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…go, the last fish died. It was pretty smelly. But when it first formed and through the sixties it was actually pretty much fresh and then it got saltier over time. How did it get saltier? Evaporation. But how was there water there to begin with, to evaporate? What was the manmade intervention? Irrigation runoff. So a lot of water is diverted out of the Colorado River through the All-American Canal about one point— And it's accumulated— 1.2 million acre-feet a year. And then most of that is used in irrigation and some of it runs off into the Salton Sea. I see. It originally formed when the Colorado River burst its banks in 1905 or something like that. And it flowed down there for a couple of years before the railroad was like, “Enough of that.” They cut it off. But yeah, I think it's quite a starkly beautiful place. And how does the salt get into the Salton Sea in the first place? The Colorado River is quite saline itself. Why? How? Mexico sued the United States for the Colorado River being too salty. Do I not understand how rivers work? Yeah, because they erode rocks, and rocks have salts in them. Ah, okay. That's why the ocean is salty. Really? Yes. That's where the salt comes from? Yeah, from dissolved rocks. Why the salinity of the ocean is so stable is another question. But my grand plan is to put another 3 million acre-feet of water in the Salton Sea, bring it back up to its historical 1990-era level. Stabilize the level, stabilize the salinity, build a canal that comes in from either Mexico or maybe under the mountains from maybe both, maybe from San Diego. Put some whales and stuff in there, like SeaWorld but bigger, and start building gigantic hyperdrive cities around the edge to do industrialization and retirees and a bit of everything. 110 miles of beautiful coastline with a climate like Phoenix and Tahoe, but warm. And we could do that and it would pay for itself because you just didn't run the math on 110 miles of coastline on a nice river. Have you pitched the Trump administration on this? This feels like the kind of thing they’d be very into. I did write a one-pager for the Secretary of the Interior, but I think they've got a lot on their plate. But actually, the United States has an agency called Bureau of Reclamation, which is part of the Department of the Interior whose job it is to figure stuff like this out. And it had one extremely powerful, charismatic leader who basically led all the big projects. If you've read Cadillac Desert, it goes into some detail here. That's a great book. And then—that's generous. You didn’t like it? No, it’s so scold-y. It’s like, “Humans should not live in the west. It's too dry.” I'm like— But if you're judging, there's so many… The Kaiser book was bad in a way, but there's really good takeaways from it. Which one? One of them was written by this Mormon fellow who was his 2IC for many, many years at the Kaiser-Frazer car company, amongst other things. And the other one was some independent researcher. I don’t know— we’ll put them in the show notes. But— They're both fine. They're both great books. But they're great because of the subject matter. Some of them are a bit long-winded. ndent researcher. I don’t know— we’ll put them in the show notes. But— They're both fine. They're both great books. But they're great because of the subject matter. Some of them are a bit long-winded. Yeah, you have to be able to read past all this stuff. But, the Bureau of Reclamation hasn't built a major dam in 50 years, so they've pretty much forgotten how at this point, I think. But your Salton Sea development, part of the reason it feels plausible is because there's no conservation argument for keeping it the way it is, because only conserving prior human errors. Well, you’d make it much better. You could actually make it have— No, but my point is, even if you wanted to develop the California coast and you say, “We'll make it much better.” People will say, “No, sorry, that's not how it is. And we need to keep it in a state of nature.” But the Salton Sea is not in a state of nature, it’s in the state of altered effluence. It's in a state of neglect, really. Profound neglect. And various studies have happened over the years. They want to spend $100 million dollars there, $200 million there to try and stabilize it to an extent. But I think that the mistake is assuming that it's always got to be this festering pustule environmental catastrophe—it doesn't. We could restore it and then unlock enormous economic value for people who need a place to live and could live around it. And build it into a new city in the United States—hasn't been built for a long time and they can be so cool. I'd go there, build that city, let's do it. And essentially infinite solar power, lots of critical minerals just like bubbling out of the ground, very close to the Mexican border, which has its advantages obviously. And you can produce plenty of fresh water for Mexicans as well. Part of a deal, everyone wins. Something like 50 to one—just back of the envelope calculation—is like 50 to one economic leverage. It would generate so much value that you'd actually… The way you would do it is you say, “Well, whoever comes and develops all the desalination technology could be asked, could be a consortium, could be the Israelis, whatever. We'll give you some fraction of the coastline and then you get to either sell that off or keep it and hold that money.” A bit like, I think Irvine did it that way and that's how you fund it, right? I don't want to box myself in here, but I think you could give 10% of that coastline away to the developing entity and 90% could be to the people of California in general, and you would still be making money, hand over fist. That's pretty unusual. You don't ordinarily find mega projects like this where there's so much value on the table that you can be that generous with it. ou would still be making money, hand over fist. That's pretty unusual. You don't ordinarily find mega projects like this where there's so much value on the table that you can be that generous with it. Part of what feels attractive to me about desalination for you is, currently Terraform sells commodities, be they natural gas or methanol or things like that. Whereas someone who wants water in a location, they need to buy water in that location, which has a price. Getting water to the city of San Francisco or getting water to Los Angeles is not a commodity. It's a very specific project. Getting water across the delta in this specific context costs $20 billion with that capital project that you were mentioning. And so you presumably, even at the early stages of the project, even when it's more expensive than it will be at large volumes, you can find somewhere where they really value having an incremental water supply and they're willing to pay for it. Yeah, I mean the value to be unlocked by bringing even small amounts of water onto this land is enormous. So again, why is Nevada 90% federal land? Couldn't give it away. Could you pump significant quantities of water into Nevada? Yes, of course you could. It's actually downhill like three quarters of the way. Sorry, three quarters of the way to Nevada? Yeah. So for example, there's already an existing aqueduct that runs from the delta here all the way down to the Cajon Pass, which is the pass that takes you from LA up to Vegas. And from there, if you were to release—so you need to upgrade that canal to carry a little more water— you could release water and flow downhill down the Mojave River down towards Death Valley. You can divert it at the Amargosa Dunes and then pump it up the Amargosa Valley there. And then basically— I see you're doing very little pumping. And it’s not net downhill most of the way— It's not downhill most of the way. The pumping is actually not that expensive, because solar array, pump, it's relatively straightforward. I'm sensing a pattern here. It's like anything that you want from SpaceX, it's like Starship will do it for you. And anything you want from Terraform, it's like just solar panels plus other stuff. And then you say, well, Nevada is a hundred valleys and we've got cities and a few of them and Burning Man in one of them, and you've got nuclear testing in one of them and Area 51 in one of them. And that's fine. And then most of them can stay as desert and maybe half a dozen of them turn into solar for synthetic fuel and half a dozen of them, you run a river the size of the Colorado River through them with a few pumping stations here and there. But mostly natural flows down into the Humboldt River, which will now become a perennial stream down into the Carson Sink where you scoop it up and then pump it back to the beginning or drop it into Lake Mead, past Vegas, where it can find its way back out to the ocean. So not very much like scribbling on a map is required to make this work. Nevada doesn't even have a significant river at all. You could be the first.…

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