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Must-Watch: Limitless Energy Masterclass from Atom-Splitter Isaiah Taylor · In the Loop AI

• 0:00
  Josh: What's up everyone, Josh here. You are about to listen to an episode featuring
• 0:02
  Josh: Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valor Atomics, a company dead set on building
• 0:07
  Josh: safe and modular nuclear reactors to solve the single most important resource
• 0:11
  Josh: problem in the world, energy.
• 0:14
  Josh: Isaiah's nuclear roots run deep with his great-grandfather being in the Manhattan
• 0:17
  Josh: Project and Isaiah himself attempting to split the atom all on his own all these decades later.
• 0:22
  Josh: And get this, they did it all, both at the age of 24.
• 0:26
  Josh: And speaking of splitting the atom, Since this episode was originally recorded,
• 0:30
  Josh: Isaiah and the Valor team did just that, achieving a milestone called cold criticality,
• 0:35
  Josh: which occurs when uranium, the isotope they use as nuclear fuel,
• 0:38
  Josh: it achieves a self-sustaining reaction.
• 0:40
  Josh: It's the first venture-backed company ever in the world to split the atom and
• 0:44
  Josh: do this. It's incredible.
• 0:45
  Josh: This was an episode that David and I recorded early on in Limitless' history.
• 0:49
  Josh: And since then, so many more new people have joined us and we wanted to enjoy
• 0:53
  Josh: Thanksgiving with our family. So
• 0:54
  Josh: we figured it would be a perfect time to resurface this gem of an episode.
• 0:58
  Josh: And when asking Isaiah to come on, we were hoping to create the canonical energy
• 1:02
  Josh: episode as to why it matters so much for everything we do.
• 1:05
  Josh: And after listening back, it's still holding strong. And I hope that it will
• 1:10
  Josh: also leave you feeling inspired the same way that it did for me.
• 1:13
  Josh: Isaiah is a total badass. If you're listening to this, I highly advise switching
• 1:17
  Josh: over to YouTube or Spotify because he is recording literally right in front of his nuclear reactor.
• 1:21
  Josh: It is so cool. It's an amazing episode. And if you enjoy it,
• 1:24
  Josh: or you have a friend that you think would be interested please share it
• 1:27
  Josh: with them it's the best way that we can grow and we're so appreciative of
• 1:30
  Josh: everyone who was listening to the first version of this and who
• 1:33
  Josh: is listening to the new version of it right now because it has been an incredible
• 1:36
  Josh: journey if you can support us in any way by sharing the episode liking subscribing
• 1:40
  Josh: on whatever platform you're listening on leave a nice review if you enjoyed
• 1:43
  Josh: but without further ado let's get into this amazing amazing category defining
• 1:47
  Josh: episode with Isaiah Taylor I really hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
• 1:52
  Josh: Why is energy the most important resource in the world?
• 1:55
  Isaiah: I would actually argue that over time, energy is the only resource in the world.
• 1:59
  Isaiah: If you think about what we're all doing as humans, we are creating entropy as
• 2:05
  Isaiah: we go throughout the universe.
• 2:07
  Isaiah: And almost anything else that you could come up with, I would argue anything
• 2:10
  Isaiah: else you can come up with, essentially consumes energy.
• 2:13
  Isaiah: Right. So when we talk about resources, natural resources, we're trying to find things in the ground.
• 2:19
  Isaiah: But there's a lot of stuff in the ground. And not only is there a lot of stuff
• 2:22
  Isaiah: in the ground, there's stuff on other planets and in asteroids.
• 2:25
  Isaiah: And the universe is fundamentally limitless as far as we know.
• 2:31
  Isaiah: The actual limiting factor in all of these things is how much energy do you
• 2:35
  Isaiah: have to transform the world around you into what you want?
• 2:38
  Isaiah: And, you know, that's the only irreversible thing, right? If you use copper
• 2:42
  Isaiah: in an electric car, you can always use that copper again, right?
• 2:45
  Isaiah: But the energy in that electric car will never be used again,
• 2:48
  Isaiah: right? You've created entropy and that's it's fundamental.
• 2:51
  Isaiah: So I actually view energy is like the only cost in the universe and it's why I focus on it.
• 2:56
  Josh: I love that. So we are focused on getting a lot of energy. We are energy constrained.
• 3:00
  Josh: I'm curious what you think. What does having an abundance of this energy look
• 3:04
  Josh: like if we do achieve this goal of getting energy costs to near zero?
• 3:08
  Josh: What becomes newly possible? What does the world look like when we actually
• 3:10
  Josh: solve the energy problem?
• 3:12
  Isaiah: So let me put it in terms of what the world looks like now. And that that might
• 3:16
  Isaiah: help us extrapolate a little bit.
• 3:18
  Isaiah: Right. So the this the sort of like history of what the world looks like in
• 3:22
  Isaiah: society is essentially three pillars getting better over time.
• 3:27
  Isaiah: Okay, so the three pillars of any product, any physical good,
• 3:32
  Isaiah: are essentially energy, intelligence, and dexterity, right?
• 3:36
  Isaiah: So these three ingredients that you need to make any physical good.
• 3:40
  Isaiah: Let's take, you know, an iPhone, right? So this iPhone is made of energy,
• 3:44
  Isaiah: intelligence, and dexterity, right?
• 3:45
  Isaiah: So it's the intelligence of the people at Apple who knew how to put it together.
• 3:49
  Isaiah: It's the dexterity of the machines and the, you know, massive CNC fleets and
• 3:54
  Isaiah: Foxconn and, you know, the physical manipulation of matter that went into putting it together.
• 4:00
  Isaiah: And then finally, it's the energy to run those machines to run the servers that
• 4:04
  Isaiah: are running CAD, you know, even the energy to fuel the designers brains as they
• 4:09
  Isaiah: eat food, you know, and they go throughout their days.
• 4:11
  Isaiah: So every single thing is made of energy intelligence, intelligence and dexterity. And, um.
• 4:17
  Isaiah: What's interesting right now is that we're getting a clear
• 4:21
  Isaiah: abundance in the intelligence and dexterity part
• 4:24
  Isaiah: right so ai you know hitting an inflection really
• 4:28
  Isaiah: means that intelligence is becoming somewhat default free uh dexterity will
• 4:32
  Isaiah: also become default free as we get more and more robotics and so what does the
• 4:36
  Isaiah: world look like when we have abundant energy it's essentially fueling those
• 4:39
  Isaiah: things in an inflected manner which means everything is free uh what does it
• 4:44
  Isaiah: mean when everything's free.
• 4:45
  Isaiah: Well, it means that like the material world is more subject to your imagination,
• 4:50
  Isaiah: right? It's more limited by what can you imagine.
• 4:53
  Isaiah: Now we're talking like, you know, somewhat far in the future here,
• 4:55
  Isaiah: but it might be closer than people think it might, you know,
• 4:58
  Isaiah: think it is today because we're so used to a world that's constrained.
• 5:03
  Isaiah: You know, heavily constrained on intelligence primarily.
• 5:06
  Isaiah: You know, the entire physical world around us has been traditionally constrained
• 5:10
  Isaiah: on the intelligence of smart people trying to figure out how to translate what's
• 5:15
  Isaiah: in our imaginations into the physical world.
• 5:17
  Isaiah: You know, we might imagine an airplane, but then the translation of that airplane
• 5:21
  Isaiah: into something that can actually fly takes an enormous amount of brainpower
• 5:24
  Isaiah: of thousands of smart people, and then a lot of dexterity to manipulate the world.
• 5:29
  Isaiah: And as intelligence becomes free, it actually just becomes a function of energy.
• 5:33
  Isaiah: So your ability to get an airplane out of your head becomes how much energy do you have, right?
• 5:40
  Isaiah: This is a world in which, you know, there are lots and lots of robots,
• 5:43
  Isaiah: which are robots, which build other robots, which build other robots,
• 5:46
  Isaiah: robots, which mine materials, which build robots, which mine materials.
• 5:50
  Isaiah: And at the end of the day, energy is the input. So what does the world look
• 5:53
  Isaiah: like when we have abundant energy?
• 5:55
  Isaiah: I mean, I think it looks like a world of imagination, right?
• 5:58
  Isaiah: A world of thinking of amazing things in your mind and watching them happen.
• 6:03
  Isaiah: Now you can imagine that,
• 6:05
  Isaiah: planet Earth, that might become a little bit crowded, right?
• 6:08
  Isaiah: We will probably have a lot more things running around and planes flying around
• 6:12
  Isaiah: if we're, you know, subject to imagination. And this is where I think space
• 6:15
  Isaiah: exploration becomes very, very interesting.
• 6:18
  Isaiah: And, you know, we suddenly reach out and find more places for us to have imagination.
• 6:24
  Isaiah: But we use the space around us, like the physical space around us as somewhat
• 6:29
  Isaiah: of a canvas on which our minds are imagining and discovering and,
• 6:33
  Isaiah: and, you know, putting things on that canvas. I'm very excited about that.
• 6:36
  Isaiah: I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.
• 6:37
  Josh: I think we definitely share that enthusiasm with you. And I love this term that
• 6:41
  Josh: I've heard a lot being thrown around, which is just too cheap to meter,
• 6:43
  Josh: is what happens when that energy becomes too cheap to meter.
• 6:46
  Josh: I think that's the basis of a lot of this show, is what are the downstream effects?
• 6:49
  Josh: What are the second order effects of all of these unlocks happening as a result
• 6:53
  Josh: of energy that's too cheap to meter?
• 6:54
  Josh: So I want to take a step back for a second and just kind of introduce who you are.
• 6:59
  Josh: Isaiah, for the listeners, has a very interesting story. Most people drop out
• 7:02
  Josh: of college and they're like, oh yeah, I showed them. I'm a college dropout.
• 7:06
  Josh: Isaiah, if I'm correct, I believe if you actually left high school and then
• 7:09
  Josh: you taught yourself to code and now you're sitting here.
• 7:12
  Josh: And for the listeners at home who aren't listening, Isaiah is sitting in front
• 7:14
  Josh: of a nuclear reactor, in front of their product, in front of hopefully what is the future of energy.
• 7:20
  Josh: So there's this quote that I love from Steve Jobs. It's like,
• 7:22
  Josh: you can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can connect them looking
• 7:24
  Josh: backwards and you have to trust that they'll work out.
• 7:26
  Josh: In your case, it is very clear to me that they worked out.
• 7:28
  Josh: So can you just kind of explain to me how you wound up sitting here in front
• 7:32
  Josh: of this reactor that you built?
• 7:33
  Isaiah: Yeah, it's an interesting story. So yeah, you're absolutely right.
• 7:36
  Isaiah: I dropped out of high school. I actually did attend three months of college.
• 7:40
  Isaiah: I think it was around three months. I attended a small liberal arts school for
• 7:45
  Isaiah: a couple of months while I was
• 7:46
  Isaiah: working 80-hour weeks doing software engineering. Didn't last very long.
• 7:51
  Isaiah: I was curious to read a lot of literature, and I've always been interested in language.
• 7:57
  Isaiah: And I realized a few months into it, I cared a lot more about the work that
• 8:01
  Isaiah: I was doing than spending my time in a classroom.
• 8:05
  Isaiah: A lot of my time in the classroom was spent, like sitting on my laptop coding.
• 8:08
  Isaiah: I was like, okay, I can really only do one of these things well.
• 8:10
  Isaiah: So, you know, education has always been something that's like a fascinating
• 8:13
  Isaiah: thing to me and that I want to do more of, but I also am on a mission and I
• 8:18
  Isaiah: have to fulfill the mission.
• 8:19
  Isaiah: And so that consumes, you know, a lot of my time and energy.
• 8:23
  Isaiah: But how did we get here? How did we get to Ward Zero behind me,
• 8:28
  Isaiah: you know, sitting in front of this amazing machine that the team has built?
• 8:31
  Isaiah: It's essentially been a journey of self-learning, right? So how does anybody
• 8:37
  Isaiah: learn? Well, they read, right? They read and they talk to people.
• 8:39
  Isaiah: If you go to school and you learn nuclear physics, you read,
• 8:43
  Isaiah: you talk to people, you do math, right? That's essentially what you're doing.
• 8:46
  Isaiah: And it turns out that, like, if you are wildly curious about something,
• 8:51
  Isaiah: that you can do that on your own as well. Now, you have to be curious about it.
• 8:54
  Isaiah: I caution people because, you know, sometimes people want to they see,
• 8:58
  Isaiah: oh, wow, you dropped out of high school, you dropped out of college. It's super cool.
• 9:01
  Isaiah: And I actually recommend that people don't do that unless they are overwhelmingly
• 9:05
  Isaiah: curious about something to the extent that it's going to drive them to try to
• 9:10
  Isaiah: understand it every single day.
• 9:11
  Isaiah: If you don't wake up like burning with curiosity about a certain thing that
• 9:16
  Isaiah: you're going to spend your life learning about and building,
• 9:18
  Isaiah: you should probably go to school because the nice thing about school is that
• 9:22
  Isaiah: it pushes you to learn things that you otherwise might not have spent the time to do. Right.
• 9:27
  Isaiah: But for those people that have, you know, an itch in their head that cannot be scratched anyway,
• 9:32
  Isaiah: except waking up every single day and working on it, you will probably find
• 9:36
  Isaiah: easier and more efficient ways to access that information and start actually
• 9:41
  Isaiah: building than going to school. And so that's what I did.
• 9:45
  Isaiah: Really thinking about this business for about 10, 11 years since I was around 14 or 15.
• 9:52
  Isaiah: You know, I have some family history in nuclear energy that motivated me to
• 9:56
  Isaiah: go and learn about it. And so that's kind of what I did.
• 9:58
  Josh: And I want people to also note that you did this in the pre-AI age where you
• 10:01
  Josh: actually had to go and read books and teach yourself things without all of the
• 10:04
  Josh: additional leverage that we have today.
• 10:06
  Isaiah: You know, that's actually such a great point. Man, if I had had access to ChatGPT
• 10:11
  Isaiah: when I was like 14 or 15, that would have been phenomenal.
• 10:14
  Isaiah: I'm so excited for the generation of, you know, students that are growing up
• 10:18
  Isaiah: right now who can, like, sit on Chappachea Petit for hours and hours.
• 10:22
  Isaiah: And it's like having a professor talking to you, which is amazing.
• 10:24
  Isaiah: But, yeah, you know, I did this back when it was mostly actually trying to read
• 10:30
  Isaiah: PDFs from the Department of Energy and the AEC in the 1960s.
• 10:34
  Isaiah: So I at least grew up in the digital
• 10:36
  Isaiah: era where you could find these PDFs online, which I'm grateful for.
• 10:39
  David: It's pretty clear, Isaiah, that nuclear is your answer, the answer that makes sense to you.
• 10:47
  David: Maybe you can walk us through that train of thought as to why you are just pilled
• 10:52
  David: by nuclear specifically, because there's other ways to produce energy.
• 10:55
  David: Solar, I still feel like, has a lot of juice left to squeeze in that whole industry.
• 10:59
  David: You could have gone and solved the solar problem, but you chose nuclear.
• 11:02
  David: Maybe you can just walk us through that choice.
• 11:03
  Isaiah: I obviously had a bias toward nuclear.
• 11:07
  Isaiah: My great-grandfather was on the Manhattan Project I've grown up thinking about
• 11:10
  Isaiah: it, but I would like to believe I was very objective.
• 11:14
  Isaiah: And one of the reasons is that I became anti-nuclear pilled when I was in middle
• 11:20
  Isaiah: school and early high school, because having studied the physics of it and having
• 11:25
  Isaiah: studied the engineering of it, I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world.
• 11:27
  Isaiah: And then I started looking around at the market and the deployment,
• 11:30
  Isaiah: and I realized that the nuclear industry in the West is dead, right?
• 11:35
  Isaiah: It's completely shuttered. It's gone. It's not doing anything. and um,
• 11:39
  Isaiah: in the journey of trying to understand why i i actually
• 11:42
  Isaiah: became anti-nuclear pill and i was like well you know
• 11:45
  Isaiah: this is an amazing technology but humanity is not ready for it and it's not
• 11:49
  Isaiah: happening and you know there's these complexities to it which make it impossible
• 11:52
  Isaiah: um and and so then i backed up and i said well i know that over the next hundred
• 11:58
  Isaiah: years a society is going to figure out abundant energy you know and i don't
• 12:02
  Isaiah: we don't know which one right but one of them is going to
• 12:04
  Isaiah: And the one that figures out abundant energy is going to have an inflectionary
• 12:10
  Isaiah: moment that takes them, you know, stratospheric.
• 12:13
  Isaiah: And I would like that to be us. You know, I would like us to be the ones that figure that out.
• 12:17
  Isaiah: And so I actually, you know, backed all the way up to the drawing board.
• 12:21
  Isaiah: I said, what is the best form of energy we could unlock today?
• 12:24
  Isaiah: And I believe I actually started with a very blank neutral slate,
• 12:27
  Isaiah: even a little bit, you know, biased against fission.
• 12:30
  Isaiah: And maybe for personal reasons that I was maybe even salty about it,
• 12:34
  Isaiah: I was like, man, it sucks that the nuclear, you know, it's such a cool technology
• 12:39
  Isaiah: that I have history in, but like it just didn't work. So what is the best form of energy?
• 12:42
  Isaiah: And that drove me to every form of energy generation.
• 12:46
  Isaiah: I really started from first principles and looked at how have humans gotten energy in the past?
• 12:52
  Isaiah: What are some theoretical ways to get them in the future?
• 12:55
  Isaiah: I looked at solar. I looked at wind, which is a proxy for solar.
• 12:58
  Isaiah: I looked at hydrocarbons, geothermal was really interesting.
• 13:02
  Isaiah: I looked at fission, fusion, all across the board.
• 13:05
  Isaiah: And at the end of the day, I came to a couple of fundamental conclusions.
• 13:09
  Isaiah: If you want to make cheap energy, you're going to have a machine that does it, right?
• 13:14
  Isaiah: So there's going to be a machine that's a box and you build the box and energy
• 13:18
  Isaiah: comes out of it, right? So like that's the fundamental thing that we're talking about here.
• 13:21
  Isaiah: What are the properties of that box? What do you want that box to be like?
• 13:25
  Isaiah: Well, ideally, you want the box to be small per power, right?
• 13:29
  Isaiah: So the box is just not that big versus the power that it makes.
• 13:33
  Isaiah: Okay, so then and the reason that's important, by the way, is like at scale,
• 13:37
  Isaiah: things generally cost how big they are.
• 13:41
  Isaiah: All right, that's a little bit of a confusing sentence. So I'll say it again.
• 13:44
  Isaiah: At scale, things generally cost their size.
• 13:47
  Isaiah: Okay, so a big thing costs more than a small thing.
• 13:50
  Isaiah: Okay, 747 costs more than an iPhone. And that's a pretty fundamental law.
• 13:54
  Isaiah: It's hard to break that law.
• 13:56
  Isaiah: You see deviations in things of similar sizes, for another reason.
• 14:00
  Isaiah: And that other reason is rate of production.
• 14:03
  Isaiah: Right? So there's sort of like two fundamental factors in how much things cost,
• 14:07
  Isaiah: how big they are, how many of them you make.
• 14:09
  Isaiah: Okay. So back, but the most fundamental one is how big is it?
• 14:13
  Isaiah: So an ideal energy machine is quite small and makes a lot of power.
• 14:19
  Isaiah: So then you back up and you say, well, okay, well, what drives the size of an
• 14:23
  Isaiah: energy machine across all of these different, uh, you know, types of energy
• 14:27
  Isaiah: generation, you have geothermal, you have solar, you have wind pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground,
• 14:32
  Isaiah: nuclear fusion, all these different things.
• 14:35
  Isaiah: And what I did is, you know, you might laugh at this a little bit But I looked
• 14:39
  Isaiah: at all of the different energy generating machines out there and I said, how big are they?
• 14:44
  Isaiah: And again, it's not total size, but it's how big are they versus the power that they make.
• 14:48
  Isaiah: All right. So what we're talking about here is power density.
• 14:51
  Isaiah: So power density is essentially per cubic meter of machine. How much energy does that thing make?
• 14:57
  Isaiah: And the answer might surprise you. I'll just I'll turn it to you.
• 15:00
  Isaiah: What do you think is the most power dense energy producing machine?
• 15:04
  David: Machine like a physical contraption, a physical gadget that humans make.
• 15:08
  Isaiah: Yep. Physical gadget that humans make or even that they theoretically could
• 15:11
  Isaiah: make. Right. But that makes energy.
• 15:14
  David: I mean, I feel like I'm just not having high context enough to answer this,
• 15:17
  David: but like, I don't know, a dam comes to mind.
• 15:20
  David: It's relatively small in the grand scheme of things versus like a field array of solar panels.
• 15:26
  David: That's my first intuitive answer. I don't know. Josh, what do you think?
• 15:29
  Josh: You mentioned the atomic bomb. I'm thinking, well, that seems like it generates
• 15:31
  Josh: a lot of energy. Maybe not a machine, but probably a pretty high density of energy.
• 15:36
  David: We can't really use that energy, though.
• 15:38
  Josh: Does that count?
• 15:39
  Isaiah: We're doing some really, really good exploration here. I really like it.
• 15:42
  Isaiah: So hydro is not power dense, unfortunately.
• 15:45
  Isaiah: Hydroelectric dams are freaking enormous. They're gigantic.
• 15:50
  David: They're large, yeah.
• 15:51
  Isaiah: The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest concrete structure ever built by
• 15:55
  Isaiah: humans on Earth. Now, it also makes a lot of energy.
• 15:58
  Isaiah: But if you actually do the cubic meters to power output, dams are actually pretty bad.
• 16:03
  Isaiah: The answer today is actually a jet engine, actually a rocket engine.
• 16:07
  Isaiah: So a hydrocarbon engine is actually the most power dense thing that we've built yet.
• 16:12
  Isaiah: Right. So if you actually look at, you know, a Raptor engine,
• 16:16
  Isaiah: that thing is like it's I haven't done the exact math.
• 16:19
  Isaiah: It might be in the gigawatts per cubic meter.
• 16:24
  Isaiah: Right. So just insane, insane energy density.
• 16:27
  Isaiah: Now, the problem is hydrocarbons themselves are kind of large.
• 16:33
  Isaiah: Right. So like the actual mass of the fuel you have to include in that calculation.
• 16:37
  Isaiah: And then you have to also include in the calculation the machinery that produces
• 16:41
  Isaiah: the fuel, the machinery that finds the fuel, that drills for it,
• 16:45
  Isaiah: that refines for it, that transports it, that stores it, puts it in the tank.
• 16:49
  Isaiah: So once you do all that math, you know, even though a rocket engine or jet engine
• 16:53
  Isaiah: is the most energy dense thing we built, you know, built yet,
• 16:57
  Isaiah: the apparatus to source the hydrocarbons is actually, you know, large. So high baggage.
• 17:03
  Isaiah: High baggage and just more physical machinery, right? It adds to the total,
• 17:06
  Isaiah: you know, cubic meters per output power.
• 17:10
  Isaiah: And again, that adds to cost, right? Cubic meterage of machinery adds to cost.
• 17:15
  Isaiah: And so now the atomic bomb is actually the right answer, right?
• 17:19
  Isaiah: So if you actually think about what produces a ton of energy in a very small
• 17:24
  Isaiah: box, you know, an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb is that answer, right?
• 17:30
  Isaiah: That you have put an enormous amount of energy into a very, very tiny frame.
• 17:36
  Isaiah: Now, obviously, the second thing you said was, well, you can't use that energy.
• 17:40
  David: Right? It's not productive energy.
• 17:41
  Isaiah: Yeah, it's too much to be productive. But what this tells you is that fission,
• 17:48
  Isaiah: you know, and fusion, but we'll talk about that in a second.
• 17:51
  Isaiah: Fission is actually as close as we've figured
• 17:54
  Isaiah: out how to get so far to this like almost
• 17:57
  Isaiah: infinite power source in a box of a of
• 18:00
  Isaiah: an abstract size right and it turns out for for
• 18:03
  Isaiah: fission that the size of the box is not super
• 18:06
  Isaiah: correlated with the power output right so like
• 18:09
  Isaiah: the reason that we make you know you know fusion machines
• 18:12
  Isaiah: or fission machine machines of a certain size honestly has
• 18:15
  Isaiah: more to do with safety than it has to do with like total power that
• 18:18
  Isaiah: you can get out of the box right you know the reason that we
• 18:21
  Isaiah: make things bigger or smaller in the fission world has to
• 18:24
  Isaiah: do with how safe we want to make them right because you you take
• 18:27
  Isaiah: this to the fundamental limit and uh you know you have
• 18:30
  Isaiah: a bomb right which is an enormous amount of energy in a very small box but it's
• 18:34
  Isaiah: unsafe and then you go the exact opposite direction which would be something
• 18:38
  Isaiah: like the machine behind me which is very very safe and it's much lower power
• 18:42
  Isaiah: density so this is actually the key to why I believe that fission is the answer for the future.
• 18:48
  Isaiah: And it's that the constraints around how big that box is really has to do with
• 18:53
  Isaiah: our ability to engineer it to be safe, right?
• 18:57
  Isaiah: It's actually not constrained by physics you can make a a nearly infinite energy producing,
• 19:03
  Isaiah: uh box of almost any any size with uh
• 19:06
  Isaiah: with nuclear fission beyond a certain minimum there's a there's sort
• 19:08
  Isaiah: of a minimum size but around that minimum size like you
• 19:11
  Isaiah: can make a box and makes the power of the you know the entire world um and then
• 19:15
  Isaiah: everything from that point to practicality is a matter of essentially safety
• 19:20
  Isaiah: engineering um okay so what this means and by the way like the fundamental reasons
• 19:25
  Isaiah: for this is that uranium itself is just unbelievably energy dense, right?
• 19:31
  Isaiah: So the kilowatt hours per kilogram
• 19:33
  Isaiah: on uranium is about 23 million kilowatt hours per kilogram versus,
• 19:40
  Isaiah: I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's somewhere around 40 or
• 19:44
  Isaiah: 50 kilowatt hours per kilogram in oil and gas, right, in a hydrocarbon fuel.
• 19:50
  Isaiah: And so you have literally millions of times more energy density in uh in fission
• 19:57
  Isaiah: now take this to like something like solar right what's the what's the power
• 20:02
  Isaiah: density of solar another way you can think about this is uh here's here's a
• 20:05
  Isaiah: trick question what's bigger a nuclear reactor or a solar panel i.
• 20:08
  Josh: Would guess solar by a couple orders of magnitude yeah
• 20:11
  Isaiah: Yeah so it's a trick question because you're like well a solar panel is this
• 20:14
  Isaiah: big you know and the nuclear reactor is that big so clearly the nuclear reactor
• 20:18
  Isaiah: is bigger, but it's actually not true.
• 20:20
  Isaiah: The solar panel is much bigger, right, per power output.
• 20:23
  Isaiah: And the answer is a couple orders of magnitude, maybe three orders of magnitude.
• 20:27
  Isaiah: It's hard to predict in the limit.
• 20:29
  Isaiah: But today, at least, you know, solar is about three orders of magnitude bigger
• 20:33
  Isaiah: in terms of physical mass than nuclear.
• 20:36
  Isaiah: So if our North Star is that a, you know, an energy machine ought to be small,
• 20:41
  Isaiah: because small things are cheap.
• 20:44
  Isaiah: Um, nuclear is, is the solution, right? So this was, this was sort of my conclusion
• 20:49
  Isaiah: on, on all of this, uh, like first principles thinking and research is,
• 20:52
  Isaiah: is essentially that fission will create the cheapest energy on earth.
• 20:56
  Isaiah: If we can figure out how to do it safely and we can figure out how to do it
• 21:00
  Isaiah: legally and in a way that the public, you know, will be happy with,
• 21:03
  Isaiah: because even if you have a safe machine and the public thinks it's not a safe machine,
• 21:07
  Isaiah: you know, you still haven't really solved the, like the fundamental problem,
• 21:09
  Isaiah: at least in a, in a short timeframe.
• 21:11
  Isaiah: Um, so the second conclusion that I had, and this is really what led to,
• 21:15
  Isaiah: to starting Valor is that if you really want to make the cheapest energy on
• 21:19
  Isaiah: earth, you're going to do nuclear fission, but you're going to do it pretty
• 21:23
  Isaiah: differently than how it's been done before.
• 21:25
  Isaiah: Um, and specifically you want to do it kind of in the middle of nowhere where
• 21:30
  Isaiah: you have sort of a safe operating place for fission, you know, out in the desert,
• 21:35
  Isaiah: out in the middle of nowhere with as many safety constraints as you want to
• 21:39
  Isaiah: put around that as much security as you want to put around that.
• 21:41
  Isaiah: And you can simply build many, many nuclear reactors. Because again,
• 21:46
  Isaiah: there's two governing principles in how much a thing costs.
• 21:49
  Isaiah: How big is it and how many you make so we
• 21:52
  Isaiah: know that fission wins the the smallness thing right very
• 21:54
  Isaiah: small machine makes a ton of power the second is how many
• 21:57
  Isaiah: you make and so these are the two fundamental you know decisions
• 22:00
  Isaiah: that went into starting this company is that we're going to make fission reactors
• 22:03
  Isaiah: because they're small and we're going to make a lot of them because making many
• 22:07
  Isaiah: of a thing makes it very cheap and so that's essentially what we're doing here
• 22:10
  Isaiah: we're making many many nuclear reactors out in the middle of nowhere uh they're
• 22:15
  Isaiah: fission reactors so they're very
• 22:16
  Isaiah: power dense, and we're going to make the cheapest energy in the world.
• 22:20
  David: Inside of your answer, I feel like there's just a lot of work being done with
• 22:23
  David: the idea that there's just not a lot of extra baggage going around the production of energy.
• 22:29
  David: So we could go and we could talk about building a dam or setting up arrays of
• 22:34
  David: solar panels or wind farms.
• 22:36
  David: And I think you would just dismantle each one of those things,
• 22:40
  David: talking about the supply chains that are required to produce those things,
• 22:43
  David: the third-party vendors that are required, the assembly that's required.
• 22:46
  David: And I'm getting the intuition here that building a nuclear reactor,
• 22:50
  David: what you're doing, there's just a lot fewer moving parts.
• 22:53
  David: And it's just a more just like simple environment to produce energy.
• 23:00
  David: And so you have less dependencies on third-party manufacturers.
• 23:04
  David: You have just overall less dependencies, generally speaking.
• 23:07
  David: And that allows you to, in theory, kind of scale out that operation and scale
• 23:11
  David: out energy production, generally speaking.
• 23:14
  Isaiah: Yeah, that's absolutely true for a lot of industries.
• 23:17
  Isaiah: Like it's absolutely true for oil and gas, right? So it's almost impossible
• 23:20
  Isaiah: today to completely verticalize an oil and gas company, right?
• 23:25
  Isaiah: Because the source of your oil continues to shift.
• 23:28
  Isaiah: And so unless you're in like the continuous real estate business where you are
• 23:33
  Isaiah: constantly buying new patches of land, exploring them, drilling, pumping oil,
• 23:39
  Isaiah: you know, moving it to refinery, which you own, refining it,
• 23:43
  Isaiah: moving it through logistics that you own to the end user site.
• 23:46
  Isaiah: That's an enormously complicated supply chain to own yourself.
• 23:50
  Isaiah: Now, what is verticalizing nuclear look like?
• 23:52
  Isaiah: Well, it looks like having a patch of land where steel comes in and graphite
• 23:56
  Isaiah: comes in and energy comes out and a bit of uranium, right?
• 23:59
  Isaiah: But the uranium part of that is actually shockingly small in terms of mass.
• 24:02
  David: A little uranium goes a long way.
• 24:04
  Isaiah: A little bit of uranium goes a hell of a long way. So now solar,
• 24:07
  Isaiah: you can make an argument about this as well.
• 24:09
  Isaiah: You could say that you have this solar plant, which is similarly structured,
• 24:13
  Isaiah: which has silicon coming in and aluminum coming in, and you have power coming out.
• 24:18
  Isaiah: Now, the problem with that is just the mass constraint, right?
• 24:20
  Isaiah: You're going to need a couple orders of magnitude, more silicon,
• 24:24
  Isaiah: more aluminum, then I need steel and graphite and uranium, right?
• 24:28
  Isaiah: So at the limit, I say I win that fight just in the fact that I need literally
• 24:32
  Isaiah: a thousand times less physical material per output power.
• 24:36
  Isaiah: And in the limit, things cost how big they are. So, you know,
• 24:39
  Isaiah: this is sort of the math for solar.
• 24:42
  Isaiah: Now, fusion is an interesting part of this as well.
• 24:44
  Isaiah: People will say, well, okay, fusion is even more power dense, right?
• 24:49
  Isaiah: Because, you know, deuterium versus uranium or tritium are even more power density per kilogram.
• 24:58
  Isaiah: The problem with that is that, again, it's more about the properties of the
• 25:01
  Isaiah: box than it is the properties of the fuel, right?
• 25:05
  Isaiah: What is like, let's characterize a fusion box. How good is that thing on the
• 25:09
  Isaiah: metrics that we talked about, right?
• 25:11
  Isaiah: An energy box should be small. That's the first most important thing.
• 25:14
  Isaiah: I would say there's two other sub attributes as well as that.
• 25:17
  Isaiah: They should be simple and made of common materials, right? Small,
• 25:20
  Isaiah: simple, common materials.
• 25:22
  Isaiah: Interestingly, fusion is worse on all three of those than fission, right?
• 25:26
  Isaiah: So a fusion machine is actually larger per power, because it's harder to capture the energy out of it.
• 25:32
  Isaiah: It's harder to create the conditions for fusion. It's hard to capture the output energy.
• 25:37
  Isaiah: So the machine itself is actually larger per power than a fission machine.
• 25:40
  Isaiah: It's lower power density.
• 25:42
  Isaiah: It's also much more complex, right? And complexity is a factor to cost.
• 25:47
  Isaiah: And the materials are much less common, right? So you can't make a fusion machine
• 25:51
  Isaiah: out of steel and carbon, right?
• 25:53
  Isaiah: Which is essentially what this machine behind us is made out of.
• 25:56
  Isaiah: And so, you know, like I said, I would like to believe I was objective in this.
• 26:01
  Isaiah: I did not know what the answer was going to be. I thought it might have been solar.
• 26:03
  Isaiah: I thought it was, you know, I actually thought geothermal for a while might have been the answer.
• 26:07
  Isaiah: But when you actually go to how does humanity have civilizational,
• 26:11
  Isaiah: you know, energy that is 10 times cheaper than it is today?
• 26:16
  Isaiah: The only answer that I see to that is nuclear fission.
• 26:18
  David: Why do you think that this is ready for society right now?
• 26:23
  David: Nuclear as a conversation goes back before I was born, before all of us were
• 26:26
  David: born. It's been around for a while.
• 26:29
  David: Why now? What's changed with technology? What's changed with politics or just the world around?
• 26:35
  David: How has the environment changed to make the question of right now be relevant?
• 26:40
  Isaiah: So I think that we made a trade-off in the 70s and 80s that made us think that
• 26:46
  Isaiah: energy wasn't that important for a while.
• 26:48
  Isaiah: And that's one of the fundamental reasons. There's a couple of fundamental reasons.
• 26:51
  Isaiah: So in the 70s and 80s in the West, we essentially became a society that imagined
• 26:57
  Isaiah: it could be somewhat decoupled from the price of energy.
• 27:00
  Isaiah: And the essential way that we did that is we exported physical industry to other
• 27:05
  Isaiah: places, right? So energy really, really matters for physical industry before AI.
• 27:11
  Isaiah: Now energy matters even for bits.
• 27:14
  Isaiah: But before AI, energy was really, really important to physical industry.
• 27:19
  Isaiah: And we went through this motion of essentially moving all physical industry to other places.
• 27:24
  Isaiah: And so it didn't matter to us. It didn't impact us as directly to have more expensive energy.
• 27:29
  Isaiah: And so I would say there's a period of irrationality in how we thought about
• 27:34
  Isaiah: energy because we thought it didn't matter. Now, it turns out that you actually
• 27:37
  Isaiah: really need physical industry as a country, right? A nation needs to be able to build things.
• 27:41
  Isaiah: And in fact, I would say the fundamental thing that an economy does is building things.
• 27:46
  Isaiah: But there's a the flaw in our thinking came from.
• 27:50
  Isaiah: The fact that there are actually like two things involved in making things.
• 27:53
  Isaiah: There's the knowing how to make them, and then there's the making them.
• 27:57
  Isaiah: And we imagined for a period of 30 years or so that we could be the country
• 28:00
  Isaiah: that knows how to make things, and that other countries could be the ones that do the making.
• 28:05
  Isaiah: And in the short term, that looks really attractive, because you get a ton of
• 28:08
  Isaiah: alpha on the knowing how to make things.
• 28:10
  Isaiah: You have rapid growth of valuable intellectual property. It's really easy to
• 28:15
  Isaiah: capitalize. It's really easy to get started.
• 28:17
  Isaiah: And you know we're like let's just export the annoying part which is like the
• 28:20
  Isaiah: real making you know to other places and that's uh highly flawed in the long
• 28:26
  Isaiah: term it maybe is a good idea for about 10 or 15 years in the long term it turns
• 28:30
  Isaiah: out that your ability to know how to make things,
• 28:34
  Isaiah: has to be coupled with the making of them right because what happens is you
• 28:38
  Isaiah: forget you forget how to make things and if you're not actively making things
• 28:42
  Isaiah: you're not learning how to make them better
• 28:45
  Isaiah: So the practical output of this is like, we forgot how to make cars, right?
• 28:49
  Isaiah: Like we started exporting car production to other places and Japan got really
• 28:55
  Isaiah: good at it. China got really good at it.
• 28:57
  Isaiah: And really only one company in the United States sort of like was like,
• 29:01
  Isaiah: huh, maybe we should remember how to make cars and make those again.
• 29:04
  Isaiah: And, you know, that'd be Tesla.
• 29:06
  Isaiah: And this happened across, you know, so many different industries,
• 29:08
  Isaiah: right? The reason that Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley is that we used to make silicon there.
• 29:11
  Isaiah: We used to make chips and then we exported them, you know, somewhere else for
• 29:15
  Isaiah: the actual production because we didn't want the effluent and the waste from that.
• 29:18
  Isaiah: And now guess what? We don't know how to make chips anymore,
• 29:20
  Isaiah: right? So this is very short term thinking. You actually have to be involved
• 29:24
  Isaiah: in the making in order to be educated on how to do the making.
• 29:28
  David: I'm reading a book about this same effect with Apple's iPhones,
• 29:31
  David: where they exported all the manufacturing to China.
• 29:34
  David: And that ended up actually just being an incubator for Chinese phone production.
• 29:41
  David: And so Huawei and all of these other Apple competitors all came out of China.
• 29:45
  David: And now actually only China knows how to make phones, including Apple iPhones.
• 29:49
  David: Correct. And so Apple is now realizing that they incubated the whole entire
• 29:53
  David: Chinese manufacturing thing, which is now the centerpiece of a lot of geopolitical debate right now.
• 29:59
  Isaiah: Exactly. Exactly. It's a short-term trade. It's something that finance people
• 30:03
  Isaiah: do because they want to make a little bit of a better return in a 10 to 15-year period.
• 30:07
  Isaiah: And then after that, you realize that you exported the ability to actually know
• 30:12
  Isaiah: how to make things because the physical world is a real place, right?
• 30:16
  Isaiah: You can't actually model everything perfectly. You have to actually see how
• 30:20
  Isaiah: the steel behaves in practice. You have to see how the machine behaves in practice.
• 30:24
  Isaiah: And so, yeah, I think it's it's I actually don't even remember this question
• 30:28
  Isaiah: started. Now you've gotten me on a separate soapbox that I care a lot about.
• 30:30
  Isaiah: But but you can't couple do a couple of those things for too long.
• 30:34
  Isaiah: Oh, we were asking why fission now?
• 30:36
  Isaiah: You're right. This is one of those reasons. Right. So we've had a.
• 30:39
  Isaiah: A return of rationality about making things in the physical world is one thing, right?
• 30:44
  Isaiah: So we suddenly realized like, it's actually probably important that we know
• 30:47
  Isaiah: how to make steel, right? It's actually important that we know how to manufacture things.
• 30:51
  Isaiah: And when you do that, you realize that energy price is really,
• 30:54
  Isaiah: really important, right?
• 30:55
  Isaiah: The reason that China dominates global aluminum is because they have three to
• 31:00
  Isaiah: four cents a kilowatt hour coal energy, right?
• 31:03
  Isaiah: They can make electricity at three to four cents a kilowatt hour and electrolyze bauxite.
• 31:07
  Isaiah: And that means they dominate aluminum. That also means they dominate gallium
• 31:10
  Isaiah: and germanium as well, which are really, really important to producing chips
• 31:13
  Isaiah: because that's the downstream of bauxite electrolysis, right?
• 31:17
  Isaiah: And so this return to rationality drives us back to understanding that energy
• 31:21
  Isaiah: price in a society is really, really important.
• 31:23
  Isaiah: It's a strategic thing that a country has to have.
• 31:26
  Isaiah: The second thing that's happening is AI, right? So all the bits people suddenly
• 31:31
  Isaiah: woke up and realized like, okay, we actually need energy to even do our bits now.
• 31:36
  Isaiah: You know, because it used to be that a data center, the electricity price in
• 31:39
  Isaiah: a data center just didn't matter that much because you weren't using that much
• 31:41
  Isaiah: compute to send emails around.
• 31:43
  Isaiah: Now we're using an enormous amount of compute every day just to do our basic
• 31:47
  Isaiah: stuff because we want to use ChatGPT for everything.
• 31:49
  Isaiah: So that's the other thing. And so both of these things are just,
• 31:52
  Isaiah: you know, this return of rationality to the West to say.
• 31:56
  Isaiah: We need cheap energy and you look around and you do the same logic that i did
• 31:59
  Isaiah: and you realize nuclear is cheap
• 32:02
  Isaiah: energy and by the way you don't have to believe anything that i've said.
• 32:06
  Isaiah: You know in theory about why nuclear will be cheap you can actually just look
• 32:09
  Isaiah: at the past right so in the early 1970s before three mile island in the united
• 32:14
  Isaiah: states uh nuclear fission,
• 32:17
  Isaiah: not only was the cheapest energy source it remains the cheapest energy that
• 32:21
  Isaiah: humanity has ever experienced.
• 32:23
  Isaiah: Right. So I'm going to say that again. In the early 1970s, the energy that we
• 32:26
  Isaiah: were getting out of nuclear reactors at that time remains the cheapest energy
• 32:30
  Isaiah: that humanity has ever experienced.
• 32:32
  Isaiah: And this is this is adjusting for inflation. Right. I'm not talking about nominal
• 32:35
  Isaiah: 1970 dollars. I'm talking about 2025 dollars.
• 32:39
  Isaiah: We were getting around three to three and a half cent per kilowatt hour energy
• 32:45
  Isaiah: out of nuclear reactors.
• 32:46
  Isaiah: Right now, we've the cheapest energy you can get in the United States today
• 32:51
  Isaiah: is somewhere around five to six cents per kilowatt hour.
• 32:54
  Isaiah: It's a little bit difficult to calculate because of subsidies,
• 32:56
  Isaiah: but that's about as good as you can get.
• 32:58
  Isaiah: So we're about double, right, the energy that we were getting in the early 70s,
• 33:03
  Isaiah: even when, you know, adjusting for inflation.
• 33:06
  Isaiah: 50 years ago. 50 years ago. Yeah. And energy should always move the opposite direction, right?
• 33:11
  Isaiah: 50 years later, you should have 10 times cheaper energy than you did before.
• 33:14
  Isaiah: That was the trend up until the 1970s, and it was reversed.
• 33:17
  Isaiah: So I think there's this massive return to rationality on energy price,
• 33:22
  Isaiah: which naturally leads you to the conclusion of fission.
• 33:24
  Isaiah: The other interesting thing is that, you know, I think that nuclear has had
• 33:29
  Isaiah: really bad marketing, right?
• 33:30
  Isaiah: It's had this, you know, intense scariness attached to it, which I think is
• 33:34
  Isaiah: very unjustified, because nuclear is the safest source of energy on Earth.
• 33:39
  Isaiah: If you look at power generated versus human death toll, Nuclear is the safest form of energy on Earth.
• 33:46
  Isaiah: It's even safer than solar, by the way. And we can talk about why that is in a second.
• 33:50
  Isaiah: But one of the interesting things
• 33:54
  Isaiah: that happened was we had these nuclear incidents in the 70s and 80s.
• 33:56
  Isaiah: You had Fukushima, you had Chernobyl, and,
• 34:00
  Isaiah: Those were wildly misunderstood by the public. They, you know,
• 34:03
  Isaiah: if you ask people on the street today, like how many people died in Three Mile Island?
• 34:07
  Isaiah: People will say numbers in the
• 34:08
  Isaiah: hundreds. They'll say numbers in the thousands. Some people say 10,000.
• 34:12
  Isaiah: Zero people is the answer, by the way. Zero people died in Three Mile Island.
• 34:16
  Isaiah: Nobody died. If you ask people about.
• 34:18
  David: What about second order consequences of like polluted soil, polluted land,
• 34:22
  David: downstream effects, anything like that?
• 34:24
  Isaiah: 13 independent studies after Three Mile Island that were largely funded by people
• 34:29
  Isaiah: who wanted to show that the nuclear industry was bad, failed to find any environmental
• 34:35
  Isaiah: or health effects beyond the fence of the Three Mile Island facility.
• 34:38
  Isaiah: Not a single study, even funded by, you know, enemies of nuclear,
• 34:42
  Isaiah: failed to find a single negative health effect or environmental effect beyond
• 34:46
  Isaiah: the fence of Three Mile Island, right?
• 34:48
  Isaiah: So now this didn't matter in the 70s and 80s. And the reason was because information
• 34:52
  Isaiah: flow was pretty centralized in the 70s and 80s, right?
• 34:55
  Isaiah: So if you had the media on board with the narrative and you had Hollywood on
• 34:59
  Isaiah: board with the narrative, you
• 35:01
  Isaiah: generally, you know, had a good grip on what people thought about a thing.
• 35:06
  Isaiah: Now, we've had another nuclear incident since then, and that was Fukushima, right?
• 35:10
  Isaiah: And Fukushima, most people think was, you know, another death toll of nuclear.
• 35:15
  Isaiah: I actually take the opposite view. I think that Fukushima was,
• 35:18
  Isaiah: uh, on net will prove to be a very positive thing.
• 35:20
  Isaiah: And the reason is, is because it was very similar to Three Mile Island,
• 35:24
  Isaiah: right? It was zero people died.
• 35:26
  Isaiah: There's maybe, maybe an argument that you can make that one person died, maybe, um.
• 35:31
  Isaiah: But it had a very similar impact, right, in terms of public sentiment.
• 35:36
  Isaiah: People immediately reacted the same way that they did for Through a Mile Island.
• 35:39
  Isaiah: There was this huge thing. They evacuated tens of thousands of people from the area.
• 35:44
  Isaiah: They shut down the nuclear industry in Japan for a couple of years.
• 35:48
  Isaiah: The reason this was different is that this is the information age,
• 35:51
  Isaiah: right? It happened in 2011. It happened in the age of the Internet.
• 35:53
  Isaiah: And very quickly after this, people started to actually read the data.
• 35:57
  Isaiah: And they realized, wait a minute, nobody died. And, you know,
• 36:01
  Isaiah: the social impact of actually evacuating tens of thousands of people was orders
• 36:07
  Isaiah: of magnitude worse than the event itself.
• 36:09
  Isaiah: And the economic impact and even the death toll impact of shutting down all
• 36:13
  Isaiah: the nuclear reactors in Japan was, again, orders of magnitude more damaging
• 36:17
  Isaiah: to the Japanese than the actual event itself. And the fact that this happened
• 36:21
  Isaiah: in the Internet age began to wake people up.
• 36:23
  Isaiah: And you had a second backlash to that where the Japanese went back and they
• 36:26
  Isaiah: said, we made a huge mistake.
• 36:28
  Isaiah: Right. We made a really big mistake by evacuating tens of thousands of people
• 36:31
  Isaiah: and by shutting down our nuclear industry. And they're beginning to turn all those plants back on.
• 36:35
  Isaiah: And so I think that these are the two kind of factors that are bringing nuclear
• 36:39
  Isaiah: fission back today is that it's the information age. Right.
• 36:43
  Isaiah: Anybody can go and read about Fukushima. Anyone can read about,
• 36:46
  Isaiah: you know, the Japanese decision to reverse, you know, the impacts of that and to turn plants back on.
• 36:52
  Isaiah: And then again, just a massive return of rationality to the importance of energy in the Western world.
• 36:57
  Josh: Yeah, 50 years is such a long time. And you mentioned the world of bits that we largely live in.
• 37:02
  Josh: And for the people that are not familiar, the world of bits is basically the
• 37:05
  Josh: computers, the ones and zeros that kind of run the world.
• 37:07
  Josh: But what we're talking about now is the acceleration of the world of atoms,
• 37:10
  Josh: which is the physical space, the meat space that we occupy right now.
• 37:13
  Josh: And there's definitely this trend that I'm starting to see, and you mentioned,
• 37:17
  Josh: in that people are starting to learn and get excited about this world of atoms.
• 37:21
  Josh: How do we create these physical objects that can break these barriers that have
• 37:25
  Josh: been left behind like energy 50 years ago?
• 37:27
  Josh: So I'm curious about your take on all of this.
• 37:29
  Josh: You co-founded a company called Valor. I'm curious...
• 37:33
  Josh: So how you think Valor can solve the nuclear energy problem? What are you building?
• 37:37
  Josh: For the people that are listening, you are sitting in front of what I believe
• 37:40
  Josh: is called Ward Zero. It's your first prototype reactor.
• 37:43
  Josh: So can you just explain to me kind of what you're, how you're tackling this
• 37:45
  Josh: problem in the world of atoms, giving us energy through Valor?
• 37:48
  Isaiah: Absolutely. So I'll tell you
• 37:49
  Isaiah: about what we built here and then what we're going to build in the future.
• 37:52
  Isaiah: So Ward Zero is the object standing behind me. This is what's called a non-nuclear prototype.
• 37:57
  Isaiah: So essentially what we did is we built a nuclear reactor, but we didn't put uranium in it.
• 38:01
  Isaiah: Right so that's kind of how you can understand what's behind this built a full nuclear reactor
• 38:04
  Isaiah: you could put uranium in this thing with a couple of minor modifications and
• 38:08
  Isaiah: it would actually turn on and it would split atoms now we don't do that
• 38:11
  Isaiah: because essentially the paperwork to actually do that in the united states would
• 38:14
  Isaiah: take four to five years and we don't have four to five years we have to do this
• 38:17
  Isaiah: immediately right so build a full reactor and then what we put in it instead
• 38:21
  Isaiah: is a silicon carbide silicon carbide is a is a great material it's an extremely
• 38:26
  Isaiah: high temperature ceramic that's also a great electrical resistor.
• 38:30
  Isaiah: And so what that means is that we can basically dump about 12 city blocks of
• 38:34
  Isaiah: Los Angeles power into the core of this reactor, and we can simulate what a
• 38:38
  Isaiah: nuclear fission reaction would be doing inside that core, which is essentially
• 38:42
  Isaiah: generating a ton of heat, right?
• 38:44
  Isaiah: And then what we do is we process that heat in the same way that we would if
• 38:47
  Isaiah: this were uranium making the heat.
• 38:49
  Isaiah: So this gives us a very, very high fidelity, real world simulation of what a
• 38:54
  Isaiah: nuclear reactor would actually do.
• 38:55
  Isaiah: And the next step is to essentially go rebuild this reactor one to one with
• 39:00
  Isaiah: a couple of lessons that we've learned on how to weld this thing,
• 39:03
  Isaiah: how to structure that thing, how to seal this thing, but actually put uranium
• 39:06
  Isaiah: in it and turn it on and split atoms for the first time. So that's the next step for the company.
• 39:11
  Isaiah: The vision of Valor is to.
• 39:13
  Isaiah: Rather than building these, you know, massive, massive nuclear plants that we
• 39:17
  Isaiah: did over the last 50 years, you had these like gigawatt scale reactors.
• 39:20
  Isaiah: We believe that small reactors are better in a bunch of ways,
• 39:24
  Isaiah: that this architecture is also better. This is a fundamentally safer nuclear reactor.
• 39:28
  Isaiah: It uses graphite instead of water as a moderator, and we can talk about why that's safer.
• 39:32
  Isaiah: But the plan is to, instead of building, you know, let's say a couple dozen
• 39:36
  Isaiah: very large reactors, we want to build thousands and thousands of these smaller reactors.
• 39:41
  Isaiah: Because, again, one of the drivers to cost is, you know, there's two drivers
• 39:46
  Isaiah: of any physical good in terms of cost.
• 39:48
  Isaiah: How big is it? How many you make, right? So we want to make small things that
• 39:52
  Isaiah: you make a ton of, and that's going to make them really cheap.
• 39:54
  David: Is the idea here that I'll be able to go down to my local Valor store and pick
• 39:58
  David: up a nuclear reactor and plug it into my home? Or how does that actually like
• 40:01
  David: plug into the grid and to start giving me energy?
• 40:04
  Isaiah: Yeah, so I would say probably not for a while. Nuclear reactors... I'm surprised.
• 40:09
  David: That the answer is reasonably yes at all to be honest
• 40:12
  Isaiah: So i think over time humanity
• 40:15
  Isaiah: continues to use nuclear fission more
• 40:18
  Isaiah: and more and more it becomes the dominant source of energy in
• 40:21
  Isaiah: the world but there's there's two questions at play there's like where does
• 40:25
  Isaiah: the energy come from and then how does it get to you right and those are two
• 40:28
  Isaiah: different things one of the nice things about nuclear fission is that you make
• 40:32
  Isaiah: a ton of cheap energy in a location and then you can you can sort of firewall
• 40:36
  Isaiah: the the nuclear-ness of that from the end user, right?
• 40:41
  Isaiah: And the firewall there is that you transport the energy through a medium and
• 40:44
  Isaiah: that medium is either electricity or it's also chemical energy,
• 40:47
  Isaiah: right? And the chemical energy part of that is really interesting.
• 40:50
  Isaiah: So our nuclear reactors, we'll make both. We'll make electricity.
• 40:53
  Isaiah: You can get our electricity from a grid and it should be much cheaper.
• 40:56
  Isaiah: We'll make electricity for AI data centers and those data centers will be getting
• 41:00
  Isaiah: the best power rates in the world.
• 41:01
  Isaiah: But also we'll make chemical fuels, right?
• 41:04
  Isaiah: So we'll actually make hydrogen, we'll bond that hydrogen with CO2,
• 41:07
  Isaiah: and we can actually make a synthetic fuel, we can make diesel, gasoline, jet fuel.
• 41:13
  Isaiah: And you might get that in any of the places that you get those those chemicals today.
• 41:17
  Isaiah: And those chemicals should be much cheaper. And so essentially,
• 41:19
  Isaiah: if you think about what we're doing there, we're sort of, we're arbing the physical
• 41:23
  Isaiah: infrastructure of hydrocarbons as a logistics platform.
• 41:27
  Isaiah: And we're plugging nuclear into it, right? And why would you do that,
• 41:31
  Isaiah: by the way? Right. Like what's the point of that?
• 41:32
  Isaiah: Well, the point of that is that the hydrocarbon, think about hydrocarbons for a second as a grid.
• 41:37
  Isaiah: All right. So we're familiar with like an electrical grid, right?
• 41:39
  Isaiah: You have a bunch of wires connected and you push electrons through and people
• 41:43
  Isaiah: get to consume that energy.
• 41:44
  Isaiah: Hydrocarbons are also a grid. They're a liquid grid, right? They're a network
• 41:48
  Isaiah: of pipelines and trucks and tanks that move them around.
• 41:52
  Isaiah: So let me ask you, which one is bigger, right? Which one's moving more energy,
• 41:57
  Isaiah: the electrical grid or the hydrocarbon grid.
• 42:00
  David: I would imagine the hydrocarbon grid because that's the whole combustion engine
• 42:04
  David: thing. Like how big is the combustion engine as a concept? I would imagine it's massive.
• 42:08
  Isaiah: Here's a crazy stat for you. On the ocean today, there's a bunch of ships, right?
• 42:14
  Isaiah: And those ships are burning hydrocarbons to propel themselves across the water.
• 42:18
  Isaiah: The energy being consumed by ships on the ocean today is greater than the entire
• 42:23
  Isaiah: electrical grid of the world.
• 42:26
  Isaiah: Just just the ships. Correct. Just ships burning hydrocarbons are consuming
• 42:32
  Isaiah: more energy than the entire global electrical grid. Right.
• 42:36
  Josh: So that is a fun fact.
• 42:37
  David: That is hydrocarbons.
• 42:39
  Isaiah: Hydrocarbons are actually a much larger grid that's more distributed,
• 42:43
  Isaiah: that's more flexible than electrical, the electrical grid today.
• 42:47
  Isaiah: Right now, there are some downsides to hydrocarbons. Right. One of the big downsides
• 42:51
  Isaiah: is that you're continuously adding CO2 to the atmosphere. you know,
• 42:54
  Isaiah: every year that you use them.
• 42:56
  Isaiah: Eventually, we want to stop doing that for a bunch of reasons.
• 42:59
  Isaiah: It's not just climate change.
• 42:59
  Isaiah: It's also the fact that, you know, eventually the CO2 level in the atmosphere
• 43:03
  Isaiah: becomes, you know, too high for, you know, after about 600 ppm,
• 43:08
  Isaiah: your brain function, you know, starts to go down those sorts of things.
• 43:11
  Isaiah: So there are lots of reasons why over time, that's not sustainable.
• 43:14
  Isaiah: But if you just think about it as a grid, right, think about it as just moving
• 43:17
  Isaiah: energy around, the hydrocarbon grid, I would say is far better,
• 43:22
  Isaiah: far better than the electrical grid and it's far larger and it has potential
• 43:26
  Isaiah: to move terawatt hours of energy around.
• 43:29
  Isaiah: Now, if you could fix the CO2 problem part of that and only get the logistics
• 43:34
  Isaiah: part, you know, you would have essentially given yourself the ability to distribute
• 43:39
  Isaiah: all of the world's energy from only a couple of points, which is great for verticalization.
• 43:44
  Isaiah: And it's actually quite solvable. The way that you do that is you take the CO2
• 43:48
  Isaiah: out of the atmosphere and you build it into a hydrocarbon, allow people to burn
• 43:52
  Isaiah: it, which puts it back into the atmosphere.
• 43:53
  Isaiah: And you take it back out, send it out, allow people to burn it,
• 43:56
  Isaiah: puts it back in. you take it back out, and you've created a closed loop of CO2, right?
• 44:01
  Isaiah: So you're not adding net new CO2 to the atmosphere.
• 44:04
  Isaiah: Every year, you have a fixed rate of people, you know, CO2 ppm.
• 44:09
  Isaiah: And you're essentially just using the atmosphere as a transport mechanism to
• 44:13
  Isaiah: get your ingredients back to you again.
• 44:15
  Isaiah: Because remember, CO2, you know, these, it's not carbon, that's energetic,
• 44:19
  Isaiah: it's the structure of the molecule that's, you know, that's energetic.
• 44:23
  Isaiah: And the nuclear fission is essentially infusing co2 and water uh into an energetic
• 44:28
  Isaiah: form which is a hydrocarbon right you're ejecting the oxygen out of that now
• 44:31
  Isaiah: you have an unoxidized chemical uh and i'm sorry i know i'm getting a little
• 44:35
  Isaiah: bit uh chemistry you know bored here but uh that is essentially what we're what we're planning to do.
• 44:41
  Josh: Yeah i'm gonna try to ask you this question in a way
• 44:43
  Josh: that that you can explain to normal people where we don't go too deep in
• 44:46
  Josh: chemistry but i'm curious about what makes these reactors different
• 44:49
  Josh: than um i i know people there people
• 44:52
  Josh: the pebble bed reactors are very popular the gen 4 reactors that are coming
• 44:55
  Josh: they're much larger you mentioned modularity is one part of it but what are
• 44:58
  Josh: the benefits aside from the small size aside from the modularity that you are
• 45:02
  Josh: kind of taking advantage of relative to the size is it just size or is there
• 45:05
  Josh: something else that's also going on behind the seeds or within the reactor that
• 45:08
  Josh: that makes it more like it's more powerful and more efficient
• 45:12
  Isaiah: So I would actually say that these reactors will be less powerful per size than
• 45:17
  Isaiah: some of the reactors that have been built before.
• 45:19
  Isaiah: The reason that we do that is that it makes it safer, right?
• 45:21
  Isaiah: So one of our beliefs here is like safety is probably the most important driver of cost in nuclear.
• 45:27
  Isaiah: If you can make a reactor that's 10 times safer, you can actually make it 10
• 45:30
  Isaiah: times cheaper because it allows you to do it more often, more quickly deployed at scale.
• 45:35
  Isaiah: So these will actually be a little bit less power dense than traditional light water reactors.
• 45:39
  Isaiah: But we actually get to manufacture them we get to make
• 45:41
  Isaiah: a ton of them and that makes them cheaper the really unique thing
• 45:44
  Isaiah: here is that these reactors are just a lot hotter right so
• 45:47
  Isaiah: the outlet temperature on these reactors will be around
• 45:50
  Isaiah: 800 850 degrees celsius that's compared
• 45:53
  Isaiah: to 300 sometimes 350 degrees celsius
• 45:57
  Isaiah: in a light water reactor that unlocks
• 46:00
  Isaiah: two really important things so the way that you make energy
• 46:03
  Isaiah: in a nuclear reactor traditionally is that you have
• 46:06
  Isaiah: a very hot outlet temperature and then you
• 46:09
  Isaiah: have ambient uh air at a
• 46:12
  Isaiah: certain temperature as well and you can extract energy from the
• 46:15
  Isaiah: difference between those two temperatures right and this is called carno
• 46:18
  Isaiah: efficiency right so you have a hot a t hot and a
• 46:20
  Isaiah: t cold and the difference between those temperatures governs the
• 46:24
  Isaiah: maximum amount of energy they can get out of that for most plants around the
• 46:28
  Isaiah: world this is 20 to 30 percent right of the of the total energy that you can
• 46:33
  Isaiah: get out of that in a hydrocarbon engine which works a similar way you can push
• 46:37
  Isaiah: you know into the mid 30s in you know very efficient.
• 46:42
  Isaiah: Nat gas, combined cycle generators, you can push 50% total efficiency.
• 46:49
  Isaiah: But this is all limited by the basic physics of the difference between your
• 46:55
  Isaiah: hot side and your cold side.
• 46:56
  Isaiah: The way to increase that diff and the way to increase the efficiency is essentially
• 47:01
  Isaiah: just to make the difference larger.
• 47:03
  Isaiah: The larger the difference between the cold side and the hot side,
• 47:05
  Isaiah: the greater efficiency you can get out of that.
• 47:07
  Isaiah: And it turns out that at 850C, you can actually get really efficient at producing electricity, right?
• 47:14
  Isaiah: So we'll be significantly more
• 47:15
  Isaiah: efficient at producing electricity than a traditional nuclear reactor.
• 47:19
  Isaiah: Now, the other really interesting thing that gets unlocked here by doing high
• 47:23
  Isaiah: temperatures is actually direct production of hydrogen, right?
• 47:28
  Isaiah: So ideally, right, hydrogen is a chemical energy, right?
• 47:31
  Isaiah: Pure hydrogen, because it's deoxidized, and the fact of oxygen in the atmosphere
• 47:36
  Isaiah: means that it's chemical potential energy.
• 47:38
  Isaiah: If you take that hydrogen and you combine it with the atmosphere,
• 47:41
  Isaiah: you get water and you get a ton of energy, right?
• 47:43
  Isaiah: So in theory, a really good thing to do with a nuclear reactor is to seed that process, right?
• 47:49
  Isaiah: You get some water, you combine it with reactor energy, and you get free hydrogen.
• 47:54
  Isaiah: And now that's a very valuable thing that you can go and sell.
• 47:57
  Isaiah: You can combine it with CO2 to make a hydrocarbon. You can do a bunch of things with it.
• 48:00
  Isaiah: Now, the way in the past that people have thought about nuclear to hydrogen
• 48:04
  Isaiah: is to start with electricity, right?
• 48:09
  Isaiah: So have a nuclear reactor that spins a turbine, makes electricity,
• 48:12
  Isaiah: run the electricity through an electrolyzer, right, that electrolyzes water,
• 48:16
  Isaiah: and then you get hydrogen out of it.
• 48:18
  Isaiah: The problem with this is that you get two efficiency hits right
• 48:22
  Isaiah: so you get the efficiency hit of making uh electricity right
• 48:25
  Isaiah: which as we know could be a you know a 60 70
• 48:28
  Isaiah: hit to your efficiency you lose a ton of that energy just making the electricity
• 48:32
  Isaiah: then you have the efficiency hit of running it through an electrolyzer right
• 48:36
  Isaiah: and that electrolyzer also has an efficiency you know related to it as well
• 48:39
  Isaiah: and you're losing a lot of that energy so by the time you've gone from uranium
• 48:42
  Isaiah: fission in a core to chemical potential hydrogen you've lost a ton of energy in that process.
• 48:47
  Isaiah: The other thing is you've added a lot of physical machinery,
• 48:50
  Isaiah: right? So you've added a turbine and a generator and an electrolyzer.
• 48:54
  Isaiah: And again, you want to make machines as small as possible and as simple as possible.
• 48:58
  Isaiah: An interesting alternate to this is that you just use heat to split water, right?
• 49:04
  Isaiah: So any chemical will actually decompose.
• 49:07
  Isaiah: It'll break down at a certain temperature, right? So at a certain temperature,
• 49:10
  Isaiah: every chemical compound will decompose.
• 49:13
  Isaiah: And so in theory, you can essentially just get water hot enough from a nuclear
• 49:18
  Isaiah: reactor to get free hydrogen out of it.
• 49:21
  Isaiah: Now, in practicality, if you catalyze it properly, that temperature is somewhere
• 49:25
  Isaiah: around 1600 to 1800 degrees Celsius.
• 49:27
  Isaiah: That's too hot for us today. Someday we'll have reactors that run that hot, too hot for us today.
• 49:32
  Isaiah: But what you can do is you can run that water through a couple of chemical cycles
• 49:37
  Isaiah: and transform them into another chemical that has a much lower decomposition temperature.
• 49:42
  Isaiah: So what I'm talking about here is something called the sulfur iodine cycle.
• 49:46
  Isaiah: The sulfur iodine cycle is a chemical cycle that takes water,
• 49:50
  Isaiah: makes two other acids out of that water, and then you use heat to decompose
• 49:55
  Isaiah: those acids, and you get hydrogen out of that, and then you recycle the ingredients.
• 50:00
  Isaiah: So sulfur and iodine, if you combine water,
• 50:03
  Isaiah: with sulfur dioxide and iodine you get
• 50:06
  Isaiah: two acids out of that you get a hydriotic acid and sulfuric
• 50:09
  Isaiah: acid and you can actually decompose those two
• 50:13
  Isaiah: acids uh just below the output temperature of
• 50:15
  Isaiah: this reactor right so you can do it around 750 to 800 degrees celsius and they
• 50:20
  Isaiah: will just thermally break down and you get the free hydrogen out of that um
• 50:24
  Isaiah: so what are we left with well you don't need a turbine right because we're not
• 50:27
  Isaiah: making electricity you don't need a generator and you just need a couple of
• 50:33
  Isaiah: tanks of chemicals, right?
• 50:34
  Isaiah: And need a good heat exchanger to do that thermal decomposition.
• 50:37
  Isaiah: So we see this as an incredible way to add a much higher efficiency where you're
• 50:41
  Isaiah: not limited by the Carnot cycle and you're not limited by the efficiency of
• 50:45
  Isaiah: an electrolyzer to essentially just take reactor heat with very minimal moving
• 50:48
  Isaiah: parts and just a couple of tanks of chemicals and make hydrogen.
• 50:52
  Isaiah: And we think it'll be the cheapest hydrogen in the world. Sorry,
• 50:55
  Isaiah: you told me to say that without chemistry and then there's a tonic chemistry. I'm sorry.
• 50:59
  David: There was a lot of, yeah, chemistry and like matter. that
• 51:02
  David: was a in the contrast of bits versus atoms
• 51:05
  David: that was heavy on the atoms side of things yep and
• 51:08
  David: uh maybe you could just like extrapolate like when we're
• 51:11
  David: talking about atoms and moving atoms and manipulating atoms to produce the things
• 51:15
  David: that we want the conversation starts with a lot of the stuff that you just said
• 51:19
  David: first it starts with the getting the energy producing the energy in order to
• 51:23
  David: manipulate atoms uh josh brought up this contrast of like for the last you know
• 51:27
  David: 30 years since the rise of the internet, the rise of Silicon Valley,
• 51:31
  David: the world, humanity, has really been heavily invested into bits.
• 51:34
  David: Like, how do we make the bits in the right order, the ones and zeros in the
• 51:37
  David: right order to produce value?
• 51:38
  David: And like, atoms has lagged in contrast to bits over the rise of the internet.
• 51:44
  David: But you are getting really excited about atoms. Maybe you can,
• 51:47
  David: can you give, get me and Josh and also our listeners, get them excited about atoms.
• 51:51
  David: Like once we unlock having the right atoms in the right order to unlock energy,
• 51:56
  David: how does the world of atoms get easier to change, easier to flip, flip a bit?
• 52:01
  David: Like how do we get flipping atoms easy as flipping bits downstream of all of
• 52:06
  David: this? Just get us excited about Matt Adams.
• 52:08
  Isaiah: So I'm actually going to flip it around for you a little bit and say,
• 52:11
  Isaiah: everyone has always been excited about atoms
• 52:14
  Isaiah: like atoms is actually what we we have all cared
• 52:17
  Isaiah: about for the last 50 years but we also care about money
• 52:20
  Isaiah: right and it what's been true over the last like 30 to 40 years is like well
• 52:25
  Isaiah: first of all the reason we care about money is generally because of atoms like
• 52:29
  Isaiah: what do people do once they get money from let's say starting a sass company
• 52:32
  Isaiah: and becoming a billionaire well they spend that money on atoms right they they
• 52:36
  Isaiah: start to have a private chef, which makes them delicious food.
• 52:39
  Isaiah: They get a private jet, which like flies them around wherever they want to go.
• 52:43
  Isaiah: They get a beautiful house, they get a boat, right? So I would actually argue
• 52:46
  Isaiah: like the world of atoms has always been the thing that is very interesting to people.
• 52:52
  Isaiah: Now, the second thing is that there's this intellectual side that's also very
• 52:56
  Isaiah: interesting to people, which is like the right way to order bits, right?
• 53:00
  Isaiah: And that is like a captivating question in the mind that has,
• 53:04
  Isaiah: you know, driven a generation of entrepreneurs and a generation of innovators and engineers.
• 53:09
  Isaiah: But I think that's mostly just been driven by the fact that the world of bits
• 53:14
  Isaiah: was really the only place you could be intellectually curious, right?
• 53:18
  Isaiah: If you're a intellectually curious person, and you're an engineer,
• 53:21
  Isaiah: and you have the option before you as a.
• 53:24
  Isaiah: Look, life starts when you're in high school, right? So like,
• 53:27
  Isaiah: when you're in high school, and the options in front of you are opening a laptop,
• 53:30
  Isaiah: and creating something, right, by the end of the day, right, by the end of the day,
• 53:35
  Isaiah: as a 17 year old with a laptop, you can have created something that's functional,
• 53:39
  Isaiah: and maybe even makes you some money.
• 53:41
  Isaiah: And a couple years later, you could be making a lot of money.
• 53:43
  Isaiah: And in five years, you could be a millionaire, right? Like, the world of bits
• 53:47
  Isaiah: was the place that that happened.
• 53:49
  Isaiah: So I think that our obsession with bits is actually more an obsession with innovation.
• 53:55
  Isaiah: It's an obsession with discovery and with engineering.
• 53:58
  Isaiah: And the world of bits was the only place you could really do that.
• 54:01
  Isaiah: So then we have to back up and say, like, why was bits the only place you could do that?
• 54:05
  Isaiah: Well, there's two reasons. Like, one is the simple, like, political answer, right?
• 54:11
  Isaiah: Which is like, it became very hard to do things in the world of atoms in the West.
• 54:15
  Isaiah: We added an enormous amount of federal regulation over everything that moves.
• 54:19
  Isaiah: And we didn't do that in bits, right? And so a 17-year-old could open a laptop
• 54:22
  Isaiah: and create something with almost no interaction with regulation.
• 54:26
  Isaiah: Whereas, you know, just trying to, you know, make a sample rocket,
• 54:32
  Isaiah: you're wondering like, oh, am I, you know, south of some sort of like regulation
• 54:36
  Isaiah: here that says that I can't have, you know, this chemical in this room and that sort of thing.
• 54:40
  Isaiah: And so there's just a very quick, easy path to being an engineer,
• 54:44
  Isaiah: to being an innovator, to being somebody who's intellectually curious with bits.
• 54:48
  Isaiah: The other thing, though, is that it's the second thing we talked about where
• 54:51
  Isaiah: there is a fundamental limitation in the world of atoms that hasn't existed
• 54:56
  Isaiah: in bits in terms of like cycle time, right?
• 54:59
  Isaiah: Like, so the fact that if you're sitting in front of a laptop,
• 55:02
  Isaiah: you can have a piece of software at the end of the day that's doing something cool.
• 55:05
  Isaiah: Whereas, you know, if you have a physical thing in your mind,
• 55:07
  Isaiah: it maybe takes a couple of weeks, right?
• 55:10
  Isaiah: I think that's also changing. And that's what I'm really, really excited about, right?
• 55:14
  Isaiah: The things that we talked about before, you have energy, intelligence, and dexterity.
• 55:19
  Isaiah: As intelligence and dexterity get cheaper, and energy gets cheaper,
• 55:23
  Isaiah: I believe that we will start to play with matter in the same way that we play with bits, right?
• 55:29
  Isaiah: Life starts in high school, okay? It starts where you play.
• 55:32
  Isaiah: The reason that we have so many incredible software engineers and so much software
• 55:34
  Isaiah: is that people play with computers when they are in high school, right?
• 55:39
  Isaiah: And literally play, We're playing video games.
• 55:42
  Isaiah: A lot of software engineers that I know got into software because they were
• 55:45
  Isaiah: playing video games and it gave them this love of computers.
• 55:47
  Isaiah: And then they started modding the software and they wanted it to do cooler things.
• 55:51
  Isaiah: And that taught them software engineering because they want to make an extension
• 55:54
  Isaiah: to Minecraft, something like that.
• 55:57
  Isaiah: And I think that we're going to start playing with atoms. What would playing with atoms look like?
• 56:01
  Isaiah: Well, it would look like talking to an AI that runs a CNC machine or runs a 3D printer.
• 56:07
  Isaiah: And you actually can start to get these cycle times again. You can maybe by
• 56:10
  Isaiah: the end of the day, be holding the thing that you thought about.
• 56:12
  Isaiah: And then the next day you tweak it, you make it better. You could be holding
• 56:15
  Isaiah: the physical object that you were thinking about.
• 56:17
  Isaiah: I don't think I need to convince people that that's more exciting than software, right?
• 56:21
  Isaiah: Like you imagine a drone
• 56:24
  Isaiah: that can fly you around right and within a
• 56:27
  Isaiah: couple days you you're sitting on it and it's in the air right like that's that's
• 56:31
  Isaiah: the future that we that you know i would like to see and that i think i think
• 56:35
  Isaiah: happens in the next you know 10 to 20 years as dexterity gets cheaper as intelligence
• 56:40
  Isaiah: gets cheaper i don't think i will have to convince many people to be to be tinkering
• 56:44
  Isaiah: with you know the real world once it becomes possible to do that again.
• 56:48
  Josh: Yeah, that sounds right. And it feels like the world of atoms as that accelerates
• 56:52
  Josh: will be even more accessible and more, I guess, quality of life improving for
• 56:56
  Josh: the average person than the world of bits.
• 56:57
  Josh: I feel like with the world of bits and correct me where I'm wrong,
• 57:00
  Josh: but a lot of times you are extracting value from software or maybe you're injecting
• 57:04
  Josh: yourself into social media.
• 57:05
  Josh: You're just kind of reading and writing with this thing, but it doesn't extrapolate
• 57:08
  Josh: out too much into the real world. So when we do have this accessibility,
• 57:11
  Josh: I think about myself and where I could use an abundance of energy.
• 57:14
  Josh: My car, for example, it costs 20 something cents per kilowatt.
• 57:16
  Josh: If we get that down to free, it becomes much easier to get around.
• 57:20
  Josh: But even things where we're building
• 57:21
  Josh: humanoid robots and these things can probably be more cost effective.
• 57:25
  Josh: I'm curious kind of if you can if you have any fun or interesting examples to
• 57:29
  Josh: get people excited about what what it actually looks like for the average person.
• 57:33
  Josh: Like how is how's my day actually improved as we get this abundance of energy that's much cheaper?
• 57:38
  Isaiah: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's just a really like everyday person example.
• 57:43
  Isaiah: The reason that your dishwasher sucks is because of energy regulation, right?
• 57:47
  Isaiah: The reason that you can't just like throw an entire plate of food into the dishwasher
• 57:51
  Isaiah: without having to do any wiping, like, all right, when you're done eating food,
• 57:55
  Isaiah: you should basically just pick up the plate in front of you and like throw it.
• 57:59
  Isaiah: To a machine and the machine does the rest right and
• 58:02
  Isaiah: like the next time you're ready to eat food you like pick up a plate you put
• 58:05
  Isaiah: food on it and you like throw it back to the machine that's how this should
• 58:08
  Isaiah: work and the only reason that it doesn't work that way is actually energy regulation
• 58:12
  Isaiah: it's called energy star there's a there's a fleet of regulations that we've
• 58:15
  Isaiah: put around how our appliances use energy that has essentially forced the industry to,
• 58:22
  Isaiah: create these machines around a function of regulation why
• 58:25
  Isaiah: do like dishwashers and washing machines like
• 58:28
  Isaiah: seem like they don't really get that much better and the user interface
• 58:31
  Isaiah: doesn't change that much it's essentially because we're solving for energy regulations
• 58:35
  Isaiah: right so in an energy abundant future like the
• 58:38
  Isaiah: machines should just do the annoying stuff for you you know we're 50 years from
• 58:42
  Isaiah: the invention of i mean probably more than that of the dishwasher and it's like
• 58:46
  Isaiah: not that different of an experience um so i i would i would say like let's get
• 58:51
  Isaiah: way more creative like what is what does living in a house look like well it
• 58:55
  Isaiah: looks like just doing what you enjoy,
• 58:57
  Isaiah: and you know when you're like literally throw it i think that'd be pretty sick
• 59:00
  Isaiah: like i want i want to see i want to come up with like a dishwasher of the future
• 59:04
  Isaiah: where you literally throw it that would be sick um oh.
• 59:07
  Josh: That makes me
• 59:08
  Isaiah: Real happy and like all of your your clothes
• 59:11
  Isaiah: like your dishwasher your washing machine should not just
• 59:14
  Isaiah: first of all you shouldn't load it like what is loading it that's nonsense like
• 59:16
  Isaiah: i want to throw my clothes at the at the basket and it just comes
• 59:19
  Isaiah: back folded right my my washing machine should fold
• 59:22
  Isaiah: my clothes too and should put them back in the drawer and um
• 59:26
  Isaiah: and you know like that that sort of thing is like very very obvious
• 59:28
  Isaiah: to me maybe that's through humanoids maybe that's through you know just better
• 59:32
  Isaiah: dishwashers and the concept of a dishwasher becomes uh becomes very different
• 59:36
  Isaiah: but all of these things are are unlocked by by energy now something that's very
• 59:41
  Isaiah: motivating to me i talked about the dishwashers and the washing machines because
• 59:44
  Isaiah: that's like an everyman thing but like i'm also extremely motivated by by outer space
• 59:48
  Isaiah: Right. And there's no formulation where we are man among the stars,
• 59:54
  Isaiah: man on the moon, man in Mars without abundant energy. And that's what's really, really exciting to me.
• 1:00:00
  Isaiah: Energy is essentially the biggest tool that you need to go and make the solar
• 1:00:04
  Isaiah: system a fun place to be for humans.
• 1:00:07
  Isaiah: You know, it's how you can terraform a planet. It's how you can create habitations.
• 1:00:11
  Isaiah: You know, it's how you can create, you know, big floating cities above Venus.
• 1:00:16
  Isaiah: And it's that's you know there's lots of mechanical problems to solve in there
• 1:00:19
  Isaiah: but again there's an extent to which mechanical problems will be solved by intelligence
• 1:00:23
  Isaiah: right intelligence and dexterity and essentially you just need a lot of energy
• 1:00:26
  Isaiah: to do it that's what i'm really excited about.
• 1:00:28
  Josh: So i feel like there's probably these these two core pillars that people can
• 1:00:32
  Josh: get really excited it's about how this energy affects their everyday life and
• 1:00:35
  Josh: we could probably have a full podcast conversation about the interesting new
• 1:00:39
  Josh: ways that you could design things that we use every day to be improved.
• 1:00:41
  Josh: But it's also the dreamer vision, where now because we have this new abundant
• 1:00:46
  Josh: energy unlocked, we can dream about going to the stars and the downstream effects of that.
• 1:00:49
  Josh: We had Sean McGuire on the show fairly recently, and he was talking about how
• 1:00:53
  Josh: focusing on something like Mars has downstream effects for people back at home,
• 1:00:56
  Josh: where in order to get to Mars, we need that nuclear react that fits in a suitcase,
• 1:00:59
  Josh: and we need all these new technologies.
• 1:01:01
  Josh: So I think, and I'm hopeful based on what you're saying, is that we will get
• 1:01:04
  Josh: all these downstream effects hopefully fairly soon, or at least directionally
• 1:01:08
  Josh: we're headed towards that now in the way that we weren't in the past.
• 1:01:10
  Josh: I'm curious what you think about timelines.
• 1:01:12
  Josh: When will people start to notice the effects of this cheaper energy?
• 1:01:16
  Josh: When will we start to have dishwashers that can catch the dishes or robots that
• 1:01:20
  Josh: can fold our clothes in a way that's kind of accessible for the average person to use?
• 1:01:24
  Isaiah: I think that is entirely limited by entrepreneurs, right?
• 1:01:29
  Isaiah: So when we think of like tech today and we think of like startups today,
• 1:01:32
  Isaiah: we're all we're really talking about is like young, crazy people who have some
• 1:01:37
  Isaiah: like wild vision of how a dishwasher should actually catch your plate and then
• 1:01:41
  Isaiah: decide to go make that thing a reality.
• 1:01:44
  Isaiah: And the fundamental motivation for that is twofold.
• 1:01:47
  Isaiah: Like one, they want to imprint their will on the universe and they want,
• 1:01:50
  Isaiah: you know, every single home to have a dishwasher that catches your dishes.
• 1:01:52
  Isaiah: Two they want to become a billionaire or a centimillionaire or
• 1:01:55
  Isaiah: whatever um the uh becoming
• 1:01:59
  Isaiah: a centimillionaire and the possibility of imprinting your your will
• 1:02:02
  Isaiah: on reality has been mostly impossible in the physical world in the west right
• 1:02:07
  Isaiah: different in in you know other countries in the world specifically china but
• 1:02:10
  Isaiah: in the west this has not been a path because of not enough energy and also because
• 1:02:15
  Isaiah: of very stringent regulation that makes it just difficult for innovation to
• 1:02:19
  Isaiah: happen and difficult for companies to scale.
• 1:02:22
  Isaiah: I think both of those things are heading in the right direction right now,
• 1:02:25
  Isaiah: which is that you see tons of entrepreneurs suddenly realizing that you can
• 1:02:29
  Isaiah: become a billionaire by making something cool.
• 1:02:31
  Isaiah: Impulse Labs is a great example of this, right? Sam is a buddy.
• 1:02:34
  Isaiah: He was like, Stowe's should be 100 times better than they are right now,
• 1:02:38
  Isaiah: right? And that's what he's doing.
• 1:02:39
  Isaiah: So I think there will be a ton more people who go out and do things like that.
• 1:02:43
  Isaiah: The second side is the regulation side. I think we're seeing a lot a fundamental
• 1:02:48
  Isaiah: change in how we think about regulation, especially at the federal level,
• 1:02:51
  Isaiah: that will affect that, you know, significantly.
• 1:02:53
  Isaiah: But it's it's gated on people listening to this podcast like it's gated to to
• 1:02:58
  Isaiah: young people in high school who are like, I have a different vision for what your couch should be.
• 1:03:03
  Isaiah: I think the couch should be way sicker than it is right now.
• 1:03:06
  Isaiah: And I'm going to become a billionaire doing that.
• 1:03:08
  Josh: That's a future that seems really excited that I can get very pumped about.
• 1:03:11
  Josh: It feels like the future ahead is actually going to look like the future.
• 1:03:14
  Josh: When I look out over New York City, it will probably look materially different
• 1:03:18
  Josh: than over the next decade than it did in the past decade.
• 1:03:20
  Josh: So that's a future I think a lot of people can get super excited about.
• 1:03:23
  Isaiah: This is a great point, by the way. And in the future, looking like the future
• 1:03:26
  Isaiah: is like also why we did this.
• 1:03:28
  Isaiah: You know, we have a bunch of people on Twitter. I collect Twitter haters. It's very fun.
• 1:03:33
  Isaiah: And we're like, why does your nuclear reactor look like a video game or like,
• 1:03:37
  Isaiah: you know, what's going on here? And like the answer is.
• 1:03:39
  Josh: It reminded me almost like an NVIDIA GPU type thing. It looks very cool.
• 1:03:42
  Isaiah: You know, I tried to make it not look like a GPU. It's very,
• 1:03:45
  Isaiah: very hard to make a vertical box not look like a GPU.
• 1:03:48
  Isaiah: It's just kind of what they look like. But, you know, it is very futuristic.
• 1:03:53
  Isaiah: It's Tron. It's Star Trek.
• 1:03:55
  Isaiah: And, yeah, the reason is absolutely the future should look like the future.
• 1:03:58
  Isaiah: And, you know, when you're walking into a nuclear reactor that was built in
• 1:04:02
  Isaiah: the year 2025, it should not feel like you're at like a hospital switchboard in the 1970s.
• 1:04:08
  Isaiah: And that's definitely what we're going for here.
• 1:04:10
  David: For the podcast listeners that are not watching the video, Isaiah's background
• 1:04:14
  David: is the most sci-fi industrial looking thing. It looks like you just opened the
• 1:04:19
  David: first level in Doom and you're on Mars.
• 1:04:22
  David: While he was talking, a man in a Segway just zipped on by, going like 20 miles an hour.
• 1:04:27
  David: And it was extremely distracting because it was a little bit surreal just watching
• 1:04:31
  David: this man zipping around this factory floor with a nuclear power reactor.
• 1:04:34
  Isaiah: I didn't realize that. That's great. Sometimes when I'm on calls,
• 1:04:37
  Isaiah: people think that this is a fake background until I see a forklift go by,
• 1:04:41
  Isaiah: you know, carrying a pallet. And they're like, oh, that's real. That's happening.
• 1:04:45
  Josh: It's very real. Well, there's one more topic that I want to touch on that's
• 1:04:47
  Josh: very front of mind for us particularly here.
• 1:04:51
  Josh: Limitless is how we're powering kind of this AI and the intelligence revolution
• 1:04:55
  Josh: and how we're doing these data centers and kind of how we power the rest of
• 1:04:59
  Josh: everything. So these are modular reactors.
• 1:05:01
  Josh: I understand that you can use them in clusters.
• 1:05:03
  Josh: You could kind of stack them on top of each other to create data.
• 1:05:06
  Josh: What I understand also is companies
• 1:05:08
  Josh: like XAI and companies like OpenAI are kind of energy constrained.
• 1:05:15
  Josh: And what I'm curious to ask you about is, will this technology be capable of
• 1:05:19
  Josh: powering these data centers, one?
• 1:05:21
  Josh: And then is it actually powerful enough or is it modular enough that we could
• 1:05:26
  Josh: scale that across the country to the average person? So, like,
• 1:05:29
  Josh: will we be able to power data centers? Will we be able to power my neighborhood?
• 1:05:33
  Josh: How does that kind of distribution of these reactors work as you start to roll them out?
• 1:05:37
  Isaiah: Yeah. So this is, you know, just good business sense at this point.
• 1:05:41
  Isaiah: You know, what, how do you actually go and scale a business?
• 1:05:43
  Isaiah: I would love if our reactors in the next five years could power every American home.
• 1:05:47
  Isaiah: There are business constraints to that, regulatory constraints to that.
• 1:05:51
  Isaiah: I think the easiest thing for Valor
• 1:05:53
  Isaiah: Atomics to do today is to go help AI achieve all of its goals, right?
• 1:05:58
  Isaiah: Help all of the hyperscalers get all the power that they need to win the AI
• 1:06:01
  Isaiah: race to make sure that the United States of America is the most dominant AI country in the world.
• 1:06:07
  Isaiah: That's a massive, massive problem that we're going to solve in the next five years.
• 1:06:11
  Isaiah: Now, beyond that, yes, I'm very excited about that energy getting into your
• 1:06:15
  Isaiah: hands. And I think there are two ways that that can happen.
• 1:06:18
  Isaiah: The one way is, you know, we go and build, you know, small reactors around the country, right?
• 1:06:22
  Isaiah: So we have four of these units next to your neighborhood, that sort of thing.
• 1:06:27
  Isaiah: Another really interesting way, though, is that we just make the hydrocarbons
• 1:06:30
  Isaiah: that the world consumes, right? So if you're going to get on a jet aircraft
• 1:06:35
  Isaiah: in about five years, I hope that that fuel is made by Valor Atomics Reactors.
• 1:06:40
  Isaiah: And I hope that that fuel is about a third the cost that it is today.
• 1:06:44
  Isaiah: And because fuel is the largest operating cost of an airline,
• 1:06:48
  Isaiah: I hope that your plane ticket is much cheaper.
• 1:06:50
  Isaiah: And if you're going to be driving on a bus or you're going to be driving on
• 1:06:54
  Isaiah: a truck or you're getting goods delivered to your house from a semi truck,
• 1:06:58
  Isaiah: I hope that all of those things are much, much cheaper because they're buying
• 1:07:01
  Isaiah: Valor Atomics fuel, which is a whole lot cheaper than refining oil.
• 1:07:04
  Isaiah: And then in the long term, I think absolutely our reactors are powering the
• 1:07:08
  Isaiah: grid all around the world.
• 1:07:09
  Josh: I'm curious about the global energy mix, kind of how nuclear,
• 1:07:13
  Josh: how prescient nuclear is relative to others.
• 1:07:15
  Josh: So we're burning lots of fossil fuels. We have a lot of solar energy.
• 1:07:18
  Josh: Does the equilibrium eventually balance out to a mix of those three?
• 1:07:22
  Josh: Or do you see a future in which it's actually all just nuclear?
• 1:07:24
  Isaiah: I believe that the power mix in the next, let's say, 50 years is going to become 99.1.
• 1:07:29
  Isaiah: 99 nuclear fission, 1%, you know, other things. I think that solar will always have...
• 1:07:36
  Isaiah: Some applicability in remote places, right? There's always going to be that
• 1:07:40
  Isaiah: one place that you want to be where there's no infrastructure and you just need
• 1:07:43
  Isaiah: a bit of power to run some compute, you know, to keep yourself warm.
• 1:07:47
  Isaiah: And it's hard to beat a solar panel for that.
• 1:07:49
  Isaiah: But in terms of the massive, massive volumes that humanity needs going forward
• 1:07:54
  Isaiah: to power AI, to power robotics, it's going to be nuclear.
• 1:07:57
  Isaiah: And it's in even hydrocarbons, right? Most of the world's energy today is hydrocarbons.
• 1:08:01
  Isaiah: And if those hydrocarbons become just a transport mechanism for nuclear power,
• 1:08:05
  Isaiah: I think you're going to see a world of 99.1.
• 1:08:08
  Isaiah: And I think that's going to be a much cheaper way. And we're going to it's going
• 1:08:10
  Isaiah: to be much more abundant.
• 1:08:11
  David: Isaiah, as we wrap up this podcast, and you get back to work working on a literal
• 1:08:16
  David: nuclear reactor that's in your background, what, what are you going to do first?
• 1:08:19
  David: Like, seriously, what's next for you?
• 1:08:21
  David: What are your priorities for this week for this month?
• 1:08:24
  David: Where are you in the arc of what you're trying to build?
• 1:08:27
  Isaiah: Absolutely. The next goal for Valor Atomics is essentially to go rebuild this
• 1:08:32
  Isaiah: thing one to one, put uranium in it and split atoms for the first time.
• 1:08:35
  Isaiah: That's all we think about every day.
• 1:08:37
  Isaiah: You know, nothing gets built in the world without it actually getting built,
• 1:08:40
  Isaiah: right? One of our big convictions at Valor is that you can only design so much on paper, right?
• 1:08:45
  Isaiah: Designing something for five years on a piece of paper is going to teach you
• 1:08:48
  Isaiah: less than building it in the first year, testing it, building another one,
• 1:08:52
  Isaiah: testing it, building another one, testing it.
• 1:08:54
  Isaiah: That's what we're doing for the next few years. We're building reactors.
• 1:08:57
  Isaiah: We're making them bigger, more powerful, more sophisticated.
• 1:08:59
  Isaiah: And we're getting into the practice of building reactors and splitting atoms.
• 1:09:03
  Isaiah: That's our entire focus right now.
• 1:09:05
  Isaiah: So look out for Ward 1, which will be our first critical nuclear reactor.
• 1:09:09
  David: And if you had a message for our listeners, our listeners are pretty intellectually
• 1:09:12
  David: curious, high agency people who just always like getting their fingers in the dirt.
• 1:09:18
  David: Any advice for them? How can they support you if they are just like peaked and
• 1:09:22
  David: pilled by your mission or just any general advice for what they should do if
• 1:09:26
  David: they are just interested in learning more?
• 1:09:28
  Isaiah: Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me on Twitter, Isaiah underscore P underscore
• 1:09:31
  Isaiah: Taylor. Post some awesome stuff in there all the time. We keep it spicy.
• 1:09:36
  Isaiah: You can find Valor Atomics, ValorAtomics.com. That's V-A-L-A-R Atomics.com.
• 1:09:41
  Isaiah: And come visit us. Come check out the reactor.
• 1:09:43
  David: Where is it? Where is the actual reactor? Where is the facility?
• 1:09:48
  Isaiah: We're here in Los Angeles. We're in Hawthorne, about a mile from SpaceX.
• 1:09:51
  Isaiah: We've got great beaches, great surfing, and some of the best engineers in the
• 1:09:54
  Isaiah: world creating the future.
• 1:09:55
  Josh: I just wanted to let people know to absolutely follow you guys,
• 1:09:58
  Josh: because that's actually how I found you.
• 1:10:00
  Josh: I love the theatrics you do around the company, where you guys had this big unveiling event.
• 1:10:06
  Josh: And I was like, who are these people that are turning a nuclear reactor event
• 1:10:09
  Josh: into this big thing? And it was you. And it makes the future more exciting.
• 1:10:13
  Josh: And just wanted to thank you, because we need more founders like you trying
• 1:10:17
  Josh: these hard things, improving our world in this life of Adam so that the everyday
• 1:10:21
  Josh: life becomes a lot more exciting. So we're just super, super grateful.
• 1:10:24
  Josh: Really glad that you joined us today and excited for other people to hear your mission.
• 1:10:28
  Isaiah: Well, thank you. And I'm glad that you fell for my psyop of the party,
• 1:10:32
  Isaiah: which was essentially an exercise to see how many tech bros we could get to
• 1:10:35
  Isaiah: show up into a building wearing a suit and tie.
• 1:10:37
  Isaiah: And I think that we did quite well. We saw a lot of suits and ties that night
• 1:10:42
  Isaiah: on Tech Bro. So it was very successful.
• 1:10:45
  Josh: Certainly nerd sniped me. Yeah.
• 1:10:47
  David: Isaiah, thanks for joining us on Limitless.
• 1:10:49
  Isaiah: Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.