If you visit California,
you might be inclined to go to Disneyland,
or jump in your convertible
and take Highway 1 up the coast,
or maybe make a pilgrimage to Yosemite.
All very fine choices.
But if you're the kind of person
who ravels in our planet's extremes,
then it's Route 395 that you're after.
This one glorious road
will carry you from Death Valley's desert floor
to sky high views of Mount Whitney.
You can see the 5,000-year-old bristle cone pines,
the oldest living organisms.
Or the bizarre tufa towers of Mono Lake.
And true to California's boom and bust spirit,
you can saunter around the ghost town of Bodie.
What a novel experience to find an empty American city,
where all the businesses are shut down.
To do 395 up right,
it helps to have a guide.
And mine is a man named Jan and his crew.
The pass back here.
Haryn.
Let's step. Tidy up
And Lemmy,
the hardest partying dog of all time.
Jan agreed to show me some of what 395 has to offer,
but only if we agreed not to disclose any locations.
My name is Jan Zwierstra.
I'm an industrial designer out of LA,
and I spend a lot of time camping
and a lot of time in the Eastern Sierra.
It's a place I love.
And sometimes I'm known as 395 North
because this, yep!
My Instagram account.
And I don't like to be known as that,
but I'm trying to use it to set a good example
and do more with it than just social media.
Where did we end up camping?
We got here late last night.
I wasn't sure where we are.
This is BLM land
right on the outskirts of the national forest.
And it's one of my favorite places in the world.
Basically everything outdoors
wrapped into one.
Yeah.
Good thing about California, man.
Oh man,
we have so much national forest and public land
that you can literally just cruise out
and find a place to camp.
It's ours.
What I wish it was mine is Jan's sweet truck.
It's a 2019 Ford ranger,
has about 200 Watts of solar in it
and a fridge and has everything that an RV has
except for a toilet,
but just on a smaller, simple scale.
You drive us around day-to-day in LA
and then just roll out when you want.
Yeah. It's my daily driver.
Handles great, and then when I'm done with work,
I can just bail and go camping and out.
So the camper basically has only what I need.
Think of it as backpacking with a car.
Yeah.
The fridge has a couple of compartments.
This is just the kitchen box,
stove, utensils, and a bunch of stuff.
This one has just dry food.
Then when you get inside, there's a bed.
The bed flips up. So you've got tons of room in here.
This awning
is phenomenal.
If you want to pull that over.
That is cool.
Let me just pop that up.
Sort of.
So home on wheels.
Yeah. This is my vacation house.
Let's do this. So nice man.
Even with his nomad lifestyle,
Jan faces the same big question as the rest of us.
Do the internet and smartphones have to ruin everything
when you find the super special,
beautiful spots is that you busted out a map
and like, look at where might be cool to go,
or is it word of mouth
and just getting to know people, the locals and.
If I see a dirt road, I just want to go down.
So a lot of this is just aimless rambling.
It's a desire to just see something,
check that out.
For some reason,
it's more fulfilling than getting a recommendation
from somebody or there's tons of apps and websites now,
road trip apps,
camping apps,
they proliferate it.
The knowledge is accessible on the internet, right?
I used to fight the geo tags,
and I would get really pissed off
and be like, why are you posting this place?
It's going to blow up.
It's going to get trashed.
Now I've realized that you, you can't fight it.
The internet has just shrunk the world.
So we're not going to stop it.
We're not going to stop people from going there.
So I'm a lot more focused in conversation now
with trying to set a good example.
When you go, pick up your trash.
When you're pooping out in the wilderness,
don't leave your toilet paper on the top, you know.
Make sure you follow good steps for leaving no trace.
As a thank you for this quick guide
to pooping etiquette,
we made Jan, Haryn and Lemmy some tacos
and we all took in the night sky
and knocked back a couple of drinks.
Take that apocalypse.
The thing about good times and serenity in 2020
is that they're fleeting at best.
After we split up from Jan and continued on our way,
smoke started to envelop us.
The plus side was that our RV no longer smelled like feet.
The downside was breathing.
My man David here suggested
that we try and outflank the smoke
by cutting through Yosemite.
Without a reservation,
we had to talk our way in.
Yes. No stopping, no getting out.
Don't go to the valley.
Yeah, no problem.
We just, yeah, we just wanted to get through.
It was a beautiful choice.
Glad we got out of that smoke.
Whoa.
But not quite as effective as we had hoped.
Fast forward four hours or so,
and we had managed to trade the smoky majesty of Yosemite
for the smoky, um,
Look at it.
Strip malls of the Central Valley.
We have made it sort of out of the smoke
all the way across Yosemite National Park
and here to the gorgeous Central Valley of California.
We're off to see a kind of surprising tech startup
that is making some pretty strange machines
to serve all the growers out in this region.
And where was the, where here and this near Fresno.
This is California farm country, right?
We're just South of Fresno
town called Kingsburg.
So we're right in the Central Valley of California,
very, very large farming Valley here.
It's kind of considered the bread basket of the world.
The central Valley stretches out
over about 20,000 square miles.
And the farmers here produce about one fourth
of the food that Americans eat,
including a whole lot of fruits and nuts.
Tell me a little bit of the background of guys.
I know some of this is like a family business
that the roots of this go back ways.
Tell me kind of like how we got,
so it was essentially like a startup, I guess.
Yeah, definitely.
So the founder of our company is Dave Crinklaw
and he started the business back in 1982.
He started with his basically,
with his dad was commercial spraying of trees and vineyards.
Got to the point where our biggest challenge was labor.
Just the shortage of it really.
He was forced into innovating
and he had had this idea for quite some time
about doing a driverless sprayer.
And it finally got to the point where he said,
"You know what?
I either got to get out of this business
or I'm going to innovate."
Organic or not,
crops need to be sprayed.
And this process has to take place a few times a year.
This means hiring a lot of people to work long hours
under serious pressure.
And so just like the tech bros to the North,
GUSS decided to solve all of its problems with robots.
On this like labor points,
you guys have set this up
where you can have somebody you know, track
and that one person can monitor,
I think like eight of these.
In order to operate GUSS,
you have one guy or girl that sits in a pickup
and they monitor from a laptop computer.
So that person is basically just watching all the vehicles
on the screen.
They can monitor up to eight of them at a time
while they're out there, spraying in the orchard.
And so that user interface
really provides them with all the information they need
to make sure that the machines are safe
and that they're doing the correct job.
So it tells them what speed they're driving,
the engine RPM,
the amount of gallonage per acre
that they're applying at any given time.
So if any one of the machines has an issue,
it's going to send an alert to that laptop.
Much like a self-driving car,
these beasts use GPS, LiDAR and cameras
to see and navigate the world around them.
They also rely on pre-built maps of the orchards
for extra guidance.
GUSS builds the machines right here
and then takes them out for robot training
on this orchard next door.
It's here that the company learns
if the machines will behave
and do as their software and human masters command.
So this is kind of like the,
this is the test orchard
where you guys put it through the paces
and work on their technology?
Yeah. So this is our test orchard right here.
It's right by our building
as you can see in the background.
So every new machine,
as it comes off the assembly line,
it's put through a commissioning test right here.
We test all the sensors on the machine,
autonomous computer,
all the safety systems make sure it's doing what it's doing
prior to when it's delivered to a customer.
So what's it doing now?
So right now he's doing a test spray.
So he's just turning the water on
to make sure that the system comes up to pressure,
spraying water out of the nozzles,
just to make sure it's all functioning properly.
Okay.
It's got like a crazy turbine at the back or?
Yeah. So it's basically just a big fan
and that fan's driven off of the Cummins diesel motor.
And it just basically creates a big airflow.
GUSS is already selling these vehicles
to brave modern farmers.
And people of the world over
have taken notice of its machines.
And have you just sold them in the central Valley
or like throughout the US
or even overseas,
or where like where are they going?
Yeah so,
right now the majority of our machines
are here in California in the Central Valley.
However, we do have machines and customers in Florida
and the Citrus Industry over there
as well as Australia.
And I think you started selling them
in like December of 2019, right?
Yeah.
So we started taking orders early last year
for the sprayers.
And the first delivery we made were in December of 2019.
Okay. And how much do they cost each?
So our retail price
on these machines is $285,000.
So it's like,
it's not a small investment,
but I'm sure the regular sprayers aren't cheap either.
Yeah. I mean, we're,
we're honestly not too far away
from conventional equipment on our price.
And the main thing is that the return on investment
is very, very quick due to all the labor savings
and the increased efficiency.
I mean these machines, they just,
they just thrive.
But basically what we're doing besides this machine,
this is our first machine,
we call it Orchard GUSS,
mainly designed for your nut trees,
as well as citrus and fruit.
In the future, we're working on a few other projects.
We're going to do more machines.
One of them is actually a vineyard sprayer.
So vineyards are much tighter spacing.
So the machine has to be physically smaller.
And then we've got our eyes
on doing a lot of other innovating.
That right there friends,
is a Central Valley farmer
putting his whole fruit basket on the table.
Gary's Ted Talk can't be far off.
And with that,
it was time to get back in the RV.
And to confront what happens
when three men are bested by their own failings
in the forces of entropy.
Next on Hello World,
we cruise into the Mojave Desert
in search of a lunar lander.
We have instruments that we are going to deliver
to the South Pole of the moon in December, 2022.
Instruments that are trying to scan the surface of the moon.
And hang with a test pilot
who walked away from this.
So we just finished part two of a three part series
of Ashlee and the team Hello world's
big trip down highway 395.
Now we seem to have gotten a little farther South.
We're like, kind of in, well,
we're an undisclosed locations
through sort of the Eastern Sierras
and then a little bit farther in the Central Valley.
But so first I wanna ask you how you found Yon.
Like there seems to be this tension where he like,
he feels like this man with conflicts,
like he wants to put all this beautiful footage out
and so wonderful to look at.
And yet there seems to be the sense of tension of like,
Oh, is he contributing to a kind of way
of consuming the world that he doesn't really believe in?
Yeah, well that's true.
That Yon, he was like awesome to hang out with.
And his whole crew, they were really fun to hang out with,
but he was actually hard to get ahold of.
We found him the,
my awesome producers on the show
found him and reached out.
And then, you know, part of it was like,
I think we were like trying to contact him for like a month
that it was very spotty
'cause he would just be like gone for two weeks
and have no connection and not really get back.
And then I think there were a couple of emails
where he's like, I wanna do it
but I kinda don't wanna do it.
I think once we hung out, we got along so well.
And I think he'd watch some of the shows
and he was, he knew we weren't trying to like, you know,
do some gotcha.
We're gonna expose all your secret spots to everybody
so it ended up being okay.
What was the pool you were in, like hot or cold pool?
Yeah, I hope I described as right
and Yon doesn't get mad at me.
I mean, it was just out on some, some landlords
they kinda like spike down into the ground
and create this pool.
It wasn't super hot, It wasn't cold either
It was kinda of nice.
It was refreshing.
I remember that day it was really, really hot
and we'd been stuck in the RV all day.
It was good to get out and sorta feel clean for once.
And BLM land is this really special type of land that's,
I mean, it's in California and obviously
across the US as well.
But that's, you know, like BLM happens on BLM land.
I think you get a better sense of how much of a
big part of California is sort of like uninhabited
run, sort of maintained by the government
that there's, just go and see.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And we get into that a little bit.
Chatting with Yon
and he was talking about the difference,
off camera he was talking about going to Texas
and some other States
and just how much harder it was to find spots like that.
And people aren't always as excited
to see you like romping around in some of these places.
And so, yeah, California's got a magic like that.
And again, even though I live here,
it was a reminder that I don't take advantage of this stuff
as much as I should.
It was nice to have like somebody who really knew
what they were doing and to remind you
that you just need to think more creatively.
Yeah, and then you went to,
another big aspect of California's vast land
being rows and rows and rows and rows of orchards
not fruits which is the kind of stuff you drive past
when you're going to 70 and stuff like that.
How did you find the these robot spray?
Orchard robot sprayers?
Yeah, this was a cool one.
I mean, this is one where like somebody reached out to me
either on Twitter or Instagram and they're like,
"You gotta see this thing and these, these guys
down in the Central Valley, they're selling.
Yeah, It's like all those Silicon Valley guys
talking about their self-driving cars,
they don't even sell it.
These guys are like selling these things
that can't even make them fast enough."
And I kind of ignored it the first couple of times
this guy was persistent.
He didn't even work at guys.
He was like lives out there.
And then finally, you know, I pulled up the picture
I'm like, Oh yeah, I gotta go see this thing.
And then their website, like, it kind of blew me away too.
I don't wanna seem like,
I'm trying to like downplay the technology
of the Central Valley and stuff,
but their site was pretty amazing.
And I have these likes, you know,
the super impressive videos of this stuff in action.
And so once I saw that, it actually seemed real.
I was like, Oh yeah, I wanna go, go see these guys.
They were kind of nonchalant about how
they had like put it together,
which I thought was impressive and like so different
to the Valley, as you know,
where like everyone's telling you how awesome they are
all the time and these guys were just like,
"Yeah, we just picked up some LIDAR.
And like, we had a couple guys like,
write the software for this
and we got some help from this company."
Yeah, they're like next thing you know
the sprayer is driving itself.
I was like, okay.
How much of a difference does it,
I know you mentioned that they also use pre,
sort of pre drawn out maps all through
which I have to imagine it's pretty helpful.
You're also not dealing with like cross traffic,
like, I mean yeah.
Like the bicycles in the orchard.
No, for sure, the difficulty of like getting
a self-driving car to work
is much, much harder, and they do, yes.
The pre drawn maps totally helpful.
I mean, you can get all these like satellite images now,
or aerial footage.
And then with GPS, I mean,
you're telling this thing exactly where it needs to go.
And then a lot of the, LIDERS and the cameras
other thing, I think it mostly just in case
something runs into it or something like a tree's
fallen down since the pictures were taken
and so a lot of it's for safety.
But I still thought it was still surprising to me
'cause I done this for a long time and you just don't have,
I've never really had a startup from the Central Valley
reach out to me at all, you know?
And then I have been,
I got into like AG-tech for a while
and I noticed that
people were doing cool stuff
but they did kind of like tend to keep it to themselves.
It was like this farm would make all this
sort of custom machine
but not really sell it.
And so that kinda caught my attention
that these guys had shipped them all the way
to places like Australia already.
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Ag tech is, it's pretty wild.
Like I know someone who runs a dairy farm
and they milk the cows using a robot
that uses lasers to locate the utter.
The cow walks in and then there's like some lasers
and then it just automatically milks it,
It's just incredible.
Yeah, the computer vision stuff's getting weird.
So I know there's other company in Idaho
and they're usually computer vision.
So like picking rock is like a big thing on farms.
I always pictured in my head that you got out in the field
and you pull off the rocks once and that's sort of it,
but they get churned up by the ground all the time.
And so this is like this annual exercise where like humans
have to go out and scour the field,
they carry all this heavy stuff
and so, you know, this other company's using
computer vision and robot hands to go do that.
So I guess, I'm sure over the next 10, 20 years
is gonna get pretty weird out on the farm.