Anything Is Possible with Dave Friedberg | Where It Happens

0:00[Music] thank you so much for joining i mean we're 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 um all of the above and definitely want to get deep down the rabbit hole on molecular molecular beverage printing technology and everything you're working on there i would personally love to just kick off um with a little bit of just background on on you and um and how you kind of got to where you are today i mean you have a insanely uh interesting career you know everything from quinoa to metro mile car insurance and now you

0:41know changing the world with with climate tech so would 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 my ability to recall information to think clearly to think creatively suffered because of my sleep but now i've found something that changed the game for me and that thing is beam dream a functional sleep product that has really changed my life i'm excited to get to share it with you all today and so that you can get a special

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1:58checkout i guarantee you're gonna love it um sure i mean i you know my uh my origin story uh as i've come to write it is i was born in south africa i moved to la 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 so i grew up mostly in la and then i went to uh um school at the uc berkeley where i majored in astrophysics my uh interest has always been in science and mathematics and so that was kind of my um you know my focus and then you know i

2:40was working um 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 um and meanwhile like the dot-com bubble was happening across the bay and throughout silicon valley there was a

3:13dude in my dorm freshman year who started a website that he sold uh to cd universe or for 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 at an investment bank that focused on technology mergers and acquisitions and i'd never taken a business or finance or accounting class so for me that was like a big um kind of learning curve you know

3:49coming 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 imploded you know 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 like 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 um anyway that was my experience out of

4:20college i i ended up joining google in early 2004 and i left a couple years later to start the climate corporation so you know that's kind of the the main the main arc of the story yeah well it's really interesting kind of how it's how it's come to where it is today too and and you know 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 which i definitely want to get into the way you've kind of created this foundry model and you're funding

4:53people 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 spin them out to go raise money etc it sort of reminds me of like an iac of the future right like going and building a um you know holding company foundry model that can spin these up and fund these amazing swings in a in a different way um so it strikes me as very very cool what you're what you're doing and how you're approaching it well i wouldn't say that our objective is to fund science um

5:28i 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 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 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

6:02think 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 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 non-linear 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

6:39view to form a novel business concept and a novel strategy that can go and change that market um 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 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 ccd sensor initially wasn't like hey one day

7:13we 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

7:43markets 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 um so i know you know you mentioned you know solving big problems um i feel like making the world a better place um but you can 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 hang out but what drives you to

8:18after all those successful businesses that you've created um get up and and and take on this really big challenge i think everyone's got um uh call it conscious 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 uh the human conscious is like a little kid riding an elephant and the elephant is the subconscious so you know we could probably talk for hours uh you know with therapists involved on where where

8:59individuals motivations arise from um but for me my you know when i was in seventh grade i joined the environmental the ecology club at school um because it was pretty evident that you know i 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 seemed net destructive for our benefit and you know that this can start with just kind of like ruining the environment with uh pollution and you know the the common kind of nomenclature of you know anthropogenic climate change i think is is the hit azure and an important one because it really

9:40is an existential crisis right like like humans have this tendency to kind of um you know want to get so indulgent uh to the point that it doesn't matter what happens around us um 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 um and you know how do we kind of solve these crises and solve these problems um so you know i 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 uh

10:16intellectually 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 i get uh you know pretty pretty unhappy so you combine those two facts with this you know 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 you know i don't

10:44really do that very often especially with three young kids um but yeah look i i feel like um 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

11:19in 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 big part of our thesis is that sustainability is not about cutting back and doing less and eating less and 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

11:51all 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 human tool set is is un is 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 trialled and challenged and we've risen to the occasion i think we are being trialled 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

12:24you hit on there is a really powerful mental shift i think and it's it's a um it's a generational shift in how people think about sustainability that you 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 tennis years ago sustainability was about you know uh shower heads 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

12:49cut back to be more sustainable what you're talking about is a fundamentally different thing it's you know not constraining your your usage and continuing to live in a world of abundance but do it in a different way where we have technologies that can fundamentally change it make more water you should 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 uh then you should be able to do that now here's here's a fundamental philosophy about humans um you know the the buddhists call it uh uh doc it's um it's it's desire uh humans

13:25have desire as the root of 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 um you know again this this book i mentioned happiness hypothesis has a study in it which has been challenged but it's really interesting which shows that the more income humans make or a typical person in the united states the happier they are up till 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 your change in income

14:02so 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 yeah it's like the hedonic treadmill right it's exactly right that's exactly right and so so evolutionary biologists psychologists even some of these you know religious uh 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

14:33in consumption so every human is only happy this year if they eat and consume more than they did last year uh 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 of 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 so you can't just say hey stop all people stop what we need to do is figure out how to meet the trend line

15:05using better technology that uses less resources yeah you had an amazing quote i think it's on your on your website and kind of one of the foundational pieces that said um 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 um i thought that that was such a powerful statement of what you just said yeah you know 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 ninety percent of the world's population

15:44will live in china southeast asia and africa ninety percent that population those populations are coming up the income curve right so even in china i think gdp per capita has increased by 7x over the 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

16:23give 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 um 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 i want to believe that's true because i love consuming like you know and but can you explain what makes you so sure in that um so on a first principles basis

17:04we 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 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

17:41at 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

18:12stock in the fermenter tank and the yeast cell eats the sugar and it spits out the animal protein take that animal protein 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 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

18:42this century um and by doing that the energy efficiency of that yeast cell the amount of sugar it requires and you know 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

19:10humans 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 it's that you know like 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 are 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 uh who kind of hypothesized that there

19:42was 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 uh an amazing thing and an amazing innovation so i also just look to i prior success is not a guarantee of future success but there's certainly something to the fact that we as a

20:14species have been able to do this um over and over again throughout history totally agree i mean there's a great book uh if anyone's interested called the alchemy of air i don't know if i ever mentioned it but um you know it's about the haber bosch process that was um you know the book opens up with this great uh anecdote you know humans the reason our population swelled in the 17th 18th 19th century is because farming you know the 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 you know

20:53grew 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 uh in in producing plants producing life um and the way we got all the fertilizer is uh off of these guano fields off the coast of 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 um these rocks brought it back to europe and then we grew crops and fed the the

21:30population of 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 with two nitrogens

21:58are 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 it would break the nitrogen bond nitrogen would then stick to hydrogen and you'd end up making ammonia and um they basically synthesized ammonia today synthesizing ammonia accounts for somewhere between three and six percent 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 you know a stroke of engineering ingenuity uh that that enabled uh that outcome by the way i wouldn't say it was

22:38just a stroke of ingenuity because much like the wright brothers and thomas edison it was an iterative engineering project it was all about trying and and and editing uh experiments over and over and over hundreds and hundreds of attempts to eventually figure out how to synthesize nitrogen ammonia and um and that outcome saves 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 that it's a remarkable that is 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

23:10also brings us to you know one of the main topics that we wanted to talk about with you which is canna um and this this new big swing that that you are a part of and helping helping to build and and can you just talk maybe at the start of it about why the beverage industry grabbed you like what what about it what features of it made you think this was a pressing big problem to solve and 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

23:39know the production board we operate as this foundry uh so you know we're a holding company meaning you know we hold uh 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 um so so that's kind of how we operate

24:11so 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 i 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 um 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

24:44intellectually 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 and all of the related publications and um 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

25:20number 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 with smart people have we have tech talks in our office that kind of stuff so 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 um 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

25:54um you know learn learning is is is your own mission um and so yeah i was having dinner with this professor and he was like we were talking we're we're at um i think we're at tarquin 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 um a bottle of wine and he was trying 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

26:26it's about 12 ethanol which is the alcohol and less than one percent is all of the molecules that make up all the odor color flavor and mouth feel right it's insane just one percent and the same is true for every beverage oj soda beer they're all water a tiny little bit of ethanol or sugar and then less than one percent is the stuff that makes a taste smell it look and feel the way it does so that one percent 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

27:01those 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 wind down in 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 uh and he published on this so i was like that's super interesting because if you could really and then and then the other the big breakthrough uh kind of that he pointed out was that

27:30the 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 don't we make the star trek replicator like this would be so thick like we could just take those compounds and put them in a machine and you could just make whatever you want and so that was kind of the genesis now you know this is not as easy as it sounds because we've spent three years and over 30 million dollars and you know

28:06we haven't yet launched the product it doesn't sound easy for what it's worth yeah but um in principle it was an easy statement to make you know why do we just write the star trek replicator um but ultimately uh it required actually running an r d cycle so there was a guy named lance kaiser who's our chief scientist at canna and lance you know previously worked at amorous and ripple foods and so he's a flavor chemist and so we started running these experimental plants where we started trying to make wines and make beverages in-house using just the the raw chemistry so we would take water we would take ethanol and then we would

28:40take 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 gallow 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 this stuff so we can just buy

29:14all these chemicals we buy these 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 a hardware engineering exercise which is how do you make effectively an inkjet printer for beverages and so what's the dispense system how do you get it down to sub micro liter volume because again when you're talking about one percent of a beverage being the flavor compounds and you have 60 different compounds going in you have to dispense the tiniest fraction of of a milliliter to be able

29:45to make sure that the flavor is not overdone or under done and so getting precision control being able to do it quickly and being able to do it with lots of different viscosities 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 um 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

30:18recreate that flavor and that's how we create our flavor library and our and our beverage library um so that's what we've been working on at 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

30:47experience 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 so that it's cheaper and how do we make it incredibly awesome um 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

31:14for it to proliferate the way that you want it's a debate that i have constantly with greg on this show and outside of the show by a text about the whole like web 2 versus web 3 world where my my perspective on it is that the web 3 technologies and platforms actually have to be fundamentally significantly better than the web 2 alternatives in order to actually see any sort of you know material shift in the long run so the way that you set it there as it relates to this you know hardware and um technological innovation makes a lot of sense to me on the just on the climate impact of

31:44something 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 about that as well yeah sorry that was your question i went down this very

32:14weird tangent so um the origin story but uh look the bottle 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 dollars on bottled and canned beverages a year okay 2.3 trillion dollars we um we consume something on the order of a hundred billion uh plastic glass cans more than 100 billion it's really hard to track all this stuff every year

32:57most 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 seven percent sugar and less than one percent 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

33:31make plastic and glass and canned you know 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 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 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

34:05every 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 on the order i don't even know the how accurate this is but something on the order of

34:38500 trillion liters of water a year being pumped around to make these beverages um and to make the plants that that make these beverages so the whole system is crazy and it's 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 space 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

35:13don'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 eighty percent of media consumption was those two slots and then um you know cable came along and suddenly there was like more slots and nowadays we have youtube and tick tock and you know most of what's consumed 99.9 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

35:46infinite 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

36:21that doesn't mean that it's the most appealing beverage to any individual if 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 could find on the store shelves there's only 150 options there and you can find brands that actually matter to you that actually appeal to you and theoretically

36:47you could personalize it you could 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 why starbucks is 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 100 you know it costs like three million dollars to start up a beverage brand you know you gotta come up with the packaging logos you gotta print the packaging you gotta make the beverage you gotta fill up the packages with co-packers then you

37:17gotta go find stores to carry it for you on that 150 sauce you got to convince them to put 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 canada and now anyone that buys it you get rev share on that cost you nothing to make it and your rent share will probably be greater than the revenue share you would make from

37:45selling those beverages on the storage shelves it's like um ghost kitchens but for but for brands you can just immediately go start something up like this like when mr beast did the thing with his burgers and you could have you know ghost kitchens all around the country like what whatever travis kalanick's got cloud kitchen it's like doing that but in the home that's why you immediately are in the most important place and you have shelf space in the most important place in these people's lives um that's a really really cool concept i i hadn't appreciated that from the from the article it makes it makes a lot of sense

38:12i don't think that there is you know like maybe there's a hundred brands that make up 99 of beverage sales in any category today i think in the future hopefully it's a hundred thousand brands and you know 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 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 um so i

38:50do 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 yeah and do it just in time you know you enable 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 hear you know hearing me speak what do you think

39:26is going through his mind well look um when when incumbents face technology threats um they often discount the um 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 and then 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

40:15apples when apple came out uh 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 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 um and so i think that there will be you know for a long period of time and they will they will be right for a long period of time this will not move the

40:47needle and then all of a sudden it will um 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 um these these changes take much longer to happen than anybody thinks but then when they happen they happen much faster than you ever thought possible and that's exactly how i feel about this 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 they command like i mean youtube i think does more revenue now

41:24than all the uh production companies combined or something um you know it's insanity um and uh and same with netflix i mean you know and everyone poo-pooed the quality of the content on youtube everyone said netflix is just using second-rate stuff i mean there's always a rationalization why the existential threat against you um 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 gonna be retired and they're gonna be wealthy and they're gonna be happy and they're gonna be hanging out with their grandkids they don't have this motivating force to defend and protect

41:59founders 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 on time they're not to kind of jump the train onto another track which is a whole another project you know you can look at how disruptive it looks like mark zuckerberg is at running you know facebook today but um you know i think he sees the threat uh he sees the risk to his core business and he's able to make the change and he's not ignoring it um but you know incumbents generally that are not run by folks that started the business

42:32um and could kind of have authority over that their job is to serve the shareholders keep the dividends flowing etc it's why the um 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 their ultimate demise as they're unable to see these things coming i want to ask you um two questions so so one on canna when can we buy one um when can i get one of these in my house um and uh and then i want to ask you on a separate thread so let's start there yeah so um the first 10 000 devices will

43:06be sold for 499 the pre-orders begin march 3rd for 99. um and so you can uh place a 99 deposit refundable if 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 um 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 might be a short time away for others but um uh you know that that that's the current plan um and then you know when you get the device uh there's a a cartridge system

43:44cartridges are delivered automatically so you it's a per drake pricing model you don't pay uh for consumer 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 um and so depending on what you consume through the device you're charged variably each month and so the prices range from you know 29 cents for things like sparkling water or soda water or what have you um up to 299 depending on the on the beverage that you're purchasing which is like a a nice cocktail or something okay so it's canna.com for anyone out there listening i will certainly be

44:19pre-ordering one of these um yeah c-a-n-a-com um i have to ask you before we lose you here about a another interesting future thinking technology that that you've written about recently you wrote an epic thread um that started the greatest source of value and 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 wolfe who i imagine you've come across or know at lux capital um just on the need for a branding change around uh you

44:57know nuclear technology and nuclear energy and how it's gotten caught up in people's minds you know with like hiroshima nuclear war etc can you talk a little bit about this and 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 um in my view um so there's a couple of points you made just look at our time here um okay so um [Music] all electricity on earth today is made by um you know spinning turbines and so you heat water up and you use that to kind

45:36of spin these turbines except for uh solar right where we use um uh photovoltaic cells uh to create an electric current um and so you know nuclear technology is instead of creating that heat from a system of um 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 right helium is two protons uh it's got some

46:24electrons spinning around it and so on you know plutonium is this very heavy it's got a hundred plus uh protons a bunch of neutrons and um these these heavier elements are unstable um 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 the nuclear bomb that you know that we all know the technology from

46:54uh used in 1945. so um so nuclear fission uh or nuclear reactors use these uranium and plutonium power sources where they actually control the breakdown of you know uranium and plutonium into into lighter elements control the energy that's released and then use that heat uh to create water and the 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

47:32materials 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 that's an interesting technology um 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 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

48:11in 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 coalesce it eventually collapses and it gets so tight that it fuses and that that's the magic of stars and the magic of physics uh in our

48:44universe and so um helium actually can burn into bigger elements and so on so um 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 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

49:22hydrogen 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 tokamak system tokamak are these donut shaped systems and inside that donut you 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 uh circle and you pump energy into it 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

49:54the 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 i care they're spending about 60 billion dollars 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

50:27can 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 um

51:04fertilizer we're gonna do this full circle now why'd it pull back yeah so one of the 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

51:36system 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 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

52:05there'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 um but sorry 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 um uh like i mentioned phosphorus some of the heavier elements that are really uh called rare earth metals that are used in battery technology and semiconductor systems and superconductor systems we're gonna have to figure out how to get more of this stuff in the future if you have infinite energy

52:38you 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 a 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 in the few seconds when a star 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

53:13just 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 fission systems with the

53:49theoretical 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 nuclear synthesis becoming an industrial process on earth the math pencils out it's going to take a lot of material that you convert it to 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 were we editing genomes and changing life forms on earth today we could theoretically be

54:21engineering individual atoms and changing the elemental composition of our local area of space and uh 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 that 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 the couple year a 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 um we've taken up

54:53enough of your time i know you've got to run um this was amazing i feel like i owe you money for coming on because i just got like an unbelievable science technology futuristic master class over the last hour so thank you so much i'm going to fly out to california and buy you a dinner no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no just just continue this just just buy a can of device tell your family to buy a can of device pre-orders on canada.com march 3rd we will we will all do that so

55:18a dot com canada.comcana.com dave thank you so much for joining and everyone can tune into the all-in podcast as well where you are uh one of the co-hosts which we all love so thank you so much this was amazing thanks for having me in the podcast i guess anything is possible because that's definitely the vibe when you talk holy [ __ ] [Music] that was a uh that was a crazy conversation that was definitely one of those um i can't believe i get to do this as a job or for a living type conversations what'd you think um well first okay so here's my like unedited

55:54raw kind of opinion so basically if i understand this he's created this thing called canna 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 um that it could taste as good as like any beverage possible and then it instantaneously can create it i i'm like that's what the skeptic of me says um so we'll see right well how do you think about that relative to like beyond meat impossible who are saying they can do these things you know to reproduce molecularly something that tastes like meat and they're you know

56:40high-flying big companies now i mean i was i was skeptical yeah i just needed 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 um how do you create a fire that didn't require doing it in the 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

57:12technological 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 99 but like you know jury is out so our jury isn't out sorry um i'm interested to see so that's that's one p 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 um after listening to him talk about nuclear fission for in astrophysics like i don't know if i'm like living my life wrong like you know like i feel like

57:51i haven't heard the word phosphorus since i've been in eighth grade um and maybe i've been living under a rock um but i think that like that was really cool because i you know i did learn a lot um i feel smarter but i also feel really dumb uh 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 um my first reaction is i [ __ ] love dave um i thought he was amazing some of the stories he told from you know his experience or how he wound around to

58:24different things he's done i mean he founded metro mile like he's founded all these different things he's like the quinoa king um all this different stuff he's done but he's very personable and the fact that he can kind of feinman technique things like he's explaining a lot of this stuff you know to us like we're five and i think in a lot of these areas we are basically five like when he got hunted i mean he i preface it by saying like he's obviously super smart and 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

58:56nuclear fission like i would never it's impossible to explain nuclear fission basically to a five-year-old like i i didn't totally get it so if you're listening to this and you didn't totally get it it's okay i think i i disagree i don't know i think i think i understood that more than i understand most people that try to explain web 3 and like hand wave a bunch around web3 stuff and that's not to say either one is like gonna work or not gonna work but when he was explaining it i mean he he literally explained it in the span of like three minutes so i wanna also give him credit for the fact

59:28that like he tried to squeeze that in before the end because i asked the question really late um but he broke 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 asked on the street about this stuff i'm not saying that he didn't do a great job of explaining i'm saying that ex you know maybe the five-year-old sahu bloom was smarter than five-year-old greg eisenberg but you know i 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

1:00:01did you get it on right like i'm not gonna 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 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

1:00:30constraint 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 non-linear 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 um with with the nuclear technologies talking about there's amazing amazing non-linear potential so i thought the like the broader idea and the ethos behind it was amazing i also just i

1:01:10[ __ ] 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 but like i hope you're right that that's what i'm my big

1:01:54takeaway you asked 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 web3 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 tastes the same i also think there's an interesting question around like do people care about the provenance

1:02:26of 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 [ __ ] 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 nft world and why an nft is worth something

1:02:59and so i think about that in the case of wine as an example here of like is there enough um 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 gonna go pre-order one when

1:03:28it comes out um but i thought it was fascinating man i just like i really came away just saying like holy [ __ ] i can't believe i just got to have that conversation for a job totally yeah i 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 into the stuff we build you also brought up i would just close with this you brought up one of the most important points um from the whole episode which was a micro point and i think i i want to reiterate it because i

1:04:02don't want it to go unnoticed when when i asked him about um 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 you know he was like science journals reading following interesting people on twitter then it was meeting with interesting people which maybe meeting with interesting people you know 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

1:04:37now 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 um 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 um constraint on the 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

1:05:10pod is publicly available like you're in like uh we're in your ears right now the room where it happens exactly so um that's why i mean that's why we started the pod and 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 conversations so i'm glad you said that um this was awesome you like the pod get out right now and tweet out that you love our pod and links to the pod we're trying to grow it as fast as possible um and we want your we have like a

1:05:49strangely low amount of youtube subscribers um i think it's kind of our faces we're faces for radio man maybe that's the case um but i think it's i think we've got like 4 700 uh youtube subscribers so go on youtube give us a subscribe go on spotify and apple and tweet us like subscribe i love it thank you so much man that was a that was a blast um so much fun i hope everyone loved it and looking forward to seeing everyone's feedback on the episode cheers

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