The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 47 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Caldwell: US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply
“The US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.”
Caldwell: US lacks labor pool required to operate critical mineral refineries
“And we don't have that labor pool here that has that embedded know-how that can walk up to a refinery and quickly get it operating on spec, and then also manage that variability.”
Caldwell: Refineries and mining must leverage automotive autonomy and humanoid robots
“And what we've landed on is that you have to go full bore kind of like leveraging the advances in autonomy in automotive and humanoid robots to go and apply that to refineries and to mining operations.”
Caldwell: Startups should only vertically integrate if their existence depends on it
“You should not be vertically integrating just because you can save five percent or 10% or 20, even 50% on a subcomponent that does not kind of check the box of like, does the company exist or not?”
Caldwell: Reinforcement learning enables fully automated control of industrial plants
“We're at this point where kind of like the compute and machine learning, reinforcement learning Do really enable, enable you to go no humans in the loop and how a lot of these plants are controlled.”
Turner Caldwell: Long mining build cycles trap tech startups in pilots
“But you'll end up doing a lot of pilots and because they don't build enough plants kind of sequentially, like, they'll build one big mine every five years if that. And the, like, there aren't just, there just aren't a lot of opportunities to get into a commerc…”
Caldwell: Reinforcement learning will automate scaling of new chemical processes
“That like scale jump is actually something that we think that RL and will enable with like a pretty meaningful like pace adjustment where you don't need the humans to kind of like fine tune the process conditions around a new process chemistry because the, you…”
Caldwell: US has lost ability to build infrastructure and mineral plants
“The reason that we are so panicked about it right now is because we have fundamentally lost the ability to build large-scale infrastructure, and we have lost the ability to, like, operate complex minerals plants.”
Caldwell: Mariana Minerals uses reinforcement learning to automate mineral refineries
“We're making a big bet on autonomy and refineries, where we use reinforcement learning to actually remove humans from the loop in determining how refineries operate.”
Caldwell: Co-locating plant operators with software engineers beats forward-deployed models
“Sitting the software engineers right next to the operating teams, but Not in like a forward deploy engineer type way where everyone has the same incentives is what's going to yield the best results when it comes to trying to optimize these assets.”
Caldwell: Legacy mining companies abandon autonomous tech projects after short failures
“And I think what we see, at least in, in, in the minerals industry, is, like, folks will give it a shot for a year. You know, people have tried to do autonomy and mining for a long time. And generally a lot of companies will just end up, you know, they'll fail…”
Caldwell: Industrial refining algorithms match consumer tech software models
“And the software space you know, a lot of the underlying optimization algorithms that we're writing for our plants, they look very, very similar to the optimization algorithms that are in dog walking apps and Uber ride optimization underwriting loans ad optimi…”
Caldwell: Musk's aggressive deadlines force teams to prioritize critical paths
“When Elon sets, like, super aggressive targets, the goal is actually to get the team to think really deliberately. There's a thousand things that have to happen, but a hundred of them cannot be done in six months, so we have to go attack those hundred things.”
Caldwell: Flat organizations are hypercritical for rapid information flow
“I think the flat orgs is, is hypercritical, right? You need information to flow as quickly as possible. You need to democratize access to information. And that's really the purpose of flat organizations.”
Caldwell: Organizational churn and lack of progress cause burnout, not long hours
“I think the thing that actually causes burnout is churn and like a lack of feeling like you're making progress physical.”
Caldwell: Mining pump lead times are 30 weeks in Australia versus days in China
“The supply chain for like a new pump in Australia could take, you know, 30 weeks and getting that exact same pump but with a mine in China, it shows up in, you know, a week or three days.”
Caldwell: Global lithium production capacity must 4x within 10 years
“Lithium, you know, needs to four X in the next, in terms of production capacity in the next 10 years, roughly, in order for the, ah, batteries that we want to build to be built.”
Caldwell: Indonesia accounts for roughly 70% of global nickel supply
“Indonesian kind of like production capacity has scaled to the point where it's now something like 70% of global nickel comes out of Indonesia.”
Mariana Minerals aims to build 10 mineral projects in 10 years
“You know, we want to build 10 projects in 10 years. Those projects will be an increasing scale over time.”
Caldwell: Mariana Minerals aims to build 10 projects in the next decade
“We're building a lithium refinery in Texas with the goal of building 10 projects in the next 10 years.”
Caldwell: Mineral facilities take up to 10 years to reach capacity
“Once you start building, it can take five years to get something built, and then it can take three or three to five years to get something actually operating at rate.”
Caldwell: Operating teams, not technology, limit software penetration in industrial plants
“The gate to software penetration, really not the gate, what sets the rate of software penetration and technology penetration into these plants and into these mines ultimately is the operating teams.”
Caldwell: Mining industry faces 35 years of labor pool attrition
“It's the, you know, for the mining industry, we're in a similar position where we're kind of, we've had 35 years of just meaningful attrition in the labor pool.”
Caldwell: The mining and minerals industry is massively software deficient
“At Tesla, what became very apparent is that the industry is massively software deficient”
Caldwell: Teams cannot wait for full information before making decisions
“You can't wait to have all of the information available to make decisions, right? And oftentimes you won't find out if the decision is correct or not until you've made it, tried it, and then iterated really quickly”
Caldwell: Data silos naturally form when teams hit 100 people
“And that doesn't really happen in teams of, like, 10, 20, 30 people, but it does start to happen once you get into teams that are a hundred people or more.”
Caldwell: Mariana Minerals removed internal access controls on engineering data
“Everything is like web app posted their access controls are basically gone at least internal to the company. When it comes to being able to see like the core engineering information, it does not live on a hard drive somewhere. It does not live in an email that…”
Caldwell: Capital projects require tracking the full history of all decisions
“There are insane data silos between the engineering groups and the procurement teams and the construction teams. And so you have to build like a net new operating system that ensures that like the history of every individual decision is tracked and everyone ca…”
Caldwell: Deploy small SWAT teams to address critical paths in parallel
“You have to, like, set up, you know systems that enable you to mobilize, like, core groups of teams to go after critical paths while also not letting the next decision kind of fall behind. And a lot of that is around having, you know, little SWAT teams that ar…”
Caldwell: Daily shift passdowns instill manufacturing discipline in R&D
“If you want to drive like process development and R&D towards thinking about it as a manufacturing type process, the best forcing function is at the end of the day, you have like the equivalent of a shift passed down, which is you say, here's what we did. Here…”
Caldwell: Setting aggressive targets without a technical path demoralizes engineering teams
“As long as you're setting goals that are aggressive, but are possible, like, that has to be, like, it has to be in the realm of possibility then, you know, it doesn't, like, if you go super, super aggressive on targets that have no actual technical path toward…”
Caldwell: Construction schedules should be built bottom-up from discrete tasks
“On construction, you need to boil it down into specific subsets of tasks that are, you know, actually torquing bolts and actually like welding out seams to build that up into like, what does the schedule actually need to be instead of doing like top-down asses…”
Caldwell: Infrastructure projects lack manufacturing-style progress tracking
“That level of like measuring and measuring against goals and setting targets just doesn't happen in this like large scale infrastructure ecosystem.”
Caldwell: Pure-play SaaS companies struggle to penetrate the mining sector
“Software companies that sell to mining companies have a very, very hard time penetrating the sector because the issue is the, like the rate of uptake of software and of technology is actually gated by what would be the customers if you were a pure play SaaS co…”
Caldwell: Tesla requires eight to ten interview conversations for engineering hires
“The, like the key part of the hiring process at, you know, Tesla at least, and I'm sure it's SpaceX is the like technical evaluation, it goes quite deep. And so there, you know, you're going to talk to six engineers. If you're applying for an engineering role,…”
Caldwell: Engineers should see end-to-end project iterations before starting startups
“I wouldn't go and start something until you have, like, been able to sit around a project that you have seen go end to end, and then done that multiple times. That enables you to see how, like, how much better can you get with each iteration of, like, from con…”
Caldwell: Founders should master technical skills before company-building skills
“You want to have as strong of a technical basis before you go and have to learn all of the company building side of things. And so making sure that you're kind of like over indexing on the technical side before you go and kind of sign up for figuring out how t…”
Caldwell: Raw metals are the primary cost driver in battery manufacturing
“When I was working on factory design and construction, The most expensive thing was actually the equipment that goes inside the factory. Then when we started working on cell manufacturing, kind of realized that the expensive part of making cells is the stuff t…”
Caldwell: Mining pricing dynamics invert traditional manufacturing economies of scale
“Like in the mining industry, more demand, this is totally different than manufacturing, more demand if you have a higher volume, the expectation is that the price goes up. And because it's a, you know, constrained supply, and so the pricing dynamics are totall…”
Caldwell: Tesla vertically integrated early because no subcomponent market existed
“Tesla had to vertically integrate early because people just weren't making the parts that were needed. Like that was a, it was a do or die, There was no incentive. There was no market for people to build the kind of like sub components that were required. And …”
Caldwell: Vertical integration transfers partner risk into your company's risk profile
“At the end of the day, when you vertically integrate, you are transferring the risk profile of your partner kind of into like your new expanded risk profile. And so you need to be really confident or at least believe that you can, you are better positioned to …”
Caldwell: Humans are poorly suited for multivariable plant optimization compared to RL
“As you like build more of that large scale infrastructure and kind of like see the problems that humans have to solve on a daily basis, it becomes like pretty obvious that these are problems that humans don't, aren't best positioned to solve. Like these are la…”
Caldwell: First-of-a-kind facilities face major project financing hurdles
“It's hard to get project finance on a first of a kind facility where you're demonstrating a new unit operation for the first time.”
Caldwell: Aluminum is the most consumed metal in defense
“It's actually, like, the number one most consumed metal in defense applications.”
Caldwell: Build mining infrastructure at the trough of commodity cycles
“You actually want to be building infrastructure at the bottom of commodity cycles, not at the top of commodity cycles.”