Building the Future, Not Arguing About It

We have come to believe that history is made by elections, movements, protests, media campaigns, and culture wars.

Tom Chi isn’t so sure.

A founding member of Google X, holder of 77 patents, founder of At One Ventures, and author of Climate Capital, Chi has spent his career building things instead of debating them.

It has also led him to see what really changes history. Vaccines. The shipping container. Search engines. GPS. The internet. Artificial intelligence. The innovations that reshape civilization rarely begin with governments or mass movements. More often, they begin with a handful of engineers, scientists, and inventors solving practical problems that eventually change how billions of people live.

His critique of the economy grows out of that same way of thinking. It isn’t really about capitalism versus socialism or left versus right. It’s about systems design. Markets, corporations, GDP, shareholder value, consumer confidence — these are systems we created. Engineering decisions as much as economic ones. We built them to solve one set of problems.

Chi asks whether they’re still producing the outcomes we actually want. If they aren’t, perhaps they deserve to be redesigned just as surely as any other technology.

From there, his prescription follows naturally. Thirty industries account for most of the damage to our air, water, soil, and biodiversity. Those industries were designed by people. They can be redesigned by people.

The goal isn’t persuading millions to think differently. It’s enabling the builders, engineers, and inventors to create technologies so much better that they simply replace what came before — because they’re cleaner, cheaper, and more effective.

The conversation leaves us with a question that’s difficult to dismiss: Have we confused talking about change with the far more consequential work of actually building it?

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There is a moment somewhere off a reef that Tom Chi once knew, when the color drains out of the water. A few months is all it takes. The rainbow goes to gray, and the gray goes to nothing.

He is a physicist by training, an engineer by practice, a man who spent his life building things that had to survive contact with the real world: search engines used by billions, self-driving cars, the strange spectacles of Google Glass. And what the reef told him was simpler and harder than any of it: that the systems we trust to organize the world were drawn up for a planet that is quietly ceasing to exist.

His response is not one you’d expect—not guilt, not sacrifice, not the old sermon about paying more to feel better. Chi’s move is to treat economics itself as a design discipline, not a law of nature handed down, but something we build and therefore something we can build differently. Markets, like reefs, are systems, and the ones we have were engineered for a world of stability and slow change, not for the accelerating extremes that we now live in.

Read that way, the arithmetic turns inside out. A single week of fire in Los Angeles can erase more wealth than years of careful spending on the alternative. Which means the expensive thing was never the cure: it was the waiting. The most regenerative way to make a thing, he argues, can also be the cheapest way to make it. Nature stops being a cost to be offset and becomes a balance sheet we’ve been reading upside down.

His new book is Climate Capital, and he asks what becomes possible when doing right by the world stops being a luxury and starts being the smart money. Tom Chi was a founding member of Google X, the team behind self-driving cars and Glass. Now he is the founder and managing partner of At One Ventures, a holder of 77 patents, and the author of Climate Capital. It is my pleasure to welcome Tom Chi here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Tom, thanks so much for joining us.

Tom Chi: Hey, Jeff, great to be here.

Jeff: Well, it’s great to have you here. I want to talk about this idea, first of all, that you talk about, that so much of what’s wrong today, the overlapping crises that we face — climate destabilization, technological disruption, economic fragility, and so many other things — really stem from this idea that the systems that we have are not adaptable to the world that we live in today.

Tom: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you look at anything that’s around in nature right now, even the stuff that’s “recently evolved,” it has been here for a little while, which means everything that nature has been doing has been iteratively tested and shown to have longevity, shown to add something useful to its ecosystem. And that’s basically how you make something that lasts for a really long time.

Janine Benyus has a quote that I really love, which is, “Life improves the conditions for other life.” And if you have found a way to survive where your presence continues to support life, including life other than your own, then you’ve found a way to survive that is kind of in concert with the rest of the biosphere. And that’s kind of where everything has arrived to, except for us right now.

In comparison, we don’t have the same evaluative function, right? Nature’s evaluative function is the stuff that actually works on this physical planet and this physical universe with the resources around us. The economy that we created works off of metrics that we kind of made up: Consumer Confidence Index, inflation rates, our definition of who is unemployed versus not, and so on and so forth. And we try to hit those metrics the best that we can. But the entire thing is a design discipline. We both designed the criteria for it and how we try to optimize for those criteria, and we designed what sort of actions one can take are in bounds and out of bounds. And we’re at this funny point right now where the economy that we designed, which is one of the largest things that humanity has collectively created, is just not compatible with the biosphere and has not lived up to the same sort of criteria that all of the rest of life has succeeded in living up to, to be here.

Jeff: What about the argument that you hear, particularly from the extreme sometimes, that there is a hierarchical nature of life in the biosphere, and we sit, humans sit at the top of that?

Tom: Yeah. I mean, it would be a little bit hard to go and… Well, look, there’s a lot of different lenses here. One lens is basically just to look at the total biomass of various things, in which case most of the life on planet Earth is plants, actually. And we’re a tiny, tiny sliver. We’re a sliver of a sliver, and we’re substantially less than the insects, we’re substantially less than the worms and microbes, and lots of other organisms actually take up way more biomass on the planet than we do.

I think if we have this kind of sense that we have dominion over things, it’s because we’ve shown that we can destroy those things. But I would just suggest that that is not a particularly high bar. You may not be superior just because you can destroy a thing.

Jeff: What are those things where we have had a positive impact? Is that a good place to start looking at this?

Tom: Yeah. There’s nothing about the existence of humanity, period, which necessitates exactly how we have to act. And we’ve seen from many cultures, just not the one that has culminated to the sort of global economy and the culture around business and economics that has led to it — that particular culture is quite incompatible with the biosphere. But there’s been many cultures throughout history that not only arrived at some sort of balance and harmony with their biosphere, but have taken it substantially further, where the presence of humans actually improved the biodiversity of the landscape, helped to go and solve important ecological problems as they were arising, as opposed to being the creator and propagator of ecological problems.

Jeff: And where are those examples? Talk about that.

Tom: It’s literally everywhere. We wiped out a lot of the folks through colonization of Indigenous people. But there are also many Indigenous peoples that are still alive and still continue to have fantastic stewardship over their lands.

I remember when I was at Montreal COP for biodiversity a couple years back, and at that COP, we put forward the collective goal of trying to protect 30 percent of the lands to support biodiversity on planet Earth by the year 2030. Now, my favorite event at that COP was actually not officially on COP grounds. There is an event that was put on separately by Indigenous folks, a little bit off the grounds of the main conference, and that happened at night, a three-hour event. And basically, various Indigenous folks from around the world who are already serving the role that that Montreal COP was trying to discuss, they basically said, “Look, we’re already protecting more than 30 percent.” I think the issue is that there is a whole world that recognizes what we do and a whole world that doesn’t. And the world that’s inside of that conference right now doesn’t recognize it until it’s basically owned by colonial powers, for lack of a better description. Basically, if Denmark comes in and says that this forest area is now under some carbon project management, now it counts. But before, when Indigenous people were just keeping that part of the forest healthy, sequestering carbon, storing carbon, providing great habitat, then it didn’t count for anything because it wasn’t part of the ledger of, effectively, a former colonizing country.

Now, I look at that, and I can kind of see a couple different threads coming from it, right? Number one, we’re not bringing the people that are doing most of the work into the room. They literally had to go schedule their own bite separately. We are accounting for things, but we only account for things that go through particular structures that we’re most comfortable with, through powers that we’re most comfortable with, through methods of structuring that we’re most used to. Because for those Indigenous people, was there a corporation put together?  Is there verifying the credits?  Is there biodiversity consultants coming out there and getting paid in order to count organisms inside of a quadrat? Nope, nope, nope, and nope. But that said, if one were to do an independent study of the biodiversity of these lands compared to neighboring lands, you will see that it’s better. And whether that stuff is all accounted for to the nth degree, to be able to serve the needs of some sort of carbon or biodiversity project, that’s yet another matter, that has to do with what we allow to be counted. It’s not who has the skills and who is making the difference.

Jeff: Talk about it from a practical point of view. We hear oftentimes, particularly in the business world — and I know you’ve heard this — that one of the hardest things to do is change the culture of a company. To a certain extent, you’re talking about changing the culture of the globe in many respects.

Tom: I actually don’t really think that I’m changing the culture of the globe, because if you were to grab 100 random people off the street — and you could do this anywhere; you could do this in Midtown Manhattan or on the streets of Bangalore or whatever, go pick any place that you want to where you can grab 100 people in a day, and you ask 100 people in that day, “Hey, what’s your attitudes toward nature? How do you feel about nature?” Then what you’re going to get is people that are mostly very positive about nature. Probably the worst responses you get will be neutral, where they’re like, “Oh, I don’t think about it that much.” But out of the 100, you’re probably going to get lots of very positive responses. So given that, it means that the unbiased setting for human beings is that they generally are nature-philic. They’re biophilic. They like to be around natural things. It calms them. It inspires them. They find natural scenes and healthy ecosystems to be really beautiful and fascinating and all that sort of thing. So I think that’s the culture of humanity.

The fact that we created a couple business surfaces, right? The corporation was invented to do particular colonial sea voyages, and debt was invented several thousand years earlier to handle particular things. But there’s economies that have been designed without debt, and there’s absolutely economies well before we defined the corporate form with limited liability and all that sort of thing. So what that basically says to me is that there’s been a couple designs—design forms and design decisions that we’ve made on top of our very basic love of nature and our very basic affinity for nature. We’ve created a bunch of rules on top of it that make us act out of accordance with the thing that we actually already intrinsically love. If anything, the weird cultural manipulation has been that we invented these corporate forms that allow us to completely decimate ecosystems and say, “Well, this number moved in the right direction, so I’m fine with it.” But I think the people that love those numbers typically don’t go to see the damage, right? And anybody who actually sees the damage doesn’t feel as cleanly as what that statement would suggest, which to me means that there is a type of cultural impulse that is being repressed, actually — that we largely love nature, and we’ve suppressed the cultural impulse because we’ve been told over and over that the only reasonable way to run an economy is to destroy it.

Jeff: How does that square with the fact that such large portions of the global population live in urban environments, dense urban environments?

Tom: Yes. Cities actually have a lower footprint per person than people that live in rural areas, so that by itself is not necessarily any particular issue. And you’ll notice that the people that are in cities, they very much look forward to being able to take that beach vacation. They very much look forward to being able to drive up to the Catskills from New York City on a three-day weekend in order to spend some time in nature. So when people are in the presence of nature, they feel inspired. They feel at peace.

There’s a lot of economic opportunities in cities, and we live in a world where we really ask people to participate in the national and global economy, and in order for them to meet their basic survival needs. So I’m also not surprised that people congregate in places where there’s more of that type of opportunity. I wouldn’t say that anybody moves to the city because, on their wish list, it says, “I hate nature. I need to go to the places that have the least of it.” That’s not really what people are going for.

Jeff: To what extent, though, does that apply to that portion of the population in cities that can afford to go to the beach or go to the Catskills or whatever, and that it’s not an option for everybody there in a city, and nature is often far away?

Tom: Yeah. Actually, way better is to bring more nature into the city. We see this with places like Singapore that have been very thoughtful about the proportion of green space and public green space compared to their otherwise very built-out urban core. So you can absolutely have the best of both worlds.

And we have plenty of economic studies from the real estate perspective show that when you add some tree cover to a neighborhood — so imagine you have your stereotypical concrete city block — when you add some tree coverage, when you add some areas for nature and reflection, that it absolutely increases the property values in those areas and in very substantial ways as well. So it is both economically sound and better for the human psyche to be able to bring some of the nature back into those environments, even if folks are kind of crowding in for the economic convenience.

Jeff: Talk about the economic aspects of all that we’re talking about and how the system can change to better reflect a different economic design.

Tom: Well, I think there was a time period where economic assumptions were close enough to what was needed that it didn’t create this level of breakdown. So if you scoot back to earlier times, then we had more basic issues around whether we could have access to food at all, or have access to basic medical care and prevention from infectious disease, and whether we could have access to clean water and all that sort of thing. And to the extent that we have invested in infrastructure and economic systems, that people are able to deliver those things to us comfortably at low enough cost, then we move on to other realms of problems.

Now, I think the zone in which one tries to be thoughtful and efficient about the creation of some of these basic creature comforts, then I think that generally is a good, right? The one spot where we allowed it to get away from us is from housing, right? For the other things, food and water have gotten cheaper over time, though there is some variation locally by inflation. But housing costs have kind of spiraled out of control. In the U.S., I think about 20 years ago, it was only about 19 percent of people’s paycheck would go to housing, whether that be a rent or mortgage. Now it’s closer to 40 percent. And we’re kind of moving into this zone where if you’re not able to cover the creature comforts, then you create this really deep fear.

Now, if you flip it around and say there was a time period where efficiency around creature comforts — that’s an unalloyed good; let’s get great at it — then I think that’s the time period where the economic designs that we’ve created so far worked well enough. They were close enough aligned with what we needed.

Now, a lot of us are really struggling on the housing side, but outside of that, we have access to lots and lots of goods and services at lower prices than ever. And people are kind of chasing down a completely different pathway, right? Creature comforts, like once you get eight hours of sleep, you don’t need 20, right? Once you have a roof over your head, then you’re okay for a bit. Once you are able to consistently have access to food, you don’t need to eat 10 times more calories in a day. But we’ve created a type of capitalism where consumption is not bounded like that. Somebody could absolutely spend 10 times more on outfits or spend 10 times more trying to signal to their neighbor that they are a more virtuous or a wealthier person, all that sort of thing. And that’s where we’ve kind of broken into this type of disconnect, where further incentivization of that sort of economic activity is basically burning up the planet for reasons that don’t seem to provide the same levels of happiness, comfort, and value that the original creature comforts things did. So you’re in kind of a diminishing-return situation with an economy that is trying to maximize these diminished returns.

Jeff: To what extent, though, does that economy — which makes sure that there are those basic needs, at the very least — rely on the ability to expand, for people to, as you say, overconsume?

Tom: Yeah. There’s nothing about overconsumption that is required for an economy to work. Actually, it may be the sign of a very unhealthy economy — which is the one that we live in right now — for there to be a handful of very wealthy people that are doing most of the consumption. We’re kind of calling it a K-shaped economy. Basically, the folks that are on the richer part of the K are able to buy a bunch of things — things that they absolutely don’t need, things that are just for kicks — and that can go on and on, and that can continue to eat up a bunch of planetary resources at the same time as there’s other people that are not being able to get access to their basic creature comforts.

Now, what we have been working off of up until now is this theory that, well, if you help any of the people, it’ll lift all the boats. So you don’t necessarily need to help the poor people directly. You can just help the rich people, and they’ll have even more options for more things that they can buy, and that will somehow automatically help all the people that are struggling. And I think by now we should know that that doesn’t work. I mean, we’ve had a bunch of different administrations dress up that basic idea in a dozen different ways, and it just doesn’t work. If you want to go solve these particular problems, you need to focus on those problems, right? And we really haven’t. We’ve gone with this lift-all-boats mythology.

Jeff: When you say it doesn’t work, can you unpack that a little bit?

Tom: Oh, sure. I mean, a bunch of the metrics that we’ve been trying to optimize have been going relatively well. Overall GDP is up there. Unemployment rates, despite all the hubbub around AI and robotics, still staying relatively low. Inflation is higher than we would like, but still low compared to historical maximums. So in a way, we’re kind of hitting a bunch of the positive economic indicators that one would like and that we kind of design everything around. And also, we have more people with housing insecurity, food insecurity than ever. So I think it’s relatively clear that the system we’ve put together is not working.

Jeff: Is it a system that needs tweaking or to be pulled up by its roots, as you say it?

Tom: Well, look, I don’t know that there’s that much of a difference between those two things. It does need to be edited. And there will be some economies that say, “Hey, we’re pretty close to what we want, or close enough.” And because maybe in their particular economy, fewer people are falling off the bottom, right? Because there are a bunch of ways to design an economy. Every single country has done it a bit differently. And depending on what those countries have done, there’s more or less wealth inequality. There’s more or less risk of human lives and welfare being lost to really just unfortunate and avoidable things. And I think, for some of the folks where things have been working generally better, yeah, maybe for them it’s a tweak. For other folks, you might want to have a larger reset. But I think, at the end of the day, the more important thing is to be committed to a design process where you keep on iterating on how an economy works until it really meets your goals.

And if your goals is just maximum GDP, and your goals are really just for some of these metrics we’ve been using to guide the economy to run well, then everything’s already great, there’s nothing to do, right? But it’s really that expansion of saying, like, “Hey, our goal is correct. Are we really having the net effect that we’re wanting to have with the system?” So there’s a little bit of a goals reset. And I think the goals reset is actually the main thing to do. A lot of the particular things to sort out happen relatively quickly in the goals reset. Just in the same way that relatively ethical people can be asked to do unethical things relatively quickly by the corporate form of existence, right? Because a corporation, by some readings, basically says you just need to maximize shareholder value no matter what. It’s like a Milton Friedman sort of idea. I don’t think that’s the only reading of how one can put a corporation together, but one can imagine that that’s your main goal as an executive. But as soon as you try to start prioritizing that goal over other things, you will find it will ask you to make unethical decisions relatively quickly.

We’re the people that designed the corporate form. We shouldn’t be sitting here saying, like, “Well, that’s just the breaks, guys. That’s what corporations do to good people. Even good people go in there and they need to make some tough ethical decisions. Sometimes it doesn’t turn out right.” No. We designed the whole game, so we shouldn’t be sitting here with our arms crossed, basically saying, “Too bad. This game sometimes threshes people up and destroys them, and other times does this helpful thing.” No, make a better game. What are you doing?

Jeff: Is it naive to think, though, that a better game will not have its own inherent problems and cause choices that may not be ideal in that framework? After all, we are human beings, and human nature plays a role.

Tom: Well, I think the main question is: Are folks committed to a process of iteration toward something that is better? And this is enshrined in many sorts of ideas. In the American version of it, it is the idea of iterating toward the more perfect union. They never said, “Okay, we’re going to get to a perfect society,” or, “What’s happening in 1776 is the perfect society.” No. Why would a Constitution have amendments if you are pretty sure you were perfect from the start? So clearly, the folks that kind of framed our Constitution — and one can look at your own local examples, because there has been governance that has done better and governance that has done worse over time — but I think the framers of this Constitution basically recognize that it’s an iterative process.

I think what we’re seeing in the media right now is the media rewards people that take very strong positions, even if they go and contradict their own position two months later. They really like people that take very strong positions, it’s highly favored by the algorithm. And this includes a bunch of people that are going to tell you that they’re 1,000 percent sure that the only thing that will work is X, Y, and Z. And I don’t think you should believe those people. You should believe people that are interested in improving things through an iterative process and keeping their eyes open throughout that process, including for some of the things you’re suggesting: “Hey, if we took a different approach to designing the economy, could there be other unintended consequences?” Absolutely. But right now, we’re living through unintended consequences that are very damaging to the health of the society and the biosphere. So I’m not saying that one could not come up with economic designs that are even worse, but I’m pretty sure that there’s many economic designs that are better.

Jeff: In a society in which we hear repeatedly that people are not comfortable with or don’t really like significant change, how does that iterative process fit into that frame?

Tom: Well, we’re going to have a lot of change either way, right? So one can point to that and say, like, “Well, people don’t really want to change, so I guess we shouldn’t try,” or we can say, “Well, there’s going to be a bunch of change anyhow.” If we don’t take effective action on climate, the sort of changes that we will be experiencing will be: Asheville, North Carolina, is flooded. That’s not even near the coast. Or Lahaina, Hawaii — burns down in a day — that was built on a historic wetland; it’s not the sort of environment that is meant to burn down. The L.A. fires wipe out $275 billion of value in four days, right?

So, look, you can just accept that the world will only be those changes and none of the changes that we intend to make toward trying to make things better. We can just accept that the only changes that we’ll experience are our old systems falling apart and us trying to make do with old systems falling apart. But I don’t think that there’s a world where we get to choose no change.

It’s really do we get to unconsciously choose the kind of changes that will be highly disorientating, disruptive, and feel helpless toward them? Or are we going to take on changes that we intend to take on to be able to improve upon, mend some of the things that we might have been doing a little askew before?

Jeff: One of the things that you talk about is this green premium — that virtue signaling and trying to do the right thing sometimes has an additional cost — which seems totally unnecessary and not sustainable. Talk about that.

Tom: Yeah. In our firm, we don’t invest in anything that requires a green premium. In fact, we do quite the opposite. We find very green ways of doing the dirty, damaging industries out there. And there’s about 30 industries that do 90 percent of the damage across air, water, soil, and biodiversity. So it is actually a small enough target to sensibly work on and improve upon. Basically, in those 30 industries, we try to find things that have much better unit economics paired with much better environmental economics. And when you get that, then a lot of the things that have been the sticking points of the arguments suddenly disappear, right? You don’t need people to go out and march in the streets, to elect somebody else, to regulate the industries, to have them do the right thing, if they’re going to clean up their act anyway because they’re excited about doubling their margins.

And this is not to say that a green premium could never work, but a green premium would tend to need to be enforced by other things than just the efficiency of an economic design. And that can come through government regulation, a bunch of other things. But in our firm, we presume that governments are not… Well, I mean, they historically have not been stable enough to keep those regulations in place. In Europe, maybe a bit better. So I think if one is operating in Europe, then maybe you can use the regulatory backdrop as a little bit of your foundation on what you can presume to be true versus not. But in the U.S., we don’t really have that. So our firm basically works off of this idea that you need to find innovations that are both radically cheaper and radically greener at the same time. You cannot exchange greenness for cheapness. 

But, yeah, when you do that, it’s actually not really some sort of deep conceptual fight. I mean, either one could work, but the world of green premiums also requires a really strong regulatory presence. And if that exists in your society, great. If it doesn’t, then you just need to beat the unit economics.

The virtue signaling thing is yet a different thing. And in practice, I think it’s actually a relatively stupid thing. Now, the reason that it gets talked about so much is most of the people that talk about virtue signaling are not the people that make anything. They just talk about stuff. So honestly, their entire job is signaling. So one should not be surprised or even disappointed that sometimes they want to signal in a virtuous way. Would you prefer your newscasters all to declare that they’re evil and they hope for terrible things to happen? This stupid thing, right?

But the people that don’t need the virtue signal are the people that actually do the damn thing. So in our firm, we find the folks that do the damn thing. We help to capitalize them. We roll up our sleeves, and we help them get through the manufacturing cycle. And there’s no virtue to signal. You either get it done and the numbers work out better, or they don’t. And I think, at the end of the day, the idea of virtue signaling is just a stupid idea. It’s something that can only exist in a world where people prioritize media representation over actual outcomes.

Jeff: Which brings up another aspect of this, in thinking about all of the changes and the iteration that you’re talking about: Do we need to be looking at this as a cultural issue or a political issue? I mean, arguably both. But which comes first here?

Tom: No, I actually think it’s neither. I think the reason that we’re stuck is we’re trying to treat it as these big things. And like I said, culturally, people already love nature. There’s nothing else to do there, right? We just happen to create an industrial economy where all these people that love nature can’t help but destroy nature in the process of buying food, driving a car, heating a home. And that’s dumb, right?

If you woke up one day and somebody told you, like, “Hey, by the way, we fixed everything in the industrial economy so that driving a car doesn’t destroy nature anymore, heating your home doesn’t destroy nature anymore, eating food doesn’t destroy nature anymore,” I don’t think that there’d be some big backlash where people are like, “No, I demand the version that destroys nature.” It’s in nobody’s interest, right? So let’s not even pretend that it’s some deep cultural problem. People actually, in fact, would love to do right by nature if it would still allow them to live lives that work. So this is why we focus on upgrading the industrial economy. As mentioned, there’s only about 30 industries that are 90 percent of the damage across air, water, soil, and biodiversity, which means there’s only 30 places to improve. And the way that those places got improved was not through 10 million people marching in the streets and voting a particular way, or putting all their faith in a specific politician, or all that sort of thing. And look, if that’s a thing that appeals to you, I’m not trying to prevent anybody from marching in the streets or voting however they want. Please do that, be civically engaged. But if that’s the main way that you think that the world will be solved, no, it’s not, right? At the end of the day, you could elect all the right politicians. But if we don’t actually fix the 30 industries that are doing the most damage to nature, then we’re still stuck. So the task is really just that.

And when one looks at what it took to innovate in those industries, it’s way fewer people than what it takes to be politically active, than what it takes to drive some huge cultural revolution. The Haber–Bosch process, which drives our fertilizer production and has driven a kind of unsustainable approach to agriculture, that was literally invented by two people: Haber and Bosch. And actually, most of these inventions that define the 30 industries right now, including the ways that they are currently unsustainable, were invented by small teams — one, two, three, maybe five people tops. So you don’t really need to convince 10 million people. You need to find the right group of five people that might really be onto something to decarbonize one of those 30 industries, or get rid of the hydrological damage or water pollution coming from one of those 30 industries, or the biodiversity displacement and damage. And that’s it. It doesn’t involve 10 million people. Most of the time, the invention crew is less than five. I—as you said in the intro—I’m a named inventor on 77 patents. I’ve been in many invention teams and have built a lot of these things by my own hands. And I know exactly what that setting looks like. It doesn’t involve a bunch of political bickering. It’s really just three or four people that are skilled in the art, that are machining this, programming that, connecting it to so-and-so, figuring out how to make it manufacturing scalable. And you just do that for 30 times, and you will address all the major things that need to be addressed.

Jeff: And talk about technology and its role in all of this. You alluded to it just now in terms of the invention process, but what role is the constant change and progress of science and technology in all of this?

Tom: Yeah. Science and technology is the stuff that magnifies intention. And we can spend a lot of our effort in science and technology in the ways that… Honestly, we have been doing a lot of this in the past two or three years — on things like the drone-ification of warfare or making the most convincing deepfakes ever. And I’m going to tell you that both of those things are potentially very destabilizing, very damaging to society. But it is this successful amplification of an intention. For the folks that are drone-ifying warfare, they said, “Well, how can we destroy more targets for less capital?” And if we can… Japan just announced that they’re going to experiment with drones made of cardboard. How cheap can military hardware get that still is lethal and targeted? And I think we should be pretty worried about the further amplification of that intention.

Similarly, intentions can be amplified that are about making sure that everybody is fed and clothed and housed, and has access to a solid education and access to opportunities in life. And those are things that can be part of our intentions as well. We have not been prioritizing those intentions as much recently. This is why a bunch of the people in school right now, their dream is just to become an influencer, which I think, to me, says a lot about what we have failed to prioritize or mention in terms of what it looks like to really contribute to society as opposed to just talk about shit. So, yeah, that’s where a lot of the efforts got to go. It’s honestly not that complicated. It’s way fewer people than people think, and it just needs to get over the line.

And what’s really nice about this stuff is, unlike political stuff, which just can swirl and swirl and swirl. And maybe you even make a really good argument one day and the opposing side quiets down for three months, well, they’re going to strategize how else to come after your argument three months after that, right? So it’s never over, even after you’ve done  a fantastic effort educating, communicating, persuading, because there’s definitely persuasion in politics as well. But by comparison, if you’re trying to upgrade these 30 industries that are doing 90 percent of the damage to nature, it’s not something that requires millions of people to tune in or believe you or be persuaded. It either physically works or it doesn’t. And I actually love the clarity of that because one can iterate on whether it physically works or doesn’t in a very coherent way that is very accretive over time, as opposed to a lot of the arguments that we have—especially political arguments on culture—that are not accretive over time. They just swirl forever because, as long as there are multiple parties, multiple parties will try to say one more thing that tries to spin the argument one more time, as opposed to most things that are built well, right? If somebody builds a bridge well, it stands for 100 years. If somebody builds a bridge really well, it stands for 1,000 years. And we have seen those things. We have Roman aqueducts from 2,000 years ago. We have pyramids from 4,000 years ago. We have a bunch of things that have been built that lasted for a very, very long time.

And think about the settledness of that. I think it’ll be very comforting for a lot of people, psychologically, to be out of the swirl of media, because media never ends. It swirls, it tries to get you very passionately engaged in things for short amounts of time in order to influence you into taking particular actions, and it’s very exhausting. It’s dopamine hit after dopamine hit, and then sort of like motivational exhaustion. And if you compare that to the people that sit down and apply something, which I call build integrity, which is the integrity that people that build bridges need to bring together, the integrity that people that are upgrading these industries need to do — then that is the integrity of understanding how the physical system works, iterating until you see that it works really, really well and serves a lot of people, and implementing that really well so it stays in place for a long time, whether it’s 100 years or 1,000 years — or some of these industries, 40 years is great, right? But that’s what we should be aiming for. All these other things that kind of swirl around forever with no landing — we need to get out of those sorts of mental loops. Those mental loops are designed to maximize advertising revenue. I think the purpose of the human being is something that is much greater than that. And I’m not saying we should never have that experience, but we got to minimize it. And we got to spend a lot more in the satisfaction of build integrity, working on real problems and just getting them done.

Jeff: Tom Chi. His book is Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. Tom, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Tom: Yeah. Thanks for the call today.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.