"800 Billion Little Behaviour Changes": Mick Liubinskas on Commercialising Climate Tech

Climate salad. Yeah. Amazing. What do we call it?

Is it an organization? Is it a venture? Is it a movement? I don't know.

What do we call it? Yeah, now we're four years in. We've got 800 climate tech companies, 800, 200 members, about 125 investors, 150 mentors, and our goal is to help Australian climate tech companies go global. Australia produces a lot of great technology, but we don't commercialize nearly enough.

People keep saying we punch above our weight. Do you think it's harder for climate companies to go global than others? Because we're not talking about assessor software that just rolls out and sells to be to be right. We need 10,000 little changes, and actually, if you think about 8 billion people on the planet will do 100 things a day, you know, that's 800 billion little behavior changes.

We will not look back in any investment we make now, negatively, we will absolutely say, I wish we did more. So, Mick, welcome. Finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, we meet in person. Exactly.

We're making the most of it. We're recording something. It seems to be the only way we're actually ever going to meet with the record. So climate salad.

Yeah. Amazing. What do we call it? Is it an organization?

Is it a venture? Is it a movement? I don't know. What do we call it?

Well, look, it's the back story is it was supposed to be just a newsletter. I was like, yeah, so I nine years ago, my best friend in the world pushed me into climate innovation, said that we need 10,000 innovations. I'm like, okay, that sounds like a problem to solve over the next 20 years. And then four years ago, four and a half years ago, I was working with about 12 companies.

Just I've done a little bit of investing, supporting them. And every time I told someone about these companies, like they would just be blown away like Cecil Earth or GoTera or MJ Thermal. And I'm like, I need to tell people about this. So I started a blog, like literally 45 minutes my wife and I one weekend, she's an awesome marketing person, created this blog, created this newsletter, put it out, and we got like 100 responses and 25 new companies contacted me.

Oh, wow. And then by the end of the year, we were at 112 companies, like 100 companies within a five month period. That's nuts. And then the government contacted this new stuff.

I was going to say, can you and your team run a program? I'm like, there's no team like this. There's nothing here. It's a new life.

And then we so we we turned it into basically a membership based industry group focused on Australians who are building global solutions to be climate problems. And that's that's what we've been doing. And salad is the whole it's a mixed match of things together. I was always guessing that's what it was.

There was the goal. A lot of people rang me up and told me it was a terrible name. And I'm like, it's just an newsletter. Don't overthink it.

But it has been pretty good in terms of someone did think we were a catering company once. But that was the thing. It's it's green. It's multicultural.

It's mixed. And we should have more of it. That's about 100 percent. So firstly, my voice, I'm so sorry.

I have had so many events. I have talked nonstop. It's Friday. I think I've got one more talking thing after this.

And then hopefully my voice will hold on for that break. I'll do the talking. It's right. You do the talking.

Before we get into climate side and all that sort of stuff, let's frame it up and sort of talk about you because you're fascinating background. A lot of time in the US. You know, stuff that a lot of our audience would love to hear. Yeah.

So give me a sort of quick summary of the last 30 years. Yeah. Yeah. Let's sort of how you ended up where you are.

Yeah. Briefly, I was at total nerd as a teenager in computers, networks, databases, everything that got me onto the internet before it was even a browser back in the early 90s. The worldwide web, as it was called. Yeah.

Well, you pre worldwide web. The links, text-based browsers, etc. So bulletin boards. And then I built a couple of websites and started web development agency.

Then got into tech startups. And then I really loved working with multiple companies. And probably more about my personality and attention span than about my abilities. But just down the road, actually, we, here is Zeri Hills.

We started Polynesia back in 2008. I loved Polynesia. It's such a cool name. You've got good names in your life.

That was Phil Moore. So Phil was my partner. He's and he's the now the partner at main sequence. Yeah.

So we started Polynesia back then with the view of doing almost what we've done in climate salad in tech, which is Australia deserves a great tech industry. Let's support it. We did 25 tech companies out in about a seven-year period. Right.

Two exits, two still going. Yeah. Law paths doing brilliantly. They're a great, great tea.

They come in here and film all the time. They just down the road. They do a lot of filming in the studio. Yeah.

So that was great. And then we were co-founding investors and mentors of startmate. And then Telstra approach. He's been in the show too.

All right. And then Telstra asked me to come and set up a tech accelerator for them with any parker and Charlotte Yaconi. That was Murudi. And we had all these companies going to the US and they said they said go to the US and help the companies on the ground.

So my wife and I and three young kids moved to San Francisco 2016. It wasn't the peak. It wasn't the best time to go to San Francisco. Let's be honest.

But it did change my life in a really good way because a certain person pulled out of the Paris agreement for the first time. And then my friend nudged me into into into climate. Yeah. And then I started working with the universities over there.

Berkeley, Stanford, Singularity University in the Wacombinator program. I love Singularity University. I've come across it all within a few times. They're a fascinating organization.

Yeah. Massive ambition right. I think it's a real new take on having impact. So yeah, that was great.

And then I moved back to Australia 2019. I did it a couple of years with BCG digital ventures. Yeah. I want to remember those.

Yeah. You're taking me on a journey of my years. Even though we're both really, really young. And then I really wanted to work on climate.

So I left to focus on climate technology work. And yeah, now we're four years in. We've got 800 climate tech companies, 1200 members, about 125 investors, 150 mentors. And our big, our big goal is to help Australian climate tech companies go global because one of the things that's worth digging into is that Australia produces a lot of great technology, but we don't commercialize nearly enough.

And I'm, I keep, people keep saying we punch above our weight. And I'm like, we punch nowhere near our weight. We have massive advantages, such an incredible potential opportunity. And we do well based on our size and distance.

But I think that's a missed opportunity. Do you think it's harder for climate companies to go global than others? Because they're often, you know, we're not talking about a SaaS software that just rolls out and sells to B2B, right? Which is what a lot of people do.

Absolutely. There's a lot more complexity. They're often physical businesses. And there's a lot of cost and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you think it's, I mean, it's a, it's a bigger barrier being further away with the kind of organizations.

Huge. So there's two big barriers. One is that climate is not fully appreciated about you. Whereas now, ironically, SaaS, that's right.

I was, I saw a company get funded and they do something like, you know, hedge arbitration. It's like, you know, solving all the wars. It's not trying to be the world at all. Exactly.

Well, there was an e-commerce platform for making people buy more stuff that I don't need. I'm like, great, thank you. But that's the reality is that those, those, those are established categories. And the simplicity of SaaS, I'll say, even though it's very, very hard to do, is start, start a company in Australia and focus on the US.

And 99, 99% of businesses do that and they'll have a decent chance. But as you said, in climate, a third of the companies are software, a third are devices. Yep. So it's $100 to $20,000 products.

Yep. And then a third of them are infrastructure-based. Which is even more difficult to grow. Much more difficult.

So you look at it's coming like GoTera, an absolute alchemy magical company. They, they take, they use robotized machines that have maggots in them to eat food waste for woolly's, lend lease and hired. And it turns it into chicken feed and fertilizer. Like 12.

That's a magic product. But it's a bio-engineered product. You, you've got to install it. It's messy.

There are maggots involved. Like it's, it's flawed. Not easy to sell maggots to investors. No, but you're selling massively reduced methane, which again, the world doesn't fully value.

So yeah, it is, it is definitely harder for those reasons. So go back to when you used the great word Nudge. And you said you got Nudge into climate. So you're, one of your friends sort of, you said you pushed you into it.

So tell me a little bit about that. And did you have any interesting climate before? Was it more of a passing inch? How did that?

Because obviously you're so embedded in it now. Like how did that sort of happen? Yeah, I would say I was a, I would describe now I would would have said at the time I'm quite an active positive person. Yeah.

I had worm farms. I recycled. I was, you know, I was doing it. You're doing your bit.

I was doing my bit. Yeah. But he sent me a couple reports. And again, I, I think when I move to the US, it opened up space in my life.

And that was critical. What did actually know anyone? Yeah. Well, I actually, I actually knew a few people, but I left like 10 boards in Australia and you know, it's created a bit of a space.

And also I'm having this early midlife crisis of like, what am I going to do for the next 20 years? And then he sent me some reports. So randomly, a guy I grew up playing basketball with and now surf with was the chair of the European Commission for Sustainable Finance. That's random.

Like, like there's massive role. He's in say does it sound like a little role? He's in Brazil at the moment in cop working on like trillion dollars worth of sustainable finance. So, but I just said to him, hey, this US has pulled out of the Paris agreement.

This looks really bad. And he's like, maybe it's the time you got in the game. And that's a basketball reference of get off the bench and get in the game. Do something.

Do something. Make it impact. And I'm like, I'm a, I'm a nerd. What am I going to do?

He goes, we need 10,000 innovations in sustainability and clean tech. And I'm like, hey, I can do that. So, when he says 10,000 innovations in 10,000 businesses or 10,000 ideas or how do you decide to define that? Every little product in the world needs to change slightly to become sustainable, supply chain, every little thing we've got.

So the massive difference of this can I've got here can be 99.5% recycled. Whereas this glass, at the moment, it's about six, I think six to 14%. So, can this can be almost exactly the same can as a Pepsi can back in the 60s or 70s.

Like, incredibly, but your glass is more challenging. And obviously, our plastics, which are plastic is an incredible, incredible chemical solution. We can just do it. We need to need to do it in slightly different ways.

I love travel. I want to get on planes and travel around the world. I'm about 50 countries next year, but after I finished in Antarctica. And but the plane needs to be filled with sustainable aviation fuel and to do sustainable aviation fuel, that by itself needs 100 technologies because you need to be able to grow, you need to move it, you need to, so there's just everything we've got that makes humanity amazing today and that has benefited my life needs to change slightly and all of that needs innovation is to do that.

Can everything in our lives become sustainable or are the things that just we should just actually get rid of? Yeah, there's a big difference between doing less bad. So, if you, there's definitely better ways to do coal. Like, coal has been, you know, have been an incredible energy source.

You can make it more efficient. You can do sort of carbon catch and storage, but it's less worse versus solar and wind. And then you've got solar, which is like the solar panels aren't as fully recyclable as they could be. We've got to improve all those components.

So, I think there are some things which we should just stop. So, definitely consumption. Like, people talk about the populations to be and that's not, that's not the reality. The issue is consumption.

So, how much each person is consuming of everything? Of everything. And like, if you look at the eight billion people on the planet, it's actually the Americans, the Australians, the English, the Canadians, that we consume like three to ten times the average. So, it's so bad.

So, we would need like six earths. If everyone ate like an Australian and consumed like an Australian, we'd need six earths. It's like 12 for the US or something. I'll work to check the numbers.

So, we do have to cut back some consumption. And it's little things like just, you know, where your genes are a little bit longer. And when you're ordering catering for an event, don't have 45 sandwiches left over. Like, there's just, there is behavioral changes which definitely help.

And this is the reality. I like to joke that there's no silver mushroom in getting the world back to climate positive. We need like, we need 10,000 little changes. And actually, if you think about eight billion people on the planet, we'll do 100 things a day.

You know, that's 800 billion little behavior changes. But it's, I think it's totally doable. Yeah, you do. And so, how many do you think we, since you started?

Yeah. What do you, what number are you at? Yeah. It's a really good question.

Look, vast majority of companies we work with are still at an early stage. Yes. We have about 50 companies that have valued at more than 50 million dollars. And some of them are heading towards a billion.

That's amazing. And it's, it's, it's interesting to talk about solving a climate problem with a capitalist solution. But I think we have to. So, some of these products getting capitaled into them and turning them into great businesses is probably the fastest way to actually get outcomes.

And that's really important because instead of saying please buy my product, it's not as good. And it's 20% more expensive. But it happens to be better for the environment. What we're seeing now is by my product, it's, it lowers your risk in the long term.

It can save you money. And it's better than the alternatives. That was the change that needed to happen. That's right.

And go to a good example of that. Of like, instead of taking your, now, policy comes in and says, you can't destroy your, or your waste will worse. You can't destroy land-filled because of the methane costs. We're going to charge you $1 per ton.

That's quite expensive. Well, hang on. What do you put in a go-terra machine? And actually, it'll produce chicken feed and fertiliser on the other side.

And we'll charge you one tenth of that. It's like, that sounds like a really good outcome. And the CFO is happy, right? Like, you can't just do it for the sustainability people.

The CFO and the company has to go, that makes economic sense. Because of the capitalist environment, we're in shareholders and so forth. Everyone needs to have. That's right.

You're not going to dismantle that and get to re-degrowth at any time soon. We need to work with that system and make a lot of changes by making better products. So that in terms of your question around how far have we gone? I think we've made incredible progress, but we haven't tipped over yet in terms of, on two things.

One is wholesale economic value. And the second one is everybody appreciating that value. So the second one. I think it is.

Because number one, I'd say 7 billion people on the planet don't have massive amounts of money sitting there to pay a premium and to have impact in their life. A lot of people are still trying to get food, shelter, education, electricity and safety. So to expect them to make that call, then you've got the top point 1% who have trillions of dollars in wealth. And they're like, I don't need it.

I'm so wealthy. I'm going to fly my private jet to Paris for my favorite cheesecake. But then you've got the people in the middle who can make the change. But the reality is nearly vast majority of people have either personally or indirectly, through someone close to them, had an experience with a climate disaster, which they can't, which feels significantly worse than it did 10, 20, 50 years ago.

And it's really different to everybody. You could have been directly involved in a flood. You could be sitting up at Lisbon going, I don't mind rebuilding my house every 10, 15 years for a big flood. But every three to five years is just ridiculous.

And we've been doing some great work with NRMA insurance around, we built help fund with them, which is to help Australians get more climate resilient by implementing innovations, Australian innovations into Australian communities. And I think it's a great example of this, a really great combination of factors we're just helping us get to that tipping point. I've got two questions from that. I'm trying to decide which one to ask the first.

I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, which was the investment side. Yeah. It's getting easier. Yeah.

But it's still a lot harder. Yeah. Is it? Do you feel, I feel like the investment money going into climate-based businesses is almost a lot like the investment money going into female founders.

There's a lot of talk and very little action. Yeah. It was that how it, in reality, I'm not involved enough to know, but that's how it seems from the outside. Well, there's really good support at the very early stages.

Mm-hmm. A lot of accelerators, a lot of university programs. And there's literally trillions of dollars at the late stage. Nothing in the middle.

And it's really hard in the middle. And the reason is it's still about timing. Because investors would rather pay three, five, tenix more for a company or a product, when they know it's leading and it's going to win. Yeah.

Then to take the risk too early. So there's a big, especially with clean deck 1.0 with solar and EVs. Mm-hmm.

A lot of people lost a lot of money. And so therefore, people are waiting till it's definitely real. And then they'll pay extras in corporate to the same. Yeah.

I think, I think it's you're sort of talking about seed series A being that kind of level, which is that sort of where we're thinking. Even as you said, because hardware, you know, it's so expensive. I see a series A for a software company could be three million bucks. We've got series A.

60 million bucks series A's. Like V2 Foods was a $85 million series A. Yeah. We've got Secona batteries, electrify, Allegro energy, MJ thermal.

These companies are $100 million products. So we talk about it being slower to a million but faster to a billion in revenue. But that means that the capital requirements are significantly higher. And actually, they're more complicated in terms of, they need debt financing and infrastructure financing.

Everything's more complicated. Yeah. Do you have a company that has completely blown you away with an innovation that you just saw? You know, there's a lot of innovations that are obviously the wrong word, but you know, they tell you about it, well, that makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you obviously just talked about the food waste thing. I have not heard of that.

I think that's amazing. But is there any, is there any one that you can think of or two that you've just got? Oh my god. Yeah.

How the hell did you think about that? Yeah. I've got 800. I'll have to we'll have to extend this off this for another four or five hours.

A few really quickly, one Capricorn power. Some guys who've been in the energy system industry for a long, long time, they've basically used a jet engine and made a version of it. It's a recuperated, brightened engine, which can take waste products and turn it into 24 hour electricity. Wow.

Do you remember back to the future too, where he comes back and puts this stuff in? So bar one water in Victoria, they're trying to do a deal with arena and Capricorn power. It's it processes sewerage and has these massive energy needs. They can actually put sewerage in the front end of this engine and produce electricity out of the out of the sewerage that they were actually processing.

That's what 24 hours and energy. That's amazing. And the second one is MJ Thermal out of Newcastle University, two material scientists mucking around with aluminum and graphite. And they're like, they create this brick, which basically contains its shape.

And you heat it a bit and it stays really hot for a long time. And the incredible thing. So burns like coal, except the next day, it's still sitting there. And do you want to do it again?

Use it again. You can use it hundreds of times. And then when you finish with it, you can recycle it and turn into a can. So like that is alchemy, right?

And they are out of two material scientists out of Newcastle University, a coal town that is now booming. Like Newcastle University, the I2N program up there, Shavorn in the team, like it has just incredible potential. Allegro is up there. Mel Ventures is up there in Musselbrook with a hardware deep tech with a big focus on climate.

Like this, this is why I get excited about telling my story because there are 70 good things happening. Gosh, the brains on people that come up with these things, I find just fascinating. So one really important thing is you and I, even though we look really, really, really young, I like the way you keep saying that. There's the younger generation that might be digital natives, but they're also environmental natives.

So I talk about making stuff less bad. They talk about nature first. And that is a different perspective. So I think it's brains and a perspective change.

My dad is a massive climate denier. Things that's all made up because scientists can horrible scientists can tear down these fossil fuel industries. But actually, I've got three kids. They are nature first.

You don't have to convince them that there's a problem. You're like, why aren't we doing it with nature? Because I kind of like breathing. I like drinking water, and I need food, like reasonably important for humans.

So the combination of brains and perspective, I think, is critical. Well, that has segwayed nicely into the other question. So I'm glad I asked the investor one first. So where I was going to go from that was, where and how close do you feel we are to the tipping point of, you know, not being able to come back unless we do something drastic.

So I guess what I'm thinking here is we're all, everyone's making efforts. Yeah. It's a lot of climate deniers. Yeah.

People make an effort until they don't anymore. And there's a reason for that. We're seeing that right now in the particularly politics. I guess where is that point do you think?

I know no one knows the answer. Sure. Where it's so hard to come back. Yeah.

And it's then it's going to be a point of what we can't not do something now or we've gone. Yeah. I've got a rule of maximum three percent of time on the negatives. But I'm just intrigued to know.

No, great. So in a few weeks, I get to present me a few weeks. In a few weeks, I get to graduate from my Masters of Sustainable Development at Crow University, which was an incredible experience. I did it slowly over four years in my spare time.

So fascinating. We did environmental health, environmental law, environmental pollution, like just all these studied these things in depth. And the really hard thing actually is the dad and someone who's an total optimist is to not read the news about how bad things could get. And the reality is it's actually a very, very hard to explain.

And it's one of the things you're an incredible communicator. But the issue of the scientists to talk about two degrees by 2050 has been, I think, disastrous. But also, I am a pretty smart guy and I've spent four years studying these things that they are incredibly complex. So like the, there's like the La Nina, El Nino, where the patterns, the things like the swathes glacier in Antarctica, at least like three kilometers of water on a glacier that has been cycling for 10,000 years during which humanity has thrived.

And if that basically starts melting and flows in the ocean, you're talking within a five-year period of like two or three meters of sea level rice. And are you going to Antarctica in January with a bunch of climate scientists? And it's like it's that scary. Everyone knows about Siberia and how cold it is.

Siberia actually has so much organic material frozen into the tundra. If that gets, if that thaws, then that is released as methane and could have like 20 to 50 years of negative carbon emissions in over a 10-year period. Those two things, they happen and we do not go back. And the complexity of them is amazing.

There's this thing called AMOC, which is, I keep, it's a really hard, it's the anti-maridial oscillating, not the currents, but circuit. But it's basically how water and air moves but across the oceans. And it's incredibly complex, based on the acidity in the water, the temperatures, the wind, like there's 57 factors. If that slows down, like in with that changes dramatically, like everything in terms of food, like you could have a point where there's effectively 80% loss of sea life and sea food.

So there are, this is the hard thing to talk about is people kind of think, yeah, I get climate change is not very good and a few extra bush fires, a few extra storms. Like it could genuinely be disastrous. My view is we actually have made so much progress on technology and policy and people understanding this, that if we have exponential growth in a couple of areas over the next 10 years, we will avoid most of it. But we are well past 1.

5 degrees. And the way to think about it is not the weather, but think about your own body temperature. I've got kids. And they can, they can, they can be hot after a sports game, or they can be cold in winter.

But if they, if you get the thermometer on them and their, their temperatures gone up one and a half degrees, you're taking the hospital, right? And that, that's the way to think about it is it's the regulated temperature, not weather. Like they are two completely different things. And the main thing I can say is, for years of studying it, I'm a decently rational person.

Like it could get bad and it's worth this, like we will not, we will not look back on any investment we make now negatively. We will absolutely say, I wish we did more. No matter what we, I will say that. Like I'm committed my whole life to it, massive cost to my whole family.

But I will, I will definitely say by 2035, two things, the whole world has changed so significantly. Like I think we'll be at 80% EVs by 2035. I think we'll be at micro grids in, in the homes with solar and wind and even solar batteries and EVs. But we will also look back and boy, say boy, I wish we did a bit more.

Yeah. Well that can't, you're, you're setting me up for my questions perfectly. So switching back to the more positive side, how far have we come? Because we all know, and then the, I mean, everyone knows we're not doing that.

That doesn't seem to have any impact. But we have, we are having an impact. We have changed, we aren't plastic bags. There aren't, you know, there's a million things that we even go back to CFC's and you remember when that happens, it was so long ago, right?

But there has been a lot of global change and there has been global. How far have we come? I think, you know, one of the things I took a lot about on this show is a lot of entrepreneurs are always pushing for the next goal. They never actually look back at what they've achieved.

Yeah. And I think you need to, because I think it gives you more motivation to keep going. Yeah. So as a global community, yeah, how far have we come?

What have we achieved? It's a really good question. I was asked recently about like, but what about the ozone layer? It repaired itself and it's like, it actually didn't.

We had this, the Montreal Protocol and we changed, we changed like four or five million products around the world, basically refrigeration and aerosols. And then we repaired it. So it was actually a great example of what we had to do. Interestingly, though, the US benefited because DuPont had the patents on hydrofluoric components.

It's the only environmental, global environmental protocol that actually supported because they financially benefit of it. So that's something negative in that. I think there is incredible belief that we are about to have a positive teaming point. That's true.

And my view is it's going to happen in 2027. So and the reason I say that is, I'm an old geek who's been through a lot of innovation waves. And I know what it feels like before it's about to take off. So fill in my back in our colonizer officers, when we're sitting here going, we've got engineers, we've got entrepreneurs, we've got technology, we've got platforms and tools, like we've got the essence of what we need to go and build this.

And out of that, you have start, mate and blackbird and camber and all these other things come out of it. So I think we are just ahead of that. And on the on the negative side, the problems are actually driving policy change. And no matter what you think about natural now or narrative for certainly the last 24 hours, global policy is absolutely moving this direction because you can legislate against clear problems.

There's too much plastic in our bloodstreams. We've got a legislator against that. People are dying from carbon emissions, like from pollution, but you can legislate against that. So that legislation is increasing over time.

So you've got policy driven growth. And then you've got more customers because of policy, but also because of problems. So when you walk in the store and they're sitting next to, you know, if I see a plastic drink and I see a can, I'm going to take the can because I know that it's more recyclable. Yeah.

And and and and eight billion people make those tiny dishes in that direction. Well, sushi fish has been in the news this week, right? How many of those damn things are made? If we get rid of those and put them in a billion, like literally that, that it's it's such a painless change, like the ozone story.

Yeah. Look back at those change to be deeper refrigeration aerosols. Yeah. It was completely painless.

That's right. It was it was not a bother at all. That's right. It really did what it was, but it seemed like it at the time.

That's right. It's the that's the challenge for entrepreneurs is to make you product rights. If you get your little cardboard thing, which I saw recently this Ray is doing for your soy sauce, you don't care. You just want the soy sauce on your on your avocado and chicken wrap or send them.

So I think that's exactly right. There's a really interesting tension between I feel like this is bad. I should do something about it, but I'm just one person out at eight billion. Yeah.

Surely surely my one can doesn't make a difference. And actually percentage wise, it doesn't, but what is important is actually your the perception of what happens. So now everyone here in this room, everyone I interact with gets slightly more infected with saying, maybe I should try a little bit harder. And when I see you try being harder and the next person try a bit harder, we will try a little bit harder.

So that is absolutely happening. And so as those customers grow, more people want to build products for them, more investors want to invest in those companies. And then and then so you've got policy driving it, increased customers. And the final thing is the technology is getting better and better and better.

So instead of saying, hey, by my product, it's 20% more and it's a bit crappy, but it happens to be good for the environment. I'm saying it saves you money and makes you money. DNA energy is a great example. They manage energy systems for bigger sites.

They had a big fast, big fast food company in the US curious about their product. Nice to have, maybe I'll try it. They have a heat wave. All the aircon goes down.

The energy blows out. They can't actually open their stores for a couple of weeks, lose millions and millions of dollars. They set a purchase order through the next day because they're like, it's a risk management. This actually is a continuity for my business.

Energy has to be managed. We've taken it for granted. And now that's not the case. So they're the three things that went why I think 2027 is going to be the big tipping point.

Policy is driving more customers and more customers is driving better technology and that's organ to tip over. It seems to me that as a species, we almost need something drastic to happen to us first to take action. Yeah. Is there something that's going to happen before 2027 that's going to cause that tipping point in your mind?

Possibly. I was worried, slash hopeful. And this is an awful position to be in Ryan. I know what you're going to say here is what I understand.

Go on. I thought the Olympics was going to have a moment where there was going to be a disaster. And we were a bit lucky. But I think there's a high chance of a sporting event where someone might die.

And I'm not hoping for it. I sound like an asshole saying this. I'm not wanting that to happen. And I'm not wanting floods and those things.

But you're right. Like 911 is a moment where a plane crash is in the building. You're like, holy, that is just awful. We need to do something about it.

This is a boring, boring frog problem where you're basically saying like this is a tiny thing that actually increments over time to the point where it's then it's too late to go and act. So it's something that humans are not very good at responding to. And that's why there was the only news how to think of the average person needs to be personally impacted by the environment every three days to care. And it's kind of right.

It's kind of right to be like, if you're sitting there trying to pay your bills and you're working your butt off in two jobs and you're trying to get your kids through school. And Michael Bence comes on and says, oh, can you please do this and pay me? Can you get a battery for your home? Yeah.

It's 15 grand. You're like, what are you talking about, man? I like it. So we've got to make better products where it's like, oh, there's a company in the US that is offering free batteries in your home for $19 a month and they offer blackout protection.

Amazing. So they give you this free, massive battery. But what they want to do is they want to have that battery as a part of their virtual power plant to manage the greed. So that will give you the guarantee.

Everyone's happy though. The house gets a battery. The house gets uninterrupted power if it goes down and the grid gets better energy. So there's business model innovation here as well.

The thing with innovation is sometimes I think it holds change back. Give you a great example. Think about when Plasma screens came along. First time they ever came.

We're old enough, young enough. Have you wanted to describe it to remember? They were a fortune. They were like 28 grand, right?

And now they're like 300 bucks. And everybody sees that in every product. They come out. They're so expensive.

But if you wait, you know, they're going to come down. And this is what's happening with batteries. I would love to go and get a battery. A lot of people would love to go and get a battery.

At the beginning, I didn't get solar because I was waiting for batteries, right? I was like, well, why would I get solar? Because I'm not going to be there most of the time when I'm using it. That was before we all worked from home.

You know, there's always these, there's always an excuse to think. And unfortunately, because we know batteries will get cheap and someone will come up with that solution here in Australia, we all wait for it. It almost holds back innovation, holds back progress. It's bizarre.

It does. I mean, look, that's there's always the early adopters. And then, and I think there is a there's a public benefit of this, which is why I think subsidies in this area make sense. And yeah, there's a diesel petrol subsidy, like which is billions, right?

And, and so we subsidize a lot of these things. I don't think it's crazy to look at the car industry here for years and years and years. All those places in Adelaide, I was looking at these things. If they took that money and retrained them all, yeah, that would just be such a bad deal.

I mean, they did eventually, but it took out forever. Yeah, it is. And look, there's an advanced manufacturing. Yeah, it's sort of national security and sovereign, sovereign, wealth, different kinds.

So it's, it's definitely complex. But absolutely, I think there is, there is that pressure point that we're getting to. We're now just becomes easy. Yeah, batteries are coming down so fast in speed.

And, and again, Australia, if you would ask me before we used to go where our strengths are going to be, I might have said ad tech and grid and energy, but a long duration energy storage is actually a huge area. So it's kind of mid-size. There's home batteries and then there's the next big size. Both of those together are combining to the point where it's going to change everything.

Because it answers the question about when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. So batteries are going to get to the point. So two things I'm going to say, but by, I'd say by 2030, you're going to have an EV. And also, you're going to go into bunnings and you're going to be in there buying a couple of screws and another succulent.

And you're going to go, you're going to say, you're going to go buy battery for a hundred bucks. Well, like, think about solar panels. The first solar panels in the space programs were millions and millions of dollars per square centimeter. And now I just got some solar panels.

Like, the guy tried to charge me five grand for my, for my lights and my driveway. I've just got solar. It was like 50 bucks. Yeah.

I'm like, I had to wire it all up. So solar has got so cheap because it's scaled. So, and I think all all technologies go on this rights law path where every time they, they, they scale, their prices come down dramatically. And then, and what you also have is India and China are leading this massively because of these huge populations.

Then you've got Indonesia and Philippines and Vietnam, these incredible high tech countries with massive populations and huge needs who are skipping, they're not going to have big grids with coal fire power plants. They're just going past that phase. Exactly. And we'll talk about China.

It's like, yeah, China's still installing lots of coal fire power plants. They're not using them very much. And they're installing last year, 10 times as much solar, then coal installations. So that, and they for a lot of the last 18 months, they're about for the first time ever.

And then they're going through huge growth. Yes. And they've got a massive middle class. We've had, we've gone through our growth and benefits.

It's hard for us to say, hey, don't you pollute just because we did. It's very hard to say that. But they are also knowing that they have economic benefit out of this. They have an EV in battery industry and a solar industry because they now supply chain.

So they could do investing in it. So it's complicated, but it's, it's a big problem and we can solve it. It's so interesting. You said you're going to Antarctica.

Yeah. Tell me about it. Why? Who with?

How long? What, while you're looking at? Yes. Going in January.

So it's been on my bucket list for a long time. I had a goal before I turned 50. I wanted to get to 50 countries and prior to COVID, I was on track. But I'm now sitting at, I'm at 48 countries and five continents.

So next year, I'm going to Chile and then Argentina and then in Antarctica. And I'll be seven continents, 50 countries. So I was winging about it being on my bucket list to a good friend of mine, Leonor Watson. And she's an incredible business coach.

And she's been twice. And she's like, hey, let's get a group of people going down. So we've got Anastasia from Regro, Paul Fox from EV. So we've got a bunch of climate people.

And we're going to go and spend two weeks on a boat and go see this incredible experience of Antarctica. What's, it would be so stunning. What's your anticipation for this light? Because there's like nowhere else on the world.

It really is. And also, and from a climate perspective, it's really, really important. Do you think it'll be scary as well? There's no doubt.

There's no doubt. So 20 years ago, I climbed out at Kilimanjaro in Africa. And I saw the glazes up there. And on the top, you're only there for five minutes.

And Jeremy, my guide was like, basically, like, you know, meek, it's melting. It's like, it's going to, it might not be here for your kids. And I was like, whoa, he had this incredible moment. That was before I finally got into this.

And then four years ago, I was up in Keynes, and I got taken by some marine scientists down and saw the coral reefs. And they showed me the bleaching. I was like, wow, it's a horrific bleaching. It's huge.

It's a really big issue. And massive tourism, right? So if they're, if they're greyberry reefs white, then there's a significant list. So I want to go and have this experience with nature.

I really want to go and spend some time on a boat where I'm not having 35 second conversations with 100 people. I want to have deep and many conversations. And I want to, I want to be shocked by the beauty and fragility of nature. And that's what I'm going to see.

Incredible. How long have you get that you fly somewhere? Would you just go straight from Tazzi or how small? You can fly from there and you can go from New Zealand, but basically into Santiago, onto Buenos Aires.

And we've got a, we're meeting with a lot of the climatic leaders of Buenos in Argentina, which is really good. Then we, then you fly down to Ushui, which is on the very southern tip of Argentina, right? And then, then you get a boat across the drags passage, which is pretty wobbly. So that's supposed to be pretty wild, isn't it?

It's the worst, it's the worst ocean crossing in the world. But then you get down in Tartiga, which is beautifully still. And you jump in the water. I'm camping on the ice going in the water.

Yeah, because the water looks like the most purest liquid in the world, in the pictures and movies that I've seen or documentaries and samples. Yeah, it is cold, but it is very, it is very fresh, obviously, and the significant less pollution. And then, yeah, we camp on the ice overnight in a sleepy bag and kayaking. So yeah, going to go have this big experience.

How incredible. Yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing about that. We're going to, we'll definitely get you back on because I want to hear about that.

I love doing trips like that we can do insane things. And that will, that will be incredible. Mick, what do you want to say to anyone who's watching this? We have a lot, we have, I don't know, we have 60,000 followers with them.

A lot of them are founders, right? So everyone wants to do their bit, but they will may watch this and then just go back because it's nothing happened. If there's one simple thing they can do, is it investing in them? We're talking about innovators here.

We're not talking about average people. In terms of they're not necessarily jobs. These are people who take action. What's something someone like that should do?

Yeah, it's a really good thought. I think the first thing to think about is this transition is well underway. So if you think it's not going to affect you, then, then, then I think it's worth thinking about it, whether it does. What does, what does water cost affect you?

What, if you export a product into the, into European Union, like they have sea bams kicking next year, which means that everything gets taxed on its environmental cost at full cost. So even if you built manufacturing it in Vietnam or Bangladesh, and you're sending it to Europe, so there are, there are implications for everybody on this. So think about the negatives and be aware of those, but more importantly, think about the opportunities. What could you do?

If this is a growing area, what could you do to actually reduce the risk of your business, but actually go and grow as well? So think take that on the positive side. The really easy things anyone can do is to move your super over to future super or Australian ethical. Like that is a huge signal because it's about a 20 year investment.

You'll still get a great return, and it's going to be more likely to go to positive sources, the negative sources. The biggest change that can happen in Australia to change the entire industry and goes back to your initial point of how do you sell these products internationally when they're difficult? Yeah. Is if we can get Australian companies to buy Australian innovations, then that is the biggest thing to unlock.

Now, if these are innovators running their own companies, they're obviously not sitting in procurement of these other big companies, but they might have already sold into Australian companies. They may know them. The harsh reality is because Australia is a small market, we've never had to buy innovations. So we wait for the world to decide and then we actually then we follow and we certainly don't buy Australian innovations.

We almost see that as a negative because you go, well, I've never had to buy one. So my perception is that I normally buy American stuff, or I buy Chinese appliances, or I buy European or something, and Australian, there's just a negative perception. Whereas if we can actually buy our own products at an R&D or an innovation stage, that gives validation, it gives revenue and it increases the local circularity of value. Whereas the alternative is two bad things happen.

One, the company grows very slowly in Australia because it takes years and they end up being small. The second one is, they get frustrated and they go and the value is lost. So quickly compare the difference between Atlassian and Canva. Atlassian was started significantly earlier, no investors from Australia, East opt for the employees, but overseas and grown massive success and a lot of positive output, but no Australian investors benefit other than IPO.

Canva, seed investors, series A investors, like any shop, like the return of value to Australia from Canva, because it's 10 years late and was done when ecosystem was at a different level is huge. And I think that's the that circularity of value in Australia, when Australian by Australian innovations is the biggest unlock by far. That's a great example. And of course, everyone should join climate service.

Yeah. So it's 125 bucks a year. Where does that go? That's a great, I think people would want to know what, what happens to that, mate?

Well, you can see me wonderfully dressed here today. So the car you came in exactly, exactly helicopter. Yeah, that $125 from 1200 people, that like that I'm breaking you in there. So the whole purpose of that was, I loved the, there was, you know, there's Facebook groups for entrepreneurs and things and if they're open access, they get noisy very quickly.

So we wanted everyone in there to be committed. And we thought that we needed a price at a point, which was allowed for that for an entrepreneur with no money and give them base value. So you entrepreneurs get to be in our WhatsApp group in our Slack community. They get a bit of time for me over the year.

They get discounts on events. We've got about 300 videos. You do a lot of events. We used to, we've cut them down a little bit because, you know, we've actually a lot of the early government funding has wrapped up.

And part of the reason wrapped up is because we hit critical mass. Right. Four years ago, the goal was to hit a thousand companies by 2030. And then last year, three years in, we're at 700.

So we're like, look, the job's done. The critical mass job's done. The next job is scale. So the, the next job is to take a couple of companies and get them past a billion dollars, which proves the model.

And then the money starts flowing. Yeah. So that's even, even Canva, it wasn't until Canva was like a multi billion dollar success that ever and went, I get at this now works. Yes.

So this is the hard thing about investment is you think it's all about risk and ventures all about, you know, bold bets. And actually, it's not, it's massively de-risked. And that's all based on historical data. So you've the first, but the first dozen companies have got to go succeed in spite of that.

So we've got to, we've got to brute force them across the line. And once we do, then it starts flowing. Cool. So yes, join climatesale.

com. Be part of it. And lots of value reach out. There's, and there's lots of the individuals can do.

I think there's, I talked to before about one in eight billion people, you think you can't do much. Then we massively underestimate our influence in that. And I've never failed to show someone how they can have a really positive influence. So challenge me.

Thank you so much. It's been fascinating. It's, we finally get to meet in real life. We're both nowhere real.

But it's just such an interesting topic. It's such an interesting subject. I don't think most people would know there's that many companies in climates at it. And they do.

And they can see what you're doing. And you are having a huge impact. So one, thank you for your work. Absolutely.

And thank you so much for coming and sharing it on the show. Yeah. Happy to share. Thanks, mate.

No problems.