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…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. , 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. It could be the first, but it's an entire state worth of land that would have the climate of Switzerland if it just had water. Do the Israelis do a lot of desal? Yeah, reverse osmosis was largely developed there. Actually, I think they just announced that they're using coastal desalination in the Mediterranean to refill the Sea of Galilee, which is in essence the reservoir that they use to feed downstream irrigation on the Jordan Valley. Why not produce your Terraform desal edition and sell it to the Israelis for— They're already very good at it. But this wouldn't be cost-competitive or it wouldn't be anything competitive? I'm honestly not sure. I think they can produce at 400 bucks per acre-foot. And to be honest, if I was able to produce a 400 bucks per acre-foot, I'd be very happy right now. Long term, $99. At $99, I think I can steamroll the California Coast Commission if I need to, but even $400 would be pretty extraordinary. What have you learned about leadership running Terraform? That's a good question. I went to a high school where there was a leadership program in a way, and it was kind of a Judeo-Christian based type thing. And so this idea of leadership through service was taught, which I think is super valuable and something I've always thought about. And our org chart is drawn upside down because ultimately that's the way the—can I swear on this podcast? Yeah, the problems flow downhill. Yeah, exactly. So that's an important one. I think that I've made plenty of mistakes at this point, but having made those mistakes, I can now read Leslie Groves’ work about the Manhattan Project or Rickover’s work about the nuclear Navy project and interpret those texts and understand what they really mean or have a better insight into the sorts of problems they're actually dealing with because they don't necessarily translate that well into a narrative form. Just learning to hold myself accountable, hold other people accountable about how to titrate how demanding you're being versus other things about how to understand what people want rather than what they say they want and then make sure they get what they need. Stuff like that. Dial up your demandingness? Dial it down? Dial it up. Okay. Dial it up. Yeah, absolutely. And is it about finding constructive forms of it that lead to better performance? they need. Stuff like that. Dial up your demandingness? Dial it down? Dial it up. Okay. Dial it up. Yeah, absolutely. And is it about finding constructive forms of it that lead to better performance? Yes, it's a balance. One of the mistakes I've seen a lot of first-time founders make is they assume that an hour of coaching is as good as an hour of firing. Because at the end of the day, you can't be some other founder, you can only be yourself. And so you want to build an organization that essentially is like an extended mind for you and for your hands and arms and the ways that you think about a problem. And I think Stripe is very much a reflection of you and Patrick. I'm not sure which one the most, actually. I have a question for you about that next up. And so to an extent, the parts of Terraform that weren't working with the parts that I was trying to build, not my way against my better judgment. And when I just gave up on that and said, “Screw it, I'll just do it my way.” It suddenly started working becauseI could understand and intuit how it worked.Yeah, had to become pretty demanding there. And obviously no one's perfect at recruiting. And so the success to that is you've got to give people extremely direct feedback and coaching and mentoring and ultimately invite them to build their career elsewhere. It's been really tough. Some of the people I had to let go, people I really like, people I’m friends with, for many years in some cases. And obviously I wish them the best. But again, having read resume after resume after resume, nothing is worse for your career than sitting in a job failing for you because you don't have the guts to quit and your manager won't fire you. And I've just seen this so many times because it's not that you're not growing, it's that you're growing backwards in that time. For a couple of years, success is mandatory. I don't really care that much about how you go about succeeding. I'm happy to help you, but at the end of the day, you have to succeed. We're going to force you to succeed. Success is mandatory, no matter what you're doing. That did not come naturally to me, but it's very intuitively obvious. So my question for you is, in the counterfactual where you and Patrick founded YC companies together but they weren't Stripe, they were two separate companies, what would the world now look like? Oh, I have no idea. Would he have founded Stripe or would you have founded Stripe and then the other one do something different? Stripe was much more his idea than mine. Would you be in the United States? Plausibly not. He came here first. I mean, we both came here for college. What were you studying in school? I did not stick around long enough to declare a major, but— You can make something up. Yeah— Physics. You would've done physics. I would have done physics. MIT or Harvard? Or a JPL, you know? Yeah, I wouldn't curse you. There's a sad story. Is there any hope for it?…

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