Transforming Waste into Clean Energy | Eden Energy DSH #1287

Speaker 1 The hydrolysis is you oxidize and neutralize heavy metals, you break down pathogens.

Speaker 1 So we did a study with the DOD in the early days of the New York State Department of Health where we ran tests on Bacillium strepthamopolis and anthrax.

Speaker 1 And it's the only technology to ever receive 100% pathogen destruction on those pathogens. Wow.

Speaker 1 All right, guys, we're talking energy today. We got Jonathan from Eden Energy.
Thanks for joining us, man. Yeah, thanks for having me.
We just had a fun event in Austin.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was a great time having you guys there and got to meet a lot of really cool and interesting people and tell our story a little bit and looking forward to telling a little bit more.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you said some stuff on fire over there, right? Yeah, we uh we bought some of the fuel we made and we make fuel from anything carbon-based.

Speaker 1 That specific sample was made with uh like mixed plastics, dog poop, uh, food waste, used cooking oil, things like that.

Speaker 1 And uh we did a little burn ceremony where we asked the uh the audience to write down what they want to let go of. And we put it in the fire pit, covered it in oil, and

Speaker 1 let those

Speaker 1 energies go into the atmosphere. Yeah, with all the plastic going around in the atmosphere, we need that right now, right? Yeah, for sure.
And we finally have a solution to plastic.

Speaker 1 I mean, there really isn't one out there that is currently being utilized that actually gets rid of it down at the molecular level.

Speaker 1 I mean, yeah, sure, you can pyrolyze it and turn it into a basically a liquid plastic, which is a subset of fuels, but nothing really cleans up the mess that is in plastic.

Speaker 1 And we can do that because we break things down at the molecular level. Yeah.
Why is plastic so dangerous?

Speaker 1 You know, plastic is a tough one because there's all sorts of different compounds that they use, such as plasticizers and fillers,

Speaker 1 and they're all different, right? You have PET, which is made from CO2 condensation reactions. So there's a ton of CO2 in water bottles, right? The plastic that they use there.

Speaker 1 But then the plastic that you get, like your laundry detergent, that's what they call high-density polyethylene, right? HDPE. And that's almost all oil, right?

Speaker 1 There's no condensation reactions used in that. So plastic is really difficult because you can't really recycle it, right?

Speaker 1 Recycling is such a head fake.

Speaker 1 People believe that when they throw things away in the recycling bin, it's actually getting recycled when 95% of what goes into the recycling bin doesn't end up recycled.

Speaker 1 It either gets landfilled or incinerated. Wow.
So how does that process work? Which one? Like when you recycle something, does it go to a separate facility? Oh, sure.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of times it goes to a facility, but let's just say you have a bottle that's got some oil traces on it or a label or a different type of cap.

Speaker 1 You typically can't recycle that because it's either different types of plastics or it's contaminated, where our system doesn't care because if it's carbon-based, it can convert.

Speaker 1 So you can have a plastic bottle filled with heavy oil, plastic bottle filled with whatever, vomit, for all I care, right? It's still going to work.

Speaker 1 It's still going to break it down and convert it into energy. Nice.
How'd you come up with this technology? Because it sounds really sophisticated, all right?

Speaker 1 It's actually a little bit simpler than most people would think, and I can't take credit for coming up with it. That credit belongs to my father.

Speaker 1 So we've been walking down this path together since 1997. We've had some really cool successes over the years in advancing this technology.
But like any new technology,

Speaker 1 it's a long road to get it validated and proven and out to the world.

Speaker 1 And now we're finally ready to bring this technology to market.

Speaker 1 So it's it's been really amazing but uh my father really just looked at what the earth does how does the earth make oil and uh there's a lot of misconceptions out there that people believe oil is millions of years old when it's some of it could be but it's not right and our technology proves that because our technology is simply a reverse engineering of mother nature using heat pressure time and water to break things down at the molecular level using free hydrogen as a catalyst to break down carbon bonds interesting yeah i remember growing up they taught us oil was from dinosaur bones.

Speaker 1 Yep. That's a myth.

Speaker 1 I mean, yes and no.

Speaker 1 Well, first off, it wouldn't be from the bones anyway, right? It would be from the organic, right?

Speaker 1 Bones are made of calcium, so that's not really a carbon-based compound where oil is just carbon and hydrogen, right?

Speaker 1 But yeah, I mean, a lot of the organic material went underneath the surface of the earth.

Speaker 1 Once it gets down there, heat, pressure, and time break it down.

Speaker 1 So sure, you could have oil sitting in reserves that's millions of years old, but oil is constantly being rejuvenated as it's always being created, right?

Speaker 1 It's a constant reaction taking place in the mantle of our earth.

Speaker 1 We should throw up some clips of the demo of how your stuff works on the video too. Yeah, we can definitely do that.
Yeah, that'd be cool. Got some really cool footage.
Get a visual of it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How big is it?

Speaker 1 Well, we build systems ranging in size from two tons per day, which is a 53-foot trailer and a 20-foot trailer, right, for your control station, all the way up into the tens of thousands of tons a day, which is a full-blown refinery that would take up 100-plus acres, right?

Speaker 1 So we can build these from all shapes and sizes, really depending on the client's need.

Speaker 1 So that's what we're doing a little bit differently than what we've done in the past. In previous iterations, we were plant owners and operators, right?

Speaker 1 We ran the facilities, we built them, we paid for them. Now we're doing it a little bit different, or we're going to the waste producer as an equipment manufacturer.

Speaker 1 So we've had a lot of people tell us, this is such a disruptive technology, it's amazing. And we have to stop stop them and say, no, it's not a disruptive technology.

Speaker 1 It's an industry enhancer because now everybody who's producing waste can benefit from their waste by turning it back into clean energy on site.

Speaker 1 So they're greatly increasing their bottom line by getting rid of their costs for disposal of waste and their cost for purchase of energy. Two birds, one stone.
I love it.

Speaker 1 I've seen some countries have so much waste, they ship it to other countries. Have you seen that? Yeah,

Speaker 1 and especially if you look at China for years and years, China was basically collecting everybody's waste, thinking that they'd be able to figure out how to do what we have.

Speaker 1 But there really isn't a viable solution that's currently on the market outside of what we do.

Speaker 1 Because you look at some of these other technologies like pyrolysis or gasification, which very frequently we're compared to,

Speaker 1 but we're immensely different from both.

Speaker 1 The simple way I describe it is if pyrolysis is a bird scooter, we're a Rolls-Royce, right? You can get from A to B, but you're riding in a little bit different style.

Speaker 1 Pyrolysis is one of those technologies that has been around a really long time. It traces its roots all the way back to the ancient Egyptians.

Speaker 1 But here's the problem with pyrolysis: there's two major problems. One, it's completely energy inefficient.

Speaker 1 To make really clean products out of pyrolysis, you're looking at a 10 to 20% energy efficiency at most.

Speaker 1 Meaning, for every 100 units of energy you make, you need to take 80 to 90 units of that energy to make the next 100.

Speaker 1 And also, pyrolysis doesn't solve pollution.

Speaker 1 You take it, you take the waste, you put it through pyrolysis, you make energy and more pollution. Because there's toxic byproducts such as tar and ash, which are immensely costly to get rid of.

Speaker 1 And then the fuels are often heavily loaded with whatever contaminants were in the waste, whether that's chlorinated compounds, dioxins, furins, heavy metals.

Speaker 1 because it doesn't do anything about them, right?

Speaker 1 So you're really not solving pollution with pyrolysis. You're kind of just taking pollution, turning it into energy, and more pollution.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Where what we do, we've been third-party validated over 90% efficient, right? So you take 100 units of energy, you take 10 of those units, and you make the next 100. Wow.

Speaker 1 So it's significantly higher, right? And that's because of how we use water, right? We're a water-based technology, where pyrolysis is a heat-based technology. Yes, you're more hydrogen-based or?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. We are a hydrogen-based technology.
A lot of people ask us if we can capture it and we don't try to capture it because that is the magic of what we do.

Speaker 1 We use water under pressure to create free hydrogen, which breaks down all those molecular compounds. So you're able to break everything down at the molecular level.

Speaker 1 Now, a lot of your listeners might be familiar with the chemical pesticide glyphosate. Glyphosate is carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and hydrogen.
All compounds we all know.

Speaker 1 Nitrogen and phosphorus are great fertilizers. Everyone knows oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, right?

Speaker 1 Those are very common, but it's how it's bonded together, which makes it an unnatural construct, which makes it dangerous to us.

Speaker 1 Now, what we do is we go in, we break that down at the molecular level, causing all those elements to become free.

Speaker 1 We literally turn glyphosate, a harmful pesticide, into an organic nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer. Wow.
That's big because they haven't been able to figure out how to get rid of glyphosate, right?

Speaker 1 It's in the rainwater now, I believe, 80% in America.

Speaker 1 It's in almost everything at this point because it does evaporate. Wow.
So we figured out how to neutralize it and turn it back into a viable product.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's some big farms that could use this stuff for their crops. Yeah.
You know,

Speaker 1 pesticides and everything. Yeah.
And look, glyphosate isn't even the worst one. There's one commonly used out there called atrazine, which is why we see so many men around the U.S.

Speaker 1 with such low testosterone levels because literally it feminizes you. It brings your testosterone and elevates your estrogen.

Speaker 1 There's that famous viral Alex Jones clip where he screams, they're turning the frogs gay. And look, they're not turning the frogs gay.

Speaker 1 But what is happening is those frogs are becoming highly feminized to the point where some male frogs are growing ovaries. So there are chemicals out there that we're using that are just killing us.

Speaker 1 And now we have a solution to break them down. Yeah.
Yeah. I think hydrogen is going to be the future of energy, right? In the future, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1 Right now, they're going through some issues figuring out how to easily store it, right? The biggest issue with hydrogen right now is storage. Like, how do you store it?

Speaker 1 Because it is just a very light gas so it's not the easiest to compress and store plus it requires a lot of energy to store it right but those are all technologies that we need to be working on i mean we're pouring billions upon billions of dollars into r d and a lot of these technologies that we're researching i look at them and i say why are we wasting our money we should be spending money on how to store hydrogen better and new and advanced nascent technologies because what we're using right now like wind and solar they've been shown to be very detrimental to the environment really very detrimental how does wind damage the environment so when you look at an energy you can't just look at it from the perspective of how does this make energy right you have to look at this full life cycle right from manufacturing to to operations to disposal and when you analyze the full picture of wind it's a much different story than the clean energy that everybody talks about They're 300 plus feet tall, made of metal, fiberglass, dysprosium, all these really insane metals.

Speaker 1 They require thousands and thousands of gallons of lubricants just to keep spinning. If there's no wind, there's no energy.
Tens of thousands of tons of concrete per wind turbine.

Speaker 1 Then you have to worry about the transmission to get that energy because, look, I just drove in from Sedona. You're driving through the desert.

Speaker 1 You see all these wind turbines in the middle of nowhere. And it's like, oh, that's great.
It's producing energy. But how do you get that energy from A to B? Oh, you build massive infrastructure.

Speaker 1 You build massive power lines. That's all hydrocarbon energy being used to get these power lines to to where they need to be.
And then you have to have reliable grid.

Speaker 1 You can't be relying on a technology that's unreliable to be able to power all the things you need. So all these wind stations, they have backup hydrocarbon energy.

Speaker 1 So you're building double the infrastructure.

Speaker 1 So it's not a win. It's

Speaker 1 not a green technology by any means. The wind might be renewable.
but the wind turbines really have no real solution for recycling until now, right? We can recycle wind turbines.

Speaker 1 They're almost 40% hydrocarbon from the epoxy, right? And the fiberglass and silica-based compounds would just end up in your biochar. But

Speaker 1 they're really not a green tech. Then you talk about battery storage to store the energy.

Speaker 1 And when you look at battery storage, there's not enough minerals in the world to be able to produce enough power for more than like two or three months' worth of energy.

Speaker 1 So if we relied solely on wind, solar, and batteries to power our infrastructure, we would be in the dark all the time. Interesting.
Yeah, Elon went pretty all in on solar, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, you know, solar I'm not as opposed to as I am wind. Solar definitely has uses.
We're going to be installing solar on every single one of our large-scale systems on the roof space.

Speaker 1 But I'm not someone that believes you should be cutting down farmland or trees to be putting in a solar farm, right?

Speaker 1 Especially we've seen how fragile those systems are. No sun, right? No energy.
You get one bad hailstorm, it can wipe out the entire panels, right?

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of issues with solar as far as the solar farms, but solar does have a place in the future of energy. I just personally don't think wind does.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 What about electric, like all these electric vehicles?

Speaker 1 You know, the EVs are,

Speaker 1 that's a tricky one because obviously they have uses.

Speaker 1 If you are using completely green energy, like hydro or nuclear, those are the ones that I do consider green, right?

Speaker 1 Even though hydro does have its negative effects on the environment as far as ecosystem shaping, right?

Speaker 1 But if you are using completely green energy, they definitely have benefits. But then it comes down again to the batteries, right? Where are you sourcing these batteries from? Are you getting the

Speaker 1 China? Or even worse, where are the minerals and substrates for those coming?

Speaker 1 Sid Harthkara did a book called Cobalt Red. Yeah.
And it really blew my mind when it came to what cobalt mining looks like. and the detriment that these children go through to mine cobalt.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think there's something estimated like 40,000 children in the DRC that are just basically slaves mining cobalt so we can play with our phones. Holy crap.
Where is that?

Speaker 1 The Democratic Republic of the Congo. So it's

Speaker 1 sub-Saharan Africa,

Speaker 1 just off the coast, right in like the middle. Yeah.
So what is cobalt needed for in the phones? So cobalt is part of the batteries. It's part of the

Speaker 1 metal of the battery that allow for the transmission of the electricity. Jeez.
I wonder if they'll find an alternative to that. They are, and we're actually looking at some as well.

Speaker 1 I mean, Eden is going to be rolling out other technologies other than what we're other than our Eden energy systems. And one of the things that we're looking at is a graphene-based battery, right?

Speaker 1 So a carbon-based battery that'll have removable anodes and cathodes that once you're finished with the battery, you can take the metal components out, you can drop the battery right into the system and completely recycle it.

Speaker 1 That'd be great, because I don't want to buy stuff that child workers are I mean, it's hard these days, a lot of stuff, not even just our phones, right? Our clothes.

Speaker 1 I mean, I mean, we look at where we've outsourced a lot of our factories to, and they really don't have great child labor laws. And you look at China where they're building the iPhones.

Speaker 1 I mean, some of these factories put up nets around the factories to prevent people from committing suicide. That's how bad it is.
That's how bad it is.

Speaker 1 So it's one of those things where we got to get back to understanding that corporate giants shouldn't be making the profit margins that they are because people need to be able to live as well, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people have said it. I've heard, I think, some of the people on your podcast say it, but a lot of people are modern-day slaves.

Speaker 1 They just don't realize it because they're getting paid, but they're getting paid just enough to survive. Just over broke job.
Yeah. Right.
Acronym. Yeah, I try to buy locally as much as I can.

Speaker 1 I go to farmers' markets and I try to buy from local mom and pops.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's the best way to do it because you're not only supporting local families and local communities, but you're probably also getting food that's not going to hurt your gut.

Speaker 1 That's a whole nother podcast. That's a whole different animal.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Man, I got to talk about like you and your dad's relationship. Like, have you always worked together? Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, from when you're a young kid and you have a very entrepreneurial, successful father

Speaker 1 who you firmly believe in, it's very easy to want to follow in his footsteps.

Speaker 1 My father is the founding EVP of Ticketmaster and did a lot of really cool things and has some classified patents, which led him into having some really cool friends, so to speak, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, I grew up having directors of three-letter agencies at my house every other weekend and things like that. So it was a really amazing place to grow up.

Speaker 1 But I was that inquisitive kid who was always around, always asking questions.

Speaker 1 And that's why I think I consider myself the most blessed scientist and entrepreneur on the planet just because of the experiences I got to have growing up being surrounded by heads of state and going to all these amazing places.

Speaker 1 Because when you're an entrepreneur, and you're doing something big, one of the lines they say is act like you've been there before, right?

Speaker 1 And for me, it's, I don't have to because I have been there before. I've been in a lot of these situations as a kid.

Speaker 1 I mean, I remember touring the Oval Office at like nine years old because my father was working with the government, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, we were doing projects with the DOD and DOE in the early days and DARPA and all these cool things. So

Speaker 1 it's been a blessing to be able to work with my father because, I mean, a lot of... people who have a scientist for a father say their father's one of the smartest men they know.

Speaker 1 And I don't think my father is one of the smartest men I know. I know he's probably one of the smartest men on the planet.

Speaker 1 So it's a lot to live up to.

Speaker 1 It hasn't always been the easiest career path because you have a father who's done as much as he has.

Speaker 1 He demands a lot, right? And right out of college, I mean, I had to jump all in. I mean, I basically stopped having a social life the day I graduated college.

Speaker 1 And it's just been all science and advancing and making the world a better place ever since. Wow.
The stuff is really going to change the world, I I think, dude.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 a lot of people have asked me why have I continued to push this with all the setbacks and the hurdles and everything that we've been through over the last 30 years, and it's because I know what this technology can do for the world.

Speaker 1 In 1996, before my father sat down this path, we were in Mexico and we saw a Mayan shaman.

Speaker 1 And the Mayan shaman said to my father, he's going to create something to clean up the world.

Speaker 1 And about a year later, he was in Sedona meeting with the scientists scientists working on thermal depolymerization, which is one of the reaction steps in our process.

Speaker 1 And that's how all this was born.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's a really amazing opportunity to be able to bring something so special to the world

Speaker 1 and leave a legacy behind.

Speaker 1 We call my father God's janitor and now I call myself Earth's janitor. And I need to make sure that this technology gets to the world because the world so desperately needs it.
I love that.

Speaker 1 That's beautiful, man. Wow, Mein shaman.
Yeah. I never knew those existed.
Yeah, he's a six foot five Irish guy who considers himself Mayan.

Speaker 1 He could read the hieroglyphics, wears a boretooth carving of Kukul Khan, who is the Mayan, the main god of the Mayans, the feathered serpent god of the Aztecs, called him Quetzcoatl.

Speaker 1 But yeah, we've spent a lot of time in the Yucatec, Tulum especially. I mean, my family's been going to Tulum since the late 80s.

Speaker 1 It was the scientific capital, really, of the Mayas, where the medicine men and the shamans lived. So we spent a lot of time in Tulum.

Speaker 1 My sister, about a decade ago, did a documentary called The Dark Side of Tulum. So the Mayans really have a major role in what we're doing because they were the original environmentalists, right?

Speaker 1 The Yucatec is as fruitful as it is because the Mayans cultivated food forests all over the Yucatec.

Speaker 1 And now it just grows naturally.

Speaker 1 So it's really, it's an amazing place.

Speaker 1 And the jungle is home, which is why I call Miami home. The only place in the continental U.S.
I can get the jungle. Yeah, I love that.
You mentioned hurdles earlier.

Speaker 1 What were the biggest setbacks and hurdles throughout this 30-year journey? Sure. So, Eden is actually the third company that we're going to be building to roll this out.

Speaker 1 The first company was Changing World Technologies, did a lot of really great stuff. Tried to go public in 2008, and the IPO released the day before the market crashed.

Speaker 1 Bad timing. Yeah, that was just one of those things where you're just like, dang.

Speaker 1 But we restructured, we reorganized. Then, in 2012, saw the biofuel market collapse.
And that led to some hurdles with the board.

Speaker 1 And we had ended up having, with everything that went on, we had to walk away from our own business.

Speaker 1 But thankfully, my father owned the technology outright. So we got all the rights of the technology back.
I mentioned the Mayans.

Speaker 1 The same day a group out of Turkey, the same day we got all the rights back, which was actually my father's birthday in 2013,

Speaker 1 we got all the rights back. This group called us, a company called Maya.
So we were like, oh, that's got to be fate. We did some research together.

Speaker 1 And after the research at Lehigh University, they were all in. We formed a worldwide joint venture.
I moved to Istanbul. I lived there about five years.

Speaker 1 That's where I met Yozde, who's here in the room with us. She's our co-founder at Eden, and also my wife.

Speaker 1 And I spent five years living over there, advancing the technology even further.

Speaker 1 We built a small version of what we call version two of the technology to demonstrate that we could process everything at once in an energy-efficient way. We proved that out.

Speaker 1 We designed a 1,500 ton per day system for the city of Istanbul. We finished that design in May of 2016.
And then in July of 2016, there was a failed coup d'état.

Speaker 1 And the country has seen extreme economic turmoil ever since. By 2008, pretty much everything was mothballed.

Speaker 1 I moved back to the U.S. with GoSD,

Speaker 1 got involved in a stem cell startup.

Speaker 1 helped build that company and then the pandemic kind of put things in a different perspective for me.

Speaker 1 I saw how really evil the biomedical industry was and realized that it was not a career path for me. I needed to do something different.

Speaker 1 So around April of 2021, I got connected to a guy starting a regenerative agriculture company.

Speaker 1 And I thought it was great, jumped all in. Gozday joined a couple days after I did and as one of the founding partners, we built that company for about a year and a half.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 an opportunity arose for me to start fresh, brand new, with everything that I had learned from my family's tech, start a new company with a new business model.

Speaker 1 And I started putting together the pieces. I called John Shaw, who was basically with my father since 2002, as one of our main guys.

Speaker 1 He ran and basically built and rebuilt our large facility that we built. We built a 250 ton per day in 2002 to process butterball turkey waste, right?

Speaker 1 The blood, the guts, the bones, the feathers, things like that from the turkey slaughter. And I called him and I didn't even get a chance to actually ask him to come back in.

Speaker 1 He kind of just went, well, where do you want me?

Speaker 1 And from that moment, we just kept pushing. About six months later, I got introduced to one of our other partners, Joe Schop.

Speaker 1 And we just kept running and gunning. And now we're here and we're ready to start building and manufacturing.
We've got manufacturing all teed up, ready to go.

Speaker 1 We've got all of our system designs ready to rock and roll. And we just hired back as our chief technology officer, Sean Jones, who was one of my father's main engineers for over a decade.

Speaker 1 So I get to bring in now an engineer as my CTO who could teach me the engineering on the side. Let's go.
Everything comes back full circle. Everything comes back full circle.

Speaker 1 So Eden is ready to really make a significant difference in this world. And we've got so much going on.
I mean, right now I'm up at 5 o'clock most days and I go to bed around 10.

Speaker 1 And there really is no time where I'm not working. And thankfully, My wife is also one of the partners.

Speaker 1 So if I'm working at 8 o'clock at night, she's not yelling at me because chances are she's she's in the meeting with me. I love that, man.
Yeah, you were in Austin for 10 days straight.

Speaker 1 Ian loved your show, Ian Carroll. Yeah.
Yeah, he looked like he was having a blast. Yeah, you know, I've been a big fan of Ian's for over a year now.
I found him randomly about a year ago.

Speaker 1 And I just love how he just lays out everything as facts. He puts everything out there and allows you to formulate your own opinion based on what he does.

Speaker 1 And that's what I think more news people need to do. But yeah, I saw Ian walk in.
I'm like, that's Ian Carroll. So it was, it was pretty cool.

Speaker 1 We had a really nice drop-in, and I'm looking forward to connecting with you.

Speaker 1 I'd love to see someone like him or Tucker cover the energy crisis. Yeah.
And, you know, at the end of the day, that's really the only issue that is out there.

Speaker 1 Energy and waste, right? A lot of people talk about water. There is no water crisis.
The world is 70% water.

Speaker 1 It's an energy crisis because if energy was cheap and abundant, desalinization would be easy.

Speaker 1 But desalinization right now is expensive because energy is expensive, especially in places where they need desalinization, like Cali, where it's over 33 cents a kilowatt there.

Speaker 1 In Texas, it's like 12 cents a kilowatt. Wow.
So in California, where they really need water, right?

Speaker 1 If the energy prices were lower, they wouldn't really need water because you would just set up desalinization plants on the coast and pump it into the inland.

Speaker 1 It's just, it's a fortune because of the

Speaker 1 high energy costs.

Speaker 1 So we need to work on getting that down over there because they have fires every year. So it's not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon.
And there's a lot of reasons for the fires.

Speaker 1 I mean, California historically was not as wet as it is, right? If you look back at the historical record, California was always an arid climate.

Speaker 1 Only in the last couple hundred years has it really seen the rainfall that it has been getting.

Speaker 1 So it's just going back to more of the historical trends. But California also has very strict laws in the books about forest management.

Speaker 1 And if you don't go in and clean up those forests, then you get all these brush fires that most of the time are started by people, right? The vast majority of these fires are not naturally occurring.

Speaker 1 It's somebody at a campfire or somebody throwing something out of their car or intentionally lighting it, right? A lot of fires are intentionally lit.

Speaker 1 Maybe they're trying to clear brush and it just got out of control or whatever it may be.

Speaker 1 But yeah, California's definitely got some hurdles. And if they had cheaper energy, they'd be able to get significant water to battle a lot of these fires.

Speaker 1 But energy in California is the highest in the continental U.S., which is why it's one of our prime targets for our systems. Man, it's high here, too.
My bill will be going up every single month.

Speaker 1 It's crazy. I don't even use that much energy, but it's probably doubled since I moved here four years ago on my energy bill.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's that significant. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But Vegas is growing like crazy right now, right? Yeah. Everyone from Cali's leaving, coming here.
Yeah. There's not enough houses here, actually.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Crazy. I don't know how you guys live in the desert.

Speaker 1 I can't be here full time. I got to travel.
Yeah. You know, I like living at different spots every few months.
Maybe you could have a living. That's my neighborhood.
Where would you be?

Speaker 1 Whoa, that's tough. Would I already have enough money to just do whatever? Yeah.
Probably not in a city then. Because city, I feel like you live there to just grind and hustle and make your bag.

Speaker 1 And then I'd want to ideally move out, have like acres of land, tons of animals on a farm somewhere. Nice, you know.
What about you?

Speaker 1 Right now, I'm looking at finding some land in Homestead, Florida, which is basically the southernmost point. And I do want to set up a homestead there.

Speaker 1 But I'll probably be south of Miami for the foreseeable future. I mean, I'm not too worried about hurricanes.
You build a house that can withstand them.

Speaker 1 And hurricanes, I mean, you hear a lot of talk about hurricanes getting more and more and worse and worse. But again, if you analyze the real historical data, they're actually not.

Speaker 1 The prevalence is actually very consistent.

Speaker 1 And the major storms, right, category 3 plus has seen no real increase.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of information that I see, especially on like Twitter and Instagram, where I see these scientists talking about things like, oh, we're seeing more fires now than ever in human history.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 if you expand the graphs, they share a graph that shows from like 1940 to now. And if you expand it to the 1930s, the graph goes crazy up high.
And right now, it's crazy low.

Speaker 1 Because in the 1930s, you saw more acreage burn than I think in the last 20 years combined or something. But they cut that part out.
They cut that part out. It's the same with CO2, right?

Speaker 1 You have all these guys talking about this CO2 that the world can't handle over 420 parts per million. And if you look back at the historical record, CO2 was always higher.

Speaker 1 It was over a thousand for most of the planet's history, right? And life thrived. CO2 is the most important gas for fertilizer, for plant growth.
And yes, it definitely has some warming effect.

Speaker 1 But CO2 is the gas of life.

Speaker 1 I was talking with a scientist probably about 10, 15 years ago, one of my father's

Speaker 1 mentors, right? This is when I talk scientists, I mean, this is like head office.

Speaker 1 And he was explaining to me that if it were not for the Industrial Revolution, where we started burning exorbitant amounts of hydrocarbons and releasing that excess CO two into the atmosphere, there's a very high likelihood that the CO two levels would have dropped below the threshold of 150 ppm to support plant life.

Speaker 1 And if that would have happened, all plant life on Earth would have died out, which means everything would have died out. Holy crap, right?

Speaker 1 It would have been a mass extinction like we can't even imagine because

Speaker 1 prior to the Industrial Revolution, CO2 was at 180 parts per million and dropping. Since then, we're up to about 420,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 the number, like the concentration that they put in industrial greenhouses is over 1,000. The ISS is at 5,000, right? The International Space Station.

Speaker 1 Submarines, nuclear subs are 3,000 to 5,000 ppm, right? So if human beings can't survive over 420, why do we have these man-made structures at such high levels?

Speaker 1 Why are greenhouses at such high levels? And

Speaker 1 the CO2 narrative just doesn't make sense to me, especially as someone who's an expert in carbon, right? Our technology is a carbon conversion technology.

Speaker 1 Now, when I say that, people are like, oh, what are you? A climate denier? I'm like, no, obviously the climate has major issues. The world is sick.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 We're trying to restore Eden. That's why it's our name.
But I don't think it's CO2. I think it's all the hundreds of millions of tons of chemicals we spray in the land each year.

Speaker 1 It's all the plastics that are polluting all of our land.

Speaker 1 It's all the incineration and all all this toxic vapors that we're emitting into the atmosphere that are changing all the natural constructs, right?

Speaker 1 We're destroying our world with pollution, and then we're blaming the gas of life on any environmental degradation that we see, and it just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 But again, I mean, the world is sick. We have a lot of work that has to get done.

Speaker 1 But if it's the

Speaker 1 main concern is pollution, now you actually have a viable solution to it because we can take everything from plastics to food waste to even fracking water, right?

Speaker 1 The contaminated hydrocarbon water, and we can purify it back into a clean source.

Speaker 1 Do you think there should be more regulation around pollution?

Speaker 1 You know, regulation is one of those tricky ones that will often backfire, right?

Speaker 1 They put in regulations and then businesses just look at it as a hurdle and they completely avoid doing anything in that world, right? And it can hurt industry.

Speaker 1 I think the way that you really get things to change is you have to give people a reason to want to be better, right?

Speaker 1 And because of how efficient our systems are, they're massive profit generators.

Speaker 1 I mean, if you have high waste disposal costs and high energy costs, I mean, you can be seeing models that have two, three hundred percent IRR and we're afraid to show those to clients, right?

Speaker 1 That's insane. If I tell a client, some of these models are are insane.
We built out a

Speaker 1 1,500 ton per day model for an island.

Speaker 1 And islands are some of the best targets because they have nowhere to get the waste and energies are through the roof. We built out this 1,500 ton per day model for the island.

Speaker 1 That's a $200 million system. Jeez.

Speaker 1 The electricity cost. was over 40 cents a kilowatt and they were paying over $75 a ton for waste disposal.

Speaker 1 The model on that system without credits and incentives was like 220% IRR, meaning that in year one, they're bringing in almost $400 million in profit without credits and incentives just on that facility because they're taking their stored waste, right, and turning it into clean energy.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the things we look forward to changing. Waste is a human construct, right? Waste is...

Speaker 1 It's like the definition of a weed. What's the definition of a weed? A plant out of place, right? Waste is something that we can't currently use in its current form.

Speaker 1 But if you have a whole ton of plastic and someone's looking at that, oh, that's going to pollute the environment.

Speaker 1 I look at it and say, oh, that's a crap ton of energy that we can just turn into fuels to make clean energy from.

Speaker 1 So it's really all perspective. So waste is one of these human constructs that we look forward to changing because waste is no longer waste, but a commodity that can be traded as its energy.

Speaker 1 Wow, which is huge because there's so much waste just sitting everywhere, right? It's the biggest industry in the world. Is it? Because every single industry has waste.
That's true, yeah. Right?

Speaker 1 Oh, that's a super good point. Every single industry, whether it's the oil manufacturing, electronic goods, right? We've done a study.
Well, I shouldn't say we.

Speaker 1 My father in the early days when I was only about 14 years old did a study with Dell where we just took whole computers and we processed them,

Speaker 1 able to extract all the precious metals and everything.

Speaker 1 And now we're looking at these really amazing new technologies that are able to not only separate out those metals, but or not only extract those metals, but separate them by their components.

Speaker 1 So there's a lot of amazing things coming coming down the pipeline, especially for e-waste, because our phones have gold and silver and all these other precious metals in them where if you can capture it, that's now a secondary waste stream that these waste producers processing e-waste can capture, right?

Speaker 1 They don't have to take apart the motherboard and extract them by hand. They just throw the whole phone in, grind it up.

Speaker 1 This machine is going to extract all those metals and then the rest of the plastics and everything else go get converted into energy. That's big time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because there's gold and silver in these devices, right?

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 1 This is really, really good technology, man yeah i'm impressed i can't wait to see this more mainstream it's been a journey and uh that's why we never gave up on it um we've got a really strong team right now uh and it's just getting stronger by the day and we're going to start doing some really active recruiting to bring on some really really big players we're going to look for a top-tier cfo and make sure that we have all of our financials in order because we're we are going to look to tokenize these systems as far as their energy and co2 credits and there's going to be massive plays at hand in the crypto world.

Speaker 1 We're working with a tier one platform that is getting ready to launch called ZDKL. And we're doing a lot of really cool stuff.
I love it, man. Any other partnerships?

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's actually

Speaker 1 a lot of things transpiring. I mean, like I said, I'm probably pulling a 12 to 14-hour day every single day.
So you're just, you're kind of constantly grinding.

Speaker 1 We're talking with some partnerships with a couple different

Speaker 1 states, a couple different countries looking to scale manufacturing in parts of South America, parts of Africa, parts of Indonesia. So really just looking to get this technology to the world.

Speaker 1 And we are going to be reaching out to some of the big corporate giants like Coca-Cola and things like that.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of people don't know, but Coca-Cola is the number one plastic polluter in the world.

Speaker 1 And what they're sitting on is just a vast, untapped amount of energy that they could probably use to power their facilities completely and then some, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, plastic bottle companies would be good. What about glass? Does it process glass? Well, glass is silica-based, right? So

Speaker 1 a lot of people ask, well, what can you guys process? And it's much easier for me to tell you what we can't process, right? And that's metal, rocks, and glass. Got it.

Speaker 1 And it's not that they can't go through the system. They can absolutely go through, but they don't convert in anything.
So they just end up in your biochar and they lower the quality of your biochar.

Speaker 1 So we try to extract them out. The quality of the biochar is based on the purity of the carbon, right?

Speaker 1 So biochar technically is 75 to 95 percent carbon, right?

Speaker 1 Anything lower is basically just waste, and anything over 95 percent gets that carbon black specification, right, where you get your water filter-grade carbon.

Speaker 1 But we generally produce a carbon about 85% purity, but if you start throwing in a lot of glass into there or metal and things like that, then your purity levels can drop.

Speaker 1 Someone else will have to solve the heavy metal issue, not you. No, we did solve the heavy metal.
Oh, you did?

Speaker 1 So, that is actually one of the main components of the first three stages. So we're an eight-stage process here.

Speaker 1 Raw material preparation, thermal depolymerization, hydrolysis, separations, thermocracking, concentration, polishing, and power generation.

Speaker 1 In stage three, hydrolysis, you go water under pressure, right? We create free hydrogen. But what happens is those metal, those heavy metals, they become water soluble.
They're oxidized.

Speaker 1 So they extract from whatever component they're in, and they end up in the water phase, and they're oxidized naturally occurring form, right?

Speaker 1 So they're no longer in this radical reactive form because let's remember, lead, mercury, all these heavy metals, they're naturally occurring constructs, but it's when we process them and we turn them into their unnatural forms that they really become dangerous.

Speaker 1 Well, but mercury exists in nature, lead exists in nature, right? These are all naturally occurring.

Speaker 1 What we do is we're able to actually revert them back into their natural form, their oxidized form, and we're able to literally discharge them directly to the land without worry about them leaching.

Speaker 1 Nice. We did that research with Jefferson Tester at MIT about 20 years ago, and it was one of those happy accidents.
We were processing coal to seeing if we can upgrade coal.

Speaker 1 And after they tested the coal, they were like, well, where'd the mercury go?

Speaker 1 And we tested the water and we found oxidized mercury in the water. Damn.
So it was one of those really cool things. So the hydrolysis is actually where a lot of the magic happens.

Speaker 1 You oxidize and neutralize heavy metals. You break down pathogens.

Speaker 1 So we did a study with the DOD in the early days in the New York State Department of Health where we ran tests on bacillium strepthymopolis and anthrax.

Speaker 1 And it's the only technology to ever receive 100% pathogen destruction on those pathogens. Wow.
So that was right as the whole anthrax scare was happening.

Speaker 1 And with our military connections, they wanted to see, make sure if there really was like a major attack and they had to dispose of this, they had a solution. And they did, right?

Speaker 1 We were the solution. We had a small facility operating on the Philadelphia Naval Yard.
So we had everything all set and ready to go in case of a major emergency.

Speaker 1 But yeah,

Speaker 1 we have 100% pathogen destruction. So we're able to do medical and infectious waste, no problem.
We even had a permit in New York State for over 20 years to process medical and infectious waste.

Speaker 1 So yeah, I mean, what we're able to do,

Speaker 1 it's not a waste-to-energy technology. It is a complete waste reclamation technology.

Speaker 1 We're able to take all the compounds and everything that's in the waste and capture it in a form that's a viable product, right? There's no waste and there's no byproducts.

Speaker 1 We create regenerative fuel oil, which is our crude oil, regenerative natural gas, biochar, a liquid fertilizer if you're processing like food, waste, and organics, right?

Speaker 1 If you have nitrogen or phosphorus or potassium present in your waste, you're able to capture that and use it as a fertilizer. And then water, right? So we're a net water producer.

Speaker 1 So if you think of garbage, garbage is about 50 to 60% water.

Speaker 1 Most people don't think about that. It's got a lot of moisture in it, right? So if you have a ton of waste, you have 1,000 pounds of water in there, which is about 200 gallons, right?

Speaker 1 It's about 8.4 pounds per gallon. So all that water usually just evaporates and goes away.
Now you're able to capture it, and we're working with this really cool water filtering technology.

Speaker 1 that is able to capture and make drinkable 98% of your stream, right? An RO system is like 10 to 20% if you're lucky. So if you have 100 gallons, you can get 10 to 20 gallons of usable water.
Wow.

Speaker 1 This company is claiming 98 gallons of usable water. Holy crap.

Speaker 1 From trash? Well, from wastewater, right? They're a really cool wastewater technology. We actually met them when we met you at CES about two months ago.

Speaker 1 We got introduced to them. They were presenting here.
They're called water, but spelt with two Vs. Very, very cool company.
Interesting. But yeah, we're looking to

Speaker 1 take their technology as an add-on to our systems.

Speaker 1 So now a community, right, let's say one of these off-grid communities with a thousand homes, they can put a system in, take all that extra water and convert it to drinking water for the community.

Speaker 1 I'd rather have that than municipal tap water. Yeah.

Speaker 1 With fluoride and who knows what else?

Speaker 1 Well, the the the worst in in the tap water, I mean the fluoride's obviously bad and and thankfully it looks like Bobby is going to put in some legislation to get rid of that across the United States, but it's really the birth control.

Speaker 1 That's yeah, I heard that. I mean the birth control in the water is is is really wrecking havoc on men.

Speaker 1 And I'm a biologist by trade. That's what I study, right?

Speaker 1 And you look at what's going on with our fish, like the largemouth bass is having major reproductive issues because you test our rivers and lakes and there's fake estrogen floating around our rivers and lakes because it's such a small molecule that it gets past the wastewater treatment facility.

Speaker 1 Dang. And I mean, you have so many women around the country who are on birth control who

Speaker 1 pee it out, right? And then it ends up in the wastewater treatment plants and then it ends up up in nature.

Speaker 1 And that's one of the reasons why, I mean, my testosterone levels, I saw my levels and I'm looking at me. I'm a 36-year-old male.
I'm a former high-level athlete. And I'm looking at it.

Speaker 1 My levels are sub-400. And I'm like, oh, my gosh, like, how did this happen to me? And, I mean, I look at my lifestyle where I sit in front of a computer for hours and hours and a day on end.

Speaker 1 I haven't been in the gym as much as I should be.

Speaker 1 And it makes sense, but it's all the poisons in the food. I mean, you go out.
I mean, I drink and eat very clean at home. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But I'm not one of these people that isn't going to go out to a restaurant. And you order a water at a restaurant, unless you get the bottled water, you're just getting municipal poison.

Speaker 1 And you're showering in it, you know, you're bathing in it, going in a swimming pool. Yep.
Oh, chlorine is a killer. Yeah.
I stopped going in pools unless they're saltwater pools. Yep.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's very smart. And I mean, that was one of the things I always worried about, like, swimmers like Michael Phelps.
Like, what is that long-term chlorine explosion going to have?

Speaker 1 Because you're inhaling it. it

Speaker 1 bad. I've seen videos where like it literally enters your bloodstream as soon as you get in the water.
Yep. There's a I think you actually had him on your show, Dr.
Papa. Yeah, Pampa.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a beast. He had a really great video that showed how quickly chlorine absorbs into your skin.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And like he just filled up a glass of drinking water, tested it for the chlorine, it turned in, and then he put his fingers in it for like 30 seconds and pulled it out and there was no chlorine left in the water.

Speaker 1 Yeah. It's insane.
That's disturbing.

Speaker 1 That's why I stopped going to steam rooms too. Yeah.
Because they use tap water. So you're just inhaling birth control and fluoride and whatever.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I used to feel worse after steam rooms than going in. That would make sense.
I mean, it's

Speaker 1 that's there's so many poisons all around us constantly. Um and then we wonder why we're sick, we're depressed, because we've really just thrown our natural systems a wrench every five minutes.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 especially with the lifestyles that a lot of people live today, I mean, marijuana is not what it was 40 years ago. I mean, it's a heavy narcotic at this point.
I get anxiety on enough. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I mean, I still partake from time to time, but alcohol is another big one, right? I mean, alcohol, I stopped drinking about two, a little over two years ago

Speaker 1 because just for work, right? I'll still toast. Like, I'll have a glass of champagne while we're doing a nice toast and have a couple sips, but I stopped socially drinking.

Speaker 1 And the advancement I have seen in my thinking over the last two years after giving up alcohol has been,

Speaker 1 I've advanced more in my scientific thinking the last two years than I did in the previous 33 years. Holy crap.

Speaker 1 Just the

Speaker 1 immense ability for my brain to start putting things together when I stop poisoning it is immense, right?

Speaker 1 And alcohol basically opens up the pores in your brain and allows just things to cross the blood-brain barrier.

Speaker 1 I mean, it really is one of those things where you wonder why. it's legal when things like marijuana were illegal.

Speaker 1 And I mean, you look at the fluoride in in the water, you look at all these other chemicals that we've been allowed to consume while other countries aren't, and it really makes you question things.

Speaker 1 It does. And a lot of people point to you like you're a conspiracy theorist when you question things.

Speaker 1 But when you're a scientist and you understand things at certain levels, you're like, no, that's not conspiracy. There's something major.
There's facts and data behind it.

Speaker 1 It's not like it's a random saying, you know? Yeah, exactly. Jonathan, it's been awesome, man.
Where can people find you and find Eden Energy and potentially work with you? Yeah,

Speaker 1 so we're pretty active on Instagram and LinkedIn. You can find me personally at JonathanAppell13 on both Instagram and LinkedIn.
On Instagram, we're EdenEnergy.co. That's the same as our website.

Speaker 1 And on X, we're EdenEnergyX.

Speaker 1 But that's really where we're active right now. We are going to be using an app called Own, which you've had some of those guys on here.
We're very good friends with those guys.

Speaker 1 And I believe our marketing team is also going to be using TikTok here a little bit. And I think they're also on YouTube.
Perfect.

Speaker 1 But our marketing team does some really great work, puts out some really great content.

Speaker 1 And I'm going to be a little bit more active in X over the coming months, really trying to get Eden's name out there, but also explain things from the scientific perspective. I've been so blessed to

Speaker 1 have the opportunity to learn. And I mean, yeah, a lot of people don't have the opportunities I've had.

Speaker 1 I'm very thankful and fortunate. Look forward to getting back.
Can't wait to see you guys everywhere. Thanks for coming on, man.
Thanks for having me. Check them out, guys, and I'll see you next time.