Big Technology Podcast - Can Technology Solve Our Climate Crisis — With David Friedberg

Episode Date: February 15, 2023

David Friedberg is a co-host of the All-In Podcast and the founder and CEO of The Production Board, a holding company focused on addressing the earth’s problems via technology. Friedberg joins Big Technology Podcast for a conversation about how, specifically, we might be able to solve our climate crisis with tech. Join us for an in-depth conversation on earth's most pressing issue, filled with concrete examples and a healthy dose of optimism. Stay tuned till the end where Friedberg discusses nuclear fusion's awesome potential. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [e-mail]

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. David Friedberg is our guest today. He's the co-host of the All-In podcast and the founder and CEO of the production board, a holding company that's focused on addressing the earth's problems with. technology. Now, I've always wanted to have a conversation here about how specifically we might be able to solve our climate crisis with tech, since behavioral mitigations just don't appear likely to work. I mean, just think back to COVID and how we failed there. And are we actually going to have

success when it comes to climate? Friedberg, who's currently working to infuse South American agriculture company Lavoro with productivity technology and take it public via a SPAC is about as well-vers on this topic as they come, and I'm so excited to speak with him. Now, before we begin, I want to share that I've been in touch with some really amazing guests, and I'm trying to, well, push them over the finish line. And this is where I'd like to ask your help. Guests often look at ratings to decide whether to come on, and a large number of five-star reviews is always helpful for recruitment. So would you consider rating this podcast five stars in Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or both if you listen on both? I promise it will help improve the show.

And now, my conversation with Dave Freedberg. Hey, Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Thanks for being here. We spend a lot of time paying attention to the big tech companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. A lot of time talking about Twitter, a lot of time talking about AI on this show.

We're probably going to get to that as we continue this discussion. But I think rarely do the headline spend enough time focused on how our technology can help solve some of the problems that we're seeing with our climate crisis. And I think having you on, you're actively working on these type of problems is a great opportunity to dig into this in a way that doesn't get enough attention. That's what this podcast is all about. So why don't we start here? What is the state of the planet right now in terms of where the climate is? Just give us like the high level view of the problem and then we'll go into some of the technological solutions. It's a controversial question because, you know, some people will make the case that we're, you know, not seeing the effects as we're predicted on the timescales that we're predicted, and some people will say that we're seeing worse effects.

The key metric, obviously, that a lot of folks look to as being kind of, you know, the physical driver of the predicted effects of climate change is the concentration. of atmospheric carbon. And, you know, the simple equation is carbon in carbon out. How much carbon are we putting in the atmosphere? How much are we pulling out? Or how much is the planet pulling out in the oceans and in plants and so on? And so that number, you know, continues to rise. We also Al Gore's inconvenient truth. And so much of the kind of investing and technology community that's oriented around solving problems associated with climate change really focus on that key metric, which is carbon reduction or the replacement of traditional systems that are used to do things, mechanical systems, to do things that emit carbon into the atmosphere in the process.

So, you know, there's no really good line of sight to when we're going to stop increasing the rate of carbon emissions into the atmosphere. There's efforts on energy and transportation and food. you know, there's there's a ton of capital being organized around that as the key objective is to reduce that carbon emitting number. But yeah, we don't have a like at this point a good predictor that says we're still, everyone still feels rather anxious. You know, my personal point of view is I am not that anxious.

I'm not that anxious because I do see a portfolio. of technologies that are developed or developing. And those technologies are not just about doing good for the planet. They're just better business sense. And what I mean by that is they make stuff that's cheaper and better than the traditional way of making stuff or doing stuff. And if it's cheaper, if it's a better economic alternative, customers, the market will adopt it.

And if the market adopt it, then that technology and that system becomes standardized, becomes proliferate. And if it happens to put less carbon in the atmosphere, then that is a fantastic side effect of the adoption of that technology. So, you know, renewable energy production is one that everyone's touting because we're seeing industrial scale renewable energy like solar and wind cost less now than traditional petrochemical driven electricity production. you know, as low as under three cents a kilowatt hour. And, you know, we're typically looking at

about 10 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour for traditional coal and natural gas power. So if that technology is cheaper, then it is better. And the economy will move forward. And I think we see this just across the gamut, whether it's in agriculture where, you know, animal agriculture is a huge emitter of carbon or in energy production or in transportation or in manufacturing, there are technologies that in the absence of being carbon emitters or not carbon emitters, they're just faster, cheaper, and better. And those technologies are moving us forward, improving economic productivity, and they happen to also have lower carbon emissions.

And so that's why I'm fairly optimistic, because I just see all these new systems coming online and all these investments to move the economy forward across all these industries. that are just better. And they also emit less carbon. So that's a, you know, kind of a why I'm not too anxious and I'm fairly optimistic. And then there's also these big like step change technologies like nuclear fusion, which are on the horizon that seem to finally be real. And if those happen, then you can not just see the cost of energy go super low and have no carbon emissions, but you can actually see energy production go up by 10 fold or 100 fold, which is another game changer for humanity. So that's why I'm pretty optimistic. I'm seizing on this faster, cheaper, better part of

your answer. And I want to put a pin in that to come back to it later because I want to ask this other foundational question as we get going, which is during COVID, one of the things that I came to the realization of. And I think a lot of people who are watching our reaction to some of the preventative measures, if we put this task of trying to save the environment or try to protect population at large to humanity as a whole, we're just not going to get the responses. Like I thought that if we're not going to, for instance, follow some of these rules and restrictions when, or we're going to fight these rules and restrictions, when we know that they can directly save human lives in front of us, then this idea of taking human behavior, human

action to help this far away problem of climate crisis seems unlikely. So I'm kind of curious, like what your perspective is, can we leave it to people's behavior changes to help get us out of this crisis, or is it more of a technological solution? Then maybe we come back to this faster, better, cheaper idea. Yeah. So we've never saved the world by assuming that everyone's going to do good together. Okay. And humanity has faced existential crises for 200,000 years, right? Like, I say humans were roaming the plains of the savannah without any food. And we were just eating scraps that were left for us on the ground, and eventually we figured out how to engineer the earth to make food for us. And that was the dawn of agriculture. And it wasn't this

collective, let's all eat less effort. Folks ate what they wanted to eat and ate what they could get their hands on. They didn't take food and not eat because other people were hungrier or more starving than them. Social consciousness makes everyone a socialist in a nuclear situation, meaning, you know, you will give stuff up for your family that you live with. You will maybe give some stuff up for your neighbors that you live on the road with. And then as you start to get wider and wider, you start to care less about those people being taken care of by you. In fact, those are the folks who are competing for resources against you. So every human has this innate drive called desire.

And desire means I want to have what I don't have. And so you always observe that which is in the world outside of you. And there are things that you see in the world that you don't have and you say, I want to have those things. And that's what drives humanity. That's what drives the individual human. Now, you're willing to give those things up to take care of those around you that you care about. But at some point, you can't take care of everyone.

And so the people you can't take care of become your competitors for resources. And that's how tribalism and, you know, nation states and all these things that create distinction between large groups of people arise. And in fact, when it comes down to it, even those nation-state collectives may fall apart, as we've seen in civil wars in the past, when resources become scarce and folks want more than they have. And then they start competing within their nation-state and things get ugly. So that's, I think, a really fundamental psychological premise. And history is proven at time and time again. The only way out of these problems is by inventing cheaper and better alternatives like agriculture. We realize we could

seed in the ground, when we put a seed in the ground, a plant grew, and that we could eat the plant a few months later. That was this kind of, you know, ingenious discovery and this ingenious invention, and then we started to develop irrigation and all these systems where we could engineer the natural ecosystem around us to make stuff for us. And then everyone had more. Everyone had abundance. And the rate of desire and the rate of competitiveness went down, and there was eras of peace and errors of abundance that arose. And this has been the case with every step change of technology since the dawn of humanity, we identify some way to engineer something novel, create an era of abundance, and these social conflicts kind of die down. If you think about the planet

today, there's about 95% of the world's people at the end of the century, based on recent population forecasts, call it 90% of people that will live in Africa and South Asia. Okay, 10% of the people will live elsewhere. So within those two regions, you have a group of people that are rising in income. And, you know, when you go from making $6,000 a year to $30, or $60,000 a year, let's say $6 to $30 like has happened in China in the last 30 years, what happens with that population? Well, suddenly they have more resources and they want more stuff and they consume more stuff. They're not oriented around, let's save the planet. Those individuals, those families, the people that live there, say, I can now feed myself twice as much. I can now buy twice as many

pounds of meat each week because that's satisfying to me. And that can something. pattern is what really drives the core problem. You can't assume that social consciousness will arise and everyone will suddenly stop this natural drive of desire and then they move up the economic ladder, they have access and opportunity to buy new stuff and then assume that they won't. Most of the demand will come from that emerging developing class. And as that happens, they're looking for more resources. So the only way we can solve the problem is if we give everyone an alternative for energy, for food, for materials that is cheaper and better versus trying to convince them to do good for the world because they have other priorities.

And I think that's like a really core pieces here, which is the only path to sustainability is a sustainable business, meaning it can make money by selling a better, cheaper product. Okay, so I'm definitely hearing from you that it's a technological solution. I would agree that it's a technological solution as well when we get towards figuring out how to answer these questions on climate. The thing that I'm not understanding, and maybe you can unpack for me is when you talk about production, right, we're producing, I think you said better, cheaper and faster, faster, better and cheaper, we're still producing more. And it does seem to me like you produce more, you're using more resources. So how does producing faster, better, and

cheaper if we're going to be producing for a planet, you know, again, that's not going to take these mitigation efforts on their own. We know that. How does that solve the problem? Yeah, this gets to a first principles of physics question and also one where we talk about leverage or productivity. So the key term to think about is productivity. Productivity is this basic principle that defines how much unit of output you can get per unit of input. Okay. So if you can change the productivity of doing something or making something by a significant fold, you can make it cheaper and make a lot more of it. I'll give you an example.

Today it takes 30 units of energy to make a unit of beef. Okay, so if you measure beef in terms of calories, to make one calorie of beef takes about 30 calories of energy across the whole system. And it also takes several years because you have to grow corn and then you have to move to feed lots and feed cows and then process the cows and ship them to the restaurants. So you're moving molecules around. You're using a lot of energy. So it's about a 30 to one energy conversion ratio. So what if, and what is beef? Well, beef is just four elements, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen primarily. So if you can take those four elements

and reconstruct them in a smarter, cheaper, better way into the cells of beef, into the protein of beef, and it's chemically identical. It's the exact same thing as beef. You just didn't happen to use the whole cow to make it. And you could only use, say, five calories of energy to make one calorie of beef. Well, now you can make six times as much beef with price parity. Or you could make three times as much beef and chop the price in half. So that's how productivity works. And technology is what allows humans to improve our productivity. When humans first farmed the earth. When we first started with agriculture, we did everything manually. We used, you know, sticks, and we moved them through the ground, and we put seed in the ground, and we harvested

them. And then the tractor came along. And now, instead of farming one acre per person per year, one person could farm 40 acres per year, and eventually 400 acres per year. And if you go to Australia today, you'll see farmers farming wheat across 10,000 acres per farmer per year. The leverage we get on a unit of time, the leverage we get on a unit of energy has gone way, way up. And so we can now make more food and make it cheaper. And that's because of the unlock enabled by all the technology used in agriculture to make that possible, like the tractor, precision agriculture, software to drive those tractors, et cetera. So that's what's really, I think, key for folks to understand is how critical productivity unlocks can give us more and give us at a lower price. And that's

where I think we start to beat the climate change problem. And so how do you outpace in what we have, what you're talking about in the earlier part of this conversation where we have not only more people who are starting to consume more, but also population growth. So just looked it up. We hit a billion people on the planet in 1804, 2 billion in 1927. Now we're in 7 billion range. I mean, this thing is growing. You're, you know, you're entrepreneur. You do, you know, you know how software works. And when it comes to exponential growth, this is your territory. So do our productivity gains, then offset the incremental demand? Yes, they do. Now, there's also another important factor, which we didn't realize until we got

rich as a species. As we have more, we actually reproduce less. And this is a really weird socioeconomic statistic that seems to be emerging now. Reproduction seems to be, this output of scarcity that, in fact, the less income and the more challenged people are, the higher their population rate. That's a very big generalization, but there's a lot of these charts and data that can kind of demonstrate that. As more of the world has become industrialized and developed, and more people have a grocery store they can walk to to pick up food, more people have a clothing store they can get clothing from, more people have comfortable warmth and heat and shelter,

they tend to reproduce less. They have fewer children. There's a lot of theories about why this is. But regardless, you know, it could be related to comfort and feeling less distress and so you don't need to kind of get more. It may be a function of just my time.

I'm satisfied with how I'm spending my time, whereas humans in the absence of satisfaction with their condition in the world, they seek satisfaction through having children. There's a lot of theories for this. I'm not going to kind of try and be too predicted or too theoretical here. But this is an important statistic because what we're seeing now is actually a plateauing in global population.

And some countries like China are now predicted to see their population shrink. So number one, we've got this massive kind of technology improvement that's being realized across every industrial sector. and these new technologies that can be game changers, meaning 10x or more improvement than cost or output. And we have perhaps a shrinking population base across the developed world. So, you know, keep that in mind that the challenge of climate change being driven by people is less about population growth at this point. And it's just much more about, you know, what technologies are being adopted and utilized.

Okay. And so we've talked theoretically a little bit about how we end up being more efficient and cheaper and better in terms of the things that we produce. And obviously, this is going to come down to agriculture and other forms of farming, the actual production and then, of course, industrial, the industrial side of things. And you're particularly focused on the agricultural side. How do we bring technology to bear in order to make us more efficient when it comes to farming? And I'd love to hear a little bit from your perspective. of what's going on with one of the companies that you're involved with Lavoro and how that actually helps solve some of these issues that we're talking about. So when you look at where global calories are produced and consumed by country, you kind of see countries that are importers and countries that are exporters. You know, countries that don't make a lot of calories because they don't have the land to do so, to make their agricultural system can't support it. they have to import. They have to buy

by food. So countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Somalia, Ethiopia, much of the Horn of Africa, huge population base, net importers of food. Then there's places and then the biggest exporting market is Brazil and Latin America. So the U.S. is the largest agricultural products exporter, but we're not really growing that amount very much. Where it's growing the most

is in Latin America. So Latin America is big fertile ground. Unfortunately, so much of it is or was rainforest land, which is, there's now a lot of restrictions that are prohibiting the continued kind of growth into the rainforest. But with just the land that's not rainforest today, there's a tremendous amount of calories being produced. And Latin America as a region exports twice as many calories as the U.S. So the Latin American market is growing. And the farmers down there are becoming very sophisticated. You know, they make nearly 10 times as much profit in terms of their margin, their operating margin, as a U.S. farmer. And they're typically 40 years old, a U.S. farmer's 60.

So, you know, what Lavoro is, is these guys are the retailers to farmers, meaning they meet with farmers every week, help them make decisions on what to do with their farm, what technology to use, how to use the technology. They sell them their seed and their crop protection and fertilizer products, and they make a margin doing that. So we did this investment in this merger with Lavor. that we're hopefully going to close here in the next two weeks or so, where as the largest agricultural retailer in the region in Brazil,

they have this access to these farmers. And where we're particularly interested is how do you bring new technology to the farm that helps farmers improve their productivity? Like I mentioned earlier, software being used in tractors allows farmers to massively increase their yield per acre, which means getting more per acre of land every year. And it's not about putting more stuff in the ground. It's about putting the right stuff in the right part of the ground.

So you can actually use less inputs and get more output. And so software adoption by farmers in Brazil and in the region is negligible compared to the U.S. These tools are available. They're here. So we're investing in this company and then we're going to help them bring software tools to the market and other emerging technologies like biologicals to help farmers kind of improve their productivity and the sustainability of farming. And that's why we're so excited about it.

They have the largest footprint. They reach more farmers than anyone else. And so we're going to have a really key role. We're taking, I think, three out of seven board seats to help make this happen. The other area that's super interesting, and I'll just talk about biologials for a second. So in agriculture, farmers put three things on the ground. They put seed. They put fertilizer.

And then they put what's called crop protection. These are things that keep insects and bugs and fungus and weed. weeds and all this stuff away from the farm. Because as soon as that stuff gets into your farm, into your crop, your yields go down, and you get less per acre. So it turns out that there are little microbes in the soil. If you take a teaspoon of soil,

there's about 10 billion unique microbes in that soil. And those microbes, these little bacteria and yeast and fungi, are doing all sorts of interesting things. They're making chemicals. They're eating chemicals. Sometimes they can actually make fertilizer from the atmosphere. Sometimes they can keep insects away. So there's this emerging category of technology and agriculture that's really just nascent.

It's about 10 to 20 years old now, where we've identified how we can take bugs, little microbes from the soil, and use them to replace traditional agricultural inputs like fertilizer and crop protection products. Fertilizer and crop protection products are usually very carbon and energy intensive to make. And they can also be persistent in the environment and not very healthy. So by pulling those out of the equation and putting natural microbes, into the equation, you can start to kind of re-engineer how we're doing agriculture in a more sustainable way. And it's more productive for the farmer, and it costs less. So, you know, we're really excited about the opportunity for biologic. These guys have a huge biologics business as well. And we have a couple of companies in the space that we've partnered them up with,

one's called Patternag, to do soil testing for farmers and then figure out what microbes are in the soil and then make recommendations on products to use and then bringing new microbes to the market. So I think that's a big exciting effort that we're thrilled to be a part of because it means, you know, again, going back to the sustainability point, it's better for the planet and it makes the farmers more money and it gets more yield per acre. And this is something that Lavoro is doing. Yeah, they have a business unit called CropCare and they have all these products in there. And then we have other businesses that we're going to partner with them to try and accelerate and expand that work. I want to get a little bit nerdy for a second and talk about how

Lavoro is at the moment looking at which parts of the field are producing what type of product and then deciding how to treat them differently and how to get more out of them. Can you talk a little bit about you, you said that you want to introduce technology there. Can you talk a little bit more about the technology that's involved? Yeah. So my last company, the company I started in 2006, I left Google in I started a company called the Climate Corporation, and we sold it in 2013. It's become, you know, very much the largest software platform used in agriculture today. Through Monsanto. Through Monsanto, which is now part of Bayer.

So it's called Bayer Field View, I think, or Bayer Climate Field View, you know. And so there's about 180 million acres globally that use that software, you know, just to give you a sense of scale. The U.S. Corn Belt is about 160 million acres. So pretty good footprint on that product. Now, this is a whole area of agriculture called precision agriculture or predictive agriculture or digital agriculture. You can use these different names. And the idea is historically, a farmer would look at his field and he'll say, I have a good gut, I have a good sense, I have a good intuition about what to do with my field. And so I'm going to go use this seed and this amount of fertilizer, and then he'll plant it.

and what's possible now that wasn't possible 30 years ago is the ability to get data from that field that can help that farmer make a more informed choice about what to do in different parts of the field. A field is only a field because we call it a field. Within the field, there's many different types of soil, there's many different types of terrain, some parts of the field water pool,

some parts of the field are at the top of a hill, some parts have different bacteria in the soil, Some parts have different amount of nitrogen or phosphorus or other chemistry in the soil. So if you can understand and get data about what's in different parts of the field, you can make different decisions about what to do. And then all farm equipment today that's made by all the big farm equipment companies has what's called variable rate control systems. And what that means is you can put different amounts of seed, different amounts of fertilizer,

different types of seed, different types of fertilizer in different parts of the field. and it's all run by software. So you have an iPad in the tractor, and you write a prescription, which says, here's what I want to print in my field, and it's a little colorful map, and you click go. And the tractor or the sprayer or the applicator go through the field,

and it literally just prints your field. It puts different seed in different parts of the field, different amounts of chemistry, different amounts of fertilizer, and then boom, you've now optimized your field. That was unfathomable 30 or 40 years ago. So digital technologies like satellite imagery, radar imagery, soil testing data, the variable rate control that's been put on all the farm equipment. It's all working together now to give farmers these novel insights into what's

really going on in their field. So instead of using gut or instinct, they can now use this data system to make a decision about what seed to use and how much seed and how much fertilizer and then actually go out and print it in the field. And so that's transforming agriculture. It doesn't mean we're using more stuff. In fact, more often than not, you use less stuff and you get more out. And so this is a really kind of important advance for humanity that's part of a long trajectory of improving productivity and ag. Like I mentioned earlier, we went from humans farming by hand to, you know, using tractors, and then we had plant breeding where we could develop bigger and taller plants and all these different technologies over the years have compounded to give us this

incredible output. And just to give you a sense of how quickly this has moved, in the U.S., the average corn farmer had about 90 bushels an acre 30 years ago, or 100 bushels an acre 30 years ago, and now they're, you know, at over 170 bushels an acre today. So, you know, these technologies are all dramatically improving these outcomes. In Brazil, the farmers are still getting about 110 bushels an acre. So there's a lot of, in China, they're about 100 bushels an acre. In Nigeria, there's 70 bushels an acre, or Kenya, sorry. And so in all these different countries around the world with similar soil and similar climate, farmers are getting different amounts of calories produced per acre. So technologies allow them to kind of advance this. So precision or digital

agriculture is really giving everyone this toolkit to make better, smarter decisions and to control those decisions in the field. That's cool. And so coming back to your theme of better, fast, or cheaper, now I'm starting to understand it a little bit. Because if you're able to get more yield out of one field, then A, you don't have to use more land to get the same amount of crops. And B, you don't need to cut down any more rainforest, hopefully. Exactly the goal. It will still probably happen, but go ahead. And put land back into conservation.

I mean, that's a big push here, particularly, you know, a lot of people think big ag is bad. But everyone that works in agriculture has the same orientation around solving climate change. And everyone says, if we can put more land back into conservation, we win as a species. Right now, around the world, we're generating roughly 3,000 calories per person per year. So we are making enough food around the world. We have all these supply chain problems that are causing some people to go starving while other people are, you know, getting clinically obese. But it's, you know, it's really fundamental that we have the capability today to feed ourselves and overfeed ourselves. And so we can put land back into conservation and allow rainforests and forests to grow back.

In the U.S., we have a great conservation program that's funded by the federal government where farmers, if they put land back into conservation, they'll actually get paid. to do this. And now we're seeing in Brazil, this new president, Lula, has this similar sort of push, which is how do we save the rainforest and put that land back in conservation, which is totally feasible under these conditions. David Friedberg is here with us. He's the founder and CEO of the production board, also a member of the All In podcast. You probably know him from there. We'll be back right after this to talk a little bit more about how technology might be able to help the climate crisis, but really talking about the business side of this. Is there is there money to be made in working on these businesses or is the market no longer going to support this?

There's definitely a question there. We'll try to answer them on the other side of this break. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down

the biggest business headlines. in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcasts with Dave Friedberg. He is the founder and CEO of the production board, also former employee at Google. Maybe we get some Google questions in before we end this. But let's just talk a little bit about the business of this.

So first of all, you are trying to, I think, what is it, take Lavoro Public with a SPAC. It's kind of interesting to hear the four-letter acronym SPAC. It's had a bit of a... Four-letter word. Oh, okay. It's a four-letter word, also four-letter acronym. But, oh, yeah. And actually, maybe one of your buddies has been part of the reason why people aren't so excited about it anymore.

So maybe we can talk about that. But, yeah, I'm just kind of curious, why is SPAC? and and what kind of interest is there in the business world for these type of companies. Yeah, well, look, I mean, SPACs have become a four-letter world. That's why I say that. It's kind of a joke in the markets. Yeah. When you meet within public market investors, like no one wants to touch a SPAC anymore because so many of these collapsed after people despaq, after these mergers de-spaq.

And that's because so many of the companies that went public ended up being, you know, zero revenue or low revenue or low-margin business. that had many years ahead of them still. Some people will joke, there's a reason, you know, the public markets have had their, you know, their kind of requirements for someone to go public historically because the public markets can't really stomach what venture capitalists typically fund, which is long range, sometimes capital-intensive business bets that take a long time to prove out. Yeah, that doesn't even sound like a joke to me. that sounds like a legitimate criticism of what happened.

That's right. And so, you know, a couple years ago, and SPACs have been around for a long time, a couple years ago, obviously there was this kind of positioning that we could use SPACs as a way to get private companies public sooner and give public investors more access to private companies, what would have otherwise been private companies,

and they would have access to otherwise. And the problem is the typical investor base, you know, what venture capitalists do is spend a lot of time where they're supposed to if they do their job, spend a lot of time doing diligence and understanding these companies very deeply to determine what are they really capable of, what's the risks, and what should they be worth based on the long-range outcome potential of the business and also the risks of executing on that outcome. And so the idea of a SPAC making a private company public sooner than the otherwise would have been able to go public was kind of interesting.

because a lot of public investors don't have access to the venture industry and venture and private investments. And so getting access to these companies earlier was appealing. So that's what really kicked this whole thing off. I wasn't, you know, really involved in all that stuff early on. I think we set up our SPAC vehicle. And so the production board, you know, we don't operate as kind of a traditional, you know, SPAC sponsor. We saw the opportunity to have a vehicle whereby we could find a strategic partnership through that vehicle. So our goal was to find a large, profitable, and growing business in one of the markets that we work in, which is food, agriculture, human health,

bio-manufacturing, and broadly the life sciences. So those are the markets that we know well. And what we wanted to do was to bring one or more of our technology businesses to partner with a scaled business like this and use that to accelerate that business as outcome. And that's what we found with Lavoro, you know, it's a business that's doing I don't want to misstate the numbers, but, you know, it's projected this calendar year to do between 2 and 300 million of EBITDA, top line growing 40%, you know, north of $2 billion revenue

top line, and market leader in their industry and in their region. So, you know, it's a profitable, growing, scaled business. And it's a market leader, and it's in a market we know well. And, you know, so in our kind of approach, we were setting up to bring one or more of our technology businesses to help them. We announced a partnership between Patternag and Lavoro. And so this is a very strategic deal for, and we're also investing $100 million. You'll find very few SPAC sponsors that are actually investing in the SPAC that they're involved in. Yeah. So we're putting our own capital at risk. We're, you know, we don't get these founder shares. We only get one third of the founders. We only get two thirds of them. The stock goes up 25 or 50%. So, you know, we're really aligned

with shareholders. But to your question, it's a total shit show out there. You know, SPACs have gotten such a bad reputation because so many of them are trading below $10. And everyone thought that the company that they were investing in was a good company. And then it turns out that they didn't hit gold or didn't hit milestones. And the stock got beat up for it. And so everyone lost money over and over and over again. So many of the portfolio managers I've talked with in the public markets have said, I am just restricted. I can't invest in any pre-d-SPAC companies anymore because we've had so many scenarios where we thought it was a good company, it was going to do well. And then our stock got cut in half, and I lost X dollars. And so my boss or my boss's boss said, I'm fired

if I put any more money into any pretty de-spaq deals. So it's, the vehicle itself is pretty distressed. And I would say broadly speaking, I don't think that there's going to be a quick return to SPAC land anytime soon. In fact, I think it'll only filter out to business. like what we're doing with Lavoro, profitable, scaled, growing, you know, kind of where you can measure it on its financial returns and results, not kind of some speculative, you know, out-your outcome. Why not just go public through a traditional IPO? Yeah, so I think I can say this.

But they had on file a plan to do that, Lavoro did. And we through our, because again, we're strategic investors and partners. So our partnership with them, they've, they kind of understood the value we could bring to the table. and that's why we ended up working together on this. Yeah, I'm kind of curious if you're at all a little bit annoyed with Chimoff, who was sort of the number one cheerleader for the SPAC vehicle, and now some of his SPACs are not doing so well.

Talk about the ones under $10, so far, which he was part of down 34% since the SPAC, and 43% in the past year, Virgin Galactic, down 38% in the past year, and 50% since the last SPAC. Yeah. So I'll say a couple things. there is not a smart Silicon Valley, I should say it another way, there are many smart Silicon Valley VCs and investors who set up SPACs in the last couple years. Okay. So, and all of them

have stocks that are way down. Uh, so that, you know, I don't think that, um, singling out any individual, uh, you can certainly do the same about anyone that stood on a podium and said, buy this stock. I'm the SPAC sponsor. Uh, and a lot of smart, reputable people in Silicon Valley and across Wall Street and celebrities, I mean, everyone did this over the last couple of years. So it's been, I would say, broadly a kind of a collective concern on, you know, should people, should individuals be using their celebrity or their influence to be cheerleaders for stocks and whether or not that's a good idea? And we see that over time, the individual cheerleader for a stock is probably just as good as, you know, a monkey ringing a bell, right? I mean,

look at the joke about Jim Kramer on CNBC. This guy has a TV show, and there's the joke that the inverse Kramer index, I think, is up 20% and the Kramer index is down 17%, meaning like if you bet on what he said to do versus the opposite. And he's, you know, up there on TV every day cheerleading people to buy one stock and sell another. So generally, I think that that's probably a bad idea. It's to be kind of a stock cheerleader or denouncer. And I think like, you know, the way that this is all kind of playing out, a lot of people are hitting the themselves on their head. I've spoken to a lot of my friends who became SPAC sponsors and got very vocal about some transaction they did and are just feeling like honestly a little dumb.

They're like, how did I get caught up in all the hype and the hysteria? And they regret it. I will also say that, as you know, broadly speaking, growth stocks and the tech market, because it's so growthy, have had massive retreats, right? Like growth stocks in aggregate, not just with SPACs are down 60-70 percent. I mean, Google was down 55. percent or 50 percent last year or something. So it's not just SPACs that got beat up. Spacks were part of a broader kind of tidal wave of reset away from growth towards value that happened in capital markets over the past year. And SPAC certainly get a bad rep. But here's another statistic I'll tell you, I think I've mentioned this on the podcast, but 65% roughly of companies that went public

since 2020, whether that's through SPAC or IPO, 65% are trading below. the total cash they raised as a private company, as a tech, as by VCs. So they're so low in value in aggregate that they're actually worth less than the money that went into them. So two-thirds of them. It's an incredible statistic. So it's not just about the underperformance of businesses. It's about a fundamental reset of value that's broadly affecting growth. And I think that the SPACs just became the sort of poster child for this. I mean, Google did drop in value, but at least there's something there for a lot of SPAC companies, people sort of looked up and said, where's the cream filling? But I want to ask you about the...

I'll say the biggest problem with SPACs is that they were sold to retail investors. And that's where people felt really shafted. Traditional IPOs get sold to these institutional investors and they're typically the main holders. And you don't have someone going on a roadshow pitching a company like that to the public. Spax did. And that's the circus problem. When you have kind of a ringleader in a circus and they go and they tell everyone buy the stock, buy the stock. They're putting themselves on a podium. Lots of people buy the stock, all these individuals that otherwise aren't typically in these markets. And so it's a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing in that they are kind of being shown and given access to things they otherwise wouldn't have. The problem is they

kind of end up in things that lose money. And then the person who stood on the podium is to blame. And the whole vehicle is to blame. And so I think that that's certainly a big part of what's gone on with SPACs. In addition to, you know, the fact that all, you know, so many of them were speculative out your businesses, meaning they have to do something in your four or five to be worth what you're paying for today. Right. Right. And then just the timing was tough with the Fed. Yeah. That's a good point. Let's just talk quickly about whether there's a market for some of this climate forward, you know, for lack of a better term, type of technology or productivity enhancing type of technology when it comes to meat and agriculture. There's, you know, there's obviously

been some of those companies that are doing the better, faster, cheaper when it comes to, meat that doesn't come from the cow. I would love to hear you react to these statistics. So Beyond Meat is one of them and it's down more than 80% off its all-time high. And Impossible Burger has done layoffs and laid off more than 20% of its staff. These are some of the poster children. This is coming from Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast. What's your perspective on where this sort of cadre of companies sit right now? And, And do you think the market will have appetite to fuel the type of stuff that you're, you're betting on, especially in these current conditions?

Yeah, so I'm not a, so the problem with impossible foods and beyond meat and companies of that ilk is that they charge a higher price than the alternative. So ground beef, you know, three bucks a pound, roughly. Beyond meat, impossible are like two to three to four times that price. So I've always been negative on these businesses. I've never invested in them. And I've been, you know, when people have approached me about investing, I've said no. And I, you know, people said I was an idiot when Beyond Meat Stock went through the roof.

I'm like, I don't know, man, I don't think this thing's going to last long term, just a matter of time. Because there's just a fundamental consumer behavior that will emerge over time that will win out, which is if it's not cheaper and better, you're not going to want it. So, you know, 5% of people or 10% of people call themselves vegetarian. I'm vegetarian. I've never eaten meat in my life. So, you know, I don't have a, never know. And so I don't have a desire to go eat like a Beyond Burger or Impossible Burger. You know, it's got a lot of coconut oil or other kind of deeply saturated fat.

So it's also not healthier. So the reason people buy it is to feel better for the planet and to make some kind of, you know, conscious decision and feel better about themselves. So what I've told people is that these businesses are like luxury goods brands. You know, you can buy a purse that carries your stuff. or you can buy a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and then feel good about carrying a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and be like, look what I got. There's nothing that's necessarily higher utility for that purse.

It just gives you a good feeling about the brand that you're associated with. And I think the same is true of these fake meat companies where you feel good about buying them, but you pay more. And over a period of time, people are going to stop doing that because at some point, if you're a meat eater, you're going to say, why would I pay $8 when I could pay $3 for a burger? and it tastes the same and it's better or it's better. And, you know, I kind of feel like I've done enough for the planet or I'm doing good

enough for the planet if I eat it once in a while. Right. So they don't replace the solution. The way to replace the solution is to make ground beef that's chemically identical, meaning it's the same product and it's made cheaper. And you just don't happen to use animals. So that's a tip. That's a much more technologically challenging problem.

There's a lot of kind of work being done around this. Now, to your point about investors, I think there is this, this tidal wave right now of capital going into green investing or eco-conscious investing or whatever you want to call it. And often the capital isn't doing a good enough job of distinguishing between high-value luxury branded solutions which don't scale and actual technological solutions which are high risk, but if they work, they will become really big. And the problem is so many of those technologies are still very nascent.

They don't make a cheaper alternative today. They're like the out-year kind of solution like we talked about earlier. And so it's very hard for capital. So then capital's kind of looking for a home and it finds its way into the luxury goods business. And so you see this across CPG consumer package goods. You see this across, you know,

all these different categories where all this money is kind of pouring into these better for the planet solutions. But because they're more expensive, they don't ultimately win the market. If they don't win the market, they actually don't help the planet that much. So to help the planet, we have to make the bets on the technology, which is long range and

risky, and you'll lose a lot of money along the way. And investors have to be ready for nine out of ten things failing. But hopefully, if the one out of ten thing does hit, it becomes worth 100x. And that's, I think, kind of the real ratio of what's going on in the market today. Do you have time for one more question about fusion? So I think the big question underlying all of this is can we also become more efficient when we use energy? and you're a big proponent on basically switching to fusion.

So can you talk a little bit about or enhancing our use of it? Can you talk a little bit about that solution and where it gets us? Fusion is what goes on in the sun. So protons fuse and form. So hydrogen is one proton in the nucleus. And when those two protons get enough energy and jam into each other, they actually fuse and they get stuck together and they become a helium nucleus. And helium has two protons.

And so you have to have a lot of density and a lot of energy to force those protons close enough. And the reason is under the laws of physics that the weight of two protons stuck together is less than the, or the mass of two protons stuck together is less than the mass of those two protons floating around alone. And the difference in that mass is the energy that is released when they're put together. So that is the physics, the E equals nc squared physics, that actually drives the core of fusion energy as a source of energy. So how do you get two protons to smash into each other?

They need to be really close together, firstly, which means really dense, and they need to be moving at a really high speed, which means high energy. So how do you get the kind of density and energy needed to make this happen? Well, the only place we see it happening is in the center of the sun. It's not even the outside of the sun. It's all the way in the center of the sun where this is happening. So fusion aims to recreate the conditions at the center of the sun here on Earth in a controlled way and then to pull the energy of that fusion reaction out of a system and use that energy to make electricity.

And that's the principle that I think was first theorized in the 1950s. And ever since then, there's been this like endless effort to try and make it a reality. Now, the way we do it is we create what's called a plasma, which is where you take hydrogen in the form of what's called Deuterium and Tiberium. Tritium, these are like, this is like, instead of having just a proton, you also have a proton and a neutron stuck through it. You spin it around in, you know, some sort of system, or you energize it, and it gets so energetic, like 100 million degrees Celsius, that all the electrons fly off and you just get these protons moving super, super fast. And then you use magnets, a magnetic

field to squeeze this proton plasma together, this plasmetic really close. So that's how you get density. Now think about taking a balloon and try to squeeze it, squeeze it, squeeze it. If you try to squeeze a balloon to one one hundredth of its size when it's filled with air, how hard would that be? You have to get your hand around the whole balloon. You have to squeeze it. And if any tiny hole shows up in any part of your hand, the balloon will pop and all the air will get out. And that's the challenge with plasma fusion, is if you can't squeeze it and there's a tiny break in the magnetic field, all the plasma gets out. It doesn't cause a big explosion or anything because this is generally pretty low energy. So the whole point of fusion is you kind of are trying to control a magnetic

field and squish all these protons together and drive this energy out of it. And that whole system, people have tried many different ways and many different architectural designs, things called Tokamax and Stellarators and all these fancy words. Lately, they're these kind of pulsed plasma systems, all sorts of different technology concepts. I think that what's going on right now, generally speaking, and the reason that we're all getting very optimistic. Two years, three years ago, there was about seven fusion startups. Today, there's roughly 70. So there's this massive proliferation, and there have been a bunch of technical

breakthroughs that have been demonstrated in the last two years. What's really happening is digital technology, is allowing us to do things that we historically could not do at a scale of physics that allows. us to control these systems and make them work right. So when I say digital technology, I mean, to control the magnetic field, you have to make sensing and adjustments in 10 to the negative 15 seconds. Okay, that's how, like the speed at which you have to sense and respond to perturbations in the plasma and change the magnetic field is so minuscule that you have to get computing working right. You have to get sensing working right. You have to be able to get perfect

measurements of the field, all of these underlying digital technologies and better sensors, better semiconductors, better superconducting materials, better compute power, better computing, better models, AI-driven models. They're all coming together to finally give us this really difficult engineering capability of causing man-made fusion. And when you do this, you get this energy out of the system, you know, you generate electricity, and hydrogen is, you know, Deuterium is roughly, you know, completely abundant and infinite on Earth. So theoretically, humans could make infinite energy on Earth with all the stuff we have around us using fusion. If we can make it work. It's not radioactive. I mean, generally there's some isotopes in the thing that generally, let me just

say that it's not radioactive. There's no heavy elements. It's not like uranium or plutonium that you're breaking apart to release energy. You're sticking hydrogen atoms together to create energy. So it's super clean. It's super abundant. It's technically very difficult. If we we can do it and we can do it scalably, then it's theoretically possible that humanity can produce 10 or 100 times as much electricity per year as we do today, at a cost that is 10 to 100 times cheaper than we do it today. That's what is so exciting to everyone, because that's sort of a breakthrough doesn't just solve all of our energy needs and replace all the carbon-emitting stuff. It creates entirely new industries that are not even possible or feasible today.

And if those industries get created, it will be another kind of sea change of abundance for humanity that makes us say, holy crap, I cannot believe we ever lived in a world that was different than this. We're going to feel completely awash in anything and everything we ever wanted. And so that's what's kind of so compelling about it. I think that the digital technologies are causing this big shift on the win rate and we're starting to see some of these work. Now, of those 70 companies, which ones are going to win? I have no frigging clue. I don't know which of them are real. I don't know which of them are fake, which of them are schemes, which of them are going to actually have the technical breakthroughs, which of them are going to fly through the wall.

But I will tell you that I would bet on the portfolio, and I would say there's probably a 90-plus percent chance or 95-percent chance, that we will have scalable fusion energy in the next decade or two, and it will become a big change for everyone. That's why I'm also so optimistic, because I think this portfolio of bets with all these different technologies going at it from different angles, someone will figure it out, and this thing will kind of get there. Dave, this was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. It's great. And that will do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast.

Thank you so much to Dave Friedberg for joining. I learned a ton during that episode. And man, those were some really great insights. I appreciate Dave coming on and sharing them. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Thanks to all of you, the listeners, for making this dream a reality for me. Every time you come back is just so amazing.

It's been wild to watch our numbers grow. So thank you for that. Okay, that will do it for us here on our Wednesday show. Remember, Friday will be alive on LinkedIn at 11 a.m. Pacific, 2 p.m. Eastern to break down the week's news. Ranja and Roy will be joining me, as always, for that discussion. And once again, please remember to rate and review. Those are always appreciated and really do help make the show better. Okay, thanks again.

We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast. Thank you.