Shawn Flynn  01:13

Now, James, you’ve had a fascinating career, and what really amazed me is the start of it was actually Lucas Films. Could you talk a little bit about this

James Ehrlich  01:22

It goes back to when I was in New York and growing up on Long Island and New York City and Manhattan. I was involved in lighting design, and working for rock and roll bands, doing their lighting. This was during the transition between analog and digital systems. At that moment, I started to learn about programming and software programming, and I was particularly interested in video games and video game design. When I finished my undergrad degree at New York University, I moved out to San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and instead of moving into the Valley itself, I’m moved north to the North Bay, towards Marin County. I was working with some fantastic folks who were working with George Lucas, Industrial Light & Magic, and LucasArts, and decided to start a software company in the early 1990s, building tools for digital effects and motion pictures. I was also doing video games and tools for video game development.

Shawn Flynn  02:25

After Lucas Films, you had your own TV show that was syndicated nationally. Can you talk a little bit about this show and your guerilla marketing tactics to grow this phenomenon?

James Ehrlich  02:38

As I said, I was up in Marin County in Northern California. It was just a really beautiful place. I was surrounded by these organic biodynamic family farms producing gorgeous kinds of food, artisanal ingredients. I was feeling so good at making friends and enjoying these farm-to-table meals, and even though I had my software company running and doing well, I decided to do some case study research. Because I didn’t even know what the word organic meant in the early to mid-1990s. I thought everything was organic, including petroleum. Learning about that was really fascinating.

As I was digging into this whole concept about farming in these particular ways that were generating high yield outcomes, I started to film the stories of these family farms, these farmers, and tracking the food where it was going, to schools, eldercare, and restaurants. At that moment, we realized that we had some substance of a really nice television cooking show. I had the ingredients coming from these family farms, one to three Michelin star chefs that we were featuring, and the marriage of those things together. We started a public access TV show in the Bay Area. Originally, it was in the North Bay, and then we branched out to San Francisco.

In the early year or two that we were producing, we were about eight to ten local public access TV stations. Back then, in the ’90s, you had about 35 channels on TV, and by law, one of them had to be a local public access cable channel. And so, the odds of people actually tuning in and watching our show were really high because it was a 1 in 35 chance that you could land on our TV series.

It was called Organic Living. I was filming in high definition using Apple Mac, FireWire, and Final Cut Pro. We were basically the Spielbergs of public access television because it was in letterbox format. That was quite beautiful. Seemingly overnight, we gained demand for the show. We started to then send tapes, actual video cassettes, out to 54 public access stations around the country. We really got the interest from some public television stations because people producing and watching the PBS said, “Your show should be on my local public television station.”

In 2003, we put a little bit of money into higher production value, and we did a satellite feed. Back then, that’s how you could reach out to the national stream of public television stations. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I just thought, “Maybe we’ll get a few stations. It will be interesting.” After the satellite feed happened, we had 62 stations pick us up. Then we had the carriage or capacity to start to bring on sponsors because then we had actual broadcast television.

At the apex of the show, we had about 122 public television stations around the country. We were reaching about 35 million homes each week. We had a best-selling companion cookbook that I co-authored on Hachette in 2007.

We had two versions of the show. One show was called Organic Living, and the other was called Hippie Gourmet. It was sort of an A/B test. Hippie Gourmet was edgier and got more viewers because people will tune in, learn something, and enjoy the show whether or not they like hippies. But the show didn’t do well in terms of sponsorship, of course, because a lot of the blue-chip sponsors weren’t interested in putting the money behind that.

It was a phenomenal experience for us to be reaching people around the country with this prosaic series of farm-to-table experiences of delicious food, and of simple yet so pleasurable and heart-warming life-affirming activities. We were getting emails and letters from people all around the country, typically from red states or Bible Belt areas, who wanted to hate the show because of the word organic or hippie or whatever. But they’d say, “Because I watched your show, I started to cook differently,” “I was able to get my husband off of his medications for diabetes,” or “I was able to bring my child back from ADD or ADHD.” All these different things were sort of happening for us that we’re so deep and meaningful. It was an impactful experience for me to be able to communicate this kind of content to people, and I felt like we were really on a good path, from a planetary perspective, that this kind of messaging was so well-received.

Shawn Flynn  07:52

That was back in 2007. You’re an entrepreneur. You keep going and you keep going, obviously. What’s happened since then?

James Ehrlich  08:00

Well, I was still doing contract video game design and development and other kinds of work in tech because I married my mind to technology and nature. There was this convergence, if you will, between digital aspects of living and also the natural aspects of living. When I had a sort of epiphany, I had come to Stanford University in 2012. After a lot of different kinds of endeavors and work, I was on campus at Stanford, involved in a project development called the Solar Decathlon.

Solar Decathlon is a *inaudible* university global cohort of who could build the most energy-positive house. It was a very interesting competition. I was brought on as the organic food and living coach and lecturer. It was amazing! Except that in the first five minutes of researching this smart house competition, I realized that a smart house inside of a dumb neighborhood makes absolutely no sense. And so, I really began to focus on this idea of neighborhood infrastructure that could have critical life support systems of clean food, clean water, clean energy, as well as these energy-positive homes. We’re really blessed at Stanford to be connected with these professors who agreed with my premise and were willing to stand behind me in my research initiative. That was where I began this whole path towards getting us to thinking differently than traditional builds in traditional neighborhoods.

Shawn Flynn  09:52

Right now, you are the first-ever entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford. Can you talk a little bit about that? and can you get give a little definition of what an entrepreneur in residence is?

James Ehrlich  10:04

There was an interesting moment when I had a high-paying staff position as a senior technologist and researcher at Stanford. I realized at the same time that the planet was not going in the right direction and that I had to do something. In order to do that, I concluded that it had to be from an entrepreneurial perspective. I had to realize a commercial endeavor that was an impactful investment vehicle that would allow us to fix the planet but as an appealing business case.

The issue at Stanford is that senior staff positions, researchers, and even professors, are not allowed to have commercial activities in addition to their daily academic activities. So, I applied for a professional leave of absence, which not a lot of people do. But I did it because I didn’t want to lose my affiliation and my connectivity to Stanford because it’s an incredible campus and resource. It’s actually doing so many things to fix our world. I went back to a mode without salary from Stanford, and instead took a position as an entrepreneur-in-residence. This is the first time in a 125-year history that that title was applied to somebody at Stanford.

I was working at the time with Professor Larry Leifer in the Center for Design Research (CDR), which is part of the School of Mechanical Engineering. We started diving into the research initiative that I was self-funding. I was putting up my own money to do these off-campus satellite prototyping of circular waste and food systems, things that would be connected to smart house infrastructure. That’s where that connectivity started to really take off.

Shawn Flynn  12:10

Now, can you give us a little bit more information about the whole connectivity of the environment? I have done a little research and I heard about the World Wide Web. Can you talk a little bit about this?

James Ehrlich  12:23

I was deeply inspired by the work of Dr. Suzanne Simard from the University of Vancouver in British Columbia. She has a really interesting story. She was up in the Pacific Northwest and her dog had fallen into an outhouse hole. They were feverishly trying to get the dog rescued. They did, fortunately. As she was down in this hole, she noticed the side of the walls. It looked like Ethernet cabling between all of the trees and the bushes and the plants and under the forest floor. She was particularly curious. Where do all these connections lead from and to? She discovered what she lovingly called the Wood Wide Web, instead of the World Wide Web.

Essentially, her research showed that old-growth Douglas-fir trees were conveying nutrients, minerals, sugar, carbon, etc. to maple seedlings several hundred meters away on the forest floor. It’s not a Darwinian kind of concept, but actually, a beneficial collaborative economy that exists under the forest floor. The particularly interesting thing about this is that it’s a sentient mesh network that doesn’t have a single brain. It’s actually distributed intelligence that, at the point of sense, can make decisions, but also relate information across the entire network. It’s a have-need network.

I was particularly fascinated by this in terms of our current economic milieu that we live in. Could we find a way to create a digital interface between the mycelium network and new neighborhood developments in such a way that we could understand the nutritional flows of not only just food and waste, but also about energy, water, and human patterns, and all of those things complimentary to each other in a symbiotic way? That was my spark to start developing at least the architectural thinking, the software for a village operating system, a village OS. That was the part of the research that we were really focusing on from this spin-off company that I had created based on my research at Stanford.

Shawn Flynn  14:48

James, right now, with traditional farming, are there any inefficiencies that are currently happening? Are there any developments that are being created to help solve these inefficiencies where humans and the environment, like farms, are working together?

James Ehrlich  15:07

I can tell you that from the research that I’ve done and also research done by the UN shown in a UNCTAD 2013 report entitled, Wake Up Before It’s Too Late, that was quite telling and unappropriate. Their findings and my findings, as well, are that small agriculture, like hyperlocal, organic, biodynamic, or permaculture farming, is the best way forward to feed 10 billion people on the planet by 2050.

I know that sounds sort of antithetical to the current big agriculture that’s going on right now, but the truth is that we need to be restorative in what we’re doing in terms of our food system. We need to be reducing our carbon footprint down to almost zero as possible as we can. We also need to be farming in a non-till soil environment, meaning you’re not hoeing the ground and constantly turning up and disrupting the very precious mycelium network that is growing underneath connecting all those different cultivars.

When you have that mycelium network, what’s amazing is that when an insect or a pest bites the leaf of a connected cultivar in the farm, its saliva is detected throughout the whole network. I call it the forest WiFi, because all of a sudden, then, they start to release pheromones that attract particular kinds of birds and wasps that go right after those pests. In other words, there’s this network that wants to be self-healing, if we just give it a chance to.

That’s really the point of a different kind of farming. It’s a different kind of economic model also, where you create an overabundance of artisanal ingredients that’s diverse as a full menu for neighborhoods and communities. That was how we used to be up until about 1950 around the world. There’s a fantastic Rockefeller Foundation report on this.

James Ehrlich  17:14

Up until 1950, 75%, of humanity lived in small, self-sustaining communities, which meant that they were producing what they needed for themselves and their families. They were also over-producing other interesting biodiverse ingredients, going into the town, square, or plaza to barter or sell whatever they had, and exchange with other people who are growing or bringing other things.

From our perspective, that is really the way forward. It’s a combination of higher-efficiency yield, that’s hyperlocal, denser, and more bioavailable nutrition. It’s providing more nutrients to people as they’re eating because the food doesn’t have to travel and have all that caloric impact taken away from it as it goes through hundreds or thousands of miles.

Shawn Flynn  18:13

The cities of the future, what type of technology right now is being used to design them? Has it just been designed on a computer? How is it being done?

James Ehrlich  18:24

A lot of its still sort of traditional thinking in terms of master planning and design thinking. Unfortunately, a lot of the rules on the books were put there about 150 years ago by these big business interests; district-scale, electric, heat, water, waste, and big agriculture, as well. But those rules were put in place to create dependency. Of course, there’s security with that dependency, but there’s also a kind of brittleness, meaning that when it breaks, it breaks badly, and it breaks for a lot of people. There would be a domino effect. For instance, if a transformer goes out, it takes out an entire neighborhood or district or city. The eastern seaboard can go out from a very small kind of falling off a tree across a certain kind of power line.

Our perspective is designing, in a way, for decentralized living with essentially, an off-grid capacity not just in power, but also in water, circular way systems, and also in producing food.

In designing these communities, part of our village operating system software is a digital twin. It’s this concept of using artificial intelligence and machine learning to model an optimized neighborhood development with those kinds of SimCity toggles, if you will, of how much housing versus how much open space and regenerative capability can be put on a particular piece of land or area. With that then, we start to put out these several kinds of models or municipalities, for landowners, for banks, and other folks, to really get an understanding of what the next steps are. We really feel like we’re at the forefront of the next generation of changing the rules for how these kinds of communities can get built-in a fast track permitted way.

Shawn Flynn  20:35

How will IoT (Internet of Things) and those devices lay apart in cities of the future?

James Ehrlich  20:42

Our main goal really is as follows: It’s resiliency using regenerative and restorative mechanisms.

There are some fantastic technologies out there. A lot of technology out there that is a lot of bells and whistles. It can be a bit confusing because there’s too much going on.

But we view technology quite differently. It has to be a means to an end. From our perspective, the best technology is the kind that you don’t know are there but are just making your life better. That’s really the concept. There are technologies like power generation, microgrid storage, sharing of power across neighbors. Whether it’s in clean-water technology, or clean food or circular waste systems, all those pieces are humming along in the same way as when you go to your kitchen or bedroom and turn the faucet or light and everything just works. It’s a means to an end. In other words, except with us. Our system is off-grid, it’s decentralized, so it’s reliable, but it’s reliable in the context of your own neighborhood in your community.

Shawn Flynn  22:04

Right there, you talked about a grid system, a renewable waste system. Can you go a little more detail about what these systems are?

James Ehrlich  22:13

There are a lot of technologies that are out there right now that are bulletproof, that works really well, and that are siloed, meaning that they do what they do. They stand alone, whether it’s a water system, energy system, waste system, etc. We’re looking at this whole idea of being able to have a system that can oversee and learn where those different, previously siloed, pieces can now communicate with each other, understand the relationship in a symbiotic mycelium network kind of way, and have a neat network if you will. That’s terribly exciting! We think for the future of living in communities where technology is supporting our thriving.

Shawn Flynn  23:03

Can these micro cities be adopted easily for emerging countries such as maybe India or Africa, where maybe there’s really no infrastructure right now at all?

James Ehrlich  23:14

The goal has always been about the developing world because that’s where the next 2-3 billion people are coming to the planet from in 20-25 years. As these people move, especially into the middle class, which is what’s expected, if they want what we have now, in terms of suburbs, the planet is going to die. In terms of car culture, in terms of waste-producing energy-sucking neighborhoods, we’re not having much hope, to be honest.

So absolutely, the plan is to take the technology for Northern European, North American, and other developed economic areas; bring it to fruition, proving the economic model; and then do what Stanford calls, “Design for extreme affordability.” Take all of that, and take it down to its basic components that could then be expressed across the global south, like rural India, Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

The goal is that, when people see that the model is a moniker for the way the new middle class wants to live in Europe and the US, then it’s something that they aspire too. This is opposed to starting in the global south, where, typically, folks there would not trust something just coming new to them in that way. They like knowing, for instance, the Tesla, that it’s the aspirational vehicle of the middle class. Why not then also consider the same kind of Elon Musk marketing plan for the rest of the planet around housing?

Shawn Flynn  25:02

These houses in these emerging areas, will they be designed also for autonomous cars and autonomous vehicles to be used in these facilities? Or will there just be a set grid, some power, and farming without roads or those connections? I’m just trying to visualize it.

James Ehrlich  25:21

Essentially, it’s the subdivision of the future. A subdivision the future does not require garages or driveways because, within the next 5-10 years, we’re going to have level five autonomous transit that’s not only going to be ours, it’s going to be drones’. There will be drone taxis. There are going to be all kinds of automated delivery systems. There’s going to be this bifurcation between human and pet travel versus goods and services travel. That’s going to really change the nature of how we live in relationship to neighborhoods.

The key thing, from our perspective, is a bikable, walkable park-like setting environment that is completely edible from one end of the neighborhood to the next; fruit trees, nut trees, berry bushes, herbs, medicinals, all kinds of different soil-based farming, vertical farming, all these different kinds of aspects that are about life-affirming abundance. That connectivity has then the peripheral electric vehicle parking that can be both storage system but also charge those electric vehicles. With areas for places where drone deliveries can happen or drone taxis can happen. Through that lens, do we really need to be living in the city so much anymore? Can we start to relieve some of the pressure from these megacities that are typically coastal and quite in danger? So in that regard, being able to live further and further away from cities where there’s plenty of cheap lands, that can then provide for and support human living in such a way that maybe they don’t have to commute as much or even at all.

And also the nature of work is changing. We know an Oxford study that came out last year that in 20 years, less than this 47% of all employment will not exist anymore, and it’s not going to come back as something else. A person who used to work a horse and buggy system,  won’t suddenly have a job working in an automotive factory. It’s going to be quite different. We’re going to have even white-collar jobs that will be replaced by artificial intelligence. There are ML (machine learning) AI lawyers right now, for instance, spitting out hundreds of thousands of contract work daily.

Certain things are going to reduce the need for employment. Yet at the same time, our current economic system isn’t preparing for this. We really need a different approach in how we imagine how we’re going to live in neighborhoods that could be the basis of self-sufficiency, along with some kind of universal basic income, potentially. And in that way, we can start to create new economic models that can start to flourish outside of cities in these more Peri-urban or rural areas.

Shawn Flynn  28:41

Not to go off-topic, but I’m curious to go into more detail about this, if possible. How do you vision the economies of the future if 40% are displaced workers?

James Ehrlich  28:55

Exactly. There’s a huge Delta right now in economic inequality in the world, typically around housing, but also with access to clean water, clean food, renewable energy, and hygiene. That delta is increasing. It’s not decreasing. And what happens? Mathematically speaking… There’s a calculation from NASA that came out a few years ago, called the HANDY (Human and Nature DYnamics) model, that predicts global civilization collapse based on these very same indicators.

We should start thinking differently about how we can live. I’m not speaking about a dogmatic kind of economic system versus another, whether it’s socialism or capitalism, or these kinds of things. But rather, what I would call compassionism, a mechanism that allows for people to have their basic Maslow’s hierarchical needs met, then practice compassion.

If you’re living with dignity in an energy-positive home that’s generating more power than your family needs each month to run, with food safety and security, primarily, clean water, hygiene, and all those things met, then you don’t need a lot more capacity to come from a universal basic income amount to be able to start to think big thoughts of: What can I do to make a difference? What can we do in a neighborhood? in a community? Maker Movement. DIY, 3D printing, new economic models with software and technology, and also low tech systems that we can devise. In other words, There’s a bright future. It’s not dystopic. We have a bright future when we think in a way that is about diffusing this incredible tension that we’re living under right now around the world. It’s not just here in the US. It’s in Europe. It’s on every corner of the planet, essentially. People are living under this kind of stress, and it’s going to get worse unless we start to really address that.

Shawn Flynn  31:29

In these cities and villages of the future…, I’m trying to see what people will be doing with their time all day if they don’t have those jobs as they’ve been replaced. Sounds like things are self-sustainable. Sounds pretty amazing. Almost. What are people doing?

James Ehrlich  31:46

Well, let me just clarify, there’s no such thing as topia. We understand that with human nature, there are good people, there are bad people, there’s greed, there’s avarice. There are all these different things that people have and it’s part of our nature as a species. At the same time, there have been really good tests. 

For instance, Finland gave a universal basic income for a two-year research program that they did, where they gave each family instead of welfare payment. They gave them a certain amount of basic income per month. And it was really interesting to see that people weren’t just sort of sitting at home, watching football or bubbling hookah. They were learning and improving themselves and trying to find themselves in this next era of culture and humanity and technology. In other words, the system was there to support them in a way that they could find new ways forward. And that’s really where I think this is going to lead. I really do.

Shawn Flynn  32:51

These cities in the future, are they siloed? Or is there communication going on between them? Because I would think that a city in the US wouldn’t be the same city built in sub-Sahara Africa.

James Ehrlich  33:05

You’re absolutely right. First of all, I’d like to just say that I’m more of a village, town, neighborhood person. The town is built by a series of villages, and the villages built by series of neighborhoods, and that those neighborhoods themselves, each one of them, and each village is redundant and resilient with its capacity and capabilities. That’s the first thing.

The second thought is, that doesn’t mean they’re gated. In fact, it’s the opposite. They’re more like university campuses. The best ecovillages in the world have ebb and flow of people coming from all around the world, taking classes, teaching classes, learning, doing research. There’s this wonderful opportunity to look at, creating these sort of off-grid neighborhoods that are lily pads of connectivity. And that’s also part of the village operating systems software model, which is that these communities are interconnected and can improve each other autonomously by climate zone. That’s the first of its kind.

Shawn Flynn  34:12

Can you talk more about the communication among these villages, what type of information is being passed back and forth? How is it being done?

James Ehrlich  34:20

Well, from a technological perspective, it’s primary infrastructure, food, water, energy, waste, critical life support systems, neighborhood scale, that are being optimized and learning from each other in similar climate zones. That’s kind of Buckminster Fuller’s perspective on looking at the world from a resource-driven framework, as opposed to sort of arbitrary capricious lines drawn on maps. So border-free, in other words, sharing of data between neighborhoods, the neighborhoods themselves are talking to each other from an infrastructure perspective.

And then there’s the sociological anthropological kind of content and culture, expressions of life-affirming kinds of abilities, things that people have or doing. That could be interesting as the social glue, if you will, to help each of these kinds of communities in similar cultural aspect areas to build and have stronger ties with each other, internally to their neighborhoods, but also externally to other neighborhoods and other communities.

So for instance, it’s already proven that a successful eco-village of even just 100 homes has a 25-kilometer public goodwill radius that surrounds it because it’s overproducing these beautiful artisanal ingredients, creating restorative ecology around it, so park-like settings. it’s drawing in the neighbors and the people in such a way that they’re engaged in community activities and all different kinds of things that are happening there. And that’s a pretty good radius.

Normal neighborhoods are the opposite. They are sort of self-interested and isolated. Even though they seem to be connected by roads, and by WiFi and all these other kinds of networks, the truth is that the typical kind of architecture that you see even is that the garage faces the streets, that people before they even get to their house, the garage doors opening, as they pull in, there’s a seamless moment where the garage door’s closing right behind them, and then they’re in, they’re done. They don’t want any kind of connectivity with anybody else or anyone else in that area.

So we see a lot of opportunities to reimagine communities where, just physically and viscerally, people have more opportunities to connect. This also applies especially to aging, this whole idea of senior-living or assisted-living for us is perverse because we want to see a world where, as people get older, their knowledge, their wisdom can be imparted to the youngest people living in the community. and that the youngest people’s energy and enthusiasm can be infectious to those people who are older, and that they feel young again. to be perfectly honest, when you’re born in a community, where when you go to the community center, and you see these notices on the wall of birth notices, birthdays, graduations, life celebrations, anniversaries, then you also see elder care, hospice care, and death notices, you see on one board a story arc of life where you fit in. you’re not separate. You’re not a pariah because you’d have small children, and you’re not garbage when you get older. That’s a very simple kind of solution that we can answer for by how we design and develop neighborhoods going forward in the future

Shawn Flynn  38:06

Speaking of social dynamics and social structure, I’m kind of curious about taxes in the future. I know that’s probably a taboo topic. But I gotta ask what’s going to happen if you’re supplying your energy if you’re pretty self-sufficient?

James Ehrlich  38:22

It’s a amazing question. One of the things that the thought process has gone into is creating a system where the government can be creating the framework digitally, for fast track permitting of off-grid, decentralized neighborhoods. And because the government is involved in establishing those new rules, to create those new communities, because of the connectivity in that regard, they don’t lose the tax base. They still have that kind of relationship. The people understand that they wouldn’t be living in a safe, secure, decentralized community if it wasn’t for that very government that was allowing them and providing that kind of framework for them to do it. So we, in other words, see the village operating system software as an opportunity to synapse, to remove the hurdles, in other words, for government to be able to create these communities, but also where it’s not libertarian. It’s not seasteading or something off away from the government. But actually, that taxation can happen, but people understand how and why they’re being taxed.

Shawn Flynn  39:36

Right now, there’s a ton of technology being developed for 3D-printed houses. I’m guessing some of this will be utilized in these villages of the future. Can you talk a little bit about that current technology?

James Ehrlich  39:48

There’s a lot of movement right now in 3D extrusion. In combination, there’s also a lot of movement, fortunately, is what we call prefab, controlled, built environment. construction. Essentially, it’s a warehouse environment. Similar to the Henry Ford days of the Model A and the Model T coming off an assembly line.

If you can imagine, these wall units, everything’s built-in, they’re made of say, beautiful circular, sustainable hardwood, and glass. And those wall units are the components of a house or an apartment building. But everything’s built-in, in the warehouse, so wiring, plumbing, HVAC, Heating, Air conditioning, glazing, lighting, sensors, all of that in each component, and then it gets trucked right to location and steps together like Lego

Through this mechanism, we’ve been able to see a savings of about 35% less construction waste, which is incredible. Imagine one-third of a new house essentially going into a dumpster. It makes no sense, environmentally speaking, economically speaking, etc. Also, we’ve seen that it saves almost one-fifth of the labor because these components come to the site, and you don’t have to have the same kind of journeymen located for so long on a construction site. Most importantly, a home can go up in two or three days and be moving ready. It’s pretty incredible that way.

So on the 3D extrusion side, this idea of hempcrete is a new kind of environmentally friendly concrete because it uses hemp industrial hemp, along with lime and water, those three ingredients. no longer needs sand, In other words. the hemp is a weed and it has amazing tensile strength. It is a system that can be extruded by these robots so that you can create 3D-printed structures within about 24 hours. after a few days of hempcrete cures, and then You can put the finishings in, and within about a week or so families can move in. And those homes can sell for less than $5,000 each. That’s for us the most exciting aspect for creating neighborhoods in the global south. that robots can come to use earthen materials, locally sourced materials and be creating these villages in these neighborhoods in the span of a few weeks.

Shawn Flynn  42:26

So we’ve talked about a ton of things. How do you see all this playing out in the next 10 years? What’s your vision?

James Ehrlich  42:33

Well, quite simply, we know one thing. It’s not a matter of technology anymore. It’s a matter of money and political will. And what’s interesting is when you have the money, and enough of it, political will usually a little bit better. Not always, but most of the time.

Primarily, we hope that this 11 trillion-plus US dollars that’s coming out of fossil fuel investments, that’s divesting by whole countries like Norway and Ireland –also the University of California. I love them. And that’s a lot of money. now, that can be applied to creating the future neighborhoods that answer critical housing shortages, and also address almost all the 17 Sustainable Development Goals baked into one kind of master plan thinking. the future we see in the next 5-10 years is a Marshall plan, if you will, to take these kinds of funds and apply it to residential regenerative real estate funds and a green bond that can allow for these communities to be built rapidly and at scale, using prefab manufacturing, 3d printing and integrating all those technologies in such a way that they are rolling out new neighborhoods to meet the needs of social affordable middle-class housing in a way that is restorative and regenerative and life-supporting and life-affirming. That’s the goal.

Shawn Flynn  44:14

There’s a lot of talk about colonizing Mars. It’s in the news, Elon Musk all the time. Is this type of technology able to be applied to space exploration, space colonization? How does this all work?

James Ehrlich  44:29

Absolutely. So I’m a senior fellow at NASA Ames Research Center and part of a consortium of university and technology colleagues there. And albeit I’m a bit of a pain in their ass because I’m a terrestrial guy, more than an extra-planetary guy. But what we’re doing with ReGen Villages applies to what Elon Musk wants to do on Mars and what other folks are trying to do on the moon. We feel like we can do both I’m a big Elon fanboy. Let’s put it out there. He wants to see a million people, by 2050, living full time on Mars. I think that’s an incredible aspiration. At the same time, there are 10 billion people. At that moment, we’re going to be living here on Earth. Our solution is to create the mechanisms that will support what Elon Musk is doing on Mars for those 1 million happy folks, but that the other 10 billion people here on earth have what they need, and that their needs are met. And that we can sustain and support that kind of population here on earth. And we may know that it is.

Shawn Flynn  45:44

James, we’ve talked so much about all this technology, but we haven’t talked yet about ReGen Villages and your company. Can you talk a little bit about what ReGen Villages is and what you’re going to do in the next year or two?

James Ehrlich  45:57

Sure. ReGen Villages is a company that I founded in 2016, based on the research that I had been doing at Stanford, plus 15 years before that case study, research really about healthy, happy living. And ReGen Villages is a technology company. It’s a software company, building tools and technologies for regenerative, resilient, self-reliant neighborhood developments. And we’re also a residential development company. So, we wear two hats. asset back real estate development, but also that there’s a software stack. and that the software stack can be used by other developers, constructors, communities, and yes, governments around the world going forward. So the next couple of years for us are really exciting.

Shawn Flynn  46:45

So if anyone wants to find out more information or get in contact with you, what’s the best way to go about it?

James Ehrlich  46:52

info@regenvillages.com. That’s the best way, I would say.

Shawn Flynn  47:04

James, I want to thank you for taking the time today to be on Silicon Valley.

And for our listeners, please write a review on iTunes, whatever podcast platform you’re using to listen to this. And those reviews encourage us to make more amazing episodes such as the one you listen to today, and we look forward to providing a new episode next week here on Silicon Valley.

James, once again, thank you for your time today.

James Ehrlich  47:26

Thank you so much.

Outro  47:28

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