How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

Water is all around us–quite literally, there is enough water in the air we breathe to meet all of humanity’s needs and then some. Engineering professor Cody Friesen invented a solar-powered device that captures this vapor and transforms it into drinking water. Cody began manufacturing these ‘hydropanels’ with his Arizona-based company SOURCE in 2014, and today they’re used in more than 50 countries worldwide.This week on How I Built This Lab, Cody talks with Guy about the prevalence of water scarcity in the U.S. and around the globe, and his company’s work to become the world’s first renewable, fully-digitized drinking water utility. Plus, the two discuss how entrepreneurs should be thinking about the growing renewable energy market.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com slash host. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you remember Tatooine, the desert planet in Star Wars, water was a scarce resource. Rain only came to Tatouine maybe once a decade. So instead, the humans of Tatouine would rely on moisture vaporators.

These were small towers that looked like rockets that would capture water vapor from the atmosphere. Now, the technology to make this happen wasn't just theoretically possible. It actually exists today and is in use in 52 countries around the world. It's a device called a hydropanol made by an Arizona-based company called Source. The hydropanel looks a bit like a solar panel, but inside is a series of fans and materials that quite literally create water out of sunlight and air. The technology was developed by an engineer named Cody Friesen, who also founded Source. The devices essentially work by drawing the moisture that already exists in our atmosphere. Imagine that the air around us, the troposphere, is like a giant invisible store of what?

water. Cody's technology is simply turning that invisible water vapor into drinking water. Right now, each hydropanel can produce about five liters of water a day, and the cost of a panel is relatively high, but Cody predicts that the cost will drop dramatically over time, and the panels will produce much more water as the technology gets better. If this scales, it could have a huge impact on access to fresh, clean drinking water around the world. And for Cody, water, or rather water scarcity, has been a theme his whole life growing up outside of Phoenix, Arizona. So you grew up in Arizona. Obviously, Arizona gets most of us water. I think of the Colorado River, right? Or maybe all of it, essentially. The Colorado and the Salt River system, yeah.

It's sort of like this interesting thing when I was a kid, you know, I grew up in the middle of this cotton field and there's, for several months a year, they flood irrigate. And yet in the scouts, we would go hiking into the mountains and hike through the desert to a riparian spring where like there's just a trickle coming out of the rock. And yet there would be cottonwoods and cat tails and all these birds. And there's sort of like this juxtaposition that was sort of ingrained in me. Yeah, because, I mean, obviously you're an area. Arizona, this is a part of the world with very limited water, right? And then parts of the state use lots of water to grow crops. But then as you point out, you've got these other places in the state where it's possible for life to thrive on very little water. You see that in some of those

beautiful desert landscapes. So sort of thinking about this on like a global scale, right? I mean, because Arizona is just one of many places in the world where water is hard to find and water scarcity is becoming more of a problem because of climate change. So do you have a sense sort of globally of how hard it is to find easily available clean drinking water? Yeah. So, I mean, we're talking about approximately a third of humanity does not have access to safe water at home. Right. And so it's something like 2.4 billion people.

And that's the official number. But for anybody who's been to, you know, large cities around the world, whether that's Mumbai or Mexico City or Jakarta, the government states, that there's potable water at home, but there's likely not. I didn't ever think that I would, you know, come back to water as a, you know, as an entrepreneur. Yeah. But it's sort of like this fascinating thing that, you know, the reason why I, and I think a lot of people are attracted to the renewable energy space is because it's solving a massive problem, a global problem that is emerging, but also when solved will really enable humanity to live in a much more earth-aligned way. Yeah.

And yet, the thing that I found, I think one of the things that I struggled with as a entrepreneur in the renewable energy space is that it's, while you're solving a large-scale problem that affects humanity, it's not a human-scale problem. Yeah. And yet, you know, sort of water is probably the most personal, intimate substance. Right? It's what we put in our bodies. It's food. There's religion and faith and it's sacred stuff in a lot of societies. And yet we haven't to date solved the water in a way that aligns people on planet. And so I saw this opportunity to sort of to imagine applying the principles of renewables without knowing yet how to do it at that time. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about just the United States for a moment, which is amazing to me. I did not know this because most people, listening, you turn on your tap and there you go, you got water. And if you live in a city or you're connected to municipal services, that's just how it is. But about 15% of U.S. homes rely on water from wells, I know I've got one. And apparently about a fifth of people of well water, that water would

fail a water quality test. We'd get our quality tests every year. So a significant number of people in the United States who are not getting municipal water that is treated might be drinking or probably are drinking water that is not safe. Yeah, exactly. The statistics are quite shocking in that regard. I'm also on a well. I happen to have four times the legal limit of arsenic in the groundwater at my house. And so, and I moved into that house well before I started Source Global.

So I put in this arsenic treatment system, which was quite expensive to solve that problem. But it's sort of a not just a static problem. It's one that's growing in the sense that the reasons that water, out of a well or out of the ground may or may not be potable are innumerate. If you live in the Northeast, right, your well is likely in contact with the water table that is in contact with your, you know, your septic system. And so, you know, there are all those issues as well. So, you know, water becomes very quickly from going from thinking about sort of the

municipal scale problem and the way that we solve that problem with chlorine and concrete pipes and kind of doing that in a centralized way to then there's the rest of humanity that either lives on wells or in areas where that type of infrastructure is just not possible. Right, right. So I mean, so for the past few decades, right, a lot of our efforts around sustainability have been focused on, you know, finding new sources for electricity, right? Like solar or wind, which are more abundant than, you know, say oil or coal, which have to be dug out of the ground. And as we kind of develop the technology to harness those energy sources more efficiently, it's going to become cheaper, right, than other non-renewable sources

that are harmful to our environment. But, you know, it's just hearing it. It seems like no one was really thinking about applying the same concept to water, right? That there's possibly another source of fresh water besides what's in the ground and in our rivers and in our reservoirs that that we could use instead. Exactly. Yeah. And sort of the ultimate extractive resource, right? It's either in the ground or it isn't or it's either rained or it didn't.

And, you know, when we think about renewables, renewable energy is begotten by free feedstock, right? The feedstock of sunlight or the feedstock of wind. When you're running a coal-fired power plant, the dominant source of cost is the cost of digging up free coal, putting in a coal car, moving it across the ground. around burning that, right, and then dealing with, you know, the knock on effects. Even if coal's very cheap, right, the, the coal has to be dug and put in the coal car. That's a linear problem. You can't change those physics. But if you could make solar PV ever more efficient and make it ever more efficiently, then then eventually we knew that would be lower cost than coal. So in a very similar way, the question that I asked myself about 10 years ago was, could we

do precisely for water what we've now done for electricity. Could you make it from existing abundant sources of like sunlight and water with sunlight and air? Right, exactly. So, and it wasn't even, it wasn't even, the starting point wasn't even air as much as like, okay, the energy source is sunlight. What could we do? And when I analyzed this, recognizing that the lower part of the atmosphere, the troposphere, has this insane amount of water vapor in it, 10 to the 16 kilograms. So that's one and then 16 zeros kilograms of water vapor.

About 100 million years of all of humanity's water needs replaced every single week. The average lifetime of a water molecule in the atmosphere is about seven to nine days. It comes up off the ocean due to sunlight bearing down on the oceans, evaporates, and then eventually rains back within seven to nine days. And so here we have this massive resource that's actually growing due to climate change, but that's a whole other topic. But we have this massive resource that's everywhere. It's an atmospheric ocean. And it- I guess I should mention, we live in the troposphere. The troposphere is the atmosphere all around us. It's like from ground all the way up, like six miles.

That is essentially an invisible store of water all around us all the time. You got it. And even in, you know, the desert, right? So we're, you know, I'm sitting in Scottsdale, Arizona right now, and it's hot and it's dry. Three percent, five percent humidity, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so you think about that resource, right? So you think about free feedstock, sunlight's everywhere, water vapors everywhere. Okay. So now the only problem, in heavy air quotes, is how do you very efficiently move those water molecules from the gas phase to a liquid phase? Let me see if I can understand this, a slightly different, which is we are, if we're living in an invisible, massive water source, you know, reservoir, right, this huge source of water.

The question you're asking is, well, could we capture that and turn it into drinking water? Sort of like when you walk out of your house in the morning, it depends on where you are. And even in some dry places, there's dew, right, that collects on leaves. And the question, I guess, is could we scale that? Could we essentially scale what nature does? Exactly. And could we create the conditions of dew on leaves at high noon in the middle of the summer in the middle of the desert, right?

Water we all know is 200 atoms and an oxygen atom, right? You bash them together and you get water, right? But it's a little more complicated than that. But you knew, and I guess most scientists know, that in theory you can produce water if you get those elements and have the right conditions. Now the question is, how do you really do that? So where do you start?

Yeah, so, well, first we start with humility with respected data. Yeah. Because, you know, what we know whenever we're talking about such a huge problem is that no matter how smart one thinks they are, how smart the team is, the fact is that we are always just sort of taking the data directly ahead of us to invent a little bit, innovate a little bit, and then take more data so that we could sort of fail our way to success, if you will. And so the starting point, I'm a material scientist and there are many, many, many materials

around us that are, and the term is hygroscopic, right? So with a G, because the hydroscopic would be something that is attracted to liquid water, hygroscopic is something that's attracted to water paper. And everything from the reason why you don't go jogging in a cotton shirt, because that's hygroscopic, to when you leave a lid off the sugar bowl and the sugar gets a little bit clumpy. Yeah. Right? It's doing that because the water vapor in the air is being absorbed by the sugar, all the way to you know, when you're in a your favorite greasy spoon restaurant and the salt shaker has

rice kernels in the bottom, the rice kernels are there to absorb the water preferentially so that the salt doesn't, so the salt doesn't get clumpy. Yeah. All around us are these, you know, materials that have these properties. Same reason why, you know, when you open a new box of shoes, there's a silica packet inside, right? Yeah, because it's absorbing all the moisture to make sure the shoes don't rot. You got it. Exactly.

So, you know, we know that there are materials that have this property. Could we engineer a material that is able to concentrate water vapor from the air rapidly? And then upon exposure to sunlight, rapidly respire that water vapor back out so that inside of the device, now called the source hydropanel, we could create the conditions that you described earlier, the dew that forms on leaves when you walk out of your home. in the morning. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of Source. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of Source. So, you knew you could use air and sunlight to create water, but you you need to build a device that could actually not only capture those two things, but then

make lots of water. And that sounds very, very challenging. Yeah, and actually not to throw a crazy number of numbers at the audience, but just to kind of get used to the kind of scales here. So per square meter of Earth's surface, we get about 1.2 kilowatts of sunlight. Oh, average obviously around because sometimes it's less sunny and sometimes more sunny. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if it's cloudy, it might be half of that, right? So about 1.2 kilowatts per square meter.

That's a lot of energy. The sun is a powerful thing. Okay. Right. If you were to put a liter of liquid water in a pan and you put it on your stove. Yep. And you convert all of that liquid water to a gas, right, turn into vapor. Yep.

you would have to put in about 640 watt hours per meter. So 0.64 kilowatt hours per liter. So that means that per square meter per hour at 100% efficiency, there's about two liters of thermodynamic potential to make liquid water. In other words, per square meter of land on the earth, If you factor the amount of sunlight and air that is hitting that spot, it should produce two liters of water a day. If everything was perfect. So that actually corresponds to a heck of a lot of water, right?

It's a lot of water. And that's basically, and I know I'm kind of reducing this to, you know, sort of overly simplistic science, but that's essentially because we are living in the troposphere, which is this massive invisible, basically, layer of water vapor. the sun is constantly evaporating that water anyway. So the question is, why don't we just capture that evaporation? Exactly. And you have to actually create that phase change, right? So you have to put the energy in to get that conversion to liquid. And so what we set about was thinking about all the different thermodynamic routes

that you could go from the gas phase to the liquid phase using sunlight. And so that's what then led to, okay, well, first of all, right, water vapor is very dilute in the atmosphere. It's, you know, anywhere from one to, let's say, one to five percent by weight. So if we are at that level, how do we concentrate that dramatically, right? So we use a material that concentrates that water vapor by about 10,000 times by volume. It's like solar panel material? It's a nanostructured material that is very hygroscopic and then has sort of the Goldilocks binding energy. So just strong enough to bind water molecules, but not so strong that they can't be released back out.

So this is a material that you knew about or came across that is like desiccant in a, you know, like those little bags that you say, do not eat silica. It works the same way. It can concentrate moisture, essentially. And we're jumping ahead, but this is the material that you would eventually put on panels like that kind of look like solar panels, right? Yeah. So very similar to those desiccans that you're used to, except for just able to hold a lot more water,

do that a lot more quickly and then able to be cycled. And so the recognition that, okay, okay, if we could concentrate that water vapor onto an absorbent of one form or another. And then if we could apply sunlight to those materials in a smart way, we could respire that water vapor into a stream inside of a device and push the dew point inside the device above ambient. So again, back to your daily life, if you are taking a shower and, you know, you like a hot, steamy shower, you get out and you notice that there's water condensed onto the mirror, that occurs because you push the dew point above the ambient temperature. And of course, the mirror is at ambient temperature. And so you get condensation. And so could we inside of a device push the dew point up high enough that under all earth relevant conditions, we could. could get condensation. And so that was the sort of the question that had to be answered by the

development of what we now have as a product. All right. So you began to work on this and you now have these devices. They're hydro panels. And from what I gather, I mean, essentially they kind of look like, I mean, there's a solar panel on it, right? A regular photovoltaic solar panel. And that is used to power this device because inside there are fans. And essentially, they draw in warm air, push it through this material, and then from that material, water, the water is extracted? Yeah. And so now when we start talking about source hydropanels, right, there, as you said,

there's a PV module in the middle, and that's producing enough electricity to run the electronics and the fans and so on, and some of the control points, there's an arm processor inside that's actually solving a problem every second that's saying, okay, here's the ambient condition, here's the amount of sunlight I have, and then let me configure the system to optimize for efficiency. And the basic principles that we talked about are how source works. And so we take in air, we push those across these materials. We take out just the right amount of water molecules from that air.

We then expose the material to sunlight. We then get a concentrated water vapor stream that we, we then bring back to ambient conditions on ambient temperature and water vapor is then condensed out. And so essentially, I mean, anybody listening should go check the website out because it's actually quite amazing. I mean, you are literally, these panels make water out of air and sunlight. And do the panels need to be in a very sunny place? Because on the one hand, if it's in a humid environment, right, the panels can pull all that moisture out of the humid air. But on the other hand, if it's in a really dry place. It's presumably getting more power from the sun. Yeah, I think I think actually,

Guy, you hit it on the head that there's, there's sort of two competing factors, right? So if you're in Manila and it's 85% humidity, but it's partially cloudy, the thermodynamic putt is pretty short, right? The distance between 85% and 100% is short. Whereas if you're in Phoenix and it's 5% humidity, but yet you've got the full unmitigated sun bearing down, obviously you have the energy to drive the process. So the sort of competing factors are true around the planet. And so you'll see that, for example, in Dubai, we create a very similar amount of water as in Manila, as an example.

And so, yes, there are places and times of the year where the amount of water we produce is minimized, but on sort of an average, those places are similar. Probably the worst place for us, of course, is like northern Quebec and, you know, the middle winter when it's minus 40 out because, of course, not only is there no water vapor in the atmosphere because of saturation concentration is so low, but also there's no liquid water. And so, you know, obviously places with a hard freeze, we don't produce water in the middle winter, but that same place, Quebec, obviously during the rest of the year, has, because they're very high latitudes, you know, have very long days, very high humidity.

And so again, yearly average, the not a water produced is not terribly different than, for example, San Francisco. You know, it's amazing. A couple weeks ago on the show, we had a founder who was working on a company to create geothermal energy anywhere in the world, that the technology now exists to dig very, very deep, very quickly, like 20 kilometers down. And essentially, anywhere you dig 20 kilometers down, you're going to hit a geothermal energy source anywhere around the world. This is similar principle. What you're saying is that not just theoretically, but in actual fact, you can produce and bring abundant water to any place on the planet? That's right.

Yeah, I mean, so today we're in 52 countries, and we've built over 450 projects across six continents, and in a lot of the places that we go are the lowest cost source of drinking water. And what's sort of fascinating, there's no physical reason. This is a big statement, why these source hydropanels can't eventually. be the lowest cost of livered potable water on the planet. Lower cost than what you flush toilets with at home, what you consider sort of free water, which of course is not. So the cost of making a device that is made of earth abundant, sort of industrially abundant materials and making it ever more efficient

and making ever more efficiently leads to a cost structure over time that is almost impossible to beat by traditional infrastructure, traditional extractive processes. And we just saw that happen with coal, right, over the last dozen years. Yeah. We are seeing that in real time happening with electrification of transportation, you know, starting with, of course, Tesla's being better and a better experience than a typical ice car, in terms of combustion engine car. But now reaching commoditization in a way that's sort of shocking.

All you had to do is watch this last Super Bowl to see how quick. the world is changing. It would be shocking to me that in over the next decade or so, that renewables driven approaches don't take over yet a much broader set of resources, not just water, but also in other areas. We're going to be right back with Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of Source. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Cody Freezing. reason who makes hydro panels that can generate drinking water nearly anywhere in the world. So, Cody, this technology is not just theoretical.

These panels actually exist. They're in operation all over the world, right? And, you know, you guys, I think, have deployed these panels in like 50 or so countries. There are homes that are using them for drinking water. And by the way, how much water can each panel produce? Yeah, so each hydropanel can do up to five liters per day. And when we think about the way that, you know, we go to, let's say show up at a school or at a home, it's really understanding the drinking water needs of that facility and then putting in arrays of the size that match that need. Right.

So done in a very similar way to how solar, you know, solar arrays are established to meet the load. Let's take the Navajo Nation, which is. 27,000 square miles. So it's about the same land area as West Virginia. About 175,000 Navajo live there. 54,000, let's call it a third of them, have no water at home, zero. So we installed at about a little over 500 homes last year. We'll do about 700 homes this year, where we solve the problem of them not having any drinking water at home. So right now, each panel can produce about five liters or five liters per day. Okay. And so it's not obviously enough for all your water needs. It's five liters. Let's imagine what a liter of water looks like. But can that change? I mean,

is this a technology challenge that eventually those same panels will be more efficient? Or is that just essentially maximizing what nature provides and air and sunlight? Absolutely. So we have an R&D group that reaches about eight years into the future. So at eight years, it's pretty wild. At five years, it's pretty concrete ideas. At two years, it's becoming productized. So we have a roadmap of substantial increases in productivity over the coming years and such a way that also reduces the cost. So when we think about the roadmap to go from places that where people either have wells

that are not producing potable water, have no potable water, are relying on plastic bottle water, are relying on trucked water or boated water, right? we're directly competitive today in a way that removes all the lack of sustainability issues associated with those approaches and maybe most importantly, creates ownership, agency, and democratization over that resource, which is a big unlock when you're talking about something so fundamental to your life. If you don't have good water, it's Maslow's hierarchy all over here. Food water shelter. How do you ensure that the water is clean and drinkable? I mean, it's,

because essentially it's like rainwater, right? Which can be fine, but doesn't it have to have other properties to taste good and also to be safe? Yeah, it actually turns out it's much purer than rainwater, right? So when we actually produce the water, it's effectively distilled water. It's pure water. We then, because water is the stuff of life, we then ozenate that water. So in other words, we take oxygen molecules from there. We make O3 and we keep that concentration.

up while it's stored so that we always have water that's sterile, and then we mineralize that water. So by the time that humans are consuming that water, not only do we know that it's safe and that it's mineralized, so for taste and health, we also know that that's true because every hydropanel is connected to the cloud and we see data feedback from every hydropanel we've deployed that says, yep, we produce this amount of water. We have this much water in storage. It's sterile and has been mineralized. And by the way, now it's been dispensed.

So we've sort of created the world's first renewable, fully digitized drinking water utility, if you will. I mean, I know that the analogy has been made and you've heard it before, but it is like Tatooine. It's like, right? It's like they had these, what were they called on Tattoo? I can remember the, those like spiky things. Somebody listening, I'll remember it. moisture vaporator, right, where they were like water farms, right? And I mean, this is essentially what you're talking about. Of course, it doesn't look like the vaporators on Tatooine, but which you're essentially saying is that in the not too distant future, a home can be powered entirely by renewable energy and can produce all of its water needs. That's right. And, you know, if you think about 20 years ago, if you were to ask, oh, should I put a,

kilowatt of solar on my roof, people would have said, oh, well, go put in double paint windows first, right? Or put in more insulation first. And now, of course, that discussion is never that. It's just, yeah, put another kilowatt of a peak solar on your roof because it's so cheap. I think there's a very similar thing happening in water in the sense that today we consider it as free when we know it's not. It's, you know, or it's really the most extractive resource we utilize. Yeah. And so when we think about going to whole home levels, which is entirely possible, with the approach we've taken, you could go build a home in the future today that has a completely closed loop water system that has no input other than source hydropanels. Now, would there be

necessarily a good argument to go do that at this moment other than to demonstrate it? I'm not so sure. But that sort of existence proof only gets you to recognizing that if you're paying $150 or $200 or $300 a month for your water, you think about that over the course of a mortgage, the real cost of your water system is actually quite high. And so it doesn't actually take us decades to get to a position of parity that's similar to what we saw in solar PV. Right. Right now the cost of these panels is high. It's too high for most people to afford, right? But presumably the cost will go down over time. How much is it to fully install a panel on a home, for example, that's going to produce five liters of water. Yeah. So if you buy source hydropanel online, which is the way that Americans can get

our hydropanels directly, they're about $2,000 a piece. And so, and of course, we have to ship them and install them. So when you amortize that cost out, right, that's already considerably lower cost than bottled water, for example. And so, and of course, we have lease models and so on. So there's, you know, people can do this without having to come up with cash up front. Now, when we think about these large raise like we did with the Navajo or we did with Worm Springs tribe in Oregon, the real cost actually gets way lower, right? And so we're able to actually solve problems where we're directly displacing trucking water or directly displacing having to go drill a new borehole and then and solve the water quality issues that exist. All right. Let's talk about your business too. I know you got a lot of

backing from one of Bill Gates's funds and other investors. You've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but you're not the only company working on this. So what is the sort of the business plan? Will you ultimately make money simply from selling the panels? Yeah, so we make money by selling panels and by selling water under contract today. In other words, you sell bottled water, right? We sell, yeah, we sell bottled water, but that's a small part of the business. What I'm talking about is our water is a service business that we'll contract with school systems

or with governments to sell water based on arrays that we've built. And then, you know, I think the reason why Breakthrough Energy Ventures came in or Fifth Wall came in, which is a real estate backed entity or Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund is, you know, all of these entities are dealing with the challenges associated with water going forward, right? Obviously, real estate developers can't, if they have land that design water rights, that's a huge problem, right? There are a number of these investors that are thinking about water at a systemic level, right? And how do we move from linear extractive to sustainable circular, right? And how do we move to a place that is going to work in the future?

And, you know, I think we've got an approach there that is, you know, potentially meaningful. And when it comes to competitors, I mean, is your feeling, hey, the more the merrier because this is actually, this is technology that needs to, to spread around the world? Yeah, I mean, anybody who's working on solving water as a hero in my book. I mean, there's, it's an infinite market space for a given company, right? So it's, it's going to take many solutions to solve all problems. From a competitor perspective, I mean, we're the only ones that do what we do, right? There's, there's other folks that take water from the atmosphere, but they do that in a way that requires high humidity and quite a bit of electricity. So we've solved the problem in a different way. And I think that gives us a large addressable market, about a half a trillion dollar addressable market as it sits right now, again, effectively infinite from where we sit today.

And so, you know, there's interest in source because of our unique technology, but also because of the big unlock that we've enabled from a market perspective. All right. Here I am in California. And so, you know, there's a lot of concern over what the future of agriculture will look like. And this is a big problem, I mean, especially in parts of California where, you know, almonds are really to require a lot of water and avocados and other, you know, grapes in Sonoma County. In fact, many of these verdant, you know, places that have been completely transformed because of water, essentially what you're saying is this is not going to be a problem. If, in fact, everyone adopts this kind of technology, that you will be able to essentially irrigate anywhere in the world. Yeah, if you think about, well, let's start in the Central Valley, right? We are really heading in a direction that is not sustainable and have been for a long time. The farm workers that live in the Central Valley today live in communities where the groundwater has been poisoned by generations of pesticides and fertilizer and so on. So you think about the knockoff effects are not just bulk water and can we grow almonds, but remember that there are humans that are there doing that work. And so there's,

like this big challenge there, which we've got a number of projects going on in that region to support farm workers. But separately, and I think this was your main point, there's no reason why through advanced agriculture approaches that use something like 120th or 130th amount of water, that you couldn't produce water in the way that we do and then grow fruits and vegetables and so on in advanced agriculture setting. I mean, essentially what I'm hearing is that in like, and you may not be saying this, but I think we can kind of draw this conclusion, which is if, for example, now we think about people dying from infections, right? And most people died from infections in wartime. That's

why you had like so many deaths in the civil war. It was infections. And now the vast majority of these infections could be healed with antibiotics, right? And so we're like, wow, you know, how crazy was that? Or, you know, you think about bloodlily. in the middle ages, right? Like how they thought that they were treating diseases with leeches. In 100 years from now, are we going to say, my God, we were so fixated on municipal water, piped water or water sources when all we had to do is focus on making our own water wherever we are. I mean, are we going to get to that point?

Yeah, I mean, the best corollary is, you know, 1995, we talked about maybe there would be 20 million Internet users globally within 20 years. within 20 years. And now there are six billion smartphones, meaning that information poverty is an entire thing of the past. One of the things that is always sort of remarkable to me is the human brain's inability to deal with exponentials, right? I think many people are concerned about the exponentiality of all the problems in the world today, right? Many, many things that are running away from us. But the inverse is true too, right, where exponentiality has enabled solar to be really cheap, has enabled DNA testing, that's minuscule fraction of what it was 20 years ago, smartphones, et cetera. And the same thing is true when we start talking about renewable water.

We start talking about source hydropanels. And so, you know, the learning rates of technologies are really, really fast. And I think that's sort of what gets me really excited about technology and makes me optimistic about the future in general. But it makes me really optimistic specifically about what we do at source. Cody Friesen, CEO, founder of Source. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Guy. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab.

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