Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries on solar maximalism, hard tech, and reclaiming the Salton Sea
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What is Casey Handmer’s solar maximalist worldview and why does he believe solar will dominate?
Non alcoholic in this. I have insufficient filter as it is. They're perfectly filtered. Just so you are
flattening. You're a solar maximist. People should fully update their worldviews that solar is gonna beat out everything.
The solar wave is is exponential, right? People are really bad at like understanding where they sit on an exponential curve and then correctly projecting into the future. My grand plan is you put another three million feet acre feet of water in the Salt and Sea, bring it back up to its historical like 1990 era level, stabilize the level, stabilize the salinity, and we could do that and it would pay for itself. Have you pitched the Trump administration on this thing? I did write a one pager for the Secretary of the Interior. Um, but I think they've got a lot on their plate. It's not rocket science. And I'm sure they'll figure it out sooner or later. I mean it's a little bit rocket science, you know, a lot of meat in there.
Actually, yeah, it's probably rocket science.
We had a a f Irishman here recently and that was a two pint episode for that guy. That got nice enough filtered by the end. It's like not that many for a session, but actually kind of a lot for a podcast. Especially if it's going back to work outs. Casey Hanmer is the founder of Terraform Industries, which is developing a machine that makes synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. He's also a prodigious blogger and all-around polymath. Cheers! So You started your career at Hyperloop.
That's where I first escaped from academia, yeah.
Yeah. Um uh uh working career. Is Hyperloop ever gonna happen?
I think I can safely say that now. Okay. It's really kind of interesting because you had a bunch of very talented engineers that came together to take a crack at a project that they weren't sure was possible. And it turns out that of all well it turns out that of all the the the known unknowns, they basically were able to solve them. But the levitation, vacuum, construction, all that sort of stuff. Um it was this like weird kind of subtlety that that ended up, you know, if I may say derailing the whole project, which is that the faster you go, the further you want to be away from the surface of the earth. And you would understand this as a pilot yourself. If you make a habit of flying through canyons and mountains, sooner or later the the cone of ground that you can get to with a seven G turn completely intersects the ground itself and then you die.
Um and and the same thing applies, you know, whether you're in a tube or not.
Um
Um so the practical consequence of that is if you want to build a network of hyper loops across the United States, you have to drill almost the entire way, right? Which is a lot of rock. You have to move a lot of rock, it's very expensive. Then when you start tallying up the numbers are California high-speed rails, supposedly north of a hundred billion dollars now, you say, Well, that seems like a lot of money, how many seven three sevens could you build and operate for thirty years for that much money? And it turns out you could move more people more quickly that way than with the hyperloop.
Uh
you
first turned me on to Henry Kaiser. Can you summarize the Henry Kaiser ove for people and maybe explain why he's so understudied?
That's an interesting one. So On my way in here today, I passed by the Kaiser Permanente just down the road. Um of course you have to pay your respects. Henry Kaiser grew up poor, uh, left high school, um, started off in photography initially, then went into uh hardware, then into construction, a bunch of other things. Every huge project you've heard of, he worked on. He worked on Shasta, he worked on Grand Coulee, he was the Grand Coulee principalie dam. He was the principal behind the Hoover Dam, which at the time they called the Bold Dam. Just insane work ethic. Would work 20 hours a day, every day for his entire life, right, like right up until he died at 85. And he really got going uh after the Hoover Dam at the beginning of World War II when just up the road here at um at Richmond uh and a few other places started these shipyards where they took the techniques they'd learned at at Hoover Dam and then applied it to shipbuilding and ultimately able to churn out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ships.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Casey Handmer’s solar maximalist worldview and why does he believe solar will dominate?
0:00–12:28
2
How did the failure of Hyperloop shape Handmer’s perspective on hard‑tech projects?
12:28–23:11
3
What lessons does Handmer draw from Henry Kaiser’s industrial empire?
23:11–33:29
4
How does Terraform Industries convert sunlight and air into synthetic natural gas?
33:29–44:28
5
Why does Handmer argue that solar‑panel costs will drop to just a few cents per watt?
44:28–56:29
6
What role does government intervention play in accelerating solar and desalination technologies?
56:29–1:07:10
7
What is the grand plan to refill the Salton Sea and its expected economic impact?
1:07:10–1:15:40
8
What leadership principles does Handmer consider essential for building hard‑hardware companies?
1:15:40–1:16:05
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Cheeky Pint
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