00:32:17 · JC Lozano, Ryan Deng
[00:32:17] S1: Yeah. [00:32:17] S0: You're seeing firsthand what people are building for these consumers. What is on the horizon for us? Is Terminator three coming? [00:32:24] S1: I I don't think so. Okay. No. I don't like... I I don't know, fundamentally. What I what I do believe and what we believe as a company is that like the best way to move forward is like make the pie bigger for everybody. Right. Right? Like that is the most important thing we can do with the time we have. I think it's just like trying to figure out how to make this pie bigger and bigger for everybody here and everybody across the world. And so like that's how we see the company mission flowing into that is like if you have more metals brought to market, things become cheaper, things become... Like, more people can get access to the same amount of goods, the same amount of quality of life, like all these different pieces. And so, like, if you are enabling that, you're enabling the pie to get bigger for everybody. And I think, you know, at least for me, I'm like a very much an optimist. And so like for me, the future is like, okay, how do we like make the pie big enough for everybody that we're all able to like participate in this future of abundance, this future of like metals abundance fundamentally. And I think if you have that, it unlocks a bunch of like things like energy abundance, it unlocks a bunch of things like sort of like technological abundance, but like that is the future we're trying to build towards. I don't know exactly what it looks like. It's a great question.
00:33:28 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:33:28] S0: Maybe space travel like once we're able to, you know, feasibly go on to to the moon and and to Mars, potentially operating mines on on, you know, those projects as Yeah. I mean, have you thought of that? Consider that for the future of the company? Because Oh, yeah. I feel like it's not too far out, you know? [00:33:43] S1: Yeah. Space mining is awesome. Yeah. It's definitely on the radar. You know, we're we're starting with threshold resources, and then we're looking at kind of, like, resources onto the ocean. And then fundamentally, I think space mining is a super interesting thing. The cost of space travel keeps going down or of getting stuff into space is keep... Keeps decreasing, which is super important. Space travel is still really expensive, but like getting stuff into orbit is cheaper. [00:34:06] S0: Is the concentration of metals on those, you know, different planets higher than than Earth or... [00:34:11] S1: So it's mostly asteroids are actually the place that have a lot of metals, it turns So the moon has... [00:34:17] S0: The moon [00:34:17] S1: actually, like, has a similar composition to the Earth Mhmm. Because we think that it was part of the Earth at one point. Yeah. But then the other planets, it kind of varies. Like asteroids are like a super promising place that, you know, a bunch of folks are looking at. But the fact is that like we actually have plenty of metals on Earth. [00:34:34] S0: So there's still like an abundance?
00:34:34 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:34:34] S0: So there's still like an abundance? [00:34:35] S1: They're... What's getting more challenging is like actually getting the metals. Right? So ore deposits are getting deeper and something called the mineralogies, which are basically like how the ores are formed into solids, how the metals are intercalated with other other metals and rocks and mineralogy. It's a blanket term that refer... It's not a blanket term. Geologists have a very precise definition of it. But Yeah. For the point of this, it's just like the the way that you... It's getting more challenging to to mine metals. Like that's that's the other part that's getting hard is that basically like the deposits are getting much much deeper. Right. As they get deeper, it's more expensive to get to them. [00:35:11] S0: Because you have to [00:35:11] S1: dig a more. Yeah. Exactly. [00:35:13] S0: I can imagine, like, most of the surface level stuff has been probably like mined. Right? [00:35:18] S1: I would say most of the easy surface level Easy stuff [00:35:21] S0: deposits have already, been identified and they've looked at that space. Right? [00:35:25] S1: Well, I mean, we've been mining for, like, fifteen thousand years, probably. Ten thousand years at least. [00:35:29] S0: Yeah. [00:35:29] S1: Eight thousand. Something like that. Mhmm. For a while. Okay. [00:35:33] S0: That that puts into perspective.
00:35:33 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:35:33] S0: That that puts into perspective. [00:35:34] S1: Yeah. But the the challenge you have is that, like, the the... Like, one way to think about it is, like, all the easy stuff's been been found. And so what you're left with is more challenging resources. So what makes them more challenging is either they're deeper underground, so it takes a lot more money to get to them Yeah. Or they're lower grade, which basically means the pound of metal. Oh. Sorry. The percentage of metal and like a pound of material is lower. [00:36:00] S0: So the just degrades, essentially. Correct. [00:36:02] S1: And then the third thing is what I was gesturing at earlier, [00:36:06] S0: which is just [00:36:06] S1: like, mineralogy is getting more And so that just means that like, it's more expensive to process it and actually extract the metal Uh-huh. From like the gang material, which is like all the material that it's like embedded in. [00:36:18] S0: That's it. Yeah. And like, you know, aside from America, are there are there regions of the world that are pretty like unexplored that you could go and and look at
00:36:26 · JC Lozano
[00:36:26] S1: or reach out the world? There's plenty of metals in The US. Okay. Like, that's the crazy part. Right? There's actually like a bunch of these things. The problem that we have in The US specifically is that we're not very good at this anymore. We need to get better at it. And so, like, lot of the mines that are operational in The US tend to be one of... Fit, like, a couple of criteria. Right. So either one, the grade is really, really high, which basically going back to, like, if I mine a pound of material from the earth, like, what percentage of it is, like, actual valuable ore. Mhmm. Right? So the grade can be really high, and the deposit can be small. That's like economical and we know how to do that. Right. There's like relatively few of those. The second is it can be like a massive, massive deposit. Mhmm. And then there, we also know how to do that because you get these incredible economies of scale where you can just throw a bunch of, like, money and really large equipment and really, you know, large groups of people at the problem. And because, like, the resource is so large and because you get economies of scale, you know, your your cost of operation goes down and you're able to do it economically. Sure. The problem is that, like, there aren't that many of those assets left. There's a bunch of assets which are, like, medium sized Mhmm. Low grade that we don't know how to go after economically. So that's where autonomy and kind of like doing it in a different way becomes really, really important. Right. Because you're like unlocking these resources that other folks can't economically mine.
00:37:47 · Ryan Deng, JC Lozano
[00:37:47] S0: So you wanna get it as cheap as possible, as fast as possible so that way you can deploy it to these mines that aren't... Were not worth going after in the beginning Mhmm. Now because you can do it more cheaply. Because you have a differentiated Yeah. Let's dive a little bit more about your early undergrad days. Okay. I wanna dive into the person that you are, you know. You've heard about the company, exciting stuff. Yeah. What what was that feeling like when you when you got into Stanford University? Oh, super exciting. [00:38:13] S1: What was that feeling like? Man, it feels... It was ages ago, actually. [00:38:18] S0: What was that like? [00:38:21] S1: Let's see. Really exciting. So I'm from Wisconsin originally. Yeah. So I was like very excited to go someplace warm. Uh-huh. As simple as that sounds. [00:38:30] S0: Was that like your number one target score? Did you have any other safeties? [00:38:33] S1: I had a couple other like schools in the East Coast that I was excited to go to as well. [00:38:36] S0: The Harvard, MIT maybe? [00:38:37] S1: Those are, yeah. [00:38:38] S0: Okay. Alright. So it's safe to say that you were you were cracked. You're very smart. [00:38:46] S1: I was very excited to go to Stanford. Yeah. And then, you know, studied computer science and physics. I got super lucky, actually. Like, didn't really know what computer science was until I got to Stanford. [00:38:56] S0: Oh, so you weren't technical beforehand? Like, you weren't dabbling in, like, computers and things like that?