Latest / In the Loop AI / How Nuclear Solves the Energy Problem | Valar Atomics' Isaiah Taylor

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How Nuclear Solves the Energy Problem | Valar Atomics' Isaiah Taylor · In the Loop AI

• 0:03
  Josh: Why is energy the most important resource in the world
• 0:06
  Isaiah: I would actually argue that over time energy is the only resource in the world
• 0:10
  Isaiah: if you think about what we're all doing as as humans we are creating entropy
• 0:15
  Isaiah: as we go throughout the universe,
• 0:17
  Isaiah: and almost anything else that you could come up with i would argue anything
• 0:21
  Isaiah: else you can come up with essentially consumes energy
• 0:24
  Isaiah: right so when we talk about resources natural resources we're trying to find
• 0:28
  Isaiah: things in the ground but there's a lot of stuff in the ground and not only is
• 0:32
  Isaiah: there a lot of stuff in the ground there's stuff on other planets and in asteroids
• 0:36
  Isaiah: and the the universe is is fundamentally limitless as far as we know the actual
• 0:42
  Isaiah: limiting factor in all of these things is how much energy do you have to transform
• 0:46
  Isaiah: the world around you into what you want and you know there's that's the only
• 0:50
  Isaiah: irreversible thing right if you use copper in an electric car you can always use that copper again,
• 0:55
  Isaiah: right but the energy in that electric car will never be used again, right?
• 0:59
  Isaiah: You've created entropy and that's fundamental. So I actually view energy as
• 1:02
  Isaiah: like the only cost in the universe and it's why I focus on it.
• 1:06
  Josh: I love that. So we are focused on getting a lot of energy. We are energy constrained.
• 1:11
  Josh: I'm curious what you think. What does having an abundance of this energy look
• 1:14
  Josh: like? If we do achieve this goal of getting energy costs to near zero,
• 1:18
  Josh: what becomes newly possible? What does the world look like when we actually
• 1:20
  Josh: solve the energy problem?
• 1:22
  Isaiah: So let me put it in terms of what the world looks like now.
• 1:25
  Isaiah: And that that might help us extrapolate a little bit. Right.
• 1:28
  Isaiah: So the this the sort of like history of what the world looks like in society
• 1:33
  Isaiah: is essentially three pillars getting better over time.
• 1:37
  Isaiah: Okay. So the three pillars of any product, any physical good are essentially
• 1:42
  Isaiah: energy, intelligence and dexterity.
• 1:45
  Isaiah: Right. So these these three ingredients that you need to make any physical good.
• 1:49
  Isaiah: Let's take, you know, an iPhone, right? So this iPhone is made of energy,
• 1:53
  Isaiah: intelligence, and dexterity, right? So it's the intelligence of the people at
• 1:57
  Isaiah: Apple who knew how to put it together.
• 1:59
  Isaiah: It's the dexterity of the machines and the, you know, massive CNC fleets and
• 2:03
  Isaiah: Foxconn and, you know, the physical manipulation of matter that went into putting it together.
• 2:09
  Isaiah: And then finally, it's the energy to run those machines, to run the servers
• 2:13
  Isaiah: that are running CAD, you know, even the energy to fuel the designer's brains
• 2:18
  Isaiah: as they eat food, you know, and they go throughout their days.
• 2:20
  Isaiah: So every single thing is made of energy, intelligence, and dexterity.
• 2:25
  Isaiah: And what's interesting right now is that we're getting clear abundance in the
• 2:30
  Isaiah: intelligence and dexterity part, right? So AI, you know, hitting an inflection
• 2:36
  Isaiah: really means that intelligence is becoming somewhat default free.
• 2:39
  Isaiah: Dexterity will also become default free as we get more and more robotics.
• 2:43
  Isaiah: And so what does the world look like when we have abundant energy?
• 2:45
  Isaiah: It's essentially fueling those things in an inflected manner,
• 2:49
  Isaiah: which means everything is free.
• 2:51
  Isaiah: What does it mean when everything's free? Well, it means that like the material
• 2:54
  Isaiah: world is more subject to your imagination, right? It's more limited by what can you imagine?
• 3:00
  Isaiah: Now, we're talking like, you know, somewhat far in the future here,
• 3:02
  Isaiah: but it might be closer than people think it might, you know,
• 3:05
  Isaiah: think it is today because we're so used to a world that's constrained,
• 3:10
  Isaiah: you know, heavily constrained on intelligence primarily.
• 3:13
  Isaiah: You know, the entire physical world around us has been traditionally constrained
• 3:17
  Isaiah: on the intelligence of smart people trying to figure out how to translate what's in our imagination.
• 3:23
  Isaiah: Into the physical world. You know, we might imagine an airplane,
• 3:26
  Isaiah: but then the translation of that airplane into something that can actually fly
• 3:29
  Isaiah: takes an enormous amount of brain power of thousands of smart people,
• 3:33
  Isaiah: and then a lot of dexterity to manipulate the world.
• 3:36
  Isaiah: And as intelligence becomes free, it actually just becomes a function of energy.
• 3:40
  Isaiah: So your ability to get an airplane out of your head becomes how much energy do you have, right?
• 3:46
  Isaiah: This is a world in which, you know, there are lots and lots of robots,
• 3:49
  Isaiah: which are robots, which build other robots, which build other robots,
• 3:53
  Isaiah: robots, which mine materials, which build robots, which mine materials.
• 3:56
  Isaiah: And at the end of the day, energy is the input.
• 3:59
  Isaiah: So what does the world look like when we have abundant energy?
• 4:01
  Isaiah: I mean, I think it looks like a world of imagination, right?
• 4:04
  Isaiah: A world of thinking of amazing things in your mind and watching them happen.
• 4:09
  Isaiah: Now, you can imagine that on planet Earth, that might become a little bit crowded,
• 4:13
  Isaiah: right? We will probably have a lot more things running around and planes flying
• 4:17
  Isaiah: around if we're subject to imagination. And this is where I think space exploration
• 4:22
  Isaiah: becomes very, very interesting.
• 4:23
  Isaiah: And we suddenly reach out and find more places for us to have imagination.
• 4:29
  Isaiah: But we use the space around us, like the physical space around us as somewhat
• 4:34
  Isaiah: of a canvas on which our minds are imagining and discovering and,
• 4:38
  Isaiah: you know, putting things on that canvas. I'm very excited about that.
• 4:40
  Isaiah: I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.
• 4:42
  Josh: I think we definitely share that enthusiasm with you. And I love this term that
• 4:45
  Josh: I've heard a lot being thrown around, which is just too cheap to meter,
• 4:48
  Josh: is what happens when that energy becomes too cheap to meter.
• 4:50
  Josh: I think that's the basis of a lot of this show is what are the downstream effects?
• 4:53
  Josh: What are the second order effects of all of these unlocks happening as a result
• 4:57
  Josh: of energy that's too cheap to meter? So I want to take a step back for a second
• 5:00
  Josh: and just kind of introduce who you are.
• 5:03
  Josh: Isaiah, for the listeners, has a very interesting story. Most people drop out
• 5:06
  Josh: of college and they're like, oh, yeah, I showed them. I'm a college dropout.
• 5:09
  Josh: Isaiah, if I'm correct, I believe you actually left high school.
• 5:12
  Josh: And then you taught yourself to code.
• 5:14
  Josh: And now you're sitting here. And for the listeners at home who aren't listening,
• 5:17
  Josh: Isaiah is sitting in front of a nuclear reactor, in front of their product,
• 5:20
  Josh: in front of hopefully what is the future of energy.
• 5:23
  Josh: So there's this quote that I love from Steve Jobs. It's like,
• 5:25
  Josh: you can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can connect them looking
• 5:28
  Josh: backwards and you have to trust that they'll work out. In your case,
• 5:30
  Josh: it is very clear to me that they worked out. So can you just kind of explain
• 5:33
  Josh: to me how you wound up sitting here in front of this reactor that you built?
• 5:36
  Isaiah: Yeah, it's an interesting story. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
• 5:39
  Isaiah: I dropped out of high school. I actually did attend three months of college.
• 5:44
  Isaiah: I think it was around three months.
• 5:46
  Isaiah: I attended a small liberal arts school for a couple of months while I was working
• 5:50
  Isaiah: 80 hour weeks doing software engineering. Didn't last very long.
• 5:54
  Isaiah: I was curious to, you know, to read a lot of, you know, literature,
• 5:57
  Isaiah: and I've always been interested in language.
• 5:59
  Isaiah: And, you know, I kind of realized a few months into it, like I cared a lot more
• 6:02
  Isaiah: about the work that I was doing than, you know, spending my time in a classroom.
• 6:06
  Isaiah: A lot of my time in the classroom was spent like sitting on my laptop coding.
• 6:09
  Isaiah: I was like, okay, I can really only do one of these things well.
• 6:11
  Isaiah: So, you know, education has always been something that's like a fascinating
• 6:15
  Isaiah: thing to me and that I want to do more of.
• 6:18
  Isaiah: But I also am on a mission and I have to fulfill the mission.
• 6:20
  Isaiah: And so that consumes, you know, a lot of my time and energy.
• 6:24
  Isaiah: But how did we get here? How did we get to Ward Zero behind me,
• 6:28
  Isaiah: you know, sitting in front of this amazing machine that the team has built?
• 6:32
  Isaiah: It's essentially been a journey of self-learning, right? So how does anybody
• 6:37
  Isaiah: learn? Well, they read, right? They read and they talk to people.
• 6:39
  Isaiah: If you go to school and you learn nuclear physics, you read,
• 6:43
  Isaiah: you talk to people, you do math, right? That's essentially what you're doing.
• 6:46
  Isaiah: And it turns out that like if you are wildly curious about something that you
• 6:51
  Isaiah: can do that on your own as well. Now, you have to be curious about it.
• 6:54
  Isaiah: I caution people because, you know, sometimes people want to,
• 6:58
  Isaiah: they see, oh, wow, you dropped out of high school, you dropped out of college, it's super cool.
• 7:01
  Isaiah: And I actually recommend that people don't do that unless they are overwhelmingly
• 7:05
  Isaiah: curious about something to the extent that it's going to drive them to try to
• 7:10
  Isaiah: understand it every single day, right?
• 7:11
  Isaiah: If you don't wake up like burning with curiosity about a certain thing that
• 7:16
  Isaiah: you're going to spend your life learning about and building,
• 7:18
  Isaiah: you should probably go to school because the nice thing about school is that
• 7:22
  Isaiah: it pushes you to learn things that you otherwise might not have spent the time to do. right?
• 7:27
  Isaiah: But for those people that have, you know, an itch in their head that cannot
• 7:30
  Isaiah: be scratched anyway, except waking up every single day and working on it,
• 7:33
  Isaiah: you will probably find easier and more efficient ways to, you know,
• 7:37
  Isaiah: access that information and,
• 7:39
  Isaiah: start actually building than going to school. And so that's what I did. I've been.
• 7:44
  Isaiah: Really thinking about this business for about 10, 11 years since I was around 14 or 15.
• 7:50
  Isaiah: You know, I have some family history in nuclear energy that motivated me to
• 7:54
  Isaiah: go and learn about it. And so that's kind of what I did.
• 7:56
  Josh: And I want people to also note that you did this in the pre-AI age where you
• 7:59
  Josh: actually had to go and read books and teach yourself things without all of the
• 8:02
  Josh: additional leverage that we have today.
• 8:04
  Isaiah: You know, that's actually such a great point. And like, man,
• 8:07
  Isaiah: if I had had access to ChatGPT when I was like 14 or 15, that would have been phenomenal.
• 8:12
  Isaiah: I'm so excited for the generation of, you know, students that are growing up
• 8:16
  Isaiah: right now who can like sit on Chappache PT for hours and hours.
• 8:19
  Isaiah: And it's like having a professor talking to you, which is amazing.
• 8:22
  Isaiah: But yeah, you know, I did this back when it was mostly actually trying to read
• 8:27
  Isaiah: PDFs from the Department of Energy and the AEC in the 1960s.
• 8:32
  Isaiah: So I'm at least grew up in the digital
• 8:34
  Isaiah: era where you could find these PDFs online, which I'm grateful for.
• 8:37
  David: It's pretty clear, Isaiah, that nuclear is your answer, the answer that makes
• 8:42
  David: sense to you. Maybe you can walk us through that train of thought as to like
• 8:46
  David: why you are just pilled by nuclear specifically, because, you know,
• 8:50
  David: there's other ways to produce energy.
• 8:52
  David: Solar, I still feel like has like a lot of juice left to squeeze in that whole
• 8:55
  David: industry. You could have gone and solved the solar problem, but you chose nuclear.
• 8:59
  David: Maybe you can just walk us through that choice.
• 9:00
  Isaiah: You know, I obviously had a bias toward nuclear. You know, my great grandfather
• 9:04
  Isaiah: was on the Manhattan Project.
• 9:06
  Isaiah: I've grown up thinking about it, but I would like to believe I was very objective.
• 9:10
  Isaiah: And one of the reasons is that I became anti-nuclear pilled when I was in middle
• 9:16
  Isaiah: school and early high school, because having studied the physics of it and having
• 9:20
  Isaiah: studied the engineering of it, I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world.
• 9:23
  Isaiah: And then I started looking around at the market and the deployment.
• 9:26
  Isaiah: And I realized that the nuclear industry in the West is dead, right?
• 9:31
  Isaiah: It's completely shuttered, it's gone, It's not doing anything.
• 9:34
  Isaiah: And in the journey of trying to understand why I actually became anti nuclear
• 9:38
  Isaiah: pill. And I was like, well, you know, this is an amazing technology,
• 9:41
  Isaiah: but humanity is not ready for it. And it's not happening. And,
• 9:45
  Isaiah: you know, there's these complexities to it, which make it impossible.
• 9:48
  Isaiah: And, and so then I backed up and I said, well, I know that over the next hundred
• 9:52
  Isaiah: years, a society is going to figure out abundant energy, you know,
• 9:56
  Isaiah: and I don't, we don't know which one, right? But one of them is going to.
• 9:59
  Isaiah: And the one that figures out abundant energy is going to have an inflectionary
• 10:04
  Isaiah: moment that, that takes them, you know, stratospheric.
• 10:07
  Isaiah: And I would like that to be us. You know, I would like us to be the ones that, that figure that out.
• 10:11
  Isaiah: And so I actually, you know, backed all the way up to the drawing board and
• 10:14
  Isaiah: I said, what is the best form of energy we could unlock today?
• 10:17
  Isaiah: And I believe I actually started with a very blank neutral slate,
• 10:21
  Isaiah: even a little bit, you know, biased against fission, maybe for personal reasons
• 10:25
  Isaiah: that I, you know, was maybe even salty about it.
• 10:28
  Isaiah: I was like, man, it sucks that the nuclear, you know, it's such a cool technology
• 10:32
  Isaiah: that I have history in, but like, it just didn't work.
• 10:34
  Isaiah: So what is the best form of energy? And that drove me to, to every form of energy generation.
• 10:39
  Isaiah: I really started from first principles and looked at how have you,
• 10:43
  Isaiah: you know, humans gotten energy in the past?
• 10:45
  Isaiah: What are some theoretical ways to get them in the future?
• 10:48
  Isaiah: I looked at solar. I looked at wind, which is a proxy for solar.
• 10:51
  Isaiah: I looked at hydrocarbons, geothermal was really interesting.
• 10:55
  Isaiah: I looked at fission, fusion all across the board.
• 10:58
  Isaiah: At the end of the day, I came to a couple of fundamental conclusions.
• 11:00
  Isaiah: So if you want to make cheap energy, you're going to have a machine that does it, right?
• 11:05
  Isaiah: So there's going to be a machine that's a box and you build the box and energy
• 11:10
  Isaiah: comes out of it, right? So like, that's the fundamental thing that we're talking about here.
• 11:13
  Isaiah: What are the properties of that box? What do you want that box to be like?
• 11:17
  Isaiah: Well, ideally you want the box to be small per power, right?
• 11:21
  Isaiah: So the box is just not that big versus the power that it makes.
• 11:25
  Isaiah: Okay. So then, and the reason that's important, by the way, is like,
• 11:28
  Isaiah: at scale, things generally cost how big they are.
• 11:32
  Isaiah: All right, that's a little bit of a confusing sentence. So I'll say it again.
• 11:35
  Isaiah: At scale, things generally cost their size.
• 11:38
  Isaiah: Okay, so a big thing costs more than a small thing. Okay, 747 costs more than an iPhone.
• 11:43
  Isaiah: And that's a pretty fundamental law. It's hard to break that law.
• 11:47
  Isaiah: You see deviations in things of similar sizes for another reason.
• 11:51
  Isaiah: And that other reason is rate of production.
• 11:54
  Isaiah: Right so there's sort of like two fundamental factors and how much things cost
• 11:58
  Isaiah: how big they are how many of them you make okay so back but the most fundamental
• 12:03
  Isaiah: one is how big is it so an ideal energy machine is quite small.
• 12:08
  Isaiah: And makes a lot of power so then you back up and you say okay well what drives
• 12:12
  Isaiah: the size of an energy machine across all of these different you know types of
• 12:17
  Isaiah: energy generation you have geothermal you have solar you have wind,
• 12:20
  Isaiah: pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground, nuclear, fusion, all these different things.
• 12:25
  Isaiah: And what I did is, you know, you might laugh at this a little bit,
• 12:28
  Isaiah: but I looked at all of the different energy generating machines out there.
• 12:32
  Isaiah: And I said, how big are they?
• 12:33
  Isaiah: And again, it's not total size, but it's how big are they versus the power that they make.
• 12:38
  Isaiah: All right. So what we're talking about here is power density.
• 12:40
  Isaiah: So power density is essentially per cubic meter of machine. How much energy does that thing make?
• 12:46
  Isaiah: And the answer might surprise you. I'll just I'll turn it to you.
• 12:49
  Isaiah: What do you think is the most power dense energy producing machine?
• 12:53
  David: Machine like a physical contraption, a physical gadget that humans make.
• 12:57
  Isaiah: Yep. Physical gadget that humans make or even that they theoretically could
• 13:00
  Isaiah: make. Right. But that makes energy.
• 13:02
  David: I mean, I feel like I'm just not having high context enough to answer this,
• 13:05
  David: but like, I don't know, a dam comes to mind. It's relatively small in the grand
• 13:10
  David: scheme of things versus like a field array of solar panels.
• 13:14
  David: That's my first intuitive answer. I don't know. Josh, what do you think?
• 13:16
  Josh: You mentioned the atomic bomb. I'm thinking, well, that seems like it generates
• 13:19
  Josh: a lot of energy. Maybe not a machine, but probably a pretty high density of energy.
• 13:24
  David: We can't really use that energy though.
• 13:25
  Josh: Does that count?
• 13:27
  Isaiah: We're doing some really, really good exploration here I really like it so hydro
• 13:31
  Isaiah: is not power dense unfortunately hydroelectric dams are frickin enormous they're yeah the three,
• 13:39
  Isaiah: gorgeous dam in China is the largest concrete structure ever built by humans
• 13:43
  Isaiah: on earth all right now it also makes a lot of that test but if you if you actually
• 13:46
  Isaiah: do the cubic meters to power output dams are actually pretty bad and.
• 13:50
  Isaiah: The answer today is actually a jet engine, actually a rocket engine.
• 13:54
  Isaiah: So a hydrocarbon engine is actually the most power dense thing that we've built yet.
• 13:59
  Isaiah: Right. So if you actually look at, you know, a Raptor engine,
• 14:02
  Isaiah: that thing is like it's I haven't done the exact math. It might be in the gigawatts per cubic meter.
• 14:10
  Isaiah: Right. So just insane, insane energy density.
• 14:14
  Isaiah: Now, the problem is hydrocarbons themselves are kind of large.
• 14:19
  Isaiah: Right. So like the actual mass of the fuel you have to include in that calculation.
• 14:24
  Isaiah: And then you have to also include in the calculation the machinery that produces
• 14:27
  Isaiah: the fuel, the machinery that finds the fuel, that drills for it,
• 14:31
  Isaiah: that refines for it, that transports it, that stores it, puts it in the tank.
• 14:35
  Isaiah: So once you do all that math, even though a rocket engine or jet engine is the
• 14:40
  Isaiah: most energy dense thing we built yet, the apparatus to source the hydrocarbons
• 14:45
  Isaiah: is actually large. So high baggage.
• 14:48
  Isaiah: High baggage and just more physical machinery, right? It adds to the total,
• 14:52
  Isaiah: you know, cubic meters per output power.
• 14:55
  Isaiah: And again, that adds to cost, right? Cubic meterage of machinery adds to cost.
• 15:00
  Isaiah: And so now the atomic bomb is actually the right answer, right?
• 15:04
  Isaiah: So if you actually think about what produces a ton of energy in a very small
• 15:08
  Isaiah: box, you know, an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb is that answer, right?
• 15:14
  Isaiah: That you have put an enormous amount of energy into a very, very tiny frame.
• 15:19
  Isaiah: Now, obviously, the second thing you said was, well, you can't use that energy.
• 15:23
  David: Right? It's not productive energy,
• 15:25
  Isaiah: Yeah. Yeah, it's too much to be productive. But what this tells you is that
• 15:30
  Isaiah: fission, and fusion, but we'll talk about that in a second.
• 15:33
  Isaiah: Fission is actually as close as we've figured out how to get so far,
• 15:38
  Isaiah: to this like almost infinite power source in a box of a of an abstract size
• 15:44
  Isaiah: right and it turns out for for fission that the size of the box is not super
• 15:48
  Isaiah: correlated with the power output,
• 15:51
  Isaiah: right so like the reason that we make you know you know fusion machines or fission
• 15:55
  Isaiah: machine machines of a certain size,
• 15:57
  Isaiah: honestly has more to do with safety than it has to do with like total power
• 16:00
  Isaiah: that you can get out of the box right you know the reason that we make things
• 16:04
  Isaiah: bigger or smaller in the fission world has to do with how safe we want to make
• 16:07
  Isaiah: them right because you you take this to the fundamental limit,
• 16:11
  Isaiah: and uh you know you have a bomb right which is an enormous amount of energy
• 16:15
  Isaiah: in a very small box but it's unsafe and then you go the exact opposite direction
• 16:19
  Isaiah: which would be something like the machine behind me which is very very safe
• 16:23
  Isaiah: and it's much lower power density,
• 16:25
  Isaiah: so this is actually the key to why I believe that fission is the answer for the future.
• 16:30
  Isaiah: And it's that the constraints around how big that box is really has to do with
• 16:35
  Isaiah: our ability to engineer it to be safe, right?
• 16:39
  Isaiah: It's actually not constrained by physics. You can make a nearly infinite energy
• 16:44
  Isaiah: producing box of almost any size with nuclear fission beyond a certain minimum.
• 16:49
  Isaiah: There's sort of a minimum size, but around that minimum size,
• 16:52
  Isaiah: like you can make a box and makes the power of the entire world.
• 16:56
  Isaiah: And then everything from that point to practicality is a matter of essentially safety engineering.
• 17:02
  Isaiah: Okay, so what this means, and by the way, like the fundamental reasons for this
• 17:06
  Isaiah: is that uranium itself is just unbelievably energy dense, right?
• 17:11
  Isaiah: So the kilowatt hours per kilogram on uranium is about 23 million kilowatt hours
• 17:18
  Isaiah: per kilogram versus, I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's somewhere
• 17:23
  Isaiah: around 40 or 50 kilowatt hours per kilogram.
• 17:27
  Isaiah: In oil and gas, right, in a hydrocarbon fuel. And so you have literally millions
• 17:32
  Isaiah: of times more energy density in fission.
• 17:36
  Isaiah: Now, take this to like something like solar, right?
• 17:39
  Isaiah: What's the power density of solar? Another way you can think about this is,
• 17:42
  Isaiah: here's a trick question. What's bigger, a nuclear reactor or a solar panel?
• 17:46
  Josh: I would guess solar by a couple of orders of magnitude.
• 17:48
  David: Yeah.
• 17:49
  Isaiah: Yeah. So it's a trick question because you're like, well, a solar panel is this
• 17:52
  Isaiah: big, you know and the nuclear reactor is that big so clearly the nuclear reactor
• 17:56
  Isaiah: is bigger but but it's actually not true the solar panel is much bigger right per power output
• 18:00
  Isaiah: and the answer is a couple orders of magnitude maybe three orders of magnitude
• 18:04
  Isaiah: it's hard to predict in the limit but today at least you know solar is is about
• 18:09
  Isaiah: three orders of magnitude bigger in terms of physical mass than than nuclear,
• 18:14
  Isaiah: so if our north star is that a you know an energy machine ought to be small
• 18:19
  Isaiah: because small things are cheap, nuclear is the solution, right?
• 18:23
  Isaiah: So this was sort of my conclusion on all of this, like first principles thinking
• 18:28
  Isaiah: and research is essentially that fission will create the cheapest energy on
• 18:32
  Isaiah: earth if we can figure out how to do it safely,
• 18:35
  Isaiah: and we can figure out how to do it legally and in a way that the public will be happy with.
• 18:40
  Isaiah: Because even if you have a safe machine and the public thinks it's not a safe
• 18:43
  Isaiah: machine, you still haven't really solved the fundamental problem,
• 18:46
  Isaiah: at least in a short time frame.
• 18:48
  Isaiah: So the second conclusion that I had, and this is really what led to starting
• 18:52
  Isaiah: Valor, is that if you really want to make the cheapest energy on Earth,
• 18:56
  Isaiah: you're going to do nuclear fission.
• 18:58
  Isaiah: But you're going to do it pretty differently than how it's been done before.
• 19:01
  Isaiah: And specifically, you want to do it kind of in the middle of nowhere,
• 19:05
  Isaiah: where you have sort of a safe operating place for fission.
• 19:10
  Isaiah: You know, out in the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, with as many safety
• 19:13
  Isaiah: constraints as you want to put around that, as much security as you want to put around that.
• 19:17
  Isaiah: And you can simply build many, many nuclear reactors. Because again,
• 19:21
  Isaiah: there's two governing principles in how much a thing costs.
• 19:24
  Isaiah: How big is it? And how many you make? So we know that fission wins the smallness
• 19:29
  Isaiah: thing, right? Very small machine makes a ton of power.
• 19:32
  Isaiah: The second is how many you make. And so these are the two fundamental,
• 19:35
  Isaiah: you know, decisions that went into starting this company is that we're going
• 19:38
  Isaiah: to make fission reactors because they're small.
• 19:40
  Isaiah: And we're going to make a lot of them because making many of a thing makes it
• 19:44
  Isaiah: very cheap. And so that's essentially what we're doing here.
• 19:46
  Isaiah: We're making many, many nuclear reactors out in the middle of nowhere.
• 19:50
  Isaiah: They're fission reactors. So they're very power dense. And we're going to make
• 19:52
  Isaiah: the cheapest energy in the world.
• 19:54
  David: I feel inside of your answer, I feel like there's just a lot of work being done
• 19:58
  David: with the idea that there's just not a lot of like extra baggage going around
• 20:02
  David: the production of energy.
• 20:04
  David: So we could go and we could talk about building a dam or setting up arrays of
• 20:09
  David: solar panels or wind farms.
• 20:11
  David: And we I think you would just like dismantle each one of those things talking
• 20:15
  David: about the supply chains that are required to produce those things,
• 20:18
  David: the third party vendors that are required, the assembly that's required.
• 20:22
  David: And I'm getting the intuition here that building a nuclear reactor,
• 20:25
  David: what you're doing, there's just a lot fewer moving parts.
• 20:28
  David: And it's just a more just like simple environment to produce energy.
• 20:34
  David: And so you have less dependencies on third-party manufacturers.
• 20:37
  David: You have just overall less dependencies, generally speaking.
• 20:41
  David: And that allows you to, in theory, kind of scale out that operation and scale
• 20:45
  David: out energy production, generally speaking.
• 20:48
  Isaiah: Yeah, that's absolutely true for a lot of industries. It's absolutely true for oil and gas.
• 20:53
  Isaiah: It's almost impossible today to completely verticalize an oil and gas company
• 20:58
  Isaiah: because the source of your oil continues to shift.
• 21:02
  Isaiah: And so unless you're in the continuous real estate business where you are constantly
• 21:07
  Isaiah: buying new patches of land, exploring them, drilling, pumping oil...
• 21:13
  Isaiah: You know, moving it to refinery, which you own, refining it,
• 21:16
  Isaiah: moving it through logistics that you own to the end user site.
• 21:19
  Isaiah: That's an enormously complicated supply chain to own yourself.
• 21:23
  Isaiah: Now, what is verticalizing nuclear look like? Well, it looks like having a patch
• 21:27
  Isaiah: of land where steel comes in and graphite comes in and energy comes out and
• 21:31
  Isaiah: a bit of uranium, right? But the uranium part of that is actually shockingly small in terms of mass.
• 21:35
  David: A little uranium goes a long way.
• 21:37
  Isaiah: A little bit of uranium goes a hell of a long way. So now solar,
• 21:40
  Isaiah: you can make an argument about this as well. You could say that you have this
• 21:43
  Isaiah: solar plant, which is similarly structured, which has silicon coming in and
• 21:47
  Isaiah: aluminum coming in, and you have power coming out.
• 21:50
  Isaiah: Now, the problem with that is just the mass constraint, right?
• 21:53
  Isaiah: You're going to need a couple orders of magnitude, more silicon,
• 21:56
  Isaiah: more aluminum, then I need steel and graphite and uranium, right?
• 22:01
  Isaiah: So at the limit, I say I win that fight just in the fact that I need literally
• 22:05
  Isaiah: a thousand times less physical material per output power.
• 22:08
  Isaiah: And in the limit, things cost how big they are. So this is sort of the math,
• 22:14
  Isaiah: for solar. Now, fusion is an interesting part of this as well.
• 22:17
  Isaiah: People will say, well, okay, fusion is even more power dense,
• 22:21
  Isaiah: right? Because deuterium versus uranium or tritium are even more power density per kilogram.
• 22:29
  Isaiah: The problem with that is that, again, it's more about the properties of the
• 22:32
  Isaiah: box than it is the properties of the fuel, right?
• 22:36
  Isaiah: Let's characterize a fusion box. How good is that thing on the metrics that we talked about, right?
• 22:42
  Isaiah: An energy box should be small. That's the first most important thing.
• 22:45
  Isaiah: I would say there's two other sub attributes as well as that.
• 22:48
  Isaiah: They should be simple and made of common materials, right? Small,
• 22:51
  Isaiah: simple, common materials.
• 22:53
  Isaiah: Interestingly, fusion is worse on all three of those than fission,
• 22:57
  Isaiah: Right. So a fusion machine is actually larger per power because it's harder
• 23:01
  Isaiah: to capture the energy out of it.
• 23:03
  Isaiah: It's harder to create the conditions for fusion. It's hard to capture the output energy.
• 23:07
  Isaiah: So the machine itself is actually larger per power than a fission machine.
• 23:10
  Isaiah: It's lower power density.
• 23:12
  Isaiah: It's also much more complex, right? And complexity is a factor to cost.
• 23:17
  Isaiah: And the materials are much less common, right? So you can't make a fusion machine
• 23:21
  Isaiah: out of steel and carbon, right?
• 23:23
  Isaiah: Which is essentially what this machine behind us is made out of.
• 23:26
  Isaiah: And so, you know, like I said, I would like to believe I was objective in this.
• 23:31
  Isaiah: I did not know what the answer was going to be. I thought it might have been
• 23:33
  Isaiah: solar. I thought it was, you know, I actually thought geothermal for a while
• 23:36
  Isaiah: might have been the answer.
• 23:37
  Isaiah: But when you actually go to how does humanity have civilizational,
• 23:42
  Isaiah: you know, energy that is 10 times cheaper than it is today.
• 23:45
  Isaiah: The only answer that I see to that is nuclear fission.
• 23:48
  David: Why do you think that this is ready for society right now?
• 23:52
  David: Nuclear as a conversation goes back before I was born, before all of us were
• 23:55
  David: born. It's been around for a while.
• 23:58
  David: Why now? What's changed with technology? What's changed with politics or just
• 24:02
  David: the world around? How has the environment changed to make the question of right now be relevant?
• 24:08
  Isaiah: So I think that,
• 24:10
  Isaiah: we made a trade-off in the 70s and 80s that made us think that energy wasn't
• 24:15
  Isaiah: that important for a while.
• 24:16
  Isaiah: And that's one of the fundamental reasons. There's a couple fundamental reasons.
• 24:20
  Isaiah: So in the 70s and 80s in the West, we essentially became a society that imagined
• 24:25
  Isaiah: it could be somewhat decoupled from the price of energy.
• 24:27
  Isaiah: And the essential way that we did that is we exported physical industry to other
• 24:32
  Isaiah: places, right? So energy really, really matters for physical industry before AI.
• 24:38
  Isaiah: Now energy matters even for bits, right? But before AI, energy was really,
• 24:44
  Isaiah: really important to physical industry.
• 24:46
  Isaiah: And we went through this motion of essentially moving all physical industry to other places.
• 24:51
  Isaiah: And so it didn't matter to us. It didn't impact us as directly to have more expensive energy.
• 24:56
  Isaiah: And so I would say there's a period of irrationality in how we thought about
• 25:01
  Isaiah: energy because we thought it didn't matter.
• 25:03
  Isaiah: Now, it turns out that you You actually really need physical industry as a country,
• 25:06
  Isaiah: right? A nation needs to be able to build things. And in fact,
• 25:08
  Isaiah: I would say the fundamental thing that an economy does is building things.
• 25:13
  Isaiah: But the flaw in our thinking came from the fact that there are actually two
• 25:18
  Isaiah: things involved in making things. There's the knowing how to make them,
• 25:22
  Isaiah: and then there's the making them.
• 25:24
  Isaiah: And we imagined for a period of 30 years or so that we could be the country
• 25:27
  Isaiah: that knows how to make things and that other countries could be the ones that do the making.
• 25:31
  Isaiah: And in the short term, that looks really attractive because you get a ton of,
• 25:35
  Isaiah: alpha on the knowing how to make things.
• 25:37
  Isaiah: You have rapid growth of valuable intellectual property. It's really easy to
• 25:41
  Isaiah: capitalize. It's really easy to get started.
• 25:43
  Isaiah: And we're like, let's just export the annoying part, which is like the real
• 25:46
  Isaiah: making to other places. And that's highly flawed in the long term.
• 25:52
  Isaiah: It maybe is a good idea for about 10 or 15 years.
• 25:54
  Isaiah: In the long term, it turns out that your ability to know how to make things,
• 25:59
  Isaiah: has to be coupled with the making of them, right? Because what happens is you forget.
• 26:04
  Isaiah: You forget how to make things. And if you're not actively making things,
• 26:08
  Isaiah: you're not learning how to make them better.
• 26:10
  Isaiah: So the practical, you know, output of this is like, we forgot how to make cars,
• 26:14
  Isaiah: right? Like we started exporting car, you know, car production to other places.
• 26:19
  Isaiah: And Japan got really good at it. China got really good at it.
• 26:22
  Isaiah: And really only one company in the United States sort of like was like,
• 26:26
  Isaiah: huh, maybe we should remember how to make cars and make those again.
• 26:29
  Isaiah: And, you know, that'd be Tesla.
• 26:30
  Isaiah: And this happened across, you know, so many different industries,
• 26:33
  Isaiah: right? The reason that Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley is that we used
• 26:35
  Isaiah: to make silicon there. We used to make chips and then we exported them,
• 26:38
  Isaiah: you know, somewhere else for the actual production because we didn't want the
• 26:41
  Isaiah: effluent and the waste from that.
• 26:43
  Isaiah: And now guess what? We don't know how to make chips anymore,
• 26:45
  Isaiah: right? So this is very short term thinking. You actually have to be involved
• 26:48
  Isaiah: in the making in order to be educated on how to do the making.
• 26:52
  David: I'm reading a book about this same effect with Apple's iPhones,
• 26:56
  David: where they exported all the manufacturing to China.
• 26:58
  David: And that ended up actually just being an incubator for Chinese phone production.
• 27:04
  David: And so Huawei and all of these other Apple competitors all came out of China.
• 27:08
  David: And now actually only China knows how to make phones, including Apple iPhones.
• 27:12
  David: Correct. And so Apple is now realizing that they incubated the whole entire
• 27:16
  David: Chinese manufacturing thing, which is now the centerpiece of a lot of geopolitical debate right now.
• 27:22
  Isaiah: Exactly. Exactly. It's a short-term trade. It's something that finance people
• 27:26
  Isaiah: do, because they want to make, you know, a little bit of a better return in a 10 to 15 year period.
• 27:30
  Isaiah: And then after that, you realize that you exported the ability to actually know
• 27:35
  Isaiah: how to make things because the physical world is a real place, right?
• 27:40
  Isaiah: You can't actually model everything perfectly. You have to actually see how
• 27:43
  Isaiah: the steel behaves in practice. You have to see how the machine behaves in practice.
• 27:47
  Isaiah: And so, yeah, I think it's, it's, I actually don't even remember this question started.
• 27:50
  Isaiah: Now you've gotten me on a separate soapbox that I care a lot about,
• 27:53
  Isaiah: but, but you, you, you can't couple, do a couple of those things for too long.
• 27:56
  Isaiah: Oh, we were asking why fission now, right? This is one of those reasons, right?
• 27:59
  Isaiah: So we've had a, a return of rationality about making things in the physical
• 28:04
  Isaiah: world is one thing, right? So we suddenly realized like, it's actually probably
• 28:08
  Isaiah: important that we know how to make steel, right? It's actually important that
• 28:11
  Isaiah: we know how to manufacture things.
• 28:13
  Isaiah: And when you do that, you realize that energy price is really,
• 28:16
  Isaiah: really important, right?
• 28:17
  Isaiah: The reason that China dominates global aluminum is because they have three to
• 28:21
  Isaiah: four cents a kilowatt hour coal energy, right? They can make electricity at
• 28:25
  Isaiah: three to four cents a kilowatt hour and electrolyze bauxite.
• 28:29
  Isaiah: And that means they dominate aluminum. That also means they dominate gallium
• 28:32
  Isaiah: and germanium as well, which are really, really important to producing chips
• 28:36
  Isaiah: because that's downstream of bauxite electrolysis, right?
• 28:39
  Isaiah: And so this return to rationality drives us back to understanding that energy
• 28:43
  Isaiah: price in a society is really, really important. It's a strategic thing that a country has to have.
• 28:48
  Isaiah: The second thing that's happening is AI, right? So all the bits people suddenly woke up
• 28:53
  Isaiah: and realized like, okay, we actually need energy to even do our bits now,
• 28:57
  Isaiah: you know, because it used to be that a data center, the electricity price in
• 29:00
  Isaiah: the data center just didn't matter that much because you weren't using that
• 29:03
  Isaiah: much compute to send emails around.
• 29:05
  Isaiah: Now we're using an enormous amount of compute every day just to do our basic
• 29:09
  Isaiah: stuff because we want to use ChatGPT for everything.
• 29:11
  Isaiah: So that's the other thing. And so both of these things are just,
• 29:14
  Isaiah: you know, this return of rationality to the West to say...
• 29:17
  Isaiah: We need cheap energy. And you look around and you do the same logic that I did.
• 29:21
  Isaiah: And you realize nuclear is cheap energy. And by the way, you don't have to believe
• 29:26
  Isaiah: anything that I've said, you know, in theory about why nuclear will be cheap.
• 29:30
  Isaiah: You can actually just look at the past, right? So in the early 1970s,
• 29:34
  Isaiah: before Three Mile Island in the United States, nuclear fission,
• 29:38
  Isaiah: not only was the cheapest energy source, it remains the cheapest energy that
• 29:42
  Isaiah: humanity has ever experienced, right?
• 29:44
  Isaiah: So I'm going to say that again. In the early 1970s, the energy that we were
• 29:47
  Isaiah: getting out of nuclear reactors at that time remains the cheapest energy that
• 29:52
  Isaiah: humanity has ever experienced.
• 29:54
  Isaiah: And this is adjusting for inflation, right? I'm not talking about nominal 1970
• 29:57
  Isaiah: dollars. I'm talking about 2025 dollars.
• 30:00
  Isaiah: We were getting around three to three and a half cent per kilowatt hour energy
• 30:06
  Isaiah: out of nuclear reactors, right?
• 30:08
  Isaiah: Now, the cheapest energy you can get in the United States today is somewhere
• 30:13
  Isaiah: around five to six cents per kilowatt hour. It's a little bit difficult to calculate
• 30:16
  Isaiah: because of subsidies, but that's about as good as you can get.
• 30:19
  Isaiah: So we're about double, right, the energy that we were getting in the early 70s,
• 30:24
  Isaiah: even when, you know, adjusting for inflation.
• 30:26
  David: 50 years ago.
• 30:27
  Isaiah: 50 years ago. Yeah. And energy should always move the opposite direction,
• 30:31
  Isaiah: right? 50 years later, you should have 10 times cheaper energy than you did before.
• 30:35
  Isaiah: That was the trend up until the 1970s, and it was reversed. So I think there's
• 30:39
  Isaiah: this massive return to rationality on on energy price, which,
• 30:42
  Isaiah: you know, naturally leads you to the conclusion of fission.
• 30:45
  Isaiah: The other interesting thing is that, you know, I think that nuclear has had
• 30:49
  Isaiah: really bad marketing, right?
• 30:50
  Isaiah: It's it's had this, you know, intense scariness attached to it,
• 30:54
  Isaiah: which I think is very unjustified, because nuclear is the sort of the safest
• 30:58
  Isaiah: source of energy on earth.
• 31:00
  Isaiah: If you look at power generated versus human death toll, nuclear is the safest
• 31:05
  Isaiah: form of energy on Earth. It's even safer than solar, by the way,
• 31:08
  Isaiah: and we can talk about why that is in a second.
• 31:12
  Isaiah: One of the interesting things that happened was we had these nuclear incidents
• 31:15
  Isaiah: in the 70s and 80s. You had Fukushima. You had Chernobyl.
• 31:18
  Isaiah: And those were wildly misunderstood by the public.
• 31:22
  Isaiah: If you ask people on the street today, like, how many people died in Three Mile
• 31:25
  Isaiah: Island? People will say numbers in the hundreds. They'll say numbers in the
• 31:28
  Isaiah: thousands. Some people will say 10,000.
• 31:31
  Isaiah: Zero people is the answer, by the way. Zero people died in Three Mile Island. Nobody died.
• 31:36
  David: What about second-order consequences of polluted soil, polluted land,
• 31:40
  David: downstream effects? anything like that?
• 31:42
  Isaiah: 13 independent studies after Three Mile Island that were largely funded by people
• 31:47
  Isaiah: who wanted to show that the nuclear industry was bad failed to find any environmental
• 31:53
  Isaiah: or health effects beyond the fence of the Three Mile Island facility.
• 31:56
  Isaiah: Not a single study, even funded by, you know, enemies of nuclear failed to find
• 32:01
  Isaiah: a single negative health effect or environmental effect beyond the fence of
• 32:04
  Isaiah: Three Mile Island, right?
• 32:06
  Isaiah: So now this didn't matter in the 70s and 80s. And the reason was because information
• 32:10
  Isaiah: flow was pretty centralized in the 70s and 80s, right?
• 32:13
  Isaiah: So if you had the media on board with the narrative, and you had Hollywood on
• 32:17
  Isaiah: board with the narrative, you
• 32:19
  Isaiah: generally, you know, had a good grip on what people thought about a thing.
• 32:23
  Isaiah: Now, we've had another nuclear incident since then, and that was Fukushima,
• 32:28
  Isaiah: right? And Fukushima, most people think was, you know, another death toll of nuclear.
• 32:33
  Isaiah: I actually take the opposite view. I think that Fukushima was,
• 32:36
  Isaiah: on net will prove to be a very positive thing.
• 32:38
  Isaiah: And the reason is, is because it was very similar to Three Mile Island,
• 32:41
  Isaiah: right? It was zero people died. There's maybe, maybe an argument that you can
• 32:46
  Isaiah: make that one person died, maybe.
• 32:48
  Isaiah: But it had a very similar impact, right, in terms of public sentiment.
• 32:53
  Isaiah: People immediately reacted the same way that they did for Through a Mile Island.
• 32:56
  Isaiah: There was this huge thing. They evacuated tens of thousands of people from the area.
• 33:01
  Isaiah: They shut down the nuclear industry in Japan for a couple of years.
• 33:04
  Isaiah: The reason this was different is that this is the information age,
• 33:08
  Isaiah: right? It happened in 2011. It happened in the age of the internet.
• 33:10
  Isaiah: And very quickly after this, people started to actually read the data.
• 33:14
  Isaiah: And they realized, wait a minute, nobody died.
• 33:17
  Isaiah: And, you know, the social impact of actually evacuating tens of thousands of
• 33:22
  Isaiah: people was orders of magnitude worse than the event itself.
• 33:26
  Isaiah: And the economic impact and even the death toll impact of shutting down all
• 33:30
  Isaiah: the nuclear reactors in Japan was, again, orders of magnitude more damaging
• 33:34
  Isaiah: to the Japanese than the actual event itself.
• 33:36
  Isaiah: And the fact that this happened in the Internet age began to wake people up.
• 33:40
  Isaiah: And you had a second backlash to that, where the Japanese went back and they
• 33:43
  Isaiah: said, we made a huge mistake, right? We made a really big mistake by evacuating
• 33:47
  Isaiah: tens of thousands of people and by shutting down our nuclear industry.
• 33:50
  Isaiah: And they're beginning to turn all those plants back on.
• 33:52
  Isaiah: And so I think that these are the two kind of factors that are bringing nuclear
• 33:56
  Isaiah: fission back today is that it's the information age, right?
• 33:59
  Isaiah: Anybody can go and read about Fukushima. Anyone can read about the Japanese
• 34:04
  Isaiah: decision to reverse the impacts of that and to turn plants back on.
• 34:09
  Isaiah: And then again, just a massive return of rationality to the importance of energy in the Western world.
• 34:13
  Josh: Yeah, 50 years is such a long time. And you mentioned the world of bits that we largely live in.
• 34:18
  Josh: And for the people that are not familiar, the world of bits is basically the
• 34:21
  Josh: computers, the ones and zeros that kind of run the world. But what we're talking
• 34:24
  Josh: about now is the acceleration of the world of atoms, which is the physical space,
• 34:27
  Josh: the meat space that we occupy right now.
• 34:30
  Josh: And there's definitely this trend that I'm starting to see, and you mentioned,
• 34:34
  Josh: in that people are starting to learn and get excited about this world of atoms.
• 34:37
  Josh: How do we create these physical objects that can break these barriers that have
• 34:41
  Josh: been left behind like energy 50 years ago?
• 34:43
  Josh: So I'm curious about your take on all of this. You co-founded a company called Valor. I'm curious...
• 34:50
  Josh: So how you think Valor can solve the nuclear energy problem? What are you building?
• 34:53
  Josh: For the people that are listening, you are sitting in front of what I believe
• 34:57
  Josh: is called Ward Zero. It's your first prototype reactor. So can you just explain
• 35:00
  Josh: to me kind of what you're, how you're tackling this problem in the world of
• 35:02
  Josh: atoms, giving us energy through Valor?
• 35:04
  Isaiah: Absolutely. So I'll tell you about what we built here and then what we're going
• 35:07
  Isaiah: to build in the future. So Ward Zero is the object standing behind me.
• 35:11
  Isaiah: This is what's called a non-nuclear prototype.
• 35:13
  Isaiah: So essentially what we did is we built a nuclear reactor, but we didn't put uranium in it.
• 35:18
  Isaiah: Right. So that's kind of how you can understand what's behind us.
• 35:19
  Isaiah: Built a full nuclear reactor. You could put uranium in this thing with a couple
• 35:23
  Isaiah: of minor modifications, and it would actually turn on and it would split atoms.
• 35:26
  Isaiah: Now, we don't do that because essentially the paperwork to actually do that
• 35:30
  Isaiah: in the United States would take four to five years, and we don't have four to
• 35:32
  Isaiah: five years. We have to do this immediately, right? So build the full reactor.
• 35:36
  Isaiah: And then what we put in it instead is a silicon carbide.
• 35:39
  Isaiah: Silicon carbide is a great material. It's an extremely high temperature ceramic.
• 35:44
  Isaiah: That's also a great electrical resistor. And so what that means is that we can
• 35:47
  Isaiah: basically dump about 12 city blocks of Los Angeles power into the core of this reactor.
• 35:53
  Isaiah: And we can simulate what a nuclear fission reaction would be doing inside that
• 35:57
  Isaiah: core, which is essentially generating a ton of heat, right? And then what we
• 36:00
  Isaiah: do is we process that heat in the same way that we would if this were uranium making the heat.
• 36:05
  Isaiah: So this gives us a very, very high fidelity, real world simulation of what a
• 36:10
  Isaiah: nuclear reactor would actually do.
• 36:12
  Isaiah: And the next step is to essentially go rebuild this reactor,
• 36:14
  Isaiah: one to one with a couple of lessons that we've learned on how to weld this thing,
• 36:18
  Isaiah: how to structure that thing, how to seal this thing, but actually put uranium
• 36:22
  Isaiah: in it and turn it on and split atoms for the first time.
• 36:24
  Isaiah: So that's the next step for the company. The vision of Valor is to...
• 36:28
  Isaiah: Rather than building these, you know, massive, massive nuclear plants that we
• 36:32
  Isaiah: did over the last 50 years, you had these like gigawatt scale reactors.
• 36:35
  Isaiah: We believe that small reactors are better in a bunch of ways,
• 36:39
  Isaiah: that this architecture is also better. This is a fundamentally safer nuclear
• 36:42
  Isaiah: reactor. It uses graphite instead of water as a moderator, and we can talk about why that's safer.
• 36:47
  Isaiah: But the plan is to, instead of building, you know, let's say a couple dozen
• 36:50
  Isaiah: very large reactors, we want to build thousands and thousands of these smaller reactors.
• 36:55
  Isaiah: Because again, one of the drivers to cost is, you know, there's two drivers
• 37:00
  Isaiah: of any physical good in terms of cost How big is it?
• 37:02
  Isaiah: How many you make, right? So we want to make small things that you make a ton
• 37:06
  Isaiah: of and that's going to make them really cheap.
• 37:07
  David: Is the idea here that i'll be able to go down to my local valor store and pick
• 37:11
  David: up a nuclear reactor and plug it into my home? Or how does that actually like
• 37:15
  David: plug into the grid and to start giving me energy?
• 37:18
  Isaiah: Yeah, so I would say probably not for a while,
• 37:21
  Isaiah: Nuclear reactors.
• 37:22
  David: I'm surprised that the answer is reasonably yes at all, to be honest.
• 37:26
  Isaiah: So I think over time, humanity continues to use nuclear fission more and more and more.
• 37:32
  Isaiah: It becomes the dominant source of energy in the world.
• 37:35
  Isaiah: But there's two questions at play. There's like, where does the energy come
• 37:38
  Isaiah: from? And then how does it get to you? Right. And those are two different things.
• 37:42
  Isaiah: One of the nice things about nuclear fission is that you make a ton of cheap energy in a location.
• 37:47
  Isaiah: And then you can sort of firewall the nuclear-ness of that from the end user,
• 37:53
  Isaiah: right? And the firewall there is that you transport the energy through a medium.
• 37:57
  Isaiah: And that medium is either electricity or it's also chemical energy,
• 38:00
  Isaiah: right? And the chemical energy part of that is really interesting.
• 38:03
  Isaiah: So our nuclear reactors, we'll make both. We'll make electricity.
• 38:06
  Isaiah: You can get our electricity from a grid and it should be much cheaper.
• 38:09
  Isaiah: We'll make electricity for AI data centers. And those data centers will be getting
• 38:13
  Isaiah: the best power rates in the world.
• 38:14
  Isaiah: But also we'll make chemical fuels, right? So we'll actually make hydrogen,
• 38:18
  Isaiah: we'll bond that hydrogen with CO2, and we can actually make a synthetic fuel,
• 38:22
  Isaiah: we can make diesel, gasoline, jet fuel.
• 38:25
  Isaiah: And you might get that in any of the places that you get those chemicals today,
• 38:29
  Isaiah: and those chemicals should be much cheaper.
• 38:31
  Isaiah: And so essentially, if you think about what we're doing there,
• 38:33
  Isaiah: we're sort of, we're arbing the physical infrastructure of hydrocarbons as a
• 38:38
  Isaiah: logistics platform, and we're plugging nuclear into it, right?
• 38:42
  Isaiah: And why would you do that, by the way. What's the point of that?
• 38:45
  Isaiah: Well, the point of that is that the hydrocarbon, think about hydrocarbons for a second as a grid.
• 38:50
  Isaiah: All right, so we're familiar with an electrical grid, right?
• 38:52
  Isaiah: You have a bunch of wires connected, and you push electrons through,
• 38:55
  Isaiah: and people get to consume that energy. Hydrocarbons are also a grid.
• 38:58
  Isaiah: They're a liquid grid, right? They're a network of pipelines and trucks and
• 39:02
  Isaiah: tanks that move them around.
• 39:04
  Isaiah: So let me ask you, which one is bigger, right? Which one's moving more energy,
• 39:09
  Isaiah: the electrical grid or the hydrocarbon grid?
• 39:12
  David: I would imagine the hydrocarbon grid because that's the whole combustion engine
• 39:16
  David: thing. Like how big is the combustion engine as a concept? I would imagine it's massive.
• 39:20
  Isaiah: Here's a crazy stat for you. On the ocean today, there's a bunch of ships,
• 39:25
  Isaiah: right? And those ships are burning hydrocarbons to propel themselves across the water.
• 39:30
  Isaiah: The energy being consumed by ships on the ocean today is greater than the entire
• 39:35
  Isaiah: electrical grid of the world.
• 39:37
  Isaiah: Just the ships. Correct. Just ships burning hydrocarbons are consuming more
• 39:44
  Isaiah: energy than the entire global electrical grid, right?
• 39:47
  Josh: That is a fun fact.
• 39:48
  Isaiah: That is unreal. Hydrocarbons are actually a much larger grid that's more distributed,
• 39:54
  Isaiah: that's more flexible than the electrical grid today.
• 39:58
  Isaiah: Right now, there are some downsides to hydrocarbons, right? One of the big downsides
• 40:02
  Isaiah: is that you're continuously adding CO2 to the atmosphere every year that you use them.
• 40:07
  Isaiah: Eventually, we want to stop doing that for a bunch of reasons.
• 40:09
  Isaiah: It's not just climate change. It's also the fact that, you know,
• 40:12
  Isaiah: eventually the CO2 level in the atmosphere becomes, you know,
• 40:15
  Isaiah: too high for, you know, after about 600 ppm, your brain function,
• 40:21
  Isaiah: you know, starts to go down those sorts of things.
• 40:23
  Isaiah: So there are lots of reasons why over time that's not sustainable.
• 40:25
  Isaiah: But if you just think about it as a grid, right, think about it as just moving energy around.
• 40:30
  Isaiah: The hydrocarbon grid, I would say, is far better, far better than the electrical
• 40:34
  Isaiah: grid. And it's far larger.
• 40:35
  Isaiah: And it has, you know, potential to move, you know, terawatt hours of energy around.
• 40:39
  Isaiah: Now, if you could fix the CO2 problem part of that and only get the logistics
• 40:45
  Isaiah: part, you know, you would have essentially given yourself the ability to distribute
• 40:50
  Isaiah: all of the world's energy from only a couple of points, which is great for verticalization.
• 40:54
  Isaiah: And it's actually quite solvable. The way that you do that is you take the CO2
• 40:58
  Isaiah: out of the atmosphere and you build it into a hydrocarbon, allow people to burn
• 41:02
  Isaiah: it, which puts it back into the atmosphere.
• 41:04
  Isaiah: And you take it back out, send it out, allow people to burn it, puts it back in.
• 41:07
  Isaiah: You take it back out, and you've created a closed loop of CO2,
• 41:11
  Isaiah: right? So you're not adding net new CO2 to the atmosphere every year,
• 41:15
  Isaiah: you have a fixed rate of people, you know, CO2 PPM.
• 41:20
  Isaiah: And you're essentially just using the atmosphere as a transport mechanism to
• 41:23
  Isaiah: get your ingredients back to you again.
• 41:25
  Isaiah: Because remember, CO2, you know, these, it's not carbon, that's energetic,
• 41:29
  Isaiah: it's the structure of the molecule that's, you know, that's energetic.
• 41:33
  Isaiah: And the nuclear fission is essentially infusing CO2 and water into an energetic
• 41:38
  Isaiah: form, which is a hydrocarbon, right? You're ejecting the oxygen out of that.
• 41:41
  Isaiah: Now you have an unoxidized chemical.
• 41:43
  Isaiah: And I'm sorry, I know I'm getting a little bit chemistry, you know,
• 41:47
  Isaiah: bored here, but that is essentially what we're planning to do.
• 41:49
  Josh: Yeah. I'm going to try to ask you this question in a way that you can explain
• 41:53
  Josh: it to normal people where we don't go too deep in chemistry,
• 41:55
  Josh: but I'm curious about what makes these reactors different than...
• 41:59
  Josh: I know people, the pebble bed reactors are very popular, the Gen 4 reactors
• 42:03
  Josh: that are coming, they're much larger.
• 42:04
  Josh: You mentioned modularity is one part of it, but what are the benefits aside
• 42:07
  Josh: from the small size, aside from the
• 42:08
  Josh: modularity that you are kind of taking advantage of relative to the size?
• 42:12
  Josh: Is it just size or is there something else that's also going on behind the seeds
• 42:15
  Josh: or within the reactor that makes it more, I guess, more powerful and more efficient?
• 42:20
  Isaiah: So I would actually say that these reactors will be less powerful per size than
• 42:25
  Isaiah: some of the reactors that have been built before.
• 42:27
  Isaiah: The reason that we do that is that it makes it safer, right?
• 42:29
  Isaiah: So one of our beliefs here is like safety is probably the most important driver of cost in nuclear.
• 42:35
  Isaiah: If you can make a reactor that's 10 times safer, you can actually make it 10
• 42:38
  Isaiah: times cheaper because it allows you to do it more often, more quickly deployed at scale.
• 42:42
  Isaiah: So these will actually be a little bit less power dense than traditional light
• 42:45
  Isaiah: water reactors. reactors, but we actually get to manufacture them,
• 42:48
  Isaiah: we get to make a ton of them and that makes them cheaper.
• 42:50
  Isaiah: The really unique thing here is that these reactors are just a lot hotter,
• 42:54
  Isaiah: right? So the outlet temperature on these reactors will be around 800, 850 degrees Celsius.
• 42:59
  Isaiah: That's compared to 300, sometimes 350 degrees Celsius in a light water reactor.
• 43:06
  Isaiah: That unlocks two really important things. So the way that you make energy in
• 43:10
  Isaiah: a nuclear reactor traditionally is that you have a very hot outlet temperature.
• 43:15
  Isaiah: And then you have ambient air at a certain temperature as well.
• 43:19
  Isaiah: And you can extract energy from the difference between those two temperatures,
• 43:22
  Isaiah: right? And this is called Carnot efficiency, right? So you have a hot, a tea hot and a tea cold.
• 43:27
  Isaiah: And the difference between those temperatures governs the maximum amount of
• 43:30
  Isaiah: energy they can get out of that.
• 43:32
  Isaiah: For most plants around the world, this is 20 to 30%, right, of the total energy
• 43:38
  Isaiah: that you can get out of that.
• 43:39
  Isaiah: In a hydrocarbon engine, which works a similar way, you can push,
• 43:43
  Isaiah: you know, into the mid 30s in, you know, very efficient nat gas combined cycle
• 43:49
  Isaiah: generators, you can push 50, you know, 50% total efficiency.
• 43:53
  Isaiah: But this is all limited by the basic physics of the difference between your
• 43:58
  Isaiah: hot side and your cold side.
• 44:00
  Isaiah: The way to increase that diff and the way to increase the efficiency is essentially
• 44:05
  Isaiah: just to make the difference larger, right? The larger the difference between
• 44:08
  Isaiah: the cold side and the hot side, the greater efficiency you can get out of that.
• 44:11
  Isaiah: And it turns out that at 850C, you can actually get really efficient at producing
• 44:16
  Isaiah: electricity, right? So we'll be significantly more efficient at producing electricity
• 44:21
  Isaiah: than a traditional nuclear reactor.
• 44:23
  Isaiah: Now, the other really interesting thing that gets unlocked here by doing high
• 44:27
  Isaiah: temperatures is actually direct production of hydrogen, right?
• 44:31
  Isaiah: So ideally, right, hydrogen is a chemical energy, right? Pure hydrogen,
• 44:35
  Isaiah: because it's deoxidized, and the fact that we have oxygen in the atmosphere
• 44:39
  Isaiah: means that it's chemical potential energy.
• 44:41
  Isaiah: If you take that hydrogen and you combine it with the atmosphere,
• 44:44
  Isaiah: you get water and you get a ton of energy, right?
• 44:47
  Isaiah: So in theory, a really good thing to do with a nuclear reactor is to seed that
• 44:52
  Isaiah: process, right? You get some water, you combine it with reactor energy,
• 44:56
  Isaiah: and you get free hydrogen. And now that's a very valuable thing that you can go and sell.
• 45:00
  Isaiah: You can combine it with CO2 to make a hydrocarbon. You can do a bunch of things with it.
• 45:03
  Isaiah: Now, the way in the past that people have thought about nuclear to hydrocarbon,
• 45:07
  Isaiah: sorry, nuclear to hydrogen.
• 45:09
  Isaiah: Is to start with electricity, right? So have a nuclear reactor that spins a
• 45:14
  Isaiah: turbine, makes electricity, run the electricity through an electrolyzer,
• 45:18
  Isaiah: right? That electrolyzes water, and then you get hydrogen out of it.
• 45:21
  Isaiah: The problem with this is that you get two efficiency hits, right?
• 45:24
  Isaiah: So you get the efficiency hit of making electricity, right?
• 45:27
  Isaiah: Which as we know, could be a, you know, a 60%, 70% hit to your efficiency,
• 45:32
  Isaiah: you lose a ton of that energy, just making the electricity,
• 45:35
  Isaiah: then you have the efficiency hit of running it through an electrolyzer,
• 45:37
  Isaiah: right and that electrolyzer also has an efficiency
• 45:40
  Isaiah: you know related to it as well and you're losing a lot of that energy so by
• 45:43
  Isaiah: the time you've gone from uranium fission in a core to chemical potential hydrogen
• 45:47
  Isaiah: you've lost a ton of energy in that process
• 45:49
  Isaiah: the other thing is you've added a lot of physical machinery right so you've
• 45:52
  Isaiah: added a turbine and a generator and an electrolyzer and again you want to make
• 45:57
  Isaiah: machines as small as possible and as simple as possible,
• 46:00
  Isaiah: an interesting alternate to this is that you just use heat to split water, right?
• 46:05
  Isaiah: So any chemical will actually decompose, it'll break down at a certain temperature,
• 46:11
  Isaiah: right? So at a certain temperature, every chemical compound will decompose.
• 46:15
  Isaiah: And so in theory, you can essentially just get water hot enough from a nuclear
• 46:19
  Isaiah: reactor to get free hydrogen out of it.
• 46:22
  Isaiah: Now, in practicality, if you catalyze it properly, that temperature somewhere
• 46:26
  Isaiah: around 1600 to 1800 degrees Celsius, that's too hot for us today.
• 46:30
  Isaiah: Someday we'll have reactors that run that hot, too hot for us today.
• 46:33
  Isaiah: But what you can do is you can run that water through a couple of chemical cycles,
• 46:38
  Isaiah: and transform them into another chemical that has a much lower decomposition temperature.
• 46:43
  Isaiah: So what I'm talking about here is something called the sulfur iodine cycle.
• 46:47
  Isaiah: The sulfur iodine cycle is a chemical cycle that takes water,
• 46:51
  Isaiah: makes two other acids out of that water, and then you use heat to decompose
• 46:55
  Isaiah: those acids, and you get hydrogen out of that and then you recycle the ingredients.
• 47:01
  Isaiah: So sulfur and iodine, if you combine water.
• 47:04
  Isaiah: With sulfur dioxide and iodine, you get two acids out of that.
• 47:07
  Isaiah: You get a hydriotic acid and sulfuric acid, and you can actually decompose those
• 47:13
  Isaiah: two acids just below the output temperature of this reactor, right?
• 47:17
  Isaiah: So you can do it around 750 to 800 degrees Celsius, and they will just thermally
• 47:21
  Isaiah: break down and you get the free hydrogen out of that.
• 47:24
  Isaiah: So what are we left with? Well, you don't need a turbine, right?
• 47:26
  Isaiah: Because we're not making electricity.
• 47:28
  Isaiah: You don't need a generator and you don't need an electrolyzer.
• 47:31
  Isaiah: Instead, you just need a couple of tanks of chemicals, right?
• 47:33
  Isaiah: You need a good heat exchanger to do that thermal decomposition.
• 47:37
  Isaiah: So we see this as an incredible way to add a much higher efficiency where you're
• 47:41
  Isaiah: not limited by the Carnot cycle, and you're not limited by the efficiency of
• 47:44
  Isaiah: an electrolyzer to essentially just take reactor heat with very minimal moving
• 47:48
  Isaiah: parts and just a couple of tanks of chemicals and make hydrogen.
• 47:51
  Isaiah: And we think it'll be the cheapest hydrogen in the world. Sorry,
• 47:54
  Isaiah: you told me to say that without chemistry, and then there's.
• 47:56
  David: A like there was a lot of yeah chemistry and like matter that was a in the contrast
• 48:03
  David: of bits versus atoms that was heavy on the atoms side of things yep and maybe
• 48:08
  David: you could just like extrapolate like
• 48:10
  David: when we're talking about atoms and moving atoms and manipulating atoms to produce
• 48:13
  David: the things that we want the conversation starts with a lot of the stuff that
• 48:17
  David: you just said first it starts with
• 48:19
  David: getting the energy producing the energy in order to manipulate atoms josh brought
• 48:24
  David: up this contrast of like for the last, you know, 30 years since the rise of
• 48:27
  David: the internet, the rise of Silicon Valley, the world, humanity has really been
• 48:31
  David: heavily invested into bits.
• 48:33
  David: Like how do we make the bits in
• 48:34
  David: the right order, the ones and zeros in the right order to produce value?
• 48:37
  David: And like atoms has lagged in contrast to bits over the rise of the internet.
• 48:42
  David: But you are getting really excited about atoms. Maybe you can,
• 48:45
  David: can you give, get me and Josh and also our listeners, get them excited about atoms.
• 48:49
  David: Like once we unlock having the right atoms in the right order to unlock energy,
• 48:55
  David: how does the world of atoms get easier to change, easier to flip, flip a bit?
• 49:00
  David: Like how do we get flipping atoms easy as flipping bits downstream of all of
• 49:04
  David: this? Just get us excited about Matt Adams.
• 49:06
  Isaiah: So I'm actually going to flip it around for you a little bit and say,
• 49:10
  Isaiah: everyone has always been excited about atoms.
• 49:12
  Isaiah: Like atoms is actually what we we have all cared about for the last 50 years,
• 49:17
  Isaiah: but we also care about money right and it what's been true over the last like
• 49:21
  Isaiah: 30 to 40 years is like well first of all,
• 49:24
  Isaiah: the reason we care about money is generally because of atoms like what do people
• 49:28
  Isaiah: do once they get money from let's say starting a sass company and becoming a billionaire
• 49:32
  Isaiah: well they spend that money on atoms right they they start to have a private
• 49:35
  Isaiah: chef which makes them delicious food they get a private jet which like flies
• 49:39
  Isaiah: them around wherever they want to go they get a beautiful house, they get a boat, right?
• 49:43
  Isaiah: So I would actually argue like the world of atoms has always been the thing
• 49:47
  Isaiah: that is very interesting to people.
• 49:49
  Isaiah: Now the second thing is that there's this intellectual side that's also very
• 49:53
  Isaiah: interesting to people, which is like the right way to order bits, right?
• 49:57
  Isaiah: And that is like a captivating question in the mind that has,
• 50:01
  Isaiah: you know, driven a generation of entrepreneurs and a generation of innovators and engineers.
• 50:06
  Isaiah: But I think that's mostly just been driven by the fact that the world of bits
• 50:11
  Isaiah: was really the only place you could be intellectually curious, right?
• 50:15
  Isaiah: If you're a intellectually curious person, and you're an engineer,
• 50:18
  Isaiah: and you have the option before you as look, life starts when you're in high school, right?
• 50:23
  Isaiah: So like, when you're in high school, and the options in front of you are opening
• 50:26
  Isaiah: a laptop, and creating something, right, by the end of the day,
• 50:31
  Isaiah: right, by the end of the day, as a 17 year old with a laptop,
• 50:33
  Isaiah: you can have created something that's functional, and maybe even makes you some money.
• 50:37
  Isaiah: And a couple years later, you could be making a lot of money.
• 50:40
  Isaiah: And in five years, you could be a millionaire, right? Like, the world of bits
• 50:44
  Isaiah: was the place that that happened.
• 50:45
  Isaiah: So I think that our obsession with bits is actually more an obsession with innovation.
• 50:51
  Isaiah: It's an obsession with discovery and with engineering. And the world of bits
• 50:55
  Isaiah: was the only place you could really do that.
• 50:57
  Isaiah: So then we have to back up and say, like, why was bits the only place you could do that?
• 51:01
  Isaiah: Well, there's two reasons. Like, one is the simple, like, political answer,
• 51:06
  Isaiah: right? Which is like, it became very hard to do things in the world of atoms
• 51:10
  Isaiah: in the West, we added an enormous amount of federal regulation over everything that moves.
• 51:14
  Isaiah: And we didn't do that in bits, right? And so a 17 year old could open a laptop
• 51:18
  Isaiah: and create something with almost no interaction with regulation.
• 51:22
  Isaiah: Whereas, you know, just trying to, you know, make a sample rocket,
• 51:27
  Isaiah: you're wondering, like, oh, am I, you know, south of some sort of like regulation
• 51:31
  Isaiah: here that says that I can't have, you know, this chemical in this room and that sort of thing.
• 51:35
  Isaiah: And so there was just a very quick, easy path to being an engineer,
• 51:39
  Isaiah: to being an innovator, to being somebody who's intellectually curious with bits.
• 51:43
  Isaiah: The other thing, though, is that it's the second thing we talked about where,
• 51:47
  Isaiah: there is a fundamental limitation in the world of atoms that hasn't existed
• 51:51
  Isaiah: in bits in terms of like cycle time, right?
• 51:54
  Isaiah: Like, so the fact that if you're sitting in front of a laptop,
• 51:57
  Isaiah: you can have a piece of software at the end of the day that's doing something cool.
• 52:00
  Isaiah: Whereas, you know, if you have a physical thing in your mind,
• 52:02
  Isaiah: it maybe takes a couple of weeks.
• 52:04
  Isaiah: I think that's also changing. And that's what I'm really, really excited about, right?
• 52:08
  Isaiah: The things that we talked about before, you have energy, intelligence, and dexterity.
• 52:13
  Isaiah: As intelligence and dexterity get cheaper, and energy gets cheaper,
• 52:17
  Isaiah: I believe that we will start to play with matter in the same way that we play
• 52:22
  Isaiah: with bits, right? Life starts in high school, okay? It starts where you play.
• 52:26
  Isaiah: The reason that we have so many incredible software engineers and so much software
• 52:29
  Isaiah: is that people play with computers when they are in high school, right?
• 52:32
  Isaiah: And literally play, Right. We're playing video games. A lot of software engineers
• 52:36
  Isaiah: that I know got into software because they were playing video games and it gave
• 52:40
  Isaiah: them this like love of computers.
• 52:41
  Isaiah: And then they started modding the software and they wanted it to do cooler things.
• 52:45
  Isaiah: And that taught them software engineering because they want to make an extension
• 52:48
  Isaiah: to Minecraft, something like that.
• 52:50
  Isaiah: And I think that we're going to start playing with atoms. What would playing
• 52:54
  Isaiah: with atoms look like? Well, it would look like talking to an AI that runs a
• 52:58
  Isaiah: CNC machine or runs a 3D printer.
• 53:00
  Isaiah: And you actually can start to get these cycle times again. You can maybe by
• 53:03
  Isaiah: the end of the day be holding the thing that you thought about.
• 53:05
  Isaiah: And then the next day you tweak it, you make it better. You could be holding
• 53:08
  Isaiah: the physical object that you were thinking about.
• 53:10
  Isaiah: I don't think I need to convince people that that's more exciting than software, right?
• 53:14
  Isaiah: Like you imagine, you know, a drone that can fly you around, right?
• 53:19
  Isaiah: And within a couple of days, you're sitting on it and it's in the air,
• 53:23
  Isaiah: right? Like that's the future that I would like to see and that I think happens
• 53:29
  Isaiah: in the next 10 to 20 years as dexterity gets cheaper, as intelligence gets cheaper.
• 53:34
  Isaiah: I don't think I will have to convince many people to be tinkering with the real
• 53:38
  Isaiah: world once it becomes possible to do that again.
• 53:40
  Josh: Yeah, that sounds right. And it feels like the world of atoms as that accelerates
• 53:44
  Josh: will be even more accessible and more, I guess, quality of life improving for
• 53:48
  Josh: the average person than the world of bits.
• 53:50
  Josh: I feel like with the world of bits, and correct me where I'm wrong,
• 53:52
  Josh: but a lot of times you are extracting value from software, or maybe you're injecting
• 53:56
  Josh: yourself into social media.
• 53:57
  Josh: You're just kind of reading and writing with this thing, but it doesn't extrapolate
• 54:00
  Josh: out too much into the real world.
• 54:01
  Josh: So when we do have this accessibility, I think about myself and where I could
• 54:05
  Josh: use an abundance of energy.
• 54:06
  Josh: My car, for example, it costs 20 something cents per kilowatt.
• 54:08
  Josh: If we get that down to free, it becomes much easier to get around.
• 54:12
  Josh: But even things where we're building humanoid robots and and these things can
• 54:15
  Josh: probably be more cost effective.
• 54:17
  Josh: I'm curious kind of if you can if you have any fun or interesting examples to
• 54:21
  Josh: get people excited about what what it actually looks like for the average person.
• 54:25
  Josh: Like how is how's my day actually improved as we get this abundance of energy that's much cheaper?
• 54:31
  Isaiah: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's just a really like everyday person example.
• 54:35
  Isaiah: The reason that your dishwasher sucks is because of energy regulation.
• 54:38
  Isaiah: Right the reason that you can't just like throw an entire plate of food into
• 54:43
  Isaiah: the dishwasher without having to do any wiping,
• 54:45
  Isaiah: all right, when you're done eating food, you should basically just pick up the
• 54:49
  Isaiah: plate in front of you and like throw it to a machine.
• 54:53
  Isaiah: And the machine does the rest, right? And like the next time you're ready to
• 54:55
  Isaiah: eat food, you like pick up a plate, you put food on it, and then you like throw
• 54:58
  Isaiah: it back to the machine. That's how this should work.
• 55:00
  Isaiah: And the only reason that it doesn't work that way is actually energy regulation.
• 55:04
  Isaiah: It's called Energy Star.
• 55:05
  Isaiah: There's a fleet of regulations that we've put around how our appliances use
• 55:09
  Isaiah: energy that has essentially forced the industry to create these machines around
• 55:15
  Isaiah: a function of regulation.
• 55:16
  Isaiah: Why do like dishwashers and washing machines like seem like they don't really
• 55:21
  Isaiah: get that much better and the user interface doesn't change that much?
• 55:24
  Isaiah: It's essentially because we're solving for energy regulations,
• 55:26
  Isaiah: right? So in an energy abundant future, like the machines should just do the annoying stuff for you.
• 55:32
  Isaiah: You know, we're 50 years from the invention of, I mean, probably more than that
• 55:36
  Isaiah: of the dishwasher and it's like not that different of an experience
• 55:39
  Isaiah: so i i would i would say like let's get way more creative like what is what
• 55:44
  Isaiah: is living in a house look like well it looks like just doing what you enjoy
• 55:48
  Isaiah: and you know when you're like literally throw it i think that'd be pretty sick
• 55:51
  Isaiah: like i want i want to see i want to come up with like a dishwasher of the future
• 55:55
  Isaiah: where you literally throw it that would be sick.
• 55:57
  Josh: Oh that makes me really
• 55:58
  Isaiah: Happy and like all of your clothes like your dishwasher your washing machine
• 56:03
  Isaiah: should not just first of all you shouldn't load it. Like what is loading it?
• 56:06
  Isaiah: That's nonsense. Like I want to throw my clothes at the basket and it just comes back folded, right?
• 56:11
  Isaiah: My washing machine should fold my clothes too and should put them back in the drawer.
• 56:15
  Isaiah: And, you know, like that sort of thing is like very, very obvious to me.
• 56:19
  Isaiah: Maybe that's through humanoids.
• 56:20
  Isaiah: Maybe that's through, you know, just better dishwashers and the concept of a
• 56:24
  Isaiah: dishwasher becomes very different. But all of these things are unlocked by energy.
• 56:29
  Isaiah: Now, something that's very motivating to me, I talked about the dishwashers
• 56:33
  Isaiah: and the washing machines because that's like an everyman thing but like i'm
• 56:35
  Isaiah: also extremely motivated by by outer space
• 56:38
  Isaiah: Right. And there's no formulation where we are man among the stars,
• 56:43
  Isaiah: man on the moon, man in Mars without abundant energy. And that's what's really, really exciting to me.
• 56:49
  Isaiah: Energy is essentially the biggest tool that you need to go and make the solar
• 56:54
  Isaiah: system a fun place to be for humans.
• 56:56
  Isaiah: You know, it's how you can terraform a planet. It's how you can create habitations.
• 57:00
  Isaiah: You know, it's how you can create, you know, big floating cities above Venus.
• 57:04
  Isaiah: And it's that's you know there's lots of mechanical problems to solve in there
• 57:07
  Isaiah: but again there's an extent to which mechanical problems will be solved by intelligence
• 57:12
  Isaiah: right intelligence and dexterity and essentially you just need a lot of energy
• 57:15
  Isaiah: to do it that's what i'm really excited about.
• 57:17
  Josh: So i feel like there's probably these these two core pillars that people can
• 57:20
  Josh: get really excited it's about how this energy affects their everyday life and
• 57:23
  Josh: we could probably have a full podcast conversation about the interesting new
• 57:27
  Josh: ways that you could design things that we use every day to be improved
• 57:29
  Josh: but it's also the the dreamer vision where now because we have this new abundant energy unlocked.
• 57:35
  Josh: We can dream about going to the stars and the downstream effects of that.
• 57:38
  Josh: We had Sean McGuire on the show fairly recently, and he was talking about how
• 57:41
  Josh: focusing on something like Mars has downstream effects for people back at home,
• 57:44
  Josh: where in order to get to Mars, we need that nuclear reactor that fits in a suitcase,
• 57:48
  Josh: and we need all these new technologies.
• 57:49
  Josh: So I think, and I'm hopeful based on what you're saying, is that we will get
• 57:52
  Josh: this, all these downstream effects, hopefully fairly soon, or at least directionally
• 57:56
  Josh: we're headed towards that now in the way that we weren't in the past.
• 57:59
  Josh: I'm curious what you think about timelines. When when will people start to notice
• 58:02
  Josh: the effects of this cheaper energy when when will we start to have dishwashers
• 58:06
  Josh: that can catch the dishes or or robots that can fold our clothes and in a way
• 58:10
  Josh: that's kind of accessible for the average person to use
• 58:12
  Isaiah: I think that is entirely limited by entrepreneurs, right?
• 58:16
  Isaiah: So when we think of like tech today and we think of like startups today.
• 58:21
  Isaiah: All we're really talking about is like young, crazy people who have some like
• 58:25
  Isaiah: wild vision of how a dishwasher should actually catch your plate and then decide
• 58:29
  Isaiah: to go make that thing a reality.
• 58:32
  Isaiah: And the fundamental motivation for that is twofold. Like one,
• 58:35
  Isaiah: they want to imprint their will on the universe and they want,
• 58:37
  Isaiah: you know, every single home to have a dishwasher that catches your dishes.
• 58:40
  Isaiah: Two they want to become a billionaire or a centimillionaire or whatever.
• 58:44
  Isaiah: The becoming a centimillionaire and the possibility of imprinting your your
• 58:49
  Isaiah: will on reality has been mostly
• 58:52
  Isaiah: impossible and in the physical world in the west right different in in you know
• 58:55
  Isaiah: other countries in the world specifically china but in the west this has not been a path because of
• 59:01
  Isaiah: not enough energy and also because of very stringent regulation that makes it
• 59:05
  Isaiah: just difficult for innovation to happen and difficult for companies to scale.
• 59:09
  Isaiah: I think both of those things are heading in the right direction right now,
• 59:12
  Isaiah: which is that you see tons of entrepreneurs suddenly realizing that you can
• 59:15
  Isaiah: become a billionaire by making something cool.
• 59:18
  Isaiah: Impulse Labs is a great example of this, right? Sam is a buddy.
• 59:21
  Isaiah: You know, he was like, Stowe's should be 100 times better than they are right
• 59:24
  Isaiah: now, right? And that's what he's doing.
• 59:26
  Isaiah: So I think there'll be a ton more people who go out and do things like that.
• 59:30
  Isaiah: The second side is the regulation side. I think we're seeing a lot of fundamental
• 59:35
  Isaiah: change in how we think about regulation especially at the federal level that
• 59:38
  Isaiah: will affect that significantly.
• 59:40
  Isaiah: But it's it's gated on people listening to this podcast like it's gated to to
• 59:45
  Isaiah: young people in high school who are like I have a different vision for what your couch should be.
• 59:50
  Isaiah: I think the couch should be way sicker than it is right now.
• 59:52
  Isaiah: And I'm going to become a billionaire doing that.
• 59:54
  Josh: That's a future that seems really excited that I can get very pumped about.
• 59:58
  Josh: It feels like the future ahead is actually going to look like the future.
• 1:00:00
  Josh: When I look out over New York City, it will probably look materially different
• 1:00:04
  Josh: than over the next decade than it did in the past decade. So that's a future
• 1:00:07
  Josh: I think a lot of people can get super excited about.
• 1:00:09
  Isaiah: This is a great point, by the way. And in the future, looking like the future
• 1:00:12
  Isaiah: is like also why we did this. You know, we have a bunch of people on Twitter.
• 1:00:16
  Isaiah: I collect Twitter haters. It's very fun. And we're like, why does your nuclear
• 1:00:20
  Isaiah: reactor look like a video game? Or like, you know, what's going on here?
• 1:00:23
  Isaiah: And like the answer is...
• 1:00:24
  Josh: It reminded me almost like an NVIDIA GPU type thing. It looks very cool.
• 1:00:27
  Isaiah: You know, I tried to make it not look like a GPU. It's very,
• 1:00:31
  Isaiah: very hard to make a vertical box not look like a GPU.
• 1:00:34
  Isaiah: It's just kind of what they look like. But, you know, it is very futuristic.
• 1:00:38
  Isaiah: It's Tron. It's Star Trek. And yeah, the reason is absolutely the future should look like the future.
• 1:00:43
  Isaiah: And, you know, when you're walking into a nuclear reactor that was built in
• 1:00:47
  Isaiah: the year 2025, it should not feel like you're at like a hospital switchboard
• 1:00:51
  Isaiah: in the 1970s. And that's definitely what we're going for here.
• 1:00:55
  David: For the podcast listeners that are not watching the video, Isaiah's background
• 1:00:58
  David: is the most sci-fi, industrial-looking thing. It looks like you just opened
• 1:01:03
  David: the first level on Doom and you're on Mars.
• 1:01:06
  David: While he was talking, a man in a Segway just zipped on by, going like 20 miles
• 1:01:10
  David: an hour. And it was extremely distracting because it was a little bit surreal
• 1:01:14
  David: just watching this man zipping around this factory floor
• 1:01:16
  Isaiah: With a nuclear power reactor. I didn't realize that. That's great.
• 1:01:19
  Isaiah: Sometimes when I'm on calls, people think that this is a fake background until
• 1:01:23
  Isaiah: I see a forklift go by. you know, carrying a pallet. And they're like,
• 1:01:26
  Isaiah: oh, that's real. That's happening.
• 1:01:28
  Josh: It's very real. Well, there's one more topic that I want to touch on that's
• 1:01:31
  Josh: very front of mind for us particularly here.
• 1:01:33
  Josh: Limitless is how we're powering kind of this AI and the intelligence revolution
• 1:01:38
  Josh: and how we're doing these data centers and kind of how we power the rest of
• 1:01:41
  Josh: everything. So these are modular reactors. I understand that you can use them
• 1:01:45
  Josh: in clusters. You could kind of stack them on top of each other to create data.
• 1:01:48
  Josh: What I understand also is companies
• 1:01:50
  Josh: like XAI and companies like OpenAI are kind of energy constrained.
• 1:01:56
  Josh: And what I'm curious to ask you about is, will this technology be capable of
• 1:02:00
  Josh: powering these data centers, one?
• 1:02:02
  Josh: And then is it actually powerful enough or is it modular enough that we could
• 1:02:07
  Josh: scale that across the country to the average person? So, like,
• 1:02:10
  Josh: will we be able to power data centers? Will we be able to power my neighborhood?
• 1:02:14
  Josh: How does that kind of distribution of these reactors work as you start to roll them out?
• 1:02:18
  Isaiah: Yeah. So this is, you know, just good business sense at this point.
• 1:02:22
  Isaiah: You know, what, how do you actually go and scale a business?
• 1:02:24
  Isaiah: I would love if our reactors in the next five years could power every American home.
• 1:02:28
  Isaiah: There are business constraints to that, regulatory constraints to that.
• 1:02:32
  Isaiah: I think the easiest thing for Valor Atomics to do today is to go help AI achieve
• 1:02:37
  Isaiah: all of its goals, right? Help all of the hyperscalers get all the power that
• 1:02:41
  Isaiah: they need to win the AI race to make sure that the United States of America
• 1:02:44
  Isaiah: is the most dominant AI country in the world.
• 1:02:47
  Isaiah: That's a massive, massive problem that we're going to solve in the next five years.
• 1:02:51
  Isaiah: Now, beyond that, yes, I'm very excited about that energy getting into your
• 1:02:55
  Isaiah: hands. And I think there are two ways that that can happen.
• 1:02:57
  Isaiah: The one way is, you know, we go and build, you know, small reactors around the
• 1:03:01
  Isaiah: country, right? So we have four of these units next to your neighborhood, that sort of thing.
• 1:03:06
  Isaiah: Another really interesting way, though, is that we just make the hydrocarbons
• 1:03:10
  Isaiah: that the world consumes, right? So if you're going to get on a jet aircraft
• 1:03:15
  Isaiah: in about five years, I hope that that fuel is made by Valor Atomics Reactors.
• 1:03:20
  Isaiah: And I hope that that fuel is about a third the cost that it is today.
• 1:03:24
  Isaiah: And because fuel is the largest operating cost of an airline,
• 1:03:27
  Isaiah: I hope that your plane ticket is much cheaper.
• 1:03:30
  Isaiah: And if you're going to be driving on a bus or you're going to be driving on
• 1:03:33
  Isaiah: a truck or you're getting goods delivered to your house from a semi truck,
• 1:03:38
  Isaiah: I hope that all of those things are much, much cheaper because they're buying
• 1:03:40
  Isaiah: Valor Atomics fuel, which is a whole lot cheaper than refining oil.
• 1:03:43
  Isaiah: And then in the long term, I think absolutely, our reactors are powering the
• 1:03:47
  Isaiah: grid all around the world.
• 1:03:48
  Josh: I'm curious about the global energy mix, kind of how nuclear,
• 1:03:52
  Josh: how prescient nuclear is relative to others. So we're burning lots of fossil
• 1:03:55
  Josh: fuels. We have a lot of solar energy.
• 1:03:58
  Josh: Does the equilibrium eventually balance out to a mix of those three?
• 1:04:01
  Josh: Or do you see a future in which it's actually all just nuclear?
• 1:04:03
  Isaiah: I believe that,
• 1:04:05
  Isaiah: the power mix in the next, let's say, 50 years is going to become 99.1,
• 1:04:09
  Isaiah: 99 nuclear fission, 1%, you know, other things.
• 1:04:13
  Isaiah: I think that solar will always have some applicability in remote places,
• 1:04:17
  Isaiah: right? There's always going to be that one place that you want to be where there's
• 1:04:21
  Isaiah: no infrastructure, and you just need a bit of power to run some compute,
• 1:04:24
  Isaiah: you know, to keep yourself warm. And it's hard to beat a solar panel for that.
• 1:04:28
  Isaiah: But in terms of the massive, massive volumes that humanity needs going forward
• 1:04:32
  Isaiah: to power AI, to power robotics, it's going to be nuclear. And even hydrocarbons, right?
• 1:04:38
  Isaiah: Most of the world's energy today is hydrocarbons.
• 1:04:40
  Isaiah: And if those hydrocarbons become just a transport mechanism for nuclear power,
• 1:04:44
  Isaiah: I think you're going to see a world of 99.1. And I think that's going to be
• 1:04:47
  Isaiah: a much cheaper way. And it's going to be much more abundant.
• 1:04:50
  David: Isaiah, as we wrap up this podcast and you get back to work,
• 1:04:53
  David: working on a literal nuclear reactor that's in your background,
• 1:04:57
  David: what are you going to do first?
• 1:04:58
  David: Seriously, what's next for you? What are your priorities for this week,
• 1:05:01
  David: for this month? Where are you in the arc of what you're trying to build?
• 1:05:05
  Isaiah: Absolutely. The next goal for Valor Atomics is essentially to go rebuild this
• 1:05:10
  Isaiah: thing one-to-one, put uranium in it, and split atoms for the first time.
• 1:05:13
  Isaiah: That's all we think about every day.
• 1:05:15
  Isaiah: You know, nothing gets built in the world without it actually getting built,
• 1:05:18
  Isaiah: right? One of our big convictions at Valor is that you can only design so much on paper, right?
• 1:05:23
  Isaiah: Designing something for five years on a piece of paper is going to teach you
• 1:05:26
  Isaiah: less than building it in the first year, testing it, building another one,
• 1:05:30
  Isaiah: testing it, building another one, testing it.
• 1:05:32
  Isaiah: That's what we're doing for the next few years. We're building reactors.
• 1:05:35
  Isaiah: We're making them bigger, more powerful, more sophisticated.
• 1:05:37
  Isaiah: And we're getting into the practice of building reactors and splitting atoms.
• 1:05:41
  Isaiah: That's our entire focus right now.
• 1:05:43
  Isaiah: So look out for Ward 1, which will be our first critical nuclear reactor.
• 1:05:47
  David: And if you had a message for our listeners, our listeners are pretty intellectually
• 1:05:50
  David: curious, high-agency people who just always like getting their fingers in the dirt.
• 1:05:55
  David: Any advice for them? How can they support you if they are just peaked and pilled by your mission?
• 1:06:00
  David: Or just any general advice for what they should do if they are just interested in learning more.
• 1:06:05
  Isaiah: Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me on Twitter, Isaiah underscore P underscore
• 1:06:08
  Isaiah: Taylor. Post some awesome stuff in there all the time.
• 1:06:11
  Isaiah: We keep it spicy. You can find Valor Atomics, valoratomics.com.
• 1:06:14
  Isaiah: That's V-A-L-A-R, atomics.com.
• 1:06:17
  Isaiah: And come visit us. Come check out the reactor.
• 1:06:20
  David: Where is it? Where is the actual reactor? Where is the facility?
• 1:06:24
  Isaiah: We're here in Los Angeles. We're in Hawthorne, about a mile from SpaceX.
• 1:06:27
  Isaiah: We've got great beaches, great surfing, in some of the best engineers in the
• 1:06:30
  Isaiah: world creating the future.
• 1:06:31
  Josh: I just wanted to let people know to absolutely follow you guys,
• 1:06:34
  Josh: because that's actually how I found you. I love the theatrics you do around
• 1:06:38
  Josh: the company, where you guys had this big unveiling event. And I was like,
• 1:06:42
  Josh: who are these people that are turning a nuclear reactor event into this big thing?
• 1:06:46
  Josh: And it was you. And it makes the future more exciting. Just wanted to thank
• 1:06:49
  Josh: you, because we need more founders like you trying these hard things,
• 1:06:53
  Josh: improving our world in this life of atoms so that the everyday life becomes a lot more exciting.
• 1:06:58
  Josh: So we're just super, super grateful, really glad that you joined us today and
• 1:07:01
  Josh: excited for other people to hear your mission.
• 1:07:04
  Isaiah: Well, thank you. And I'm glad that you fell for my psyop of the party,
• 1:07:07
  Isaiah: which was essentially an exercise to see how many tech bros we could get to
• 1:07:10
  Isaiah: show up into a building wearing a suit and tie.
• 1:07:13
  Isaiah: And I think that we did quite well. We saw a lot of suits and ties that night
• 1:07:18
  Isaiah: on Tech Bro. So it was very successful.
• 1:07:21
  Josh: Certainly nerd sniped me.
• 1:07:23
  David: Isaiah, thanks for joining us on the list.
• 1:07:25
  Isaiah: Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.