Everybody in the Pool

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we're taking a deep dive into the unsung hero of climate solutions: federal data. This crucial data helps predict extreme weather, guide public health responses, and by the way, underpins a whole lot of existing and future climate tech startups. But the US government is pulling the plug on long-standing climate infrastructure, and all kinds of groups are scrambling to protect it. Molly talks with...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the final installation in our Kickstarter Successes miniseries. Molly talks to Jonathan Cedar, founder and CEO of BioLite. You’ll hear how BioLite uses their innovative "parallel innovation" model to deliver clean energy solutions to over 15 million people. The company started with a mission to tackle off-grid energy poverty in developing countries, which led to a range of products for the U...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re looking at a climate tech company that’s a Kickstarter graduate with a surprisingly action-movie sounding solution to reforestation. Flash Forest is using drones that fire (harmless) seed projectiles at the ground to help automate and speed up reforestation. Co-founder Cameron Jones tells Molly how the mission to plant a billion trees was sparked by personal experiences with wildfire devast...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re looking at some innovative ways to get money to the climate startups that need it — specifically, crowdfunding climate solutions on Kickstarter. Molly chats with Nathan Nalevanko from Kickstarter's design and technology team, uncovering how alternative funding can drive sustainability projects and how Kickstarter has been recruiting companies in this category, and helping them with promotio...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we couldn’t let Earth Month pass without one last conversation about consumer action and devices—and this week, we’re re-airing a conversation from someone who’s an expert at designing things that people want to buy. Matt Rogers is the co-founder of Mill, a kitchen appliance that turns food waste into dried, odorless grounds that consumers drop in the mail and that get upcycled into chicken feed....

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re still diving into the choices that you can make as a consumer, in our Earth Month of personal climate action! And this one is a biggie: food. We love a climate entrepreneur with a vision to solve a big problem who goes looking around and lands on one you might not have thought of. Savor founder Kathleen Alexander did her research and landed on fats and oils, which are detrimental in all kin...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s Earth Month of personal climate action! This week we’re tackling an all-too-common question: I want to shop more sustainably, but I’m not sure what to buy (or what not to buy)! Commons is an app and website that helps you easily find sustainable alternatives to everyday items — mostly clothes and textiles now, with more to come. Founder Sanchali Pal is a self-described data nerd who’s been t...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re continuing our Earth Month of personal climate action! If your house is anything like mine, it’s a leaky sieve of escaping heat or cool air, your HVAC filters are disgusting, and there are sneaky fluorescent bulbs hanging around the house. It’s costing you money, and it’s wasting energy, meaning it’s contributing to planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in a way that’s probably fairly eas...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re kicking off Earth Month with a month of action! Our choices matter, and one of the choices I’ve been avoiding is how to replace coffee — which contributes to deforestation, is energy intensive to produce, and isn’t good news for the coffee farmers, either. This week, we’re talking with Andy Kleitsch, founder of Atomo Coffee, about their sustainable coffee blends, the road to adoption and th...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, bummer news: your bank deposits could be funding the climate crisis? But we’d never give you bummer news without a solution! This week, Molly Wood speaks with Paul Moinester, founder of Topofinance, who reveals the shocking climate impact of conventional banking. Discover how just $10,000 in a major bank generates emissions equivalent to driving 10,000 miles yearly, and why moving your money to c...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, Molly Wood talks with Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor Energy. Brad shares his remarkable journey from SpaceX rocket engineer to climate tech entrepreneur, developing technology that transforms waste biomass into carbon-negative energy using rocket propulsion principles. Yep, you read that right. A guy who used to want to be an astronaut woke up one day and realized this planet was the p...

In this episode of Everybody in the Pool, host Molly Wood speaks with Mat Dos Santos, co-executive director of Our Children's Trust, about how his organization is using the legal system to fight climate change on behalf of youth plaintiffs — the kids who have the most to lose if we get this wrong. Learn how landmark victories in Montana and Hawaii are creating precedents that could reshape climate policy across America.

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This week on Everybody in the Pool, host Molly Wood talks with Eliot Brooks, founder and CEO of Cocoon Carbon, about an unexpected climate tech challenge: how decarbonizing steel production is disrupting concrete's path to net zero. Brooks explains how his startup transforms problematic steel slag from modern electric arc furnaces into valuable materials that reduce concrete's carbon footprint while cutting costs.

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This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re exploring what might be the most overlooked tool in our climate toolkit: nature itself. Yes, we like to geek out about purely technological solutions like fusion or direct-air carbon capture or electric vehicles or consumer compost devices, but there's a whole world of climate solutions that nature has already perfected over millions of years. But how does the financial world think about th...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re going to keep talking about tech and climate innovation with a longtime technologist turned climate tech investor. Mike Schroepfer runs the investment fund Gigascale Capital, which has invested in some of the biggest names in climate tech: Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Mill, Form Energy, and a couple other names that will be appearing soon on this very show. Schrep, as he’s known, is also th...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the last official episode of our miniseries, Feeding the Matrix, all about AI, energy use, and data center design. To cap off this series, Molly spoke with JoAnn Garbin, a longtime technologist, sustainability advocate, and innovator, about her work reimagining data center design at Microsoft. It turns out, the company realized years ago that communities might start rejecting new data center...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, we’re continuing our series on AI and energy use, exploring how to expand data centers and computing without sacrificing sustainability goals or, you know, a livable planet. This week, we’re turning toward some innovations that could make that seemingly impossible goal a reality. Realta Fusion is a fusion energy company that spun out of the University of Wisconsin. It’s one of many startups worki...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the second episode in our special series on AI and energy use. When it comes to making data centers more energy efficient, few have a larger burden than Amazon’s AWS — the world’s largest cloud provider by market share. Molly talks with Chris Walker, head of sustainability for AWS, about how the company’s customers are pushing it to be as energy efficient as possible, for reasons of economic...

This week on Everybody in the Pool, it’s the first episode in our special series on AI and energy use. We’re starting at the foundational layer of AI computing: the chips. Nvidia is the undisputed leader when it comes to providing the processors (and networking equipment and cards and servers and racks) and the software platform that lets companies use those chips to train AI models. But what’s the company’s responsibility when it ...