Building A Better Future: Climate Tech That's Working Today

Dr. Awesome00:00:21

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Futurist Society where as always, I'm your host, Dr. Awesome. And we're talking in the present, but talking about the future.Today we have a very special guest, Joshua Dorfman, who is a CEO and founder of Supercool and doing some pretty interesting stuff in the climate space. Josh, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing.

Josh00:00:42

Well, thank you Dr. Awesome. I appreciate being here.Supercool is a platform to take a look at what the low carbon future actually is going to look like and how the we get there. And so what gets me very excited is when I look at the moment we operate in today, $2 trillion of investment is flowing into clean energy globally.That was 2024. It's going to be more in 2025. Fossil fuels has never hit that amount of investment in a single year.We've got 15,000 cities around the world that have climate actions in place, turning parts of their cities into living laboratories for really cool change. And then you have a decade of climate tech startups that have advanced from the lab to pilots to commercial stage and are now scaling up.Certainly not all of them. A lot fail, but many are succeeding.And so when you put all of these forces together, what I feel like is we're actually living in this new era of climate which is really about adopting the best solutions and, and accelerating them to a future which is not about solving climate so we don't die. It's actually about moving our civilization to a place that's more optimized than how we live today.

Dr. Awesome00:01:59

So what does those solutions look like and what is Supercool doing to achieve those solutions?

Josh00:02:05

Yeah, so Supercool itself, I mean we are a media platform, so podcast, newsletter, of course, YouTube. We're getting ready to launch our first event this fall, Climate Week nyc.We're working on a big which would be a fantastic conference for the spring next year. And so what we do is we go out and we say, okay, who's out there? What are these solutions? And I'll give you a couple examples.And then we try and tell the stories of what's actually happening today. And so just as one example, there's a company called Zum Z U M which is working to modernize and basically fix school buses.So Ritu Narayan, Founder CEO, comes on the show she has four children.And she says to me, josh, what's so odd about school buses, given that we're living in the 21st century, is that your young kids are having the same experience riding the school bus as their great grandparents had. Nothing's changed. And. And how can that be in a world of technology? How can that be? And so Zoom got their start about five or six years ago.Today they operate in over 4,000 schools. And here's what they do. They come into a school district and say, first of all, it's crazy.You, transportation director of Oakland or San Francisco or LA or Boston or Richmond, Virginia, or Nashville, you, transportation director, have hundreds of buses out there picking up kids, and you have no idea where they are. Right. You don't know where they are. Parents don't know where they are.And what's actually, like a chronic problem across our country is that kids are arriving late to school by taking the school bus. Right? They're supposed to. And so it's failing.So she comes in and she starts with, the city of Oakland, says, okay, look, we're going to take this over. Yes, we're going to optimize the routes. We're going to use some AI. It's just part of our solution.We're going to figure out how do we get kids to school on time, and everyone's going to have visibility to know where the bus is. And if a mom's child isn't going to school, she can just go on the app and say, notification, hey, Timmy's not coming to school today. Bus reroutes.Right? We're going to actually just use technology as exists. Okay? So buses start to get rerouted, routes get optimized, kids get to school on time.And then what they do is they go to the city of Oakland, they say, okay, look, we're going to actually electrify all of your school buses, because what does that mean? Well, that means you don't have diesel running through, you know, communities and kids sucking fumes that are really unhealthy. Right.So there's all these reasons, right, to get rid of diesel.

Dr. Awesome00:04:32

Right.

Josh00:04:33

The good news is the way we can make the economics work is now that we've optimized the bus routes, now that the kids are getting to school on time, you actually don't need 136 buses that are in your fleet. You only need 74. Right. So we're going to buy 74 electric buses to replace the 136 that you were not running very well in the first place.And we're going to move your entire system into the future. And now Zoom was so interesting. And this is what we actually try and do in our show.So we look at, so we bring them on and say, okay, that's amazing, but how did you get a school system to change their rfp, their request for proposal, to actually be able to buy all the services that you provide? Because you're probably not the lowest cost provider. It's probably not. You're delivering all this other value.And she's like, well, that's actually the business of climate. Right? This is what we do.We go in and speak to all these values that the community wants, that the parents want, that the school district wants, that the administrator wants, that the probably ladders up the mayor might even want. And we get them to actually change what they're looking for to build this future together. And so that's what we're doing.We're profiling tons of companies like that that get us very excited. Because who doesn't want a future like that? Right? It's more, it's.It speaks to the economics, it speaks to the health, it speaks to education, it speaks to just running the systems far more efficiently. That's the future we're moving toward. And we see that across the built environment.We see that really taking root in many different ways to build a better civilization than what we have today.

Dr. Awesome00:06:03

Do you think that's where the change is going to come from?Small companies doing these tasks that make the grid a little bit more cleaner, or change the school buses to electric school buses, doing like these, these small little change things so eventually it bubbles up into this larger movement? Or do you think it's going to be a silver bullet?Like, you know, all of a sudden we're going to have mass adoption of nuclear energy or mass adoption of fusion energy? Which one is, which one do you think is going to be the case?

Josh00:06:39

That's a really good question. I wouldn't pin my hopes to fusion as much as I know the fusion industry. We're in a hype cycle now.And everyone say that's coming and it's closer and closer and closer. Hopefully. Right? Hopefully. And we've taken a look at that too, with Super Cool. What I've really decided to do is not be in the hype cycle.We don't cover young startups that raise huge funding rounds. That's not interesting to me. We don't cover corporations that make big climate pledges about what they're going to do someday.That not interesting to me. And we don't cover tech. That's not here. What I'm interested in is what exists today that's actually driving change.And the more we hear about it, it can scale. And so what I do see is, yeah, Zoom starts small, but today, I mean, they're in almost every major school district.They're valued at over a billion dollars, right? We see a company called Butterfly, B U, D D E R F L Y. One of the fast companies, world's most innovative companies.This year they're in 7,000 fast food franchises.And what they do is they go into a Popeyes, or Wendy's, all these Main street places, which you don't think of as leading us into a, you know, a clean energy future. And what they come in to say is like, look, we're going to make you an offer you can't refuse.We're going to modernize and upgrade all your refrigeration, your H vac, your lighting. We're going to bring you into the most energy efficient, most modern, highest performance products on the market today. You don't have to pay a thing.We'll take most of the savings. You'll share in, it will take over.And now you're going to have a, you know, just a better restaurant, more efficient, and we can build a really big business that way. They've raised over a billion dollars, brought in private equity. So these things start small, they can scale big.But the other thing I would say is that when you look at the technologies that exist today that people, you know, I mean, they're maybe easy to dismiss. They're still finding their mainstream footing. I would say take solar and batteries, right? Solar has dropped in cost 99% over 50 years, right?It's on a learning curve, right? So it's like that. You double the manufacturing price goes down by a certain percentage.So what's so interesting is that if you just project solar forward on that same curve for another decade, you get to trivially cheap energy. You get to an energy source that costs just marginally more than the materials it takes to even make solar in the first place.And so what, what are the implications of that?I mean, people want to talk about fusion, but imagine, you know, that and with batteries, where now studies are showing there's multiple places around the world you can already run on 24. 7 solar cost efficiently, almost nearly under underpricing coal.If you're at 60% solar 24,7 because you just feed into the batteries, then you're way under the price of coal, way into the price of natural gas. Right, so, so what does that mean? Because, I mean, is that a silver bullet? It's hard to say, but imagine.But I think like you probably share the same view. The only way you get to the sci fi future is with renewables, right? Powered by the sun, infinite opportunity for energy.I mean, it could be fusion too, but solar has a proven track record and it hasn't failed for five or six decades. So you put all of these forces together and I think the future becomes very bright.It's not unclear entirely how it unfolds, but I feel very optimistic that it's going to be far. Well, certainly it's going to be way different than today. And I think the positive far outweighs the negative.

Dr. Awesome00:10:09

I appreciate that and I know that the hype cycle is not what you're covering, but personally I love the hype cycle.I like getting excited about the future and I think that that drives people to get excited and to go into these fields like young kids that are seeing these things happening before their eyes. That's the reason why they're going into the fields that, that excite them.All that being said, you know what, what get, what gets you excited, like when you're, you know, interviewing these people, like, give me, give me an example of something that you're like, man, I just can't wait until this happens. Solar sounds like it's something that excites you. What else is on the horizon that maybe we can all get excited about?

Josh00:10:51

Well, I'll give you an example that's in the news today regularly. We talk a lot. We see constantly this consternation, this geopolitical tension around rare earth minerals, rare earth metals, critical minerals.China has a lockhold on these industries because they've made intelligent investments for two decades. They saw where the future was going. This is how they were gonna strategically catch up. We're in that moment now.The US Is looking around saying, what have we done? Or how did we let this happen? Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons how, I mean, if we let it happen, how we got to this point.One company that I'm particularly excited about is a company called Cyclic Materials. And it's a Canadian entrepreneur starting now opening his first commercial scale factory in Mesa, Arizona.And this is the first company in the world that took a look at the situation now about seven years ago and said, all right, we're going to need far more rare earth magnets than we have today. Right?Because they're in everything from MRI machines to the hard Disk drives in data centers, of course, wind turbines, electric motors, EVs, et cetera. Basically, all of Western civilization runs on these rare earth magnets.We don't have enough and we've made a lot of them, but we don't recycle any of them. And China has the whole supply chain. Can I figure this out?So they're the first company in the world that's figured out how to recycle rare earth magnets at scale. Cost effectively. Getting the rare earth magnets separating from the steel in this process, which no one else has ever done.Now, the implications for that type of solution are incredible.Think of all the fields of science that, that touches to get all these elements at the bottom of the periodic table that no one really knows about, but, but the whole world depends on.And when I talked to Ahmed Garman, the CEO, the founder of this company, and they've just raised their CSB $50 million, and it's Amazon, it's Microsoft, it's Jaguar, it's BMW, they're all investing into this company because they all need these rare earth magnets.And he says, yeah, Josh, we're at the cusp of this urban mining revolution, right, where we are going to take all the stuff that otherwise might be going to the landfill and, and we are going to mine not just the steel and the copper and the aluminum at scale, but we're going to get all the rare earth magnets back.And when you get the rare earth magnets back, they're actually the purest in the world because they don't have all of the other impurities that go through the manufacturing process that they're trying to take out in the first place. We just have the purest stuff. And so to me, that's a company that's now solving climate, it's solving national security issues.It's enabling us to continue to live well in the Western world. And it's really proving what innovation could do.If I were a kid, I would get very excited about this notion of, like, urban mining, because if you look at places like Taiwan, islands that are modern developed economies that simply are island nations that don't actually have a lot of resources, they are already living in this future of urban mining. They already actually harness all of these resources, but put conglomerates together within the steel industry and other industries to actually work.They can be competitors, but they actually cooperate to build some really important infrastructure that is definitely part of the future.

Dr. Awesome00:14:19

That's interesting.You know, material science, I think, is really undersold just in the general scheme of things because it's not something that we look at initially as being this place where all this technology is bubbling up from.But I think that like I see it personally, I have, I live in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts and there's all these like little incubators that are doing amazing things and, and I've noticed that all of the straws have changed and they're not like the plat, the paper straws that are, you know, degrading as you drink a Diet Coke. They're really, you know, strong like paper straws that, that look and feel akin to plastic. And that's a small little change that I see.And I can only imagine that it's bubbling out throughout the rest of society.And so, you know, stuff like that, recycling, you know, urban mining, all of these things are things that I don't think about because I'm not in the industry like you. So it's really cool to hear about that.I do want to talk a little bit though about just like the difference between you, you mentioned a lot of different countries. What is America doing good and what are we doing bad? Because when I see, I, I feel like other countries are outpacing us.And you know, I, I follow Elon Musk on Twitter and he has like this graph of solar energy adoption here versus in, in China. And you know, the solar energy adoption is so much more vast in China.So what do you feel like we're doing good and what do you feel like we could do better at?

Josh00:15:50

We continue to be, I would say extraordinary at innovation. So yes, China, solar far outpacing us on a scale that we can't even imagine.I mean it's orders of magnitude bigger on solar, on wind, on EVs, on batteries. There's the one big beautiful bill that rolls back a lot of the incentives for these industries in America.Even if we were pushing these industries in America, I still think it's a question if we could even catch up to, to China. I mean they're so far ahead, so far ahead in fact that now they're actually putting restrictions on export of technology to the west.Which is really kind of ironic, right? Since we're given how far they've come. But I'll give you a personal example of what kind of related to Elon, of what I see in America.So before I started Supercool four years ago, yeah, just four years ago, I co founded a company with two former engineers from SpaceX and we came together, this was in North Carolina and Elon was actually talking a Lot has continued to talk a lot about carbon removal, right? How do you effectively take carbon out of the atmosphere? What are the mechanisms to do that?People talk about trees, but there's simply from a physics standpoint, there's just not enough land to plant enough trees to actually make that a viable way to pull enough carbon as quickly and as much as we're going to need to ultimately to get to solve climate. So I came together with two guys from SpaceX get on the phone with one of these guys.I had a little furniture manufacturing company in North Carolina at the time. It was all sustainable manufacturing and Covid hit gets shut down.I'm thinking more about materials because my material supply chain's getting shut down. We're using this high grade, responsibly harvested wood. Someone says, hey, there's a guy down in Raleigh you should talk to.He's got a little manufacturing thing going too. So we get on the phone and I start complaining about materials and this guy Wada says, well, what would you use?And I said, well, I don't know, maybe some alternative. Maybe we can use hemp. I don't really know a lot about it. Maybe there's something else.And he's like, oh, I've got six giant trash bags of industrial hemp in my garage. And I was like, you what? Who does that? What's your deal? And he's like well, I just moved here.I spent eight years running the life support systems team on the Dragon crew spacecraft keeping astronauts alive in space. I was like, and you moved to Raleigh, North Carolina? He was like, well, you know, I'm a, I'm an engineer. I put my spreadsheet together.I had all the cities, you know, on the rows and all my criteria in the columns. And Raleigh came to the top. We moved here, there's a lot of trees, we like it, we're here.So we have this like 20 minute conversation and I'm saying like, I'd like to come up with a better material.And he's like, well, I'm interested in carbon removal because Elon's taught, we've been talking about it and this guy has like a seven year master plan or a seven phase master plan wada to like get to Mars and you know, colonize Mars. And so he's like, materials would help.And so within 20 minutes we come up with this idea like, well, if we can find something that grows faster than trees, where do trees go anyway? Like trees while you cut them down, they're lumber, they go into houses.So if we could figure out how to grow something that's faster than trees, that had utility that we could turn into a product, that we could replace trees in home building maybe we could actually speed up this entire cycle, use far less land and do cargo. So you fast forward four years. That's actually what we did. We built a company called Plan and we identified a perennial.Grass grows about 10 times faster than trees. So you can plant it in far less land and you can harvest it every year. So you get far more biomass off the land.It has the same structural, actually a little bit superior to trees in terms of its structural integrity. We got more SpaceXers to move from LA to North Carolina.We built first of its kind electric production technology, no smokestack on the roof, a modular system that takes a giant mill.It's basically the size of a town, shrinks it down to something that can go into any warehouse in America and you plug it in and about 140ft later you start spitting out what essentially is the structural panels that you nailed to the two by fours.When you build a house, which is called oriented strandboard, we got dear Horton, the largest homebuilder in the country, to show up and place an order for 10 million of these panels. That was about six months ago. That's about 90,000 homes. That's about 15% of the homes built in America in any given year.And the that's American innovation that can scale. And so that's my personal story.And when I think about SpaceX or Tesla and I think about one of Elon's, maybe he will have many legacies, but I do think one of the legacies that's a little bit less noticed is all of the people like Wada and Nate, who's now our CEO, who have spun out of his companies, who have been trained in a certain mindset, who are building extraordinary companies, scaling incredible technologies, it's really remarkable. I think that's what America does great.And what I think we don't do quite so well is we have a very hard time with industrial policy, just like China has.So we have a very hard time just putting in place the government support that unlocks innovation and enables it to scale and compete the way the rest of the world is starting to move. That's obviously we're more of a capitalist, free market type society. So we tend to it fits and starts.But the innovations that we've got just across these many industries is really fascinating to me and I think still underrepresented in terms of what we know and understand is happening today in America.

Dr. Awesome00:21:11

Yeah, I totally agree about the idea of just intellectual capital to promote innovation. I think that we're still drawing these people all around the world and we have this unique environment which gives them the space to think freely.But you know, one of the things that I feel like I notice this is my opinion. I feel like politics is a huge, you know, infective source for a lot of the delays that we have.And you know, I think that for whatever reason it's infected climate science more so than, than any other one.And like, you know, you don't have the same kind of pushback with like robots, for example, like everybody wants robots, red or blue, you know, and something that for whatever reason politics has, has infected nearly everything in our discourse. And for whatever reason, climate change has been this really big pushback. Do you think that that is a problem?I mean, do you think that it's going to get better? What are some, some facets of hope that you see along, along the road?Because that's one of the things that I feel like whenever I talk to somebody that's in climate, I just, I look at, you know, this, the 50% of America is just against climate science in whatever shape it comes in, or climate technology in whatever shape it comes in. And I, I wonder how we're going to get past that. But you have a unique perspective. I'd love to hear what you think about that.

Josh00:22:43

Yeah, I mean, I think that it's the, to me it's fairly straightforward why we're in this situation. And it's because there's an industry that's under threat, that's dying.I mean, if you look at, so again, if you look globally at automobile sales and EV sales versus gas combustion engine sales, we are now terminal. You can see the terminal kind of death phase that you play out that trend. Gas powered cars are going away. It's just over time, it's going to happen.So we have an environment in America where the fossil fuel industry is obviously entrenched. It also, they speak to this kind of way of life that is a little bit mythology. We want our loud cars.I mean, I live here in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. We've got Bike Week, we've got motorcycles coming through here and it's awesome and it's fun.But I think this industry sees, it sees the threat and the threat is now.So in my mind it's like I look at this, this moment where we're talking that the one big beautiful bill has passed all these Incentives have been rolled back for wind, solar, etc. And I think that just to me this is just, it highlights the fear of the 20th century technologies that are really in decline.And it's purely because they're, I mean, technologies, I mean, you know, are they technologies? They're, they're fuel sources. They use technology. Right.But like the, the cost of fossil fuels, cost of oil has stayed relatively flat adjusted for inflation for a century. Right. Like it gets harder to drill, gets more expensive, but technology kind of levels that a little bit.Whereas like we've already talked about with solar and these other technologies. Right. So the cost declines and that future is going to play out.But what I see, what gives me hope is, you know, you take a state like Iowa, so it's, you know, it's, it's become a red state. Used to be more of a purple state, but just two weeks ago, a wind turbine factory announced that it was reopening. And I think it's alliant.It's the fifth largest. Well, they're an energy company, but they're also the fifth largest wind energy developer in America, based in Iowa.They've announced that they're moving forward with a billion dollars of investment in wind by 2030. Now, Iowa already has, they already run on 60% wind energy. The winds blow very strong in Iowa. It makes economic sense to do that.So the politics, yes, they get in the way, but they don't slow down the march of economics.And part of the reason that Iowa really likes wind as well is because now that wind energy in a rural state is paying taxes for schools and libraries and police stations and fire departments, I mean, that is the source of taxable income. Right. When you're out in rural areas where there's just not a lot of industry, there's also lease payments to farmers on their land.You have these different constituents who actually like wind energy because it speaks to their economic interests. We also, I guess the last thing I'll say on this is back in January I interviewed this investment banker, Britta von Essen.She's one of the, probably one of the foremost straight up renewable energy investment bankers. Works for a boutique bank called CRCIB. They've done $70 billion or so of transactions.And I was having this exact conversation saying, okay, we know the administration's about to change over. Politics are probably going to change, incentives are going to change.What's your view on the future of development, renewable clean energy development moving forward? She's like, look, it's definitely going to change, but it Changes all the time, back and forth, whipsaws.And if at the national level we pull things back, you very often see states step up or even cities step up and the gaps get filled in. But the march of technology is only going in one direction. And that's really what gives me hope.

Dr. Awesome00:26:38

Yeah, the inevitable progress of humanity. That's. I certainly agree with that. I think that that's something that everybody can look to as something that, that's hopeful.I think it's very easy to see how we've progressed just in general, for the better, for all human beings. And that's something that I always tell people.There's always this pessimism that of new technology, and I think that every new technology has made our lives better, if you take a look at it from 50 years, 100 years perspective. So I really appreciate you saying that.So, last question before we get into our, our general questions that we ask all of our guests is that, what do you think that if you were to have, you know, an insight into the future person's day would look like that might be different today as opposed to, you know, 20 years ago? Right. Like, I mean, I think if you were to talk to young Josh Dorfman, we might not know that we had electric cars and now we have electric cars.What is the future going to look like with climate technology maximized to its potential for the everyday human being?

Josh00:27:47

Yeah, that, that is a great question to me.I think that it's a tricky question for me to answer because just like when we're promoting Super Cool and I'm like, what visual can I show of what the world looks like?It's hard because so much of this is infrastructure, so much of this is systems that improves our lives or makes systems far more efficient without us even necessarily having to change all that much. What I see, for example, take our homes.We talk to lots of companies that are kind of on the bleeding edge of what's happening in our homes today as we electrify. So as we move to not just solar and storage, but we move to induction stoves that have batteries in them.So if the power goes out, they can still cook. You can still cook for the next 24 to 48 hours and run the fridge, and you have a far better cooking experience.And now that electricity is coming from the grid and you don't have natural gas, and then you talk about, you know, electric water heaters and heat pumps and all this stuff that's gonna come into the house and houses are going to become and starting to Happen really just like their own mini power plants, also sharing energy with the grid, also potentially sharing energy with their neighbors. Homeowners getting compensated for that sharing depending on what they have.And it all happening way where it's behind the scenes, where you know the kinds of businesses that are running today and this is happening in homes, in like the Popeyes McDonald's I mentioned is, you know, we talk about this need to go build more grid, more power generation. We've got AI but then you have this other view that's like, well, we only use 42% of the grid today on average, right?We actually, we've built for these peaks, but we actually don't use it very well. What if we optimize what we have? And what if, you know, I have, and this is Tesla's, Tesla's doing this, others are doing this.What If I've got 15,000 homes on a system, they all have Tesla batteries. And the utility comes to me and says, hey, you know what, we're in San Francisco and the energy is about to spike.It's going to be really hot in six hours. We already know that in advance. Can you start to give me some of the energy back?And then Tesla says, yeah, we got all these homes using our batteries. What if we just give you back a small amount or we just pause charging the electric car for like 10 minutes. No one's going to know.But, but now you don't have to fire up that peaker plant and maybe you don't need to go build all of that power. We're just moving to a world where all of this stuff starts to happen. It's like it's automation.We had Tim Holt, who's on the board of Siemens Energy and runs their grid technology business on the show and he's like, what we're trying to get to with this power grid, which really is the most important infrastructure for the future, is to have it as synchronous and orchestrated as self driving cars. You think about all the AI and the technology that goes into making every car on the road self driving. Imagine a grid that operates in the same way.And so I see systems that enable us. So that's one I think.The other thing I would say though is what triggers for me we had on this architect Eric Corey Fried, who is the director of sustainability for CannonDesign, which is global architectural firm, probably consider one of the most forward leaning in terms of sustainability. So they have clients like the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, all of these cancer clinics.And Eric comes in he says, how would you like to have a cancer clinic that isn't built with cancer causing materials? And he's like, they're like, yeah. He's like, okay, because that's what you have right now, right? There's all these volatile organic.That's the one world we live in today. It's like, like that's the outcome I'm going to give for you. Do, do you want that there? Yes, we want. Okay, cool. Great. I'm going to get to work.I don't need to tell you all of my biophilic design and what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it, but basically at the same price, I'm going to give you something that's going to be far superior for everybody in that building. And so we're going to be moving to better infrastructure. And you see it the same in schools.And the last thing that I'll say just on this point, you know, we've, a couple of times on my show we've touched on trees, urban trees, and we had on the mayor of Barranquilla, Colombia, Jaime Pumarejo. And Barranquilla, you know, they don't have to think about, oh, geez, how do we, how do we reduce the carbon footprint of our people?I mean, It's Colombia, it's 1 16th the carbon footprint of America. They've got other things to worry about. I mean, it's hot, right?So he's like, well, we mapped where students were actually passing out from heat on their way to school. And then we wanted to go plant trees. But I had a lot of people still in my city who didn't understand just the inherent value of a tree. Right.Cooling. Right. All the other things that trees can do.So I took some of them to London and we saw a study in London that said intentionally planted tree lined streets. Those streets have 15% higher property values for their homes, which translates into 15% higher property taxes for the city.There is an ROI on planting trees. They've planted 250,000 trees in Barranquilla. That does a ton of things for the quality of life, but it also pays for itself.Over time, the city gets that money back and you move to a future that is actually greener, more livable, just far better than where we are today. That's, that's what I see.

Dr. Awesome00:33:13

That is awesome.I, I, I really appreciate that idea of having cities be more beautiful, having, you know, simple messages that you can tell somebody like, do you want to, do you want a Building that does not cause cancer to be your next cancer center.Like those th, those are things I think that people can get behind, you know, like simple messaging, making people's lives better on just a daily basis, like, just so it's tangible, you know, that tangible progress.I think that's something that, that, that is really going to help us get the political will and, and the, the social will to, to do a lot of these big projects. Because it's a huge project, right? I mean, it's not something that's going to happen overnight.And we've been talking about it for two decades now, and, and probably more. And I, I, I don't think that any of us can say that we've seen the progress that we wanted to. But listen, that's a fair point.Listen, I, I, I really appreciate you being on the show.And you know, as many of our subscribers know, at the end of the show, I ask our guests three very general questions, just kind of get an idea of, like, where they're coming from.And the first one for me, like, I, you know, my passion for doing this podcast and for a lot of the stuff that I do and research is to build a future that I have noticed on utopian science fiction like Star Trek or things like that. And that's the future that I want to live in.And so when I'm making moves in the same way that Elon has this idea of going to Mars, that's the way that I'm making moves. I want to live in a utopian vision of the future. But you obviously have a lot of passion about this, and I wonder where your inspiration comes from.

Josh00:34:55

My inspiration comes from some things that I feel for me personally were kind of maybe my own destiny, right? My own sort of fate, if you will. So I was born on February 21, 1972. That's the day Nixon opened China. Right?That's the day that the, that the U.S. decided, you know what, we have to go figure out how to engage what's going to clearly be this very important country. In the 1990s, I moved to China and I spent a couple of years was teaching English.Ended up actually working for a bicycle lock company called Kryptonite that was very popular back in the day. And I was in factories. I had this incredible experience.And toward the tail end of that experience, 1997, I'm in Guangzhou and we opened another factory.I'm traveling with a Chinese businessman to this restaurant where we're going to celebrate by toasting and baijiu based on their green alcohol, a little bit of snake blood, and consummate the deal. And, you know, okay, we're off. We're doing business. Before we go into the restaurant, this Chinese CEO takes me aside.He says, josh, look, my Mercedes is the biggest Mercedes in this entire parking lot that was also filled with Mercedes, even though it was Communist China nearly 30 years ago, it was a lot of Hong Kong kind of money bleeding into Southern China. And in that moment, what crystallized for me is what I'd seen over the past two years, which is, this goes back now nearly three decades.But you could already see the bridges, tunnels, highways, all this infrastructure coming in to turn China from a country where a billion people at the time were riding bicycles to a place that was moving to an automobile economy. And I thought, I don't know anything about global warming. I don't know anything about climate change. I never studied it.But I know enough about geopolitics and I know enough about energy to ask the question, at least, where's all the oil going to come from? What is this going to mean for the Middle East? What is this going to mean for geopolitics?And then eventually it did lead me to say, and what does this mean for a finite planet where we're going to be burning more fossil fuel, et cetera, et cetera.And I have always felt that part of why I'm here is to elevate awareness about how we can move to a more sustainable future, so that whether it's in China or developing Eastern Europe or India or anywhere else, that we can all aspire to live as well as we possibly can today, while enabling future generations to have that same opportunity. And. And that has driven me, for now, the. Just about the past three decades.

Dr. Awesome00:37:22

That's awesome, man. I wish you the best of luck in that. I. I want to live in that future, too.And not only here in America, but, like, I. I do a lot of traveling myself, and, like, I'll go to a city like Karachi, Pakistan, and there's no trees, you know, there's a ton of smog. Like, those people deserve to live in the same type of environment that, that people in Colombia do. And I feel like it's.It's something that I hope that that future comes to pass because in all of the utopian science fiction, it's always like this beautiful, lush city with lots of trees and there's, you know, no fossil fuels that. That we're looking towards. And I want to live in that future. So, next question.I. I wonder, like, in, in 10 years, what do you think is going to make the biggest impact for us? Just like on a, on a human basis? Like, is it going to come from energy?Is it going to come from, you know, we're all going to be driving electric, electric cars, which is going to be the biggest impact for, for you and your family? You think that's going to happen within the next 10 years?

Josh00:38:22

Yeah, well, I think the biggest impact for, let's see. I'm trying to think about that for me and my family because, because I do see it in two ways and we've talked about both.I do think where, where we're moving in terms of far cheaper, far more abundant renewable energy is going to be a, is going to become transformational over the decade, next decade in a way that, that we can't quite see yet.As those learning curves continue to decline, as those, those costs decline and what the implications are for that Star Trek future, excuse me, I think are profound and they may, some of them may be coming sooner than we realize. Desalinization, when it plants like things that actually become affordable. I think that's one.But by some bizarre twist of fate, I moved to a county in America, Horry county in South Carolina, that has more of the types of schools I'm describing to you that are these net zero schools that actually don't consume fossil fuels or they produce more solar and geothermal. Right. That's basically how they run than any other county in America, are made with healthier materials.And you walk into these schools and you're like, yeah, this feels like the future. My youngest child's going into sixth grade. She's going to be fifth grade. Rather she's going to be one of these schools in the fall.And so it takes longer to change an entire built environment. But I do feel that this awareness is spreading that not only is this just more.Does it make more economic sense for a school district district to build schools that actually don't need to pay a power bill. But the evidence is becoming clearer that children just by default will perform better, will be able to reach more of their potential.In schools where you have more daylight, we don't need as much artificial lighting.In schools where you take those chemicals out of the wall, where you have sound barriers so you don't actually have to hear an external highway or just a really busy street. That's an environment built for performance. And I, and I.That feels much more personal to me what that means for, for the learning opportunities and for my kids to actually reach Their potential.

Dr. Awesome00:40:35

Yeah, that's awesome. I, I have two daughters myself, and I always think about, like, what is the future going to look like for them?It's going to be totally different, you know, and, and you know, part of it is climate technology, but also part of it is, you know, AI and all the other technologies that are coming down the pipeline, they're, they're going to live a very different life than, than you and I have lived. And it's interesting to, to pontificate about that.So, last question, which is kind of dovetails into what I'm saying is that, you know, for me, like I'm in medicine, I see medical breakthroughs happening all the time, but outside of medicine, I, I follow a lot of different technologies because that's what interests me. And I would say, you know, the one that I, I just, every single time I see an article about robots, I have to read that article.It's just something that, like, you know, for whatever reason, like I'm, I'm personally interested in because technology is happening at such a break, a breakneck pace. There's just too much to keep up with. But I can tell you that I know more about robots than about any of the other technologies.So for you, what do you, what do you, outside of climate technology, what are you keeping an eye on? What, what is like really of super interest to you?

Josh00:41:46

Well, first let me just say I had this experience, I think it was in 2011, I want to say I went to work for this company that Amazon had just bought called quidsy, which was diapers.com and so did these different e commerce sites. It was this guy, Mark Lore, who's become a pretty well known businessman, he had started it.And in my orientation I got on a little minivan and went with a few folks out to this warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania that was serving New York City with I think like one day delivery already, like beating Amazon. This is part of why Amazon bought them.And we went into, and part of the way we got to that was you go into that warehouse and so you just walk in and it actually was already run on robots, right?It was just the robots that were just, this just orchestrated, moving all the goods around the warehouse floor to the humans who were at the stations, you know, just taking the stuff off the robots and putting in boxes and shipping out. That's part of how they got speed. And it was really one of those moments where it was just jaw dropping, where it was like, oh my God. God.I am in eastern Pennsylvania looking at the Future. Right. It was like mind blowing. So I guess I would say, like you, I'm very interested in lots of different technologies.I am really fascinated by cars, by transportation, and so I do also pay pretty close attention to that.One thing that I'll say, because it dovetails with all my interests, it's probably the last point is I recently got an opportunity to talk to the guy who runs the Formula E racing team for Andretti.

Dr. Awesome00:43:27

Yeah.

Josh00:43:27

Are you familiar with Formula E?

Dr. Awesome00:43:29

Well, I'm familiar with Formula one. I know that there's a Formula E and I've tangentially heard about it, but tell me more.

Josh00:43:35

Yeah, okay. So, yeah, tangentially heard about it. I mean, even though it's my industry, it's kind of tangential.But the reason we started talking and the technology's interesting. Okay, so the cars now are. They're not quite F1 because F1 have these massive engines, but they're still like 0,61.8 seconds, 200 mph cars.What was so interesting to me is that, and this probably goes to really where my ultimate interest is, Formula E as a racing series was started a decade ago. Today it has 500 million global racing fans. It's the fastest growing motorsport in the world.And what was interesting in talking this guy, Roger Griffiths of Andretti, who was there from the beginning, you know, it basically boiled down to like three things. Like, one, they took a look at the limitations of the tech. A decade ago, you had batteries that weren't up to actually running.Like an F1 type experience. Right. You couldn't even get into a formation lap without drivers being worried that their battery was going to drain.And so this guy's like, Beijing was the slowest formation lap probably in the history of motorsport racing. Or, you know, race one. Okay, well, they, you know, so they said, well, what are we going to do? How about we shorten the races? 45 minute races.Perfect. Because today we live in a world with very short attention spans. That's a perfect amount of time for us. All right, so deal with the limitation.What about the strength? The cars are quiet. You know what we can do? We can go put the race right in the middle of the city. Let's go do that in Mexico City. Let's go do that.I mean, of course Monaco, but Miami or, you know, wherever we're going to do it right? And because the cars are quiet now, we can actually bring families to these races. We can actually attract different people.And why don't we just not do that?What if we actually, instead of F1, where one car gets out in the lead and there's very few lead changes or even passes, let's go borrow from Super Marrow Brothers. Let's put like, yeah, you can roll over certain so you get like power boost, right, if you go over like certain. And now, so he's this guy.So Roger's like, look, if you go to Monaco, of course, F Formula one, Monaco, greatest sporting event probably on the planet. But there's probably no lead changes, right? If you watch the Formula E race, there's going to be 400 lead changes.So we built a better product, more entertaining, right? We're getting different audiences and we can play music and we can make it kind of like a party. And all of this is on a climate platform.It's all electric cars, which everyone knows is a huge climate solution, but we don't even really have to talk about it that much because it just underpins this entire experience which is driving the fastest motorsport growth in the world.That, to me, that combination of technology, understanding what humans actually want to how to build incredible experiences that get them excited about the climate future, that's really the place that lights me up more than anything else. And examples that I'm constantly looking for.

Dr. Awesome00:46:23

Yeah, no, I totally agree. Now you got me interested in that. Just even having I play a ton of Mario Karts. So let's see. Have you seen the new F1 movie?

Josh00:46:35

Yes, I have.

Dr. Awesome00:46:36

It's good.

Josh00:46:38

It's so good. The beginning I thought was a little slow. I turned to My son, my 15 year old, and I was about to be like, how are you feeling about this?And then the racing started and it was like.

Dr. Awesome00:46:48

I know, yeah, so good, so good. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you so much to all of our subscribers.If you are not subscribing, if you could hit like and subscribe, that would really help us. And for those of you guys who are listening on a regular basis, we will see you in the future. Thank you, everybody.