SPEAKER_00: slash twist all right next up on the program jb schraubel is here he is the founder and ceo of redwood materials but you probably know him as one of the co-founders of a little electric car startup from here in the silicon valley called tesla and uh welcome to the program jb hey great to be here thanks for having me yeah so we've known each other forever um i'm 50 feet away from SPEAKER_05: my tesla roadster number 16 and my signature model s zero zero zero zero one uh what an amazing journey you had at tesla tell me just if you were to recap the experience from roadster model s to model three and all the near-death experiences for the company uh how do you look back on that amazing SPEAKER_09: journey in your life oh man it's uh it's like trying to recap you know uh the encyclopedia britannica here um i mean it's it's such an adventure you know i i just kind of look back SPEAKER_11: on it all um you know mild disbelief and and you know uh you know some of the the brutal you know near-death most difficult stuff kind of gets you know a little bit tempered even with just a little SPEAKER_14: bit of time and um you know i just feel incredibly proud to have like been a part of this you know crazy revolution and been at the right time in history when all this was possible and we were Chamath Palihapitiya: able to do these things and the batteries seem to be the key component here there was something about that time period when y'all started working on tesla and making it work where correct me if i'm wrong but battery technology from uh the the smartphone revolution and the laptop you know boom of uh the late 90s into the 2000s played some sort of role in uh setting the the groundwork for tesla to be able SPEAKER_11: to do what you did correct yeah it was pivotal and and i think that that was you know if there's a luck to it that was the lucky timing and and some of it was intentional but uh lithium-ion batteries you know were commercialized in about the year 2000 for laptops um sony did that you know it was bleeding edge you know then and you know three years later tesla starts and you know four or five years later uh you know we're building them into the first roadster next to you so you know that that was it was that sort of beginning of you know the that decade that uh you know presented that kind of opportunity and before that you just couldn't make a modern electric car they just they weren't SPEAKER_23: technically feasible you could only do so much with you know nickel metal hydride or lead acid batteries SPEAKER_11: um i remember one stat that you know we would constantly kind of talk about or think about and it's that you know the roadster when it was fully charged the whole car you know with a person sitting in it has an energy density higher than a lead acid battery so you know there's no physical way you could take these this like old technology and make it you know perform that way so that that SPEAKER_16: was what made it possible and the cost of the original battery pack in that roadster was somewhere SPEAKER_27: in the forty thousand dollar range fifty thousand dollar range if i remember correctly yeah it was in SPEAKER_20: that ballpark it was you know close to a thousand dollars a kilowatt hour wow you know so i think uh SPEAKER_30: 53 and change kilowatt hours in the first generation roadster and uh yeah probably around fifty to fifty SPEAKER_34: five thousand dollars something in there just for the battery pack just for the battery i replaced my SPEAKER_27: roadster battery pack with the 300 plus mile one i think for twenty five thousand dollars uh x number SPEAKER_05: of years later and i can go 350 miles although you probably wouldn't want to drive for six hours in a SPEAKER_38: roadster it might be a better mission for the y need a chiropractor after that you you did feel um SPEAKER_05: you did feel the road in the roadster um but it was mind-blowing tell me what it was like to deliver SPEAKER_00: those first hundred if you take your back yourself back to that time period and people on the road in la and in the bay area and those first hundred getting delivered and i guess larry sergey and yourself uh bill SPEAKER_05: lee david sacks myself there was just like a group of people who put those hundred and sixty thousand SPEAKER_27: dollar deposits down for those first hundred signatures what was it like when you delivered SPEAKER_43: those first hundred signatures i mean it was it was incredibly rewarding and exciting you know we were SPEAKER_11: obviously pretty late delivering them in the first place just a year or two just a little bit um and uh you know and all these early customers just were such a key part of the the company and the mission back then it was it was kind of you know this sense of camaraderie you know making this SPEAKER_30: happen um and yeah we were i mean we were super proud of it you know we put our heart and soul into that thing and and uh you know worked on it for so many years as a pretty small team and obviously it was a very different you know profile then you know much much lower profile um but you know to see a modern SPEAKER_11: electric car out there and having customers actually enjoying it and experiencing it doing you know multi hundred mile drives it was it was pretty amazing i mean that was revolutionary people didn't you know SPEAKER_34: most people would still think we were lying actually about the range you know in those days which was Chamath Palihapitiya: amazing that is uh such an accurate description of that time period is the fear uncertainty and doubt that was being directed at you and and tesla was insane and you know we're driving the cars yeah 150 200 miles and telling people look it works and they're literally saying nobody will ever buy an electric car SPEAKER_05: because of range anxiety and i'm like i'm charging the thing once a week in la you know it's my daily driver i drive you know whatever 10 miles back and forth to santa monica to the office and um i literally had people jump in the car when i would be at valets and just say please take me for a ride around the corner please just i want to experience the the exhilaration even at that time before ludicrous mode i don't know what the zero to 60 was on the roadster but it was four seconds or 3.7 or something yeah i think SPEAKER_23: yeah just just under four for the sport model but it you know it was the same experience though i mean SPEAKER_11: it you know minus the whole all the creature comforts and the nvh and the handling and a bunch of other things you know a few little things um but that that same experience of getting in there you know feeling the torque feeling a zero to sixty in under four seconds um you know i was driving the roadster last weekend um and it's amazing how you could just like feel the dna of what electric cars became and have there are today you know even in that that early thing if you don't have 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steve sherbison has number one of that obviously and i'm sure you have one of them so they were driving around but what was that milestone like when the signature 1000 come out and it's a you know it's a it's a proper sedan that you know families and you know valets could actually park as opposed to the roads or which valets would be i can't start SPEAKER_63: your car couldn't get in it in the first place yeah they couldn't get in it but that you know so many SPEAKER_08: times i had to sit with the valet and tell them the car is on and they're like i don't the car's not on i don't hear it and they would sit there and it'd be like it's on it doesn't make noise SPEAKER_11: well i mean the model s was um i mean it's such a different car i mean that that was the one that SPEAKER_23: really with the roadster was a technology validation you know we proved the batteries could work they could go in a car it could be safe could do the range and acceleration but SPEAKER_11: i mean the s was was a whole different thing and um you know it was so good you know we put so much effort into that and i mean elon was hell-bent on making it you know the best car you know on the road and and we you know i think really delivered on that at the time it was it was phenomenal um you know i i still am amazed though at how much skepticism there was you know even even after you know delivering those you know we kind of imagined i imagined that you know people would see SPEAKER_68: this and they'd say oh okay clearly this is the future this is all going to work you know all the car companies are going to copy this immediately yeah and you know we'll have to go really fast SPEAKER_11: you know figure out how we can carve out a niche um and it just didn't happen you know that's so strange customers loved it you know it was a runaway hit with reviewers and and magazines and customers but the the the copying and the the market change didn't happen that was interesting that was fascinating Chamath Palihapitiya: to me as well because now instead of taking one person for a ride i've got five people jumping in the car SPEAKER_05: car people are using it as their daily drivers and now you're starting in los angeles and in the bay area to see them uh flood into people's parking lots at google facebook you know you you couldn't go anywhere in silicon valley without you know 10 20 30 of them being in the in the parking lots at apple etc and yet no competitors arrive and you're blowing past 200 miles and people are still claiming that there is a range issue and the superchargers start hitting you know two three hundred miles added in and you know 40 minutes or whatever it was and that was always what i found so strange about the criticism the SPEAKER_08: car has won not only car of the year there were people who said this is the greatest car ever made i think car driver correct me if i'm wrong was one of them said the greatest car ever made um yeah i think SPEAKER_30: they did i mean there was they were just blown away it's like it wasn't didn't compute it didn't even fit into their rating system in terms of efficiency and performance and luxury it they yeah didn't work SPEAKER_78: in the way they've reviewed cars previously now the model three now that was that was a hard one SPEAKER_05: uh that almost killed the company uh you guys just worked yourself to the bone to get that out let's fast forward to that and then we'll switch over to your new company tell us about SPEAKER_00: making the fifty thousand sixty thousand dollar car that ultimately i would say and i think you probably would agree you tell me if you do was the completion of the mission the mission was always to SPEAKER_27: have a car that was really accessible some people might argue the thirty thousand dollar car is the is the ultimate slam dunk but i consider the model three and y just so transcendently good as cars and SPEAKER_00: so accessible to such a wide group of people that y'all succeeded in the mission of of creating a long-term sustainable electric car company and electric future tell us about i mean how horrible that was SPEAKER_78: up until the up until the up until the deployment of it and then how rewarding it was to not have the SPEAKER_09: company go out of business again it was uh it was pretty brutal um you know it's just such an unbelievable SPEAKER_11: exercise and and uh learning how hard it is to make large quantities of things and you know deep respect for manufacturing and and scale um you know i i think you know there aren't that many startup companies that sort of have to tackle that level of you know automation production supply chain all those other complexities and um you know it it kind of brought us to our knees you know for for you know a good year or two in the midst of that whole thing um you know it was all hands on deck you know the SPEAKER_14: whole company was pulled into this you know every every level of you know engineering and and you know SPEAKER_30: every other function for that matter um i mean i pretty much you know moved to nevada in those days SPEAKER_11: and you know camped out at the gigafactory and you know did everything i possibly could do to to make batteries possible and battery packs and and motors and everything else um yeah it was uh it was pretty crazy you know hard to expect and look you know looking back into it we knew it'd be hard but we didn't Chamath Palihapitiya: know how hard yeah i mean it's one of the great things i think about entrepreneurship is that um if you actually knew how hard it was going to be you just would not do it it's one of the great priorities SPEAKER_04: or paradoxes i mean you guys had i remember visiting the factory in the gigafactory at that time period and you literally had executives from the corporate office on the line delivering cars interact i mean Chamath Palihapitiya: literally people who were in accounting were there delivering model threes to customers just to keep SPEAKER_05: the company solvent i mean the esprit de corps is was just palatable and uh you know i just think the world you probably don't hear this enough but i think the world does thank you ultimately for the massive sacrifice it took to to make the world pivot to electric and it's it's so clear i think and i'm curious your thoughts that now that tesla has done this and succeeded um it is now inevitable that the ice engine will be retired and and and we will be a hundred percent electric in the next decade two or SPEAKER_23: three what are your thoughts on that i 100 agree i mean we the we've passed the the threshold here the SPEAKER_30: tipping point or whatever analogy you want to use you know there's there's no um there's no going back and you know there'll there'll still be bumps along the way i mean it's it's sobering to realize or SPEAKER_68: remember you know what a small percent of the fleet is still electrified i mean we're still SPEAKER_11: you know broadly in single digit percents maybe approaching 10 you know depending on which region but um you know we've got a long way to go still but you know it's clear now to every major you know auto company maybe bar a few holdouts but um you know they people realize this is the future and where it's headed um and it's it's really cool you know because that was actually one of the the main missions of the team at tesla in the earliest days was you know even despite how hard it was and you know maybe we'd fail trying but you know damn the torpedoes we were going to try and you know convince the world that this was the future and accelerate it as much as we could and um you know having that shared mission and that sense of purpose you know made it possible i'd say to get through the the production hell and uh you know keep everyone engaged and aligned and create that you know that SPEAKER_47: that spirit that you felt uh norway 75 of new passenger car sales in 2020 are electric it's amazing SPEAKER_05: i mean they heavily subsidize it they're incenting but it just shows what this combination of excellence from tesla and the product combined with a country that takes it seriously and by the way norway has the biggest oil reserves and largest largest sovereign wealth fund in the world people don't know that but their offshore oil is unbelievable and it's quite paradoxical that norway is 75 new car ev and they have the largest reserves of oil let's just say something about you know what they're doing domestically versus what's there if tesla and uh we'll we'll go over to redwood materials next if tesla had failed what would the state of evs be today in terms of uh you know let's say you SPEAKER_00: failed at the model s you know time period just model s never got delivered model s doesn't get SPEAKER_104: delivered where are we at in the world with ev production well i mean personally i think the SPEAKER_30: technology is so compelling that it it it's going it was going to happen at some point no matter what SPEAKER_11: um i don't think it would have happened as fast and i think you know we may still be you know bumbling SPEAKER_30: along if tesla had had failed as you said somewhere in one of those production ramps s or even three um you know i just think it would have taken much longer and and the world wouldn't be as far along SPEAKER_44: as we are now and we'd have to do the electric truck you think they would be doing it now or they SPEAKER_30: would do it 10 20 years from now hard to predict i you know i i i'm pretty sure it would have been SPEAKER_109: later and i'm going to put it at closer to two decades than one you know it's and that really SPEAKER_30: matters you know this stuff i mean we can't go fast enough in terms of decarbonizing the world it's SPEAKER_11: terrifying you know to realize you know how how screwed up we are and how far we still have to go so you know that that acceleration and and that you know pulling ahead of you know other companies SPEAKER_111: launching this is really really important to the world uh if extreme weather no matter how you look SPEAKER_05: at it the the extreme weather we're seeing is um you know it's it's getting worse i think seven of the SPEAKER_00: eight fires we had in the last year are the other record fires uh in california history so this is in a very acute situation even with the massive progress we're making uh but you know founders plus technology can change the world and you did so we're thankful for that tell us uh about redwood SPEAKER_11: materials which you started in 2019. yeah redwood materials so um you know i started this you know to kind of look ahead at you know some of the issues and uh infrastructure and materials supply chain uh problems that were coming at us you know as the whole fleet electrifies so you know first off SPEAKER_30: i i love being an entrepreneur i love building things i love you know building teams and companies and projects um and you know i really believe strongly in the ability of you know small teams to have big SPEAKER_11: you know leveraged impacts on on the future and you know we just talked about that at tesla of course but you know what i saw that wasn't getting addressed i thought fast enough was um first off looking at the end of life for ev batteries you know it seems like a small issue and it seems far in the future and not something to worry about but it is a a substantial scale problem and it's going to take us quite a few years to get ready at scale um you know to fully demanufacture all of these batteries uh and i think it's it's the the challenge of reaching scale and economies of scale around that uh that a lot of people forget the other thing for me is is sort of imagining where this this all ends up and you know pretty bullish that the whole fleet is going to electrify all the cars on the planet will be electric and you know once you do that you know all of those materials that make up those cars um are going to be in a closed loop ecosystem you know they don't go away SPEAKER_23: they're they're in the car for the life of the car and you know that combined industry is bigger than SPEAKER_11: all of the mining that feeds it it's it's you know bigger than the existing kind of you know parts industries that supply it and it doesn't exist today so to me it's sort of seeing this massive industry SPEAKER_89: that that is going to be created it's a certainty and also seeing nothing happening yet and it not SPEAKER_30: existing that that to me was part of the really compelling reason to jump into to redwood what SPEAKER_114: what happens if a tesla gets totaled the battery pack maybe you know has whatever 10 degradation and SPEAKER_05: it's you know five-year-old battery pack what actually happens to the battery packs uh today SPEAKER_00: and then what is your plan for used battery packs in the future yeah there's a luckily a small number SPEAKER_23: of you know battery packs from evs today that are actually reaching end of life you know they last SPEAKER_68: pretty long and it's like you said a few that get totaled or wrecked um you know generally those you know get you know taken apart you know the modules come out of the pack you know a lot of components can get salvaged and reused you know even in a damaged pack some can get reused um the modules themselves you know if they're really dead truly end of life can't be refurbished or reused um you know go into a recycling pathway and uh you know today we we do recycle some ev modules SPEAKER_11: but the bulk of the stuff we recycle is actually uh smaller post-consumer you know stuff and also production scrap those are the biggest feedstocks but those those batteries then go through this recycling pathway and the the process we're scaling and inventing today is is how do we essentially take SPEAKER_68: them apart chemically and reintroduce them right back into cell manufacturing as fast as we possibly can SPEAKER_102: and how does that work uh is are the materials in uh you know for a neophyte like myself are the SPEAKER_05: materials in my battery pack spent and then you know uh cannot be reused or can they simply be taken apart and uh reconstituted how does that actually work chemically and and and practically uh you know SPEAKER_122: in layman's terms obviously yeah it's it's a little bit more complicated than you know recycling an aluminum can or something like that because you know there's there's multiple materials multiple metals SPEAKER_68: all mixed together and you know they're not just in a simple metallic state you know when you look at an aluminum can you can pretty easily imagine you know okay there's some aluminum here i could crush SPEAKER_11: it i could melt it i could make a new can um you know the same high level thing can happen with a battery you know those those materials are are fundamentally um all of the atoms are still fundamentally there you know they're not uh damaged they haven't been lost to the environment the function of the battery has been degraded and maybe the best way to think about it is that it's it's almost kind of corroded internally you know some of the atoms have recombined you know the elements have kind of reorganized themselves in a way that the the function of the device is no longer there but all of the elements are still inside so you know we basically you know are able to essentially take it apart you know separate out one at a time um using the different chemical SPEAKER_68: properties of the metals and and separate them back into uh you know pure streams of each of SPEAKER_11: those components and and looking really thoughtfully at what how is it made again you know we can figure out the most efficient ways to go you know to kind of jump and tunnel through from that recycling Chamath Palihapitiya: process into the manufacturing process got it how long does a tesla battery pack modern battery pack last two or three hundred thousand miles it seems and then it goes down to what 70 80 percent yeah and SPEAKER_23: i mean maybe maybe even more than that depends on the the use case um you know it could be 15 years pretty easily maybe even 20 years for for some of the longer live batteries so we don't know yet Chamath Palihapitiya: because they've been in the field is is that the um the actual truth of it is that it's hard to predict SPEAKER_30: you know it it is to some extent but you know there's sort of a probability distribution for SPEAKER_68: how long these things last you know they don't all die on sort of year 16 and a half or you know SPEAKER_11: there's there's this sort of bell curve that happens and um that bell curve is different based on every chemistry and every car and every product you know the interesting thing is you know this is all much more deterministic than trying to predict vehicle sales or something like that you know that that's really hard you know you're projecting people's behavior and everything else and incentives you know here the cars are already sold you know we know how many there are we know where they went um the only real variable is that that curve you know how wide is it you know when where's the center of it um so you know this is actually phenomenally predictable you know more SPEAKER_68: predictable than you know if you were trying to look ahead and say how many would be sold and SPEAKER_114: where would they be sold it's fascinating to me um that now that the batteries we have a 300 i think SPEAKER_27: our model y is 320 and then we're thinking about getting the long range model s i was going to get SPEAKER_05: the plaid but i was like you know what i think i want the long range more so it's easier to go to la and tahoe and you know not even think about the battery if those degrade even 50 the batteries SPEAKER_08: you'd still be at 200 miles so i this concept this big fear was that the battery packs would um degrade that that actually hasn't come to pass has it did you guys think that they would degrade faster than SPEAKER_30: they did no i i think um you know i think there's probably too much focus on range degradation being SPEAKER_11: the end of life that that i what you're saying is i think right on you know that probably won't be the way that batteries reach end of life um you know a bunch of other things happen over time you know they they start to lose power capacity when they get really old um and eventually you know they sort of have a knee in their performance where you know something something else goes wrong and it accelerates um and or functionally just won't work you know some part fails got it um that's typically SPEAKER_23: where i believe the end of life will be you know if it was a nice linear degradation i think people would be super happy driving them at 50 of their initial range it'll be an old car in 15 years SPEAKER_114: how long are these electric vehicles gonna last when compared to ice vehicles because without a SPEAKER_05: transmission as such and you know a giant oil you know disgusting carbon burning engine in the front it seems like even like brake pads last forever because you have regeneration like what is the SPEAKER_27: lifespan of an electric vehicle when compared to ice and it does seem to be that these things might be on the road a lot longer than traditional cars am i correct i i think yeah i think they absolutely SPEAKER_139: will be um you know the you're basically talking about electric motor which you know has you can run SPEAKER_11: continuously in many cases you know for tens of years you know it's not going to wear out um and uh you SPEAKER_23: know with a well-designed system you know there's no reason it shouldn't last many hundreds of thousands of SPEAKER_11: miles or you know maybe a million miles um we've had a couple of those right there's been a couple David Friedberg: in europe that have hit a million miles now they've changed their battery packs i think in the one i read SPEAKER_27: about that hit a million or close to it they had changed the battery pack three times which i think SPEAKER_05: since the car is so old it was probably one of the original model s's and apparently that person probably wanted to keep upgrading it but you know the warranties are eight years and 120 000 miles so SPEAKER_00: that's pretty bold for tesla to i think that's that was increasing for tesla right they kept increasing SPEAKER_09: the um the warranty yeah and then i mean it's always a little bit of a crystal ball trying to figure that out but um i think it's proving out to be really low risk and and conservative um but on the material SPEAKER_11: recycling the other you know piece to kind of remember that maybe isn't as obvious is you know production scrap and yield loss and you know there's a surprising amount of material that that actually starts into the production process that doesn't make it through to a finished car to a customer and you know that stuff happens immediately it happens day zero you know of a car's life SPEAKER_68: so you know depends on exactly where you look but that can pretty easily be 10 of the material Chamath Palihapitiya: got it so when we're making battery packs there's some amount of overflow things are not getting SPEAKER_27: included in the battery pack and that just correct basically falls on the factory floor so to speak SPEAKER_14: or maybe literally and some of this is structural you know imagine um the equivalent of like a SPEAKER_11: stamping where you're trying to you know make a circle out of a nice rectangular sheet of paper you know all the stuff that's around the circle yeah is production scrap you know it wasn't really wasted but you know it's still material that didn't get put into the original or the final product SPEAKER_05: so you know that's equal value it did absolutely just as good right it's the exact same material it's this is what happens when a sushi chef cuts a you know basically a loin of tuna they've got all this scrap when they cut around it and that scrap goes into your uh spicy tuna roll that's actually SPEAKER_11: that's a good analogy um you know and and that's uh that's a really you know significant amount of material you know we're when we're talking about 10 one in 10 cars you know equivalent of material uh that's a lot and you know it's a chance to to have a pretty big impact on the near term you know price structure of these things well the other you know piece that we're focusing on a lot is is material manufacturing and what does it mean well recycling is is one part of the equation you know it's a source of raw materials you know ultimately it's a really critical part of the market um but we're also you know going all the way through to finish cathode material anode copper foils um and and really you know becoming a manufacturing company for these core uh battery materials and that supply chain just doesn't exist in north america right now it's sort of amazing how critical this is to us SPEAKER_34: and into the world and how uh centralized it is right now in asia where is it centralized i know korea had SPEAKER_05: a big manufacturing obviously china does as well um where are the materials coming from because i hear everything from australia the congo you know all these different places people claim the materials SPEAKER_27: are coming from but in reality where is the material for battery packs coming from today and SPEAKER_14: where are they being manufactured you know it's complicated as hell you know that looking at the SPEAKER_11: supply chain map for this stuff is like throwing spaghetti on the wall literally um you know the problem is you have four or five critical materials you know all of which come from really different continents and sometimes a mix of them so you kind of have to pick which critical material you want to follow and and then look at it you know lithium for instance you know is coming from australia south america you know often it you know from south america it might come to north america then it might go to china and then it might go to korea or japan then it may come back to north america that's just lithium um you know copper can be even more silly you know north america you know is a big scrap market for copper wire plumbing you know all these things were a big generator of copper waste um yet we don't have much copper manufacturing so we actually export copper scrap back to china and korea you know where it gets made into in some cases you know the the same anode copper foil then sent right back to north SPEAKER_164: america to be made into batteries so really kind of crazy flow this should all be done on the continent SPEAKER_05: whether it's you know mexico south america the united states and so in sourcing this would be um more efficient certainly in terms of moving atoms around the planet but would also be would it be feasible on a cost basis to do this in like say mexico or even in the united states to manufacture batteries here and to to do more of this here is that the goal it absolutely is the goal SPEAKER_11: and and it is feasible you know these things are not um massive you know labor intensive practices you know they they have you know some technical jobs and some good jobs associated with them but it's more more about automation and chemical engineering and process control um you know the the reason that they are done predominantly in asia is you know it's a little bit legacy you know this is where the companies that initially had expertise in this were and they scaled up you know that that kind of makes sense um you know but uh you know absolutely this can be cost efficient you know done near where SPEAKER_68: batteries are assembled um and and really you know should be and certainly will be in the future Chamath Palihapitiya: yeah it does seem to me we're starting to realize that the supply chain optimization we did for the past 20 years might have been flawed in that SPEAKER_05: we we were arbitraging labor but at the expense of the resiliency of the supply chain which we experienced during the pandemic and now we're seeing you know another issue which is uh we're making ev batteries but we're sending them on cargo ships that are massive pollutants and that's a lot SPEAKER_30: of weight to be sending back and forth around the world i assume absolutely you know the resiliency of that you know the lead time of it is is really challenging um and the embedded emissions of SPEAKER_68: all the movement and transportation uh is a major factor you know evs are obviously you know they're SPEAKER_11: great for uh carbon you know and and over the use of the ev you know they pay back themselves many times over but when you kind of do that analysis you know making the electric car you know does have a pretty SPEAKER_68: significant uh investment in emissions is kind of how i think about it you know we invest energy you know you invest some emissions from all the things that went into it and then it has a payback period SPEAKER_11: as you use it and don't burn gasoline and by doing things like you know localizing the supply chain increasing recycled material content you know we can change the payback period the emissions payback period of an electric car dramatically right you know we can make it i think twice as good you know which is a really big deal you know that might mean the difference between 10 or 20 000 miles of driving before you hit your co2 payback versus maybe a few thousand ah that that was another part of the Chamath Palihapitiya: fear uncertainty and doubt that was being spread people saying oh these cars are you know so damn SPEAKER_05: they're more damaging to create an ev than it's worth this is uh poppycock yeah yeah that that was never SPEAKER_68: true i mean even even in the worst grid you know driving the thing you know on coal power which doesn't it's not the best model obviously but even in that case you were still very efficient and and SPEAKER_11: quite clean so you know it's all upside from there and you know i i think people were trying to kind of you know find different you know flaws and complex arguments to to make it seem that evs weren't weren't very good um but in any case you know doing these other you know issues like localizing and and recycling SPEAKER_171: um you know it makes it you know an absolute no-brainer is there going to be a battery shortage we keep SPEAKER_05: hearing that there's going to be a battery shortage because evs power walls grid systems are you know growing at a pace that maybe people you know in the even in the biggest estimates didn't anticipate um people are buying more laptops buying more phones buying more upgrading their phones uh frequently is there going to be a shortage you think is that a a potential risk here that more people will want SPEAKER_139: cars than we can actually make battery packs for well i mean i think you know we already see a shortage SPEAKER_23: basically you know i i think uh truth be told i mean this whole thing could be ramping up even faster SPEAKER_11: if there was you know a full balance across the whole supply chain um you know what i sort of see from my point of view right now is you know so many different oems you know countries you know uh SPEAKER_68: factories customers are leaping into evs you know making these huge announcements you know saying SPEAKER_11: they'll be fully electric in their fleet you know this decade or next um they haven't i think really done the math fully on you know what that entails in the supply chain and tracing it all the way back literally all the way back to the mines you know you you need to do that or else you know it's not a you haven't really fully solved it and you know it has the feeling to me of kind of a giant overbooked flight you know all these people are like oh this is great like we're gonna go to that new place we all want to go there it looks great sweet you know let's all get on the plane and go and you know everybody's saying they want to go there at the same time right um you know meanwhile you know we we have to sort of build the planes to get there we have to you know figure out how to you know SPEAKER_181: sequence everyone and you know you don't even have enough runway no it's and yeah i mean the SPEAKER_11: the figurative runway is like the time to do all this and right um you know it can all get sorted out over time but you know obviously we're trying to do this fast as a society and as a species SPEAKER_68: um i do think you know we're going to have a really painful time of it and you know it won't be just a simple battery shortage i think it's going to kind of ripple through different parts of the supply chain you know it may at one point be nickel shortages maybe it'll be cathode shortage SPEAKER_171: maybe another day it'll be separator shortage yeah um this we're already seeing this yeah you know SPEAKER_05: manifest itself you know obviously during the ppe and and you know issues around um the pandemic but then i just recently saw that the self driving or assist driving in the uh cadillac escalade which is supposed to be um quite um respectable uh level two kind of system that they took it out in the 22 Chamath Palihapitiya: model of the escalator and we saw this because they can't get the chips yeah so the chip shortage is just indicative of what can happen when you have a rush or you know any kind of uh disruption in SPEAKER_05: these services but we have plenty of material it's just the cost of digging it up right i mean we have material here in the united states and some places of rare earth minerals there's not a rare SPEAKER_00: earth mineral shortage it's just the the ability to dig it up and and build the infrastructure correct SPEAKER_30: for the most part yeah i think you know nickel may be a little challenging as we go through all this um SPEAKER_11: you know there is enough of it um but it it's been searched for more diff more more thoroughly than some of the other critical materials um you know i think there's tons of lithium in the earth's crust you know it's quite prevalent you know that that's one where it's the whole industry to go from searching for it to developing it refining it just needs to scale and it takes too long i mean some of these mines take eight years you know to to go from exploration to production it's a very very slow process you know maybe we can cut that in half or do some dramatic things um but even as you do that you know you you kind of start to cut environmental corners and you're pushing into more sensitive areas so there's no free lunch there um you know this it's one reason that i'm so excited about you know you know going after every little bit of recycled material we possibly can because it's it is the lowest hanging fruit you know it's the lowest cost the lowest emissions and has the least disruption to everything else going on so yeah every atom of that should SPEAKER_27: be recycled that we possibly can if only we thought about water usage in the united states this way we SPEAKER_05: literally don't have water meters and we have massive leaks and we just simply do not focus on the leakage literal leakage and here you know you're talking about the stamping of you know circles into SPEAKER_102: different metal sheets and it's just going on the the cutting room floor it makes no sense SPEAKER_14: yeah and it's it's amazing even on the consumer battery side how much you know leakage is a good word SPEAKER_23: for it leakage there is in the supply chain you know it's something like 90 of the batteries uh that SPEAKER_68: get sold to consumers put in small devices uh end up not recycled in north america landfill somewhere SPEAKER_11: landfilled maybe stockpiled in somebody's garage or drawer or somewhere you know it it's it's pretty amazing and you know those you know those contain an incredible amount of valuable materials cobalt especially um you know and that uh you know that is sort of what we're aiming to you know build into SPEAKER_195: a virtual mine what would be the value in an average iphone of the materials and the battery and SPEAKER_00: whatever for recycling is it 10 bucks worth of materials 25 if it was if you were able to efficiently SPEAKER_68: get it out yeah it's i mean it's small compared to the value of the iphone of course you know the the uh battery to device you know cost ratio is way different than an ev um it's on the order of single SPEAKER_11: digit dollars you know it's not you know not like you're gonna get a huge payday there but um i think the bigger issue is is the impact it can have on on uh sourcing of those materials for an ev sort of amazing but only a few hundred uh iphones you know can provide enough cobalt to make a new tesla battery pack really you know it's it's a difference in the chemistry used in in consumer electronics devices that are very cobalt intensive relative to you know ev or powerwall type batteries that are SPEAKER_30: really very efficient with cobalt so that that's one of the really compelling reasons to do that SPEAKER_05: you know we need to have a bit of a coordinated effort like we had around straws and plastic bags where we banned straws in india in the uk and in new york and california and then the same thing with Chamath Palihapitiya: plastic bags where you said hey listen you got to pay for it there should be a very aggressive public SPEAKER_05: campaign of if you have batteries sitting in drawers please go to this location you can go to let's say every post office just said you go to a post office you give them a battery they give you a five dollar gift card just that simple some really simple way for the government to intervene and say you know here's the use for post office any um for recycling any uh electronics you have bring it to your post office and we'll try to you know sell that to recycling companies because apple now is doing that apple will return will take back anything you give them even old imax they won't give you a SPEAKER_08: credit for the oldest ones but at least they'll take them and i'm assuming they're they're doing some SPEAKER_00: sort of you know i hope they're doing some sort of conscientious recycling they claim they are but i SPEAKER_23: don't know if they are or not no they put a lot of thought into it they're they're doing uh SPEAKER_11: some some pretty creative things in this whole space and uh um but i think you're exactly right i mean kind of a call to arms you know across the country to to you know have people help with this you know it almost feels like kind of the world war ii stuff where you know we're trying to like rally critical materials that we already have and control um you know it's it's an exciting thing SPEAKER_205: that i think people could really get fired up about well you just think about it as a generational SPEAKER_27: thing the boomers i think were a little too busy just you know being successful then you have us as gen xers who were really thinking about these things and trying to change the world but now you SPEAKER_05: have the millennials in gen z where i think that this is the first thing on their mind right like it's a consider it was a consideration for us obviously some people like yourself made this our life's mission but we were very aware of it but if you just look at the action set you know if people bring straws my three daughters are just like we don't want straws we don't want straws please don't give us straws you know they'll ask the waiter preemptively to not bring a straw and then of course the waiter brings straws puts them in the drink and like they're just like ah why did you SPEAKER_208: bring the straws you know it's like it's so crushing for them to get a straw which is pretty SPEAKER_11: awesome when you think about it you know it's incredible how much uh yeah i mean the different generations really get this and it just makes it immediately clicks and makes sense on how it should all work um and you know this is also i'd say been on the mind of a lot of you know ev customers you know for a long time i mean people really want to think about you know the the emissions the embedded emissions you know what happens at end of life to the product um for me it was always kind of you know interesting to see that discrepancy because you know we'd be spending all of our time on making more of them and invent making it better and cheaper faster um you know but then sort of in the top 10 list of questions from customers was well what about you know end of life and what about you know supply chain and you know it not that we'd you know not focus on it all but it was it was harder to put as much balanced effort in that as consumers were putting in their mind so what you know about SPEAKER_05: manufacturing uh which has been you know a large portion of your career's work we constantly hear like hey listen we can't make iphones or laptops in america but then we see tesla and yourselves and you know supply chain being built here to build cars and to build power walls to build solar whatever it happens to be um do you think if because we obviously have some geopolitical issues right now uh around you know various authoritarian countries and you know uh our interactions with them this seems to me to be a national security issue that we would be able to have batteries produced here in america is SPEAKER_27: this something we should be looking at as you know a critically important thing for you know the sovereignness of america i i absolutely think it is i mean it it to me seems totally untenable that we SPEAKER_11: would electrify our whole transportation fleet and have all of that dependent on a whole other set of countries uh for every core component of it it just it i can't see that possibly working and see that possibly working and if we did that you know it you know it would be this you know massive transfer of you know our whole economy it's a big part of our economy somewhere else um could iphones David Friedberg: be made here like just straight up like you guys build cars here people were like that's impossible you did it like could iphones and just just let's just say smartphones be manufactured here and what would SPEAKER_68: they cost like an extra hundred bucks or something like i mean i i think you know it can absolutely complicated things you know in the united states i i think part of it is you know we didn't try and SPEAKER_11: you know we made some strategic decisions that it wasn't uh yeah yeah it wasn't a heads-up competition in some cases um you know certainly there's talent here there's there's smart you know smart people there's um you know i'd say you know really a lot of innovation and creativity especially around SPEAKER_30: you know automation and factory software and the way to to improve this you know very you know in quick quick cycles um you know i i'm not i'm not saying it's an easy competition i mean china is you know SPEAKER_11: incredibly entrepreneurial and they're working you know really really hard um you know i i think you know people can't take that for granted you know and can't understand maybe without really being SPEAKER_30: there and going there you know how how intense and how much work they put into this and succeeding but we can compete we absolutely can i mean i'm not willing to just like throw up my hands and give up and say like oh well we're too you know too uh successful or lazy or something you know i'd move to SPEAKER_00: a different country if that was the case as we wrap here um people have been talking a whole bunch about solid state batteries i guess quantum scape is uh one of the companies working on that what are your SPEAKER_05: thoughts and you know this ultra fast charging concept um i guess versus lithium um tell us a little bit about how the future of batteries is going to play out over the next two decades well SPEAKER_23: fundamentally these are still lithium ion batteries you know they're the chemistry going on inside the SPEAKER_30: battery is very very similar um you know the big difference is in the anode material and the separator SPEAKER_11: so in the anode instead of having something like graphite or silicon where you have to basically kind of store the lithium uh inside of a matrix of carbon or or silicon oxide uh or silicon um you instead you know can store the lithium as metallic lithium just literally a sheet or a film of lithium SPEAKER_68: um you know to do that you know usually requires some really interesting changes to the separator and the electrolyte um you know whether it's a ceramic or whether it has you know different you know characteristics that allow that lithium to be a metal um you know so that's really the the main SPEAKER_11: structural change that's happening is is it going to work oh and if so when i i think it will work i mean the the performance from quantum scape in particular that i've seen it is really really good you know that the science of it is robust you know the performance is amazing um manufacturing of it is really difficult so you know this is uh you know something where you know that whole set of technologies has to get scaled it has to get you know made robust and and made at the right price point um you know i'm confident i i'd rather bet on that than i would betting on like you know a chemistry invention you know to make you know a new chemistry situation work for a battery um you know so i i do think SPEAKER_205: this is you know an important part of the future of batteries but it has better density i guess is part SPEAKER_114: of the concept here so if it had better density does that mean it's a lighter vehicle or you need SPEAKER_27: less of them therefore the cost would go down but currently it's very expensive to manufacture is that what we're kind of in right now in terms of the zone yep that's that's pretty much exactly it you SPEAKER_11: know it's um higher energy density higher in terms of mass and volume both um much faster charge times you know so that's another really potentially you know big benefit of course um you know the lithium doesn't have to like find its way into that you know matrix of graphite so that's kind of a traffic jam SPEAKER_05: for it and you just avoid that and it has lower materials like 15 minutes you charge 80 of the pack SPEAKER_00: or something like that right and it doesn't degrade it as much or something or even faster even faster oh wow SPEAKER_11: so i mean it what's possible and demonstrated at small scale is is incredible i mean it's you're basically you know back to you know a couple minutes kind of charge time when would um when SPEAKER_229: would we see this in an electric vehicle you think best case likely tricky to expect you know i i five to SPEAKER_30: ten years i don't want to get in front of you know uh some of these different companies on their SPEAKER_11: projections but you know i i think it's it's a few years away you know it's not like this is not going to be the 2023 model or something like that or um you know it has to mature and it has to you know really get you know scaled to gigawatt hours per year um you know we just got in the beginning of this we talked about how brutally hard that is and i think you know there's a whole cycle that has to happen with some of these new technologies but it but it's so compelling i mean this is this kind of like paints a road map to me you know out several decades where you know it's already sort of a no-brainer that everything will be electric and then when you overlay you know technology getting you SPEAKER_68: know even much better and cheaper you know it's it's absolutely assured yeah this that is one of the SPEAKER_27: great things i think uh of people building on the shoulders of your legacy and elon's and the whole SPEAKER_05: team over there is now it's inspired people to to really think bigger right and i i really think that what you did and what elon has done even more than the legacy of electric vehicles is an entire generation and i see it as an angel investor all the time because they reference you all SPEAKER_00: is that you inspired people to just try to do something even more ambitious and so for that humanity owes you a a great thank you and so on behalf of humanity i will thank you jb uh for all Chamath Palihapitiya: the hard work you and the teams over there did because it's the ramifications are everywhere i mean i'm seeing people who want to take on desalinization i'm seeing people who want to take on fusion just SPEAKER_00: you know huge huge uh audacious projects i think and uh if it wasn't for tesla i don't think people would be as bold uh and ambitious to save humanity from you know let's face it we got an existential crisis here right um and how are you feeling optimistically about our chances against global SPEAKER_05: warming do you wake up in the morning sometime and say this feels 50 50 or do you wake up and say you know what knowing what i know about the human spirit and innovation and entrepreneurship SPEAKER_11: we're going to beat this thing well i i mean i'm a i'm an optimist and a technologist you know i i know we're going to beat this thing you know but at the same time i i think it's going to be a bumpy ride and um probably more bumpy than everybody expects and really yeah and realizes uh i mean we have so much change baked in to where we are even today and uh really we have a lot of work to do you know to get to truly zero emissions um i mean i it's always shocks me because so many of the projections and everything else are talking about you know like oh a percent reduction you know on you know let's let's reduce back to like 22 000 levels i mean we need to get to zero you know this isn't this isn't about sort of a 10 or 20 reduction or 50 reduction it's like when do we get to zero um you know that seems super obvious if you think about it you know it's like when you stop over our skis we need to stop we're literally in a hole in a hole digging a hole and it's like well we're going to slow down the dig SPEAKER_41: and you're like really like you know let's actually not dig at all yeah we're gonna we need SPEAKER_165: to fill in the hole we need to get back to the surface level here we're under water i mean this is SPEAKER_05: exactly dangerous territory that you know as uh you know i think a lot of people have pointed out SPEAKER_00: this is a really stupid experiment to do with our planet it's unbelievably stupid and i think you know SPEAKER_11: sometimes it's almost the case you know again we're you know it's almost hard to trust everyone with the data because you don't want to demoralize the whole planet either um so we we kind of set out little intermediate targets that seem you know motivational and and whatnot um but anyway i i am optimistic you know we're going to solve it you know this this won't be the end of humanity or something like that um you know i think you know the next years and decades are going to be uh pretty intense though in terms of people really realizing how bad this experiment was and and rallying you know SPEAKER_68: more and more of our like collective willpower to go fix it faster uh you know and we will realize SPEAKER_05: what we lost when it's gone uh you know just a couple years ago i i was went scuba diving on the great barrier reef and you know the water is a degree and a half warmer or something and you see these amazing coral formations and then you see dead coral floating you come around one turn and SPEAKER_27: it's heartbreaking and it's like that's not coming back you're not going to get the ocean to reverse a degree and a half in time for this coral to not be destroyed and the number of homes that will burn SPEAKER_05: the number of forests that will burn the number of species who will be displaced you know we we can't even calculate it you know we we have the technology that the i think the frustrating part i think for SPEAKER_28: a lot of us is it's so obvious that the technology and the solution is there it's about execution at SPEAKER_00: scale and you know i think that's one of the great things that you you've done in your careers to SPEAKER_30: execute at scale right yeah and it's it's it's hard but you know people are excited you know to do it SPEAKER_11: and if we can make the products better you know it doesn't have to be you know chasing everyone with a stick you know that that's just not going to work and it's not going to be fast enough so i mean that was kind of always the mantra at tussle was okay you know to really do this faster we have to make a better car you know it has to be better in every way you know it can't be regulated into SPEAKER_111: existence um yeah it's it's kind of like yeah telling people like you can't have a steak ever or SPEAKER_05: like you're going to have to eat like a bunch of grass and that's going to save the planet it's like not going to work we need to work with human motivation here listen jb thanks for the the hard work i know uh you guys have done a great job with the fundraising which i assume means you're hiring talented people uh if people wanted to come work with you and save the planet and do the good work SPEAKER_117: that you're doing over there how can they find out about job opportunities and careers to save the planet SPEAKER_23: yeah thank you for the you know the reminder i mean if people want to uh learn more they can come to our website you know redwoodmaterials.com we've got a bunch of different awesome job openings we're SPEAKER_30: hiring you know engineers across the across the whole space a lot of chemical engineers automation software controls mechanical engineering um it's a really fun problem and i think uh you know a pretty amazing team to get in uh early and and make some major changes to this whole industry SPEAKER_109: uh this is the ground floor folks so if you've got that engineering degree this is a great great SPEAKER_00: option for you so please go apply and uh the world needs you all right jb continued success and SPEAKER_254: we'll see you all next time on this week in service bye bye thank you i'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world truth be told uh i never graduated from college and uh this is the closest i've ever gotten to a college graduation today i want to tell you three stories from my life that's it no big deal just three stories the first story is about connecting the dots i dropped out of reed college after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop in for another 18 months or so before i really quit so why'd i drop out it started before i was born my biological mother was a young unwed graduate student and she decided to put me up for adoption she felt very strongly that i should be adopted by college graduates so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife except that when i popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl so my parents who were on a waiting list got a call in the middle of the night asking we've got an unexpected baby boy do you want him they said of course my biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school she refused to sign the final adoption papers she only relented a few months later when my parents promised that i would go to college this was the start in my life and 17 years later i did go to college but i naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as stanford and all of my working class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition after six months i couldn't see the value in it i had no idea what i wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out and here i was spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life so i decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay it was pretty scary at the time but looking back it was one of the best decisions i ever made the minute i dropped out i could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting it wasn't all romantic i didn't have a dorm room so i slept on the floor in friends rooms i returned coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with and i would walk the seven miles across town every sunday night to get one good meal a week at the hari krishna temple i loved it and much of what i stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on let me give you one example reed college at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country throughout the campus every poster every label on every drawer was beautifully hand calligraphed because i had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes i decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this i learned about serif and sans serif typefaces about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations about what makes great typography great it was beautiful historical artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture and i found it fascinating none of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life but 10 years later when we were designing the first macintosh computer it all came back to me and we designed it all into the mac it was the first computer with beautiful typography if i had never dropped in on that single course in college the mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts and since windows just copied the mac it's likely that no personal computer would have them