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The Giant Torch That May Help Save the World · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:21
Speaker 2: When I'm just walking around the world day to day.
0:24
Speaker 2: They're all the obvious we need to solve this problem
0:27
Speaker 2: to deal with climate change kinds of problems that I
0:30
Speaker 2: notice that everybody notices, you know, all the cars people
0:34
Speaker 2: are driving, all the old buildings using heating oil, all
0:37
Speaker 2: the airplanes flying overhead. But on top of those in
0:41
Speaker 2: my face, in our face things, there are other things
0:45
Speaker 2: that are less obvious but also very big and very important, like,
0:50
Speaker 2: for example, the fertilizer that's used to grow the food
0:53
Speaker 2: we eat. Turns out, the standard way to make fertilizer
0:57
Speaker 2: is to take natural gas, which is basically just carbon
1:00
Speaker 2: and hydrogen, use the hydrogen to make ammonia, which makes fertilizer,
1:06
Speaker 2: and essentially release the carbon into the atmospe sphere in
1:09
Speaker 2: the form of carbon dioxide.
1:11
Speaker 1: A huge amount of carbon.
1:13
Speaker 2: Dioxide goes into the atmosphere every year because of fertilizer,
1:17
Speaker 2: which means that even the most goody two shoes vegan
1:21
Speaker 2: plant based meal can contribute to climate change.
1:24
Speaker 1: Unless you probably see where this is going, we.
1:28
Speaker 2: Could figure out a way to make fertilizer without that
1:31
Speaker 2: very annoying part where we release tons of carbon into
1:34
Speaker 2: the air as carbon dioxide. We would never notice the
1:38
Speaker 2: difference in our daily lives, but it would be a
1:41
Speaker 2: really big deal for the world.
1:47
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this.
1:48
Speaker 2: Is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
1:51
Speaker 2: people who are trying to make technological progress.
1:54
Speaker 1: My guest today is Rob Hanson.
1:56
Speaker 2: He's the co founder and CEO of a company called Monolith.
1:59
Speaker 2: Rob's problem is this, how do you separate hydrogen from
2:02
Speaker 2: natural gas without emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and
2:07
Speaker 2: how do you do it at scale in a way
2:09
Speaker 2: that makes economic sense. What is the sort of basic, cheap, mass,
2:15
Speaker 2: industrial scale way to get hydrogen.
2:19
Speaker 3: Now, you take steam and you take methane, and you
2:22
Speaker 3: heat them up together really hot, and the oxygen from
2:27
Speaker 3: the water in the steam reacts with the carbon in
2:29
Speaker 3: the methane to make CO two, liberates a bunch of energy.
2:33
Speaker 3: All the rest of the hydrogen is converted to free hydrogen,
2:36
Speaker 3: and so you get hydrogen from both water and methane.
2:39
Speaker 3: But the energy that's being put into that chemically is
2:42
Speaker 3: the carbon reacting with the oxygen form CO two.
2:45
Speaker 2: So the basic idea here is you've got methane, you
2:48
Speaker 2: get natural gas, which is essentially hydrogen and carbon, and
2:52
Speaker 2: you want to find some way to separate the hydrogen
2:55
Speaker 2: and the carbon without sending that carbon into the atmosphere. Right,
2:59
Speaker 2: That's what you're trying to figure out. And at some
3:01
Speaker 2: point you discover the work of this French scientist named
3:05
Speaker 2: Laurent Foucherie, and he has an idea for how to
3:08
Speaker 2: do so tell me about that. How do you wind
3:11
Speaker 2: up working with him?
3:13
Speaker 3: And so I just emailed him. I mean, I still
3:15
Speaker 3: I look at that email everyone. I just emailed him
3:18
Speaker 3: from the email address on the scientific paper and he responded,
3:23
Speaker 3: and then Pete and I flew to France and we
3:25
Speaker 3: met him, and the moment was we've done lots of this, right,
3:27
Speaker 3: We met lots of professors or researchers, and usually they'd
3:31
Speaker 3: have a paper and maybe they'd have like a poster
3:33
Speaker 3: of what they did. And Laurel started there. He described
3:35
Speaker 3: his work and then he's like, do you guys want
3:38
Speaker 3: to see the reactor?
3:39
Speaker 1: Ah?
3:40
Speaker 3: And we're like, what do you mean the reactor. He's like, well,
3:42
Speaker 3: I'll go show you the reactor. So we go and
3:44
Speaker 3: it's like this thing out of a science fiction movie.
3:45
Speaker 3: It's in a room, it's maybe six feet tall. It's
3:47
Speaker 3: got wires and tubes coming out of it, and we're like, whoa,
3:50
Speaker 3: this is incredible. And then he says, do draw me
3:53
Speaker 3: to turn it on, and we're like sure, and so
3:57
Speaker 3: it gives us had you know, earplugs and dark glasses,
4:01
Speaker 3: and this like flurry of French researchers kind of comes around.
4:05
Speaker 1: So he gives you the glasses. Why when he turns
4:07
Speaker 1: it on? What happened?
4:09
Speaker 3: So he turns on? So what drives this process? Right?
4:11
Speaker 3: Using electricity to heat methane too incredible temperatures. Well, the
4:15
Speaker 3: way you do that is with what's called a plasma
4:16
Speaker 3: torgu sounds cool. Yeah, imagine a like a combustion burner,
4:21
Speaker 3: like a flame, even a gas stove right where you're
4:24
Speaker 3: burning a combustion. It looks like that, but instead of
4:28
Speaker 3: being fire, it's a plasma generated by an electric discharge.
4:33
Speaker 3: And he has a view hole through that you can
4:35
Speaker 3: actually see it, and so it's like lightning inside of
4:38
Speaker 3: this reactor. And it's purple because it was a nitrogen plasma,
4:41
Speaker 3: and it's loud and bright and incredible, and it's doing
4:47
Speaker 3: the thing you want to do. Yeah, it's heating you know,
4:50
Speaker 3: gas to very high temperature using one hundred percent electricity
4:54
Speaker 3: with no combustion.
4:56
Speaker 2: And what you get out is hydrogen and carbon black. Yep,
5:00
Speaker 2: that's right, So tell me about carbon black.
5:02
Speaker 3: All right, So it's solid carbon, but as most people know,
5:06
Speaker 3: not all solid carbon is created equal. You've got graphite,
5:09
Speaker 3: diamonds are pure carbon, very different than graphite, and then
5:13
Speaker 3: carbon black is another form of pure carbon. And when
5:15
Speaker 3: you zoom in on it with an electron microscope, it
5:18
Speaker 3: looks like a bunch of grapes. So there's these spheres
5:21
Speaker 3: of carbon that are nanometers maybe ten to fifteen nanimeters,
5:25
Speaker 3: and then they fuse together into what looks like a
5:27
Speaker 3: bunch of grapes. And that's really important because that structure,
5:31
Speaker 3: when you mix it, and they discovered this around World
5:33
Speaker 3: War One, if you mix that carbon structure into rubber,
5:38
Speaker 3: it dramatically reinforces it. And so if you think of
5:41
Speaker 3: a pencil eraser, that's rubber without any reinforcing carbon black,
5:46
Speaker 3: and then if you think of the tread of your tire,
5:47
Speaker 3: that's got highly reinforcing carbon black. And you couldn't really
5:51
Speaker 3: make a modern car tire out of erasers, but you
5:55
Speaker 3: absolutely can out of carbon black filled rubber.
5:58
Speaker 1: So is Laurent part of the company.
6:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I talked to Laurn every week pretty much.
6:04
Speaker 3: He has for ten years, been a big part of it.
6:07
Speaker 3: We have a research partnership. Still run that pilot reactor
6:10
Speaker 3: in his lab doing kind of experimental work because it's small.
6:15
Speaker 3: Our commercial reactor in Nebraska is one hundred feet tall, okay, giant,
6:20
Speaker 3: you know, Laren's is six feet He's, you know, an
6:22
Speaker 3: equity holder in the company. Just an awesome guy. Like
6:27
Speaker 3: I said, we were right, we got super lucky and
6:29
Speaker 3: he was the real deal.
6:30
Speaker 2: So how did you turn Lauren's idea? How did you
6:33
Speaker 2: turn this thing you saw in his lab into Monolith
6:37
Speaker 2: into this company you have now?
6:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have a saying at Monolith, which is,
6:43
Speaker 3: we don't do things because they are easy. We do
6:46
Speaker 3: things because we thought they would be easy.
6:49
Speaker 1: Yeah.
6:50
Speaker 3: And so his system operates at three kilograms per hour
6:54
Speaker 3: of production. And now we've spent the last eleven years
6:58
Speaker 3: going from three kilograms per hour up to fifteen hundred.
7:01
Speaker 3: We literally just hit the fifteen hundred kilograms per hour
7:04
Speaker 3: in the last couple of months, so five hundred x
7:07
Speaker 3: increase in scale and that was really hard. And then
7:12
Speaker 3: it's not just fifteen hundred, you know, for a minute
7:15
Speaker 3: or an hour, it's you have to be able to
7:17
Speaker 3: do it all the time. It's got to be commercially
7:19
Speaker 3: viable manufacturing process. It's the classic head We known it
7:24
Speaker 3: was going to be this hard, we probably would have
7:25
Speaker 3: never started, but we did, and we've got the other side.
7:29
Speaker 2: So I want to talk about where you are now.
7:31
Speaker 2: I want to talk about being on the other side.
7:33
Speaker 2: But before we do that, I want to go back
7:35
Speaker 2: because I've heard you talk about sort of figuring out
7:39
Speaker 2: how to found the company. Because I've heard you talk
7:42
Speaker 2: about founding the company, and in particular the frame you
7:46
Speaker 2: took in figuring out what to do, like what company
7:49
Speaker 2: to found? That frame seems really interesting and really useful.
7:54
Speaker 2: Talk about that a little bit.
7:55
Speaker 3: We had this basically founding philosophy, and that is that
8:00
Speaker 3: what clean tech really needs to be is it needs
8:03
Speaker 3: to be both clean and economically advantaged.
8:06
Speaker 2: Meaning cheaper or better then other products in the marketplace.
8:11
Speaker 3: Right now, your your your value proposition minus your cost
8:16
Speaker 3: structure is better than everyone else's and you can win
8:19
Speaker 3: on both sides to be a better business.
8:20
Speaker 1: It's a better business in some way.
8:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, Okay, it's really easy to do something just cheaper
8:25
Speaker 3: if you have no regard for the environment. Right, we've
8:27
Speaker 3: seen that, and it usually is in the you know,
8:30
Speaker 3: most disadvantaged communities that bear the burden. And the other
8:34
Speaker 3: side's also quite easy. And you see this. The media
8:37
Speaker 3: loves these. It's a cleaner way to do something, but
8:40
Speaker 3: the second sentences, it's going to cost way more and
8:43
Speaker 3: it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work at scale.
8:46
Speaker 3: If that's your value proposition. Now it's okay to be
8:49
Speaker 3: more expensive or have a less total value proposition early
8:52
Speaker 3: on with a pathway to becoming. And I think you know,
8:55
Speaker 3: PD solar is an example of that.
8:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, started out more expensive and then got cheaper.
9:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's okay. Those you got to be skeptical
9:04
Speaker 3: because it's quite rare that that's actually the story. Much
9:08
Speaker 3: more typically, it starts out more expensive, it ends more expensive. Yeah,
9:13
Speaker 3: but look, that's what we were searching for.
9:15
Speaker 2: Presumably, it's hard to find something that is both cleaner
9:18
Speaker 2: and cheaper, because if it existed, somebody'd.
9:20
Speaker 1: Already be doing it. Right, It's like a twenty dollars
9:23
Speaker 1: bill lying on a sidewalk.
9:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so The third part is the reason that
9:29
Speaker 3: it hadn't been done, Todate. That's what we were searching for,
9:31
Speaker 3: was it was cleaner, it was cheaper, and the reason
9:34
Speaker 3: it hadn't been done is that the technology had not
9:37
Speaker 3: been advanced sufficiently to make it happen.
9:43
Speaker 2: In a minute, Rob talks about where Monolith is today.
9:47
Speaker 2: Spoiler alert, It includes the biggest plasma torch ever built
9:51
Speaker 2: in the history of the world.
10:03
Speaker 1: Now back to the show.
10:05
Speaker 2: So, how big is your plasma torch?
10:08
Speaker 3: Biggest p my torch that's ever been built.
10:10
Speaker 1: What's it look like? How big is it? How tall
10:13
Speaker 1: is it? I don't know. I don't even know a task.
10:15
Speaker 3: It's measured in tons. It almost looks like a like
10:20
Speaker 3: a big rocket engine. You could say it's you know,
10:22
Speaker 3: thousands of parts, it's maybe twenty feet tall and use
10:29
Speaker 3: cranes to move it around.
10:30
Speaker 1: Let's actually talk about how it works.
10:31
Speaker 2: So you have a reactor now, right, and you said
10:35
Speaker 2: it's commercial scale, meaning you're are you selling hydrogen and
10:39
Speaker 2: carbon black.
10:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're selling the carbon black to the existing market.
10:44
Speaker 3: There's a number of things in our public but one
10:45
Speaker 3: that is public was with Goodyear, right, big American iconic
10:49
Speaker 3: tire manufacturer, so we collaborate with them, and they included
10:55
Speaker 3: our carbon black in their electric drive GT tire, which
10:58
Speaker 3: is the Tesla Model three replacement tire. Okay, and that
11:02
Speaker 3: was a bit of a demo tire for them. I
11:04
Speaker 3: think that one was ninety percent sustainable materials. So right,
11:08
Speaker 3: tire are made up of all different types of things
11:10
Speaker 3: and the big push is to get them to be
11:12
Speaker 3: one hundred percent sustainable over time. And so that was
11:15
Speaker 3: a nice step along the way. And then we're working
11:17
Speaker 3: with other tire companies as well to reduce the carbon
11:20
Speaker 3: footprint of their tires.
11:23
Speaker 1: And what about the hydrogen.
11:25
Speaker 3: The hydrogen which I'll get into, we're sadly not selling
11:28
Speaker 3: yet and that's because even though it's a commercial scale plant,
11:32
Speaker 3: it wasn't big enough to justify investing and converning that
11:36
Speaker 3: hydrogen into ammonia. It would have been like the world's
11:39
Speaker 3: smallest ammonia plant. So this is the first unit. And
11:42
Speaker 3: then now that we're reaching success, and this is you know,
11:45
Speaker 3: the Department of Energy stepping in for the next stage,
11:47
Speaker 3: which is to build twelve more of those identical units
11:50
Speaker 3: at the same site. Then we'll have thirteen total. Once
11:52
Speaker 3: we have thirteen total. All the hydrogen from the thirteen
11:55
Speaker 3: will go into a normal kind of world scale ammonia plant.
11:59
Speaker 2: So let's talk about what you still have to do
12:02
Speaker 2: and then what you still have to figure out to
12:04
Speaker 2: do the things you want to do. Right, so you
12:06
Speaker 2: have this proof of concept plant essentially that is like,
12:11
Speaker 2: you know, you're not quite to true industrial scale yet.
12:14
Speaker 3: That's exactly nailed it. So we are full industrial scale reactor.
12:19
Speaker 3: But carbon black plants never have one reactor. They have
12:22
Speaker 3: ten or in our case, we're going to do.
12:24
Speaker 1: The same with hydrogen.
12:25
Speaker 2: Right, you're not making enough hydrogen to that's rery make
12:27
Speaker 2: it worth.
12:27
Speaker 3: So in fact, while our plant is you know commercial
12:30
Speaker 3: and operating, it's the world's smallest commercial carb black plant
12:33
Speaker 3: right now, right, And so the next step is to
12:36
Speaker 3: build it out, and it's that modular buildout, and we
12:38
Speaker 3: decided to do twelve reactors next in two groups of six,
12:42
Speaker 3: and we're hoping to break ground on it next year.
12:45
Speaker 3: It's you know, over a billion dollar project. We did
12:48
Speaker 3: get a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy to
12:50
Speaker 3: fund a billion dollars of debt into that project, and
12:53
Speaker 3: then we're going to raise equity from our existing shareholders
12:55
Speaker 3: as well as probably some new ones in the new year,
12:58
Speaker 3: and that's the next step, and that plant will then
13:00
Speaker 3: be a true world scale manufacturing facility. And we think
13:04
Speaker 3: that's you know, the next five years is what's going
13:06
Speaker 3: to take us to do that?
13:08
Speaker 1: What are the what might go wrong?
13:12
Speaker 3: I think probably the biggest risk is you know, it's
13:16
Speaker 3: a megaproject.
13:17
Speaker 2: You say megaproject, I think over budget and takes forever.
13:22
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that's the challenge, right, is how do you
13:24
Speaker 3: mitigate that risk? But that's the risk, and you nailed it.
13:27
Speaker 3: It's it's just mega projects don't have a great track record,
13:32
Speaker 3: and we're doing everything we can to mitigate it. But
13:34
Speaker 3: that's the one that keeps me awake at night is
13:36
Speaker 3: you find yourself with you know, unseasonably cold winters or
13:40
Speaker 3: unseasonably wet summers and all of a sudden, it just
13:44
Speaker 3: you've slipped on schedule.
13:46
Speaker 2: Oh man, if the weather can screw you over, that's terrifying.
13:50
Speaker 3: But that's big construction, right, And that's the challenge of
13:52
Speaker 3: the energy transition that few people talk about is it's
13:55
Speaker 3: always just the technology. And like, don't get me wrong,
13:59
Speaker 3: I've spent a decade in the technology realm, I understand
14:01
Speaker 3: how hard it is. But then you've actually got to
14:03
Speaker 3: build out infrastructure, and if.
14:05
Speaker 2: We're serious, billion dollar projects that no one has ever
14:08
Speaker 2: built before anywhere ever.
14:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, and if we're serious about tackling climate like, we
14:15
Speaker 3: have to rebuild a major portion of our infrastructure, our
14:20
Speaker 3: energy infrastructure and industrial infrastructure, materials infrastructure, And of course
14:25
Speaker 3: there's risk in that. I think what we offer, and
14:29
Speaker 3: I think this is an important model, is you need
14:31
Speaker 3: to have returns that are commensurate with that risk.
14:33
Speaker 2: So okay, so there's the megaproject. That's kind of the
14:36
Speaker 2: medium term challenge. I mean there's also hydrogen, right, Like
14:41
Speaker 2: we've been talking about hydrogen and sort of where it
14:43
Speaker 2: is now, and hydrogen has this really essential input for
14:47
Speaker 2: ultimately fertilizer. But there's sort of a couple sides of
14:50
Speaker 2: hydrogen that we haven't talked about yet that seem like
14:53
Speaker 2: big and interesting. Like one is where the hydrogen is
14:57
Speaker 2: coming from, or where the natural gas I should say
14:59
Speaker 2: is coming from, and then the other is other potential
15:03
Speaker 2: uses of hydrogen. Right, those both seem like big ideas
15:06
Speaker 2: that you could potentially be at the center.
15:07
Speaker 3: Off that's right. Yeah, So you know, we intentionally because
15:11
Speaker 3: we didn't want to have that risk of chicken and
15:14
Speaker 3: egg on a new hydrogen market, we started with an
15:16
Speaker 3: existing end use that's not going away now. Going beyond that,
15:21
Speaker 3: I think there's going to be lots of growth in hydrogen.
15:24
Speaker 3: If we're a hundred million tons today, you know, I
15:26
Speaker 3: think the bulls have it at five hundred million tons
15:30
Speaker 3: by pick your date, and maybe not quite that optimistic.
15:33
Speaker 3: But you know, do we have a couple hundred million
15:35
Speaker 3: tons of hydrogen probably?
15:38
Speaker 2: What are the big drivers of growth for hydrogen demand
15:43
Speaker 2: for use of hydrogen in the next ten twenty years.
15:46
Speaker 3: I think heavy transportation is interesting. So think of like
15:49
Speaker 3: big ships, maybe class eight trucks, which is like you know,
15:53
Speaker 3: long haul trucking.
15:54
Speaker 2: Basically transportation that is so energy intensive that it will
15:59
Speaker 2: be very hard to electrify, and so then you'll want
16:02
Speaker 2: some alternative clean source of power.
16:05
Speaker 3: Yes, if you imagine a container ship going from Long
16:09
Speaker 3: Beach to Shanghai, the whole thing would be batteries. If
16:12
Speaker 3: you wanted to do it with batteries, and so you
16:15
Speaker 3: need a liquid fuel and you can burn ammonia. But
16:17
Speaker 3: I think there'll be some applications there, and then I
16:19
Speaker 3: think there'll be other chemical applications. The big one that
16:22
Speaker 3: could be huge is steel. Right, So steel is typically
16:25
Speaker 3: reduced with carbon, the iron ore is reduced with carbon.
16:28
Speaker 3: You make CO two lots of it. You can reduce
16:31
Speaker 3: steel with hydrogen and that way you only make water
16:34
Speaker 3: instead of CO two. You know that, that's kind of
16:38
Speaker 3: you got to be the cheapest possible hydrogen to play
16:40
Speaker 3: in that world because there's not any margin in the steel.
16:43
Speaker 2: Steel is just a brutal commodity business, right, Yeah, that's right,
16:47
Speaker 2: Or you need some kind of subsidy, you need a policy.
16:50
Speaker 1: Lever would be the other way to do it, right,
16:52
Speaker 1: that's right.
16:52
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you know if a couple of parts of
16:55
Speaker 3: those two part of steel, part of heavy transportation, I mean,
16:59
Speaker 3: you'd see hydrogen demand double over today's Yeah.
17:02
Speaker 2: Planes, I mean, I know it's kind of a dream.
17:04
Speaker 2: But like people are, you don't buy it. You're wincing
17:06
Speaker 2: at what I say.
17:09
Speaker 1: No, I don't not buy it.
17:11
Speaker 3: I think I think the most likely root for hydrogen
17:14
Speaker 3: getting into airplanes is through synthetically produced liquid hydrocarbons, which
17:19
Speaker 3: you can like CO two plus hydrogen, you can convert
17:21
Speaker 3: into jet fuel, and so that I believe pure hydrogen.
17:26
Speaker 3: I think for shorter haul maybe big planes, long distances,
17:32
Speaker 3: it's a hard problem. You need a lot of energy density.
17:34
Speaker 3: I mean you have when you want a lot of
17:35
Speaker 3: energy density, it's it's hard to beat, Like kerosene, just
17:39
Speaker 3: really hard to beat it.
17:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean it is interesting, you know, given
17:44
Speaker 2: that your input is a fossil fuel, right, like methane,
17:51
Speaker 2: like oil is under the ground and it's from whatever
17:56
Speaker 2: one hundred million years ago, like the sun grew plants
17:59
Speaker 2: and then they died and then they sat under the
18:02
Speaker 2: ground and they turned into methane.
18:04
Speaker 1: Like.
18:05
Speaker 2: Fossil fuels are amazing in that way, right, They're like
18:08
Speaker 2: this incredible store of energy that you can use whenever
18:12
Speaker 2: you want.
18:13
Speaker 3: And yeah, and it's uh, I spend too much time
18:16
Speaker 3: thinking about deep time.
18:18
Speaker 1: When you think about deep time, what do you think about.
18:21
Speaker 3: So I'm working on this project where I'm just trying
18:25
Speaker 3: to do the geological timescale in the basement of my house.
18:29
Speaker 3: And so I've got this line that is, you know,
18:32
Speaker 3: forty five meters long, right, And if you have a
18:35
Speaker 3: line that's forty.
18:36
Speaker 2: Five going around the sort of the whole perimeter. Yeah, Like,
18:40
Speaker 2: help me picture. This is like a finished basement. It's
18:42
Speaker 2: like a rumpus room.
18:43
Speaker 1: That's what's going on in your basement.
18:45
Speaker 3: Okay, right, that's right, and so right, the age of
18:51
Speaker 3: the universe is four point five billion years.
18:54
Speaker 1: You said the universe. I think you mean Earth.
18:56
Speaker 3: And so if you've got forty five meters, which is
19:00
Speaker 3: forty five thousand centimeters, it means that each centimeter of
19:04
Speaker 3: that line is one hundred thousand years. Each millimeter, right,
19:07
Speaker 3: a millimeter, which is like the stroke of a pen, Yeah,
19:11
Speaker 3: is ten thousand years?
19:12
Speaker 1: Love it? All of human history basically? Yeah?
19:15
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you can then like look at this thing
19:16
Speaker 3: and be like, all of human history is the stroke
19:19
Speaker 3: of a pen on this line that extends around the
19:22
Speaker 3: entirety of the room. But your point is exactly right.
19:25
Speaker 2: Anything, I don't I'm not ready to leave your basement yet.
19:29
Speaker 2: What motivated you to draw this line?
19:31
Speaker 3: I wanted to explain to my kids how how long
19:35
Speaker 3: geological time was. That's nice anyways, that was what I
19:38
Speaker 3: was trying to do, is try to explain to my
19:39
Speaker 3: kids how deep time is. But in the energy one
19:43
Speaker 3: it's right.
19:44
Speaker 1: Wait, did it work?
19:47
Speaker 2: Do you think your kid's got a better understanding.
19:49
Speaker 3: Let's ask him in like five to ten years.
19:52
Speaker 2: And so do you think about deep time in relation
19:56
Speaker 2: to your work?
19:57
Speaker 3: Yes? I mean this is the point is you made
19:59
Speaker 3: the point of what fossil fuels are is a transfer
20:03
Speaker 3: of energy through deep time that we as a species
20:05
Speaker 3: has accessed, right, and we first access to transfer of
20:08
Speaker 3: energy through time with like fire. Right when you burn
20:12
Speaker 3: wood you get to access one hundred years of stored
20:15
Speaker 3: energy that the treated. When you burn coal you get
20:17
Speaker 3: to access hundreds of millions of years of stored energy.
20:21
Speaker 3: And that's been incredible. It's changed our society, our planet,
20:26
Speaker 3: our way of life. And that's because transferring energy through
20:30
Speaker 3: deep time is net positive. The problem is is that
20:34
Speaker 3: when you transfer energy through deep time with combustion, you
20:37
Speaker 3: also transfer the CO two from the ancient atmosphere that
20:40
Speaker 3: was over hundreds of millions of years drawn down in
20:44
Speaker 3: a balanced way into the atmosphere now over hundreds or
20:47
Speaker 3: a couple thousand years. And that's the challenge. And so
20:50
Speaker 3: what monolith is at its core? Right, we're still transferring
20:54
Speaker 3: the energy through deep time, but we're not transferring the
20:57
Speaker 3: CO two because the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere.
21:02
Speaker 2: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Here.
21:20
Speaker 1: That's the end of the ads. Now we're going back
21:22
Speaker 1: to the show. Let's close with the lightning round.
21:26
Speaker 2: What's one thing everybody should do when they visit Lincoln, Nebraska?
21:31
Speaker 3: Go to a Nebraska Cornhuskers football game or a Nebraska
21:35
Speaker 3: corn Huskers women's volleyball game.
21:38
Speaker 2: I didn't see women's volleyball coming. Yeah, tell me about
21:41
Speaker 2: a Nebraska corn Huskers women's volleyball game.
21:44
Speaker 3: So the big news this happened just a few months ago.
21:48
Speaker 3: It's one of the greatest volleyball programs in the country.
21:52
Speaker 3: But what's cool is they have a huge fan base.
21:55
Speaker 3: It's the most expensive ticket in Lincoln.
21:59
Speaker 1: More expensive than a football game, and.
22:02
Speaker 3: Earlier this year they decided that they were going to
22:06
Speaker 3: do a game at the football stadium and put over
22:09
Speaker 3: ninety thousand attendees, which made it the most live watched
22:15
Speaker 3: female sporting event in history. Full stop, all sports, all countries,
22:20
Speaker 3: all times.
22:20
Speaker 2: Which element do you like better, Hydrogen or carbon?
22:25
Speaker 3: I mean probably hydrogen because it's in our name. Often
22:28
Speaker 3: people say what's monolith named after? And Mono is one,
22:31
Speaker 3: which is kind of the point and so but with
22:34
Speaker 3: the stone, and that's to represent the solid carbon. So
22:38
Speaker 3: maybe hydrogen was first, but carbon is right behind it.
22:42
Speaker 2: Okay, kind of like on the periodic table. As a
22:47
Speaker 2: mechanical engineer, what do you understand about the world.
22:53
Speaker 3: I think I probably understand about the second law thermodynamics
22:57
Speaker 3: more than the average person, and that's entropy. And that's
23:00
Speaker 3: that you know, So you've got the first law, which
23:03
Speaker 3: is conservation of energy, and a lot of people can
23:05
Speaker 3: intuitively get that it's neither creater are destroyed. But entropies
23:08
Speaker 3: are more interesting one where it's what sets up time
23:11
Speaker 3: in the era of time and that there actually is
23:14
Speaker 3: no such thing as true circularity because we get older
23:17
Speaker 3: every year.
23:19
Speaker 2: And to be clear, it's that entropy or disorder increases.
23:22
Speaker 3: That's right, Yeah, that's right, but by law it increases,
23:26
Speaker 3: and that's actually really powerful and it comes to play
23:29
Speaker 3: in a lot of parts of real life.
23:31
Speaker 2: Well, I feel like at some level it's what you're
23:33
Speaker 2: fighting trying to build a billion dollar, first of its
23:36
Speaker 2: kind megaproject, Like you're trying to create a tremendously large
23:41
Speaker 2: ordered system in the face of a universal law that is.
23:46
Speaker 1: Fighting against you.
23:47
Speaker 3: That's excellent. Anything else you want to talk about. No,
23:52
Speaker 3: this has been wonderful, very much, appreciate it. Likewise, not
23:57
Speaker 3: many people go this deep. I don't think I've ever
23:58
Speaker 3: told the story about my basement before, so you pulled
24:02
Speaker 3: that one out of me.
24:08
Speaker 2: Rob Hanson is the co founder and CEO of Monolith.
24:12
Speaker 2: Today's show was produced by Edith Russello, edited by Karen Schakerji,
24:17
Speaker 2: and engineered by Sarah Bruger. If you like the show,
24:21
Speaker 2: please tell somebody about it, or review it on whatever
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Speaker 2: don't review it, but email us and tell us how
24:30
Speaker 2: we could make it better. You can email us at
24:32
Speaker 2: problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll
24:37
Speaker 2: be back next week with another episode of What's Your
24:39
Speaker 2: Problem