Pushkin, I may have Higgins and this is solvable interviews with the world's most innovative thinkers working to solve the world's biggest problems. So you know that here unsolvable. We're used to having guests who are taking on huge challenges. But our guest this episode, Shashy Bulletsoir, is not content with just one solvable. He has three. The first is electricity access. Today a billion people around the world don't have access to electricity, and that number is expected to grow.
My first solvable is coming up with mechanisms to make sure those billion people have electricity. The second is it's not electricity that matters, it's what people do with it. One of the most important things people can do with electricity is refrigeration. Can say perishables, if they're growing fruits and vegetables, they can store them and take them to market. They can store sensitive pharmaceuticals. Off the seven points some billion people in the world, almost a third don't have
access to refrigeration. I would love to solve that problem. The third is the dignity of sanitation and tilets. Today, again, over a billion people in the world do not have access to clean sanitation. Whether it's its home, whether it's in cities where human waste just gets it dumped into local waterways. One of my soluables is making sure everybody in the world has a decent sanitation waste treatment. CHARGI is the CEO of the Institute for a Transformative Technologies
in California. Its mission is to use technological breakthroughs to transform global development, improving access from millions of people to sanitation, food, primary healthcare, and electricity. Now, the potential to harness technology to create solutions to economic, social, and environmental challenges is massive.
Anybody with even a passing interest in tech or artificial intelligence has probably had that giddy feeling about these huge opportunities for developing countries to skip stages that took other nations years to get to. And it's totally true that frontier technologies today are better, cheaper, faster, and more scalable. They're even easier to use than ever before. But technology also presents an array of challenges that need to be handled with care. And Shashi Bullus where it walks that
balance beam quite beautifully. He grew up in India and he believes his countrymen there should have the agency to solve their own issues, and that's a huge part of his philosophy today. He passes it on in his work in India as well as in Kenya and Nigeria. She's work at the Institute for Transformative Technologies focuses on solving problems for people living in poverty by using technology, and he hits on three solvables in this discussion, but the
one he gets down and dirty with is sanitation. The World Health Organization reports that almost two point three billion people worldwide still do not have access to rudimentary sanitation facilities. Almost half of India's people don't have toilets at home.
A good sanitation system can prevent environmental damage caused by untreated sewage flowing into rivers, and it can also stamp out the terrible health risks associated with open defecation, like infectious diseases, under nutrition, and even increased vulnerability to verbal, physical, or sexual violence. So there's loads in this conversation with Malcolm Gladwell, let's get into it. What's your kind of point of entry, the kinds of things you're interested in.
Growing up in India, one of my most distinct memories is that we'd have foreign tourists when as foreign typically I mean white tourists would come. I live very close to Islam, so they'd come take pictures with the poor kids. I wasn't myself particularly poor, but lived around them. Then they'd go off to their ashram, the yoga retreats and so on, and it's very curious what brought them there.
And when I asked them, they said away here to help, which as an Indian kid, made me feel like, wow, we must be so incompetent that we can't help ourselves. And you know, as I go back to India, now, some of the kids just died, right, it's never never made it to adulthood. Others did find, but they did find on their own. And so this idea of as an Indian, I have to do what I can to
help India became very important to me. At the same time, I realized that only Pakistanis can help Pakistan, only Kenya can help Kenya, and so it became very important for me to have the sense of local empowerment, that we're all global citizens and global poverty is a global problem. But it became extraordinarly important for me to work in the context in which you're finding really good people in
country and working with them to solve local problems. Describe how you got drawn into the kinds of problems you're now How did you get interested in those particular issues. A few years back I was invited to start and institute at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley to use the R and D might of the National Lab system to address problems related to poverty. And what I immediately realized was that this whole technology for good space is full of hammers looking for nails. Hey, I've got
the stabulist technology. Let me go solve problems with them. And typically these result in technologies sitting on jobs. They make for great media splashes, but otherwise don't really go anywhere. So we launched a very ambitious study we call the fifty Breakthroughs. Essentially, what are the fifty most important technologies required to solve poverty over the next twenty years, and our job is to get them to life that fifty
or some significant subsetup. Yeah you have this list of fifty, Yeah, tell me a little bit more so criteria about what it takes to be on the list. What we did was methodically went through every major problem that effect poor food security, health, education, human rights, gender inequity, digital access, electrification, water, and so on, and essentially said, many of these problems actually will go away with good policy and good infrastructure. But there is a sub class of these problems, so
which a new generation of technologies is required. Those elogies currently don't exist. What are dose Yeah, And then, as we did in mapping, we said, well, some of these technologies may come to life on their own simply because of market forces. So a low cost smartphone, for instance, today you can get a fifty dollars smartphone, and I'm sure pretty soon you can get a twenty five dollars smartphone.
On the other hand, you have problems that are so complex, problems that don't have strong enough market forces, like a milliaria of vaccine. So what we do is we've taken a class of problems in the middle where you don't have to spend fifty million dollars to solve it. You can solve each one with two to five million dollars. We also categorize these problems on the basis of commercial interest.
If this is a problem in which a global company can make money solving, chances are it's going to fix itself. Again like the smartphone. So that's further that's exactly, so two dimensions. Really, one dimension is how complex is it? The other dimension is what's the commercial attractiveness. Yeah, if it's if it's commercially attractive to global companies like like g or Apple, problem is going to be solved. On At the other end of the spectrum, there are problems
it's simply are not financially viable. So a lot of things related to human rights, for instance. So we again focused in the middle where we said, look, there are companies based in Kenya, based in Pakistan, based in India. They actually would love to build financially sustainable businesses with these technologies, but they don't currently invest the R and
D to bring those technologies to life. So what we do is we take philanthropic money, figure out a way to make those technologies to life, demonstrate the financial and business viability of these technologies, and then work with those companies to launch businesses. So let's start with refrigeration. Walk me through. I know nothing about it. My notion about refrigeration is a five hundred dollars plug in refrigerator. It
seems to me at first plush, how on Earth. Would you make such a thing practical for a very, very poor community. So let's talk about refrigeration in two stages, first the electrification, then refrigeration for electricity. The current paradigm, at the historic paradigm has been let's build these large electric infrastructures, let's have fossil fuel based generation and turn
the switch on. When we started looking at the electrification problem, we realize that if you're a far flung village, it's very hard to extend the grid to where you are.
You have to build what's called a solar minigrid. And in India we did some math in terms of the three years back, what is the cost of a solar minigrid, what is the translate into in terms of per month utility bills, and what can people pay If a family is earning three to five dollars a day, which is not a typical for the average Indian household, the cost of electricity with a solo minigrid was twice what people
can afford to pay. In addition to that, if you want to build a solar mitigrate in a village of a thousand people, you'll take you two or three months. So our mission became can we reduce the cost by fifty percent and can we dramatically reduce the installation time.
So we sought out the three or four people who consider it to be the leading experts in the world from the developing world, and over the course of two and a half years, we built such a system and almost on the one one of the questions we asked ourselves as great, if you build this technology, who will take it to market? And there was one company that jumped out Data Power. As you know Data as a huge conglomerate in India. They have presence in multiple sectors.
They are also a company that is a long history of doing the right thing, investing in social businesses, thinking about profit only as an afterthought, and electrically ality is not going to be widely profitable, even if you go to Switzerland or Lichtenstein. So they're thinking was can we get a company that has staying power that can whatever
we design procure the stuff using massive economy. The scale has the respect of the government and communities around the country so that they'll trust them to do the right thing and can really move the economic muscle. Put in hundreds of million dollars to do this at a massive scale. So we brought them to the table in twenty sixteen and as of late eighteen, we had built the system to their satisfaction. So as we speak, we are in the process of launching what would be the largest electrification
event in history. So they've agreed to do ten thousand villages, twenty five million people. We're actually talking about this same project in another episode of Solving. So it's lovely how these two things dovetail. I'm cused the scale of this. So you're talking about one of these solo It's costs how much I'll give you a cost in terms of per what for a full system which includes the panels, the batteries, electronics, and the one to two kilometer grid
plus smart meters. It costs a dollar fifty per what. So for a village of thousand people, it's about forty five thousand dollars. Oh wow, that takes me as an incredibly low number. It is. It is affordable, but still, you know these are very poor people, right, we still have to make the math work. So the flip side of this is energy efficient appliances, right, because you could have electricity at whatever costs you have them at, but if you if your appliances are consuming much more than
they should, your monthly bills go up. Right, So that's where energy efficient and affordable refrigation comes in. If people were to use an existing fan, in existing run of the mill fan, they'd pay much much more than they can afford. Certainly, if they would use an existing fridge, let's say, let's see got used fridges for one hundred bucks, right, there's no way they'd be able to afford electricity. Therefore,
there's no way they'd be able to afford refrigeration. Do these ideas, what are the chances they all trickle back to the developed world? For example, you have this modular mini solar grid. Why if I'm a rural community in North America somewhere, is there a point at which we say, can I have that thing that you've already installed in India? Does it move the other direction? It can? I don't believe the minigrids themselves will, because we're optimizing them for
people who went three to five dollars a day. Yeah, and so that comes with certain limitations. In the US, for instance, people are willing to pay a lot more than that. And so I'm sure some version of these technologies will come back. There's one that I'm particularly excited about that that I'm quite certain will come back. Remember we talked about waste treatment. Do you know that earthworms
love eating human poop? Terms out that one of the problems we work on a scanentation and waste treatment, sewage treatment, and we had concluded that it's going to be impossible going forward to build out that kind of sewage treatment for a billion plus people to billion plus people around the world, and composting toilets currently in the West are ridiculous expensive, ridiculously complicated. Turns out that earthworms actually like
human waste. But if you simply take a drum of earthworms and put human waste in it, built around because the matter is so dense, a few British scientists you put if I had a I'm not sure I understand this. So let's take two tanks. One tank has cowdang. Yeah, the other tank has human waste. Cowdang is a lot less dense. This is a lot more fibrous material, so the earthworms will define in that tank. In the other tank, human waste is significantly more dense, right, so they just
cannot breathe it's not an aerobic process. So some scientists in a couple of British universities, I think well Ower a decade back, had figured out that if you create a layered system, and the way this layered system manifests itself in the toilets rebuilding is imagine. Imagine you have a tiny outhouse. You're in a village. You have a hut, and outside that hut is an outhouse that's let's say four feet by four feet and you know, seven feet tall.
Right behind it is a drum that's three feet in diameter, three feet in depth. The bottommost layer is just rocks that you'd find locally. Then you've got gravel, which you can also find locally, and then sand, which some variation of it you can find locally. So that takes up about twelve to eighteen inches. Right, then you've got a three or four inch layer of the earth rooms and some sort of organic matter. Right, So that is the digestion mechanism for the toilet. How much do you think
something that that would cost. It's one kilogram of earthworms twenty five bucks. In my drama, I have how many worms? One kilogram of worms? Let's say it's a thousand words, thousand rights. And I would ask a totally naive question. If you start with a thousand worms, how quickly do you have more than a thousand worms? Does the population sort of multiply? Do they self generate more and more worms? Well, the thing about pretty much every species except humans is
the optimis the population based on the resources I see. Okay, so what happens is if you don't use the toilet, the population goes down. You can go almost six weeks, two months without using the toilet at all, right, and even after that the eggs state doornament. So once you start using it again, the population grows. So, yes, you've got about a foot and a half of available space. Right. So let's say a family of four is using this toilet with the tiny dram. How long do you think
it takes to fill up? Longer than one would think? Is my answer? Very astute. Yeah, it takes eight years to fill up. Because what the worms do is they there's obviously law of conservation of masks. They convert a lot of it into into C or two, which is much better than methane, which is what would happen ordinarily, and then they chew up the stuff into tiny, tiny little particles, and in the process they destroy ninety nine plus press into the pathosions. So essentially it gets washed
away into the soil. But you wouldn't drink it. But if you drank it, drank the affluent, nothing would happen to you. Wow. Wait, So what happens is the waist goes in the top is it and it filters down? Correct? And where are the worms? Are they throughout the base or are they? Why is it that the presence of this base diminishes the density of the waist. One thing it allows the worms to do is they can they can spend time wherever they want. If it gets too
dense above, they can go below. The second thing is that by adding these layers you're dramatically increasing the surface area. So as the waist filters down, the biofilm gets depot a very very large surface area. So whatever pathogens the worms don't kill off die off in that process? Is the drum in the ground and the and the waste is going directly into it? How is this configured? Imagine the typical commode and usually in the context you work
and it's it's a squatting toilet. Right, you have the little u pipe that goes from the commode and then it dumps under the ground into this drum. Oh see the drum is buried. Yeah. Yeah. The point is after eight years you might have to revisit this, but in the medium to long term you install this and it's no must not us. You're not digging up the drum at any point. Or that's correct. Yeah, we have run
into some problems. So two years back, India had horrible monsoon range and in one of the villages the worms drowned simply because there was two feet of standing water for a couple of weeks. So things like that can happen. How do you know when all your worms are drowned? Does it start to back up? It starts to smell. One of the really good things about these toilets is that there's no smell. They're't of lives. In fact, most of the users they don't care about the pathrision destruction value.
What they care about is, hey, wow, I can have a toilet that doesn't smell. How can it not smell simply because of the biological process here right, So I have this video that I love showing essentially it's a camera in one of these drums, and it's over the course of twenty hours, and if you just look at the footage at normal speed, you don't see anything. What you do notice is that a couple of hours after
somebody defecates, the stuff disappears. If you significantly increase a speed, what you see is that the earthworms are doing what earthworms do, which is they're rolling the soil over right. And so as a result of that, within two hours after somebody defecates, the stuff is actually already better than soil. How widely has this system been deployed in India? On one hand, it is the most widely said linked to alet technology for the four On the other hand, it's
a tiny number. It's like seven thousand or so, and we've been figuring out one of two directions to going. Turns out that there's a much larger scale version of this that we've used for treating raw sewage so as I mentioned earlier, and a lot of cities in the developing world, which is just dumps into local water wagement and that causes all sorts of problems from esthetics to health and so on, and so in the city of Pune,
which has a bunch of such sewage pipes. We've tapped into one of them and have a larger scale version of this earthworm. Larger scale, how big is it? You know, it's the size of half football. Can you do this at any scale in principle yes, My sense is that as it gets larger, rather than simply growing it, we may just have to go through your So what's happened
to the word? It's doing very well. So that is actually the thing we're most excited about right now, simply because now you can go into a city and over the course of a year build out the sewage treatment infracturate a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the cost probably one temper the cost of what cost you if you if you built a conventional system. If you compare this in the West, suppose you were going to build out a sewage treatment down the road from where we are now.
Is the ratio the same one tenth or is it? I'm just I'm curious about the kind of state of the art Western style sewage facilities. What is the what are the costs of those compared to something like this. I couldn't give you a dollar number for that, right but if you just look at the components of the cost, right, so the earth worms kind of grow themselves, meaning that you just have a large ditch with sewage and there are thems that reproduce. The rest of it is almost
zero infrastructure, So you've got no concrete. You know, if you go if you walk into a typical sewage treatment plant, you've got lots of power. You've got pumps because the way we treat waste right now of the area them there the ways, right, so none of that is required. It runs on a tiny solar panel just to pump the stuff, and the rest of it is just the worms. So the amount of land is the same, but you're not spending anything on motors and pumps. You're not spending
anything on large concrete structures. So this is one that you expect to move from that could well, you think be popular in more developed countries. It could be. It could be. So give you an example of something that came up which I would love to explore. I don't know if the current regulatory environment allows for that. In the state of Alabama, Lounges County, it's a largely African American community, the rates of worm and round worm infection.
They're comparable to the developing world, and the sanitation infrastructure there is non existent, and the state of Alabama is just not bothered to build it out, and so a lot of the old septic tanks they just dump into the soil there. A place like that is perfect for
this kind of setup. Obviously, given that the US is much more of a litigious society than India is, we're actually much more careful about liability protections and so on and so forth, and it's not yet clear what the regulatory environment is, so composting toilets and a lot of and turns out in the US, it's a county by county thing around the country. So some counties are fine with it because they don't have a large enough population and most of them live off grid anyway, and it's
just an alternative to septic tanks. But other counties are much more stringent about it. But if that switch flips where counties, particularly rural counties, recognize that this is a much more environmentally sound way to do things, with the appropriate checks and balances to make sure we're not polluting the ground and polluting the waterway is as suspect something
like this could be very very interesting. In fact, if you do an Internet search, you'll find that there are some people living who already do something of the starting Yeah. One last question that has to do with scale. It sounds like you guys have lots and lots of good ideas, and these ideas have lots and lots of potential, But ultimately, of course everything is going to depend on your ability to scale. Is to where they make a meaningful difference.
Tell me a little bit about how you think about the scaling problem. If I wanted to put one of these toilets in every Indian village that needed one, what would have to happen. I don't believe startups a set up a scale. If you go back to the example of Data Power, the reason we brought them on board is that for a startup like ours, a small organization like ours, if we were to reach two hundred villages,
that would be unprecedented scale. Data Power wouldn't think of two hundred is even a starting point for them, ten thousand villages as a starting point. So our belief is that the best way of scale is to have a company like that that's hungry for this for this market, that is respected by the government, that has a good track record and has a staying power. As it happens, there's another Tata company that we've been working with. It's
called Tata Projects, which is an infrastructure company. We're talking to them about possibly scaling up this toilet and this sewage treatment business. It's not nearly as mature as the Tata Power conversation is. But I suspect if you if you go around the world in a number of emerging economies Kenya and Nigeria, Ethiopia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh and so on, there are companies that are much better position than outside entities to scale and our job is to
find who they are. If they're not interested, that kind of that ends the deal right there. But if they are, we bring them up. But this is from from the perspective of someone I taughta products. Is this actually a business? I mean there's says is the you can the idea of installing these and presumably being paid by the local municipality or whoever it is that actually translates into something that could be conceived of as a large scale business.
It would have to be a large scale business in fact, because it's a low margin business. Yeah, it has to be a large scale business. In the toilets context, you may recall that the multi government in India launched this sort of universal toilets initiative and that was going to be the vehicle for us to do this. Unfortunately, in that program it ended up being a numbers game more
than anything else. So we've decided to pull back from that a little bit to wait for that dust to settle, meaning that because the government was giving one hundred and seventy five per household subsidy to build toilets, and so lots of households took one hundred and seventy five dollars built something that kind of resembled a toilet, but the user rate is not very high. And in an earthworm based system, if people build a toilet and don't use it,
the earthworms die. Yeah, So what we're waiting for is pretty soon we believe that in the country like Indiana, a bunch of countries around the world, open defecation is or will soon be a thing at the past because it's if nothing else, it's a matter of dignity and it's a matter of security. So people will want Aspirationally, people will want clean toilets, and so this is we believe it's perfect a position for that. Yeah. Yeah, this
has been fascinating. Thank you, Thank you so much. Absolutely, I never thought i'd learned that a kilogram of earthworms cost twenty five dollars, but I will certainly be repeating that fact. The way Shatterly tackles these huge, almost existential challenges with such great detail, it's really important. I think he says himself that technology and artificial intelligence cannot alone solve global poverty. It all depends on the context and
the existing structures. Bringing this holistic viewpoint is something a lot more tech people could find helpful. Oh and the electrical minigrids Shashi mentioned to Malcolm, they're actually the subject of our next episode of Solvable. Ashvindale will tell us more about the incredible ways they can transform lives and communities. Solvable is a collaboration between Pushkin Industries and the Rockefella Foundation, with production by Laura Hyde, Hester Kant, Laura Sheeter, and
Ruth Barnes from Chalk and Blade. Pushkin's executive producer is Neia LaBelle. Research by Sheer, Vincent engineering by Jason Gambrel and the great Folks at GSI Studios. Original music composed by Pascal Wise and special thanks to Maggie Taylor, Heather Fine, Julia Barton, Carly Mgliori, Jacob Weisberg, and Malcolm Gladwell. You can learn more about solving today's biggest problems at Rockefeller Foundation dot org slash solvable. I'm Mave Higgins. Now go solve it.