YouSaid · the spoken record

Cody Friesen

lines on the record: 42
first: 2022-09-15
most recent: 2022-09-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“What gets me really excited about technology and makes me optimistic about the future in general, but it makes me really optimistic specifically about what we do at Source.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, the best corollary is 1995. We talked about maybe there would be 20 million internet users globally within 20 years. And now there are 6 billion smartphones, meaning that information poverty is an entire thing of the past, right? One of the things that is always sort of remarkable to me is the human brain's inability to 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 20 years ago. Smartphones, et cetera. And the same thing is true when we start talking about renewable water. We start talking about source hydropanels. And so the learning rates of technologies are really, really fast. And I think that's sort of.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which we've got a number of projects going on in that region to support far more workers. But separately, and I think this was your main point, there's no reason why through advanced agriculture approaches that use something like 120th or 130th amount of water, that you couldn't produce water in the way that we do and then grow fruits and vegetables and so on. Advanced agriculture setting.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 knock-on 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.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, anybody who's working on solving water as a hero in my book, I mean, it's an infinite market space for a given company, right? So it's going to 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 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. We've solved the problem in a different way. And I think that gives us a large addressable market, 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 interest in source because of our unique technology, but also because of the big unlock that we've enabled from a market perspective.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenges associated with water going forward, right? Obviously, real estate developers can't, if they have land that design water rights, that's a huge problem. There are a number of these investors that are thinking about water at a systemic level, right? And how do we move from linear extractive to sustainable circular? And how do we move to a place that is going to work in the future? I think we've got an approach there that is potentially meaningful.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We sell, yeah, we sell bottled water, but that's a small part of the business. What I'm talking about is our water's a service business that will contract with school systems or with governments to sell water based on arrays that we've built. And then I think the reason why Breakthrough Energy Ventures came in or Fifth Wall came in, which is a real estate-backed entity or Microsoft's climate innovation fund, is all of these entities are dealing with”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so if you buy source hider panel online, which is the way that Americans can get our hydro panels directly, they're about $2,000 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. And of course, we have a release models and so on. So people can do this without having to come up with cash up front. Now, when we think about these larger arrays like we did with the Navajo or we did with Worm 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 borehole and then solve the water quality issues that exist.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a completely closed loop water system that has no input other than source hydropanels. Now, 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 $150 or $200 or $300 a month for your water, you think about that over the course 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 parity that's similar to what we saw in solar PV.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And if you think about 20 years ago, if you were to ask, oh, should I put a kilowatt of solar in my roof, people would have said, oh, well, 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 peak solar on your roof because it's so cheap. I think there'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 really the most extractive resource we utilize”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it turns out it's much purer than rainwater, right? So 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 O3, 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. 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 hydropanel is connected to the cloud and we see data feedback from every hydropanel we've deployed that says, yep, we've produced this amount of water, we have this much water in storage, it's sterile and has been mineralized. And by the way, now it's being dispensed. So we've sort of”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? Food water shelter.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So we have an R&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 a 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 or 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.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So each hydro panel can do up to five liters per day. And when we think about the way that 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. So done in a very similar way to how solar arrays are established to meet the load. Let's take the Navajo nation, which is... 27,000 square miles. So it's about the same land area as West Virginia about 175,000 Navajo live there, 54,000, let's call it a third of them, have no water at home. Zero. So we installed at about a little over 500 homes last year. We'll do about 700 homes this year. Where we solve the problem of them not having any drinking water at home.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are seeing that in real time happen with electrification of transportation, starting with, of course, Tesla's being better and a better experience than a typical ice car internal combustion engine car. But now reaching commoditization in a way that's sort of shocking, right? All you had to do is watch this last Super Bowl to see how quickly the world is changing. But it would be shocking to me that in over the next decade or so that renewables Driven approaches don't take over yet a much broader set of resources, not just water, but also in other areas.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yeah, I mean, so today we're in 52 countries and we've built over 450 projects across six continents. And in a lot of the places that we go, the lowest cost source of drinking water. And what's sort of fascinating, 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. The cost of making a device that is made of earth abundant, sort of 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 by traditional infrastructure, traditional extractive processes. And we just saw that happen with coal over the last dozen years.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it's minus 40 out, because, of course, not only is there no water vapor in the atmosphere because 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 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. So again, yearly average, the amount of water produced is not terribly different than, for example, San Francisco.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think actually, Guy, you hit it on the head, that there's sort of two competing factors, right? So if you're in Manila and it's 85% humidity, but it's partially cloudy, the thermodynamic putt is pretty short, right? The distance between 85% and 100% is short. Whereas if you're in Phoenix and it's 5% humidity, but yet you've got the full unmitigated sun bearing down, obviously you have the energy to drive the process. 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 a Manila, as an example. And so, yes, there are places and times of the year where the amount of water we produce is minimized, but on sort of an average, those places are similar. Probably the worst place for us, of course, is like northern Quebec and the middle winter.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the basic principles that we talked about are 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 a concentrated water vapor stream that we then bring back to ambient conditions, an ambient temperature, and water vapor is then condensed out.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so now when we start talking about source hydropanels, right? As you said, there's a PV module in the middle, and that's producing enough electricity to run 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.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 like a 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 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 now have as a product.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so very similar to those desk cons that 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”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a nanostructured material that is very hyroscopic and then has sort of the Goldilocks binding energy. So just strong enough to bind water molecules, but not so strong that they can't be released back out.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And you have to actually create that phase change, right? So you have to put the energy in to get 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 phase to the liquid phase using sunlight. And so that's what then led to, okay, well, first of all, water vapor is very dilute in the atmosphere. It's anywhere from one to let's say one to five percent by weight. We are at that level, how do we concentrate that dramatically, right? So we use a material that concentrates that water vapor by about 10,000 times by volume.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Son is a powerful thing, okay? Right. If you were to put up a liter of liquid water in a pan and you put it on your stove and you convert all of that liquid water to a gas, right, turn it into vapor. You would have to put in about 640 watt hours per meter, so 0.64 kilowatt hours per liter. So that means that per square meter per hour at 100% efficiency, there's about two liters of thermodynamic potential to make liquid water.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and actually, not to throw a crazy number of numbers at the audience, but just to kind of get used to the kind of scales here. So per square meter of Earth's surface, we get about 1.2 kilowatts of sunlight.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make You got it. 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 the source hydropanel we could create the conditions that you described earlier the dew that forms on leaves when you walk out of your home in the morning”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All around us are these materials that have these properties. Same reason why when you open a new box of shoes, there's a silica packet inside.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the way to when you're in your favorite greasy spoon restaurant and the salt shaker has rice kernels in the bottom, the rice kernels are there to adsorb the water preferentially so that the salt doesn't, so the salt doesn't get clumpy.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Starting point, I'm a material scientist, and there are many, many, many materials around us that are, and the term is hygroscopic. So with a G because the hydroscopic would be something that is attracted to liquid water, hydroscopic is something that's attracted to water and paper. And everything from the reason why you don't go jogging in a cotton shirt, because it's hygroscopic, to when you leave a lid off the sugar bowl and the sugar gets a little bit clumpy, right? It's doing that because the water vapor in the air is being absorbed by the sugar.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so, well, first we start with humility with respect to data because what we know whenever we're talking about such a huge problem is that no matter how smart One thinks they are 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”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And could we create the conditions of due on leaves at high noon in the middle of the summer in the middle of the desert, right?”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, right? Yeah, exactly. And so you think about 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 a liquid phase?”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, exactly. And 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 analyzed this recognizing that the lower part of the atmosphere, the troposphere, has this insane amount of water vapor in it, 10 to the 16 kilograms. So that's one and then 16 zeros kilograms of water vapor, about 100 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 that's actually growing due to climate change, but that's a whole other topic. But we have this massive resource that's everywhere. It's an atmospheric ocean.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in a very similar way, the question that I asked myself about 10 years ago was could we do precisely for water what we've now done for electricity?”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, and 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 when we think about renewables, renewable energy is begotten by free feedstock, the feedstock of sunlight or the feedstock of wind. When you're running a coal-fired power plant, the 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 the knock-on effects, even if coal's very cheap, right? The coal has to be dug and put in the coal car. That's a linear problem. You can't change those physics. But if you could make solar PV ever more efficient and make it ever more efficient, then eventually we knew there would be lower cost than coal.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reasons that water out of OL or out of the ground may or may not be potable are enumerate. If you lived in the northeast, right, your well is likely in contact with the water table that is in contact with your septic system. And so there are all those issues as well. So water becomes very quickly from going from thinking about sort of the municipal scale problem and 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.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. The statistics are 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 at my house. And so, and I moved into that house well before I started Source Global. So I put in this arsenic treatment system, which was quite expensive to solve that problem.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yet we haven't to date solved water in a way that aligns people on planet. And so I saw this opportunity to sort of imagine applying the principles of renewables without knowing yet how to do it at that time.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's sort of like this fascinating thing that 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 humanity to live in a much more earth-aligned way. And yet, the thing that I found, and 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 large-scale problem that affects humanity, it's not a human-scale problem. And yet, you know, sort of water is probably the most personal, intimate substance, right? It's what we put in our bodies. It's food. There's religion and faith and it's sacred stuff in a lot of societies.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 something like 2.4 billion people. And that's the official number. But for anybody who's been to large cities around the world, whether that's Mumbai or Mexico City or Jakarta, government states that there's potable water at home, but there's likely not. I didn't ever think that I would come back to water as a entrepreneur.”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Colorado and the Salt River system. It's sort of like this interesting thing when I was a kid. 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 riparian spring where there's just a trickle coming out of the rock and yet there would be cottonwoods and cattails and all these birds. And there's sort of like this juxtaposition that Was sort of ingrained in me”
2022-09-15 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT