#44 - WTF is happening in El Segundo

35:33Aww. Thanks, Augustus. Friendship. Same. Yeah, we almost did. Back when I checked LinkedIn, it was seeing Cameron's post that he moved into El Segundo. It's like, it seems like an interesting place. I'll go check it out. So we're in cold DM to be on LinkedIn. I did. Wow. How did we get connected for KBBQ? Colin. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like a weird coincidence. Think back at it. That's got to be the most successful cold LinkedIn DM of all time. Except you didn't respond, so not successful at all. Well, that's because it was on LinkedIn, Soren. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I wouldn't respond now.

36:14And I'm at Augustus through our good pal, Phil. Phil Ehrenstein, founder of Dirac Automated Work Instructions. The assembly company. The factory company. Recently closing a new big client in Southern California. I heard an upstart defense company. I have no further details on said engagement, but congrats to Phil Ehrenstein. We miss you. I'm sorry that whatever is keeping you in New York is keeping you in New York. It feels like a TBPN act. Siren call. You know, we're actually a direct customer. Are you really? Yeah. Yeah. Assembly instructions. What's your ROI on? Bellas economy. Hey, stop it.

36:55Yeah, no, real, real. Well, I mean, we probably have to have one less technician than we do right now. So we're probably saving roughly. We actually pay$50 million a year for our Dirac. So it's really great ROI. Relative to having more technicians. Does anyone have to go to the bathroom? All right, we're losing daylight. Come on. you're briefly mentioning that you guys off camera that you guys kind of run your companies in very different ways what is the most like horrible thing that's gone wrong in the last like 18 months individually augustus go yeah one of them i'm gonna have to talk about a little bit tacitly uh well we talked about the first one i got microscopic arachnids in my eyeballs that was bad because i wasn't sleeping at all and i was very stressed out and so they started to infest my eyes.

37:54That was probably personally the worst thing. Corporately, I mean, we've been crushing for sure. But I told you we had to move up to Pendleton, Oregon, because we didn't have a waiver to fly in the Central Valley of California. The only place with deregulated airspace that we could get access to quickly enough was Pendleton. I think maybe that was the beginning of when we really stopped hanging out. Maybe it was a bit before that but yeah when when i and my whole team moved to another state for six months yeah and that would contribute slightly yeah yeah and lived out of a cold warehouse and then also periodically a mountain base in the middle east that's a kpi yeah that well yeah it was pretty sweet but um that was a pretty harrowing point in time um any other like disastrous awful things that have occurred um i feel like there's something oh oh oh do you mean like the not immediately recent but thing a month ago was that austin is that what you're alluding you're being accused of of causing floods yeah i thought that's what you're asking about yeah yeah yeah yeah that was um what the fuck that was sorry it's been so long did you do that no no no no don't please don't joke about that on this so okay so i mean for context for those that haven't heard i assume that most people watching this is like a tech inclined audience that does know.

39:19The long story short is that we at Rainmaker conduct cloud seeding operations in Texas for farmers, both to provide water to them in events that they don't have water for irrigation any longer or to recharge their aquifers. And on July 2nd, we conducted an operation. We dispersed about 70 grams of silver iodide into two clouds, both of which precipitated and dispersed over the course of the ensuing two hours. And then on July 4th, of course, there were floods in Texas that came as a consequence of the convergence of the remnants of Tropical Stormberry and the system from the Pacific. So it dumps over a trillion gallons of water over that area in Texas.

40:01And cloud seeding largely is not known, right? And so people put two and two together and got five and said, well, they're doing weather modification in Texas, Rainmaker is, there is this flood. Who's to say that they're not to blame for that flood? But in a context, like how much water cumulatively across every operation has Rainmaker ever generated? The most that any single cloud seeding operation has ever produced is 10 million gallons. The amount we produced for Utah this past year was on the order of like 300 million gallons um so there's a few orders of magnitude well but that was over the course of that was over the course of eight months right um so we had to do a lot of um pr we we went on a couple shows we did a little bit of tweeting uh just to communicate to people what cloud seeding was what it could do what it couldn't do that we had no association whatsoever with that flood i i i suppose yeah that was that was pretty bad man yeah i was with that yeah that was i have to deal with that yeah yeah well you know i was on twitter i go on your replies and i just see photos of the sky yeah and the like white lines from the contrails for what it's worth for what it's worth at the peak of that around like july 8th we got one to 200 emails per day on our contact email with pictures of contrails um we now get no more than two per day um so i think that the vast majority of people have since, who have encountered this information, realized that cloud seeding had nothing to do with those floods, that it couldn't have affected those floods whatsoever, and that it's a useful and measured tool for increasing water supply across the drivestriken west and the rest of the world where water scarcity is something of concern.

41:55So that was quite a cycle for sure. There's some people in Congress that are still talking about that. But for the most part I think we're over the hump there. I forgot about that saying. Sorry. Blacked out for that period of time. I feel like everyone at this table is going to have a hard time competing with Augustus on the kind of extremes peak. Yeah, my company was not almost outlawed by the federal government. Well, for what it's worth we've been outlawed by two states. We've been outlawed by two states. I can't even compete with that one i can sell parts in every state yeah i've got i've got 48 in the domestic market there were only 32 that proposed bans this past congressional session wow yeah um so that is definitely a complicating factor so what you do must be very dangerous then right uh you know it's it's not um it's not as much as uh hustle bitch uh prolific uh rage bait poster on twitter would have you believe um no i mean you know we can we can produce uh tens to hundreds of acre feet of additional precipitation in any given operation um the materials that we use uh they're it's about 50 to 100 grams per operation uh dispersed over hundreds of thousands of acres the concentrations of silver iodide the material that we use found in the soil after years of previous operation is in the parts per trillion so about a million times less than that which is naturally occurring.

43:24So both, you know, with respect to pollution, with respect to potential flooding or avalanche risk, we're well within bounds on safety as per the dictates. Sorry to like give you the whole thing, but per the regulation in all of the states in which we operate, either from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation or the Utah Department of Natural Resources or Oregon Department of Agriculture. It's a very safe, measured technology. Frankly, if we could produce a trillion gallons of precipitation over the course of a day, you know like New Mexico and Arizona wouldn't look that way anymore they'd be green but we haven't figured out that yet I don't know if it's physically possible so I guess yeah that was probably the peak peak bad thing that happened what about you Ted yeah I think like the Rainmaker Pendleton campaign last year I think we had a somewhat analogous experience in Nevada over the summer.

44:18We were in northern Nevada, staying in a town called Winnemucca a couple hours northeast of Reno. That's a two-hour drive, driving aggressively. And then our test site was another hour and 15 minutes, a portion of which you would not want to take most four-wheel drive vehicles on. And so that's not ideal for testing some cutting-edge hardware. We were drilling at an actual gold exploration site for a client, and so it was valuable data and I think a good real-life test, but that's not ideal for testing hardware. And so we are now kind of finding a facility in Tucson to do our field operations out of with a backyard that we can drill in.

44:56There's one thing you can't do in El Segundo, and that is drill a 5 ,000-foot hole that's representative of a copper. Not with that attitude. He's pretty chill. I probably should. I haven't yet. There's a hole right there. Maybe mercury in the ground here, but you can try here. If we could borrow some of this. Are you using all of this? not down okay good we need about 40 by 40 square feet you know what another thing is that you you can't do in el segundo because of lax airspace uh you can't do high altitude drone flights can't really do any drone flights yeah huh indoors yeah yeah yeah um okay problems problems problems problems um everything's going really swell for range view really swell no okay okay um Yeah, so at Range View, I mean, the biggest problem is that we can't get elements.

45:53Like, to make parts, we need metal. Like, we actually just shape metal. We just shape metal. We go from ingot-looking metal to more part-looking metal. And so you need the metal. But the problem is the metal is an American. I mean, lots of it is, but lots of it isn't. because others have thought it matters a lot more than America, and so they invested a lot more. And so it's like a fight. It's a fight to get crates of ingot. What metal specifically? Hold on. I want to press Cam on this a little bit, because the question was, what is the most disastrous thing that's happened to your company in the last 18 months?

46:36And you're describing a fundamental issue in the country. You're not describing a problem, like a disaster at Rangeview specifically. It's a disaster because we can't make parts. The lead time for parts, like we came into the industry and average people take like 10 to 14 months to make parts. And a stupid amount of that is actually just getting this stuff. Like we promised customers that we would make parts in two to four weeks, which is how long it takes us to make parts. We didn't take it. So we had we had like many orders out to customers, you know, critical components. And we just blew past on time delivery, like atrocious on time delivery for our our operations because of things that we hadn't considered.

47:24Like we had expected there to be support in what we did. Like we are in a chain, right? Like a long a long chain of things. Even after we're done with the part, our customer still has to take it, do their stuff to it before it even gets integrated into their system. So we held back key things happening in America and in this neighborhood. So if I delivered a late part to anybody, I apologize. This is so much bigger than us. And so we're considering, like, do we go into refinement operations? Do we go into mining operations? And there's just too much to do. Like, it doesn't work for us. So, you know, we weren't getting we weren't getting banned, but we've delivered it.

48:08It's taken us over eight months to deliver some parts. And that's been incredibly frustrating. And I appreciate the customers that, you know, can tolerate it. But, yeah, it's not what I expected at all. And it was it's it's really sucked because from the get, we knew that the problem in this industry was that people weren't delivering parts on time. and that was one of our core tenants for the company. Yeah, blowing past customer delivery dates feels so bad. It is terrible. Yeah. And just to provide a little more color on this problem there, Cameron's doing very special alloys with some elements where the market is maybe a few hundred million or a billion dollars.

48:53And trying to find a mine that has that or even adding a processing circuit to get out some of these really special elements is extremely expensive and it's really only China. That is the state providing investment to add these circuits to other processing plants. Yeah, like half NIM is a really good example. High purity half NIM is... In mineral sands in a tiny, tiny proportion. Yeah. Yep, exactly.

49:19Thankfully, not as dramatic as a lot of these. But for context, we build technology to help military systems work together better. and we end up working with a lot of very cutting edge and next generation systems that may not be to the reliability that we would like. we had a live demo scheduled in front of a very large audience of senior military members where we were going to be operating a swarm of UAVs and some other things from across the country and little did we know the company that we were working with that builds the UAVs which is not sold not near us not near us for the record um happened to switch to a new propeller supplier a couple weeks before we acquired those drones well we were out there testing a week or so before we had a drone fall out of the sky they tried to blame it on us about a couple days later we were out redoing that we're doing a test we had another drone fall out of the sky they tried to blame it on us we had one more drone left for this demo the night before the demo uh the last drone fell out of the sky

50:39and uh we told the company this is clearly not our fault but anyways um ended up not being able to run the live demo in front of a very large audience of senior military members um which was a real bummer um but we're doing okay and uh you know we're we're we're able to to grow and scale but i think it's just you know i think to kem's point right the the supply chain for and the reason they switched to this propeller is not because of they they uh you know are bad engineers it was it was actually the best propeller that was that was they could acquire that was not from china they were switching it was one of the last components they were switching um that was still chinese made and they switched to a it was a some european um vendor and And basically every one of these propellers had a design flaw in it where after a couple dozen hours of flight, it would just snap.

51:37It would be the repeated sort of motion of the propeller would cause it to fatigue and break. And, you know, I think to Cam's point, right, like this is a supply chain issue across a lot of the industry that is much deeper than people realize. right it's it's it's not just uh you know big uh fighter jets and those sorts of things right it applies all the way down the stack to you know relatively small small drones um and everything in between um but uh that was a a a night where i did not sleep well but uh here we are yeah i think one of the most stressful periods uh of niros and and probably of my life um just the like continued stress, continued pain was at the beginning of this year.

52:29And it was really because we kind of thought we could deliver on a new version of a product. It was really just a new product, like from the ground up, but kind of a new version, much, much faster than we ended up being able to. And there was sort of a few factors that made that so painful. One was slipping on customer delivery dates. And I think one of the most important values that I want to instill into my company as we grow is doing what you say. And I've seen a lot of companies in the defense space and in the drone space that just don't follow that and think it's okay to kind of make false promises and and not deliver um and up until this it's actually the norm in the defense yeah it is the norm um which is very very sad which is it's sad to the point where like sometimes if you promise the actual deadline you end up over bidding the next guy who's just who's just ridiculously underbidding the the deadline and so you look bad by kind of being honest so it's actually in some sense encouraged to maybe you know yeah it's it's it's it's astonishingly bad yeah um and so kind of up until this point i mean we hadn't been shipping a huge volume of stuff but generally we'd you know made our deadlines and made things happen for our customers uh and then we had this kind of like two month period where we just did not get the thing done because it was significantly more complex than we'd originally kind of mapped and, you know, the engineering resources didn't line up in the way we thought.

54:16And, you know, there's a lot of reasons and a lot of lessons learned from that. And we're thankfully much, much better because of it and much better at the planning around this type of stuff now. But for those two months, like I was not doing the normal things that I do as the CEO of a startup. I was basically just working on the hardware, which is honestly, in this case, kind of a bad sign. I mean, I love doing it. But this was, I mean, 18 hour days, just hoping something would work, trying different things. And then going to bed just completely exhausted and just feeling like the, it's just like such a draining feeling where you can't really see the light at the end of the tunnel.

55:04and um you know i think a lot of companies have have gone through periods like this for for longer and we're very lucky to have gotten past it relatively quickly um and in most of the cases like shipped something to the the customers um when they like really really needed it uh but that is i think that is one of the the like periods of neros where i don't look back on proudly there's a lot that I do look back on proudly and and that's that's not one of them but we did learn an incredible amount from it um and now being able to deliver on time and just not make any promises that we can't meet is extreme it's it's held extremely highly at the company one and one congrats like getting through that that was at the same time that like your appendix was exploding or something, right?

55:59Oh yeah. This, this was also stacked on top of my, uh, my kidney would, would cause me severe pain multiple times a week. Um, and actually now looking back, just drain like 30 % of my energy total. Um, and I didn't really know what was going on cause it took a very long time for doctors to figure it out. And I got surgery in May and I felt so much better since like, I think my, my total output is massively increased, but it was like, I would also have to leave those sessions of debugging and trying to figure out the next step um and leave the team because i was just in so much pain or just completely out of energy yeah yeah well so thug well done um but then but then that gets to another point you guys talking about how many a company in defense uh promised capability and failed to deliver on it i think to uh to reference the point in the conversation earlier where we're saying like well you know gundo certainly isn't just like the party bus and it's not a bunch of pre-seed companies with vision uh and no hardware to speak of anymore um it's much more material like we're deployed to customers throughout the united states and world um but i think that part of the uh like cross that we bear, so to speak, is that until we're all running leviathans, right?

57:22Like until these companies are unambiguously radically successful, until we've proven that our business model and technology is like a smashing success and eventually will comprise some sort of zaibatsu that is worth many billions of dollars, if not more. Like we do have this responsibility. I think about this all the time. I don't know if you guys do. Maybe it's particularly potent given that cloud seeding has been scrutinized so heavily in the past, but we do bear this responsibility to make our company successful, not just for our own fiduciary responsibility sake, but for the sake of re-industrialization and inspiring the next generation.

58:02And should any one of us, let alone most of us or the Gundo project writ large fail, it will be a data point against doing real things into the future indefinitely, right? Like we not only cannot fail for the sake of our own individual missions, for the sake of like the promises that we've made to our investors that want great outcomes and for the sake of our employees that have slaved away, for the sake of like their equity upside, but also because should we fail, so too will the nation to some extent because it has been ripped of some inspiration or hope that a bunch of individuals could just decide to do things.

58:41I think about that often. Very true. And something I consider occasionally, but I think we should all consider more because it is so, I mean, it's so important that we win here. And it goes back to the point of like, the people sitting at this table represent most of the categories that are so important to the country, but are also very in the spotlight. And so if we're the ones to fail, I think it's extra bad. All in All in Going to do a little phil erenstein betting maneuver and go all in on this hand we're gonna win what i want to know is how do you keep pushing on the gas and how have you individually like these are such different companies how do you keep pushing on the gas as things start scaling up and you know you're you're deciding where to send employees or what to focus on or anything else how do you decide i mean i I think I could speak to this from kind of a personal perspective and a company perspective.

59:50Personally, I think, like I found as a founder, figuring out how to be sustainable is really important.

1:00:02And I think most of us here dedicate like the vast majority of our time to our companies. But you have to figure out the like little things that keep you sane. um and in the the painful periods that i've talked about that's also where the the sort of like basic stuff slips you know not going to the gym not eating properly and it really just like digs you into a worse hole um so for me like being able to keep the gas on is actually about finding like a slightly more sustainable pace um or like and what keeps it sustainable but from a company perspective I think we've gotten much, much, much better at deciding what really matters and thinking about the slightly longer term goals.

1:00:49We definitely have had the problem where we're just fighting exactly what's in front of our face. And we're very schizophrenic and just kind of change direction on a dime. And I think we've gotten much better at looking at a six-month time horizon, a year time horizon, a multi-year time horizon, and thinking about what matters. And for like in 2025, it's the first time that since the beginning of the year, Niros has worked towards basically a singular goal. I mean, there's always other ones in the background, but just consistently worked towards that. And the engineering team has like known what they're going towards, known generally what they're working on.

1:01:27And the plans never survive battle, but they have to shift. but uh for us it's been like actually if you stop being like so intense and misdirected um in the moment you get better results over over a longer period of time and that that's just like a learning um after doing this for for two years it's interesting you say that i uh I don't, I don't, I'm under no pretensions that like I'm working 20 hours a day or anything like that. Right. Um, but I still feel pretty like potent guilt for any time spent either with my loved ones or otherwise, um, instead of the company. And so like those outlets, uh, I think, you know, when, when Gundo first started or Rainmaker first started, there was this sort of, mocking like oh they're a bunch of meathead gym bros like none of us really work out that much anymore right um i find it hard to do so that's awesome you're yoked um but uh personally for me like yes there's some moments like this even right now that's very meaningful um but like the thing you know jensen juan like talked about this like certain kinds of work are very relaxing um like when when you have a specific goal that you've been working towards for a long time with like a very tractable solution that is contingent just on your execution actually perhaps opposite um i find that a little bit more wearing um than the curious serendipitous opportunity um that arises and now the failure case there is that you're more liable to distraction right but like if there's an opportunity for me to jump on a plane to go anywhere to stand up a new not line of business but new like contract in a different region or to make some very particular executive hire or scientific hire um if there's like a novel research paper that comes out of some lab that might inform over the next six months the tech stack that we use like that is the sort of relaxing fulfilling work that I think probably helps me keep my foot on the gas like that is what is inspiring so that I can get through more of the rote like email trenches and to Zane's point I think off cam earlier maybe that's like an exemplification of how radically different actually some of us are um to be clear i don't love emails that is draining yeah yeah yeah i mean i guess that's like the most hyperbolic example right but you know how you're saying like do you feel more oriented and fulfilled from working towards a specific goal yeah generally i get what you're saying though like i i love that startups keep things constantly changing and constantly interesting and i think it's the novelty might be the wrong word but the the like jumping on a plane last minute to go halfway across the globe to just like address something as fast as possible is is very satisfying and fun and i i do find that refreshing on occasion i think what isn't uh what is not energizing for the entire company at least for us is if that leads to constant change in direction for what everyone's working on.

1:05:12I think personally, I love doing different things. I love kind of going on the side quests as needed. And I love actually getting very hands-on with what the company is building, whether that's the hardware or the process that we're creating. And I love the variety of startups. But I think it's it's you start to wear people out if you're like pulling them in a bunch of different directions totally and i think actually it's another point about what's different in gundo now versus two years ago um perhaps exactly that which made us successful early on that sort of dynamism and rapidity with which we could change direction and work um does not work when you have even maybe as many as 10, let alone like 50 plus employees.

1:06:03That requires more procedure, direction, long-term planning, these kinds of things. That's been a big change in the last six months for us. Yep. I think what I find motivating is staying close with our customers. I grew up around mining and so I'm deeply passionate about it. And I'm always learning more about the industry and meeting more people that we are helping solve problems for. And I am trying to pass that passion onto the team and many of them have taken to it. We have guys, some of which are from the mining industry, many of whom are not, but they're passionate about hydraulics or building big machines.

1:06:44And we show them, well, here's this big hydraulic machine we're building. And they get really excited about it. And also introduce them to this guy whose friend died on one of these rigs in all sorts of awful ways and you're like okay we can cause some serious impact here um with just a few years of rnd that is uh yeah that's motivating all right so ted and i both gave pick me answers what about you zane and cameron i think i think i would i would jump in on on soren's and i've made the mistake in the past of driving myself into the ground um and not realizing it way too late like literally months too late where i've been not eating not sleeping not exercising properly and just in hindsight making just the most god-awful decisions honestly um like i'm just like thinking why why would i do that um and i you know i think i definitely you know came to realize that as the company grows I just need to do a better job taking care of myself for the company actually going to see a doctor when they're not saying hey it'll pass and you know keep your head down it actually does make a big difference right and um you know I think if you grow the company correctly you're you're building you're you've hired people that are way smarter than you and way better than you at every different part of the company right if you touch that part of the company you will be slowing the company down and so you kind of have to to remove yourself as much as possible continuously from different parts of the company and your job becomes helping the company scale not in the next month or two but six months 12 months down the line and that is just a different type of thinking different type of activity and i often find myself falling into the trap of you know writing a proposal or going out in the field or fixing a bug in software and and um it's just That's kind of my instinct is to dive into that.

1:08:41And I've really had to pull myself back from doing that more recently because I will literally slow the team down in the process. You ever hear Jeff Bezos talk about puttering? I'm sure that 8 a.m. you're puttering around, reading the newspaper, drinking coffee. See, this is why I've seen it. Every single day I will go on a walk around lunchtime. It's like a half an hour walk around the block in front of my office, around the corner and back. I know that route well. I see this guy on that route many times. He has neighbors now. Without headphones, without music, just kind of without anything, just going for a walk.

1:09:22And it's during those times that I find that the most productive time in the entire day of like 30 minutes of just going for a quick little walk in the sunshine, that it can feel sort of self-indulgent at times. It's like, why am I not on my desk, you know, pounding away, heads down. But that's where I think a lot of the real insights happen, especially when you do it regularly, and it just becomes a part of your day. And that's something I highly encourage of kind of everyone here to spend some time just kind of blocked off unstructured time that you're not interrupted at. It is really important for a lot of those longer term things that at the end of the day, in the long tail, that's what actually matters.

1:10:07the motivation that the motivation that i have is when you peel back all the layers something that's existential like i'm i'm quite worried i'm quite worried that america is is very not ready

1:10:32yeah I'm worried that in not so long of a time the national security of the of the country will be questioned and we will not be in the position of power that we think we are in now because we bet on the wrong things and that is coupled with the idea that I think you've said this before Augustus there is no cavalry. There is nobody coming. It is just us and our friends and the people who care. There is no invisible force that cares inside of the country that's going to come in and save us. And I think that's a pretty hard thought to believe deeply and slack off with. And that's been an obsessive thing that has had to be balanced with all of these, you know, semantic learnings that come from burning yourself.

1:11:38I think it's also the reason why it's so important to have a group of people that can share those things with you. Because in my whole life, I'd always thought that you just have to work harder. I had not met other people who had worked just as hard or even harder than me with the same level of obsession. and so it had been hard to not feel guilty for spending time in over the weekends and taking time to think and reflect and ultimately do more with a bit less and that's a community thing I don't think that's something you can learn by yourself in a short matter of time I think there have been like a few life mentors of of mine that have been a little surprised with how how early these later in life lessons have come for us and i think it's because us i think it's because there's this collective of folks that go through albeit having different businesses like a very similar set of pressures um and so the struggles that we have are are real among all of us and we can learn through through all of those together because we respect each other and because we motivate each other so i'm i'm both pushed by the the existential threats that i think are are real and will manifest soon um and mentored by the peers inside of this neighborhood that are feeling the same way but experienced and doing a marathon not a sprint so two two thoughts there one's a question i guess um yeah like to to anybody that does listen to this that's like maybe a kid that feels relatively without company or peerless because they do have some grand ambition or does want to work extraordinarily hard or is obsessive about some particular domain um like gundo's here for you guys um everybody here is like that and like is and to be clear gundo is a lot more than table than this table there's a lot of companies that are here that might not be as loud on twitter but are are just as serious and just as dedicated to the mission as we are across across space across manufacturing across materials and everything else and so i i want to be clear that that else gundo is actually a much larger community than people seem to realize yeah there are probably over over a thousand people here now yeah i mean you could vehemently disagree with everyone that's sitting at this table and still probably find a community an extraordinary company at in el segundo that you would mesh with and find community in and that segues into my question stir in the pot a little bit cameron you you said like uh you're worried that america may not be ready to meet the challenge that arises in the coming years that America may not be able to maintain its national security.

1:14:50Why does that matter? Like, why do we care about that? And like, listen, I'm a patriot. I love our country too, but why? You know, like what, and this points to one of Zane's previous points, like the delta between the ethos of every founder and employee, I think even in Gundo is pretty radical. um the thing that binds us i think is love for our nation and it is love for like a more abundant and material and grandiose future but but like why why fight for america and i'm curious yeah for all of you guys so

1:15:30i mentioned this on a prior conversation with with ty but um i spent a lot of my life going back and forth to China. And at one point I made the conclusion that I wanted to live in China. I'm an industrialist. I want to see the community around me growing. And from eight years old onward, my trips to China for my father, who was off showing there for his electronics business, impressed me every time. I would go and see cities the size of Los Angeles and New York be constructed between my year-long trips, you know, at a rate that I had never seen before. And I remember this very distinct moment.

1:16:15I was on a bullet train from Shenzhen to Xiamen. And I'd thought about how I learned in school that California has spent billions of dollars and laid, you know, just a few miles of track and had been a huge political embarrassment to, to even in some ways, democracy as a whole, everyone trying to vote for things. And I was sitting on this incredible smooth bullet train, you know, nearing speeds of 200 miles an hour. Um, and I thought like, why, like, why is this just propaganda? Like, did I just grow up in a country of, of, of propaganda? Um, and then we had gone through a tunnel and I started to see jars next to the train as we were flying by.

1:17:03And I asked the translator I was with, you know, what are those? He's like, oh, those are just the bones. We're going through a cemetery. And I realized that what they'd done is choosing two points and cut through everything and did everything that was necessary to get it done. And it was a collectivist society. And I was kind of cool with that when I first thought about it. Okay, you know, I understand, but we moved forward. And then I went to the factory that I was making products in, and this was before this story became public and anyone had known from a third party, but I saw it firsthand.

1:17:40They were making products for us, and I looked out the window and I saw nets. I was like, why are there birds outside? Like, what? Why are there nets? And it's like, that's because, you know, this is a window outside of the bedroom of our employees, which are directly across the hall of their factory station. And that's for employee safety. And then there was this moment that happened where I had realized what I believe the human spirit was, because I grew up in a country that valued the human spirit on a basis of individuality. And in that moment, I realized that this country made me free to take the agency that I wanted to, to make my life become whatever it wanted to be.

1:18:30And I could do it. And it was this old-fashioned sense that, frankly, we don't hear as folks in our generation anymore of the American dream. I, in that moment in China, found the American dream. And since then, I realized that the difference that I saw between China exceptionalism and American decline was, it was temporary. And we had the ability to take the fundamentals that our founding fathers instilled into our country and run with them. And I always think, what was America like? What was America like in the 60s, 70s, and 80s when we were doing the impossible? We were building the SR-71 and the F-117.

1:19:24Must have been a pretty freaking crazy place. And I think there's a path to that. I think it's a few crazy mad lads going pretty hard on some important problems to get us back there. But we can take the whole country back there and our country can begin to feel the way again that lifted humanity to a place that has never been before. That's the country that I want to be a part of. That's the country that I want to put a moon base up, to put a Mars base up. And if we don't feel that way very soon, it will not be us. That's for certain. so i think i have a it's interesting perspective on this question of you know why give a shit right why why do we care that china doesn't doesn't take over the world i mean they sure can build great beautiful cities they can build a lot of hardware real cheap why care from the ages when i was born to the age of 21 i spent 11 years of my life outside of the united states um living all over the world um and so i got to see a different perspective on what america was I think I grew up very American.

1:20:35I was in very American communities even when I was living abroad.

1:20:42But I got to see the rest of the world's perspective on America. And of course, America, there's a bit of a caricature for sure, right? There's the kind of big dumb American kind of moving around. But I think you kind of when it comes down to it, people can, you know, laugh at Americans in America and there's plenty to laugh at. But America is that place that they want their kids to grow up in. And the question is why, right? Why do you want your kid to grow up, right? People in Europe live plenty of nice lives. They have, whatever, 300 days of vacation a year, whatever it is, right? I think it's 360 in France.

1:21:20Something like that. And five days of sick days. Those five days must be tough, man. But the thing is, they want their kids to grow up to be in the U.S., right? And the question is, you know, why is that? And I think what the U.S. represents, and I think, you know, we're seeing another generation really take this torch, is a world of sort of fearless builders that have sort of self-selected for in the craziest parts of the communities across the world, that the people that were outcast, the people that were misfits, they went to the U.S. and they started their companies and they moved west. And even California is even the Mississippi of the Mississippi, the Mississippi that couldn't fit in on the East Coast.

1:22:01Right. Moved out to California to dig for gold and set up railroads and, you know, create a colony of a colony.

1:22:12And it's a story that I think resonates among the most inspired people around the world. And that is a community that I feel very lucky to be born an American citizen, to be able to build and contribute in a small way into this country. But I think it's what America represents that is particularly unique. And there is no other country in the world. And I think, you know, you look back, say, 500 years, most people would bet against the United States, right? Who are these people who are going to flee their countries, move to a random spit of land that, you know, what the hell do they have? And not just build a country, build the most powerful country by a wide margin in nearly every industry the world has ever seen in a matter of a couple hundred years.

1:23:07And that is a wildly inspiring story. And I think the truth is we're still very early in that story. if we continue to build and continue to invest in that future. And, you know, it's up to us, right? It's up to the next generation to make that happen. It's not destiny unless we make it. And it's that story, that narrative of what it is to be an American that is, I think, what matters at the end of the day. I think to add to that um something there's two things that have all like always felt inherent to me and I have a hard time explaining kind of beyond like why they're inherent to me um but it's one is just a love for technology growing up and not in the like tech industry way But like growing up, the only thing I wanted to spend my time thinking about, aside from running around outside in the mountains in Alaska, was like, what are the coolest technologies that I can try to understand, sketch out on a piece of paper, think about what they might look like in the future?

1:24:24And I think I realized that technology moves humanity forward and it allows humanity to do things that our ancestors would have never even dreamed about. And when you look at the majority of outsized outcomes in technology over the past few hundred years where we've kind of hit the sharp curve of the hockey stick, the majority of those have come from America. And I think it's because America allows for outsized outcomes and it allows for people to take absolutely crazy bets. And that goes into my second point for myself personally, which is I feel like I've never been okay feeling like I'm doing something that is mainstream or average.

1:25:14And I don't think this is necessarily healthy. I think a lot of people can be happier because they are fine having a, quote, normal job. But for me, there's just been some, like, aversion to being, quote, normal. Um, and I think America is a, a place where you can actually pursue not being normal and having a massively positive outcome. And there's a, like, there are communities of people across America who encourage that. Um, and we, we've seen it be successful enough times where it's like, it is something you can pursue. So for me, you know, I think there are

1:26:08a lot of countries where like you have smaller examples of this. And I think it's not, my perspective is not like America is the only place you can build great things or that America is the only great country in the world. I think we have many incredible allies and we should actually value them more than we do in some cases right now. But it is the place for builders and is the place for people who want to have outsized outcomes across all of humanity. And that's what it's always stood for. The country of building something new from the very founding, the founding fathers were doing something different.

1:26:49And we had that pioneering spirit before 1776 and then all through the 1800s as we expanded west to California. And in the 1900s, we have it through space age and now the Internet revolution. And now we're doing that across many areas here. It's really that pioneering spirit to me, both in terms of kind of physical expansion. We're going to go to the moon and Mars and beyond. But then also in terms of new technology we build that is built into America's DNA. And that's what makes us unique. Yeah. And I think also for me growing up, I saw a pretty wide range of like political opinions. And sometimes those political opinions swing so far into actually like disliking or hating America for people who live in America, which at some point like very early in my life I think I almost got like sucked down that rabbit hole of you know bad things are happening here and so the country must be bad and now looking back on that I just don't understand how like if if someone and unfortunately I think there's a lot of people that fall in this bucket now but if someone does not like America please just leave like you shouldn't be here um because the the opportunity to live here is so incredible um and there i i think you know it is always worth pointing out the things that are going wrong and trying to fix them but if you fundamentally don't believe that america is a great place um i you know i think there's many other countries that you can you can go and live in.

1:28:31And so for me, like that, that to me adds to kind of the, the passion of how I feel about this, because it's something I saw, and now like, look, look back on, you know, though, I think, I think that idea exemplifies a lot of discourse about the difference between the American regime, right, our government, and like our nation, right? I don't know if we ought to, especially as Americans, especially in a nation where, like, freedom and autonomy and the individual and, like, our potential is so important. I don't know if we necessarily ought to feel as though our regime is beloved, right? Like, why I care about America fundamentally, like, there's two reasons, maybe more.

1:29:21I could probably list a bunch, but like one, it's, it's, it's because it's ours. Like it's because it's mine. It's because this is my home. Um, and I think that's a very, it's perceived as a very anachronistic belief, you know, like to be in love with, to be loyal to the place that you were born in, um, to, to love where you are from, to love your soil. Um, it's not to say that like, there aren't many people that have come here and become Americans. Like, my family is not, like, here from the 1600s or 1700s or something. But, like, part of why I love this place is because it's mine, right? And it's because it's ours.

1:30:02And then, like, what it means for it to be ours beyond, again, like, the regime. This notion of, like, Republicans and Democrats, I find pretty tiresome. Like, I think that I won't put words in the mouth of all of you guys, but like we're we're technologists, we're futurists. We care about what the world looks like 100 years from now and hope that it's better. Like part of why I love this country is because, you know, it's it's not just to your point, I guess, Soren. Right. Like if you hate it here, like it's not just for anybody, like it's for those that aspire to greatness. And you need freedom and autonomy of the individual to allow for that.

1:30:49But like, it's not just autonomy writ large, right? Like it's not autonomy for the sake of depravity. It's not autonomy for the sake of lethargy. It's autonomy and freedom to be great, right? Like if you look at the Puritans that set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony, like they came here not just because they were being persecuted and they were misfits, but because they wanted to set up utopia, right? Like if you look at the cavaliers that came to the early American colonial south, like it's because they wanted to have great estates that they couldn't have in Europe because like they were out of space and because other people had a more hegemonic credentialist understanding of the social hierarchy and greatness unto itself was not valued.

1:31:35Teddy, you said, like, we were doing something new, kind of, right? Like, kind of it was something new to be free as an individual. But in some sense, it wasn't new at all. Like, we based our nation's constitution and our government and our values off of Rome, right? Like, I think that a lot of, like, nerdy, autist guys on the internet can say, like, that they're really into Rome or something. Obviously, I think about it for a lot of particular and personal reasons. but like the United States, it's not the successor to Rome per se, but spiritually, like the notion of self-governance of the greatest people in the world for the sake of the wellbeing of the greatest people in the world, that is what excites me, right?

1:32:17It's not like a white house and a picket fence. That's noble. That's fine. But it's because here in this nation and exclusively in this nation, which is ours, we inspire to, we inspire people to be great. Um, like it's greatness. It's a more abundant future. It's a more glorious future. Like it's, it's not perceived any longer as a virtuous thing to aspire for glory, right? Like people either consider that to be ego or consider it to be self-centered. Um, like if, if, if gundo becomes what it ought to be, it, it ought to be remarked as a glorious chapter in American history. Yes. One where people were free and where they thought about deep things and where they express themselves in unique ways.

1:33:00I feel in my heart, I know all of you do, I know you do too, Ty. I know that everybody in El Segundo feels in their heart a desire, not just for the freedom, but the freedom to be great among their staff and their friends and their loved ones and the rest of their compatriots. Like this country is worth defending and worth building up because it is great, because we desire greatness.