The Startup Ideas Podcast - Anything Is Possible with David Friedberg

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

David Friedberg (@friedberg), founder and CEO of The Production Board (TPB), is working to reimagine global systems in order to solve some of the biggest sustainability problems we face today. He joins hosts Sahil Bloom (@sahilbloom) and Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) to explain why the best path forward is using the latest science and technology innovations to meet the trends of human desire and consumption. An extreme optimist, Dave shares his positive outlook on scientific iteration, the changing brand landscape, and how Cana is revolutionizing the bottled beverage industry.Want more community? Learn more here: http://trwih.comSPECIAL THANKS TO OUR SPONSORThis episode is brought to you by Beam. We can’t get enough of their Dream Powder. We both personally take this before bed a few times a week and wake up refreshed in the morning. Their nano-CBD helps improve your body’s ability to absorb CBD, making their product the perfect supplement before you go to bed. And now Beam is offering $20 off any order of $75 or more with the code ROOM at www.beamorganics.com/room.

Thank you so much for joining. I mean, we're thrilled to have you and have a chance to talk about a bunch of things that you've been writing about doing, building all of the above, and definitely want to get deep down the rabbit hole on molecular beverage printing technology and everything you're working on there. I would personally love to just kick off with a little bit of just background on you and how you kind of got to where you are today. and you have an insanely interesting career, you know, everything from Kinawa to Metro Mile car insurance and now, you know, changing the world with climate tech. So we'd love to just get a little bit of background on you. I don't know about you guys, but I've had a pretty bad relationship with sleep for most of my life. I never had much of a routine around it. And honestly, my performance suffered.

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And if you don't love it, there is a money back guarantee. Get your money back guaranteed if you don't love it. For a limited time, you can get $20 off when you go to beamorganics.com slash room and use code room at checkout. Again, that's B-E-A-Morganics.com slash room and use code room for $20 off at checkout. I guarantee you're going to love it. Sure. I mean, I, you know, my origin story, as I've come to write it, is I was born in South Africa. I moved to L.A. when I was a kid. I was six years old. My parents immigrated to try and make it in Hollywood. They're documentary filmmakers. So I grew up mostly in L.A. and then I went to school at UC Berkeley, where I majored in Astero. My interest has always been in science and mathematics.

That was kind of my focus. And then I was working, sorry, I was working at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in the Hills Above Berkeley, which is a government department of energy lab, which was a pretty boring job. I worked in a basement doing mathematical modeling. And like, you know, I'd go in by myself and leave by myself and not talk to anyone and work on a computer and nothing. And the project I was working on would maybe turn into a particle accelerator system 20 years from now.

So it wasn't really impactful or meaningful work to me. And meanwhile, like the dot-com bubble was happening across the bay and throughout Silicon Valley. There was a dude in my dorm, a freshman year who started a website that he sold to CD Universe or for a million dollars. It was like this incredible outcome for a 19-year-old kid. And I was like, man, Silicon Valley. seems pretty amazing like the whole world is changing and it's all happening from Silicon

Valley and I want to work in tech so I started applying for jobs and ultimately got a job out of college and an investment bank that focused on technology mergers and acquisitions and I've never taken a business or finance or accounting class so for me that was like a big kind of learning curve you know coming out of college like I had to kind of learn business and learn finance and that was also when the market crashed so the dot com bubble and floated I started with 11 people in my analyst class. There were two of us left at the end of two years. It was a pretty crazy time.

I worked on probably 20 deals, most of which were companies being sold for less than cash, right? They were such distressed businesses. They were burning through money and they had no business. Private equity firms were coming in and buying them for nothing. So anyway, that was my experience out of college. I ended up joining Google in early 2004, and I left a couple years later to start the Climate Corporation.

So that's kind of the main arc of the story. Yeah. Well, it's really interesting kind of how it's come to where it is today, too. And what I think you're doing in a lot of ways, if I'm zooming out, is really kind of reimagining and reinventing the way that transformative science is funded. And like with the production board, which I definitely want to get into, the way you've kind of created this foundry model and you're funding people, scientists to go and kind of ideate on transformative technologies and then, you know, have a mechanism

through which you can spin them up into big businesses and kind of spend them out to go raise money, et cetera. It sort of reminds me of like an IAC of the future, right? Like going and building a, you know, a holding company foundry model that can spin these up and fund these amazing swings in a different way. So it strikes me as very, very cool what you're doing and how you're approaching it. Well, I wouldn't say that our objective is to fund science. I would say that our objective is to solve big problems. And more often than not, the way you can solve big problems is to use kind of the best tools and the best techniques and technologies that are available, much of which emerges from, you know, discoveries being made in science as well as kind of,

you know, new and emerging sub-disciplines and engineering. So, So, you know, our orientation is much more about what are the big problems to solve. What's the best way to solve them? What's the confluence of technology typically that we can use to solve them and then build businesses from there? And so I think to be most impactful and most transformative, it's important to remain kind of abreast of what are the emerging discoveries, what's the science showing us, what's leading the way.

And I will tell you, like, my observation has been that many scientists that are working in primary research, they're really focused on that. problem in front of them. You know, how do I identify and evolve the science? But typically, the application that can transform the market is nonlinear to where they're thinking and where they're looking. And often that requires an understanding of the markets themselves, meaning like, how do you actually take that discovery combined with several other points of view to form a novel business concept and a novel strategy that can go and change that market? And so typically, you know, if it were very linear, everyone would do it, right? If it were all

about like, hey, here's a discovery, here's the obvious application of it, boom, we're done. You know, I don't think that when, you know, humans invented the ability to do optical scanning, we would have realized at that time that it would ultimately lead to DNA sequencing, which is the primary technology in DNA sequencing. And so the person developing a CMOS sensor or a CCD sensor initially wasn't like, hey, one day we could figure out a way to like, you know, take nucleic acids and isolate them one at a time and image them and, you know, do it super quick and do it in this, like, chopped up way to create high throughput DNA sequencing and make DNA sequencing super cheap.

That was not on anyone's mind, right? And that's the interesting thing about technology is the most value can be created by seeing maybe a few steps ahead of where the confluence or the non-linearity arises. And so that's a big part of what we do. I say that our job is to connect the dots, connect the dots between science, markets, and people. So, you know, what is the market telling us? what's the science showing us the possibilities are, and who are the people that can help kind of execute against some novel point of view?

Could you talk a little more about what motivates you to do it? So I know you mentioned, you know, solving big problems. I feel like making the world a better place. But you could very much, you know, hang out in the Bahamas on the beach. You're in a very nice place yourself. You're in Marin. So, you know, you could just kind of have. hang out, but what drives you to, after all those successful businesses that you've created,

get up and take on this really big challenge? I think everyone's got, call it conscious motivation and subconscious motivation. So, you know, we typically have some sort of subconscious driver that's motivating us with some form of energy. And then we rationalize what we do consciously, right? There's a great book called The Happiness Hypothesis. The author kind of describes this as the human conscious is like a little kid writing an elephant. And the elephant is the subconscious.

So, you know, we could probably talk for hours, you know, with therapists involved on where individuals' motivations arise from. But for me, my, you know, when I was in seventh grade, I joined the environmental, the ecology club at school. because it was pretty evident that, you know, the world is in trouble, right? There's a lot of things that humans do to the planet that don't seem right and that seem net destructive for our benefit. And, you know, this can start with just kind of like ruining the environment with pollution and, you know, the common kind of nomenclature of, you know, anthropogenic climate change, I think is the hit de jour and an important one because it really,

really is an existential crisis, right? Like humans have this tendency to kind of, you know, want to get so indulgent to the point that it doesn't matter what happens around us. And I think that's really where we find ourselves is this kind of existential moment. So from a young age, I was really inclined to kind of think about ways that we could do good for the world. And, you know, how do we kind of solve these crises and solve these problems? So, you know, I don't I don't generally do well sitting on the beach. I'm an intellectually curious person and I'm also an action-oriented person. So intellectually curious in the sense that I have to constantly be learning new things

and exploring new things and action-oriented in the sense that if I'm not physically changing the things around me or doing something, I get pretty unhappy. So you combine those two facts with this overarching kind of problem that we face as a species and the sets of problems we face as a species. And I think this is just naturally what I can and should be doing with my. time. Doesn't mean I can't also once in a while go to a beach, but I don't really do that very often, especially with three young kids. But yeah, look, I feel like, let me just say one thing that's really important. I'm an extreme optimist. So I look at the crises that humanity is

facing. And we really, if we did nothing, you know, we would likely wipe out our species and all other species of life on this earth. Or maybe there would be a very hard, ugly reset that would take place over the centuries and millennia ahead. But fortunately, we have incredible technology and incredible tools as a species to theoretically reinvent all the things that got us in this problem in the first place and also reverse all the problems we've created. We have the ability to truly engineer life. We have the ability to re-engineer systems of production. And we don't have to make compromises to do it. So a big part of our thesis is that sustainability is not about cutting back and doing less and eating less and so on. Sustainability is about driving technology

forward, meaning can you make the same products that everyone wants more of and can you make them cheaper, but can you make them without carbon and without pollution? And the answer is yes, we have the tools across the board to do all of those things. So, you know, now it's an interesting question of what do you tackle first, what are the biggest problems, how do you address them? But really from genomics to hardware to software to biochemistry, the huge. human toolset is profound, like what we can do if we put our minds to it. And there have been many times when our species have been trialed and challenged and we've risen to the occasion. I think we are being trialed and challenged today and I think we are rising to the occasion. And we're

playing a small part or trying to play a small part in that effort. One of the things you hit on there is a really powerful mental shift, I think. And it's a generational shift in how people think about sustainability that you touched on, which is, you know, when I was growing up, and even when I was in college, so not that long, you know, 10-ish years ago, sustainability was about, you know, showerheads that had less water running through them so that you'd save a little bit of water when you were, when you were taking a shower, which I don't think is a bad thing, by the way, but it was things like that. It was how do you cut back to be more sustainable? What you're talking about is a fundamentally different thing. It's, you know, not constraining your usage and continuing to live

in a world of abundance, but do it in a different way, where we have technology. that can fundamentally change it. Make more water. You should make your shower on longer, right? And so like if we can make more water using some alternative system or, you know, source water using some better system,

then you should be able to do that. Now, here's a fundamental philosophy about humans. You know, the Buddhists call it DACA. It's desire. Humans have desire as the root of our kind of motivation as a species, right? It's what's made us so successful. Desire is not about an absolute condition. It's about wanting, wanting, wanting more always.

And so, you know, again, this book I mentioned, Happiness Hypothesis has a study in it, which has been challenged, but is really interesting, which shows that the more income humans make, or a typical person in the United States, the happier they are up until they make about 60 grand a year. Thereafter, income is no longer a predictor of happiness. You know what's the biggest predictor of happiness? you're changing income. So how much your income goes up from one year to the next. Suddenly, if you win the lottery, you're thrilled. Fast forward two years, you're burning through your cash, you're going to be pretty unhappy no matter what kind of yacht you're sitting on. It's like the hedonic treadmill, right? It's exactly right. So evolutionary biologists,

psychologists, even some of these religious Dharma lectures from the Buddhists speak to the same point, which is that humans really are motivated by this principle. So how does that principle play out over the last 10,000 years. Well, it's played out in this non-linear trend in consumption. So every human is only happy this year if they eat and consume more than they did last year. And when I say eat, I just mean like in terms of consumables, things that we have in our lives. And so you play this out over 10,000 years and you actually end up with this geometric increase in consumption as a species and this geometric increase in production as a species, which arises

from producing, you know, using energy. And that is what we need to solve. You can't just say, hey, stop. All people stop. What we need to do is figure out how to meet the trend line using better technology that uses less resources. And we have to do that. You had an amazing quote. I think it's on your website and kind of one of the foundational pieces that said,

over the past 500 years, the human race has seen our global population increase 14x, while our consumption has grown by 115x, and our production has increased by 240x. I thought that that was such a powerful statement of what you just said. Yeah, it's something that folks have talked about. So look, this is the point about sustainability. You can't just tell people, and think about this. By the end of this century, 90% of the world's population will live in China, Southeast Asia, and Africa. 90%.

That population, those populations are coming up the income curve. Right. So even in China, I think GDP per capita is increased by 7x over the last. last couple decades. It's extraordinary. As that population moves up that income curve, they're not trying to consume less. They're trying to consume more. So you can't see a world shift from people that are mostly impoverished to people that are now mostly able to sustain themselves and ask them to consume less. The driving motivating force of our species is to consume more. And so as we seek to consume more, we have to give those people, we have to give the world

all the things they want, all the cars, all the experiences, all the food, all the protein, whatever it is that they want, we just have to figure out how to make it better. Before we get into, sorry, go ahead, Greg. Yeah, could you, I mean, so your base assumption, and just help me understand this, your base assumption is that we can come up with the technology to consume more sustainably and better. Well, I want to believe that's true because I love consuming. But can you explain what makes you so sure in that? So on a first principles basis, we can look at, for example, all of these systems and assess the energy and resource needs to produce the things coming out of these systems.

So take animal protein as an example, right? So cows, beef. There's about 30 times. Actually, let me just speak to the whole animal system. The whole animal system to make all the animal proteins that we as a species consume requires roughly 30 times the energy going into that system as the energy coming out of that system. Okay, what is it? What are we making?

Well, we're making these proteins. These proteins are definable, right? So first principles assessment, we can look at what these proteins are. We know how to make them. We know how DNA makes them, right? We can code for those proteins using DNA. and then we just have to find a better way to make those proteins using that same DNA sequence. And so today, there are incredible technologies that are emerging in being able to produce those

proteins using what are called recombinant DNA systems. So you take the DNA of the chicken or the cow or the fish and you can put it in the yeast cell. And the yeast cell, you put in a fermenter tank like you make beer or wine. You put sugar stock in the fermenter tank and the yeast cell eats the sugar and it spits out the animal protein. take that animal protein and you can turn it into ground beef, you can turn it into chicken, you can turn it into milk, eggs, whatever. That's a very simple naive explanation. It's a little more complicated than that.

But that's generally a principle that we have the technology to do that today. There's a lot of engineering stuff we've got to get over to make it work at scale, which there's about 150 companies doing today, but they're going to succeed. And as a result, we're going to be able to replace all of animal agriculture this century. And by doing that, the energy efficiency of that yeast cell, the amount of sugar it requires. And if you look at all the total carbon footprint and everything that goes into making that that protein using the yeast cell, it's about one and a half times the energy that you consume.

So suddenly we went from 30x energy consumption to one and a half X energy consumption. That's just one slice of the pie. And we can go all the way around the pie and talk about all the things that humans make that are totally inefficient and crazy and talk about the tools that humans have to make them differently and better. And it's extraordinary. And that's really why I'm so excited and so optimistic. I'm not like, oh my God, the world is over.

And it's not just me. I'm not going to be the person that's going to solve these problems. There's like a whole group of entrepreneurs that have this market-based, you know, incentive to go and solve these problems. And it's happening all around us. We've also just done it over and over and over again throughout history, humanity. I mean, I think back to like learning about Thomas Malthus, right, like who kind of hypothesized that there was a fundamental limit to the global population. and he kind of had a number associated with it. And we've proven over and over again that we had ways.

You know, like Norman Borlaug came along with the Green Revolution and fundamentally changing the way that we produced crops, which, you know, some people think saved a billion lives. And now there's a lot of questions about, you know, sustainability and non-GMO, etc. But an amazing, an amazing thing and an amazing innovation. So I also just look to, prior success is not a guarantee of future success, but there's certainly something to the fact that we as a species have, have been able to do this over and over again throughout history.

Totally agree. I mean, there's a great book, if anyone's interested, called The Alchemy of Air. I don't know if I never mentioned it, but, you know, it's about the Haber-Bosch process that was, you know, the book opens up with this great anecdote. You know, humans, the reason our population swelled in the 17th, 18th, 19th century is because farming, you know, the kind of agriculture, industrialization of agriculture took hold And the way that worked is humans started to apply fertilizer onto crops, onto farms, fields, and the plants grew bigger. We got a greater yield per acre.

We got more food when we applied fertilizer. And the reason is fertilizer has potassium, phosphorus, and primarily nitrogen, which are key elements in producing plants, producing life. And the way we got all the fertilizer is off of these guano fields off the coast of chicken. Chile. And so, you know, there were these clipper ships, and this was the biggest industry in the world for a while, that went down there, scraped all the bat poop off of, and the bird poop off of these rocks, brought it back to Europe, and then we grew crops and said the population, the population swelled. Well, guess what? Eventually, you run out of poop. And so we were running out of poop, and there was this big challenge, which was a forecast that was made that showed, if we actually

run out of poop when we think we're going to run out of poop to fertilize all the crops, the whole planet is going to starve to death and we're all going to die. And these German physicists, chemists, figured out that you could take 70% of the atmosphere is nitrogen. And so it's a gas and it's N2. So it's really hard to break a nitrogen bond when two nitrogens are stuck together like that. And these guys figured out that if they could compress nitrogen gas to 200 times atmospheric pressure,

run it over an iron catalyst and zap it with electricity, would break the nitrogen bond. nitrogen would then stick to hydrogen and you'd end up making ammonia. And they basically synthesized ammonia. Today, synthesizing ammonia accounts for somewhere between 3 and 6% of global electricity. And all of the food that all of us eat is fertilized with synthetic ammonia. And that saved the planet. And it was just a stroke of engineering ingenuity that enabled that outcome. By the way, I wouldn't say it was just a stroke of engineering ingenuity.

ingenuity because much like the Wright brothers and Thomas Edison, it was an iterative engineering project. It was all about trying and editing experiments over and over hundreds and hundreds of attempts to eventually figure out how to synthesize nitrogen ammonia. And that outcome saved the planet. And there are many examples like that. And I think, you know, we're going to see a lot of them essentially. It's a remarkable, that was a remarkable story. I love that. I've never heard that. I need to go, I need to go do some research on it now. But I think it also brings us to, you know, one of the main topics that we want to talk about with you, which is Kana and this new big swing that you are a part of and helping to build. And can you just talk maybe at the start of it

about why the beverage industry grabbed you? Like what about it? What features of it made you think this was a pressing big problem to solve? And, you know, that'll, I think, lead us into talking about the solution that you guys have developed. Yeah. So just by way of background, as I mentioned before, you know, the production board, we operate as this boundary. So, you know, we're a holding company, meaning, you know, we hold interest in a lot of different businesses. We're not a fund. We don't earn management fees or have carried interest. We basically have a bunch of capital in our balance sheet from our investors and we get to use that capital to, you know, run research experiments, try stuff.

If it works, awesome, let's build a company. And then as we build the company, we eventually scale it up and other investors might come into the company with us. So that's kind of how we operate. So as I mentioned before, part of what I spend my time doing and our team spends a lot of time doing is understanding emerging science and then thinking about applications of that science. So on a completely unrelated topic, I was actually meeting with a professor to talk to him

about microbiome research over dinner. And so, you know, we're really interested in kind of the microbiome of the gut and soil. And that's a whole other conversation we can talk about in the future. But is that how you learn when you say, like earlier you said you love to just think about big problems and learn and you're intellectually curious. Do you do most of that by seeking out and getting together with amazing future thinking people or is it more reading or is it kind of a combination of the of all of the above? A lot of reading. So, you know, I subscribe to a lot of science journals like nature and science and all of the related publications and just follow interesting people on Twitter.

And then I go down tangents, you know, like someone posts something interesting and then I go read about it. And so, yeah, I would say number one is probably scientific journals. Number two is insights from interesting people over social media. Number three is reading a lot of books. And number four is meeting with people. So I try and do dinners with scientists. and, you know, we catch up with smart people.

We have tech talks in our office, that kind of stuff. Very cool. Very cool. Sorry, I cut you off. And encouraging for people listening because number four is actually physical, like, getting together and access to people. And the first three are anyone could do. Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. And, no, and so there's nothing special about access I have, by the way. Like, I literally have the Internet, and so does everyone else. So, you know, learning is your own mission. And so, yeah, I was having dinner with this professor, and he was like, we were talking, we were at, I think we were at Tartan in San Francisco, and he was telling me, like, we were talking about the food and why it was so good. And he was telling me about this research scientist in Germany who basically took a bottle of wine.

And he was trying to, he's a flavor scientist, and he was trying to figure out, what are the molecules that make the wine taste the way it does? And if you take a wine, it's 88% water. It's about 12% ethanol, which is the alcohol. And less than 1% is all of the molecules that make up all the odor, color, flavor, and mouthfeel. Right? It's insane. Just 1%.

And the same is true for every beverage. OJ, soda, beer. They're all water, a tiny little bit of ethanol with sugar. And then less than 1% is the stuff that makes it taste, smell, look, and feel the way it does. So that 1%, the scientist took the wine, and he ran analytical chemistry on it, and he showed that there was about 500 individual molecules in that wine that made up the flavor. And he started taking those molecules out and then putting them back in one at a time and getting consumers to taste the wine and see if they could tell the difference.

And he was able to reduce the wine down to just a few dozen compounds. And then he did it with another wine and another wine. And he kept showing that, like, you don't need hundreds of compounds to synthesize the wine. You just need a few dozen. And he published on this. So I was like, that's super interesting because if you could really, and then the other, the big breakthrough kind of that he pointed out was that the same compounds show up over and over again. So theoretically, with less than 100 chemical compounds, you could recreate OJ, wine,

you know, tea, coffee, all these different complicated beverages. That's an incredible kind of point of view. So immediately I said to the guy dinner, I'm like, why do we make the Star Trek replicator? Like, this would be so sick. Like, we could just take those compounds and put them in a machine and you can just make whatever you want. And so that was kind of a genesis. Now, you know, this is not as easy as it sounds because we've spent three years in over $30 million. And, you know, we haven't yet launched the product.

It doesn't sound easy for what it's worth. Yeah, but in principle, it was an easy statement to make. You know, why do we just get the Star Trek replicator? But ultimately, it required actually running an R&D cycle. So there was a guy named Lance Kaiser, who's our chief scientist at Kana. And Lance previously worked at Amaris and Ripple Foods. And so he's a flavor chemist. And so we started running these experiments with Lance where we started trying to make wines and make beverages in-house using just the raw chemistry.

So we would take water. We would take ethanol. And then we would take the flavor compounds, all of which, by the way, are commercially available. They're all food grade. you can buy them. In fact, people don't realize this, but most of the commercial wine you buy today is actually flavored. It's not just the grapes. So everyone from Constellation Brands to Gallo, they take grapes, they turn it into ethanol and water and flavor, and then they add other flavors to make it taste really good. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So there's a whole world of

flavor chemistry that exists, and nearly every beverage you drink has some amount of flavor compounds added to it. So there's a whole world of the stuff. So we can just buy all these chemicals. We buy these, these, what we call ingredients, and we started combining them with water and ethanol. And we basically recreated a bunch of different wines and we're like, holy crap, this can actually work. Separately, we had an hardware engineering exercise, which is how do you make effectively an inch chip printer for beverages? And so what's the dispense system? How do you get it down to sub-microliter volume? Because again, when you're talking about 1% of a beverage being the flavor compounds, and you have 60 different compounds going in, you have to dispense the tiniest fraction

of a milliliter to be able to make sure that the flavor is not overdone or underdone. And so getting precision control, being able to do it quickly, and being able to do it with lots of different viscosity of different compounds. This was all a hardware engineering track. So we did a lot of research on that. We did a lot of research on the chemistry. And then we started scanning. We scanned thousands of different beverages.

So we analytically break down what are the components of most beverages, and then use that to recreate using heuristics. our formula of what is the right dozen compounds of three dozen or four dozen, what's the right formula to recreate that flavor. And that's how we create our flavor library and our beverage library. So that's what we've been working on in Canada for the last couple of years. And we've now got, you know, we've done multiple iterations on a full hardware prototype of a device that goes on the kitchen countertop. And a big part of this is, again, going back to my principle I spoke about earlier, you can't take things away from consumers. You have to give them more. And so part of our principle is,

How do we make it cheaper than what you buy at the store and tastier and a better experience? And so the product development cycle on top of all that is trying to solve those key problems, right? Like, what's the supply chain going to look like? How are we going to make the cartridges? How are we going to get them to your home? How are we going to make sure this all works out economically? How do we charge you some that it's cheaper? And how do we make it incredibly awesome?

And so that's a lot of the basis for Canada. This is a fight, by the way, like that last point you made about it actually having to be significantly better than the alternatives for consumers in order for it to proliferate in the way that you want. It's a debate that I have constantly with Greg on this show and outside of the show via text about the whole web two versus web three world where my perspective on it is that the web three technologies and platforms actually have to be fundamentally significantly better than the web two alternatives in order to actually see any sort of material shift in the long run. So the way that you set it there as it relates to this hardware and technological innovation

makes a lot of sense to me. Just on the climate impact of something like this, you had some interesting stats in the article in your kind of medium post when you released it or announced it around the impact that something like this could have. And I think you said there's 60 liters of water required to irrigate an orange tree to make a single bottle of orange juice, 600 liters of water to grow the grapes to make a single bottle of wine. Can you just talk a little bit about what impact you think this has? And you talk a lot about decentralized manufacturing. talk a little bit about that as well. Yeah, sorry, that was your question. I went down as very weird tangent.

I like the same. The origin story. But look, the bottled beverage industry is friggin insane. If you think about it, okay? It's so messed up. If you were to land on Earth today and look at what humans are doing to, like, create beverages that we consume, you'd be like, what the hell is wrong with these people? And it's really a remnant of the Industrial Revolution.

So consumers on Earth spend $2.3 trillion. on bottled and canned beverages a year. Okay, $2.3 trillion. We consume something on the order of a hundred billion plastic, glass, cans, more than $100 billion. It's really hard to track all this stuff every year, most of which, 95% of which ends up in landfill. Okay. It's about half a billion tons of CO2 being put in the atmosphere every year because think about what you're doing. You're taking a bunch of water. You're putting it on a plant. to grow what is mostly water. An orange is 93% water, less than 7% sugar, and less than 1% is all the chemicals that make the flavor, color, odor, mouth feel, and nutrients of that orange. So we're using

a bunch of water to reduce it down to make a little bit of water. Then we use carbon dioxide machines to squeeze that stuff, put it in, make plastic and glass and canned containers. And then we put what is mostly water, 93% water on a truck, and then we use carbon dioxide to move that water around to a warehouse, more carbon dioxide to move it to a store, more carbon dioxide for you to go get it from the store and put it in your kitchen, more carbon dioxide to keep it cold in your fridge, and then you throw this plastic or glass or can in the trash, mostly ending up in the landfill. So the whole system is bonkers. Like we're wasting water to make water. We're burning CO2 to move water around, and every home in the industrialized world has a line of water. So if all beverages

are mostly water, and all we need is just that one percent of the components that, you know, kind of change the water into any other beverage, let's just solve that problem that way. Like we've already got the water pumped into our homes. We don't need to have this insane system of growing plants. We spend about 120 million acres of farmland a year to grow the, you know, fruits and stuff that we convert into beverages. And it's something. something on the order, I don't even know how accurate this is, but something on the order of 500 trillion liters of water a year being pumped around to make these beverages and to make the plants that make these beverages. So the whole system is crazy and it's two and a half

trillion dollars to spend a year. We could save people money. We could save CO2. We could make it tastier. We could make it personalized. Now think about this. Every supermarket, every store you walk into, there's only so much shelf space. Right? There's like a space. There's like a based for 150 brands, let's say, of juice, soda, coffee, tea, wine, and beer. 150 brands is nothing. You guys remember when we would watch, like, you know, I don't know how old you guys are, but like, you know, NBC on Thursday night was like network television. It was like, there was like two slots.

And everyone would watch 80% of media consumption was those two slots. And then, you know, cable came along and suddenly there was like more slots. And nowadays we have YouTube and TikTok. And, you know, most of what's consumed, 99.9.9.9. percent of what's consumed every day is that long tail of content. It's not created by the two content producers on those two slots. So if you move away from the retail store model and you no longer have 150 slots, but you have the ability to have infinite slots because the beverages can now be printed dynamically and they're all digital, now you have an infinite variety of beverages. Everyone can get a

beverage that tastes better to them. And no two people love the same beverages. So, you know, What's happened in the beverage industry over the last hundred years is really what I think we would argue is the lowest common denominator of flavoring and branding. So what is Coca-Cola and Pepsi? It's just a nameless, faceless brand. It means nothing to you. It means nothing to me. And the flavor of Coca-Cola and Pepsi has been designed to appeal to the largest number of

people possible. But that doesn't mean that it's the most appealing beverage to any individual. If you were to get your own bartender, he would make you a drink that would taste a lot better than a Coca-Cola. And so think about it that way. Like when you have the ability to print, when you have the ability to be dynamic in terms of what a beverage can be, you can find a drink that's better for you, more tasty to you than anything you can find on the store shelves because there's only 150 options there. And you can find brands that actually matter to you that actually appeal to you.

And theoretically, you could personalize it. You can add sugar, add alcohol, add vitamins, add caffeine, take stuff away, and make it your way, which is exactly what Starbucks does. And it's so successful. Everyone gets it their way. So the other thing that's interesting to us is I think we want to kind of blow up the landscape for brands and beverages because branding today is like a hundred, you know, it costs like $3 million to start up a beverage brand. You know, you've got to come up with the packaging, logos, you got to print the packaging, you got to make the beverage, you got to fill up the packages with co-packers. Then you got to go find stores to carry it for you on that 150 slots. You got to convince them to put it in one of their slots and then you got to market the consumers to go into the store to get it.

That's crazy. What if Sahil had his own beverage brand that he could create, cost him nothing to make, the logo is digital, the formula is digital, and you promote it on social media and you put it on Kana, and now anyone that buys it, you get rev share on that. It costs you nothing to make it. And your red share will probably be greater than the revenue share you would make from selling those beverages on the store shelves. It's like ghost kitchens, but for brands. You can just immediately go start something up like this.

Like when Mr. Bees did the thing with his burgers and you could have, you know, ghost kitchens all around the country, like whatever, Travis Kalanick's got Cloud Kitchen. It's like doing that, but in the home. So you immediately are in the most important place, and you have shelf space in the most important place in these people's lives. That's a really, really cool concept. I hadn't appreciated that from the article. It makes a lot of sense.

I don't think that there is, you know, like maybe there's 100 brands that make up 99% of beverage sales in any category today. I think in the future, hopefully it's 100,000 brands. and any individual can find a perfect brand for them. Like imagine if your favorite anime character is a brand, right? You would choose that anime character over Coca-Cola. I mean, what the heck is Coca-Cola? Or your favorite athlete, you know, maybe like the bench player, you know,

someone you play baseball with, right, is a brand. And that's something that appeals to you more personally than, you know, whoever's on the Wheaties box this week. So I do think that there's an opportunity to find better one-to-one matching with consumers, and for consumers to find stuff that matters more to them than what's available in the brand landscape today. And so by moving this model from centralized production to decentralized production, you enable and do it just in time, you know, and digitize it all, you enable this proliferation

of branding that totally transforms the landscape. So what do you think, you know, James Quincy, he's the CEO of Coca-Cola. I hope he's listening. I don't know if he's listening to this. but if he's listening to hearing me speak, what do you think is going through his mind? Well, look, when incumbents face technology threats, they often discount the effect it will have on their incumbency,

and they're right. Because more often than not, technology adoption is kind of on an exponential curve. It looks very, very flat for a very long period of time. Slow and then all at once. And then all at once. And that acceleration is when they get hit upside the head. And so they are right for years. Everyone was right about Tesla for years. And then all of a sudden they were really, really wrong. And I think this is, this was true with Apple's, when Apple came out with the personal computer. And, you know, their adoption cycle was such that it took them a couple generations before they were really able to get production up.

you know, this is always going to be true with all technology. It's the incumbents, first of all, it's a little bit hard to grok. Their whole existence, their place of being, no one ever likes to be told that, you know, your existence doesn't make sense anymore. And so I think that there will be, you know, for a long period of time, and they will be right for a long period of time. This will not move the needle. And then all of a sudden it will. Have you heard of Dornbush's law, Dave?

No. Dornbush's law. says that it was originally around currency crises, but it applies to this exactly, which is these changes take much longer to happen than anybody thinks, but then when they happen, they happen much faster than you ever thought possible. Yeah, right, exactly. And that's exactly how I feel about these type of transformative tech. Yeah, and look at what media companies kind of said about, you know, Netflix and YouTube,

and, you know, it's like all of a sudden, you know, they command, like, I mean, YouTube, I think does more revenue now than all the, you know, production companies combined or something. It's insanity. And same with Netflix. I mean, you know, and everyone pooh-pooed the quality of the content on YouTube. Everyone said Netflix is just you using second-rate stuff. I mean, there's always a rationalization why the existential threat against you can be kind

of dismissed. There's always options for dismissal. And you know what? In five years, whoever's running that big company, they're going to be retired and they're going to be wealthy and they're going to be happy and they're going to be hanging out with their grandkids. They don't have this motivating force to defend and protect. Founders don't sit at the helm of big 150-year-old companies. And as a result, their incentive is really to keep the trains on time. They're not to kind of jump the train onto another track, which is a whole other project.

You know, you can look at how disruptive it looks like Mark Zuckerberg is at running, you know, Facebook today. But, you know, I think he sees the threat. He sees the risk to his core business. and he's able to make the change, and he's not ignoring it. But, you know, incumbents generally that are not run by folks that started the business and can kind of have authority over that. Their job is to serve the shareholders, keep the dividends flowing, et cetera. It's why the Icarus paradox applies so closely to these big incumbents. Like what made them successful for a long period of time actually ends up being their ultimate demise

as they're unable to see these things coming. I want to ask you two questions. So one, on Canna, when can we buy one? When can I get one of these in my house? And then I want to ask you on a separate thread. So let's start there. Yeah, so the first 10,000 devices will be sold for $499. The pre-orders begin March 3rd for $99.

And so you can place a $99 deposit, refundable, if for whatever reason we don't ship the devices or things blow up and it doesn't work, you get your money back. But, you know, hold your place in line. we are working on our production cycle right now. So the plan is to ship these in early 2023. So it's a long time away for me. It might be a short time away for others, but that's the current plan.

And then when you get the device, there's a cartridge system. Cartridges are delivered automatically. So it's a per-dra pricing model. You don't pay for the cartridges. They show up at your doorstep automatically as you're running low. the machine knows, the device is connected.

And so depending on what you consume through the device, you're charged a variable each month. And so the prices range from, you know, 29 cents for things like sparkling water or soda water or what have you, up to $2.99 depending on the beverage at your purchase, which is like a nice cocktail or something. Okay, so it's cana.com for anyone out there listening. I will certainly be pre-ordering one of these on March 3rd.

Yeah, C-A-N-A. Yeah, C-A-N-A.com. I have to ask you before we lose you here about another interesting future-thinking technology that you've written about recently. You wrote an epic thread that started the greatest source of value in wealth creation in the 22nd century could be driven by terrestrial nucleosynthesis. This is a topic that, well, first off, you're going to need to explain it to me like I'm five, but this is a topic that I've talked about recently with Josh Wolf, who I imagine you've come

across or no at Lux Capital, just on the need for a branding change around, you know, nuclear technology and nuclear energy and how it's gotten caught up in people's minds, you know, with like Hiroshima, nuclear war, et cetera. Can you talk a little bit about this and what, where you view the future of it going and how, how and why it's going to be so transformative? Yeah, so this is a, this is an extension of a technology that's, that's in development in my view. So there's a couple of points you made, just look at our time here. Okay, so all electricity on Earth today is made by, you know, spinning turbines. And so you heat water up and you use that to kind of spin these turbines, except for solar, right, where we use photovoltaic cells to create an electric current.

And so, you know, nuclear technologies, instead of creating that heat from a, you know, system of burning something like oil or coal or natural gas, you create the heat through the kind of reaction on an atomic scale, nuclear reactions. So nuclear energy, as it's termed today, primarily refers to nuclear fission. And so if you take very heavy elements, right, so if you guys remember physics or chemistry, hydrogen is one proton, it's got one electron spinning around it, helium is two protons, it's got some electrons spinning around it, and so on. Plutonium is this very heavy. It's got 100 plus protons, a bunch of neutrons, and these heavier elements are unstable.

When they smash into each other, they can actually form smaller elements and release energy in the process. And so if you get enough of them together close enough, that creates a chain reaction, and that chain reaction is the nuclear bomb that we all know the technology from used in 1945. So nuclear fission or nuclear reactors use these uranium and plutonium power sources where they actually control the breakdown of uranium and plutonium into lighter elements, control the energy that's released, and then use that heat to create water. And the magic of nuclear energy is you can use a very small amount of material, to create an incredible amount of heat for many, many years

using just one rod, that rod can last for years and years and years, and create enough heat to power a small city. It's an incredible technology. The danger being that these are radioactive materials, meaning if they get into the environment, if they escape, they can cause widespread damage as we saw with Fukushima. So now let's talk about another technology. So that's an interesting technology.

It's really powerful. The other technology is what's called nuclear fusion. nuclear fusion is what goes on in the sun. And so when you get enough small atoms together, like hydrogen, and you squeeze hydrogen close together, it actually starts to form helium by all those hydrogen atoms smashing into each other. And if they smash into each other at a fast enough rate with enough density, they fuse into helium. That's fusion. And they release energy as well in the process. So while they might form helium, they also release some energy.

and that energy can be harnessed in different ways. And that is what our sun is. Our sun is burning primarily hydrogen into helium. And over time, stars all over the universe burn hydrogen into helium through this fusion process. And by the way, the way they get so close together, all these hydrogen atoms, is through a very powerful force called gravity. So if you get enough hydrogen together, starts to coalesce,

coales, and eventually collapses and it gets so tight that it fuses. And that's the magic of stars and the magic of physics in our universe. And so helium actually can burn it to bigger elements and so on. So again, as these elements start to fuse, they release heat, they release light. So what we're trying to do with plasma fusion systems on planet Earth is to recreate those conditions on the sun, is to basically take hydrogen plasma and get those atoms, those protons to smash into each other. And in the process, release heat, release energy, capture that heat and energy, convert it into electricity, and use it as a fuel source.

And the magic of this is there's no radioactive materials involved. But the challenge is how do you squeeze the hydrogen down to a tight enough density and make it go fast enough, make it energetic enough, that you trigger that fusion reaction and get it to sustain itself. And so the current state of the art is what's called Pocomac system. Pocomac are these donut-shaped systems. And inside that donut, you've got a bunch of magnets on the walls of the donut. And the magnets are designed to keep all the hydrogen together,

in a close enough little circle, and you pump energy into it, and you get this plasma to spin, spin, spin, spin, spin. And if you get it tight enough, boom, it fuses, energy comes out. That's the simple statement of what is probably the most complex thing humans have ever tried to do. There's a big research program in Europe called ITARE. They're spending about $60 billion trying to make the first demonstration system of plasma fusion.

Now, what makes plasma fusion so amazing and miraculous, if we can do it, if it works, it will produce more energy than is put in to start the fusion. There's no radioactive materials, and it uses hydrogen as a fuel source. Hydrogen is everywhere. It costs nothing. So we can literally pull water out of the ocean, pump it into a fusion system, and create energy, create electricity that humans can use. That's the promise of fusion.

And it's decades away, but it's been decades away for decades. Every year, there are these amazing breakthroughs, and we've had a series of breakthroughs over the last year. I won't detail them all now. but we're clearly making progress. Now, what I was highlighting is if you really extrapolate out, and I was saying, like, think non-linearly now, let's say we've got infinite energy and let's say we've got this ability to actually control plasma,

there's a combination of things that you can do that can unlock potential for us on this planet that I think we're constrained by today. So we talked earlier about fertilizer. We're going to do this full circle now. Wind it full back, yeah. So one of the inputs in fertilizer, there's nitrogen, which we talked about. There's also potassium and phosphorus.

Phosphorus is mined out of the ground. There's only so much phosphorus on this earth. All phosphorus is made in the explosion of stars billions of years ago. That's where all the phosphorus on planet Earth came from. It wasn't made here. It wasn't even made in our sun. It was made in other stars billions of years ago, billions of years before our solar system even formed. And some of that phosphorus found its way into the area of our solar system.

Some of it found its way into the rock that became Earth, into the molten rock, and some of it's in our crust of our planet. And so all that phosphorus, every strand of DNA uses phosphorus. So without phosphorus, life doesn't exist on Earth. So we need phosphorus to grow plants and to eat and all this stuff. We're going to run out of phosphorus in about 100 years. That's how much we're mining out of the ground and how little there is left. How will the hell are we going to get phosphorus?

Well, we're going to have to come up with some solution to recycle it. But generally speaking, there's a whole bunch of these heavier elements. you know, heavier elements being things heavier than call it iron, that are really hard to just make, that are impossible to make, that we just have to find and then mine and then use. Lithium, which is what we're using to make all of our batteries, right? Like I mentioned, phosphorus,

some of the heavier elements that are really called rare earth metals that are used in battery technology and semiconductor systems and superconductor systems, we're going to have to figure out how to get more of this stuff in the future. If you have infinite energy, you can do what stars do in the end of their life and during a supernova, which is to actually pound a ton of neutrons into a heavier element. And when those neutrons hit that atom, they basically, there's an interesting kind of physical reaction that takes place. They get converted into protons and a bunch of energy is released.

And that is such an energy-intensive process. It only happens in the few seconds when a star exists. explodes. All phosphorus is made when a star explodes. So it's not even made in the star. It's only made in the moment it explodes. That's how much energy it takes to make phosphorus and just jam all of those neutrons in there. So theoretically, there are systems now where we use petawatt lasers. These are lasers that are like, you know, quadrillions of watts. We turn them on for a picosecond and they pump plasma, shoot a bunch of neutrons into an atom and convert that atom using the same nuclear synthesis system that happens in supernova. And we're,

doing that in labs today on Earth. There's about five or six labs that do that. The challenge they face is it takes so much energy to do this. It takes so much power. When you combine the unleashed energy potential of plasma fusion systems with the theoretical laboratory scale potential of nuclear synthesis that we see in labs today, and you fast forward 150 years, I think it's theoretically feasible on a first principles basis that we could see nucleosynthesis becoming an industrial process on Earth. The math pencils out. It's going to to take a lot of material that you convert into energy that you then use to drive neutrons into atoms to make stuff, but it's going to be possible. And I think it's just such a profound

way to think about our place in the universe. Not only will be editing genomes and changing life forms on Earth today, we could theoretically be engineering individual atoms and changing the elemental composition of our local area of space. And, you know, the human ingenuity and the tools we have could allow us to just take this chunk of molecules we have sitting around us and we call planet earth and convert it into anything the heck we want right we are on a spaceship and we can make that spaceship our own holodeck and you know that's like the couple year couple hundred year kind of principle of where i think these technologies take us of unlimited energy and all this capacity to engineer things absolutely incredible we've taken up enough of your time i know

you've got to run this was amazing i feel like i owe you money for coming on because i just got like an unbelievable science, technology, futuristic masterclass over the last hour. So thank you so much. I'm going to fly out to California and buy you a dinner to continue this. Just buy a Kana device. Tell your family to buy a Kana device. There's pre-orders on Kana.com, March 3rd. We will all do that. So Kana.com, Kana, Kna.com. Kna.com. Dave, thank you so much for joining. And everyone can tune into the All-In podcast as well, where you are one of the co-host, which we all love. So thank you so much. This was amazing. Thanks for having me.

podcast, I guess anything is possible because that's definitely the vibe when you talk to you. Holy shit. That was a crazy conversation. That was definitely one of those. I can't believe I get to do this as a job or for a living type conversations. What do you think? Well, first, okay, so here's my like unedited, raw kind of opinion. So basically, if I understand this, he's created.

this thing called Ticana that basically can make any beverage through a combination of chemical, you know, chemicals. It sounds like one of those things that's too good to be true, that it could taste as good as like any beverage possible and then it instantaneously can create it. I'm like that's what the skeptic of me says. So we'll see, right? How do you think about that? Well, how do you think about that relative to like, beyond meat, impossible, who were saying they can do these things, you know, to reproduce molecularly something that tastes like meat and they're, you know, high-flying big companies now? I mean, I was skeptical.

Yeah. I just need to, I think, I do think that they had, you know, that was a huge task at hand. It's like, how do you recreate meat with just, you know, non-meat? How do you create a... That didn't require doing it in a house. That's the other thing that's so hard here is like they're saying decentralized. right like they're going to put one of these in your house and you're going to be able to do it with just water and then these little you know capsules yeah so i think like i'm a i'm a believer in tech technological change so i'm default an optimist but i do think that when i hear something like this i'm like well yeah that sounds amazing like sign me up um take my ninety nine dollars but like you know jury is out so or jury isn't out sorry um i'm interested to see so that's that's one that's one big sort of thing. The other thing is, I don't know if I feel dumber or, like, I don't know if I feel

like dumb after listening to him talk about nuclear fission for an astrophysics. Like, I don't know if I'm like living my life wrong. Like, you know, like, I feel like I haven't heard the word phosphorus since I've been in eighth grade. And maybe I've been living under a rock. But I think that, like, that was really cool because I, you know, I did learn a lot. I feel smarter, but I also feel really dumb when it comes to a lot of these big problems that he's solving. Yeah. So I have a few, I have a few reactions. I guess my first reaction is I fucking love, Dave.

I thought he was amazing. Some of the stories he told from, you know, his experience or how he wound around to different things he's done. I mean, he founded Metro Mile. Like, he's founded all these different things. He's like the Kinawa King. all of this different stuff he's done, but he's very personable and the fact that he can kind of

Feynman technique things. Like he's explaining a lot of this stuff to us like we're five. And I think in a lot of these areas, we are basically five. Like when he got onto the nuclear. I mean, I preface it by saying

like he's obviously super smart and extremely smart and one of the smartest people I've ever spoken to in my life. But I don't like, when he was explaining nuclear fission, like I would never, it's impossible to explain nuclear fission basically to a five-year-old.

Like, I didn't totally get it. So if you're listening to this and you didn't totally get it, it's okay. I disagree. I don't know. I think I understood that more than I understand most people that try to explain Web3 and like hand wave a bunch around Web3 stuff. And that's not to say either one is like going to work or not going to work. But when he was explaining it, I mean, he literally explained it in the span of like three minutes.

So I want to also give him credit. for the fact that, like, he tried to squeeze that in before the end because I asked the question, really late. But I thought he broke it down in a way that was, like, much more understandable than what you would get from, you know, an astrophysicist that you just ask on the street about this stuff. I'm not saying that he didn't do a great job of explaining. I'm saying that, you know, maybe the five-year-old Sahou Bloom was smarter than five-year-old Greg Eisenberg.

But, you know, I think it's okay if you're listening to this and you didn't quite get it. I think it's like it's what what level did you get it on, right? Like I'm not going to go start this company or like really, you know, go read a research paper and understand every term. But like the general concept of what he's breaking down or trying to get across, I think you can like understand on an intellectual baseline level after listening to him talk, which is, that's more my barometer. Like Einstein explaining relative relativity to me, I'm not going to understand and go be able to go do the formulas and the math. But do I understand the general concept around it? Like what he's getting at with that last piece is if you remove the constraint of energy, which has historically

been a constraint because there's never existed technologies to make energy truly abundant, if you remove that as a constraint, you unlock unbelievable nonlinear potential with all of these other things in the world. And he was giving the example of phosphorus, which maybe is over all of our heads, but there's a million examples of things where when something has historically been a constraint, you remove it through some amazing technological innovation, like what he's talking about with nuclear technology he's talking about. There's amazing, amazing nonlinear potential. So I thought the broader idea and the ethos behind it was amazing. I also just, I fucking love optimists. And so like his techno optimism and like the can-do attitude around solving massive

problems, whether or not it ends up happening in my lifetime is a separate question. But I can't help but come away from something like that with just like an amazing feeling about what the future looks like yeah i mean he i asked him i think i asked him a couple tough questions you know um and i think you know the biggest question i have is this sounds really perfect and i hope you're right but actually not bud like i hope you're right that that's what my big takeaway you ask me what my takeaway is my takeaway is i hope he's right and i'm glad that he's working on this i thought your skepticism and some of the questions were were great i usually play the skeptic on this show when there's things coming up around web three that sound extremely optimistic or

future thinking and so i thought it was really interesting to hear the questions you asked and and especially around you know some of the hardware questions of like actually going and doing this and the timeline for actually making it real and taste the same. I also think there's an interesting question around like, do people care about the provenance of beverage? Like wine, right? People care about the label of the wine. People care about the winery, the vineyard, the story of where it came from.

Like you can go, I always saw it with NFTs. You can go replicate the Mona Lisa down to the molecular level. It can be exactly identical to the Mona Lisa, but it's not the fucking Mona Lisa. and it's never going to be worth the same as the Mona Lisa, even though it is molecularly identical to it because there's provenance, and that matters. And we've talked about it with art and with the NFT world and why an NFT is worth something. And so I think about that in the case of wine as an example here,

of like, is there enough that people care about the provenance of their wine that people will have an apprehension around it? With beverages that are more commoditized, like an orange juice or, you know, coffee, I actually think people do care about the provenance, but with things, you know, that are more commoditized, could I see something like this working and being a big part of a household? Sure. Could I see it in the next, you know, two years, probably not. 10? Yeah, I personally could. I mean, I would use this. I'm going to go pre-order one when it comes out. But I thought it was fascinating, man. I just like, I really came away just saying like,

holy shit, I can't believe I just got to have that conversation for a job. Totally. Yeah. I also think it's just like additional inspiration to work on. harder problems and work on sustainability and try to incorporate a lot of this thinking into the stuff we've built you also brought up I would just close with this you brought up one of the most important points from the whole episode which was a micro point and I think I want to reiterate it because I don't want it to go unnoticed when when I asked him about how he was learning how he was being intellectually curious and gathering all this information the first three ways were all things that are openly accessible to anyone in the world.

He was like science journals, reading, following interesting people on Twitter. Then it was meeting with interesting people, which may be meeting with interesting people in physical worlds is challenging or there's access points that make it, you know, something that not everyone can do. But the first three, which is what you pointed out, are something that anyone in the world with an internet connection now has access to. And so I thought that was a really cool, empowering point for anyone that's out there wanting to take these big ambitious swings, was that someone like a Dave Friedberg, who's had

tremendous success, is actually consuming the same information that you all have access to in the world that we all have access to. So there's no constraint on the access to this information. It's a constraint on your motivation and your intellectual curiosity to go and pursue these things. Totally. I mean, the first time we met this guy, or the only time we met this guy was on this pod, you know, and this pod is publicly available. Like, you're, in, like we're in your ears right now. In the room where it happens. Exactly.

So that's why, I mean, that's why we started the pod. And so I'm glad that you brought that up. It's a great place to, great place to end it. That is exactly why we started this podcast to give people access to these kind of conversation. So I'm glad you said that. This was awesome. So if you like the pod, get out right now and tweet out that you love our podcast.

and links to the pod and we're trying to grow it as fast as possible. And we want your, we have like a strangely low amount of YouTube subscribers. I think it's because of our faces. We're faces for radio, man. Maybe that's the case. But I think it's, I think we've got like 4,700 YouTube subscribers. So go on YouTube, give us a subscribe, go on Spotify and Apple and tweet us. Check us at every.

Like, subscribe. I love it. Thank you so much, man. That was a blast. So much fun. I hope everyone loved it. And looking forward to seeing everyone's feedback on the episode. Cheers.

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