New Book: Climate Capital — Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future | An Interview with Tom Chi | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

New Book: Climate Capital — Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future | An Interview with Tom Chi | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli What if the economy isn't broken — just badly designed? Tom Chi, Google X founding member, inventor of 77 patents, and venture capitalist at At One Ventures, joined me on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age to discuss his new book Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. From the streets of Florence to the strip malls of Silicon Valley, from the mechanics of attention capture to the physics of ecological economics, this conversation goes far beyond climate. It's about how we design the systems we live inside — and whether we have the will to redesign them before it's too late. 📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com Article Body Tom Chi has worked on things that changed the world. Microsoft Office. Web search. The self-driving car. Google Glass. He'll tell you himself that not all of them were hits, and he's fine with that — that's what it means to be an inventor. But what he's working on now is different in scale from anything before. Not a product. Not a platform. A redesign of the global economy. His new book, Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future, starts from a premise that sounds radical until you think about it for more than a few minutes: economics is a design discipline. And right now, it's poorly designed. Not maliciously — poorly. We built systems optimized for short-term capital extraction, and we're living with the consequences. The question Tom is asking is whether we can redesign them before those consequences become irreversible. He didn't get there through ideology. He got there through Florence. Tom was auditing sustainable MBA courses alongside his partner when he was invited to a conference in Italy. He landed, got a day off, wandered the streets — and something clicked. The entire city is built from sustainable materials. And it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. That moment demolished an assumption he didn't even know he was carrying: that sustainable living means downgrading. Florence is a 2,000-year-old counterexample to every joke about Birkenstocks and cold showers. We knew how to do this. We just forgot. Which brings us to the first big thread of our conversation: the pattern of forgetting. We talked about this in the context of technology, not history. Specifically, how the shift from software you paid for to software supported by advertising quietly changed everything. When you pay for a tool, the goal is to make it better. When the tool is supported by advertisers, the goal is to keep you inside it as long as possible. Clippy used to annoy us because it interrupted our train of thought. Now interrupting our train of thought is the entire business model. Tom has a phrase for what's happening at scale: cognitive despoiling. We spent the 20th century strip mining the physical resources of the planet. We're spending the 21st century strip mining the cognitive resources of humanity. There's a finite number of coherent thoughts this civilization can produce. And we're burning through them — with misinformation, amygdala triggers, and dopamine loops — the same way we burned through forests and waterways. The damage is invisible because it's underwater, like ocean trawling. But it's real. And it compounds across generations. This is where I had to push back a little. Because I grew up in Florence. I made the jump to digital. I love my vinyls and I love my streaming library. I'm part of the contradiction he's describing. And I asked him: given all this, where do you even start? His answer is the most practical thing I've heard in a long time. Start with physical businesses. The ones actually causing most of the damage — to water, soil, air, biodiversity. And here's the part that almost nobody is talking about: 90% of the cost structure of a physical business already aligns ecological and economic goals. Fewer raw materials used means lower feedstock costs and less extraction. Less energy consumed means lower processing costs and fewer emissions. Shorter supply chains mean lower logistics costs and fewer transport emissions. The economy and the ecology are already pointing the same direction on 90% of what matters. The 5% that isn't aligned — pollution — is what the lobbyists fight about. So that's what dominates the news. And that's why we think this is harder than it is. Tom's firm, At One Ventures, is built around this insight. They invest in what he calls the triad: disruptive deep tech that delivers radically better unit economics and radically better environmental outcomes at the same time. Their portfolio companies don't sell sustainability. They sell efficiency. The ecological benefit is baked in by design. The customers buy it because it's cheaper and better. The planet wins as a side effect. That's the book. Part toolkit, ...