Latest / Everyday Ancestral with James Barry / Canada, the 51st State? B. Lorraine Smith on National Identity, Tariffs, and the Illusion of Borders

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Canada, the 51st State? B. Lorraine Smith on National Identity, Tariffs, and the Illusion of Borders · Everyday Ancestral with James Barry

• 0:00
  Welcome back to Everyday in Sustrel. I'm your host, James Barry. What is a life-affirming economy?
• 0:08
  Can you imagine that the economy that is actually designed to affirm our lives versus just take our money
• 0:15
  to sap all of our energy? Well, my next guest is B. Lorraine Smith. She has a gift for reimagining
• 0:23
  economies, agriculture and business through a regenerative lens. She is a perfect fit to bridge
• 0:30
  ancestral values with future forward regenerative thinking because regenerative regeneration isn't
• 0:36
  just for farmers, it's for boardrooms, cities, classrooms and kitchens and B. Lorraine Smith,
• 0:41
  her mission is an economy that serves life, not just quarterly earning reports. So please join me
• 0:50
  in learning more and go on deep with B. Lorraine Smith. So I have to ask this first question
• 0:58
  as you are Canadian, how do you feel about Trump and just in general people starting to talk about
• 1:04
  Canada becoming the 51st state of the US? I know in general a lot of Canadians just the Canadian pride
• 1:13
  is like, you know, no way we're not going to let that happen, but you come at it from a totally
• 1:19
  different perspective. I'm really curious like what is your opinion as a forward thinker? Yeah,
• 1:24
  let's start small, James. Let's just tip into these little tulips. I don't know how forward I am,
• 1:30
  but I kind of have maybe a different view of what's happening. First of all, I really do respect
• 1:36
  people's concerns and discomfort and in some cases it's very real lived experience. So my
• 1:41
  sister, for example, runs an amazing micro brewery here in Northern Ontario. The tariffs and some
• 1:46
  of the sort of financial dynamics that are playing out between our two fine nations has a real
• 1:52
  everyday impact on her ability to run a profitable business. And I could, you know, play that
• 1:57
  scenario out in many people's homes right now. So I don't mean to trivialize the severity,
• 2:03
  and in some cases really challenging nature of what's happening. But if I stand back and think about
• 2:09
  what the difficulties mean between our two countries right now, I want to add a few things
• 2:16
  before we try to have one opinion on this. First is this notion of Canadian pride makes me a
• 2:22
  little bit uncomfortable. It forgets some really important internal challenges. Forget interprovincial
• 2:31
  trade, which has its own tariffs and has for decades. It's a very strange trade environment
• 2:36
  domestically in Canada. Let's set that aside and notice that we have a whole nation within a
• 2:41
  nation called Quebec that considers itself in many ways a standalone nation. I lived in Quebec
• 2:47
  for many years and it took me living there as an angle phone who speaks French and getting
• 2:52
  to know the dynamic there. That isn't just like oh, there's a part of Canada that speaks French.
• 2:56
  It is a separate nation, period. And so this Canadian pride thing, it's a little confusing when
• 3:02
  you cross over into Quebec. And then let us not forget that we are actually a nation of many,
• 3:07
  many nations, often called our First Nations, our indigenous communities, many of whom are alive
• 3:12
  and well. I go over a ridge just a few miles to grocery shop into the First Nation of Shigging,
• 3:18
  the closest village to where I live. And I see teachers, lawyers, farmers, regular everyday people
• 3:24
  who are of a different nation within this country who are alive in spite of not because of Canadian
• 3:31
  pride. So I have an uncomfortable feeling when I hear people talking about Canadian pride and
• 3:39
  forgetting the existing domestic opportunities for more grace and generosity across the many nations
• 3:47
  that are here. But if I get a little technical on an economic point around tariffs and the
• 3:54
  financial drama that's playing out, again, not to minimize the pain that it's creating. It's
• 4:00
  definitely creating some gain for others. Let's not forget, I'm really low to see oversimplification
• 4:05
  with these things. Like tariffs have been around for a very long time. And I have talked to a lot of
• 4:10
  people, including economists and people involved in international trade about tariffs over the years.
• 4:17
  And one consensus I hear is it's really complicated and nobody can explain the real effects of tariffs.
• 4:25
  We can talk about some of the basics. We can look at a little bit of cause and effect. But most of
• 4:31
  what we're dealing with here is drama, not real knock on system effects. Anybody who tries to turn
• 4:38
  it into a kind of Canadian pride story or we just have the wrong economic lever. I feel like that's
• 4:44
  an oversimplification that's maybe being fed by a media propaganda. And if I can throw one last
• 4:51
  zinger in here, what I really think about borders is we made them up. It's a human construct and
• 4:57
  any other species that we might collaborate with or be aware of. If they could speak our language,
• 5:04
  they might tell us how funny they are. One of my main mentors are migratory birds and other
• 5:08
  migratory species. And for them, the idea of borders is an absurdity. And I long for the day,
• 5:14
  and I think we might be moving towards it where we become much more bio-regional in our thinking and
• 5:19
  and set aside this kind of jingoistic warmongering or whatever it may be because I don't think it's
• 5:25
  really serving most of us. I think this is one of the reasons I was so excited to speak with you is
• 5:31
  on this podcast, we're really trying to take these kind of ancestral values from the past and
• 5:36
  bring them forward, bring them into our present. And I feel like in many ways that's what you're
• 5:41
  talking about. One of the words you use a lot is regeneration. And that's a word we see a lot in
• 5:47
  the food systems here, regenerative. That's a really catch-all word right now. But what is the
• 5:52
  difference for you between regeneration and sustainability? Sometimes the difference is honestly
• 5:58
  just the choice of jargon. Certainly in the corporate space, if you look at large food companies'
• 6:05
  disclosures or communications, you will see a lot of both of those words. Sometimes they're used
• 6:10
  a little bit interchangeably. But if I were to say what I would like the difference to be,
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  I'm going to be very literal. So the term regenerate proposes that something is created that
• 6:23
  wasn't there before. So there's a change of state. Going from, let's talk about soil for a moment,
• 6:29
  going from perhaps a soil that's very degraded, possibly even contaminated, that growing healthy
• 6:35
  nutritious foods might be very constraining, might not go very well. And then if we regenerate
• 6:42
  that soil through different practices, and there are lots of different practices to regenerate
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  soil, we will see a change where that soil enables better, healthier, more continuous,
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  perhaps even more nutritious food production, or production of fiber or fuel or flowers or whatever,
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  all the fun things are that we might grow in soil. So something has changed when it is regenerative,
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  and in principle it's changed for the better in terms of some purpose that we might be aiming to
• 7:12
  serve. Sustainability is again what it says on the tin, it's sustained. So then we could ask,
• 7:20
  well, what is being sustained? And it kind of proposes if you go really literal that nothing's
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  really changing, it's staying the same. So we're sustaining our ability to produce food. We're
• 7:31
  sustaining our ability to have a certain yield from a certain crop or a certain acreage.
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  And the word sustainability is probably one of the most misused in the English language.
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  I used to work for a firm called sustainability, and that seemed like a really gutsy name when I
• 7:49
  worked for them. And starting in 2012, I was the director of the New York office of sustainability.
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  And people used to say, that's kind of bold. He named your company The Field. It'd be like, you know,
• 8:01
  being a food company and calling yourself food. All right, that'd be a weird name for a company.
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  But they made the point long before my time there that the company was founded when sustainability
• 8:11
  was like an avant-garde business term, they bought the URL for $200. So it was like, these are
• 8:18
  early days. So the word has slid around a lot. The meaning is what matters. So if I could encourage
• 8:25
  your listeners, which includes me, hi, future self, to hold one thought with the word regeneration,
• 8:31
  it's what has changed as a result of this regenerative activity. And is it better? Is it more
• 8:37
  desirable? And if nothing has changed, or if we can't tell, we probably need to go a little deeper,
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  we need to inquire a bit further. Well, that's what a lot of businesses hire you to do, right?
• 8:47
  They hire you to go deeper for them. And to really, I guess, in a sense, like look at the metrics,
• 8:55
  because they're all very metrics-centric, they're looking for you to provide not only how they're
• 9:02
  doing, so kind of give them a report card, but also how they should move forward, correct?
• 9:08
  That is correct, although I'd love to put a slightly finer point on it. So in sustainability,
• 9:13
  we somewhere along the kind of early 2000s, the 20 teens, another jargony term emerged to try
• 9:21
  to clarify sustainability, because things were getting really jargony and a bit greenwashy and vague.
• 9:26
  So along comes another term, which some of you might be familiar with, ESG, environmental,
• 9:31
  social, and governance. And it's a weird term because it's kind of an adjective, like you need to
• 9:35
  put something after it, like ESG reporting, or ESG investing, right? But a lot of people just talk
• 9:41
  about ESG, like a general thing. Again, a bit like we might talk about food. It's a big topic.
• 9:47
  What do we mean by food? But ESG is its own category. It's getting kind of beaten up in its own
• 9:52
  way these days. Sometimes I think for good reason. Sometimes just out of reaction or like lots of
• 9:57
  triggers being pulled these days. So I grew up in the field of ESG. I entered the sustainability
• 10:06
  and what is now often called ESG field in 2003. So over a quarter century ago, back then the
• 10:12
  words were already a bit like, wait, what are you even talking about? It's very niche. Now it's
• 10:16
  super mainstream. If you have investments and you talk to your investment advisor or you go on
• 10:21
  to the website to rebalance your 401k, I'm fairly sure you'll see the term ESG somewhere in there.
• 10:29
  Maybe also ethical, maybe also sustainable, lots of fun jargon, but ESG is a big one.
• 10:34
  So for about 20 years, my focus was on enabling companies to apply best practice in ESG
• 10:41
  and sustainability strategy, disclosures and reporting and increasingly looking at investor
• 10:46
  disclosures. But I want to be really clear on what I do now because that's actually very different.
• 10:53
  It took me about 20 years. I'm kind of slow. I try to be respectful to my past self and to any
• 10:58
  other selves out there sort of working through career questions. We can't necessarily do it overnight.
• 11:04
  It took me 20 years to realize that even though there are very real frameworks with very real
• 11:09
  data, these are metrics that are based on true scientific principles and you can see them with
• 11:14
  your own eyes and write them down and compare you over your. But even then, I saw that really
• 11:19
  companies weren't having a better impact. And remember that regenerative notion, like what is
• 11:25
  changing from what to what? And is it getting better ecologically? Is it making us healthier
• 11:31
  as humans or as communities and society? And over and over, I'd be involved in these strategy
• 11:38
  projects and engaging stakeholders from around the world. I'm kind of lucky that I speak a couple
• 11:42
  different languages, a few European and Brazilian Portuguese. So I could have quite a wide range
• 11:48
  of global conversations. And over and over, I was hearing, we're trying really hard. We're setting up
• 11:54
  these amazing goals. We're measuring them. We're managing them. We're doing all the things we're
• 11:58
  told in business school and everywhere else. But things aren't getting better. And so in 2021,
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  after a couple decades sort of realizing I was beating my head against the wall, I stepped away
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  entirely and I gently fired all of my clients at the time I was freelancing and I had seven projects
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  on the go and I gently let them go. I'm still very good friends with most of the folks involved there.
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  They understood. In fact, they agreed. And I invited myself to stop complaining about the problem
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  and ask, well, if I could do things differently, if it were up to me, if I were scoping and budgeting
• 12:32
  and making all the decisions, what would I do differently? And so I set out on that course and
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  that is what I do now, which is I should be very candid. It's different than companies calling
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  me up and saying, hey, can you help us with these metrics? In many ways, now what I'm focused on
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  helping people do, either within companies or others who've stepped away and are trying to innovate
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  in different ways, still within business, I help them see why those metrics fail.
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  And what we need instead to be truly regenerative and how do we apply our skills and discernment
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  are awareness of what's really happening ecologically and socially and make fundamentally
• 13:12
  different decisions so that business is a force for healing, that it's a force for wellness.
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  I feel like you're so privy to very global awareness due to precisely what you're saying. You
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  know, you're working with businesses throughout the world in different languages. And you're seeing
• 13:28
  of what I would say is a very holistic perspective, like at least you're striving towards, right?
• 13:36
  I know this is a very general question, but let's just focus on the food systems. So what are you
• 13:40
  finding is broken? And what are your thoughts on how to fix it? Let me give an everyday example of
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  something that I see that feels way bigger than me, but also really obvious to anybody who sort of
• 13:56
  decides to pay attention to this or becomes empowered to pay attention to this. I don't know what
• 14:00
  is like where you are, but where I am, that grocery store that's the closest grocery store that I
• 14:05
  could go to that has, you know, aisles. And you could have a cart and push it. So I know grocery
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  store could mean a lot of different things. And there's a lot of different places to get food these
• 14:13
  days. But let's just say the average person in North America who's going to buy food for themselves
• 14:20
  in their family, they're likely at some point in the week to be in a grocery store. Well, there's
• 14:25
  no headline that the way grocery stores are arranged is to enable you to be more likely to buy
• 14:32
  certain products over others, right? And companies buy shelf space and they they collaborate that
• 14:37
  might be known as the incentivize the grocery store managers to put things at a certain height.
• 14:44
  You know, it's not by random coincidence that the really bright, shiny candies in very delicious
• 14:49
  exciting packaging is right at the eye level of a toddler. Like if it were based on health decisions,
• 14:55
  it would be way out of the eye level of the toddler where only the grown-up could see it and make
• 15:00
  decisions. And you go a step further. Like again, if I walk into the grocery store here, I have to
• 15:05
  sort of run a gauntlet of really unhealthy food decisions from just highly processed breakfast cereals
• 15:13
  and, you know, really sugary snacks, even the bread, which you'd like to think could at least be
• 15:19
  something viable there. It's not. It's like old bleached flour, you know, very, very industrialized.
• 15:27
  So one of the biggest problems we have is that for everyday people who have a lot on their minds,
• 15:33
  like how many hundreds of thousands of decisions to most people have to make every day,
• 15:38
  that just to meet their basic needs, which, you know, eating is one of the only things we really do
• 15:44
  need to do. They have to make a series of very difficult decisions to wade through the store that's
• 15:52
  been set up to provide them with their food. And there's so many industrial forces in place to make
• 15:58
  that harder than it really should be if our only priority as a society or as a food industry
• 16:05
  was to ensure we all have healthy guts and plenty of energy. We just be looking at an entirely
• 16:12
  different universe. So that's probably problem number one. Let me turn the table just for a sec,
• 16:18
  just to see where what might be useful because there's a lot I could say about what the food
• 16:22
  industry is doing. But I just want to check something. Have you ever heard of the expression like
• 16:25
  were a bunch of lemons? Is that familiar? Like we want to be sure followers. Yeah, just
• 16:30
  looking for answers. Let's just say I just arrived from another planet, which sometimes I feel like I
• 16:35
  did and I just heard somebody using that expression and you're my earth interpreter. Thank goodness.
• 16:40
  And I'm like, hey, James, they just use that expression about lemons. Can you just break that down
• 16:43
  from me? What are they saying? What would you tell me? Lemons are individuals looking towards
• 16:50
  the given answer. They want the answer. They want to be directed what to do, where to go,
• 16:55
  what to eat, what not. Okay, maybe you're too smart for this question. I gotta make it even simpler.
• 17:01
  Why lemons? What's the story with lemons? Isn't it some animal that will actually walk off the
• 17:06
  cliff? Perfect. That was invented by Disney for a film that was positioned as a documentary.
• 17:15
  It is not real. Lemons were gathered from their natural habitat and brought to an entirely
• 17:21
  different part of the north where the film was made and pushed or thrown off the cliff.
• 17:27
  Why did you think they created that narrative? Well, one of my rules of thumb is to not
• 17:33
  ascribe motive because every time I've done it, I've learned that there was something I just
• 17:39
  didn't understand. So I can't say why. It was an award-winning film. It did go on to win.
• 17:44
  And I believe it was understood to be a documentary. I'm going to set aside the why because
• 17:49
  I'd be speaking on behalf of others, which I'm not invited to do and I'm not privy to the why.
• 17:55
  I'll tell you why that matters to me and why I raise it here.
• 17:59
  Because we have so many ingrained beliefs about how nature works and even how human nature works
• 18:09
  that are not only wrong, they were constructed to be understood a certain way that is wrong.
• 18:20
  So it's one thing to just not understand. It's another thing to be trained to believe
• 18:27
  something that is wrong. Disney's easy to pick on and as one of the largest media companies in the
• 18:33
  world that has a tremendous amount of mind share of my nieces and nephews, Disney matters. I'm going
• 18:39
  to just set all of that aside. And although I've gone backstage on several of the largest media
• 18:44
  companies in the world in their ESG capacity, I've had a chance to see what we might call
• 18:49
  news or entertainment from a very different angle. And the result of that is for most of the last
• 18:55
  decade, I have taken in practically zero mainstream media. Or if I do, I take it in as like an
• 19:00
  archaeological or anthropological artifact, the same way I'm interested in looking at a fossil
• 19:06
  or like understanding how a basket is made. But I'm not taking it like, oh, this is how I'm going to
• 19:13
  educate myself or this is how I'm going to find out what's going on. Because it's quite simply
• 19:17
  very far from the laws of nature. This may sound very conceptual, but it's actually very relevant to
• 19:24
  how we eat and how industry treats us as eaters. The laws of nature aren't really up for discussion.
• 19:30
  I'm not going to call it science because I think that word is almost as badly abused as the words
• 19:34
  this dateability. And look out regeneration and heads up bio-regionalism your next. But the laws
• 19:39
  of nature use whatever words you want. I don't get to decide how a meniscus forms on a water drop
• 19:47
  surface. I may be able to affect it with chemistry. I may observe it or I may not, but it's just how
• 19:53
  nature works. And there are changes. Evolution has happened. It is continuing to happen. So things will
• 19:59
  continue to evolve. But even evolution responds based on nature's laws. These aren't arbitrary things
• 20:07
  and they're definitely not up for industry to decide. But we, for the most part, as modern industrialized
• 20:16
  humans, have been protected from the laws of nature. Protected might be the wrong word there.
• 20:23
  We don't get to see them. We don't get to understand them. If we do, it's like a little field trip
• 20:27
  or like an eco vacation. Oh, let's go to the cloud forest in Costa Rica. It'll be beautiful. Yeah,
• 20:32
  let's do that. There's nothing morally wrong. In fact, it's a longing we have. Where I do have
• 20:39
  some moral concern is that industry makes it hard and expensive for us to experience the laws
• 20:45
  of nature just as we go better days. And then confuses us with broken laws over and over and over
• 20:52
  that are incentivized. And by that, I mean, these companies make great profit. Or if they don't,
• 20:57
  they get in trouble from their shareholders and they adapt so that they do make profit. And I say
• 21:02
  this with all the love, it was a little bit of a trick question. If even you highly educated,
• 21:07
  brilliant wise sage, grown up human, didn't know that was a lie put together by a company that
• 21:17
  is respected. And in fact, loved by many people. How can we begin to make proper discernment
• 21:27
  and decisions about what we eat? We're so full of mixed up like meat is so bad. It's running
• 21:32
  the environment. No, you just need to eat meat. You know, soy is the devil. No, soy. We need more
• 21:38
  soy. We need more protein. That's a bit of a preach about where we need help. Well, this is a hot
• 21:44
  topic right now because this is really what we're talking about is like, so who's the expert?
• 21:49
  If we're looking at the experts to give us the answers, but the experts are following something
• 21:55
  that someone co-opted many, many years ago. And you know, which you could argue everything has
• 22:00
  been co-opted. So you're either going back a few weeks or a few years for information,
• 22:07
  or you're going back even further, but either way, wherever the information is being pulled
• 22:14
  to garner your decision, you don't actually know if it's a pure source. You don't actually know
• 22:20
  if it's true. You're just assuming it's true because it's being passed down from
• 22:26
  enough people saying it, or from someone who is labeled an expert, or someone who wrote a book,
• 22:32
  or has some tangible media that you actually watched, read, or listened to, that they are now
• 22:40
  this expert. And it very much could just be, like I said, you're the co-opted, or just someone's
• 22:45
  opinion that they're passing off as expert advice. So this is something I've been thinking a lot
• 22:52
  about. So I'm really excited that we're delving in this, and you're like the perfect person to
• 22:57
  bounce us off of. But the question then becomes, well, then what do you trust? Who do you trust?
• 23:03
  I do have some answers to that in terms of how I guide myself, because you can make yourself a
• 23:07
  little crazy, like just trying to have breakfast, frankly, or trying to have a conversation with friends.
• 23:12
  But of course, I'm not the knower of all things. So I'll share my guiding principles on this
• 23:19
  ever evolving. The number one that I have for discerning information that comes at me,
• 23:26
  and recall I did about two decades in mainstream ESG and sustainability. Well, I stepped out of
• 23:31
  that in 2021. It's 2025. So it's been almost a quarter century very focused on corporate
• 23:37
  disclosure, corporate communications, and dialogue with stakeholders around the world across
• 23:43
  sectors. So a lot of food, a lot of forestry, manufacturing, including food and
• 23:47
  bev energy. I've been in very deep trenches in industrial conversations, and in boardrooms,
• 23:55
  and factories, and plantations, and then just researching, squirreling away. But one of my main
• 24:01
  sources has been the corporate disclosures themselves. So not what the journalists say, sometimes,
• 24:06
  yes, but mostly what is the actual company say? And I want to just insert something very
• 24:13
  important here because it's very easy to dismiss. Well, companies, they're full of shit. They're
• 24:17
  going to say what they need to say, blah, blah, blah, maybe. But rest assured, a publicly listed
• 24:23
  company, which is where most of my industrial expertise has been, they have very strict rules,
• 24:28
  and they're very risk-averse about what they can say publicly. And I've been at those
• 24:33
  conversations with legal counsel, like if they're even slightly itchy about something,
• 24:39
  they do not want to get that rash. They will not publicly state something that they cannot stand
• 24:44
  behind. It doesn't mean it's good information. It doesn't mean we like it. But we can rest assured
• 24:50
  that it's at least true to them. They can back it up. Because if they can't, they do not want to
• 24:57
  run that risk. We're seeing some interesting greenwash cases in the, in a few places.
• 25:03
  So that's going to be interesting, but it doesn't mean the words they said weren't true. It
• 25:07
  might mean they're misleading in various ways. But all to say, I actually believe most of the
• 25:12
  information that companies are saying. So how do I make a decision about what to do, what to buy,
• 25:17
  what to eat, what to trust? My number one principle is, can I discern if anything is changing?
• 25:27
  So what do I mean by that? If a company says, you know, we're committed to environmental
• 25:33
  sustainability, that's why we're dot, dot, dot, right? Insert whatever amazing thing they're doing.
• 25:38
  But I can't actually see something changing as a result other than a kind of paper statement.
• 25:45
  We reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. Well, what changed as a result of that other
• 25:50
  than your electrical bill went down? Did you reduce just because you switched fuel sources?
• 25:56
  And did that fuel source actually reduce in your region? Or did you just jive us to bit,
• 26:01
  but somebody else picked up the rest? It could be both. But if you can't tell, then as far as,
• 26:07
  you know, nothing changed. And so that's just blah, blah, blah. That's just letters on a page.
• 26:12
  But if you can actually see the impact of something, like real impact that if you had your own
• 26:19
  eyeballs right there, you'd be able to say, oh, yes, this soil now retains moisture. It's less
• 26:25
  likely to be in the path of fire. And because it will, it fire goes out when there's sufficient
• 26:32
  moisture, right? When we make tinder boxes in monospecies plantations and then call it a wild fire,
• 26:38
  we got the wrong word. We got to use our discernment. What is changing? And if you can't answer
• 26:46
  that, this maybe isn't as fun for everyone. I actually find it really interesting to try to find out.
• 26:52
  First of all, what do I want to change? I want to be healthier. I want my family to be healthier.
• 26:57
  I want everybody I know to be healthier. I want the ecosystem that keeps me alive around me to be
• 27:01
  healthier. There's a few other things I want, but that kind of sums it up. And this company's
• 27:05
  telling me they're doing things around that. What can they tell me that actually means something
• 27:11
  changed? And the vast majority of those disclosures, they're not out there. They don't exist,
• 27:18
  because if they did, what they showed that changed is, oh, we paved more roads. We made higher margins
• 27:25
  on lower food value products. We made it more likely that more kids are going to sit in straight
• 27:31
  lines in school and memorize a bunch of crap. Those are the metrics. But I want to watch for what's
• 27:37
  changing and look for where can I find that out? And I guess the punctuation mark on that is if
• 27:42
  I can't find it out through a company's own literature, I just try to sense it using my own
• 27:47
  mind and body. And so that usually brings me pretty close and pretty local.
• 27:52
  When I think that is what we're seeing a real uptick in is that over the last few years where
• 27:59
  people were blatantly lied to and science was used against itself. And now people mistrust what
• 28:07
  government agencies say, what corporations say, there's just this overall sense of mistrust.
• 28:14
  Yet I think where people are putting the trust is in their own experience. Do I feel better
• 28:19
  eating this way? Do I feel like I'm helping the world by buying organic? You know, whether you have
• 28:26
  the proof of it or not, do you feel like it's working? That feeling, the feeling of something is
• 28:34
  taking over the actual proof. It's like a social proof now. I super agree with that. I mean,
• 28:44
  one of the most powerful things we can do is change our minds. And you know, it's kind of a cliche,
• 28:48
  you know, mindset is really important. It's one of the highest points of leverage when we look at
• 28:52
  places to intervene in a system. There's lots of great systems thinking that looks at, you know,
• 28:56
  where can we intervene in a system? And the highest places you can intervene is in the
• 29:01
  in the mindset and the worldview in which we experience the system. I'm going to borrow myself
• 29:07
  as an experiment here, talking about the importance of feeling for quite a while when I was very
• 29:12
  immersed in the sustainability world. I would say I was sort of at peak enthusiasm. Like, we're going
• 29:18
  to do this. You know, these are leading companies, name a food company that you might have heard
• 29:24
  of like household names, food and Bev. I probably worked with them and or my colleagues sitting
• 29:28
  at a couple of desks. So we did. And these are like multi-million dollar companies and they were
• 29:32
  ambitious. And I'm like, yes, we're seeing more and more really meaningful investor frameworks
• 29:38
  coming out. And I can talk more about the investor piece if you like. So I'm really enthusiastic.
• 29:42
  And I'm also going deep into food systems. I was living in the US at the time in New York City.
• 29:47
  And I'm horrified by industrial ag. I am just like, this is so not okay on so many levels.
• 29:53
  And in particular, the meat industry was just catastrophic from so many angles.
• 30:00
  Certainly the environmental impacts, the moral and ethical impacts, the impacts on the human
• 30:05
  workers that's, you know, just gross. So overnight, I went from a very omnivorous eater,
• 30:11
  very sort of meat-friendly to essentially plant-based. And it literally happened overnight.
• 30:16
  It was a very visceral feeling. I was like, I can't eat that. I feel like I'm eating my own leg.
• 30:20
  Like I just can't do it. And for the ensuing 10 years, I was very plant-based.
• 30:25
  And I felt great. Meanwhile in parallel, I also got back to serious marathoning.
• 30:30
  I got into ultra-marathoning. I ran a five-day ultra-marathon as a plant-based athlete
• 30:36
  at age 50. Right? Like I was doing great. I felt great. And I think there's a lot of
• 30:45
  power in how your mind is. And I was eating clean whole foods for the most part.
• 30:51
  Your wonderful wife, Margaret, was a great guide in helping me navigate some health issues
• 30:57
  that emerged on the tail end of that plant-based decade. Fast forward and I'll skip lots of
• 31:02
  very uncomfortable gastric experiences to say. Then I changed. I don't judge myself for being
• 31:09
  plant-based in those years. It was the right decision for me at that time. I felt great.
• 31:15
  I achieved a lot. I'm proud of myself. But I'm also aware that there were certain
• 31:20
  elements of the way I was eating that I wasn't willing to talk about. And there were certain
• 31:25
  wider contextual things that I couldn't see at the time. For me, it was as simple as the meat
• 31:30
  system is catastrophic. I don't want to invest in it and I don't want to ingest it.
• 31:36
  And then, as I was stepping out of mainstream sustainability and starting to see like,
• 31:40
  whoa, there's a lot more going on, which by the way partly happened because I was on the ground
• 31:44
  in Brazil, meeting a lot of very grassroots what we would call regenerative farmers.
• 31:48
  They're actually just people growing stuff who aren't in the news, who aren't on Instagram.
• 31:53
  They're just human beings living well and they get missed by the mainstream system.
• 31:58
  And I was experiencing their approach and seeing so many things with my own eyes. I was like,
• 32:04
  oh, this matters. And in that context, along with some gastric evolution, I shifted back to
• 32:12
  practically a paleo diet now. And as much as I can, I'm grain-free. That's kind of hard, but
• 32:17
  I work on it. Certainly processed grain-free if I can. So where I'm going with this is,
• 32:22
  there was a lot of inner recognition, like recognizing things that I didn't understand.
• 32:30
  And I needed to experience them with my own body, with my own eyes, with my own trusted friends.
• 32:36
  Margaret is one of the most trusted people in my life. So she could tell me something
• 32:41
  that maybe would have been harder for me to hear from others. And incidentally, the sustainability
• 32:47
  community that I was very much in, the corporate sustainability community, when you aren't plant-based,
• 32:52
  it's a little bit like being a smoker, right? You're kind of quiet about it. And you know,
• 32:55
  you got to step outside. Can I get some? Do you have gravy, too? Whereas when you come out as
• 33:00
  plant-based, oh, welcome. Thank you. We're so glad you're finally here, right? It's a very kind of
• 33:06
  culty situation. And so... Yeah, very hypocritical as well, yeah. Right. I mean, there's a lot we could
• 33:12
  say, but honestly, genuine, truly believing. As I did, I truly believed that I was making a positive
• 33:19
  decision for my own personal wellness and for anybody I cooked for and for my wider community.
• 33:26
  So a lot had to change in my own mind to realize, like, no, you know where I really want to get my
• 33:32
  food from? Farmer Nick, who's delivering a little. In fact, my riggers are all off, so I won't hear
• 33:36
  him. He's going to be leaving the most incredible food at my front door from his biodynamic regenerative,
• 33:43
  give it whatever label you want. Just real, healthy, truly regenerative food.
• 33:49
  What I hear you saying is basically that, you know, we only know we know. And then we need to
• 33:56
  honor our process as we go throughout life as we learn. And you know, and you just honor whatever
• 34:02
  that process is. But I have to think, I mean, you have been privy to sides of industry that most
• 34:10
  people don't know. I hear you saying that that is also dictating some of your choices, you know,
• 34:16
  sometimes it's moving you away from eating certain things and then, and then, you know, your own
• 34:21
  life brings you and your own health journey brings you back to where it needs to go. But is there
• 34:27
  anything like, even if you pick three things in your 20 years, I know I'm asking a lot here.
• 34:34
  But are there like three things that you think the people listening or watching this podcast
• 34:40
  should know about the systems that will help them make decisions moving forward?
• 34:47
  There's one that's really prominent for me. This is uncomfortable. Can I kind of go into an
• 34:53
  awkward space? Well, that's all, that's the only space I like. Yeah, take a deep breath while
• 35:00
  you're in liquids. I really encourage people to follow their money. And it's actually more
• 35:06
  doable than you think. I appreciate why people say, oh, it's so complicated. I don't have time.
• 35:11
  I don't know where to look. Have you tried like, for instance, if you have a 401k plan or you have
• 35:17
  any, you know, an IRA or some kind of investment that's in the, let's call it the market, it's your
• 35:24
  money. It is yours. If you wanted to, you may, you may not want to, but if you wanted to,
• 35:29
  you have legal and fiduciary right to walk up to that institution or call them or get in touch
• 35:36
  in whatever way you do and say, I'd like it all right now, please. It's yours. And if you
• 35:43
  literally don't know what it is invested in and let's be clear what investments are,
• 35:49
  they're money that somebody else is doing something with. What is changing?
• 35:53
  awkward admission. I decided to follow my own up here in Canada. We call it an RRSP, a registered
• 35:59
  retirement savings plan, functions very similarly to an IRA or a 401k tax incentivized in all of the
• 36:04
  rest of it. I've only been in this field for 25 years, right? So last January, 2024, I get the
• 36:10
  the prospectus. It's like a freaking phone book lands on my doorstep and I ignore it because
• 36:16
  yeah, good. Someone's doing their homework, right? And then this little bell went off in my head
• 36:20
  as I was getting ready to pitch it into the recycling bin, which by the way, don't even get me
• 36:24
  started on recycling, which rarely gets streamed into any meaningful market. Oh, the recycling
• 36:28
  in Portland gets shipped to China. Probably doesn't many more because they close their doors.
• 36:33
  Well, that's another story to get shipped back. Like no joke, this happened when we used to live
• 36:39
  in Portland. They shipped the recycling to China and China sent it back because it had too much
• 36:46
  food waste on it. That's right. How that to me is like insane, you know, in the name of the earth.
• 36:54
  Like see also Lemmings, a promise I'll come back to the investor thing, but I'll go on a 30-second
• 36:59
  segue here. We believe that if there's a recycling symbol and we put it into the right receptacle,
• 37:04
  something good is going to happen. We do not know that even, for example, in Canada, wealthy,
• 37:10
  well-governed Canada, at a minimum, 91% of recycled materials end up in landfill or incinerated.
• 37:21
  Only 9% is actually turned into something else, which is what the word recycling means.
• 37:28
  We believed the lemming story. Oh, they hurled themselves off the cliff every once in a while. We
• 37:33
  believe the recycling story. We are being lied to. That material is not being turned into picnic
• 37:40
  tables. It is not being turned into Patagonia jackets. It is going into landfills and ultimately
• 37:48
  leaching into our water or crumbling into our oceans. Right, which is why microplastics are such a
• 37:54
  huge thing. And people jump on it. So let me come back to the investor thing real quick. I just
• 37:59
  want you to hold the invest things. I do want to just say this one thing because I'm curious about
• 38:03
  your reaction or your response to this since it has to recycling. I've always thought we're kind of
• 38:09
  shamed, residentially. When I say we, I'm talking about people in general, we're shamed. You have
• 38:15
  to recycle in your home. But in my judgment, in my experience, and to your point, it's meaningless
• 38:23
  that it's actually corporations that are moving the needle around planetary issues with energy
• 38:31
  and water toxins in the air that is more of them that need to move that needle first because the
• 38:40
  residential quarter wouldn't move the needle enough. The real challenge, in my view, is even if
• 38:47
  all of us did it, there is no it for all of us to do. Here's the paradox there.
• 38:53
  The them there is corporations, but corporations are run by people and they're run by people who
• 38:57
  believe the lemming story and think there is a way. Like when you recycle, it goes away. But there
• 39:03
  is no way away is inside your body. Away is inside your, your river, your ocean, your seagull. We are
• 39:10
  away. Welcome to away. So the human beings that run companies, I've never met a company run
• 39:17
  by anything other than human beings. I am in favor of companies being run by something other
• 39:21
  than human beings like a river. River would do a great job and I don't buy the whole like,
• 39:26
  oh now there's companies with rivers on the board. Sorry, but fuck that shit. When they run the company,
• 39:31
  call me. Otherwise, it's a little nominal like, yeah, they get some stakeholder input. No, a river
• 39:36
  would run a company very differently and it would be like, what the fuck are you doing putting
• 39:40
  things in plastic? We have nowhere to put that. No. Find something else and it's very awkward James.
• 39:46
  I'm one of your customers. I love pluck. It's brilliant. But you as the creator of this incredible
• 39:52
  product, you have to get it to people safely, conveniently stored in some way that human beings can
• 39:59
  do something with. So we do have a very real challenge. But we are smart, smart people. And when
• 40:06
  we are told, these are your design constraints. And by the way, they follow the laws of nature,
• 40:12
  which are the only laws we are all beholden to from birth to death and beyond.
• 40:19
  Then we go, oh, well, let's think about that. But right now, we're believing the lemming story.
• 40:25
  We're believing the recycling story and our laws are like jurisdictional laws that human beings
• 40:31
  pretend to enforce don't follow the laws of nature. One of the hints that we've still got the
• 40:36
  wrong economic paradigm is that we have laws. You don't need a legal structure. You don't need
• 40:43
  judges and all this whacked out private prison system when you follow the laws of nature.
• 40:50
  That is a symptom of a broken paradigm. Let me just quickly underscore this point by following
• 40:56
  my own money if I may. I took that perspective and I said, you know what? If the human being who
• 41:02
  has over two decades experience creating and analyzing investor and ESG disclosures can't follow
• 41:09
  her own investment, then we have a problem. And I wrote about this, by the way, and I'm happy to
• 41:13
  make it available to anybody who's curious. I followed my own investment money. It was in one of
• 41:18
  the most ethical funds in Canada pioneers. All the language was around global sustainability, blah,
• 41:23
  blah, blah. Most of it, you can't even see you following it goes to the IMF and the World Bank
• 41:28
  and all this like Goldman Sachs who then invest in Deutsche Bank is like very musical cherries.
• 41:33
  So that's already a big problem with the financial system, perhaps a chat for another time.
• 41:38
  But the ones where you could follow you could say, oh, here's an actual company name. And then you
• 41:42
  could go look at that company. One of them is an industrial egg feedlot company. It's like, wait,
• 41:49
  I felt sick. I felt sick. And you know what I did? So this is my one. I could come up with more,
• 41:55
  but my one thing that everyone can do is be really honest about what you're paying for right now.
• 42:04
  When I saw that with my own eyes, with my own skill set going, yeesh, I divested from the whole
• 42:10
  thing. And that's not wise financial advice. Your financial advisor wants you to have as much money
• 42:14
  as possible when you retire, which why do we retire like retired enough? But anyway, I put it all
• 42:20
  into cash, which is financially dangerous for a whole bunch of reasons. But I was like, well,
• 42:26
  I'd prefer financially dangerous than walking around knowing I'm paying for the very system
• 42:31
  that I'm calling out and saying, I don't want this. I think we can do something better. So I believe,
• 42:37
  this is why I said it's uncomfortable. There's a lot of, yeah, but what about, but I got kids
• 42:40
  and I got health care and I got, I get it. We have real lives that we are trying to live in the
• 42:45
  best way we can. But one thing I believe we all can do is make very honest, grounded in the
• 42:52
  change we want decisions based on where we put every single penny we work hard to earn.
• 43:00
  It is such a hard discussion for people. We get inundated with people saying, oh,
• 43:08
  pluck is so expensive, all this stuff. We're literally right now creating this kind of map
• 43:14
  of savings just to inform people like we are always trying to make it cheaper for people.
• 43:20
  The issue, and this is the truth, the issue is that if we charge you what we really want to charge
• 43:29
  you, which is the lowest we can go, we won't have enough money to buy ads to make sure that you
• 43:36
  know the product exists to do the things that bring your attention to us. So we actually have to
• 43:43
  set it at a higher cost to ensure that there's enough money so that someone else doesn't come in.
• 43:49
  So this has to do with this competition, basically. We are protecting ourselves and our brand
• 43:56
  from in a sense like espionage from someone coming in who has a lot more money who can just like
• 44:03
  replicate what we do and then pay for ads because nowadays most small businesses specifically
• 44:09
  e-commerce are run by social ads or online ads. And the winner of that game is whoever has the
• 44:17
  most money. And that's the truth. Here's the other hard truth. When people say to us, this is so
• 44:26
  expensive, though thing I really want to say to people and I don't, but what I really want to say
• 44:31
  is, well, why is this expensive? But yet your cell phone bill is not. Why is this expensive? But
• 44:38
  you're paying for three streamers that you previously never paid for. You know, remember we used
• 44:44
  to people paid for cable and it was let's just say $20 a month. Now they're paying $40 to $60
• 44:51
  because they're paying for separate streamers. To me when I hear someone say, well, this is expensive.
• 44:56
  What I really hear is, I don't want to choose my health or so that's me assuming that they think
• 45:04
  you know, organ meats are healthy or the more accurate question could be, well, you clearly don't know
• 45:12
  that this is probably one of the best decisions you could make for your health. You don't
• 45:16
  understand the value of what organ meats could provide for your health. You haven't felt that yet.
• 45:22
  You haven't felt sick enough to know that your food choices matter. Yeah. So there's lots of
• 45:29
  things, but the reality is, is priorities, right? It's the story we're telling and it's that mindset
• 45:36
  you're talking. It's like the path that we have decided, this is what it is. This is what it means
• 45:41
  instead of, and I think you beautifully brought this up, that maybe what we think it is
• 45:46
  is actually a falsehood or is a truth that someone shared a long time ago that was made up,
• 45:51
  but we've now converted that narrative into a truth and it never was. Yeah, it's tricky. There's
• 46:00
  another layer of trouble. I'll just make sure your listeners aren't fully off the hooky one. They're
• 46:05
  like, okay, I'll follow every penny I promise. We have this saying in some of the kind of hardcore
• 46:10
  sustainability circles where you say it's hard to be a clean fish in a dirty ocean. So even if
• 46:16
  you say, okay, I'm going to make sure I only fund things that I truly care about. I'm going to
• 46:22
  clean up my diet. I'm going to do all the things that I'm going to do my best to know the truth and
• 46:26
  I'm going to do a pretty good job. You're still stuck in this world as an entrepreneur. My business
• 46:33
  model was very simple before I fully stepped away. My business model was I'm a freelance consultant.
• 46:38
  I can be a hired gun on your ESG and sustainability consulting work. That was really easy because
• 46:44
  demand was booming and I could be as busy as I wanted and I could, for the most part, pick my clients.
• 46:49
  That's an easy business model when you're not trying to disrupt anything. But now that I see my
• 46:55
  job as enabling business decision makers that might be folks in an executive role or in some role
• 47:02
  where they're implementing change. My real job is to enable them to not only think it's a thought
• 47:08
  but to think it's a desirable thought that the economy works in service of life,
• 47:13
  that it follows nature's laws, that of course a viable business is one that makes us healthier
• 47:18
  within a healthier ecology. That's my job. And to do that job, I do a number of different things.
• 47:23
  Well, that's actually not what most people think they want. And so my own business model, I am
• 47:30
  actively this very weak. I had to blow up something that was actually going really well,
• 47:33
  great feedback, but it was not profitable. It was not serving my own ability to be sustained,
• 47:38
  much less regenerated. I function on planet earth. When I do hike over the ridge and go to get
• 47:44
  groceries, I wade past all the toxic stuff and try to get some good local stuff. Or when I hand over
• 47:49
  my farm share amount to the amazing farmer Nick down the road, that's got to be in a fiat currency
• 47:56
  that they can recognize in exchange. I can't just be like, oh, I think really erudite thoughts,
• 48:01
  give me some great food. I got to pay them. We are in a very exciting time and folks who do not
• 48:08
  have a lot of excess cash, which is most human beings on this planet. In fact, most don't even have
• 48:15
  excess. They have negative. Most people in this modern economy are in some kind of debt,
• 48:20
  at the very least a mortgage if not other like college or other debt. So we are cash scarce
• 48:26
  in an economy that's getting more expensive for day to day survival. And that's not by accident.
• 48:34
  And that is constrained and kind of creatively crimping energetic space to be in. So we're like
• 48:43
  triply called. We have to figure out what the truth is, like what would be good food? What would
• 48:48
  be a good way to put my money? We have to have the kind of equanimity and serenity and calm
• 48:56
  to be able to enact those decisions. Those are already two really big missing pieces for many people.
• 49:03
  But then we need to find ourselves in a system that's at least got those choices that isn't going
• 49:09
  to beat us over the head when we try to live that way or marginalize us or call us something
• 49:13
  really weird, you know, just for trying to be healthy and make choices that aren't what the
• 49:18
  mainstream industrial system that's very harming promotes makes easy and makes most profitable.
• 49:24
  So it's a bit of a triple whammy, but lots of us are working on it. And I think we're having
• 49:28
  more fun anyway. That's my view on this fine Friday anyway. As we wrap it up, I feel like we
• 49:36
  have tapped into sort of the red pill of pulling back the curtain and just saying, hey,
• 49:43
  what you think may not be what is accurate, but at the same time, you have to find your own
• 49:50
  dignity of your life. You have to find your path in this life with the idea that you are in a toxic
• 49:55
  soup and that things may not be what you think they are. As we close, like, is there something tangible?
• 50:04
  Is there something that people can walk away from this conversation with besides just pulling
• 50:09
  back the curtain, but something that they can actually do, given that you did say, okay, follow
• 50:13
  the money, but I'm talking what's something that the minute they stop listening to this,
• 50:18
  what can they do then? What's the next moment after listening to this that they can actively do
• 50:24
  that might help find some piece? Yeah, what comes to mind for me is that in fact, there is a lot of
• 50:31
  amazing, very powerful regenerative work going on across systems, across regions, very locally
• 50:39
  and beyond. If I had one piece of guidance for folks, it would be use your amazing innate senses,
• 50:46
  but we're all born with them, right? We are sensory and sensitive and let your senses highlight
• 50:55
  one of those things that you have access to. It might be a great regenerative farmer that you've
• 51:01
  been thinking about checking out. How do you get a farm share? It might be a local gardening project.
• 51:05
  It might be your book project. There's no one thing, but whatever it is that when you bring it
• 51:13
  to mind, it offers that heart opening, reaffirming human health reinforcing and or ecological
• 51:24
  health reinforcing pathway and energize that, put time to it if it calls, put money to it. It's
• 51:33
  happening all around us. That is, by the way, what wakes me up every morning and lets me sleep peacefully
• 51:40
  at night is this, except for the odd, very disturbing dream these days, but there is so much
• 51:47
  really, really beautiful stuff going on and the more we energize it, the better we feel,
• 51:52
  but be the more energy it gets. Just pick one of those things and bring your power, whatever
• 51:59
  that is, your attention, your pension and let that be your gift today. I love it. Yeah, that's
• 52:08
  such a great takeaway. For anyone that is struggling to find that superpower or that beautiful
• 52:16
  thing around them, that is that your work right there is to find the gratitude even when things
• 52:22
  feel toxic or even when they feel like the world's on your shoulders kind of thing is to find some
• 52:29
  sort of beauty or gratitude in a moment, in a person, in an experience that can carry you to the
• 52:38
  next moment. Lorraine, I realize that you've written a lot of fantastic pieces. Where can people
• 52:45
  read some of these thoughts, these meditations to have shared here 25 years? Where would they
• 52:51
  go to read some of that? Thanks, James. I appreciate that. My blog, be LorraineSmith.com. There's a
• 52:58
  blog there where I share my weekly letter. You can also sign up to get that weekly letter in your
• 53:03
  inbox if you like that kind of thing. So there's a place to sign up on my website at be LorraineSmith.com
• 53:08
  and I really enjoy corresponding with folks who are on this path. I call it the path to industrial
• 53:14
  healings. So really the best place would be my website and I'd love to see folks there and hear
• 53:19
  questions, comments and also what you're seeing because there really is so much rich stuff out there.
• 53:24
  So I'd love to hear people's ideas. Yeah, you're a deep thinker and I'm deeply grateful for
• 53:30
  not only your presence in our presence in our life, but just that you existed. You're out there
• 53:36
  and then I think even how you delicately answered the Canada U.S. question really
• 53:44
  shares how you look at a situation that you don't look at it from a very surface. You go as deep
• 53:49
  as you can with it. You brought a lot of points that even I wasn't thinking about or considering
• 53:56
  because I think it is easy to get used to the media trap. If you're only hearing that perspective
• 54:01
  and forgetting that there's so many other layers to every topic that we're learning or hearing about.
• 54:07
  So thank you for bringing that awareness. Thank you for doing what you do and thank you for joining
• 54:13
  me today and thank you all for listening or watching the everyday and social podcasts. You know,
• 54:18
  we would love your support. So please subscribe, share the podcast. The more people that
• 54:24
  subscribe, the more you're communicating to us that you like what we're doing and so it helps us
• 54:28
  get even more guests. It helps us spread that word, that ancestral word. So please take
• 54:35
  you for tuning in. Thank you so much for joining me on everyday ancestral. If you enjoyed this
• 54:43
  episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You could find the show notes, links
• 54:49
  and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's e-a-t-p-l-u-c-k dot com. And hey, if you know someone
• 55:00
  who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.