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Josh:
What's up everyone, Josh here. You are about to listen to an episode featuring

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Josh:
Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valor Atomics, a company dead set on building

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safe and modular nuclear reactors to solve the single most important resource

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problem in the world, energy.

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Isaiah's nuclear roots run deep with his great-grandfather being in the Manhattan

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Project and Isaiah himself attempting to split the atom all on his own all these decades later.

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And get this, they did it all, both at the age of 24.

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Josh:
And speaking of splitting the atom, Since this episode was originally recorded,

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Isaiah and the Valor team did just that, achieving a milestone called cold criticality,

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Josh:
which occurs when uranium, the isotope they use as nuclear fuel,

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it achieves a self-sustaining reaction.

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It's the first venture-backed company ever in the world to split the atom and

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do this. It's incredible.

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Josh:
This was an episode that David and I recorded early on in Limitless' history.

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Josh:
And since then, so many more new people have joined us and we wanted to enjoy

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Josh:
Thanksgiving with our family. So

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Josh:
we figured it would be a perfect time to resurface this gem of an episode.

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Josh:
And when asking Isaiah to come on, we were hoping to create the canonical energy

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episode as to why it matters so much for everything we do.

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And after listening back, it's still holding strong. And I hope that it will

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also leave you feeling inspired the same way that it did for me.

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Josh:
Isaiah is a total badass. If you're listening to this, I highly advise switching

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Josh:
over to YouTube or Spotify because he is recording literally right in front of his nuclear reactor.

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Josh:
It is so cool. It's an amazing episode. And if you enjoy it,

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Josh:
or you have a friend that you think would be interested please share it

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Josh:
with them it's the best way that we can grow and we're so appreciative of

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everyone who was listening to the first version of this and who

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is listening to the new version of it right now because it has been an incredible

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journey if you can support us in any way by sharing the episode liking subscribing

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Josh:
on whatever platform you're listening on leave a nice review if you enjoyed

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Josh:
but without further ado let's get into this amazing amazing category defining

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Josh:
episode with Isaiah Taylor I really hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

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Josh:
Why is energy the most important resource in the world?

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Isaiah:
I would actually argue that over time, energy is the only resource in the world.

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Isaiah:
If you think about what we're all doing as humans, we are creating entropy as

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Isaiah:
we go throughout the universe.

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Isaiah:
And almost anything else that you could come up with, I would argue anything

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Isaiah:
else you can come up with, essentially consumes energy.

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Isaiah:
Right. So when we talk about resources, natural resources, we're trying to find things in the ground.

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Isaiah:
But there's a lot of stuff in the ground. And not only is there a lot of stuff

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Isaiah:
in the ground, there's stuff on other planets and in asteroids.

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Isaiah:
And the universe is fundamentally limitless as far as we know.

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Isaiah:
The actual limiting factor in all of these things is how much energy do you

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Isaiah:
have to transform the world around you into what you want?

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Isaiah:
And, you know, that's the only irreversible thing, right? If you use copper

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Isaiah:
in an electric car, you can always use that copper again, right?

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Isaiah:
But the energy in that electric car will never be used again,

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Isaiah:
right? You've created entropy and that's it's fundamental.

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Isaiah:
So I actually view energy is like the only cost in the universe and it's why I focus on it.

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Josh:
I love that. So we are focused on getting a lot of energy. We are energy constrained.

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Josh:
I'm curious what you think. What does having an abundance of this energy look

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Josh:
like if we do achieve this goal of getting energy costs to near zero?

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Josh:
What becomes newly possible? What does the world look like when we actually

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Josh:
solve the energy problem?

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Isaiah:
So let me put it in terms of what the world looks like now. And that that might

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Isaiah:
help us extrapolate a little bit.

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Isaiah:
Right. So the this the sort of like history of what the world looks like in

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Isaiah:
society is essentially three pillars getting better over time.

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Isaiah:
Okay, so the three pillars of any product, any physical good,

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Isaiah:
are essentially energy, intelligence, and dexterity, right?

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Isaiah:
So these three ingredients that you need to make any physical good.

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Isaiah:
Let's take, you know, an iPhone, right? So this iPhone is made of energy,

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Isaiah:
intelligence, and dexterity, right?

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Isaiah:
So it's the intelligence of the people at Apple who knew how to put it together.

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Isaiah:
It's the dexterity of the machines and the, you know, massive CNC fleets and

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Foxconn and, you know, the physical manipulation of matter that went into putting it together.

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Isaiah:
And then finally, it's the energy to run those machines to run the servers that

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Isaiah:
are running CAD, you know, even the energy to fuel the designers brains as they

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Isaiah:
eat food, you know, and they go throughout their days.

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Isaiah:
So every single thing is made of energy intelligence, intelligence and dexterity. And, um.

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Isaiah:
What's interesting right now is that we're getting a clear

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Isaiah:
abundance in the intelligence and dexterity part

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Isaiah:
right so ai you know hitting an inflection really

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Isaiah:
means that intelligence is becoming somewhat default free uh dexterity will

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Isaiah:
also become default free as we get more and more robotics and so what does the

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Isaiah:
world look like when we have abundant energy it's essentially fueling those

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Isaiah:
things in an inflected manner which means everything is free uh what does it

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Isaiah:
mean when everything's free.

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Isaiah:
Well, it means that like the material world is more subject to your imagination,

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Isaiah:
right? It's more limited by what can you imagine.

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Isaiah:
Now we're talking like, you know, somewhat far in the future here,

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Isaiah:
but it might be closer than people think it might, you know,

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Isaiah:
think it is today because we're so used to a world that's constrained.

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Isaiah:
You know, heavily constrained on intelligence primarily.

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Isaiah:
You know, the entire physical world around us has been traditionally constrained

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Isaiah:
on the intelligence of smart people trying to figure out how to translate what's

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Isaiah:
in our imaginations into the physical world.

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Isaiah:
You know, we might imagine an airplane, but then the translation of that airplane

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Isaiah:
into something that can actually fly takes an enormous amount of brainpower

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Isaiah:
of thousands of smart people, and then a lot of dexterity to manipulate the world.

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Isaiah:
And as intelligence becomes free, it actually just becomes a function of energy.

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Isaiah:
So your ability to get an airplane out of your head becomes how much energy do you have, right?

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Isaiah:
This is a world in which, you know, there are lots and lots of robots,

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Isaiah:
which are robots, which build other robots, which build other robots,

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Isaiah:
robots, which mine materials, which build robots, which mine materials.

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Isaiah:
And at the end of the day, energy is the input. So what does the world look

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Isaiah:
like when we have abundant energy?

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Isaiah:
I mean, I think it looks like a world of imagination, right?

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Isaiah:
A world of thinking of amazing things in your mind and watching them happen.

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Isaiah:
Now you can imagine that,

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Isaiah:
planet Earth, that might become a little bit crowded, right?

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Isaiah:
We will probably have a lot more things running around and planes flying around

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Isaiah:
if we're, you know, subject to imagination. And this is where I think space

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exploration becomes very, very interesting.

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Isaiah:
And, you know, we suddenly reach out and find more places for us to have imagination.

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Isaiah:
But we use the space around us, like the physical space around us as somewhat

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Isaiah:
of a canvas on which our minds are imagining and discovering and,

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Isaiah:
and, you know, putting things on that canvas. I'm very excited about that.

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Isaiah:
I think it's gonna be a lot of fun.

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Josh:
I think we definitely share that enthusiasm with you. And I love this term that

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Josh:
I've heard a lot being thrown around, which is just too cheap to meter,

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Josh:
is what happens when that energy becomes too cheap to meter.

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Josh:
I think that's the basis of a lot of this show, is what are the downstream effects?

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Josh:
What are the second order effects of all of these unlocks happening as a result

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Josh:
of energy that's too cheap to meter?

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Josh:
So I want to take a step back for a second and just kind of introduce who you are.

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Josh:
Isaiah, for the listeners, has a very interesting story. Most people drop out

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Josh:
of college and they're like, oh yeah, I showed them. I'm a college dropout.

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Josh:
Isaiah, if I'm correct, I believe if you actually left high school and then

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Josh:
you taught yourself to code and now you're sitting here.

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Josh:
And for the listeners at home who aren't listening, Isaiah is sitting in front

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Josh:
of a nuclear reactor, in front of their product, in front of hopefully what is the future of energy.

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Josh:
So there's this quote that I love from Steve Jobs. It's like,

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Josh:
you can't connect the dots looking forward, but you can connect them looking

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Josh:
backwards and you have to trust that they'll work out.

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Josh:
In your case, it is very clear to me that they worked out.

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Josh:
So can you just kind of explain to me how you wound up sitting here in front

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Josh:
of this reactor that you built?

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Isaiah:
Yeah, it's an interesting story. So yeah, you're absolutely right.

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Isaiah:
I dropped out of high school. I actually did attend three months of college.

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Isaiah:
I think it was around three months. I attended a small liberal arts school for

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Isaiah:
a couple of months while I was

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Isaiah:
working 80-hour weeks doing software engineering. Didn't last very long.

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Isaiah:
I was curious to read a lot of literature, and I've always been interested in language.

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Isaiah:
And I realized a few months into it, I cared a lot more about the work that

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Isaiah:
I was doing than spending my time in a classroom.

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Isaiah:
A lot of my time in the classroom was spent, like sitting on my laptop coding.

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Isaiah:
I was like, okay, I can really only do one of these things well.

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Isaiah:
So, you know, education has always been something that's like a fascinating

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Isaiah:
thing to me and that I want to do more of, but I also am on a mission and I

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Isaiah:
have to fulfill the mission.

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Isaiah:
And so that consumes, you know, a lot of my time and energy.

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Isaiah:
But how did we get here? How did we get to Ward Zero behind me,

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Isaiah:
you know, sitting in front of this amazing machine that the team has built?

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Isaiah:
It's essentially been a journey of self-learning, right? So how does anybody

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Isaiah:
learn? Well, they read, right? They read and they talk to people.

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Isaiah:
If you go to school and you learn nuclear physics, you read,

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Isaiah:
you talk to people, you do math, right? That's essentially what you're doing.

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Isaiah:
And it turns out that, like, if you are wildly curious about something,

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Isaiah:
that you can do that on your own as well. Now, you have to be curious about it.

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Isaiah:
I caution people because, you know, sometimes people want to they see,

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Isaiah:
oh, wow, you dropped out of high school, you dropped out of college. It's super cool.

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Isaiah:
And I actually recommend that people don't do that unless they are overwhelmingly

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Isaiah:
curious about something to the extent that it's going to drive them to try to

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Isaiah:
understand it every single day.

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Isaiah:
If you don't wake up like burning with curiosity about a certain thing that

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Isaiah:
you're going to spend your life learning about and building,

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Isaiah:
you should probably go to school because the nice thing about school is that

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Isaiah:
it pushes you to learn things that you otherwise might not have spent the time to do. Right.

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Isaiah:
But for those people that have, you know, an itch in their head that cannot be scratched anyway,

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Isaiah:
except waking up every single day and working on it, you will probably find

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Isaiah:
easier and more efficient ways to access that information and start actually

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Isaiah:
building than going to school. And so that's what I did.

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Isaiah:
Really thinking about this business for about 10, 11 years since I was around 14 or 15.

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Isaiah:
You know, I have some family history in nuclear energy that motivated me to

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Isaiah:
go and learn about it. And so that's kind of what I did.

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Josh:
And I want people to also note that you did this in the pre-AI age where you

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Josh:
actually had to go and read books and teach yourself things without all of the

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Josh:
additional leverage that we have today.

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Isaiah:
You know, that's actually such a great point. Man, if I had had access to ChatGPT

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Isaiah:
when I was like 14 or 15, that would have been phenomenal.

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Isaiah:
I'm so excited for the generation of, you know, students that are growing up

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Isaiah:
right now who can, like, sit on Chappachea Petit for hours and hours.

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Isaiah:
And it's like having a professor talking to you, which is amazing.

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Isaiah:
But, yeah, you know, I did this back when it was mostly actually trying to read

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Isaiah:
PDFs from the Department of Energy and the AEC in the 1960s.

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Isaiah:
So I at least grew up in the digital

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Isaiah:
era where you could find these PDFs online, which I'm grateful for.

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David:
It's pretty clear, Isaiah, that nuclear is your answer, the answer that makes sense to you.

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David:
Maybe you can walk us through that train of thought as to why you are just pilled

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David:
by nuclear specifically, because there's other ways to produce energy.

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David:
Solar, I still feel like, has a lot of juice left to squeeze in that whole industry.

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David:
You could have gone and solved the solar problem, but you chose nuclear.

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David:
Maybe you can just walk us through that choice.

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Isaiah:
I obviously had a bias toward nuclear.

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Isaiah:
My great-grandfather was on the Manhattan Project I've grown up thinking about

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Isaiah:
it, but I would like to believe I was very objective.

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Isaiah:
And one of the reasons is that I became anti-nuclear pilled when I was in middle

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Isaiah:
school and early high school, because having studied the physics of it and having

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Isaiah:
studied the engineering of it, I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world.

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Isaiah:
And then I started looking around at the market and the deployment,

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Isaiah:
and I realized that the nuclear industry in the West is dead, right?

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Isaiah:
It's completely shuttered. It's gone. It's not doing anything. and um,

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Isaiah:
in the journey of trying to understand why i i actually

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Isaiah:
became anti-nuclear pill and i was like well you know

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Isaiah:
this is an amazing technology but humanity is not ready for it and it's not

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Isaiah:
happening and you know there's these complexities to it which make it impossible

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Isaiah:
um and and so then i backed up and i said well i know that over the next hundred

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Isaiah:
years a society is going to figure out abundant energy you know and i don't

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Isaiah:
we don't know which one right but one of them is going to

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Isaiah:
And the one that figures out abundant energy is going to have an inflectionary

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Isaiah:
moment that takes them, you know, stratospheric.

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Isaiah:
And I would like that to be us. You know, I would like us to be the ones that figure that out.

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Isaiah:
And so I actually, you know, backed all the way up to the drawing board.

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Isaiah:
I said, what is the best form of energy we could unlock today?

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Isaiah:
And I believe I actually started with a very blank neutral slate,

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Isaiah:
even a little bit, you know, biased against fission.

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Isaiah:
And maybe for personal reasons that I was maybe even salty about it,

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Isaiah:
I was like, man, it sucks that the nuclear, you know, it's such a cool technology

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Isaiah:
that I have history in, but like it just didn't work. So what is the best form of energy?

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Isaiah:
And that drove me to every form of energy generation.

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Isaiah:
I really started from first principles and looked at how have humans gotten energy in the past?

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Isaiah:
What are some theoretical ways to get them in the future?

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Isaiah:
I looked at solar. I looked at wind, which is a proxy for solar.

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Isaiah:
I looked at hydrocarbons, geothermal was really interesting.

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Isaiah:
I looked at fission, fusion, all across the board.

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Isaiah:
And at the end of the day, I came to a couple of fundamental conclusions.

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Isaiah:
If you want to make cheap energy, you're going to have a machine that does it, right?

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Isaiah:
So there's going to be a machine that's a box and you build the box and energy

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Isaiah:
comes out of it, right? So like that's the fundamental thing that we're talking about here.

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Isaiah:
What are the properties of that box? What do you want that box to be like?

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Isaiah:
Well, ideally, you want the box to be small per power, right?

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Isaiah:
So the box is just not that big versus the power that it makes.

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Isaiah:
Okay, so then and the reason that's important, by the way, is like at scale,

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Isaiah:
things generally cost how big they are.

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Isaiah:
All right, that's a little bit of a confusing sentence. So I'll say it again.

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Isaiah:
At scale, things generally cost their size.

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Isaiah:
Okay, so a big thing costs more than a small thing.

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Isaiah:
Okay, 747 costs more than an iPhone. And that's a pretty fundamental law.

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Isaiah:
It's hard to break that law.

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Isaiah:
You see deviations in things of similar sizes, for another reason.

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Isaiah:
And that other reason is rate of production.

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Isaiah:
Right? So there's sort of like two fundamental factors in how much things cost,

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Isaiah:
how big they are, how many of them you make.

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Isaiah:
Okay. So back, but the most fundamental one is how big is it?

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Isaiah:
So an ideal energy machine is quite small and makes a lot of power.

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Isaiah:
So then you back up and you say, well, okay, well, what drives the size of an

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Isaiah:
energy machine across all of these different, uh, you know, types of energy

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Isaiah:
generation, you have geothermal, you have solar, you have wind pulling hydrocarbons out of the ground,

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Isaiah:
nuclear fusion, all these different things.

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Isaiah:
And what I did is, you know, you might laugh at this a little bit But I looked

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Isaiah:
at all of the different energy generating machines out there and I said, how big are they?

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Isaiah:
And again, it's not total size, but it's how big are they versus the power that they make.

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Isaiah:
All right. So what we're talking about here is power density.

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Isaiah:
So power density is essentially per cubic meter of machine. How much energy does that thing make?

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Isaiah:
And the answer might surprise you. I'll just I'll turn it to you.

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Isaiah:
What do you think is the most power dense energy producing machine?

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David:
Machine like a physical contraption, a physical gadget that humans make.

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Isaiah:
Yep. Physical gadget that humans make or even that they theoretically could

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Isaiah:
make. Right. But that makes energy.

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David:
I mean, I feel like I'm just not having high context enough to answer this,

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David:
but like, I don't know, a dam comes to mind.

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David:
It's relatively small in the grand scheme of things versus like a field array of solar panels.

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David:
That's my first intuitive answer. I don't know. Josh, what do you think?

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Josh:
You mentioned the atomic bomb. I'm thinking, well, that seems like it generates

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Josh:
a lot of energy. Maybe not a machine, but probably a pretty high density of energy.

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David:
We can't really use that energy, though.

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Josh:
Does that count?

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Isaiah:
We're doing some really, really good exploration here. I really like it.

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Isaiah:
So hydro is not power dense, unfortunately.

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Isaiah:
Hydroelectric dams are freaking enormous. They're gigantic.

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David:
They're large, yeah.

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Isaiah:
The Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest concrete structure ever built by

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Isaiah:
humans on Earth. Now, it also makes a lot of energy.

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Isaiah:
But if you actually do the cubic meters to power output, dams are actually pretty bad.

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Isaiah:
The answer today is actually a jet engine, actually a rocket engine.

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Isaiah:
So a hydrocarbon engine is actually the most power dense thing that we've built yet.

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Isaiah:
Right. So if you actually look at, you know, a Raptor engine,

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Isaiah:
that thing is like it's I haven't done the exact math.

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Isaiah:
It might be in the gigawatts per cubic meter.

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Isaiah:
Right. So just insane, insane energy density.

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Isaiah:
Now, the problem is hydrocarbons themselves are kind of large.

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Isaiah:
Right. So like the actual mass of the fuel you have to include in that calculation.

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Isaiah:
And then you have to also include in the calculation the machinery that produces

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Isaiah:
the fuel, the machinery that finds the fuel, that drills for it,

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Isaiah:
that refines for it, that transports it, that stores it, puts it in the tank.

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Isaiah:
So once you do all that math, you know, even though a rocket engine or jet engine

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Isaiah:
is the most energy dense thing we built, you know, built yet,

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Isaiah:
the apparatus to source the hydrocarbons is actually, you know, large. So high baggage.

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Isaiah:
High baggage and just more physical machinery, right? It adds to the total,

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Isaiah:
you know, cubic meters per output power.

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Isaiah:
And again, that adds to cost, right? Cubic meterage of machinery adds to cost.

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Isaiah:
And so now the atomic bomb is actually the right answer, right?

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Isaiah:
So if you actually think about what produces a ton of energy in a very small

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Isaiah:
box, you know, an atom bomb or a hydrogen bomb is that answer, right?

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Isaiah:
That you have put an enormous amount of energy into a very, very tiny frame.

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Isaiah:
Now, obviously, the second thing you said was, well, you can't use that energy.

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David:
Right? It's not productive energy.

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Isaiah:
Yeah, it's too much to be productive. But what this tells you is that fission,

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Isaiah:
you know, and fusion, but we'll talk about that in a second.

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Isaiah:
Fission is actually as close as we've figured

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Isaiah:
out how to get so far to this like almost

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Isaiah:
infinite power source in a box of a of

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Isaiah:
an abstract size right and it turns out for for

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Isaiah:
fission that the size of the box is not super

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Isaiah:
correlated with the power output right so like

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Isaiah:
the reason that we make you know you know fusion machines

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Isaiah:
or fission machine machines of a certain size honestly has

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Isaiah:
more to do with safety than it has to do with like total power that

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Isaiah:
you can get out of the box right you know the reason that we

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Isaiah:
make things bigger or smaller in the fission world has to

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Isaiah:
do with how safe we want to make them right because you you take

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Isaiah:
this to the fundamental limit and uh you know you have

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Isaiah:
a bomb right which is an enormous amount of energy in a very small box but it's

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Isaiah:
unsafe and then you go the exact opposite direction which would be something

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Isaiah:
like the machine behind me which is very very safe and it's much lower power

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Isaiah:
density so this is actually the key to why I believe that fission is the answer for the future.

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Isaiah:
And it's that the constraints around how big that box is really has to do with

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Isaiah:
our ability to engineer it to be safe, right?

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Isaiah:
It's actually not constrained by physics you can make a a nearly infinite energy producing,

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Isaiah:
uh box of almost any any size with uh

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Isaiah:
with nuclear fission beyond a certain minimum there's a there's sort

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Isaiah:
of a minimum size but around that minimum size like you

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Isaiah:
can make a box and makes the power of the you know the entire world um and then

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Isaiah:
everything from that point to practicality is a matter of essentially safety

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Isaiah:
engineering um okay so what this means and by the way like the fundamental reasons

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Isaiah:
for this is that uranium itself is just unbelievably energy dense, right?

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Isaiah:
So the kilowatt hours per kilogram

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Isaiah:
on uranium is about 23 million kilowatt hours per kilogram versus,

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Isaiah:
I'm going to get this number wrong, but I think it's somewhere around 40 or

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Isaiah:
50 kilowatt hours per kilogram in oil and gas, right, in a hydrocarbon fuel.

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Isaiah:
And so you have literally millions of times more energy density in uh in fission

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Isaiah:
now take this to like something like solar right what's the what's the power

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Isaiah:
density of solar another way you can think about this is uh here's here's a

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Isaiah:
trick question what's bigger a nuclear reactor or a solar panel i.

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Josh:
Would guess solar by a couple orders of magnitude yeah

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Isaiah:
Yeah so it's a trick question because you're like well a solar panel is this

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Isaiah:
big you know and the nuclear reactor is that big so clearly the nuclear reactor

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Isaiah:
is bigger, but it's actually not true.

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Isaiah:
The solar panel is much bigger, right, per power output.

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Isaiah:
And the answer is a couple orders of magnitude, maybe three orders of magnitude.

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Isaiah:
It's hard to predict in the limit.

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Isaiah:
But today, at least, you know, solar is about three orders of magnitude bigger

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Isaiah:
in terms of physical mass than nuclear.

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Isaiah:
So if our North Star is that a, you know, an energy machine ought to be small,

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Isaiah:
because small things are cheap.

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Isaiah:
Um, nuclear is, is the solution, right? So this was, this was sort of my conclusion

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Isaiah:
on, on all of this, uh, like first principles thinking and research is,

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Isaiah:
is essentially that fission will create the cheapest energy on earth.

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Isaiah:
If we can figure out how to do it safely and we can figure out how to do it

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Isaiah:
legally and in a way that the public, you know, will be happy with,

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Isaiah:
because even if you have a safe machine and the public thinks it's not a safe machine,

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Isaiah:
you know, you still haven't really solved the, like the fundamental problem,

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Isaiah:
at least in a, in a short timeframe.

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Isaiah:
Um, so the second conclusion that I had, and this is really what led to,

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Isaiah:
to starting Valor is that if you really want to make the cheapest energy on

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Isaiah:
earth, you're going to do nuclear fission, but you're going to do it pretty

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Isaiah:
differently than how it's been done before.

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Isaiah:
Um, and specifically you want to do it kind of in the middle of nowhere where

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Isaiah:
you have sort of a safe operating place for fission, you know, out in the desert,

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Isaiah:
out in the middle of nowhere with as many safety constraints as you want to

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Isaiah:
put around that as much security as you want to put around that.

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Isaiah:
And you can simply build many, many nuclear reactors. Because again,

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Isaiah:
there's two governing principles in how much a thing costs.

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Isaiah:
How big is it and how many you make so we

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Isaiah:
know that fission wins the the smallness thing right very

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Isaiah:
small machine makes a ton of power the second is how many

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Isaiah:
you make and so these are the two fundamental you know decisions

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Isaiah:
that went into starting this company is that we're going to make fission reactors

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Isaiah:
because they're small and we're going to make a lot of them because making many

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Isaiah:
of a thing makes it very cheap and so that's essentially what we're doing here

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Isaiah:
we're making many many nuclear reactors out in the middle of nowhere uh they're

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Isaiah:
fission reactors so they're very

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Isaiah:
power dense, and we're going to make the cheapest energy in the world.

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David:
Inside of your answer, I feel like there's just a lot of work being done with

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David:
the idea that there's just not a lot of extra baggage going around the production of energy.

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David:
So we could go and we could talk about building a dam or setting up arrays of

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David:
solar panels or wind farms.

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David:
And I think you would just dismantle each one of those things,

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David:
talking about the supply chains that are required to produce those things,

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David:
the third-party vendors that are required, the assembly that's required.

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David:
And I'm getting the intuition here that building a nuclear reactor,

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David:
what you're doing, there's just a lot fewer moving parts.

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David:
And it's just a more just like simple environment to produce energy.

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David:
And so you have less dependencies on third-party manufacturers.

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David:
You have just overall less dependencies, generally speaking.

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David:
And that allows you to, in theory, kind of scale out that operation and scale

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David:
out energy production, generally speaking.

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Isaiah:
Yeah, that's absolutely true for a lot of industries.

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Isaiah:
Like it's absolutely true for oil and gas, right? So it's almost impossible

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Isaiah:
today to completely verticalize an oil and gas company, right?

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Isaiah:
Because the source of your oil continues to shift.

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Isaiah:
And so unless you're in like the continuous real estate business where you are

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Isaiah:
constantly buying new patches of land, exploring them, drilling, pumping oil,

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Isaiah:
you know, moving it to refinery, which you own, refining it,

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Isaiah:
moving it through logistics that you own to the end user site.

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Isaiah:
That's an enormously complicated supply chain to own yourself.

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Isaiah:
Now, what is verticalizing nuclear look like?

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Isaiah:
Well, it looks like having a patch of land where steel comes in and graphite

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Isaiah:
comes in and energy comes out and a bit of uranium, right?

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Isaiah:
But the uranium part of that is actually shockingly small in terms of mass.

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David:
A little uranium goes a long way.

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00:24:04,180 --> 00:24:07,960
Isaiah:
A little bit of uranium goes a hell of a long way. So now solar,

394
00:24:07,960 --> 00:24:09,740
Isaiah:
you can make an argument about this as well.

395
00:24:09,860 --> 00:24:12,980
Isaiah:
You could say that you have this solar plant, which is similarly structured,

396
00:24:13,240 --> 00:24:18,040
Isaiah:
which has silicon coming in and aluminum coming in, and you have power coming out.

397
00:24:18,180 --> 00:24:20,460
Isaiah:
Now, the problem with that is just the mass constraint, right?

398
00:24:20,560 --> 00:24:23,780
Isaiah:
You're going to need a couple orders of magnitude, more silicon,

399
00:24:24,240 --> 00:24:28,780
Isaiah:
more aluminum, then I need steel and graphite and uranium, right?

400
00:24:28,920 --> 00:24:32,800
Isaiah:
So at the limit, I say I win that fight just in the fact that I need literally

401
00:24:32,800 --> 00:24:35,700
Isaiah:
a thousand times less physical material per output power.

402
00:24:36,100 --> 00:24:39,560
Isaiah:
And in the limit, things cost how big they are. So, you know,

403
00:24:39,640 --> 00:24:42,080
Isaiah:
this is sort of the math for solar.

404
00:24:42,220 --> 00:24:44,500
Isaiah:
Now, fusion is an interesting part of this as well.

405
00:24:44,920 --> 00:24:48,920
Isaiah:
People will say, well, okay, fusion is even more power dense, right?

406
00:24:49,060 --> 00:24:58,060
Isaiah:
Because, you know, deuterium versus uranium or tritium are even more power density per kilogram.

407
00:24:58,420 --> 00:25:01,900
Isaiah:
The problem with that is that, again, it's more about the properties of the

408
00:25:01,900 --> 00:25:05,000
Isaiah:
box than it is the properties of the fuel, right?

409
00:25:05,200 --> 00:25:09,540
Isaiah:
What is like, let's characterize a fusion box. How good is that thing on the

410
00:25:09,540 --> 00:25:11,240
Isaiah:
metrics that we talked about, right?

411
00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:14,680
Isaiah:
An energy box should be small. That's the first most important thing.

412
00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:17,320
Isaiah:
I would say there's two other sub attributes as well as that.

413
00:25:17,500 --> 00:25:20,520
Isaiah:
They should be simple and made of common materials, right? Small,

414
00:25:20,660 --> 00:25:21,520
Isaiah:
simple, common materials.

415
00:25:22,520 --> 00:25:26,820
Isaiah:
Interestingly, fusion is worse on all three of those than fission, right?

416
00:25:26,920 --> 00:25:32,040
Isaiah:
So a fusion machine is actually larger per power, because it's harder to capture the energy out of it.

417
00:25:32,580 --> 00:25:36,880
Isaiah:
It's harder to create the conditions for fusion. It's hard to capture the output energy.

418
00:25:37,060 --> 00:25:40,360
Isaiah:
So the machine itself is actually larger per power than a fission machine.

419
00:25:40,500 --> 00:25:41,380
Isaiah:
It's lower power density.

420
00:25:42,420 --> 00:25:47,080
Isaiah:
It's also much more complex, right? And complexity is a factor to cost.

421
00:25:47,380 --> 00:25:51,480
Isaiah:
And the materials are much less common, right? So you can't make a fusion machine

422
00:25:51,480 --> 00:25:53,640
Isaiah:
out of steel and carbon, right?

423
00:25:53,780 --> 00:25:56,140
Isaiah:
Which is essentially what this machine behind us is made out of.

424
00:25:56,620 --> 00:26:01,100
Isaiah:
And so, you know, like I said, I would like to believe I was objective in this.

425
00:26:01,100 --> 00:26:03,760
Isaiah:
I did not know what the answer was going to be. I thought it might have been solar.

426
00:26:03,880 --> 00:26:07,300
Isaiah:
I thought it was, you know, I actually thought geothermal for a while might have been the answer.

427
00:26:07,600 --> 00:26:11,800
Isaiah:
But when you actually go to how does humanity have civilizational,

428
00:26:11,800 --> 00:26:15,520
Isaiah:
you know, energy that is 10 times cheaper than it is today?

429
00:26:16,080 --> 00:26:18,600
Isaiah:
The only answer that I see to that is nuclear fission.

430
00:26:18,600 --> 00:26:22,680
David:
Why do you think that this is ready for society right now?

431
00:26:23,200 --> 00:26:26,680
David:
Nuclear as a conversation goes back before I was born, before all of us were

432
00:26:26,680 --> 00:26:28,840
David:
born. It's been around for a while.

433
00:26:29,400 --> 00:26:35,000
David:
Why now? What's changed with technology? What's changed with politics or just the world around?

434
00:26:35,160 --> 00:26:39,460
David:
How has the environment changed to make the question of right now be relevant?

435
00:26:40,260 --> 00:26:46,160
Isaiah:
So I think that we made a trade-off in the 70s and 80s that made us think that

436
00:26:46,160 --> 00:26:47,960
Isaiah:
energy wasn't that important for a while.

437
00:26:48,380 --> 00:26:51,420
Isaiah:
And that's one of the fundamental reasons. There's a couple of fundamental reasons.

438
00:26:51,700 --> 00:26:57,740
Isaiah:
So in the 70s and 80s in the West, we essentially became a society that imagined

439
00:26:57,740 --> 00:27:00,100
Isaiah:
it could be somewhat decoupled from the price of energy.

440
00:27:00,400 --> 00:27:05,160
Isaiah:
And the essential way that we did that is we exported physical industry to other

441
00:27:05,160 --> 00:27:10,900
Isaiah:
places, right? So energy really, really matters for physical industry before AI.

442
00:27:11,100 --> 00:27:14,600
Isaiah:
Now energy matters even for bits.

443
00:27:14,820 --> 00:27:19,180
Isaiah:
But before AI, energy was really, really important to physical industry.

444
00:27:19,280 --> 00:27:23,880
Isaiah:
And we went through this motion of essentially moving all physical industry to other places.

445
00:27:24,060 --> 00:27:29,740
Isaiah:
And so it didn't matter to us. It didn't impact us as directly to have more expensive energy.

446
00:27:29,900 --> 00:27:34,140
Isaiah:
And so I would say there's a period of irrationality in how we thought about

447
00:27:34,140 --> 00:27:37,720
Isaiah:
energy because we thought it didn't matter. Now, it turns out that you actually

448
00:27:37,720 --> 00:27:41,560
Isaiah:
really need physical industry as a country, right? A nation needs to be able to build things.

449
00:27:41,740 --> 00:27:45,860
Isaiah:
And in fact, I would say the fundamental thing that an economy does is building things.

450
00:27:46,440 --> 00:27:49,360
Isaiah:
But there's a the flaw in our thinking came from.

451
00:27:50,050 --> 00:27:53,550
Isaiah:
The fact that there are actually like two things involved in making things.

452
00:27:53,690 --> 00:27:56,850
Isaiah:
There's the knowing how to make them, and then there's the making them.

453
00:27:57,270 --> 00:28:00,690
Isaiah:
And we imagined for a period of 30 years or so that we could be the country

454
00:28:00,690 --> 00:28:04,730
Isaiah:
that knows how to make things, and that other countries could be the ones that do the making.

455
00:28:05,190 --> 00:28:08,350
Isaiah:
And in the short term, that looks really attractive, because you get a ton of

456
00:28:08,350 --> 00:28:10,550
Isaiah:
alpha on the knowing how to make things.

457
00:28:10,750 --> 00:28:15,410
Isaiah:
You have rapid growth of valuable intellectual property. It's really easy to

458
00:28:15,410 --> 00:28:17,230
Isaiah:
capitalize. It's really easy to get started.

459
00:28:17,770 --> 00:28:20,830
Isaiah:
And you know we're like let's just export the annoying part which is like the

460
00:28:20,830 --> 00:28:26,410
Isaiah:
real making you know to other places and that's uh highly flawed in the long

461
00:28:26,410 --> 00:28:30,650
Isaiah:
term it maybe is a good idea for about 10 or 15 years in the long term it turns

462
00:28:30,650 --> 00:28:33,790
Isaiah:
out that your ability to know how to make things,

463
00:28:34,330 --> 00:28:38,170
Isaiah:
has to be coupled with the making of them right because what happens is you

464
00:28:38,170 --> 00:28:42,910
Isaiah:
forget you forget how to make things and if you're not actively making things

465
00:28:42,910 --> 00:28:44,810
Isaiah:
you're not learning how to make them better

466
00:28:45,210 --> 00:28:49,410
Isaiah:
So the practical output of this is like, we forgot how to make cars, right?

467
00:28:49,570 --> 00:28:55,730
Isaiah:
Like we started exporting car production to other places and Japan got really

468
00:28:55,730 --> 00:28:57,350
Isaiah:
good at it. China got really good at it.

469
00:28:57,910 --> 00:29:01,750
Isaiah:
And really only one company in the United States sort of like was like,

470
00:29:01,830 --> 00:29:04,010
Isaiah:
huh, maybe we should remember how to make cars and make those again.

471
00:29:04,150 --> 00:29:04,950
Isaiah:
And, you know, that'd be Tesla.

472
00:29:06,310 --> 00:29:08,550
Isaiah:
And this happened across, you know, so many different industries,

473
00:29:08,670 --> 00:29:11,890
Isaiah:
right? The reason that Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley is that we used to make silicon there.

474
00:29:11,970 --> 00:29:15,150
Isaiah:
We used to make chips and then we exported them, you know, somewhere else for

475
00:29:15,150 --> 00:29:18,290
Isaiah:
the actual production because we didn't want the effluent and the waste from that.

476
00:29:18,650 --> 00:29:20,670
Isaiah:
And now guess what? We don't know how to make chips anymore,

477
00:29:20,890 --> 00:29:24,450
Isaiah:
right? So this is very short term thinking. You actually have to be involved

478
00:29:24,450 --> 00:29:27,850
Isaiah:
in the making in order to be educated on how to do the making.

479
00:29:28,090 --> 00:29:31,650
David:
I'm reading a book about this same effect with Apple's iPhones,

480
00:29:31,850 --> 00:29:34,010
David:
where they exported all the manufacturing to China.

481
00:29:34,250 --> 00:29:40,630
David:
And that ended up actually just being an incubator for Chinese phone production.

482
00:29:41,210 --> 00:29:44,950
David:
And so Huawei and all of these other Apple competitors all came out of China.

483
00:29:45,070 --> 00:29:48,890
David:
And now actually only China knows how to make phones, including Apple iPhones.

484
00:29:49,110 --> 00:29:53,250
David:
Correct. And so Apple is now realizing that they incubated the whole entire

485
00:29:53,250 --> 00:29:58,710
David:
Chinese manufacturing thing, which is now the centerpiece of a lot of geopolitical debate right now.

486
00:29:59,010 --> 00:30:03,410
Isaiah:
Exactly. Exactly. It's a short-term trade. It's something that finance people

487
00:30:03,410 --> 00:30:06,990
Isaiah:
do because they want to make a little bit of a better return in a 10 to 15-year period.

488
00:30:07,450 --> 00:30:12,470
Isaiah:
And then after that, you realize that you exported the ability to actually know

489
00:30:12,470 --> 00:30:16,830
Isaiah:
how to make things because the physical world is a real place, right?

490
00:30:16,910 --> 00:30:20,250
Isaiah:
You can't actually model everything perfectly. You have to actually see how

491
00:30:20,250 --> 00:30:23,650
Isaiah:
the steel behaves in practice. You have to see how the machine behaves in practice.

492
00:30:24,610 --> 00:30:28,110
Isaiah:
And so, yeah, I think it's it's I actually don't even remember this question

493
00:30:28,110 --> 00:30:30,650
Isaiah:
started. Now you've gotten me on a separate soapbox that I care a lot about.

494
00:30:30,810 --> 00:30:34,310
Isaiah:
But but you can't couple do a couple of those things for too long.

495
00:30:34,370 --> 00:30:35,810
Isaiah:
Oh, we were asking why fission now?

496
00:30:36,290 --> 00:30:39,070
Isaiah:
You're right. This is one of those reasons. Right. So we've had a.

497
00:30:39,620 --> 00:30:44,520
Isaiah:
A return of rationality about making things in the physical world is one thing, right?

498
00:30:44,600 --> 00:30:47,820
Isaiah:
So we suddenly realized like, it's actually probably important that we know

499
00:30:47,820 --> 00:30:51,080
Isaiah:
how to make steel, right? It's actually important that we know how to manufacture things.

500
00:30:51,320 --> 00:30:54,360
Isaiah:
And when you do that, you realize that energy price is really,

501
00:30:54,540 --> 00:30:55,560
Isaiah:
really important, right?

502
00:30:55,680 --> 00:31:00,000
Isaiah:
The reason that China dominates global aluminum is because they have three to

503
00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:02,920
Isaiah:
four cents a kilowatt hour coal energy, right?

504
00:31:03,020 --> 00:31:07,300
Isaiah:
They can make electricity at three to four cents a kilowatt hour and electrolyze bauxite.

505
00:31:07,460 --> 00:31:10,740
Isaiah:
And that means they dominate aluminum. That also means they dominate gallium

506
00:31:10,740 --> 00:31:13,840
Isaiah:
and germanium as well, which are really, really important to producing chips

507
00:31:13,840 --> 00:31:17,220
Isaiah:
because that's the downstream of bauxite electrolysis, right?

508
00:31:17,300 --> 00:31:21,500
Isaiah:
And so this return to rationality drives us back to understanding that energy

509
00:31:21,500 --> 00:31:23,760
Isaiah:
price in a society is really, really important.

510
00:31:23,940 --> 00:31:25,960
Isaiah:
It's a strategic thing that a country has to have.

511
00:31:26,280 --> 00:31:31,340
Isaiah:
The second thing that's happening is AI, right? So all the bits people suddenly

512
00:31:31,340 --> 00:31:36,120
Isaiah:
woke up and realized like, okay, we actually need energy to even do our bits now.

513
00:31:36,120 --> 00:31:39,300
Isaiah:
You know, because it used to be that a data center, the electricity price in

514
00:31:39,300 --> 00:31:41,700
Isaiah:
a data center just didn't matter that much because you weren't using that much

515
00:31:41,700 --> 00:31:42,980
Isaiah:
compute to send emails around.

516
00:31:43,300 --> 00:31:47,660
Isaiah:
Now we're using an enormous amount of compute every day just to do our basic

517
00:31:47,660 --> 00:31:49,740
Isaiah:
stuff because we want to use ChatGPT for everything.

518
00:31:49,980 --> 00:31:52,700
Isaiah:
So that's the other thing. And so both of these things are just,

519
00:31:52,720 --> 00:31:55,560
Isaiah:
you know, this return of rationality to the West to say.

520
00:31:56,250 --> 00:31:59,990
Isaiah:
We need cheap energy and you look around and you do the same logic that i did

521
00:31:59,990 --> 00:32:02,350
Isaiah:
and you realize nuclear is cheap

522
00:32:02,350 --> 00:32:05,510
Isaiah:
energy and by the way you don't have to believe anything that i've said.

523
00:32:06,250 --> 00:32:09,810
Isaiah:
You know in theory about why nuclear will be cheap you can actually just look

524
00:32:09,810 --> 00:32:14,450
Isaiah:
at the past right so in the early 1970s before three mile island in the united

525
00:32:14,450 --> 00:32:16,690
Isaiah:
states uh nuclear fission,

526
00:32:17,290 --> 00:32:21,410
Isaiah:
not only was the cheapest energy source it remains the cheapest energy that

527
00:32:21,410 --> 00:32:22,850
Isaiah:
humanity has ever experienced.

528
00:32:23,290 --> 00:32:26,690
Isaiah:
Right. So I'm going to say that again. In the early 1970s, the energy that we

529
00:32:26,690 --> 00:32:30,730
Isaiah:
were getting out of nuclear reactors at that time remains the cheapest energy

530
00:32:30,730 --> 00:32:32,410
Isaiah:
that humanity has ever experienced.

531
00:32:32,610 --> 00:32:35,970
Isaiah:
And this is this is adjusting for inflation. Right. I'm not talking about nominal

532
00:32:35,970 --> 00:32:38,810
Isaiah:
1970 dollars. I'm talking about 2025 dollars.

533
00:32:39,130 --> 00:32:45,250
Isaiah:
We were getting around three to three and a half cent per kilowatt hour energy

534
00:32:45,250 --> 00:32:46,790
Isaiah:
out of nuclear reactors.

535
00:32:46,990 --> 00:32:51,450
Isaiah:
Right now, we've the cheapest energy you can get in the United States today

536
00:32:51,450 --> 00:32:54,650
Isaiah:
is somewhere around five to six cents per kilowatt hour.

537
00:32:54,810 --> 00:32:56,810
Isaiah:
It's a little bit difficult to calculate because of subsidies,

538
00:32:56,970 --> 00:32:58,470
Isaiah:
but that's about as good as you can get.

539
00:32:58,670 --> 00:33:03,610
Isaiah:
So we're about double, right, the energy that we were getting in the early 70s,

540
00:33:03,870 --> 00:33:05,710
Isaiah:
even when, you know, adjusting for inflation.

541
00:33:06,270 --> 00:33:10,890
Isaiah:
50 years ago. 50 years ago. Yeah. And energy should always move the opposite direction, right?

542
00:33:11,010 --> 00:33:14,270
Isaiah:
50 years later, you should have 10 times cheaper energy than you did before.

543
00:33:14,530 --> 00:33:17,710
Isaiah:
That was the trend up until the 1970s, and it was reversed.

544
00:33:17,910 --> 00:33:21,890
Isaiah:
So I think there's this massive return to rationality on energy price,

545
00:33:22,030 --> 00:33:24,450
Isaiah:
which naturally leads you to the conclusion of fission.

546
00:33:24,810 --> 00:33:29,090
Isaiah:
The other interesting thing is that, you know, I think that nuclear has had

547
00:33:29,090 --> 00:33:30,270
Isaiah:
really bad marketing, right?

548
00:33:30,410 --> 00:33:34,750
Isaiah:
It's had this, you know, intense scariness attached to it, which I think is

549
00:33:34,750 --> 00:33:39,690
Isaiah:
very unjustified, because nuclear is the safest source of energy on Earth.

550
00:33:39,750 --> 00:33:46,290
Isaiah:
If you look at power generated versus human death toll, Nuclear is the safest form of energy on Earth.

551
00:33:46,470 --> 00:33:50,110
Isaiah:
It's even safer than solar, by the way. And we can talk about why that is in a second.

552
00:33:50,470 --> 00:33:54,010
Isaiah:
But one of the interesting things

553
00:33:54,010 --> 00:33:56,890
Isaiah:
that happened was we had these nuclear incidents in the 70s and 80s.

554
00:33:56,930 --> 00:33:59,630
Isaiah:
You had Fukushima, you had Chernobyl, and,

555
00:34:00,540 --> 00:34:03,820
Isaiah:
Those were wildly misunderstood by the public. They, you know,

556
00:34:03,900 --> 00:34:07,060
Isaiah:
if you ask people on the street today, like how many people died in Three Mile Island?

557
00:34:07,500 --> 00:34:08,900
Isaiah:
People will say numbers in the

558
00:34:08,900 --> 00:34:11,920
Isaiah:
hundreds. They'll say numbers in the thousands. Some people say 10,000.

559
00:34:12,820 --> 00:34:16,300
Isaiah:
Zero people is the answer, by the way. Zero people died in Three Mile Island.

560
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:18,480
Isaiah:
Nobody died. If you ask people about.

561
00:34:18,480 --> 00:34:22,580
David:
What about second order consequences of like polluted soil, polluted land,

562
00:34:22,920 --> 00:34:24,620
David:
downstream effects, anything like that?

563
00:34:24,620 --> 00:34:29,900
Isaiah:
13 independent studies after Three Mile Island that were largely funded by people

564
00:34:29,900 --> 00:34:35,020
Isaiah:
who wanted to show that the nuclear industry was bad, failed to find any environmental

565
00:34:35,020 --> 00:34:38,440
Isaiah:
or health effects beyond the fence of the Three Mile Island facility.

566
00:34:38,700 --> 00:34:42,280
Isaiah:
Not a single study, even funded by, you know, enemies of nuclear,

567
00:34:42,620 --> 00:34:46,440
Isaiah:
failed to find a single negative health effect or environmental effect beyond

568
00:34:46,440 --> 00:34:48,180
Isaiah:
the fence of Three Mile Island, right?

569
00:34:48,320 --> 00:34:52,920
Isaiah:
So now this didn't matter in the 70s and 80s. And the reason was because information

570
00:34:52,920 --> 00:34:55,460
Isaiah:
flow was pretty centralized in the 70s and 80s, right?

571
00:34:55,540 --> 00:34:59,340
Isaiah:
So if you had the media on board with the narrative and you had Hollywood on

572
00:34:59,340 --> 00:35:01,800
Isaiah:
board with the narrative, you

573
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,260
Isaiah:
generally, you know, had a good grip on what people thought about a thing.

574
00:35:06,020 --> 00:35:10,400
Isaiah:
Now, we've had another nuclear incident since then, and that was Fukushima, right?

575
00:35:10,520 --> 00:35:15,000
Isaiah:
And Fukushima, most people think was, you know, another death toll of nuclear.

576
00:35:15,260 --> 00:35:18,040
Isaiah:
I actually take the opposite view. I think that Fukushima was,

577
00:35:18,300 --> 00:35:20,720
Isaiah:
uh, on net will prove to be a very positive thing.

578
00:35:20,960 --> 00:35:23,780
Isaiah:
And the reason is, is because it was very similar to Three Mile Island,

579
00:35:24,280 --> 00:35:26,000
Isaiah:
right? It was zero people died.

580
00:35:26,180 --> 00:35:31,060
Isaiah:
There's maybe, maybe an argument that you can make that one person died, maybe, um.

581
00:35:31,710 --> 00:35:36,490
Isaiah:
But it had a very similar impact, right, in terms of public sentiment.

582
00:35:36,710 --> 00:35:39,730
Isaiah:
People immediately reacted the same way that they did for Through a Mile Island.

583
00:35:39,830 --> 00:35:44,090
Isaiah:
There was this huge thing. They evacuated tens of thousands of people from the area.

584
00:35:44,270 --> 00:35:47,890
Isaiah:
They shut down the nuclear industry in Japan for a couple of years.

585
00:35:48,090 --> 00:35:51,170
Isaiah:
The reason this was different is that this is the information age,

586
00:35:51,350 --> 00:35:53,570
Isaiah:
right? It happened in 2011. It happened in the age of the Internet.

587
00:35:53,830 --> 00:35:57,710
Isaiah:
And very quickly after this, people started to actually read the data.

588
00:35:57,730 --> 00:36:01,590
Isaiah:
And they realized, wait a minute, nobody died. And, you know,

589
00:36:01,670 --> 00:36:07,190
Isaiah:
the social impact of actually evacuating tens of thousands of people was orders

590
00:36:07,190 --> 00:36:09,190
Isaiah:
of magnitude worse than the event itself.

591
00:36:09,530 --> 00:36:13,410
Isaiah:
And the economic impact and even the death toll impact of shutting down all

592
00:36:13,410 --> 00:36:17,250
Isaiah:
the nuclear reactors in Japan was, again, orders of magnitude more damaging

593
00:36:17,250 --> 00:36:21,190
Isaiah:
to the Japanese than the actual event itself. And the fact that this happened

594
00:36:21,190 --> 00:36:23,290
Isaiah:
in the Internet age began to wake people up.

595
00:36:23,450 --> 00:36:26,730
Isaiah:
And you had a second backlash to that where the Japanese went back and they

596
00:36:26,730 --> 00:36:28,350
Isaiah:
said, we made a huge mistake.

597
00:36:28,510 --> 00:36:31,650
Isaiah:
Right. We made a really big mistake by evacuating tens of thousands of people

598
00:36:31,650 --> 00:36:35,610
Isaiah:
and by shutting down our nuclear industry. And they're beginning to turn all those plants back on.

599
00:36:35,850 --> 00:36:39,750
Isaiah:
And so I think that these are the two kind of factors that are bringing nuclear

600
00:36:39,750 --> 00:36:42,930
Isaiah:
fission back today is that it's the information age. Right.

601
00:36:43,050 --> 00:36:46,330
Isaiah:
Anybody can go and read about Fukushima. Anyone can read about,

602
00:36:46,370 --> 00:36:52,010
Isaiah:
you know, the Japanese decision to reverse, you know, the impacts of that and to turn plants back on.

603
00:36:52,590 --> 00:36:57,210
Isaiah:
And then again, just a massive return of rationality to the importance of energy in the Western world.

604
00:36:57,610 --> 00:37:01,890
Josh:
Yeah, 50 years is such a long time. And you mentioned the world of bits that we largely live in.

605
00:37:02,110 --> 00:37:05,290
Josh:
And for the people that are not familiar, the world of bits is basically the

606
00:37:05,290 --> 00:37:07,230
Josh:
computers, the ones and zeros that kind of run the world.

607
00:37:07,330 --> 00:37:10,150
Josh:
But what we're talking about now is the acceleration of the world of atoms,

608
00:37:10,310 --> 00:37:13,730
Josh:
which is the physical space, the meat space that we occupy right now.

609
00:37:13,730 --> 00:37:17,550
Josh:
And there's definitely this trend that I'm starting to see, and you mentioned,

610
00:37:17,990 --> 00:37:21,390
Josh:
in that people are starting to learn and get excited about this world of atoms.

611
00:37:21,510 --> 00:37:25,010
Josh:
How do we create these physical objects that can break these barriers that have

612
00:37:25,010 --> 00:37:27,010
Josh:
been left behind like energy 50 years ago?

613
00:37:27,090 --> 00:37:29,790
Josh:
So I'm curious about your take on all of this.

614
00:37:29,910 --> 00:37:33,250
Josh:
You co-founded a company called Valor. I'm curious...

615
00:37:33,940 --> 00:37:37,540
Josh:
So how you think Valor can solve the nuclear energy problem? What are you building?

616
00:37:37,740 --> 00:37:40,980
Josh:
For the people that are listening, you are sitting in front of what I believe

617
00:37:40,980 --> 00:37:43,180
Josh:
is called Ward Zero. It's your first prototype reactor.

618
00:37:43,320 --> 00:37:45,820
Josh:
So can you just explain to me kind of what you're, how you're tackling this

619
00:37:45,820 --> 00:37:48,300
Josh:
problem in the world of atoms, giving us energy through Valor?

620
00:37:48,640 --> 00:37:49,940
Isaiah:
Absolutely. So I'll tell you

621
00:37:49,940 --> 00:37:52,460
Isaiah:
about what we built here and then what we're going to build in the future.

622
00:37:52,680 --> 00:37:57,160
Isaiah:
So Ward Zero is the object standing behind me. This is what's called a non-nuclear prototype.

623
00:37:57,560 --> 00:38:01,760
Isaiah:
So essentially what we did is we built a nuclear reactor, but we didn't put uranium in it.

624
00:38:01,760 --> 00:38:04,900
Isaiah:
Right so that's kind of how you can understand what's behind this built a full nuclear reactor

625
00:38:04,900 --> 00:38:08,580
Isaiah:
you could put uranium in this thing with a couple of minor modifications and

626
00:38:08,580 --> 00:38:11,340
Isaiah:
it would actually turn on and it would split atoms now we don't do that

627
00:38:11,340 --> 00:38:14,740
Isaiah:
because essentially the paperwork to actually do that in the united states would

628
00:38:14,740 --> 00:38:17,880
Isaiah:
take four to five years and we don't have four to five years we have to do this

629
00:38:17,880 --> 00:38:21,680
Isaiah:
immediately right so build a full reactor and then what we put in it instead

630
00:38:21,680 --> 00:38:26,680
Isaiah:
is a silicon carbide silicon carbide is a is a great material it's an extremely

631
00:38:26,680 --> 00:38:29,880
Isaiah:
high temperature ceramic that's also a great electrical resistor.

632
00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:34,140
Isaiah:
And so what that means is that we can basically dump about 12 city blocks of

633
00:38:34,140 --> 00:38:38,960
Isaiah:
Los Angeles power into the core of this reactor, and we can simulate what a

634
00:38:38,960 --> 00:38:42,460
Isaiah:
nuclear fission reaction would be doing inside that core, which is essentially

635
00:38:42,460 --> 00:38:44,380
Isaiah:
generating a ton of heat, right?

636
00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:47,800
Isaiah:
And then what we do is we process that heat in the same way that we would if

637
00:38:47,800 --> 00:38:49,240
Isaiah:
this were uranium making the heat.

638
00:38:49,400 --> 00:38:54,300
Isaiah:
So this gives us a very, very high fidelity, real world simulation of what a

639
00:38:54,300 --> 00:38:55,540
Isaiah:
nuclear reactor would actually do.

640
00:38:55,980 --> 00:39:00,660
Isaiah:
And the next step is to essentially go rebuild this reactor one to one with

641
00:39:00,660 --> 00:39:03,460
Isaiah:
a couple of lessons that we've learned on how to weld this thing,

642
00:39:03,560 --> 00:39:06,840
Isaiah:
how to structure that thing, how to seal this thing, but actually put uranium

643
00:39:06,840 --> 00:39:10,760
Isaiah:
in it and turn it on and split atoms for the first time. So that's the next step for the company.

644
00:39:11,280 --> 00:39:13,000
Isaiah:
The vision of Valor is to.

645
00:39:13,620 --> 00:39:17,620
Isaiah:
Rather than building these, you know, massive, massive nuclear plants that we

646
00:39:17,620 --> 00:39:20,220
Isaiah:
did over the last 50 years, you had these like gigawatt scale reactors.

647
00:39:20,600 --> 00:39:24,480
Isaiah:
We believe that small reactors are better in a bunch of ways,

648
00:39:24,480 --> 00:39:28,340
Isaiah:
that this architecture is also better. This is a fundamentally safer nuclear reactor.

649
00:39:28,620 --> 00:39:32,200
Isaiah:
It uses graphite instead of water as a moderator, and we can talk about why that's safer.

650
00:39:32,920 --> 00:39:36,800
Isaiah:
But the plan is to, instead of building, you know, let's say a couple dozen

651
00:39:36,800 --> 00:39:41,460
Isaiah:
very large reactors, we want to build thousands and thousands of these smaller reactors.

652
00:39:41,920 --> 00:39:46,300
Isaiah:
Because, again, one of the drivers to cost is, you know, there's two drivers

653
00:39:46,300 --> 00:39:48,060
Isaiah:
of any physical good in terms of cost.

654
00:39:48,300 --> 00:39:52,180
Isaiah:
How big is it? How many you make, right? So we want to make small things that

655
00:39:52,180 --> 00:39:53,940
Isaiah:
you make a ton of, and that's going to make them really cheap.

656
00:39:54,080 --> 00:39:58,100
David:
Is the idea here that I'll be able to go down to my local Valor store and pick

657
00:39:58,100 --> 00:40:01,860
David:
up a nuclear reactor and plug it into my home? Or how does that actually like

658
00:40:01,860 --> 00:40:04,580
David:
plug into the grid and to start giving me energy?

659
00:40:04,900 --> 00:40:09,540
Isaiah:
Yeah, so I would say probably not for a while. Nuclear reactors... I'm surprised.

660
00:40:09,540 --> 00:40:12,220
David:
That the answer is reasonably yes at all to be honest

661
00:40:12,220 --> 00:40:15,580
Isaiah:
So i think over time humanity

662
00:40:15,580 --> 00:40:18,700
Isaiah:
continues to use nuclear fission more

663
00:40:18,700 --> 00:40:21,460
Isaiah:
and more and more it becomes the dominant source of energy in

664
00:40:21,460 --> 00:40:25,160
Isaiah:
the world but there's there's two questions at play there's like where does

665
00:40:25,160 --> 00:40:28,300
Isaiah:
the energy come from and then how does it get to you right and those are two

666
00:40:28,300 --> 00:40:32,600
Isaiah:
different things one of the nice things about nuclear fission is that you make

667
00:40:32,600 --> 00:40:36,700
Isaiah:
a ton of cheap energy in a location and then you can you can sort of firewall

668
00:40:36,700 --> 00:40:40,980
Isaiah:
the the nuclear-ness of that from the end user, right?

669
00:40:41,080 --> 00:40:44,300
Isaiah:
And the firewall there is that you transport the energy through a medium and

670
00:40:44,300 --> 00:40:47,320
Isaiah:
that medium is either electricity or it's also chemical energy,

671
00:40:47,500 --> 00:40:49,840
Isaiah:
right? And the chemical energy part of that is really interesting.

672
00:40:50,040 --> 00:40:53,060
Isaiah:
So our nuclear reactors, we'll make both. We'll make electricity.

673
00:40:53,140 --> 00:40:55,940
Isaiah:
You can get our electricity from a grid and it should be much cheaper.

674
00:40:56,180 --> 00:41:00,240
Isaiah:
We'll make electricity for AI data centers and those data centers will be getting

675
00:41:00,240 --> 00:41:01,460
Isaiah:
the best power rates in the world.

676
00:41:01,960 --> 00:41:04,640
Isaiah:
But also we'll make chemical fuels, right?

677
00:41:04,760 --> 00:41:07,840
Isaiah:
So we'll actually make hydrogen, we'll bond that hydrogen with CO2,

678
00:41:07,840 --> 00:41:12,580
Isaiah:
and we can actually make a synthetic fuel, we can make diesel, gasoline, jet fuel.

679
00:41:13,000 --> 00:41:16,960
Isaiah:
And you might get that in any of the places that you get those those chemicals today.

680
00:41:17,160 --> 00:41:19,860
Isaiah:
And those chemicals should be much cheaper. And so essentially,

681
00:41:19,900 --> 00:41:23,960
Isaiah:
if you think about what we're doing there, we're sort of, we're arbing the physical

682
00:41:23,960 --> 00:41:26,740
Isaiah:
infrastructure of hydrocarbons as a logistics platform.

683
00:41:27,160 --> 00:41:31,000
Isaiah:
And we're plugging nuclear into it, right? And why would you do that,

684
00:41:31,080 --> 00:41:32,420
Isaiah:
by the way? Right. Like what's the point of that?

685
00:41:32,720 --> 00:41:37,440
Isaiah:
Well, the point of that is that the hydrocarbon, think about hydrocarbons for a second as a grid.

686
00:41:37,700 --> 00:41:39,880
Isaiah:
All right. So we're familiar with like an electrical grid, right?

687
00:41:39,900 --> 00:41:43,220
Isaiah:
You have a bunch of wires connected and you push electrons through and people

688
00:41:43,220 --> 00:41:44,260
Isaiah:
get to consume that energy.

689
00:41:44,640 --> 00:41:48,200
Isaiah:
Hydrocarbons are also a grid. They're a liquid grid, right? They're a network

690
00:41:48,200 --> 00:41:51,820
Isaiah:
of pipelines and trucks and tanks that move them around.

691
00:41:52,100 --> 00:41:57,020
Isaiah:
So let me ask you, which one is bigger, right? Which one's moving more energy,

692
00:41:57,200 --> 00:41:59,820
Isaiah:
the electrical grid or the hydrocarbon grid.

693
00:42:00,300 --> 00:42:04,100
David:
I would imagine the hydrocarbon grid because that's the whole combustion engine

694
00:42:04,100 --> 00:42:07,560
David:
thing. Like how big is the combustion engine as a concept? I would imagine it's massive.

695
00:42:08,080 --> 00:42:13,880
Isaiah:
Here's a crazy stat for you. On the ocean today, there's a bunch of ships, right?

696
00:42:14,040 --> 00:42:17,540
Isaiah:
And those ships are burning hydrocarbons to propel themselves across the water.

697
00:42:18,100 --> 00:42:23,840
Isaiah:
The energy being consumed by ships on the ocean today is greater than the entire

698
00:42:23,840 --> 00:42:25,080
Isaiah:
electrical grid of the world.

699
00:42:26,180 --> 00:42:32,700
Isaiah:
Just just the ships. Correct. Just ships burning hydrocarbons are consuming

700
00:42:32,700 --> 00:42:36,540
Isaiah:
more energy than the entire global electrical grid. Right.

701
00:42:36,700 --> 00:42:37,560
Josh:
So that is a fun fact.

702
00:42:37,820 --> 00:42:39,000
David:
That is hydrocarbons.

703
00:42:39,440 --> 00:42:43,520
Isaiah:
Hydrocarbons are actually a much larger grid that's more distributed,

704
00:42:43,520 --> 00:42:47,480
Isaiah:
that's more flexible than electrical, the electrical grid today.

705
00:42:47,680 --> 00:42:51,200
Isaiah:
Right now, there are some downsides to hydrocarbons. Right. One of the big downsides

706
00:42:51,200 --> 00:42:54,300
Isaiah:
is that you're continuously adding CO2 to the atmosphere. you know,

707
00:42:54,540 --> 00:42:55,600
Isaiah:
every year that you use them.

708
00:42:56,100 --> 00:42:58,820
Isaiah:
Eventually, we want to stop doing that for a bunch of reasons.

709
00:42:59,000 --> 00:42:59,860
Isaiah:
It's not just climate change.

710
00:42:59,960 --> 00:43:03,360
Isaiah:
It's also the fact that, you know, eventually the CO2 level in the atmosphere

711
00:43:03,360 --> 00:43:08,660
Isaiah:
becomes, you know, too high for, you know, after about 600 ppm,

712
00:43:08,860 --> 00:43:11,640
Isaiah:
your brain function, you know, starts to go down those sorts of things.

713
00:43:11,960 --> 00:43:14,160
Isaiah:
So there are lots of reasons why over time, that's not sustainable.

714
00:43:14,500 --> 00:43:17,860
Isaiah:
But if you just think about it as a grid, right, think about it as just moving

715
00:43:17,860 --> 00:43:21,880
Isaiah:
energy around, the hydrocarbon grid, I would say is far better,

716
00:43:22,080 --> 00:43:26,140
Isaiah:
far better than the electrical grid and it's far larger and it has potential

717
00:43:26,140 --> 00:43:28,600
Isaiah:
to move terawatt hours of energy around.

718
00:43:29,260 --> 00:43:34,780
Isaiah:
Now, if you could fix the CO2 problem part of that and only get the logistics

719
00:43:34,780 --> 00:43:39,160
Isaiah:
part, you know, you would have essentially given yourself the ability to distribute

720
00:43:39,160 --> 00:43:43,760
Isaiah:
all of the world's energy from only a couple of points, which is great for verticalization.

721
00:43:44,920 --> 00:43:48,060
Isaiah:
And it's actually quite solvable. The way that you do that is you take the CO2

722
00:43:48,060 --> 00:43:52,360
Isaiah:
out of the atmosphere and you build it into a hydrocarbon, allow people to burn

723
00:43:52,360 --> 00:43:53,760
Isaiah:
it, which puts it back into the atmosphere.

724
00:43:53,980 --> 00:43:56,760
Isaiah:
And you take it back out, send it out, allow people to burn it,

725
00:43:56,860 --> 00:44:01,780
Isaiah:
puts it back in. you take it back out, and you've created a closed loop of CO2, right?

726
00:44:01,880 --> 00:44:04,340
Isaiah:
So you're not adding net new CO2 to the atmosphere.

727
00:44:04,720 --> 00:44:09,740
Isaiah:
Every year, you have a fixed rate of people, you know, CO2 ppm.

728
00:44:09,980 --> 00:44:13,520
Isaiah:
And you're essentially just using the atmosphere as a transport mechanism to

729
00:44:13,520 --> 00:44:15,180
Isaiah:
get your ingredients back to you again.

730
00:44:15,300 --> 00:44:19,300
Isaiah:
Because remember, CO2, you know, these, it's not carbon, that's energetic,

731
00:44:19,540 --> 00:44:22,780
Isaiah:
it's the structure of the molecule that's, you know, that's energetic.

732
00:44:23,040 --> 00:44:28,640
Isaiah:
And the nuclear fission is essentially infusing co2 and water uh into an energetic

733
00:44:28,640 --> 00:44:31,720
Isaiah:
form which is a hydrocarbon right you're ejecting the oxygen out of that now

734
00:44:31,720 --> 00:44:35,740
Isaiah:
you have an unoxidized chemical uh and i'm sorry i know i'm getting a little

735
00:44:35,740 --> 00:44:41,160
Isaiah:
bit uh chemistry you know bored here but uh that is essentially what we're what we're planning to do.

736
00:44:41,160 --> 00:44:43,740
Josh:
Yeah i'm gonna try to ask you this question in a way

737
00:44:43,740 --> 00:44:46,420
Josh:
that that you can explain to normal people where we don't go too deep in

738
00:44:46,420 --> 00:44:49,540
Josh:
chemistry but i'm curious about what makes these reactors different

739
00:44:49,540 --> 00:44:52,340
Josh:
than um i i know people there people

740
00:44:52,340 --> 00:44:55,360
Josh:
the pebble bed reactors are very popular the gen 4 reactors that are coming

741
00:44:55,360 --> 00:44:58,420
Josh:
they're much larger you mentioned modularity is one part of it but what are

742
00:44:58,420 --> 00:45:02,240
Josh:
the benefits aside from the small size aside from the modularity that you are

743
00:45:02,240 --> 00:45:05,540
Josh:
kind of taking advantage of relative to the size is it just size or is there

744
00:45:05,540 --> 00:45:08,760
Josh:
something else that's also going on behind the seeds or within the reactor that

745
00:45:08,760 --> 00:45:11,300
Josh:
that makes it more like it's more powerful and more efficient

746
00:45:12,090 --> 00:45:17,530
Isaiah:
So I would actually say that these reactors will be less powerful per size than

747
00:45:17,530 --> 00:45:18,970
Isaiah:
some of the reactors that have been built before.

748
00:45:19,150 --> 00:45:21,830
Isaiah:
The reason that we do that is that it makes it safer, right?

749
00:45:21,910 --> 00:45:26,970
Isaiah:
So one of our beliefs here is like safety is probably the most important driver of cost in nuclear.

750
00:45:27,170 --> 00:45:30,590
Isaiah:
If you can make a reactor that's 10 times safer, you can actually make it 10

751
00:45:30,590 --> 00:45:34,690
Isaiah:
times cheaper because it allows you to do it more often, more quickly deployed at scale.

752
00:45:35,170 --> 00:45:39,050
Isaiah:
So these will actually be a little bit less power dense than traditional light water reactors.

753
00:45:39,050 --> 00:45:41,690
Isaiah:
But we actually get to manufacture them we get to make

754
00:45:41,690 --> 00:45:44,570
Isaiah:
a ton of them and that makes them cheaper the really unique thing

755
00:45:44,570 --> 00:45:47,590
Isaiah:
here is that these reactors are just a lot hotter right so

756
00:45:47,590 --> 00:45:50,570
Isaiah:
the outlet temperature on these reactors will be around

757
00:45:50,570 --> 00:45:53,790
Isaiah:
800 850 degrees celsius that's compared

758
00:45:53,790 --> 00:45:57,190
Isaiah:
to 300 sometimes 350 degrees celsius

759
00:45:57,190 --> 00:46:00,950
Isaiah:
in a light water reactor that unlocks

760
00:46:00,950 --> 00:46:03,890
Isaiah:
two really important things so the way that you make energy

761
00:46:03,890 --> 00:46:06,850
Isaiah:
in a nuclear reactor traditionally is that you have

762
00:46:06,850 --> 00:46:09,550
Isaiah:
a very hot outlet temperature and then you

763
00:46:09,550 --> 00:46:12,370
Isaiah:
have ambient uh air at a

764
00:46:12,370 --> 00:46:15,170
Isaiah:
certain temperature as well and you can extract energy from the

765
00:46:15,170 --> 00:46:18,250
Isaiah:
difference between those two temperatures right and this is called carno

766
00:46:18,250 --> 00:46:20,850
Isaiah:
efficiency right so you have a hot a t hot and a

767
00:46:20,850 --> 00:46:24,350
Isaiah:
t cold and the difference between those temperatures governs the

768
00:46:24,350 --> 00:46:28,410
Isaiah:
maximum amount of energy they can get out of that for most plants around the

769
00:46:28,410 --> 00:46:33,050
Isaiah:
world this is 20 to 30 percent right of the of the total energy that you can

770
00:46:33,050 --> 00:46:37,250
Isaiah:
get out of that in a hydrocarbon engine which works a similar way you can push

771
00:46:37,250 --> 00:46:40,990
Isaiah:
you know into the mid 30s in you know very efficient.

772
00:46:42,380 --> 00:46:49,080
Isaiah:
Nat gas, combined cycle generators, you can push 50% total efficiency.

773
00:46:49,940 --> 00:46:55,100
Isaiah:
But this is all limited by the basic physics of the difference between your

774
00:46:55,100 --> 00:46:56,540
Isaiah:
hot side and your cold side.

775
00:46:56,920 --> 00:47:01,540
Isaiah:
The way to increase that diff and the way to increase the efficiency is essentially

776
00:47:01,540 --> 00:47:02,860
Isaiah:
just to make the difference larger.

777
00:47:03,060 --> 00:47:05,700
Isaiah:
The larger the difference between the cold side and the hot side,

778
00:47:05,860 --> 00:47:07,400
Isaiah:
the greater efficiency you can get out of that.

779
00:47:07,840 --> 00:47:14,400
Isaiah:
And it turns out that at 850C, you can actually get really efficient at producing electricity, right?

780
00:47:14,460 --> 00:47:15,840
Isaiah:
So we'll be significantly more

781
00:47:15,840 --> 00:47:19,660
Isaiah:
efficient at producing electricity than a traditional nuclear reactor.

782
00:47:19,880 --> 00:47:23,840
Isaiah:
Now, the other really interesting thing that gets unlocked here by doing high

783
00:47:23,840 --> 00:47:27,860
Isaiah:
temperatures is actually direct production of hydrogen, right?

784
00:47:28,040 --> 00:47:31,640
Isaiah:
So ideally, right, hydrogen is a chemical energy, right?

785
00:47:31,740 --> 00:47:36,300
Isaiah:
Pure hydrogen, because it's deoxidized, and the fact of oxygen in the atmosphere

786
00:47:36,300 --> 00:47:38,420
Isaiah:
means that it's chemical potential energy.

787
00:47:38,580 --> 00:47:41,080
Isaiah:
If you take that hydrogen and you combine it with the atmosphere,

788
00:47:41,340 --> 00:47:43,820
Isaiah:
you get water and you get a ton of energy, right?

789
00:47:43,960 --> 00:47:49,920
Isaiah:
So in theory, a really good thing to do with a nuclear reactor is to seed that process, right?

790
00:47:49,980 --> 00:47:54,520
Isaiah:
You get some water, you combine it with reactor energy, and you get free hydrogen.

791
00:47:54,540 --> 00:47:56,840
Isaiah:
And now that's a very valuable thing that you can go and sell.

792
00:47:57,000 --> 00:48:00,220
Isaiah:
You can combine it with CO2 to make a hydrocarbon. You can do a bunch of things with it.

793
00:48:00,760 --> 00:48:04,360
Isaiah:
Now, the way in the past that people have thought about nuclear to hydrogen

794
00:48:04,360 --> 00:48:09,680
Isaiah:
is to start with electricity, right?

795
00:48:09,860 --> 00:48:12,480
Isaiah:
So have a nuclear reactor that spins a turbine, makes electricity,

796
00:48:12,780 --> 00:48:16,680
Isaiah:
run the electricity through an electrolyzer, right, that electrolyzes water,

797
00:48:16,720 --> 00:48:18,100
Isaiah:
and then you get hydrogen out of it.

798
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:22,220
Isaiah:
The problem with this is that you get two efficiency hits right

799
00:48:22,220 --> 00:48:25,520
Isaiah:
so you get the efficiency hit of making uh electricity right

800
00:48:25,520 --> 00:48:28,860
Isaiah:
which as we know could be a you know a 60 70

801
00:48:28,860 --> 00:48:32,160
Isaiah:
hit to your efficiency you lose a ton of that energy just making the electricity

802
00:48:32,160 --> 00:48:36,020
Isaiah:
then you have the efficiency hit of running it through an electrolyzer right

803
00:48:36,020 --> 00:48:39,640
Isaiah:
and that electrolyzer also has an efficiency you know related to it as well

804
00:48:39,640 --> 00:48:42,860
Isaiah:
and you're losing a lot of that energy so by the time you've gone from uranium

805
00:48:42,860 --> 00:48:47,640
Isaiah:
fission in a core to chemical potential hydrogen you've lost a ton of energy in that process.

806
00:48:47,820 --> 00:48:50,220
Isaiah:
The other thing is you've added a lot of physical machinery,

807
00:48:50,460 --> 00:48:54,200
Isaiah:
right? So you've added a turbine and a generator and an electrolyzer.

808
00:48:54,420 --> 00:48:58,100
Isaiah:
And again, you want to make machines as small as possible and as simple as possible.

809
00:48:58,760 --> 00:49:04,300
Isaiah:
An interesting alternate to this is that you just use heat to split water, right?

810
00:49:04,420 --> 00:49:07,120
Isaiah:
So any chemical will actually decompose.

811
00:49:07,260 --> 00:49:10,740
Isaiah:
It'll break down at a certain temperature, right? So at a certain temperature,

812
00:49:10,960 --> 00:49:13,320
Isaiah:
every chemical compound will decompose.

813
00:49:13,860 --> 00:49:18,660
Isaiah:
And so in theory, you can essentially just get water hot enough from a nuclear

814
00:49:18,660 --> 00:49:20,920
Isaiah:
reactor to get free hydrogen out of it.

815
00:49:21,320 --> 00:49:25,440
Isaiah:
Now, in practicality, if you catalyze it properly, that temperature is somewhere

816
00:49:25,440 --> 00:49:27,520
Isaiah:
around 1600 to 1800 degrees Celsius.

817
00:49:27,920 --> 00:49:32,060
Isaiah:
That's too hot for us today. Someday we'll have reactors that run that hot, too hot for us today.

818
00:49:32,880 --> 00:49:37,200
Isaiah:
But what you can do is you can run that water through a couple of chemical cycles

819
00:49:37,200 --> 00:49:42,120
Isaiah:
and transform them into another chemical that has a much lower decomposition temperature.

820
00:49:42,480 --> 00:49:46,120
Isaiah:
So what I'm talking about here is something called the sulfur iodine cycle.

821
00:49:46,380 --> 00:49:49,880
Isaiah:
The sulfur iodine cycle is a chemical cycle that takes water,

822
00:49:50,220 --> 00:49:55,240
Isaiah:
makes two other acids out of that water, and then you use heat to decompose

823
00:49:55,240 --> 00:50:00,000
Isaiah:
those acids, and you get hydrogen out of that, and then you recycle the ingredients.

824
00:50:00,220 --> 00:50:02,740
Isaiah:
So sulfur and iodine, if you combine water,

825
00:50:03,380 --> 00:50:06,100
Isaiah:
with sulfur dioxide and iodine you get

826
00:50:06,100 --> 00:50:09,860
Isaiah:
two acids out of that you get a hydriotic acid and sulfuric

827
00:50:09,860 --> 00:50:13,060
Isaiah:
acid and you can actually decompose those two

828
00:50:13,060 --> 00:50:15,980
Isaiah:
acids uh just below the output temperature of

829
00:50:15,980 --> 00:50:20,920
Isaiah:
this reactor right so you can do it around 750 to 800 degrees celsius and they

830
00:50:20,920 --> 00:50:24,580
Isaiah:
will just thermally break down and you get the free hydrogen out of that um

831
00:50:24,580 --> 00:50:27,940
Isaiah:
so what are we left with well you don't need a turbine right because we're not

832
00:50:27,940 --> 00:50:33,100
Isaiah:
making electricity you don't need a generator and you just need a couple of

833
00:50:33,100 --> 00:50:34,300
Isaiah:
tanks of chemicals, right?

834
00:50:34,380 --> 00:50:37,020
Isaiah:
And need a good heat exchanger to do that thermal decomposition.

835
00:50:37,400 --> 00:50:41,740
Isaiah:
So we see this as an incredible way to add a much higher efficiency where you're

836
00:50:41,740 --> 00:50:45,140
Isaiah:
not limited by the Carnot cycle and you're not limited by the efficiency of

837
00:50:45,140 --> 00:50:48,760
Isaiah:
an electrolyzer to essentially just take reactor heat with very minimal moving

838
00:50:48,760 --> 00:50:52,160
Isaiah:
parts and just a couple of tanks of chemicals and make hydrogen.

839
00:50:52,360 --> 00:50:55,020
Isaiah:
And we think it'll be the cheapest hydrogen in the world. Sorry,

840
00:50:55,180 --> 00:50:58,800
Isaiah:
you told me to say that without chemistry and then there's a tonic chemistry. I'm sorry.

841
00:50:59,200 --> 00:51:02,300
David:
There was a lot of, yeah, chemistry and like matter. that

842
00:51:02,300 --> 00:51:05,260
David:
was a in the contrast of bits versus atoms

843
00:51:05,260 --> 00:51:08,420
David:
that was heavy on the atoms side of things yep and

844
00:51:08,420 --> 00:51:11,600
David:
uh maybe you could just like extrapolate like when we're

845
00:51:11,600 --> 00:51:15,400
David:
talking about atoms and moving atoms and manipulating atoms to produce the things

846
00:51:15,400 --> 00:51:19,420
David:
that we want the conversation starts with a lot of the stuff that you just said

847
00:51:19,420 --> 00:51:23,620
David:
first it starts with the getting the energy producing the energy in order to

848
00:51:23,620 --> 00:51:27,680
David:
manipulate atoms uh josh brought up this contrast of like for the last you know

849
00:51:27,680 --> 00:51:30,540
David:
30 years since the rise of the internet, the rise of Silicon Valley,

850
00:51:31,120 --> 00:51:34,340
David:
the world, humanity, has really been heavily invested into bits.

851
00:51:34,520 --> 00:51:37,260
David:
Like, how do we make the bits in the right order, the ones and zeros in the

852
00:51:37,260 --> 00:51:38,620
David:
right order to produce value?

853
00:51:38,880 --> 00:51:43,740
David:
And like, atoms has lagged in contrast to bits over the rise of the internet.

854
00:51:44,390 --> 00:51:47,210
David:
But you are getting really excited about atoms. Maybe you can,

855
00:51:47,210 --> 00:51:51,110
David:
can you give, get me and Josh and also our listeners, get them excited about atoms.

856
00:51:51,330 --> 00:51:56,110
David:
Like once we unlock having the right atoms in the right order to unlock energy,

857
00:51:56,630 --> 00:52:01,610
David:
how does the world of atoms get easier to change, easier to flip, flip a bit?

858
00:52:01,790 --> 00:52:06,530
David:
Like how do we get flipping atoms easy as flipping bits downstream of all of

859
00:52:06,530 --> 00:52:08,330
David:
this? Just get us excited about Matt Adams.

860
00:52:08,750 --> 00:52:11,790
Isaiah:
So I'm actually going to flip it around for you a little bit and say,

861
00:52:11,790 --> 00:52:14,830
Isaiah:
everyone has always been excited about atoms

862
00:52:14,830 --> 00:52:17,650
Isaiah:
like atoms is actually what we we have all cared

863
00:52:17,650 --> 00:52:20,630
Isaiah:
about for the last 50 years but we also care about money

864
00:52:20,630 --> 00:52:25,310
Isaiah:
right and it what's been true over the last like 30 to 40 years is like well

865
00:52:25,310 --> 00:52:29,310
Isaiah:
first of all the reason we care about money is generally because of atoms like

866
00:52:29,310 --> 00:52:32,870
Isaiah:
what do people do once they get money from let's say starting a sass company

867
00:52:32,870 --> 00:52:36,570
Isaiah:
and becoming a billionaire well they spend that money on atoms right they they

868
00:52:36,570 --> 00:52:39,590
Isaiah:
start to have a private chef, which makes them delicious food.

869
00:52:39,770 --> 00:52:43,050
Isaiah:
They get a private jet, which like flies them around wherever they want to go.

870
00:52:43,190 --> 00:52:46,790
Isaiah:
They get a beautiful house, they get a boat, right? So I would actually argue

871
00:52:46,790 --> 00:52:51,890
Isaiah:
like the world of atoms has always been the thing that is very interesting to people.

872
00:52:52,330 --> 00:52:56,350
Isaiah:
Now, the second thing is that there's this intellectual side that's also very

873
00:52:56,350 --> 00:53:00,230
Isaiah:
interesting to people, which is like the right way to order bits, right?

874
00:53:00,330 --> 00:53:04,530
Isaiah:
And that is like a captivating question in the mind that has,

875
00:53:04,550 --> 00:53:08,930
Isaiah:
you know, driven a generation of entrepreneurs and a generation of innovators and engineers.

876
00:53:09,450 --> 00:53:14,510
Isaiah:
But I think that's mostly just been driven by the fact that the world of bits

877
00:53:14,510 --> 00:53:18,230
Isaiah:
was really the only place you could be intellectually curious, right?

878
00:53:18,290 --> 00:53:21,410
Isaiah:
If you're a intellectually curious person, and you're an engineer,

879
00:53:21,590 --> 00:53:24,110
Isaiah:
and you have the option before you as a.

880
00:53:24,680 --> 00:53:26,960
Isaiah:
Look, life starts when you're in high school, right? So like,

881
00:53:27,080 --> 00:53:30,580
Isaiah:
when you're in high school, and the options in front of you are opening a laptop,

882
00:53:30,580 --> 00:53:35,740
Isaiah:
and creating something, right, by the end of the day, right, by the end of the day,

883
00:53:35,940 --> 00:53:39,520
Isaiah:
as a 17 year old with a laptop, you can have created something that's functional,

884
00:53:39,700 --> 00:53:40,920
Isaiah:
and maybe even makes you some money.

885
00:53:41,080 --> 00:53:43,600
Isaiah:
And a couple years later, you could be making a lot of money.

886
00:53:43,760 --> 00:53:47,620
Isaiah:
And in five years, you could be a millionaire, right? Like, the world of bits

887
00:53:47,620 --> 00:53:49,020
Isaiah:
was the place that that happened.

888
00:53:49,360 --> 00:53:55,260
Isaiah:
So I think that our obsession with bits is actually more an obsession with innovation.

889
00:53:55,520 --> 00:53:58,280
Isaiah:
It's an obsession with discovery and with engineering.

890
00:53:58,620 --> 00:54:01,340
Isaiah:
And the world of bits was the only place you could really do that.

891
00:54:01,760 --> 00:54:05,800
Isaiah:
So then we have to back up and say, like, why was bits the only place you could do that?

892
00:54:05,960 --> 00:54:11,040
Isaiah:
Well, there's two reasons. Like, one is the simple, like, political answer, right?

893
00:54:11,120 --> 00:54:15,180
Isaiah:
Which is like, it became very hard to do things in the world of atoms in the West.

894
00:54:15,320 --> 00:54:18,520
Isaiah:
We added an enormous amount of federal regulation over everything that moves.

895
00:54:19,120 --> 00:54:22,760
Isaiah:
And we didn't do that in bits, right? And so a 17-year-old could open a laptop

896
00:54:22,760 --> 00:54:26,160
Isaiah:
and create something with almost no interaction with regulation.

897
00:54:26,620 --> 00:54:32,140
Isaiah:
Whereas, you know, just trying to, you know, make a sample rocket,

898
00:54:32,300 --> 00:54:36,100
Isaiah:
you're wondering like, oh, am I, you know, south of some sort of like regulation

899
00:54:36,100 --> 00:54:39,940
Isaiah:
here that says that I can't have, you know, this chemical in this room and that sort of thing.

900
00:54:40,480 --> 00:54:44,820
Isaiah:
And so there's just a very quick, easy path to being an engineer,

901
00:54:44,940 --> 00:54:48,080
Isaiah:
to being an innovator, to being somebody who's intellectually curious with bits.

902
00:54:48,500 --> 00:54:51,720
Isaiah:
The other thing, though, is that it's the second thing we talked about where

903
00:54:51,720 --> 00:54:56,900
Isaiah:
there is a fundamental limitation in the world of atoms that hasn't existed

904
00:54:56,900 --> 00:54:59,480
Isaiah:
in bits in terms of like cycle time, right?

905
00:54:59,600 --> 00:55:02,000
Isaiah:
Like, so the fact that if you're sitting in front of a laptop,

906
00:55:02,000 --> 00:55:05,060
Isaiah:
you can have a piece of software at the end of the day that's doing something cool.

907
00:55:05,480 --> 00:55:07,720
Isaiah:
Whereas, you know, if you have a physical thing in your mind,

908
00:55:07,760 --> 00:55:09,640
Isaiah:
it maybe takes a couple of weeks, right?

909
00:55:10,940 --> 00:55:14,640
Isaiah:
I think that's also changing. And that's what I'm really, really excited about, right?

910
00:55:14,780 --> 00:55:18,980
Isaiah:
The things that we talked about before, you have energy, intelligence, and dexterity.

911
00:55:19,200 --> 00:55:23,420
Isaiah:
As intelligence and dexterity get cheaper, and energy gets cheaper,

912
00:55:23,600 --> 00:55:29,400
Isaiah:
I believe that we will start to play with matter in the same way that we play with bits, right?

913
00:55:29,520 --> 00:55:31,820
Isaiah:
Life starts in high school, okay? It starts where you play.

914
00:55:32,000 --> 00:55:34,820
Isaiah:
The reason that we have so many incredible software engineers and so much software

915
00:55:34,820 --> 00:55:38,920
Isaiah:
is that people play with computers when they are in high school, right?

916
00:55:39,080 --> 00:55:42,080
Isaiah:
And literally play, We're playing video games.

917
00:55:42,200 --> 00:55:45,180
Isaiah:
A lot of software engineers that I know got into software because they were

918
00:55:45,180 --> 00:55:47,560
Isaiah:
playing video games and it gave them this love of computers.

919
00:55:47,760 --> 00:55:51,300
Isaiah:
And then they started modding the software and they wanted it to do cooler things.

920
00:55:51,460 --> 00:55:54,640
Isaiah:
And that taught them software engineering because they want to make an extension

921
00:55:54,640 --> 00:55:56,080
Isaiah:
to Minecraft, something like that.

922
00:55:57,240 --> 00:56:01,720
Isaiah:
And I think that we're going to start playing with atoms. What would playing with atoms look like?

923
00:56:01,840 --> 00:56:07,060
Isaiah:
Well, it would look like talking to an AI that runs a CNC machine or runs a 3D printer.

924
00:56:07,240 --> 00:56:10,120
Isaiah:
And you actually can start to get these cycle times again. You can maybe by

925
00:56:10,120 --> 00:56:12,220
Isaiah:
the end of the day, be holding the thing that you thought about.

926
00:56:12,380 --> 00:56:15,000
Isaiah:
And then the next day you tweak it, you make it better. You could be holding

927
00:56:15,000 --> 00:56:16,560
Isaiah:
the physical object that you were thinking about.

928
00:56:17,040 --> 00:56:21,640
Isaiah:
I don't think I need to convince people that that's more exciting than software, right?

929
00:56:21,740 --> 00:56:24,780
Isaiah:
Like you imagine a drone

930
00:56:24,780 --> 00:56:27,920
Isaiah:
that can fly you around right and within a

931
00:56:27,920 --> 00:56:31,840
Isaiah:
couple days you you're sitting on it and it's in the air right like that's that's

932
00:56:31,840 --> 00:56:35,940
Isaiah:
the future that we that you know i would like to see and that i think i think

933
00:56:35,940 --> 00:56:40,740
Isaiah:
happens in the next you know 10 to 20 years as dexterity gets cheaper as intelligence

934
00:56:40,740 --> 00:56:44,760
Isaiah:
gets cheaper i don't think i will have to convince many people to be to be tinkering

935
00:56:44,760 --> 00:56:47,780
Isaiah:
with you know the real world once it becomes possible to do that again.

936
00:56:48,490 --> 00:56:52,230
Josh:
Yeah, that sounds right. And it feels like the world of atoms as that accelerates

937
00:56:52,230 --> 00:56:56,190
Josh:
will be even more accessible and more, I guess, quality of life improving for

938
00:56:56,190 --> 00:56:57,630
Josh:
the average person than the world of bits.

939
00:56:57,990 --> 00:57:00,070
Josh:
I feel like with the world of bits and correct me where I'm wrong,

940
00:57:00,150 --> 00:57:04,030
Josh:
but a lot of times you are extracting value from software or maybe you're injecting

941
00:57:04,030 --> 00:57:05,190
Josh:
yourself into social media.

942
00:57:05,310 --> 00:57:08,070
Josh:
You're just kind of reading and writing with this thing, but it doesn't extrapolate

943
00:57:08,070 --> 00:57:11,510
Josh:
out too much into the real world. So when we do have this accessibility,

944
00:57:11,570 --> 00:57:14,410
Josh:
I think about myself and where I could use an abundance of energy.

945
00:57:14,510 --> 00:57:16,590
Josh:
My car, for example, it costs 20 something cents per kilowatt.

946
00:57:16,650 --> 00:57:19,910
Josh:
If we get that down to free, it becomes much easier to get around.

947
00:57:20,070 --> 00:57:21,450
Josh:
But even things where we're building

948
00:57:21,450 --> 00:57:24,870
Josh:
humanoid robots and these things can probably be more cost effective.

949
00:57:25,110 --> 00:57:29,050
Josh:
I'm curious kind of if you can if you have any fun or interesting examples to

950
00:57:29,050 --> 00:57:33,290
Josh:
get people excited about what what it actually looks like for the average person.

951
00:57:33,430 --> 00:57:38,350
Josh:
Like how is how's my day actually improved as we get this abundance of energy that's much cheaper?

952
00:57:38,350 --> 00:57:42,910
Isaiah:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here's just a really like everyday person example.

953
00:57:43,290 --> 00:57:47,190
Isaiah:
The reason that your dishwasher sucks is because of energy regulation, right?

954
00:57:47,310 --> 00:57:51,690
Isaiah:
The reason that you can't just like throw an entire plate of food into the dishwasher

955
00:57:51,690 --> 00:57:55,770
Isaiah:
without having to do any wiping, like, all right, when you're done eating food,

956
00:57:55,970 --> 00:57:59,410
Isaiah:
you should basically just pick up the plate in front of you and like throw it.

957
00:57:59,880 --> 00:58:02,840
Isaiah:
To a machine and the machine does the rest right and

958
00:58:02,840 --> 00:58:05,360
Isaiah:
like the next time you're ready to eat food you like pick up a plate you put

959
00:58:05,360 --> 00:58:08,140
Isaiah:
food on it and you like throw it back to the machine that's how this should

960
00:58:08,140 --> 00:58:12,140
Isaiah:
work and the only reason that it doesn't work that way is actually energy regulation

961
00:58:12,140 --> 00:58:15,880
Isaiah:
it's called energy star there's a there's a fleet of regulations that we've

962
00:58:15,880 --> 00:58:20,860
Isaiah:
put around how our appliances use energy that has essentially forced the industry to,

963
00:58:22,240 --> 00:58:25,920
Isaiah:
create these machines around a function of regulation why

964
00:58:25,920 --> 00:58:28,920
Isaiah:
do like dishwashers and washing machines like

965
00:58:28,920 --> 00:58:31,820
Isaiah:
seem like they don't really get that much better and the user interface

966
00:58:31,820 --> 00:58:35,200
Isaiah:
doesn't change that much it's essentially because we're solving for energy regulations

967
00:58:35,200 --> 00:58:38,300
Isaiah:
right so in an energy abundant future like the

968
00:58:38,300 --> 00:58:42,960
Isaiah:
machines should just do the annoying stuff for you you know we're 50 years from

969
00:58:42,960 --> 00:58:46,460
Isaiah:
the invention of i mean probably more than that of the dishwasher and it's like

970
00:58:46,460 --> 00:58:51,360
Isaiah:
not that different of an experience um so i i would i would say like let's get

971
00:58:51,360 --> 00:58:55,400
Isaiah:
way more creative like what is what does living in a house look like well it

972
00:58:55,400 --> 00:58:57,000
Isaiah:
looks like just doing what you enjoy,

973
00:58:57,520 --> 00:59:00,840
Isaiah:
and you know when you're like literally throw it i think that'd be pretty sick

974
00:59:00,840 --> 00:59:04,440
Isaiah:
like i want i want to see i want to come up with like a dishwasher of the future

975
00:59:04,440 --> 00:59:07,580
Isaiah:
where you literally throw it that would be sick um oh.

976
00:59:07,580 --> 00:59:08,080
Josh:
That makes me

977
00:59:08,080 --> 00:59:11,220
Isaiah:
Real happy and like all of your your clothes

978
00:59:11,220 --> 00:59:14,060
Isaiah:
like your dishwasher your washing machine should not just

979
00:59:14,060 --> 00:59:16,920
Isaiah:
first of all you shouldn't load it like what is loading it that's nonsense like

980
00:59:16,920 --> 00:59:19,680
Isaiah:
i want to throw my clothes at the at the basket and it just comes

981
00:59:19,680 --> 00:59:22,520
Isaiah:
back folded right my my washing machine should fold

982
00:59:22,520 --> 00:59:26,060
Isaiah:
my clothes too and should put them back in the drawer and um

983
00:59:26,060 --> 00:59:28,900
Isaiah:
and you know like that that sort of thing is like very very obvious

984
00:59:28,900 --> 00:59:32,600
Isaiah:
to me maybe that's through humanoids maybe that's through you know just better

985
00:59:32,600 --> 00:59:36,560
Isaiah:
dishwashers and the concept of a dishwasher becomes uh becomes very different

986
00:59:36,560 --> 00:59:41,300
Isaiah:
but all of these things are are unlocked by by energy now something that's very

987
00:59:41,300 --> 00:59:44,220
Isaiah:
motivating to me i talked about the dishwashers and the washing machines because

988
00:59:44,220 --> 00:59:48,400
Isaiah:
that's like an everyman thing but like i'm also extremely motivated by by outer space

989
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:53,980
Isaiah:
Right. And there's no formulation where we are man among the stars,

990
00:59:54,280 --> 00:59:59,500
Isaiah:
man on the moon, man in Mars without abundant energy. And that's what's really, really exciting to me.

991
01:00:00,100 --> 01:00:04,720
Isaiah:
Energy is essentially the biggest tool that you need to go and make the solar

992
01:00:04,720 --> 01:00:07,260
Isaiah:
system a fun place to be for humans.

993
01:00:07,500 --> 01:00:11,380
Isaiah:
You know, it's how you can terraform a planet. It's how you can create habitations.

994
01:00:11,580 --> 01:00:15,680
Isaiah:
You know, it's how you can create, you know, big floating cities above Venus.

995
01:00:16,420 --> 01:00:19,480
Isaiah:
And it's that's you know there's lots of mechanical problems to solve in there

996
01:00:19,480 --> 01:00:23,480
Isaiah:
but again there's an extent to which mechanical problems will be solved by intelligence

997
01:00:23,480 --> 01:00:26,680
Isaiah:
right intelligence and dexterity and essentially you just need a lot of energy

998
01:00:26,680 --> 01:00:28,220
Isaiah:
to do it that's what i'm really excited about.

999
01:00:28,220 --> 01:00:32,200
Josh:
So i feel like there's probably these these two core pillars that people can

1000
01:00:32,200 --> 01:00:35,700
Josh:
get really excited it's about how this energy affects their everyday life and

1001
01:00:35,700 --> 01:00:39,100
Josh:
we could probably have a full podcast conversation about the interesting new

1002
01:00:39,100 --> 01:00:41,460
Josh:
ways that you could design things that we use every day to be improved.

1003
01:00:41,640 --> 01:00:46,000
Josh:
But it's also the dreamer vision, where now because we have this new abundant

1004
01:00:46,000 --> 01:00:49,880
Josh:
energy unlocked, we can dream about going to the stars and the downstream effects of that.

1005
01:00:49,980 --> 01:00:53,160
Josh:
We had Sean McGuire on the show fairly recently, and he was talking about how

1006
01:00:53,160 --> 01:00:56,080
Josh:
focusing on something like Mars has downstream effects for people back at home,

1007
01:00:56,400 --> 01:00:59,840
Josh:
where in order to get to Mars, we need that nuclear react that fits in a suitcase,

1008
01:00:59,840 --> 01:01:01,580
Josh:
and we need all these new technologies.

1009
01:01:01,740 --> 01:01:04,440
Josh:
So I think, and I'm hopeful based on what you're saying, is that we will get

1010
01:01:04,440 --> 01:01:08,040
Josh:
all these downstream effects hopefully fairly soon, or at least directionally

1011
01:01:08,040 --> 01:01:10,500
Josh:
we're headed towards that now in the way that we weren't in the past.

1012
01:01:10,700 --> 01:01:12,400
Josh:
I'm curious what you think about timelines.

1013
01:01:12,680 --> 01:01:15,880
Josh:
When will people start to notice the effects of this cheaper energy?

1014
01:01:16,040 --> 01:01:20,420
Josh:
When will we start to have dishwashers that can catch the dishes or robots that

1015
01:01:20,420 --> 01:01:23,840
Josh:
can fold our clothes in a way that's kind of accessible for the average person to use?

1016
01:01:24,940 --> 01:01:28,920
Isaiah:
I think that is entirely limited by entrepreneurs, right?

1017
01:01:29,060 --> 01:01:32,300
Isaiah:
So when we think of like tech today and we think of like startups today,

1018
01:01:32,740 --> 01:01:37,380
Isaiah:
we're all we're really talking about is like young, crazy people who have some

1019
01:01:37,380 --> 01:01:41,640
Isaiah:
like wild vision of how a dishwasher should actually catch your plate and then

1020
01:01:41,640 --> 01:01:43,800
Isaiah:
decide to go make that thing a reality.

1021
01:01:44,060 --> 01:01:47,180
Isaiah:
And the fundamental motivation for that is twofold.

1022
01:01:47,320 --> 01:01:50,080
Isaiah:
Like one, they want to imprint their will on the universe and they want,

1023
01:01:50,200 --> 01:01:52,680
Isaiah:
you know, every single home to have a dishwasher that catches your dishes.

1024
01:01:52,680 --> 01:01:55,880
Isaiah:
Two they want to become a billionaire or a centimillionaire or

1025
01:01:55,880 --> 01:01:59,300
Isaiah:
whatever um the uh becoming

1026
01:01:59,300 --> 01:02:02,500
Isaiah:
a centimillionaire and the possibility of imprinting your your will

1027
01:02:02,500 --> 01:02:07,240
Isaiah:
on reality has been mostly impossible in the physical world in the west right

1028
01:02:07,240 --> 01:02:10,980
Isaiah:
different in in you know other countries in the world specifically china but

1029
01:02:10,980 --> 01:02:15,600
Isaiah:
in the west this has not been a path because of not enough energy and also because

1030
01:02:15,600 --> 01:02:19,300
Isaiah:
of very stringent regulation that makes it just difficult for innovation to

1031
01:02:19,300 --> 01:02:21,860
Isaiah:
happen and difficult for companies to scale.

1032
01:02:22,380 --> 01:02:25,120
Isaiah:
I think both of those things are heading in the right direction right now,

1033
01:02:25,200 --> 01:02:29,020
Isaiah:
which is that you see tons of entrepreneurs suddenly realizing that you can

1034
01:02:29,020 --> 01:02:31,140
Isaiah:
become a billionaire by making something cool.

1035
01:02:31,540 --> 01:02:34,280
Isaiah:
Impulse Labs is a great example of this, right? Sam is a buddy.

1036
01:02:34,660 --> 01:02:37,920
Isaiah:
He was like, Stowe's should be 100 times better than they are right now,

1037
01:02:38,280 --> 01:02:39,540
Isaiah:
right? And that's what he's doing.

1038
01:02:39,700 --> 01:02:43,620
Isaiah:
So I think there will be a ton more people who go out and do things like that.

1039
01:02:43,880 --> 01:02:48,220
Isaiah:
The second side is the regulation side. I think we're seeing a lot a fundamental

1040
01:02:48,220 --> 01:02:51,160
Isaiah:
change in how we think about regulation, especially at the federal level,

1041
01:02:51,300 --> 01:02:52,940
Isaiah:
that will affect that, you know, significantly.

1042
01:02:53,810 --> 01:02:58,590
Isaiah:
But it's it's gated on people listening to this podcast like it's gated to to

1043
01:02:58,590 --> 01:03:03,310
Isaiah:
young people in high school who are like, I have a different vision for what your couch should be.

1044
01:03:03,530 --> 01:03:05,990
Isaiah:
I think the couch should be way sicker than it is right now.

1045
01:03:06,130 --> 01:03:07,710
Isaiah:
And I'm going to become a billionaire doing that.

1046
01:03:08,090 --> 01:03:11,710
Josh:
That's a future that seems really excited that I can get very pumped about.

1047
01:03:11,850 --> 01:03:14,670
Josh:
It feels like the future ahead is actually going to look like the future.

1048
01:03:14,790 --> 01:03:18,390
Josh:
When I look out over New York City, it will probably look materially different

1049
01:03:18,390 --> 01:03:20,810
Josh:
than over the next decade than it did in the past decade.

1050
01:03:20,930 --> 01:03:23,570
Josh:
So that's a future I think a lot of people can get super excited about.

1051
01:03:23,570 --> 01:03:26,330
Isaiah:
This is a great point, by the way. And in the future, looking like the future

1052
01:03:26,330 --> 01:03:27,970
Isaiah:
is like also why we did this.

1053
01:03:28,070 --> 01:03:32,650
Isaiah:
You know, we have a bunch of people on Twitter. I collect Twitter haters. It's very fun.

1054
01:03:33,150 --> 01:03:37,070
Isaiah:
And we're like, why does your nuclear reactor look like a video game or like,

1055
01:03:37,210 --> 01:03:39,210
Isaiah:
you know, what's going on here? And like the answer is.

1056
01:03:39,310 --> 01:03:41,670
Josh:
It reminded me almost like an NVIDIA GPU type thing. It looks very cool.

1057
01:03:42,090 --> 01:03:45,550
Isaiah:
You know, I tried to make it not look like a GPU. It's very,

1058
01:03:45,710 --> 01:03:48,650
Isaiah:
very hard to make a vertical box not look like a GPU.

1059
01:03:48,910 --> 01:03:52,930
Isaiah:
It's just kind of what they look like. But, you know, it is very futuristic.

1060
01:03:53,190 --> 01:03:55,230
Isaiah:
It's Tron. It's Star Trek.

1061
01:03:55,550 --> 01:03:58,390
Isaiah:
And, yeah, the reason is absolutely the future should look like the future.

1062
01:03:58,990 --> 01:04:02,810
Isaiah:
And, you know, when you're walking into a nuclear reactor that was built in

1063
01:04:02,810 --> 01:04:07,950
Isaiah:
the year 2025, it should not feel like you're at like a hospital switchboard in the 1970s.

1064
01:04:08,270 --> 01:04:10,450
Isaiah:
And that's definitely what we're going for here.

1065
01:04:10,570 --> 01:04:14,230
David:
For the podcast listeners that are not watching the video, Isaiah's background

1066
01:04:14,230 --> 01:04:19,770
David:
is the most sci-fi industrial looking thing. It looks like you just opened the

1067
01:04:19,770 --> 01:04:21,450
David:
first level in Doom and you're on Mars.

1068
01:04:22,090 --> 01:04:27,130
David:
While he was talking, a man in a Segway just zipped on by, going like 20 miles an hour.

1069
01:04:27,310 --> 01:04:31,090
David:
And it was extremely distracting because it was a little bit surreal just watching

1070
01:04:31,090 --> 01:04:34,050
David:
this man zipping around this factory floor with a nuclear power reactor.

1071
01:04:34,350 --> 01:04:37,630
Isaiah:
I didn't realize that. That's great. Sometimes when I'm on calls,

1072
01:04:37,830 --> 01:04:41,550
Isaiah:
people think that this is a fake background until I see a forklift go by,

1073
01:04:41,670 --> 01:04:44,290
Isaiah:
you know, carrying a pallet. And they're like, oh, that's real. That's happening.

1074
01:04:45,060 --> 01:04:47,940
Josh:
It's very real. Well, there's one more topic that I want to touch on that's

1075
01:04:47,940 --> 01:04:50,380
Josh:
very front of mind for us particularly here.

1076
01:04:51,180 --> 01:04:55,440
Josh:
Limitless is how we're powering kind of this AI and the intelligence revolution

1077
01:04:55,440 --> 01:04:59,180
Josh:
and how we're doing these data centers and kind of how we power the rest of

1078
01:04:59,180 --> 01:05:01,040
Josh:
everything. So these are modular reactors.

1079
01:05:01,200 --> 01:05:03,320
Josh:
I understand that you can use them in clusters.

1080
01:05:03,500 --> 01:05:05,820
Josh:
You could kind of stack them on top of each other to create data.

1081
01:05:06,580 --> 01:05:08,560
Josh:
What I understand also is companies

1082
01:05:08,560 --> 01:05:14,680
Josh:
like XAI and companies like OpenAI are kind of energy constrained.

1083
01:05:15,000 --> 01:05:19,240
Josh:
And what I'm curious to ask you about is, will this technology be capable of

1084
01:05:19,240 --> 01:05:20,840
Josh:
powering these data centers, one?

1085
01:05:21,000 --> 01:05:26,680
Josh:
And then is it actually powerful enough or is it modular enough that we could

1086
01:05:26,680 --> 01:05:29,340
Josh:
scale that across the country to the average person? So, like,

1087
01:05:29,480 --> 01:05:32,460
Josh:
will we be able to power data centers? Will we be able to power my neighborhood?

1088
01:05:33,260 --> 01:05:37,020
Josh:
How does that kind of distribution of these reactors work as you start to roll them out?

1089
01:05:37,950 --> 01:05:41,430
Isaiah:
Yeah. So this is, you know, just good business sense at this point.

1090
01:05:41,550 --> 01:05:43,430
Isaiah:
You know, what, how do you actually go and scale a business?

1091
01:05:43,670 --> 01:05:47,550
Isaiah:
I would love if our reactors in the next five years could power every American home.

1092
01:05:47,970 --> 01:05:51,850
Isaiah:
There are business constraints to that, regulatory constraints to that.

1093
01:05:51,990 --> 01:05:53,470
Isaiah:
I think the easiest thing for Valor

1094
01:05:53,470 --> 01:05:57,930
Isaiah:
Atomics to do today is to go help AI achieve all of its goals, right?

1095
01:05:58,110 --> 01:06:01,850
Isaiah:
Help all of the hyperscalers get all the power that they need to win the AI

1096
01:06:01,850 --> 01:06:06,750
Isaiah:
race to make sure that the United States of America is the most dominant AI country in the world.

1097
01:06:07,410 --> 01:06:11,010
Isaiah:
That's a massive, massive problem that we're going to solve in the next five years.

1098
01:06:11,610 --> 01:06:15,330
Isaiah:
Now, beyond that, yes, I'm very excited about that energy getting into your

1099
01:06:15,330 --> 01:06:17,710
Isaiah:
hands. And I think there are two ways that that can happen.

1100
01:06:18,070 --> 01:06:22,450
Isaiah:
The one way is, you know, we go and build, you know, small reactors around the country, right?

1101
01:06:22,530 --> 01:06:26,310
Isaiah:
So we have four of these units next to your neighborhood, that sort of thing.

1102
01:06:27,010 --> 01:06:30,770
Isaiah:
Another really interesting way, though, is that we just make the hydrocarbons

1103
01:06:30,770 --> 01:06:35,430
Isaiah:
that the world consumes, right? So if you're going to get on a jet aircraft

1104
01:06:35,430 --> 01:06:40,390
Isaiah:
in about five years, I hope that that fuel is made by Valor Atomics Reactors.

1105
01:06:40,510 --> 01:06:44,070
Isaiah:
And I hope that that fuel is about a third the cost that it is today.

1106
01:06:44,530 --> 01:06:48,110
Isaiah:
And because fuel is the largest operating cost of an airline,

1107
01:06:48,230 --> 01:06:50,010
Isaiah:
I hope that your plane ticket is much cheaper.

1108
01:06:50,590 --> 01:06:54,150
Isaiah:
And if you're going to be driving on a bus or you're going to be driving on

1109
01:06:54,150 --> 01:06:58,570
Isaiah:
a truck or you're getting goods delivered to your house from a semi truck,

1110
01:06:58,570 --> 01:07:01,470
Isaiah:
I hope that all of those things are much, much cheaper because they're buying

1111
01:07:01,470 --> 01:07:04,070
Isaiah:
Valor Atomics fuel, which is a whole lot cheaper than refining oil.

1112
01:07:04,350 --> 01:07:08,270
Isaiah:
And then in the long term, I think absolutely our reactors are powering the

1113
01:07:08,270 --> 01:07:09,050
Isaiah:
grid all around the world.

1114
01:07:09,190 --> 01:07:12,970
Josh:
I'm curious about the global energy mix, kind of how nuclear,

1115
01:07:13,170 --> 01:07:14,890
Josh:
how prescient nuclear is relative to others.

1116
01:07:15,010 --> 01:07:17,990
Josh:
So we're burning lots of fossil fuels. We have a lot of solar energy.

1117
01:07:18,530 --> 01:07:21,870
Josh:
Does the equilibrium eventually balance out to a mix of those three?

1118
01:07:22,010 --> 01:07:24,050
Josh:
Or do you see a future in which it's actually all just nuclear?

1119
01:07:24,050 --> 01:07:29,630
Isaiah:
I believe that the power mix in the next, let's say, 50 years is going to become 99.1.

1120
01:07:29,950 --> 01:07:35,790
Isaiah:
99 nuclear fission, 1%, you know, other things. I think that solar will always have...

1121
01:07:36,800 --> 01:07:40,340
Isaiah:
Some applicability in remote places, right? There's always going to be that

1122
01:07:40,340 --> 01:07:43,740
Isaiah:
one place that you want to be where there's no infrastructure and you just need

1123
01:07:43,740 --> 01:07:46,980
Isaiah:
a bit of power to run some compute, you know, to keep yourself warm.

1124
01:07:47,320 --> 01:07:49,040
Isaiah:
And it's hard to beat a solar panel for that.

1125
01:07:49,560 --> 01:07:54,100
Isaiah:
But in terms of the massive, massive volumes that humanity needs going forward

1126
01:07:54,100 --> 01:07:57,240
Isaiah:
to power AI, to power robotics, it's going to be nuclear.

1127
01:07:57,500 --> 01:08:01,600
Isaiah:
And it's in even hydrocarbons, right? Most of the world's energy today is hydrocarbons.

1128
01:08:01,800 --> 01:08:05,640
Isaiah:
And if those hydrocarbons become just a transport mechanism for nuclear power,

1129
01:08:05,700 --> 01:08:08,240
Isaiah:
I think you're going to see a world of 99.1.

1130
01:08:08,380 --> 01:08:10,800
Isaiah:
And I think that's going to be a much cheaper way. And we're going to it's going

1131
01:08:10,800 --> 01:08:11,500
Isaiah:
to be much more abundant.

1132
01:08:11,840 --> 01:08:16,160
David:
Isaiah, as we wrap up this podcast, and you get back to work working on a literal

1133
01:08:16,160 --> 01:08:19,700
David:
nuclear reactor that's in your background, what, what are you going to do first?

1134
01:08:19,800 --> 01:08:21,540
David:
Like, seriously, what's next for you?

1135
01:08:21,680 --> 01:08:24,160
David:
What are your priorities for this week for this month?

1136
01:08:24,640 --> 01:08:26,940
David:
Where are you in the arc of what you're trying to build?

1137
01:08:27,120 --> 01:08:32,160
Isaiah:
Absolutely. The next goal for Valor Atomics is essentially to go rebuild this

1138
01:08:32,160 --> 01:08:35,460
Isaiah:
thing one to one, put uranium in it and split atoms for the first time.

1139
01:08:35,600 --> 01:08:36,980
Isaiah:
That's all we think about every day.

1140
01:08:37,200 --> 01:08:40,620
Isaiah:
You know, nothing gets built in the world without it actually getting built,

1141
01:08:40,820 --> 01:08:45,060
Isaiah:
right? One of our big convictions at Valor is that you can only design so much on paper, right?

1142
01:08:45,500 --> 01:08:48,820
Isaiah:
Designing something for five years on a piece of paper is going to teach you

1143
01:08:48,820 --> 01:08:52,660
Isaiah:
less than building it in the first year, testing it, building another one,

1144
01:08:52,780 --> 01:08:54,240
Isaiah:
testing it, building another one, testing it.

1145
01:08:54,580 --> 01:08:56,880
Isaiah:
That's what we're doing for the next few years. We're building reactors.

1146
01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:59,540
Isaiah:
We're making them bigger, more powerful, more sophisticated.

1147
01:08:59,620 --> 01:09:02,940
Isaiah:
And we're getting into the practice of building reactors and splitting atoms.

1148
01:09:03,100 --> 01:09:04,600
Isaiah:
That's our entire focus right now.

1149
01:09:05,060 --> 01:09:08,980
Isaiah:
So look out for Ward 1, which will be our first critical nuclear reactor.

1150
01:09:09,160 --> 01:09:12,880
David:
And if you had a message for our listeners, our listeners are pretty intellectually

1151
01:09:12,880 --> 01:09:18,060
David:
curious, high agency people who just always like getting their fingers in the dirt.

1152
01:09:18,680 --> 01:09:22,380
David:
Any advice for them? How can they support you if they are just like peaked and

1153
01:09:22,380 --> 01:09:26,540
David:
pilled by your mission or just any general advice for what they should do if

1154
01:09:26,540 --> 01:09:27,800
David:
they are just interested in learning more?

1155
01:09:28,120 --> 01:09:31,220
Isaiah:
Yeah, absolutely. You can follow me on Twitter, Isaiah underscore P underscore

1156
01:09:31,220 --> 01:09:35,240
Isaiah:
Taylor. Post some awesome stuff in there all the time. We keep it spicy.

1157
01:09:36,000 --> 01:09:41,360
Isaiah:
You can find Valor Atomics, ValorAtomics.com. That's V-A-L-A-R Atomics.com.

1158
01:09:41,680 --> 01:09:43,620
Isaiah:
And come visit us. Come check out the reactor.

1159
01:09:43,860 --> 01:09:47,920
David:
Where is it? Where is the actual reactor? Where is the facility?

1160
01:09:48,340 --> 01:09:51,480
Isaiah:
We're here in Los Angeles. We're in Hawthorne, about a mile from SpaceX.

1161
01:09:51,960 --> 01:09:54,780
Isaiah:
We've got great beaches, great surfing, and some of the best engineers in the

1162
01:09:54,780 --> 01:09:55,620
Isaiah:
world creating the future.

1163
01:09:55,800 --> 01:09:58,520
Josh:
I just wanted to let people know to absolutely follow you guys,

1164
01:09:58,520 --> 01:09:59,960
Josh:
because that's actually how I found you.

1165
01:10:00,080 --> 01:10:06,060
Josh:
I love the theatrics you do around the company, where you guys had this big unveiling event.

1166
01:10:06,180 --> 01:10:09,420
Josh:
And I was like, who are these people that are turning a nuclear reactor event

1167
01:10:09,420 --> 01:10:13,200
Josh:
into this big thing? And it was you. And it makes the future more exciting.

1168
01:10:13,340 --> 01:10:17,380
Josh:
And just wanted to thank you, because we need more founders like you trying

1169
01:10:17,380 --> 01:10:21,360
Josh:
these hard things, improving our world in this life of Adam so that the everyday

1170
01:10:21,360 --> 01:10:24,380
Josh:
life becomes a lot more exciting. So we're just super, super grateful.

1171
01:10:24,560 --> 01:10:27,960
Josh:
Really glad that you joined us today and excited for other people to hear your mission.

1172
01:10:28,220 --> 01:10:32,000
Isaiah:
Well, thank you. And I'm glad that you fell for my psyop of the party,

1173
01:10:32,140 --> 01:10:35,460
Isaiah:
which was essentially an exercise to see how many tech bros we could get to

1174
01:10:35,460 --> 01:10:37,320
Isaiah:
show up into a building wearing a suit and tie.

1175
01:10:37,880 --> 01:10:42,020
Isaiah:
And I think that we did quite well. We saw a lot of suits and ties that night

1176
01:10:42,020 --> 01:10:44,820
Isaiah:
on Tech Bro. So it was very successful.

1177
01:10:45,680 --> 01:10:46,980
Josh:
Certainly nerd sniped me. Yeah.

1178
01:10:47,720 --> 01:10:49,260
David:
Isaiah, thanks for joining us on Limitless.

1179
01:10:49,800 --> 01:10:50,860
Isaiah:
Awesome. Thank you so much, guys.