Pushkin. Out of everything we cover on this show, out of all the themes I do, I have to admit have a favorite. My favorite theme. My favorite thing we cover is the energy transition. There are a bunch of reasons I love the energy transition shows. One reason the giant obvious global stakes right fighting climate change to the people working on the energy transition. The people I talk to in these shows actually make me feel hope rather
than despair. It's a big one and three. Reason number three, which is related to reason number two, is there is just so much creativity in this field, in this set of industries. There's so much of people looking at the world and trying to think at a really basic, fundamental, kind of first principles level, how can we solve these giant problems? How can we get the carbon free energy
we need at a price we can afford. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Peter Goddard. He's the co founder and CEO of Found Energy. Found Energy is in its early stages, but the fundamental idea behind the company is so creative and audacious and frankly so intellectually fun that
I really wanted to talk to Peter. Peter's problem is this, how can you use aluminum, just regular aluminum, like from an empty can of coke, as a new source of energy. The idea of using aluminum as an energy source first came to Peter not as a way to deal with problems on Earth, but to deal with problems in space, specifically problems on Europa. Europa, as you may already know, is an icy moon of Jupiter. At the time the idea came to him, Peter was working at JPL at
NASA's Jet propulsion LAUD. He was part of a team designing a spaceship to send to Europa. The idea was that the spaceship would land on the Moon and then drill down through the thick sheet of ice to the water below to look for signs of life. But drilling through all that ice was going to take a lot of energy, and Peter and his colleagues were trying to figure out how to send that energy all the way to Europa to this moon orbiting Jupiter.
When you send something into space, mass is super precious, you know, every gram is very expensive, you know, in terms of payload, and so we were sort of sitting around debating, you know, like what could go in this like little space in that spacecraft that would pack enough energy.
So we're talking about different lithium ion batteries, for example, and I'm sitting there realizing that we're not really thinking holistically enough about this problem because the framing and the shell and the structural members of the spacecraft are made from aluminum, which is you know, twenty time twenty to forty times more energy dense than those lithium ion batteries.
Like I'm looking at these renderings of these spacecraft that are sitting on the surface of Europa and then realizing like, oh my god, most of this aluminum is doing absolutely nothing, Like there's basically it's microgravity on these or on these moons that you know, they don't need to be they don't need to withstand crazy forces. Once they're there, they have to survive launch and then once they're there and landing,
and then once they're there essentially doing nothing. And I thought this is insane, like why are we not why we're not utilizing this this energy just sitting around when you know, every single gram that you send into space is so precious. So I pitched this idea of saying, like, you know what if we could consume that aluminum for energy, that would dramatically reduce the constraints on what needs to go in that in that energy storage box there?
And what did? What did? What was the response when you pitched that idea?
The response was essentially, you know that that just might be crazy enough to work.
And do they say that every day at JPL. People love saying that at JFL, I've had they do. There's a lot of out of.
The box thinkers over there. It was, It's a wonderful place to work.
So what happens you have this idea? What happened?
Yeah, so we're sort of sitting around and bouncing ideas off one another. I proposed this idea and and you know, people sort of dismissed it immediately and then thought from and realized, actually, you know, there might be something here. So I actually got some some funds to start my own research lab sort of within JPL, to to take a look at this. I sort of cheekily called it the self Cannibalizing Robot Project.
Because the spaceship is going to go to a moon of Jupiter and then eat itself, burn itself up to provide energy for its for its work.
Exactly, it's going to assume that super energy, dense exoskeleton that it no longer needs.
Like, what does that actually look like in your mind? Like, so this thing is there, it's on this moon of Jupiter. What actually happens?
So to give you an example of how this might look, So the spacecraft would have these aluminum landing legs. They would land on the surface of this this icy moon, and those legs would essentially cork screw into the ice and once they're there, they undergo this process called activation, where you have this large chunk of aluminium. It can actually get broken down by water. It's basically a rusting process, but accelerated, you know, like a million times. And the
process is exothermic as well. So as that aluminum starts exothermically, it is releasing heat, reacting with that water, it's producing hydrogen gas. These legs actually leave behind these little underground caverns of hydrogen gas. So the leg detaches, it degrades, it disintegrates the rusts, and then it leaves behind this little cavern of hydrogen which then that robot or maybe other robots can navigate over and tap into as a refueling station.
So the landing legs decay, they leave behind hydrogen, and that hydrogen is fuel that can then power the drill that's going to go deep down into the.
Ice exactly, or communications or you know, imagery equipment.
So did it get anywhere?
So we ended up proving out some of the core aspects of that technology. The specific program I was working on, the funding was sort of called into question. You know, these are big congressional It's basically a line item in a congressional budget, and for whatever reason, that went away and the interest waned.
And you leave when your project gets canceled.
So I, yes, I ended up leaving and going back to school to further this concept. And I had found a professor that I had worked with as an undergrad, Doug Heart, who was really excited to take this technology to the next level where we could actually use it for Earth applications.
Huh. So use it for Earth applications is a big difference. Like you had a spaceship that eats itself, which seems like very elegant and very reasonable, right, because the core idea is like, oh, it's really hard to get to Jupiter. It's really hard to get you know, the marginal gram of stuff to Jupiter. So if we can use the
spaceship itself, that's amazing. Like it's not obvious to me that you'd be like, oh, the Jupiter think got canceled, but let's use it on Earth, Like why is that a why does that even come to mind?
So, for one, you know, I was really obsessed with doing something Earth related. You know, I spent all my time every waking second, thinking externally, thinking about the Solar System, thinking about these other planets, life elsewhere, realizing how precious and especial and interesting it is that we have life on Earth now and uh, and wanting to do something to preserve that just sort of a sense of like cosmic you know, beauty if you if you will.
Like having looked at these other planets and moons, is like, boy, that'd be a way harder place to live than Earth.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you'r lived ex I was living in la at the time, and like, there's so much to point to and and and think. Was sort of miserable at the place. You know, you're stuck in traffic and you look over and someone's sort of screaming to themselves in the car next next to you, and and realizing, you know, existence on life is really hard. But when you spend so much time looking at at existence or the possibility exist on other planets, you realize,
you know, we we have it pretty good. And you know, we've spent actually literally billions of years adapting to to the gravity of Earth and to the pressures and to the temperatures. And you know, why, why waste that? Why waste that? So?
Okay, so you you start looking down instead of looking up, Uh wha, what happens?
So I started thinking about, okay, where where else might we find energy that's being underutilized on Earth? And I realized that there was a lot of aluminum sitting around doing nothing on Earth. You know, it's I looked into aluminium recycling, realized that there's a bit of green washing going on. We don't do as good of a job as we think. And you know, it's just it's more difficult to recycle aluminum than we're led to believe.
Often, even aluminum cans. I would think aluminum cans would all be uniform and therefore relatively manageable to recycle. Not so well.
We've created an interesting problem for ourselves there, because an aluminum can is actually two different allays. There's the sort of cap is a separate piece from the body, which needs to be deep drawn, and so you need basically different properties for the manufacturing. And you know, when you open the can, you want it to sort of snap open and be very satisfying.
That snap if it's destroying the world, that's an unfortunate consequence exactly.
But with the body, you don't want that snap when you're when you're manufacturing it. And so so they end up using two different alloys, and so when you melt it back down, you basically can only make one of those, and you have to add some primary aluminum s virgin aluminum in order to do that, because you have to dilute out some of the impurities. All that to say, it's it's a much harder problem than people think. And what that means practically speaking is that a lot of
aluminum just ends up in landfills. You know, it ends up getting exported to countries where manual labor is cheaper, so that they can pick out those impurities by hand sorting is not quite there yet.
Uh and uh and and so.
You end up with billions of tons of aluminum that that is underutilized.
So let's let's talk about aluminum for a minute, because it's really interesting, right, Like, there is this whole history of aluminum. You know, if you go back a couple hundred years at this point, right, it is used to be this wildly precious metal because even though it's super abundant in the in the earth, it is pretty much always bound up with something else, usually oxygen. Right, there was this moment that everybody writes about it, and I
hope it's true. Where like Napoleon the third right, the Napoleon. After Napoleon supposedly like for his like B list guests would give them plates of like silver and gold, but the A list guests got the aluminum plates because there was this wildly rare, beautiful thing. But then somebody figured out how to make illuminum much more easily, right, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, so if you think about like the ages of society, right, there's like the Stone Age, and then there's the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, and you know the order in which those occurred are basically how how close to that useful form are they found in nature? So obviously the stone age triviual. The stone is the stone is a stone.
Finding a rock is the easy part.
Yes, you put a rock on top of another rock. You do that a couple more times, and you've got you've got stonehengs, you've got you've got houses, you've got you know, we were we were doing a good job stacking stones. Slightly more complicated, you know, you have metals that are more closely found in their elemental forms, so things like copper. And then you have things that are not found as a pure metal but can be easily reduced.
So something like iron, for example, is a little bit easier where you can take the iron ore and you can heat it up with some some carbon usually just from some some charcoal, uh, and get a workable metal there.
But this is way more complex than stones. We've made some technological progress there, yes, so big leap, maybe the biggest. It's a huge leap.
Uh. And and then and then you get to aluminum, which, despite being extremely abundant, is like you said, is not found in its its base metal elemental form. It's found as various aluminum oxides, and aluminum binds super tightly to those oxygen atoms, and so to rip them off requires a lot of energy.
Right, And as I understand it, because of that, aluminum in its pure form was super rare until like well into the nineteenth century, and then there was essentially this technological breakthrough, right.
Yeah, in the eighteen hundreds, independently, an American scientist Hall and the I believe a French scientist Hero both figured out an electrochemical process that worked, and yeah, within the span of a couple decades, you know, they were actually able to start making kilograms and then tons of that material.
And Hall, by the way, started the Aluminum Company of America, right, which is Alcoa, which is today steal a giant company. Like the dude who figured it out started that company is like, it's like the Edison, It's like the ge of aluminum. Right, Like a guy figured it out and started a company, and it's still a giant company exactly.
And the US government was so proud of this achievement that they cast which at the time was I think the largest piece of cast aluminum, which is like three kilograms. They cast the point for the Washington Monument in Washington, d C.
Because aluminum was so fine and so modern, and it was like the symbol of the age.
Exactly, and it had all these unique properties that made it so valuable for just a very wide range of applications.
So you start with the work in space. Then you start looking at Earth and seeing all this underutilized aluminum, which you recognize as this incredible potential source of energy. Like where does that all go? Like where do you land?
So then I had to pivot a little bit and look at a problem that you know, people care more about from a financial sense, and that's just this general idea of fuel moving energy around. And it turns out aluminum is really good for that.
Because it is so energy dense. Weirdly, if you can if you can figure out a relatively straightforward way of getting the energy out of aluminum when and where you want to, then suddenly aluminum itself is this incredible fuel that we just don't think of as fuel exactly.
And you know, aluminum is actually the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, so it's not something we'd run out of.
So I get the idea. Right. At some point, you start a company and try and go from an idea to you know, a thing in the world, where are you now, Like what what are you doing?
So like countries like Germany or Japan, you know, most of the energy that they consume is fossil based and a lot of it is imported. And so because aluminum has these properties where it's energy dense, the productions electrified, it's super abundant, it's a great candidate for replacing fossil fuels for those applications. And so that meant that we needed to get the cost down of using this process. You know, when you're essentially burning something, it needs to
be quite literally dirt cheap. And you know, we were doing some interesting things with catalysts and promoters, and you know, whenever you're doing industrial chemistry, sort of the devil's in the details in terms of the cost drivers. And so that gave me this new motivation to start, you know, solving those correct problems, so to speak.
And that's what correct because they're correct in terms of the market. Correct because somebody might actually pay you to do the thing at scale. That's what makes it correct.
Yeah, it's the it's usually the thing that's really hard that standing in the way of someone actually using this technology in a practical sense.
And in this instance, what is the thing that's really hard that's standing in the way of someone using this technology.
It's always cost at the end of the day.
Technoeconomics, right, that term talking to sort of energy transition people like technoeconomics is fundamentally what the energy transition is about. Right, exactly where where are you now? What like specifically, do you have a sort of first use case in mind?
Our first you know, beach head market so to speak, is actually in the aluminum industry. It's a way of enabling circularity within the illumin industry to solve this issue that aluminum waste is not always efficiently handled. So what we can do is we can take aluminum waste. We can extract that energy to decarbonize some of the last remaining truly fossil based processes in the illuminum industry.
So, just to be clear, this initial use you're using the ideas to use scrap a loluminium as a source of energy that will be used in making new.
Aluminium exactly, or just in making aluminum oxide, which can also go and turn into other products as well.
So okay, So that is a weird clever place to start. Are you actually doing that? Yeah?
So today we're doing it on a small scale, but it is it's definitely at a subscale. So you know, to give you a sense, these plants are producing aluminum on such a scale that they need megawatts of thermal power, we're still at killowat scale. We're maybe twenty to fifty x away from really getting started in a meaningful way.
Okay, so that's the first one. Like what's the like less niche one. That's a little bit farther.
Out right, So what's interesting, like on our global scales, if we look at today's aluminum supply chain, because it is their energy intensive to make, it's essentially an energy supply chain. So we can look at at where what countries are connected by these aluminum flows and and see that oh, actually, you know, you could you can essentially just expand this and then use it directly as an energy flow in addition to just a material flow.
Right, So if you're if you're making aluminum in Iceland and sending it to Germany, you're functionally sending energy from the whatever geothermal vents in Iceland to Germany. You just don't know it because you think you're sending aluminum cans. Is that what you mean?
Yes, although in Iceland right they're using more hydro to make the their aluminum, but similar ideas. So you know, it's actually this closed loop process where you you essentially recharge your aluminum oxide in a place like Iceland, you then ship just that metal in these big billets to Germany. You use our process to turn that into heat, uh, and then you send that aluminum oxide essentially back on the same boat maybe that that brought to in the
first place. You and you repeat the process. We're actually calling it the world's first rechargeable fuel.
So you get so let's just talk through both how you sort of recharge it, which is basically how you make aluminum, and then how you get the the heat out of it, right, how you get the energy out of it. So just the basic like how you make aluminum, you get box side out of the ground. What do you do to make aluminum?
So you know, starting from box site, you heat it up. You need to produce aluminum hydroxide, and then you bake that and you drive off the water molecules and then you're left with a particular grade of aluminum oxide that then goes into your hall Hero process where they electrochemically split the aluminum and the oxygen, and then you're just left with that metallic aluminum.
Okay, just pure elemental aluminum yep. Okay, So now it comes to you what do you do with it?
So it's proprietary, but it's a it's a surface treatment to to the aluminum that that causes the aluminum to break down along the micro structure when it's exposed to water.
Okay. And then so once you've applied your secret sauce to the aluminum, what happens in this universe where you're using it as a fuel source? Like what what happened?
So then you know, then you just have sort of this general purpose fuel which you can use to replace fossil fuels for all sorts of applications. Like I was saying earlier, you split water when you let aluminum rusk, and so then you have the rest of that energy in the hydrogen. You can then just burn that hydrogen and then that will just produce heat at you know,
way above a thousand degrees celsius. And you know, starting with those high temperatures, that gives you a lot of flexibility to produce steam that can run turbomachinery, but can also replace fossil fuel for a lot of really high temperature applications a.
Hard problem, right, Like steel people talk about sort of decarbonizing steel and these sort of industrial processes that need really high temperatures is a particularly hard problem that you can't do with sort of standard and so this could do that exactly.
Yeah, we're just talking high temperature heat and you know, any any process that requires that would be a good candidate.
Like you want it at a steel plant in Germany or something. You want it at a at a place where they need a lot of heat and are importing fossil fuels to get it, right now, Like that's the sort of obvious use case.
We're using like local coal or you know. But yeah, exactly, that's exactly right.
In a minute, why Peter's plan might not work. So when you have you know, your first reactors out in the real world doing real work, Like just help me picture it, Like what is your first reactor out in the world. What's it going to look like?
Yeah, so for the first you know, megawatt scale systems, we're talking like a four foot by four foot by four foot cube.
Okay, so so so quite small. That's the size of the box. And then dumb question, is there like somebody like putting just like scrap aluminum into the box, Like is it like a guy shoveling coal on the railroad two hundred years ago? Like what's going on?
It's not unlike that. Okay, let me let me put it that way. And so there's there's conveyor belts and sort of shredders and you know, the basically all the standard equipment you would have in the in the waste processing industry. And then they'll get to a form factor the basically these pellets that then get automatically fed into the box.
What happens inside the box.
So this is where a lot of interesting stuff happens. This is where we actually are facilitating an aluminum water chemical reaction. And so you're getting these big pieces of aluminum that are going in that illuminum is getting broken down at the microstructure by our activator compound and then it's interacting with water. So you can imagine it's just in its simplest form, it's just essentially a vessel where you're mixing all these things together. But easier said than done.
Okay, and then what comes out of the box.
So the box will fundamentally have two to three outputs. So the first two are the sort of the energy the power outputs, and so depending on the customer, you know, we're able to provide energy as heat or hydrogen gas which can then be burned or some combination. And so depending on that application, you basically have a pipe that comes out that has this energy containing gas.
Hot air, hydrogen gas, whatever they want exactly.
And then the other is this refined aluminum hydroxide, which again you know, these companies that make aluminum or use aluminum at some point in the value stream, you know, upstream of that they are sourcing this material, and so this actually saves them having to go in mine additional box side. So if you if you look at this whole process through the lens of making aluminum oxide, it's
actually carbon negative. So you're getting this essentially the only carbon free source of aluminum hydroxide there is in the world. There's no other way to make this.
Why might it not work?
So, you know, we have very high confidence in our go to market strategy, which is using aluminum waste to decarbonize. You know, these very specific industries, but at some point you do run out of aluminum waste.
You know. Well wait, so you're just stipulating that the aluminum waste part will work at scale and the technoeconomics will work. Like, might that part not work there?
Well, it's so cheap you have a huge buffer for it to work even poorly, and it still makes sense.
Huh. Say more about that?
You know, like we're talking like really bottom bottom of the barrel aluminum waste. So this is stuff that in some cases companies are actually paying other peoples to take away because it's too contaminated.
And so can you use that that absolutely garbage aluminum, Like you can use whatever crappy recycled aluminium that's a mess and that nobody wants. You can use that efficiently and and it works for you. Yep, yep.
We're just our process eats aluminum and leaves everything else pretty much untouched.
And is that the aluminum you're using now?
Yeah, So we're we're we're looking at those you know, low quality feestock, and it's a lot like food and beverage packaging and stuff that's that's contaminated or maybe it's like mixed with other metals or plastics or organic contamination.
It's what I put out on the curb every week, and I think there's no way that can actually be useful. They are probably just putting it in the garbage. You're saying, that's what you can use exactly. Yeah, and how big is that? I mean, that's if that works, that's a lot, right, Like, if you're just taking it as given that that's going to work, that's a lot of success. If that works, right, presumably that's a very large market for inputs for you. No, totally.
Yeah, I mean it's it's a large market, but given the scale of the you know, emissions globally, you know, it's not really going to put a dent in that. It's you know, it's it's probably a good outcome for our company and for definitely our customers for using this technology, but it's not the impact that I'm interested in specifically.
Like, it's not going to reduce the average temperature of the Earth in one hundred years.
No, you know, it's going to have more positive impacts than just carbon emissions reductions because you're also cleaning up the mining industry around aluminium oxide production.
So this sort of recycled aluminum that nobody else wants, is enough to supply the energy for this one piece of the production of new aluminum? Is that I mean? Is that basically what you're saying? Yep, exactly, But then we have the whole rest of the world to worry about exactly. Okay, so tell me about the whole rest
of the world. So, once you're using all the crappy recycled aluminum that nobody else wants and decarbonizing this piece of the process of making new aluminum, what's the what's the next move?
Yeah, so the next move is to close the loop, as we like to say. So that's actually recharging the byproduct of our own reaction, doing that in a place where you have abundant renewables, and then sending it to a place where you do not have abundant renewables. And at that scale, then you know there's no constraint on the amount of aluminum that we have access to it. It's literally the most abundant metal in the Earth's crust.
So in that universe you were, it's sort of end to end. You're just in some clean way that doesn't entirely exist yet. Turning box site into pure aluminum, which then is your fuel, and you're sending it to wherever they need it, and you're turning that aluminum into heat, and then you're the product of that reaction. Is what aluminum oxide that you're sending back to your clean plant and turning it back into pure aluminum and just going back and forth like that. That's the dream exactly, yep.
And on the technoeconomic side, maybe somebody will come up with something cheaper or easier or something, right. I mean, you're not just competing against what exists today. You're competing against all these other smart people who are trying ultimately to solve the same problem you're trying to solve, but in different ways. Right.
You know, we're not necessarily too worried about that. In some ways, we will need multiple solutions, so you need to get like maybe ten kilograms of aluminum reacting at once. Easier said than done. But you're not talking massive systems, and what that means is you can modularize, so you can start rolling this out. So we really only have to do a fifty x scale up really well, and then we can mass produce what we call our aluminum water reactors.
So it doesn't have to be that big. You just get a kind of little reactor and then you put twenty of them right next to each other. Is that what exactly?
Exactly, so you don't take on that scale risk all at once. So that's you know, you know again like scaling up fifty x is also a major challenge.
And non trivial.
Yeah, and you know, we we have a big team of really smart people working on it. But you know what, you think, thinking long term, there's there's kind of a timing risk, I would say, where as we scale these technologies, you know, we need people to be ready to use them.
And while you know this early, these early adopters in the aluminum industry, they're ready to use this tech now roughly, you know, as we go to decarbonized industrial heat more broadly, you know, they may not be ready to commit to a new technology, unproven technology with you know, supply chain risk and basically the things that are standing in the way of them moving to any other technology.
Well, and they are industries that operate at massive scale, right, and you're like kind of doing this little thing and trying to scale it up, and it seems it seems like there's like a chasm you have to leap in some way to get from where you are to like, you know, decarbonizing a steel plant or something.
And you know, we're hedging that risk by not starting there and starting with the folks that have a reasonably high adoption readiness level that is commensurate with our technology readiness level.
So I don't want to end the main part of the interview on the like why it might not work as as kind of a tenuated bomber. So like when you think happy thoughts about the world ten years from now, well like what does it look like and what is your place in it?
Lookally, you know, you look at replacing the fossil fuel supply chain, which has been developed and optimized and obsessed over for you know, basically one hundred years and more. You know, you can't just replace all of that with one thing. This is a sort of everyone problem. And and yeah, you know we I love looking at this. If you google aluminum supply chain, probably a map comes up showing these these lines going from places today with lots of renewables, and you know, I want to see
that turned into the next energy supply chain. That's that's what excites me.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning ground Okay, I want to finish with the lightning round it right that you sort of remote control drove the Curiosity rover on Mars. Yes, not just me.
I was on the team that did operations for Curiosity, and I was working on the arms specifically. It takes about one hundred people every single day to operate this thing.
Oh so you like made the arm move and pick things up.
A part of the team that did that. But yeah, pretty much.
What's your favorite part of Mars.
Well, there's really only one interesting part of ours, in my opinion, which is the mountain.
Is there one mountain? It's not a mountain on Mars. It's the mountain on Mars.
It's it's like a bulge in the planet that you know, you could call a mountain. But so if we agree that that's a mountain, it's actually the largest mountain in the Solar System.
What's interesting too about it.
The thing that was cool is that you can basically, as you drive up sort of get a hiss a geological history of Mars as you sample different rocks, and you know, Curiosity was basically just driving up this thing until it dies.
Huh, what's your second favorite metal?
Probably I would have to say iron, you know, just from from its importance.
There's a whole age. Yeah, I actually talked to you probably cross paths with Mateo Hotamo form energy. Right. He is using iron to make batteries, and it's, you know, in a way somewhat analogous to what you're doing, right, Like their batteries are essentially iron that is rusting and unrusting in the way that you're rusting and unrusting aluminum.
Right, yeah, exactly, and you know they're using a cheaper material, but it's it's also less energy dense, so it's really.
Wildly less right, Like their play is like we don't care about energy debt. They can be gigantic out of the desert.
They're just going for costs and so it's it's amazing for first stationary energy.
I think what they're doing is school. I mean it's complementary, right, Like they are not going to generate heat to power a steel mill and you're not going to be doing energy storage at utility scale, right.
So yeah, and actually you know, we it's very complementary in that in order to do truly carbon free aluminum smelting with renewables like solar and wind, you need to solve the intermittency issue because these pol hero cells run really hot, so you know, solar wind plus like a form energy a facility could could be an interesting way to enable more aluminum production.
Is there some engineer, either living or from history, who you think everybody should know about?
I would say I would say people these days don't give enough credit to the engineers from the Apollo era of NASA, where you know, we're like obsessing over going back to the Moon and like, you know, we think what we're doing now is impressive, like you know, sending people into space like what we were doing back then with the tools that they had.
They did it basically on an iPhone right yeah wait wait less yeah exactly.
I just I just think that's insane and that and that it worked. Uh, you know we got people back from the Moon.
Yeah, getting them there was the easy part. Getting them back was hard.
Yeah.
Peter Goddard is the co founder and CEO of Found Energy. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lyddy Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.