Casey Handmer: Terraform Industries is weeks away from delivering its first full-scale sunlight-to-natural-gas system

cheaper. I wonder when these lines cross.

You know, if I'm able to surf that wave of cheaper solar and I can pass most of that value onto my customers by keeping my costs under control, um, then at what point should it be cheaper to synthesize fuel rather than dig it out of the ground and ship it halfway around the world?

And the answer then, and I think the answer is basically the same now, was sometime this decade, you know, 2030 at the outside. Uh, okay. Wonder if anyone else has noticed this. A few people had. What are they doing about it? Not what I would do about it. Okay.

Well, I guess I should probably stop, you know, kicking myself in the in the shins at NASA and go and do this at uh go and start a company and at least give it a go. Find out what it's like. Uh see see if building a hardware company is as fun as everyone makes it sound. And um and here we are.

So uh you know I say it's a infazard to play around on spreadsheets too much. What happens to the price of land as solar uh as as solar energy production costs uh decline? Yeah, that's a good good question.

Um because because ultimately the the value of of land under solar is the value of what people are willing to pay for that power and things they do with that power.

Um and so what we've seen for example is that um the value of land under solar is something like a 50 100 times higher on a per acre basis or per revenue basis than than your kind of average agriculture even in a fairly developed agricultural state like the United States. And that's the same for synthetic fuel.

Um the the flip side actually and the thing that I worry about in terms of AI safety is that um it's pretty clear to me that the uh economic utility of of land that's being used as solar array to power an AI data center is over $100,000 an acre at present value.

And that's just higher than almost any kind of existing human use other than particularly dense and and large cities. Um which makes me wonder maybe not in 10 or 20 years but in 30 or 40 years whether the AIS will encroach upon our agricultural land and make it harder for us to eat. Yeah.

this runaway AI that just decides it's in my best interest to blanket as much of the US or the world as I can with solar uh to you know further myself. Yeah, I mean it seems to create a strong economic forcing function and maybe we can slow it down a few years with usual regulatory uh stuff.

Um but I think that may be one of the reasons why why Elon has been talking more about um doing large scale AI development in space.

If you can convince the the AIs they're better off doing it in space where they don't have to fight with humans, maybe they'll go there first instead of I mean there's there's there's plenty of land on Earth. There's there's more land on Earth that's not being farmed than there is land that is being farmed.

But, you know, just not inexhaustible. Um something like a 100 100,000 terowatts uh lands on the oceans and 50,000 terowatts lands on parts of the earth that no one lives on or uses and humans consume about 10 terowatts of energy. So, there's plenty to go around for now. Yep. For now. That makes sense.

Uh I want to get into NASA government shutdown, bunch of stuff. But uh before let's touch the third rail. No, let's let's No, let's go even more skitso. Uh Tucker had a guest on the show yesterday uh that was uh talking about talking about chemtrails. Uh what's your take on on uh on on uh chemtrails?

I'm I'm a pilot and I've I've flown around a fair bit and I've never seen one. Um I think I think that uh like you know playing around in kerosene is not very good for you. Um and and we we do see like health impacts from people who live too close to freeways and things like that.

You know there are definite health impacts from from burning the longer chain hydrocarbons. Um as far as chemtrails go I must confess I'm not not as deeply familiar with uh various conspiracy theories like that. Although I do think that NASA's been covering up life on Mars. So we'll see about that.

Covering up life on Mars. Yeah. Before we talk about life on Mars, the uh chemtrail thing is funny because you have to believe that that you know tens of thousands of people are coordinating to do this largecale operation.

Not not not one of them has ever come out and said hey here here's here's here's evidence that you know this massive operation is is happening without there are aircraft which spray chemicals right like they call crop dusters.

you have crop testers and they have a very particular look and feel of course um and then and of course if you if you if you spend much time doing like structural calculations um and you you look closely at say a trip 7 or something it's pretty clear that um that um sorry my son's at work today and he just wanted to see if he'd come in um it's a familyfriendly show Veterans Day.

Yeah. Yeah. His face is not on the internet though nor is he a veteran if he was and hopefully never will be. um uh crop to aircraft.

You know, I fly to Australia every now and then and you're like, you know, actually the conspiracy theory that that planes can't contain enough fuel makes more sense to me because it seems unlikely to me that that you could actually keep a plane that big up in the air for 14 hours and cross an entire ocean like halfway around the world.

Oh yeah. Like where where where are you putting all the all the chemtrails you're spraying out? Like in the overhead bin, there's never any room in there. So I don't understand like Yeah. Yeah. We got plenty of space. Let's bring the fuel and the and the toxic chemicals or whatever. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean there there are there are levels to the to the conspiracy because there is just the world of like what if it's just like leted gasoline where it's like sort of the chemicals are deranging people in a bad way because it's just pollution.

Like I don't think people really debate that like the possibility of pollution is happening. It's different when it's like okay yes it's like specific chemical that does a specific thing and and triggers a specific reaction from the population. I mean there are plenty of chemicals that can make you crazy.

Most of them taste very good. Really? Like what? Stevia, diet coke.

No, I mean likeite quite literally like until the invention of GLP1 agonists like something like a third to a half of Americans were going to die quite younger than they otherwise would because of you know weight weight related heart disease and obesity. Why? Because sugar tastes good. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So that's a poison. It's actually poisoning you. It's it's actively degrading the quality of life. Ray Ray Pete would would disagree. But uh why are we covering up life on Mars? Yeah. Um, so to be fair, you know, you don't want to be the boy who cried wolf and shut it's aliens. It's aliens. It's aliens.

Um, but so so so what tends to happen in in these um in in scientific fields is it becomes very fashionable to be quite skeptical of of things as as it should be.

Um but at the same time, you know, evidence will accumulate over time and and so you'll have this kind of neat cottage industry of people who can explain away any evidence they see um without uh without necessarily updating their their prior prior knowledge or prior assumptions about it.

And I I I was trained at Caltech by the geologist um uh I've forgotten his name. This is age. Okay, it's coming to you. It'll come back to me eventually. Uh Kosh Joe Koshank and um a legend legend among men.

And uh and he was the guy who who when he got his sample of ALH84001, a Martian meteorite that was found in Antarctica a while ago now um that uh he he he identified these um cubo like hexahedraledral magnetite crystals um that that were in the meteorite.

It's it's non-controversial that they were found in the meteorite. Uh and it's also never ever been demonstrated they can be made by any known lab process other than culturing magnetactic bacteria that use them for navigation. um essentially. So, so you know the meteorites are full of magnetite.

Magnetite is a naturally occurring mineral, but there's a particular configuration of of of it crystallin form which we we only know can occur. We only know of ways it can occur with biological precipitation. So, um yeah, that's that's it's called the magneto fossil if you want to Google it at home.

And I think it's it's it's about as strong as evidence as you could possibly hope for finding without actually going there and kicking rocks yourself. Are you familiar with this thing, the great unconformity in the Grand Canyon? Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. Can you explain this to me?

It Somebody sent this to us. You got to talk about this on the show, and I was just going to read the Wikipedia, but now we have someone who actually is familiar with it. Not an expert. I don't want to pop quiz you, but like it would be cool if No, I've been there. I've been there. I've been there several times.

It's it's it's amazing. I've taken my kids there. Um so so if you go to the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, uh there's a trail called the Bright Angel Trail, and if you're very very fit and it's not too hot, you can walk down to it and back in a day. Um but I would recommend starting at midnight, right?

you get down to it in the early morning and then and then um you know after after after daybreak but then you get back up before it gets hot or take a couple of days enjoy it.

Um but there's also an exposure just northeast of Vegas at a place called Frenchman Mountain which you can just drive right up to although last time I was there it's unfortunately covered in broken glass.

Um okay great unconformity so uh over time you know the the oceans rise and fall due to climatic variations and also land rises and falls due to geological stuff. Um, and when land is above sea level in general, it's it's eroding. And when it's below sea level, it's in general accumulating sediment.

And so what you see in the Grand Canyon, that is to say the the most of the Grand Canyon is a series of layers of of carbonates, which means it's it's shallow oceans that are forming reefs and and sand sandunes and sand sandstones, which means it's um you know, rivering kind of delta environment or something where where the land is gradually sinking relative to the ocean, creating an accommodation space in which um which uh new new uh dirt and soil and rocks and stuff can can come down and fall and and be compacted and form these layers.

Um, and then what happens is if the if the ocean falls down or or the land gets lifted up, uh, then you then you see erosion. And what happens is that is that newly formed rock gets eroded away for a while and then it sinks again and then it starts to build up again.

And so you get these like what are called little unconformities, which is where you've got a little period of missing time, a million years here, 100,000 years there, 10 years over here, and maybe 10 million years over there where where the land has been above sea level, and so no new rock has been forming or if it has, it's since been eroded away.

Okay, so this occurs at all scales. And it turns out that the at the bottom of the Grand Canyon or very close to the bottom is a thing called the great unconformity. And it's kind of mindboggling because the rocks on on one side of this are this kind of the Vishnu shist basement rock.

It's this ancient rock that forms the you know the core of our North American continent at least in this place. Um it's it's ancient at crystal. It's 1. 6 billion years old. It's like what 13% of the age of the universe.

And then literally like one thumbs width away from that above it is the the oldest sedimentary rocks in the Grand Canyon which are 500 million years old. I think they're just after the after the um the uh um Cameron explosion. Um okay, this is stretching my memory. This is a long time ago now. 535 million years ago.

And it's just kind of crazy. So, so what happened in there? It's a missing billion years. It's a missing billion years. And so, so, so in that time rock formed, right? Sure. And probably entire mountain ranges formed. Like it takes it takes a 100red million years to form a mountain range and then eroded away to nothing.

Sure. Right. So like the Appalachian Trail, the Appalachian Mountains were were a mountain range taller than the Himalayas 130 million years ago. Pretty much eroded away to nothing. Um so you could form and destroy a mountain range the size of the Appalachian mountains in that time. 8 n 10 times in that time.

Entire continents form and sink. Entire superc continents form and sink. Probably not dinosaurs back then as far as we know. But but there was definitely like life in lots of life in the oceans and and some plants and stuff on on land and some insects and things. Um actually insects I think came later.

Look, don't quote me on this. Check Wikipedia. Ask Grock. Um, but it's all gone. It's all gone. At least, you know, and and and when you look at one of those geological time scales, you see a lot of recent rocks and not so much detail in the older rocks.

And that's just cuz like as you go back in time, you get exponential destruction of of the geological record. There is actually a corner of the eastern Grand Canyon where what's called the Grand Canyon Supergroup, which is a a series of layers that's inclined like this kind of pokes up.

And that's the only place on Earth that we have rocks from that age. It's kind of an intermediate intermediate age rock. Um, yeah, it's just bizarre. So you can go there. You could just outside Vegas like skip skip the tables for half a day, drive out and uh maybe they could put a casino at the great unconformity.

I mean on on the Wikipedia page, the reason this is so interesting is because on the Wikipedia on the Wikipedia page it says there is currently no widely accepted explanation for the great unconformity among geoccientists. There are hypotheses that have been proposed.

It is widely accepted that there was a combination of events which may have caused such an extreme phenomenon. One example is a large glaciation event which took place during the Neoproto Zoic around 720 million years ago.

Um and so there's like a whole bunch of theories but there's like how did they grind away so much so much rock? Yeah. Because because essentially like where this where the rock is forming and being destroyed is very close to sea level almost always. Right. Yeah.

And and so at some point the rock that is on the underside of the great unconformity had to have been lifted up near sea level. Mhm. And then it has to have sunk down a mile or two to form all the rocks above it, right?

And now it's been lifted up again above sea level because the bottom of the of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River is obviously above sea level. Otherwise, it wouldn't float to the ocean. Um, so it's kind of crazy that this goes up and down. Um, yeah, I mean that's geology for you. There's still work to be done.

Um, maybe you'll figure it out one day. Okay, forming a new great unconformity, right? Like the the rocks below the Grand Conformity, the Vishnu shift are being eroded by the Grand Canyon as we speak.

So if the Grand Canyon ever fills in and starts to, you know, build rocks again in the future, the the Great Unconformity will be below where it is now in that part of the world. Okay. Well, let's let's talk about something we can all agree on, which is three Atlas. What's going on with that? What?

I don't know anything about this. You know, this is a comt. Yeah. Some people think it's a they're saying it's a comet. A lot of celebrities are saying it's a an alien ship, but what's the Casey Hanmer? Give us a breakdown on We haven't been following it. there's been enough uh in technology.

Likewise, I've been focused mostly on the finer details of like fixing electrolyer seals and things like that.

I would say that these interstellar objects are super interesting and I would like to get a close look at them and I really wish that we had some like maybe Tom Mueller could build a series of spacecraft with like lots of onboard ISP that we park out, you know, near the moon or something and then when we one of these comes through, we press the button and it immediately like adjusts its orbit and shoots off in that direction and we get a nice flyby.

we get a few photos. Um, that'd be super cool. We're seeing them about once a year at this point and that's just cuz our our telescopes have gotten better. As far as Atlas goes, um, I have a cousin who who routinely texts me updates on like it's an alien ship for sure. Um, I I don't think it is. I think it's a comet.

I think that actually some of the earlier ones will be better than it. I think it's a very large comet, a very old comet. Um, seems to be a comet to me.

But but if you were a sufficiently advanced alien, you know, uh race, would you not want to just attach yourself to a comet that was headed in the direction you wanted to go and just ride along with it? No. No. I think I think um too slow. Well, so I I went Oh, yeah. Exactly.

I went Well, who knows how long the aliens live, but I I went to I went to Celtech to study kind of warp drive to try and understand how to do that, and I didn't succeed, obviously. Um but someone might one day.

Um, but I think that uh if you've seen Avatar 2, the the spaceships that Jim Cameron puts there for the humans to fly to Alpha Centuri are like kind of what I have in mind when I think like how would how would humans or aliens that are comprehensible and legible to humans travel.

It' be something like that, you know, enormously energetic uh relativistically uh accelerated, very very bright, very flashy, very obvious. Um or or maybe something like Warp Drive if we can ever figure it out.

Um but I think you know comet that takes 100,000 years to kind of wander its way from the nearest star to here. Very boring. Very boring. Yeah. Boring. Yeah. Uh Moon, Moon or Mars. This was a debate that we were having earlier.

Seems like uh the Jared Isaacman nomination was kind of reinvigorating some discussion over whether the US should prioritize Mars over the moon. Elon has been pro Mars for a very long time. Moon is kind of incidental.

Uh other folks see moon as like a key geopolitical race that we have to address right now and win and then that gets you a ticket to the real the real competition which is Mars potentially. Uh how are you thinking about the tradeoffs between resources spent going to the moon resources spent going to Mars?

Um so initially I was quite pro Mars. Um, and I wrote a couple of books about uh doing stuff on Mars and realized that, you know, its advantages are actually like both both both destinations are pretty difficult in their own way. Um, they both have their challenges.

Um, and and actually I think what SpaceX correctly realized is that if you're going to do anything meaningful on either place, you have to develop a rocket system like Starship that can basically uh fire hose mass at pretty much any target in mind. Um, you know, it's not a fair fight, you know, kind of situation.

And um and so once you have something like a starship, you know, doing something pretty cool on the moon is very straightforward.

Um but if you're if you're constantly trying to put together some mission that's like just made of like little bits and pieces and and small puny rockets and very expensive, you know, slow going contracts and stuff, you really struggle to do anything meaningful on either of them ever.

Um, so yeah, I'm I'm very much in favor of of uh, you know, kind of incidentally on the way to Mars, setting up a couple of lunar research stations and putting a few thousand people there and running it like the space station is now, but for more than six people. Yeah.

Um, and I think we could totally do that for like Antarctica program level budget with Starship. Yeah. My my my theory on it just as you know an outsider has always been uh fire hose mass at low earth orbit. Get Starlinks going every day.

Tons of I love those montages that are just showing Falcon 9's up and back every single day. Do that in low Earth orbit.

then do that for the moon and same thing like like dozens of flights to the moon and back every single day and then and then start you know weaving to the to Mars because it feels like Mars is just a completely different uh set of of tradeoffs and cadences based on when we can actually launch. It's not every day.

And so, uh, just getting the reps in of like humans, just even just a human or I don't know, maybe a robot at some point. Uh, like getting off of a like landing a rocket on a celestial body and then getting out and jumping around.

Like even if that's if that's happening every single day, it's going to be that's a lot of that has to transfer to Mars, I would imagine. What's the most underrated planet? Yep. H underrated planet. What's a planet that you think about a lot? I spent a lot of time thinking about Mars. Mars still underrated. Mars.

Most people would put it at their number two after Earth. Yeah. I had a little little side project where I I built like the highest resolution topo map of Mars using um using a bunch of like NASA data that's kind of in the archives, not not being directly funded.

So I have I have a 6 m resolution global topog topography map of Mars. Um, and I've been doing some like hydraology simulations and stuff with it to see what happens when we terraform. It's um, yeah, so it's kind of hard to appreciate, but like planets, even small planets like Mars are overwhelmingly big.

Once you start dealing with these planetary scale data sets, it's like 200 terabytes. You know, I start asking my wife, "Can I please buy another hard drive? " And she's like, "You've already spent $5,000 on hard drives this month. Maybe you should slow down. " And I was like, "Well, okay.

" But like, planets are really, really big. And yet I have a, you know, almost photorealistic render of of Mars to, you know, sub 100 meter resolution sitting on a on a spinning platter on my desk at home. It's pretty wild. That's pretty cool that we get to do that. I could never have dreamed of that when I was a kid.

It's just unimaginable. Yeah. Air traffic control. Should it be run by a pregnancy test? Pregnancy test. No, I don't think so. Um, but it could be.

Uh so so you know I mean at the end of the day like the the shoulds the the normative discussion is is kind of beyond my pay grade but the descriptive discussion of like whether whether it could is something that I think I can appine on and um and yeah I mean fundamentally what a a graphics uh you know system does on a computer is it's doing you know roughly a billion collision calculations a second and um that that's a much more sophisticated uh graphics engine than than Doom but but still it's something that you can buy in any PlayStation or something today.

Um, and ATC is just not that complicated, right? It has it has a bunch of edge cases, but it's not that complicated.

And and it's also a a system that for justifiable reasons is very very um conservative about adopting new technology, but at the same time, you know, the the cost that we endure as a as a civilization to um various uh air traffic control problems and they're not only caused by government shutdowns um kind of undeniable.

And there's also an efficiency aspect.

you know, we could probably shave 5% of our uh fuel usage if we were able to have basically weather weather optimal director uh pointto-oint flights for for all aircraft that that wanted them rather than the usual ATC thing, which is, you know, basically follow existing uh instrument approved routes between in many cases like places on maps that were once radio navigation beacons but no longer exist.

Yeah. You mentioned uh giving it giving the project to the MAG 7. Uh, I wonder, do you think that there's an opportunity for a startup to sort of do like the Anderoll flipped model, build it with venture capital dollars, then try and sell it to the government once you have a better system in place?

And also, is the actual software and hardware like actually the problem? There was that uh Nathan Fielder HBO special that was kind of like it's maybe more about pilot communication and human training, human error when something goes wrong and it's not necessarily like a computer system and like a bad line of code.

Yeah, I think you probably still want to have have people sitting in in control towers looking at radars. Yeah. Um I'm not saying like the the solution to our problem is to fire every last air traffic controller.

M um quite the opposite but like if you think about what those air traffic controllers are doing a lot of the time it's stuff that could be a few lines of code right like it's one of these things we got I know a thousand corner cases but 99.

99% is just one case it's just the standard like did these intersect instrument in instrument routing well just like you basically get a clearance to fly to fly a certain route at a certain time and then you know all goes well you'll never see another plane um but you know every now and then you've got to got to keep an eye on things you got to control the airspace.

M yeah it's not it's not a complicated puzzle. I mean like uh Microsoft Flight Simulator 95 had a pretty good simulation of this. So it's the sort of thing that I think is uh well well within our technical capabilities. Yeah. Something that we actually want to do. Yeah.

I guess to some degree you can forecast the entire flight path before the plane takes off and make sure that it does not intersect with any other flight paths at any point in time. Yeah, that's relatively straightforward.

I think I think some people on X were like, "Oh, you know, sure, we should just hand another monopoly to to Starink to do all this stuff. " I think actually I don't think that's the case. I think that you could actually design a series of algorithms that would run centrally, but also autonomously on every aircraft.

And so you have like everything in in aviation is these like multiple layers backups. Um so so there's always always something checking the checking the system that um uh sorry and a co-orker just brought in a new baby cuz uh I I start this company and then all my employees start having more children.

I think I'm doing something right. That's that's a great sign. Yeah. Um but um uh yeah.

So so the so the idea there is like your your onboard computer on board your aircraft if you're flying a you know commercial 737 or something should be like getting minute-by-minute updates on weather and tailwinds and headwinds and so on and being like well you know I can save 5 cent fuel fuel if I go up 1500 ft you know route into the jetream.

Sorry about the bumps everyone. and and we get the rift faster and um and then it just kind of automatically does the flocking thing where it it it sees and avoids and and doesn't uh intersect with other other aircraft.

Um but yeah, just just the the technology adoption cycle at the FAA is understandably and you know airlines and and um aircraft manufacturers understandably are pretty conservative, but it's also very very slow and so we end up with a situation where where you know delays and and actual crashes and stuff are occurring because the system is not as good as it could be.

So, I think the the way I mean it's way beyond my pay grade, but the way you would do this is you would you you'd uh basically commit to buying or purchasing a family of of improved products that are interoperable according to some pretty straightforward standard.

Um you could base it on, you know, Australia and Europe has largely automated ATC at this point. Um and uh and then you integrate systems automated what is there already? Europe automated traffic control. Europe and Australia is a terrible place to be a pilot, right?

Like in the United States, you can you can fly VFR like as when I was a private pilot, I flew VFR visual flight rules under 18,000 ft.

You can you can do basically anything you want and I don't know if the uh if the ATC systems could could handle that quite yet, but when I was flying, we didn't have ADSB rolled out very well. So, you know, basically you had to look out the window all the time and try and spot out the aircraft. Yeah. Um Yeah.

Do you have a take? Pretty pretty dicey in LA sometimes. Do do you have a do you have a strong take on the AI capex buildout?

It feels like um I I I just feel like your company and a lot of the a lot of the companies kind of of your vintage are very much aligned with like do something really ambitious that as it scales it compounds and all of a sudden like once it's working you're marshalling like I I do imagine when I think about your the story of your business I think about um you know billions and billions of dollars flowing into more and more solar panels and just this crazy flywheel once the technology gets working.

We've talked about this in the past. It feels like that's kind of happening in the context of like token factories right now.

Um, but are there anything that that has given you jitters to the structure or how things are playing out or do you or or do you see it as like um uh as like one narrative is just like it it's felt cool to watch big things get built and I'm wondering like how you're processing like the AI capex build out all the crazy capex that's going on.

Um, I think the United States has always done well when they're able to take a a difficult problem and transform it into a form that could be solved by pouring money on it and then pouring money on it. Yeah. Um, let's give it up for pouring money. Yeah.

And so if um if someone were to ask me like, do you really think that every dollar being spent on hyperscaling right now is being spent the best possible way it can? No, of course not. Yeah. Right.

Um but is it nevertheless efficient uh from a perspective of competition to to spend as quickly as they can to ramp this technology up right now? Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's obviously a there there I use all the models every day. It's um I'm a discerning customer and I think that's quite transformational.

I mean they frustrate me as well but like that the the the direction of improvement is very clearly going in in one direction. Mhm. Um and this is not a a race where United States can afford to be anything but first.

And uh and I think it's a real question to wonder like what what does the UN Security Council look like in 15 20 years when um uh when you know basically most of them today have their own nukes and I think they actually UN Security Council permanent members all have their own nukes these days.

Um and in the future most of them will not have their own uh AI sovereignty. Oh, do you think that the AI sovereignty projects are not going to bear fruit because they're under scoped or undercaled?

Because I feel like a lot of countries would say like you just answered the question, but a lot of countries we're doing a we're doing a one gigawatt data center like we're good. We're checking the United States is is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in this direction right now.

And and how much is I mean China I I guess is serious about it. Do you think Russia is serious about it? It does not seem like UK and France are. It does not seem some of Russia Russia's biggest clusters are like a thousand GPUs. Australia we did hear is investing in quantum computing.

Do you think that that's going to be relevant? No. Can you say more? Just sent the market down.

I can I'll say I'll say it in Australia has this has like basically the best solar resource on earth and and it has you know it's a modern western liberal democracy with like rule of law and and uh incredible natural resources and and 25 plus million well educated wealthy people. Yeah.

And and every time there's a new wave of technology they go ah never mind mate we'll catch the next one. We'll catch the next and drives me crazy. Um, so, um, so that's why I'm here. Um, but they have Kira. Yeah. You ever surfed? You ever surf there? It's one of the best point breaks of all time. Yeah. Yeah.

No, the beach is doing comparable. And like I live in I live in the San Gabriel Valley, but I come to Santa Monica about once every two years under duress, I will add, and people say, "Oh, Santa Monica, it's the most amazing beach. " I'm like, "Yeah, maybe if you're like from, I don't know, like Canada or something.

" But, uh, I grew up on I grew up on Kilk Beach in, uh, in the central coast of New South Wales. It's I would I wouldn't I wouldn't swap all of Santa Monica for like a single bucket of sand from that beach. It's the best sand. Absolutely incredible. Best sand on Earth. You've been there. You've surfed in Australia.

Australia. I didn't know that. That's good. Yeah. Um, EVPN down under. Yeah, we need to mark your calendars. Down Under. I I like I like I love Australia feels like a just a very large Fosters California. It feels like California as a continent. A violet crumble. That'll get me going. I love crumble.

Last thing I was curious to get your take on. Uh this company T1 Energy went super viral last week because they're just making a massive amount of solar panels. Everyone got really excited because including ourselves saying, "Wait, we know how to build things.

" uh and turns out it was a Chinese company that was like a forced seller of their uh of their manufacturing facility. Do you think there's anything that we can learn from T1 Energy and and what what the the original kind of builders of this facility facility did in terms of like just scaling that out?

I I haven't actually heard the story so I'm not the right person to comment. Yeah, T1 Energy I mean you you would you'd be interested in the story. It's a It's a eight $800 million stock. They're making one gigawatt worth of solar a year. And people got really excited. Tiny. That's tiny. Yeah.

I mean, like globally, we're going to make 1. 4 terowatts of solar this year and deploy about 700 gawatt. Yeah. So, yeah. Uh, a couple years ago, I used to say it's it's about one megawatt per minute, but now it's it's closer to one megawatt every 40 seconds. 40 seconds. So, you know, we got to get those kind of nuts.

Okay. And and so is is Are you like in are you two billion modules this year? Like would you encourage one for every family on Earth?

Would you encourage America or like the like the venture ecosystem or the government to like to like try and bring you know manufacturing capacity back to America because when we've talked about this before you've always said like hey if China's going to be subsidizing it just buy as much as possible.

And that makes sense like economically, but over the long term like if you need to scale exponentially there there might be a case for reshoring. Do you think that that's a good a good idea? Yeah, I think controlling supply chain for for solar technology is super important.

Um and uh and just because China currently leads doesn't mean the US can't lead in the future. I mean we've we've seen this in the past, right? Yeah. Um the the industry is extremely dynamic.

You wouldn't have to try all that hard to if you had like a 5% edge over your competition, you could be the number one in 5 years or something like that, right? Um uh much different. Why didn't you look into that or why aren't you vertically integrating? Uh is that just something that might happen in the future?

I mean, it might be the last thing we vertically integrate. It's it's a well it's well it's not really a problem for venture or government, right? It's a problem for banks. Sure. Right. It's like buy buy the machine from from Germany. put it in a shed, put it in a giant building and start turning them up.

So, it's it's it's pretty well understood how to do this scale. Um, it's not really a technology problem. Um, technology development problem, but that's my bread and butter. My bread and butter is like doing doing weird complicated stuff.

Is the reason that it's in China mostly labor cost or environmental concerns or regulation or just the cost of capital? Do you have an idea of like like I understand like the whole story of Yeah. the whole story of like why the iPhone landed there. Like I understand that story a little bit.

I don't necessarily understand why solar panels went there specifically. Yeah. I mean, Australia invested a bunch of money into developing this technology and and then Germany spent a bunch of money on manufacturing it at a steep loss and both of them basically gave up at some point.

And meanwhile, China looked around and said, "hm, we just had the Beijing Olympics. We're kind of a big deal now. " And uh um you know we we'd like to do something about Taiwan sooner or later, but the last time anyone got uppety in the East Eastern China Sea area.

Um they they they did a lot of damage until until the United States curb stomped them with uh by choking their supplies of of energy. And it turns out that neither Germany nor Japan had had anywhere near sufficient supplies of of the domestic energy sources.

And once the combined bomber offensive and the the um the the submarine war took out their ability to transport oil from where it was being made to where it was being used, basically both war efforts collapsed within months. So if you're China, you'd be like, "Hm, where's my oil coming from?

" You know, 16 12 million barrels a day is coming from uh coming from Middle East a long way away via via like the straits of Aman straits of Malaca, straits of the straits of Malaca, which we don't control, can't control. Don't have a deep water blue water navy.

um you know via via our you know historical and and current geopolitical adversaries uh who kind of allow the oil to pass by because they're they're playing nice today right like hm maybe maybe it's actually something we should spend you know because the US sorry the Chinese um political economy is is much more kind of expansionary and it's spending it's much more um supply driven rather than demand driven um so if we're going to spend a bunch of money on like you know more or less inflationary projects may as well spend them on giant solar panel factories and they got really good at it and you know all credit to them like it's It's a bloody lot of hard work to do that and they did it.

Um and um now basically we all benefit from that you know if we willing to buy from them but that doesn't mean it's something that's like intrinsically impossible for the United States to do. Um you know it's it's just a question of will. It's just a question of who who actually wants to go and do this at scale. Mhm.

Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Thank you for taking the time. after you after you create abundant energy, uh we're going to require that uh or we're going to make a a bid for you to become a uh you know a more uh invest more of your time in podcasting. Yes. Yes, we do enjoy this.

That' be hard to do at this point. I've been showing Yeah, you have. You've been on a tear. Congratulations. You've been uh you've been all over. Uh I know your secret that sitting around talking about stuff is is incredibly fun. It's so much fun. It really is. Well, thanks for doing it with us today. Great to see you.

coming by. Uh, talk soon. Happy Veterans Day. We'll talk to you soon. Uh, let me tell you about Finn. AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one in ranking on G2. Uh, we have a surprise guest joining us in just a few minutes.

We'll see if he can join in the uh, Reream waiting room. He says he's down to join. Um, in the meantime, let's go through some more post. What else? Back in the timeline. Um, there's some news in the Wall Street Journal. You see some of these images leaking from Nano Banana 2. No. What is this?

Uh, they are a little too uh photorealistic for for my interesting. Uh, for my preference. Okay. What's going on here? Oh, wow. Okay. So, it's got Jeffrey Epstein and with Diddy Diddy together. These are very accurate images. These seem remarkable. Third term.

Um yeah, is this uh so this is from Roberto Nixon who's who came on our stream at Meta Connect. He says, "Wild Times Nano Banana 2 apparently leaked a few hours uh today on some platforms and the limited results by a handful of users have been pretty insane.

The model was apparently from an uncensored slightly older checkpoint. when it actually launches, it won't be this uncensored, of course, but crazy to think what a handful of engineers at the Frontier Labs have access to and the chaos they could cause if they so wished.

Um, I wonder Yeah, it's so it's so interesting where I I would love to actually trace where these leaks came from, what the whole flow is, because um it's possible that uh like it's possible that there's like some Photoshop in here as well.

Like if you're in the business of creating a leak or a fake leak, you can uh you can do all sorts of funny things. Um there was a uh what what was it? There was someone who what what did they do?

They went and they they filmed something normally and then they went into After Effects and they made it look like they were on a green screen for it and they made fake behindthe-scenes footage for their real footage. So it looked like they were ser.

So they actually went surfing and then they and they and then they made a a CGI version behind the scenes. Uh just like that there there's that Apple uh trailer now for the for the introduction to uh Apple TV and they say we made it all uh practically. We did it all practically.

Um let me uh see we need a uh we need an image for uh uh for our next guest because we are not doing video. We are just doing he is semi non but we have growing Daniel in the reream waiting room. Let's bring in Growing Daniel into the TV. Growing Daniel, how are you doing? Doing really great. How are you guys doing?

Fantastic. You're doing well. It's great to finally have you on the show. It only only took you three invites, but you've been busy and you finally made it. It's an honor to be here. I didn't I didn't have anything to say before. I'm glad. Now you do. I'm glad. Yeah.

You're launching the moral discernment company of San Francisco. Getting into moral discernment. Uh finally I would love to know what that what that means. Well, like is this is this is this a vibe shift for on your part or do you feel like this is a continuation of your you know affinity for moral discernment?

walk me through how you evaluate like what is or is not a good startup idea or like a virtuous like uh Trace Stevens says that good quests philosophy like how how do you think about judging the the work of the technology industry that we see every day on display on X I guess it's not really complicated to me I mean okay so if you're selling like uh gambling then uh you're basically um selling drugs to people uh like and everyone knows that right.

Uh I I didn't think it'd be a big thing to say, but you should want to build things that are good for people. And I think that's exactly what the pope was saying. Um if you are engaging in the act of creation, then you should try and create something that's actually good for people.

And I think over the past uh 10 years, we've had this like really weird, I guess, school of moral philosophy that we all collectively call woke. Sure. It's been really dominant and it's had an extremely aggressive uh priest class that tries to get every it tries to coersse everyone into bending the knee to it.

Um and nowadays that's not a very popular perspective thankfully. I think that that fever kind of broke. Uh but I don't think what replaces it is nothing. I don't think that's a good solution. I think everyone should want to should want to help. Actually, you cannot criticize technology at all.

If it's software, you cannot criticize it. We're banning you you we're making it illegal to identify negative externalities of any technology product. And a lot of this stuff is even externalities. It's literally just you're selling drugs to people in terms of the economic transaction, right? Like it's the core product.

It's not like somebody got, you know, left fielded walking down the street by gambling. It's funny. People people used to be criticized, you know, 3 years ago it was like stop building enterprise SAS and people were like okay I'll build gambling apps. Yes. Okay.

But on the gambling issue uh walk me through how you think about the utilitarian calculus of like what is or is not gambling because uh when I think about like like putting money in an S&P 500 ETF in an IRA that I hold for 30 years, I don't think of that as gambling.

Um, but then if I'm if if you're a professional fund manager and you're managing retirements, like that's not gambling. There is risk, but then you go down to like zero day options and it's starts to look a lot like gambling. Uh, and so do you believe in this like moral relativism?

Do you think that there's a clear line, a bright line like what is or is not gambling these days? Passive income. I mean I mean yes, sometimes there just interface with it, but is it is it I is it I'll know it when I see it. Uh, I don't even think gambling's wrong, by the way.

Like it's like I think it's fine to get together with your friends and play poker on a Sunday or something like that's totally fine.

Um, uh, so as far as like gambling goes, I'm I'm saying that if you're going to dedicate your life to building something, which is what you do when you start a company, it's not like you're just like, you know, doing something as a hobby. Uh, then what I'm saying is that you should reflect morally. Yes.

if you get like I I don't think I'm not here to tell you what is right and wrong. Um but the pope's entire point was that you should think about that and try and do good things and uh I didn't think anyone on earth I guess one person for sure had a problem with that. Um and so I I don't have the moral guide book.

Uh there is a guide book. I I uh I own a copy. It's called the Bible. Yes. Um but uh I do not I cannot uh you know extrapolate that to every modern situation. Um but I do encourage everyone who's building anything to think about what they're building. What good is it? Is it actually helping people?

And by the way B2B SAS doesn't get me up in the morning but hey that's honest software that actually you know solves people's problems. That's a great thing to build. I think I like that. I like that. Um, I mean, so le let's get into steel manning the other side of this because, uh, that's what's fun.

Um, it's okay to it makes for good content. So, uh, it so it's okay to it's okay to,