Nick and Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures (and a preeminent investor in general), discuss the state of climate, climate and energy work in general, and climate venture capital in 2024 and beyond. Specifically, Nick and Albert dive deep on:

• How our collective response to climate change so far has been a bit ‘meh’
• The ‘low energy’ trap and what we stand to gain if we reverse it
• The prognosis for climate tech venture capital in 2024 and beyond

Don't miss out on this podcast if you’re interested in learning more about the state of climate tech, climate tech venture capital, electrification, and more! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or your favorite podcast platform to catch all the latest episodes.

Timestamps:

00:02:06 - Reflecting on 2023's Climate Crisis

00:04:52 - Where we’re at: Climate Progress and Challenges

00:05:14 - The Reality of Climate Action Progress

00:08:12 - The Low Energy Trap

00:13:03 - Funding Challenges for Climate Companies

00:17:03 - The Benefits of a War-Like Climate Action Mode

00:23:10 - The Need for Comprehensive Climate Action

00:30:01 - The Climate Venture Capital Landscape in 2024

00:31:10 - The Impact of Interest Rates on Climate Work

00:36:12 - The Importance of Writing for Idea Crystallization

Read Albert and others’ blog posts on USV’s website: https://www.usv.com/writing/

If you love listening to The Keep Cool Show, please leave me a 5-star review on Rate My Podcast: https://ratethispodcast.com/keepcool

Thank you so much! 

Plus, stay up-to-date on all things Keep Cool here: https://keepcool.co/ and follow Albert on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Albertvanosdol and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasvanosdol/

Nick:

Albert:

I would say the most important story in 23 definitely is the acceleration of the climate crisis. I think, you know, 23 was a year that was, as the saying goes, off the charts. If you look at all sorts of different charts, air temperature, ocean temperature, for the acceleration of methane in the atmosphere, just all sorts of indicators that the system is very severely out of whack. And that we have essentially conducted a kind of a mini geoengineering test by removing aerosols from the fuels, the marine fuels.

Nick:

Yeah, that in particular, all of those things are striking to me. The shipping one in particular is striking because it's an example of a coalition of industry stakeholders and businesses ostensibly getting together to do the right thing, which is to clean up shipping fuels, removing aerosols from, you know, making the fuels incrementally better so that they emit less aerosols because those are bad for human health and other plants and animals, but also inadvertently, yeah, reducing a net global cooling effect that aerosols have in the process. And I think it's kind of illustrative of how complicated and complex challenges in climate are.

Albert:

For sure. I mean, if anything, you know, we really want the opposite, right? We want more of the sun's radiation to head back out to space before. And so, you know, and when ships are in port, it could have shore power. So I think a big part of the concern over these sulfur missions came primarily from ships being in port and costs, you know, air pollution in and around port. close to where people live. So this is definitely the kind of thing that could be reversed. And, but it also speaks to this larger question of, you know, what kind of geoengineering efforts should we be looking at? And when we think about

Nick:

Albert:

My view here is we aren't close. We just aren't close. So I think the biggest issue I have is that there's sort of this narrative out there occasionally that we've got this, you know, like we're making progress on decarbonization. And I'm just like, I don't know what those people are smoking. Because I think if anything, what 23 shows is how far behind we are. And so when you asked me earlier, what's the least important story? In some way, the least important story are all the little progress stories. Because yeah, it's good that we're making progress, but our progress just is not in the right ballpark. And I think that the issue is that carbon in the atmosphere has a cumulative effect. Right. And so, and we're still adding new net carbon to the atmosphere. It's not like we've reached a point. And so I look at these curves and the cursor was like, it's going to go like this. And then it's magically going to come down here based on all these investments we're currently making. But then you drive around anywhere in the world and it's like, Most cars are not EVs. Yes. And point to small Nordic countries where more than 50 or 60 or 70% of new cars are EVs that are being sold. Norway, yeah. You go almost any place in the world and the vast bulk of cars are internal combustion engine cars. Like, it's not even close. It's not even... And so I'm like, yeah, we're selling a lot of EVs and, you know, the Chinese EV makers are making a lot of products, but it's still a drop in the bucket. And we're still like, behind him. And so, you know, and so to me, yes, I like the progress, you know, I think there are interesting things happening, I think, you know, but we're just not like the total allocation of effort globally to this still isn't close to where it needs to be.

Nick:

Yeah. And sometimes it also feels like it's very firmly focused on things that you touched on, such as transportation, which is a major sector that needs to change.

Albert:

Yes. It's an transportation is a major, major emitter.

Nick:

zero argument being made on my part or your part against that. But then, you know, there's all these other sectors, be it agriculture or even just ecosystem conservation and restoration that, you know, I understand that it's those business models aren't necessarily as neat as selling a different type of car, but they also just need everything needs more attention. And a lot of those sectors get a lot less attention than transportation. Sure. Absolutely.

Albert:

The thing to me is, If we really, really truly leaned into this, the kind of things that would become possible are so amazing. And that makes it such a shame that we're not. So, you know, I wrote a blog post a while back, which I titled, we're in a low energy trap. And I had the, you know, a little Star Wars, it's a trap, you know? Yeah.

None:

So.

Albert:

Energy is something that we need for everything. We need it for production. We need it for homes. We need it for fun.

Nick:

Fertilizing food, what have you.

Albert:

Nick:

Interesting. Yeah, I was reminded of the old kind of famous quote about when nuclear fission was first coming online in a big way in the US where some folks predicted that, you know, soon electricity would be too cheap to meter because we'd be able to produce so much of it inexpensively. And, you know, I am not advocating exclusively for nuclear energy by any means, but yeah, you know, based on technologies that exist, people have made those predictions and they haven't come to bear for a variety of reasons, some of which you mentioned, unfortunately. You know, beyond some of the things that we've noted that challenge us or bum us out a little bit, as we look ahead to a new year and enter with some zeal and optimism, I guess, what are some things that you're particularly excited about, be they innovations, companies that you're talking to, policy, tailwinds, anything's fair game?

Albert:

Well, I think that we are continuing to see a ton of progress in battery storage and we're very far behind there relative to renewables generation, right? So solar is the cheapest power you can get by a wide margin when the sun shines, when it's daylight. It is extremely expensive power when you go all in. And one of the things I really wish is that we had a more honest dialogue about solar, where we can both say that both of these things are true. It's the cheapest when it's available, and it's pretty much the most expensive when it's not.

Nick:

Yeah, we can hold both truths to be the same at the same time. It's like when it's there, it's the cheapest, and when it's not there, its cost effectively rises to infinity.

Albert:

Well, or you have to add in the cost of storage, and the cost of storage is very high, right? And so I am excited about people working hard on driving down the storage cost. And I think we're going to see a lot of decline in storage costs over the coming years. I mean, we've already seen a tremendous decline in storage costs over the last 20 years, right? So, but more of that is needed if we want to make use of renewables extensively, which I think we want to because it's so cheap. I mean, it's, you know, it's remote fusion, right? I mean, we have fusion energy. It's just remote fusion energy, which in some ways is like the best fusion energy because, you know,

Nick:

You don't have to build the infrastructure yourself.

Albert:

It's far away, right? So things going wrong are far away. So next point, though, is I think fusion is exciting, entering an exciting phase. Now, I also think that people are going to find it's going to take longer. I mean, look, if Helion actually ships on the timeline they've announced, I would be as a... That would be tremendous.

Nick:

Albert:

It would be incredible, right? I'm not holding my breath until then. I can't hold my breath more. I think we just need to get out of it by all means. And I think that has to include the nuclear that we can build today is fission. So I think these things are all exciting. I mean, overall, I am excited by how it continues to be just an extraordinary inflow of talent into the space. I think capital as well, although on the capital front, we still haven't solved the problem that we outlined in a blog post the beginning of last year, which is, There really is this kind of shortage of capital that's willing to fund companies that need to build a first facility, first of a kind facility. First of a kind facility. And there's still some technical risks, still some engineering risks, right? Certainly. And we don't have enough capital pointed at that. And I am really kind of believe the government has a role to play or not necessarily as an allocator of capital. but as a kind of providing sort of a, Hey, we will underwrite some amount of loss guarantees. And I think that would unlock a huge amount of private capital.

Nick:

It makes me think of kind of like, you know, the DOE's loan program facility and stuff that the work that they're already doing that could perhaps be extended in a not incredibly different way to help them.

Albert:

And the loan program office has access to a lot of capital. Their underwriting mode is to underwrite large-scale projects. And we need those large-scale projects. And that's great. And I don't think they're set up to underwrite a lot of smaller projects, but they could. I don't know whether by law, but if they tried hard enough, I'm sure they could find an administrative way to fork off some of that money and say, we're going to provide some kind of insurance product or maybe work with the private sector to provide some kind of insurance product that will unlock a lot of this capital. So that continues to be a concern, but overall, yes, it's talent. Talent continues to come in both into the existing companies and people are starting exciting new companies. And so at the end of the day, it's the human capital that is going to come up with the solution. And then financial capital will follow. I'm convinced of this. It may be, there may be some delay, but financial capital seeks opportunity. So it will fall.

Nick:

Yeah. That's something I think about a lot. I think, you know, one of the best opportunities and one of the most exciting things is the amount of human capital that is now directing itself at climate challenges. To some degree, I think that's happening because, I don't know, I think humans in general respond better to acute versus chronic or long-term more nebulous challenges. You know, like 20 years ago when inconvenient truth came out, climate change still felt like this thing that was 10 or 20 years away. Now we certainly see it unfurling in front of us in our day-to-day lives and I think that more acute effect is pulling more people into it and bringing more policymakers, entrepreneurs, capitals to the table. And ideally, it's not too late.

Albert:

Well, the thing that we need on the policymaker side is we need politicians who will run on We're going to lean into this and we're going to build an awesome future. And yes, there will be a price to pay along the way. Like we are going to have to go into some kind of, you know, I think war-like mode where we allocate, where government becomes a big customer, you know, like government was a big customer of Ford, of General Motor in World War II. So I think government needs to become a big customer and we need to ask people for some amount of sacrifice. And I think it's one of those things where politicians think asking people for sacrifice is not the mood that the population is in. And I just think this is one of those things that is true until it's not. And I will start turning optimistic when candidates win races by saying, we're going to build the solar punk future. Are you with me or not? You know, and whether it's solar punk or something, I mean, you get the idea, like this amazing future, this future of really cheap energy of pervasive energy of, you know, cities that aren't polluted by noise from cars and so forth, like this amazing future. And I believe that eventually somebody is going to win an important race with this message. That's when I will start turning really, truly optimistic.

Nick:

Yeah, and again, as we echoed earlier, it's kind of being able to maintain this equal perspective that things are very challenging and that in working through those challenges, we can produce a future that's fundamentally very exciting and we can paint a very compelling vision of what that looks like.

Albert:

Yeah. And, you know, people don't like this war. Sometimes people don't like when I talk about this, but the reality is World War II We upskilled a ton of people, right? We created, I mean, there was a program in place to train machinists so that they could work in the war effort. Well, they were all highly qualified labor for the post-war industrial process and growth, right? And again, if we lean into this, it's not just energy, it's also human capital. It's all of these things that we can lean into that would stick with us after this big push, but we need a big push. And the problem we're having is because we're afraid of doing the big push, we keep falling further and further behind. And I think that is kind of the unacknowledged truth is that brings me back to the beginning of the conversations. We are falling further behind that anybody who thinks we're making headway, I think is not looking at the data the right way.

Nick:

Albert:

Exactly. Which brings me back to this thing that I really feel we're going to need emergency measures. And here's my view on emergency measures. It's a little bit like chemotherapy, right? You would never ever do chemotherapy if you didn't have cancer. It's just brutal on the body. It's just a bad thing. You don't want to be doing it. Conversely, if you have cancer, you would much prefer extremely well-researched chemotherapy over random chemicals in your body. And so the fact that we're under-investing today in, OK, what are these different techniques we can use? There's Marine Club brightening. There's also, it turns out, marine cloud thinning. Susan and I have just funded an effort, a very early effort on that, and that's clouds over the Arctic. If you thin those, you can actually let warm air escape. You can let infrared radiation escape.

Nick:

Interesting. A little counterintuitive, but cool.

Albert:

Potentially rebuilding some of the ice as well, which then helps again with the albedo. We need to research those things. And the fact that the people working on this have a hard time getting enough money is just utterly infuriating. Because again, in the scenario where we don't need it, fantastic, great. We'll figure out a few other things along the way by doing this work. But if we are going to be looking at emergency measures that we haven't researched that well. And you know, there are all sorts of things. There's modeling, like where should the stuff go? What will it be its impact on global weather? Sure. You know, and you can quibble with some of the stuff in Neil Stephenson's Termination Shock, but it's worth reading because it speaks to some of the problems that come along with this. But these are problems that we can research and understand as opposed to just saying, bad area, don't go there, don't look at it. I mean, we're already geoengineering the planet, right? Of course, yeah, at the most massive scale. Right. So to say we shouldn't be looking at this as sort of like, we shouldn't be looking at the thing that we're already doing, like we're just doing it accidentally as opposed to intentionally.

Nick:

It's like we've put 1.5 trillion, I don't know exactly what the right stat is, but I think 1.5 trillion tons of carbon in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. And then you can think about methane and nitrous oxide and CFCs and HFCs and all kinds of other stuff. And it's like, Yeah, we've already pulled eight levers and done it for 200 years, and we're afraid to, like, test at the smallest level, pulling a few other levers in the opposite direction.

Albert:

And this is also important, I think. The climate system, unfortunately, is full of positive feedback loops. Very few negative feedback loops in the climate system, which is why when you look at the historic climate record, we have experienced big swings. And the reason we experience big swings is once it starts swinging, there's a lot of positive loops before you get to the negative loops.

Nick:

Interesting. That's something I need to do a little more research on myself. It's like the longer I've been in climate work, the more appreciation I've built for how complex the climate system is, which is not to say that we don't understand some of the key levers and the dynamics, but it's like the deeper you go, the more you can kind of unfurl very curious sort of feedback mechanisms and there is a lot of uncertainty in how some of that could unfold. But fundamentally, that is another concern is because you do not know exactly how it might unfold. It might not be quite as bad as you think, but it could also be quicker and faster and worse than expected. And that uncertainty is its own risk. There's an interesting quote that I read when I was reading, I finally read Speed and Scale by John Doar, which is, you know, a good book, lots of basic kind of climate action plan 101. I have some of my own quibbles with it, but we don't need to get into those. There's a good quote in it from Hal Harvey, where he says, or said at one point, if our concern about climate change is not properly aimed, it just dissipates. I think this sort of tracks with some of the things that we've been touching on. But, you know, when you hear that, you know, how do you react to it? Are there things that you think investors or policymakers are over-indexed on that perhaps aren't resonant with whether it's consumers or what have you.

Albert:

I think the issue here is that because we are so off in our resource allocation, it starts to feel a little bit like a fight. It's a little bit, well, we're going to give some money to nuclear. That's not money that we don't have to do whatever carbon drawdown or whatever you your favorite things, right? And I just think this kind of view exists primarily because we're just not taking enough of our physical resources, enough of our infrastructure and pointing it at the problem. And so again, coming back to this sort of World War II metaphor, I mean, we didn't decide that we're going to win the war with just like, let's say guns or grenades. We're like, oh, we're going to need battleships and airplanes and tanks and

Nick:

Right. It wasn't zero-sum thinking. It was sort of all hands on deck.

Albert:

Because we're spending 50% of GDP on the effort, right? And when you spend 50% of GDP on the effort, you don't have to, like, yes, you still have to make some trade-offs at the margin, but you're like, we can do this and this and this. And by the way, we need all of them. And I think this is, so when I hear this quote, I sort of feel a little bit, it's a quote that I understand. I get it. When you're spending very little, as we're today, I need to be very careful what you pointed at. I would say there's another thing that worries me a little bit about this quote, which is there's some people in the industry who are like, we have all the tech we need. We just need to deploy it. And I think that's also to me a little worrisome because I think a lot of the tech that we have is good and we should be deploying it. We talked about nuclear earlier. But nuclear is a great example. We have working reactor technology, but there's a lot of innovation in reactor technology that's coming. And we should really be leaning into that while we also commit to building some of the existing reactors. And again, I keep coming back to this. If you look at World War II, the planes at the end of World War II were a lot better and faster and more capable than the planes. We didn't be like, okay, we have all the planes we need. You know, no, we kept improving them.

Nick:

And so. Planes were a decade or two old technology at that point, you know, like World War One was not fought with planes.

Albert:

They had a few towards the end. Basic. Yeah. Very basic. Yeah. And so I think the mindset here has to be one of, this is also such an incredible opportunity. And it is coming back to maybe some, you know, other question around research allocation. People are sort of like, oh, well we're in some kind of fight with China, right? This is a very common. Yeah. But then when you look at where most of the world's PV made? China. Where are most of the world's batteries made? China. Most EV sales. China, who has the most extensive, you know, rare earth, even though they're neither rare nor earth, but the program of, you know, like securing those resources, China.

Nick:

Yeah. And so a Chinese company actually just became one of the number and it's through a mine in the democratic Republic of Congo, but it's a Chinese company. That's the number one producer of cobalt in the world now too.

Albert:

Yeah. And so you look at all this stuff and you go, okay, you're worried about China. You here being government and you, have this opportunity to sort of say, Hey, we can actually create this better future, but we're going to need to actually sacrifice a little bit to reshore a lot of this stuff, to make really basic things that you need to make patterns. We don't make them unsure at all, even though we could make them, but we don't. Sure.

Nick:

Yeah, or we are just now starting to break ground on some small facilities to do so, which is great, but it's only happening now. Exactly.

Albert:

It's a start. So it's just this incredible opportunity for somebody in politics to lean into this narrative. It's an incredible opportunity because the first people to really lean into this narrative, I think you're going to have such an advantage. It'll be such a surprise. It'll be so, it'll so stand out from the current clutter of people talking about how climate change is a hoax. I don't know. Yes. Maybe some voters in the Republican primary think that, and that's how you get on the ticket. And that's why people are saying it. But the Yale project that does a really thorough job of creating consumer and voter sentiment on this shows that people fully understand that this is not a hoax. And that's a maddening.

Nick:

That's shifted a lot in the last 10 years. I think even among the Republican voter base, more than half of folks readily recognize that climate change is a challenge.

Albert:

And so you have this thing where you can be like, yes, China's a real threat. We need to also, climate's a real threat. We can work on both of these and we can have a great future coming out of this, like an amazing future. But by the way, it's gonna really require some sacrifice. Are you with me? Like that, I think is a message that will resonate with a lot of voters. It's like, there's a purpose here. There's that kind of a, like, you know, a sort of an energy that comes from this. And so I'm just waiting. hoping that somebody will emerge just like, I'm going to lean into this. And the second somebody starts to get traction with this message, I think it will be like a big switch that has been flipped.

Nick:

Yeah, sacrifice on the front end for a lot of long-term gain on the back end. It reminds me a little bit of, you know, this is perhaps a strange example because it was such a terrible thing, but in the wake of 9-11, you know, presidential approval had never been higher than it was for President Bush right in the immediate aftermath. There's that rally around the flag effect which is to say nothing about everything that happened in the 20 years after that. We don't have to include that in the conversation. But the point is, it's like some sort of rallying cry that could be as trenchant as that event was. To rally, yeah, to bring people together, to make sacrifice is what I'm waiting for.

Albert:

Nick:

Albert:

2024 will be, I think, a very interesting year and somewhat hard to predict. And the reason is certainly, yeah. There's still a lot of valuations and pain in the software world from the sort of 21 and early 22 excesses that hasn't worked its way through the system. And so, you know, we see some of these large bankruptcies like Convoy that had raised, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think we will also see some companies in the climate space that had raised a lot of money not do as well as people had expected them to do or take more time. So I think 24, I'm not holding my breath that 24 will be this like breakout year quite yet. I do think that there is an ongoing shift of capital. And that shift of capital into climate at the very sort of asset allocators, like all the way the LPs and the endowments and so forth. Yeah. I think that's going to continue. And so that makes me optimistic, but I think 24 might still be a tricky year. I think a lot of this stuff needs to work its way through the system. It's kind of like a really big hangover.

Nick:

And so sometimes the hangover lasts two days and not just one.

Albert:

Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, I think, but I'm overall just based on seeing people, you know, who control very large pools of assets, their realization that, you know, software returns aren't going to be the kind of shooting fish in a barrel that they were for, you know, almost two decades, you know, and seeing that this transformation has to happen just if people looking at the data that we discussed earlier. So I am optimistic, but I think I'm more optimistic about second half of 24 and then 25 than I am about early 20s.

Nick:

Yeah, it feels like there's some more digestion that needs to happen in the first half of the year. I think each week you see announcements, unfortunately, about layoffs at big and small companies. You know, some companies, I think especially in the solar space, which, you know, at the highest level, solar continues to grow, like we're adding a lot more capacity. But if you decompose into smaller markets, residential solar is certainly not in exactly the same spot in terms of growth that it was a couple years ago. So you have companies like Sunfolding or other companies having a hard time and all of that will continue.

Albert:

I would also add that there's still in my mind some probability around the landing not being as soft as you know, people are predicting. So, so this tail risk here also, and, you know, if you look at the jobs report, depending on how you look at it, for example, there's some good numbers and then there's some pretty bad numbers in there as well. And then if you look at consumer credit, you know, there's like, you know, we're back to default rates of pre COVID levels, which suggests that the sort of COVID stimulus money has worked its way through the system. And part of the problem here is that the hiring environment is, you know, there's reasons to believe that it won't be as good ever again, at least in the near, like ever again, this may be the wrong way, but like in the very near term, there are lots of things that, you know, companies are like, well, I can actually do this with fewer engineers, or I can use the code co-pilot and the productivity of my engineers higher. I can use engineers overseas that are cheaper. You know, there was a study from the FT that showed that in freelance marketplaces for copy editing, there's already a decline in volumes and in pay. So this is another reason why, coming back to this idea of this climate narrative, I think we might not have a soft landing. really leaning into the climate transformation might also be exactly what we need for kind of the overall economy to do reasonably well. And I think, you know, for this government as a purchaser, coming back to this idea, like government could be a purchaser of a lot of things that then are also very useful for everybody else. And obviously power being, you know, at the top of this list.

Nick:

Albert:

A hundred percent. Also, people are going to be skeptical that this is going to be truly transitory and that these now lower rates as a result are going to be reliably lower. So I agree with that sentiment that this development.

Nick:

Yeah. And then, you know, to spin it more optimistically again, at the most basic level, if we really want to manage inflation over the next, however many decades, reducing the cost of energy, again, probably the best way to do that.

Albert:

Absolutely. It's a key input to so many different things.

Nick:

Yeah, brilliant. Very compelling stuff. I've liked how we've tied a lot of different things together. I guess as we turn to, you know, the tail end of the podcast, I'd be curious, this is a question that doesn't necessarily have to do with climate work directly, but you've had a very long, successful, impactful career in doing this work. A question I often like to ask folks is like, if you had to think about kind of a core or a couple core skills, or even if you want to kind of call it craftsmanship of crafts, that have served you best in your career. What do you think some of those are? You know, for me personally, I can offer that I've iteratively honed in on the fact over the past few years that just writing and synthesizing and curating information is something that I do quite well. So I'd be curious to hear what you think those are for you.

Albert:

Writing is absolutely, it's so essential. we live in this age where you can be consuming information nonstop. I mean, it's, it comes at you, you know, you pick up your phone, there's like, you know, messages, there's Twitter. It's forced down your throat. And the step of writing, which forces you to actually lay things out in a way where you then read it again and where maybe you have other people read it and they go, this doesn't make sense. Like you're saying this here. We seem to be saying the opposite over here, and how does this fit together? It is a true superpower, and we do a lot of writing at USB. I mean, some of it makes it to the USB blog, but a lot of it doesn't. You know, stuff that we write internally as part of our own process. And it's just too easy to only read and consume and never form your own opinion. And also it's very easy in conversation to say a lot of things that kind of sort of sound right, but if you were to write them down, you just, you know, you take up the level of where it has to be to make sense very significantly over a conversation. And so I would say writing is kind of a superpower and I encourage everybody to develop some practice, you know, even if it's just writing for yourselves with some frequency. Even if you never publish it.

Nick:

Right. A hundred percent. And yeah, I mean, even as, and again, as it's not, it doesn't necessarily pertain to climate work, but I think writing is one great medium for that. But really it, for me, it comes down to sort of like the expression and the crystallization of ideas. And for some people that's singing for some people, it's painting for some folks it's spoke yet anything else. So we're getting kind of off the climate topic, but I do think that's a very important point.

Albert:

It is a very good point. And actually art, I do think is obviously also a major carrier of narrative. And so seeing more climate related art will also play a role in how people think about this problem as a narrative.

Nick:

Yeah, and especially as it pertains to the consumption of media of which there's so much. I don't have a clean perspective on this, but it doesn't seem to me as though a lot of whether it's written fiction about climate or, you know, movies about climate that perform well and enter the zeitgeist. Some of those have done a good job of, I think, trying to distill how stark the climate reality could be, but it doesn't necessarily always feel to me as if those, again, have moved folks to action in the way that is necessary. So it's something worth continuing to think about. Yeah. Well, Albo, listen, this has been phenomenal. I could probably talk for three more hours, but in closing, I'd love to just offer the opportunity for, I think we've already offered a lot of calls to action, but whether it pertains to work that you do at USV or just perspective that you have otherwise. What are some things that for people listening in that are perhaps a bit shocked by some of the things that we've talked about or also perhaps a bit empowered by some of the things that we've talked about? You know, what are some basic things that you would encourage them to read or practice or explore further to contribute to everything we're talking about?

Albert:

You know, I do believe that kind of, if you read a good book, Termination Stock, I think is fun to read. You know, I think that Mystery for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is great. And I wish these were more widely known because I do think it would give people something to think about.

Nick:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin, I'm going to miss her last name, but that's one that I'd add to the list as a really good book on comprehensive sustainability.

Albert:

Yeah, that's great. So I think, you know, just pick up a book about the topic is a great start. But I also think, you know, it's the kind of topic that people need to start to be able to be comfortable to discuss. in the family, with their neighbors, with their friends. There's a great program that I would encourage people to check out called The Week. It is kind of two sessions that you do with friends and families, and they have a whole content library to support it. And it's very powerful. It's, I think, the kind of personalized and among friends and family network of where I think real sort of momentum can be built in terms of the level of people's understanding, both of the threat and also of the opportunity of transformation. Got it.

Nick:

Got it. Excellent. Love it. Yeah. And then as a final call to action, if folks are interested in reading the writing that USV does publish, and I'm cognizant that there are many listeners of this podcast that are also fundamentally folks who are fundamentally interested in getting into climate work, not to put the cart before the horse, but I imagine that looking at the portfolio page of companies that USV invests in and then exploring roles that are open at those companies is a great place to go. Absolutely.

Albert:

We have tons of climate companies and for the most part, they're all hiring. So that's a great call to action. Go look at those.

Nick:

Excellent. All right. Well, anything else that was on your mind, Albert, that we should mention, or did we do a good job of getting it done in about 45 minutes?

Albert:

I think we did a fantastic job and we covered a lot of different topics. That's great.

Nick: