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

Mark (00:01)
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, entertainment, education, life. And today Our guest is Nathan Silvernail. He is the CEO and founder of Planted P-L-A-N-T-D.

And what they're doing is pretty awesome. They are

Jeremy Gilbertson (00:28)
Agreed.

Mark (00:28)
making structural panels made from fast growing grass, stronger, more moisture resistant, and more fire resistant than the panels that they replace. Essentially, we don't need wood any longer. There we go. That's the upshot. His history started in SpaceX. It came to Plantd We're going learn all about that. Nathan, thank you.

for thinking on paper with us today. Welcome to the show.

Nathan Silvernail (00:56)
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Mark (00:59)
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. what's your motivation, Nathan? That's my first question really. What's driving you?

Nathan Silvernail (01:18)
It is a kind of difficult one to answer. I think there's a lot of, you know, life qualities that kind of tie into that decision. but I'd say by and large, you know, if you're gonna dive into the high level as to like why I I kind of change 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 nineteen. I was very married to space. I love it. You know, I it's still I still love it. But at the same time, I 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 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 you know, even long-term posterity, where we get to the point where.

space travel, you know, especially inhabiting 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 I I really just fell head over heels for the idea that Elon kind of helps sell. The whole like occupy Mars thing became near and dear to my heart. I love the shirt. I repped it every day. I saw the mural. I ate lunch in front of it every day.

And you know, I 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. 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. It I worked seven days a week, 15 hours a day for six months straight. You know, not a lot of people can actually do that and maintain that level of of of output. And you saw that on the attrition levels there. You 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 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 into some of my thinking when it came to that.

Jeremy Gilbertson (04:16)
What was a what was like you you always hear the SpaceX interview is is pretty challenging. What was what was the toughest toughest aspect of that or was it tough?

Nathan Silvernail (04:26)
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 it was kind of a different angle, I would say. I found the interview process to be pretty straightforward. In fact, they're not

They're not a company anymore, but I was also interviewing for Scaled Composites at the like 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 was paying for. it wasn't hard at all. I I kinda went in and it it was it was pretty much I had an offer before I even walked out of the building.

Jeremy Gilbertson (05:11)
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 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 I have to stay here. I've invested and I can't pivot. I'm too old. I 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 there's my call to action, disruptors and curious minds. Yeah.

Mark (05:44)
Yeah, d like there's a

a political broadcast by Jeremy.

Nathan Silvernail (05:45)
Actually,

to that point, I I 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 freshmen 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 gonna look at things very differently. You're gonna evaluate life decisions and career paths 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 gonna give you a neat perspective when you get there. So absolutely.

Mark (06:24)
You you mentioned that you did fifteen 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?

Nathan Silvernail (06:32)
No, I work 14 times as hard. Way more. Yeah,

Mark (06:34)
There you go fourteen times as hard. More hours. Twenty hours a day.

Nathan Silvernail (06:39)
it is a very different world. Working at SpaceX was cool, especially on my first projects. I built the first reusable payload fairing. 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 fairing. and

Jeremy Gilbertson (06:54)
Can you can you explain

that a little deeper for people that may not know?

Nathan Silvernail (06:57)
Sure, yeah. The payload fairing is is basically the conical part of the rocket on the top that separates just as soon as you get out of the atmosphere to release the 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 four million dollars. So assume eight million dollars 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 four million dollars from the fr coming from the sky. Like, why would we not go catch it? Like, 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 it's really beautiful in the sense, and you look at like how society's changing, you look at how technology's 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 sync his, you know, ideas of reusability in place and really expand them in a no notable way. But you know, basically what you could imagine is these j large bus-sized 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 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 like 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 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 saved. but it was a really cool project. It's it's it worked just by basically figuring out how does it fall, correcting how it falls, putting cold gas thrusters all over it and in in effectively a parachute system and kinda going from there.

Jeremy Gilbertson (09:26)
I love how you simplified that so quick. just put some thrusters on it, spit around, get a parachute, get out there and catch it. Like

Nathan Silvernail (09:32)
Yeah.

Jeremy Gilbertson (09:32)
it's it's a pretty freaking amazing feat.

Mark (09:34)
was it a w does someone just who was it said, I know what we do, we just go out there, we do this, this, and this. Or did it emerge much more professionally than that? Or was it literally somebody that this is what we do? Or were were were there different paths going on at the same time as people tried to find a solution?

Nathan Silvernail (09:50)
no, not at all. It was Elon injected an idea of we should reuse this. And then you 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 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 he just got a big kick out of it and we kind of went down the path. And, you know, we we understand that there's iterations to a process, right? Where you have you can't optimize something until it's it's a thing. and so our first step was just make it a thing, as inefficient or as scrappy as it might be. And he was all over it. But it was definitely to the testament of just some very brilliant engineers.

Jeremy Gilbertson (10:39)
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 the the material used for that, things like OSB and and siding board and and two by fours and all of that kind of stuff.

Mark (11:00)
Do you mean buildings and materials, Jeremy?

Jeremy Gilbertson (11:02)
that's exactly what I'm saying? It's exactly what I'm saying. Thanks for reining me in. so building materials, right? How did how did you how did you land on this? And what why did you pick this this board, this new building material as the piece to reinvent?

Nathan Silvernail (11:20)
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 I'd kind of like payload fairing develop or fail faring 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?

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 I I when I say we, I mean my co-founder and I, he came from SpaceX too. We were tied at the hip and we did some gnarly shit together. So sorry, we did some gnarly

Mark (12:14)
What's his name?

Nathan Silvernail (12:15)
Wada tan.

He's our co-founder and CTO. and we've done some really cool stuff together. And so when we we used to walk in in in we called them coffee walks at SpaceX. Whenever we just couldn't take it anymore and we needed a break, we'd 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 and where we 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 father's 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 a the solution, they didn't take a a lens of like,

Is it sustainable? Can we do this forever? No, well, it'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, when we threw a matrix at the wall, just like we would solve everything, we we we've designed the requirement space around the problem we think we're trying to solve and carbon sequestration, right? What's the 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 we 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 that's the re 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 new 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 in the carbon emissions on the lumber industry, it's bad. and so I I think that's really got 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 math, 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 to everything that we do in this regard, we can come up with a really, really meaningful solution that can pull c 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 in a in a meaningful way to go back to where we were in a very fast way, but we can certainly make a huge dent 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.

Mark (16:08)
do you have any data or any percentages on the carbon emissions of the lumber industry to give us some with something to think about in terms of how it relates to steel, for example?

Nathan Silvernail (16:20)
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 there's like a they assume that it's a one-for-one because 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 account that they're taking credit for that they shouldn't be. And it's effectively falsifying their 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 it's it's a it's a different mechanism altogether.

Jeremy Gilbertson (17:20)
Is this is this strictly for like the the engineered wood, like the OSB kind of stuff, or is this for lumber sticks? Like is this across Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail (17:28)
It's predominantly in the engineered lumber side.

When it comes to dimensional lumber, and just you're taking a log and you're ripping it down into different geometries, 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 realized old growth trees were finite, they you know emerged this idea.

of OSB oriented strand board where okay, well we can take the trees that we can't cut down and make dimensional number and then we'll just glue them back together in the shape that we want. That's when the efficiencies were bored.

Jeremy Gilbertson (18:05)
That was like ripping that

was like ripping the bark off those and then processing that into some weird pulp and layer and mold and Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail (18:12)
Yep. Yeah,

that's exactly it. Mm-hmm.

Mark (18:15)
You sound like

a l 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 to make a table. You're not talking about that kind of wood. You're talking about wood that is used in in building what?

Nathan Silvernail (18:32)
So when I say the difference between lumber and like engineered lumber, engineered lumber is just that. It's 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 c you cut it into two by twos or sorry, two by fours or four by fours or or whatever. so those are the varying differences. Either way, it is lumber. It's still technically wood. And to be

Correct in that regard. What we do is still wood. By definition, even though we're using perennial grass, it's still wood. It's just a more efficient form of it than a timber-based variant.

Jeremy Gilbertson (19:11)
Yeah, so another call out I wanna I wanna do because it's gonna 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. And what a what a way to like point and direct. I think a lot of people feel like kind of aimless in meaning and purpose is this like big elusive thing. But if you can sit down and ask yourself that question, that that can that can really get some good stuff going. I appreciate you saying that. Very cool.

Nathan Silvernail (19:35)
Yeah. Thanks.

Jeremy Gilbertson (19:38)
let's

Mark (19:37)
Especially

in the face of what we're facing as well. It's even it's like there's so it the battle and it is a battle seems so overwhelmingly

Nathan Silvernail (19:44)
Absolutely.

Mark (19:46)
against us that it's you just I I can't do anything, I'm not gonna do anything. And and

Nathan Silvernail (19:50)
Yep. yeah.

And people die in that mindset all day long. That's why, like I said, when I 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (20:13)
Hell dude, you got me ready to run through the wall, man. This is awesome. Nathan, what's the cool

Mark (20:18)
Perennial glass grass wall.

Jeremy Gilbertson (20:20)
Right. What's

Nathan Silvernail (20:20)
Right. Exact well,

it's pretty strong. You might not be able to run through it, yeah.

Jeremy Gilbertson (20:25)
Real 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 a talk to that, you know, when it went to QA that resonated with you for one reason or another? Like from a student.

Nathan Silvernail (20:44)
that's a good question. honestly, a lot of them are very focused more kind of locally. I'd 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 I try to frame it in a sense of if it 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (21:27)
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.

Nathan Silvernail (21:39)
man, that is a that is a complicated question. all right. Well, I'll start with what we're doing. So at PlantD and externally it's it's easy to see this grass-based material that we've developed. That's a that's 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 is 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 efficiency 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 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 accept a market that's as antiquated as the lumber market, as as set in its ways 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 as 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 lumber, 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 it on the timber-based side of things. We designed it so that permitting was not a didn't change, the way that they inspected it didn't change, the way that you certify the product doesn't change. It goes through the same exact channels that we do now, albeit inefficient. We didn't want to change all of that.

The weight of the panel is the same. The pressure on your nail guns is the same. Hell, it even looks the same. And most of our builders can't even tell the difference between

Mark (24:07)
Does it smell the same?

Nathan Silvernail (24:09)
their old product and the new product. Not really, actually. It does smell a little bit different. It does smell a little bit like lawnmower 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 a process change on their side in any way. And then also figure out a way to make it cheaper. If it can be a cheaper product, it doesn't change anything, and it's just gratuitously better in every degree, you're gonna get mass adoption no matter what. And that's what we found actually. We've 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. I 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (25:00)
Mark, this is directed to you. So we talk about calcified systems a lot on the show. So Nathan, that's what we call the that. Things that have been so

Nathan Silvernail (25:06)
Yeah, that's a good

Jeremy Gilbertson (25:07)
entrenched, they're stodgy, they can't move. And looking at them to try and change them, you're you're baffled at where to start, right? So is this process deliberate?

To look at okay, what does the spec read? What is the what is the CSI spec read? 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?

Nathan Silvernail (25:27)
Yep, yep, absolutely. Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Gilbertson (25:28)
Badass,

man. That's so cool, dude. What an approach.

Nathan Silvernail (25:32)
Well, what's what's interesting, and I know you've got questions, but what to that point, D our our our our takeoff customer, I'll say our largest customer in the in the home building space is DR Horton. And they helped us get here. They helped us really identify what that path would look like because they're as forward thinking as a builder could possibly be. And originally we actually designed a material that had a higher strength to 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 laughed and 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 play. It's like, okay. And that's when that, that's when that light bulb went off. And like, we we're we're in the wrong requirement space. Let's redefine this a little bit. And then we applied that lens.

Mark (26:21)
You said the next 10 years of your pipeline is full. There's a lot of different types of wood, hardwood, softwood. There's a lot of different uses, different woods for different uses. I don't know enough about the the building industry to say which wood is made for which thing, but I know that that there's hardwoods and softwoods. 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?

Nathan Silvernail (26:48)
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 your 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 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 on price at that point in time. But it's not going to be this 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 dra you would reduce it drastically enough to 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 it's we show up everywhere where you're not gonna see it. Like we're in the floors, walls, and roofs, right? You're gonna see.

Siding, you're gonna 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 negative. 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 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 earth. As long as, and this is the final piece of the equation. Is the structure that you just built 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.

Mark (29:07)
Carry on with the calcified systems. We've spoken about meat, we've spoken about fossil fuels in the past, and the 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 it is again, it's a fight.

Nathan Silvernail (29:35)
You fight them with the same bullets they're surviving on, man. I am not a fan of the capitalistic structure, if I'm on if I'm being honest. I'm probably the only 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 my own company back then. I was also working for the United Launch Alliance. That's the sister or 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 competitor, 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 silly, you're not gonna 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 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 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 approach 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 just in 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 bit flip occurs. The strategy that 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 gonna have to get out of the space.

Jeremy Gilbertson (31:51)
Going back to DR 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?

Nathan Silvernail (32:07)
critical. Yeah, critical. Our success is hand in hand with the D R. Horton. The way that they've approached it with us, their their partnership has just been unbelievable. It it really has been. The way that they're approaching, they're they're 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (32:32)
So Mark, put that in our attacking calcified systems playbook, internal champion forward thinking, dot dot dot.

Mark (32:40)
That'll be a PDF out in New Year, that'll be in it.

Jeremy Gilbertson (32:43)
That's right.

Nathan Silvernail (32:44)
Yeah.

Mark (32:45)
gonna quote you. Nathan, I I I found this in an interview 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.

Nathan Silvernail (32:58)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mark (33:00)
are there any benchmarks that a a lumber producer listening to this would be? but is a

Nathan Silvernail (33:06)
No, literally everyone.

Literally every in every metric possible, we're we're above some number. Strength, better. Moisture 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, my 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 it's structurally speaking, it's the way it's manufactured, it's going to be the cost. The 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (34:06)
Plus you

don't have

Mark (34:06)
Okay.

Jeremy Gilbertson (34:06)
to burn more wood to dry it out to begin with. Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail (34:09)
Right. Actually, it's

Mark (34:10)
That's the big one.

Nathan Silvernail (34:11)
very efficient in that

regard, to if I'm being honest. The morphology of the biomass right off the bat, it's it's effectively at the moisture level I need it to be at by the time we harvest it.

Jeremy Gilbertson (34:21)
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 was I know you do you like your walking talks.

Nathan Silvernail (34:31)
Ha ha ha.

Jeremy Gilbertson (34:32)
Like Mark Mark and I like have these little tech walking talks that we do as well. They're a bit remote, but walk me through the aha moment 'cause that's always the fun little piece of it. Even if it was you probably have multiple, but like talk me through.

Nathan Silvernail (34:47)
Nah, man, it was one 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. Like 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 a hemp fiber. That's very strong. you know, we made some products out of that. We went on and we we we tested all sorts of biomasses, 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 gonna be able to build a palace out of those panels? No. Are you even gonna be able to, like, I don't know, put them on the growth floor and sand on them without them breaking? Not usually. so what we ended up doing is just like we 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 gonna 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 hundred year period of time to where the 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 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 gotta plant seeds every year. That eats into your margins. Like that's not gonna work. And so you had to solve for all of that. And at the end of the day, what I realized was, wow, this is a much harder problem than I 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 went we're here in North Carolina and we just went to all these farmers and we're like, what is this? Can you can you help us to figure out what this is and all this? And we thought it was miscanthus for the longest time, if I'm being real. And we're like, and finally found a farmer that knew what it was. And like, this isn't Miscanthus, it's this. And this is 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 equation 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 and construction? No.

Same thing with hemp.

Like this beautiful material, it's impossible to to process at scale. It has what's called herd right in the middle of the stems, which makes up ninety percent of your mass that's completely unusable. Like sure, you can might 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 gotta disrupt the soil every time you establish a field. There goes the there go goes the 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.

Jeremy Gilbertson (39:14)
What does that what does that mean?

Nathan Silvernail (39:16)
so if you were to take one acre of our plant, one acre of like loblolly pine, for example, you're gonna plant the acre of loblolly pine, You're gonna wait 15 years. You're gonna harvest it, you're gonna get some amount of biomass off of that.

You're gonna 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 fit you establish your field, you're 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, dries way quicker than like a two, three di 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. 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 has 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 and the stocks just go to waste. Yeah, that's true. And it's a shame that we can't. But have you seen hor corn harvested before? 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 as 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 a global scale, it has to be the most efficient process you could possibly imagine. That means purposefully grown monocultured grass that's got a perpetual harvesting cycle. Eventually, this machine, instead of being in a in a in a warehouse with a

Mark (41:16)
Is that

the combine harvester for the grass?

Nathan Silvernail (41:18)
No, this are these are like my renderings like my future manufacturing lines.

Mark (41:23)
In terms just also

on in terms of the the the the combining to use a an agriculture term terminology, do you have to build special equipment to harvest the grass? Does it create do you create bales out of what you cut or do you just take it from the field into the processing plant,

Nathan Silvernail (41:38)
Yeah, so it's actually kind of cool. 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 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 a number of different harvesters because like not all land is 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 sections, shoots it into the back of a truck, and that truck drives straight over and throws it into the machines.

Mark (42:16)
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

to rehydrate and get all the nutrients back . you're growing a monoculture so the land will be well I think that am I wrong?

Nathan Silvernail (42:31)
You think that, but we actually have a way around that.

You are. We have a way around that. It's actually really cool. It's it's a completely closed-loop circular manufacturing system. So I'm gonna 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 we do the establishment. We disrupt the soil one time, you mix in your your 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 flatlines, you'll get about three layers of rhizomes that 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 root structures itself. and then you just keep cutting it. And then it depends on the region that you're at. Okay. So here in North Carolina, it is seasonal, 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 I-85 corridor all the way south to South Florida. That removes the 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 them plants to 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 densification process and you effectively just reset that whole timeline. So it's

Mark (44:57)
Do the birds

and the bees and the butterflies like this?

Nathan Silvernail (45:02)
they don't hate it. It's that's a that's a cool thought, actually. it doesn't have any known pests, so there's nothing that's gonna come and eat it.

Mark (45:09)
So

it has no known pests, but d is it a an an a sanctuary for the wildlife for the bees that so much of this monoculture is taking from

us?

Nathan Silvernail (45:18)
yeah, actually we we've had some problems with that. I 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 insects making at home.

Mark (45:30)
So we need to save the bees as well as the trees.

Nathan Silvernail (45:31)
A

hundred percent. Yeah, absolutely.

Jeremy Gilbertson (45:34)
That's great qu great question. Great question, Mark.

Mark (45:34)
quote George Carlin. It's

Nathan Silvernail (45:37)
Yeah.

Mark (45:37)
George Carlin, Jeremy. That he's

my in that's how I get all my questions from him, as you know. Love it. Thank you.

Jeremy Gilbertson (45:46)
Well speaking of questions,

are we are we at carryover point? Do you wanna where do you wanna where do you wanna go from here, Mark?

Mark (45:52)
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 at the last guest.

Asked. So the question for you, Nathan, is

Concorde went out of service in two thousand and three or two thousand and four. 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 sto we've stopped using, which is actually freaking awesome?

Nathan Silvernail (46:36)
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 Concorde and like why did it fail? It failed on unit economics. It didn't fail on capability, it didn't fail on physics. It it's g it's gonna come back the moment somebody figures out how to make the unit economics work. I think the same thing's happening with a space shuttle. Honestly, Starship is is it's not there.

and that's not Elon's goal or anything, but it could potentially go into that regard where you have, you know, you go back into the 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 it's just 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 stopped. And I think when you think of SpaceX and what they've accomplished in the in that industry, reducing costs of upmass and ultimately having this really gnarly platform, the Starship, it's totally possible that we get we get that that capability back.

Jeremy Gilbertson (48:00)
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 in the papers and the books is a lot of people kick its ass all the time. But it's it's cool to get a great perspective that it's pretty awesome.

Nathan Silvernail (48:13)
Yeah, I wonder why.

It was awesome, man. And when I was a kid, it was like the thing that really got me going. I went to Embry Riddle. 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 I love that spaceship.

Jeremy Gilbertson (48:32)
Dude, my

my grandfather, who was a airline or airplane mechanic, World War II guy, wanted me to go to Ember Riddle. He was dead he was dead convinced that I was going to Emory Riddle. And I hadn't I didn't have the heart to convince him that I didn't have the math brain to to survive in that environment. But yes. Yep,

Nathan Silvernail (48:50)
It's very math heavy.

Jeremy Gilbertson (48:53)
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?

Nathan Silvernail (49:00)
Yeah, and honestly, I think our I think our conversation really kind of hints at w 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?

Mark (49:26)
Perfect thinking on paper question. Thank you, Nathan.

Jeremy Gilbertson (49:28)
yeah, thanks for joining us. This has been fantastic. A calcified system attacked again. We are winning. Keep fighting.

Nathan Silvernail (49:35)
Ha ha.

Jeremy Gilbertson (49:36)
it's fantastic. Mark, closing thoughts.

Mark (49:40)
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 getting very quickly beyond our control.

Nathan Silvernail (50:01)
Yeah. Running among. Yeah.

Mark (50:04)
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 or wherever you're watching it, please like, Share it. Share it one person. You must know

Jeremy Gilbertson (50:17)
Two.

Mark (50:17)
one person who thinks, you know what? Some of these calcified systems need a kick up the ass. And this show, well, spread the word. Yeah. So

Nathan Silvernail (50:27)
Yeah.

Mark (50:27)
thank you. Thinking on paper.xyz. Until next time, be disruptive.

Stay curious.

Jeremy Gilbertson (50:34)
Keep thinking on paper.