Why We're Closer To Stopping Climate Crisis
Picture this. Humanity is on a collision course with a climate crisis. But what if I told you we already have 80% of the solution to stop it? Sounds hopeful, right? But we're not out of the woods yet.
Climate change is one of the most pressing challenges of our time, threatening the very fabric of our planet's ecosystems and human civilization. But what if we already possess 80% of the solutions needed to combat this crisis? Ravi Kurani sits down with Ryan Kushner, co-founder of Third Derivative, a climate technology accelerator, to explore the future of clean energy, carbon capture, and how startups are driving innovation in the fight against climate change.
Ryan Kushner brings his wealth of experience in climate tech acceleration to the table, sharing insights from his journey with organizations like Elemental Accelerator and his book, "Accelerate This: A Super Not Boring Guide to Startup Accelerators and Clean Energy Entrepreneurship." He discusses the evolution of climate solutions, from having only 60% of the necessary technologies a few years ago to now possessing 75-80% of what we need to address the climate crisis. Kushner also delves into the role of accelerators in nurturing startups and fostering partnerships between entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors to drive meaningful impact.
The conversation takes a deep dive into the structure and goals of Third Derivative, a program of the Rocky Mountain Institute, which aims to support and scale the most promising climate tech startups worldwide. Kushner explains how their 18-month program offers financial support, mentorship, and crucial connections to a network of corporate partners and venture capital firms. The discussion also touches on the challenges and opportunities in the water sector, highlighting the need for innovation in areas such as agriculture, water reuse, and decentralized water systems.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- The current state of climate tech solutions and the rapid progress made in recent years
- How accelerators like Third Derivative are shaping the future of clean energy and carbon capture
- The structure and benefits of climate tech accelerator programs for startups
- Insights into the challenges and opportunities in the water sector
- The importance of decentralization and innovation in addressing water scarcity
- A glimpse into the most promising water technologies and the obstacles facing desalination
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Watch the interview:
Meet Ryan
Ryan Kushner is the co-founder of Third Derivative, a climate tech accelerator working in collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Institute. With years of experience in the climate innovation space, Ryan has been instrumental in driving solutions to address the climate crisis. His work spans across clean energy, carbon capture, and helping startups scale technologies that have the potential to reshape our planet’s future.
Ryan is also the author of Accelerate This: A Super Not Boring Guide to Startup Accelerators and Clean Energy Entrepreneurship, where he shares insights on the startup ecosystem and his experiences in climate tech. Through Third Derivative, he supports over 160 startups and continues to be at the forefront of accelerating innovations that aim to mitigate climate change.
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Transcript
00:01
Ravi Kurani
So picture this. Humanity is on a collision course with a climate crisis. But what if I told you we already have 80% of the solution to stop it? Sounds hopeful, right? But we're not out of the woods yet. Welcome to liquid assets. I'm your host Ravi Kurani, and today I'm joined by Ryan Kushner. A driving force behind climate tech innovation and co-founder of Third Derivative were diving into the future of clean energy, carbon capture, and how startups are accelerating the solutions that could change the fate of our planet. From startup accelerators to scaling technologies thatll define our future, this episode is packed with insights on how we can turn the tide on the climate crisis. Get ready for a conversation that could reshape how you think about climate tech. Lets jump in.
00:57
Ravi Kurani
Today. We have an awesome guest for you today, a really old friend from San Francisco, actually. Ryan Kushner.
01:04
Ryan Kushner
I'm Ryan Kushner. I'm the co founder of Third Derivative, the climate technology accelerator of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and author of accelerate this, a super not boring guide of Starp accelerators and clean energy entrepreneurship. Check out the podcast.
01:24
Ravi Kurani
Ryan were talking about earlier. You guys have 160 startups. Tell us more about that. And you've been at the forefront of accelerating and bringing money into the climate tech world. Let's jump into that.
01:39
Ryan Kushner
Sure. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Yeah, we're old friends, know your sister. We've connected through accelerators through the years and through various businesses and phases of life. So I appreciate that and appreciate being here. My sort of life in climate technology, which is inclusive of water. I really began when I moved to San Francisco and I went to the Presidio graduate school. I saw the Keeling curve, I saw the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and it's okay. Here we are. Humanity, industrial revolution. Holy shit, you are here. And I knew that was a compelling issue to work on. And at first I didn't know. So I dropped into the world of activism and protest.
02:29
Ryan Kushner
And then I discovered that we have effectively, the solutions, or the formula for the solutions that we need to solve this big crazy problem, and they're going to be tons of ancillary benefits or we know what solutions we need and we are smart people and we like making businesses. We can do that. The particular sort of methodology that I fell into were accelerators, which for me being fairly add, was just fun because after Presidio, I worked at a climatech startup. And then when I went to work at elemental accelerator, which I think is where we first encountered each other and specifically has like a water vertical. We had 40 startups in the portfolio there. So I got to learn about a really broad sort of swath of companies and technologies and just have a macro sort of view on where we're at.
03:24
Ryan Kushner
If we're in a climate crisis and we're trying to get to stabilization and drawdown, where are we and what do we need to be doing? That was really important for me, just in terms of my nervous system, to know, are we screwed, are we going to be great, are we going to be okay, where are we at in this timeline? And so we can talk a little bit about that. But having that sort of macro view worked really well. And then we're going to accelerate, as you get that broad view, elemental. And then I had the chance to collaborate with the new energy nexus to write my book, which is called accelerate this, a super not boring guide to startup accelerators and clean energy entrepreneurship. And that was the chance to jump out of being like a practitioner and more into an academic researcher.
04:11
Ryan Kushner
And I got call up all of the really interesting innovation programs that I knew about, put them into a book, learn about them, and that was a really gratifying process to learn how many errors in the query, how many approaches there are, like what have we come up with in terms of accelerators, incubators, venture studios, prizes? What are those things? How do they work? Do they work? And what's like the secret sauce of some really interesting select ones? And then to the current day, what you are referring to is my current project, which is a collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Institute. It's a program of RMI called Third Derivative, and we launched around three and a half years ago. And we have, as you mentioned, 160 startups in the program now, very ambitious.
05:04
Ryan Kushner
We're reaching towards 500 by 2026 with a whole bunch of themed cohorts, which we can get into a lot of geeky detail about. But that's what, that's my background, what I've done and where I'm going.
05:17
Ravi Kurani
Super cool, man. There's like a ton to unpack there. I want to go back to the beginning and just redefine some terms for people. You mentioned the keeling curve and drawdown. For folks that don't know what both of those things are, can you explain them in a layperson's term?
05:33
Ryan Kushner
Sure. I'm a layperson too, so I very much relate to that. So the keeling curve, and I might have this, some details wrong here, but it is the measure of concentration of carbon dioxide in the environment. I think it's from the Mauna Loa Observatory. Please yell at me if I. If I get these detailed wrong. But we know from ice core samples back 20,000 years and more recent history, we've been monitoring how much carbon dioxide is in the environment, which has been fairly stable until about the 17 hundreds when we started burning a significant amount of coal, and then population expansion and change of land use. But it's a really interesting graph with a crazy hockey stick, which shows carbon dioxide.
06:23
Ryan Kushner
It's at about 270, effectively for the entire extent of the modern homo sapien existence, what we're used to, and then it's shot up dramatically since then. So now we're at 400 ish, and that's unprecedented and crazy and shows graphically, like, you are here. You as a person were born into this human experience at a time when shit isn't in the fan. And we're just starting to recognize that, make plans for that, help other people understand that it's relatively unintuitive because this is not something that one expects out of life. And so that sort of. It encapsulates the climate crisis in a graph for more or less.
07:18
Ravi Kurani
And you said earlier, too, that you had this coming to life moment where you're like, man, after you saw this graph, you're like, is there a way forward? Are the technologies there? What kind of conclusion did you come to? Is. And that's a loaded question here, but what happened after that?
07:35
Ryan Kushner
It was really a process of stages of grief, in a way, where it was like denial. No, that can't be right. Bargaining. Oh, but if acceptance, so on and so forth. But it really began my sort of intellectual exploration of, well, what does this mean and how bad will things get? And are we going to survive? And at the time, that was around 2018, 2019, the answers were just coming into focus. And great work was done by organizations like drawdown and others to ask the question. We understand the problem. We know the sources of carbon and we know what's causing the issue, but what are there in terms of solutions? Can we do this? Can we stabilize?
08:25
Ryan Kushner
Can we exist in basically, more or less, with some latency of the world we are now, which is hurricanes in California and fires in Hawaii and so on. Can we progress? Can we draw carbon down? And that began their journey to look at that and understand that there was a sense that at the time, rough numbers, clean energy was becoming cheaper, it was hitting the cost crossovers, where clean energy was becoming very quickly cheaper than fossil fuels. And so there is a sense that eventually we would get to a fossil free world. But how quickly? What's the ancillary damage? And roughly, there was, like we had in hand in the 2019, like, around 60 ish percent of the technology. We needed to address a large amount of it, but then we needed to invent that other 40%.
09:21
Ryan Kushner
And it's, to some degree, it's a false dichotomy. And that's one of the things we talk about. The derivative is with our portfolio of 160 startups and growing, some are novel solutions, some are sequestering solutions, those are novel. Some are other solutions that contribute or accelerate other larger solutions. Software that powers solar or better electrolyzers to make cheaper hydrogen. So it's the innovation happens both in that sort of, like, novel 40%, like, we don't have this, but we need it, but also it accelerates that existing 60% to be faster. Now the calculus has changed, and this is like, rough numbers, but we have in hand most of the solutions. Probably 75, 80%, and 20% are novel, but we know better than we ever have. There is so much deployment, and we have so much data on this, and we've been looking at it.
10:21
Ryan Kushner
We have a sense of what the future is going to be like. And I guess the good news, or definitely the good news, is that we've avoided a absolute climate, catastrophic, call it three to ten degree celsius rise. And so that is like the end of Earth in any recognizable way. And that was very much on the table when I looked at that keeling curve, and I started to be curious about this. But because solutions have continued apace, and the rational economics of the market are just that, we add almost 85 ish percent of all the new energy last year added to the grid, as we add more ev's, and as population grows, is clean energy, and that grows every year. So you can see from a grid perspective, and now from a vehicle perspective, where that's going.
11:19
Ryan Kushner
And so, drawing that all out, we're not going to be in like a three or four degree, five, six, seven to ten degree world. We'll probably be in like a two to three degree centigrade rise from pre industrial levels. And that's very bad, but not completely catastrophic. And every sort of 10th of the percentage matters a lot for everyone's life and stability, and being able to live in a world and fly places and do things and have supply chains. That's when I lecture at Singularity University about the pace of exponential change. I say, thank you, exponential technology. We've avoided this. And here are the things that we need to do right now to avoid more pain in the future.
12:13
Ryan Kushner
And there's a fantastic economic case for avoided costs down the line and investments and income to be made now in what we're very firmly in, is the great energy transition.
12:26
Ravi Kurani
And what are those points? Actually, that's a really interesting segue when you gave that talk at singularity. What are those handful of bullet points of things that we can do today?
12:34
Ryan Kushner
There are quite a few. The end of the pipe, as far as we know, is the world is basically wind and solar and storage and all EV's, even if we had not great policies, which thankfully we do, depending on the geography now, that's just what gets cheaper. Fossil fuels are a commodity, they're not a technology. And so by some measures, they've never gotten cheaper. Like the internal combustion engine is effectively as expensive or cheap as it was when it was invented, relative to costs and strength of the dollar. And so we know that there is going to be like wind, solar batteries, plus some nuclear and a suite of smaller solutions.
13:24
Ryan Kushner
What we can do now is invest in all the things that accelerate that, all the things that draw down carbon, all of the things that get us to a net zero world faster. Like more Ev's. Financing devs places everything along the EV chain to transition away from transportation, fossil fuels, everything along the energy generation, transmission, storage, supply chain for grids, anything in clean or regenerative agriculture, and particularly things that draw down carbon that can be natural solutions or economic solutions as well. And so that last thing is really the most unexplored and newest area, because you can imagine that if we're in the world we are now, there's still some sort of like latent heat and emissions. We're in a very disrupted world right now. And so we don't really want to be in a 400, 450 degree world.
14:25
Ryan Kushner
We want to be in a 270, the world that is most beneficial and familiar to human life and the entire world of carbon capture. Carbon drawdown is something that needs to be worked on dramatically right now, in addition to everything that accelerates all the existing solutions. And just to say at third derivative, we have like focus areas. We launched with a focus on energy, buildings, transportation and industry, which is sort of anything in manufacturing.
15:00
Ryan Kushner
And then we've moved quickly into sort of themed cohorts which are sub technologies or novel technologies where we can get together little coalitions of startups, the corporates that want to work with them, and the VC's that want to fund them along wraps all around sort of their derivative and our ability to find the startups, vet them, bring them into the fold, and also pair them with sort of policy and everything else beyond the customers and the finance. And so right now we have two theme cohorts. One is clean mobile power, which is a partnership with Netflix and Disney, and that's basically clean generators. And starting with this sort of Tesla approach, where we'll deploy on production sites where there is budget, and then make it cheaper and then be able to get that more widely and specifically into the global south.
15:53
Ryan Kushner
And then our second theme cohort, which we're doing right now, which is sponsored by the Grantham foundation, which is specifically around carbon capture and direct air capture. And so having a coalition to have some network effects within that. And then we'll be moving into petrochemicals, steel, cement, hydrogen. We're working on forming those sort of technological association, working groups, innovation spheres. And that's like the things that we're leaning into that'll be part of our future growth at their derivative.
16:28
Ravi Kurani
Super cool. Yeah. I want to actually take a few steps back for the audience because I know we have a few folks in corporate that also listen to this as well, and they may be a little bit unfamiliar with the startup ecosystem. Can you just give a really high level understanding of what is the accelerator model? Right. If you're a startup and you're going through this journey of raising money, coming building your product, where does accelerators fit on that? And I think that probably ties in really well with your accelerate this. But then the second question is around unpacking what you just said around third derivative. What exactly is third derivative? And then given kind of the accelerator model and where startups are in their journey, how does that kind of fit in with third derivative and the Rocky Mountain Institute?
17:14
Ryan Kushner
Yeah, great questions and jump in this journey very well. As an entrepreneur, being in accelerators and beyond. So you, I work on the programmatic aspect, you've been in them as a program. And so I'd say you have a lot of thought experience, so put out there, as you see. But effectively, an accelerator is a small business support system. Right? And so if you are a startup, incredibly hard, the failure rates very high. And so accelerators exist to increase the growth rate and the survival rate of technologies. Specifically in my vertical and climate tech, we in third derivative and beyond. Generally there's an application process, a vetting process, some number get into the program. We try to service all of the companies that apply in some way, just from building an ecosystem perspective.
18:15
Ryan Kushner
And then programs generally offer some form of financial support, access to customers, access to mentors, basically anything that you need as an entrepreneur as you're trying to understand the market, develop your technology, develop your team, and grow and scale responsibly so you can grow your business. And from my perspective, grow the impact. You can have an accelerator. And there are accelerators for anything. There are a million. And that's fantastic. I really focus on using capitalism to solve capitalism. So using all. I only work with for profit companies generally, although we are a nonprofit, and that's important from being a neutral sort of beneficial ecosystem actor perspective, by working with for profit solutions to give them the money and the support that they need to grow, and then also to have the corporates play a great role because they're potential customers.
19:24
Ryan Kushner
And there's three ish reasons why corporates would want to be a part of an accelerator. One is because they're looking for technology that they want to use and that they want to use as part of their deployment. That's like, number one reason number two is they're interested in the technology, but potentially that they want to invest in it and maybe absorb it completely, or be a stockholder in it or a shareholder in it, because they understand the economics around it. And third is a general sort of CSR perspective where they have money, they should be doing something good. This is in their vertical image on the process of understanding it.
20:02
Ravi Kurani
Cool. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
20:05
Ryan Kushner
I was just thinking about, do I tick off all of the questions that you had on accelerators? Oh, then you want to know specifically around third derivative.
20:14
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, exactly. Just if you can explain both to me and the audience, what is. You started third derivative and then it was sucked up into the Rocky Mountain. What was a relationship there? What exactly is the purpose of both entities? What do they do?
20:28
Ryan Kushner
The Rockman Institute has been around for 30 plus years now. It's a 700 plus person organization in seven or eight global offices. A really large organization that does amazing work understanding the techno economics of the energy transition, energy efficiency and policy, so forth. It really had a great hand in shaping the inflation Reduction act. Consults with world governments and corporations all around the world. And so what they were curious about was adding to their portfolio. There's about 30 programs adding to their portfolio of programs, all within the banner of the energy transition and trying to keep the world within roughly a 1.5 degree rise. Having an accelerator so they can work directly with technology, put a finger on the scale of what technology is going to be funded using their corporate network. And so that's where the collaboration came from.
21:24
Ryan Kushner
I was at the new energy Nexus at the time and wrote the book. We were approached, and so we formed it as effectively a partnership of a program that is firmly within Rocky Mountain Institute. And so we are a program of Rocky Mountain Institute, and we have a really synchronous relationship, like with the mothership, as we pursue our own program goals and so on and so forth. The program itself is great. It was like a dream come true for me as someone that's like a super geek around accelerator programs and understanding, like how do they work? How do they not work, how are they great? Where do they fail? Startups, there's a lot of criticism, a lot of people have been burned from a programmatic perspective and lessons learned.
22:12
Ryan Kushner
I try to bake a lot of that sort of into the book, and I work with a lot of accelerators as they're forming, to structure it to be maximally helpful and minimally destructive along their path to all of their partners, especially the startups. And so their derivative was an incredible opportunity because Rocky Mountain said, okay, Ryan, you wrote the book, you have a lot of experience with this. Tell us what our program should be. And I was like waiting for the but, or the twist, or the keep it within, blah blah, but it was really like a blank slate sort of blue sky project, which from an impact perspective is what you want. And so we set out to design the program, which we tried to make as entrepreneur friendly as possible, as ecosystem building, and give back as possible.
23:03
Ryan Kushner
So the long, short of it is that it's an 18 month program, it's very light touch. And so we talk to our startups as they need, but roughly around like once a month or so, and we'd have a check in with them and we ask them what resources they need. When you're stepping into the program, you're given the opportunity to have $100,000 us convertible note, which means that the value of the note converts at your next round. And so there's not a lot of complicated negotiation that happens at the start of it. And also you don't need to take the note if you don't want to. You can. As a startup, about 20%, 30% of the companies don't take the note, and that's fine with them. We consider them absolutely full members of the program.
23:57
Ryan Kushner
We help them just as much because our interest is in working with the most impactful and the best startups in the world, helping them grow and scale and achieve their potential impact. We don't really want to get on their balance sheet as our first priority. Having the 100K is actually a separate for profit entity, that is a partnership, but we make sure to keep the mission separate from the economics, although the economics are always in the center, because these are for profit companies, and unless they have a market and a technology that will sell, they can't impact. And then the program, we have incredible corporate partners, about 13 corporate partners, a 4 trillion market captain, and I think now 14 venture capital partners with 800 million AUM. And so it's a very large network.
24:57
Ryan Kushner
And so what you get as applying to the program, getting in, is that we say, okay, Ravi, we love suture, we love whatever you're working on. It's a good time to talk to this VC firm, or it's a good time to talk to this corporation. And we do timely and appropriate introductions where we're always trying to do pattern matching and make sure that everyone's ready for the conversation and we seed it correctly. And then we let the sort of economics unfold.
25:27
Ryan Kushner
In addition to the 100k, just for what it's worth, we're also exploring our own sort of bit of financial tools, like an early stage fund, a later stage fund, a first of a kind fund like we understand from a growing startups perspective, leaning on financial partners is great, but there's also the opportunity to be involved in that and help use our knowledge of the companies to benefit the economics and benefit the companies as well. So that's one of the things we're going into. Does that sort of get at? Yeah, totally.
26:00
Ravi Kurani
That's super informative and definitely makes sense. One of the things I actually wanted to riff on there is a lot of the guests that I've had on the podcast have said that the water ecosystem is just lacking. There's not really a network in water as well built out as it is for potentially energy, or even ten x or 100 x larger than energy being tech in terms of just regular SaaS based companies that you would see in Silicon Valley. The question, and I think it's more of actually probably a brainstorm, is what do you think are elements of building a successful climate tech accelerator? And if you were to start from scratch, or potentially build a vertical within third derivative itself, what does that look like?
26:48
Ravi Kurani
What are elements of how you get from the way that you felt in 20, 16, 20, 18, 20, 19, to that 60% discrepancy of putting in money, to getting to that 75% discrepancy? What does that look like for water?
27:04
Ryan Kushner
Water is a weird one. I don't have to tell you this. I say that the general elements are finding the various partners who have an economic interest or a mission interest or a policy interest in doing the things that you want to do. And so that's incredibly general. But that's what it takes to build the ecosystem of just asking the question who, you know, we start backwards from what the world needs, what are the critical gaps that need to be filled so we can have a sustainable world? Getting back to 270. So what are the missing things there? So that's how we end up focusing on carbon and power and so on and so forth. And so then we back into that. Then when we have a focus on, okay, so let's really look at cement, they really look at hydrogen.
27:59
Ryan Kushner
Who is working in this right now that whether they know it or not, should be a part of this coalition, because they have some interest in this now and in the future particularly. And so within waters. And most of my experience this is a bit outdated because it was with elemental accelerator, because they had this specific water. Vertical water is almost all the time municipal from all of the water that exists in the world. Probably a large amount of that is municipal. Working with municipalities as customers is a bit funny. And so I would need to do a deeper dive to understand. Just like the water issue, everyone sounds like climate desertification water. What does that look like? What are the problems? What can we solve and what are the opportunities? And who's working on that? What do you think?
29:00
Ravi Kurani
I think you're right. And it's popping up throughout the podcast. Is water is a scary beast because the customer and the distributor of water is primarily municipalities. However, the larger users of water are agriculture, right? That's one of the largest users of water outside of your regular population of us flushing our toilets, using showers and drinking it. A lot of the conversation has come around to this disincentive, mostly around the price of water and it being just this kind of flush and forget sort of mechanism where people don't understand the real value of it. And I there is a finite source of it, unless we figure out how to make it an infinite source.
29:46
Ravi Kurani
And just a third kind of through line that's popped up in a few of the interviews is around the leapfrogging that has happened with telecoms being at the top, energy being at second, and then water slowly following this word of decentralization pops up a lot around its ability to be actually then given back to the users. I think that the kind of headline here is almost taking away the quote unquote control away from the municipalities and giving it back to the population such that they could do rainwater harvesting or whatever. These technologies are basically getting water back into the hands of the folks that use it versus the municipalities, which then really get into this water rights issues and like all of these other things that stack on top of that.
30:33
Ryan Kushner
But that's. Yeah, and in terms of that, like the only I know about very few, like there's air to water harvesting. Like the source panel I checked in a while ago, that's growing. I don't know how much of that can address, but that seems like exactly the kind of innovation they're talking where that's decentralized and where that's like a b two C market. Like you worked in a b, two C market.
30:59
Ravi Kurani
It's painful.
31:02
Ryan Kushner
And there are water accelerators, right? There's imagine hq. Oh, I haven't checked on them for a. But that was a great ecosystem in San Francisco. They were doing all water stuff. Do you know, does that still exist?
31:15
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, magic x two O is still around, I believe. Tom Ferguson, who led it, has actually started his own fund called Burnt Island Ventures. And now there's like aisle utilities. And there's another guy in Europe that I just spoke to called watervent, which is another kind of water accelerator and water connector.
31:32
Ryan Kushner
And if you are a water investor, who are you? What do you invest in? I'm trying to learn for the benefit of myself hopefully, and your listeners. What's the standard portfolio around a water investor?
31:47
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it's funny you ask that question because the uses of water are so broad that being a water investor is like being an investor in AI. AI is used in multiple different verticals. And you can invest in a large language model of. Maybe you invest in OpenAI or Google's thing, but at the end of the day it's the application of how AI is used. The only real problem here is AI is more of a technology, horizontal, whereas water is like from a single source. Like you either get it from the ground or from lakes, or you desalinate it from the ocean. There's a number of ways to actually get water into the system. The users of water then are very different. And so it's almost, I guess the only analogy would be like the way that you invest in fuel.
32:29
Ravi Kurani
If you dig a few drill or you bring oil, you would probably be in the same caliber as if you were like a petroleum investor.
32:38
Ryan Kushner
So what are the most interesting water innovations? Can I ask you two questions. I don't want to completely, for sure. What are the most interesting water innovations? Two or three, question one, question two is people ask me all this. Ask me this question all the time, but I'm not an expert. Desalinization. Why can't we do that cheaper? Like, why is that not a thing?
33:00
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. And I'm gonna. I'm gonna anecdotally pull from a few of the interviews that I've had. Water innovation, like, the three coolest ones that I've heard. The first one actually focuses on agriculture, because agriculture is the largest user of water.
33:14
Ryan Kushner
More around.
33:15
Ravi Kurani
How do you make your crops more watery, more water resilient? And the second around that is, how do you use data to then just make sure that you're not watering? Because today you just. You basically flood irrigate, or you water inefficiently compared to how you could if you had the data and if you had the technology. That's the first thing. The second ones are around greywater and blackwater reuse. So a lot of our city's waters, especially in the US, are just dumped into the drain. And so there's a really cool company that's basically doing black water and gray water reuse. That's puts the dirty water back into the buildings. And secondarily, they also do hot water capture. Right. So a lot of our energy is lost to heating up the water for showers and for dishwashers. And about the winter day, when all the.
34:02
Ravi Kurani
When there's steam coming off the road, all of that energy could be captured back in. That's the second technology that was really cool. And the third is actually what you just said, source this. I think it's company called source water that does the moisture capture, and they're just these kind of, these big fishnets that basically capture moisture from the air. Yeah. And to your second question. Sorry, go ahead.
34:23
Ryan Kushner
Now, I was just gonna say the source panel that I know about, it's like a. It's roughly like a solar panel that. Yeah, I think you get eight to ten gallons a day.
34:32
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.
34:32
Ryan Kushner
From the.
34:33
Ravi Kurani
And then you're around the cell. The technology just takes way too much energy today in its current form. And secondarily, actually just came off of an interview, is the brine that you put back in is also just really harmful for putting it back in the ocean like that. It just destroys the ecosystem around the desal plant. And so until we figure out a way to reuse or store the brine in another way and then make the energy transformation less energy intensive. I think desal at this current state is. That's what the major problems are.
35:07
Ryan Kushner
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. There was when I helped create this accelerator for utilities, and one of the participants in that was DeWa, which is the Dubai Energy and water authority. And it was interesting because they run both and they had, like, all the energy that they needed so they could power the D cell. But there's ancillary issues of what. What do you do with that salt? It's a good question. I feel like we should put that in our corns of cob and things like that. But Morton's should be, like there.
35:41
Ravi Kurani
Morton should be capturing every single desal plant. Yeah.
35:45
Ryan Kushner
Yes. But interesting. Thanks for the download.
35:49
Ravi Kurani
Coming close to the end of the episode, it's a question that I asked to everybody. What is a book, a movie, or a tv show that has been, but is like giving you the overview effect?
36:00
Ryan Kushner
Give me. Sorry, I missed the question.
36:03
Ravi Kurani
Giving you the overview effect. Is there a book, a tv show, or a movie?
36:08
Ryan Kushner
Good question. I was pretty deep into the first episode of foundation, which is on Apple TV, and it's based on the Isaac Asimov foundation series. And that gives an overview because it takes place across many worlds over an incredibly long amount of time. So, like, over hundreds and thousands of years, you're tracking multiple planets and empires as they evolve. That I like things, especially when I'm feeling, like, anxious from thinking about climate and just life stuff. I really appreciate things that help me zoom out into sort of geologic time. First of all, I watch a lot of just geology. How did this mountain rage form? Things on YouTube? Recommend that. But then the foundation series, which is now in its second season, is really great. Awesome.
36:59
Ravi Kurani
I'll definitely have to check that out. Yeah, I loved. From what you're saying, it reminds me of the three body problem by Liu Xixin, which kind of had this, like, geologic view of time, which was really interesting from a Sci-Fi standpoint, but really cool.
37:11
Ryan Kushner
Yeah.
37:12
Ravi Kurani
Ryan, thanks a ton for coming on the pod. We really appreciated it. And for all those you out there, you know where to find us. You can find us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or Google podcasts. Ryan, thanks a ton.
37:24
Ryan Kushner
Thank you. Good to see you.