Alright gang, so it's come to this, a clip show. Over the years I've interviewed hundreds of guests, as you know, and many of those episodes contained absolute gold. A lot of those guests went on to become millionaires and raised tens, hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for their project, and generate many more. And a lot of those people were doing brilliant things for the climate, in eco tech and other spheres. A lot of times in our political discourse, we see climate change as man bear pig in the south parkification of Al Gore. But of course, the reality is there's lots of money to be made and lots of economic opportunity for those who are willing to solve some of humanity's and the globe's greatest challenges. So here are some people who I deeply admire from the archives of the podcast, and I've clipped them together to kind of paint a picture of not only the world as it is in some perspectives you might not have heard, but also to show you that if you're smart and if you solve truly challenging problems, there is lots of money and good to be made for you personally. So let's jump into the past in a time before I knew how to use microphones or cameras. One thing that I've learned through doing this podcast is how deep the tentacles of eco tech go. We might broadly be familiar with solar panels and various small things, windmills, but there are other truly novel ideas out there for making this planet more hospitable and for making our presence on this planet more sustainable. So these are some very interesting people doing really unique things that I hope you'll enjoy, including energy and circular economy ideas and creating new forms of matter from atoms. Not stuff. Have a listen. We have reached a level as humanity in terms of manipulation of matter and energy that is unprecedented. And this per se, it's an incredible advancement. But on the other side, we're matching this with computational and cognitive capabilities. Look at generative AI and everything which is opening today. So we have the capability to manipulate matter and energy, the cognitive capabilities, two manipulators, and we're building sensing and equation capability to do all of these. And by bringing all of these together, we can completely accelerate all the processing. We can redo a lot of the stuff, both on the natural side, on the organic side, on the inorganic side. And that's why we can bring the atom. And when I talk about the atom and the bits coming together, this is about really manipulating the matter, the atoms and the bits of the cognitive part connecting through the sensing and the activation. And by adding all of these, you can really think and do things that are unthinkable in normal circumstances. And you can do really new things that are unprecedented. Were you fascinated with technology throughout your career? Or is this something that you just learned about through your work and then became more passionate about it? Where did you begin? I'm an engineer by training. But I have to say it was for me a kind of, there was everybody talking about the digital, the digital piece. And I started looking at the deep tech side of things. It was 15, 16, 17. It was when people started talking to me about this. And then I thought, yeah, there must be something coming after all of these digital wave. We really need to apply to something. And I concluded that this was basically the post digital wave that is going into into the atoms and really make it real tangy building and really gives us the possibility because there is a color barrier to what I just mentioned before, which is that's why I start with industrial revolution. One of the big problems coming with the first and the second industrial revolution that it was basically fundamentally based on exploitative paradigms. And when I say exploitative paradigm, it means really concrete. It means going from bigger to smaller. This is when you have long polymer chains that you break down with all the petrochemical energy. All of those things is about going from bigger to smaller. And because we can manipulate energy and matter at this with this precision, we can completely change the paradigm on which society is built. And we can bring it to a place where we have a generative paradigm. So we start from the small and we build the big. So we start from the atom and we move to something which is bigger, which as a corollary, as a very, very important consequence, which is that we are right now as humanity in a point in time, which is very much comparable to the one in which we were 10,000 years ago, when we went from being enters gathers to being farmers. It's only that now, because of all this wave, we are in the position to be instead of being enters and gathers, enter gathers of resources, we become farmers at the atomic level. So instead of becoming farmers and growing plants and getting the the cattle together and so on, we are working with organism at the micro scale and tell those organism to do what we wanted to do, or we can really put together the atoms in a construction in a way that we need them to do to do things that were unthinkable before. So it's a completely different word that we are about to build, which is ultimately the reason why I decided to leave the comfortable place where I was and to really join and possibly also help drive this kind of transition for humanity. One of the most exciting aspects of our world is harnessing the power of the sun. We've got this gigantic energy source that's just right there in the sky, but we've been very ineffective at actually harnessing it. Well, I've got a few different people that I've interviewed in the past, like Hans Danieva, who's going to talk to us right now about an ingenious way for capturing carbon and harnessing more of that energy from the sun. Energy is not so much the concern, there is plenty of energy, we just need to harvest it. Yeah, and that is something that we all have to wrap our heads around because we come from this fossil fuel mindset. I just recently read an article about somebody who installed solar panels on their roof and those solar panels were able to meet more than 100% of their total energy demand. And they said it took a while to completely redefine how they thought about their energy usage, because before they would be very afraid to have the air conditioner on all day or the air conditioner plus some other appliances. And then once they learned that it didn't matter that the sun was blasting on their house anyways, they said I can run the air conditioner all day, I can have my appliances running and I still never see it, I can charge my car, I can charge my e-bike, all of these things are happening from this free energy that we're capturing. And this person who wrote the article described it as a personal revolution and being an incredibly freeing thing, because we're stuck in these old mental models of energy is expensive and energy is finite, that makes it hard for us to see that an inefficiency like you said could not matter if we have enough and it's abundant as it is, which it seems like it should be. Yeah, of course, you should not spoil energy, but we should not be afraid of using energy or trying to, for example, aviation is a hard to obey sector. So you could argue that, okay, as long as we cannot fly one of those airplanes on batteries, we don't fly. I think that's anyway from a societal point of view, it's a very difficult thing to do. It's kind of, when I look at society, when I look at people around me, I just realize like, you know, you can't revolutionize things, you cannot close down all the airports, you can't, you will get a revolution, people will be upset about that, you will disrupt so many things. So what we need to do is to make sure that, of course, society, as it is, can continue to evolve in a rather, let's say, evolutionary way. But that, of course, we change, for example, the fuels from fossil fuels to green fuels, but we keep using fuels. Why not? If it's appropriate to use fuels, use fuels, it's just, you know, it's a chemical, you only need to make sure that it's not heating up the atmosphere. And if you make the chemical base on CO2 that you get from the atmosphere in the first place, well, it will not heat up the atmosphere. So these are smart things that we can do to make sure that people can continue their lives and society can continue to evolve without disrupting anything. Because I mean, disrupting society for the sake of saving the planet, it's not going to work. If we, if we, if we need to save the planet by means of a societal disruption, I think it's going to be a disaster. We need to save the planet, but we need to do it without disrupting society. Another interesting avenue of future tech is carbon capture. CO2 or greenhouse gas emissions is one of the defining problems facing our species. So let's talk to Martin Schechdel of craft block and hear what he has to say about some ingenious carbon capture tech. I was working, especially in the last decade, in selling ceramic products, special ceramic coatings to steal a glass of ramex industry. And those were smart coatings helping to increase energy efficiency of furnaces and things like that. Means on the other hand, I've seen a lot of energy wasting, right? A lot of flue gases from the stream name to the atmosphere without being used. Actually, I never thought about that before. And then in 2008, roughly, I saw TV report about heat storage made of concrete. I found it pretty interesting. Well, cheap material, you can cast in each shape available worldwide. But the confusing thing was they named themselves a high temperature heat storage, but could only store 500 degrees C. So I was calling just the inventors, which was a German research institute and a construction company, actually. Is it why is there a limit in temperature? Why can't you store it 1000 degrees? So why not a 2000 degree C? We discussed, actually, we met also in person for two days discussed about this topic. And it turned out that concrete is the problem itself, because this cannot bear that much temperature. And from that time, it was just, for me, curiosity and a scientific approach to figure out how to improve concrete. I didn't think, even at that point, think about building a company, serving world's problem. But just, it was a challenge, right? And that's exactly what I did. I took this challenge, thinking about typical scientific approach, what's the problem, literature search, things like that. We've got so many great technologies today that are not only going to reduce our carbon footprint, they're also going to make life more livable and sustainable for us all. One of my next guests on this show, Greg Johnson, has a crazy company called Aquapore Technologies that's going to make concrete help conserve more rainwater amongst other things. Again, the tentacles of ecotech go so deep and these people are such geniuses. Have a listen to what he has to say. Concrete, contrary to our perception of it, is not permanent and it doesn't last forever and it does need to be replaced. And it's also an impending ecological disaster because it just sits there. And what do you do with it once it's no longer useful, right? When you break it up, you haul it to where? Where does it go? And what we hinted at earlier is the resource intensity of producing this substance that is ubiquitous in urban life. So in addition to dealing with it, because it's not permanent, talk to me about creating it and what resources go into it because that's another very fascinating angle of what you're up to. Yeah, it's a very different technology than normal traditional Portland cement based concrete. And so the reason concrete's ecological footprint is so large and it's harmful is because of the use of normal cement to make concrete. And so think of cement as just the thing that binds everything together. It makes it strong. Well, Portland cement is produced in a manner that's extremely CO2 intensive. And in the production of normal Portland cement, I think the estimate is that the industry is responsible for like 8% of the world's CO2 emissions every single year. And those cement plants, most of them are run on coal. So they use coal to sort of fire those plants. Our technology is very different. We use no Portland cement. It's an assemblage of industrial minerals, one of which is one of the most abundant resources on earth's crust. So it's everywhere. And then we use water and what we call a catalyst, which is it's a very light acid, if you will, that comes from agribusiness. So this is all byproduct of industry that's already sitting out there. We don't need to take material into a kiln blow off CO2. So right out of the gates, our technology we estimate is going to be about 85 to 90% lower CO2 footprint than concrete with our only footprint really being, you know, freight, right? We have to get materials from point A to point B. So it's just inherently low carbon. We call it inherently green. That's interesting. So do you think there's enough of these byproducts to make this truly scalable? Could it replace all? For thousands of years, potentially. The material we use is not going anywhere. There's piles of it sitting around. The other beautiful thing about our process is you hit on it too with normal concrete. You tear down a building. Where does that all go? Most of it gets land filled. With our material, you can break it down and you can create like synthetic aggregate that goes right back into the mix and you can recycle, you know, everything that we use just to make more product. So it really is a full, kind of full lifecycle type product that we can continue to recycle and make new material with. That's awesome. I had no idea about that. So what is this fly ash that I've seen from your website? Can you explain a bit about that? Sure. Fly ash is it's a product that comes off of coal production and it's one of the byproducts we've used, or we've at least tested going back in the mix. And it's just a way to get carbon intensive product out of the, I guess, the stream of industry and back into a useful product. And it's something we've tested and used and we can use it. It's not ideal. There's some other things we can do with fly ash that don't have to do with making permeable concrete necessarily. But I guess the easiest way to put it is just a byproduct from coal-fired power plants that is dirty, it's nasty, it sits in retention ponds and it gets land-filled and there's other uses for it besides leaching into groundwater. Yeah, which is my favorite hobby. If you've watched any of the episodes of the show, you'll know that the circular economy is one of my favorite concepts in the world. It's about reusing, closing the loop, changing our society and our business practices from input over here to garbage out over there as they've been traditionally run. What if we can take some of that waste or garbage and repackage it and make it into something that's actually useful for us? There's limitless possibilities and one of the coolest of those concepts is from this man, Ben Christensen, who has a truly outrageous idea for a circular economy around trees. I love these kinds of win-win-win wins, right? Yeah, that's my favorite thing on this show is finding things that just appear to be better from all angles, all points of view, and this certainly seems like that. You're solving a number of problems at once and you're benefiting the world. Truly, truly an incredible concept. I love the thought of this, so maybe explain to our listeners what is the process, the ideal process that you see happening with these trees. The great point, so normally when a tree comes down in a city, it's coming down for things we talked about, whether it's old for pest risk or it's diseased or it's part of a planned removal because there's a new building coming in or something like that. So as soon as that's happening, oftentimes those things can be predicted. So it starts with knowing what's happening first and getting our data really aligned. So that's with cities, that's with private tree care companies, that's with things like being able to understand the impacts of storms, and that starts with having really good data on your tree canopy. So you need to know what trees are there, you need to know how old they are, you need to know what condition they're in. That also helps you keep them alive for longer, which is ultimately really the goal here. As you know that, you can predict more effectively what's going to happen to those trees. Once you do, you are able to start thinking about how can we be being ready to salvage that wasted material that is going to come down. And so as we prepare for that, you want private companies as well as the city to be ready to take these trees down in a way that actually enables reuse. So oftentimes when you see somebody take down a tree, they cut it into these really short sections. I've seen that. It's hard to turn that. Yeah, exactly. They're called cookies. They're not delicious. It's really hard. Right. Second, I was like, okay, we're bringing it back full circle. Cookies. Somebody said cookies. They called us. I was getting excited too. But you can't do anything out of that, right? It's a short little stump. And so it starts with the actual taking downs. That's building the capacity and the knowledge within those folks. And so instead, you'd be producing bigger logs, which then can be taken to local processing facilities, whether that's a city or private company that can turn that into primary processed material. So you can think about a slab or a dimensional lumber, and then connecting in with secondary producers. So furniture manufacturers, flooring manufacturers, you can pretty much do anything. I mean, I've got some wood behind you or behind me here. You can use it for anything. It's amazing. It can be a cutting board. It can be a massive ceiling installation. It can be a table. It really has a lot of different uses. And so then it would be used. The next piece of that for us is 15% of all of our profits get reinvested back into city trees. So we work with local planting organizations to help support the maintenance of existing trees and also to get a lot of new trees in the grant. So that's sort of the best case scenario, which is a lot of different stakeholders working together. And that's why we call ourselves a platform. And that's the technology that we're really bringing in the table to make that efficient. So we've got a lot of different coordinating entities that need to work well together to pass this material along and get it to market. And that's what we'd help really, really make happen. Now we know that transitioning to a new sustainable world is not easy from political pushback to vested powers that be, we've got so many different angles that make these problems extraordinarily difficult. They're difficult conceptually, they're difficult practically, and they're difficult socially to get people on board with something that might ultimately be good for them. That's why I have such deep admiration for these types of people who've made it their life's work to build something more meaningful than just a job or just a career. Addressing climate change in a big way is something that I feel like I can do to really help serve the world. I feel like it's one of the biggest existential issues that we have. And we need as many people as possible really thinking about how we can address it. And in particular, and I'm sure we'll talk about this more, but addressing it in a real people first way. So for me, it offers this amazing opportunity to not just address and create a planet that we can live in in 2100, but also to address many of the societal inequities that we have in our current economy by creating a new and better model. I do think the first or next trillionaire, there are probably already trillionaires out there, will be someone that finds out how to crack the code with clean energy, clean water, clean. It's going to be an environmental type entrepreneur. I think that, you know, is going to be rewarded. Wouldn't that be incredible? That's just a small taste. We've only scratched the surface of what some of these people and some of these ideas can do. But I hope it expands your mind just a little bit to think about how far out these things go. EcoTech and the future tech, it's not just one category, it's not just one thing you know, it is a huge range of categories. So we might do some clip shows like this in the future if you like it drop me a line to get some of that gold from those past episodes because I have interviewed some genuine geniuses out there and it's time that their message maybe saw the light of day again. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And with that, this special episode of the podcast is over. [Music]
