EP 347 Brando Crespi Awarepreneurs Interview

Hi, this is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneur. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Brando Crespi, and our topic is lessons from the Amazon to help solve the climate crisis. Brando Crespi is the founder and executive chair of Global Biochar Inc, a company focused on the deployment of biochar and green charcoal as the most effective way to mitigate our climate crisis while also addressing food security, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and global health issues.

He also focuses on philanthropic and advisory work as a cofounder in 1985 and still executive vice chair of the Brazilian born NGO, ProNatura Internacional. For more than 3 decades, Crespi has helped design, fund, and implement developmental projects using many biochar and climate smart agriculture in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Over the last decades, PNI has deployed €1,600,000,000 in 63 countries and has helped lift over 7,000,000 people out of what was often abject poverty. Brando Crespi, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Paul. Great to be here with you.

And I just wanna do a quick shout out to Sandy Hirschberg, incredible ecosystem builder here in New Mexico. He says, Paul, you need to talk to Brando. And if you haven't known this yet or hadn't heard this yet, we are doing one episode a month of a New Mexico based social entrepreneur or impact leader, and Brando is up in Santa Fe now. So, Sandy, like, you have to talk to him because he's amazing. And I think you're right, Sandy. Thank you so much. So, Brando, you've been at this a long time. And a key to our topic today is about your time in the Amazon.

You found something there, or you were turned on to something there. You're like, wait, wait, wait. Something's happening here that's really powerful. Tell us about your time there, and what was it that you discovered during your time in the Amazon?

Oh, that's a loaded question, because, the Amazon is, you know, at best, one of the most extraordinary cathedrals on this planet. You feel the presence of spirit so loudly. And, you know, we have an image of the Amazon as a forest. You have to bring a machete to chop your way through, Well, that's secondary forest. That's what's grown after the trees have been cut down. Most of the pristine Amazon you could bicycle in. It's, fairly dark down there because the canopy is so thick, and that stops lower growing plants from growing. So that's why, you know, the the first thing that comes to mind for me when I think of my various trips of the Amazon is just the magnificence and the miracle of it and the diversity of it.

Like, I still remember every first night in the Amazon, I can't sleep because of the actual unusual noises, you know, the birds, insects. I mean, there are even noises which sound metallic, and it's really birds and insects. And and I was in a bar once in Sao Paulo, and I heard them again. And there were 2 Amerindians walked into the bar, and they were just playing and making these noises. I was just so amazed. It could be the sound the metallic sound could come out of one's mouth. And I'm sorry. I'm just riffing off some of the extraordinary experiences that one has there.

And, you know, all of this is there's a shadow over what I'm telling you about because so much of it is in jeopardy. You know? It's drying up. It's catching fire. But on a on a to to come back to your question. I'm sorry. I just got off on that. James Lovelock, who was one of the great environmentalists of the last century, he just died a few years ago. I think he was, I don't know, a 100 or something.

He's a father of the Gaia theory, which some of you may know as a hypothesis. It was confirmed that the whole planet is alive. The biosphere is includes the atmosphere of the planet. Anyway, James Lovelock said, the best chance we have to survive on this planet is to learn from Amazonian Indians about biochar. And that's where I think we can start and, and go quite deep into that.

And when was it that you first started hearing about biochar and starting to see some of the results of peoples native peoples in the Amazon using biochar? What what are we talking about?

Well, I I have to confess, sir, I learned about biochar, I think it was, like, 30 years after my first trip to the Amazon. I I didn't I didn't I've never heard that word before. So what happened is that in 1985, I cofounded a foundation in Brazil called ProNetura. And ProNetura, was supposed to be WWF, but Brazilian government wouldn't it was a military government at the time, wouldn't allow us to to start what they saw as an American NGO. So we started pronatura, and, you know, the folly of youth, we decided to tackle one of the 7 most dramatically deforested areas of the Amazon. An area called, which is larger than the UK. So at a time, if some of you may remember, the flavor of environmentalists, of the tactical strategy of environmentalists was to protect, was to conserve, was to create oasis. And that didn't really work because how can you create a fence around something the size of the UK? And then how do you defend that territory from migrant, agriculturists, farmers who slash and burn.

You know, you can't shoot them for cutting down the tree. So we had to figure out something else. And what we figured out was what eventually was called, always called sustainability. And, you know, to make it simple, what we realized, we needed to work with the people who were part of the problems and turn that group of that those people into part of the solution. So it was a long journey, which today is fairly obvious and widely accepted. It was kind of bottom up decision making, gender balance. You know? And and this led to us getting a prize called the Mitchell prize at the US Academy of Science in the nineties and eighties was giving out every 4 years, which, at the time, was considered the noble of sustainability. So so here we are in Brazil at the Rio conference of 1992, and we decide to bring what we'd learned in to Africa, Asia, and other parts of the world.

I moved to Paris from which we run the African and Asian work, all the rest, in the Americas. It's run out of Rio. And we decide to address one of the main causes of deforestation, and that is charcoal, green. Charcoal is not only responsible for 70% of the deforestation of Africa, which is much worse than Brazil and the Amazon. But it's also responsible for the death of 6,000,000 women and children each year. Those are the volatile organic compounds that come out of charcoal when you burn it. And it's still a major source of cooking fuel in the world. So the 2nd largest business in Africa is about $20,000,000,000 totally informal business.

So we decide to find a solution to this, and we put our hands in our pockets, hire an engineer, go to Northern Senegal, and and build a machine to take agricultural waste and turn that into a green charcoal. And I'm getting back to the Amazon in a second. I'm sorry. It's a bit long wind.

No. This is great. This is great.

Yeah. Then we are in Saudi, and our technology wins a prize for best technology for the developing world. And I got a call from some guy at Cornell, I have no idea who he was, who, you know, introduces himself as professor Johannes Lehman and congratulates us on our prize and says, Randall, do you realize you have the best biochar technology in the world? Well, that's true at that time, not now. And and I say, thank you, Johannes. But what is biochar? And that is a question which changed my life.

So so what's the answer? What is biochar?

Okay. So biochar is the result of of Amerindians observing what happens to soil after once, charcoal is left from the previous fire. And what they realized is that that charcoal becomes a home for bacteria. Well, we realized that they didn't. But it's a home for fungi, bacteria, and also little critters. Because when you crumple up that charcoal, what you have is something that has a texture of a sponge. So into that texture, into those microtubes, water goes in and with the water go all these different critters, fungi, and so on. And and they realized very quickly that they could generate a soil which was incredibly fertile.

Now we know it's 900% or slightly more fertile than the land next to it.

900% more fertile.

Wow. And that is, you know, amazing in itself, but you have to also realize that Amazonian soil is very unfertile. Just it's so humid that there's a top soil that breaks down very quickly and allows for plants to trees to grow up to, you know, 40, 60 meters. What the what Amerindians did is that they started terraforming, but we now realize was close to 11% of the Amazon, by adding ground charcoal and, you know, household waste to the soil. What this did is created the conditions where cities could be built. And that was considered impossible until 20 or 30 years ago because, indeed, the soil is so poor that it couldn't maintain a population density of that kind. Now we know there were cities, which were probably about 50,000 people strong and which were certainly cleaner

and

healthier than London and bigger than London was in 14th century. So that's that so Johannes tells me, you know, what you have, that black powder which comes out of your machine that you compress into making a green charcoal actually is what the Amazonian Indians had discovered has its extraordinary properties on soil. And why don't you try it out? And so we went to Haziz, who was a friend and farmer next to our factory near Saint Louis in Northern Senegal and and said, will you try it? And when we came back a few months later, he said, you won't believe what happened. I have tripled maize. I have doubled rice, and my onions are 60% bigger than they were before. And so we were pretty impressed. So decided to see what we could do with this black powder. And and they went to Burkina and Niger and Mali and other countries on the border of Southern Sahara and mix mix that black powder, the biochar, with camel dung and combining that for a few other, you know, like, secret recipes.

But, anyway, the long and the short of it is that we could create, and we did create 11 harvests a year of vegetables starting with sterile Sahara sand and just adding biochar. Obviously, you need some water, but we saved about 80% on the water. We calculated that we'd normally use needed to to grow that food. And here we were doing getting extraordinary results, you know, on a on a 60 square yard plot of land we could feed a family of 10 and give them enough income because we grew vegetables according to what was not available at local markets. So the prices would be high. A third of what they grew, they sold. And this essentially was we are able to feed a family of 10 in areas where nothing would grow up to that point.

Wow. And so you said up to 11 harvests a year, Brenda. Did I hear you correctly?

You heard me correctly. Yeah. We call it super vegetable gardens. But, you know, that is that's the power of biochar, and it doesn't work on all soil. It doesn't work very well on clay soils. But it does work on, most other soils, especially sandy soils. And and, you know, the impact on water saving and food security is incredibly meaningful, especially because we in the US don't realize what's going on in the rest of the world, but we are in the midst of work. We're at the beginning of a food security crisis.

Yeah.

So what we experience as inflation in the supermarket is actually the result many, many times, well, apart from the usual creed of, you know, the intermediaries, but it's really the result of the fact that crops are starting to decrease worldwide. So Peru has lost 60% of its avocado production. And, you know, you go around the world.

Talking to a citrus farmer, and in Florida, they're having trouble growing oranges. Right?

Yeah. And it's through everywhere. And, so coming back to James Lovelock, what he had realized is that not only was this ancient Amazonian wisdom really valuable to deal with our food supply and our water scarcity. But that, actually, once you use biochar, you are actually putting into the ground something which is between 60 to 95% carbon. So in other words, what we're doing is we can use biochar to take the carbon that plant absorbed through or or develop through photosynthesis and treat it through a technology of this called pyrolysis and take that powder, put it into the ground, and all of a sudden, you have a carbon sink. Because if you let those trees, for instance and I'm looking at, permit peak fire, where you have 360,000 acres destroyed by fire, if you let those stumps of trees just rot in those mountains, after 5 to 7 years, it becomes methane and greenhouse gases. It's just where else nothing can be done with it. But if we take them out of there, grind them, chop them, put them through this machine, and then use it to grow crops or for many other uses we can get into, you know, a biochar, what you have is one of the most effective solutions to decarbonize our atmosphere.

And that's why Lovelock said it's our best chance to survive on this planet.

Yeah. So I'm gonna get into the climate aspect in a second, but I wanna, just for a moment, acknowledge in the bio that I read, it's talking about your work since making that discovery and creating some machinery to scale up the production of biochar. You and your team have helped lift 7,000,000 people out of poverty. Did I read that correctly?

Yeah. Yeah.

So our audience would get mad at me if I didn't ask you. Like, well, how did that we're we're we're social entrepreneurs. So tell us a little bit about that part, and then we'll circle back around to the climate aspect and the carbon sink aspect.

Sure. So when we started pronator, as I told you, we needed to find ways to involve local local population in in ways which would empower them to change the social, economic, and other conditions that they lived in. And so what we quickly realized is that to this is really developmental or NGO developmental work, but that's what we've done for 36 or 37 years or whatever it is now. It's nearly 40. Anyway, so what what we realize is that you cannot bring about profound change except in extremely rare cases in working top down with leaders, politicians, in some cases in Africa, even kings. It just doesn't work. What you have to do is try to combine a powerful bottom up strategy where people take control over their lives and a top down strategy where there is funding and support for positive activities that they own. And this is very important.

You know, I I've having worked, in developing countries, and we worked in 62 developing countries. So I've been around this planet a few times. What you quickly realize is that there's a crisis of hope. And today, that crisis affects even young people in the US or in Europe. But there is a kind of it tends to be a passive acceptance of conditions which are experienced as historic and unmutable. So we needed to find way to break through that impasse, if you want. And and one of the easiest way to do it was to go into a community, and we always did it in very respectful way. We asked permission.

We would arrive with public transport. We never arrived with 4 wheel drives and satellite phones. And then for the first few months, we would you know, all our our people would be trained to really learn and listen, which is something that most, how Yale or Harvard, you know, trained, environmentalist are not really trained to do. And one of the main objectives of that was to find who the natural leaders of those communities were. And very often, they are very different from the formal leaders. It may be the priest. It may be the owner of a local whorehouse. It may be a woman who is very passionate about the fate of her children.

And so eventually, we even created a school in Nigeria where or a setting in Nigeria where we invited natural leaders to come and teach each other. We would, again, try and and listen. This allowed for the creation this process allowed for a creation driven by these people of something which was unheard of, which is what would you like your country, your state, your, you know, your region, your village to look like in 50 years for your children's children. And and so we really got people to start thinking outside of their box, which was very limited by survival, because we're talking about some of the purest, poorest people on the planet, Niger Delta or Burkina or whoever. And and this and this strategy has been proven incredibly successful. It's a very empowering strategy, and, you know, we can support local communities when they want to do this. But it's they are now masters of the future when they start seeing that their strategies can work, do work, and are applicable and scalable. And the difference between this and traditional developmental models is, in my mind, clearly visualized by the fact that if you look at annual reports of mining or oil companies, they are they have beautiful pictures about a school or a hospital they build in some place near their mining or drilling operation.

And when you go actually to see that school or hospital, what you see is an abandoned building because most of the time. Because the local population, it doesn't belong to them. So if a window breaks, they wait for the company to come and fix it. Right. And this kind of attitude, which ultimately is fairly paternalistic, and if you want, a neocolonialistic, which is here we are, we're giving you a token of our appreciation. Meanwhile, we're robbing you of your natural resources. Doesn't work. And what does work is what I described earlier.

And that's what and I'm simplifying things a bit, but this is what worked all over our planet in very poor communities. And it's wonderful to go back and see that they've built cooperatives, that they've built schools, that they're proud of their place, and all of that.

Beautiful. Such an inspiring story, Brenda. So let's do this. In a moment, I wanna come back and get more specific into the climate aspect of what you're doing. Before we do that, I just wanna take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsor. Are you passionate about making a difference but feeling stuck on how to take your mission driven business to the next level? You don't need a lengthy coaching program. You need targeted advice from someone who understands the unique challenges that social entrepreneurs face. With my strategy session package, we'll focus on your most pressing decisions, whether it's clarifying your value proposition, optimizing your marketing strategy, launching a new product or service, or adjusting your pricing to align with your mission.

These sessions are perfect when you know the direction you wanna go, but you need someone with the experience to help you get there. If you're ready to unlock your potential and amplify your impact, book your strategy session now. The link is in the show notes. So welcome back, everybody. I am here with Rondo Crespi, and we are talking about lessons from the Amazon to help solve the climate crisis. And right before the break, Rondo, you were telling us an incredible story about helping to lift 7,000,000 people out of extreme poverty. And what I was hoping for on the rest of the show is to talk a little more specific about the climate aspects of what you're doing. And I think our listeners would understand.

Wait a second. There's all this carbon, and you're putting it in a form and putting it in the soil and getting 900% more fertile soils and 11 harvests a year and using a lot less water. I think our listeners would be like, wow. That that makes sense. Right? So the one climate aspect is just the way your technology is helping food to grow, uses a lot less resources, and per, you know, unit of water or fertilizer, you get a lot more results. And, also, I would imagine less transport of the food is because you can grow more locally. Is that fair to say?

Yeah. Absolutely.

So tell us a little bit more about what are some of the other climate significant aspects of this technology that you and your team have developed?

Well, couple of things before we get into that. First of all, those that figure of 900% was a figure derived from studies in the Amazon. When you come to New Mexico, you don't get that increase in yields, you know, except if you're selling a desert land, and then you have a 100% or whatever increase. Right? Because nothing is growing there, or nothing much is growing there. Anyway, that that's, just a small qualification. You know, now we have over 30,000 studies of biochar, and the US is a bit behind the curve. But what these studies show is that you can increase food on average. You know, these are meta studies.

Oh, 20 to 200%. Still significant. Yeah. Then the other point I wanted to make in passing is that the the greatest lesson from the Amazon that I got, and same lessons working with shamans in Africa, is that native people have an extraordinary lesson for us, and this is pervasive through indigenous cultures around the planet. They look at everything as being alive, as being as a spirit being present. And this mindset paradigm is incredibly important and incredibly useful, because right now, we deal with nature from this arrogant of western thinking. And and this is part of the reason why we are the only animal that dirt his own nest. No other animal on this planet does that.

But coming you know, going a little deeper than that, the native wisdom understands about the interconnectedness of life and how, you know, even small interventions, positive interventions can bring extraordinary results. And you look at the whole rewilding movement, for instance, and you see that you bring wolves into, you know, a, nature reserve and all of a sudden, the rivers change course because there's what's called the tropic cascade and all these impacts, all kinds of life systems. But without going to, you know, going farther than that, I think, you know, we need to really be humble and learn from native people who have who have an an approach tested by centuries and an approach which today the cutting edge of science realizes, yeah, there is profound wisdom in that. But I just wanted to give a shout out to to that mindset which we need to embrace ourselves.

We could use a lot more of that. I in my previous career, I had the honor of doing a lot of community development work as a social worker on the Pueblos here in New Mexico for for quite some years. And, oh, I am so grateful for what I learned in that time. And Yeah. Yeah, I can only cosign what you're saying there. Yeah.

Yeah. And and whatever, you know, you look at the seed situation of wisdom or, you know, understanding and what we've done. And Monsanto is a perfect example of the dark side of our of the dark consequences of a certain kind of reductionism an extractive thinking. You know? Yes. But, anyway, you know, I I am very much, a supporter of of, the wisdom of native people. And we could have a whole show about that because we worked with shamans to find products from for Dior, for instance. Yeah. And they found it by going into the forest and talking to the trees and listening to what they have to say.

So there's, you know, there's an intelligence in nature, which now I think through plant medicine, a lot of people are starting to understand that we're not the only intelligent species on this planet, but actually, intelligence is pervasive. And, and, it's in the animal world. It's in the plant world. So

Absolutely. So one of the things that I have just been incredibly honored in these days more and more, Brendo, is I get emails from around the world. Sometimes it's from 3rd year business student at UNM Anderson here in Albuquerque, and sometimes it's somebody in Africa or Asia. And especially on the younger end of the age continuum, what they're reaching out about is the world is on fire. And I'm trying to make sense of how do I make a living, take care of myself financially, take care of a family, and do something when I go to work every day that is gonna make a difference when the world's on fire. What would you say to somebody who sent you an email like that, given all your experience in making a difference, lifting people out of poverty, thinking about climate change, helping communities that don't have a lot of resource, make massive changes, what's possible for their children and grandchildren, and somebody now who wants to find work like that but hasn't yet quite gotten there. What would you say to somebody in that position?

It's, you know, I I my wife is a teacher, and I hear from her the whole time about how depressed kids are. And, you know, I I can understand that the future looks bleak and, you know, especially when you start looking at trends. And and, unfortunately, looking at reports on climate by the IPCC, they always had 3 scenarios, which was best case, worst case, and middle ground. And, you know, unfortunately, the worst case the worst case scenario was the most accurate, and sometimes reality was worse than that. So understandable that one feels overwhelmed and, you know, one feels like saying, well, let me just take care of me and my family, and, you know, I'll try and minimize what I can. Well, you know, I think that the main thing is to really not give up. And the way to not to give up one's own values and one's own purpose in life is to find hindered spirits, is to find people you can work with who have the same objectives or with whom you can create a plan. And I was eating this morning in the Guardian about the incredible, edible, gorilla gardening movement that encourages people to take any empty space, grow food, and let people use it as much as they want.

They don't even need to sell it. You know, people can grow. And and this is an example that we can think outside the box, and we can take our destiny in our hands. It's difficult to do it individually. It's easier to do it for the support of the group. And there again, you know, find the leaders around you, not necessarily the official ones, but the charismatic ones, And and and align around a vision which is bigger than yourself, where you can be of service to the whole. Because that ultimately will bring meaning to your life and joy to your days. So maybe a simple recipe, but it's what comes to mind right now.

You know? The other thing which is important, and here we get into a more political mindset, is to realize that the we are all subjected to a gigantic PR experiment from the hydrocarbon industry, which is basically saying, it's your fault the world discovered with plastic because you're not recycling world. Well, it's your fault that, you know, you're not doing enough around climate change. And all of this strategy, which is to diffuse the focus around the responsibility, we need to push back. And, you know, what they're applying is the same techniques

that

the tobacco industry developed, where, no, nothing is wrong with tobacco. What's wrong is the fact that people fall asleep with a cigarette and their mattress catches fire. And so let's focus our lobbying efforts and our legislative efforts into putting fire retardants in mattresses and fabrics and in and in furniture. And they made it the way they did that is the PR agency started a firemen's association, which lobbied for this, and it killed hundreds of firemen who walked into, you know, trying to stop fires and died from the fumes of all these chemicals.

Yeah.

Yeah. The same thing is going on today around hydrocarbons, around oil and gas. And so we need to to really push back and, push our legislative or legislators to oblige these companies to take responsibility. And one simple example is orphan wells, which in New Mexico, there are thousands of them. And they are just emitting methane, which is, you know, depending where number of variables can be 80 times worse than c o two is a climate problem. So, you know, they should be responsible for that. And Bank of Europe is leading the charge and putting in carbon taxes on a number of products starting with steel and cement and next year going into plastics. And that will oblige companies, because they don't like paying taxes, to decarbonize.

And that is a result of public pressure. And I remember talking many years ago to the environmental to the Dutch environmental minister who said, you know, we quickly realized that these companies are so powerful, so rich that we needed to strengthen the alternative voice. So we funded NGOs as a way to counterbalance the power and influence of oil and gas. Today, you know, that's a very enlightened attitude. But, nevertheless, you know, the same thing the same problems remain, and we need to hold these companies responsible. And it's happening all over the world in courts. They're being sued. And, you know, I have I've worked with all companies, especially because sometimes they're the only source of funding for social environmental problems as part of their corporate social responsibility in developing countries.

Nowadays, first of all, they call themselves energy companies. Secondly, they have real problems in hiring good people because nobody wants to work. Well, not nobody, but a lot of people don't wanna work for them.

Yeah.

They are. They're part of the problem, not part of the solution. And you see the greenwashing, including, you know, direct carbon capture, which is totally too much, too expensive a way to suppress the carbon. Yeah. And but one that they get 1,000,000,000 from the government because they fund senators and congressmen, and Yeah. In return, get favorable laws and funding.

Yeah. So tell us a little bit in the in the remaining few minutes we have, Brenda, tell us a little bit about what global biocarbons looks like now as an enterprise. Like, what are some of the project? What's some of the like like, your staff size? Just give us a sense of, like, many years. I think you said about 40 years into the journey now. What does it look like now? What are some of the projects? What are some of the countries you're working in in September 20 24 as we're recording this episode?

Well, the reality is, to scale biochar, NGOs, nonprofits are not the appropriate tool to do that at scale. And the Swiss, Research Institute calculated we had 360,000 plants of biochar, we would have solved our climate crisis. Obviously, you know, more details to that. So, you know, I've I moved to New Mexico during COVID or at the beginning of COVID and realized that I could bring a lot of what we had learned over the years at Peronatura. But that what was before me was an extraordinary opportunity to take those burnt stubs and from the Hermit Peak's fire

And and let me just jump in in case one of our listeners didn't know. The Hermit's Peak fire is the largest fire in the history of New Mexico. There was a prescribed burn that got out of unanticipated, or some people say anticipated, winds. And it's in the northeast corner of New Mexico. Yeah, northeast, and relatively under resourced communities, very much Latinx Hispanic communities, and it's been devastating to those rural communities. So just just wanted to give our listeners a sense of what was the Hermits Peak Fire.

Yeah. Thank you. That's 62,000,000 stubs of burnt trees Yeah. In those mountains today. Yeah. So all of that could be turned into biochar. We could take them out of there, and, actually, FEMA is supposedly paying timber yards to extract that burnt wood. But the problem is that nobody knows yet about bauxhall.

Just a few people understand the whole issue of soils and the importance of good soil and the chemistry of soil science and all of that. So when I looked at creating a biochar business, well, one thing in our favor was the fact that the financial community loves biochar because it's a very foolproof way of generating carbon credits that can be traded internationally on carbon markets. So some biochar companies, especially developing countries, live and survive on the on the funding that they get from essentially sequestering carbon, I e, biochar in the soil. And that can be quite profitable. It could be about 5 or $600. Some cases more, in some cases less per tonne. We didn't want to go that route. So we were looking at and we had do other enough farmers here, organic regenerative farmers.

Well, our our experience was that we couldn't find offtakes for that kind of the amounts of biochar that we would create if we really address those problems in those scarred mountains. So we we moved into a new vision or strategy, which is to we've developed some very proprietary processing. And what we can do is create a kind of biochar, which is which is a bio carbon, which we could that's why, you know, biochar is in itself bio carbon. But what we decided to do is to not to try and find a place in a business which is about $62,000,000 a year in the US, but to actually compete in a business which is about $18,000,000,000, which is a carbon black business. And carbon black is you know, everything dark around you is probably carbon black. The ink on your paper, the the tires in your car. I don't know Amazon. You know, Carbon Black is widely used, including in dark plastics.

So one of the things we are doing is or want to do is decarbonize the plastic industry, which needs to decarbonize for all kind of reasons, but including, in fact, the Europeans are now putting taxes on carbon. So we know that we can substitute at least 30, 33% of plastics where you have dark plastics with a form of biocharcoal, bio carbon. And so that's what we're doing, and we we hope to be in production by the end of next year. And we already have a real interest from the plastics industry to buy our our product. And in parallel with all of that, we'll make voucher for whoever wants it and whoever sees the value of it, be it native people or regenerative farmers or you know, what's actually happening is that big ag, like Taylor Farms and others, are testing biochar in California Central Valley. And next year, they're gonna start adopting it and using it. The results I hear have been very, very promising both in terms of increasing yields and decrease in the use of water. So, you know, the future is bright, but meanwhile, we've chosen, to go for phagiosoteric hanging fruit, which is a plastic industry.

Right. Nice. Well, Brandon, I could hang out with you all day, and I know you're busy and our listeners are. As we start to wind down, if the the the 40 plus years, there's no way we could touch at all. If there was something you were hoping we were gonna get to that we haven't touched on it, or there's something you wanna leave our listeners with as we start to say goodbye, what would that be?

Well, you know, in a way, thinking back about your earlier question, I think that's you know, the hopeful news, and we need hopeful news, is that we do have all the solutions to deal with climate. And they've been there the whole time. What we don't have is the awareness and the political will to radically address some of the causes of climate. But know that it's a doable thing. We can continue to evolve on this planet and become a species which is much more wise and conscious, and that it's up to each one of us that that we need to also join forces to do this.

Absolutely, Brandon. Just to give an example, we're both New Mexico residents here. I've been here since 1993. Love this place. But last week, we had something called the New Mexico Startup Forum here in New Mexico. And the winner of that now this was was a climate track, but this was not a climate event. This was the the biggest gathering or one of the biggest gatherings of the startup world in New Mexico. And the winner of the pitch competition, which was much anticipated and a lot of people put their hat in, was a climate tech company.

Chuck Call Chuck Call and, the grid flow battery team, they're doing next generation batteries, which is essential for us to move towards renewables in more cost effective ways. They won the, quote, Startup World Cup pitch competition in New Mexico, and they're going to the Bay Area to take part in the national pitch competition, and it is a climate tech company. If you're in New Mexico and wanna be part of a community like Brando was talking about, Chuck and his team started Batteries and Beer once a month connection of climate, people coming together, just sharing a beer together at a local brewery and being supportive, and what are you on? And I need to hire somebody, or I'm looking for a lawyer. Just we've got a really wonderful ecosystem here in New Mexico, and being part of that is part of what keeps me hopeful and just keeps me going, Brando. So I just wanted to say, if you're interested, I'll put a link to the grid flow team and ask them to get on the batteries and beer. Email us so you can come hang out with us if you're in Albuquerque. Brando, thank you so much for sharing.

I'm gonna take, take your offer on and come and hang out with you.

Please come hang out with us. There's so many with us. We got we got sustainable ag people and battery people and solar panel people and folks working on next gen sustainable materials, all sitting down having a beer together. So

Beautiful.

Yeah. It's just I feel so blessed. If you're in New Mexico, please come join. And if you're not and you wanna understand more, there is an incredible climate community here. So if you feel free to reach out to me if you just wanna understand what's going on. But, yeah, we'd love to have you and be fun to drink a beer with you, Brando.

Thank you, Paul.

So thank you so much for being on the show today, Brando. If somebody wanted to get ahold of you, find out more, what's the best way to contact you?

I guess, you know, LinkedIn is still a pretty good one. You know? There's Cool.

I will resources. I will put Brando's LinkedIn profile as well as some of the other resources, like the Global Biocarbons website in the show notes. And, Brenda, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you.

So thanks again for listening. Before we go, this is an example. You've heard me say it before, listeners. I love when you send in requests or suggestions who you want to have on the show. I had never heard of Brando before even though we live an hour apart. Thank you, Sandy. We really appreciate it. Long way to say, if you have an idea for somebody to do an interview with, please go to the AwarePreneur's website.

And on our contact page, we have 3 simple guidelines of what we're looking for. If you feel like it's a fit, we'd love for you to send your ideas in. And lastly, just wanna say thank you so much for listening. Please take really good care in these intense times, and thank you for all the positive impact that you're working for in our world.