The Exchanges

Q And are you talking about just heat, or are you talking about hydrothermal resources, or just hot rock?

A Yeah, great question. So I'm talking about, um, super critical areas where you can, you have enough heat that either using liquid that's in the ground, or, uh, you, or using above ground liquid You can do a thermal transfer and make electricity. So this is not about heating and cooling. Uh, there are a bunch of great companies, Dandelion and Bedrock and others who are working on that. This is about power generation systems that have power plants, uh, top side that can pump tens or hundreds of megawatts of power onto the grid. So Zanskar doesn't have special drilling technology. They don't have new fluids or new rink and cycle systems on, on the top. They literally just Have a better way to look for geothermal, because in America, there's only a few sites, and those sites were where we, like geysers in Northern California, where we see stuff coming out of the ground. In Iceland and Indonesia, there are a bunch of sites, because you can see the steam coming out everywhere. It's very accessible to get to that very, very hot area underground. Today, when we do, when we drill wells looking for geothermal, we'll drill 10 wells and get one hot spot. And, and that's not cost effective. Those wells are very expensive. With Zanskar, they have been proven that they can drill 10 wells and get 90% hit rates, and so nine out of 10 instead of one out of 10. That flips the switch on Zans, on, …

AI assessment note: “So I'm talking about, um, super critical areas where you can, you have enough heat”

Q of new and interesting applications in the, in the power sector and, and beyond, and I know that you are really focused on the AI space. Um, you know, I, in talking to a lot of investors, like, many don't see AI as a standalone category. It's sort of like, it fits into other climate tech classes. How do you, at a broad level, think about AI and climate tech?

A AI and climate tech is just a fascinating discussion because I think, for sure, in some ways, AI is driving this explosion of electricity demand that could set people back in their climate goals. At the same time, many aspects of AI as an enabling technology are going to help us present solutions to these challenges. So it's pretty circular, pretty complex, but let's see, a couple things. I think, um, The explosion of demand for electricity is, ah, a good thing. Ah, it can help drive a transition to cleaner generation, but there's a matching and a speed problem in terms of catching up to that demand, and I think that that is what people are fretting over. It's not just AI, it's also electric vehicles, it's also crypto, it's also on-shoring in the case of America. So, these are big challenges that are not gonna go away. Uh, what we need to focus on is, you know, I would say unlocking gridlock. You know, gridlock for me is this concept of not being able to get more clean baseload power generated, but then moved and then removed from the grid itself. And all of that, those are three big things, you know, make it, move it, and then use it. Those are all ripe for innovation and investment. I have no doubt that innovation and investment And AI itself will be extremely helpful in solving those problems. We, we are very, very good when we focus enough. We're very good at solving these …

AI assessment note: “AI is driving this explosion of electricity demand... aspects of AI as an enabling technology”

Q I do have to ask you about electric aviation. So the last time I think we actually recorded a conversation together, it was in 2018, and we talked specifically about electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft and how it would sort of change regional air travel pretty quickly. And I'm wondering, do you still believe that? Like, what developments have we seen in that space? And has it Met expectations.

A Quickly was probably a little bit of a, a stretch on my part. Um, but, uh, it's, it's still happening. You know, that company, uh, went public, and we're no longer an investor in it, because when companies go public, we tend to, um, step away, but I'm still a huge fan of what they're doing, and I think they are, let's say, a year or two away from, um, human and commercial flight. And, uh, Joby Aviation, another competitor of theirs in the U.S., is also on a similar trajectory, and it's very, very exciting. I do think it is going to transform things, and I do think that they definitely overestimated what they could do in the two to five year time frame, and I believe that once they and others prove that this is truly viable and working, I think you're going to see an explosion of Of, um, other companies doing it, and of market adoption. You know, we see this in the drone industry, right? Drones were sort of magical and weird and play things, and now not only are they, um, critical in warfare, but they're also doing things. I mean, I'm sure you've seen a drone show where hundreds or thousands of drones are in coordination with one another, um, displaying billboards in the sky. I was in, um, I was in Dubai recently and just strolling along, uh, the Gulf and, In the evening and looked up, and there happened to be a drone show, and I was mesmerized. It was very impressive, but at th…

AI assessment note: “Quickly was probably a little bit of a, a stretch on my part.”

Q There were a lot of people who doubted solar, of course. Like, were there any predictions with solar that played out as expected, and then were there any that you thought would happen that didn't play out?

A Yeah, I mean, we used to run around and tell investors and anyone who would listen with our fancy spreadsheets, this is Bill Gross and I. Bill was the founder of Idealab, and he was the founder of the solar company that I joined up with him to create, and he was the CEO, and I was the president, and we would run around with Fancy spreadsheets and special models that would tell everyone how we were going to get from this eight or 10 dollars down to a dollar a watt, and the truth was, like any good founder, we didn't know exactly how it was going to work and exactly what time frame, and then when I sold that company to Suntec, and I joined Shengrong Shi at Suntec, who is the founder of Suntec and a wonderful solar cell scientist, , he really understood the science much better than I did, and he had the same thing, and I remember we went to a I think it was like a fortune magazine interview or something about the future of solar. And he was pounding the table saying, we're going to get to a dollar a watt, you know, in some two years or three years. And, and we left the meeting and I said, I want to believe that, but how are we going to do that? And he said, I really have no idea. I don't know how we're going to do this. And, and we weren't sure. And what followed was we in the industry overall got there faster than we expected. And one of the key catalysts that I hadn't really und…

AI assessment note: “we in the industry overall got there faster than we expected”

Q What are your wildcards for the year or for the rest of the decade? Are there anything that you're now just thinking about that you think could be transformative that maybe wasn't on your radar until recently?

A Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, you know, again, one, one thing in the last five that was a surprise to me was the American political will. You know, I often believe about America. We sort of show up late, but boy, when we show up, you know, we can have an impact, and that, and that's true in geopolitical conflicts, but it's also true in domestic policy, and so I was really pleasantly surprised with the impact that the climate bill Uh, is, is going to have, but even emotionally had for everybody. I, I think that that's a wild card. What happens next there that could swing in either direction, either just undoing all of that, which would be a colossal, um, disappointment, but also other versions like doubling down. Um, I think as Republicans understand that at a existential level, this is just a losing issue to be on the wrong side of, you know, you're just more wrong every single day. It's not a, this is not a sociopolitical issue, um, and it's just like, and it's not something like taxes where you can pick a side and maybe, uh, hold, hold your ground. Climate, you just lose. You just lose slowly or you lose quickly. I think when they come around to that, and some of them, and governors are already starting to do this, certainly at the state level, this is happening all over the place, I think we may see more of a consensus view, as you see in Europe, as you see in Asia,…

AI assessment note: “I think that that's a wild card. What happens next there that could swing”

Q I'm particularly intrigued by the use of AI for things like materials discovery or exploration, which we've been talking about, um, not just geothermal, but stuff like geologic hydrogen, right? Like there's a lot of interesting applications of AI there to find these pockets of, of hydrogen deposits, um, grid planning and grid modeling. Um, where are you, what, what other areas of AI application are you most interested in?

A You know, so at Obvious Ventures, we invest in planetary health, human health, and economic health, and I lead the planetary piece, but on the human health front, that's where AI has had a lead for a long time. I was reading something funny about AI where a researcher was saying, look, in AI research, once it goes out of research and starts getting used in the real world, it's no longer called AI, it's just called software, you know, and so Siri, you know, people don't think of it, it's absolutely as AI, even a Google search, For the last 10 years has been AI driven, machine learning driven, but we just think of it as, oh, software, you know, it's just, and it also becomes very obvious and standard, which is, I'm sure, frustrating or humbling for some of those early technologists who developed it. Uh, I think in drug discovery, we were early investors in a company called Recursion Pharmaceutical, and Recursion was using AI for a long time to help speed the process of drug discovery and drug approvals. And we see it again and again in that realm, ah, you know, genomics is this incredible field that used a lot of compute to make sure that we could map the human genome. We're now trying to do that with, um, proteins and in the field of proteomics, which I think is, my understanding is much more complicated even than the genome itself, and then, um, mapping the human genome. And ye…

AI assessment note: “I think in drug discovery, we were early investors in a company called Recursion Pharmaceutical”