Thinking On Paper

Data centers use water to cool air, not chips. The water chills the air that gets blown across the racks, and that is where it evaporates. Remove the air and you remove most of the water.

Simon Jesenko runs Iceotope, which builds cooling with no fans and no air at all. Fifteen to twenty litres of refined oil circulating inside a sealed chassis, touching every component. His point about the headlines: they describe air-cooled facilities, and the industry is moving off them. Once a site runs fully liquid-cooled, he says consumption drops immensely.

He explains:

- Why direct-to-chip cooling only solves 80 percent of the problem, and what stays hot
- What the dielectric liquid actually is, where it comes from, and why Shell and Exxon make it
- Why early liquid cooling installs leaked, and what that did to the industry's appetite for risk
- Why the power supply unit, not the GPU, is where his technology wins
- Why crypto miners proved immersion cooling years before data centers

Please enjoy the show.

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Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to data center cooling challenges
(01:07) Water usage in data centers compared to agriculture and other industries
(03:00) Basics of open loop and closed loop cooling systems
(04:18) Guest introduction: Simon Jesenko of Isotope
(05:02) Misconceptions about data center cooling technology
(06:08) Evolution from air cooling to liquid cooling in data centers
(07:31) Direct-to-chip cooling technology explained
(08:40) Water consumption in traditional vs modern data centers
(10:29) Market transition towards fully liquid cooled data centers
(12:23) Airflow management and chip-level cooling techniques
(13:34) Environmental factors influencing data center placement
(15:50) Challenges of integrating liquid cooling into existing hardware
(19:02) Future-proofing with system-level liquid cooling
(22:02) Immersion cooling history and applications in crypto mining
(23:25) What is dielectric liquid and its environmental impact
(26:50) Adoption and market opportunities for Isotope’s technology
(30:56) Optimizing power distribution with liquid cooling
(34:15) Industry trends and next steps in liquid cooling technology
(37:24) Capacities and limits of current cooling technologies
(40:26) Guest question: How has AI replaced daily activities?

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Learn more about Iceotope: https://www.iceotope.com/

Thinking on Paper:
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◼ Follow Mark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfielding99/
◼ Follow Jeremy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremygilbertson/

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 learnt.

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

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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

We read the National Space Transportation Policy in full. Signed 20 August 2026, it shreds the 2013 directive and rewrites how the US gets into space, moves around up there, and comes back down.

The War Department is all over it. Launch ranges, reentry infrastructure, a clause about accommodating launches within 48 hours of need. You don't build a 48-hour capability to do science. Somebody expects to lose a satellite and need a replacement up fast.

Here's what we think stops it. Not rockets. Not pads. Demand. Most of what goes up is Starlink, everyone else crams onto rideshares, and a target of 1,000 assumes five times more reason to be up there than anyone currently has. The document is a sales pitch with the government as a customer.

We also get into the Mars carve-out and what it says about who America needs, the ISS retiring the same year and China’s plans to land on the moon.

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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 ⁠
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Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to the US Space Transportation Policy
(03:20) US Launches in 2025 and 2026
(04:45) Private Industry and Market Demand
(06:24) International Competition and Collaboration
(07:55) Infrastructure Needs for Increased Launches
(10:00) Government Coordination and Regulatory Frameworks
(12:02) Market Opportunities and Ride-Sharing in Space
(15:13) Future Missions to Mars and Lunar Surface
(18:43) International Efforts and the Race to Mars
(20:48) Implications of the 2030 Space Goals
(23:22) Summary and Next Steps

Why do we stop asking questions as adults? Philosopher Pia Lauritzen has analysed 30,000 of them, and says nothing was ever lost.

The ability stays. What changes is the price. Every question admits you don't know something, and nobody gets promoted for ignorance. Ask in the wrong room and curiosity starts to feel like an interrogation, which is why most of us learn to keep the question to ourselves.

She proves it in keynotes. One minute, two rules, and every person in the audience writes one. They could do it the whole time.

Full episode with Pia Lauritzen on questions, curiosity and whether AI can think at www.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. 

🏠 ⁠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 ⁠

Nicholas Ponari says AI music makes live performance more valuable, not less. Mark Fielding 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.

--
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. 
🏠 ⁠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 ⁠