HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you remember Tatooine the desert planet in Star Wars, water was a scarce resource. Rain only came to Tatooine maybe once a decade. So instead, the humans of Tatooine would rely on moisture vaporators. These were small towers that looked like rockets that would capture water vapor from the atmosphere. Now the technology to make this happen.

wasn't just theoretically possible. It actually exists today and is in use in fifty-two countries around the world. It's a device called a hydropanel made by an Arizona-based company called Source. The hydro panel looks a bit like a solar panel, but inside is a series of fans and materials that quite literally create water out of sunlight and air. The technology was developed by an engineer named Cody Friesen, who also founded SORS.

The devices essentially work by drawing the moisture that already exists in our atmosphere. Imagine that the air around us, the troposphere is like a giant invisible store of water. Cody's technology is simply turning that invisible water vapor into drinking water. Right now, each hydropanel can produce about 5 liters of water a day, and the cost of a panel is relatively high, but Cody predicts that the cost will drop dramatically over time.

and the panels will produce much more water as the technology gets better. If this scales, it could have a huge impact on access to fresh, clean drinking water around the world. And for Cody, water, or rather water scarcity. has been a theme his whole life, growing up outside of Phoenix, Arizona. So you grew up in Arizona. Obviously Arizona gets most of Swarkening with the Colorado River, right?

Uh or maybe all of it, essentially. The Colorado and the Salt River system, yeah. It's sort of like this interesting thing. When I was a kid, you know, I grew up in the middle of this cotton field and there's For several months a year they flood irrigate. And yet in the scouts we would go hiking into the mountains And hike through the desert to

a reparian spring where like there's just a trickle coming out of the rock and yet there would be cottwoods and cattails and all these birds and there's sort of like this juxtaposition that Yeah, because I mean obviously you're in Arizona, this is a a part of the world with very limited Water, right?

And then parts of the state use lots of water to grow crops. But but then as y you point out, you've got these other places in the state where it's possible for life to thrive on on very little water. You see that in and some of those beautiful desert landscapes. Um so so sort of thinking about this on like a global scale, right? I mean'cause'cause Arizona is just one of many places in the world where where water is hard to find and water scarcity is becoming More of a problem. So do you I mean do you have a sense of

sort of globally of how hard it is to find easily available clean drinking water. Yeah, so I mean we're talking about approximately a third of humanity does not have access to safe water at home. Right. And so it's a it's something like two point four billion people.

And that's the official number, but it for anybody who's been to you know, large cities around the world, whether it's Mumbai or Mexico City or Jakarta. The government states that there's potable water at home, but of Likely not. Um I didn't ever think that I would

you know, come back to water As a You know, as an entrepreneur. Yeah. But it's sort of like this fascinating thing that

you know, the reason why I and I think a lot of people are attracted to the renewable energy space is because It's solving a massive problem, a global problem. That is emerging, but also when solved, will really enable h humanity to live in a much more Earth aligned way. Yeah.

And yet the thing that I found, I think one of the things that I struggled with as a entrepreneur in the renewable energy space is That it's while you're solving a h large scale problem that affects affects humanity, it's not a human scale problem.

Yeah. And yet, you know, sort of water It's probably the most personal Intimate substance right. It's what we Put in our bodies, it's food. Right. There's religion and you know, faith and it's sacred stuff in a lot of societies.

And yet we haven't to date solved war in a way that aligns people on planet. And so I I saw this opportunity to sort of to imagine applying the principles of renewables without knowing yet how to do it at that time. Yeah.

All right, let's talk about just the United States for a moment, which is amazing to me. I did not know this because most people listening, you turn on your tap and there you go, you got water. And if you live in a city or you're connected to municipal services, that's just how it is. But About fifteen percent of US homes rely on water from wells. I know I've got one. And Apparently. About a fifth of people of well water.

that water would fail a water quality test and we'd get our quality tests every year. So if significant number of people in the United States who are not getting municipal water.

That's treated. might be drinking or are probably are drinking water that is not Safe. Yeah. Exactly. The statistics are quite quite shocking in that regard. I'm also on a well.

I happen to have four times the legal limit of arsenic in the groundwater that at my house. And so um and I moved into that house well before I started Source Global. So um I put in this arsenic treatment system, which was quite expensive to solve that problem. But it's sort of a not just a static problem, it's one that's growing in the sense that the reasons that

Water. out of a well or out of the ground that may or may not be potable. Are innumerant. If you lived in the North East. Right, you're well as likely in contact with the water table that is in contact with your you know, your septic system. And so, you know, there are all those issues as well.

So it you know, water becomes Very quickly from going from thinking about sort of the municipal scale problem and the The way that We

solve that problem with chlorine and concrete pipes and kind of doing that in a centralized way. to then there's the rest of humanity. that either lives on wells or in areas where that type of infrastructure is just not possible.

Right, right. So I mean so for the past few decades, right, a lot of our efforts around sustainability been focused on you know, finding new sources for electricity, right? Like s like solar or wind. which are m more abundant than, you know, say oil or coal, um, which have to be dug out of the ground.

Um, and a as we kind of develop the technology to harness those energy sources more efficiently, it's going to become cheaper, right, than other non renewable sources that are harmful to our environment. But you know, it's it's just hearing I mean it's it seems like no one was really thinking about applying the same concept to water, right? That that there's There's possibly another source of fresh water. besides what's in the ground and and and in our rivers and in our reservoirs that that we could use instead.

Exactly. Yeah, and it sort of the ultimate extractive resource, right? It's either in the ground or it isn't, or it's either rained or it didn't. And Yeah, when we think about renewables. renewable energy is be gotten by free feedstock.

Right, the feedstock of sunlight or the feedstock of wind. When you're running a coal fired power plant. The Yeah.

dominant source of cost is the cost of digging up free coal. putting in a coal car, moving it across the ground. burning that, right, and then dealing with you know the the knock on effects. Even if coal's very cheap.

Right. The the the coal has to be dug and put in the coal car, that's a linear problem. You can't you can't change those physics. But if you can make solar P V ever more efficient and make it ever more efficiently. And then eventually.

We knew that would be lower cost than coal. So In a very similar way. the question that I asked myself about ten years ago was could we Do

Precisely. for water what we've now done for electricity. Could you Make it. from existing abundant sources of like

Sunlight and water with sunlight and air. Right, exactly. So and and it wasn't even it wasn't even the starting point wasn't even error as much as like, Okay, the energy source is sunlight, what could we do? And When I analyze this recognizing that the lower part of the atmosphere, the troposphere

has this insane amount of water vapor in it, ten to the sixteen kilograms. So that's one and then sixteen zeros kilograms of water vapor, about a hundred million years of all of humanity's water needs. Replaced every single week. The average lifetime of a water molecule in the atmosphere is about seven to nine days. It comes up off the ocean due to sunlight bearing down on the oceans. evaporates and then eventually rains back within seven to nine days. And so Here we have this massive resource.

It's actually growing during due to climate change, but that's a whole nother topic. But we have this massive resource that's everywhere. It's an atmospheric ocean. And it I guess I should mention we live in the troposphere. The troposphere is the atmosphere all around us. It's like from ground all the way up Like six miles. That is essentially an invisible store of water all around us all the time. You got it. And even in, you know, the desert, right? So we're you know, I'm sitting in Scottsdale, Arizona right now and it's

Hot and it's true. Three percent, five percent humidity, like, right? Exactly. And so you know you think about um that resource, right? So you think about free feedstock, sunlights everywhere. Water vapors everywhere. Okay, so now

The only problem in heavy air quotes is How do you very efficiently move those water molecules from the gas phase to the liquid phase. Let me see if I can understand this in slightly different which is we are if we're living in invisible massive water source you know reservoir, right? This huge source of water. The question you're asking is, Well could we capture that

and turn it into drinking water. Sort of like when you walk out of your house uh in the morning, it depends on where you are. And even in some dry places there's dew, right, that collects on leaves. And the question, I guess, is Could we scale that? Could we could we essentially scale what Would nature Does.

Exactly. And could we create the conditions of do on leaves at high noon in the middle of the summer in the middle of the desert, right? Water we all know is two hydrogen atoms and a and an oxygen atom, right? You you bash'em together and you get water, right? But it's it's m a little more complicated than that. But you knew and I guess uh you know, most scientists know. That in theory you can

you can produce water if you get those elements and and have the right conditions. Now the question is how do you really Do that. So where do you start? Yeah, so well first we we start with humility with respect to Dcause you know, what we know whenever we're talking about such a huge

problem is that no matter how smart one thinks how smart the team is. The fact is that We are always just sort of taking the data directly ahead of us to invent a little bit, innovate a little bit.

And then take more data so that we could sort of fail our way to success, if you will. And so The starting point, I'm a material scientist and there are many, many, many materials around us that are and the the term is hygroscopic, right? So With a G because

the hydroscopic would be something that is uh attracted to liquid water, hygroscopic is something that's attracted to water paper. And everything from The reason why I don't go jogging in a cotton. So it's hygroscopic to when you leave a lid off the sugar bowl.

And the sugar gets a little bit clumpy. Yeah. Right. It's doing that because the water vapor in the air is being absorbed by the sugar. All the way to you know when you're in a Your favorite greasy spoon restaurant and the salt shaker has Rice kernels in the bottom. the rice kernels are there too

Adsorb the water. Preferentially so that the salt doesn't so the salt doesn't get clumpy. Yeah. All around us are these, you know, materials that have these properties. Same reason why, you know, when you open a new box of shoes, there's a silica packet inside of it that's a design. It's absorbing all the moisture to make sure that the shoes don't rot. You got it. Exactly. So You know, we know that there are materials that have this property.

Could we engineer a material? that is able to concentrate water vapor from the air rapidly and then, upon exposure to sunlight, rapidly respire that water vapor back out, so that inside of the device, now called a source hydropanel, we could Craig to the conditions that you described earlier, the dew that forms on leaves when you walk out of y your home in the morning. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Cody Freesen, founder and CEO of Source. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest is Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of Source. So you know you could use air and sunlight to create water, but You needed to build a device that could actually Not only capture those two things but then f but then make lots of water.

And that's a that sounds very, very challenging. Yeah, and actually not to throw a a crazy number of numbers at the audience, but just to kind of get get used to the kind of scales here. So Uh per square meter of Earth surface, we get about one point two.

Kilowatts. Well average obviously around 'Cause sometimes it's less sunny and sometimes more sunny. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So if it's cloudy, it might be half of that, right? So About one point two kilowatts.

That's a lot of energy. Sun is the sun is a powerful thing, okay? Right. A leader of liquid water in a pan and you put it on your stove. Yep. And you convert all of that liquid water to a gas, right? Turn it into vapor. Yep. Um you would have to put in about six hundred and forty

watt hours per liter. So point six four kilowatt hours per liter. So that means that Per square meter. Per hour. At a hundred percent efficiency, there's about two liters of

Thermodynamic potential. to make liquid water. In other words, per square meter of land on the earth. If you factor the amount of sunlight And air.

That is hitting that spot. It should produce two liters of water a day. If everything was Perfect. So that actually corresponds to a heck of a lot of water, right? It's a lot of water.

And and that's basically and I know I'm I'm kind of reducing this to um you know sort of overly simplistic science, but that's b essentially because we are living in the troposphere, which is this massive invisible basically layer of water vapor. The sun is constantly evaporating that water anyway. So the question is Why don't we just Capture that evaporation? Exactly. And you have to actually create that phase change, right? So you have to put the energy in to get that uh that that conversion to liquid. And so What we said about

was thinking about all the different thermodynamic routes that you could go from the gas phid phase using sunlight. And so That's what then led to okay, well, first of all, right. water vapors very dilute in the atmosphere. It's you know anywhere from one to let's say one to five percent by weight. So

If we are at that level, how do we concentrate that dramatically, right? So we use a material that concentrates that water vapor by about ten thousand times by volume. It's like it's like solar panel material. It's a

nanostructured material that is very hygroscopic and then has sort of the goldilks. binding energy. So just strong enough to bind water molecules, but not so strong that they can't be released back out. So this is a material that you knew about or came across that is like desiccant. It w in in a in a you know like those little bags that shoes says do not eat silica. It works the same way. It can concentrate moisture, essentially. And

We're jumping ahead, but this is the material that you would eventually put on panels like that kinda look like solar panels, right? Yeah. So it very similar to those desk and seeds you're used to, except for just able to hold a lot more water. Do that a lot more quickly and then able to be cycled. And so The recognition that okay, okay, if we could

Concentrate that. Water vapor onto an adsorbent of one form or another. And then if we could Apply sunlight to those materials in a smart way.

we could respire that water vapor into a stream inside of a device and Push the dew point. inside the device above ambient. So Again, back to your daily life.

If you are taking a shower and you know, you like a you know hot, steamy shower, you get out and you notice that there's water condensed onto the mirror. That occurs because you push the dew point above the ambient temperature. And of course the mirror is at the ambient temperature and so you get condensation. And so Could we

inside of a device push the dew point. Up high enough that under all earth relevant conditions, we could get condensation. And so that was the sort of the question that had to be answered by the development of What we you know now have. As a as a product.

Alright, so you you began to work on this and you now have these these devices. They're hydro panels. And from what I gather, I mean essentially they kind of look like I mean they are solar there's a solar panel on it, right? A regular photovoltaic solar panel. And that is used to power this device because inside there are fans And essentially they draw in warm air. push it through

This material. And then From that material water the water is extracted. Yeah, and so Now when we start talking about source hydro panels, right? There as you said, there's a

P V module in the middle. And that's producing enough electricity to run the the electronics and the fans and so on. And some of the control points. There's an arm processor inside that's actually solving a problem every second that's saying, Okay, here's the ambient condition, here's the amount of sunlight I have

And then let me configure the system to optimize for efficiency. Yeah. And the basic principles that we talked about are Or how source works. And so We take in Air.

We push those across these materials. We Take out. Just the right amount of water molecules from that air.

We then expose the material to sunlight. We then Get it. Concentrated water vapor stream. That we then

bring back to ambient conditions and ambient temperature and water vapor is then condensed out. And so essentially y y I mean it's er anybody listening should go check the website out because it's actually quite amazing. I mean you are literally These panels make water out of air and sunlight. And and do the panels need to be in a in a very sunny place?'Cause on the on the one hand, if it's in a humid environment, right, the the panels can

But on the other hand, if it's in a really dry place it's it's presumably getting more power from the sun. Yeah, I think I think actually, Guy, you hit it on the head that there's there's sort of two competing factors, right? So if you're in Manila And it's eighty five percent humidity. But it's partially cloudy.

the thermodynamic putt is pretty short. Right. The the distance between eighty five percent and hundred percent is short. Whereas if you're in Phoenix and it's five percent humidity, but yet you've got the full on uh mitigated sun bearing down, obviously you have the energy to drive the process. So The

sort of competing factors are true around the planet. And so you'll see that, for example, in Dubai, we create a very similar amount of water as in Manila as an example. And so Yes, there are places and times of the year where the amount of water we we produce is minimized, but on sort of a average Those places are similar.

Probably the worst place for us, of course, is like northern Quebec where and you know, the middle winter. when it's you know minus forty out because of course there Not only is there no water vapor in the atmosphere'cause the saturation concentration is so low, but also there's no liquid water. And so, you know, obviously places with a hard freeze we don't

produce water in the middle of the winter, but that same place, Quebec Obviously during the rest of the year has because of Very high latitudes. You know, have very long days. Very high humidity. And so again, uh yearly average.

the amount of water produced is not terribly different than, for example, San Francisco. You know, it's it's amazing. A couple weeks ago on the show we had uh a founder who's working on a company to create geothermal energy anywhere in the world. That that the technology now exists to dig very, very deep, very quickly, like twenty kilometers down. And and essentially anywhere you dig twenty kilometers down, you're gonna hit a geothermal energy source anywhere around the world. This is similar principle. What you're saying is that not just theoretically, but in actual fact, you can produce

And bring abundant water to any place on the planet? Yeah, I mean so today we're in fifty two countries. And we've built over four hundred and fifty projects um across six continents. Um and in a lot of the places that we go were the lowest cost source of drinking water. And what's sort of fascinating

There there's no Physical reason. This is a big statement. Why These source hydropanels can't eventually be the lowest cost delivered potable water on the planet.

Lower cost than what you flush toilets with at home. What you consider sort of free water, which of course is not. So The cost Of making a device that is made of earth abundant, sort of indust industrially abundant materials.

And making it ever more efficient and making it ever more efficiently. leads to a cost structure over time. That is almost impossible to beat.

Bye. Traditional infrastructure, traditional extractive processes. And we just saw that happen with Cool. Right over the last dozen years.

Yeah. We are seeing that in real time happen with electrification of transportation. Um You know, starting with, of course, you know, Tesla's being better and a better experience than a typical ICE car and internal combustion engine car. But now reaching commoditization in a way that's that's sort of shocking, right? All you gotta do is watch this last Super Bowl to see how quickly the world is changing. Yeah. But it would be shocking to me that in over the next

Decade. So Yeah. Renewables. Driven approaches don't take over yet a much broader set of resources. Not just water, but also in other areas.

We're gonna be right back with Cody Friesen, founder and CEO of Source. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with Cody Friesen. Who makes hydro panels that can generate drinking water nearly Anywhere in the world. So Cody, this technology is not

just theoretical. These panels actually exist. They're in operation all over the world, right? And and You know, you guys I think a deployed Фіті орсо кантриїс а There are homes that are using them for drinking water, and by the way, how much water

Uh can each panel produce. Yeah, so each each header panel can do up to five liters per day. And When we think about The

The way that you know, we go to let's say show up at a school or at a home, it's really understanding the drinking water needs of that. facility and then putting in arrays of the size that match that need. Right. So done in a very similar way to how solar

you know, solar arrays are are established to to meet the the load. Let's take the Navajo Nation, which is twenty seven thousand square miles. So it's about the same land area as West Virginia. About a hundred and seventy five thousand Navajo live there. Fifty four thousand?

Let's call it a third of them. Have no water at home. Zero. Hm. So Uh, we installed at about a little o over five hundred homes last year. We'll do about seven hundred homes this year.

Where we solve the problem of them not having any drinking water at home. So right now each panel can produce About five. Liters or day. Five liters of per day, okay. And so it's not obviously enough for all your water needs. It's five liters. That's imagine what a liter of water looks like.

But can that change? I mean, is is this a technology challenge that that eventually those same panels will be more efficient, or is that just essentially maximizing what nature provides in air and sunlight. Absolutely. So we have an R and D group that reaches about eight years into the future. So You know, at eight years it's pretty wild ideas. At five years it's pretty concrete ideas. At two years it's becoming productized. So

We have uh roadmap. of substantial increases in productivity over the coming years. In such a way that also reduces the cost. So when we think about the roadmap to go from

places that where people either have wells that are not producing potable water or have no potable water, are relying on plastic bottle water, are relying on trucked water or boated water, right? We're directly competitive today in a way that removes all the lack of sustainability issues associated with those approaches and Maybe most importantly. creates ownership, agency, and democratization over that resource. Which

Is A big unlock when you're talking about something so fundamental. to your life. If you don't have good water, it's Maslow's hierarchy all over again, right? Yeah. Food, water, shelter. How do you ensure that the water is clean and and drinkable? I mean it's i because Essentially it it's it's like rainwater, right?

And which can be fine. But doesn't it have to have other properties to taste good and also to to be Safe. Yeah, and actually turns out it's much purer than rainwater, right? So when we when we actually produce the water, it's effectively distilled water. It's pure water.

We then because water is the stuff of life, we then ozonate that water. So in other words, we take oxygen molecules from the air, we make O three. And we keep that concentration Up. While it's stored, so that we always have water that's sterile. And then we mineralize that water.

So By the time that humans are consuming that water, not only do we know That it's safe. And that it's mineralized, so for taste and health.

We also know that that's True because every hydro panel is connected to the cloud and we see data feedback from every cider panel we've deployed that says yep. We produce this amount of water. We have this much water in storage. It's sterile and it's been mineralized. And by the way, now it's being dispensed.

So we've sort of created the world's first renewable fully digitized drinking water utility, if you will. Hm. I mean, I know that the analogy's been made and you've heard it before, but it is like tattooing.

It's like right it's like they had these I what were they called on tattooing I can't remember the um There's like spiky things that somebody listening will remember. A moisture v uh vaporator, right? Where they were where the they were like water farms, right? And I mean Uh the this is essentially what you're talking about. Of course it doesn't look like the vaporators on Tatooine, but What you're essentially saying is that

in the not too distant future. A home can be powered entirely by renewable energy. And can produce all of its water needs. That's right. And You know, if you think about

twenty years ago, if you Where to ask Oh should I put a kilowatt of solar in my roof, people would have said, Oh, we'll go put in double pane windows first. Right. Yeah. Or put in more insulation first. And now, of course, that discussion is never that. It's just yeah, put another kilowatt of uh of peak solar on your roof because it's so cheap. I think there's s a very similar thing happening in water in the sense that

Today we consider it as free when we know it's not. It's you know, or really the most extractive resource we utilize. Yeah. And so When we think about going to whole home levels, which is entirely possible with the approach we've taken. You could go build a home in the future today. That

Has completely closed loop water system. that has no input other than source hydro panels. Now. w would there be necessarily a good argument to go do that at this moment, other than to demonstrate it? I'm not so sure.

But that sort of existence proof only gets you to recognizing that if you're paying hundred and fifty or two hundred or three hundred dollars a month. For your water. You think about that over the course of a

Of a mortgage. the real cost of your water system is actually quite high. And so It doesn't actually take us decades to get to a position

of parody that's similar to what we saw on solar P V. Right. Right now the cost of these panels is h is high. It's too high for most people to afford, right? But presumably the cost will go down over time. How much is it to fully install a panel on a home, for example, that's gonna produce five liters of water? Yeah, so if you buy source hider panel online, which is the the way that Americans can get uh our our hider panels directly, they're about two thousand dollars a piece. And so and of course we have to ship them and install them. So when you amortize that cost out, right, that's already considerably lower cost than

bottled water, for example. Right. Um And so and of course we have lease models and so on. So there's you know, people can do this without having to come up with cash up front. Now when we think about these large arrays like we did with the Navajo or we did with Warm Springs tribe in Oregon. the real cost actually gets way lower. Right. And so we're able to actually solve problems where

We're directly displacing trucking water or directly displacing having to go drill a new bore hole and then and then solve the water quality issues that exist. All right, let's talk about is your business too. I know you got a lot of backing from one of Bill Gates' funds and and other investors. You very hundreds of millions of dollars, but

You're not the only company working on this. So how what is the What is the sort of the the business plan. Will you ultimately make money simply from selling the panels? Yeah, so we make money by selling panels and by selling water under contract. Um today.

Um it's about it. In other words, you bottle you you sell bottled water, right? We sell Yeah, we sell bottled water, but that's uh a small part of the business. What I'm talking about is our water's a service business that uh you know, we'll contract with school systems or with governments to to sell water based on arrays that we've that we've built. Yeah. And then, you know, I think the the reason why Break Thro Energy Ventures came in or

Fifth Wall came in, which is a real estate backed uh entity, or Microsoft's climate innovation fund. Is You know, all of these entities are dealing with The challenges associated with water going forward, right?

Uh obviously real estate developers can't. if they have land that doesn't have water rights, that's a huge problem. Right. these investors that are thinking about water at a systemic level. Right, and how do we move from

Linear extractive to Sustainable circular. Right. And how do we move to a place that is gonna work in the future. And

You know, I think we've got we've got an approach there that is, you know, potentially meaningful. And when it comes to competitors, I mean, is your feeling hey, the more the merrier because this is actually This is technology that that needs to spread around the world. Yeah, I mean anybody who's working on solving Water is a hero in my book. I mean there's it's it's a infinite

Market space. for a given company, right? So it's it's gonna take many solutions to solve all problems. From a competitor perspective, I mean, we're the only ones that do what we do, right? There's there's other folks that take water from the atmosphere, but they do that in a way that requires high humidity and quite a bit of electricity. So

We've solved the problem in a different way. And I think that gives us a large addressable market. It's about a half a trillion dollar addressable market as it sits right now. Again, effectively infinite from where we sit today. And so You know, there's there's interest And

source because of our unique technology. But also because of the big unlock that we've enabled from a From market perspective. All right, here I am in California. And so uh you know, there's a lot of concern over over what the future of agriculture will look like. I mean this is a big problem. I mean, especially in parts of California where, you know, almonds are really require a lot of water and avocados and other

you know, grapes in in Sonoma County, um In fact, Many of these verdant, you know, p places that have been completely transformed because of water. Essentially what you're saying is

This is not going to be a problem if in fact Everyone adopts this kind of technology that you will be able to essentially irrigate anywhere in the world. Yeah, if you think about well, let's start in the Central Valley, right? We are really heading in a direction that is not sustainable. And have been for a long time.

The farm workers that live in the Central Valley today live in communities where The groundwater has been poisoned by Generations. Of

pesticides and fertilizer and so on. So you think about the knockoff effects are not just bulk water and can we grow almonds, but Remember there are humans that are there doing that work. And So there's like this big challenge there. Which

Yeah. We've got a number of projects going on in that in that region to support farm workers. What? Separately, and I think this was your your main point. There's no reason why

through advanced agriculture approaches that use something like one twentieth or even one thirtieth the amount of water. That you couldn't uh produce Water. In the way that we do.

And then growth Fruits and vegetables and so on. An advanced agriculture setting. I mean essentially what what I'm hearing is that in like And y you may not be saying this, but I think we can kind of draw this conclusion which is If for example now we think about

people dying from infections, right? Um and most people died from infections in wartime. That's why you had like so many deaths in the civil war. It it it it was infections. Yeah. And now m the vast majority of those infections could be healed with antibiotics, right? And so we're like, wow, you know, has how crazy was that? You know, you think about bloodletting and the Middle ages, right? Like how they thought that they were treating diseases with

W in a hundred years from now are we gonna say my God, we were so Fixated. Um municipal water, piped water or

water sources when all we had to do was focus on making our own water wherever we are. I mean, are we gonna get to that point? Yeah, I I mean the best corollary is you know, nineteen ninety five, we talked about maybe there would be twenty million internet users globally within twenty years. Right. And now there are six billion smartphones, meaning that information poverty is an entire thing of the past. Right. One of the things that

It's always sort of remarkable to me as the human brain's inability to uh deal with exponentials, right? I think many people are concerned about the exponentiality of all the problems in the world today, right? Many, many things that are running away from us. But the inverse is true too, right? Where

Exponentiality has enabled solar to be really cheap. Has enabled DNA testing, that's minuscule fraction of what it was twenty years ago. Smartphones. Et cetera.

And the same thing is true. When we start talking about renewable water, when we start talking about source hydro panels. And so, you know, the learning rates of technologies are really, really fast. And I think that's sort of what gets me really excited about. technology and and makes me optimistic about the future in general. But it makes me really optimistic specifically about what we do at Source.

Could you freezing? CEO founder source. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, guy. I appreciate it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab.

You can follow how I built this on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now. The next episode is available right now, or you can binge all of our episodes ad-free. By subscribing to Wondery Plus and Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at HowI Built This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at GuyRoz on Twitter and at guy.Roz on Instagram. This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Raptine Arablui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Esteves, Chris Massini, Elaine Coates, Josh Lash, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thomson. Niva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. how I built this.

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