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Chapter 1: What is the current state of America's critical minerals supply?
The U.S. is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply. We are too slow at designing, building, and ramping up new minerals capacity, even after we have licensed to operate.
Even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change.
You both came out of Tesla. What does the Tesla model give you that a traditional industrial company doesn't have?
The belief that you can innovate on systems that are old and archaic. If the outcome is worth it, Tesla will fight through the challenges of getting to that outcome. We're making a big bet on autonomy in refineries, where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.
The world's leading producer of silicon carbide, which is a key power semiconductor, is based here in the U.S. And so we should be leveraging the applications of that technology here first, manufacturing here at home. And if we don't,
The U.S. power grid runs on mechanical systems designed before World War II. American critical mineral supply sits 50 years behind China. And demand for both is accelerating faster than at any point in history. For decades, the bet was that innovation at the edge — better batteries, smarter software, faster chips — would be enough. It wasn't. The infrastructure underneath never kept up.
Grid transformers are still steel, oil, and copper. Critical minerals still flow through refineries the U.S. doesn't own or control. Two founders who built the Megapack, the 4680 battery cell, and Tesla's global mineral supply chain think the same playbook that rewired the auto industry can rewire the grid and the mine. The constraint isn't ambition.
It's whether American industry can move fast enough to matter. Turner Caldwell and Drew Baglino speak with Aaron Price Wright about megawatts, minerals, and the new strategic high ground.
Now, it's tempting to talk about the AI race as a competition of models and chips. But the truth is that AI dominance and re-industrialization more broadly are physical projects.
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Chapter 2: How does automation impact the mining and refining processes?
They are energy projects. They are mining and refining projects. They are manufacturing projects. They are grid-scale projects. Every breakthrough model, new factory, and autonomous system that we'll talk about here today has a real-world requirement underneath it. Materials, energy, and the ability to move electricity where it's needed, when it's needed.
We increasingly hear concerns that AI will put an undue strain on an already faltering grid, will demand more energy than we can give, more build-out than we can keep up with. And in many ways, these are fair concerns. But rather than taking this at face value and putting our pencils down on progress, we see this as a call to action, an opportunity. We can do great things in this country.
We have rallied around national projects before. accomplish things few dream possible and we can do so again. This is the next chapter of American dynamism.
If we want to rebuild the industrial backbone of the United States, we have to rethink the entire stack from critical minerals to energy generation to transmission to how we build and interconnect new infrastructure at the speed that it's needed. This next conversation brings together two incredible entrepreneurs building across that stack to talk about what it will take to do just that.
Please join me in welcoming co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, Turner Caldwell, and founder and CEO of Heron Power, Drew Baglino. We'll spend a lot more time in this room today talking about AI, but the constraint on America's AI future, and as I mentioned, I think reindustrialization more broadly is in many ways atoms and not. algorithms.
So you two are both building fundamental pieces of this physical infrastructure that the future AI economy can't live without. So maybe just for the audience to get started, why don't you briefly explain what you both build and why these physical industries matter?
Yeah, so Mariana Minerals is a software-first minerals mining and refining company. When I say software-first, what that means is that about a quarter of the company is software engineers, machine learning engineers that are developing three core operating systems to accelerate project delivery and increase the amount of autonomy that we see in minerals operations and in refining operations.
Capital Project OS is basically a product lifecycle management tool, is the way to think about it, but that goes from process development and mine development all the way through engineering, construction, and procurement operations. and doing agentic workflow automation kind of through that stack. PlantOS is how we use reinforcement learning to control refineries.
And MineOS is, again, how we use reinforcement learning to control, do short-interval autonomous control of mining operations. But we do not sell software. We are not a SaaS company. We develop, we engineer, build, and operate minerals projects. And so we have a copper mine that's operating in southeast Utah that's producing high-grade copper refineries.
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Chapter 3: What lessons from Tesla are applied to the energy and minerals sectors?
Well, I had a front row seat to an amazing set of impactful innovations at the grid's edge, right? EVs becoming more affordable, not just more affordable, but more omnipresent around us, building the supercharging infrastructure to support those electric vehicles, and then working on grid storage. I was responsible for Megapack and scaling the energy business at Tesla. And I
All along the way, what I saw was even though there's so much innovation happening at the edge of the grid, on the other side of the wire, there's really been no change. The systems underpinning the grid today are the same largely mechanical systems that were developed over 100 years ago. And you don't get control. You don't get monitoring. You end up with an overbuilt system that is fragile.
And also, there's not a lot of suppliers providing that equipment. And most of them are actually headquartered overseas. And that just doesn't seem like a secure position for such critical infrastructure for us to have here in the United States. What does it take to get things done here? I think you can. I mean, I built the mega factory with my team.
My team was super awesome in Lathrop, California in 11 months. It was a JCPenney warehouse. 11 months later, the first product came off the line. But ultimately, what it comes down to is alignment. when you're working with your local jurisdiction, they can use the process for a code-compliant project to say no at every step, or they can say yes at every step.
And so how do we as a collective, you know, gain alignment that building, re-industrializing the U.S., building critical infrastructure and supporting our critical supply chains here in the U.S. is a good thing, and identifying ways to say yes at every step along the way and really accelerate these processes versus no. And when you do find that, it can be magical. That's been my experience.
And I know in particular, we've talked about sort of labor costs and labor shortages, and oftentimes people point to that as the reason why they can't get things done in the U.S., but what's your experience then?
Yeah. I mean, today's factories are really automated. If you're building a new factory today, you know, in China or the U.S., the labor differential is less than 10% of cost of goods sold. It might even be less than 5%. But what actually is driving the competitiveness of the different locations, in my mind, is it comes down to supply chain.
And how do we develop co-located critical supply chains in the United States where the logistics costs are much, much shorter and much, much lower because the logistics time is much, much shorter? If you look at, you know, China, they are so thoughtful about building these industrial areas.
You know, everything that you could possibly need to build a car, which has 7000 parts in it, you know, is within less than a three hours drive. Getting to that kind of co-location of the supply base in the United States would be a major unlock, along with automation, while still providing immense numbers of high-paying, important jobs. I think that's a vision that I'd like to advocate for.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges of rethinking the U.S. power grid?
Yeah. that's a hard thing to replicate not in a startup and it's a hard thing to maintain within a startup, but I think it's really important to getting things done.
Yeah. Yeah, totally. Um, talking about kind of getting things done and building that team and, uh, being able to hire. You know, one thing that jumps out is both of your companies are building real facilities that will create real jobs.
Turner, your initial lithium and copper projects should add over 500 construction jobs and additional full time jobs in the next 18 months, with many more as you scale operations. Drew, Heron is getting ready to build out its first large factory, which should also be something around 500 jobs. And, you know, that's just the first factory of many.
What have you both learned about building an industrial workforce in the U.S. in 2026?
I think you have to be creative here in the U.S. We are reindustrializing, and I can't just go to, like, a phone tree of power electronics manufacturing engineers or production associates. And, I mean, in my background, I was responsible for building, along with my team, the 4680 program manufacturing facility, a 50-gigawatt-hour battery facility in Texas.
And, you know, at that point, there were really not a lot of battery operations in the United States. So you instead have to look for analogs. So I was hiring people out of high speed bottling plants and out of, you know, syringe manufacturing facilities where they're making billions of syringes.
And, you know, if you can get that creative hat going, you find that there's immense depth of talent in the U.S. And people are excited to work in new industries and you build that shared vision of the future. And I'm very positive about what you can get accomplished here.
Yeah, I would say that looking at analog industries is a great point. It's the, you know, for the mining industry, we're in a similar position where we're kind of we've had 35 years of just meaningful attrition in the labor pool. But the oil and gas sector has a bunch of extremely good talent.
And the software space, you know, a lot of the underlying optimization algorithms that we're writing for our plants, they look very, very similar. to the optimization algorithms that are in dog walking apps and Uber ride optimization, underwriting loans, ad optimization. And so there is transferability in the like broader U.S. talent pool. What's important is building that talent magnet.
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