Michael Peres sits down with Chip Carter — creator and host of Where the Food Comes From — to explore one of the most fascinating questions of our time: How will we grow food in space? After thousands of farm visits and decades in media, Chip’s journey has taken him from small-town farming roots to standing on a NASA launch pad — and now into conversations about feeding astronauts on the Moon and beyond. Together, they dive into lunar soil experiments, zero-gravity farming, the Artemis program, and what it really takes to grow lettuce where DoorDash doesn’t deliver.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• How Chip went from wanting to “get out of farming” to telling agriculture’s untold tech stories
• Why modern farming is powered by robotics, AI, drones, and blockchain
• How scientists successfully grew plants in actual lunar regolith
• The challenge of watering crops in zero-gravity
• Why the Moon is becoming a launch platform for deep space exploration
• How bio-unit lunar farms could create breathable atmosphere and grow food on the Moon
• What growing plants in space reveals about life beyond Earth

Catching up with Les Johnson, former Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and veteran space technologist with a forty year career in aerospace, as he digs into the real engineering behind interplanetary travel, solar sails, nuclear rockets, and the future of humanity in space. From leading advanced propulsion programs at NASA to writing both hard science and science fiction, Les brings a rare mix of technical depth and big picture perspective.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• How Les went from a 12 year old kid dreaming of NASA to Chief Technology Officer at Marshall Space Flight Center
• How solar sails and nuclear thermal rockets really work – and why they may be key to deep space and Mars missions
• What makes sustaining life on Mars so difficult, especially when it comes to radiation and long term survival
• How Les thinks about existential risks like AI, nuclear war, and quantum computing as “slow catastrophes” rather than movie style disasters
• Why he’s skeptical we must have a single “theory of everything” and how his liberal arts background helps him explain complex physics to everyday people

Michael Peres is joined by Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO and a veteran entrepreneur with 15+ years building and scaling tech companies around the world. After mining his first Bitcoin in 2013, Markus became deeply involved in blockchain, data infrastructure, and new business models at the edge of Web3, AI, and robotics. Today, he’s focused on decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) and how they can unlock the next generation of real-world automation.

In this episode, you’ll learn:
• How decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) could become the missing verification layer robots need to operate safely outside controlled environments
• Why AI-driven, blockchain-backed sensor networks may be critical for helping robots confirm that what they “see” is actually real
• How DePIN-based consensus systems could tackle one of robotics’ biggest limitations: filtering, ranking, and challenging unreliable sensory data in dynamic environments
• Ways decentralized networks can add transparency, resilience, and trust to robot decision-making without relying on a single vendor or cloud provider
• Why the combination of edge AI, DePIN sensors, and distributed verification might become the foundation for truly scalable, real-world autonomous machines