How Land Raising Works | Laurence Allen, Terranova

0:00In Venice in the 70s, they lifted a whole island with multiple buildings on it using a cementous mud mixture called mud jacking. It was super cool and obviously very relevant for Venice that you can just lift like the whole thing using underground injection They really just never did it again because it's so expensive We solved the cement being super expensive problem with wood chips, which are free delivered and abundant We did the math. Florida has enough waste wood on a yearly basis to lift the entire city of Miami by the whole mountain needs in one year We are basically the anti-subsidants and I think the right solution to fix that at scale Today I have the pleasure of sitting down with Lawrence Allen the co-founder and CEO of Terra Nova Thank you for having me on, Ty.

0:38Terra Nova is basically going to lift land out of flood zones by injecting like wood ships slurries into the ground. How is that currently being done today? It's really not being done. So the unfortunate truth is there's really not a miracle solution for flooding. We have large scale flood problems and they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on even just flood consulting to try to figure out what to do about it. But the issue is your toolbox is very limited. So you have seawalls. You can put a really expensive seawall in front of a property. How much does that cost? It depends. I'd love to give you like a per foot basis, which is how you'd really price it.

1:13But for a small municipality like my hometown of Santa Fe, for example, they quoted 500 to 900 million for the seawall that they needed, which is, of course, prohibitively expensive if it's like a 60 ,000 person city. So usually the answer is too much for a seawall. And you can do dike systems out of dirt. you can do things like for example demolishing and rebuilding the entire city they do very similar with infrastructure all the time where you'll just find that the cost of other things is too high and you can't just casually import fill and prop properties up and so what you're forced to do is demolish it put the filter on you know spend a year year and a half compacting it and then And at the end of the day, you can rebuild that infrastructure or that community where it was, but higher.

2:05And, you know, at the end of the day, you have pretty much the same situation as - Is it Palisades or something? Yeah, exactly. Burned out rebuild. It's a terrible situation. So really what we're doing is kind of breathing a breath of fresh air into that, where all of a sudden you have something you can do, where you can, on a maintenance budget, protect, you know, whole communities. You can protect critical infrastructure. you don't have to wait for these giant capital projects to go through you can really do something today you know this is shovel ready technology you can also do it dramatically less expensive this is less than an order of magnitude what seawalls cost you're you know protecting the infrastructure immediately you get incremental protection instead of you know the crazy interruption of service that you might imagine with some massive highway project and then you know following that with uh your constant ongoing maintenance that that you have there there's also something to be said for how much safer and better this is you don't have this perpetual risk that you have with lots of other solutions so for example if you install some earth and levee you're going to be fighting gophers till the day you die on that it sounds crazy but actually one of the main issues and one of the things that the you know leaders in the architecture engineering and construction world in the bay area meet every month about is protecting these levees from gophers because a gopher can literally take out like a city by just chewing through an earth like hundreds of millions of dollars of damage or something way like a trillion i mean it's it's crazy um they're worried about uh a levy collapse that cascades and is you know domino effect into more levies collapsing in the bay and the predicted damage from that is about a trillion dollars so we had Fiona Ma the state treasurer over it like what are your plans you know you guys just keep doing more and more levies you know it's just getting worse and worse and how much of these levies cost I got it's again it's it's like a linear foot figure for for each of them it really depends what you're protecting but they're very expensive they're not as much as like a mechanical floodwall seawall system but they're still very expensive and they take forever to do and they're all certified by the Army Corps of Engineers or something it's not like a casual thing a city can do a Is this something similar to wildfires where a county or even state like California basically just doesn't even think about it and kind of buries the head in the sand until some massive billions and billions and billions of dollars damage happens?

4:30And then they're like, oh, fuck, we should really have done something about this. And then they kind of just forget about it again. Yes, it is very similar to that, unfortunately. There's kind of always a chicken or the egg problem and a lot of finger pointing about who exactly is responsible for this. Lots of municipalities would love to bring in, of course, a giant bag of federal money to solve their problems. My hometown is hoping for some federal assistance as well. Of course, we're competing with the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, who historically floods a lot worse. And so it's a hard sell. Even with my hometown being six feet under sea level, it's hard to get external support for that.

5:06Every time you have a king tide in Santa Fe or you have a pump failure, you have massive flooding and the whole community rallies for a little bit. people think of it as kind of an existential problem in the city so it's a little bit more severe than in other places where it is actually top of mind but your expenditures don't necessarily reflect that sentiment and the reason is because again there's just not much you can casually do or you know even anything you can do by taking bonds out and having the municipality itself pay for it you really are in a game where you're competing for serious federal spend on your personal city's flood resilience.

5:43It's something like 15 to 300 feet underground is where you guys are injecting the wood chips. And then you're able to, with one machine, bring, I think, 20 connexes of wood chips per day or put 20 through. Yeah. So 20 semi-truck loads of wood chips a day through each shipping container unit, which we call our arc. So that's kind of a slurry processing and a command and control center. Each arc can support up to three rovers currently. So we have these rovers we call Prometheus units that are basically actually delivering that final injection pressure and moving that wood material underground.

6:17And they're being supplied with both energy and slurry material by these big shipping containers that just kind of sit stationary in the parking lot. And you move truck after truck through them and you lift the land progressively. And you're able to do all this in like a day, right? Well, it depends what you're lifting. So it's kind of that modular unit of three Prometheus units in one arc that can lift an acre by a foot every day so if you want an acre lifted by foot and that's it it's a one-day project potentially we've done same-day deployments it's it's not all that hard usually though i would expect you to want dramatically more than that one of our major issues is all the projects we get offered are huge like really really huge um we so is it like prohibitively you know you got to scale up into that and this is not something where you can just go and tackle like a hundred million dollar project yeah i'm building 10 of these new you can see it behind me um this is the the first of the production unit the gen 2 prometheus unit i'm building 10 of those this year and that's enough to support like 100 acre projects um but we have to do like 600 acre wetland restoration projects and like similar for new housing development they're all huge and the reason is because they can't do anything else when you need that amount of fill and you don't have enough on site you can't casually import it and so they start to look for you know other craziness things they could bring in and we come up i guess relatively high on that list now because we're so much less expensive and i love that those are the groups that are willing to go but man it is it's hard to casually go deploy that you know i want our first um infrastructure project to be like a three to thirty acre type thing and not you know like us lifting the entire ninth ward for example so what is what has that been like so far how have you kind of gone and contacted people that would actually fit that bill of 30 to 60 acres versus much larger projects usually it's them coming to us people find us the launch we did recently was pretty helpful i had tons of land developers reach out um a few like kind of funny ones like a parking lot project and some other things that are actually relatively good project surprisingly What would make them a good project?

8:25For us, like higher value created by that lift is ideal. So if we're lifting something that has infrastructure in place already that has more value to the customer, there are some other things. We have a lot of tools that model underground geology, and we use that to explore how much it's going to cost to do projects in certain areas. we also have you know you go to plan.terra nova.inc and you can plan your own flood project explore your flood risk you know model your underground injections and that gives us a pretty good idea of what it's going to cost in an area but it is it is variable and so you can kind of decide how good of a project it is based off of how well it comes out on those tools in general it pretty much works everywhere you don't want to inject into direct bedrock usually but but expensive to drill in at a minimum.

9:16Our fracturing into bedrock would also be very expensive. Use a lot of additive too. That's kind of the main difference between low-cost injections and high-cost ones for us is how much additive you use in the process. And what is additive? It's like our viscosifying agent. So we use wood, water, and a thickening agent so that you can pump it like a milkshake. Is this a little bit like mining where you drill core samples all over the place where you're going to potentially do the injections and then you decide based on those core samples how to do it it's yeah it's a lot like mining we have um you know i hate the buzzwords but we have an an ai tool that we've trained off of about 900 000 geocores in california and because of that we've been able to model the entirety of california's underground geology and we can use that to kind of leverage the data that we take on site or that already exists usually we can do most of our cost modeling without any on-site work which is really important for vetting lots of customers and going through that pipeline quickly but those those tools really allow you to find ideal projects and and do that vetting in a really low stakes way i know you like worked as an intern at spacex prior to this and i was watching the tvn appearance earlier today and you're like we were uh one of the startups that were in stealth like the longest how did you think about when you're just starting the company how did you think about kind of the critical path to actually doing the first major project yeah my my co-founder started filing patents back in 2020 so we've been thinking about this for forever we incorporated late 2021 and i I was working at SpaceX at the time.

11:00I got a return offer. I loved it. My entire team ended up moving around or otherwise leaving the company. And so I would have come back to kind of a shell of my previous team. And so I luckily decided to stick with the startup instead. Very glad I did. It was certainly a long, long road. I think lots of people like to flex. You know, we started this company six months ago and we're already at XARR, X area. We are very much a slow burn for a little bit. But it was really because we were trying to be capital efficient. We were bootstrapping. We were actually figuring this technology out. No one had done this before.

11:36And so luckily - Were you just poor? We were a little poor. That kind of sometimes helps with slow ramp. Yeah, it might be a more apt way to describe it. But yeah, we were doing it very cost effectively. So we figured out this technology, got some critical patents issued in the US and in Europe off of it. and so there there was some utility to that long stealth mode but some days i wish i you know raised a two million dollar pre-seed back in like late 2021 instead for for this type of thing how did the technology develop what was the first uh version of the atlas and like vulcan that you built yeah the first version of well i'll go back and say prometheus which is the one that does the injection is kind of where we started and the first version of that was actually a hacked concrete pump um so you can take a concrete pump and it's a it's a way higher pressure pump than you need actually and the issue is it has these like tiny little ball valves that just clog i mean you can imagine trying to put like a two inch wood chip through like a ball valve with you know like a half inch of clearance or something right it clogs all the time but we were able to get wood underground and so we were able to validate it with that that you know old pump we kind of we call it old faithful even though it wasn't all that faithful but and where did you validate yeah so we did that at our our project site up in sacramento and so we basically have this site that you know floods it is an orchard it's a walnut orchard and so he can't plant like half of it because it has flood problems so he's very interested the the city that we're doing it in is is famous for having flood problems as well so it's very top of mind they're all like behind levees and when you drive down the road to get there you're like current you're on a road with a levee above you and the farmland below it and so you can just tell you know if this levee breaks this entire area it's over for that yeah it's like but it's not like one foot underwater it's like six feet 20 feet underwater and that's because actually the entire central valley subsided about 20 feet due to groundwater extraction and is that the situation that san rafael has no center fells is a little different um theirs is primarily because they built a lot of it on fill so they would basically import fill they'd like cut tops of mountains off of and put them in center fell or like take tons of dredge out of the bay and put it there and then they also built some directly on top of landfill and so you just like have a landfill you know build a city on top of it and unsurprisingly that it kind of sinks over time as it compacts and it's sinking in some areas as much as two inches a year which is really a lot you know if you're if you're looking at sea level rise for example it is not on that same order lots of people look at what we're doing and they you know might say we're like sea level rise alarmists or something it's really not about that it's about land that sinks and and what you do about that so if you're in an area like jakarta for example you know their their whole city is about to have to be moved because they just have pumped so much groundwater out i saw a figure the other day um it's the same thing in tehran tehran sinks 25 centimeters a year due to groundwater extraction there's just no you know it's hard to even imagine that like what does it mean to sink like a foot a year um but it's a it's a very serious problem and we are basically the anti subsidence and i think the right solution to fix that at scale when i think of like miami or especially like south florida i think this is just a problem with the entire state basically that it's all just going underwater over time yeah their sea level rise is worse on the east coast and lower lower east coast it's also true that you know hurricanes don't don't help that there's a number of other problems that are notable as well like petroleum extraction causes places to sink a ton long beach is famous for that like called a sinking city for years there's many other examples of the same thing happening.

15:29Mexico City is maybe the most famous. It's sunk like it's 80 or 100 feet. So there's no end in sight. It's turtles all the way down. You can sink your city as much as you. And is this a solvable problem at that scale? Like, okay, you say for a 60, even 600 acre project, that's a pretty solvable amount. But then you think of the entire scale of South Florida. Is that a solvable problem where you can just inject a whole bunch of wood chips and it's all good we did the math and florida has enough wood waste wood on a yearly basis to lift the entire city of miami by the whole amount it needs in one year so it's actually surprisingly well matched trees grow like three times as fast down there and so you have really a lot of wood and florida strangely is already pre-separating all their wood from their other waste it also is very much solvable at a city scale long beach notably has two like artificial islands off the coast and they kind of did solve the problem and they solve it by underground injection of water and so when they're extracting the petroleum through this well they're also injecting like seawater through the other i don't know yeah exactly to offset it and so i think if you turn the pumps off this it would probably sink but you know we can kind of put our heads in the sand and you know that that's a nice band-aid for now i know you mentioned that wood chips are basically free and we just produce a ridiculous amount and there's really no place for them to go right now how did you come to the conclusion that wood chips was the right thing to be injecting versus like concrete or just mud yeah it was a pretty easy conclusion just frankly there there really is nothing else that's volumetrically available on that level it's kind of like it's wood or dirt right and surprisingly wood is way cheaper than dirt um it's a huge waste product and so in california i actually i'll give i'll give the centerfell example in my hometown of centerfell that of course you know has these terrible flood problems they ship eight semi truckloads of wood chips every single day including sundays to the center valley to be burned in biomass energy plants we had an intern that got asthma from the same stockton biomass energy plant that centerfowl sends its wood chips to it's very unideal it's subsidized to like 14 cents a kilowatt hour by the state they'd prefer not to do that it's just subsidized wood disposal and you have to do it because otherwise wood would pile up people just you know dump it on the side of the highway if you can't get rid of it centerfowl pays a thousand bucks a semi truckload to get rid of it for example right now and so of course you You can get it for free if you'd want to.

17:51And it's pretty much the exact same almost all over the world where you just have, you know, trees growing constantly and you have to do something about that. You have agricultural waste. We talked to a single farmer in the Central Valley and she said she burned 50 ,000 tons of biomass of like agricultural wood waste that year, which is crazy. It's actually illegal as well. So it's funny that they just talk about that. but that's one source you can get it from urban wood waste so like the local waste municipalities have just from the tree trimming operations that they do a lot of that is more extreme in california because we have these laws now about how many trees you can have close to your house to prevent fires so they've had a you know resurgence of this and you can also get it from sawmills sawmills have tons of waste and they you know bring it mostly to biomass energy plants as well and you can additionally get it from fuel management from like forest fire prevention has tons of that especially in the dry seasons as well can you walk me through the history of just raising land in general i know and you know i'm from alaska and we probably like every three or four years you have to just redo the highways because there's so many potholes from the permafrost it just constantly destroys highways and roads i know you mentioned that alaska is one of the first places where they're like lifting highways kind of using this type of technology yeah alaska does something close so they built pretty much the whole alaskan highway system on wood chip fill but they didn't place it with our underground injection method they just placed like three to four feet of surface fill and then they you know built their highway on top of that just pave it with concrete on top yeah exactly and you do that mostly because it's lightweight fill and so before everyone used pomace they were using wood chip waste it was you know expensive inexpensive it's actually like almost as good as pomace once it's anaerobic it does not decompose at all and so luckily we're going into this with departments in transportation and their geotech's understanding that would persist indefinitely anaerobically huge tailwind for us would be hard without that and alaska is one of the best examples of that they did similar in in oregon and washington and also in california we have the dumbarton bridge which is like 20 minutes uh east of here which is built on i believe 15 feet of wood chip fill on one of the embankments so there's lots of examples of things being built on wood if you're looking for examples of underground injection that's kind of a whole nother category everyone's heard of grouting you could do a lot of this with grouting it would just be so expensive you would choose not to so how much would that cost a lot more i think so we target about 50 000 per acre foot this would be like just material alone it's like 250 000 for cement um so you know you're starting there and then in addition to that cement doesn't flow very well underground this was kind of proven in venice in the 70s they lifted a whole island with multiple buildings on it using a cementious mud mixture called mud jacking and it worked i mean it's kind of weird that the study is so hard to find on google because it was super cool and obviously very relevant for venice that you can just lift like the whole thing using underground injection they really just never did it again because it's so expensive that everyone looked at that and went okay that's not scalable you can't afford that amount of cement you can't afford the giant research team to do that so we solved the cement being super expensive problem with wood chips which are you know free delivered and abundant and then we solved the giant research team to pull this injection off by having robots that do the injection for us and you know, AI planning software.

21:36We also notably have a slurry that performs much better, which is maybe surprising. How did you test that? Yeah. So primarily I'm saying it performs better in terms of how the injection process happens. And so when you are using something that is as viscous as your cementious grout mixture, you need a ton of injection wells. And those wells are super expensive, as you might imagine. so they're doing an injection i this is the wrong number but something on the order of every 10 feet whereas you know we would do it maybe every thousand feet for a really large project and so there's a very large difference in that and it becomes like you have to drill way more holes and it just takes a lot more time that sort of thing yeah exactly um it's also and that's primarily because like wood chips are neutrally buoyant as well and so they flow really well and it's like on the other end of the spectrum from the extremely viscous mix that you use with cement There's lots of other things.

22:31Of course, cement also hardens, and there's all the complexities that come from that. So surprisingly, wood performs super well. We don't claim this publicly usually, but we expect it to perform better in earthquake situations than normal dirt. And so you're starting a leg above. And the reason is because this is under a minimum of 30 feet of consolidated earth. So it's a ton of compaction for us. And that wood chip slurry that you have very quickly turns into something that's more like an MDF or a particle board underground. and you know as you know mdf and particle board are going to be way better to you know build a house on than something like uh you know normal alluvial dirt might be let's say you have a site you're going to do a deployment and let's say you're just raising one acre what does that process actually look like yeah so you load this thing up on this cool little drop deck trailer we have that like has airbags that brings it down you drive it on hold up strangely we tow it on a cyber truck which you might like to see.

23:27I was up in Sacramento two days ago doing exactly this. We actually brought this back for you today and we'll deploy again tomorrow. So it's casual enough to bring it in for a podcast appearance. But we bring that injection Prometheus robot over. We currently at the site also have that big ARC 20-foot long shipping container that's all set up. That takes a little longer to set up. You can spend a day setting it up. You can do it quicker than that, but it's hard. Why is it hard? You have to, so you have to plumb water into it. You have to get electricity source. You have to keep it kind of level.

24:04It doesn't have to be perfect. And then you have to, you know, also set up all of the hoses that get run out to the units like this, this rover unit. And it's certainly possible for us to like do a same day deployment, but you'd be doing the injection late at night. So what we, again, we do that frequently, but like moving towards a world with more normalcy where we're having external contractors do it like our partner gothams i'm expecting they're probably going to do a day set up and maybe some more than that you could have just fully vertically integrated the entire process but you did decide which areas you want to just focus on for now and eventually maybe you do kubana expanding and are doing the entire process yourself but right now it makes sense to have other partners which parts of the process did you decide these are the things we should focus on versus you know just fully expanding yeah i know it's strange because we have the vulcan well drilling robot but one of the first things we decided was well drilling is like it's an industry people know how to drill wells we are not reinventing the wheel and we want them to know that they can do it in a very low cost way this is not the same as like a water well you can do you know 20 of these wells a day like they do you have to do like different standards for water wells yeah it's much different so we are doing non-permanent wells which is great when you're trying to permit this if you have a permanent well you almost always have to get a well drilling permit in any any region to do that whereas with a non-permanent well it's kind of regionally specific in sacramento for example you don't need a well drilling permit for non-permanent wells so what we do is we basically come into the site either we drill the wells or an external contractor does we do this you know set up in the parking lot with the arc system and then we have our rovers that go out to the different injection wells and actually lift them up you'll have you know less rovers than than total number of injection wells but usually multiple and you'll you know do that injection process you'll lift it to your side topography and at the end you you pull it all up back out of the well and it's just an open well bore which is great means you're leaving no hardware behind so there's no added cost uh there's nothing for any kind of permitting agency like a waterboard or an epa to get concerned about and it's just you know really low stakes and and fairly easy to to do and to conceive of i remember when jeff bezos was starting Amazon, he mentioned that basically it would be impossible to start Amazon even a few years earlier if the internet didn't exist and the like roads and highways didn't exist and UPS even didn't exist.

26:25Then there was a bunch of these different parts that would have made the cost of starting Amazon be way too high. Like it'd be just impossible to do. Is this one of those things where if you didn't have the like geography data or topology data from California, it wouldn't be possible to start? Yeah, that that would not be the thing that would have killed us. It would be hard without the level of artificial intelligence that you can kind of casually do now to pull a lot of these things off. Or there's just data all over the place and you just got to go pick it up. Data scarcity is definitely a problem.

26:53I would say more than that, it's the like AI talent behind it. We've been able to make some pretty big leaps forward. We kind of repurposed some algorithms from the robotics world that, you know, had recently won ICRA papers, for example, for our own underground geology use cases. So there's certainly something there. But more than that, I would say robotics in general as an industry is kind of what enables this to be possible to scale. You can't casually hand this off to a contractor if you don't go for the level of autonomy that we're going for. They can't just go like manually control these pumps.

27:26We tried. You clog it every single time without fail. So you do need to bring that autonomy in. And then there's a number of, you know, well-timed other factors. One is the fire risk, which is causing an obscene amount of wood and wood waste. And then the other one is, of course, sea level rise and subsidence kind of finally catching up to most major cities. Let's say you go to San Rafael and you do want to help them with lifting up their town just a little bit. You say like a couple feet, something like that. Six. Six feet. Okay. What would you have to do prior to being willing and comfortable to just say yes to that kind of project?

28:02Yeah, we definitely are a few years out from that right now. We want to do some infrastructure projects right now. We're going to start a project very soon. That is near Petaluma, very near Highway 37. And so we'll be pulling in partners. Caltrans wrote an internal grant that we're hoping gets funded to study our work there. And so we'll bring in other partners and they'll give third-party validation of the efficacy of this and the ability to lift serious infrastructure with this and not just open land like what we've been doing right now. We will then kind of stair-step in complexity. I hope to do some projects with the Department of Water Resources in California.

28:44There's a$20 billion aqueduct subsidence issue that we could fix very easily. There are lots of other relatively low-hanging fruit projects. Highways, surprisingly, are one of them. We can lift highways much more accurately than you need to not crack them, which is the question we get all the time. We can lift things to about a two millimeter level precision, which is, of course, much more than you actually need. And so kind of stair-step up and do infrastructure. and then finally we will get to projects where we're doing multi-story buildings which for us is like kind of where it starts to get real you know it's not table stakes anymore you're lifting you know someone's home you're lifting you know someone you're not going to have them move out while you're lifting it right so this is something you just do and coincide as well they're living yeah if we're doing your highway you're driving over it if we're doing your runway you're flying over it we're doing um anyone's house they'll continue to live in it which is one of the best parts of this technology why hasn't someone done this before like we can't figure that out We have tried to figure it out because it's like we're playing Minecraft and we're mixing earth with wood.

29:42And if you put it together and you have the solution for global flooding and somehow no one had ever done that. I can't even believe that we were like the first hand in the cookie jar for that. But we feel very fortunate and have tried to be stewards of this new technology and not vertically integrate on the level where no one else can do this without us. We don't want to be the ones preventing people from using this technology that could save their entire city. We want to instead be licensing this out so any contractor can go do this so cities can do it themselves. Currently, one of the ministers of Indonesia, as we speak, is pitching Jakarta on using this technology for the whole city.

30:22That's enabled by the fact that we would just license it directly to local contractors who understand the permitting that happens in Jakarta, Indonesia, which I certainly do not. and so instead of having an individual team that you have to hire to figure out that entire process you just outsource it to some other team that already knows it yeah yeah what a nightmare i can't even imagine um what it'd be like to have to go figure out the permitting in every single one of these places we also have the huge tailwind that you can kind of shoo this into a lot of project types that are already like about to start if you have a new home development project and you've permitted this and your a firm specs a final compaction amount and a final topography we can just do that like to spec so you can just bring in this technology instead we've seen that in the wetland restoration world a lot where like they'll have pre-spec those two things and this will just work and so they don't have to make any changes they just switch and use this technology and they can start like next month i got to imagine that this has not been a super smooth process what would have been the biggest things that have just gone wrong it took a while to figure it out I mean, just to be frank, we had lots of long days and, you know, I was sleeping in the back of a Chevy Silverado many nights at our pallet site.

31:35You know, I struggled to find the thing that was the hardest, I would say, just in general. T-tech is hard. We are really great at fabricating here. Luckily, we have a team that, you know, cuts metal like it's butter and builds very large things overnight. but actually getting it to work repeatedly repeatedly and to be able to do customer handoffs and and have assurances that that is going to work well for them as well has been maybe the hardest thing so far is just getting that equipment to work as reliably as you need it to to get those operating hours in the clogging issue funny enough was like one of our big things where we we finally solved it by figuring out a really good additive and a really great slurry mixture and having the machine take control over that so that we wouldn't make manual errors anymore we've solved you know other injection problems with just really going back to first principles and like what can you do to affect what's happening underground it's such a black box but actually we've come up with many things that you can do that allow you to fix problems before they happen we have like jetting technology for example that really helps a lot lowers the initial injection pressure so that it's not the biggest pump you've ever seen and we don't have to use crazy concrete pumps.

32:47Is that also something that you're thinking about where if you just expand the time that you're willing to do a project and maybe suddenly you can use way cheaper pumps and other technology? Or is this something where it doesn't really have a huge impact, whether the project takes like two days, three days, a week, two months, that sort of thing? Occasionally we'll have big impacts for customers. So our partner Gotham's, for example, does a lot of FEMA projects. With FEMA projects, they care a lot about the speed, of course i think one of the main advantages this technology is also that it can be done very quickly because you don't have that huge compaction time so you're starting really a leg up because you don't have that like year and a half it's like a two-week compaction process instead of a multi-year one you you do definitely have a huge advantage from speed and it's cool you know similar to many project types unsurprisingly you can just scale it up so if i wanted it to be faster i would just bring more robots to the site and we would just do it faster there's no issues with you're basically raising one part of the land while the other part isn't being raised like at the same time that's one of the things we plan for so that the change in grade between your let's say your natural topography and the one that you lift you have to plan that transition zone so we have like an earth anchor technology for example where if you want to get a really steep transition you can put our earth anchors in and you can make it so only lifts the roadway and doesn't lift the surrounding area.

34:08If you don't care as much, you can save some costs by just doing a larger scale project where you're, you know, keeping a whatever 3 % grade all the way back to your neighbor's house. When you were working at SpaceX, what did you learn there that you've kind of taken to this? Really a lot. I had a really incredible mentor there and also an incredible lead who taught me a lot of leadership and responsibility just at a high level other than that i i learned how to manufacture things and what were you working on i was working on dragon thermal protection systems primarily so dragon is the one that brings the astronauts to the iss and also but you know something where reliability really matters a lot right and that's like i think that's like the most uh reliable part of anything that spacex launches because it has to work yeah no it really was like a zero um zero failure game but yeah i'd work on the back shell so all of the carbon fiber all of the protection heat shielding that you see on top of it was was the main thing i would work on and i pretty much touched every part there i also worked on the raptor rocket engines for a bit because we had a production crisis and i was you know flown down to starbase for a bit to work on booster as well.

35:27What was that like? Really cool. Very cowboy. Felt like a hurricane was about to hit all the time. I don't love that tip, bottom tip of the US weather, but it was cool. You just, you know, I'd go to bed at like 3 a.m. after working all night long and wake up, you know, at 10, walk back into work and there'd just be a new building that like was not there when I left at 3 a.m. So it was a pretty incredible place to see and to, you know, be around that piece of work, I think was very inspiring and maybe one of my my bigger lessons yeah it's it's kind of nice i we were there recently i think like a week and a half ago and they were building megabay uh for starship production i think of v3 i would love to see that i i worked in high bay which was yeah high bay is so tall that when you look up to it to try to see the the top you always guess wrong with your it's hard it's hard to understand because obviously there's there's taller skyscrapers with skyscraper you kind of know where to look but you always guess wrong because high bay just has this weird ratio where i just kept doing this double adjust on my head all the time and it was really cool i was at the top of it where elon's office is and looking out from there you can basically see to mexico it's a really nuts feeling because there's very few projects in the united states of the same scale and like the speed of things happening that they created a city i mean brownsville was there before but it wasn't it wasn't the Brownsville there's nightlife in the city now and Starbase is like a destination city all of a sudden Boca Chica was not really a place that you could go that there was technically the one little neighborhood you know on Weems Road was technically there on some level before but that was really it even the the housing it's just it looks like a mini Manhattan project happening I think the Manhattan project is almost the perfect comparison to Starbase it It has really just felt like that the entire time where Elon, you know, is giving this directive from the top that like thou must, thou must count in minutes instead of, instead of days.

37:23And so you just, you do, you do work like getting to Mars depends on it. Yeah. What was the, what was the craziest story from working there? I don't know what my craziest, my favorite was there's this welder there called Bulldog who's by far the best welder. And so he gets to do whatever he wants and he just whips this ATV around all the time. He works like 120 hour weeks and everyone else is not allowed to work double overtime, but they can't like tell their best welder. No. And he was like one of my favorite guys I've ever met. I made lots of friends there. I was, I'll give, I'll give one funny story.

37:56So I'm there. This is a Thanksgiving and they have a fantastic banquet and I'm excited to go back to Hawthorne where I was, I was based out of primarily. and so i'm supposed to take elon's jet back which is an honor and i took it there as well is that the private jet or the spacex jet it's actually his personal jet so he has two personal jets that he just like let spacex executives use um but also the engineers get to take it pretty frequently too and so i was taking la and uh starbase or uh primarily but lots of other things too it goes to austin as well um so anyways i'm i'm supposed to go on this jet and my flight gets canceled.

38:36I'm like, oh man, I got bumped. Like, I think I'm going to have to book a, you know, a normal Southwest flight back. But luckily I get rescheduled to something like 9 PM and get on the plane. I get back. It's basically midnight in Hawthorne. I lived right across the street from SpaceX. So I kind of walked in and I made the mistake of checking my phone right before going to bed. And there's like seven emails from Elon and they're like company CC at all emails. And And basically he says, everyone needs to come back into work right now. This is like midnight on Thanksgiving. And apparently there was some, you know, misunderstanding in how well Raptor production was going.

39:14And so Elon is there, like telling everyone he's welding on the shop floor right now of SpaceX. And I walk in, I don't know what the heck to do. And this is not my team. SpaceX was very much split into, you know, your different teams. you know dragon and uh falcon and falcon heavy and starship and raptor yeah and raptor and starlink and they're all split up but everyone is told just come in right now on thanksgiving and go work on on raptor production and i thought i was gonna see elon i didn't see him there i did see him a couple times at starbase but anyways i come in i work till i think 7 a.m with jacob who's the senior director of raptor production it was super cool it was just me and him like fixing a robot welding arm for raptor and i was also like inside of one of the one of the rocket engines just like manually sanding the wall trying to get it done faster like this is going to make all the difference for launch somehow but i did end up doing weekend flex work for the next like two months i think on raptor and i honestly kind of enjoyed it but that that that is the the best story i have for the intensity of spacex yeah i i've kind of uh recently come to the conclusion i wouldn't say that chaos is necessary but i've noticed that even if you like read elon's bio by walter isaacson he's talking about these surges and i think that was probably one of the the surges where randomly at 11 p.m.

40:45if you don't have your phone on you miss an email from Elon saying come right now and then if you're like not there that's that's the time to be there how like what did you learn during those surges I just had a lot of fun I mean I think most people that go to work at SpaceX know what they're getting into and they kind of you know I would compare it to maybe fraternity hazing or something for you you know what you're gonna get into and you're you're walking in preparing to have your engineering elevated and some of that comes from the intensity of the work the responsibility that you're given immediately you know you as an engineering intern are responsible for your work i mean you own hardware almost immediately and you're responsible for that getting to completion my team was always the the most behind team because our stuff was like arts and crafts basically where technicians would make small errors and would you know threatened to push launch back by a month and so we had you know upper management breathing down our necks all the time people would literally sleep on the shop floor and like not do their laundry for multiple weeks because they were you know working 70 hours trying to trying to get stuff done but that intensity is very good and in many ways spacex is very adept at empowering engineers and you're aware immediately that everything that you're doing has meaning and that you can really move the needle.

42:06My final presentation that I gave said that, and this is checked by someone else, by the way, I said I saved the company like$15 million, which is amazing, right? And if you were going to work at Lockheed Martin or some other company, you wouldn't feel that same way at the end of your time there that you would have had an impact at that level, especially not as fast as SpaceX will let you fill those shoes. When I was there, I was talking with one of the rocket designers for the door that's going to be on starship and he basically said you can have as much responsibility as you want and you can just keep on taking on responsibility and it's not as long as you just deliver and if you don't deliver then you're just out but if you deliver you just take on as much responsibility as you want you can definitely out people have 30 feet from elon rules where they wouldn't get too close but those doors are actually hard i worked on the one on dragon i worked on the the seal and the seal redesign and it's like impossible to get those seals RTV perfectly because it's again it's all arts and crafts so how do you get arts and crafts reliable to the point where you can like have an astronaut safely be in there so we would be you know testing and trying to make sure this seal went down appropriately and then you do pull tests on it to make sure and lo and behold you know you had some air intrusion or some other issue and it wasn't perfectly applied and you'd start over so we like redesigned the entire door just so that we could fix that and you know lots of examples of that we do pull testing on lots of things and it would fail and you know be on the phone with nasa trying to decide if you can ship it or not or if you got to go back to the redesign and i i think seeing how high stakes everything was in that environment where you have responsible engineers and manufacturing engineers working together it's a little different on the experimental areas like starbase you have like build engineers that do both but you very much have like a partner engineer and these two teams one is trying to produce them one is responsible for designing it making sure that it fits that design and and you're not shipping hardware that's unsafe but that's a very functional way to very you know quickly solve problems and iterate and get something out that is safe but is also like cost effective and you have lots of opportunity to innovate one of the main things that had just happened when i got there for example is we started to reuse the outer back shell so we would use the carbon composites again and so we would save all that and we would reapply the like ablative material that goes over it instead of having that have to like get completely scrapped every time you do a launch just because the outer area got burnt so lots of innovation came from like how do you reuse that how do you test that that's safe how do you um you know actually build like a perfect new layer over something that's already flown and now they've you know reused a falcon 9 i had done earlier but they got to like 24 reuses on a falcon 9 and it is so amazing human ingenuity is so amazing i mean my prius barely even made it 60 000 miles in high school so it's uh it's it's pretty cool coming out of that type of environment where there's a lot of structure and it's very clear you're not the only person that has to have high intensity you know if you're the founder of a company you kind of set the pace whereas if you're at some massive company like spacex like most massive companies the intensity is just not very high um but then i think with spacex it's very high um how do you kind of like hiring spacexers i've hired to i have a candidate here right now for a work trial who i am going to make an offer to if you're seeing this michael you did you did great today um but he's he's our first like non-spacexer i've hired in a while i'm just because it's really great to get people who have come from that high intensity environment yeah how do you actually adopt that into the work that you're doing because if you have let's say you have a deadline and it's like we have to have a a dragon capsule ready so that we can ship you know passengers on it by x date i think that's a very big fire that you have under your ass whereas with this it's like if we don't if we delay a week or a month or even a day maybe the holes aren't dug maybe the land doesn't you know move an inch but it doesn't really it doesn't have the same fire yeah getting teams that care helps a lot I mean I would say you can kind of lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink you need people that are passionate about the mission spiky young kids that want to work on really hard problems is is only who we hire a lot of makers also you want to get people that if they weren't working with you they would still be you know doing something late that night soldering you know it's important to get people that kind of live to work instead of working to live.

46:40But I, you know, as a founder, I try to really live what we're doing. We had, you know, a few periods of this where I exemplified that. Some of them were at our pallet site. Some of them were just here. I was working no less than 90 hour weeks for the entirety of our fundraise, which was interesting. That was, you know, a very high intensity time for us because we were both deployed in the field and I was trying to raise a round. We had a number of other ones. was a silly one recently was I did like four out of five all-nighters going into our launch, which is crazy. We had - That's a horrible idea of a go on.

47:12So Ty and I were clay pigeon shooting on a Thursday. Was it Thursday? I think it was a Thursday. Damn, okay. And I called David Zagainov, who was another friend of ours who was there, his in-house designer, and asked him to do a logo that day. And by that night at like 9 p.m., he had pulled off a fantastic logo, which we now use our bison. And I had to build a website and get a launch video done off of that before our Monday launch and so we basically had a team which we we'd worked with before that was working in Europe and another team working in the U.S. and I would run them like in 12-hour shifts to do that very quickly and so I would pull an all-nighter to make sure that you know they didn't get stuck and and do some website poorly it seemed silly but i'm i'm glad with how it turned out we got a lot of customers in from that launch and launch video was the same thing just you know trying to put all the branding immediately overnight in in that um took took some time when you're coming into contact with these types of customers especially if you're working with cities and governments and those types of organizations the default pace is very not urgent um how do you kind of drive that urgency you think you have to be really honest with your customers like we are a venture-backed company we are on that timeline If you want to work with us, you must be aware of that and you have to have that same urgency.

48:35I think lots of municipalities, just like you flagged, do not have that urgency and they are hard customers to work with for that reason. Land developers are in a different category. Lots of folks in wetland restoration, as weird as it sounds, are actually working more urgently than we are for whatever reason. Do you know why? I'd love to say they're just fervent environmentalists, but usually it's because we're jumping into a project that they've already decided that they're going to break ground on. like a month or something. And so we have to either fit that next quarter timeline or we don't and we get passed over.

49:06And so it's very much a customer group specific thing. You need to find customers that can work for you as you scale. And our approach where we are working with contractors on a licensing basis and a revenue split basis allows us to do lots of different types of customer projects with pretty much the same end relationship for us, which is just us kind of guiding this prime contractor through the process. You're trying to get 10 of these machines built in the next 12 months. What is that going to enable you to do? And then like, what's the scaling past that? Yeah, that's going to enable us to run concurrent projects, which is pretty important.

49:41So right now we can only really do one project at a time, which is, of course, pushing everything else off. We are going to also be able to do projects with higher complexity and higher acreage. So some projects require you to be injecting on multiple wells at the same time so you can get that nice even membrane lift that you want where you get the two millimeter accuracy exactly yeah so we have a elevation tracking system that allows for that but to actually perform the injection at any reasonable rate requires multiple injection robots in lots of cases and so as you scale you just require more and more we also need to do three arc units at in that same time period so that's basically three of these big 20 foot shipping containers that we fill.