecutors. There's a whole anti-deforestation restore the rule of law process that is hard to achieve with a for-profit model. A lot of philanthropy and restoration of the rule of law is needed there and that's not something that forest friendly entrepreneurship can solve by itself but a lot of that is given permission to operate because of this poverty story. What are the business models that can work? You ever heard of the company Sambazon - that company is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars it's 20 years old it's the largest retailer of acai in this country. Where does it get its acai?- it gets its acai from forest dwellers who go into the forest and they harvest these berries from standing trees in well-preserved forests they go back to the processing center and they sell them and that's their annual income and so rather than cutting down trees and running cattle they are harvesting produce from standing forests. Brazil has like seven, eight or nine different kinds of zoning for forests - they're indigenous reserves, their national parks, another one of them is called extractivist reserves, extractivists is a word in Portuguese which means wild harvesting, it basically means this source is set aside can't cut down the trees but you can take out its nuts and berries and other things like that and bring commercial value to them. Acai is done this way, Brazil nuts are done this way, dozens of other products are done this way. If we can increase the consumption of Brazil nuts and acai and plenty of other forest products wild harvested cocoa chocolate is being harvested this way then we will be able to make sure that these standing forests and the populations that live within them are earning a heck of a lot more money than they would by running cattle or soy so a couple things need to be done - one we need to lobby all of the chocolate companies in the world to become the world's carbon negative chocolate we need to make wild harvested chocolate the Gucci, the highest premium most expensive stuff that you want to give to your family for the holidays another thing that needs to be done is interesting -  where is this chocolate, how do you ensure that it's coming from a wild harvested supply chain, we need the fine techs to get involved with that tracing process, so part of it is consumer demand, part of it is organizing the corporate supply chain, part of it is organizing the new financial products that integrate carbon - forest preservation money and biodiversity preservation money which can come from for-profit financial instruments to get involved in the pricing of this wild harvested chocolate acai Brazil nuts you name it Wesley: yeah one thing I would add is that the other smart thing that Sambazan did is they built processing plants right there in the communities that are harvesting the berries so they're also creating job opportunities in those areas and not just extracting it from the forest and sending it to the West straight away they're creating opportunity right there and Jonah you're talking about chocolate if you want to give altered Eco a plug and talk about them? 1:22 Jonah: So Alter Eco's not the one to get the pub - Louisa Abram chocolates is the one to give a plug. So the Mendez chocolate, Louise Abram chocolate - there are already a number of forest product providers that need visibility so if you are Kim Kardashian and you have hundreds of millions of followers tweet about these brands so they get sold out instantly and there's like years of demand for what they have to offer - that sends a signal to the local forest entrepreneurs - oh wow oh my God that chocolate company is really taking off man, instead of cutting down let's go more in that direction. How to become a chocolate wild harvesting entrepreneur.   Gab: everything you're saying is hitting all the the things that can zoom means fit like for example if you have a giant settlement you got 350 families producing this huge diversity of nuts fruits and everything that can be done as a large business and then now what were you saying here Jonah you said there were three things that buyers man I kind of lost my train of thought but that it's it's a it's a local thing right You have all these families that are there doing it - they're not cutting down it's not extractive right there are constantly being new trees and new things planted intended and like for example the sambazon example I could see that happening in North America in some years with all the people who have all the different nut trees and all the things that are growing on on their domains right and you were saying to make that cool too you were saying to make that like the trend where for example I think in the fifth book Anastasia talks about the future she models the future of what's going to happen after all these domains start  spreading across the world and she says the price for Kin's Domain food specifically is going to be many times the price of even just normal organic food and so that eventually be you know when that phenomenon becomes known and the businesses catch wind of the fact that there are families who are personally tending this with love and care zero chemicals at all huge biodiversity like that creates its own market it becomes this big premium product right and we can position this movement as the future of everything right because there's going to be so much food being produced at a large scale by all these people living on their land that we can start to feed a large portion of the population like Wesley said earlier the example of the dacha's in Russia like these small backyard gardens which are like 600 meters square or less it produces more than 50 percent of the country's food on like less than 10% of the usable agricultural land which is like shocking and the government doesn't really do anything - it's just people who have these summer houses in Russia and they go there in the summer and they grow all their food and it produces a huge like 90% of the country's potatoes are are produced that way in small backyard gardens and all these other fruits and things and so you're really starting to lighten my brain up with the possibilities of the future here like in North America and how these things can become more successful and get funding and things. 1:25 JONAH: Some we haven't touched on yet, it's relevant and that's about the future of global food security some people make the argument that we got to cut down Amazon or any given Forest to make room for growing new crops so that we have enough food to feed everybody if your purpose was really ....  and the biggest part of the equation that they ignore is the story of animal protein. So it takes 40 times as much land - I'm making the numbers of it up - but it's something like 40 times as much land to produce one ton of beef as it does one ton of plant biomass or plant or fruits or nuts whatever edible plant produce and the trend is for animal protein production to fall when it's grown on farms and instead to grow it in the lab so the argument that we need to cut down more pristine forests in order to ensure global food security is a lie, it's simply not true we're going to achieve it in the lab and we can create a lot more food by making land use changes away from this super inefficient system of cattle in the Brazilian Amazon into agroforestry or you pick your animal, you switch it out or vegetarian diets and you're on your pathway to much greater food security. Gabriel: yeah then well when you say food security all I'm thinking is that I keep going back to the Kin’s Domain thing it's one family has two and a half acres where they're growing this huge diversity of things and like if people could see the validity of this model because it's already been done there's over a thousand settlements in Russia and the largest ones are 400 families and they're like 25 years old you know what I mean and like it's super successful and it's spreading like wildfire even without that much support, now the government's over there are starting to get behind it but it's like how I see it is this model is the ultimate answer for food security right it's two and a half acres every family they're growing this huge diversity and then the trade and the economy that develops in that Community like when I was in Russia I remember they traded this giant 40 kilo bucket of honey for a whole bunch of different produce and things that their neighbor grew and they're bartering, so whatever this person doesn't grow this person does and they exchange and then whatever they all don't need they sell a surplus to the local communities around them and things like that and so it's like this thriving economic model - and yeah I'm not exactly sure what I want to say by all that but I'm I'm hoping that for everybody who's listening that this gets your gets your brain working as to all the possibilities that we can make these things a success right because like Jonah said there's so much money and so much so many different areas that is there simply we need to put the proper offer in front of the proper people in order to start tapping into that because you know our options are way broader than we think, and actually to that point ... I wanted to circle back to sort of a smaller scale aspect of it where like let's say I'm a group of 10 people and I want to live on my land I want to plant this garden I want to have my kin's domain, I don't personally have money even together all 10 of us we don't necessarily have enough money to buy a suitable piece of land or something and we wanna start making steps to getting some land and building this life - how could those people put together this idea and get funding even if they don't have like a network or connections - are they just cold calling  land trusts, are they cold calling family foundations, they're going to places and do you see what I'm saying how could people start to tap into these kinds of things so the the answer to that changes depending on whether you're going for philanthropic support or for-profit support. 1:31 JONAH: I'll give first about the for-profit person and I'll talk then about the philanthropic support. So most of the easy money that's going to be available that will be from the traditional financial system - it'll be for a mortgage - and in order to qualify for the mortgage to buy that land it might be you need to have demonstrated history of income and so rather than going for a Hundred Acre Farm you go to a two acre fee or whatever it might be a year two years of financials showing your ability to make a profit off of that and then you'll qualify for your first loan to buy for your first mortgage to buy a larger piece of land. If you want to go for the 100 Acre story then create a for-profit entity that is able to demonstrate its ability to develop a operating model and have a whole business model, you have a board of directors, you have a couple years of financials, you demonstrate your ability to repeat this several times and all of a sudden you have an investable product where it's not just Corporation depending on families X Y and Z Corporation a has a demonstrated track record no matter how much money you give them or what geography they can go stamp it out somewhere else around the world because that's what they do that's their business model and if you develop it like Jim Gale that Wes was talking about. if you develop it as a venture thing that has infinite scaling possibilities and it has some technology involved that makes it easier for Farmers to monitor what they've got going on then you may be able to get that high risk outsize money that is really looking for scale and there's actually a startup for agroforestry that is super relevant for that called Propagate Ventures that you should look up because there may be a business partnership opportunity with them. G: interesting, we know them don't we? W: yeah we do know Ethan and the team over there. Wesley:  one thing on the financial side that I would say is - I'm against going into debt to any of these financial institutions so what I would say it starts super small if all you can afford is a quarter acre or not even just maybe your backyard of your apartment building if you start growing say cabbage okay one cabbage let's say is worth a dollar but if you turn that cabbage in the sauerkraut you can 10x that dollar easily. I think one of the young entrepreneurs out there is Fermentation Fair and they're just taking produce and fermenting it and literally taking small scale farming and making a profitable business at it, so basically anything that you create turns into something else - if you're gonna harvest a tree its worth whatever but then you turn that tree into a table and chairs you're 10-20x in your money. I think that would be my strategy as far as moving forward as opposed to going into debt to any of the financial institutions. Start small but be smart about it and learn how to upsell your produce. JONAH: on the philanthropic side there are some coalitions of funders that pay attention to these things one is called the Agroecology Fund, another one is called TIFS let me look up what it stands for oh this is not for philanthropy but there are some big grant making foundations involved - it's called Transformational Investing in Food Systems and there are others, so if you search out their foundations for 'land use nature-based solutions philanthropy' - you pull on that thread you'll be able to find a number of grant making foundations that are either associations of grant making foundations that are focused on these things or individual ones. If it's in the Amazon just look at the website of amazoninvestor.org and if you look around that website you can find lists of dozens of investors and grant makers that are focused on that region. 1:36 Gabriel: right you know we do have some people in South America so that's very useful and like yeah I'm just really trying to get people to see that this is a lot more accessible and possible than we might have previously imagined because for people who are trying to get into this money winds up being an obstacle right or resources they have the skills they have the capability but the initial money to get the land and to start the first stages of the building winds up being such a big obstacle for some people.... but those same people if they were to take their plans and put it into something that they can present to any of these groups that you're talking about here then with persistence they could have a shot at getting the resources that they need and we don't need to just look to the government or all these other entities to get us these things and so I really hope everybody who's listening that what we're discussing Jonah, West and I can start to broaden the horizons and to think creatively about how we can fulfill our plans because there's a million ways to do it it just takes careful presentation of what you have to do and getting it in front of the right people, like there's tons of people who are willing to help it's just they don't know about it and they need to be informed and educated... Wesley: one success story I would say people could look up is polyface farms in Virginia worth looking into you know it's basically a very biodiverse you know they have animals they have plants they all work together - look up polyface Farms. Gabriel: Jonah you know something I just thought of is like we're gonna be republishing the books and so we're gonna have hundreds of thousands, millions of new people reading the books and being inspired by this vision of life and there's going to be a lot of renewed interest in this and we're gonna see a huge second wave of the Ringing Cedars worldwide - large investors or philanthropists and individuals and families are gonna see this, we can make them aware of this, there's going to be a lot of eyes on this and there's going to be a lot more people involved and so I think that this would be a lot more appealing and viable to people if they know that there's a giant amount of people who want to do this. It's like if we give you the funds and the access and the help and all these things then the supply of people who are willing to fulfill these plans is virtually infinite and I think that's pretty appealing to people who are willing to fund and help these things. 1:39:30 Jonah: I want to riff off that so the Kin's Domains and the Anastasia books have certain religious and spiritual messages behind them they represent a minority of the religious and spiritually motivated people in the world the Catholic Church in response to climate change and a lot of the other biodiversity destruction problems that humanity is facing started a new movement called Laudato Sea which is really based on reverence for nature - there's a book called The Immortality Key that lays out all this archaeological evidence that the origin of many of the world's religions might come from psychedelic experience and there's a lot of research that shows that psychedelic experience results in a reverence for nature I'm going down this line to say that those religious and spiritual movements that are tied into reverence of Nature and and agricultural models that restore Humanity are far too few and as a inclusive movement the Anastasia committee is really well positioned to get involved in the Interfaith community so you can pay, so that you can compel desert populations in Arab countries that are primarily Muslim to also get involved in back to land movements. Solar power is much cheaper than it used to be we can come up with strategies to desalinate water we can re-green the Middle East you know we can read green all this certification that has been happening through human Ingenuity and new entrepreneurial models and those movements that are most effective at spreading and maintaining discipline are those that do have a religious and spiritual center. A couple decades ago I looked at who my heroes were Martin Luther King Mother Teresa so many of the world's leaders of social movements come from a religious and spiritual tradition and so today we see something called the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative where people from diverse religions understand the value of the rainforest and engage in advocacy processes to promote its conservation. So my prayer for you... 1:42:40 May the Anastasia movement become the tip of the spear of new agroforestry entrepreneurship and wealth creation and financial product design so that you can seed the communities of consciousness and spiritual curiosity and religious devotion around the world to adopt the same patterns of human preservation and nature preservation that you guys are propagating. Gabriel: yeah well it should because you're saying it's inclusive to every religion it's not exclusive to any peoples. So many of the religious teachings around the world are geographically focused and the prophets at the different times they came in the world they came and they gave their message for a specific people in a specific way at a specific time but the message of the Ringing Cedars is universal to everyone the world right now for the rest of time forever to people in Africa and Europe North America the Hawaiian island like everywhere and it's viable to everyone and it doesn't exclude any religious beliefs and it just builds upon them because basically its saying that the land that we're stewarding is God's creation and we're connecting with God through taking care of this land that we've been trusted with and so there's this giant potential to getting integrated with all these religious movements and trying to bring that Consciousness into religion even more. The large religious movements that are across the world it's yes let's develop ourselves and be The Virtuous and best versions of ourselves that we can be and let's improve Society but then let's also like remember that we're on God's green earth and that we need to take care of this and we can have happy beautiful families on this green earth that we've been given by God right because maybe that can be a religious Renaissance in its own way and we can start to integrate these things. I look forward to that day and that's a beautiful Vision that you just planted in our minds here. You know the opportunities and the universality and the effectiveness of this movement is unlimited, it fits into everything, it solves everything, and all we need to do is just get it in the right places. So Jonah I want to be respectful of your time here I know we've been going for almost two hours now I want to ask I mean first of all that was like a that was like a tour de force of amazing and mind-expanding information like I'm gonna have to watch this again I wish I could get somebody to translate and transcribe this and put it into a blog post because there's so much useful information here that I think people should come back to but is there anything that you want to share with our audience like in closing anything that you feel inspired to say or anything we may have missed. Jonah: Love is a pattern that includes all - -adopt the pattern of inclusion and you'll have success.   Gab: wise words good to think about. Wes is there anything you want to add in here brother? Wesley: I think the only thing left in the back of my mind is when you were talking to Bruce Perlowin about growing hemp and he was talking about how there's a perfect amount of hemp to grow I don't remember it was maybe 40 acres anything more the processing gets unhandling anything less it doesn't make a financial sense and then the other aspect of that was having the hands on deck to go and harvest for the two days in the year where it needs to be harvested and I think to the Kin's domain settlement model where that would just work perfectly where you have the whole Community come together for two days a year to do the Harvest, and so there is power in community and you know it hands down it's going to be more powerful than some Corporation where people will hate their job and they gotta you know everything's for the dollar and you know it's just that's the dead and dying systems that we're all growing out of. Gabriel: my mind has been so opened as to all these possibilities like 300 families each with a hectare of land and they're growing chestnuts and hazelnuts and apples and peaches and plums and grapes and berries and and all these different things or you can even take a piece of the land on the community and set that aside 40 acres of hemp right and everybody can come together and do that 40 acres of chestnuts or walnuts or Hickory - there's some species of Hickory that produce a lot of oil and that's like an undertap market if you start pressing that for oil you know and you get a whole bunch of people to come together and do that and do that as a large business as a community there's a million things that we can do and so. Thank you Jonah I'm super grateful for your time I know that our community is grateful for your time thank you for doing what you do in the world Jonah you're such an inspiration to me I talk about you all the time to everybody I know I'm super grateful for your presence and help and mentorship in my life I love you man you are an aspiring beautiful human being so grateful to know you thank you for everything that you contribute thank you for believing in what we're doing here and taking the time to do this and once we're more ready with our things I really love to connect with you again and see how we can like take these things forward because I know that you've got all the ways to help us move things forward but I want to take it slow and steady but when we're ready I don't want to waste your time so we'll reach out and keep things going but thank you. Jonah: Sounds great Gabe thanks so much, Ciao ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonah's most popular article