Three months ago I left my career of 15+ years in the film industry to join Terraform Industries as an electrolyzer technician. I was not qualified for this position in the traditional sense. The interview process felt like my entire life was put under a microscope. I cobbled together every mechanical side quest I’d ever taken and presented a portfolio to be weighed and measured, along with the content of my character, by unimaginably smart and perceptive people. This intense interview process concluded with what I think was intended to be a softball request to explain, from first principles, how an audio speaker functioned. The problem was I blanked on how an audio speaker functioned, so I stammered out an unsatisfactory and vague hypothesis involving “vibrations.” I still got the job. I am not exactly sure how I pulled off this incredible pivot into a highly technical field without the formal qualifications, other than what I hope was recognized in me as a near rabid hunger to be “a part of it.”
If I have one unique skill, it’s an uncanny intuition for sensing something substantial beneath plain text. Ten years ago I read a cryptic Craigslist post that had one line: “For Rent: parking space with a view. Dogs OK.” I read that and, like Paul Atreides smelling spice for the first time, I saw a potential timeline flash before my eyes involving an off-grid urban farm within LA city limits where I could build a tiny house with a view of downtown LA from my bedroom window, have chickens, and grow food. This vision turned out to be true. I’m looking at the skyline right now. A rooster is crowing, and I haven’t paid an electric bill in over a decade.
I bring this up because Terraform’s website is comically plain. It’s a few paragraphs of text and an ASCII depiction of a castle. I read the first line, “cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air,” and was struck by a bolt of lightning. This was a company that was going to change the world, or at least had a shot at it, and I had to work there. I felt it in my bones. Looking back at my life, I feel like I’d been wandering the desert in search of the promised land. While sidetracked in the wilderness, I spent my free time dreaming about robotics and manufacturing with a vague awareness of a tsunami of hypersonic change about to crash down out of the sky. What was most frustrating was that while I could sense the storm clouds of the singularity on the horizon and was excited for it, everyone around me was either unaware or terrified. What I was able to read between the few lines of text on Terraform’s website was that, hiding in plain sight for those with eyes to see, there was a team of talented and driven people who were not afraid of this impending wave of radical change but ready for it. They had a plan to move the needle in our favor: cheap, abundant energy available everywhere.
Three months in, I’m happy to say that my intuition based on a few lines of text was correct. It’s weird after all my years of trudging in the mud to be part of a team that is… going places.
This post isn’t the place to explain their plan for changing the world. There are countless hours of recordings of the founder, Casey Handmer, doing just that, available for anyone to listen to. A good place to start is their website, maybe you’ll see what I did.
