Technology, Connected - He Quit SpaceX to Make Houses from Grass | Nathan Silvernail, CEO of Plantd

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Nathan Silvernail quit SpaceX to make wood from grass.Building the first part of a rocket SpaceX ever reused - the nose cone - wasn’t enough. After a decade working for Elon Musk, he quit. Took everything he had learnt.And started Plantd. The plan? Make carbon-negative engineered lumber from fast-growing perennial grass. Climate tech meets space tech. Wood, without trees.  Plantd's panels replace OSB, the oriented strand board that sheathes the floors, walls and roofs of almost every new American home. In this hotly anticipated episode, Nathan joins Thinking On Paper to talk about his SpaceX journey, why he thinks Mars is a distraction from the work in front of us, how the lumber industry accounts for the wood it burns, and why building a material stronger than steel turned out to be wrong. You’ll get insight into the nine-month harvest cycle, what it takes to change the culture of an industry without letting it notice, and why he believes the unit economics that let SpaceX displace ULA will do the same to timber.Please enjoy the show.Thinking on Paper connects the dots between technology and what it means to be human. New episodes every week.🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠--Chapters(00:00) Grass building panels that replace wood(04:10) SpaceX: what the job actually cost him(07:56) What a payload fairing is and how SpaceX recovers it(11:52) Lumber: why anger put him in this industry(24:02) OSB alternative: a drop-in structural panel(28:00) Carbon negative building materials explained(29:50) SpaceX and ULA: the same playbook for lumber(35:55) Why hemp, bamboo and mycelium fail as building materials(40:14) Harvest: nine months against fifteen years(46:00) Why the Space Shuttle was retired

I was also working for the United Launcher Lines. That's the sister or the company between Boeing and Lockheed that managed the Atlas and Delta Rockets. I did a whole bunch of development work for them. They paid for my graduate degree, and then their biggest competitors, SpaceX, effectively hired me and I went to work for them and completely displaced them in the launch party, right? Back then they were laughing, you know, like, you guys are still,

you're not going to land rockets, that doesn't make any sense. You guys think you can do this, you can't do this. And look at where we're at now. where we're at now, where ULA's their launch, companies, nothing compared to what we did at SpaceX. And it's awesome because of that because we took that calcified system, or Elon, I would say, approached a very meaningful way. We're doing the same thing with the lumber market. What you see behind me is our landed rocket. This will have the level of disruption in the lumber market that SpaceX had in the launch market. Disruptors and curious minds,

welcome to another episode of thinking on paper, connecting the dots of all the technologies, and finding the impact on what it means to be human, whether that's business, culture, society, life. And today, our guest is Nathan Silvernail. He is the CEO and founder of Planted, the L-A-N-T-D. And what they're doing is pretty awesome. They are making structural panels made from fast, growing grass, stronger, more moisture-resistant and more fire resistance than the panels that they replace. We don't need wood any longer. Nathan, thank you for thinking on paper with us today.

Welcome to the show. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I think we all understand space rockets and SpaceX. What we don't understand, perhaps, is why you would turn your back on that to do something down on Earth. So what's your motivation, Nathan?

That's my first question, really. What's driving you? I'd say by and large, you know, if you're going to dive into the high level as to like why I kind of changed paths so heavily is when I was working at SpaceX and, you know, even my years before that, I started my own contracting business. I was I was contracting engineering work for NASA when I was like 19. I was very married to space. I love it. You know, it's still I still love it. But at the same time I look at the times that we're currently in. I look at the times that I'm, you know, seeing come down the line 10, 15, 20 years. And I really want to devote my time to something that I find to be really meaningful. While I love space travel and I'll always geek out on it and I think it definitely has a place for us in the future. I think we're putting too much of a heavy priority on that as a society. And I think we can spend a lot more time and a lot more effort on things here on Earth that will benefit us currently, future posterity and even long-term posterity where we get to the point where space travel, you know, especially in how. happening other planets will certainly be cool and something we should look forward to,

but not something that I think we should be focusing on right now. And as a kid, Elon really, you know, I really just fell head over heels for the idea that Elon kind of helped sell. The whole like Occupy Mars thing became near and dear to my heart. I love the shirt. I wrapped it every day. I saw the mural. I ate lunch in front of it every day.

And, you know, I always thought it was cool. And it is cool because it's a sexy sci-fi thing. But realistically, it's not something we should be. spending our time on. And once I realize that, and I realize the level of effort that we need to put here on our planet, especially when it comes to increasing the efficiency of manufacturing in absolutely every regard, we should be putting way more heavy focus on that in the near term than we are. So I think that's part of the question, or sorry, part of the answer. There's other aspects to it. If I'm being honest, SpaceX was very hard. It was a very difficult company to work for.

You know, I worked there for the better half of a decade. And you, the way that I like to think of it is it was just this really gnarly school. You went from high school to college to grad school to SpaceX. And SpaceX was the real test. And to kind of anchor everybody's understanding of what it's like to work for SpaceX, or at least what it was like to work for SpaceX while I was there, it was very much impossible. I worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for six months.

You know, not a lot of people can actually do that and maintain that level of output. And you saw that on the attrition levels there. Most people didn't make it past the first year. Hell, most people were like, as soon as I vest stock, I'm out. I had a different approach. I like the pain. And so I survived pretty well and I flourished pretty well. But like I said, at the end of the day, that definitely kind of played into some of my thinking when it came to that.

What was like, you always hear the SpaceX interview is pretty challenging. What was the toughest aspect of that, or was it tough? I didn't think it was tough. No, well, I have to kind of frame the timing. When I started at SpaceX, it was a much smaller company. They sought me out. I didn't like go try to get a job there. So it was kind of a different angle, I would say.

I found the interview process to be pretty straightforward. In fact, they're not a, They're not a company anymore, but I was also interviewing for scaled composites at the same exact point in time. It was scaled composites on Wednesday and SpaceX on Thursday. And I just sort of piggybacked on the hotel that one of them was paying for. It wasn't hard at all. I kind of went in and it was pretty much, I had an offer before I even walked out of the building. The power of the pivot is really awesome because we have to be flexible moving into an unknown new version of the world.

and like to hear you go from SpaceX and rockets and life support systems and all of that stuff to pivoting to what you do now is a testament that, hey, listen, you know, for for folks that have been in the same career for a long time, a lot of people think I can't do, I have to stay here. I've invested and I can't pivot. I'm too old. I don't have the knowledge. Bullshit. Put yourself out there. You can make it happen. It's hard, but you can do it, right? There's my call to action disruptors and curious minds. It's a podcast by Jeremy. To that point, I give talks at the local universities, Duke and NC State and UNC, and I just gave a lecture last week to one of the freshman business classes. And I told them the same thing. They actually came up to me and were asking me questions because some of them are like in a business class, but they're a physics major. And they're like, I'm just worried that like I'm not doing the right thing.

Be ready to pivot. No matter what you're doing now, I guarantee you in 10 years, you're going to look at things very differently. You're going to evaluate life decision. and career past and all of that. None of it's a waste of time. You're learning. You're applying what you're learning now

and it's going to give you a neat perspective when you get there. So absolutely. You mentioned that you did 15 hour days, seven days a week, six months of the year. Now you've got your own business. So you're working twice as hard, right?

No, I work 14 times as hard. I thought you got 14 times as hard. More hours. 20 hours. Way more. Yeah, it is a very different world. Working at SpaceX was cool, especially on my first projects.

I built a first reusable payload pairing. I don't think that gets enough attention, by the way, especially in the world of landable rockets. Like the first thing we ever actually really reused was a payload pairing. Can you explain that a little deeper for people that may not know? Sure, yeah. The payload faring is basically the conical part of the rocket on the top

that separates just as soon as you get out of the atmosphere to basically inject the payload onto orbit, or into orbit, rather. And so it's basically what takes the load of the aerodynamic pressure as you're reaching orbit. And so it's, I think each half costs like $4 million, so assume $8 million total for the pairing combination.

And Elon, you know, being Elon and thinking the way that he does, he came out to the floor one day and was just like, this is $4 million coming from the sky. Like, why would we not go catch it? Right. We can go catch it. Why can't we? And so that kind of bred this really interesting idea

where we were like, all right, how would we catch it? And we actually built a whole development phase around this. And it's really beautiful in the sense. And you look at how society's changing. You look at how technology is changing, especially in aerospace. And this was really a pretty pivotal point.

You know, what got us to where we're at now or where SpaceX is at now and how Elon really started to sink his, you know, ideas of reusability in place and really expand them in a notable way. But, you know, basically what you could imagine is these large bus size pieces. of carbon fiber coming back from space and you got to figure out how to catch them. And so we went through a whole development campaign.

It was actually pretty badass. I lived on a boat in like the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between Florida and Africa for months waiting for a rocket launch to occur to actually catch this thing from space for the first time. And what most people won't know is the very first payload we ever actually retrieved from orbit was the same exact day we ever landed. ended a rocket on land for the first time. And what's cool about that is here in my atrium,

I've got this little homage to SpaceX where I used to collect hardware and I have all these cool little pieces of hardware from the different things I built or worked on. And they gave us a mission patch for the first rocket landing. And it has with mine, I framed it and it has a bolt that I pulled off that payload fairing. So the very first rocket to ever land on land, plus the first payload fairing we ever actually got back from orbit,

I have a piece of that hardware that I save. But it was a really cool project. It worked just by basically figuring out how does it fall, correcting how it falls, putting cold gas thrusters all over it and effectively a parachute system and kind of going from there. I love how you simplified that so quick. Oh, just put some thrusters on and spit around, get a parachute, get out there and catch it. It's a pretty freaking amazing feat. Was it, did someone just say, who was it?

I know what we do. We just got out there. We do this, this and this. Or did it emerge much more professionally than that? Or was it literally somebody, this is what we do? Were there different paths going on at the same time as people tried to find a solution? Oh, no, not at all. It was Elon injected an idea of we should reuse this.

And then I was working with, there were a couple of guys on my team at the time that had to be the most brilliant engineers I've ever worked with. Like, just incredibly impressive thinkers. And they put this plan together. And they ultimately, when they pitched it to Elon, he was like part of the plan was I go live on a boat for a while, right? And so when we pitched that to Elon, he just got a big kick out of it. And we kind of went down the path. And, you know, we understand that there's iterations to a process, right, where you can't optimize something until it's a thing.

And so our first step was just make it a thing, as inefficient or scrappy as it might be. And he was all over it. But it was definitely to the testament of just some very brilliant and engineers. Buckle your seat belts. Ladies and gentlemen, we're making a hard pivot. Let's talk about how things get built here on earth, buildings, houses, all of those things that are traditionally used, the material used for that, things like OSB and siding board and two by fours and all of that kind of stuff.

Do you mean buildings and materials, Jeremy? That's exactly what I'm saying. It's exactly what I'm saying. Thanks for raining me in. So building materials, right? How did you, how did you land on this? And why did you pick this board, this new building material as the piece to reinvent? Anger.

Yeah, absolutely anger. I would say it was a very long process to figure out what we wanted to do. It was in that like, kind of like payload fairing development or fairing recovery development. You have to opt, you can't optimize a thing that doesn't exist. And so for us, it was like, what is it that we're even trying to optimize here? And really diving into all of that and understanding like, where are we failing as a civilization when it comes to our development? It was really hard for me to actually dig into because it's so complex. And I had no real experience in any of these industries when I was getting started.

So we were just throwing stuff at the wall, to be honest. It was, what do we care about? We started with that one question. Like, what is it that we want to do? We just went through the last 15 years of our life. I mean, when I say we, I mean, Mike Co-Brown and I, he came from SpaceX, too. We were tied at the hip and we did some gnarly shit together. So we just in our Wadatatan.

He's our co-founder and CTO. And we've done some really cool stuff together. And so when we used to walk and we called him coffee walks at SpaceX, whenever we just couldn't take it anymore and we needed a break. We kind of go lean on each other, go for a walk, grab coffee. And we would just daydream about what else we wanted to do and where we would. wanted to show up for the world. And ultimately, we really started to put emphasis on the climate side. I am an environmentalist at heart. I adore Earth and think that as a species, we live parasitically on this planet, where we're not really showing up in the way that we should be for posterity and for

our future Earth or even our current Earth. And I think you look back at generations, especially through the industrialization period, where our fathers and fathers' fathers made decisions that were for the near term and not for the long term. And we're experiencing so much of that pain today. And I look at the kids these days and I have these lectures with them that are just like, I'm sorry. You know what I mean? And so that's kind of how I look at it. And when I look at the lumber industry, it's a perfect example of just this like really antiquated way of doing things where they came up with a solution out of a necessity back in the day. It wasn't actually, the solution, they didn't take a lens of like, is it sustainable? Can we do this forever? No. Well, like,

later we'll get us through the next 10 years and we'll make a bunch of money doing it. So that's what I mean when I say anger and why I got to where we were at. But, you know, if you back up, really what we were solving for, and we threw a matrix at the wall, just like we would solve everything. We've designed the requirements based around the problem. We think we're trying to solve. Carbon sequestration, right? What's the heart of the problem right now?

Our emissions are through the roof. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is just way too high. It's obvious. How do we bring that down and how do we bring it down as fast as humanly possible? So we went and we explored all of the different industries that are heavy emitters, right? You've got power, you've got steel, you've got concrete, you've got lumber. Most people want to avoid lumber as a topic. And when it comes to emissions, and that's another reason why I say anger got me on this path,

is because when I actually went through and did all the math, like they have to publish, all the major lumber companies have to publish their emissions data. And they're emitting huge portions of their steps so that they can claim that they're carbon neutral, like net zero basically. and it's just, it's literally a lie. And so when I went through that and I realized the way that they were manipulating the numbers and you look at the carbon emissions on the lumber industry, it's bad. And so I think that's really what got us driving on it. The fact that all of my buddies from SpaceX went to work on Fusion,

I was obsessed with Fusion and was like, that'd be a cool place to spend my time. But then things changed my mind. Like, we can't all go work on Fusion, you know? We can't all go do this one thing and try to solve one problem. Some of us have to go off and do the things that maybe aren't as sexy. You know, maybe nobody else is even thinking about. And I think lumber really solidified that for me, especially like I said, when I went through

the mat, I started going to job sites. I started talking to builders. I started talking to who our current customers are now and just learning just, honestly, everything kind of inefficient and wrong about the industry. And it just has so much low hanging fruit that if we just took a step back, applied first principles, everything that we do in this regard, we can come up with a really, really meaningful solution that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere at record rates. I don't know that I'd ever say we have a chance at actually reversing it in a meaningful way to go back to where we were in a

very fast way. But we can certainly make a huge debt. And then the main goal isn't like, let's hurry up and solve the problem. The main goal is let's set next generation and next generation and the next generation on a path that is sustainable. Don't take the lens of our fathers and solve for ourselves and today and the amount of money we can make. Do you have any data or any percentages on the carbon emissions of the lumber industry to give us something to think about in terms of how it relates to steel, for example? Yeah, 20% of the lumber industry or sorry, 20% of the biomass in the lumber industry is

burnt to actually dry the material in the manufacturing process. So in order to make engineered wood, for example, there's a recipe they have to follow. Part of that recipe is removing a certain amount of moisture from the biomass in the first place. They basically omit the fact that they do that. And they assume that it's a one for one because of the plant was grown and carbon was sucked out. And then now we're releasing it back to the atmosphere. But because they already did it, they're kind of trying to equate that to zero. When in reality, if they would have just let the tree stay alive and not cut it down and not use a part of it to dry,

we wouldn't have released all of that back into the atmosphere, so you certainly have to account for that. It's things like that that they're taking credit for that they shouldn't be. And it's effectively falsifying their emissions records, and it's putting humanity on a track that isn't actually like a sustainable idea, at least with the lumber industry.

When you go to steel and concrete, it's a different mechanism altogether. Is this strictly for like the engineered wood, like the OSB kind of stuff? Or is this for lumber sticks? Like is this across? It's predominantly in the engineered lumber side. Yeah.

When it comes to dimensional lumber and just you're taking a log and you're ripping it down into different geometries, um, they tend to let that kind of like floor dry is what I call it where you're just kind of letting it sit out and reach a certain moisture level off the bat. It's really just around engineered lumber, which is becoming more and more and more of a solution. Obviously in the 1950s, when we realize old growth trees were finite, they, you know, emerge this idea of OSB-oriented strand board where, okay, well, we can take the trees that we can't cut down and make dimensional lumber and then we'll just gloom back together in the shape that we want. That was like ripping, you're born.

That was like ripping the bark off those and then processing that into some weird pulp and layer and mold and. Yep. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. Mm-hmm. You sound like, like you know wood, Jeremy, so I don't know anything about wood. So already when you said engineered wood, when I think of wood, I think of going to the

local DIY shop and buying some wood to make a table. You're not talking about that kind of wood. You're talking about wood that is used in building what? So when I say the difference between lumber and like engineered lumber, engineered lumber is just that. It's lumber you take, you break it down into its small particles and you glue it back into the morphology that you're looking for to meet the fit form and function that you're designing for. Regular lumber is literally just that. You take a log and you cut it into two by twos or sorry, two by fours or four by fours or whatever. So those are the varying differences.

Either way, it is lumber. It's still technically would. And to be correct in that regard, what we do is still would. By definition, even though we're using perennial grass, it's still would. It's just a more efficient form of it than a timber-based variant. Yeah. So another call out I want to do, because it's going to stay in my brain for a while. I loved the question that you said, where did we, where do we want to show up for the world?

What a question, man. What a way to like point and direct. I think a lot of people feel like kind of aimless in meeting and purpose is this like big elusive thing. But if you can sit down and ask yourself that question, that can that can really get some good stuff going. I appreciate you're saying that. Very cool. Especially in the face of what we're facing as well.

It's even like the battle and it is a battle seems so overwhelmingly against us that it's just I can't do anything. I'm not going to do anything. Oh, yeah. And people die in that mindset. set all day long. That's why, like I say, when I give these talks to these kids, you know, they're 17, 18. I look at them like, I am sorry. We put you in a bad spot. But I'll do my best if you show up and you do your best. And together, tomorrow will look great. But you do have to be prepared to show up as a warrior and start fighting the system that we need to fight. Hell, dude,

you got me ready to run to the wall, man. This is awesome. Nathan, what's the perennial grass wall? Right. Well, it's pretty strong. You might not be able to run through it. Real quick, before we move on the details of the, you know, how we turn grass into stuff to make buildings awesome. What's one of the coolest questions you heard from one of your, you know, people you did to talk to that, you know, when it went to Q&A that resonated with you for one reason or another, like from a student? That's a good question. Honestly, a lot of them are very focused more kind of locally.

say a lot of them have curiosities around how they think that, you know, what would be best for them and like, how could I show up? And I try to frame it in a sense of if don't try to think that any minimal step that you take is not enough. Just be willing to take any step that you can. And I think, you know, when I get more and more feedback around what we're doing and how we had this shift or sorry, how I had this shift from like a very technical role at SpaceX and in aerospace to what I'm doing now, people understand the level of like pivot that you actually can do to show up for for betterment in the world and I think you know that resonates cool so what are you building tell us about the product tell us about where it's being used how it's being used and what you're starting to see change in those ecosystems by its use oh man that is a that is a complicated question um all right well I'll start with what we're doing so I planted and externally it's it's

easy to see this grass-based material that we've developed. That's a true. That's a true statement. That's this much of what we're actually doing, though. What we're really doing, how we're showing up for the world is we are redefining how engineered lumber is manufactured. Okay. We want to decarbonize the lumber industry. I'm tired of this, you know, net zero terminology.

It's carbon negative. If you're not carbon negative, you're doing something wrong. And there's no reason why it can't be carbon negative. And we're out to prove that. We're also out to show that you can build a company with sustainability and inefficiency at the forefront of your design requirements without ever sacrificing anything financially or capitalistically. So those are the two things overarching that we're really trying to hit on. Now, the thing that I have to kind of really approach here is when we think about how do you affect that level of change?

How do you incept a market that's as antiquated as the lumber market as it's set in its way, as the lumber market and is as capitalistically backed as the lumber market and impose this level of change. And one of the ways that I've actually kind of found was just making it to where nobody even knew they were changing in the first place. You can't ask people to change. You have to just kind of force that change on them so gradually that it becomes the new standard. And what I mean by that is like you queue our first product. This is ultimately why we landed on oriented strand board is our first product. Now, again, that is our first product.

There's a million different things that we can make when it comes to how we've configured our machinery and our technology. We can tune the, tune the machines to make any real product, any real density, dimensional number, OSB subfloor, you name it, we can make it. However, the OSB product itself was designed specifically to be a drop in replacement for what currently exists on the market, on the timber base side of things. we designed it so that permitting was on it didn't change the way that they inspected it didn't change this way that you certify the product doesn't change it goes safe through the same exact channels that we do now albeit inefficient we didn't want to change all of that the weight of the panels are the same the pressure on your nail guns is the same hell it even looks the same and most of our our builders can't even tell the difference between smell the same their whole product and the new product not not really actually

it does smell a little bit different it does smell a little bit like lawnmark clippings I'll be honest but only when you're making it. But yeah, once we actually got that understanding and we figured out like, okay, here's how we can get the adoption is don't change anything. Don't let them know that they're actually doing anything different. Don't enforce the process change on their side in any way. And also figure out a way to make it cheaper. If it can be cheaper product, it doesn't change anything. And it's just gratuitously better in every degree.

You're going to get mass adoption no matter what. And that's what we found actually. And I tell our investors this. a lot is we're in a position where we effectively have infinite demand. There's no real sales need here. It's sold itself. The next 10 years of my production capacity is accounted for. And that's because it's such an obvious answer, right? It's such an obvious replacement. Mark, this is direct to you. So we talk about calcified systems a lot on the show. So Nathan, that's what we call that. Things that have been so entrenched, they're stodgy. You can't move

and looking at them to try and change them. You're baffled at where to start, right? So was this process deliberate to look at, okay, what is the spec read? What is the, what is the, what is the, what is the, what is the, what is the nail gun pressure thing look like? All of those things. Did you look at those and define those as your design constraints? Yeah. Yep.

Absolutely. Bad ass, man. That's so cool, dude. What an approach. Well, what's, what's interesting? And I know you've got questions, but what to that point, our, our, our, our, uh, takeoff customer, I'll say, our largest customer in the, in the home building space is D.R.

And they helped us get here. They helped us really identify what that. path would look like because there is forward thinking as a builder could possibly be. And originally we actually designed a material that had a higher strength weight ratio than steel. And like Wad and I being engineers are like, how cool is this? Like we made steel out of grass. And when we handed it to them, they kind of laugh. They're like, that's cool.

But we would never buy that from you. I'm like, wait, why? It's so, it's so strong. And that's where the understanding of how the industry works and how people think in that industry really came into place. It's like, oh, okay, and that's when that light bulb went off. And like, we're in the wrong requirement space. Let's redefine this a little bit.

And then we applied that lens. So you've got this one product that you said. Is that a hardwood or a softwood? Does that matter? And going forward, how are you accommodating those different wood types? Yeah, that's a good question. The way that I would say this is do you like tight jeans or bell bottoms? Right.

When you're choosing pants, your choice is really more of your want. Like, what are you looking for? So when you're saying, hey, like, what kind of wood do I want here or there? That's a choice. That's a preference that a builder makes or a consumer or somebody buying the house makes. When it comes to what we're doing, it's everything that wouldn't fall into that category. It's all the structural stuff that you don't see, right? Nobody's going to choose the OSB that they actually put in.

They might choose like a premium product. They might choose a commodity product. It might be based on price at that point in time. But it's not going to be this stylistic preference. So when it comes to the buildings of the future, yeah, is there space for you to have the deck railing in your backyard mahogany because that's what you want? Sure, right? But would you make your whole house out of that? Absolutely not.

And there's still going to be room for that. I would say like the lumber market wouldn't go away completely in that regard, but you would reduce it drastically enough where you'd have a really positive impact. And so what we're doing, like I said, is I wouldn't say it's hardwood or softwood. technically I would imagine that it's comparable to softwood as far as the base material that engineered lumber is made from. But really it's we show up everywhere where you're not going to see it. Like we're in the floors, walls, and roofs, right? You're going to see siding. You're going to see the mahogany railing outside.

But 99% of the house is going to be a sustainable material. And by doing that, it's so carbon-egging. And that's why, again, I hit on this like, don't do net zero. nobody should be thinking on net zero it's as carbon negative as possible and there are certain aspects we can all we can dive into where our carbon negativity will show up around 10% all the way to like 250% that's the world you need to live in if you do that you can get mahogany railing and enjoy your bell bottoms right and still be very carbon negative and you're still showing up for the for the earth as long as and this is the final piece of the equation is the structure that you just built is is

Earth better because it's there. If the answer to that is yes, have at it, right? Have at it. Make it look cool, do what you want. Like, be happy with it. If the answer is no, then stop and make that answer yes and then solve for your opinion or your preference. To carry on with the calcified systems,

we've spoken about meat, we've spoken about fossil fuels in the past, and same questions come up, the same friction, same obstinate blockage to new systems. The calcified systems have powerful lobbies, They have powerful government. They have powerful companies and they have all the money and all the history behind them. How do you think about that and how do you fight that? Because, again, it's a fight.

You fight them with the same bullets they're surviving on, man. I am not a fan of the capitalistic structure, if I'm being honest. I'm probably the only entrepreneur anybody will ever meet that does not care about making money. I care about doing the right thing. But I'm not silly in the sense of like I understand that I have to fit within this system that's been designed and that I was born into. And so when it comes to that, the strategy that I've employed on the business side

is really going to be what moves that needle. There's going to come a point where they just simply won't compete. And the beautiful part here is how it ties back to SpaceX. So my early years in my career, especially when I was in college, I mentioned that I was a contractor for NASA. I started my own company back then.

I was also working for the United Launcher lines. That's the company between Boeing and Lockheed that managed the Atlas and Delta Rockets. And I did a whole bunch of development work for them. They paid for my graduate degree. And then their biggest competitors, SpaceX, effectively hired me. And I went to work for them and completely displaced them in the launch market, right? Back then they were laughing, you know, like you guys are still, you're going to land rockets.

That doesn't make any sense. You guys think you can do this. You can't do this. And look at where we're at now, where ULA's their launch companies, no. compared to what we did at SpaceX. And it's awesome because of that, because we took that calcified system, or Elon, I would say, approached it in a very meaningful way.

We're doing the same thing with the lumber market. What you see behind me is our landed rocket. This will have the level of disruption in the lumber market that SpaceX had in the launch market. And the way that we approached that is on the unit economics, just the way Elon approached it. He understood that if you could get a 10x reduction in upmass cost, you have a very, very viable solution

that's going to get a lot of funding. It's going to give you traction that ULA and companies like that would just never be able to compete with. That's where I'm shooting to get to. There will be a day where that bitflip occurs. The strategy we've got has so much ground financially

has a market share that's meaningful with a price competitiveness that's meaningful enough to where if you can't compete, you're just going to have to get out of the space. Going back to D.R. Horton for a second, how important to this whole mission do you think it was to have an internal champion like that who's ingrained and entrenched but willing to veer off to the right? Oh, critical. Yeah, critical. Our success is hand in hand with D.R. Horton. The way that they've approached it with us, their partnership has just been unbelievable. It really has been. The way that they're approaching, their very forward thinking,

which is incredibly rare in this industry. And the lens that they've helped us apply to everything has just been, like I said, critical. We would not be here without their support. So Mark, put that in our attacking Calcified Systems Playbook, Internal Champion Forward Thinking, dot, dot, dot. That would be a PDF out in New Year. That'll be in it.

That's right. I'm going to quote you. Nathan, I found this in an interview you with you somewhere. At the end of the day, you can take my panel and you can take a timber-based panel and put them through the tests, and mine will kick its ass all day long. Yeah. Are there any benchmarks that a lumber producer listening to this would be, ah, but?

No, literally everyone. Literally in every metric possible, we're above some number. Strength, better. Moister resistance. We're in a different universe. it's not even like a little bit better, totally different universe. We have redefined what moisture resistance in this material should actually look like. Rigidity, the way that we actually put it together, the emissions aspect of it,

the sustainable manufacturing approach, the logistical supply chain up front, like the upstream side, is going to be basically zero. So it's kind of in all of those ways. It's structurally speaking, it's the way it's manufactured. It's going to be the cost. It's organic, right? Like, I don't have all of these additional waxes and additives that I have to add to get the moisture resistance properties that I'm looking for. We've got it inherent to the process.

So it's kind of in every way. Plus, you don't have to burn more wood to dry it out to begin with. Right. Actually, it's very efficient in that regard. If I'm being honest, the morphology of the biomass right off the bat, it's effectively at the moisture level I needed to be at. by the time we harvest it. Okay, so where was the aha moment? Were you sitting in a field and just grabbing some grass,

throwing in the air going, I think we can build some shit with this. Like, I know you did you like your walking talks? Like Mark and I have these little tech walk and talks that we do as well. They're a bit remote, but walk me through the aha moment because that's always the fun little piece of it. Even if it was, you probably have multiple, but like, talk me through.

Nah, man. It was one moment. moment, it was at a very long test cycle. It was us trying everything we could think of and then finally getting a little bit of luck. I think that's really what happened. You know, when I think about how we started when like I said, we started with the idea. We need to capture as much carbon as possible. Put that somewhere useful. Don't bury it under the ground and try to get Bill Gates to fund a weird business strategy like that. Put it in something useful that'll survive the test of time. We actually started with mycelium. We were looking at that and like the growth rates are

impressive. What can we make with this? Turns out not a lot. You know, the fiber strength, structural properties, it's a sponge, basically. There's not a lot you can do with it. We went on to hemp next and we're like, all right, hemp has a lot of promise. Like, you're looking at hemp fibers and there's nothing stronger than hemp fiber. It's very strong. You know, we made some products out of that. We went on and we tested all sorts of biomass and we were having no luck. You know, when you look at hemp, there's a lot of problems associated with that biomass. There's not, you can't just you can make a structure you can make a panel out of anything you want. Are you going to be able to build a palace out of those panels?

No. Are you even going to be able like, I don't know, put them on the floor and stand on them without them breaking? Not usually. So what we ended up doing is just like we do with everything else, we create a requirement space for it. And part of that requirement space is it has to solve three aspects of the equation. One, it needs to be something that can be structural, right?

We know what those requirements are. It has to meet them. Two, it has to be economical. I have to be able to create a business out of this. At some point in time, as much as I hate capitalism, I am going to need positive margins. Okay? So it has to meet that criteria. There's a lot of like sub requirements that are filtered out because of that one step alone.

And then the third aspect of it is it has to be carbon negative. I have to be able to sequester enough carbon in the material that it offsets our emissions through the production process because there's still emissions. And then ultimately survive a 100 year period of time to where the house structure itself. becomes that carbon sink. And so when you actually apply that lens and you create that matrix of requirements and you start just putting all these different biomass, biomasses through those tests, they all fail, man.

They all fail for one reason or another. Hemp, it's this really beautiful fiber, but it's impossible to process at scale. It's really hard to process at scale. It's not a perennial. I got to plant seeds every year. That eats into your margins. Like, that's not going to work.

And so you had to solve for all of that. And at the end of the day, what I realized was, oh, wow, this is a much harder problem than I thought it was getting into this. What are we doing here? And then our final material kind of just fell into our lap. If I'm being honest with you, we had a sample of it. We didn't know what it was. Somebody had sent it to us at that point in time, like one, literally one little stick. And so we're here in North Carolina.

We just went to all these farmers and were like, what is this? Can you help us figure out what this is? and all this. And we thought it was Miscanthus for the long time. I'm being real. And I'm like, and finally found a farmer that knew what it was. I'm like,

this is a Miscanthus. It's this. And this is the name of the plant. Like it doesn't exist agriculturally. It was super hard for us to find initially. But it passed all the checks, you know, when you look at bamboo and hemp,

like bamboo is this fantastic building material, right? Super strong, grows really fast. It is not good agriculturally for a number of reasons. So that, it fell out of the equestrules. in that regard. It is such a dense material. It eats through our blades really quickly.

So it costs me a lot of money and tooling to process the material. Well, there goes the economics of it. Does it work for cutting boards? Does it work for global scale of house in construction? No. Same thing with hemp. Like this beautiful material, it's impossible to process at scale.

It has what's called herd right in the middle of the stems, which makes up 90% of your mass that's completely, completely unusable. Like, sure, you can maybe make some fertilizer out of it or something, but the vast majority of your mass that you're growing is not usable. So there goes the economics. You got to disrupt the soil every time you establish a field. There goes the, there goes the, the environmental aspects of it, so on and so forth, to the point where the material that we landed on is so efficient, it has a 9x to a 15x land advantage on a per acre basis over any tree species. What does that mean? So if you were to take one acre of our plant, one acre of like

Loblolly pine, for example, you're going to plant the acre of La Lolli Pine. You're going to wait 15 years. You're going to harvest it. You're going to get some amount of biomass off of that. You're going to sacrifice 20% of it to dry the rest of it because it takes way too long to dry a giant log. That's it. You take our plant. You establish your field. Your heart. harvesting within nine months, right? You harvest within nine months. The moisture level is damn near what you want because you've got a much smaller diameter that's exposed to the elements.

Drives way quicker than like a two, three foot diameter log. And then you're harvesting it very efficiently. I don't need a bunch of equipment to go in and cruise and all that stuff. I'm not leaving these big stumps in the ground that's just wasted mass. I'm mowing the grass, man. And I'm literally just like, I start here. I mow the grass. I go down my fields.

And by the time the last ounce of grass is harvested, this grass is grown back. And I just keep doing that. It gives me the opportunity of a perpetual harvesting cycle. And if you do that, if you take that approach, like a lot of folks are like, well, why don't you use corn? We grow corn so much here in the United States. And the husks and the stocks just go to waste. Yeah, that's true. And it's a shame that we can.

But have you seen corn corn hard? first off, you have to plant it with a seed, so it breaks the unit economics right off the bat. Second off, once you harvest corn is your main product, you've destroyed your fibers. There's really not a whole lot you can do at that point. You can go do something with it, I'm sure, as far as a waste material goes, but that's about it. To solve this problem in the totality that we need to solve it on, on a global scale, it has to be the most efficient process you could possibly imagine. That means purposefully grown monoculture grass that's got a perpetual,

cycle, eventually this machine, instead of being in a warehouse. Is that the combine harvester for the grass? No, these are like my renderings of like my future manufacturing lines. In terms of the combining to use an agricultural terminology, do you have to build special equipment to harvest the grass? Does it create, do you create bales out of what you could or do you just take it from the field into the processing plant? Yeah.

So it's actually kind of cool. So soft answer is no, you can't use anything off the shelf, but then hard answer is like, it's not that bad. What I mean by that is there's harvesters that already exist for other plants. Like we have a relationship with John Deere, and they've given us some harvesters that they just made some slight modifications to, and they work really well for the majority of the crop. I have not a number of different harvesters because like not all land is at the same level of inclination and all that. So you have to solve for other aspects of it. But for the most part, it just cuts it down. It cuts it into the sections,

shoots it into the back of a truck, and that truck drives straight over and throws it into the machines. How many years? How many seasons can you keep using the same land with this grass before the land needs to be left for five years to rehydrate and get all the nutrients back that you're growing in monoculture, so the land will be. You think that?

Well, I think that. Am I wrong? You are. We have a way around that. It's actually really cool. It's a completely closed loop circular manufacturing system. So I'm going to derail slightly, but when we cut the grass down, we put it into panels, it gets manufactured. It is impossible to not have waste, all right?

You can't solve for zero waste, but you can use your waste in really efficient ways. And so what we do is we've adopted a gasification bioreaction process that goes into our manufacturing process that takes that waste. It converts it to a carbon product. And there's a bunch of really cool use cases I'd love to talk to you about. when it comes to that kind of stuff. It's a whole different conversation. But our current use cases, we actually use it as biochar. And so what we do is we take that carbon, we sprinkle it into the soil before we even do the establishment in the first place.

That feeds the microbes in the soil so well. It'll revitalize any land that might already be, you know, otherwise not producing. And then we go ahead and we do the establishment. We disrupt the soil one time. You mix in your biochar. You do your planting. You sprinkle a little bit of nitrogen. And then you let the plants grow.

And these are perennials. They're rhizome-based. They're not seed-based. Okay? You have to tissue culture them. You have to clone them. It's inefficient in the front end because you don't have just a seed, but you gain all of that back later on. And so these plants can grow for 20 years, repetitively.

And you actually don't see your full maturation, your full yield per acre until about year four or five. You're harvesting immediately and you're just getting better and better and better and better. Till it flat lines, you'll get about three layers of rhizomes. I go about 15 feet deep in the ground, which is beautiful because you're sequestering, more and more carbon in the in the in the in the in the root structures itself um and then you just keep cutting it and then it depends on the region that you're at okay so here in north carlanta it is seasonal um the winters it goes dormant once you have a certain once you hit i think 54 degrees soil temperature you go into a dormancy it stops producing so what our goal is is we're actually

going to be following the i85 corridor all the way south to south florida that removes a seasonality aspect of the majority of your land. And then to answer your last question, when you hit that 20 to 25 year mark, there is a way that you can actually go in and actually revitalize themselves by doing what's called a dedensification process. So that you never actually have to dig them up and redisturb the soil in the first place. You do a de-dentification process and you effectively just reset that whole timeline. So it's-

The birds and the bees and the butterflies like this. Um, they don't hate it. That's a cool thought, actually. Um, it doesn't have any known pests. So there's nothing that's going to come and eat it. So it has no known pests, but is it a sanctuary for the wildlife for the bees that so much of this monoculture is taken from us? Yeah, actually, uh, we, we've had some problems with that. I'll call them problems.

But in reality, we just kind of work around it. But every now and then you'll, you'll get some, some inspects making it home. because we need to save the bees as well as the trees. 100%. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. Great question, Mark. It's George Carlin, Jeremy.

That's how I get all my questions from him, as you know. Love it. Thank you. Well, speaking of questions, are we at carryover point? Do you want to, where do you want to go from here, Marty? So the follow over question, bringing back. So what we like to do, thinking on paper is, all about connecting the dots, Nathan. So we always like to ask our guest to leave a question for

the next guest. And before you leave a question for the next guest, we're going to ask you the question that the last guest asked. So the question for you, Nathan, is the Concord went out service in 2003 or 2004. We haven't replaced supersonic commercial aviation with anything yet. There are companies working on possible replacements. But it's kind of been abandoned. Can you think of another technology that has been abandoned or we've stopped using, which is actually freaking awesome? Oh, yeah, the space shuttle, for sure. The space shuttle is like this really interesting design in spacecraft that just got abandoned

and nobody replaced it, right? You think about Concord and they're like, why did it fail? It failed on unit economics. It didn't fail on capability. It didn't fail on physics. It's going to come back the moment somebody figures out how to, to make the unit economics work. I think the same thing's happening with a space shuttle.

Honestly, Starship is, it's not there. And that's not Elon's goal or anything, but it could potentially go into that regard, where you go back into the realm or the period of time with the space shuttle, and we had this really cool capability, going to orbit, putting technicians on orbit, maintaining really expensive telescopes and things like that.

And in 2011, we just were like, yeah, this is really expensive. It was like a billion dollars a launch or some crazy thing. So the unit economics really didn't serve us. They got to the point where it'd be cheaper to just replace the Hubble telescope instead of sending really expensive technicians up there and risking so much to, you know, service it. And so that's kind of why it's stopped.

And I think when you think of SpaceX and what they've accomplished in that industry, reducing costs of upmass and ultimately having this really gnarly platform, the starship, it's totally possible that we, we get that, that capability back. I love that you came out in support of the space shuttle, man, because a lot of the space guests that we talk to

and just the things that I read and the papers and the books is, a lot of people kick its ass all the time, but it's cool to get a great perspective that it's pretty awesome. It was awesome, man. And when I was a kid, it was like the thing that really got me going.

I went to Embry Riddell. So obviously I worked really close with Kennedy Space Center. And watching the shuttle launch was one of the coolest aspects of it. And I got to watch that thing launch probably more than most people. And I love that spaceship. Dude, my grandfather, who was an airline or airplane mechanic, World War II guy, wanted me to go to Emory Riddle. He was dead. He was dead convinced that I was going to

Emory Riddle. And I had, I didn't have the heart to convince him that I didn't have the math brain to survive in that environment. It's very math, that me. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Well, that's awesome. That's awesome. So I love that answer. have you thought about a question to leave for the next guest? Yeah, and honestly, I think our conversation really kind of hints at how I would answer the question. But my question for the next guest would be, you know, what else do you see that's calcified, right? What other technology do you see that is antiquated? And we should and could absolutely have a better solution for, but we're not because of capitalism or whatever structure that's continually propping it up.

Perfect thinking on paper question. Thank you, Nathan. Yeah, thanks for joining us. This has been fantastic. A calcified system attacked again. We are winning. Keep fighting. It's fantastic. Mark, closing thoughts. Save the trees, use planted wood made from grass to replace the lumber industry and maybe lower some of that, some of those emissions and get a little bit of control over this temperature, which seems to be, gain very quickly beyond that control. Thinking on paper.xyZ for more shows connecting the dots of all the technology. If you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify or Apple or IHeartMedia, wherever you're watching it, please like, share it one person.

You know, we're just one person who thinks, you know what? Some of these calcified systems need to kick up the ass. in this show we'll spread the word. Yeah. So thank you. Thinking on paper to X, Y, Z. Until next time, be disruptive.

Stay curious. Keep thinking on paper.