How I Built This with Guy Raz - HIBT Lab! Tomorrow.io: Shimon Elkabetz

Episode Date: November 10, 2022

Our planet is warming, and many parts of the world are not equipped to accurately predict the heat waves, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and floods that are becoming more frequent and intense due to the changing climate. Former Israeli Air Force pilot Shimon Elkabetz knows the importance of good weather forecasts — they can literally mean the difference between life and death. In 2016, he co-founded Tomorrow.io to improve the weather data available across the world. This week on How I Built This Lab, Shimon talks with Guy about his company’s work to help businesses, governments and individuals make better decisions in response to increasingly volatile weather. Plus, Shimon recounts some of the challenges he’s faced in fundraising for ‘hard technology’ and stresses the importance of building climate change solutions that generate immediate impact.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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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, 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 we know that over the next few decades, all of us who live on this planet are going to face very volatile weather at some point. Most of us already have crazy heat. heat waves, powerful hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, floods.

And while all of these things are scary and, at least for me, anxiety-inducing, I do take some comfort in knowing that our technology is getting a lot better at predicting these things. And it means that in the coming decades, we will start to alter our behavior days, maybe even weeks before weather-related events upend our plans. And that technology will also save lives. Well, this is an insight that Shimon Elkowitz had a few years ago. He was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force, and if you're a pilot, the weather is almost like an obsession. Shimon wondered why weather prediction models weren't better.

So in 2016, he and two friends founded Tomorrow.io. It's a company that's working on new technology to forecast weather with such accuracy that you'll know exactly what will happen in the next. few hours, wherever you are in the world. And they're about to deploy 30 groundbreaking weather radar satellites in space over the next few years that will enable their customers to make decisions based on minute-by-minute changes in the weather. I know that you went to the military and you were in the Air Force. I imagine that weather is a really important factor when you're in the Air Force, right?

For sure. So like everyone else, in Israel, I joined the military when you're in the Air Force. I was 18. And I joined the Air Force. And after three years, became a pilot. And obviously, as a pilot, in the cockpit level, weather is probably the number one variable and the most challenging factor for every training mission, every operational mission. And I was super worried about whether more than malfunction, more than human error, more than even the enemy. Unfortunately, I lost colleagues, friends, due to weather-related accidents. And later on, when I was starting to manage operationally all kind of complex situations,

I learned how much weather situations can really be the different between success and failure. Obviously, weather impacts the take-off process, the mission, the route, and of course the lending. So you constantly have to evaluate your situation and the real time and expected weather. All right. So you are in the military and you get interested in weather. And why you were a pilot, did you start thinking about maybe I could figure out of business around weather? Or did that idea come later? It definitely came later.

When I was in the military, it was a big problem. I never thought that it's something that I can do something. thing about. I did know that, you know, I wanted to start a business. And I was looking for a really big problem. And only later when I moved to Boston and did my MBA at Harvard, this is where I kind of like started to research together with my other two friends. You know, this problem that we really care about, how big is it? What people have done about it? And only then we made a decision to, you know, go after it. Okay. Let's talk about the problem. What? What is the problem? Whether, I mean, most of us have apps on our phones and they're even more sophisticated weather apps and we can find out what the weather's going to be like with relatively good precision, but that's not actually the case everywhere around the world?

So first of all, it's not the case everywhere around the world. But I felt that the kind of accuracy of the weather forecast that I had for my emissions was a lot of the weather forecast. wasn't good enough. I also saw that the way I was making decisions, either in the cockpit or outside of it when I was managing operations, I didn't have the right tool to help me make decisions at scale. And we actually realized that climate change is going to make whether a much more important problem to go after. Because weather events simply become more volatile and more frequent, any given year in any given geography. And more unpredictable. Exactly.

So, of course, that once you go outside of it, of the U.S., I mean, and, you know, the West, let's call it, the problem becomes even bigger. So let's start with that. Climate change means that weather is going to become a much bigger problem. And now, what do you do about it? So that's one layer of the problem. Okay. And presumably this other layer of the problem is that our technology or the technology that is currently in place in most places around the world is not equipped to provide that rapid weather data right now?

So before that, it's not about whether the technology is equipped or not equipped. I would say the following. First of all, when we think of the problem of we're going to have more hurricanes, more heat waves, more typhoons, more wildfires. Now the question is what do you do about it? I firmly believe and I'm very excited about decarbonization programs and how do we get to net zero. But even if we're very successful in doing that, the climate has already changed. We already break records. Now, what we're saying is that you need to put systems in place and start managing that risk just like you manage your cybersecurity risk.

Okay. you don't imagine a tech company not protecting its servers with a software solution. And that's the first thing we realized. We have to build a solution that helps organizations, either businesses or governmental, manage that risk, that solution that we didn't have as military officers. Right. All right. So let's kind of talk about some scenarios here.

We obviously know that the climate is changing and it will become much, much more volatile the next decades. And we've already started to see it. But essentially what that means is that supply chains have already been affected, will be affected even further, right? Because rough seas means container ships may not be able to cross oceans. Hurricanes, huge storms may mean that aircraft may not, you know, may not be able to land, that, you know, humans may not be able to be outdoors.

Workers may not be able to construct buildings. All these kinds of scenarios are very real, and they will be more frequent. Absolutely. And any kind of organization has assets. It can be people. It can be constant assets like buildings or infrastructure, and it can be dynamic and moving assets like trucks or ships or aircrafts. And you want to make sure that you can optimize the operational efficiency of your business,

while whether it becomes more volatile, while it challenges your operations. So I think that what we are trying to do is to make sure that you have the right tool to make the right decisions at the right time. For example, reroute because that specific area is at risk. So getting the right recommendation in the right time. The second thing is to make sure that the recommendation that you get

is actually based on an accurate forecast, right? So the technology of forecasting weather really becomes important in order to enable the decision-making process, what we call the weather intelligence. All right. Well, let me try to understand how you decided to tackle this problem because I know that you went to business school at Harvard. And with two friends of yours from Israel who were at MIT, you decided to launch this business, which became tomorrow.io. And the idea, of course, is to provide super accurate to the minute to the second weather forecasts in a microlocal way to anyone anywhere around the world. But why wasn't that available already? What was the innovation that you were able to offer that wasn't being utilized?

Was it a technological solution? Presumably, this data is there. So what was it that you were able to do to get even better data? For sure. So when you think of weather forecast accuracy, let's first understand how weather forecast is generated. You basically need three components. The first is observations. Like weather stations, radar, satellites, they help you understand what's happening in the atmosphere in real time, whether it's raining here or what's happening now. The second thing you need is a model, a set of equations into which you assimilate the observations. You take the inputs, what's happening in real time, you plug it into it. a model. And then the third thing you need is a computing power to process the model. The output of the model is what we know as weather forecast. Which is we see on the news or we get on our apps or whatever. Exactly. Now, what we learned when we started to explore, you know, why the weather

forecast is not as accurate as we wanted it to be. Why is it not as good in the entire world like it is in the U.S., we learned that the technology of forecasting weather is led and done by government agencies. And we were shocked by that because as folks who came from the military, we almost couldn't find examples for technologies that were actually created by government agencies. Even in space, you know, NASA started to work more and more with SpaceX and other companies in the last few years. and imagine you had to rely on a government agency to develop COVID-19 vaccine, where we would have been at this point.

So we understood that we can do it in-house in a proprietary way, in a way that will help us innovate faster, develop faster, and do it better in order to solve not only public safety, but also business problems. Now, we were pretty naive at the beginning because we didn't understand, to be completely honest, how difficult it's going to be to go after it. So we didn't start with everything from the beginning, with the observations and the modeling and the computing power, all the way to the software that gives you recommendations for action. We started somewhere.

But I think what really helped us was to understand that we want to fall in love with a problem and not with a specific solution. And the problem was, how do we help countries and businesses better manage their weather and climate-related challenges as the climate in the world and the weather in the world becomes crazier. We're going to take a short break, but when we come back more from Shimon about how his company, tomorrow.io, is working to improve weather forecasting around the world.

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 talking with Shimon Elkabetz, one of the co-founders of the weather forecasting company, Tomorrow.io. So what I'm trying to understand is I understand the computing power, I understand the modeling. All of those things exist and you can improve on those things. But from what I gather, you are also gathering data from other sources, right? Like, you know, essentially what we call the Internet of Things, right? And I guess to sort of paint a picture, everything that we have that's connected to the Internet, whether it's a coffee maker or our phones or a smart light bulb is constantly.

releasing data. It's like if you could see it, it would just be a spigot of information. And from what I gather, you guys are capturing the data that you can access to better predict local weather. Explain that how that works. I mean, this is like data from like traffic cameras and traffic lights and cars and cell towers. Like, tell me how you're, how that works. So when we started, obviously, you know, we couldn't raise a lot of money. When we pitched to investors, they were like, okay, climate change, why would I even bother talking about it? It takes much more than a software to solve it. So we looked for cost-effective ways to improve the observation piece, the sensing.

And we came up with an approach that we call weather of things, which is, you know, like the Internet of Things, as you said. The idea is that you can tap into all kinds of devices and generate valuable weather information. from them, like IoT devices or connected vehicles where you can tell from the wipers if it's raining or from the sensors, the temperature sensor on the car, what's the temperature externally, all the way to extracting signals from cellular towers and understanding if it's raining in a specific location. But very fast, we realize that, okay, if we just work on a technology that helps us describe what's happening in real time, it doesn't help the customer. The customer needs to understand what's going to happen. So we moved into models. And then when we gave customers more

accurate forecast, we understood that customers generally have the problem of how to make decisions at scale. And if you just give them road data, even if it's a forecast, it's not enough. So we moved into weather intelligence software that gives business recommendations. Today, I must say, we're going to space to improve observations because the weather of things approach is super cool, super geeky, but it's limited, to be completely honest. You don't have devices over the ocean. You don't have access to devices in every country and on and on and on. So, all right, so the problem is you can't get that information of oceans because oceans are vast and we don't have massive networks of cars and roads on oceans to gather that information.

So to get that information, you need satellites. So I would say the following. to help customers make better decisions, you need to give them reliable insights. And to give reliable insights, you have to have reliable and accurate forecast behind it. And I think that over the last few years, what we learned, that we're pretty much limited in terms of how much further we can improve the forecast accuracy by the inputs to the models. Because, again, as you mentioned, you don't have good enough. coverage over the oceans, you don't have many sensors in Latin America, in Africa,

in India, in many places in the world. And I would say that the most important, not just me saying that, actually, most of the agencies actually believe that the most important sensor to drive real-time and forecast accuracy is weather radar. We all see weather radars daily on-tube. TV on our apps. Radars help us understand where it's raining in real time, how the atmosphere looks like, the clouds formation, and whatnot. And what we learned is that over 5 billion people live outside of radar coverage.

And I can go on and on the consequences of what's happening when you don't have a radar coverage. Now, beyond that, the oceans do not have radar coverage. So every time a really important weather phenomena like tropical storm, like hurricane, or cyclone or a typhoon is evolving, we don't really have a good grasp of it. So in the U.S., for example, we fly airplanes, the government flies airplanes over the eye of the storm with a radar,

scan it and send it back to the model. So we can understand if it's going to be category one, two, or three, and whether we need to evacuate Miami or Tampa. Obviously, it's not as efficient as we want it to be. We want to monitor the hurricane from the inception 24-7 in real time. And rest assured, by the way, nobody is flying anything over a typhoon or cyclone in the east. So it's a big, big, big problem. That lack of sensor coverage and specifically radar creates significant issues with weather forecasting

and climate resiliency. And that's the problem, the biggest problem we're going after today. And it's part of the entire problem of how do we help customers manage their challenges. So let's talk about Hurricane Ian for a moment, right? That just hit Florida. I mean, the path of the storm, the intensity of the storm, that was pretty well predicted, right? So what would you have offered? Like, what does your technology offer that, for example, wasn't already made available in that case?

Yeah. So without getting into specifically Hurricane Ian because, you know, it's arguable whether it was accurate enough for the decision makers to evacuate on time or not, I think it is pretty agreed upon the scientific community that if we had good monitoring of hurricanes as they evolve all the way to hitting the mainland with radars, then the forecast accuracy, meaning the output of the models, would have been much more reliable. We would have known the track with more confidence. So it may sound, hey, it's good enough. We knew approximately where is it going. But when the National Hurricane Center needs to provide a track and decision makers have to decide whether to evacuate a city, even 5% improvement is a lot. Think about also all the

derivatives of it, all the insurance and reinsurance companies behind it and FEMA and I can go on and on. And as I said, you're talking about the U.S. where the situation is relatively good from a technology perspective. Let's try to think about the problem globally. It's worse, way, way worse elsewhere. So how do you solve it? Obviously, from the ground up, it's impossible. You can't deploy a radar over the ocean. Geopolitically, it's very difficult to do that in other countries. And also, it is very expensive to do it from the ground up. So we said, you know, we have to start looking if we can do it from space. And at the beginning, we didn't want to do it alone. You know, we're a software company. We raised money from investors to build a software business. Right. So we went to partners,

you know, from government agencies to big defense companies and space companies to startups. And we asked companies, hey, this is the spec we're looking for because we want to cover the world with active radars. Can you build it? And everybody said, no, it's not possible. It's not possible to build radars. It's not possible to do it in the cost that you're looking for and in the size and in the timeline that you're aiming for. So here's my question. There are thousands and thousands of low Earth orbiting satellites, right? Not all of them are weather satellites, obviously, but, you know, internet satellites and all kinds of satellites.

But presumably some of them are weather. A lot of them are weather satellites. couldn't you just buy data from existing satellites that are lower Earth orbit? First of all, yes, and most of this data is available for us, but this data is not necessarily valuable. Just being in space with a satellite is not very useful. It's not enough. Yeah, what is the sensor that you have on that satellite?

I see. And none of them has a radar that is designed to describe the atmosphere. We have imagery satellites. We have infrared satellites that are blocked by the top of the clouds, for example, so they don't see through. And we also have SAR satellites that are actually equipped with radars, but these radars are designed to describe the ground very accurately and ignore the atmosphere. Our radars are supposed to do the opposite. They're supposed to ignore the ground and basically describe very accurately the entire atmosphere. All right. So in 2023, my understanding is your plan is to launch about 30 satellites equipped with these radar sensors.

And that's the plan right now, right? Yeah, we're launching about 30 satellites starting Q1 of 2023. The launches will take throughout 2024 as well. And we're launching a combination. It's actually a constellation of two type of sensors. one is active radars. The second type of sensor is a microwave sounder, and both of them should be very, very complementary to each other and together create real-time picture of the atmosphere, precipitation, help us drive short-term prediction

on a minute-by-minute basis in different locations in the world and improve the forecast in the next day, two, three. And 30 satellites can comprehensively cover the planet? In a revisit rate of about less than an hour, yes. An hour. Wow. And how much does each one cost roughly? So the cost changes from one satellite to the other, depending on the two type of sensors. I just mentioned. It also goes down over time. The first ones are a bit more expensive. But when we look at the entire constellation cost, end-to-end, including the launches, we're looking at roughly $100 million. So how much money have you raised so far? I've seen that you raised their last round was $77 million. dollars in total how much have you raised we raised north of 250 million dollars until today and that's

enough to i mean it's a lot of money but still what you're doing is very expensive right to build the software to build the satellites to launch them to maintain them and that can that money can finance all of this it can finance most of it yeah at this point in time given the technology maturity and the timeline. I don't think that funding will be an issue. But we live in a crazy world. I didn't imagine starting a company that I will have to deal with so many macro situations, you know, from managing a business that sold mostly to airlines and sports leagues entering a pandemic

all the way to the inflation and the market crash and, you know, canceling an IPO and whatever. So, you know, it's definitely what keeps me up at night as a CEO. How do you keep running the business and not running out of money, but we're pretty well funded. You mentioned the IPO. You were going to go public via SPAC and you in the end decided not to do that. That could have raised tons of money, right, if you went public and people valued that stock. But I guess given the market conditions, you decided it was too risky to do that now. And you withdrew that decision.

Yeah, I think it was the right call. We made that call early in 2022. If we did it in 2021, we would probably be able to raise that money, which is really why we wanted to go after it. The significant amount of cash would have enabled us to go after the full business plan. But the macro changed. And I think we were looking very clearly into the future and understood that it's just the beginning. And unfortunately, we were right. The cycle is going to be pretty long. So it was a good call for the company eventually. I know that you're, you know, this is right now you are focused on governments and, you know, large logistics companies, right? I think you're already working with some airlines and the NFL, for example, because, right, I mean, if they can know that there's going to be a, you know, a microburst over their stadium, then they're not going to be able to play the game. Or maybe they, you know, they evacuate the stadium. Give me a sense. Once those satellites are deployed, what is it going to actually move? mean? Like, will me as a consumer, you as a consumer, actually begin to see the results of, you know, what this can do?

Yeah. So the answer is depending on where in the world. In most of the world, it's going to create a binary improvement. What do I mean by that? You go south of the border to Mexico, believe it or not, it's pretty challenging to understand what's happening in real time. If it's raining or not, in Mexico City, as an example, all the way to Argentina. Same for Africa, India, and large portions of Asia. And of course, over the oceans as you sail. So we're talking about binary improvement in real time, not even forecasting. In the U.S., of course, extreme weather events, the forecast for hurricanes will be much better.

talking about Santa Ana winds and the wildfire. So these winds, where do they come from? They come usually from the Pacific, and the Pacific is not monitored. So once you have better coverage of the Pacific, the entire West Coast forecast accuracy will get better. For our customers, the insights and the forecast improvement will be seamlessly updated because we already run the models. The models already feed the software.

The only thing we're going to do is to feed the models. with additional data sets that will come from space as it becomes live. So this is what we should expect. And of course, yes, we're very much focused on enterprise and government customers, but we actually do have a consumer app. So those who uses our app will benefit from it. Our app is not very popular because, you know, we're fighting huge brands and don't necessarily have a technology.

They mostly repackage the government forecast. They don't run models from the ground up. They don't create sensing technology that dramatically and fundamentally improves whether forecasting accuracy. And by the way, the opportunity that we saw when we started the company was, you know, if people already do that, it's not interesting. But if everybody is just repackaging the forecast of the government, and we have the opportunity to be the leading company of privatizing this,

then we should be there. Yeah. You're essentially saying, okay, the government data is good in the developed world, but we're going to make it better and then obviously

much better in the developing world, parts of the world where they don't even have half decent data. Yeah. Serve the underserved. And of course,

help in the developed world where extreme weather events are going to be much more challenging. And trust me, you know, 60 minutes per using the same radars that the government is providing to everyone, this is not what's going to move the needle on climate-related challenges.

And that's what we're trying to focus on. We're going to take another short break, but we'll have more from tomorrow.io, CEO and co-founder Shimon Elkowitz in just a moment. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. And my guest is Shimon Alcabets, the CEO and co-founder of Tomorrow.io. So do you think in 10 years from now, the average person will have the ability from their phone or whatever to know, with very, very specific accuracy, like if they're going to ride their bike home,

know exactly when to go and when not to go, anywhere around the world? I believe so. Yes. Today you can do it pretty well in the U.S., let's say, for the next 60 minutes. We're actually working on getting it better and better. I believe we got it better than other players who use the existing radars of the government. This is a pretty simple modeling versus the next day or two, which we're focused on as well. But I believe that with the kind of constellation that we're putting in space and the kind of products we're working on, this capability will be available globally, not even in a decade in, let's say, three to four years max.

And are you building the satellites in-house, or are you contracting with another partner? So without getting too much into the details, we obviously have vendors that support us in building the satellites, but we definitely own the IP. We design the payload. We designed the entire mission. And we use contractors to help us in doing things that we don't want to do. For example, the bus, the shield. of the satellite itself.

There's nothing innovative about it. It's just a metal box. Yeah, but it has to fit the size and the skills and the capabilities of our specific payload and mission. So it's not a walk in the park, but it's just not where we need to invest our resources. Other people did it better than us, and five years ago we couldn't have done it.

So I think also the timing for what we're doing is perfect from that perspective. When is the first satellite? launch, the schedule to happen. Q1 of 2023, most likely February. In Florida? Yes. And will you be there, presumably?

Absolutely. And you're going to be like white knuckled nervous that day, those few days, making sure it works. You know, I have a great team of really, really talented people that are so much smarter than me. They're going to be nervous, but what can I do? You know, I have no control over it. So I'm just going to enjoy the show and hopefully if we'll work out with it.

And how quickly after that satellite is deployed will it begin to provide data? Immediately. We're doing everything in our power to make sure that the entire data pipeline, the modeling capability to ingest it is ready to go. We actually work with several labs at NOAA to start working on the ability to consume this data for their own operational product. So we don't want to be in a situation where there's a satellite in space and the data is not used. Let me ask you just from your perspective as somebody obviously who's steeped in this field. Given that we're talking about extreme, massive extreme weather events already happening. I mean, look at Europe this summer.

Look at the United States this summer. Probably where you are in Israel, there was extreme heat. I can't imagine being a construction worker, building a building. in Dubai, in the middle of the summer. How is that going to happen? What do you imagine is going to, you know, will have to happen in order for economies to continue to function?

So I think the world has to wake up and start thinking about climate technology and investors and entrepreneurs should start investing their money and time in going after climate-related solutions. Climate-related solutions can focus on either climate mitigation, which is how do we get to net zero and prevent the trend from, you know, keep accelerating and getting worse and trying to prevent that from happening. And the other piece

is climate adaptation, which is, you know, the train has left the station. It's already getting warmer and warmer, crazier and crazier. How do we adapt to that? We are definitely falling in the second bucket of adjusting to this new reality by having more accurate a forecast of these events and providing the solution that helps you make those decisions at scale. But I think there are so many opportunities for innovators to come up with solutions that will move the needle. I will say that it wasn't easy to raise money for such a business.

It was actually pretty painful. And for me, it was, I don't want to say insulting or offensive, but it was pretty sad to see, you know, dog walking apps raising $300 million when you present a business idea to investors saying, hey, I'm going to improve weather forecasting dramatically in the world. It's going to cost $100 million. And they're like, but it's not software only. Or climate change is not yet here. I think when COVID started, people started to realize that those big threats that were all worried about, and saw in the movies, it can actually happen. And I think now we're starting to see people taking this much more seriously.

It wasn't like that in 2016 when we started. I mean, I'm surprised in part because, I mean, obviously there's a mission behind this. It's to help governments better predict climate catastrophes. I mean, look at countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan recently, massive flash flooding that killed thousands of people. But obviously, there is a market opportunity here. If this technology doesn't exist, if this data isn't available and you can make it available, well then presumably, I'm just thinking from an investor's perspective, people will pay for it. Absolutely.

The market exists. However, to build a solution that can actually address this market need, we're talking about deep technology. Just look at what tomorrow is doing. And it's expensive. It's expensive and it takes time. Look at what we're doing. we have one R&D group building satellite constellation. Another R&D group is building weather models from the ground up.

And the third R&D group is just building an amazing modern SaaS software solution. These are like three different companies in one. So investors usually look for the highest return in the shortest amount of time. They look for templates and they look to check all the boxes of things that worked well. and if they go outside of these boxes, then they're taking another risk. So it's not that the investors do not believe in the problem or that they do not think that what we're doing is valuable. But most investors, unfortunately, don't have the ability to take these huge risks because

we could have failed a hundred times throughout the way. It takes a significant level of execution. So how much, I mean, your business, you've got investors, you've got to, you've got bring a return in. But how much of your data are you going to make available for free? You know, if you know that, you know, Fire and Brimstone is coming to a certain part of the world and they haven't signed up and they're not subscribers, I mean, I'm assuming you're going to make that information available. First of all, you can go and download our app today and get an API key and use our products for free today. Anyone can do that. Once you start using it for commercial purposes,

This is where there are subscription plans. But the average individual that has a need can use it anywhere today already. And through our non-profit, tomorrow now.org, we're hoping to bring support, again, because we are a for-profit business, we can't invest too many resources in things that do not derive income for us. But our nonprofit was created by us in order to identify places where customers cannot afford the solution, but the need is huge. And it started with a big focus on Africa. Actually, we got amazing partners that support us. The biggest one is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that support our nonprofit. And I believe that over the next year, you're going to hear about more and more projects that create high impact in places where,

people cannot afford it in COP 27, which is happening in Sharma, Sheikh in Egypt in November, we're going to discuss some of these initiatives. So essentially, we know that we've done quite a bit of this on the show. We know that even if we start to go to net zero carbon, we've got to pull tons of carbon out of the atmosphere to stay under the 1.5 degrees centigrade. It's going to be really hard. And there will still be effects of climate change. What you're saying is, and I think I think most people agree, it's happening. We're probably not going to hit those goals.

We need to keep trying to. But in the meantime, we have to be prepared to live with what will be coming our way. Absolutely. And by the way, even if we're successful, which I really, really hope we will be in decarbonization. We'll see the impact in 50 years. But in this hurricane season, we're already getting hit. harder and harder. The impact of climate adaptation and adjusting to this new reality is about things we can do today that will generate impact today. We need to address it because we're going to

face different problems that we didn't even think about, not just wildfires and hurricanes. We're talking about hunger and food crisis as a result of this crazy weather regime that we're seeing globally. Now, if you can give a farmer in Kenya, if you can give them the right information and insight in the right time about when to harvest, when to irrigate, so they can improve their livelihood, then the impact that you can create today is huge. If you do it at scale with a modern technology, with a modern software, then you can actually mitigate the impact of climate change by a lot. Shimon, thanks so much. Yeah, thank you. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. You can follow How I Built This on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now.

The next episode is available right now, or you can binge all of our episodes, ad-free, by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at How I Built This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Guy Raz on Twitter and at guy.org on Instagram. This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Rumpteen Arablewe. Our audio engineer was Neil Rout. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Josh Lash, Jacey Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Our intern is Susanna Brown.

Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. listening to how I built this. Who is the greatest soccer player in the world right now? You know, if you just look at right now, people will say Holland, who plays for a manned city. Yeah, right. But I'm a messy guy all the way.

And your Haifa team there has made the Champions League. Yeah, and we've been doing pretty well. I can talk about it for hours. If you want to do another show about Haifa, call me.