From Cosmos to Quarries

Mat Vogels (00:00)

Welcome everybody to another episode of Pirates Only, a podcast where we bring together multiple founders in the same space to talk around a specific topic. And today we're going to dive into mining, which is a topic near and dear actually to my heart. grew up a mining brat. I moved all over the place as a kid, 17 different places by the time I graduated high school, all for mining. And my dad was a controller for different mining organizations and lived in different places in South America, Australia, New Caledonia.

So mining is near and dear to my heart. And the fact that we have two founders actively building in the space, but in completely different geographies, so to speak, is going to be fun. Let's start today with some introductions and then we'll go through some, some questions and we'll see where things go. We did have some questions I posted today. We had maybe a dozen or so questions that were, that were added, but we'll, we'll see if we get to all of them. Let's jump right in. Matt, how about you give us a little introduction, who you are.

What's Astro Forge? What are you building? And then we'll go deeper a little bit later.

Matthew Gialich (01:00)

Yeah, I'm Matt. am the CEO and founder of a company called Astroforge. At its core Astroforge is an asteroid mining company, right? We have this thesis that long-term we want to take all mining off the planet. We have one planet that we get to live on. It's a very special place to us. Let's stop destroying it and go do this in the universe. But as you can guess, that's not like a linear path. It doesn't happen tomorrow. We have a lot to go after. So right now we're focused on the platinum group metals and that's what we're going to go after.

Mat Vogels (01:27)

Love it. Ted, you are focused here on Earth, at least for now. Is that correct?

Ted Feldmann (01:32)

Yes, that is everyone Ted Feldman founder, CEO of Durin, or a startup based in El Segundo building automated drilling equipment used for mineral exploration. Drilling we're focused on is called core drilling, also known as diamond drilling, utilizes a diamond impregnated drill bit to collect cylindrical core samples like we have here. I think we might get into a bit more detail later on the pod and where we fit into the mineral exploration stack. Basically drilling is the largest spend category, exploration companies have core.

to expiration is what it comes down to. This is how we pull rock up, look at it, and analyze it to figure out whether we have a deposit in a given area. So we're focused on Earth right now, the US to be specific, but I think we'll be all over the planet and then maybe others at some point down the line.

Mat Vogels (02:15)

What brought you into mining? Let's start with you on as something to focus on. It's not one of those things that over the years people are like, you know what? cannot wait to get into mining. Yeah.

Ted Feldmann (02:25)

I think like you, I grew up around mining with my dad and my uncle, have spent the bulk of their careers in the mining industry, particularly in mineral exploration. So I've been talking about how we find deposits for most of my life. I've heard complaints about drilling for a lot of my life as well. I got formally involved towards into high school. I started working for a company exploring for titanium in Western Tennessee. Through that went really deep on the exploration process and was helping them with a bunch of stuff. But really what I took away from it was the national security implications of raw material extraction.

Basically every piece of titanium that's going into our F-35s is passing through the Russia or China at some point in the supply chain. And so building these fully American supply chains is one of the kind of moral motivations for Juren. Continuing on that in college, worked for a company called MP Materials, which operates the only rare earths mine in the United States. So again, same thread around national security and raw material extraction. And so coming to me wanting to start my own company when I was in college a couple of years ago, was basically looking for what is the big bottleneck in the mineral exploration.

or in the mining industry in general. I think the number one bottleneck is permitting. There's not much I could do about that as a 20 year old. so revised question became, how do we get more mines to the permitting stage? And so what is the actual blocker for exploration companies? And that is capital. What are they spending that capital on drilling? so a tackle drilling problem and drop the costs of that and get more data from each hole is what we're trying to do here. I was in college. So I incorporated during at the end of my junior year.

Mat Vogels (03:45)

What were we doing right before?

Ted Feldmann (03:49)

of college at Georgia Tech last year. incorporated in the computer science building after going through the Discipulous Accelerator Program and also going to the week prior, moved out to LA about a month later, two months later, started June last year and was on this full time.

Mat Vogels (04:03)

Congrats. Thank you. ride. You're just getting started too. Yeah. And fundraising. did you announce that the fund...

Ted Feldmann (04:05)

All right so far, just a year in.

We announced our pre-seed round in April, end of April. Congratulations. Thank you.

Mat Vogels (04:13)

Yeah.

Yeah. Fundraising is the hardest part. At least one of the hardest parts.

Ted Feldmann (04:17)

It's

not a part I particularly enjoy. When done like it's refining telling your story, which is my job as CEO. And if I can convince people to give me money to work on this problem, then how can I convince an engineer to give up everything to work here? And so that's core to my role.

Mat Vogels (04:32)

Yeah.

Well, Matt, same question. What got you into this particular industry? Maybe even a step further. Why mining in space over developing more innovations, technology here on earth for it.

Matthew Gialich (04:45)

Yeah, look, why mining in space is a question you get asked all the time. think it comes down pretty simply to me to ore grades. That's how all mines are based off of. That's how we underwrite mines. At the end of the day, that's what Teddy's trying to figure out, right? What is the ore grade of this? And we've known for a long time that there's a very special type of rock that floats around us in space called a metallic asteroid that has extremely high grades of critical minerals, specifically the platinum group metals that we care about. So at the end of the day, the way that I really look at Astrophorge is we're a mining company that just wants to go to the best ore and the best ore just happens to be in space.

So how do you do it? And that's where it comes from. Obviously my background is in engineering. I've worked on rockets for a long time. I've been around space for a long time. So I'm probably one of the few people that actually was able to take a step back and look at this and say, how much does it actually cost to go to deep space? How much does it actually cost to get to an asteroid and to attempt to mine it? And can we come up with a overall thesis of the total cost we're going to have to bring back X amount of material? And as of right now, we think that this case closes. Now it closes with a really good margin.

And that's the whole texture that we got to go into. So platinum group metal mines on earth, notoriously the best ones in South Africa have about a 14 % margin as of last year. These are thin margin mining companies. companies as a whole aren't places that come up.

Mat Vogels (05:57)

What's the average margin? What's the good margin for.

Matthew Gialich (05:59)

The

best margin in world right now is 14%. We had an example, the one platinum group metal mine in the United States, which is Sabane Stillwater in Montana, had a negative 5 % margin last year and is now decommissioned. So you run into these problems with it. And the reason you run into these problems that I don't think everybody realizes is because the ore, when we talk about platinum grouts, is really deep. So you have to do a really deep. And when you're talking about operating a mine at 2,000 meters underground, it's really hard. In fact, that's about the limit we can go to to economically mine.

And so it's not like we're scraping this stuff off the surface and it becomes cheaper. It's how do you make space cheaper? We're not competing with a backhoe in your backyard. Like these are extremely deep mines. We're essentially going to an alien world within our planet to go mine. Why not just go do it in space?

Mat Vogels (06:39)

Could you give us some perspective on some of the closer asteroids or some of these pieces, like the size of mind quality of a mind? How much greater rich are some of these minds that are?

Matthew Gialich (06:49)

Yeah, I'll show you guys an example downstairs. We're obviously in the Astrophorage office now, but downstairs we have an example of an M-type asteroid that's about 1.4 % platinum group metals by mass. Now to be clear, it is one of one. I have known others that are that good. Like on average, we're going to be about two order of magnitude lower than that when we talk about PGMs. I really hope I find that asteroid that'd be great. But these are still exceptional ore grades compared to what we have on earth. You're still talking five to six orders of magnitude better than the best mines in the world. So it can make a lot of sense to go after it.

this one material. That being said, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go after a lot of other materials, right? So we get asked all the time, what about cobalt, lithium, iron? So they're all up there. They're all up there. And you can make it, you can probably make some business case that there's, there was an article that came out that says there's $10,000 quadrillion on psyche worth of materials. Yeah. Most of that's iron. And like most of iron on earth is essentially free. You just pay the processing of getting it. So it doesn't really answer the case of margins. And like at the end of the day, mining is all about margins.

Ted Feldmann (07:45)

And I'm just building on that point. One of things I love about the mining industry is it's almost like we have these different engineering challenges to solve, but it is fundamentally the same market. There is always going be a buyer for platinum at some price. More buyers and more supply. It's going to change the price, but there's always going to be a buyer for these commodities. And so we have this engineering challenge of how do we lower our own costs? We don't need to worry about the demand side of this equation. It's all about how do we extract this resource? And to that end, like,

There are many different types of deposits and some are going to be higher grade and some are going be lower grade. It comes down to processing. Frankly, yes, there are valuable resources beneath where we are sitting right now. You could probably extract them in a lab, but it's going to be such a low grade that it's not economic. And so it's this balance between extraction cost and processing cost versus the grade and size of the resource.

Mat Vogels (08:32)

No, both of you mentioned this, but it seems as though there's maybe never been a hotter time or a more demanded time to be in mining. Why did it take this particular moment? Is it an acceleration in a particular technology? Is it AI? Is it robotics, cost materials? Is it just that we want to start to mine our resources here and not be dependent on other countries? What your opinions is the reason why now is the time for mining.

Ted Feldmann (09:01)

It's a combination like we need in the prior administration. The focus was on extracting cobalt or nickel or copper or lithium for electric vehicles and energy storage and wind turbines, et cetera. Now the focus is on everything we need for our defense industrial base and yeah, everything to combat China and we ourselves off of their supply chains. But also AI is a massive tailwind for us. The amount of resources that go into these data centers is immense. And so that's one of the things I like about mining.

is we're both a climate company, defense company, and an AI company. You're related to all of these different sectors.

Matthew Gialich (09:34)

Yeah along that we've seen this huge explosion in a couple different industries We've also seen a big curve shift that I don't think people realize unless you look at the data Which is one of the biggest things I'm gonna very much tailor my talk to platinum group on us because that's what I study right I don't actually know a lot about the other metal so teddy you to fill this in But when it comes to platinum, what are platinum's biggest use cases? It's catalytic converters on your car and it's chips chips is actually quickly rising as the biggest use case for platinum group metals But also a lot of people thought that electric cars were going to take over the world and we weren't going to see this

Ted Feldmann (09:48)

You're certainly no more about platinum.

Matthew Gialich (10:04)

Go look at the data. It's actually very different. And in fact, what we've seen is hybrid cars really have massive growth rate. The greatest thing about that is it uses even more platinum group metal being a hybrid. So I love it even more. Right. So we've really seen it fall into this category of cool. There's a huge demand for this commodity metal that we need to go after it. Now we can talk about a lot of different levels. Platinum is one of the few resources where we actually don't have the ore bodies to go mine. Now, like Teddy said, that all comes down to ore grade and where you go, but to quantify as a marginal use case for an ore body that actually makes sense mining, there's very few locations in the world.

That is actually not true for a lot of materials. We hear about rare earths all the time. And the problem with rare earths is there's a ton of rare earth deposits. There's a whole bunch we can go buy in the United States. It's the processing that we can't do. that it's not that we can't do is that we won't do in the United States. So we do it in China. It's very damaging to the environment process that we've regulated out of existence in the free world. So I think there's a twofold here is we got to really look at the regulation and where that's going. And do we want to make that concession or is there new techniques to refine?

the ore into the metals we need. And yeah, we got to see what the government's going to go on that front.

Ted Feldmann (11:08)

just building on that. It is a processing challenge with rare earths, is also, anything that's a processing challenge is also a mining challenge. Processing is easier as grade increases. And so we need to spend more time and capital looking for the higher grade resources that may drop the processing cost.

Matthew Gialich (11:23)

Yeah,

but regardless of grade on rare earths, it's regulated out. cannot process rare

Ted Feldmann (11:26)

very

difficult for years but now we got it

Mat Vogels (11:29)

think that'll change you think it is going to change here in the United States

Ted Feldmann (11:31)

think we've certainly seen interesting kind of regulation, but it's a long...

Mat Vogels (11:35)

fast enough before there's a switch in

Ted Feldmann (11:38)

Regardless

of processing regulation today, we have one viable rare earth deposit mine in the United States. That's Mountain Pass in California. The cutoff rate in Mountain Pass is something on the order of four and half percent total rare earth oxide. And so there's 15 different rare earths in there. Neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, antirbium are four important ones, which is maybe a tenth of what is being mined at Mountain Pass. The next deposit in the US is like an order of magnitude lower grade than that. And yet we need to find these high grade deposits we simply don't have in the US. ⁓

Mat Vogels (12:06)

there's an administrative change that changes some of these things, that would take a step back, do you see that as something that would vastly slow you down? I've heard some founders come to us and they say that they feel as though they have a clock in the back of their heads where they just don't know what's gonna happen with the next administration and they think about it as three years to get as much done as possible or as progress as possible. Do you think of that a little bit in what you're doing or not so much?

Ted Feldmann (12:29)

a little

bit, but I think mining is one of these topics where it is universal. If if the focus is on national security, then it's going to be on solving climate change. Either way, we still need to greatly increase our metals extraction. And so exactly. And so in the prior administration, it was more like throwing money at the problem, focused on the processing because we're too scared to touch the mining. In this administration, the focus seems to be more on accelerating the projects that we think are most perspective to build either way that helps us. Ideally, we're doing both.

Mat Vogels (12:41)

Not just gas.

What do you guys think though that still it's this hasn't happened before there for something so critical and foundational to so much of what we're doing is it does it tie into the fact that we've just lost a step on the manufacturing level so it hasn't been as a big of a priority on the material side or

Matthew Gialich (13:13)

No, it's economics. That's just math. It's cost driven.

Mat Vogels (13:17)

have do it. We just haven't been doing it here. In a way. ⁓

Matthew Gialich (13:20)

economic, economic viability. Again, when we look at a lot of the rare earths, like the challenge that we don't, nobody wants to say a lot about rare earths is the market cap is really small. Right. These things are not actually huge market caps. So New Disney, for example, Merck cap total last time I looked at it a week ago was 110 million. Okay, cool. So great. found a $50 billion ore deposit. Like you just can't, from commodity perspective, like the economics don't make sense. That is why you're going to hear me talk a lot about platinum group metals and not only has to do with. We can mine them for a good margin.

The market cap on them is massive. And I think that's a key point, right? really look at market cap on platinum group metals used in manufacturing last year was around 60 billion.

Mat Vogels (13:56)

60 billion, but that's a number that you can imagine growing anyway, as it becomes more.

Matthew Gialich (13:59)

Whether

or not it grows or not, I don't want to make a bet on where markets go. I need to make sure the market I'm going into today is big enough to sustain a venture scale business, right? As we go through it and there are like aren't as we look at each one of these as we go through. Gold is a huge one. just haven't found a golden asteroid. So that's a little bit of a problem for me, right? But that's the thing we got to say out loud is like economics got to make sense and economics will drive a lot of this as we go through. I think once we start to build a wall around our country, whether that's with tariffs or relationships with China,

the economics of this are starting to change. And that's why you're seeing mining come to the forefront.

Ted Feldmann (14:33)

Yeah, I mean, it comes down to like viability deposit. And like for something like rare, there's one in the US look at tungsten or intiminy. So you don't talk about much for electric vehicles, both critical for defense, very small market cap, and historically, just a few small minds for each of those in the US. I don't think have any production of either of those two metals right now, with the government getting interested, like, likely to need state backing in order to turn a profit on these projects, we don't have a massive high grade deposit containing these metals in the US. But if we need these for our defense supply chain, then surely government's going to intervene because it's a matter of national security.

your

Matthew Gialich (15:04)

But there is other ways to do this too. can also do what we do with oil, which is stockpiles. And so we've looked at doing this to some extent. think the other thing that's really important to understand about mining is I'm going to actually break mining into two different parts because we're convoluting both of them. There's the extraction part and there's the processing part. And these actually usually aren't done in the same spot. A lot of times it's two different countries and companies and going through.

Mat Vogels (15:22)

companies very

Ted Feldmann (15:26)

I'm going add exploration as third part of this.

Matthew Gialich (15:27)

Of course. Yeah. Exploration to underwrite a mine. Like you need exploration to underwrite a mine. If you want to do it on earth, there's a very well understood underwriting process for mines. And that's why you do core drilling and that's how you do it. That's delineation you do and all things like this. But regardless, there's two different steps here. Our body or not, we gotta be able to process. And the problem we have in America is we don't process. We don't turn your dirt into a bar of neodymium or tungsten or titanium, because that process is, uses a lot of bad chemicals. You use a lot of shit. We don't, we've regulated out of existence and that's a huge crux of the mining.

Mat Vogels (15:57)

Is that not what can you explain a little bit? Is that not even happening at all today in the United States? Or what is the is it happening? Just not very much. Or what does that even look like?

Matthew Gialich (16:04)

On platinum,

it's not happening at all. I can't speak for the others, Teddy. Maybe you can.

Ted Feldmann (16:07)

No, there's plenty of money going to the US, but we're We're not self sufficient in pretty much anything. And yeah, like copper, we're processing copper in the US. I don't think we're exporting copper or smelting it in Arizona or Utah. But I think, yeah, it's like lithium, we produce hardly any lithium here. We have one active lithium right now and a few under construction and then maybe we'll extract some from the smack over in Arkansas in a few years. Titanium, zero titanium production from the ground right now.

Mat Vogels (16:09)

I'm gas but process.

Ted Feldmann (16:35)

in the US. Cobalt, none. And we shouldn't have the deposits, but it's high grain elsewhere.

Mat Vogels (16:40)

we have titanium here? ⁓

Matthew Gialich (16:42)

Do we

process titanium here?

Ted Feldmann (16:43)

And now we produce, I think, with marginal spine manufacturing, some from recycling. The company I used to work for is now producing titanium in the US from recycled feed.

Matthew Gialich (16:50)

Yeah,

recycle is different though. It's a different process, right? It's the getting it out the leaching process. That's the really hard

Ted Feldmann (16:55)

But

I think my main point here is that it's not like we are mining ore and then stockpiling it in the US because we don't have the processing every piece of ore being mined is being processed somewhere. And so these two things need to be done in parallel. Like, yes, if we build a mine in the US, we need to have a processing capacity here. If we just build processing here, need to secure the feed from outside of the US. But it's not like we're stockpiling ore.

Matthew Gialich (17:17)

They don't need to be done in parallel. They haven't for probably the last five decades been done in parallel. I think we're creating economics incentives to make them want to be done in parallel. there's a difference and that's a regulatory.

Ted Feldmann (17:28)

You're not not going to maximize the profit if you just have one another

Matthew Gialich (17:31)

I actually disagree with that statement. look at aluminum, right? We process aluminum brought in Norway and we mine it in. I forget where that mine is. I'm getting the names wrong here. But the reason we do that is because of economics. It's not because of use cases, because power is way cheaper in the North and the ore deposits in the South. So economics drives this. And as soon as you start to introduce tariffs or even the threat of tariffs, you change that equation, especially when, you know, if we have to mine it in the U S ship it somewhere else, especially like China for processing.

It gets processed in China and then we have to pay a 500 % tariff to ship it back. Maybe it makes sense the processes here now where you've done it before.

Mat Vogels (18:04)

Problem still is though, is that the tariffs still feel, and you talk to founders and big and small, it's that they feel so uncertain that it's tough to build a business around whether or not those are going to stay the same and or change.

Matthew Gialich (18:17)

I think we've had a lot of clarity on the tariffs, don't you guys?

Ted Feldmann (18:19)

certainly. No. It's like popping up it like most of our supply chain is the US for our what impacts us as cherish in Canada, are we being North American supply chain? What about a third of our bomb is being imported in Canada, we don't produce some drilling components in the US is your steel products. And so they're 50 % steel tariff on a third of our bomb materially impacts our bottom line. Now, drilling hardware cost is five to 10 % of overall drilling cost. And so it doesn't really affect us that much, but certainly affects your cash flow right now.

Matthew Gialich (18:48)

Yeah. secret to us is there's no tariffs on space. So it makes it a little bit easier for us. And we already have to build a spacecraft that is primarily US based components. Although that is not a hundred percent true. There are still things we do buy from Canada, specifically some parts from rocket lab in Canada that may or may not have tariffs put on them as we go through. yeah, the ambiguity here even affects us. And we're probably one of the people that like really would be worried about it the least. And we still have some consternation over it. could just imagine when you have, especially a consumer electronic company right now, like that's all you got to be thinking about is where is this going to land and where are we going to go?

They've oscillated so much that it's impossible to predict. And we're trying to, I'm not trying to predict on next week's timeframe. I'm trying to predict on the next two to three years. I can't do that if the inputs are changing every two weeks. ⁓

Mat Vogels (19:28)

No, it's crazy. think that the

once some of these things settle and maybe they don't, but are there any companies today that are doing any of the processing in the United States or startups or new companies that are coming through at all?

Ted Feldmann (19:39)

I'll give Rio Tinto as the largest copper mine in the US, Bingham Canyon in Utah. This thing's a monster. Three-quarters of a mile deep, two and a half miles long, and a mile wide. They have a copper smelter right next to it. They're producing plates of copper a few miles away from where it's being mined. yeah, mined to metal supply chain. Freeport does that in Arizona as well. So we're producing metal in the US, mostly by these larger, vertically integrated mining companies.

Matthew Gialich (20:03)

Yeah, iron and copper are ones that are fully vertically integrated. think that with the ones that I talk about platinum, no, rare, I don't believe we're processing.

Ted Feldmann (20:10)

are. So rare earths, have the mining, and then you need to concentrate. And you get this, yeah, concentrated rare earths. And then you need to separate the rare earths. And that's a really complex part, because we group together these 15 elements because they are so chemically similar. Because of that, they're very difficult to separate. And so as of about a year ago, we are now separating rare earths in the US. They need to reduce them from the rock side to make a useful metal.

And so we're producing rare earth magnets right now in Fort Worth, Texas, MP materials, the only one in the US who can do it. What's interesting about MP is so that the asset they own Mountain Pass, we've been mining it for 80 years or so, it's gone through several different donors, previous owner, Molly Corp went bankrupt when China flooded the market in 2014. That was the whole thing that Jim Lutinsky, a hedge fund guy picked up the asset for 25 million bucks. And now it's a multi billion dollar company. was an incredible story there. But what MP did, which was smart, which our predecessor didn't do,

is they worked with the Chinese in order to get it into production because we simply did not have the processing expertise in the US. That was one of the reasons Mali Corp failed was because they tried to commission their separation circuit and they couldn't get it to work after years and hundreds of millions of dollars. And now MP and historically been selling reverts to China, Shenghe, their partner there, which they didn't want to do, but they had to do in order to save the company. And now they're selling to Japan and keeping a lot of their reverts in the US and it'll be a fully extended supply chain in the next year or two.

Mat Vogels (21:33)

Crazy. This can keep looking at what is this?

Ted Feldmann (21:35)

So this is a drill bit used in diamond drilling, also called core drilling. So the end of the bit, it's a soft iron matrix impregnated with diamond particles. The iron is designed to wear as approximate this same rate as the diamond particles. So as the diamond's dull, reveals new sharp diamonds. These bits last anywhere from five, 10 meters to 150, 200 meters. So anywhere from a few hours to a few days of drilling, depending on the sort of rock that you're going through. And so the profile is a circle.

And then that goes down into the ground and you push it and spin it into the ground. And then just to be fair, we did not manufacture this. This is something that we buy off the shelf and use on our rigs. Eventually we'll be building our own. And you end up getting rock like this. This is a cylindrical core sample. This is from about five people at the surface, a bunch of just sedimentary crap in here that's been compressed over the last million years or I no idea. It's on the side of a mountain. And so you get these core samples and then you'll end up getting hundreds of meters of these from a given hole.

These holes are anywhere from 150 to 200 meters to multiple kilometers long. The geologist will look at the core, log it, they'll tell you exactly the sort of rock and mineralogy of it. But then you're going to end up sending these samples to a lab to be assayed to know the exact composition. You can also scan them with hyperspectral or XRF or Lib sensors to get the approximate mineralogy or composition of it. But you end up wanting to know exactly what's in here, the grade at every meter or so interval across your hundreds of drill holes. And that's how you build your geological model.

and make a determination whether a project is viable.

Mat Vogels (23:02)

How does a, when you think about the technology of this, but even across the board, how outdated is the technology that we're using? So, so doing everything with the drill.

Ted Feldmann (23:10)

So diamond core drilling, the first hole was done with an 1893 by Edmund J. Long here at a project in Minnesota. And then I think it was an iron project up there. Fundamentally hasn't changed since then in terms of this drill bit spinning into the ground. And that's fairly optimal. you're, there's only a few ways to get a circular sample. You need to cut around it. The latest innovation here was in, believe, 1958, something like that. The wire line was introduced. So historically you had your drill bit at the bottom and then rods going up. And these are big pipes that you screw together.

And what you had to do when drilling was invented was take out all of those drill rods in order to extract a core sample from the end. last innovation here 60 years ago, using a wire line to extract the core sample. So what you have is you have another tube called the inner tube inside of these rods that the core slides into. There's a latch on top of that. And so you lower a tool called the overshot. It latches into place and lets you pull up the core sample without having to trip all the rods.

That was 60 years ago. There hasn't really been any innovation since then. It's a very labor intensive process. It requires three guys per rig to operate, sometimes two, but generally three laborers, 50 to 60 % of the operating cost. And the cost of this sort of drilling has tripled in the last 20 years, mostly due to rising workforce costs and a massive labor shortage.

Mat Vogels (24:22)

That's what you're tackling.

Ted Feldmann (24:23)

And

what we're trying to do it during automating this taking the human under the equation as well as scanning the rock as soon as it comes out of the surface and photographing it so we know exactly what we just drove through right when we drove through it.

Mat Vogels (24:33)

How does this technology compare to space? I feel like now is maybe the good time to split off a little bit and go back forth on the space side. Cause the technology has got to be different. It's got to be different across the board, right? Or how similar is it?

Matthew Gialich (24:44)

At the end of day, it's the same as like mining doesn't change. have two steps. Teddy is talking about a step that comes before you do mining, which is how do you underwrite a mine? You can technically go start a mine tomorrow in your backyard and just, got to provide your own finances. So that's, or you might make money.

Ted Feldmann (24:57)

gonna make a new money.

Mat Vogels (25:00)

always say the part that I was fascinated about mining growing up. It's very similar to investing in some ways is that you don't sometimes the most valuable mine is the mind you haven't dug a hole into yet. And so much of my dad's career, he talked about all these properties that they have and they haven't done anything with them on purpose, because of the fact that as soon as you do, you either have something that's worth something or it could be worth nothing.

Ted Feldmann (25:20)

could be worth something at the top of the commodity side, nothing at the bottom.

Matthew Gialich (25:23)

You have all

this but the problem with mining as a whole on earth or anywhere is that it's a low margin business So whenever you have a low margin business, you won't have more safety into it It's why real estate when you buy a house you have to have a home inspector You got to have insurance because banks don't want to take that risk and it's different as we go through different things But mining is a low margin business So they want to understand exactly what that or grid is before they go put a billion dollars of equipment when we talk about something like Copper mine, right? I mean, it's about a 1.5 billion dollar to start one of these mines You're not gonna start that if you have a hundred million dollars worth of copper

You really want to make sure you're good to go. That's why that exploration step has to happen on earth. It's a big difference in space, which is we have the separation of material already, right? We're going after again, metal asteroids. We really understand at a high level what this ore grade is already. There's not. First off, we go study a whole bunch of them. So I'll show you guys in a minute. I'll show you a whole bunch of asteroids, right? We just call them meteorites when they hit the earth and we go grab them and study them. And some of these tools you're talking about XRF we use here all the time and go study them and see exactly what's in them. And we get a pretty good distribution.

Mat Vogels (26:08)

What's technology for that?

Matthew Gialich (26:22)

of the breakdown of platinum group metals in them. And we may be somewhere on that distribution. I'm not going to say like we know exactly the parts per million of every single asteroid, but we know the distribution, the distribution is extremely high. So no matter which one we find, have a really lucrative ore body we can go mine. So the way we do it in space is we don't do that, that assessment part with core drilling. We do the assessment part by finding metal asteroids. And that is what we use earth-based telescopes to go do. We can do that with light. We can do that with a whole bunch of different technologies, or I should call them techniques to go discover what they are.

And then we just send our spacecraft out to go to the mining and the mining for us is the material removal part and the separation part. And for us, this still, this is a different process than we use on earth. On earth, you have low grade material. have to remove a lot and break down the parts of mining on earth to the best I understand them. I'm going to, again, focus is more on platinum group, amount of mines today. This might change a little bit for some other mines, but the basic premises is take a shit load of earth.

You break it down into little pieces of earth, right? To the step called combination. So you get little tiny balls of it, and then you do some kind of surface leaching. So for platinum group metals, you essentially soak them in cyanide until you leach out the metals that you can get. Blah, blah, blah. You have platinum. That's how you do it. That's all great. if you think of a metal asteroid, it's about 80 % iron. We don't have that level, right? We can't bring up cyanide with us. I don't have a caterpillar on there. So we do material removal via this dual laser system that we have here. Right? So we remove it using particles. We break it down.

And then separation for us is a pretty simple step because we're dealing with a very limited number of elements. It's iron and nickel and essentially the platinum group metals. The big trick to us is we do magnetic separation, right? So that's how we break it out. Now what this leaves us with is essentially this ball, which we call a Dore bar in the mining industry of just a whole bunch of platinum group metals stuck together. There is still a final step for us that has to be that leaching step. The difference for us is it's already broken down into small particles and it's very high grade. We're at about 90

98 % platinum group metals when we go to that leaching step, which means leaching steps are pretty quick for us.

Mat Vogels (28:15)

Was it like normal here on Earth? ⁓

Matthew Gialich (28:17)

Normally, Umicore takes

about 18 months to do the leaching. ⁓

Ted Feldmann (28:21)

you'll use heat bleaching and gold and copper as well. You'll stack up these things and you'll be spraying sand on it for decades sometimes.

Matthew Gialich (28:26)

Yeah, it can take a long time for us. It's ordered in a couple of days. And in fact, this is a very different way, but we come with a much, much higher grade or this coming out of these mines. Yeah. So that's how it works different in space. It's a very, at the end, at the core, it is the same process. I think the steps for doing in the underwrite for doing it are very different in space. We hope, but again, we have the burden to prove it. has been around for a long time. Space mining has been around for not a long time. Nobody's done it yet. So we got to go show we can do it.

Ted Feldmann (28:33)

Next reaction.

Mat Vogels (28:50)

One of the questions that came earlier today was, do think of ownership? Like you look at an asteroid and this is the first one to get there that owns it or what is it?

Matthew Gialich (28:57)

The UN, the outer space treaty is pretty clear we can't own it. Yeah, there's some stuff that I won't talk about on this podcast about how we're going to own it. But regardless for that is the way we win, and the way you win in a lot of startups is you could talk about protection and IP and all that, or you can just go faster than everybody else. And the reality is that's the tact we have. Let's go do it and show we can do it.

Mat Vogels (29:16)

stopping you right now from picking an asteroid in the

Matthew Gialich (29:18)

Absolutely not. have from the regulatory side Ted Cruz pushed through the 2015 Space Act that says clear as day Commercial companies the United States can mine asteroids and sell the material for profit. So I'm not concerned about that aspect of it Actually, I'm only concerned about can we do it for the cost we need to now take a step back here as Humans we've mined asteroids before right? We've done the Hayabusa missions We've done the OSIRIS-REx missions like we understand the physics to get to an asteroid to land on it To take material off it and to bring it back to earth

The only thing we have to do at Astroforge is show we can do it at high margin. And like cost is everything here. That's really all that it comes down to. So that's what we got to go prove.

Mat Vogels (29:57)

When was the last time that there was asteroid mining done? like you mentioned some of these.

Matthew Gialich (30:01)

O-Rex came back

what? A year ago? Dropped a sample off a year ago from Bennu? Now again, these are scientific missions with sample return and a very different premise of what I'm getting at here is like, there's no physics breakthrough needed to find an asteroid. We understand the physics here actually really well. It's been quite a few deep space return missions that we can go leverage this off of. We just got to show we can do it for a lower cost. And that's a dramatically lower cost than what NASA's done it for. And this is clearly, this is really the Falcon 1 of satellites, right? Like when Elon built Falcon 1,

At the time there was a rock called Delta four, Delta four cost about three and a half billion dollars to create and about a half a billion dollars at launch. And, know, I was like, I got 200 million bucks and we got ahead of $6 million launch target and they did it. And so you can extract a ton of capital out of space. If you really need to take more risk and you're willing to really from first principles, build back up. Like, how do you go access deep space? What are the real things you have to watch out for? How do you think about it? That's what we've done different here.

Mat Vogels (30:56)

mentioned the space X piece. And I'm curious when we move over to see when the unlock was on earth, but I always love there always seems to be these big technological unlocks and space X was like that for space. You could look at space being something that was literally out of this world, but just out of the ability for companies, certainly startups to be able to play in. And then it seems as though now I'm sure you could speak on it better. What's the cost has gone down? How many X 10 X over the last however many years?

Matthew Gialich (31:22)

Well, it's

a little bit... SpaceX definitely brought competition to the market, made it cheaper, but there were space startups that existed before SpaceX.

Mat Vogels (31:30)

Could

Astroforge exist at the margin?

Matthew Gialich (31:33)

Astrophorge couldn't exist without a little company you may have heard of called NASA. And the reason for that is there's something called the CLPS missions. These are the commercial lunar payload. I probably got that acronym wrong because I hate them. The missions to the moon that you see that keep tipping over and crashing to the surface. like, it's fun to watch, but I wish they would actually land. That for the first time in human history gave us commercial high energy launches, not going to LEO. And that's what we need to be successful. We need to access deep space. The moon is about 95 % of the way there.

So we need very little thrust to continue out into the atmosphere. And the only way to get that cheap is because NASA has essentially funded these missions for us to go do our demos. That's awesome.

Mat Vogels (32:10)

Is there any unlock on the earth side or any, it AI like for you specifically or in your industry, some of the unlocks that you have either seen recently or for your company?

Ted Feldmann (32:19)

Yeah, I don't think it's as clear a one as launch cost going down, just off the shelf robotics costs. Yeah. Dropping over last five to 10 years makes it so much easier to build an automated rig. Like we're using off the shelf robot arm right now as part of our system. And it saves us a year or two of engineering work to do that. Starlink helps getting data to the geologist in the office in Toronto quicker is a big unlock for us. It really comes down to just business model innovation. Most of the companies building these rigs today.

are not the ones operating them. One of the reasons only the gas is a decade, 15 years ahead of the mining industry in terms of technology is because the guys doing the drilling are the ones actually building their own rigs. Halliburton and Slumberge have massive R &D budgets that Eparoc or Sandvik, the two leaders in the sort of drilling manufacturing, the mining industry, simply don't have. Mining is a cyclical business. These contractors at OEM send a hordelier cash and they went to a downturn and really only spend on R &D when they are pushed by the major mining companies.

And that's, think, one of the things that I've realized over the last year or so is that like mining is perception that it's not innovative. I knew there were innovative things happening in here. I assume that was more from the equipment manufacturer side, but it's not. It is companies like BHP and Rio Tinto that are pushing the OEMs towards autonomy because they have their own KPIs that they want to hit primarily around safety, not secondarily around cost. like Rio Tinto has autonomous blast drill drills in the Pilbara.

I was in Perth about a month ago and saw the remote operation center. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. You've guys in circles and eight guys in chairs in a circle controlling a mine thousands of kilometers away. There's Rio Tinto's engineers that have built that system, that have built these automated rigs, retrofitted. There's Hull Trucks is a joint venture with Komatsu, but it is the major mining companies that are pushing innovation. And the problem we have with exploration is that it is highly fragmented. have thousands of exploration companies. It's not as bad of a situation with the contractors, but almost.

you don't have a few large champions with the cash flow to fund substantial R &D. And that's what this industry needs.

Mat Vogels (34:13)

Is it kind of, always thought of those, those large companies as almost like the Deloitte's of the world where a lot of these mining companies pay fortunes to have them, but he's analyzed. And I remember my dad was saying that he'd get you by two or three of these reports and they'd all come back different or they'd have some sort of different result and you'd almost just have to do it. And they would do it from his side as a way of pointing to saying that we did the reports, same way that people hire some of these massive firms to get these things done. can say the folks over at Deloitte said this. So that's why we went with that. No one's going to harm you for that.

Is that kind of the same? Are you breaking that mold? Is that what you're trying to break through in that?

Ted Feldmann (34:46)

Planning a mine is always going to be interpretation. You have a limited amount of data to guess what billions of cubic meters of rock are and then how you can extract it. What we're trying to do is just lower the cost of access to information. And so we are fundamentally a data collection company helping companies move faster with the cash they've raised as well as getting more data for the same amount of cash so they can get these projects out quicker, least reports out quicker and then make a decision on whether the project's viable.

Mat Vogels (35:11)

Yeah. So one of the things that we talked a little bit about earlier that you had mentioned between like mining on earth and mining in space, what do you guys think are one of the questions that was asked earlier was about mining in the ocean, deep sea pieces. Neither of you, at least right now are thinking about that. What are some high level thoughts on deep sea mining in a way? It's not like space that there's obviously there's pieces down there and it feels like it's closer to the surface. Why are there no more like deep sea mining companies?

Ted Feldmann (35:40)

First of all, there's a lot of regulatory uncertainty. It's different because at least on land you know who's responsible for it and the international ocean something. I forget what the regulatory body's called. It's just not clear. We don't really know who's responsible. You unlock the seas, you can mine in your territorial waters. That's really what the deep sea mining has been done so far. I guess it's not deep sea because it's close to land. We have done mine the subsurface before or mine the bottom of ocean before, just not in the middle of the ocean.

Mat Vogels (35:43)

more so than on our land.

Ted Feldmann (36:06)

And so that's what's getting a lot of press right now, are these nodules at the bottom of the floor. And it comes down to, yes, they're high grade, but if it's a mile down, how do you actually extract them? And the only viable way I've seen so far is essentially dredging, or it's like scooping up kitty litter when you get these rocks and then drop all the sand. And that is catastrophic to the environment. Now there's a lot of the ocean that does not have a ton of life at the bottom. And so probably still fine to mine. It's like you can, for digging a big pit here in the US or anywhere on the surface, like that is clearly surface disruption.

surface disruption in the ocean, maybe that's fine. It's a balance and it all comes down to the grade and then whether it's even legal. Someone's got to try it though.

Matthew Gialich (36:43)

actually think it's just actually much, different. It just doesn't economically work. Most of these things on bottom are manganese and iron and like you can mine them on earth. You have to now go 10,000 feet under the surface to you can end the only viable way a hundred percent to what you're saying is strip mining. We could talk about the environmental destruction that happens there. should cool. That's all great to talk about. problem is cool. Now you have to go load them on a ship. Then you have to somehow hold them on a ship and then transfer from a ship to get off and

What you get off is iron and manganese, which we can find in all there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of iron on this planet that we can go mine a lot easier. So I actually think it's purely economic. There's nothing in these nodules that we don't see on the earth in very similar grades. And it just to me, doesn't make a lot of sense from an economic standpoint. And there's a company called the metals company has been trying to do this for a while. And maybe I'm the only loser in here. That's actually gone and read their financial data on how they at this and see, and because they did some really creative fundraising things as they went through it and.

The reality is, I just don't think it works. Not an attack they're doing. And so maybe somebody will come up with a new technique that figures it out from an economic perspective. I just don't think it's viable.

Mat Vogels (37:48)

viability because one of questions was specifically I think for you, Matt, where is it literally easier to go mine in space versus mining on the ocean? And it sounds like it's not as

Matthew Gialich (37:56)

It's not the

same. I'm not going after, if it was iron, I would say no, neither. Just go to your backyard or probably go to some mountain that Teddy drilled some core samples in cause you're going to find iron all over. Right. Yeah, whatever. We're again, the only thing that we close on is the platinum group metals. That's why we're focused on it. It's not because I like platinum. It's because it's the one that makes economic sense. There is no platinum on these nodules under the ocean. There's very few mines on earth and the mines that are extremely deep.

Ted Feldmann (38:05)

Plus try and do their diet.

Matthew Gialich (38:20)

So what you're actually saying is it more cost effective to go mine in space than it is to go 2,500 meters under the earth's surface for an ore concentration that's eight parts per billion? And I think the definitive answer in my mind is yes. But that's the question I'm actually asking and answering.

Mat Vogels (38:37)

You mentioned earlier about the global impact on the planet for mining. And that was one of the questions we had somebody asked today too, it was just a chat about what it means to be in mining and the responsibility maybe holds to that as it relates to the health of the planet. And as we continue to do it, and they mentioned, obviously space is out of here and it separates that concern away. Is that one of the things you think about at Astroforge as it relates to removing that burden from the earth to somewhere else?

Matthew Gialich (39:05)

think if I want to be some futurists, like, yes, we are, as a whole, mining destroys our planet. That's just fact, right? We're these big holes, big trenches to try to extract a resource that we are then going to go use for some other course that causes a lot of pollution, a lot of damages as we go through. But we've got pretty good at managing this as we go forward. Let's look at platinum, for instance, though. Platinum is 3 % of world carbon emissions. If we could go mine platinum off the planet, we essentially remove all of that from the air.

Mat Vogels (39:31)

Mr.

Matthew Gialich (39:32)

Mining platinum is

3%. And the reason that look, it's because these mines aren't, they're not right next to a nuclear power plant in a city. Like these are mostly diesel generators in the middle of some, in the middle of South Africa, but not very near city. Like this is the middle of nowhere. You have to bring everything there. You're removing tons of rock just to get to the ore, which then you have to remove tons of ore to actually get a little bit of platinum after this, all this process that has to go into it. And if we can go mine in space, you essentially have the fuel cost of a Falcon nine. And when you calculate it out, it's about six orders of magnitude less than

than mining platinum on the earth. yes, platinum has a clear economic throughput that we can do. I don't think that's true for iron. I think it becomes more true the more rare these things get in the least ore deposits we have as we go through. I like to think of a future where we protect our planet, where we don't go to it for its resources anymore. We have to go off world. I think if we want to maintain our way of life, we have to go mine off the planet at some point because we're just going to run out of resources by default at some point, especially some of these rare ones on the outside.

I'm just hopeful the timing is now. And I think that's my bet, right? That I have the right timing. I could be wrong.

Mat Vogels (40:35)

You ever take a decade or so, but you can.

Matthew Gialich (40:37)

You gotta be the first and if you're the first and you do it there's a huge pot of gold at the end of that rainbow and that's what we're going after right we're talking about removing an industry mining is about 15 % of world GDP imagine if we not only could go do that in space there'd also be regulation put on earth where you no longer mine on earth so my hope is to create the first regulatory monopoly where I dominate 15 % of world GDP and become emperor of the planet yeah I'm coming out that part Teddy I'll let you be in my court

Ted Feldmann (41:04)

We'll figure something out. Yeah, we'll be in space by then as well.

Mat Vogels (41:07)

was gonna say, technology can translate to s-

Ted Feldmann (41:09)

No,

it's mining, it's God has given us this incredible planet with these resources that we have, but we have to use them with respect to moral obligations for the future, both in terms of the environmental impact and just what is left here. We have found a lot of the high grade deposits into the surface and we're having to go deeper and deeper underground, which does use more energy, less surface disruption. I think there's a few different types of environmental impact in mining. One is like gas emissions. And there are certain chemical processes that we use that just emit CO2 by default.

do some R &D, maybe find a way to get rid of that. Great. Two is like wastewater. A lot of the like if we're mining copper, it's often found with sulfides, you get rain, now you have sulfuric acid going into streams. So you got to make sure you line the leach pad with some clay or polymer liner so you don't have that going into the water. And then there's land disruption and cities disrupt the land. You're building a mine that's as big of a subdivision somewhere you're still disrupting the surface. I don't think mining is particularly bad.

as long as it is regulated properly and you make sure that you are not like that surface disruption is pretty much the only environmental harm that you're doing. But there are other human activities to do that to a much greater degree.

Matthew Gialich (42:13)

Yeah, let's not pretend for a second to that we're all I think humans we love to pretend like we can do things to save the planet. The choice we have right now is do we want to mine the surface of the earth or do we want to become cavemen? And I'll be honest with you, please mine the surface of the earth. I really like my iPhone and I'm not willing to make that trade. So it's somebody

Mat Vogels (42:29)

to it's not like you can't as a mutual earth and

Matthew Gialich (42:31)

Hey

Ted Feldmann (42:32)

I want us to continue to greatly increase our energy and resource consumption as standard of living improves and quality of life and life expectancy.

Matthew Gialich (42:40)

gotta go do all this stuff. And so let's not have this approach that it's all or nothing. Like I think we can be more responsible. I actually think what Teddy is doing and trying to find the better or deposits helps us out a lot because if we can find better or deposits, it's less energy to go mindset or deposit as we go into it. And same thing, if we can pull it off, cool. Maybe we give another option where it's not become a caveman or mind the planet. It's, we also now can go off world in mind. But again, that's not going to happen for everything overnight. There's some, might happen for platinum, hopefully in the next couple of years. That's my bet. I don't think it's going to happen for.

iron and manganese and copper and cobalt, like that's not realistic to see happen. So there's a lot of work that's got to go into it and we just got to keep working to improve the quality.

Ted Feldmann (43:16)

we're spending a lot more energy mining copper that's 0.15 % grade Chile than we are mining copper that is 6 % grade in the DRC and it may be underground, but still it's just finding the higher grade deposits and then that is what we need to extract every single mines that somewhere along a cost curve and as commodity prices fluctuate the fourth quarter tile.

get some put on current maintenance could shut down and then maybe we find new ones that are in C1. Great, that's what opens and then that mine is no longer viable. Human history is a story of us inventing new technologies and having lower commodity prices and then using more energy and resources. How many to continue to put in the work to stay along that trajectory.

Matthew Gialich (43:52)

Yeah, you guys heard of aluminum? Aluminum is like the best example.

Ted Feldmann (43:57)

Wasn't

there someone who was a hero that invented some cool process?

Matthew Gialich (43:59)

Dude, I heard about,

but go back to like whenever Napoleon was around, right? Napoleon silverware is aluminum. And cause that was the most baller shit Napoleon could have, right? Cause it was like, I'm King gold is for peasants. I got aluminum. And now like this can I'm drinking is aluminum. doesn't matter, but it also enabled our way of life. Like airplanes probably wouldn't exist without aluminum, right? There's so many things that we have in this world because of aluminum. That's all because of a single invent in the process. I actually hope that when we talk about Astroforge, when it comes to platinum group metals, like there's such a marginal difference there.

What does the world look like if we had almost unlimited platinum? What does that world start to look like? It's probably a world I want to go live in. It enables green hydrogen. It enables green hydrogen. There's a whole bunch of scientific use cases for this that comes through. But also if we just look at a catalyst for reducing emissions, this is what the platinum group metals are useful for or great at. And the reason we don't use it everywhere is because of its cost. What if that wasn't the case? Almost everything we talk about, all the CO2 emission catered from diesel generators and blah, Imagine if that just wasn't a problem. That's what the world that we can help create.

Mat Vogels (44:59)

That's not gonna say is if you imagine 10 years, 20 years, I love to even get some opinions on what that picture actually looks like, how long it takes. A lot of these podcasts talking about the future and what it might look like. What does it look like if you are successful beyond maybe even your own dreams of over the next decade? What does that world look like? And what does it look like for Astro?

Matthew Gialich (45:18)

just told you everything I know about the future because I don't spend a lot of time thinking about the future I think ⁓ we spend all this time No, I spent all time building the next mission and the future mission after that and everything I do is very detailed from an engineering perspective here I love to when I do think about the future. very much. this would be a cool world living. Okay, great. Here's a problem I have in front of me. Let me go solve it It's hard to dream about the future when you as a founder you got to be dedicated to what's going on now because the reality is If I think ten years ahead Astrophorge might not exist there. My job is to make sure it exists in ten years. Yeah

Mat Vogels (45:48)

There was a, yeah, was on this side of table on the VC side. Not that we encourage it, but oftentimes we see founders and I was a founder. I've raised capital before you just went through this process and you guys have to the fundraising process is so hard because you have to live simultaneously in this world of I need to go and pitch the future, the wildest future that I could think of to get all these people excited about giving me money to go do this. And then I immediately have to go back and figure out something.

Very specific. We're trying to figure out a lease or we're trying to pay for this particular software or this employee just is leaving. I need to figure out why the that's the part I think that makes fundraising so difficult is having to balance both of those worlds simultaneously. But building a company is kind of the same way. You have to balance that both, but you're exactly right. If you aren't grounded in what you're trying to do today, the next mission, you won't make it 10 years anyway.

Matthew Gialich (46:37)

Just don't lie to yourself. This is what we're doing. No matter what side of you are, it takes a lot of, it takes a lot of balls to start a company. think everybody knows this and it takes also a lot not to lie to yourself. It's very easy to get caught up in your own bullshit and be like, cool. Cool. No, it's really easy just to go read the facts and see what you got to do. And usually there's a problem ahead of you. got to go solve it.

Ted Feldmann (46:54)

Build a team next year.

Mat Vogels (46:56)

How team is it? How big of the companies you guys have right now? How big is your team?

Ted Feldmann (46:59)

Right about a dozen. dozen?

Matthew Gialich (47:01)

Yeah, we're at, hard capped the, actually we're above this now with interns, so I won't count my interns. But I actually took the Steve Jobs approach on the Macintosh team. The company will not be bigger than 50 people. ⁓ And that really makes us have to do a lot of trading on who we bring in. But I think we have some of the best space engineers in the world here. employee number two at SpaceX is on a board. Like Hans Sear all the time. We've really been able to recruit some of the best talent to come work on a mission that's different. I think we're one of the few space companies that so much space companies are orbiting the earth and

doing really boring stuff orbiting the Earth and I love you guys, God, it's boring as shit. Let's go try to explore the universe. And I think it stokes a little bit of fire on everybody to come here different than they would anywhere else.

Mat Vogels (47:42)

Yeah. If think forward a little bit to, I want to give you a chance to answer the same question of what does 10 years look like for Dern and if you, everything you want to do, you accomplish. What does your company look like? What is the world?

Ted Feldmann (47:53)

look

like? think it's like a flexibility of developing minds and tightening timelines. you can basically, basically today, the way exploration works, you're this continuous cycle of going to public markets, raising capital, spending most of it on drilling, spending three to six months analyzing that data, and then raising more capital. The world I want to live in is one of this continuous exploration process. And that's one of reasons it takes 10, 15 years to go from cool, there's some copper here,

to great let's build a mine is because of the cycle and you're always waiting on either essay results or your drill core or the capital markets. And so what we want to do is yes, get more done. We want to basically have data going straight from the drilling rig to the geologist model. So they can be constantly analyzing saying, okay, hey, instead of drilling, let's planning out 10 holes in a row, say, okay, we're like halfway through this hole. Actually, that's not good. We should drill over here, basically the data we got having this dynamic planning, so you can get

you are holds done collecting more or the same amount of data and then get projects to move quicker. And I think we're interested in getting ourselves involved in the exploration process at some point down the line. If you can build a tech stack that lowers the cost of exploration by 50 to 75 percent, that gives us a substantial advantage here, particularly if we partner with the best geologist or technology companies actually doing the AI to figure out where can we drill. I want the company I'm building right now is the one who's collecting this data. I'm not interested in doing the interpretation, at least for the time being.

We want to stay focused on just extracting the data. And so I think we have the flexibility of figuring out who do we partner with if we build this massive technological edge that we can either be a high margin services business or have the option to go and develop our own projects. We have this flexibility right now deciding who do we want to partner with. There's a lot to build before then.

Mat Vogels (49:31)

the world looks like if all that happens and even then.

Ted Feldmann (49:33)

with it. think it's

a similar vision to what Matt has we're continuing along this trend of declining commodity prices and improve standards of living. Say again. I was my vision. I know.

Matthew Gialich (49:40)

of the planet though? emperor of the planet?

Mat Vogels (49:46)

Is this planet or a different planet?

Matthew Gialich (49:48)

did maybe all of them. Right? Fuck it. Yeah, the galaxy.

Ted Feldmann (49:52)

I'm

a servant of God, but I think it'd be pretty cool to run a massive company.

Matthew Gialich (49:57)

Do you think that I

Mat Vogels (49:57)

So a lot of the divisions I get to, hear a lot of pitches and they almost all, when I asked them the question of what they envisioned in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, everybody kind of envisions this utopia of everything is cheap. The cost of energy is essentially zero cost of compute is zero. Intelligence is through the roof. What do you guys think is if some of these things hit, is that a future that you think is actually possible? I mean, that with you and are we multi-planetary is everything golden rainbows and you're emperor of a planet.

Matthew Gialich (50:24)

futures that

I'd love to see happen with what we're doing in Astrophot. Number one is if we can secure. PGMs at a high rate and bring them back. think you're going to see a lot of these technologies that fundamentally just don't close on a business case specifically around hydrogen start to become more viable. And I haven't done a lot of research. I'm not a high, I'm not pitching a hydrogen company. have no idea if even if it was free, how much that makes sense. But I think you start to see these use cases where there's going to be select areas where we can start to use these materials to build different things. Platinum is a very

melting point has a whole bunch of properties as elements that we love and there's a whole bunch of cool things we can go do with it. I'd love to see what the world becomes similar to what happened with the inflection point of aluminum. But there's probably a different reason why I'm here more than anything and the honest truth is let's be real for a second. The reason there's not a lot of mining companies because it's really boring. Like it is great, it's cool, that's awesome, it's also boring.

Mat Vogels (51:12)

It's not boring as I-

Ted Feldmann (51:13)

I think it's exciting.

Matthew Gialich (51:15)

But

I actually don't think it's exciting. Like I think it's really boring. think it is a means of something we have to do because at the end of the day you have to have a business, I want to go explore the universe. And right now we look at how NASA goes and explores the universe and NASA is really good at science. They're really good at taking on some of these frontier missions, but they haven't been really low cost enough for us to actually go take some risk and send some novel instruments up. We have these instruments like Europe or these missions like Europa Clipper costing five and a half billion dollars.

That doesn't mean like some university can go attach their camera and send it to Jupiter. If I can build these missions for the cost that we think we can hit, right? As a spacecraft that can go into deep space. I hope that we also enable a new wave of science where we can go figure out some of those core answers and thesis to what we wanted.

Mat Vogels (51:58)

saying these companies could essentially partner with you in a way where, hey, we're going to be able to lower the cost of all this because on our way back or on our way there, we're going to be getting billions of dollars worth of.

Matthew Gialich (52:07)

Yeah, we're gonna go out into the universe. What else can we do? What else can we go explore? And even as we talk about mining and that's what we are building the spacecraft for right now, what happens if we take the refinery off it and go send it to Jupiter? Could we go do that for a cost-effective price? I don't spend any time thinking about it. This is what I want to happen, not what I'm gonna spend time thinking about happening. But I think that human exploration, like how do we become a type two civilization is always on the forefront of my mind. It's something that like, you're never gonna figure out unless you go try.

Ted Feldmann (52:34)

I'll add onto that. have hardly broken the surface of the moon or Mars. Corring on both of those planets, or the moon and Mars, is something that I am very interested in wanting to do at some point. And I think by building this large kind of mining, contracting services business here, focused on removing people from the equation, I think we're in a pretty good spot to set up a special projects division a few years down the line and send a core jewelry to the moon or Mars. And we haven't cored the rock in Antarctica either. That'd be pretty cool. so we have a...

Mat Vogels (53:01)

We had at least one more question that you had mentioned earlier. We had two other people mention it, but they also mentioned it specifically to Matt. said, ask Matt about aliens.

Matthew Gialich (53:09)

I was totally joking about my alien's question. I get asked this.

Mat Vogels (53:12)

had two other people that said ask about about alien. So I don't know if that's something you say or if it's just because you're in space, but

Matthew Gialich (53:18)

No, whenever you're in space and when, look, the reality is when we talk about astromine, the first thing that comes to everybody's mind is some crazy movie and we're some crazy dudes and doing this. And the reality is, it's actually much more boring. Like we build a pretty standard spacecraft.

Mat Vogels (53:28)

Armageddon was one of the...

Ted Feldmann (53:30)

It's an incredible movie.

Matthew Gialich (53:31)

Absolutely.

100%.

Mat Vogels (53:33)

I was hoping when I asked, was your inspiration for this? And that was going to be your very first one. was just Armageddon.

Matthew Gialich (53:38)

I really want Ben Affleck to invest. if anybody knows Ben, I want to get him on the.

Mat Vogels (53:42)

commercial

Ben Affleck like putting on the suit again.

Ted Feldmann (53:46)

My problem with Armageddon

Matthew Gialich (53:51)

Teddy stop being

realistic. It was an awesome movie. All right They should have sent any humans either or like a shitty space shuttle, but that's against the point Yeah, it was bruce willis and ben afleck mining an aphrodite legit and then just blowing it up or whatever they did I even forget when it comes to aliens. Here's what I like to say about aliens all the time like from I Really hope we're not alone in the universe I don't have any evidence to suggest that we're not and I think it's really hard when you just look at the facts here to say is there

Ted Feldmann (53:54)

I'm not disputing that awesome, but it should have been on there

Matthew Gialich (54:20)

Any extra terrestrial life that goes out there. I'm pretty sure that we're going to find single celled organisms, maybe a multi celled organisms. I think the question is intelligent life. And here's the real thing about Astrophorges. If we go to an asteroid and there's intelligent or non-intelligent life there, intelligent life will know non-intelligent life. I'm not going to know. I'm just going to drill right through those guys and probably cook them and not bring them back. So I don't know if there's aliens or not. I really hope we find out, but I find it hard to believe that aliens are just UFOs coming to visit the planet.

I also find it hard to believe maybe a little bit different thought on this is that maybe the core question is that just faster than light travel is not actually physically possible. And so there could be other intelligent life forms out there that we just can't communicate with. And that's probably a really sad future that I hope is that I hope I'm incorrect with.

Mat Vogels (55:03)

I ⁓

Ted Feldmann (55:03)

I don't really

have any thoughts on aliens. I spend very little time thinking about that.

Matthew Gialich (55:07)

Have you ever

thought though, Teddy, like we talk about aliens and we always assume that means outer space. Yes, maybe that's by definition. There is a lot of places like I'm gonna get this all wrong because I watched some shitty History Channel documentary about it. There's some of these lakes that we haven't gone to on Earth that are really far under the ice caps. Deep caves. deep caves. Like if you start drilling down there.

Ted Feldmann (55:23)

unexplored life here now and our questions and I don't want to contaminate it but we got to figure out something unless I see it without

Matthew Gialich (55:29)

You're

gonna detect them.

Mat Vogels (55:31)

Yeah, if Dern was the company that discovered...

Ted Feldmann (55:33)

think that's why I want to do work in Antarctica.

Matthew Gialich (55:35)

Hold on, how much

would it cost me to like commission a drilling rig in Antarctica to go to one of these things? Yeah, it's like a mile and a half deep. Damn, much? Give me two years.

Ted Feldmann (55:41)

Yeah, give me $50 million.

It'll be a lot less soon. But no, we've just scratched the surface in Antarctica, geologically and Antarctica is basically half the Andes and half Western Australia, very mineral which places I'm not changing my in there. You're pretty good to know what's down there. Maybe

Mat Vogels (55:45)

me right now.

Similar. One of the questions to that was similar to that was we discovered new life. That's one thing. What about discovering just a new material in general that has this unlock capabilities, whether it's on earth or in space? Like what if you stumble across an asteroid that's been traveling across the cosmos for billions and billions of years, and it has some sort of metal or material or alien spacecraft that's on it. So it's not life, but it's like some sort of a, of a material on there that feels more likely maybe in some way.

Matthew Gialich (56:23)

I'll say this, we've collected a lot of samples of metal asteroids and we really don't see any materials that we don't understand on there. Now other types of asteroids, for sure. We've seen different things. There's some scientists that have materials named after them and it's really cool when you get to see this. I don't know. We really look at the elemental platinum group metals, right? There's six elements. So they're going to be broken down. And when we look at the bond structure, we can think about breaking all the bonds or not and how we go about that. It's a very different process. Look, I hope we find some cool shit on there. I don't actually don't know if I would keep it or not, or how my, the better question is.

And the way we have devised mining the asteroid, how does it respond to that? I don't know. If there's some unobtanium, would we just destroy it? Would we actually collect it? Would we reject it? I don't know the answer to that, but look, exploring the universe, this is a big crux of what we want to go do. Let's go see what's out there and then we can make decisions on what we do about

Mat Vogels (57:09)

Maybe then you discover that material that does let us go light speed and we can travel to all these planets and we'll see.

Ted Feldmann (57:15)

We will.

Mat Vogels (57:17)

Anything else you guys want to cover or topic?

Matthew Gialich (57:21)

I got nothing.

Ted Feldmann (57:22)

Not nothing. We're hiring.

Mat Vogels (57:23)

That's what I gonna say. let's do one quick CTA for both of you gentlemen. Thank you guys for spending the time here. Matt, what do need right now? What's going on? What's going on with Astroforge? What's the...

Matthew Gialich (57:33)

We're really focused on building the next spacecraft, right? The next spacecraft, which will be our second deep space mission, we'll go out and land on an asteroid and I'm going to spend all my time building that spacecraft. That's at the end, I'll be all of what we want to go do. Without that, nothing matters. And that's always going to respond to hiring the best team in the world to get it done. That's always number one, as Teddy points out, like hiring is probably the hardest thing we have to do as founders and the most important thing to do as founders.

Mat Vogels (57:46)

Yeah.

Matthew Gialich (57:58)

The second you lower your standard on hiring, like you lose. And so you just can't. And so it requires a lot of effort to get it right and to fix it when you get it wrong. ⁓

Mat Vogels (58:06)

You guys really

quickly on that point, because think both of you are going to mention hiring pieces here. What is some feedback that you can give to some founders that are building in deep tech right now, both on the recruiting side, but then retention side, as there's so many companies popping up, there's going to be this kind of whack-a-mole of people starting, leaving, and joining all these different companies.

Matthew Gialich (58:22)

On the hiring side, the honest truth is on hiring side, every time I've made an exception in my mind, it's been a bad exception. Just don't make exceptions. You know who great people are when you meet them. And the second you have questions, whether or not they're great, the answer is no. But it's really hard for founders to sit there and be like, how long am I going to take to hire this role? Especially when you're starting out, it's really difficult to go through the number of engineers you have to go through to make a great hire. And that number is going to be probably a number that you want to pretend is much smaller than it is.

You're going to need talk to probably over, you're going to need to physically talk to probably hundreds of people to find one hire to make. And that's a lot of work to go do, but you got to go do it. And that's all it is at the end of the day. You got to hire the best and don't make any concessions.

Mat Vogels (59:04)

biggest mistake I see founders to especially early and probably closer to your stage where they're just getting started. You just raised capital and you feel like, this person wants to work here and you have this Yes, like, I just want you to work here and you feel so good about the fact that somebody actually wants you and you're here with them. And it's really hard to go through that. So we always tell founders I remember making the same mistakes early on, you almost have to sit through as many of these even if you find somebody that you think is great. Obviously, you don't want to miss out on talent, but you almost have to give yourself this time.

Ted Feldmann (59:32)

to say numbers game is just I got to care and sometimes you find a good engineer, you got to in the work to make them care and show them that this is the best place for them to realize their personal mission. And so it requires getting to know people on a personal level beyond an interview. And if you're thinking about starting a company or just started out, talk to people and build up that network. Now, that's something I wish I did a lot more. And like I started the company when I was in college and so didn't have a network of really strong seniors, base X engineers. When I started out, I wish I had that I probably could have done more to build that out.

But that is what I would prioritize just as much as doing research on your idea and malinating with customers is build a great engineering network.

Mat Vogels (1:00:09)

change for retention? about retention as far as keeping that talent here?

Matthew Gialich (1:00:14)

great

engineering talent by working on great engineering problems. And the reality is here's the hard truth of it. About 75 % of how your company feels has to do with how the company is performing. So if your company is doing really well, team's going to feel really great. If your company's not doing really well, your team's not, you can only control about 25 % of it. And yeah, there's things we can do and we can try really hard there, but retention at small.

companies is going to be up and down. It's never going to be great. When you look at some statistics here, it's probably going to be much higher than anybody would like to admit. Right. It's not always the nicest thing to go after and look at. And if you have a hundred percent retention, it actually just means you're not doing your job. Your job is to hire the best people. And when you get it wrong, fix it. And I think we can't forget about that part. If you look at some people, we think are the notoriously best hiring managers in the world, whether it's the Sam Altman's or Elon Musk of the world, their hit rate is actually not that great. And they're the best in the world.

So they have to make those calls too. And it's important that you make the call.

Ted Feldmann (1:01:07)

Yeah, people like to win and you need to lead them to those victories.

Mat Vogels (1:01:12)

Any other CCA for use that you're hiring?

Ted Feldmann (1:01:14)

Yeah, we're hiring

I'm down here in LA right now the whole teams up in Nevada drilling our first hole with our first drill rig and so open it about 1000 feet. I'm on a flight up there in a few hours. And so if you want to work out in the outdoors on some cool hardware, design it in LA and test it all over the US and eventually the world, eventually other planets, then yeah, we're hiring mechanical, electrical and software engineers. We are a few hours used to Reno along IED. Nice.

Matthew Gialich (1:01:37)

We're in Nevada.

Ted Feldmann (1:01:44)

Yes. Cool.

Mat Vogels (1:01:46)

Thanks again. Boom.

Matthew Gialich (1:01:47)

Amazing cool.

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