Regeneration and Innovation with Rob Avis, Co-Founder and Chief Engineering Officer at 5th World

Oh, welcome to another episode of The Grove. Thank you to our partners, Crazy Friends, Clean Tech Growth Lab. Without them, it would not be possible to interview awesome people doing awesome things like Rob. Welcome. Thanks for having me, man.

Yeah. So, like I was saying, two things. First thing, I love the color palette that you're bringing today. It's very uh very foresty, very green. Makes me happy. And we'll just get right into it. I think if anyone uh that's listening is familiar with your contents online, uh it's very engaging. It's very interesting,

thoughtprovoking about empowering people to take control of um the knowledge, how to uh better understand relationship with nature, um economy. Uh the thing that caught my attention was a post about soil health. I'm very interested in stuff like that. Um you know, but before we get into it, if you could give a brief introduction of yourself and

what you're building. So I'm the co-founder of Fifth World. I'm the chief engineering officer. And uh prior to that uh I spent the last uh I guess that started just pre-COVID. So about 15 years before that I've been teaching permaculture, taught about 10,000 people around the world. Um and then before that uh I was working in the oil and gas

industry. So I'm a former petroleum engineer. I was the guy that brought natural gas and oil to the facilities. Then I designed the facilities uh so that we could all heat and drive cars um heat our homes and drive cars. And then prior to that, I'm actually Charlie in the chocolate factory. I grew up in a

cake factory. Uh we made uh about 100,000 cakes a day. Um and so if you map that out really quickly, I'm originally I grew up in industrial food, moved to industrial energy, and then transitioned to teaching about decentralized food, energy, and water.

and Fifth World kind of emerged as a result of working on um a property in British Columbia, Canada, who happened to be owned by uh it happened to be owned by the co-founder of Ethereum um who was interested in um scaling up regen globally because he saw the need for it. Um and so Fifth World kind of

emerged out of this idea that maybe there'd be a way to bridge the atoms and the bits. um and then use some of those kind of primitive crypto uh protocols to um give a lending hand or or enable or empower or um grow uh regen in a really meaningful way. Um and so Fifth World kind of started with that

idea. Um, we started off as a a venture studio for about 3 years, tried a bunch of different stuff out, um, which we can talk about in the podcast, and, uh, have kind of finally landed on this, uh, current niche, which is, I'd say, an intermediate step to our longer term mission of planetary regeneration within

a generation. And so, right now, we build design and build um, the easiest way to think about it as off-grid homesteads, but they're they're more than that. um basically systems that provide autonomous food, energy, water and resilient shelter.

So uh I do want to get into the beginnings of fifth of fifth world and your uh experience with that. Um but first I'd like to uh get a a deeper understanding of what regen means to you and then also dig a little bit into your past. So if we could just start with

regen uh if you could explain that in a little bit more detail. I think to understand regen you have to kind of understand the three paradigms that exist that coexist right now in society. And so the first paradigm that I refer to is the conventional paradigm. And so this is business as usual. How do we

maximize GDP growth? How do we maximize shareholder value? Um not that any of those things are necessarily bad, but they are very narrowly focused. And you can kind of summarize the conventional paradigm into how do I get more stuff without acknowledging that the more stuff actually uh requires um not accounting for the negative

externalities that is that are created as a result of creating the stuff. So if we think about kind of emissions coming from cars um the automotive industry functions at least the conventional one um with the understanding that they have free access to use earth's atmosphere as a landfill.

If they actually had to pay for that landfilling service um transportation would be very different. And we can look at pretty much any industry. I mean, I don't know what you guys pay for tippage out um on the east coast, but in in Alberta here where I live, it's like 17 bucks a ton. Cost $17 to bury garbage

forever, which is basically nothing. Um and so that's the conventional paradigm. The sustainable paradigm is one that I grew up in. Kind of started in the late 80s, early 90s. And I would argue that the sustainable paradigm is actually an end state and not a a current like a state that we should be aiming for right

now. Um the best kind of joke that I've heard about this is that if you came to me Blake and said, "Hey, Rob, how's your marriage doing these days?" And I said, "It's pretty sustainable." Um you'd probably feel pretty sorry for me. And um and so what are we actually sustaining? Are we sustaining dead

zones? Are we sustaining degraded rivers, degraded soils, uh nutrient uh food with no nutrient in it? Um what is it that we're actually sustaining? And there's actually a more pernicious problem with the sustainability movement, which is which is one that you've probably thought of but have never put words to. And I suspect your

listeners are the same. Um and it's a deeply embedded guilt. Um and if you kind of dig into it, it's like this idea of net zero, um zero escaping, reducing your footprint. um if you kind of draw those out to their logical conclusion, you end up with the only feasible option if like basically it's saying that

humans are inherently evil. Actually, that's kind of what it's saying. And and the only way to deal with that problem in their paradigm is to get rid of all the humans. Um which is not very positive and we kind of all sense it in the posts that we read on a daily basis,

but we we don't really put words to it cuz it's so uncomfortable to think about. And then the last paradigm is the regenerative paradigm which can be summarized as if the most negative thing that we've done on Earth is a nuclear bomb, what's the most positive? And it's not just some hopeful kind of, you know,

unicorn and fairy dust idea. Um, it's actually there's science behind this concept of of what it means to be just as positive as we are negative. And the best way that I can explain this is is to kind of talk a little bit about the beaver. So, I live on 160 acre farm. We

have two creeks. We have about eight beaver families that live on our property. And to the untrained observer, when when I go for a walk in our forest, um you know, with an untrained um observer, they say, "Wow, these beavers are just destroying your land. Like, look at all the trees they're cutting

down, and they're making a mess of this place." Like, that used to be this beautiful forest with these old trees standing up, and now it just looks like chopsticks all over the place. And what's actually happening there is that the beavers are creating a disturbance.

Disturbance is the word that we use in ecology. So they're they're like Newton said, every action is an equal and opposite reaction. So they're creating a disturbance. The trees that they cut down, they use to build their dams. They also eat the layer that grows just underneath the the bark called the cambium layer. That's

what the their nutrition comes from. And as a result of damming up these two creeks on my property, um, every time a beaver creates a beaver dam, they increase the background biodiversity by 28 times. So, we have more birds, we have more mammals, we have more amphibians, we have more of everything uh, as more plants as a result of the

water harvesting that these beavers do. And and so every species on Earth, whether it's humans, whether it's woodpeckers, whether it's foxes, we all have an impact. We all have a footprint. And so the first thing that we have to do in the regen space is acknowledge that you're not getting rid of your

footprint. That's like Newton said it best. Every action is an equal and opposite reaction. And so what we can do though is we can understand our place within nature cuz we are just one of nature's species. And we can understand how we can take the disturbance that we create, the footprints that we leave behind and

ensure that uh that we're actually creating 28 times the productivity um just like the beaver as a result of the actions that we take. And we currently don't think about that right now. Right now it's about how do I mine or extract or attain at the expense of without like thinking about any of

those negative externalities. But if we actually include those negative externalities in the design thinking from the beginning, we can make systems that are more profitable um that ensure that humans actually will be here in seven generations. Um and that ultimately our our well-being is like our mental health is better, our physical health is better. Um it's a

very self-interested thing to do. Uh and this is one of the barriers that I think people have against the environmental movement in general is that it comes across as sacrifice but actually it can be mutually beneficial. Got it. That was beautiful. Thank you for walking through that. So just to summarize what what I have and correct

me if I'm wrong. So the the three overarching the paradigms to understand uh the framework of regen is first the current state of things is just you know like the the sky is a is a landfill and we don't pay uh you we don't pay for that that's not uh uh factored in in

into the way that we think about building inside of the economy. The second is that the the narrative uh which I'm glad that you brought up and I'm glad that it's part of this framework. The narrative of uh climate change and sustainability so far is overwhelmingly negative. And then the third one is that uh we can not only

think about it as positive but think about it as expansive. Um and if that was taken into account in the design phase, it would really change uh a lot of the ways that that we ended up designing things. Is that accurate?

Yeah. Plus, there's the self-interest piece. Like I think that people assume that if you care about the environment, you're not um a self-interested person. But I actually would argue that the most self-interested people are uh actually care deeply about that especially if you have kids or you are thinking about future generations.

Got it. So it can be selfish and if if that's helpful. Okay, cool. So so uh so thank you for aligning that out. The next thing that I wanted to get into that um uh you touched on it. It's part of your experience. So you started in industrial food. um if you could if

you could talk about how that impacts, you know, how that experience impacted and how you shaped your understanding of the industrial food um complex for other people to to understand and how it uh relates to this conversation that we're having about regen.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean I grew up when Walmart was just becoming a big thing like as it was scaling rapidly and uh and the result of Walmart and Costco and Kroger and a lot of the big um you grocery chains um have have done a lot to shape both consumer experience, consumer pricing, like what we expect

food to cost. So they've they've really encouraged the mass um like an even larger version of industrial food because in order to be able to compete in those arenas, you really have to build massive amounts of of automation.

Um so less humans, more pumping, more pipes, more processing. Um and ultimately like you know I we we had a 40,000 foot facility. Uh like I said, we made 100,000 cakes a day. And um at some point uh as I was growing up in that, I realized that I didn't really want to

eat food that had traveled through multiple you know miles of pipe uh before going into an oven. And then you you couple that with um you know books like the end of food by Thomas Pollock um or googling you know the great nutrient collapse and it starts to become really apparent at least from the manufacturing side why

our food is is harming us um once you add in the farming element and you start understanding how we're growing our food like this is a piece of this is a this creates so much cognitive dissonance inside of me still today even though I've been in the case for 15 to 20 years

is that we use hormone disruptors and toxins on our food to stop, you know, quote unquote pests from eating them and then we consume that same food. Um, and keep in mind that the hormones in your body are operating at parts per billion. Um, and and like we're spraying these on mass on

our crops. And so, uh, you start with sick food and then you run it through these giant machines that make it more sick or more unhealthy. Um, and then you wrap it in plastics and now we have a microplastics issue. Um, so having that that like big food experience um really kind of painted um how much of a a dead

end um our current food paradigm actually is. When it'll change, who knows? It's like it's a really big ship to turn around. And I would say that the people that are like there's a small group of people I would say that are kind of waking up to it. Uh I see a lot of these influencers

on LinkedIn for example like doctors, functional medicine doctors saying, you know, you got to eat healthy. But the piece that that's still missing in most of the health influencers that I see is that nobody's actually talking about where to get the food. It's like they're acknowledging that the food's bad, but it's like, well, where does it come

from? And that's the gap that I'm trying to fill right now uh at Fifth World is and then have been actually for almost 20 years. Gotcha. Well, thank you. You alluded to my next question. So, before we get into uh uh the experience with uh the oil and gas and stuff cuz that's very

interesting perspective is within this this framework that we just discussed where the the narrative is typically uh negative and and it can be turned to be positive. if there's somebody listening that isn't too familiar with regen but obviously can get behind like hey you know the food that I'm eating is not great for me like and and there's uh

alternatives that could be better. Um how could someone like that think about it? Like how could someone like me think about that? You know cuz I shop at um you know the the big stores and things like that. I mean I have smaller stores um you know that I guess I I would say I

split time but I still don't know where that food is coming from and I'm just eating it. So, you know, what's a I guess a positively slanted way to think about this? Yeah. Well, and and this is that's a great question because, you know, it's the aggregate of the individual life decisions that lead humanity in the

direction that it goes. And I think one of the reasons that people get disenfranchised with the environmental movement is it's all guilt and no solutions. Um but the the like we are every meal that we consume has the potential to either create positive or negative externalities. We get to make that choice three times a day. And if

enough people do that the whole system transforms from the the ground up. And so someone living in a city um the easiest lowest um effort uh option you have is going to farmers markets. uh get to know your farmers and there's plenty of them around. As people go to more more people go to farmers markets, more

farmers will emerge because the market will encourage that type of behavior. Um if you are shopping at a big store, you know, Whole Foods is definitely better than um maybe other ones. And if you are um trying to choose foods that are healthy for you, generally speaking, staying out of the middle rows and

walking around the outside of the store where your um your basic ingredients are. Like one big step if you're not willing to go to a farmers market is actually just start to cook. Um start using base ingredients. Like start from vegetables, minimize the plastic on them. Uh you know, go back to using

spices again. use. Like, it's crazy to me, Blake, how many people have these high-end kitchens and that that they live off of Skip or whatever Uber Eats. Um, you know, they're just like a status symbol now that never gets used. It's like start to learn to cook. Um, and then and then once you learn how to

cook, then you can go out and get some more exotic ingredients. And ideally, you're getting these from farmers that have harvested them within the last 24 hours. Well, I I uh I have personally as somebody that just, you know, I I guess a lot of the people that eat my food can say that I cook for survival, but one of

my uh one of my go-tos is you throw a bunch of uh veggies in a pan or sorry, in a pot and then uh you throw diced meat in it and then you put the top on and you could pour broth or water depending on how saucy you want it and then you leave it.

Do you have a Do do you have a favorite uh meal that you guys make? just choose one. Yeah. I mean, I'm a I'm a really big fan of of very very simple meat dishes. And so, uh, salt is your friend. So, if you have a steak or a roast, you literally you put more salt on it than you think

you should. And literally, if it's beef, I let it sit on the counter all day long with a lid on it so my cats don't eat it. Uh, and the salt changes the the proteins. Actually, there's a process, I can't remember the name of it now, but um, it actually like transforms the

meat. And then I just barbecue it for or or pan sear it for you know 5 minutes aside. And then same thing with the vegetables like sauerkraut or steamed vegetable. I mean it's very very simple fair but if you're starting with good ingredients um you don't need these crazy barbecue sauces and all this other

stuff. It's just the flavor is actually in the food. It's not in the like most people don't know this but ketchup and barbecue sauce it's got a pretty heavy vinegar component in it. M it was designed to to to uh hide food that was going off.

It's not actually so it's an infl kind of like it's like freze fereze kills the sense in your nose so you can't smell like barbecue sauce and ketchup is actually a failure to cook not the opposite because if you're starting with good food you don't need to add all these different things to it. It's like

the flavor is in the food itself. Yeah. Good. Well, um I I I will do that. That is a uh the salt, the beef, leave it out. Um put a top on it. Um I I will implement that. So now I want to get into uh just pivot quickly to your villain arc, the one where you're in the

oil and gas industry. So, if you could talk about um your exper your experience there um because you know regardless of what people like to say about it and how it contributes to climate change, fossil fuels and stuff, it is critical infrastructure and supports everything that we have uh today for better or

worse. And so, um you know, it's a huge industry. There's it's really important that it still functions. It's important that we transition away from it, but it is an important uh uh piece of our infrastructure. So, what is it that you did? What was your experience? And what did you uh ultimately take away from it?

So, it's not the villain arc actually at all. Um I'm sorry to ruin your story. Actually, it might make story more interesting. Um I think the oil and gas industry is the most one of the most it is the most important industry in the world. Actually, I'm just going to state that because

uh we we burn so a barrel of oil has about five five years of human labor in it. So, if you think of it as like bottled human labor, um it's equivalent to 5 years of human labor and it's like $55 a barrel today, I think. So, if you take the average working year of 2,000

hours and you divide that or multiply that times five and then divide it by $55, you're going to get uh a per unit labor that's like fractions of a cent. Um we have equivalent of 400 billion energy slaves working on Earth today.

Um, so every single one of us has more laborers working for us 24/7 than like the most rich Egyptian ever did. Um, because this energy does so much work for us. So I was, uh, the guy cutting down all the forests, uh, bringing in the pipelines, building the facilities, and I didn't like cutting the forest

down. That that's the part that really irritated me. But I couldn't criticize the industry um, as a consumer. like I needed the natural gas to heat my home. I needed the oil to drive my car. Um I love the fact that I can fly at 30,000 ft and 800 km an hour and get to Europe

in 11 hours. That's incredible. Like that that trip would have taken months, maybe even a year to get to where I am right now to Europe. Um just with like horses and canoes and you know sailing ships. Like it's an amazing resource that we have. I do think we use it really irresponsibly.

Um, for example, like we shouldn't heat houses with natural gas. Like burning a 1200° C fuel to heat a 21° C house, that's like 2,000 Fahrenheit to 72 Fahrenheit is like cutting butter with a chainsaw. Um, there's way better ways to heat our buildings and and we should use the resource a little bit more

effectively. Um but I wanted to be part of uh the solution um for what happens after oil and I don't think there is an after oil actually I think that oil needs to continue to be used for making plastics pharmaceuticals like durable things that the mineral is so universal in what it can be used for. Um we need to find

higher value things than just heating houses and and running cars on it. like there's other ways that we can do those things that are more um that that will ensure that civilization has a better future. Um but that doesn't mean the oil industry ends. Uh there's lots of oil left in the ground. It's just there may

not be lots of oil for us to to use it um without being intentional. So So then how did how did your experience uh uh building those facilities and getting context into how that that industry works? How did that inform your uh the section of your career that was mostly teaching?

So everything in the world is energy. Um if you think about the sun, the sun drives all processes on Earth, it even actually is the reason that we have oil in the first place. Um and I do believe that we're running out of cheap oil. And I think that even though that's kind of

funny to say today when oil there's a 5 million a barrel um per day glut right now in the world um that could change really rapidly with any of the geopolitics going on. Um we are kind of at the end of our cheap oil and uh in the next 2 to 3 years we're probably

going to see uh irreversible declines. Um, and I'll just say that like uh predictions are for charlatans and all of my predictions are going guaranteed to be wrong. Um, but as a general rule of thumb, like if we look at the fact that uh it took millions of years to get it into the

ground and we're going to have burned it up uh you know in about 100 to 150, that's not a very responsible use of that resource. Um something that's basically just bottled sunlight. And so, like I said a bit earlier, we need to find ways of meeting human needs in a modern way so that we can have

modernity. That's a great thing that we've invented as part of our civilization. Um, and highgrade our resources in a way that uses them for their highest utility. Um, and we don't do that right now. right now we have like you know commodities markets and you can pretty much do whatever you want with any

resource because we live in a free market society um and and that's good and we need capitalism is good and free markets are good and all of that sort of stuff but if we kind of look at long history if we look at long time with a much broader perspective um we are going

to look back on the last hundred years and question our intelligence with regards to how we've used some of these resources. So I so I I want to return to something that you had uh that you had just mentioned in that answer and I wrote it down. I'm going to keep it a surprise

for you because I want to get to just the the the moment in time where you decided to uh jump into Fifth World and like you said it started around the pandemic. Uh you know it started on this one property. What was the decision for you personally to jump into entrepreneurship?

Well I've been an entrepreneur since 2008. So Verge permaculture was what I was doing prior to that and I had a small consultancy as well. So that's when we were teaching permaculture. So I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. Um maybe for that little period in time during the oil and gas industry I

wasn't but sure um you know I grew up in a my dad's business. Um Fifth World started because um I wrote a precy to one of the co-founders of Ethereum uh basically like stating how we could regenerate Earth's ecosystems in 10 years.

And the the premise was basically that if we had the resources, the coordination, the intelligence, the manpower of the US military, we could actually excuse me, we could heal Earth's ecosystems in in a decade. Um like when you look at how much resource and and that the US military has we don't have a knowledge

problem. We don't we know how to fix ecosystems. um we know how to do it uh in in efficient ways. Um we have a capital problem right now. Nature is not on the balance sheet uh in in most companies, in most economies. And um I just ran this experiment the other day.

We're looking at starting a new product offering in 2026. Um they're called Miawaki forest or little micro forests that you you plant your full succession in one day basically. and to plant a 5 acre like a a small 5 acre forest. Um it's like half a million dollars to get to like to replant that

forest in a way that's like biodiverse um going to be healthy. It's going to mimic a real forest. Now, if you think about what you would kind of value you'd get out of harvesting a 5 acre chunk of forest, we're probably talking about $10,000 at most. And those would be like really nice trees. And so it's a perfect

example of the cost of ext like we only pay for the cost of extraction, not for the actual product itself. So we're paying for the chainsaws and the humans to cut it down, but not for the actual trees. And the tree in our current economic paradigm only has the value uh once it's dead. There's like we don't

attribute value to the tree when it's alive. Mhm. So, uh, when I said we could heal Earth's ecosystems in 10 years, they said, "Write me a precy," which like a story about how that would happen and, uh, about a month later there was money in my bank account and, uh, fifth fold was

starting. It was crazy. Unbelievable. So, so then, so then what was So then with with with such a massive um uh with such a massive mission and such big ideas and things like that, how was it that you decided on what direction to go in? Um you know, like like you said, there were a couple

different I guess products you could say that you guys or projects that you decided to make uh fifth world uh around. So what so what went into deciding those things? So we started with a venture studio and one of the products that we built uh which has not scaled was what we call internally

Fitbit for planet earth and so the idea being that uh humans are not inherently destructive we just lack feedback and if you gave the right feedback to indivi to individual land managers 37% of planet earth's surface is farmed right now and it's not in regenerative ways that people would start to shift their

behaviors and then if we could tie that into a smart contract contract um on the on Ethereum or a layer 2, then we could incentivize land owners to um to make better decisions. Uh building a token is relatively easy. Um even like we figured out how to sense any ecosystem on Earth. Um we can look at it

over the last 6 years whether whether it's been like the same way that this Whoop or a Fitbit will track your health over time, we can do that with our software. Um the the hard part about a token play is you have to figure out who's going to buy them.

And we're not interested in rugps or any of that kind of um shady stuff. And so we and and also when we were building all of this stuff, it was during a pretty intense crypto winter. Um like we we start Fifth World started with a a pretty strong crypto market and then it

kind of got cold for a while and and so the idea of launching something just didn't it didn't line up properly. And so and then through hundreds like probably even maybe not a thousand but hundreds of conversations through LinkedIn and various other industry people um like that thing kept coming up that nature's just not on the balance

sheet yet. Mhm. And we you know we're trying with carbon credits and ESG and all of these other things. Um and so we we started to basic our hypothesis basically formed that we're actually in the same place Elon was at in 2004.

Um, and so we need to find our model S essentially. Um, and connect what we do into a target market that can afford the work that we do. Um, because we need to make regen cool. It needs to be something that it's not a sacrifice.

You're not running away from one system um, kind of out of fear to another one. It's like it's actually got gravity. It's like the Tesla is a better car. It drives it. It's quieter. It's It um you know, I just got one and my gasoline cost has come down by a factor of almost

seven. Um just because it's so I mean I have a solar array on my house and so um I you know fuel my car by the sun. Um and so I've made decisions to move to that technology because it's better than what I had before. And so working for individuals that want uh resilient food,

energy, water um and the best shelter on earth uh be most like healthiest, most comfortable um most enduring uh buildings is a better offer um than what is exists conventionally. And if you get enough people to do that um then you find opportunities to scale down the road. And so we're actually building regenerative farms for people.

We're building garden systems and green houses. Um we're building water harvesting systems and drought proof systems. Like we're looking at the property as an ecosystem and um integrating nature-based solutions into them. So so something that comes to mind uh is is uh part of part of the the first paradigm that that we had talked about

at the beginning and it's this idea that that nature isn't uh factored in economically. And so, uh, if you know, to the extent that I understand this, uh, this this like Fitbit angle, um, it seems like to me some, uh, a an individual, um, sorry, a a population that would be very interested in a

solution like this would be people that are economically interested in the health of their soil, which are farmers, which is the the post that I um saw that that first introduced us. And so I is there some uh connection between uh that market you know farmers and and things like that and and the idea that you're

speaking to? Yeah, ultimately the goal like farmers are really struggling especially in the US right now with some of the the policies that have um been brought forth in the last 11 months, but and they're they're actually struggling, you know, in the whole western world unless they're highly subsidized, excuse me.

Um farmers are struggling all over the world um because their input costs are going up, their soils are depleting. um they they're in an interesting economic paradigm where they lend against their farm in order to to buy all the expensive equipment and and buy buy all the inputs.

And so it's not an easy system to get out of. Um it's kind of like the company store model where um in order to work in the mine, you have to buy all your equipment from the company store and every month you get a little bit further behind um in what you do. And and so

um while the tool might help farmers, I mean it was designed to help farmers to make better decisions about their their landscapes. Um the goal behind it was to figure out how to create new revenue streams for these farmers so that they could almost like bridge financing so they could move to the new paradigm. That's the piece

that needs to be unlocked. um if we could figure out who would be interested in and like it it's it's because it's not part of our culture. Who owns the benefit of those nature-based solutions that the farmer is active actively farming and and why would somebody pay for that? That's the piece that's really difficult in the

tokconomics kind of equation. Got it. And so and and and so then the uh the pivot to the uh the the current product that you guys put forward at the moment which is building these um looking at the the property as an ecosystem uh as holistically came from this this Model S piece that making it

cool making it um finding a market for it. So that all makes sense. Something that I want to return to that you spoke about before um and you know as I believe it relates to fifth world is this idea of Trojan horses. And so in this in in this idea of uh trying to get

adoption of regen, I think Trojan horse is a big conversation as it comes to uh grid modification, renewable energy and AI. So that's why I thought it was really interesting when you brought it up uh before our conversation. So what does that you know what does the concept of Trojan horse mean to you? How does it

relate to regen? Where are you seeing it now? Um yeah, those types of things. So we've talked a lot about kind of farming and soil and these things but regen itself we can we can kind of broadly define it as the activities that we engage in as a as humans uh with regards to whether they enhance or or

retract from our relationship with nature. Um and I would say that regen is generally a pro-development approach. It's pro-human. So it's not actually an environmental movement. It's a humanist movement. But it's saying um right now earth is the only place we can live. Um if we want to be here in seven generations from now, we have to start

behaving differently. And we also know that we need money to live and all of these other things. And so within the current kind of economic paradigm, what are the types of things that we can Trojan horse into um our kind of business as usual day-to-day to uh transform them from the inside out? And

AI is a great one to think about. So, right now, everybody's talking about the AI revolution and how much water it's going to need, much power it's going to need in order to um to operate. And um and so I I actually wrote a precy for um a wealthy investor that you would know

um because they're talking about building a big AI data center like 10 gawatt plus like massive. Um to put that in perspective like the grid that powers Alberta where I live is 12 gawatt. So it's a huge place. So um one data center could double the power requirement of where I live.

Yeah. And um I looked at things like like every city uh pretty much in every kind of major city in Alberta where I live produces enough storm water which is a problem and it's a byproduct of poor urban design. Um, and it creates problems, erosion problems in our rivers. It it puts sediment into the

rivers. It harms the fish. It creates a spe like pulls asbestos and pollutants into the rivers. Um, we don't really have good treatment solutions for um for storm water generally. Like they exist, but generally they're not there's not that many practiced. And so there's enough storm water generated, for example, in the city of Edmonton, close

to where I am, to produce enough water to cool this 10 gawatt system. And you would end up with better health outcomes for the river um cuz all the particles wouldn't end up there. We wouldn't be extracting finite clean water sources in order to clean to to um cool the data center. Um and and so that'd be an

example of where we can kind of match negative externalities to like two negatives equals a positive. Um and so we don't actually have a water problem in the AI data center space. We actually have a cooling problem. And you know, humans have been figuring out cooling solutions for thousands of years. Um you know, literally like when

you want a new idea, go back into an old book um and bring it forward again. And so I have it like five or six different cooling solutions that nobody that I can see is talking about right now that would transform these the relationship that these data centers have with I'll give you another one like the city of

Edmonton in the wintertime has enough heat demand um just with if you look at downtown Edmonton you could heat the whole of downtown Edmonton with a district heating loop. So those are underground pipes delivering hot water um directly from a data center. And so now you can create a positive relationship between the data center and

the city. And so now people's hot showers and their space heating becomes um an opportunity for the data center to be able to um supply. And now the data center has a new revenue stream cuz now they're selling thermal energy which is a waste product of their chips. And one watt of compute equals one watt of heat.

Um and and so we could look at that for the power requirements as well. Like imagine every data center now sets up an aggravaic system just on the Perry urban part of the city. And so we buy you know 5 or 6 thousand acres of land. We set up uh solar arrays. Solar is the software

of electricity because it's so fast to deploy. And then we could regeneratively graze between those solar panels. So we can actually produce a regenerative food source. Grazing if it's set up properly is a biodiversity sink. So, it's good for biodiversity.

Um, and so now we can find ways like where our economy really struggles is that we um we think in silos. And so we're just going to build a data center. We're going to plug it into the grid. We're going to plug it into the water grid and we're going to do our thing. Those days

are coming to an end. We can't We're running out of water and we're running out of electricity. Alberta, where I'm from, just told all the data centers that are applying for power in our province that there's no more power. Um, so I said our grid is 12 gawatt. There's 20 gawatt of data center data centers in

the queue right now that can't develop because there's not enough generation capacity. So we're running out of the resources that we need to be able to think in silos. And so that opens up an opportunity for re regen thinking which is basically systems thinking that allows us to kind of connect one problem

set, one set of liabilities with another. Uh on the surface it just looks like we're problem solving, but we're actually Trojan horsing if we're careful. We can Trojan horse regen solutions into um these conventional businesses and completely transform our relationship with with nature around us. Well, so then so then what are what are typically

I guess you know the the thinking in silos the traditional way of going about things is one reason but what are some other reasons that you find uh you know some some other direct oppositions I don't know of people out there that are saying well you know I understand from what you just said you know Rob it

sounds like you know economically viable like it makes sense like all these things but if there's somebody that disagrees what are typically the arguments so the big argument um having run a business now for many years is that if I'm a data center and I'm having to invest in or co-invest in a district

heating loop that heats downtown Edmonton, I now have a dependency on on the city. Um, and now the city has a dependency on me. And so it adds operational complexity, it adds risk. Um, and when you're thinking about how these hyperscalers risk, uh, think think about risk, um, you know, they're they don't have time like they're, you know,

I mean, it's it's pretty crazy when you think about the depreciation rate on these chips, like they last, you know, 3 years. And so adding in the complexity of um a district heating loop is going to dramatically change the unit unit economics of of like that they get from speed. Um and so it's not just a matter

of um uh you know putting it into the next hyperscaling data center like it actually requires a bit of a societal mind shift as well. And so some of that stuff might have to happen from from a policy level. there may be policy shifts that are required. I think there there probably are solutions that are that are

less complex um if we think about them. And so we'd have to actually kind of get in the same room with some of these hyperscalers and really understand uh their capital structure, their risk structure and then look at opportunities through that lens as well. Um so that we're not adding a ton of operational

complexity in order for them to get some of the benefits of this thinking. Um that would be probably one of the big uh push backs I would say. Got it. Thank you. Are there any other major you know outside of uh building data centers and things like this? Are there any other major troen horses that

you're seeing at the moment? Um, I mean, I'm constantly thinking about these. Uh, I mean, one thing, this is not not necessarily my thinking, per se, but there was a a book written back in the '90s, maybe the early 2000s, called Rewealth by Storm Cunningham. And he ran a brick factory in the US, and uh, if you know how

bricks are made, they basically, uh, extract soil, um, they press them into bricks and they put them into a furnace. And so his brilliance came from the fact that a lot of the kind of brownfield sites that are um polluted, you generally have two options to deal with those polluted sites. You either uh dig

and dump, so you take it away and put into a landfill, or you incinerate the soil. And uh and he said, you know, I already own an incineration business. I incinerate soil and make them into bricks. So he started setting up brick factories um next to brownfield sites would dig out the degraded soil, turn

them into bricks and sell them and then redevelop the property um without the toxins. And so that kind of thinking is where we need to go as entrepreneurs. We need to find the win-wins where we can uh again he he brought two domains together like like making bricks and soil remediation are generally two

siloed businesses but he saw an opportunity to marry the two together um and make a ton more money like he became a really profitable developer and he still got to sell bricks and and so I think if we start looking at our economy through that lens we'll start finding um opportunities where we can vertically

integrate uh in in a sense um and solve multiple problems at the same time. Yeah, I've I've heard of soil remediation also with hemp and certain kinds of uh mushrooms. Is that something you've heard of? Yeah, there's uh there's a few folks in the states that are pioneering that and uh Paul Stamuts is one of them. He wrote

a book called I think it's five ways mushrooms can save the world or maybe it's 11 ways I can't remember but um it's many ways and he he talks in that book about how some of those processes have actually been patented which I think is interesting as well because that process has probably

been around for a billion years um and then we turn up and patent it and prevent people from actually doing it. So yeah, mushrooms are an amazing like micro remediation is an amazing technology um or biological process. Um and then different plants, you know, are able to to do different things in the soil for

sure. Yeah, we should well we should bookmark that. Another uh high interest of mine. Two of my favorite questions uh to ask. The first one with Fifth World specifically, what is the biggest hurdle that you're facing at the moment and how is it also an opportunity?

Um, yeah, I think right now the biggest hurdle at least in North America, I can't I mean I can't speak for for the US right now, but in Canada, there's there's a lot of uncertainty in Canada right now um with the tariffs and um the various like the relationship that we have with the United States and so

people are very cautious um kind of watching how things are going to unfold which has meant that there's a definitely a reduction in spending with regards to construction. Um, you know, that's that has been a challenge. Um, I think I think the opportunity or the silver lining in all of that is that

Canadians have realized and I do think this is happening to some degree in the US that uh supply chains are are weak and they're subject to a lot of things that generally people don't have control over. So, you know, whether it's your president making a decision that has, you know, massive influence on u the

policies that happen up here. Um, co was another great example of that where we saw certain supply chains kind of dry up or stop. Um, I think generally people are realizing that decentralized and autonomous systems are a good thing to own or good thing to control. Um, at least on within certain domains. Um, and

I think long term that we're going to see more of that type of thinking. I mean, it ties nicely into Bitcoin and and kind of some of these other decentralized uh movements that are happening on planet Earth right now. Um, and it's just a matter of time before those start infiltrating into some of

the other domains. Well, with all of these uh all this work to be done and all these ideas, uh I'm curious what inspires you? Nature. Um, you know, 4.2 two billion years of research and development. Um, all of the solutions exist in nature. We just have to have the humility to go out

and um spend time without our phones um observing how those natural processes occur and how to bring those concepts back into the way that we build um our civilization. Absolutely. Well, you're you're repping nature right now. I'm going to go back to the color palette that you showed up with. So, I appreciate that. I got to

get on that wave. Well, thank you Rob so much for your ideas. Thank you so much for your time. I'm excited to stay in touch. I think there's a lot more to unpack. I think we just uh you know floated along the surface with a lot of these things, but uh thank you for the

work that you're doing. If anyone else is inspired to follow along, uh with your journey, what's the best way to do that? Uh you can check us out at fifthworld.com and over on LinkedIn. I I post most days uh under Rob Avis.

Beautiful. Go do it, Rob. Thank you so much. Yeah, talk soon.