How Investors Can Help Small Farmers Adopt Syntropic Farming

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Eduardo: In today’s 

episode, we have Ursula Arztmann, AKA Uzzy the Founder and President, as well as Fu Mueller Vice President of Recelio here with us. And they’re dedicated to accelerate socio environmental regeneration and transitioning farmers and communities to regenerative farming their approach is founded on accelerating the paradigm shift from extractive mechanistic system towards one that is conducive to life, and that is positively adding to planetary health. So welcome to the show. 

Ursula: Thank you.

Fu: Thank you for having us. 

Eduardo: Let’s talk about the key success metric of syntropic farming, and you have pointed out in some of your documents that you measure biodiversity as a success metric. And so there’s a measure on the richness of the species that exist in a plot of land, and measure the success of the implementation based on that one assessment. So tell us a little bit about, coming from a [00:01:00] biodiversity angle versus some of this alternative methods right now for success measurement. And why do you think that biodiversity is a lot more significant?

Ursula: We’ve been looking into carbon because it’s quite obvious that when you start working with agroforestry and you have a lot of trees in the system, that carbon is sort of calling for attention because we do sequester quite a big amount of carbon.

But what we see in the carbon system from a natural viewpoint, it is one single metric in a highly complex system. It’s like as if you just blind out everything, that life actually is, and you just focus on one single metric. Do we really know whether this is the right one? Do we really know, is this the real Keystone sort of metric that will define how living systems can thrive in the future, or is it another one? Which brought us to something where we, [00:02:00] we center it in our design is the diversity. Why diversity and biodiversity? There has been a lot of studies globally on how we can increase resilience in our crop systems and it always always has the same results, which is the more species you combine, the higher resilient your systems become to drought, to floods, to storms and fires and hails and frost. So we have that in our systems by design that we have a high diversity of species, but we also align them in the natural succession of species.

So we bring species together that basically prepare the conditions for more demanding species to grow. And they themselves create conditions for the even more demanding species to grow, which nature does by design. And we imitate that in the crop [00:03:00] production. So it’s normal for us to have many species in it to increase resilience.

Biodiversity by definition is not only the amount and diversity of species, it’s also the integrity of ecosystems. So what we actually do by designing syntropic systems is we aim to create productive agro-ecosystems of high integrity. Which then also come with high resilience and biodiversity also is reflected in the diversity in genes.

So we use for example, different varieties, or we use locally adapted seed materials, which genetically also brings the right traits to the place and biodiversity in the end is the interconnection of all these things. I have a variety of [00:04:00] species, which allow me in a drought situation, for example, that those that are more adapted to drought will thrive.

Those that are less adapted will thrive less, but maybe next year it’s gonna be very wet. And then the game goes in the other direction. So these species will thrive by bringing them together. We have food systems that can withstand the extreme weather events that are ahead of us. We don’t say that they always will work.

Sometimes it will be at the edge of dying out because you’ve seen it, what the heat waves have done. I mean, if we have over 50 degrees, over 60 degrees in India, we have to understand that photosynthesis is temperature sensitive. So when temperatures go 45 degrees and higher, the enzymes that actually catalyze photosynthesis start to stop working, [00:05:00] and then we have another problem and we don’t have oxygen anymore.

So we need to design systems that are resilient and can endure these events. So biodiversity definitely brings in the resilience of systems. Carbon doesn’t do it. The carbon is a measurement point where we see, okay, we can reduce greenhouse gases, but that’s not all the problems we have on this planet. We have an insect apocalypse in front of us. We have a loss of species and biomass of insects, which is so dramatic, that when we don’t get the curve right,

and fix this problem, we will have problems with production of food. We will have problems with producing soil. Basically life on earth is not possible without insects. And carbon doesn’t address that. It’s just not in the scope. It’s just outside of the [00:06:00] vision. And biodiversity does.

Fu: Climate change defines how we will live in the future now and in the future. But biodiversity defines whether we will live or not. We see climate change, for example, as a symptom, and that’s why you don’t hear us saying ‘let’s fight climate change’. We don’t fight climate change. Climate change is a symptom, and now you can draw conclusions. You can say like, yeah, well, climate change happens because of this and this. Some people even say it has nothing to do with human interference, you know, all these arguments.

But when you raise biodiversity, then you will always sequester carbon and then you have effects. For example, monoculture plantations of trees. They don’t drive rainfalls while our systems, the diverse systems create rainfalls, right. They create the conditions for the rain to fall. And [00:07:00] things that most people don’t know, people always say the trees they’re producing oxygen, but they’re not only producing oxygen. They are, for example, also producing water. It is scientifically proven. It’s not a lot, it’s a few kilograms, right. Carbon, more than water, but they do. So, you know, in a nutshell, if you take care of biodiversity, you take care of climate change as well.

And we have other burning problems. Like our oceans are getting acid. Acidification of oceans that is life threatening. We are going to lose plankton. Actually that is the powerhouse of oxygen production here on this planet. And why is that? It’s driven by pollutants and it’s driven by the land use that we have, you know, and it’s also driven by loss of biodiversity.

So these things are all together. We appreciate really any solution. If you come up with any type of solution to tackle [00:08:00] a problem that we have, that’s appreciated, but at the same time, we need a plethora of solutions. And we also have to look at the big picture always and not just at symptoms.

That’s what we have done all the time, just trying to cure symptoms. And this is not going to solve the underlying issues here. And this is why for us biodiversity is key.

Eduardo: We can keep fighting symptoms forever, but if you really wanna look at the root causes and then the root causes of such root causes and then go even deeper, you always end up pointing at yourself.

And we’re all part of this system. So definitely systemic change is really what’s needed. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how are you envisioning facilitating change through technology? Tell us about the platform that you’re ideating right now and that you’re working on.

Fu: I have to say first it’s at a very, very early stage, right? This is like an idea that we had out of certain circumstances and events that came. And I have a technology background. I [00:09:00] have worked as a chief information officer for a long time. We might be the nature people here, but we, you know, we acknowledge that we are the tool apes. We are the apes that use tools.

And that is a gift that is also something that nature gave us that we can use tools. So technology and modern science are very important things. And we have to bring that to the table where we sit together with indigenous people, for example, and because they don’t have that, you know, they have indigenous science.

Yes. And all the traditions and the deep knowledge that they carry. We see a lot of challenges in actually getting an entry point to drive change. Right. And so we have to consider a lot of things and biodiversity and how to raise biodiversity, how to finance biodiversity.

I mean, I made it to be my personal life challenge now to make biodiversity investable. And that means that again, we look at our economy as a type of organism. And when, for [00:10:00] example our organism as humans. We need blood and the blood needs to be circulating. And when it doesn’t, then we have strokes and ultimately we will die. We see the same happening in our economic system at the moment, meaning that there is a lot of money, investment money, also money that has already good intentions. But it cannot go down to the ground. If you talk to farmers, you know, it doesn’t work. And that is one of the things that we try to solve with our approach. We want to keep cash flowing from the top to the bottom. And one thing that is extremely important to me is to understand, especially after the two years of pandemics that we had now, there has been trillions of dollars or Euro or Yen or whatever being printed during that time and that money is hanging in the cloud and is trying to materialize. It wants to become energy. It wants to become real assets. That’s what everybody wants to do. First, you gamble a little [00:11:00] bit with it. You try to make even more out of it. But at the end, you know, people will always look to do something to materialize that money and to create real wealth.

And what’s going to happen with that money is, and you know it already, we are going to create a lot of stuff with that, products, and that is actually the opposite of what we need right now. What we really need is to invest into photosynthesis. That is what’s going to bring us out of this problem here. And then it’s a little bit of a jump onto the technicalities of it, how we are going to use existing technology that’s relatively new and bring that together with our revolutionary land use system that we know so well.

So I can explain it a little bit. So it’s based on blockchain technology, it’s actually based on non-fungible tokens. Well, most people know that we have already NFTs, for example, that are used in the real estate market or something. So it’s a tokenization of a real life [00:12:00] item. And then this token can be used for like smart contracts and doing all types of things in the virtual world with it.

For example, you can have a building, a house, and you mine a token with that. And then the sales process is done with that token. Okay. But this for us was still not very interesting because it’s very static. And what we were looking for was something more dynamic that also includes time, for example, because biodiversity is something that is not static.

It’s something that is deeply connected to time. It works in time and our systems as well, work with succession. At the beginning of 22 we learned about investors that were desperately looking for ways to invest into biodiversity. And they couldn’t find anything, imagine. You can even be obliged to offset for example, and you have to look for products, to do that. And people were like, it’s impossible, I’m [00:13:00] obliged legally, so the only thing I can actually do is give that money to a trust fund. I am out of the responsibility. They know they do, but they don’t, it’s circulating the money.

Right. So, and we learned about something that Polygon actually developed. Polygon blockchain. And that is dynamic NFTs or living NFTs. And that means for the first time in history that NFTs can change dynamically, not only the metadata, so the content, but also structurally they can change.

And that changed for us everything, because it became more lifelike and hence the name living NFT, right. Now what we can do is we can actually tokenize a piece of land and then we can actually display in the NFT, how the land develops and that creates value.

And the token can be mined, can be sold, can drive a first [00:14:00] financing for a farmer to actually make a transformation, to make the transition to syntropic farming. And then the tokens can develop over time. So not only the token creator, but the token holder, they can look at the tokens and see how they change. So you have to imagine that we have all types of metrics, metadata of the token, and it has scores. So it’s not so easy because people ask for numbers and they want to measure everything.

And I understand they want to control. They don’t want to have any surprises. They want to know if they’re successful, so they need numbers. But in biodiversity, we talk a lot about qualities and that’s not so easy to measure, but what we bring with these scores is a way of having a better indicator to that.

Well, that’s it, in a nutshell and yeah, there is more things that come with that. Of course, I’m sure you have more questions I’m also happy to answer. 

Eduardo: I believe NFT is a concept that is super interesting. I have seen it applied in other contexts. But it is the first time that I see it [00:15:00] applied to nature and it brings something very, very particular.

It has to change the dynamic how money flows to the farmer in a significant way. Right? It’s not about issuing a credit like you doing the carbon markets and then some portion of that ends up in the hands of the farmer, but here, this is acquiring value. How does the model flow to end up financing the people who need it most?

Fu: So In the beginning it’s like a land steward can mine a token for a piece of land. It’s basically the coordinates and the land steward can then actually already mine it and put it onto the marketplace and sell it. And that is completely built on trust. Nobody knows yet if that will happen or not.

There’s a combination. We have a second token, which is the land steward token that is used as an ID, and it’s also always connected to the land. So when the land steward, for example, has a lot of experience or gains experience that is also displayed on the tokens that they mined.[00:16:00] With the first mining and putting it on marketplace, there is going to be a sales price for that token.

And actually at the moment. The price is kind of virtual. The farmer, or land steward, can of course define the price. It can also be in an auction, so it will be defined by demand, but let’s say the farmer says, look, I’m going to put one hectare into syntropic farming. And this will cost me, let’s say just around one hundred thousand euros.

So I would sell that token for a hundred thousand. So when it is done, that money goes to the farmer and the farmer has the cash to implement. We guide the farmers. We have a type of functionality framework that we work with. It is carefully designed so that the most important thing is really to look at the farmer, the sustainability of the farmer and the farmer’s family first. To not have this issue that we have also, like in carbon markets where people take down really nice natural systems to just plant monoculture trees, to then earn money on [00:17:00] the carbon market.

So that is the first cash that comes to the farmer. And there is no real middle man here. So of course there is some type of fees. There go fees to us as an organization and to the network itself, to the blockchain, to finance it, to actually pay the costs. But that’s it. And then what happens is that the token is tradeable so there will be a development over time.

And that development will be displayed on the NFT. I didn’t go into that yet. The technical aspects of that, but it’s possible to display a lot of things there and then the token holder can resell the token. And then it’s very interesting, of course, for people that are investing like ESG style, investing into good things and wanting to have profit. Impact investment or something.

And then you actually sell the token again. And when that happens, you have royalties and these royalties again. a little bit of the money, goes to the [00:18:00] organization, to the network and to the farmer again. So there will come in fresh money every time these tokens are traded.

There’s going to be an influx of money to the farmers, to the ground. We have like brilliant economists that we talk with and we are going to actually model and see what makes sense.

How much actually makes sense, because it’s often criticized on the carbon markets. It’s just a casino and it’s just about making money and everybody wants to get rich, but nobody cares about the planet. With our inclusive and systemic approach, we say like, look, it’s normal that people want to make profit.

Let them gamble, let them trade it. But let’s look that we bring always money back to the people that are actually running the system, meaning the land stewards. And that’s what we’re taking care of. 

Eduardo: How are you thinking of measuring biodiversity so that the value of the NFT actually increases?

Fu: The first thing that is the beauty of our systems is we don’t have the need [00:19:00] to measure. We know that we are going to raise agro-biodiversity by design. And that is really groundbreaking because if you look, especially in the global South at farmers and land stewards, a lot of them operate on € 1.80 daily.

Imagine they don’t have more capital than that. So we need to find solutions that actually take care of the smallholders here. The point is we can actually bring in real world data into the blockchain if we want to. But, the first thing is what I said before. Somebody makes a design, the design is also submitted. You can see it, you know, you can expect by planting 250 different species, you know, that the agro-biodiversity is already raised by 250.

And then, you know, for example, if you plant Oak trees, these Oak trees are home of, for example, over 200 insect species that are just on that type of trees. So you have to [00:20:00] create ripple effects that will create ecosystem biodiversity as well, and then comes the measuring. So as soon as you have a little bit of money you can start measuring.

And there we have great progress in the last months and couple of years. And of course that goes into, for example, drone mapping. It goes into eDNA, soil acoustics. We can actually listen and hear how many organisms are there and which organisms are there because they make different sounds.

And we have near real time satellite data that will be updated every two weeks with granularity of 30 centimeters, as much as I know now. And so we have a lot of external data that can actually be brought into the blockchain with Oracle services. If people are not familiar with it: Oracle services, what they’re actually doing is this, I try to explain it simple.

The blockchain will potentially be forever and it should be working forever. So you don’t want to depend [00:21:00] on information that is externally. Because then the blockchain always needs to make a request to an external source. And we don’t know what’s going to happen to this source in 10 years, 20 years.

And so we have Oracle services and what these Oracle services do is actually they aggregate, they filter, they also analyze the data and then they will actually write the transaction into the blockchain and then it’s in the blockchain and it doesn’t need to be taken from the outside anymore.

 And an Oracle service can take any type of source.

Ursula: Currently most biodiversity activities are strongly focusing on conservation, which is great. We need that. We need places where human interaction is limited, but if you look at the global scale of habitable land on planet earth, we use 87% for agriculture and forestry and forests.

The rest is[00:22:00] rivers and lakes and all the water bodies. It’s our cities and, and you know, communities and a little bit of that is shrub land. So where exactly can we create the impact that is currently needed with biodiversity? When we only focus on conservation, when we basically make a fence in an area where there is high biodiversity and no humans should touch it, doesn’t that also give us the allowance to mine and degrade and exploit the rest again? With syntropic farming, we go for another approach.

We go for another strategy. It’s an inclusive strategy. It’s not sparing land. It’s sharing land with biodiversity and be an active steward. Measurement of biodiversity is highly complex in a conservation area where there’s nobody, you need to go there. You need to get equipment [00:23:00] there. Somebody needs to do it, but in an actively stewarded land where people basically walk in every day where communities pass by, where people can take pictures of their butterflies and whatever they observe.

We start to go into a collaboration with nature again, and we have the impact that is actually needed. We can use the 50% of agricultural land. We can also change the way we do forestry. And the natural forest that we still have such as the Amazon, which you dearly care about, or  the Congo area

and in Asia, we need to have conservation strategies. But we also need to create impact on the ground. And we can only do that if we do it on a larger scale. And 50% of the habitable land is agriculture and 40% of it is already degraded and [00:24:00] not used anymore. And with the extreme weather events, habitable land will shrink drastically in the coming years.

So we need, in my point of view, not only to have this spare strategy where we do conservation and where measurement is highly complex, we also need to come together with nature again and use the land we have to really create impact. And what is a little bit special about especially Fu and me is who already mentioned the suits to boots and boots to suits.

We basically come from a corporate world. I’ve been doing strategy development, for large corporations in my past. I have my own company for 20 years. I do breathe corporate DNA. I understand markets, I understand economics, but I also have changed my suits to boots and started to walk the land and work with [00:25:00] farmers and have my hands in the soil and dirty and plant during storms it’s not only this beautiful dreamy thing.

Agriculture is a tough job and we really have to be thankful for everybody who is producing food for us, but being from both sides makes us bridge builders. So a platform focusing on investing in biodiversity is not just a mere platform of people that understand business. It’s a platform of people that understand business and understand the impact layer.

That’s where we are committed to and where we come from. And the goal is to bring the necessary money to the impact layer for the sake of humanity and life on earth.

That’s just what I wanted to add to the blockchain discussion. 

Eduardo: This is not about a business model change. It’s an entire ecosystem model change. You have agriculture, you’re touching [00:26:00] on biodiversity. You’re touching on the hydrological cycle. The communities living within those environments. With this in mind, what will you say is your call to action, to different stakeholders in this ecosystem, corporations, foundations, farmers, investors, where would you like to start?

Fu: That’s a tough one. who to pick. Decision makers. Guys, we need to talk about regulations and guys, you need to come out of your silos. You need to start to collaborate and to see a systemic picture. We find so many regulations and things to be completely counterproductive, and it’s still happening.

Every day we have new laws, new things that are not working. They come up with for example, type of agroforestry regulations where trees have to have a spacing of 12 meters. We plant every meter a tree for heaven’s sakes. That is for me one of the hardest things that we see for farmers. It also is this [00:27:00] type of being captured in these regulation bodies. If a farmer produces organic food, okay. Why? Because there is a market for organic food and generally it’s okay. It’s less poison. So a little bit better, right? But these farmers, if they want to switch, for example, to a syntropic farming system, they have issues because they cannot get the trees from nurseries that are producing organic trees because we have no organic trees in the nurseries.

So you see, this is all connected. There needs to be way more flexibility. The regulators, politicians. They have to learn from economy, from corporations. They need to learn about agile systems, about new management techniques, you know, on organization forms.

So that’s the first thing. The second thing I would like to address is investment.

When you make an investment, ask yourself, can you look into the face of your great-grandchildren and [00:28:00] say, yes, this is where I put my money in. Can you do that? Ask yourself, is it good for your kids, for their kids, for the kids to come? That is the question you need to ask yourself. Okay. So just by: Well! We need it to be a little bit greener.

We need ESG, we have some here. Ah! Sustainability. Yeah. We, we employ a sustainability manager. It’s going to be taken care of that. That is not going to work. Okay. Ask yourself, what is your business case and what is your purpose as a company and how are you conducive to life? What is your company doing?

What is the contribution to all of it? Profit? That’s not what it’s about anymore. It’s important to make some money of course, no doubt, but we have a higher goal now. That’s not only about personal profit and stakeholders. So answer to that. How is my [00:29:00] company conducive to life, not just driving value to shareholders. For farmers

I have also something to say, and that is: thank you. Thank you for all the work you’re doing.

And know that we are here. There are people that understand. It’s not everybody against you, and we reach out our hands to you. We are here and there are solutions. There are approaches and ways of changing your life and what you’re doing to get out of this enormous debt that you have. And to start also to have a life of pleasure again, and not just a life of pain or avoiding pain, you know?

There is a lot of other groups: educators, for example, super important, you know, everything starts with education and really, [00:30:00] really, really at home and in kindergartens and schools. And as parents, for example, as educators: start questioning the narrative.

Then the last thing that I want to say is that generally in all areas, the thing that Uzzy said before, it might be like the newest kid on the block, but in reality, that is ancient wisdom. That is what indigenous people know.

And we have to sit together. When you, when you look at the Hopi prophecies, for example, they say actually that there’s going to be a time where everything will collapse. The peoples of the earth will come to together finally. And everybody will bring their thing. And, you know, for the people that are like us in civilization, yeah.

We bring in modern science and we bring in tools and technology, but indigenous carry the deep understanding of life and they know that they are part of a living system [00:31:00] and we need to go back and I know it’s not easy. We need to change our language. We need to adapt our language, but that is absolutely necessary.

We cannot leave anybody out of it. And the very last thing to people like us: to be inclusive, to not close doors and to practice a nonjudgmental mind. It’s hard. I have extreme issues with BASF, Bayer, Syngenta, these companies, right? Extreme issues. I have to really calm myself down when I see what they’re putting out, but I am open. Syngenta?

Somebody’s listening there. We will hear if you want to talk. We can speak, but dude, it’s going to be hard.

Eduardo: Just by expanding the horizon a little longer, I think will make better decisions and expect more. Every opportunity that comes across our table is an opportunity to make a difference. And our money [00:32:00] is making a difference. Who do we decide to support makes a difference?

It’s not just a feeling good thing. It’s a survival matter at this point. And it’s good business. The alternative is the current path and keep supporting the same legacy institutions and the destructive extractive models. And those are bound to just die and our investment with it.

Where can people learn more about Recelio and get in touch with you perhaps, in case they have more questions?

Fu: We are really focusing our work on the social networks on LinkedIn. So that’s what we’re doing. And of course you find more on our site, on recelio.org. Recelio is written with a C. Recelio.org there you can find a little bit more information and then don’t hesitate to contact us and to enter dialogue.

This is the most important thing at the end. It’s always about relationships. And that is the point. [00:33:00] Call us, make an appointment with us and we talk about everything. 

Eduardo: We’ll post your links to your LinkedIn profiles and the website in our information about the podcast, about the episode here. Are you ready for the rapid five?

 All right. Number one is topauthor or book.

Ursula: Stephano Mancuso Brilliant Green.

And I would like to add another one: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  

Fu: Oh, that’s great. A book, I recommend The Systems View of Life by Fritjof Capra, because I love Fritjof, and for anybody who wants to understand how to transform their organization, their business with like life as a role model and to make it to be actually a living organism, go for it.

It’s not easy. It’s sometimes a little bit hard to digest. But another thing that I would like to emphasize here on the book is also that Fritjof brings together spirituality [00:34:00] and science, and he shows that it’s actually, there is no like “versus” here. We’re talking about the same thing and that’s great.

So that’s my tip. 

Eduardo: Number two is what leader do you look up to or inspires you 

Ursula: The indigenous elders. Specifically for example, Oren Lyons I deeply treasure their deep wisdom and their task of fire keeping and earth keeping that inspires me a lot and reconnects me always back to the soil when I sometimes go into the economic world or in other types of worlds in the technology world.

I think we need leaders that are deeply, deeply connected and can be role models of being great leaders, being inspiring, having vision, being connected to ancestry and place and heritage and history at the same time. I think CEOs should be more [00:35:00] grandmothers and grandfathers than just only CEOs.

And I think that’s also a message that they carry along, that the human and the life. And when I say human and the relatives, I mean all life. Resources or our relatives that are our family and they should be treated as such. So that’s um, the inspiration I take from indigenous leaders.

Fu: Great. Great, great. For me Thích Nhất Hạnh as somebody who teaches us or who shows us the power of mindfulness and also opens up a completely new perspective by the concept of inter beingness and that is needed. Absolutely. We talked before about books, but he also, like all of the books are, are worth reading. 

Eduardo: Number three, if you had a magic wand, one problem that you would solve?

Ursula: Think we, we agree Fu and I on that one and it’s a massive one. If we [00:36:00] had a magic wand and we could use it tonight and tomorrow, there would be a different world. I think people would wake up around the planet and feel reconnected to Gaia to Mother Earth. Because I believe that disconnection is one of our biggest problems we have.

Once we understand that we are a part of it and that we’re surrounded by amazing beings that we are one species out of millions. We start to look at the world differently and act differently. 

Fu: Absolutely Uzzy. You said it so nicely. Yeah. That’s to me also as well, a feeling of interconnectivity connectedness, actually, that is also what I would give back because you know, when you, when you come along and you meet with people, then you can pretty much sense and see who got a glimpse, you know, often  people that meditate or indigenous people.

Sometimes it’s people that are [00:37:00] psychonauts that are taking mushrooms or LSD or stuff, because that also drives that type of experience to know that we are all one and you know, the good thing is that all of us carry this light inside of us. It is even the CEO of Syngenta has it. We just became numb and blind and deaf to it.

So that would be also my thing that I would change the feeling of interconnectedness.

Eduardo: Number four is who do you think we should have in the podcast?

Fu: I would say indigenous people. And I don’t, I don’t wanna say like names here Uzzy came up already with someone, but I think that’s important. We talk about climate and that we cannot do this as a white people club.

Ursula: Farmers, I think it’s important that they get heard that we bring them more to the public eye, that they’re not a species by itself in [00:38:00] separation out there doing their work in the boots. I think they need to be heard and there is many out there, especially young people and we see it in our movement.

I deeply appreciate them. I see them getting bruised, working the worst weather and trying to turn things around for all of humanity, not only for their farm and they’re often overlooked or are just talked about, they should be talked with and heard.

Eduardo: Number five, do you think we’ll make?

Fu: As humanity? As humanity, you mean?

Eduardo: You think it’ll make it out of this mess?

Fu: Oh man. Okay. Look. As I said before, we are, we are optimistic doomsayers. So you ask us for doom and gloom here. Nature makes it, nature will always make it.

And our spirits are … we, we don’t die. Right? Our, our spirits don’t die. It’s energy. And we are in nature. We are embedded in this and nature will find a way. And we don’t know why this all happens right [00:39:00] now. Nature knows, we don’t. So I would like to say a little bit of a word of hope here at this point.

And it’s going to be tough. There’s going to be a lot of suffering. And I mean, next year we are going to have famines, there’s like a lot of food lacking, so that will drive a lot of change and there’s going to be a lot of bad news for sure. But imagine a world where we come together. Imagine: all these people, we have never been so many people on this planet and everybody can do something.

So that is what I want to say. What’s really important right now is to shift from pain orientation, to pleasure orientation. We need to do that shift in our personal lives. And we have a chance. We still have a chance if we do it together, I know it sounds [00:40:00] utopic, but let’s build that utopia. Let’s go down that alley and let’s do it all together and we can make it, I’m sure.

Ursula: I would like to add female perspective of motherhood. The moment you get pregnant, things change dramatically and something grows. It grows within you, and then you feel a resonance. You feel that baby within you and you start to realize it’s actually there. It’s not just a dream or somebody tells me from outside, there’s gonna be a baby born.

I can feel it. It’s not only the size of the belly that grows , it’s a resonance and it starts to interact with you. And birth is not easy. It’s endurance, it’s pain, it’s suffering and it’s suffering on both ends. [00:41:00] I believe it’s not only for the mother that suffers, everybody suffers, father suffer.

The baby suffers. Maybe all the people that aunts and grandmothers, everybody suffers until that moment of that first cry. When the baby’s here, that’s not the end. That’s not the end of a beautiful story. Motherhood is sometimes painful and you have to stick to it and you have to go for it. You don’t sleep.

You have dirty clothes. It’s tough, but it’s so, so rewarding because it’s an unconditional love that you have for this new being in the world. And there have never been so many people on this planet and we never have been so many females on this planet. And many of us share this very creative process of birth.

And we know we can do it. At the moment [00:42:00] where you go into the birth process, you have to completely let go of control. You have to just trust. It will emerge. You have to trust that everything will go right. You don’t know it, no doctors around, you know, whatever you get. There is no, a hundred percent prove that it’s gonna work, but you go for it.

You do it out of love. And I believe we need to do all of this, which is gonna be tough. It’s gonna be sweaty. It’s gonna be rough. It’s gonna be a rough ride, but we should do it. And we can do it out of unconditional love for ourselves, for our world, for nature, with a little bit of motherly caring and the female holistic healing energy, I believe we can do that.

And before we sound too hippie here, [00:43:00] sometimes I sort of go into the metaverse and hear ourselves. We can do this and we can have a good life, potentially even a way better life than we have right now. A life of purpose, a life of contribution, a life of co-creation. Will we make it? I agree with Fu, nature will make it, will me make it as a species?

That depends all on us and how we want to collaborate on all levels and how open we are for relationships and the call of emergency that we have right now, we are in the birth process. We should let everything else go…

Fu: it’s about to come out Uzzy. Yeah. We’re in labor. Yeah, we’re in labor.

Eduardo: We have to question everything and we have to question the model of civilization perhaps as, as we know it and that perhaps will make it that perhaps will make it, I mean, it’ll have to be a completely different model.

[00:44:00] Even the clean tech companies that are coming out, you know, are founded on the same mental models of infinite growth and that’s not gonna work it’s not gonna work either way. And so um, yeah, I think we have to change the way, the way we interact with, with the whole ecosystem. So it’s been great, fu and Uzzy.

Great to have you here. 

Fu: Thank you very much for the invitation Eduardo. 

Eduardo: Yeah, absolutely. Enjoyed it big time. 

Ursula: Very grateful. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.