So about 14 years ago, my wife and I left the petroleum industry, we were both mechanical engineers working in the oil and gas industry as facilities and engineers. So we were the folks that went out and brought pipelines to facilities, basically oil and gas, depending upon what was produced at the well.

And I was getting ready to cut down a massive swath of forest. I think I've always been a bit of environmentalist at heart and really didn't want to do it.

But being pragmatic and kind of understanding the importance of energy because I was a consumer of it. And I spent my university career understanding the consequences of the first, second, and third law of thermal dynamics, you know, I couldn't really criticize the very industry that I was supporting as a consumer.

And it's funny how serendipity strikes just at the right moment. I ended up getting an email from a friend and had a four minute video when it called greening the deserts. And that video fundamentally changed my life forever.

And a real genius Richard Jacobs has made it his life's mission to find them for you. He hunts down and interviews geniuses in every field, sleep science, cancer, stem cells, ketogenic diets, and more. Here come the geniuses. This is the finding genius podcast that Richard Jacobs.

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the finding genius podcast. I have Rob Davis. He's from fifth world farm and virgin permaculture. We're going to talk about becoming an echo entrepreneur and regenerative business, not sure what that means and growing all year round. So Rob, thanks for coming. How you doing? Yeah, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me if you would tell me a bit about your background and what led you to have an interest in, you know, and farming and permaculture.

Yeah, sure. So about 14 years ago, my wife and I left the petroleum industry. We were both mechanical engineers working in the oil and gas industry as facilities engineers. So we were the folks that

went out and brought pipelines to facilities, basically oil and gas, depending upon what was produced at the well. And I was getting ready to cut down a massive swath of forest. I think I've always been a bit of

environmentalist at heart and really didn't want to do it. But being pragmatic and kind of understanding the importance of energy, because I was a consumer of it. And I spent my university career understanding the consequences of the first second and third law of thermodynamics, you know, I couldn't really criticize the very industry that I was supporting as a consumer.

And it's funny how serendipity strikes just at the right moment. I ended up getting an email from a friend and had a four-minute video when it called Greening the Desert. And that video fundamentally changed my life forever.

Is that the ones from India? No, those are new ones that are coming out now by a colleague of mine, Andrew Millison.

Yeah, I am. I don't know how to jump in your story, but they were very, very inspiring, you know, the ones that Alison did. But good.

Yeah, they are very inspiring and it's incredible what you can do when you understand how ecosystems function. So, but this video was about four minutes long and it was so inspiring. It described how a gentleman named Jeff Lotton took a meaningless piece of earth in the Dead Sea Valley lowest place on Earth, hyper aired, hyper saline soils and using some simple water harvesting techniques and a solid understanding of plant ecology.

He was able to turn a meaningless piece of desert into a self regenerative ecosystem that supplied food you're around. And I said, my gosh, that is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I don't want to maintain status quo. I recognize we need fossil fuel. Fossil fuel is an amazing resource. But I want to be part of the new paradigm.

Now, around the same time, I started auditing some ecological design courses at the University of Calgary. And I stumbled upon a documentary called The End of Suburbia. And that cascaded into several other documentaries along the same line.

And I started understanding how close we were to the fossil fuel cliff. And some people believe that we just passed peak oil in 2018.

Some people believe it happened a little while ago. It doesn't really matter when it occurs because the fossil fuel era that we exist within is basically ubiquitous with GDP, we've been proven now that fossil fuel and GDP are 99% correlated.

And so when we come over that cliff, there's no going back. And a recent podcast, I'll just finish this energy point. And then I'll let you chime in there. But recent podcast by Dr. Nate Higgins and Dr. Simon Michaud, who is the head of the Finnish geologic survey.

I just finished doing a report, which basically details out that it's pretty much impossible to replace fossil fuels with renewables.

Because it's just literally not enough materials on planet earth to do it.

And so you need fossil fuels to make the trucks mine the stuff, you know, for batteries, for solar and wind. And you know, this doesn't come from nothing. I mean, there's a lot of fossil fuels that you needed to even produce.

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