transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:06] Pushkin. Today's show is about wood. Wood literally grows on trees, or it grows in trees, or maybe wood is trees. Anyway, My point is we treat wood as this ubiquitous, worthless thing all over the country all the time, wood just falls to the ground, stays there and rots. And yet at the same time there is this vast industry devoted to growing trees, cutting them down, and selling them as lumber. This combination effects suggests a profound possibility that is both very simple and very hard to realize. What if we used more of the wood that falls to the ground so we didn't have to cut down so many trees. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's your problem. My guest today is Ben Christensen. He's the co founder and CEO of Cambium, a company that is the largest seller of salvaged wood in America. Ben's problem is this, how do we take the wood that is literally falling to the ground all around us and sell it so that people can use it to build things. In our conversation, Ben and I talked about wood, and we talked about technology, about software and AI, and also about whether local wood actually matters or is just vibes and side note, we talked about running one hundred and thirty one miles without stopping, which is a thing Ben has done. Ben grew up in New Mexico in a house without central heat, where he had to chop wood for the fireplace. In grad school, he studied forestry at Yale. All of this to say that he has been into wood for a long time. To start, he told me about the moment several years ago when he was back home in New Mexico and he had this epiphany that inspired him to get into the salvage wood business.

Speaker 2:
[02:12] It was a hot summer day, was going into a grocery store and saw a bunch of firewood out front, and I thought, huh, you know, I just left a big pilot wood a quarter mile away. I wonder where this firewood is coming in from. We're in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the firewood was being shipped in from Estonia, and I thought, that can't make sense. You know, what is missing, the fact that you know you've got less than a mile apart all of this wasted material and all this material that is getting shipped in from Europe. What's missing? And so that was a starting spark moment of diving in.

Speaker 1:
[02:47] I mean, I will say, certainly, what you're saying is it makes common sense. There's a common sense resonance to it. On the other hand, globalization is amazing and amazingly efficient, and so contrary to a contrary to what common sense might suggest, it might actually make sense to send firewood from Estonia to New Mexico, even when there's wood in New Mexico. Like things like that happen all the time, and often when you look into it for good reason.

Speaker 2:
[03:17] Yeah, I mean, I think there's truth in that. The most validating piece of that is somebody who's doing it.

Speaker 1:
[03:23] Right, and it was probably cheap, right, it was probably weirdly cheap to get that bundle of wood whatever that is seven thousand miles across an ocean and two thirds of a continent exactly.

Speaker 2:
[03:33] And we can talk about maybe what is left out and the value of that at a different moment, but the high level point there is somebody's doing it.

Speaker 1:
[03:40] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[03:40] And also there's a reason that people weren't using that waste material, and that's obviously what we're focused on solving, is taking what is this huge waste problem and really tying it in bringing in the technology and the tools to do that, creating the markets to do it. There's a lot of different reasons and a lot of work you have to do to really use that waste material, and there's a reason and why it's been a waste historically.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] So okay, so you had this idea of, you know, why can't we use the wood that is just sitting here in New Mexico in the US whatever, rather than say, flying it in from Estonia. But that's kind of like a big abstract idea. Was there some moment when you realized how it could actually work in a meaningful way at scale?

Speaker 2:
[04:23] Yeah, So we started to realize and this had always been my intuition I grew up in this industry, is that our goal started to become to create the fundamental technology for the industry. So when you think about wood, there's eight to ten different steps. A lot of people have to touch it before it, you know, ends up in your kitchen or ends up in an office building. At each of those steps, there is a transaction. People are working and there's no connective tissue. And that's really what we saw in the salvage space first, because that's why it's being wasted. That's why you have a spot that is, you know, half a mile away from a grocery store. There's no connection. There's just no connectivity between those two worlds. And so what we saw is there's an opportunity to create the fundamental data layer. But to do that, you have to create demand. And so that's something I've always believed is you're going to bring software, you're going to bring AI, you're going to bring tools into this space. You have to create value by creating demand first.

Speaker 1:
[05:21] So how do you do that?

Speaker 2:
[05:23] You sell would and and that's the kicker.

Speaker 1:
[05:28] So like what does that mean for you? Like what does that mean in the case of your business.

Speaker 2:
[05:33] Yeah, basically, starting with the demand is selling a material to the end customer. So we sell into large commercial buildings think like data centers or fulfillment centers. We sell into large furniture companies like Room and Boartant Steelcase. We sell into you know, large corporates when they build new stores. We do a lot of different work there.

Speaker 1:
[05:54] So what is the business now?

Speaker 2:
[05:56] So we sell would so we make it easier for people to buy wood that has sort of the best price in the market, that has the best sourcing in the market. So if you buy a million dollars worth of wood and have no idea where it came from, no idea when it's going to show up, you know, really sort of limited QAQC. And so that's what our platform really allows. Well, we sell what that's basically what we do to the end customer, and then we are building the supply chain full stack supply chain tool upstream. So we essentially are bringing AI transactions and payments into the industry for all of those steps that go into producing wood that is then sellable.

Speaker 1:
[06:31] So those are sort of two different businesses, right, and we can talk about them in turn. We sell wood is carbon smart wood, right, There is a brand of wood that one can buy called Carbon smart Wood. That's the wood that you sell, is that right?

Speaker 2:
[06:47] So we sell our own brand. You know, there's no real brands in wood. It's a trillion dollar industry and no one cares really if you buy it from this or that.

Speaker 1:
[06:57] It's a commodity, right, it's like oil or corn or some thing, right.

Speaker 2:
[07:00] Exactly, Yeah, but we don't think it has to be that way. And you know, by bringing in the Carbon smartweed brand, we're really doing that storytelling, you know, creating a lot of value for customers and loyalty around that.

Speaker 1:
[07:12] It's like conflict free diamonds or something like trying to differentiate the commodity exactly.

Speaker 2:
[07:17] Yeah, basically being able to understand where did this come from, came locally, it was salvage, or was reuse. All of those things are things that our customers care about, and this makes it really easy.

Speaker 1:
[07:27] How big is that business?

Speaker 2:
[07:29] It's been growing really rapidly. We basically will do over eight million board feet of material this year, so really large scale compared to where we started. So it's it's great. We're sourcing nationally now. We just expanded into Canada and are doing salvage at a really hard scale and we're now the largest salvage wood company in the country.

Speaker 1:
[07:49] So eight I don't know how to contextualize eight million board feet, Like I actually don't know if it's a lot or a little.

Speaker 2:
[07:57] Yeah, so it's both a lot and a little. You know, when you're thinking about eight million board feet, you could basically think about that as like essentially call it ten large scale building. So if you think in your mind you're looking at you know, hey, these are really big, large scale like warehouses, that's essentially the volume of material you'd have.

Speaker 1:
[08:19] So that seems like a little for America it is.

Speaker 2:
[08:22] Yeah, we're definitely still in the early stage.

Speaker 1:
[08:24] Sixty billion Is that the right number of board feet America consumes the year?

Speaker 2:
[08:29] We're coming back to that word scale, which is there is so much room.

Speaker 1:
[08:32] To grow here, so so small, so very small, And I mean presumably part of that is because it's your young company. Part of it is because I imagine there's a there's a price premium, like how much more expensive is it?

Speaker 2:
[08:45] Yeah, there's there's largely not so wood is different in every region, but generally we are price competitive with the market.

Speaker 1:
[08:53] Interesting, So what is the what is the constraint on your growth at this point? Why only eight million? I'm sure eight million is hard. I don't mean to be sitting here in a room saying why only eight million? But like, but also why only eight million?

Speaker 2:
[09:06] Yeah? Absolutely, I mean we five x last year, so we've been growing like crazy. We're continuing to really see that.

Speaker 1:
[09:12] Will it be forty million this year?

Speaker 2:
[09:15] It should be close to that. Yeah, wow, So we are growing really really quickly. We have a huge volume of demand. But the truth of this is demand is it takes time. Right, you're building buildings, you're building products. Those are over several year time spans. And when somebody is going to use material. Again, we supply wood would from a material perspective, you know, white oak from US or white oak from somebody else is going to be very similar. But when they use a new supplier, there's always you know, you got to test it right. They're always going to want to see proof points that snowballs taking off. Right. We can point to really large buildings, we can point to really scaled products with national vendors. So we've got that now, but it takes some time to really get people to believe in the material.

Speaker 1:
[10:00] Is it hard to scale the supply side when you need a sort of reliable, consistent product.

Speaker 2:
[10:08] There's so much volume out there. We are supply chain constrained in the sense that who is going to use it, making sure that you have the right relationships and the right regions. All of that is what our software platform manages. But the actual volume of material is not really the constrain.

Speaker 1:
[10:24] So you've mentioned the software platform a couple of times, and I want to read a quote to you from one of your investors. You probably know what it's going to be, but I'm going to do it anyway. And it's about It's about the software side of the business. Right. The quote is it's critical for silicon value investors because we don't want to invest in a wood company. We don't want to invest in a construction company. We want to invest in a software company. Old school VC. I feel like new school VC wants to invest in wood, but that classic VC. They love software, no marginal cost, You're never going to be supply constrained. Great business. Tell me about the software side of your business. Also, are you a wood company?

Speaker 2:
[11:05] Yes? Yes, is the answer.

Speaker 1:
[11:07] I won't tell the investor.

Speaker 2:
[11:09] Okay, you can tell them.

Speaker 1:
[11:10] Okay, they know, they know. They can pretend like you're not. But there is a kind of classic story where a company starts out to do a thing and then they build software to do the thing, and it turns out the software is what everybody is the great business. I mean, Amazon web Services isn't exactly that Amazon is a good company in anyways, but it's kind of that, right, Like, Amazon web Services is a very good business that was built to help Amazon sell stuff that's actual stuff. Tell me about the software side of your business.

Speaker 2:
[11:42] Sure. So basically what we are trying to build is the data layer for wood. So if you think about those eight to ten different businesses, you have wood that is you know at the tree stage. Wood that is logs on a truck. It's got to go to a sawmill, it's got to be dried, it's got to be cut, it's off and dried again. Then you have rye board. Those boards are going to get somewhere to be manufactured or shaped. Usually there's a couple of steps there. Then you have wholesalers and distributors who are going to sort of manage that inventory and then ultimately bring the commodity to market. There's a lot of different steps, right.

Speaker 1:
[12:14] And in each of those steps, is it a different company? Is it not a vertically integrated business industry?

Speaker 2:
[12:20] There are a couple of you know, really large vertically integrated players, you know, folks like Warehouser, Georgia pacifics your A Pacific, these really large players. Fundamentally, we're trying to be vertically integrated from a data perspective. So there's about forty five thousand smaller businesses out there that kind of sit as the other half of the market compared to those really large, publicly traded, you know, big market cap companies.

Speaker 1:
[12:43] And so that's like a guy with a sawmill or something, to be crude about.

Speaker 2:
[12:47] It, it's bigger than that, you know, thinking think about businesses that are going to be twenty to one hundred and fifty people that are you know, sort of core. It's your local sawmill, it's your local distributor. It's businesses that are very real, more than mom and pop. But they're kind of in that SMB space.

Speaker 1:
[13:08] And so they are just getting some product in the middle of the supply chain from some heterogeneous set of suppliers and then selling it on to somebody else still in the middle of the stack, or some heterogeneous set of buyers. And that's the universe that you are trying to bring information to.

Speaker 2:
[13:26] Yeah, and what you're touching on there is touching on the lack of sort of macro transparency. And this is the reason why the big players are vertically integrated, because they both exist at the demand stage and then they exist all the way back up to the tree stage. When you look at how the rest of the market operates, that's not true. You kind of know who's above you, and you know who's downstream of you, but you don't know two people above you, and you don't know who's actually buying it at the end of the day, and that leads to a lot of inefficiency. There's a lot of opportunities, particularly around having and holding inventory that you don't need to hold because you're trying to hold it so that when somebody calls and says I need wood tomorrow, you're ready. If you actually work at the front end of that project, you know that they're going to need wood in nine months and you can have that deliver just at time. So that's a big part of what we do.

Speaker 1:
[14:11] And so just to be clear, like it's costly to hold inventory, right, it's a bad use of capital if you can avoid it in a consistent way. Do you know flexport weird question, But like I talked to Ryan Peterson when he was early in the early you know, not long after he'd started that company, and it reminds me a little bit of what you're talking about. Right. He talked about they do freight forwarding, and he talked about, you know, trying to start a little business importing something from China and being shocked that like shipments of stuff going around the world on giant tankers. It's like a guy at a port with like a pad of paper is actually how that business worked. Reminds me a little bit of what you're talking.

Speaker 2:
[14:53] About, absolutely right. In the similarities with flexport. You know, we had somebody on our team who is working with one of our suppliers who literally there they were like, I got to go to my office and get you a you know, a slip and their office was a porta potty and they came out with this slip like happened like two weeks ago. You know. It is one of those things.

Speaker 1:
[15:11] That slip is like a piece of paper and invoice something a bill of late exactly.

Speaker 2:
[15:16] Yeah, it's a scale slip. So just giving like this is how much what I got?

Speaker 1:
[15:20] So right, so that port of putty is your opportunity exactly.

Speaker 2:
[15:24] There's there's our new marketing campaign for sure. So the basics of it is there's a lot of these different steps and so to your question of how does this work from a salvage perspective, well, there's a lot of steps, and there's a lot of steps in traditional forestry, there's a lot of steps in using material to coordinate that effectively. It's a data questioned and to really use data, well, you have to get it onto your platform very efficiently, and then you have to make it connect. You have to make it interoperable so that at the end of the day, when we deliver wood to the end customer, we know exactly where it came from. We know all of those steps. I mean, the way to think about it is salvage would was our starting point. What we do now is we want to be looked at as the future of wood. We want folks when they are buying wood to buy it in a way that is modern, that is better sourced, and that gives them the type of optimized pricing that everyone is looking for in the market. And so we are always going to be you know, have you know this sort of core ethos around salvage, around reuse, around resiliency, and also we've expanded beyond that very significantly. So somewhere around fifty five ish percent of the total material will move this year is going to be salvaged.

Speaker 1:
[16:32] You know.

Speaker 2:
[16:32] The other you know of that is going to be sustainably harvested is part of you know, the bigger piece there, And the real theory of change here is that when you look at actually changing how we manage our forests, making that better, making that better for our planet, making that better for our communities, whoever you're optimizing for, it's very difficult to go to somebody who's managing that forest or to a logger and say hey, do better. Right, they are interested and really driven buymarket dynamics. If you are the buyer from them, if you are purchasing from them at scale, you can then really update and control and say, hey, we need you to do better if you want us to keep buying from you. And so that's that theory of change in which we've expanded from just salvage into forestry and wood products much more broadly.

Speaker 1:
[17:19] And in the current system or in the system absent your software, the buyer typically doesn't know what forest it's coming from, so they can't have any lever for change. That's the sort of problem that is being solved generally. Yes, And what's an example of a better forestry practice that a buyer might want?

Speaker 2:
[17:39] Yeah, definitely want local. Local is often a big driver. You know, they're going to want things that are really optimized for forest health. So what we really are focusing on is making sure when we're working with partners who are harvesting, that they're doing that really, really well.

Speaker 1:
[17:56] Is there a specific example of a of a way that some forest was better managed because the buyer could see through to the source via your platform.

Speaker 2:
[18:08] Yeah, I mean there's tons. I'll give an example. I can't name the buyer yet, I can talk about the sort of scale. So Hurricane Helen came through, you know, recently in the southeast, knockdown tons and tons and tons of material. That wood, you know, all those knockdown trees is in a lot of different spots. It's not all in one place.

Speaker 1:
[18:29] It seems like the kind of challenge of salvage wood, right, that's on at least a superficial level. It feels less efficient, right. I suppose you don't have to grow the trees in the first place, but getting the wood when it's knocked down and getting the right kind of wood to the right place seems quite hard. Seems like a fundamental hard thing about your business.

Speaker 2:
[18:45] Yeah, it's a coordination challenge. So there's all of this wood, you know, in this case, we're focused mostly on southern yellow pine, and there's you know, hundreds of thousands of trees down, and we were able to do that coordination. That complicated work in a lot of different communities to get that material to be processed, to be saved. As soon as material comes down, there's a clock on it. You know. If you think about wood that comes down, it's eventually going to rot, It's going to be you know, not usable. It also is going to off gas into methane. So there's a lot of sort of you know, negative impacts there. We were able to do that, We were able to coordinate that, we were able to use it. And the reason is because we had a large buyer who is ready to say we will use this wood at the end, go do this coordination for us. We want to buy it and we're really excited to use it. And so we were able to save you know, hundreds of tons there.

Speaker 1:
[19:36] That's a great case study. Tell me more about it, like was it across several states? Like where was it? How do you get people to go do it? Why does the buyer want it?

Speaker 2:
[19:46] Yeah, so a few things. It's a crossover states, you know, lots of different sort of players there. And this is a thing that we really believe as a company is there's all of these great, amazing local businesses already. It's the truck drivers who can move logs, it's the sawmills who can process them. So we work with all of those folks. They already you know, have you know, they already know the region, they already have the tools. Largely, what they need is they need coordination and again they need to be told, hey, this is where the material is, We've got a market for it. Go do it, We'll pay for it. We'll take on some of that risk in the process in order to actually kickstart and manage that supply chain.

Speaker 1:
[20:26] Tell me about the buyer, like why would somebody want to buy that? Would?

Speaker 2:
[20:29] People love it? People love the story of your reusing material. It becomes a very charismatic thing. It's the thing they talk about in other projects. It's a great pr story, something that matters. But it better be at a at least an equivalent price, if not a better price. Then this is a place where you're starting to see like, oh, this is how salvage would can work, probably in a way that it couldn't have worked fifteen or twenty years ago.

Speaker 1:
[20:56] So wait, why is it that salvage wood can work now it couldn't have worked twenty years ago.

Speaker 2:
[21:02] So there's this really amazing new technology called cross laminated timber, which is basically you can think about having a bunch of boards and then you take those boards and your finger joining them. So you're cutting these little you know, sort of connections between them, and you're making really long boards.

Speaker 1:
[21:19] Between those boards, you're putting your fingers together like so that your fingers are interlocking on your left and right's hands. That's what's happening exactly wood.

Speaker 2:
[21:28] So you're interlocking those joints and then you create these big sheets of wood. Right now, you've got a huge sheet of usually two by fours that are you know, laying there, and then you are laying another sheet where everything is perpendicular, so it's cross laminated. So you've got essentially like a waffle pattern from you know, the orientation of the boards and that's sitting on top of it, and you make a bunch of these layers and so you've got a very thick panel and from that panel you can replace concrete and steel in a builds. And there's a few different things that are really important about that. So you've highlighted some of the challenges of using salvage wood. You know, it's a little less consistent. You know, you're pulling it from different places. This is a great example of a new technology that's perfectly suited for that because it doesn't matter what the wood looks like, right, You're just putting it directly into it, So you're able to use a much larger spectrum of that waste. That's where you start to get better unit economics. That's how it starts to scale. So those new technologies are a big part of how we're able to use this material in bigger and bigger waste.

Speaker 1:
[22:35] So was some significant chunk of the Hurricane helene wood cross laminated timber.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] So that whole story I just told you all went into two CLT.

Speaker 1:
[22:49] We'll be back in just a minute. You mentioned that one of the things that that buyers, you know, the kind of final buyers want often is local wood. And I get that from a kind of vibes standpoint, but from a sort of fundamental, kind of environmental footprint standpoint, it's not so clear to me that that is meaningful. I mean, on a superficial level, I get that there's some amount of carbon footprint of driving the wood whatever across the country. But I would imagine in the sort of arc of the project that's not that significant, Like is it vibes or is there something more than vibes to wanting local wood?

Speaker 2:
[23:36] Yeah, I mean there are for sure vibes and.

Speaker 1:
[23:39] Vibes fair okay, fair, No, I get it. And like especially if you can see the wood, right, if it's framing, then it's like something. But if you can see it and it's like, here is this beautiful wood that is whatever a wood floor, Like I get that one. But that again seems back in the kind of artisanal not scalable, like I like it when you're in a commodity business and price can right, Like if I want you to succeed, I want your wood to be indistinguishable from all the other wood and maybe a little cheaper, right, Like that seems.

Speaker 2:
[24:06] Like the dreams, which is what we are doing. And again this is where we have you know, a bunch of different products with room and board where nationally you can walk into any room and board and you can source you know, you can buy you know, a chair or a console made with you know, salvage material. That's the scale.

Speaker 1:
[24:23] Well, I mean that seems like a good kind of that's like the Tesla roadsterre one, right, like room Board is a relatively expensive furniture store. Some universe of people who are already paying a lot for a chair, it might get a warm feeling from having a salvage chair like that that I is understandable. Like that seems like a good ad for what you're doing, right, a good kind of wedge yep.

Speaker 2:
[24:48] And we're doing that with more and more furniture companies. Space that's been growing really rapidly. And I want to go back to what we just said there, which is it's definitely vibes and when you say vibes, you mean how does it make you feel?

Speaker 1:
[24:58] Right?

Speaker 2:
[24:59] And there's some real power in that. I think the main thing to emphasize that what we're trying to really push is you can have again the right supply chain if you have the data, and sometimes it's going to be more efficient to do it locally. And you know, a good example is we were working with a company in Philadelphia. They were sourcing their logs also from Eastern Europe, so you know, actually shipping them in. We were able to get the material from you know, a very sort of close within fifty miles and that was much more efficient, and you know, their customers loved it. It was like a very very easy yes for them. That's a great example of like an optimization. We also sometimes you know, not every species grows everywhere in this country, right, If you want to source southern yellow pine, you can't do that. You know, in the Pacific Northwest you use the different species up they're used to dug fur instead, and so you have to optimize those supply chains. So the point if you can have the data, you can then make those choices that are closer to right every single time.

Speaker 1:
[26:00] Yeah. Good, So what are you working on now?

Speaker 2:
[26:04] So we're really leaning in and scaling our technology. So part of what we've uncovered here is theyre's such a fundamental gap and bringing in AI at scale into this industry and bringing in payments and bring in transaction. So we're really building out that full data layer and you know, verticalized servicing there. So that's big for us. A lot of scale.

Speaker 1:
[26:23] You mentioned AI. What are you doing with AI?

Speaker 2:
[26:27] So do a lot of things, you know, back to that main point. A lot of steps in this business, a lot of data that comes in on paper or in different forms. We make that interoperable largely using AI, so you can take a picture of it, you can scan it, and then you know, you can actually use that data. The second thing that I think is the big opportunity which we're building a lot more of, is a lot of folks who we work with are not folks who want to necessarily be on a screen. They want to have a conversation. So our truckers, you know, folks are I having a ske steer around a sawmill. When they need to get something done, they pick up the phone and make a call, right, That's how they want to get it done. What AI allows you to do is it allows you to take that sort of verbal piece and then actually connect it to software, so you can have a conversation about, hey, where do I need to drop off this log or I need to fill out this piece of paperwork. Let's have a conversation and I just filled out that piece of paperwork rather than I need to actually go fill out that piece of paperwork. And so that's a big way that we get more and more data.

Speaker 1:
[27:27] In like the calling an AI on the phone, calling an AI agent, Like, how's that working for you and how is it working for you six months ago? Like, is it not quite working yet but you know it'll be working in six months or where is that?

Speaker 2:
[27:40] Yeah, it's in process. I think that the way to think about it is specific use cases today and what we're moving towards is something that is more ubiquitous. But that's not where it is today yet.

Speaker 1:
[27:53] Like that's one that I can imagine people getting frustrated by, Like the guy who doesn't want to enter something on the computer, imagine, really doesn't want to call an AI.

Speaker 2:
[28:03] Yes, And we also see a lot of people starting to adopt it, right, So there's some real opportunity there. There's also some resistance, you know, where we're bringing in these new tools And this has always been our thesis. This goes back to starting with demand. Is that if you can create real value and you are a buyer or you're actually really driving revenue, then you can start to bring folks onto those tools in much bigger ways.

Speaker 1:
[28:29] Oh it's like, hey, we're going to give you a bunch of business. All you got to do is call our AI and you got the business up to you. Yeah, fair enough. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Let's finish with the lightning round. Great, tell me one great tree fact.

Speaker 2:
[29:03] Yeah, I mean one of my favorite trees is Pando, which have you ever heard of Pando?

Speaker 1:
[29:10] No?

Speaker 2:
[29:13] Have you? Are you familiar with the aspen tree?

Speaker 1:
[29:15] Presumably that's like many many trees. It's like a giant grove that is one organism.

Speaker 2:
[29:21] Exactly, So they're they're all a single organism, and Pando is the largest one, so the largest organism in the whole world. And it's like the size of a valley, which is pretty unbelievable. I mean, just to like think of a single living entity as.

Speaker 1:
[29:37] That's one guy. It's one guy, that's miles and miles big.

Speaker 2:
[29:42] Yeah. And there's some debate on age, but we're talking like potentially forty.

Speaker 1:
[29:46] Thousand years for zero four zero.

Speaker 2:
[29:48] Pretty crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[29:50] Wow, Wow, it's funny because when I was thinking about this, I was thinking of the of the like the bristle Cone pines you know on the California in Nevada border that I always thought of as the oldest, but those are like four or five thousand. I had those ready to go, and this question.

Speaker 2:
[30:08] This is a real ship of theseus moment, you know, is it the same organism that is alive, like you know, the bristle cone, that tree has been there for that amount of time as well, are referred to as the oldest, but also the tree pando has been there for that amount of time. But was it the same tree or was it you know, it's it's that's the debate.

Speaker 1:
[30:28] Yeah, well, it's not a tree the way we would say a tree.

Speaker 2:
[30:30] Right.

Speaker 1:
[30:30] If you look, you would it would look like an aspen grove right to the to the untrained eye. But the issue is it's all genetically.

Speaker 2:
[30:38] Identical, right and connected? Yeah?

Speaker 1:
[30:41] Connected, and it's been there for forty thousand years same.

Speaker 2:
[30:44] Guy, I mean, depends on who you ask.

Speaker 1:
[30:47] Oh, because you can't just take a core because the trees sticking up out of the ground have not been there for forty thousand years exactly. So how do they estimate.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] I'm not sure how they date it. I don't know.

Speaker 1:
[30:58] I have an old friend who's attend chronologist, who I have not talked to the nearest I'm gonna ask him.

Speaker 2:
[31:02] Good reason to make a call.

Speaker 1:
[31:06] I know that you run ultra marathons. Many of the interviews with you seem to be mostly about the ultra marathons, which I get but I am interested in would but I want to talk a little bit about ultra marathons. I heard you say that you give yourself a little mantra something to you know, repeat to yourself as you're running each time. And you mentioned joy in darkness as when you did. I like that one. What are some other mantras you've used in long runs?

Speaker 2:
[31:33] That's a great question. I have a number. I think. One is when you are in the moment, and this is this is always the case with the mantra, is can you make it accessible? It has to be like when you feel you know, you're eighty miles into a run and you're feeling not good. Usually you're usually not feeling good. It has to be like something that you can actually access and that you can pull up. One of one of my favorites is do not despare. You're not here to win, You're here to create beauty, and that is always possible. So that is one.

Speaker 1:
[32:07] Seems long for mile eighty. It seems like a lot to remember at mile eighty.

Speaker 2:
[32:12] It maybe is a little earlier in the race, but it's a it's a good one. Another one that is constantly coming up for me, you know, in the space is like you earned this, like in the sense of this being the spot. And you know, this is always a critique and I think a reasonable one of ult running is you are choosing to put yourself and this this position, which is obviously a choice. And so when you think about, wow, I'm feeling really bad right now, connecting that back to why, like I put myself in that position, and you know, really tying it back.

Speaker 1:
[32:46] To that tell me more about that one.

Speaker 2:
[32:49] So what I what I mean there? This is the one that I often feel, you know, comes up, especially in the darker moments, is being like, hey, this sort of reason, the bigger existential why and doing ultras to understand the sort of expansive parts of who I am and what I'm capable of. And you don't do that on mile eight when you're feeling good and you just had a snack. You do that when you're in it. And so again to this point of like, oh, do I view the thing that I'm going through as you know, a thing I'm trying to run from, or do I view it as the whole reason I am there? And the point is to experience that and to move through it in a real deep way and to learn from what that can teach you.

Speaker 1:
[33:32] So I chose this, This is freedom exactly exactly. Yeah, this is freedom is an interesting matra in many settings, right, in many settings. What's the farthest you've ever run?

Speaker 2:
[33:47] I did a one hundred and thirty one miles continuously this summer, and then I also did just under one hundred and sixty mile er across the Sahara a couple of years ago, but that one involved sleeping at night, which is different.

Speaker 1:
[34:02] Is there some distance you think no one should run? You know?

Speaker 2:
[34:07] Something that I've become profoundly afflicted by is this belief that you kind of go exactly as far as you think you can go. Yeah, since that the first time I ran a marathon, I thought, yep, no way, no way I would go further. First time I ran a fifty mile er, I remember thinking like I literally could not go another step, and then it just keeps going and going, and I just got into the Moab to forty. So I'm going to attempt two hundred and forty miles this fall. That's way further than one hundred and thirty. I don't know if you're quick at math, it's a lot more. It's a lot further, and so we're gonna have to see out ghosts.

Speaker 1:
[34:43] So you're going to try and run two hundred and forty miles all at once. Correct, How long is it going to take you?

Speaker 2:
[34:50] I mean we will see definitely a big extension. The cutoff is just under five days.

Speaker 1:
[34:56] Wow, that is so wild. What's the longest? I don't know. I'm sure there's niches. I'm sure you can't even ask what's the longest continuous ultra marathon? But what's the longest continuous ultra marathon?

Speaker 2:
[35:10] I mean the one? And again, this is where you're like the orders of magnitude are just.

Speaker 1:
[35:14] Totally remembering that a marathon is twenty six right, Like, Yeah, as it gets bigger, it's like it's so many better. You're gonna run nine marathons in a row, right, Yes.

Speaker 2:
[35:25] It's unbelievable. Yeah, I mean the longest one is there is this thing called the Self Transcendence three thousand, which is a three thousand miler and it's around a city block in New York and that's beautiful sixty days and they just run around and around and around.

Speaker 1:
[35:40] Which I love that it's around one block. That's actually so good.

Speaker 2:
[35:45] I mean, the whole point is, you know, it's not about where you are, it's it's what you're doing.

Speaker 1:
[35:50] Yeah, it's not about what's going on outside. Well, good luck in Moab.

Speaker 2:
[35:56] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[36:04] Ben Christensen is the co founder and CEO of Cambium. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.