 Alright, good morning everybody. So I had a whole presentation, mapped out, slides everything about the future of housing and how Altero can address the housing crisis. But I threw it out last night based on two inspirational conversations yesterday. The first was in one of the breakouts and Vicky Robinson, one of the fellows and minister for the environment, really laid down the challenge and said, okay, we have all these great ideas, we have all this inspiration. What do we do? What do we do? On this last day of New Frontiers, how do we take this energy, this spirit, of inspiration, of connection, and how do we earth it? How do we ground it into being? And the second conversation was after dinner with Robin Kermode at our house and she said, Brian, it just wouldn't be New Frontiers if you didn't rap. And who am I to get in the way of tradition? So in that spirit, I hope y'all ready to go because I'm ready to float and blow like a volcano, y'all ain't even ready to know. Got so much excitement and so many good feelings as we're here today at New Frontiers, New Zealand. With all these bright minds coming together, merging in a conscious co-creation, elevation way beyond the ordinary into the realms of the imagination. Got artists, engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, activists all at the top of the game saying we're the ones we've been waiting for to create and inspire the change. As we rise to the call of a world in crisis where fear and disempowerment spread contagious like a virus, divided we are tiny so the time has come now for our uniting. Aligning and inspiring all it takes is our deciding. So let's build the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible. Let's stay grounded in the practical but transcend beyond the logical. Tap into emotional and spiritual connections, intuitive feminine perceptions. What's next is our ascension only if we walk the path with pure intentions. From the cities and the suburbs to way out on the farms, we all must answer this peaceful call to arms because like it or not, the big shift is happening. It's moving like an earthquake beneath our feet because collectively we decide what our future shall be. So be thoughtful and reflective but please do not be passive. Said wake up, stand up, it's time now to get active. Peace. Ah silliness. Switching back to the nerd glasses. So the title of today's, you know basically as I said I really shifted things around so today I'm just gonna really take you on kind of like a virtual tour of our home. Many of you, can you get a quick raise of hands? Who's staying in the valley right now? All right so a lot of you, who's feeling good about it? All right so EHF really came out you know it was really a seed that was planted at a New Frontiers event several years ago and New Frontiers was an event that really came out of the land. It was an experience where we were bringing people from all around the world to have an experience in a regenerative natural environment and I really think it's important to start from that because I firmly believe in the power of emergence and that the insights and realizations which really underpin the EHF community are largely based in the physical proximity where it has been happening which is why it's such a privilege to bring this event back to upper hut after a brief hiatus to Waikku. So my journey to this land starts a bit with my brother Matthew. This is back when before the beard and this was about 12 years ago. We started a company called inflection doing big data technology work software in Silicon Valley and we really were experimenting it started in a notion of experiments finding what worked to solve big problems. We had some ideas about some problems people were having getting reliable access to government information and we were sort of experimenting and finding our way and the first few things we did didn't work. The first few experiments weren't exactly what people needed and then we finally through iteration found something that worked and from there it was a really amazing ride in a quick rocket ship so we went from just the two of us hacking away together on I was sitting on his what do you call it like a dresser as my desk and then just a couple years later we had rapidly growing company we were able to you know we scaled it up to over 200 employees across the US and Europe and then in 2012 when we sold a big chunk of that business which was very lucrative and having then spent my early 20s in the business community trying to make the money and then having you know being the dog who catches his tail I said okay well now what I made some money but what does that mean that's not fulfillment that's not meaning that's not and the stories that society had told me about what was going to make me happy and what was going to make me feel fulfilled I had first person and you know proof that they were they weren't true and that wasn't enough and so I started looking out and I'm trying to understand how I could use my my energy and my capacity for good and it wasn't hard to find a whole bunch of problems that needed addressing whether it be climate change social issues the war this is right after 2008 so the great financial crisis was still fresh in the mines firm belief and the the inevitability of peak oil and the issues there and for a period of time I got really depressed because all these interconnected problems seemed like they needed just a whole systems change and that seems so big how are we going to have global systems change but then thought back and I said well I would have never thought that we could create a business of the scale that we did but it started one step at a time started with small actions learning iterating and repeating that process finding what works and slowly scaling it up so we moved to New Zealand and we bought a farm we bought this farm this is the map and well I loved what one of the fellows said yesterday is you can tell where it's man made because they're straight lines the nature doesn't have straight lines there's a beautiful river that runs through this valley and over to the left is the the box that says you that's where we're at right now so so the farm is literally just over the hill and it's a mixture of different things it's it's a combination of sort of a pine forest a radiate of pine monoculture radiate of pine it was originally a dairy farm and there's a large aspect of native forests which is actually most of the land and then there's very much a community center where people are and so this was a major undertaking to basically say that this was going to be the place where we would develop prototypes for an alternative way of rural living and sustainable agriculture by doing by actually taking action and by learning from all of those who have come before and all the great wisdom of people who have done it but now bringing that ancient knowledge into the future integrating it not just with the land and with the people but also with the modern structures of business and commerce and so some of the issues that I was really drawn to focus on were around housing the human habitat relationship how we relate to our natural environment the term regenerative agriculture has been thrown around a lot so I put it in the slots and you know really the the initial goal at the very first new frontiers the challenge that I said forth for for ourselves was that Ottawa Valley Farms was going to be a carbon negative farm negative not just less bad that the farm itself would be a conduit to sequester carbon out of the the atmosphere and we'll talk a little bit about that later and then very much about the people I grew up in a rural community and I I saw firsthand how shifting trends have really hollowed out rural community and it made it really hard somebody talked about farmer suicides and and that's a real thing so it was something that you know we can't heal the land without healing the people who live on the land so naturally with this grandiose ambition the first thing we did was we came and we built toilets composting toilets to be precise this was the Rolls Royce model of composting toilets and you know we learned a lot this was a lot of fun and it was it it was necessary to host new frontiers because you know and but it's also great because it takes a waste product well we also think it's sewage or waste and you know creates into the human or as we call it which is actually a valuable product in in farming ecosystems it also gave us some experience in recycled materials the urinal and the right hand picture on the left side it's actually an old barbecue bottle cut in half so instead of buying eight new porcelain basins that have to be manufactured shipped across the planet and then eventually disposed of we actually got paid to get rid of these barbecue bottles cut them off with an arc welder and then we have a fully functional urinal and the concepts of recycled materials really grabbed my attention this was really fun so after the bathrooms we jumped into pallet furniture built a bunch of pallet chairs pallet beds i've sort of got a base level understanding of carpentry from from sam who is my teacher in that and this is my wonderful wife catlin who's on her throne uh we also moved recycled pallet bed raised garden beds really simple tax and pallet beds together you throw some some you know good soil in there and it's a great environment for growing food we also just got a lot of fun like all right i need a desk okay well you know we found we got some uh some old surplus cubicles from a company and for free and then we slapped them on some of the hay bales and this is totally functional desk and it doesn't require any new consumption so rather than going down to the warehouse and buying some imported newly cut wood uh this just makes use of what we already have so these are all just sort of learning experiments that ultimately taught me one of the key lessons that trash is a resource and it's a really valuable resource uh in the prep for this we had you know all the tents that we bought we're about 75 new tents 110 new beds this is an enormous amount of material and it all came in packaging and i was i was so upset i was like oh my gosh look at all this plastic waste we had trailers full of it and then uh somebody i think was david i said well we also need 10 beanbags i go oh no polystyrene it's gonna kill us i hate polystyrene and poly beanbags need so much of it and then they connected we can take the waste plastic wrappers stuff them in the beanbags and use that as the stuffing so we were able to sequester two thousand liters of plastic waste get no new polystyrene and then we had beanbags for the welcome week so and actually funnily by the end we were actually we ran out of plastic and then we were upset that we didn't have enough plastic to fill the beanbags so this also speaks you know we do this in our interiors but another great project that just wrapped up that my new friends led we took some degraded showers from a past new frontiers in terms of one of the builders that we work with said these things aren't worth a match the it's going to be too much effort to move it or reframe it or or use it you're really just better to bulldoze it and get rid of it and this is what it looks like now and just through the application of skills almost no new materials were used damian and bernard did some amazing work to transition into a beautiful space that we call the zen den another experiment that we're running is around alternative architecture this dome which has been the the home dome for all the new frontiers events was actually we purchased it off the christ church earthquake recovery authority and this was actually the very first building that was set up after the major christ church earthquake and it has been a great home for us in all of our events and domes are awesome domes hold a beautiful space interior so this was the welcome week photo and this was my brother tom giving the world's most glamorous health and safety briefing and domes are also awesome because they're just architecturally brilliant and this is you know we don't see a lot of domes in new zealand but it really surprises me because they're really really good for earthquakes they're very efficient materially and they also create they're really good for wind and they're cheap per per square foot it's a much more affordable way to create structure than squares so this is the greenhouse we call it the grow dome interior it is a beautiful and lush environment where we grow all kinds of good stuff using appropriate technologies so geothermal heating which is basically just a tube that goes underground and uses the the thermal mass of the earth so this allows us to grow kumrah in whitens valley which people said was impossible even more so we grow bananas and ginger and turmeric in whitens valley which people really said was impossible but the most important thing that's growing in the valley is lorraine lorraine looks after the greenhouse and is sort of our permaculture gardener on staff and she grows all the wonderful veggies that that several families you know rely on so but it's not all domes we have also been experimenting with container buildings this is kind of a fad it's in vogue these days people building out of shipping containers so this arrived four days before our event because the cyclone delayed the the boat as it was coming in but fortunately we were able to take it from flat pack to two fully functioning shower units with four units each in just four days which is including insulation power water lighting etc and we learned a lot through this experience i probably won't build a lot with containers in the future we learned a lot of the challenges the issues that are there basically if you don't have to change the shape maybe it's okay but a lot of toxicity in these containers that really have to be careful of i didn't know that and i was really excited about it and at one point i was like oh let's build a container hotel with 35 containers and we're gonna do this whole thing and and then katlin was the wise one and she said well maybe let's start with two listen so overall this is the ehf village uh most of you are staying here but for those of you who aren't uh these tents are really great they're tensile engineering so there's very little material used it's really just one strong pole and a bunch of fabric tensile engineering is another great form of architecture that's not often employed in new zealand so zooming out to the farm operation more broadly uh in efforts to become carbon negative uh we do a lot of biochar production this is taking the waste uh green waste material from forestry and turning it into sequestered carbon we put this back into the soil as part of our composting efforts so this is a way that we can take stuff that would normally biodegrade and evaporate as carbon into the atmosphere turn it into biochar put it back into the soil sequester it it also helps with nutrients and microbiome most important carbon engine in our farm is the cows uh the way that you manage cows uh has a huge impact uh new zealand doesn't have to you know go to zero cows to start sequestering carbon in the soil um in the u.s. there's a famous person named alan savoury who leads a lot of rotational grazing expertise there's a lot of that in new zealand as well um this is something that's super practical just the way that we rotate our herds can have a huge impact on how the soil can can take the carbon from the the manure so we very much embrace this we don't have any metrics to track it but we just know it's a good thing so we do it uh and then as part of the partnership with government riparian planting to just plant the waterways don't have the cows walk through the river and poop it's just common sense um brief plug for the family business uh this is katlin's solar energy uh invention uh she's the founder and CEO of this company and uh it's amazing it's a big mirror bowl it focuses light and it gets really fast cooks gas faster than a gas grill um laser cutters chainsaws uh and as i was talking about community you know it's it's important that we don't just get totally sucked into the function of things art and beauty is a big part of what we're doing um this is matthew's garage uh which is awesome um tents and trees and then i just wanted to briefly plug like land stewardship this is ian mure uh he's the man who yeah give it up for ian he's a legend okay so lots more experiments to come including some new building sites that uh that are fresh that we'll be doing more stuff so quickly one minute left we have five key lessons that i just wanted to end with uh one is that innovation requires experimentation nobody knows all the answers right away we have to test and iterate but unfortunately systems level stuff is really hard this is part of the co-papa of of the EHF community building communities not developments we just simply must rethink how we build our homes and how we build housing and stop thinking that it is a profit maximization exercise and start recognizing that people aren't isolated individual units that communities are the level of of magnitude that we need to be thinking about our infrastructure break the supply chains that bind us uh this might be a little controversial to some things in new zealand but there's there's a monopoly on supply chains here it reduces the quality of the product radically increases the cost um and there are better ways alibaba.com check it out and then i'm at my time but this speaks to what nigel was talking about yesterday uh to scale farming innovation we must have regional solutions uh there's a reason that fontera is so powerful here no dairy farms would be able to be viable if they had to have their own milk processing facilities on site but as we're doing you know biodynamic farming we have to basically go from seed to plate uh just on our farm it's extraordinarily expensive and hard to do it would be great if there were regional facilities where we could bring our walnuts for example or chestnuts they're really sharp and spiky where do we take them right now we have to do it all by hand but it would be a lot easier if there were regional facilities that could process the food for many many farmers on sort of a cooperative model and i think this is where the future of biodynamic farming in new zealand will go because we have to have the economics of scale to compete commercially but it's just so hard to do it as an individual farm even at you know what would be considered a mid-sized farm in new zealand like for us we're just way too small and without going to monoculture and then have fun life is short enjoy it uh we'll be having a breakout session after this uh or excuse me not after this this afternoon probably at 230 maybe at 330 check the board and we'll be talking a little bit more about what we're doing and uh really keen to get perspectives of how we can use the space especially as an education facility to spread the good news all right