🇺🇸 HIRING YOUNG INDUSTRIALISTS: - 1 Fall Remote Ops Intern (Aug–Oct) - 3 Cohort Ops Leads In Person (Sept 29–Oct 8). Help us support our Cohort founders solving America's hardest problems in El Segundo. If you're mission-driven and organized, apply below.

May 21, 2025: I finish an orthographic-orbit animation of the @DurinMining drill test site, halfway up a hill in an NV gold mine. Sentinel-2 imagery draped over a NED DEM, displaced as a mesh in Blender, sunsetty .EXR. Ten days later: I’m bumping over shin-deep ruts in a rental pickup aimed at the site. Geoscience head Chris Seligman gamely points out nouns I need to catch up on: overburden. Waste rock. Outcrop. We’re an hour from the last bar of cell service and I’m glad I downloaded an offline sat map into GAIA More honest cartographers, e.g. DIY trail mappers and survey techs, only map what they tread. I generally don’t see the territory depicted on the maps I sell. So when offered a bunk in Durin’s flophouse I gladly accepted; let's see a core drilling site in a desert mine When we dismount thumb-sized crickets, desperate for moisture, thwack against our legs. Talc-fine dust boils around our feet, crowds our sinuses. This is nowheresville, pop. diesel gens and their tenders, the sharp end of the "primary sector" Much better drivers than I towed the two-ton robotic drill and big tanks of sloshing liquids past the same ruts. Totally routine for exploration drillers: drive to dustland, bring core samples to the surface with watch-your-clothes rotating equipment, drive back, hear beery tales in bad-lumbar chairs, repeat for weeks, months, 12 hours on, 12 hours off. Modernity rests on this cycle. One can’t dig up copper, iron, nickel, gold without sending men to breathe that dust and punch those holes. Going to work and editing territory...the antipode of making maps.......

Excited to announce a $30M oversubscribed fund. 🇺🇸 El Segundo is the world's best place to build hardtech and we're the pipeline for founders from across the world coming here to do it. Joining @tbpn later today to share more. If you're at the earliest stages of building hardtech for critical industries reach out now! Link to Axios article in thread.

Everything sits along a cost curve. With sufficiently cheap energy we can mine the dirt beneath our feet.

.@Firestorm_labs is building fully 3D-printed, modular drones with swappable payloads that are designed to be cheap and easy to repair in the field. Alongside them is the xCell, a mobile, containerized factory that turns raw powder into finished drone parts on-site. Firestorm CEO @DanMagy gives us a tour live on TBPN:

There will come a time when no one can believe we ever dreamed any other way.