The future of life on Earth & making the switch from optimism to efficacy

Tom reminds us that we live on a planet that is highly conducive for life. Over the course of Earth’s macro arc, spanning a couple billion years, there has been increasing complexity and action happening in terms of what kind of life forms emerge on this planet. Despite the wide range of extinctions that have occurred, resulting in losses of roughly 15-90% of global biodiversity across history, and the extinctions ahead of us, Tom says that the planet has always bounced back with stronger biodiversity every single time if you look at the macro arc. So in this sense, he’s very optimistic that life will continue on the planet. 

However, as we get into the more local arcs, it’s important to note that any mammalian species typically lasts between one to 10 million years – and there’s a question of whether we’ll reach this average zone due to the way we’re approaching things. Tom explains that this is really the work and when there’s work to do, it’s time to put optimism aside and get to work because optimism is oftentimes a position taken when there’s not something that can be done directly.

E.g. You can be optimistic that your sports team is going to win because you’re not going to do that directly, but if you’re one of the people or in the larger group of people that are supporting with your own hands and mind to make a change, that optimism is less important than efficacy. And it’s realizing that you have that agency to switch from optimism to efficacy through having a sense of openness.

The different styles of cognition that are being applied to climate change

Tom is using his cognition and vigilance to craft a vision of a better future, but part of the reason that his firm approaches the problem the way that they do is through having spent time with the types of cognition that are being applied to climate right now. He points out that having the wrong cognition is like having the wrong tool for the job. For example, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth might wake people up to the problem of climate change, but it’s a style of cognition that generates a lot of fear and anxiety, which causes individuals to operate a lot more out of the amygdala, which leads to fight, flight and freeze responses. When Tom looked at this  scenario, he recognized that some people were ready to step up to the climate challenge and fight, but there’s also a bunch of people that take flight and deny that the problem exists because it’s one way of mentally fleeing from it, or freeze because they believe there’s nothing they can do. He says we’re getting amygdala level responses at the societal level because we’ve taken a particular style of cognition to the problem to start. 

There’s another style of cognition that we took to the problem that encompasses policy approaches. In this scenario, people rally behind the idea of “let’s just get enough people together and if we can vote for the right leaders, then those leaders are going to solve all of our problems.” Tom does believe that policy can make a difference to some extent, but notes that practical design, engineering, operations and other skills need to come to bear and just because somebody signed something doesn’t necessarily do it. This style of cognition has risks associated with it as well, where if everything is about mobilization toward voting and driving political awareness and policy changes, then people are still missing a lot of the picture of what is required to actually solve the practical problems on the ground for climate. 

He isn’t saying that these other styles are completely useless, but may be an incomplete way to address the problem given its magnitude and we’ll need to bring the full set of tools to bear.

How At One Ventures aspires to create a net positive civilization

It turns out that the reason that this planet is so conducive to life is because “life improves the conditions for other life.” This is an observation that was widely popularized by Janine Benyus, Founder of the Biomimicry Institute. Tom expresses that if you look at basically any organism on the planet, you’ll have the soil microbes, which actually make it easier for other organisms in the soil to get access to nutrients, and you’re going to have the plants, which are basically collecting solar energy and then creating the energy source for the entire ecosystem around them. In this sense, every organism on the planet is doing something where its actual contribution to the planet is a net positive, and in the process of existing, it basically creates a net positive in various ways that then enriches all the other aspects of the ecosystem. This is why a healthy ecosystem actually has the most possible organisms there. Tom says this concept differs from our current state of economics, where we can point to natural monopolies driving out competitors after a couple of decades of industry. We don’t design our economy in a way that is as nuanced, sophisticated or robust, and that’s why we have so many economic crashes as an ecosystem. But if we were to step back and learn from the way that organisms and ecosystems work, and recognize that all the species make the planet more conducive for life, there’s no reason that we, as a species, could not also do the same thing. 

Tom points to the fact that the global biomass of humanity is basically equivalent to the global biomass of ants. There’s 350 million tons of us, and there’s 350 million tons of them. The difference between us and ants is that we eat 3% of our body weight per day, so about 10 million tonnes a day, and they eat 30% of their body weight per day. So at 100 million tonnes per day, ants literally consume 10 times more of the planet than us every day. Yet, we don’t sit around complaining about ant overpopulation because the style in which they do it contributes to the ecosystems that they’re a part of. There’s no reason based on the laws of physics that we, as a civilization, could not follow the same template, where our basic existence and processes of living, making the things that we need, taking care of each other, taking care of our surroundings, could not also be as net contributed, or even more, since we are conscious beings that can design things over multiple generations, as opposed to ants.

Contributing to the health of the planet through new businesses and startups

Tom makes a simple observation: there are parts of civilization that are moving faster and parts of civilization that are moving slower. If there’s a really severe crisis (like climate change) happening where you need to address it quickly, then you should work with the parts of civilization that are moving faster. Tom isn’t against political action, but provides a fair critique that the pace of politics is insanely slow, relative to the actual problems that we’re facing. Business and technology are sectors of civilization that move quite quickly, and they can be steered toward what we need under less time if there’s a clear vision of what needs to be accomplished. 

At One Ventures has invested in 28 companies so far. Their most recent investment is one that has introduced the first vaccines for honeybees. Tom says that every one of their companies has something that he calls the “triad”. It’s basically a disruptive deep tech, which is ushering in radically better unit economics paired with radically better environmental economics, and he explains that if you can get those three together, magic happens. From his perspective, a lot of people that have been trying to make business more sustainable, and ultimately drop off one of those factors. Examples: they don’t have the unit economics and they’re hoping that you’ll pay twice as much for  a shoe that is more sustainably produced, or that you’ll pay the $100 for yoga pants with eight recycled water bottles in them. He isn’t saying that isn’t a little bit better for the environment, but when the unit economics are more expensive it means that businesses corner themselves into a niche. These businesses might attract people that are wealthy enough to afford $100 for an item of apparel, but Tom reminds his team that roughly 80% of the planet lives on less than $10 a day and there’s a couple billion people that live on less than $2 a day. If you’re trying to solve the relationship between humanity and nature, he explains that cheaper unit economics is both better for democratization and it’s also better in terms of having the force to upgrade how an entire industry works, as opposed to just launching a successful product in the market.

The empowerment formula for everyday listeners

Tom explains that if you’re ever feeling powerless, then the formula for disempowerment that you’re probably applying is to make your problems large, abstract and far from you. This might sound like: “How come the government is so screwed up? We can’t really get any of this done until we fix the whole government!” Well, that’s large and abstract because the government is actually made up of a lot of things.

Tom says that when you think about what you want to do in climate, you should employ the formula for empowerment instead, which is effectively the exact opposite of the formula for disempowerment. Make your problems small, concrete and near, go after the ones that break your heart the most, or inspire you the most though, typically breaking your heart the most actually has you staying in the work for longer. Then, stay with it long enough to see it through.  So relative to the things in the environment that you care the most about, consider tackling what might be able to change. For most people, there are going to be some changes that they can do immediately when looking at how their home works, for example, because that’s extremely near and nobody else is administering that. Also near to you are your community organizations, your schools, your county councils. If you go to a council meeting, the task forces consist of a couple of passionate volunteers from the community. Get involved and you might find yourself in charge of directing $10 million of resources for your county. Now, is that enough to solve global climate change? No, not by itself, but if a lot of people were doing that, then you’ll notice the landscape starts to change. 

Tom adds another idea: make it clear when you’re making progress versus not. In the course he teaches, he uses the phrase “specificity is the friend of innovation,” and says it’s clear when a team is really getting things done by how specific their current questions and their current answers are. The Wright Brothers and Sister had the macro goal of being able to fly, but they came to discover that three degrees of freedom (pitch, roll, and yaw) are needed in order to make it happen. That’s what it actually sounds like when you’re solving a problem. In conversations about climate, Tom urges a greater need for sophistication because the main premise to keep warming under 1.5C hasn’t changed from 10 years ago. He says he wants to hear what it sounds like when you’re actually solving the problem. While everyone’s going to Davos and the UN to influence change, Tom suggests that maybe that isn’t where change is happening. Maybe the place where progress is happening is the county council meeting where they’ve worked out that they’re going to add composting to the mix for their county. It’s that sort of conversation where you hear the details and the nuances; that is the stuff of making the future different as opposed to reiterating that we need to keep under 1.5C.

Resources Mentioned

• At One Ventures
• TomChi.com

Connect with Tom Chi

• Connect with Tom on LinkedIn and Twitter

Connect With Jason Rissman

• https://InvestedInClimate.com 
• On LinkedIn
• On Twitter

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