The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Thomas Schindler. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Thomas Schindler. Thomas is an amazing character, and it’s kind of really hard to describe who he is and what he does, but he’s the guy I’ve been talking to for, I don’t know, two, two and a half years on a regular basis. One of the most interesting people I know. He’s dabbled in building tech companies, not-for-profits. He’s a font of interesting ideas. Just one of the most interesting people I know. And so rather than giving him a formal bio, best thing to do is check him out and all of his amazing projects at thomas.cr, CR standing for Costa Rica, where he spends a fair amount of time. Welcome, Thomas.
Thomas: Thank you, Jim. It’s amazing to have this conversation in public after we had so many other conversations in private.
Jim: Yeah. Exactly. This will… you know, if we can have a conversation as good on the air as we do privately, it’ll be solid gold. I mean, every minute I’ve talked to Thomas has been value added, I gotta say. Just an amazing person.
Thomas: It’s absolutely mutual. Absolutely mutual.
Jim: So today, we’re gonna talk about one of Thomas’ big ideas, probably his biggest so far, but could be more coming. He calls heliogenic civilization a vision for a regenerative future. So why? Why do we need to think about something different? Why can’t we just do the same old shit we’ve been doing for the last three hundred years?
Thomas: Okay. So there’s a slight danger in me reexplaining something that all of your listeners have heard gazillions of times before.
Jim: They haven’t all. That’s keep in mind, the listener base is large, and only a subset listens to any given podcast. So give some background.
Thomas: I’ll give a little idea of our… And when I say our, there’s a group of people that are roughly as crazy as I am and roughly as independent from the current systems as I am. We’ve been assessing the system that we’re in as a whole, as human global civilization, for a while now and trying to find out ways to move into a better place.
Our assessment is very similar to many others, like Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens and all of these people who’ve done amazing work. Essentially, the way we look at it is we’re producing money at exponential rates. M3 globally doubles roughly every ten years, and we back that amount of money by our own productivity since ’71, and we call that GDP. Therefore, GDP needs to grow exponentially as well, roughly doubling every twenty years or so.
Now if you look closely at what GDP actually is, it’s the amount of atoms you can move in a given society. And that’s regardless of whether you’re a producing or a service economy. It really doesn’t matter because you always have to move something. Moving atoms requires energy. So energy demand is tightly coupled to that chain. Therefore, energy demand doubles every thirty years. There’s some efficiency gains in between, but Jevons paradox working against those anyway.
So we then take the 19 terawatts that we have to turn by burning fossil fuels mostly and turn that into 100 billion tons of material every year while also producing 50 billion tons of waste and pollution. That’s not a very efficient system. And we all can see that. We all notice that. But we keep that situation in place by both politics and the economy measuring their short-term success by GDP growth. And that keeps us in an eternal loop or a multipolar trap that locks us into this machine that we call the shit show or Moloch that is really good and becomes increasingly faster at turning life into waste almost literally.
So that’s the big why. I mean, the underlying why of that is because my parents told me so, and I owe it to my children, really, and to every other child on this planet. And we all do, not me particularly, but to dedicate my privilege, my life to helping us all move into something better.
And now we spend a fair amount of time thinking about what could be pathways to move us out of this multipolar trap. That’s by the way, I haven’t met anybody who really wants to be in that place. Nobody really enjoys it, but nobody sees how to get out of it. And we ultimately see three main vectors to do so.
One is getting back in touch with understanding what it means to be human. The way we like to phrase this is: three hundred thousand years of being human is stronger in us than three hundred years of being distracted by the shit show, roughly. Right? So to put it into a meme version of a big idea. But to hold on to this, once you’ve grounded yourself in the understanding that you’re a human and what that actually means, is really hard if you move back into the everyday situation of the multipolar trap.
Therefore, you need two more things. The second vector being coordination. The 98% of us or so without any meaningful resources started talking to each other and finding out that this sense of being human is quite similar and mutual. We could align with that, which would result in something that you started calling coherent pluralism. Right? And we found that again and again across our endeavors over the last decade or so that this is actually true. People see it very similarly all over the planet.
And then finally, for groups to be able to live into this whatever it means to be human, there needs to be some pathway on a material level to get out of Moloch. And what we found is so simple that it was for a while really hard to believe that it is that simple. Essentially, we could say the race for the fusion reactor can end here today because there is already a fusion reactor. We have this big fusion reactor in the sky that’s sending us 172,000 terawatts for free, distributing that evenly across the planet.
And so far, all of our ingenuity has managed to turn that into solar panels. And maybe wind if you’re generous – wind could also be seen as second-order solar. But if you look at the largest and most successful economy on the planet that I would call nature, it knows how to produce 150 billion tons of material every year without any waste and pollution. And if you look at yourself and you see that you have eyes and teeth and fingernails and bones and partially run on electricity, then there’s not much that you can imagine on a material level that you couldn’t grow. So if we put some of our ingenuity into moving our material stack from extraction and high-intensity energy into growth in natural processes, then we would have that material abundance for all.
Jim: Let me insert a data point here, which I think this would be the right time to put it. To your point about comparing the biological to the human way of building things: a human body, all the cool things it does, consumes about 100 watts. A typical American, if you include all the energy burned on their behalf, to build buildings, run cars, make steel, etcetera, is running about a continuous rate of 11,000 watts. So 110 times as much as what our body actually generates. Europeans, about 8,000 watts. Now interestingly, sub-Saharan Africans, less than 500. India, about a thousand. So if we think about the extended phenotype of humans, an interesting way to think about it is how energy intensive is it. And then, of course, then you look at the second order, which is where is that energy coming from?
Thomas: And if you extend that picture, if you look at the different processes that you could use to transform some molecules into other forms of usable molecules, then usually the way we do it is quite brute force, with a lot of heat, with chemistry, etcetera. But nature or life has figured out how to do that with a lot less energy, right? So instead of only thinking about it from an energy perspective, also think about it from a material perspective in the sense of transforming molecules from one shape into the other. And that’s called more or less enzymes. And if you look at what cutting-edge material science does at the moment in the lab, that’s exactly this – finding enzymatic pathways for material transformations that allow you not only to do this at really, really low energy demand, but also with definable properties.
And that’s very interesting because that frees you from extraction and from logistics all over the planet. You can literally start growing your material stack in place in your bioregion. And ultimately, what we want to put a focal point on is exactly that – liberating that knowledge stack such that everybody on the planet has access to it for free. And we like using an analogy, I know you’re not 100% convinced of that analogy, but there was an internet before the World Wide Web, right? People don’t usually remember that. But it was very siloed. It was proprietary. It was very boring. It was very limited. And then along came Unix, P-stack, the World Wide Web standards, all gifted for free essentially to the world, open source. And that’s ultimately, you could see that as the moment where the explosion of creativity unfolded into what we now think of as the internet. And now as a thought experiment, what would happen if we did the same thing on the atom layer? What would happen if we allowed everybody on the planet to stack for free so that they can literally grow their material pain? All of the stack. And then we could build a much more colorful, thriving, beautiful, and life-serving economy on top of that. What would that look like? Right? Compared to that image, what we’re doing, whatever we’re doing right now looks boring and quite poor.
Jim: And it’s certainly true to use the bio analogy that Mother Nature is not shipping, at least not directly and in a pinpointed fashion, carbon from California to build a person or a tree in Germany. It just doesn’t happen, right? Mother Nature uses the carbon that’s accessible within a few feet or a few miles, few kilometers of where a living thing is. And so that is an interesting analogy and probably a good way to center one’s design thinking. You know, how can we learn to do things in a way that does not require shuffling container loads of crap all around the world all the time?
Thomas: Mhmm. And this might sound absurd when you first hear it. But if you look around, there are people – I’m just gonna highlight one, Neri Oxman. She’s following that path in a private company, like proprietary situation. And there are many others on the planet doing this work right now. I wanna point out one lady who helped us see this in the first place a couple of years ago, Anne Meyer. She runs a lab at Rochester University, and she knows how to use enzymatic processes, based on the process of producing nacre in nature to produce all kinds of materials with different properties, depending on what’s desired.
But how do we get this a) out into the world and b) into liberty? That’s the important path. Now what we currently found is that there might be an interesting synergy between large-scale infrastructure projects and our attempt of trying to understand those pathways on a bioregional scale. Just to give you an example, there is a large €600,000,000 development happening in the North Pacific in Costa Rica that a friend of mine is undertaking. And as part of this, we are liberating a couple of those millions to build a 90-person research hub that allows us to identify those pathways and then lift them into a global commons through digital layers for everybody to use.
Because there are other people somewhere else on the planet who might want to use knowledge from tropical regions of, let’s say, just an example, how can I use my local natural environment to cure bamboo such that I don’t have to replace my bamboo in my bamboo structure every four to five years because it rots away? And that’s doable. And that’s just one very simple straightforward example of many.
And then we’re partnering with another large-scale infrastructure project in Sri Lanka where Sri Lanka is in need of 1,000,000 houses, and our partner has the government contract for 10,000 of them. So in that, we’re partnering to replicate the model of Costa Rica. And there the benefits, the win-all situation that we’re creating is that we’re transferring the knowledge of our first prototype, which is in South India, into Sri Lanka, and in that moving the production cost of a house from €200 per square meter to €100 per square meter. And this is enormous if you think about 10,000 houses. And so that’s how we earn the liberation of compostable money into what we call a miracle factory, because that’s what we ultimately need. We need some miracles also there. And there are other places that have shown interest. So we’re really starting to move this into reality, out of a weird, crazy dream into physical reality.
Jim: In the US, not fancy new construction is about $2,000 or just a little bit less than €2,000 per square meter. So you’re talking €100 versus €2,000.
Thomas: Well, that’s counting for the fact that you can build in a way that you don’t need air conditioning. You don’t need heating. You don’t need many of these things. But what’s most important here is there’s a different code. Building code in whatever it’s called around the North Atlantic serves industry in large part.
Jim: Yeah. The building codes are famous because there’s all kinds of lobbying that goes on. I happen to be involved with the electrical code people many, many years ago, and I was shocked and appalled at how it’s basically a creature of the industries that supply electrical components. And the code is adjusted to be good for their businesses to make people buy shit they don’t need. Surprise, surprise.
Thomas: Exactly. Exactly. No surprises. It’s a symptom of the multipolar trap that drives the shit show. Right? You need to feed this lobbying into the system to grow the GDP, and there’s no need of finger pointing in this. There’s no need to get angry with anybody. People are trying to do the best in their situation, and that’s understandable. So there’s an obligation, there’s a deep agreement in the group of people that I’m working with – there’s an obligation of using our privilege that we definitely have, right, in order to shift that game. And therefore we’re also looking towards other places of privilege.
If you look at where large accumulations of money have happened over the last century or so, definitely Norway is one of those places. Norway has taken natural resources in the form of oil, sold it to the world and accumulated enormous wealth. They own roughly 2% of everything that’s ownable on this planet, but they also are aware that some of that should be composted back into life. If you follow where money actually comes from, you could make the statement that every token of money is ultimately a claim on life lost. Because it’s been extracted somewhere, some ecosystem has been desolated, there’s been some form of death happening. So if you have a surplus of that stuff, of money, then the best thing to do with that is composting it back into life.
And they’ve seen that, at least a glimpse of it. So they’re wanting to compost some of that money. And so helping Norway to see how this could be done is one of the things we like to undertake. That’s why we package the whole project of building miracle factories around materials, around ultimately at later stages around food systems, educational systems, etcetera, to create blueprints that then can be elevated to a digital space all over the world. Building that, we call the Oslo Project at the moment, as a nod to the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project did save a situation, absolutely, right? There was a real threat that Hitler would be the first with a nuclear bomb, and I don’t want to imagine what the world might look like if that had happened. So the US, thankfully, threw $34 billion or something like that in today’s money.
Jim: Oh, today’s money. Yeah. Probably about $3.03 trillion. Not a lot, actually, on the scale of things. Right? It would be, you know, three months worth of fighting in Iraq at the peak.
Thomas: Yep. So it’s actually quite cheap to do this, they threw $34 billion of today’s money at this and solved it. And we see what we’re trying to do as our contribution here as an inverse Manhattan Project. Situated in Norway, that’s why we call it the Oslo Project – to say, let’s create a situation for mutually assured thriving rather than mutually assured destruction. And that’s what we’re after.
Jim: Ah, several questions. We’ll get into some of the details later. But if you’re successful, how are you going to avoid the temptation to fall into the multipolar trap and try to, you know, preserve this intellectual property for yourselves, monetize it, as we say? You know, if you’re building the next nuclear power, right, what kind of governance do you need? What kind of agreements do you need in place, to make sure this doesn’t happen? You know, just a recent example – there was this little company called OpenAI. What hilarious that its name is OpenAI. Right? And, you know, before they even had their product in the market, they decided that, oh, we’re gonna be ClosedAI. Right? And now they’re a for-profit company worth $300 billion. What the fuck? Right? How do you avoid that happening to your project?
Thomas: The easy answer is, of course, we’re doing all of this as a nonprofit organization. We’re doing this as a foundation in Norway, the Ardenes Foundation. As you just pointed out with OpenAI, that’s clearly not enough. I can see how influx of liberated money, like from the Norwegian Open World Fund potentially – there’s no conversation happening at this point, but potentially could also create public oversight into this. Right? Because if the donor into this project is basically the people of Norway, they want to have oversight into the actions, so that could be another layer.
The third layer is a technical layer. We would introduce that for several reasons. So once IP has been created in one of the miracle factories, we believe that it should be stored in an immutable way. We could say, let’s put it on a blockchain. Right? And people like Trent McConaghy and his projects, his crazy projects that he’s done, have provided the layer to do so easily. Right? So we can put this knowledge out in the open. It’s immutable. Everybody can have access to it forever, at least as long as there’s two computers running the blockchain.
But ultimately, if we establish that pathway, which is definitely a core part of the strategy, then this will be out in the open from the very beginning. So even if we somehow as a group allow the situation for us to be hijacked, anybody else could start building on this. Also, and this is the second equally important reason for this to be stored in a distributed way for everybody to use for free, is not everybody will be happy about this. Right? And if you store IP like this in centralized spaces, then there’s a risk attached to that. I love the idea that we have this technology at our disposal to store things in a distributed way so that they become immutable. So that’s a multilayered approach, and we still need to really experientially figure out what’s the best governance protocol for all of this. I don’t know it right now, but I know that everybody involved at this point is fully aligned with all of these ideas, and so we will put that into code to make ourselves forced to do this.
Jim: Yeah, I’d say that’s interesting. I’m involved in a similar exercise now on a not-for-profit. I just joined the board, and we’re working the bylaws to make sure that we don’t fall into the OpenAI trap as well. So I’d be very interested what you guys learn. Happy to tell you what we learn. We can share our thinking on how best to protect it. And to your point, nothing is foolproof in this world. Right? But what we can do is put in layered defenses in multiple ways so that the odds are good that we can achieve what we’re trying to achieve.
Thomas: Exactly. And I wanna add one more, which was the first time I saw it was in the Consilience Project, and then my friends at AIM Imagination also did the same thing independently actually, which is giving the organization a death date to prevent whoever’s part of the organization to create patterns of continuation just for the sake of maintaining their salary or whatever their gain is, and rather know that this will be over. This game will be over, whether you achieve the goal or not. Right? So you better achieve it so you have something to build up.
Jim: You know, I talked to Daniel quite a bit about that at the time when he came up with that idea. And I said, okay. I understand where you’re coming from, but trying for the present to define the future that extremely, I personally have doubts about. But what I would suggest, you might consider this, think there’s a way to implement it in your world, is what we eventually discovered is the answer within corporate venturing. Right? I mean, trying to build new businesses inside a major corporation. Major corporations have the bureaucratic disease way worse than not-for-profits do, believe it or not. Once you start something in a corporate environment, people have jobs. They have bosses. They have budgets. The inertia to get rid of that shit, it’s like amazingly difficult.
So when we started building on a massive scale, new businesses, we decided to rather than having a specific death date, we essentially structured something very much like venture capital uses, which is we called gates. You know, it’s the equivalent of running out of money as a startup company. Right? So this project is authorized for eighteen months with this budget. You run out of money, guys, you die. Right? Your goal is to get to that gate with a proof package sufficient for us to approve you to go through the gate with whatever it is you asked for.
And so I don’t know if I’d suggest, but I would say that I’ve never been a great fan in most cases of this closed-end date thing. Because one, we don’t know how long things will take. We don’t know what new – and this is key – what new opportunities we’ll see once we get on the road. Right? So consider a gated approach, which is it has a committed life of five years, let’s say, like Consilience did, but there’s a gate process at the end of that for everyone to decide if that goes forward. And some of those everyone are not the bureaucracy. That’s the key part, right? That you have people who have an external perspective on global value add to the system to decide whether it should go through the gate to the next phase.
Thomas: Let’s add an additional perspective. Because with the example of the Consilience Project, and I think it makes this case of publicizing the IP radically even stronger, which is once death of the organization occurs and all the IP is public, the only value of the organization itself is the group of people representing the organization. Right? There’s no value stored in that entity itself because all of the knowledge is public.
Jim: But what you’ve – and this is key – what you’ve lost are the dynamics of the organization.
Thomas: But that might be a good thing. So the people at that point can regroup into one or two or n new organizations based on the publicly available shareable knowledge and run with a fresh operating system, right? So and I would even argue this is how nature does things.
Jim: Everybody dies. Right?
Thomas: Everybody dies. Right? So your organization should also die. And I’ve struggled with setting a fixed date myself. I agree with that push. But there needs to be some form of stewarding not only the exponential growth curve, but then also plateauing and then decay. Right? And this can be stewarded, and I’m convinced of it. I don’t know how to do it yet, but the death date is the closest mechanism that I found so far.
Jim: Yeah. It’s an interesting conversation. It’d be interesting to see how that thinking works. And particularly if the death date is built deeply into the culture, right, people will think about post-death. Right? And in the early days of Game B Friends, we declared the hardcore operational stage over, and we put it into spore mode, we called it, which was send the people out into the world. Someday you may find conditions right to restart, and it turned out some subset did in 2017. We did not necessarily have that date in advance, but it just seemed the right thing to do at the time. Now here though is a negative, which I also pointed out to Daniel at the time. When you have a death date, in many cases, your best people will leave well before the death date, and you’ll have adverse selection on people, which is people who don’t have good alternatives for their careers will stay to the end because they’re being paid more than they’re worth in the marketplace. While those who have more value in the marketplace will tend to exfiltrate from your organization some considerable period, a year, even two, before the death date. So keep that in mind as another possible negative of a hard death date.
Thomas: Well, if the best people leave and the IP is public, then they can either do something completely different. But if they continue to do what that organization was supposed to do, but they get bored with the organization, they might go out and do it better. So that’s a win. It’s actually a win.
Jim: That’s the other argument. So it’d be very interesting to see. I’ll be watching this with great interest to see how that goes. Consilience Project must be coming up on its five years pretty soon.
Thomas: Maybe that’s an interesting conversation to have with them.
Jim: Maybe I’ll have Daniel, and we’ll talk about that. That’d be interesting. Alright. Let’s do an overview of the many things that could fit into your heliocentric civilization, and then we’ll come back and dig deeper into the material side where it looks like you’ve done more real thinking about what it might be. But I think the breadth of this vision is interesting to show off first. Let’s talk just briefly about the categories of material infrastructure things that you guys are thinking about. Then let’s get into some of the other interesting things like, how do you replace silicon? That would be interesting. My notes basically show me that one of the first things you’re thinking about is construction systems. And as I say, we’ll come back to that. Tell us what you can tell us at a high level first about construction and maybe other infrastructure things like roads.
Thomas: Humans have built houses for a long, long time, right, or homes or places to live. And it’s just recent that we’ve started using the kinds of materials that we’ve used. So a lot of a big portion of the material stack that you could use for a truly heliogenic, regenerative, nature-aligned, life-centered way of building is already existing.
Let’s take one example from a place called Auroville in South India, which is compressed earth blocks, stabilized compressed earth blocks. So essentially, with a little addition of clay or sometimes cement or other stabilizers like geopolymers, etc., and a manual machinery that you can use to compress the earth, enriched earth, or the local earth if it works, which happens, into blocks that after a drying period of a week or two can be used as building blocks for a house, basically reduces production costs to almost zero to the labor and a machine that can be used over and over again. And with almost zero extraction, you might want to flatten the place where you want to build your house anyway so you need to extract some earth anyway so you could use that immediately.
Now there’s a problem on the upper end of this. Let’s switch over to New Mexico where a lot of earth construction is also happening in the form of Earthships. And if people haven’t heard of it, it’s really worth checking out because it’s an ingenious design to use laws of physics to cool and warm a house in a way that requires almost zero active energy. So it can run fully on passive solar. But it requires glass, a lot of glass. So essentially it’s a longhouse wrapped in earth, lots of thermal mass on three sides, and one of the long sides is positioned such that it receives a lot of sunlight and shielded from the outside by two layers of glass, which essentially creates a greenhouse in the front and a temperate space in the back. This is where your living quarters are.
Now where does glass come from? Glass usually comes from some silicate-rich sand somewhere on the other end of the planet that needed to be extracted with heavy machinery running on fossil fuels, being heated up several times with a lot of fossil fuels and shipped across the planet with a lot of fossil fuels so that we can build this Earthship. Now can we find a replacement? And it turns out that absolutely, yes, we can. There are several. Let’s go first back into old knowledge. There’s a way of producing glass from bones. It’s not completely see-through, but it’s absolutely usable. And it’s an old technique that can be refreshed and is being refreshed – I’m in conversation with a young lady from Germany who’s perfecting that art and currently using it for big installations for global brands, right? But not at scale yet, that could be one solution.
But also you could be more sophisticated than that and use E. coli with enzymes on their outsides who in silicate-rich water create little spheres of glass around themselves. And these spheres of glass are being used as lenses to increase the properties of solar panels better. But if you give them a scaffold, they will grow along that scaffold. This is early, right? This is maybe TRL two or three. This is not scalable yet, but that’s exactly the task that we’re after with The Miracle Factory is to identify these kinds of projects, these kinds of scientific insights, and then help us all to start growing glass.
So that’s one of the pathways. There are actually two interesting attempts at roads. One is a Norwegian startup – in that case, and I want to say something about startups after this – what they do, their name is Carbon Crusher, you can look them up, what they do is they use biopolymers. They obtain that from waste paper, but there could be other sources. They essentially crush the surface of an existing road that needs repairing, and they bind that crushed material with biopolymers. And the properties of that road are as good as a fully fossil-based road. They can also do that, and they don’t have to crash old roads, they can build new roads with that process as well.
And there’s another startup in Munich, Germany, they’re called BindX. They’re producing microorganisms that bind loose materials like dirt. They use that for different applications, one of them being dirt roads in the Global South, which is a huge problem. In the Global North, you’re not really aware of that. But when it’s dry, there’s a lot of dust creation with every car that goes through or if there’s wind that then is detrimental to health, is detrimental to many things, and people use water, really scarce and really precious resource, to stop that from happening very often. Or in Costa Rica, actually, molasses is used from sugarcane, but it washes away. So what they do is they bind the surface layer around eight centimeters with microorganisms that they can apply.
So there are many, many applications already. And I just want to give one idea here that can help us use the power of both of those that I mentioned as the last points are startups, right? So they’re entrapped in the multipolar trap. Ultimately, if they’re successful, they will hit a point where they need to take part in the shitshow and extract from somewhere in order to survive in the marketplace. So way out could be to offer a new exit path, and we call that “exit to planet.” That would make the founders and the investors and everybody happy, but creates a win-all situation for the world and also the ambition for the founder most of the time. Right? The founders want to do something good in the world. So what does that mean? That means that large pools of liberated money could offer to buy that startup at market valuation, so nobody’s losing anything, and then gift it into the commons. And through this mechanism, we could very, very quickly point entrepreneurial activity and also capital towards life-serving solutions that then end up in the commons and allow us all to spin out of the or create a multipolar dance to move out of the multipolar trap.
Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting. If you can get enough capital to essentially surrender itself from the money-on-money return game. My conversations with especially the next generation, the children of the billionaires, more and more of them are willing to consider that at least at a 2-3-5% of their portfolio scale, which adds up to a considerable amount of money. Though whether it’s enough to actually buy successful startups, I don’t know.
Thomas: It depends on the stage. It could be an interesting question to discuss whether this needs to happen at market saturation at late scaling stage or whether this happens before scaling.
Jim: The time would be when does it become self-sufficient with respect to capital. I don’t think you’d want to do it before that because otherwise you just have a recursive problem of now I got to go out and get more game A capital. Right? So if I were to think about this as a way to truly liberate them into the commons, it would be at the point where the company no longer needs external capital.
Thomas: No longer needs external capital, but would need external capital for additional growth. So if you’re at maintenance point, if you want to capture the entire market globally or we just maintain the situation where we’re at because we are sustainable from an economic perspective, that’s a really interesting sweet spot for Exit the Planet. Because after that, the founders and early investors will be diluted out anyway because there’s a lot of capital required for the growth phase. Right? So their interest is not necessarily to enter growth phase. Their interest might even be to exit at this point and maintain the mission that was originally set.
Jim: That’s often what happens anyway, that the founders get outgrown by the business. And sometimes, unfortunately, the founders don’t realize it and hold on too long. That happens quite frequently. The other though might be what would happen if you engineered the businesses and the processes such that instead of growing vertically in size, they grew horizontally into multiple companies. Right? You thought from day one, we said we’re gonna build instead of building one $20 billion company, we’re gonna build $200 hundred-million-dollar companies that once they reach cash flow breakeven, could then grow organically at some natural rate in situ. It might be a radical different business architecture rather than focusing on mega growth in the vertical.
Thomas: I actually have a term for this. I call this feminine scaling. It came up in a conference. You know Thomas Bruckman, right? I think he’s been here too.
Jim: Oh, yeah.
Thomas: Yeah. Thomas did the Emerge conference in Berlin once, and he asked me to do a little workshop on deep tech, actually. And we had this beautiful, really powerful board of people there that did a fishbowl. Indy Johar, I think he’s been here too, right?
Jim: Yeah, he’s – I really like him. Now there’s an interesting guy.
Thomas: Yeah. I love Indi. He’s given me really, really good thoughts. So many people of the kind of Indy, and we started talking about deep tech, and then Indi put in the idea of care economy. And then suddenly, because it was a fishbowl, the audience showed us that they were not at all interested in what we were talking about, deep tech, but they were interested in first care and then feminine tech. And I had no idea what that meant. So I invited, I changed the topic midway. I said, “Yeah, let’s spend the rest of the show talking about feminine tech, whatever that is, and I only want to hear from women.” And first it was really, really confusing. It was a lot of sorting going on. But what came out at the conclusion of it was that there’s a difference in thinking about scaling. One is growing linearly and making something planetary sized and stuffing the planet inside. Let’s call that masculine scaling. And there’s the other form is more like replication – having a solution that works here in place and is always place-based. That’s really interesting. It needs to work here for me, otherwise it’s not of value. And then gifting it somewhere else or passing it somewhere else and saying, “This works for me here, see how it works for you over there and what you need to adapt to do it.” This is very similar to how Tyson thinks about growth versus increase. Right? Something just growing in size is a pretty boring thing. Something increasing in its density and its interrelations is not only more resilient, but also has the potential to yield more innovative flares on top of it.
Jim: Yeah. It’s more surface. Right? You know, quite simple just from geometry. You know, take a one big sphere of mass x or a 100 little spheres – who has more surface? Right? The little spheres. So I think that’s all very interesting. I do think that does touch back to Tyson. You know, Capurro has been on the show several times talking about these very interesting topics. But now let’s turn back to the hard part. Okay? These are all interesting ideas, but they are also locked in a multipolar trap, which is, you know, I’m a developer in Sri Lanka, and I want to build 10,000 houses. Right? And I can do it with these bunch of hippies, but it’s gonna cost me 50% more than if I did it in whatever the traditional method of building houses in Sri Lanka is.
Thomas: It’s actually 50% less.
Jim: You said that. I know you say that, but is that really true?
Thomas: That’s really true.
Jim: And if it’s really true, why aren’t the commercial builders in Sri Lanka already doing it?
Thomas: I honestly don’t know because it’s been tried, but the first part I can definitely say, and people can look it up. In Auroville, which is an interesting place in itself where we could talk about forever, there’s a place called the Earth Institute. The Earth Institute was established roughly forty years ago in order to understand how to construct with Earth. And so there’s a lot of research and a lot of experience, I don’t know, around 50 countries of building with these kinds of processes. And these houses – I have been in them, have touched them, have seen them. They require no more maintenance to be stable and to serve as solid, safe houses as conventional industrial methods might need. So that’s solved, it’s there. Why isn’t it being applied at scale in Sri Lanka? I have some guesses. There was actually Earth Institute conducted a quite large project together with the UN. There were a couple of thousand houses built in that way that first ran into cultural differences. So people had problems accepting this kind of building because it wasn’t what everybody else was doing, it wasn’t what they were seeing on television. We want to have concrete because that’s how people in the global north do it, these kinds of ideas.
Jim: House as status symbol, not house as use value.
Thomas: Correct. So that’s one. The other one could be a resistance by the industry because once somebody sees how it’s done, they can replicate it. So you essentially, as industry, you’re making yourself obsolete if you go down that route because the construction process and the supply chain are fully transparent and replicable, and that’s not something you would like to do as industry. Right? So I’m only assuming this, I don’t know.
Jim: That makes sense, especially the cultural barriers. You know, in a mass consumer product, it’s hard to get people to change from what is at least in part a status gain. Right? As you say, the North does it this way. Therefore, it must be better. Right? Even though it may be completely inappropriate for their culture and their climate. But let’s take the same question and apply it where it’s a business-to-business question, where the economics come more sharply to the edge. And that would be like, well, for the things we’ve talked about so far, your biogas project. How does biogas get to the point where it’s economically close enough that people will use it versus an extremely mature industry that goes back hundreds and maybe thousands of years, the manufacture of glass by applying heat to quartz, basically.
Thomas: The way we think about this is that at this point, we don’t know this particular question. The assumption is, and that’s what we need to find out with our micro factories, the assumption is that as the production cost of glass essentially drops to zero money and some time and effort instead, swapping money for time and effort, it becomes a no-brainer for a community to do so. Right? And in a community, there might also be somebody who is the person who is compelled to constructing houses. So that could be seen as a business. So that entity could start growing that kind of glass in place and having some means of transaction. Yes. But ultimately, I think it’s going to emerge into a different form of economy completely. Right? I think we have to be really, really careful here not to entrap ourselves in the idea of trying to reinvent capitalism. Capitalism is not the economy. Capitalism is one way of thinking about the economy. Right? It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, but that’s exactly what we’re asking. Because if you see nature as an economy, which it ultimately is, it’s a web of actors interacting to mutual benefit – I don’t know how to better describe an economy – then what if we could do something similar?
Jim: Though keep in mind, Mother Nature’s based on one person eating the other. Right?
Thomas: Yeah. Well, that’s not one person, but one living entity eating another. Yes. Absolutely. Right?
Jim: It’s all about who eats who. That’s the classic food web. Right?
Thomas: We’re composting each other, but the notion could be rather than seeing ourselves as an apex predator, which currently we are to our own detriment, we could start seeing ourselves as an apex custodian. I’m saying “an,” not “the,” but as an apex custodian weaving the conditions of nurturing, of life-serving solutions around us in our bioregion. That’s actually a crucial element in the idea of the heliogenic civilization, which is if your entire material stack that is required for a successful thriving life is growing out of your bioregion, you will automatically take care of your bioregion, and you will become the custodian of that bioregion. And since you can be luxuriously self-sufficient in that because there’s no real limits to what can be grown, and I know you’re eager to talk about the high-tech stuff that could ultimately be grown, then there’s no need for any kind of extraction locally or elsewhere. It’s really, really important. And that turns into a fundamentally different kind of economy, in which I’m not dismissing the use of money itself. Money as an abstraction is useful in part. I’m not using – I mean you can see me, the listeners can’t – but I might have to use a lawn mower to cut my hair, but I’m not doing that. I’m using the right tool for the right purpose. I’m using money as an ultimate abstraction for any kind of economic activity which might be quite silly actually. And so that’s why I’m not sure I can really answer that question of what’s a business-to-business relation.
Jim: I would suggest then, and of course, we thought about a fair bit of this in Game B economics, is that to make that work, you essentially have to build a membrane that chooses to eschew dollar-on-dollar economics as the measure of all value. So for instance, you could say this community by an agreement says that we are not going to buy glass even if it is cheaper, right? Because it’s cheaper in a false sense that does not properly value the ecosystem, the ability of locality and self-sufficiency, etcetera. And so we as an accord choose to close our membrane to that particular thing coming through to provide an ecosystem that works for this alternative way of doing it.
Thomas: In outcome, I fully agree. In pathway, I wanna be really careful about the language. I don’t think we build the membrane. I think the membrane is an emergent property of the building blocks that create a heliogenic civilization.
Jim: I was gonna argue that they have to coevolve. It’s because just like – this is very important – life we now think could not have evolved in the open. The membrane may have come first. There’s a number of origin-of-life thinkers who have done a lot of work that the certain class of lipids that in water will form a membrane. And it may have been that the ability to concentrate reactions in the membrane was a necessary precursor before the reactions could get concentrated enough to create life. And so in some sense they coevolved. And I’m gonna suggest it’s worth thinking about that in the same way that chemicals that might have been able to form an autocatalytic network to produce life could not do so where they’re constantly being diluted by other things. The same might be true for this class of entrepreneurial bootstrapping, where if you’re competing with the glass coming from all over the world, it’s really, really hard for anybody to get any traction at all with bioglass. And so you may need to coevolve the membrane at the same time you’re evolving the technology, or it’ll get diluted by the systemic multipolar trap.
Thomas: Yeah. That invokes several pictures here, but I’m just gonna pick the idea that my mentor in all things money, Bernard Lietaer, shared with me and ultimately turned into his big life stream. So just a word on Bernard. He was the head of the Central Bank of Belgium before he was the chief architect of the introduction of the euro. And I met him in 2003 because he wanted to create a new currency somewhere in Germany together with the head of the central bank back then. I was there because I had a software company that was supposed to build a platform for them. All of that never happened, but in the aftermath and the years after this, learned a lot, everything really I know about money from Bernard.
And he used to relay this story about the city of Ghent in Belgium. So they had an issue with a part of town with a lot of illegal immigrants. And because of their status, they obviously didn’t have much income, and that led to the usual downward spiral, substance abuse, violence, all of that, desolation in the place. Nobody knew how to help these people to legalize themselves and to get out of that multipolar trap they were in. And ultimately, the Belgian government called Bernard and asked him if he was willing to help. He came in, and he asked the people what they dreamt of. And somehow it emerged that most of the people were dreaming of a little piece of land so they could grow something. He got a piece of land from the city. He made it accessible for rent by a currency that he invented that was only earnable by doing things that would improve the living conditions, the environment. So cleaning the streets, being nice to your neighbors, putting flowers in the windows, cleaning the house, all of these kinds of things would earn you the currency that would get you what you wanted to fulfill your dream. And then next to nothing, the environment changed, and with the change of environment, people started pulling themselves out, and that was then replicated in other cities in Belgium. This worked.
Jim: Yep. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, this is where you add additional dimensions into the signaling regime. You know, the problem of money on money return is it’s a single dimension, which then trounces all other values. When you add other signaling dimensions, in this case, it sounds just like that, where you’re saying, if you do these good things, you get these signaling capacities to produce another good that may not be strictly denominated in terms of money.
Thomas: Let’s try to bind this with what you said earlier about the membrane. I think the dream is the membrane of the heliogenic civilization, like the ion channel. The dream is the channel, the opening, the pathway to the outside.
Jim: Yeah. The membrane must be semi-permeable. Right?
Thomas: Semi-permeable. In a cell, there’s ion channels among humans.
Jim: And other things. You know, there’s lots and lots of different ways that things move through membranes in living worlds. Ion channels is one but there’s many.
Thomas: Yeah. That’s a communication pathway. But let’s say dreams are something like the ion channels, the communication pathway between the inside and the outside. That binds back to the understanding of coherent pluralism in the deep grounding of ourselves in what it means to be humans if we get in touch with our three hundred thousand years of being humans. On the inside of the membrane, we’re very coherent because we share some form of dream, and we usually call that culture. And on the outside, there’s a different kind of dream maybe, but it’s compatible to an extent.
Jim: At the coherent level, there’s some things we agree at the outer because an outer membrane, let’s call it, controls the whole heliocentric civilization. There’s a small group of things that we all agree are. If we’re gonna play the heliotropic game, we all agree on these things. And then we use theme and variation to provide coherence around things we agree on at multiple levels. For instance, this pod of membranes could include an intermediate level membrane around them, which says we’re gonna use these approaches, but not these approaches. And oh, by the way, have a governance mechanism to change those rules over time. Right?
Thomas: Now we’re beginning to explore what it could feel like to be inside of the heliogenic civilization. Feels really, really weird from the perspective of North Atlantic mind and soul. Right?
Jim: Yeah. The nation state that came from the – what the hell was it? The Treaty at the end of the Thirty Years’ War where we established the nation state as this – or not even the nation state yet – the sovereign state as this all-controlling, all-coercive entity.
Thomas: I agree that both have to coevolve, and they will be emergent properties of each other as they evolve. That’s why I start using the term multipolar dance. Right? It’s never only one thing that has to be pulled up. But it is surprisingly easy to see the patterns of healthy dimensions of a civilization once you start deeply looking into and trusting the fact that we’ve already done this. We’re not really inventing anything new here. It’s more a deep remembering and a reweaving of what it’s actually that we’re doing here as humans. Right?
Jim: Yeah. For your earlier point, we’re in part at least returning to three hundred thousand years of species history. We obviously did live as biological creatures for most of that time. Five thousand years ago, did we start the transition away from being biological creatures once we tamed nature in the form of agriculture? And then we made another inflection point when we figured out how to understand nature a deep enough way to do really crazy shit, you know, between three hundred and four hundred years ago.
Thomas: One additional portion of that permeability is maybe, and sticking with the theme of governance, but also technology, is there’s this interesting pattern that Santa Fe Institute, Geoffrey West, SCALE discovered, which is really interesting – a really interesting perspective to understand why people would like to flock to cities. While it is very unhealthy and not a lot of fun to be in a city, people still do it because there are so many benefits of being in interconnected groups. We now have technology that might make that obsolete. Right? There’s no clear reason anymore why we should be physically in the same place when we can be virtually in the same place. So building on what you just said about remembering and going back in time, we’re not talking going back into caves here. Right? We still want to have global communication like we have right now, like we have been using for the last couple of years to have these conversations. And we still want to have that because it is of enormous value.
Jim: Yeah. Let me insert here that someone who has really worked on formalizing this is Jordan Hall in his Civitas work – in fact, that was Civitas. We’ve had him on the podcast a few times talk about it, and he’s written a fair bit. And he was indeed inspired by Jeff West, and his insight was there’s really two exponentials in scaling of cities. One is the scaling of the good. You get more patents. You get more classical music written. You get more businesses started. You have higher incomes. People even walk faster as it turns out, all on the same scaling law on the size of cities. The bad also scales at the same exponential. Right? Crime, disease, mental health issues, pollution, etcetera. And so Jordan’s very interesting but simple concept was to your point today, why now? So, you know, the answer we often ask ourselves when we think about why are we trying this crazy new social operating system stuff is because you can actually separate the two. You know, let’s live at scales small enough so that the bad exponential is tiny while using technology to allow ourselves to interoperate such that the positive exponentials still exist. Very clever move.
Thomas: Now how would that fit in a heliogenic civilization? Well, right now, we would still have to use rare earths to build the satellites and computers and all of the devices we need to do this, but also there, if you look into cutting-edge science, you see the evolution of biological compute. People are actively using human neurons in some cases. There’s enzymatic compute, there’s mycelium compute, there’s DNA compute and storage. And these are at the beginning. Right? These haven’t evolved yet. A mycelium computer can play a four-by-four chess game. Right? But it can do this. So if we actually, and think again in Oslo project scale, right, or Manhattan Project scale, if we apply the ingenuity of humanity to these kinds of challenges, we will solve them.
Jim: If they’re solvable, but they may or may not be. That’s a thing to keep in mind. You know, mycelial computing, maybe. DNA-based computing, people have been fooling with that for forty years and really had just a few toy examples that work. We should have a portfolio of these things. We should be thinking about them, but we have to keep our balance on the balls of our feet so that we don’t make religious judgments about what the right road is, but rather what works.
Thomas: Exactly. Of course. I’m the last one to fall or try – I hope I don’t fall into the techno-utopian trap because I think that’s an actual trap of hoping that we will innovate ourselves out of everything. This is like getting on a spaceship that’s half built and saying, “Okay, we’ve got to travel for a hundred years now, but we’ll figure it out along the way.”
Jim: Of course, that’s where we actually are today. Right? Our technology driven by the money-on-money return engine and the multipolar trap is on the tech utopian. Let’s just hope that a miracle occurs and we don’t actually fuck everything up. Right? That’s where we actually are.
Thomas: That’s why we have building the miracle factory. But if you look at, for example, the CO2 pollution happening in Germany, 40% of that is due to construction. And so if you just shift that, if you shift construction, if you reduce the need for logistics as a second order of shifting construction, you already go in an enormous way, not only in reducing CO2 emissions, but also in ecosystem destruction. Right? So you go a long way. And so we don’t need to invent biological heliogenic compute today. There’s no need. We also have working infrastructure today, but we should start going and we should start moving on this. And while we’re doing the low hanging fruit, right? The low hanging fruit starts with the heavy polluters, the heavy extractors, construction, logistics, food systems, clothing, all of these aspects. And these are easy to solve compared to the compute.
Jim: I agree with you, and I’m not sure I would put it much other than some R&D dollars on biological compute right now. But, you know, a small slice, why not? There are lots about, as you say, many things we can do between here and there. One of the most important is solar energy. To your point earlier, we’re about turning material into stuff using energy just as Ma Nature is, but we can do so much more efficiently, though we still need some.
And interestingly, I’m just thinking here – dangerous to do in public, but that’s never stopped me before – which is the level of your technologies is going to grow over time as all technologies do. I’m going to conjecture here that one of the ways of measuring the maturity of your biomimicry technologies is the decrease in external energy embedded in the product. So for instance, a fungal building block will have less external energy embedded in it per brick than a brick cooked in a brick oven will. But that will not jump from zero to one or one to zero overnight. Therefore, there will be a diminishing but not abrupt decline in the external energetic intensity of things as biomimicry gets better.
So therefore, we will still need to scale our external energy sources. And one that seems compatible, certainly with a heliocentric civilization ethos, is solar energy. Interestingly, the podcast that will be on just before yours – we published it two nights ago – was Doyne Farmer on complexity economics. He also talks about and has done a lot of work on the surprisingly optimistic learning curves around solar energy. Solar energy is coming on extremely rapidly and will get even more economical in the relatively short term. Yes, there’s still some exotic materials used, but the main materials are pretty simple – they’re aluminum and sand and some copper. We can build these into these two intercepting curves: increasing decreasing cost of solar energy and broader deployment, and a reduction of extrinsic energy embedment in materials using biomimicry. We run both those two curves together, and it makes a lot more sense than running either curve by itself.
Thomas: Absolutely. And I would add to that that the way we think about solar energy only in electricity and solar panels is very, very limited. We could also add other vectors to that, producing gas from natural processes driven by sunlight, for example.
Jim: Yeah. I’ve been in conversations with people for now, fifteen years, on artificial photosynthesis, for instance.
Thomas: Right. But that’s that’s advanced stuff.
Jim: So far not successful. And I would say there’s also been a disappointment so far in trying to use algae to produce diesel fuel precursors. But that’s another one where a fair bit of money was spent, oddly enough at an American nuclear weapons lab for some reason – they let some people work on it there. But those are some other things that might work someday. But I’m gonna put my own bet on that particular one is that in the short term, the answer is gonna be solar energy plus hydrogen electrolysis to produce truly relatively green hydrogen, and then hydrogen can be formed into dense liquid fuels not that expensively. And so there may well be a heliocentric road to liquid dense fuels, which will still be needed for certain things. Not as much, obviously. The more heliocentric the material side is, the less of those highly dense materials we’ll need, those highly dense energy sources. But we’ll still need some for like jet planes, rockets, things like that. Those can be built using solar energy. Like, it could be done now. Siemens has a full stack that can produce diesel from hydrogen. The current cost is about twice producing diesel fuel from market energy, but twice is not a big number when you’re talking about something that’s improving as rapidly as both solar energy and hydrogen electrolysis, both of which are growing at very amazing rates. When you project that out fifteen years, one could have diesel fuel or jet fuel, which is really the same thing, more or less competitive with petroleum-based products. And that would be a very interesting inflection point where, among the things that looked like it was hard to do – electric battery, long-range airplanes, no time soon probably – but solar to hydrogen to synthetic diesel, probably doable.
Thomas: And this is driven by necessity, right? So the thing that we call the heliogenic material stack or heliogenic civilization, that’s nothing special or new. It’s been termed biomimicry before. It’s been termed biomimetic. You can use many different names for this. How we distinguish the heliogenic idea from all of the others is that we say it needs to be in the commons, and it needs to be highly distributed. And the reason why everybody already right now and for a long time has been working on this is we’re running out of fossil fuels at one point. I mean, even if we’re still on peak or before peak or whatever, but at one point we’ll run out of these. We don’t have an abundance of materials on the planet, and we don’t yet have proven that we could harvest comets and the moon and etcetera. And I don’t know if you’ve had Simon Michaux here at one point.
Jim: What’s his last name?
Thomas: Michaux, M-I-C-H-A-U-X.
Jim: Sounds right up my alley.
Thomas: So Simon has done at a Finnish government-funded institute a lot of research around the question of how much materials will we need, right? And if we built everything on top of the current state of technology, replaced the entire economy, the entire fossil economy with electric economy, we would need around 4.7 billion tons of copper. Now the last couple of thousand years, we’ve managed to find about 700 million tons. We know of reserves of roughly 900 million tons, which we are planning to extract in the next thirty years. So we’re short about 3 billion tons. So where do they come from? The current race to deep ocean mining is the answer to that, because they’re quite distributed on the ocean floors in so-called nodules which contain a small amount of copper. Now there’s an issue with that because the ocean floors are the largest carbon sink on the planet.
Jim: I, by the way, refuse to invest in a seabed mining operation because I believe the ecological costs are excessive.
Thomas: They’re just actual suicide.
Jim: I think it’s the stupidest thing. I mean, I understand this is a classic multipolar trap. Game A is sending the signal to do this. Holistic thinking about the planet that we live in and our longevity says this is a very fucking bad idea.
Thomas: So I’ve had a conversation with Henrik Sala. Henrik is a really amazing ambassador for the oceans working on protecting a large portion of the global oceans. And he pointed out that right now, dragnets of the fishing industry are stirring up stored carbon from the ocean floors and releasing it into the atmosphere, resulting in as much carbon emissions as all of Germany. Let that sink in. Dragnets create carbon emissions the size of Germany. Now imagine us picking the nodules all over the ocean floors in order to have the copper we need to run electricity all over the planet. That’s suicide. That’s literal suicide.
Jim: Wow. That’s – I’m glad to know that. Send me the link to that guy too. That also sounds very important. But either way, I gotta say, I do happen to know something about the electrical grid and how the math of electrical transmission works. I think that Simon may not be correct here because actually, we can trade off copper for aluminum in transport of electricity. The conductivity is maybe 40% less, but you basically just grow the size of the wire. And because aluminum is much lighter than copper, the actual resultant wire is actually lighter so that the amount of infrastructure you need to hold the wires up is less to transmit the same amount of electricity on aluminum as on copper. And we have unlimited aluminum. There’s essentially an infinite amount of aluminum on the planet. It’s one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust.
Thomas: That could be one pathway, but Simon, I’m sure has a strong view on that. But if you actually think about it in more distributed ways, like you said, it’s a both way. Right? There’s a crossing at one point after which we don’t need to put wires everywhere anymore because we can actually produce on-site where we are. Getting to that sweet spot as quickly as possible is definitely at the core of our thinking, of our work to help us all get into that knowledge stack to do that as quickly as possible.
Jim: Yeah. So let’s recap. I think what we’re thinking here is that using these biomimicry methods, we can reduce the energetic intensity while using solar and including biosolar like artificial photosynthesis or maybe…
Thomas: Or production of gas.
Jim: Yeah. To produce various organic, high, you know, long chain organics to be used as fuels. The two cross, and we can mostly be distributed. Though I would keep in mind that true efficiency is still gonna say you can get a hell of a lot more electricity out of your solar cell in Morocco than you can in Germany. Right? You’re gonna have to be pragmatic and say for a while, it makes sense to produce electricity where it’s cheap to produce and just transmit it to where it’s not cheap to produce. So we always have to keep that in mind. But as our demand for extrinsic energy goes down, then that constraint becomes smaller.
Thomas: Exactly. Beautifully put. Out of that, which we’ve done, we can then unfold all of the aspects of what makes up a thriving civilization. We can look at education systems. How would education systems in such a place work rather than what they’re doing right now? How would governance principles work? For example, there’s at least a correlation between the ease at which central resources in a region, let’s call it a nation state, can be controlled and the form of governance. So usually, there are exceptions to this, of course, but usually the easier it is, the more autocratic the system. The idea that we follow here is if everybody is able, at least in theory, to grow their material stack, it’s really hard to control these people. So there will be different forms of governance that will be much closer to a true form of democracy. These are hopes, alright? It’s not proof, but I think it could be a function of material liberty.
And that is true also for the education system. Right now the education system is a symptom of industry. The industry essentially dictates to politics what they need as the next generation of workers if they have that kind of vision, and then that gets produced. You’ve seen that in the commodification of university. University used to be a place where people explore, open-ended, without goals, in broad ways to understand. And now we’re training people to do specific things. Now what would that look like in a heliogenic civilization? I don’t know, but I guess it has more to do with actually being in service of the world, being in service of the people, being in service of nature, being in service of yourself. We play that across any dimension, but it all comes back to liberation on the material level.
Jim: Yes. That’s always the threat. And particularly in our totally globalized world, there’s a tremendous number of choke points where we can make people literally starve in many countries by essentially political decisions. Trump just cut off a number of programs that are essential for medicine and food to poor countries in Africa, for instance.
Thomas: This stuff I’m talking about here, we’ve ran various prototypes in the form of NGOs over the last couple of years to test assumptions. Now one of these assumptions, we tested in Africa where all we did essentially was help farmers in Siaya, Kenya, coordinate a little bit better among themselves. And so 800 farmers and their families now have higher food security despite losing more or less three harvests due to climate disruptions. Higher food security than anybody around them just because they coordinated. So they’re able to do that also in place, and we’re adding vectors to that. So we can, and there’s this one specific farmer, he’s really outstanding, he’s reestablishing lost knowledge about how to create organic digesters in order to turn food waste into fertilizer, and then spreading that. Because he can only produce so much, but the idea can spread easily. So that’s what I would call feminine scaling at its best. He can serve. He actually sells part of it, but he can only produce so much. So he shares with his friends, so his friends can do this replicate the same thing.
Jim: Alright. Well, we’ve talked about all kinds of interesting things in the details. In the last ten minutes or so, let’s kick it upstairs to your Project Miracle. What are you actually saying that we should do?
Thomas: Yeah. Well, this is what we currently call the Oslo Project because Project Miracle sounds a bit hippie-ish, and we want to get closer to yes.
Jim: Ain’t nothing wrong with that.
Thomas: Well, we started calling it the Oslo Project because we’re doing so much work in Norway.
Jim: And you want their money.
Thomas: We wanna create a match between the money of Norway and the pathway of actual effective building of infrastructure towards a life-serving civilization. So we’re rooting that in the ideas of a philosopher, a Norwegian philosopher, Arne Næss. He termed the words “deep ecology” somewhere in the seventies, and it’s very similar in some ways to what we were proposing with the Heliogenic civilization. And so we’re connecting those two ideas in order to live into a world that actually builds the ideas of what we call deep ecology.
There’s a lot of learning that has happened since the seventies and since Arne died about fifteen years ago or something, which turns us slightly away from the original ideas, right? So Arne’s ideas of deep ecology were very much about no touch, don’t interfere with nature, where at the other end of the spectrum we’re saying let’s be custodians. Let’s actually get in touch with nature and let’s nurture nature and life as much as we can.
To your question, what are we doing with the Oslo project? We’re bringing together the people and the institutions that are already working on what we would call the heliogenic stack – materials but also education systems, food systems, etcetera – organizing funding for them to liberate themselves to do that work at scale and liberate the IP into the commons over the course of the next fifteen years. So ultimately we have a fifteen-year lifespan where we first identify the existing technologies of the matrix of what’s required for building a heliogenic civilization, funding them, then releasing them into the world through releasing the IP and partnering with other organizations, nation states, such to scale them up, and then starting to let go and wind down the operation so that we’re actually the hands-off organization that we want to be and not hijacking any of this for ourselves or not trying to be hijacked by it. Right? So that’s ultimately what we’re doing. It’s a fifteen-year game plan ahead of us that we’re beginning, executing right now based on the active learnings, on the building of knowledge, on the building of resource over the last decades in our network, and now we’re activating that.
Jim: Very, very interesting. Is there a place people can go online to learn about this yet, or are you still undercover?
Thomas: We’re still a little bit undercover, but maybe my blog is a good place to get early knowledge about this, which is blog.thomas.cr, which is a Substack. You could also head to projectmiracle.earth or the miraclefactory.network to see more. And as you said in the beginning, thomas.cr is the entire stack of links that help people fan out into whichever aspect of what we’re working on to really go deep, or just reach out. Anybody who wants to engage, learn more, I’m really happy, and the team is really happy to speak with you.
Jim: Very cool. Well, Thomas, I wanna thank you for an amazingly interesting conversation. We covered all kinds of cool things, right? And we also, of course, we left continents left to be explored. We could have spent twenty hours on this podcast. I had to make a number of tactical decisions. Go, okay. I could go downa that rabbit hole. Nope. I think let’s go over here.
Thomas: Yeah, I could see you’re making these decisions.
Jim: Yeah, exactly. Then but I managed to squeeze in a fair bit into our hour and a half. Actually, we went over by a few minutes, but it was well worth it in this case. So I really wanna thank you for this wonderful conversation and the great work that you are adding to the world.
Thomas: Thank you. And I’m deeply, deeply grateful for all of our conversations and also definitely this one. Looking forward to our next one.
Jim: Absolutely. Which will be on Friday.
Thomas: Yes.
Jim: Alright.