Pioneers in the Desert: A Tech-Infused Road Trip

[Music] well there it is my beloved california absolutely blanketed by smoke somehow both apocalyptic and beautiful at the same time some would say it's not the best idea to head right into this least of all during a freaking pandemic [Music] but here i am with my mass collection double pumps of hand sanitizer and my rv bubble that contains these two fine companions like me they've been tested layered with protocols and chosen to interact with the world our mission is to head out on route 395. it's a road that runs down california's eastern spine and that offers up unfair amounts of spectacular sights the kinds of things that still produce wonder amid a smoky haze i mean come on along the way we'll be visiting some of the tech world's outliers people that like to live and work on the frontier they're folks trying to feed the planet fix it or if need be just get off it if thinking different is your thing then here we go show us the way rented rv with your included dashboard ornament show us the way we're going 45 and a 70. is that as fast as it goes if you're gonna drive an rv through a fiery hellscape during a pandemic you want to be sure and do it right alongside a massive active fault system in this case may i present the walker lane which is often found hugging route 395. while not as well known as say the san andreas fault it's the walker lane that gives 395 much of its charm we're talking hot springs extinct volcanoes and mountains and we're talking more apocalypse because it's now thought that the walker lane may result in reno ending up as a beach town [Music] who predicts such things well for one this man geologist james faults who forced me to climb this hill near reno to learn about the fault we are in the middle of the uh what's called the walker lane it's a big belt of faults in western nevada also eastern california the san andreas accommodates about 80 percent of the motion between the pacific and north american plates and about 20 maybe as much as 25 of that motion is over here on on the walker lane folds is one of a growing number of geologists who have become obsessed by the walker lane fault and what it could mean for residents of california and nevada in the distant future people focus so much on the san andreas fault and what this could mean and in 10 million years to the geography of the united states and california but i mean there is the potential that this fault could be more even more dramatic if some of these theories are right we know the walker lane is growing northward along with the san andreas so they're scheduled to meet somewhere off the southern oregon coast in about maybe seven or eight million years and what what does that look like well when that happens what some of us think will occur is that the entire san andreas then will sort of rip up through the uh western part of north america or the we are the u.s and it'll strand california off to the west i mean the pacific ocean ends up kind of rushing through parts of nevada right well or is that yeah this is controversial it'll be a slow process but we may have beachfront property in reno someday this fault also sort of brings along some opportunities right we have these crustal motions in the region and in nevada there's a stretching of the crust stretching in the horizontal dimension and that helps to kind of dilate or open up faults and that brings hot water up closer to the surface and then that can be tapped for geothermal energy [Music] what's that jim did you say geothermal energy well then let's have a brief musical interlude as we gaze upon the nearby geothermal plant a vormont it's got everything awesome fans i mean really awesome fans wells that tap into geothermal brine 10 000 feet underground sweet sweet pipes and transmission lines turbines that you can't really see on either side of this generator enough juice for 22 000 homes the walker lane fault in action back to you jim and then part of the reason there was any controversy or we didn't even know that much about this fault was was 20 years ago was much harder to gather data about this kind of thing the fault wasn't as clear uh when you look down and so what is this device this is a gps station so it's actually communicating with satellites its position is changing through time and those satellites are tracking those changes down to the scale of millimeters how many are monitoring the fault there's 400 of these sensors in this region in a network called magnets these stations allow us to sort of focus in on maybe what what the most important part of the region might be like how much activity [Music] are people around here seeing as a result of the fault nevada is the third third most seismically active state after alaska and california [Music] after our chat james drove off and left me with that unique brand of existential dread that comes from learning about the perils of your surroundings and what will befall humankind to get rid of all that i had only one option a night spent at the splendid grand sierra resort and casino rv park where as it turns out you can still get doordash and eat your sorrows away [Music] all right let's see what it says to find jp google maps will get you close to the mailbox but not exactly there expect a long gravel driveway you got it yeah from reno we headed south to carson city well like the outermost edge of carson city where an old friend is engineering a most unique existence today we're a little bit outside of carson city nevada going to the house of jb stravel he's a guy i've known for a long time he was one of the first employees at tesla and the long time chief technology officer i always thought of him as the heart and soul of tesla because he was this guy who even before tesla was a real thing he was obsessed with solar-powered cars with taking lithium-ion batteries and using them to one day reshape the automotive industry he was kind of the dreamer behind the technology in the whole electric car revolution a couple years ago he decided he was going to go out on his own and start a new company around recycling all these lithium-ion batteries that he helped create we're going to learn a little bit more about his life and then we're going to go see his new factory as well what's that model three yeah there's one tesla two teslas three in the back hey guys how are you i'm good thanks for letting us do all this you've like always constantly got some project going on at home or one or another i mean i i love building things and you know i kind of do this sort of stuff to relax this is the current project yeah this is just sort of a side fun project but it's a you know an interesting experiment and being able to do this you know cheaply and quickly and find ways to deploy solar without heavy equipment and it's just fun and then even though you ran tesla's energy division you still want to you're building your own battery pack right it's i don't know i find more fun in the process you know it's you can pay someone to do something and then it's just done and but uh i think it's almost more the journey and the you know the mental exercise of thinking through it jb started coming out here as tesla began building its massive gigafactory battery plant year by year the charms of nevada grew on him and he decided to stop living in hotels and take over this fine compound over the years elon musk has gotten all of the tesla love in adoration meanwhile jb quietly did his thing in the background always a tinkerer and engineer at heart he spearheaded many of tesla's key projects before leaving the company in 2019 you come from a long line of of tinkerers tell me tell me a little bit about your dad and your grandparents and my great-grandfather actually uh you know immigrated here from germany and uh started uh an engine company in green bay wisconsin and they you know he actually built machine some of the very first internal combustion engines for boats back then for fishing boats i mean it must be in the blood to some degree because i know i mean you were tinkering from like what when you were a teenager or even before that i just enjoy it you know it doesn't it wasn't necessarily a you know a means to an end it was just something fun to do and building things taking stuff apart it's yeah it's what i do for fun even in the early days i still remember my dad taking me on you know tours of power plants when i was you know like this tall and didn't know quite what i was looking at but i thought it was all super cool and i actually really loved chemistry in high school that was probably my favorite subject back then and you know i had built a whole chemistry lab in the basement and was you know trying to learn about all that on my own and understand you know batteries and electrochemistry stuff uh even back then you went to stanford and at stanford you worked on obviously this carried over because you end up working on on the solar racing team and and i mean did you feel like there was a revolution coming or this was just something that was interesting to you well it it felt early you know it was you know things hadn't taken off and it was very um you know almost contrarian a little bit thinking about solar and solar car racing and this kind of stuff i had an inkling that we were kind of at the beginning of that transition and you could clearly see the potential overlapping into the end of that is when you know i i was spending much more time you know really digging into you know the earliest days of electric vehicles and starting to think more about lithium-ion batteries and the solar car racing stuff was was really the first you know on-road application of anything like that at some point there was a race and and the team ends up crashing at your house and this is right when the lithium-ion batteries are turning up and all these consumer electronic devices you tell my story wasn't this like the moment where you guys were like maybe we could lash all these things together and i was actually living in los angeles at the time in glendale and it was only a few miles away from where the race ended i called my buddies and was like oh come on over it's fun you know let's we'll hang out and you can all crash in the living room we ended up you know staying up you know most of the night you know reminiscing about the race and talking about the technology and how it worked and and you know hatched this crazy project you know to um to build you know a long-range electric car ditch the solar panels and just see if we could drive you know almost a thousand miles on on electricity alone it really i just fell in love with it and it you know was such a fun project it just felt like it had to be done you know i saw no one else doing it and wanted to throw myself into it and in those days southern california was kind of you know the mecca for you know the early stages of electro electric cars and batteries so it was a good place to be you end up with this guy martin eberhard and mark tyberning they want to make an an all-electric sports car you've got elon down in la he he's also kind of interested in this idea and happens to have a lot of money and and eventually these forces combine and then and then you're right there at the very beginning as well they're some of the best times you're thinking back on it but it also you know we had no idea what we were up against you know and trying to imagine what it would become um it was just a handful of people yeah and you know no one had ever tried this stuff before and that was the beginning of you know how we started to understand large format batteries and how to architect the safety of of that and so that was the challenge right i mean it was you guys were worried about obviously fires and then like how you cool these things and there were explosions in the neighborhood well it was it was a lot of trial and error i mean we were fearless and we just you know plunge into this and you know knowing that somehow we'd figure this stuff out but uh yeah i mean that we kind of built it off the experience that came out of even those earliest solar car experiments but scaled it way up yeah and had you know the support of a growing engineering team and uh you know more and more interest and focus to really you know create what became you know the roadster [Music] well this is a this is a really old roadster this was actually one of our first engineering prototypes engineering prototype five is what we called it so a little bit before we started series production you know years ago we refurbished it and uh i sort of collected this thing and i've taken care of it since i believe it's the oldest tesla that's on the road still does it give you like ptsd or only only fond memories it's it's a great thing to you know get in there and remember what evs you know were like not that long ago and it's incredible how fast the development has happened these days jb is all about batteries and what we should do with them he left tesla to start redwood materials at its heart it's a battery recycling company but looked at another way it's sort of like a lithium or nickel mine just in reverse sort of a startling amount of phones this is a big bit of phones man well yes one of many redwood has a lot of batteries i believe the technical term is a ton consumers send them in so do companies this is basically some of the incoming material that we get you know from consumers so you know it's a whole variety of stuff just 18650s scooter battery pack even you know power tool battery packs it's like a power pack thing you know but this has a battery in it so you know it's difficult to dispose of and we can recycle this for the materials we're inventing the ways you know that you can basically recycle this without having a human do it because it's too small how much lithium that's been used in here would you guys be able to recover like what's the reuse percentage almost all of it you know lithium maybe more than 80 percent nickel 95 98 same with cobalt um and copper so you know it's a pretty complete process [Music] redwood gets devices takes out the batteries and then begins breaking them down into their elemental parts this is largely done through heat serious heat which is why these space men are needed they're using an oven to create what is basically metal magma which then goes into a tub and is stirred with a rake because why not redwood then goes through chemical and other processes to end up here mounds of stuff that was once pulled from the ground and can now be reused so we got some more metal over here yeah this is just a a small batch of lithium carbonate that we just made this morning and this is sort of a chance to see you know what the the final product is and what lithium actually looks like you know once you extract it from the batteries and separate it out so you know this stuff is is quite pure lithium carbonate so this is actually the the input precursor of how lithium gets you know used and built back into batteries it is pretty neat to see it separated like this and uh you know know that this came from batteries you know that were you know otherwise you know garbage and otherwise wouldn't have been recovered i mean it's like the lithium say it's been in my phone and you guys refine it how many times can that happen can this just keep going on and on and on there's no there's no real limit to it there's no degradation that happens to those atoms of lithium or cobalt or nickel and it's one of the coolest things about this is that those metals are basically infinitely recyclable except for the small amounts that get lost in the recycling process itself you can basically keep doing that again and again and again so you can start to imagine a future where you're thinking huh like if we can do this a thousand times you know the need for mining new materials starts to dwindle that's cool after a hard day of alchemy jb will head home and tend to his nerd garden that might mean expanding the solar farm or fiddling with his homemade mountaintop internet repeaters or obviously letting that still running sexy yellow roadster loose remember kids study hard work hard find a super rich friend with a mars fetish who believes in electric cars just as much as you do and this can all be yours too [Music] if you visit california you might be inclined to go to disneyland or jump in your convertible and take highway 1 up the coast or maybe make a pilgrimage to yosemite all very fine choices but if you're the kind of person who revels in our planet's extremes then it's route 395 that you're after this one glorious road will carry you from death valley's desert floor to sky-high views of mount whitney you can see the 5 000 year old bristlecone pines the oldest living organisms or the bizarre tufa towers of mono lake and true to california's boom and bust spirit you can saunter around the ghost town of bodhi what a novel experience to find an empty american city where all the businesses are shut down to do 395 upright it helps to have a guide and mine is a man named yawn the hardest partying dog of all time jan agreed to show me some of what 395 has to offer but only if we agreed not to disclose any locations [Music] my name is jan sorostra i'm an industrial designer out of la and uh i spent a lot of time camping and a lot of time in the eastern sierra it's a place i love and sometimes i'm known as 395 north because instagram this yep my instagram account and i don't like to be known as that but i'm trying to use it to set a good example and do more with it than just social media [Music] where did we end up camping we got here lately i wasn't even sure where we are this is uh blm land right on the outskirts of national forest and uh it's one of my favorite places in the world basically everything outdoors wrapped into one yep yeah good thing about california man oh man we have so much national forest and public land yeah that you can literally just cruise out and find a place to camp it's ours what i wish was mine is yawn's sweet truck it's a uh 2019 ford ranger has about 200 watts of solar in it and a fridge and has everything that an rv has except for a toilet yeah but just on a smaller simple scale you drive us around day to day in la yep and then just roll out when you want it's my daily driver um handle's great and then when i'm done with work i can just bale and go camping so the camper basically has only what i need think of it as backpacking with a car yeah the fridge has a couple compartments this is just a kitchen box stove utensils and a bunch of stuff this one has uh just dry food then when you get inside there's a bed the bed flips up so you've got tons of room in here this awning is phenomenal if you want to pull that over that's cool let me just pop that up sorted so home on wheels yeah this is my vacation house it was so nice man even with his nomad lifestyle yan faces the same big question as the rest of us do the internet and smartphones have to ruin everything when you find the super special beautiful spots is that you busting out a map and like looking where might be cool to go or is it word of mouth and just getting to know people all the locals and if i see a dirt road i just want to go down so a lot of it's just aimless rambling um it's a desire to just see something check that out for some reason it's more fulfilling than getting a recommendation from somebody or there's tons of apps and websites now road trip apps camping apps they've proliferated the knowledge is accessible on the internet right i used to fight the geotags and and i would get really pissed off like why are you posting this place it's going to blow up it's going to get trashed now i've realized that you you can't fight it the internet has just shrunk the world so we're not going to stop it we're not going to stop people from going there so i'm a lot more focused in conversation now with trying to set a good example when you go pick up your trash when you're pooping out in the wilderness don't leave your toilet paper on the top you know make sure you follow you know good steps for leaving no trace as a thank you for this quick guide to pooping etiquette we made yon heron and lemmy some tacos and we all took in the night sky and knocked back a couple of drinks take that apocalypse the thing about good times and serenity in 2020 is that they're fleeting at best after we split up from yawn and continued on our way smoke started to envelop us [Music] the plus side was that our rv no longer smelled like feet the downside was breathing my man david here suggested that we try and outflank the smoke by cutting through yosemite without a reservation we had to talk our way in uh yes no stopping no getting out and yeah don't go in the valley yeah nope no problem we just yeah we just wanted to get through it was a beautiful choice glad we got out of the whoa okay but not quite as effective as we had hoped [Music] fast forward four hours or so and we had managed to trade the smoky majesty of yosemite for the smoky uh look at it strip malls of the central valley we have made it sort of out of the smoke all the way across yosemite national park and here to the gorgeous central valley of california we're off to see a kind of surprising tech startup that is making some pretty strange machines to serve all the growers out in this [Music] region and where would you wear here and this near fresno this is california farm country right we're just south of fresno a town called kingsburg so we're right in the central valley of california very very large farming valley here it's kind of considered the bread basket of of the world the central valley stretches out over about twenty thousand square miles and the farmers here produce about one-fourth of the food that americans eat including a whole lot of fruits and nuts tell me a little bit of the background of of gus i know some of this is like a family business the the roots of this go back always tell me kind of like how we we got to what's essentially like a startup i guess yeah definitely so the founder of our company is dave crinklaw and he started the business back in 1982. he started with is basically with his dad was commercial spraying of trees and vineyards got to the point where our biggest challenge was labor um just the shortage of it really he was forced into innovating and he had had this idea for quite some time about doing a driverless sprayer and it finally got to the point where he said you know what i either got to get out of this business or i'm going to innovate organic or not crops need to be sprayed and this process has to take place a few times a year this means hiring a lot of people to work long hours under serious pressure and so just like the tech bros to the north gus decided to solve all of its problems with robots on those like labor points you guys have set this up where you can have somebody in a truck and and that one person can monitor i think like eight of these in order to operate gus you have one guy or girl that sits in a pickup and they monitor from a laptop computer so that person is basically just watching all the vehicles on the screen they can monitor up to eight of them at a time while they're out there spraying in the orchard and so that user interface really provides them with all the information they need to make sure that the machines are safe and that they're doing the correct job so it tells them what speed they're driving the engine rpm the amount of gallonage per acre that they're applying at any given time so if any one of the machines has an issue it's going to send an alert to that laptop much like a self-driving car these beasts use gps lidar and cameras to see and navigate the world around them they also rely on pre-built maps of the orchards for extra guidance gus builds the machines right here and then takes them out for robot training on this orchard next door it's here that the company learns if the machines will behave and do as their software and human masters command so this so this is kind of like the this is a test orchard where you guys put it through the paces and work on the technology yeah so this is our our test orchard right here it's right by our building as you can see in the background so every new machine as it comes off the assembly line it's put through a commissioning test right here we test all the sensors on the machine autonomous computer all the safety systems make sure it's doing what it's doing prior to when it's delivered to a customer so what's it doing now so right now he's doing a test spray so he's just turning the water on to make sure that the system comes up to pressure spraying water out of the nozzles just to make sure it's all functioning properly okay it's got like a crazy turbine at the back yeah so it's basically just a big fan okay and that fan's driven off of the cummins diesel motor and it just basically creates a big airflow gus is already selling these vehicles to brave modern farmers and people the world over have taken notice of its machines and if you just sold them in the central valley or like throughout the us or even overseas or where like where are they going yeah so right now the majority of our machines are here in california in the central valley however we do have machines and customers in florida and the citrus industry over there as well as australia and i think you started selling them in like december of 2019 yeah so we started taking orders early last year for the sprayers and the first deliveries we made were in december of 2019. okay and they how much do they cost each um so our our retail price on these machines is 285 thousand dollars so it's like it's not a small investment but i'm sure the regular sprayers aren't aren't yeah i mean we're honestly not too far away from conventional equipment on our price and the main thing is is that the return on investment is very very quick due to all the labor savings and the increased efficiency i mean these machines they just they just drive but basically what we're doing besides this machine this is our our first machine we call it orchard gus mainly designed for your your nut trees as well as citrus and fruit in the future we're working on a few other projects we're going to do more machines one of them is actually a vineyard sprayer so vineyards are much tighter spacing so the machine has to be physically smaller and then we've got our eyes on doing a lot of other innovating that right there friends is a central valley farmer putting his whole fruit basket on the table gary's ted talk can't be far off and with that it was time to get back in the rv and to confront what happens when three men are bested by their own failings and the forces of entropy [Music] ah the perks of rv life [Music] it's late at night you're tired you spot a desert campground pull in and set up shop buttons are pushed to pop out your pop-outs [Music] a once cram disaster zone becomes livable for a while and best of all you've blindly stumbled onto somewhere like red rock canyon and well it has much to offer and many ways to soothe your soul also steaks [Music] make a couple rib eyes some mac and cheese it's like our first real food we've had it's not a sandwich [Music] david nicholson ladies and gentlemen hello world director we've got vegetables mom [Music] this is good [Music] re-energized by kraft's top powderologists in some instant coffee [Music] we make our move toward the city of mojave one of my favorite places in the world it's the home to the great windmill forests [Music] to neighborhoods full of hard-working and possibly hard-living people and most notably to aerospace adventurers of all stripes for decades the mojave air and spaceport has been the place where you test out weird new crafts either supersonic jets or space planes the folks i want to see are as mojave as it gets and they have set their sights on the moon we're off to see mast in space which i guess you could consider a startup in the new space industry except they've been here at the mojave airport for about 15 or 16 years it's a fascinating company mast in space was founded in 2004 by this guy dave maston it is said that he is shy or elusive or both so here i am with this guy sean mahoney the longtime ceo of mastin this is where madison started yeah this was the original building we've reconfigured things but um it was a garage rocket company literally in the garage very hands-on gritty get it done rather than the you know white lab coat kind of thing [Music] over the years mastin has built up a reputation as a great place for young hungry engineers to get their hands dirty with aerospace technology we're talking small teams of five or six people building things like this that's zombie it's not the prettiest spacecraft but it proved that you could take off vertically cut the engine re-light it and land this all happened back in 2010 well before spacex was landing rockets and it caught the attention of one elon musk that is a phenomenal email and it's glad to have helped inspire [Laughter] now today mastin has got over 600 flight operations under our belt with these type vehicles no one else has done 600 rocket landing operations period what sean will not say is this for years maston has lived hand to mouth going from one small contract to another it hasn't been the best run or frankly most viable business in fact mast and kind of became known for getting passed by by the likes of spacex rocket lab and others which is why it was quite the surprise when nasa decided to give this tiny outfit 80 million dollars this year to build a lunar lander maston has a series of instruments that nasa has selected that we are going to deliver to the south pole of the moon in december of 2022 that's that's soon that is soon and so after a decade of building blocks and iterations it's now go time we're purchasing the ride to point us at the moon so inside of a spacex friday yeah and then our craft will do the corrections bring us in put us on the surface and i think it's gonna fly nine scientific apparatus is that right we've got instruments that are going to be trying to scan the surface of the moon from on the lander itself but being able to execute that landing is going to be the tricky part and we've got a couple different landing sites that we're still kind of looking at despite the massive contract mastin's digs are as humble as ever and it's grit still very gritty are these guys getting ready for something this is a small rocket engine test rig okay this is where we learn and practice and get that real world experience that's not the stuff that's in the textbook one of the beautiful things about operating in mojave we have a test site on the other end of the airport you hook it up you drive it out you do the test there's no getting on the plane there's no shipping it's right here [Music] part of the story of mastin and being out here and being this hands-on place is like things aren't things weren't always great right because you're you're dependent on a contract here and there and so what's it been like keeping the business running all this time it's been a challenge we will look at a project we'll do an estimate and we'll say great we'll do it for this amount so when things go over it's on us [Music] the market while there is commercial customers the reality is there's still government dollars that are really the major driver now with nasa kind of as the anchor customer for some of these missions there's a market that's established and in a broader sense these next five years are going to set the standards for humanity's expansion beyond the planet we will return american astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972 for long-term exploration and use the current administration is super into the moon and i mean for you guys this has all been pretty fortuitous yeah look the moon is a topic of international discussion and debates eventually human beings will draw the moon into our economic sphere of influence that is where humanity will be and so the ones who get there to establish the services whether it's communication whether it's transportation interfaces or any of these things the people who are doing it will get the chance to set those things now well i see elon's elon's now that there's money out there he's suddenly interested in the mood as well so yeah so and that's been it is really cool to see the thing that you've been working on become popular but really elon is very focused on mars let's go to the moon first you didn't say anything about the shirt man i noticed immediately and i greatly appreciate it is the is the lander like sitting in a one of these warehouses or like what stage are we so we do have some hardware that's already coming in probably middle of next year is when you will have an actual thing together and this will be getting information from the moon where artemis is planning to land humans [Music] mastin's survival seems assured for now that's not always the case here in mojave other space startups like x-core have gone by the wayside and companies like virgin have spent more than 500 million dollars trying to reach orbit with little success the biggest risk takers though are humans like elliot here because he's a test pilot who volunteers to put his life on the line the last time i saw elliot was right after that crash way back in 2016. he sat for an interview to be the pilot for that test they're not skills you can like just go get even took me flying there's a couple big bumps out there today yeah he never let on that it was his first time back in a plane after the wreck or that he was still wounded and uneasy because i'm a jerk i asked elliot to take me to the scene of the crash the famed mojave boneyard where planes go to decompose tell me about this crash we were testing out a plane and i mean tell me tell me what happened so this opportunity came out where a small jet engine company was looking for somebody to debut their engine we flew the airplane successfully two times and then the third flight we had an engine failure and i ended up weaving my way between the tails of the 747s here in the boneyard until i could find a soft spot to put it down at the end of the day you know the engine that failed was a prototype engine uh so you know we i knew the risks that i was getting into you walked away but you must have been shaking for a while after that yeah i mean obviously if you're if you don't walk out of that and think uh about what you're doing with your life you're actually probably have problems but um i was flying again within a few days of the accident and testing it right another major incident in an airplane an emergency landing within a week of that uh that one so so you know get back up on the horse have you considered shirtless beach volleyball not till this moment [Applause] unlike many test pilots with military training elliot is actually an engineer who's had to work his way up into the test pilot game there's basically two paths to flight tests one is you go be a fighter pilot then you go from fighter pilot to test pilot the other is you go spend 10 15 years with a small company and you work your way from like an engineer to make that jump to the left seat i was i still if it's about your story man i mean so you've got you've got the guys you're seeing top gun and that's kind of who you're competing against somebody's got a new plane and then you got to go up against the top gun guy and explain to these people why you should fly the plane yeah fundamentally remember we lost a program to an astronaut i never even like made a counter point right now that i've been in this business for a while like the science as an engineer is fascinating right like you go and learn something in school you can read it in a book you can see how the equation works but until you can like feel it in your hand and see how that all adds up to whether it is or is not what you want from an airplane that's a whole nother level and as a test pilot i've flown 80 different kinds of airplanes successfully i've got 11 first flights so that means you're like the first person to take the machine up yeah mojave's had this mythic status you know if this is where you come to do the most groundbreaking work and to push machines to their edge i mean is that is that still the case i think there's no question that mojave is absolutely on the radar right now i mean there's the whole world's watching to see what comes out of mojave this is very desolate land where you can play and do things you can't do other places on the planet and it attracts like big ego dudes like you know frontal lobe kind of guys and to be able to get a bunch of smart dudes pointing the same direction go make something fly that doesn't look like it should that's a hard thing and it's very rewarding when it works and when it doesn't you can spend an eternity thinking about all how it all added up against you [Music] and so here we are pandemic fires the overall madness of 2020 which feels more and more like a work of experimental daddiest art and yet somehow i end up in the back of a pickup truck driving through a plane graveyard during a mojave sunset it's not perfect because perfect can't exist right now but i gotta tell you it ain't bad you

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Keywords: News, bloomberg, quicktake, business, hello world, california, road trip, tesla, elon musk, startups, silicon valley, Ashlee Vance, travel, pandemic, space

Id: ulImUb5SoPQ

Length: 47min 37sec (2857 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021