Terraform Industries' Casey Handmer on why solar beats nuclear, what happened in 1971, and rage-quitting NASA

can hear you great are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else where are you I'm I'm in the castle um I'm behind a a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year but yeah I the the castle windowless wall is right by me here so very cool can you can you uh give give me just a little bit of intro explanation of the company and then I I mean I do want to hear the story of like how the castle got built again because it's a funny story sure well let's start with terraform so three and a half years ago I I rage quit my job at at NASA JPL and um Incorporated uh terraform Industries to build cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air and um we've been at that three and a half years now and we've we've made a lot of progress it's super exciting the castle itself was built in the 80s um by by the the Bandy family who built many of the industrial buildings in in Burbank and they worked with a a general contractor who who was down to do crazy stuff and it turns out if you're building from cinder blocks you can make him any shape you like so yeah that's how we got yeah yeah it's amazing um can we uh can we start with this uh this quote tweet that went Mega viral this week uh you said I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now don't me uh it's a video of Elon Musk Landing a a rocket and uh and I think Elon quot tweeted you and said uh just read the instructions uh but can you give us some more context on like unpack that like what what exactly is the outside context problem what what's going on yeah it's a bit of a a geeky deep cut so the outside context problem is a a concept popularized in in and Banks's culture novel Series in particular the the novel accession which primarily deals with um the culture coming in contact with a with kind of a previously unknown uh Alien I mean this the whole books are full of aliens but this is like an alien alien intelligence um that that's um modality is very reactive and so the their usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming Force um uh and and then just read the instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in uh in in mx's novel so in this novel there's millions and millions of of fully sentient very very large spacecraft that fly around basically looking after Humanity um the the deeper point is um I think elon's a very interesting person I think he's obviously very underestimated uh has been throughout his entire career for whatever reason um and um is he and I think you know convention sorry sorry to interrupt but is he underestimated in corner of the internet or or just sort of broadly you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon you know Fanboy I think even then um yeah and and I think you know conventional wisdom a year ago was like oh Elon is getting involved in politics he's going to you know shoot his feet off and I think yeah he genuinely took a big risk um backing Donald Trump for the for the election um you know if if if kamla had won I doubt it would have gone very well for him but um uh but you know now there's a person who a year ago we hearing all these ophe heads like oh he doesn't understand politics you know still hearing he doesn't understand politics he's taking a huge risk he should just focus on Mars what is he what is he talking about Etc he's now in the White House like literally running the it modernization process of the entire federal government which is code for he has Rude access to the entire government um and uh I think ultimately I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for United States you know obviously there's going to be some some some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way um that's always been clear from the outset I wrote a blog post about this last year saying you know why do we need a department of government efficiency um but uh I think overall we should probably regard ourselves as extremely lucky that someone of elon's caliber has taken interest in fixing the processes that affect all of us not just you know Finding finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies or or like you know skirt around certain regulatory issues that just the normal normal way that you deal with these things um but uh you know I'm I think conversation needs to be had here and my general complaint is that the is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the Doge process are not constructive because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on um and I think you know this is a process that would be improved by constructive and and high quality criticism and and uh and suggestions and you know better ideas flying flying into the system um I think that's always always the case um but there's an out outside context problem because most of the people who are jumping up and down about you know the various legit outrages that Jo is committing do not understand what's going on um it's it's beyond their context um which is not a huge surprise but um you know it is it is a major problem it's interesting uh particularly for their interests you know and I wrote a I wrote a post about this as well in the context of California like California I live there I love it it's great it's a great state but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now and that's a real problem for the future of the Progressive Movement you know like it s Francisco needs to be a shining City on a Hill yeah I agree uh I have a sort of a random question but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it uh do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep Tech or hard tech investors after years of SAS and sort of web 3 and and now it's sort of the hot thing I mean even you started your company in 2021 uh even then you know it wasn't you know there's sort of the meme right which is you know uh uh deep Tech would have loved zero interest rates right but like uh there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being you know there were plenty but there was not as many as there are now so do you have advice to just sort of venture capitalist broadly about how you're evaluating you know if an if a you know bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible like how how do you actually you know how how how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that because like it just seems like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed but like they're doing like very real work uh and you know very likely will will have dramatic impact question yeah thanks for that um I mean one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about you know acquiring the necessary expertise to make you know better than random uh judgments when it comes to potential deep Tech startups but you know the reality is it's extremely Capital intensive it operates on a different set of both physical and you know legal laws than SAS um and that that actually makes it you know significantly less efficient I think um in terms of the health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem in this case um but instead you can look at like well what are the Contemporary and historical cases where you know major Innovations were successfully you know brought at scale into the market and in almost all cases it was actually LED within an organization so you have an existing organization that has existing you know Capital relationships and projects and and in particular a large team of of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value and then you take that team and you you throw the one a new kind of problem and a new kind of problem and so on and and the most Salient example in the recent past is the Elon industrial complex where you know Elon has this family of companies that that are doing things that everyone else you know really struggles to even kind of wrap their heads around in most cases um and uh but but you know history has replete with examples and I recently kind of gone very deep on Kaiser who founded more than 100 companies built the H Dam built 1500 ships in World War II you know stuff that we regard as impossible today like oh how can we fix American ship building he just stood up a shipyard from scratch in like less than two months uh in in 1941 like they didn't they didn't have computers back then it's just insane stuff um so uh so yeah there there are historical examples of this happening and I think one way of thinking about it is that Capital allocation in hardtech has a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money um and uh and and probably the the optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already you know proved their proved their worth um speaking Yeah speaking of organizations is uh you said you Rage Quit NASA uh is NASA's best work behind them or uh if you know now that Elon has root access you know could we see uh uh you know the the organization sort of revitalized at some point I I very much hope that um that the Doge team will will devote some efforts to helping NASA recover its historical um capabilities which we have to remember within living memory were the Envy Remain the Envy of the world um but unfortunately my experience it's personal experience I didn't see all of it obviously but my experience in NASA was that um the organization is uh you know it's still stuff to the gills with brilliant people but most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work like actively being blocked and in hinded and uh and and punished for for going above and beyond which is not how we should be running a space program competing with China like China's program managers in their space program they fear the consequences of failure and NASA's program managers do not and that is the key difference talk a little bit about uh stagnation um the you know what what happened in 1970 there's a whole bunch of different theories is a culture issue do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset I've always been tracking energy we that's the point where the energy growth kind of broke from 2.

7% per year to 2% it feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear maybe it's this Doge stuff that's going on will it be political but how important is unstaggered priorities ities for actually seeing increased human flourishing economic growth energy all the all the proxy metrics that are important well you you hit on the most important aspect there which is we can measure this right at the end of the day we either have total Factor productivity growth or we don't and if we do then our children will have a better life than us no matter what and if we don't then they won't no matter what it doesn't matter how Innovative we get about you know social programs and red redistributive spending and like various sneaky forms of Communism at the end of the day we're either growing the economy or we're not um and I think that you know what the hell happened in 1971 is overdetermined in some ways um you know Henry Kaiser died in 1967 uh you know various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so on occurred um we had the passage of NEPA and and secer in the early 70s as well um you know all of these things I think well intentioned or or kind of contingent at the time but but since then we've I think if we had not seen the emergence of Moos law and improved Computing capacity we would have been much more dire straights as far as economic stagnation goes but I'm also extremely optimistic that we're going to we're going to turn this around first of all because we seem to have gained the ability to talk about stagnation first of all and like to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding for example the fertility right um and the second thing is that you know obviously AI will help um but we've also got this incredible technology in in solar power which is allowing us to convert in a sense we're going back to the land converting sunlight into energy about 100 times more efficiently than plants do and electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn um so I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem you know this decade um we might have take a good crack at the pering problem at least in the west this decade as well um and I think those two things combined plus you know some intelligent AIS will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve can you talk more about solar why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear there's a lot of chatter in both everyone loves both right now but why why is solar what you've chosen to kind of make your life's work here yeah at least for now I mean to be clear I'm not bigoted against nuclear power I'm not worried about nuclear radiation I taught Nuclear Physics of celtech for a while um uh it's a fabulous technology but but again like we can theorize about it or we can look at at history and history shows us that nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted uh by various navies for operating you know clese you know underwater vessels that need air independent power supplies or uh nuclear carriers that need the ability to outrun uh said submarines um but other than that you know even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power the surface Fleet and I think if you you know want to honestly understand this you need to to kind of dive into why that is the case um at the end of the day nuclear reactors are steam engines and steam engines operate on What's called the BR and cycle and there are certain irreducible costs associated with you know steam turbines and so on that that drive the cost up um and that's even if NC didn't exist tomorrow right even if even if you could buy enriched Uranium on amazon.

com it would still be the case that um that that just the sttion component of it is going to cost no less than coal um solar on the other hand is fascinating because sunlight Rains Down on the Earth every day for free the there's a fusion reactor up in the sky um due to some like weird Quantum effects and again silicon trickery it is possible to convert that into high grade energy in the form of electricity with you know a layer of a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper considerably thinner than a sheet of paper um that that silicon is is enormously abundant on the earth we've gotten really quite good at making it there are factories worldwide now turnning turning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down if anything production is increasing 30 to 40% per year which is just bananas uh it's it's it's it's a sort of growth rate you'd like to see for any technology um and uh and and the reason this is occurring is because there's a a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off right so we don't have to theorize about well what is it going to take to get to you know first of a Kind second of a Kind hundredth of a kind you know start getting those economies of scale down in solar that's already happening it's a commoditized product it has no moving Parts you don't need any special you know skills or labor to install and operate it uh it's even easier to do than planting corn you just put it on the ground and it spits out power which in our discussion about 1971 you know electrical power is basically wealth it's a it's a free money printer you can put on the ground and this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated about uh the various tariffs and solar panels I think if if China our geopolitical adversary is attempting to to to harm us by uh giving us uh solar panels subsidized at their taxpayers expense uh we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even even worse uh and I pave Nevada with them or something like we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track um but yeah B basically that's the key yeah some batteries on the side and the problem is solved yeah speaking of like Paving Nevada uh what does your what does the future of Earth look like in 20 50 years is it solar panels all over in space is it solar panels all over the Earth is this is it going to feel cyber Punky or will there still be trees around at all like am I just in a matrix pod and but but my total Factor productivity is going up so I'm happy uh what does the long-term future look like for you or in your mind I think it's a bit hard to say um I'm quite optimistic um you'd have to be to start a hardware company and I think really what the future looks like comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build yeah right like if you want a great future go and build it um in terms of energy uh we can we can give every man woman and child on Earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year um with something like 6% of Earth surface under solar which is it's a it's much much less than we currently use for grazing or for roow crops or for forestry wow it's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities but um but it's it's quite a bit less in agriculture that's that's not for everyone if you like the the the scenario the previous call you were talking to dakes about like getting paper clipped we're not going to get paper clipped what's going to happen is the the net present value of land uh for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season but for solar it's about you know1 to $200,000 per year um now if that's power powering an AI a artificial superintelligence data center which is a thousand times more economically productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain which has to sleep eight hours a day and uh you know browse Twitter um then then obviously you economically speaking our Farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to St to death and like that's the that's the the true AI Doom scenario um so again something we should be aware of and something we should should figure out how to how to forall we will obviously have a lot of solar in space but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space I don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the Earth anytime anytime soon is that just because the economics don't work out I've seen a couple of these companies they're using mirrors or lasers yeah the mirror one is interesting actually um because because it kind of exploits the fact that like you're if you're a solar array owner you have no other way of getting more power um other than paying someone to reflect some more down to you which is super cool don't get me wrong um as far as solar cost goes the the stying constell is solar it's inbit itates consider more than the space station doely obviously umbe 100 times more than the space station uh and most of that power is used to um amplify radio signals and transmit them down to Earth where they're received by our antennas um and the revenue per per water of electricity used to transmit microwaves through US atmosphere to the consumer uh because it's you know uh chopped up and turned into internet data uh as opposed to as raw power is about a billion times higher like the revenue per watt is a billion times higher with it being interet at a few hundred Watts or whatever uh transmission power than it being you know attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down for power plants where we pay you know 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that um now starlink is actually fabulously profitable and I'm super proud of the team there I just I think it's absolutely incredible what they've done but there's no way in hell that their profit margin is 10 million per.

right so like it's just it's just not possible so I don't think that space based solar power is likely to be a thing do you think that the average seed stage deep Tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough because in almost almost every uh sort of question we've asked you you've had sort of economic sort of rationale behind your answer and I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that uh you know there's sort of this like sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing and then what's waiting for them is is potentially a a product that like is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product but then there's sort of um you can't actually get any value yeah I've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model and they did the thing but it just didn't it wasn't competitive on the grid at all yeah that's the nightmare scenario yeah no I mean like at the end of the day if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you then go give it a give it a shot right you don't know I don't know like customers and consumers they like they like weird things we don't we just don't know like that's the fabulous thing about capitalism it it just fire hoses options and potentials at at the market to see what sticks and if you think back to when we were children there's no way we would have known that like the the stable attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this that's not that's not how they work back then so um for the younger listeners uh just like quiver in fear we didn't have cell phones When We Were Young um uh so so you should give it a go on the other hand if you are trying to do a hard Hardware Tech thing at massive scale M you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you you cannot fight capitalism you know to to get to massive scale you have to massive value gra mystery economics yeah exactly would you would you rather have them on on your team or against you and and I just see this this mistake time and time again which is like well this technology will work if we can bring about some like massive uh behavioral change in the entire Market or something like probably not going to happen but if you can produce a product like an iPhone where when the new one comes out hundreds of millions hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by a thousand of cash in their wallet and they just they just like Shut Up And Take My Money uh then then you've done the right thing right you're you're thrilling people you're giving them something that they they'll happily part with their hard earned cash to receive and um yeah I mean it's not like this is a mystery one last build something people want I have one too okay uh uh go f yeah uh the RS project is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project um I think it's there's a certain kind of person who really likes to curate or curate and organize information and um and I think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical Origins impost and I think that's worthwh uh you mentioned briefly the sort of AI doomsday scenario where the AI just realizes that it should blanket the Earth with solar panels and to uh you know feed itself uh what else scares you in the world to end on a high note um I I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since 1930s and so we've we've literally allowed billions of people to die painfully lonely uh in old age when if we' just had enough insight and enough effort we could have figured out how to stop that a long time ago wow interesting well hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree well unfortunately we used all the gpus to make gibli this week so maybe next week we can put it we put the AI to work on extending Our Lives thank you so much for joining this fantastic I really enjoy this yeah what was that I was going to say one one last thing like one of the major problems with doge is that like we have these entitlements costs of Social Security Medicare Medicaid and so on like 1% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis right these are all diseases of old age MH right if we can just increase human lifespan by 10% we cut that whole trench trillions of dollars of of annual spending by 10% because 10% for your people die every year yep like and and they also get to not die this seems blindingly obvious uh and and yet you we spend less than 0.

1% of our of our national health Budget on anti-aging research that's L that's wild wow well we'll have to dig into that more thank you so much for stopping by we would love to have you back on maybe we'll come over and we'll we'll do one in the in the castle at some point yeah i' love to be great thank you so much this is this is a fantastic conversation really enjoyed it have a great rest your day have a great weekend talk to you soon what a brilant what a brilliant mind yes uh Scrolls enjoyer you always get good stuff with Scrolls enjoyers scroll guys the scroll guys uh we got to have the whole the whole maybe should do a Scrolls day Scrolls day uh but back away from Scrolls we're going back to books we got Nadia asparuhov coming in the temple of Technology uh she has uh just announced a new book called anti-emetics um she's a former strip press author in the the in the the Hall of Fame of authors in my opinion if you publish on strap press you're if you can publish there you can publish anywhere if you can publish there you can that's what people have been saying yeah it's really it's really the NFL of publishing yeah like it's it's uh anyway super excited for this let's see thanks so much for joining we're having some fun uh