Thinking On Paper

Nathan Silvernail quit SpaceX to make wood from grass. Building the first part of a rocket SpaceX ever reused—the nose cone—wasn’t enough.

After a decade working for Elon Musk, he quit, took everything he had learned, and started Plantd.

The plan? Make carbon-negative engineered lumber from fast-growing perennial grass. Climate tech meets space tech.

Wood, without trees.

Plantd's panels replace OSB, the oriented strand board that sheathes the floors, walls, and roofs of almost every new American home.

In this hotly anticipated episode, Nathan joins Thinking On Paper to talk about his SpaceX journey, why he thinks Mars is a distraction from the work in front of us, how the lumber industry accounts for the wood it burns, and why building a material stronger than steel turned out to be wrong.

You’ll get insight into the nine-month harvest cycle, what it takes to change the culture of an industry without letting it notice, and why he believes the unit economics that let SpaceX displace ULA will do the same to timber.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper connects the dots between technology and what it means to be human. New episodes every week.

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Chapters

(00:00) Grass building panels that replace wood
(04:10) SpaceX: what the job actually cost him
(07:56) What a payload fairing is and how SpaceX recovers it
(11:52) Lumber: why anger put him in this industry
(24:02) OSB alternative: a drop-in structural panel
(28:00) Carbon negative building materials explained
(29:50) SpaceX and ULA: the same playbook for lumber
(35:55) Why hemp, bamboo and mycelium fail as building materials
(40:14) Harvest: nine months against fifteen years
(46:00) Why the Space Shuttle was retired

A new White House memo wants America able to launch within 48 hours of need. It’s in the National Space Transportation Policy, and it’s why we got held up at the Department of War. We read every line.

The memo revokes the 2013 policy and sets a target of more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year by 2030. The US flew roughly 200 last year, so that’s about a fivefold jump in four years.

The Secretary of War and NASA run the federal launch and reentry ranges, and the War Department has to work out what’s stopping launches at 48 hours’ notice for high-priority civil and national security missions.

So what’s the real bottleneck: rockets, spaceports, land for reentry, or demand? Most launches today carry Starlink satellites or rideshare payloads. We ask whether 1,000 a year is a plan or a sales pitch, and what it means that 2030 is also when the ISS is due to retire and when China aims to land astronauts on the Moon.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast exploring AI, space tech, quantum computing, commercial spaceflight, and the systems shaping the future.

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Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to the US Space Transportation Policy
(03:20) US Launch Frequency: 2025 vs 2026
(04:45) Commercial Space Industry & Market Demand Gap
(06:24) US vs China Space Race & Global Competition
(07:55) Launch Range Infrastructure & 48-Hour Responsive Space
(10:00) Regulatory Frameworks, FAA & Spectrum Allocation
(12:02) Smallsat Rideshare Economics & Market Opportunities
(15:13) NASA Mars Carve-Out & Artemis Lunar Surface Goals
(18:43) The Geopolitical Race to Mars & Commercial Landers
(20:48) ISS Deorbiting & Realism of the 2030 1,000-Launch Target
(23:22) Key Takeaways for Commercial Space Tech

#spacetech #spacepolicy #nationalspacetransportationpolicy #commercialspace #spaceforce #astronomy #aerospace #spacex #thinkingonpaper

Why do we stop asking questions as adults? Philosopher and researcher Pia Lauritzen has analyzed over 30,000 questions and discovered a striking reality: our innate curiosity never actually disappears.

The ability to wonder stays intact. What changes as we grow up is the social price tag. Every question requires you to admit you don't know something, and in corporate culture, nobody gets promoted for sounding ignorant. Ask the wrong question in the wrong room, and harmless curiosity starts to feel like a high-stakes interrogation—which is why most of us learn to keep our thoughts to ourselves.

Lauritzen proves that our questioning instinct is only suppressed, not lost. In her keynotes, she gives audiences just one minute and two simple rules, resulting in everyone writing a thoughtful question instantly. They could do it the whole time; they just needed permission.

In this episode of Thinking On Paper, we explore the philosophy of questions, why workplace structures punish curiosity, and whether artificial intelligence is actually capable of genuine thought.

Be curious, stay disruptive.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.

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#philosophy #curiosity #criticalthinking #artificialintelligence #pialauritzen #workplaceculture #thinkingonpaper #podcast

Nicholas Ponari says AI music makes live performance more valuable, not less. Mark calls the same future a hellscape.

Ponari's scenario: by 2045 his son types a script into a generator, gets a feature film in the style of Kubrick crossed with Tarantino, and hits publish. 

Everyone becomes a creator in every medium. Nobody can consume a fraction of it, so AI becomes the largest curator in history.

Mark's objection is that shared culture dies with it. No song anyone else has heard. No film anyone else has seen. Nothing left to talk about.

Ponari's answer is scarcity. When everything is generated, the things that cannot be, a room, a crowd, live music, become more valuable than ever.

Who's right?

Full episode at thinkingonpaper.xyz.

Be curious, stay disruptive.

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Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 

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🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠

📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠

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The U.S. and China are racing to build artificial intelligence systems that could lead to machine superintelligence before anyone fully understands the consequences. The risk? Global economic meltdown and existential threat. Not on our watch.

In this episode of Thinking On Paper, Mark and Jeremy examine "The Hard Question of AI," a thought-provoking essay by Planet CEO Will Marshall. Marshall argues that frontier AI governance now requires the same strict verification, trust, and global non-proliferation frameworks historically reserved for nuclear weapons.

That means moving far beyond voluntary safety pledges. Real enforcement would require monitoring advanced hardware chips, tracking massive data-center construction and energy consumption, inspecting frontier AI labs, protecting whistleblowers, and establishing international red lines around recursive self-improvement (RSI).

However, comparing AI to nuclear arms has major flaws. While weapons-grade uranium is scarce and heavily guarded, AI software can cross borders instantly—meaning a rogue actor or small lab could accidentally trigger AGI first. At the heart of the discussion lies one critical question: What would an AI Cuban Missile Crisis look like? What event could force the U.S. and China to cooperate beyond empty political rhetoric?

We also cover:

• Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and the real incentives behind AI safety warnings
• The limits of voluntary tech regulation and the RAND verification framework
• Recursive self-improvement and closed-loop AI growth loops
• The geopolitics of the U.S.–China AI race and the supply chain bottlenecks
• The Fermi paradox and whether governments can build institutions capable of managing superintelligence (Hint: they can't)

Please enjoy the show. And don’t have nightmares.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack
🫵 Choose your own technology adventure
📺 Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube
🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on Apple Podcasts
📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram

Chapters

(00:00) Trailer
(01:38) AI and Existential Risk
(02:40) OpenAI, Anthropic & Google: The Frontier Labs
(04:40) Nuclear Meltdown vs. Existential Threat
(05:50) Why Everyone is Talking About the End of Humanity
(08:00) RSI: Closed-Loop Recursive Self-Improvement
(10:00) A Copyright and Legal Interlude
(19:39) Why America and China Are Locked in an AI Race
(23:51) The AI Cuban Missile Crisis: What Would It Take?
(28:07) The Global AI Supply Chain and Data Centers
(35:09) USA, China, and the Structural AI Dead-End
(40:36) Applying the Nuclear Framework to Modern AI

AI companies are splashing billions on more GPUs before they use the ones they already have. Many sit idle, others use a fraction of their potential. 

For the hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI companies, buying more GPUs does not solve much if the GPUs already in the rack spend too much time waiting for the rest of the system.

The next battle in the AI infrastructure wars is efficiency: GPU utilization, NICs, memory movement, networking, CPUs and software that keeps expensive hardware doing useful work.

Moshe Tanach runs NeuReality AI, a company building infrastructure for AI inference. In this conversation, he explains why the next wave of AI infrastructure depends on GPU utilization, NICs, memory movement, networking and software efficiency, not just buying more chips.

This is a technical conversation about AI inference, infrastructure efficiency and the hardware layer beneath ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the AI tools now being built into business software.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 

🏠 ⁠Buy us a beer on Substack⁠

🫵 C⁠hoose your own technology adventure ⁠

📺  ⁠Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube ⁠

🎧 R⁠emember Steve Jobs on APPLE⁠

📺 ⁠Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram ⁠

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Chapters

(00:00) The GPU challenge

(01:27) Training Vs Inference

(05:45) Memory & Keeping The GPU Busy

(07:31) Deep Seek, Blackwell & Ruben

(09:03) How Ripe Is CPU For Reinvention?

(11:03) AI Agents Run On CPUs

(12:51) Do We Need All The Computation?

(14:35) GPU Utilization Rates

(16:50) Tokens In A Context Window

(20:59) Data, Knowledge & Wisdom

(23:56) Why Are Your GPUs Busy? (A Truck Analogy)

(29:07) Hyperscalers

(31:59) The Decode Phase

(36:47) What More Efficient GPUs Means For The User

Bruce Friedrich, founder of the Good Food Institute and author of Meat, explains why the future of food may depend less on changing human behaviour and more on changing how meat is produced.

For more than 12,000 years, humans have relied on animal agriculture to produce meat. Bruce argues that this system is reaching its limits.

We explore how cultivated meat is made, why it is attracting support from governments and major food companies, and why some of the biggest meat eaters are also the most open to the technology.

Along the way, we discuss the environmental cost of livestock, antibiotic resistance, food security, infrastructure, consumer psychology, regulation, and whether this technology could become as transformative as renewable energy or electric vehicles.

We also examine what happens to farmers, why culture may be harder to change than technology, and whether cultivated meat can ever reach price parity with conventional meat.

If the next agricultural revolution is already underway, it may not begin on a farm.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack

🫵 Choose your own technology adventure

📺  Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube

🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE

📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram

--

Chapters

(00:00) Who Eats Cultivated Meat?

(02:37) Cultural Significance of Meat

(06:09) What Is Cultivated Meat?

(08:25) The Science Behind Cultivated Meat

(10:48) How Much Does Cultivated Meat Cost?

(14:46) What does cultivated meat taste like?

(17:10) Emerging Companies in the Lab Meat Industry

(19:08) Industry Support for Alternative Meats

(21:06) Government Role in Innovation

(24:40) The Future of Animal Agriculture

(28:25) Agricultural Policies for Sustainability

(31:41) What Are Fermented Meats?

(35:48) Meat And Antibiotic Resistance

(39:32) The Invisible Costs of Meat Production

(42:26) The Future of Cultivated Meat

Asteroid mining sounds insane until you speak to AstroForge CEO Matthew Gialich.

Matthew’s team at AstroForge builds spacecraft to mine metallic M-type asteroids for platinum group metals, the unglamorous but essential metals inside phones, cars, chips, electronics and much more.

AstroForge is one of the few companies trying to make space mining real, targeting metal-rich asteroids that could contain platinum, palladium, iridium and other PGMs.

Why? Earth’s resources are getting harder, deeper and more expensive to reach. The good stuff is not sitting neatly on the surface. A lot of it is buried, depleted, regulated or uneconomic.

In this episode, Matthew explains why asteroid mining may now be technically and economically possible, why Planetary Resources may have been too early, how SpaceX changed the capital story for space startups, and why AstroForge’s first deep-space spacecraft failed after travelling nearly a million miles from Earth.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life.

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack
🫵 Choose your own technology adventure
📺 Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube
🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE
📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram

Chapters

(00:00) Asteroid Mining Trailer
(02:51) The Economic Necessity of Asteroid Mining
(08:37) Lessons from Planetary Resources
(10:43) Risk and Innovation
(15:26) Deep Space Two
(19:05) The Quest for Asteroid Exploration
(22:20) Aliens & Life Beyond Earth
(24:17) Ownership and Ethics in Space Mining
(26:21) The Next Challenges in Asteroid Mining
(27:56) Changing Earth's Economy
(30:13) The Role of Capital
(32:32) Matt's Vision for Space Exploration
(35:06) The Drive to Explore the Universe
(36:55) NASA's Evolution
(39:17) Inside Astroforge
(42:53) The Complexity of Space Engineering
(44:25) Data Centers in Space
(47:30) The Limitations of AI in Space Engineering

Quantum computers could change medicine, material science and AI. Unfortunately, it's impossible to know how because the industry is buried under hype. Dr. Bob Sutor takes us on a masterclass through the conflicting headlines to the reality of quantum technology today. 

By the end of the show you’ll know what’s fact and fiction, where the industry is heading and how to protect yourself from AI slop masquerading as insight.

We also learn about:

• Why “quantum supremacy” and “quantum advantage” claims should be treated carefully

• Why quantum computing is still in its prehistory

• How engineering discipline is changing the field

• What IBM and Cleveland Clinic’s protein simulation work shows about quantum chemistry

• Why money, sovereignty and technology are driving the quantum industry

• How governments are funding quantum computing in the United States, France, the UK, Finland and elsewhere

• What China may be doing in quantum computing

• Which industries are doing serious quantum research

• Why there are many quantum hardware approaches and no clear winner yet

• Whether helium-3 supply matters for quantum computing

Bob also explains why quantum computers will be useful for specific classes of difficult problems where classical computers struggle, especially once systems become larger, more reliable and fault tolerant.

The conversation ends with practical advice on separating the quantum noise from the Thinking On Paper signal.

Please enjoy the show.

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Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping your life. 

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack

🫵 Choose your own technology adventure

📺  Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube

🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE:

📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram

(00:00) AI Quantum Slop

(00:40) Welcome To The Show

(06:04) When Quantum Computers Finally Become Useful

(10:13) Why Governments Are Throwing Money at Quantum

(15:53) Is China Ahead in Quantum?

(18:48) Where Quantum Might Actually Matter

(27:11) Can Quantum Help Fix Climate Change?

(28:35) Why Battery Companies Care About Quantum

(30:31) Why Quantum Doesn’t Belong in the IT Department

(31:53) Who’s Doing the Real Work in Quantum?

(32:40) Why Quantum Companies Need Real Customers

(38:19) The Funding Problem Behind Quantum Progress

(45:22) Does Quantum Computing Need Helium-3?

(48:01) Will We Need a Quantum Computer Matchmaker?

(50:38) How to Spot Quantum Hype Before You Share It

Awad Sayeed, co-founder and CTO of Parsnipp AI, joins Thinking on Paper to explain generative engine optimisation, or GEO, and how companies can become more visible inside LLMs.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How generative engine optimisation differs from SEO

• Why context matters more than keywords in AI search

• How ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini use information differently

• What persona-based agents reveal about brand visibility

• How structured data helps AI systems understand websites

• Why comparison pages and clear product information matter

• What black-hat GEO could look like

• How AI-generated content could pollute the internet

• Whether brands should create separate experiences for humans and AI agents

• How advertising may develop inside AI assistants

Awad argues that GEO doesn’t replace SEO. Strong websites, useful content and clear structure still matter. But companies now need to think about whether AI systems can retrieve, interpret and recommend their information in the right context.

And as this is Thinking On Paper, we ask about the human impact, the wider change in the structure of the internet, trust, data and consumerism. 

Please enjoy the show.

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🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack

🫵 Choose your own technology adventure

📺  Watch our beautiful faces on YouTube

🎧 Remember Steve Jobs on APPLE

📺 Get clips and exclusive videos on Instagram

--

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to Generative Engine Optimization

(03:36) Understanding Persona-Based Agents

(06:23) The Transition from SEO to GEO

(09:06) Context in LLMs and GEO

(11:41) Black Hat Strategies in GEO

(14:22) The Future of the Internet

(16:58) Advertising in the Age of GEO

(19:37) The Impact of GEO

(28:22) The Evolution of AI Models

(29:03) Integrating AI into Business Strategies

(29:52) Agents vs. Humans

(32:10) The Future of SEO and GEO

(34:08) Tools for Visibility and Analytics in AI

(36:00) Customer-Driven Development

(39:23) The Role of Storytelling in GEO

(42:04) Model Transparency and the Future of AI