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What is the role of GeoNFTs?
Recorded: July 3, 2025 Duration: 1:22:30Space Recording
Short Summary
In a dynamic discussion, Tim and industry experts explore the intersection of crypto and ecology, highlighting potential partnerships, innovative token launches, and the growing demand for sustainable economic models. The conversation reveals a trend towards integrating ecological metrics into blockchain systems, paving the way for a new era of eco-conscious crypto initiatives.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Jim, everyone, can anybody hear me?
I can hear you.
This is Jim. I want to be sure that my network is not giving me issues. Thank you very much, Jim.
Okay, I don't know. I think we just have to give me some, two more minutes or to see
what else we join in. So apologies for the inconvenience. I think, I don't know, Stephanie
isn't here and then other speakers were supposed to be here but
there is an unforeseen eventuality that happened and they can't make it now. So
we just have to give some more time for others to join and then we will continue. Hello.
Hello.
Oh, dear. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Oh, my gosh. All right. Sorry about that technical
difficulty, everyone. Emmy, would you say, can you hear me?
I can hear you, Stephanie, yes.
Thank you for taking over hosting duties.
Hello, everyone.
I'm so sorry.
My laptop doesn't work.
My phone does.
What's new today?
Tim, I want to welcome you as our speaker today.
Thanks so much.
Yeah, thank you. And also, we tend to greet everyone
that we know and don't know. Katrina is here as a listener, and Peter is here, who knows Tim,
Brave, Kieran, and Emmy from the geek community. Someone is behind that Lonics logo.
And I'm so glad that you're all here, Agent BXM.
I'm Stephanie.
And without further ado, let's get into it.
Because I think, Tim, you're going to take the whole hour,
aren't you?
Well, we'll go for how long we need to.
That's right.
It's awesome.
I would like to first say that your scope of knowledge is so vast.
I'd like to introduce you because we've had the chance to speak once
and correspond a few times you the community when I was
chatting with them said you were thinking about a coin way back in 2011 they were very impressed by
that and my co-founder is going to join us if possible who has listened to the scope of your economics ideas.
And they all take place in the context
of you're deeply involved in agriculture
and sustainable environment, sustainable farming.
Would you take over from there?
Yes. Yeah, thank you.
Yeah, I'll go through a little bit of history, but try to talk more about the present and future and see what people can contribute.
Because this is a vast idea.
It's a heavy lift.
It needs support.
It needs ideas.
And that's why I'm very glad to engage today. So yeah, you know, my career has been agriculture
and the environment and then kind of shifted to ecology and economy. So kind of that kind of one
scale and then at the higher level scale. So I've spent my career in local government, some state government work,
nonprofit, my private business and others connections in my private business. So I so I've been in the government, private and nonprofit world
and non-government.
So that's been a that's been a very enlightening process relative
to always focused on landscapes sustainability and
kind of what i learned is depending on which sector in you you solve problems differently
and that is kind of one of our problems we solve problems differently and they don't and those
problem solving don't align up but uh let me kind of go back a little bit here. So I've been farming, not a large farm, but a farm, a farm
large enough to know what it is since 1996 in the Midwest of the United States here,
Minnesota. And it's actually, I moved back to the farm my great-grandfather settled.
So a long history here. Our sons are the fifth generation. So a deep, deep history of agriculture and just
having, you know, having the land in our ownership. And you kind of get a little, you get a deeper
sense to what that is, which is very helpful, I think, in this field. so, you know, back in 1905, Hugh Bennett, uh, saw the erosion on,
and I think it was in South Carolina, he was doing landscape land surveys and saw the erosion
going on, on these, uh, newly timbered lands and said, this is an economic issue. Soil erosion is
an economic issue. And here we are, you know, 120 years later, and we're still grappling with what that means. And, you know,
because it's a tough subject. You know, in the 30s, the USDA stepped in with their soil conservation
program. And then, you know, that basically funded practices on the landscape. And if you fly across
the United States and you look down,
you can still see many of the practices that went on from the 30s through,
well, today, but 30s through the 1980s was a lot of them.
And if you have an eye for it, you can see the landscape and how valuable that work was.
And in the 80s, we went to kind of an outcome-based program,
the Contributed Reserve Program. 80s, we went to kind of an outcome-based program, the conservation reserve program. So instead of
just practices, we use metrics to determine soil quality, habitat quality. So kind of a shift. It
was a major shift from practice-based to outcome-based. It didn't happen wholesale. It just
happened in little bits. And then at the turn of the century, the 2000, the eco-market started
emerging and they were kind of struggling between
practice and outcome based i was working at the local governments at the time kind of saw this
evolution firsthand um and uh the usda had a program called the conservation security program
to kind of really shift from practice to outcome outcomes but as we are probably familiar with, or many of us in there,
is it's not always the technical and scientific, it's the political and social economic issues
that are the heavy lift. So scientifically and technically, they understood how to go from
practice-based, outcome-based, but fairly well, at least the nuts and bolts of it.
But then it's just so hard to move it forward.
You know, a couple things along the way, Garrett Harding's tragedy, the commons, he wrote that in
the late 60s saying, hey, we have the commons, we have soil, we have water, we have all these things.
They're not privately owned. Of course, people are going to consume them and degrade them.
And unless there's private ownership. And then Eleanor Ostrom came around a decade or two or three later and said,
no, we can govern the commons.
It's been happening for thousands of years.
People govern the commons.
It just has to have the right context.
So that's still being debated on how that can happen.
So I became a fan of governance. We think of governance as a structure
of an organization, and that is part of it, but it's really a problem solving approach.
So as I talked about the sectors, if you give, if you think of a problem and you hand that problem
over to the government or the corporate or the NGO sector, they will devise a different solution.
Each one will have a different solution because each one is structured different to solve problems.
And that's kind of where we're stuck. We're stuck in these silos.
So the challenge is how do we transcend that problem solving approach that none of those sectors are going to give up.
In fact, governance is so intimate to them that if you shift your governance too much,
you become another sector.
Kind of an odd thing to say, but that's kind of how governance defines the sectors.
So here we have sector silos.
We have practice based going to outcome based.
We have tragedy, the commons or governance of the commons.
So all this is on the table.
And I'm farming.
And in 1996, 97, started farming.
And, you know, I had been away from the farm for 20 years.
So I came back with fresh eyes on this.
And then I'm like, you know, if the society, government and others are asking for these ecosystem services, carbon sequestration, pollination, all these things, I'm going to need a market signal.
I mean, as a farmer, you're a price taker and a policy taker.
There's not a lot of lead that you can do as a farmer unless you get really specialized on a particular.
Actually, that's a very good insight. That's very smart.
Okay, good. Yeah, and chime in. I appreciate the comments and make sure people are listening in
and know that. So yeah, so if I'm a price taker and a policy taker, I'm going to need a market
signal. So then early 2000s, I started seeing these metrics show up. I started working
on farm policy for a non-government organization. And these metrics, whether they're soil quality
index, water quality index, et cetera, I recognize them as a, in my previous careers, I could speak to every sector with an index.
I could say, hey, I want a water quality index of 80.
Well, the government can figure out what that means.
The farmer can figure out what that means.
The agronomist, their consultants can figure out what that means.
I mean, it takes a little research, but you can basically explain that in a short period of time that, you know, you have a landscape.
You manage a certain way. It has a certain outputs, and these metrics calculate that. Not 100%. Metrics are good
tools. They're not absolute. But we use them all the time, and we depend on them all the time. And
a good example right now is the USDA will come out with a crop report in July, and it will say, for example, the estimated yield is 174.6 bushels per acre in the United States.
And they'll go down to the 10th of the bushel.
And there's really no kernels on the corn at all.
So they're using algorithms and metrics to determine what this outcome could be.
algorithms and metrics to determine what this outcome could be.
And believe it or not, the markets zero in on that number as if it's the absolute truth
and trade based on that.
So metrics aren't accurate, but they are directionally correct generally.
And they rely on it.
So in the summer, we have a heat index.
There's really not a direct measurement to that,
but there's indices all over our life,
air pollution indices and all that.
So we use indices all over.
Some of them, most of them don't think about.
So this whole environmental metrics world
that I was stepped into,
I saw there's a market signal, and then I had projects that I was stepped into. I saw there's a market signal and then
I had projects that I could demonstrate that out and worked with farmers and things like that.
And so at the time my business attorney says, Tim, I think you have something figured out here.
So write that down. It doesn't have to be long, 80 pages. Just get it on paper so you can,
you know, you have that. So in July of 2009, I finally had some time in front of me to to write.
And I started writing my first book, Eco Commerce 101,
the subtitle, Adding an Ecological Dimension to the Economy.
And it was the the the approach was natural capital
is the foundation or nexus of economic systems and ecological systems.
And so there's a foundation there that is worthy.
It's a good starting point.
I'm sorry, Tim, is that in the sense of a stock of capital? Natural capital. So yeah, natural capital, a very broad term,
really, you know, most broadly, it really means the planet Earth, you know, and how it functions
ecologically. So a field, you want to go right down to a field, like a field on our farm,
you could define that as a, you know, as natural capital.
And it consists of the soil, the plants, the weather, you know, the precipitation. So all
those things that make life on this planet possible are really fall on the umbrella of
natural capital. So I see. I see. So yeah, John, I wanted, I'm sorry sorry i was going to try to introduce you to tim because you haven't
spoken yet tim john is a um in one of his many roles he's uh studies public economics and local
public economics and now i'll be quiet okay okay i did speak once but but no so uh so what you're
describing actually is what we would what i think economists would call an endowment.
So there's, you know, there's endowments that are fundamental.
And basically what we do is we take rocks and we make them into iPhones.
And everything in between is, are things that are not fundamental endowments.
It's their labor and other things like that.
They're labor and other things like that.
So not to sound like a Marxist, but ultimately there are these things which require no production and they just exist.
And that's the sort of natural resources that you're describing.
Sure. And I have developed a natural capital accounting system, a unique one, that addresses the abiotic, as you mentioned, as well as the biotic aspects of natural capital accounting system, a unique one that addresses the abiotic, as you
mentioned, as well as the biotic aspects of natural capital. That biotic can also be natural. I mean,
the thing is we have nothing to do. Well, we have nothing to do with the potential, I suppose,
that we do plant trees and then that creates a biotic endowment. Sure. I look at the biological
ones as conditionally renewable, meaning that, you know, based on environmental and other impacts to it.
The conditions determine the productivity of it, where the abiotic, non-renewable, such as sunshine and all those things.
Yeah, we, you know, we get them.
Yeah, we, you know, we get them. They're renewable.
They're renewable.
The abiotic geophysical, once you're talking about the rocks, yeah, they're there.
They're non-renewable.
And then in between those two layers is the, which I define them as biophysical resources, the plants, animals, and then the bioprocesses, the things that support it.
So if we would be on Mars, we'd be talking about
the abiotic renewable and the abiotic non-renewable. We're on planet Earth, so we get those two in the
middle, the biological conditionally renewable. So it helps. As a farmer, I use all four layers
of that natural capital. I mean, you know. you're neglecting the labor input of the Martians.
Well, that's not natural capital.
So yeah, right.
The robots on there are, yeah,
are part of the production system out there.
Continue.
Yeah.
So yeah, so natural capital,
and then what I call the natural capital unit is these four layers.
I adopted the thinking from a gentleman from Norway, Peter Logba, and incorporated that into my first book and later on adopted it to my natural capital unit. So that's a, that's a key point to be able to create
a conical unit, a fundamental unit of natural capital. And there's, there's multiple natural
capital accounting systems, but none of them, to my knowledge, work for me as a landscape
practitioner. And a lot of them are more from an academic, you know, scientific perspective from
the biomes on down, where I need, as a landscape practitioner, I need to have one that aggregates from the bottom up.
So that's that's so.
So being being in crypto, I've got a sort of naturally adverse reaction to governance as a notion, because governance is a sort of thing that undermines
contracts and commitments governance says that it is whatever i say it is because we can vote
and realign everything so governance that that's but but on the other hand what you
actually were talking about i believe is what economists describe as contractability
is what economists describe as contractibility.
So you can't make a contract with somebody
unless you can describe a metric of performance.
So if I don't know that you've delivered four papers to a doorstep,
I can't make a contract with you to be a paperboy
because I don't really know how to measure your execution of the contract correctly.
So, yeah, I think you're absolutely right that the fundamental is to describe these measures
of whatever it is you think is socially or otherwise important.
And from there, you would develop what, again, economists, my nerdy persona, would describe as a mechanism.
So rather than governance, I guess I would say that a farmer as a price taker and a policy taker would say,
all right, I really don't know why you care about ducks.
It's not really my business to care.
Maybe I care about ducks more than you.
It doesn't particularly matter.
But if you say that I've got to set aside a certain part of my life, I don't have to.
But if I do set aside a certain part of my land for waterfowl, then I'll be rewarded in a certain way, then I'll respond optimally.
And if your mechanism is aligned with whatever the social objective is,
then you achieve it in this kind of decentralized way,
meaning that farmers that can easily create wetlands do it
and those that can only do it at great expense don't.
And that's exactly what you want.
You want the most wetland at the least cost.
So metrics and mechanisms are exactly the right, in my view, the right way to approach
all of these kinds of free riding and collective action and commons problems.
Sure, because it's the same way I decide to grow corn or beans or forage.
Right, exactly. It's not governance, it's mechanisms. I don't care about your governance.
It is just, what is it to me personally? That's how I approach governance. And each sector has a unique problem-solving approach.
And I solve problems as a practitioner certain different ways than if I am a policymaker.
So, but I just on a quick side note, I developed a governance assessment and design model because I didn't find one that was adequate for my work.
I didn't find one that was adequate for my work. And I basically can assess
the nearly infinite number of governance variations, you know, and I use this combination
of actors and styles. But that's a side note. So I do appreciate governance. I have a model that I
use to assess collaborative governance, as well as hierarchy governance, market governance, network governance. So yeah, and that's a huge play in how things get resolved is we seem,
we are quite governance illiterate. I don't blame us for that, but we are. And now that
governance, you know, just the last election cycle, I was telling people this isn't an election on policy.
It's an election on governance.
You know, and I think that has played out fairly true.
So now going back to, let's see.
So then we have that.
So maybe I'll step into kind of crypto economic systems.
into kind of crypto economic systems.
And Stephanie, just maybe the groups that you work in,
is that something that is of interest
or is this a top of the priority
or somewhere crypto economic systems?
How much of an interest is that in the group?
Oh, I think it's very interesting.
And especially when we have John around
to talk about how you might incentivize people through these mechanisms.
Everybody's very interested, and especially we've advertised you as thinking carefully about these units that might be represented as assets.
So please, go ahead.
Yeah, good.
So, yeah, and I will make a comment you'd mentioned about my reference to a coin. So, yeah. And so as I was immersed in this, these market signals and the government programs and the new ecosystem markets, I, as a, as a producer, and like I say, I, it's a part-time aspect of my life it it's a it's my research
ground it's part-time job type of thing and i and i and i wanted to keep it in the family so that's
why i do it too but but it gives me that kind of sense of how i get uh how you know behavior
economics moves in but in in july of yeah 2009 this is before I was knowledgeable of Bitcoin or crypto and I and on the first page
of eco commerce 101 in the second paragraph or so I said we need a new coin and uh because I
knew it was so fundamental because I knew the dollar was not sophisticated enough to function
in an ecological economic system I just knew that intuitively or whatever knowledge came from.
Because when I look back on it, I am kind of impressed that I put that on there.
But it was really fundamental to this.
And then as Bitcoin came out and as crypto came out, it's like, ah, that's what I was talking about.
So then we go to crypto economic system. So, you know, what what what do you need to create a crypto economic system of itself?
I don't. Yeah. So you need and I, you know, generally a capitalist, not not kind of what we see going on in the world.
I'm a more broader capitalist. I to me, I see a capitalist should consider all capitals.
Okay.
Shouldn't pick favorites.
So a capitalist.
So to do, to create just kind of a generic way
to create a crypto economic system.
First, you'd have to find your capital.
What capital do you want?
And you can call it a building.
You could call it the natural capital of the world
or anything in between, but pick your capital or capitals. And then, then a,
as I call it a conical unit, you know, what's the most fundamental unit that you need to divide
that capital up? So let's say you have a factory and you decide to divide that up in cubic meters.
Okay. You can do that, right? And
each cubic meter has some value relative to the productivity of that factory. In my case, I used
a natural capital cell. So I put a grid on the landscape. And as you hear me speak here, I say
I did this. Well, it isn't a functioning unit unit yet and part of my sharing this is because I want the minds of people that know how to create this crypto economic system
uh I have the logic uh I mean it keeps revealing itself to me but I have this logic in a point
where I can employ it but so capital and then divide that capital into a conical unit and that conical unit will be important for uh accounting uh currency development uh governance uh and uh yeah those are those are
the main ones uh you know but there's other geospatial geospatial accounting and then the
third thing or the third thing yes is uh enable a currency to be minted from each of those conical units.
Compare it to gold.
Gold's in the ground.
People don't create currency from gold in the ground.
They take the gold out.
They take the gold out. They get a store of it. There's a critical mass of it.
They get a store of it.
There's a critical mass of it.
They create a currency based on that gold, or we did until 1971 to the degree.
And but each one of those currency, each one of those coins minted does not associate itself to any particular piece of gold.
So it's and that's kind of the same logic I'm using. So you have these natural capital cells.
I'm using. So you have these natural capital cells. Each one designates one currency unit.
It's not the value of that currency isn't associated specifically with that natural
capital cell, but collectively they are. So you have a capital, you have it divided up into units,
and you have currencies that are generated from each unit. Okay. So that's the fundamental pieces there.
Now, who's going to spend that currency?
Well, that capital has outputs, right?
That factory puts out cars.
The land puts out ecosystem services, whether they're grain, livestock, pollen, pollinators, carbon, sequestration, things like that.
Pollen, pollinators, carbon sequestration, things like that.
And so the value of the currency is related, directly related to the outputs of the capital. model there, you create a range bound currency
that fluctuates between the opposing forces of productivity
and the economic value of that.
So if I take that and apply it to e-commerce,
I have the landscape as a capital, it's gridded out.
I create these conical units and my four-layer accounting system.
And let's say 1 million NCCs are – so let me go to our geo-NFTs because we haven't talked about that yet, and that's the title of the talk.
So I – as a land manager, as a farmer, I do all these activities already.
I delineate my fields. I send that shape file to my agronomist. They download all sorts of landscape data. I input my management. We calculate the does that you you have to manage your capital and you
have to figure that out so the geo nft basically um codifies that somewhat so i draw a line a
polygon around my field and now that geo nft you know can start the process of of initiating minting
into the into the coin the farmer doesn't get those coins they go into the bank they were creating a supply of natural capital and a supply of currency simultaneously
together as they both scale up together and then uh i you know i do the same thing i do now download
all that good data download all my management activities and then add the metrics to spit out
what i'm going to get for corn you know is it going to be 180 bushels an anchor estimate? Is the carbon sequestration going to be this much? You know, I do
the things that are valued. So if carbon isn't valued, I don't bother figuring that out. If corn
is valued, I do. So anyway, so that's really the model in the nutshell. So the GONFT becomes the
unit that I can.
And this is where Peter comes in and appreciated his thoughts in this last six months is I own the GEO NFT data. I own what's in that space.
It is my proprietary information that goes in there to determine the outputs.
And then as a GEO NFT, this isn't an NFT like those art NFTs. This is a governance unit,
an accounting unit. I don't sell my GeoNFTs. And so I have this GeoNFT and I can invite
people into it, right? I can invite my agronomist in it. I can invite my broker into it. I can invite
maybe someone from General Mills that's interested in buying carbon from it so it's my governance unit my shared governance
unit that can transcend the sectors so instead of i should here i'll explain how markets work
today eco markets work today so there's thousands of markets out there, eco markets, 17,000, maybe carbon markets, I heard, and all sorts of these markets.
That's not really true. That's amazing. I had no idea.
Yeah, it's something, you know, it's just it's a ridiculous amount of these voluntary markets and all that.
I mean, all good use. They're all they all made good progress.
They all made good progress.
But here's what the problem is.
As a person that's creating outputs, I would have to upload my data into all those markets.
And they would apply their metrics to it and then tell me what it's worth and what they would buy.
By the time I did that, I would have consumed all the value of any transaction so what i'm proposing here is that we create a
a uh a farmer governed farmer centric accounting system that you know individual farmers can join
on and then that's i don't have to send my data anywhere i can invite people into it my data
becomes more secure and probably more as important when When I send my data somewhere, it's old the next day, right?
I mean, not very old, but it gets old quickly because
the earth and my production system keeps going and that data is stagnant.
So it's a static piece.
So if I have my own universal database,
it's always up to date because that's my operating system.
So there's a lot of benefits from having a, you know, a eco commerce platform or NCC platform
or NCU platform versus having thousands of different accounting systems. Now, it makes,
it makes sense that we got to where we are today because as I kind of gave that history of transition from practice to outcome and all that, people are just finding their way forward through this.
And they use these metrics and these entities have problems to solve.
So they design metrics to solve their problems.
They create their accounting system.
Their board is happy.
And then it happens to the next board, the next board, the next board. So they're trying to solve
their problem, not the problem. And the problem is we don't have a universal accounting system
that people can interact with. So that's kind of a hard thing for people to backtrack on. It's like,
well, should we undo all these things? It's like, no, all that work that you've done to assess lands and assess metrics and all this is all valuable. We just need a way to
motivate them to organize on one platform. Well, if you want to create a market,
the market has to be thick. A thin market is not good because there's private information and there's a strategy that is involved on both of the size of the market.
So a thick market requires a homogeneous commodity.
Sure.
So, you know, you describe, you know, Redwinder wheat number two, and there's billions of bushels of it.
And we know what that commodity is so a challenge is to have a system of description
of environmental or in our ecological attributes that that truly are uniform across an important
swath of the fundamental endowment so you know you. Well, of course, an acre is not enough because an acre
of a lake is not the same as an acre of desert. So acre is not sufficient. You've got to describe
it more completely. And how to describe it is really not clear. It could be anything.
Sure. Yeah. And I appreciate the thick and thin. I haven't used those terms for a while, but I will
revisit them and use that for kind kind of a i don't see
analogy uh kind of a explanation of what i'm doing so to yeah to to that you to that your point so
for for a while i would say my natural capital unit is the bushel basket the geospatial
cyber physical bushel basket that we're missing. But you've got to have the right degree of specialization.
You know, a bushel of corn is not a bushel of wheat.
So we know that's a distinction.
And yet if you distinguish too much, you know, a bushel of wheat from Kansas, a bushel of wheat from Nebraska,
well, that's not a useful distinction.
And then the market becomes thinner.
So that's a judgment, you know, exactly how much, how do you refine the hedonic description of whatever it is that you're trying to sell?
So that's a judgment.
Sure.
Right.
And in the right platform, you can let people do that instead of having an institution do that.
Well, no, I don't think that you can induce that from people.
I mean, I don't really know what a used car is, for example.
So I might have one to sell, but I don't know how I would describe it as a commodity.
Sure.
And if you gave them the power to do it, I would describe it in a way that would benefit me in the commodity space.
So somehow.
So I agree with you.
So, yeah, you need institutions to describe things that become universal.
So let's go. Yeah, go to the bushel. So before the bushel, global grain trading was difficult.
And if I would have went back a couple hundred years, 300 years and said to the farmers, you need a bushel basket.
They said, why do I need a bushel basket?
I'm already selling grain.
Well, that's right. But they were selling grain because the market was local.
And there was no possibility of a global market because we couldn't move things.
Right. And so when I tell people I have this NCU4, they go, why do I need that makes grains fungible relative to if I want to grow corn or oats or anything.
I understand what, you know, I can grow 200 bushels of corn an acre or 70 bushels of oats an acre.
You know, these are fungible qualities that I can compare.
We don't have that in the eco market world. And so that's why I
proposed the NCU4 is it helps me provide some fungibility between if I'm going to grow 200
bushels corn and then how many tons of carbon and how much water quality and all that. So it allows
me to stack those values in a way that as a producer, I can make market decisions based on bushels
and NCUs and other metrics.
So I like the notion.
And in fact, the finance revolution that was in the 2000s
and late in middle 2000s was really based upon derivatives
and creating secondary market for derivatives.
And to make that happen, you had to,
again, have a homogeneous commodity. So if you were selling a mortgage on the secondary market,
you really couldn't sell my mortgage because I could be an alcoholic and who knows what I'm
going to do with my payments. So somehow you've got to integrate all of these mortgages that are
with individual peoples and individual banks and separate out the components of them that could could be used at least as an
average in expectation of as a homogeneous commodity and so that I
like that and then this is I think kind of what you're trying to get to it can't
be too ambitious you can't sell everything you can't be too ambitious. You can't sell everything. You can't talk about, you know, universal market is too much because it's too complex. But you can, for example, say, all right, we agree, many people agree anyway, that carbon sequestration is an important thing to do.
important thing to do. Well, okay. So perhaps we could generate a measure. And the point that
you're making about measures is really correct. That unless I've got a measure that can be
uniformly applied to many different situations, it's not a useful measure. But if I have a measure
that, you know, with the black forest in Germany and a desert in Tunisia, still there's carbon sea crustacean.
Then I can create a market for that commodity.
And that's a big deal.
You know, I may not be able to create everything for a farmer, but that aspect of his actions I could create a market for.
And that's once we have markets, then we have gains from trade and that's a tremendous
contribution to uh to social welfare although you'd need some kind of authentication some kind
of verification no that's right and of course and that's the major that's the question of
contractability so we have we have a measure but then do we really do we really know that you're
fulfilling that measure so if i have my used car and I say, yep, totally change the oil every 3,000 miles, if that's not verifiable, then you can't sell a car with that characteristic.
So it must be that not only have you defined a good measure, but as Stephanie points out, it has to be verifiable.
Otherwise, we can fake and then nobody believes your commodity.
Yes, and that's really a big stumbling block.
A huge, yeah. But, but also an opportunity because if you can solve it,
anybody that can fix the market can get rich because markets you can get,
bless your heart. I know you want to get rich. You're just trying to help
to help humanity. But if you can fix that, I mean, then you're the man and you can take your share.
humanity.
Oh no, we're going for very long to be there.
Yeah. No, I've paid a lot forward here, John. I get a little bit paid back. So yeah. So the
verification, there's so many resources being put into this, but they're so dispersed.
And so just like these metrics, what a universal accounting system does is it creates a market for metrics as well.
So right now-
No, you got to be concerned about that because if I can buy a metric, then I can fulfill the metric.
So that really isn't.
I'm not saying about buying the metric.
I'm saying about using the metric.
Well, but if I can influence a metric that is chosen.
I mean, that's so famous.
I think it was Mark Twain.
He said that if legislatures regulate markets, then the primary market will be for legislatures regulate markets than the primary market will be for legislatures. So, you know, by the same,
by the same token, you know,
if governance is what controls our wealth and we're going to try to control
governance.
Well, sure. I mean, we all, we all have our own governance style.
We're all our own governance actor, right?
We're all our own people and we want to have the governance work for us.
Right. So here's, let's go to the metrics things. I think we're not quite on the same page here.
So, so we, as I've watched these eco markets progress since the early 2000s and, and they
used metrics. I mean, basically the foundation, the foundation is metrics, right? You know, carbon metrics and water quality metrics and all that.
And so if some organization gets in a committee room and decides we want to buy oats with good water quality metric, they create one, they attach it.
OK, so but are the most evolving aspect of this market?
I think what's neglected, though, is the ver verifiability and you can make a metric verifiable
in two ways.
You either have an expensive audit process
or you can make an incentive compatible to,
if I report a metric, it actually is the correct metric.
Yeah.
But to identify a metric is important.
You have to do that.
That's a necessary thing.
But then the metric has to be meaningful which means if you have to
make it be credible or at least incentive compatible right so as i mentioned earlier on
in july the usda is going to come out with a crop report and it's all based on on metrics and
algorithms okay it's not based on anything physical. I mean, corn physical. So, yeah, there's a lot of metrics that we depend on.
And so there's certainty to that, right?
And then there's uncertainty that we ignore.
Because if the corn report comes out at 174.3 bushels, I'm certain that it's not going to be that come October, November.
But, you know.
But if I contracted the farmer to get me 500 bushels of
corn, either he does or he doesn't. And I can measure that fact. So, therefore, I can contract
with the farmer. Okay. So then let's go back to this whole mess of metrics that are out there for
carbon and water quality. Okay. So some are good and some are bad. Some are costly, some are not. So we want to have the best ones. We want the cheapest ones that are best that are most representative to reality.
Right. I agree.
Yeah. Okay. There's no market mechanism in place for that to occur, right? Because they're all in their silos.
No, but that's a market for markets. So that's why it doesn't exist. Right. Yeah. Right. So you can create that if you have a universal accounting system that I,
as a producer and the buyer can see the cache of metrics available to us,
and we can start choosing which ones optimize the reality.
which ones optimize the reality.
And now, yeah, go ahead.
Well, I was just going to, no, please finish your sentence,
and then I have a question for John.
So, yeah, we have this layer, we have these disparate markets
that each have their disparate metrics,
and I have to dump my data into all of them.
And it's really a ridiculous situation we have in our hands. And,
and we either can continue to expand that the trajectory is to create more
markets, more metrics, more, more, more,
or we can turn that on its head and create a singular platform,
which, you know, takes a little social and political heft.
But if the market is so much more efficient, you know,
how we have to show that
light with the shine the light on that and say, if we turn this upside down, create a farmer centric
farmer governed accounting system, then we will reduce the cost by 90%. That's, you know, that's
what we have to show out there. And then people say, all right, demonstrate that for me. And,
you know, and there's plenty of ways to do do that but it's a matter of getting that conversation out there
so john i think this relates to what tim was just saying which is you said well there's that's a
market for markets and and that doesn't exist would you please go back to that point okay so
please go back to that point.
Okay.
So what you said, Tim, is interesting.
There is at some level a market for markets.
So the Hong Kong stock market was famous for insider trading.
So I was always warned that if you invest in the Hong Kong market,
you're an idiot because all the arbitrage has already been gotten by the insiders in Hong Kong because there's no rule against insider trading.
Now, there's a rule against it in the NYC and New York Stock Exchange, but it's not clear that it is meaningful.
It might be a little bit more meaningful, but at least in Hong Kong, you can do insider trading.
So they've expressed a governance system, and then you can do insider trading. So they've expressed a governance system.
And then you can choose.
Do I want to invest in a market
where all insiders have already exhausted opportunities
and then take that as the starting point
and then say, I'll invest in Hong Kong?
Or do I want to-
You're talking about crypto.
Well, yeah, well, crypto yeah well that way right but but you know but a
crypto a crypto uh currency that can credibly convey that they abide by a certain set of rules
could distinguish itself and therefore you know get people to choose to invest so there is a meta
market for market in that sense and you you were suggesting, I think, that if you let farmers choose metrics and choose commodities in effect, well, they could really screw it up.
And then no one would be interested.
So if farmers are too selfish in defining metrics that can't be objectively verified by outsiders, well, then nobody cares.
objectively verified by outsiders, well, then nobody cares. So they have to bind themselves to
metrics that are meaningful and can be measured and they can be held to account. And if they do
that, they actually benefit because then they can sell whatever it is they're trying to package.
And that works for everyone. But that's a very long process. appear so that so if i if i was 24 i would say yeah
absolutely friedman says that markets are efficient and there you go we're going to drive out the
inefficient information yeah but now i'm 105 and i don't believe that anymore you know it's just
it's too long to get to the equilibrium so you, you know, we're, you know, in the long run, we're dead.
In the short run, we're making mistakes.
Yeah.
Well, right.
And if we were having this conversation in the year 2000, yeah,
we'd have been talking similar stuff, but not as educated.
But yeah, I had my 25 years passed now.
So I, you know, I have made headway.
So now through that, and so here's kind of what this, it comes down, you know, there's the crypto, an economic system comes down to just a few things, right?
You know, capital currency and output, and then how those relationships are in between.
And so as I watch these markets stumble. You know, I'm sorry, that middle bit is pretty important.
It turns out there's a lot of that middle bit.
So you said currency capital and how we transact and how they're related.
That's actually where all the action is.
Well, right.
But I mean, complexity is derived from simple components.
Complications derive from simple components, complications derived from most, many components. So yeah, if you get a, you know,
yeah. And the relationships, in fact, in fact, I got these relationships down fairly well, where
I can create an eco commerce economic equation that I can manipulate to see values as they adjust.
So that's that relationship piece.
So I can manipulate the relationships on mathematically.
So now, as I was watching these markets unfold, you know, and I tell people you need a new bushel basket.
We have a bushel
basket for ecosystem services that are provisional. And now we need a bushel basket in quotes for
ecosystem services that are regulating, not regulation, but regulating like carbon and all
those things, supporting and cultural ecosystem services. So we, you know, and people say, Tim,
yeah, that makes sense. Cause when you want to account for something new, you needed a new
accounting unit or new accounting system. You can't, we, you, that makes sense. Because when you want to account for something new, you needed a new accounting unit or a new accounting system.
You can't, you know, how can we account for these new values if we don't have a new accounting system, right?
No, that's fair.
Absolutely.
Absolutely fair.
Yeah.
Tim, I was, as I'm listening to this, and you know we're here in complete support for you untangling all of this.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, no, we're very, we ask a lot of questions.
But what I haven't heard in expressing a lot of the framework that you're talking about, and I think this is where I'm stuck is,
what measure is really in demand that that demand,
that group of consumers would want that measure and be willing to trade across localities?
Oh my God, Stephanie, I'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to sanction you
what so i'll sanction you because you've just introduced marketing oh no well we love we love
marketing because braven but i mean but it's michael it's very yeah it's very it's very important
because even if you can define these kinds of things, who cares?
And you have to know that people care.
And so marketing, sadly, is really essential to the whole equation.
Sure.
So the demand is out there.
Okay.
I mean, I didn't. But for what?
But for what?
Yeah.
I'll finish that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
The demand is out there.
So when I wrote EcoCommerce 101, I didn't say we should demand these things. The demand is out there. So when I wrote EcoCommerce 101, I didn't say we should demand these things.
The demand is out there.
General mills, carbon markets, there's billions of dollars being traded on these things.
Generally, the demand is out there.
But what specifically is a defined commodity is the demand for?
Well, so, yeah, all this pollination, you name it, anything to do
with the environment, there's a demand for people to produce it. So you go back to Adam Smith,
he calls it effectual demand and absolute demand. Okay. So absolute demand is everything that
everyone says they want, right? Effectual demand is what people bring forth to motivate the production.
OK, so now there's two reasons why you you have absolute demand and not effectual demand.
One is you have absolute demand and people have no money or very little money.
And the other thing is you have absolute demand, but you don't have the mechanisms to efficiently trade.
Yes, right. And that's what you're trying to address. And that is very important for sure.
So I see the demand out there. It's everywhere. Okay. You may not see it, but it's, and I'm not
saying consumers go. I do see it. I do see it, but I don't know exactly what I'm seeing. And
that's my concern. Sure. You have to say what you're seeing. You're seeing a lot of absolute
demand and very little effectual. I would say I I would say I'm seeing more abstract demand and not specific demand for commodities that are well defined.
This is great.
Yeah.
And so when you go to the grocery store, when I go to the grocery store, I don't really, I mean, I like to buy good food and all that.
But I don't like, I'm not a consumer that looks at the labels and say, I'm only going to buy environmental stuff.
That's not where the demand is at.
That's 5% of the demand.
The larger demand is through the institutions, the corporations, the governments that are saying natural capital is important to society.
And we need to not degrade it at the rate we are.
And so, what I look at it as, my model isn't for the consumers.
It can be used for the consumers. But we can't expect 5% of the consumers to lift the entire world up.
But we can expect the corporations, and there are many of them, that have sustainability goals that are doing their own individual work.
What I'm saying is that it's too disparate for a producer like myself to engage.
All right. So that's an interesting point because that characterizes the market in an entirely different way.
One thing I would have said is that really, even if I care about carbon footprint, I'm stupid to buy it because my particular contribution is irrelevant.
So I buy it. People buy whatever they buy. I don't affect that. I don't buy it. People particular contribution is irrelevant so i buy it people buy whatever they
buy i don't affect that i don't buy it people buy what they buy and my contribution is negligible so
i should really just buy beer because my my contribution to carbon is totally irrelevant
now corporations on the other hand but no no no i'm i'm defending this idea corporation they
have a different motivation it's not not, so, you know,
they may at some level care about the environment,
but the expressed demand is that, you know,
really they can't affect the environment.
It's stupid.
They can't.
They're too small, even as a corporation.
So they're demanding something else.
And so that's, they're demanding to show that they care about the environment. And so that's something that you can address. That's an addressable market is what I'm saying.
Okay. So then let's even take another step back and take the whole ecological environmental stuff off the table. Okay. So someone said, Tim, no matter what system you have, someone's going to game it, you know,
so think about how people want to use it that you're not going to use it for. And so I'm driving
in Minnesota in November, a few years ago, and then we have winter here in Minnesota and, uh,
uh, and snow blowing all over the place at times. And the department of transportation, um, uh,
pays farmers in high critical areas to leave standing corn stocks to catch all right
so they don't impede traffic and all that which is totally freaking sensible you know because that's
that's public goods and they pay for public goods in the central way and that's exactly what we
should do right so that's yeah so and they can identify the cost and value very easy and i'm
driving down there and i'm driving down there
and i'm like is that an ecosystem service or what is it and so what i realized what it's a public
good yeah what what i'm doing is i'm not creating an ecosystem service market that's that can be set
on this thing i'm creating the mechanism for two parties anywhere in the world to connect with each other relative to land use management and
land use outputs. That's fundamentally, that's what we're creating. So I'll just say one more
thing, Stephanie. So then the food of health. Yeah, no, please. Yeah. So the food is health
people who I started talking to last year said, Tim, we need a way to get people to find good quality food. And it's like, yeah,
so people that want good quality food can find good quality food by this geospatial matchmaking,
along with an accounting system that tells you what's being created on there. So this is larger than eco markets. It's really a way for commerce to occur on a geospatial
landscape that wasn't able to before. Let me just interject one second, because if I were Robbie,
who is our usual host, he would be thanking everyone and saying our hour is up but i'm not robbie so i do wish to thank everyone the
hour is up if you would like to go we're so grateful you were here and emmy so glad you you
uh stepped in to host nur uh i guess you're out of a job for today because emmy did that
Because Emmy did that.
And I just want to introduce you, Tim, to Joseph, who is Agent BXM here, who I told you about.
He's the one who did the land registry app.
And then maybe you two could connect or on Twitter or somewhere else.
I'd be happy to also connect you.
be happy to also connect you um but we are at four o'clock and i bet that there's more to say
because i saw peter come off his listener status and i'd love to invite peter peter to say something
well thank you i'm i finally figured out spaces so i haven't i've been able to listen to the entire thing. And I am just enthralled.
I mean, I have, I mean, John, my God,
just listening to a real economist talk to Tim,
who obviously knows his stuff inside and out.
And I'm going, God, we're so close
to be able to create a marketplace here.
Yeah, well, I think that's right.
Markets are really important.
I'm with you. I'm just like... And I'm with Tim, too. I mean, you got to create the markets. I'm
with him. And I'm just listening here, and I'm listening to what you just said at the last
little piece where somebody wants to be able to get access to that food. Well, that to me is the marketplace is the infomediary,
the piece that sits in the middle.
Yep.
And the ecosystem is the entire globe of farmers
and all of the other ecosystems that attach with,
and I still haven't caught my head around this accounting unit yet,
but oh my God, I'm so fascinated when you hear experts talk about economics.
It was always my love, but I was okay at it, but this is really impressive.
But just to connect all of these pieces up,
I can't help but feel that there is something pretty darn large right here.
Yeah, I appreciate that, Peter.
There is.
It's a monster, but it's tameable.
So let me suggest something. When we started, actually, I was sort of looking for opportunity
to add this, but if you can get the metrics right, and you can make... So to me, fundamentally,
here's what you have to do. You to define a relevant metric people care about this
metric people care about it's it's grain it's a certain type and it's of a certain volume that
makes a difference to me because i can make a certain amount of bread from it and you know
capturing a certain amount of carbon or or having so many ducks survive or making so much snow
not come across the road these could be, and these are things I might care about.
But what's intriguing is if you could correctly define these metrics.
So, for example, it might be that land in Minnesota
can do a variety of things if done in a certain way,
and land in Maine can do something else,
a whole other array of the characteristics
you describe.
So now you've done this, what an economist would call an hedonic decomposition of the
commodity space.
So this is something that Lancaster and Rosen did some research in.
So the way to conceptualize this is a house is really a collection of bathrooms and floor space and land and square footage and bedrooms and so forth.
And you can estimate the value of a house by the distance from the best school system, plus some measure of the amount of land it takes up and the number, so on and so on.
So it's not the house you care about, but the characteristics of the amount of land it takes up and the number, you know, so on and so on. So it's not the house you care about,
but the characteristics of the house.
But-
So here I'll give you a little bit of confidence.
But no, no, wait, wait, let me finish this thought.
Okay, there you go.
So there's a literature in economics that talks
about synthetic agents.
So if I don't really have to live in the house,
I don't have to buy a literal house.
So I can buy four bedrooms and three bathrooms and a lawn, but they could be in totally different places.
And that's a thing I can't do physically, but it's a thing I can do in a marketplace.
So if Maine is very good at providing acreage and New York is very good at providing proximity to operas, then I could bundle an artificial house that doesn't exist that has those characteristics and I could buy them.
And collectively, they're worth more than they are separately. And so if you can correctly define
these economic decompositions of these kinds of environmental goods, then you could have specialists that, you know, in Arizona,
we do something. And in Russia, we do something different. But collectively, the bundle of these
things could be much more valuable than the individual, you know, production in separate
places. So synthetic goods made of your hedonic characteristics is a thing that becomes possible.
And a marketplace, it can be much more valuable.
So on that, so one of my partners, his name is Jerry Hatfield.
He was the USDA Agroalty Research Service Laboratory Director out of Ames, Iama for decades.
And he created many of the metrics that the USDAda now uses so so i have that as a foundation
but on the metrics conversation it seems odd for him to say this but the metrics are less important
than the accounting unit because metrics are so evolving because they get due to technology
science values and all that metrics arerics are very evolving. So you're
never going to capture the metric in a static spot. And that's the trouble is people are just
always improving the metrics because we can't. But the thing is, you have to choose the side
because if you're saying it could be an acre, it could be a hectare, it could be linear feet,
I can't describe what it is that I'm trying to buy.
So even if it's an inferior metric, you have to choose one
so we can create this heterogeneous commodity that can be marketed.
So the accounting unit, the natural capital unit, is the container that is static.
It's a stable substrate, and the metrics are the flexible interface.
So we're we're we'll always be deciding on the best metric every day and every
every and it will you can change, you know, in five years or two days, whatever.
So the people focus on the metrics.
They're important, but they're so evolving that you can't build a market on just metrics.
You need an accounting system for those metrics to reside in.
Well, I'm going to push.
Wait a minute.
This is starting to sound like health care in the United States, which is a little disturbing.
So I'm just going to say it and then maybe I hope someone can convince me I'm wrong. But if we think about pricing all of these little pieces of inputs, then that's how our hospital bill gets so big.
Right. And so I don't know that anybody in this case, what the providers hated was when the government said, in order to put the costs back down, we'll pay you by the outcome.
So we'll give you this much for keeping your population healthy.
And now we're going to hope that the provider markets adjust so they'll be more
efficient, so they'll provide the same health with low costs. And I'm getting really confused.
So I wonder... But that's fine, provided that we understand, you know, what you would,
Tim would call the governance, what I would call the mechanism. So, you know, you describe what
you want, and I can provide it, if at least you compensate me for what you want. So, Stephanie, look at it this way.
Accounting is not valuation. Okay. So I account for all these things as a farmer. I account for
my natural capital. I account for all my inputs. I account for all those things. Okay. Now the other
part of the world is saying they value some different outputs.
So it's like, why don't I use the accounting system I use right now?
To so I don't I'm not saying like people said, why do you want to price everything?
I don't.
I want to account for things and then allow people to value them if they want.
If you want to give me a hug for doing something, that's fine.
Or money, that's fine.
But we don't have to.
Accounting is kind of the framework we're missing and we're trying to create markets
without accounting and so that's i'm not saying we need to value every or price every little thing
that i do on the farm i'm just saying i need to account for them and if someone wants more of them
create effectual demand then the opportunity is there i would say those things are very
complementary i mean you do have to account for them without question.
And you've got to account for them in a way that's credible.
So, you know, you can claim that you've got five acres, but if you don't have any acres at all, that's a problem for me because I've given you money for nothing.
So it has to be auditable or at least true what your accounting tells me.
But also, if you're accounting for things that I don't care about, then we can't trade.
If you're saying, well, I have a farm
and the house is green, I'm not gonna pay you for that.
So you've created a market
that I don't want to participate in.
So you've gotta have the units of account
be things which are economically relevant
to whatever the buyer's side is.
What I'm saying is I account for all the
data to produce a crop
and that same data can be used for
accounting for anything else you want off the land.
Okay.
So what
you've said, if it's true, is
that you have actually gone to the
fundamental hedonic decomposition.
So you have the basic elements.
OK, now, if you've done that, then bless your heart,
I'm on board.
So that's the question.
Have you reduced this to the really fundamentally things
from which you can take linear combinations
and then find whatever it is you actually care about?
That's how I grow corn every year.
Yeah, OK.
Well, if you can do that, then we're all good. Yeah what is the, what really are you talking about in the sense of,
if you have figured all that out and you've put that data in, but it has a very short lifetime of relevance, maybe. I don't know that that's true.
But is there a private marginal value,
social marginal value difference here
that we're trying to articulate?
And does that distance change along?
What's going on?
But if he's actually defined the fundamental,
I can value it socially, you can value it privately.
So it doesn't matter
as long as the fundamentals are described then we can assign values according to our own preferences
exactly but you have to find the fundamentals the fundamental elements correctly yes but why do i
care if it was yesterday's news well no the the but the measures hopefully are durable the values of of the measures, of course, are day-to-day.
Today I had a storm and all my corn is destroyed.
Sorry.
The measure can change.
The value can change.
The measure is how much corn is growing.
Is this becoming the Bureau of Measures and Standards?
That's very useful.
That's tremendously useful so here
I'll give you an example of one pilot that we're trying to you know try to put together there's a
Canadian company a farmer he has a company that he takes tracker tractor exhaust and uh injects
it into the ground okay okay so it the carbon emissions are sequestration and it improves his soil health.
Okay.
So then there's another company that creates this molecular barcode that can be used in solid liquid and gas.
So we throw this barcode in the diesel fuel, runs it through his tractor and into the ground. And now you have,
there's that whole route there. There's multiple benefits there that multiple people can value,
but as long as they have the barcode and the geospatial accounting. So that'd be one example
of who wants to value that? Well, whoever wants to value that. But it's a process of value that people say there's value to.
Right.
But the fundamental is you have to have to find a measure and you have how much diesel exhaust was injected into a ground.
And you have to have a reason to believe that the measure that I'm provided for some particular farmer is true.
If you've done that, you've done your job.
Yeah, and geospatial accounting, because everything, you know, not everything,
a lot of things in the environmental world or ecological system,
it was geospatial, right?
Watersheds are geospatial, you know,
so you need to count where these things come from now
where you didn't have to prior to.
Tim, are you open to the idea?
I think when we spoke, you were that the geo NFT could be they could be representing different sizes, right?
be they could be representing different sizes right there's of course they're unique so you
could have but they would each have different measures in terms of national natural capital
units yeah so it's like a house right with different these are my fields and they're all
different shapes and sizes yes yeah right but you might actually want to do this. I mean, if you can define homogeneous hedonic elements, then you might be well served to put them in a fungible token.
So, you know, I can say, you know, the reduction of carbon. So how much was sequestered? I don't really care how or where. I just want to know that that's what happened.
care how or where I just want to know that that was that's what happened and then there could be
a separate mechanism that sort of described what what NFTs were responsible for those kinds of
responsibilities the the how or where is getting important but here I'll I'll get to your point
there John because you are correct on that so we have a NCC grid so there's a uniform grid on the landscape. And then the geo NFT is a polygon with containing those in there.
So the NCCs act as a conical unit for ecological monitoring,
valuation and currency development.
And the geo NFT is the conical unit for governance and tokenization and
market interoperability.
So I'm going to caution you again about governance.
You don't,
you don't want the farmer to change the rules halfway through.
Well, we, we talk, we're using two different avenues of governance.
I know John, but I mean, yeah, right.
Yeah.
I, I, what it means is what you say it means.
That's right.
I don't know what it means.
Yeah.
Right.
I govern what I grow on the land.
Yeah.
Right.
So those, you, you choose in response to incentives, that's fine. But if you can affect the metrics or the measures or the reward system, that's concerning because then you have a confidence.
No, then someone else governs that. You're right. Yeah. Yeah. That shared governance is kind of my second title. Shared governance for sustainable working landscapes. That was my second book. Yeah, I'm all about governance. So I would say the difference is between choice and governance.
So choice, of course, is what farmers do.
But governance is a mechanism in which they operate.
Right.
We get to make some choices, and we don't get to make some choices.
But, Stephanie, yeah, it's 4.15 on a holiday weekend, so really appreciate this.
But I suppose people would like to go.
Well, thanks very much, Jim. We really appreciate it.
I'm happy to stay on. I'm just,
I feel like we just can't quite get to the punchline,
but we're getting much closer.
Well, Peter,
we're there. We just have to,
we'll get there. Why don't we have another call
in a bit, and your piece and stephanie's piece and a
couple other pieces are are there and uh and i have someone i'm i'm meeting with a funder investor
in uh hopefully before the july 20th and they it's the company that has that barcode tracer.
So, yeah.
I do have one question. So with the molecular thing where it injects the exhaust into the
ground. Now I want to go to John's point. How do we actually know that that gas went
into the ground?
There's a barcode reader for that.
We have to read the soil to know that that's true.
Okay, so we read the soil so we know that it hasn't been tampered with.
Otherwise, we're affecting the market ourselves.
We let the market players determine their level of certainty they want.
I mean, we're not going to...
That's problematic because if we determine...
So there's a market for limits.
If we determine the average expectation of correct behavior,
then of course, everybody wants to defect from that somewhat.
And then the whole average goes to zero.
That's a classic paper.
In a shared governance model, you don't get to do that as
easy. Well, I'm not so sure about that. I know. It's a show and tell. I get that.
No, no. But let me get my bottom line is this. I think you have the right elements. It's
measurement. It's credible measurement. It's decomposing things into what people care about.
And then it's creating a market in which they can trade. And that's exactly correct.
Now, the details there are very difficult and how you can do it right. You can do it wrong.
Lots of failed markets. Lots of markets where people are cheated.
Lots of markets where they work until they don't work, like we had the 2008 meltdown of the finance system, because it turns out mortgages were not really backed correctly.
But, you know, so the implementation is always hard.
You know, like hardware is hard.
That's what people say.
But you have the correct elements to look at, in my view.
And then now it's just a question of how do we do the engineering?
Yeah, sure. Well, I'll give you an example of my foresight on some of this. So the intrinsic
exchange group, IEG, partnered with New York Stock Exchange like two and a half years ago
to create national asset companies. So they were stepping way big into this space, right?
And I told the people I'm working with, they're going to fail. They're like, how do you know they're going to fail?
I said, because they're basing everything on evolving metrics and not on a stable accounting
substrate. Right. And they pulled the plug two years later, you know, and it was like, yeah,
that's, that's why, you, that's why. And I agree.
That's a necessary thing.
If you don't have that, you're screwed.
I was going to say a different word, but you're screwed.
And everybody, yeah.
But that's not sufficient.
You've got to have more.
But you're right.
That's necessary.
So what I'm saying is over the years, I've created the accounting system that no one else has created.
That's what I'm saying.
That's the whole.
And that's necessary and foundational and very good.
Yeah.
So if you don't have a good accounting system, then you don't.
And if you do, you know it's good.
So, Peter, the question is, is this accounting system robust enough to plug into a you know a platform that a geo nft the
providence can you know be secured and all that so it's like yeah i i have the uh i'm just saying
i have the accounting system and uh i don't know how else i can do that except prove it right so
the conversation today was to share that but the work needs to be done yet to prove it
yeah well wonderful tim i we really appreciate that it. Yeah. Well, wonderful, Tim. We really appreciate it. It's great work, and I'm really excited to see where it goes.
It's really an honor to be with people who try to tackle the biggest things, and we're really happy to support you, Tim.
And it's a hard problem, Tim.
It's a hard one, yeah.
Taking out a hard problem, yeah.
Yeah, well, it's, you know.
But an important one, so good for you.
Yeah, you know, and who's going to think
of this? A farmer, economist,
ecologist, right? I mean, it's not anyone's
going to walk into this thing.
But, Stephanie, Ellen Brown had
mentioned about, you know, I might do a
webinar on this, and certainly we'll
inform you, and then we can see some visual
things on here, and maybe that will help piece things together.
Oh, well, we should talk about a demo of some kind yeah hey hey joseph a demo please
i like to praise him let's take your stuff that would do this stuff and we should do a demo and
open people's eyes okay remember the the demo that i've been asking if they could bring up you know put it
back on the on the web oh yes i do yeah the the farmer with the coffee beans in south america
um i keep telling you that is the best demo i've got more mileage out of that than anything else
thank you peter that is an nft You know, our community has never seen that.
We made that a long time ago to work out.
It's brilliant.
Because it now talks to the farmer.
Now, all I want to do is figure out
how to hook it into what Tim's talking about.
Yeah.
Please share that.
We're going to get there, Peter.
We have a December 31st deadline, remember?
Oh, yeah.
I'm on it.
Well, this has really been wonderful, Tim.
We'd love to listen to, tell us, please share with us when you're going to be speaking and where.
We'll tweet it out.
We'll be glad to have you back and work with us and other community members. And Joseph,
you've been quiet, but you know we're thinking about you too, Land Registry Man. And Peter,
it's always good to see you. We always have things to talk about, and you'll have to come
back as a guest sometime. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Joseph. We appreciate your inputs.
Yeah, great conversations. I appreciate it. Really great, Tim. Oh, thanks Tim. Thanks Joseph. We appreciate your inputs. Yeah, great conversations.
Really great Tim. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody. Thank you for being here. Thank you everyone for your time. Thank you for the knowledge shared. Super excited to learn a lot today and I want to say thank you. Thank you Tim for you, team, for sharing your knowledge.
It was so insightful.
Yes, and I got to listen.
I will listen to this again to give a summary of the space.
Thank you very much.
Oh, thank you, Annie.
That'd be huge.
Thanks.
