All those juicy bits of energy

Los Angeles, CA – Thought Leadership

Ray Podder is a man who is more than alive, he is on fire. Lit from within with more juice than a battery pack, Ray can speak for hours about his favorite subject – energy. He worked as a director of digital innovation for a global digital agency that contracted with the utility companies realizing that there were many great ideas, and valuable solutions slipping through the cracks. Things just were’t flexible enough to allow anything innovative to take hold, and like most geniuses recognizing wasted genius, he writhed watching great ideas and solutions melt away.

So Ray got busy. He wrote a book and began pulling the data together to share with humanity. So the scraps of genius falling to the floor would end up on somebody’s plate to make a nice energy stew – meaty enough to provide fuel for an entire community.

Whether external presentations or unpopular R&D, the path to innovation and invention is limited in the utility world when bureaucracy is at work, and stakeholders fight lobbyists to change laws that are slow as molasses. Ray is determined to change all of that. Disruption is a key component to his formula, but not in the bloody revolutionary sense. He uses open source and gifting information in the classic approach that science and knowledge are meant to be free. It is the economy we create around this that helps form the basis of our livelihood. So thanks, Ray, for all those juicy bits of energy we get to suck on for free, and then make all sorts of bubbles once we chew on it.

What is your book about?

It’s a systemic look at the ideas we think with…ideas which have gotten us here to a dirty energy dependent economic model that keeps us in perpetual debt to nature and each other. The book looks at the science behind the alternative technologies and approaches, and outlines some practical strategies for local and global renewable energy resilience. Strategies like open sourcing distributed energy innovations, and using emerging web constructs like crowdsourcing to redefine access at the community level.

What is the impact of your work, and what clean tech or sustainable industry needs are you trying to address?

I think that if we don’t address the root behavior that mass cultivates greed and envy to drive progress, buying more stuff no matter how “sustainable” it is, is not going to solve the real problems. Online, it’s about gamifying rewards for positive actions like sharing and collaborating, and on the ground, it’s about rewarding actions that contribute to the highest quality of life. For example, we open source food, water and energy sovereignty content for our non profit called BETTER, by getting expert innovators and community leaders to give up ideas and resources that they would otherwise hoard within the for profit market by presenting clear upsides like membership access to Open IP for innovators, and substantial cost savings for communities.

Real change comes from how we think and feel first, rather than substituting one less destructive practice for another. To that end, my work is about reframing the current reality with better explanations that drive positive actions on one end, and then creating on and offline environments where those ideas can be rewarded and encouraged. For example, one of the things I’m currently working on is a platform called FORM that lets people allocate their group buying resources to the communities of people and activities they care most about. This accomplishes two things not present in the current market paradigm. One, it lets users prioritize which activities benefit the community by funding what matters most to them, and two, it addresses the question of who owns what by the density of allocations they get for their efforts.

How could this be considered Noble Profit? Or how can this create Noble Profit?

First of all, I love the concept of noble profit as a truly worthwhile aspiration. I look at profit for what it represents rather than what it currently is in a networked marketplace. What profit represents is the reward for motivating actions that create more access to experiences, and more power to do good. Does it have to be a vehicle to maintain unnecessary inefficiencies to keep margins in place? Isn’t that what drives inflation and debt in the first place?

As the opacity of the old brick and mortar world give way to more transparent exchanges of information, the previous barriers to entry dissolve as well as the inherent risks. That’s why you get the long tail where more people can be producers with less capital investment. That’s why things become easier to copy and harder to own the intellectual property of. While deeply vested commercial interests try to prevent this litigiously, the so called “non-market” activities to minimize margins continue. In this environment, I believe we need a fundamentally new model to recapture value.

We are starting to see some of that happening now with time banks, shared use, crowd funding and more and the trend is here to stay. My work embraces this natural network phenomena and attempts to Aikido it for the benefit of all. So yes, it is all about Noble Profit, with the definition of what “Profit” represents still a work in progress 😉

You talk about threats to the status quo and ways industry shut down invention. How can the new paradigm of free energy provide prosperity for all including those who currently provide energy? Is this completely disruptive or are there ways to use the paradigm we have in a new way?

Free is about an economic distribution paradigm not a scientific reality. In the current spaces of nanotech, biomimicry, design efficiencies and more, the cost of generation is rapidly dropping. Too cheap to meter technologies are not only real, but they may be necessary for our next evolutionary leap forward.

Everything in our material world is a function of materials and energy.

The last industrial revolution reduced the cost of the energy component from human and animal labor to fossil fuel driven machines by a factor of 10 or less. That allowed for the exponential human progress we witness today. The next iteration of this cannot be based on an incremental cost reduction or an incremental efficiency. It too has to be exponential, and I think the new technologies now emerging to leverage innovations in the areas of heat, pressure, friction, kinetics, biochemistry, electromagnetism and more can do that brilliantly.

Some of these innovations have been with us for a while, but were either suppressed or discredited as many historical records indicate. I don’t make a big deal about this, because I don’t believe there is some panacea solution from the 19th century that’s going to transform our current energy demand woes. There are no good guys or bad guys in this, and it’s not my role to debate the validity of these claims for zero point generators and the like, because it is more of a function of the economic paradigm we are embedded in rather than some diabolic conspiracy to deny the people a prosperous future. When the dominant economic paradigm is founded on regional scarcity and winner take all, then of course anything that disrupts that will be marginalized.

I think the real solutions are about providing new upsides for investors, innovators and integrators in ways they could not benefit from before the emergence of many to many networks. One way to look at this is how work is now getting done on collaborative platforms like Quirky.com, BetterMeans or Thrdplace. They are using open source style democratized equity sharing ideas for the respective contribution of their participants so that everyone is motivated to perform well. The work I’m doing on and offline is about taking these ideas to the next level. I think real change is going to come from people getting the rewards they expect and then some over releasing disruptive innovations into a marketplace that by its very design cannot sustain them.

What is your path to get where you are? What process did you use to write the book/launch a company like yours?

The book was a passion project that gave me access into the academic and scientific community. It also gave me access into the new economics and sustainability spaces. For that I’m deeply grateful. I never planned it that way, I just wanted to express what I felt to be true. The rest of it now gives me a foundation to both continue to share new ideas for a sustainable future and build the tools that I hope will be transformative in carrying that vision forward.

How do you find your topics/content/clients and advertise? What strategies have been the most successful for you in promoting your book/ the business and expanding your outreach?

Real relationships. Period. I just love to connect with cool people like yourself and try to help them get what they need. That’s it. I have no strategy of or formula for this. Across the current efforts for the on and offline efforts for GROW, FORM and BETTER we have dozens of talented volunteers helping us, and all of them are simply about good people coming together for something we all feel worthwhile. I genuinely dig cool people who want to make the world a better place and I try to give them whatever I can to help in their journey forward.

How do you track and measure your progress?

Progress is relative to impact and its context. The social media page stats and book sales are simple but effective indicators. Another is how many invites I get for being a featured speaker or panelist. These things are a given in a commercial context, but I think the real measure of progress is the look someone gives me where I can see that an “a-ha” moment has occurred. I know I’ve affected someone to do unleash their respective brilliance on the world. There is no metric for that. That’s priceless! That’s the thing I really call progress.

How do you monetize your work so you are sustainable when all you are doing seems to be so philanthropic?

I don’t. I have a consulting practice around sharing domain specific knowledge to design network based products and services, and I earn enough from those gigs to pay my personal bills. The non-profits I’m involved with earn from donations now, and as the network products and service come online, there will be royalty and subscription models to generate more resources to keep operations going. I don’t need much and ideally I’d like to set up an environment where I do not have to pay for anything at all. If I can cover what I need to address the access, experience and security I need without cash, that’s the exemplary life I want to lead with.

I think we have created a society based on monetary constructs that don’t really serve us anymore. Money in it current incarnation is a model of currency that fails to address the functions that it was originally intended for. Namely an instrument of trust, a medium of exchange and a store of value. In a debt based dirty energy economy, it falls short on all three counts.

How do you trust a currency whose reserve value is inextricably tied to future reserves of dirty energy?

The government certainly can’t guarantee it, because on the dollar note itself it says “In God We Trust”. It’s only a valid medium of exchange if the parties I exchange value with agree to its terms. Oftentimes, especially in the non-profit volunteer driven economy of relationships, time banks and donations, it does not translate to its promised exchange rate. As for the store of value measure, it has to coincide with a property where the parties in question have consensus. We can agree on an unit of measure called a meter because we can all agree that there is a property called “length”. Length is the same property regardless of community or context. However, money is an unit of measure that’s supposed to measure a property called “Value”.

Value is highly subjective and contextual. Digital trading platforms, barter systems, group buying and more are already challenging that paradigm. I don’t think measuring things in terms of money is sustainable in the near future. So, yes, I have a value creation strategy, but I do not have a monetization strategy.

Have you formed partnerships with any other organizations to increase the effectiveness of your strategies?

Yes. We are very fortunate to align with both the scientific and the creative communities. We engage with them in various capacities, mostly co-promotion and bartering of resources.

How does art and design play a role in the adoption of more sustainable business and lifestyle practices?

In my world design is everything. Design connects us, it solves for systemic inefficiencies to do more with what we have better, it engages us, and it delivers experiences that bring us closer together. We put everything we do through a comprehensive design filter, and we keep on iterating for better outcomes.

What mistakes have you made along the way as a green entrepreneur? What advice would you give others starting a green business?

I’ve made many. Bad partnerships are probably on the top of the list. Namely relationships where you give up too much of your hard work for a future upside that never seem to materialize. What I’ve learned from it is to fail fast and get up quick. Learn your lesson and believe in your own power. The right people will come to your aid if your intentions and motivations are pure of heart. That’s what is happening now. That’s the best advice I can give to anyone. Live for your passions. Be aware of your position and be yourself. The rest is easy.

What professionally compels you to do this?

This is my life. It’s my personal quest for the truth. I can’t do anything else.

What do you hope to achieve personally through this?

This is not about me. My work is for all of us. All I want is the ability to continue doing it.

Thank you Ray! We are grateful for your brilliant work.

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To learn more about Ray Podder visit
http://about.me/raypodder

To follow One The Revolution on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/onetherevolution

To learn more about This Is Grow visit
http://www.thisisgrow.org

To follow Ray Podder on Twitter
@raypodder

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Noble Profit is brought to you by Creative Entity Org and Creative Entity Productions created by Amy Seidman.

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