Koen van Seijen of the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture podcast talks with John Kempf about the need for more capital to support the transition to regenerative agriculture — and what farmers should do with that money when it comes
John Kempf. Koen, tell us a little bit about your story and the scope of the work that you’re doing.
Koen van Seijen. I’m not a farmer. I was born in the city center of Rotterdam, which is a medium-sized city in the Netherlands. I was always interested in food, although not necessarily in agriculture, but over the years I started to look more into it. I was on the “slow food” side — I thought that if we would all just buy slightly better food, then everything would be fine.
But I vividly remember reading an article 12 or 13 years ago about holistic planned grazing in Australia. This was before Allan Savory was famous — before his TED Talk — and the article was about two people, Bruce Wade, a trainer of holistic planned grazing, and Tony Lovell, who was an accountant. They both are unfortunately no longer with us, but they talked about soil, they talked about grass, they talked about grazing, and they talked about carbon.
I really got hooked by that. I liked the numbers they were showing and the fact that food and agriculture could be part of the solution instead of just a smaller, “less dirty” part of the problem around climate change and biodiversity. That really triggered me. I reached out to Tony, and he was passing through Amsterdam because he was on his way to Denmark to raise money — this is where the money part comes in as well. At the end of the article, they mentioned that they didn’t just want to be consultants for farmers in transition, but they actually wanted to raise money to buy land, regenerate it and make a profit.
And from that moment on, I started following this space. Actually, the space didn’t really exist — but I started following the role of money in this transition. I got really interested in that and was very surprised that the financial sector — and this means family offices who manage money for large families, people who had recently sold companies, even people who won lotteries, etc. — why they weren’t considering food and agriculture that much. I’m not a big investor myself, and I’m not a farmer, but I wondered what my role in this space could be — what could I add?
So, I started recording interviews, or conversations, about this topic about six years ago. We talk with people who are doing things in regenerative agriculture and food, and we ask them everything — why, how, what they’re doing, what the barriers are, what the challenges are, etc.
Kempf. I think you deserve tremendous credit for your continuous curiosity and learning and for sharing those conversations. I would say your work has brought groups together probably three to five years earlier than what would’ve happened without your presence in this space. I think you’ve been successful in accelerating the conversation that much.
van Seijen. Thank you. But I think we’ve been extremely lucky in our timing. You see the world waking up to the potential. I think you’re absolutely right — this space is very young. But there are some serious family offices, some serious foundations, some serious institutional investors — banks, pension funds, insurance companies that manage large amounts of money — talking about regeneration and talking about regenerative agriculture. Is it the level we would like it to be at? Absolutely not. Is it a start? Yes. I remember 10 years ago talking to investors about soil, and you’d see their eyes look away. That has changed.
If you’re interested in health, if you’re interested in inequality, if you’re interested in the big questions around land ownership, if you’re interested in biodiversity, interested in chemicals, in fossil fuel or climate — you end up on soil at some point, and you start taking it more seriously.
Kempf. Your comment reminds me of the signature that Gail Fuller has on his email: “Soil is the answer. What was the question?”
I’d love to get your take from a big-picture perspective — what is the role that capital can play in facilitating the adoption of regenerative agriculture on scale? Where do we need capital? What are the things that farmers and agronomists should be thinking about and the impact that money can have on the landscape?
van Seijen. I would say the first thing to realize is that there are a lot more types of capital out there than you would imagine. For many farmers, the only relationship to capital is relatively extractive, and it’s usually called a bank. But there’s a world of capital out there — a growing number of different types of capital available for people who are in transition. Available, meaning that you’re taking a huge responsibility — you’re taking someone else’s money, putting it to work, and ideally giving it back, plus return.
I think the second point is that you should really consider how dependent you want to be on outside capital. Of course, many farmers are dependent on yearly loans and operating capital, but that’s a risk. Many have unfortunately experienced the negative side of that. Money is an extremely powerful tool. We — society in general — have mostly used it as a very extractive one. It has the potential to be regenerative when handled with care — or, let’s say, when handled with certain boundaries. I think if we should approach it from that perspective — assume that most of the capital you’ll find will be extractive. So be careful.
But there are a growing number of pools, many popping up every day, that aim to enable farmers to transition faster. They could be flexible loans, they could be interesting equity options, etc. I think the “faster” piece here is fundamental. It’s an accelerator. It’s not going to enable you to start. There’s a very big transition needed between your ears. Capital is one of those tools that can help you accelerate, but I would be wary of saying it is the most important — that “if there were only more capital, we would go faster.” It is just a tool to accelerate something that hopefully should already be going. But it can definitely help.
Kempf. Tell us a little bit about what a relationship that’s not extractive, but truly regenerative, might look like. What types of boundaries does capital need to have around it to transition from extractive capital to a more collaborative scenario?
van Seijen. It could start with very simple things like flexibility for loan agreements. If it’s an objectively bad year, let’s say, there might not immediately be a penalty or immediately a need for a renegotiation. Or, we’ve talked with the people at Mad Agriculture, the people behind the perennial fund, which started with a profit-sharing or revenue-share model. They sit on the side of the farmer and share the revenue in good and bad years.
Profit sharing could be interesting as well, but many farmers don’t want that. This is interesting because we, as investors and people coming from finance in the city, thought profit sharing would be amazing. But farmers want a relatively straightforward but still very flexible loan agreement with a fixed payment instead of profit sharing. From a value perspective, you’d think profit sharing would be better for farmers — if there’s a lot of profit, we share; if there’s none, we don’t. But many farmers just wanted the security, or wanted to know what they would be paying.
Another way came from a livestock farmer in Australia who together with an investor wrote a holistic plan and bought the neighbor’s land. They decided that a single interest rate point wasn’t really going to work for them because what if it was a really bad year and they had to de-stock? If they still had to pay 5, 6, 7, 8 percent, then they would be incentivized to not completely de-stock and would hurt the land in a very dry year — which Australia has been having — and would hurt the underlying asset.
They decided to make a formula based on two things: precipitation and ground cover. One thing they could control partly — ground cover — and one thing they couldn’t, which of course was the weather. And based on that, like an interest rate, an earned rate came out. In really good years it would be pretty high, and in really bad years it would be zero. In bad years, the farmer was incentivized to completely de-stock and take care of the shared asset, which is the land. Of course, he also said, “ask me again in 10 years to see how this worked.” We’re working with him to see if we can share the terms of the formula. Hopefully they will soon because it’s one of the first deals I’ve heard of that really aligns the investor with the farmer.
It’s very rare that you find an investor who is able mentally and education-wise to go that far. But that’s what we need. We need more experimentation, and we need more farmers who want that. We need more investors who want to take a step in that direction and see how they can move beyond the very standard agreements that haven’t really been working to speed up the transition.
The financial world usually only wants to look at one number: the return. Maybe they care a bit about risk, but they’re not very good at that. But when we add a third factor — impact — things get very complicated. And yet that’s what we need to be talking about. There’s a wave of people right now who have experience elsewhere — they’ve built and sold companies, they have experience getting stuff done — and they’re getting super excited about food and agriculture. I think that’s what we really need. We need more people in this space who obsess over agriculture and watershed restoration and what financial tools we can build around that.
I am convinced that in the near future, the financial world will wake up to the potential of regeneration as a whole. There will be a lot of attention for the sector. There will be a lot of interest in putting money to work. We always ask the question on the podcast, “What would you do with a billion dollars?” It’s not a joke. People reach out to us who are managing significantly more than that, and they want to get involved, but they just don’t know where to start. And unless we as a sector give them the tools to put that money to work — to put some of it where it needs to be to make significant change — they will go somewhere else. Because money needs to work, and it will go to another sector, and we’ll just get fancy PowerPoints.
The attention is not that strong yet, but when it comes and it starts to build up — when significant players start to want to deploy money — we need to be ready. We need to be ready to accept a hundred-million-plus check and put it to work in a way that makes significant change in the soil and significant change for farmers and local communities. That’s going to be a very intense situation, but we need to be ready because there’s simply no other way we can get the health outcomes, the climate outcomes, the water outcomes, the biodiversity outcomes we want and need.
Kempf. When you think about the tension that that will create and the need to be prepared to accept those hundred-million-dollar checks, where do you see the areas of opportunity for growers today? How do we as an industry evolve to be prepared for that?
van Seijen. It’s a good question. I don’t think it’s an issue for individual growers. But with CPG brands — companies that are going to process and sell what’s grown on farms — there’s a lot of opportunity for growth and a lot of shortage of money right now. It’s very difficult to build a CPG brand; there’s obviously a lot of risks. I think there’s a lot of room there to invest in a way that then flows back to the farm — meaning much better offtake agreements. We can talk endlessly about the financials of a farm, but if you don’t somehow capture some of the value you create for the outside world through carbon, through water, through premiums, through quality, through flavor — it’s going to be very difficult with input costs alone going lower.
With just reducing your input costs, it’s going to be very difficult to become financeable for individual farms. Not impossible, but difficult. I think we have to look more upstream or downstream — beyond the farm gate. That’s not to say that there might be investment ways to bundle five or 10 farms and to somehow pay for outcomes with those mechanisms. It could be an outcome-based payments scheme; it could be many things. I’m saying, let’s not put a hundred million into one farm — that usually goes wrong. There’s too much concentration.
But what if an insurance company doesn’t want to move with less than a hundred million — do we want to engage with that? And if we want to, what does it look like, and how do we make sure we don’t repeat the same extractive tensions and concentration that the financial sector usually pushes toward?
My main answer would be to make sure you organize — make sure it’s not individual farmers, who will be played out by the system very easily. It could be cooperative, co-owned facilities. It could be processing. It could be machinery. It could be setting up brands together. All of that is very much in need. I think organization is the big driver in making sure more money comes back to the farm. Whatever is needed in your context, make sure you have more freedom and more independency and more agency.
Kempf. This is such an important point, Koen. I completely agree with you in that the narrative that has really inspired many people to begin farming regeneratively over the last four or five years is that of reducing inputs — increasing profitability by reducing inputs. If that pattern continues for the foreseeable future, and I have no reason to expect otherwise, then the regenerative producers will very rapidly become the low-cost producers.
But that is not the pathway to long-term success and healing relationships. We also need to decommoditize ourselves, and we need to make sure we are not just producing commodity foods. Because as long as we are producing commodities, even if we become the low-cost producer, this doesn’t work in the long run.
Let’s just imagine for a moment that we’re 15 years down the road, and 80 percent of farmers producing a given crop have adopted these regenerative agriculture management practices. Now you’ve again balanced out and everyone is now equally a lower-cost producer, but you’re still competing for the same commodity price point.
I think the point you’re making is extremely important — that we need to work together and figure out how to decommoditize ourselves by whatever mechanism and means that might be for our given farming operation.
van Seijen. That gets to the nutrient piece as well. If your amazingly grown regenerative food — high-quality flavor, nutrient density through the roof — goes into an extremely processed, ready-to-eat meal, are you going to be very happy with that? Apart from that, you’re probably not going to get paid very well. This is a fundamental piece to wrestle with.
It’s not easy to decommoditize, obviously — otherwise we would’ve done it — but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t really engage, because as you’ve said, restoring relationships start there. It starts with not being a commodity, because you’re going to be replaced by whoever they can find who’s cheaper by one cent. You’ll be replaced in a second. That’s not an easy message and not an easy path because it means getting into all other sectors that you’re probably not used to — processing, ownership, all of that. But I think it’s a fundamental one if we want to have rural prosperity, local jobs, etc. We need to really wrestle with this elephant.
Kempf: Several times in this conversation you’ve mentioned nutrient density in the context of decommoditizing and of a pathway forward.
van Seijen. That connection — healthy soil, healthy produce, healthy gut systems, healthy people, and of course healthy ecosystems — it’s the big question we try to answer — could that be the key to unlocking larger consumer demand? That question is still out there. We don’t know.
Kempf. What gets you excited about nutrient density?
van Seijen. Listening to conversations you had with Dan Kittredge of the Bionutrient Food Association — that really got me on this path as well. It’s the potential, again, of decommodification and the potential of health, not only for me personally and for my family, but also the potential of many more people becoming interested in soil because they’re interested in health. I think it’s the potential of reaching more people who are willing to pay a premium — or even not to pay a premium, but to search for something specific because they know that a regeneratively grown tomato has X times the amount of phytonutrients you need.
I think that’s another one of those visions we need to get to. This potato is different from that potato depending on the way it was grown. This tomato is different. This ground beef is different. I’m excited about it not only because of my health, and because it shows that flavor is connected to taste — and of course it’s connected to nutrient density and to soil — but also because of the potential that most people are more interested in their health than in water cycles, biodiversity and soil carbon.
Kempf. What might a future look like if we, as a society, collectively invested, emotionally, in the concept of nutrient density? I imagine a space where, at the governmental level, we had the USDA and FDA and NIH all coordinating to produce and to incentivize the production of food that had medicinal value and that would prevent us from becoming ill and that would reduce our dependency on drugs. There are a lot of motivations for this from a collective productivity perspective, from a reduced healthcare cost perspective. There are benefits here for insurance companies — medical insurance and life insurance and so forth.
There are so many incentives, but of course there are a few industries that would be left completely outside of the economic benefits of such a system. Agribusiness and pharmaceuticals are the two obvious ones that come to mind.
van Seijen. They’re often one in the same, interestingly enough. But I think that’s why I get excited — because this is such a big shift economically, and it will have such benefits for us — for our planetary health, our personal health and our farm health. It deserves all the attention and all the investment and all the grants it can get — to try to unlock that interest on the institutional level, the farming level, and also the consumer level.
I think we’re going to see food-as-medicine companies, but we’re going to see a lot of BS as well, unfortunately. It’s going to be very interesting to see if the consumer is more interested in that than in another certification, for instance.
Kempf. If we take this one step further, how would our culture be different if people were vibrantly healthy and mentally focused and sharp and clear? I grew up in, and I’m still a part of, the fourth-largest Amish community in the world. Certainly the food culture is not what it once was, but it is still generally a much cleaner and healthier and higher-quality food culture than society at large. And I look at this particular group of people that I’m surrounded with, and the echo chamber of regenerative farmers that I’m surrounded with, and it’s a group of people who are generally very concerned about health, who are very mentally sharp, focused and alert. They prioritize building valuable healthy relationships with each other, with their family, with their community.
And I contrast that with society at large, which is drugged up, eating crap and increasingly dysfunctional. People are fighting with each other more than they’re building community. I’m speaking in broad, sweeping generalities, and none of these things are universally true, but my goodness.
van Seijen. How can we be happy culturally if we’re not healthy and well-fed? I don’t mean well-fed in terms of calories — for the most part we figured that out. The question now is how to go beyond that. Except for a few pockets here and there, we cannot imagine what a healthy human population or human ecosystem looks like.
Kempf. Exactly. I’ve never thought of it quite in the way that you framed it, but it’s very true. One of the comments I’ve made many times is that many of us as farmers don’t really know what healthy plants look like anymore. We’ve never gotten the opportunity to experience and observe them.
Koen, what do you believe to be true about agriculture that is different from the mainstream point of view? Where do you have a perspective that is very different from those you commonly encounter?
van Seijen. In terms of finance, it’s that farming can be profitable. Many ecological and regenerative farmers are profitable, and I’m happy for them. But I think in mainstream finance, the story we’ve been telling ourselves is that farming is a struggle, and money is not there. There’s definitely money in the land, but not elsewhere. And if we keep repeating that story, it’s going to be very difficult to convince people that farming could be profitable.
But it’s definitely possible to make money with farming. The belief that you can’t is a myth that’s holding us back, even though we have an enormous debt to pay to the soil and to the climate. Sally Callhoun, who was a famous investor in the space and grant maker, said that yes, we’ve been extracting so much that there’s a debt to pay, but she was absolutely convinced that over time, after a transition period, however long that might take, interesting returns are there. We want people to be excited about financing agriculture because they are opportunities to make good money. I’m not saying crazy money — never trust crazy money, crazy returns. Always delete the deck where you get a crazy return. But there’s good money to be made in the sector.
And to then talk about the regen part, I think single solutions are tricky. I get so many emails about how some single input is going to change the world. Biochar is going to change everything, or this technology or software. It’s going to make everything different. I think the “single thing” idea is not true and is dangerous. There’s going to be a suite of tools. Even if there was one thing, we probably wouldn’t be smart enough to pick it.
Kempf. In biological systems there is very seldom one thing. And when there is one thing that has an outsized impact or influence, quite frequently it ends up being a synthetic material that is manmade that has a negative outsized influence rather than a positive one.
van Seijen. Yes. We need a holistic view. This is a word we’ve been using way too much, but you wouldn’t believe how many times an investor or a company comes to me thinking one thing is going to change everything.
Kempf. It makes you question how well they understand the ecosystem and how well they understand the landscape.
van Seijen. It makes you question the rest of the things they say. Just like when you see crazy hockey sticks. I always see crazy hockey sticks in presentations! After year three everything always goes to the moon! I’m like, yeah, I understand the function in Excel works like that, but it doesn’t mean you should put it in a presentation. It just makes me question everything else the person says.
Under-promise and over-deliver. I understand that you have to over-promise to raise money. There’s a dance there. But when I see these hockey-stick curves, I don’t think that’s going to happen. There’s going to be a lot of challenges with building anything. And I deeply respect anybody who builds anything from scratch.
Kempf. There’s this interesting phenomena in biological systems — most biological systems develop along the Fibonacci series of numbers. The variable for different systems is the time factor. Do you go from one to one to two, three, five, eight, 13 in a matter of 20 minutes, as in the case of bacterial populations, or in 20 years, as in the case of a tree cycle or something like that? There’s this progression.
But I’ve observed that human organizations that are also really successful and really impactful start slowly, and they do reach a threshold where it appears as if the growth is faster on the surface, but in fact there’s a tremendous amount of history and depth and background behind it to get to that place. Take the Savory Institute or a number of different platforms or groups that have had consistent staying power for decades. They all share this principle.
van Seijen. It’s an incredibly powerful force. The company may be the strongest organizational form we have, maybe apart from a revolution. Once they exist for a while, it’s very likely they’ll exist for a bit longer. I hope we’ll see the birth of many regeneratively focused businesses. How do we use that organizational form that can attract people and can really move mountains — that can attract a lot of capital and a lot of resources to do things like shooting stuff into space, etc.? How can we use that to regenerate at scale? Because if it’s individual farmers by themselves, the forces are too strong — it’s just not going to go.
How do we focus on these regenerative businesses? How do we make sure they’re well capitalized with the right type of money, and well resourced in terms of people that are in this for the long run?
Kempf. We’ve been circling around this conversation of what I’ve been calling “decommoditizing yourself.” You’ve been describing the need to take ownership over processing and marketing and sales channels and all these various pieces, and now you’ve brought in the very important piece of doing it as a group, as a community — whether that’s as a company or by whatever mechanism.
Within that context, there’s the need to decommoditize — the need to develop processing and to develop pathways to market that aren’t dependent on the mainstream supply chains that presently exist. What is something you think farmers would benefit from knowing and understanding about this pathway? What are the characteristics of those who have done so with success?
van Seijen. That’s a really good question. There are quite a few examples. They don’t get onto the list of the top 50 fastest growing companies or anything like that. But there are quite a few examples of producers getting together, or of processors getting very close to producers, and building a long-term, symbiotic relationship with each other all the way down to the market.
I would go there to learn. But you have to ask around quite a bit to find these successful examples; they usually don’t have a massive website or media presence. Not because they’re underground or because it’s part of some conspiracy, but simply because they don’t need it, and it doesn’t serve them.
I think a big lesson is that stuff takes time. Make sure you set up the governance in a way that works well for the long haul. Make sure you get the right type of money involved. Try to be as far away from extractive, short-term stuff as possible. That’s not always possible, but when you do, know you’re dancing with the devil. Extractive capital always comes knocking on the door at the wrong moment.
Also, these successful models don’t have to be super profitable. Like processing — as long as it’s farmer owned, or if it’s owned by a nonprofit or by a cooperative or whatever structure you choose, as long as it brings more money to you and your colleague farmers and it pays the bills, that’s fine. There’s no need to build another extractive vehicle on top of you and your friends’ farms just to have huge profits. And there’s quite a bit of public money available, so go and look there as well.
There’s quite a bit of interest in this. There’s always a shortage of these deals. I was making fun of fancy PowerPoint slides before, but it does help to have somebody involved who is able to speak the language of finance and can make nice-looking Excel sheets. You can have the best plan, with the best margins, and you know you’re going to be successful, but if you present it in a horrible way, it’s going to be very difficult to raise any capital.
That would be my advice. Go to people who have done this in the past. They for sure made many mistakes you don’t want to repeat. Find the right kind of people and the right type of money because otherwise it’s going to be very challenging. There’s an endless list of people and companies who took the first money that was on the table and regretted it later.
Kempf. Are there any other important topics that we haven’t yet touched on that we should talk about?
van Seijen. I think we should talk a bit about the input space. We maybe underestimate that this is an important piece. If you get together with enough farmers, could you make a high-end compost tea or some other on-farm input — something that make sense in groups and not as individuals? Or you could negotiate a better contract with other farmers for inputs? The temptation is to magically think that we aren’t going to need inputs soon after we’ve started this journey. I don’t think that’s the case, but the question is how to get off the dangerous ones.
Which inputs are absolutely necessary to buy? Which ones can I produce myself? Which can we produce or procure as a group?
Kempf. I don’t want to avoid this topic, because it is an important conversation, but you triggered another thought — there is this narrative too many farmers have of being regenerative pioneers and being rejected by their community — the idea that they’ve really left the cuckoo’s nest and are doing something crazy. But if we could actually get immediate social networks in local regions to work together, we could rapidly reach a scale to regenerate.
Ryan Holiday wrote this fascinating little book called The Obstacle Is the Way. The point is simply that the things that appear most difficult, if you face them and you work your way through them, you overcome those obstacles. It is the very process of overcoming those obstacles that can completely revolutionize your life, your outcomes and everything around you.
We have this frequent experience of a new approach to farming and agriculture not being accepted, but in fact, if we’re in this position, we need to have our own support network. We need to have people who can be there to encourage us and support us and help us through this process mentally, emotionally and so forth, from a community perspective. But then, when we are successful in being ambassadors and communicating the message and the opportunities, and getting buy-in from our local community, that really is the pathway to regenerating local ecosystems and watersheds.
van Seijen. Absolutely. I heard an interview with a regionally focused farmer, and the interviewer asked him, “What if five other people nearby were doing what you’re doing?” Nearby is of course a flexible term, but he said it would change everything. We’re the weirdos — the different ones. We have to constantly explain what we’re doing. But if a few other people around you are also in transition, that changes everything. If you get to scale, it will even trigger the ecological restoration of the small water cycle we’re hoping for. If you’re on a slightly bigger scale, with three or four or five farms, local production is possible of certain inputs that can’t be too far away because they might go bad. Then you’re tied in together, and I think there’s massive benefits.
Kempf. When you engage in regenerating landscapes, then you rapidly reach a point at which the only inputs that you need are inputs that are defined by your geological context and the geological landscape. There are some landscapes where the foundational apparent bedrock material doesn’t contain enough selenium, or doesn’t contain enough boron; it doesn’t matter what you do from a regeneration, carbon-sequestration perspective — there will always be certain susceptibilities to disease and insect pressure as a result of those nutritional imbalances that are a result of the parent bedrock material.
But in these local groups, there would be tremendous synergy in collaborating on some of those key inputs that are needed. I’m with you in that it is entirely possible to get to a place where we are not on this treadmill of needing to apply purchased inputs just to grow a crop. But I do believe that because of their geological context, there are many regions of the world where we will need to spoon-feed small amounts of very specific things to just address deficiencies that exist in the ecosystem.
Also, the biggest input that many farmers are most dependent on is water. That is the fundamental issue.
van Seijen. What if you could grow that yourself, with your neighbors?
Kempf. Exactly. What if you could grow water collectively with a group of neighbors? And it’s not a question of “What if?” — you can. We now know that is possible. It’s been demonstrated multiple times around the world. And not only can you grow your own water — you can ensure that you have water when you need it consistently throughout the growing season, not sporadically, not occasionally, not to these extreme vagaries of the weather.
I think perhaps the entire bottom line of this water ecosystems conversation is that for us as farmers over the last 20 or 30 years in particularly, we’ve experienced increasing vagaries of the weather — extreme floods followed by extreme droughts in the same growing season, sometimes yo-yoing back and forth multiple times per season. And what we are now coming to understand — and some people have understood for decades — is that this is in fact a function of ecosystem management — watershed management.
The way you manage plants in the ecosystem has the ability to regenerate and produce a much more stable water cycle, where you get consistent rainfalls, as many older farmers remember from 40, 50, 60 years ago. In some regions, none of us living might remember, but it’s still possible for those landscapes. That’s exciting, and that’s something to inspire the imagination with.
van Seijen. Yes, and I would add — how can you, as an investor, as somebody in finance, not be excited about that? There must be a way to help accelerate that with money.
