We have a way to convert fuel to high-temperature heat, that high-temperature
heat into light, and then that light into electricity through
matched solar cells. It would be a solid-state internal combustion.
Well, do you want to just hop right in and tell us the background, basically,
of how you got here, what you're building, the end-to-end
Yeah. Well, I've been obsessed with energy ever since
I was a kid. This is partly because of the PSYOP that
is SimCity. You can't really start your SimCity without electricity. It's
not quite true in real life, but that got me going. I actually
visited a coal power plant when I was five. or
let's just call it an enrichment trip that my mom managed to
score me. And when I was in grade five
or something, I learned that the highest temperature in
the entire solar system was actually achieved on Earth in
fusion power plants. And in addition to
this being fascinating, the promise of effectively untapped
energy on Earth was incredibly exciting to
me and motivating. And when I dropped out of school later,
long story, but basically tyrannical teacher, doors were unlocked,
ex-hippie parents that didn't send me back. And I learned that
I could, well, basically talk my way into
university if I got the right tests done and then just were connected
to professors. And that's what I did. I grew up in Halifax,
Nova Scotia, actually in Dartmouth, but I bussed over to the university there
and I learned Computer science first, because I was really fascinated by
the computer. It was the access to the internet. It was all this, you know, it was just
post-internet bubbles, a lot of money. But then in
my third year, I really wanted to shift into physics, focused
on physics, and ultimately got so excited and picked
up to do research and ultimately chose to do that for my graduate
studies. So went to Princeton, actually, to study
nuclear fusion. And it was amazing because of the concentration of
talent there and the legacy of the projects. But essentially, the
glory days of Princeton as a fusion research center were at an
end. Basically, after the Cold War, a lot of projects
got canceled, and nuclear fusion Princeton among
them, towards an international project. So as the last
gasp, they ran tritium to actually make fusion
power, which was very, very, very successful, but it makes it radioactive. So
it's the last thing that we did. And that's at all of the records. And
that's what attracted my attention in the first place. And everyone It
had not come back and still has not come back to that initial level. And
my professors were at the top of
their careers, but still scrounging for money. And
I was just like, my goodness, Facebook is worth $14 billion.
Can you imagine? 14 billion. What an outrageous amount. That's the
same amount as Eater. That's the actual same as the entire
global fusion project, which will deliver too
late to make a difference for climate change. I
need to tap into the entrepreneurial timeframe here to make a goddamn difference
because Well, why was I interested in energy at that point in
addition to like the sort of it's really cool gut
level stuff It's like I need to make an impact on
the problem of my generation, which is clearly climate change We don't have an
answer for how to shift off of mondo quantities of
oil to like Standing up a whole other energy system about
that. How am I gonna do that? so I moved out here to Silicon Valley
and my first company tapped into a An
observation I made in the physics of compressed air basically
figured out that instead of wasting a ton of the heat
of compression during the air compression, and then wasting the
energy on expansion because the air gets really cold and cold air has
less pressure, You could capture that energy by
directly injecting water mist and
inject it back in during expansion to
provide that energy as heat, which ultimately
turns into pressure, which turns into more power. And
it's a very simple physics observation and there's a
lot of engineering to make it really work, but we proved that it
could and really changed, you know, I
was reminded of in physics
they teach you about thermodynamics and they say here's the Carnot cycle it's
the most efficient cycle but we can't do it because you
can't compress and expand isothermally like no one's really figured out
how to really do that I mean you can kind of have a limit case but
you can't do it quickly and basically we prove that you can do it quickly so
we can start Approaching more efficient thermodynamic cycles. It
really is possible. So a sort of four minute mile
effects Like you can kind of break the limits of these Typical
considerations and real heat engines but be also like
we fucking did it and it still is going to be really I
think ultimately a really good way to do compression expansion of
gas. The other thing that we learned was we did this through
the venture ecosystem and we had, you know, a top investor,
absolutely top. And we brought in more top investors, including
people, you know, individual tech billionaires like Bill Gates
and Peter Thiel and several others. who basically managed
to support us by being really exciting
and public about what it can be and what we were doing, signed
and building in public, like we were sort of a media darling, until
sort of the last gasp of that clean tech era.
And unfortunately, the technology was sort
of acquired for much less than it could have been. So
I think that, which is a complicated story, by
the way, and bits and pieces, some is still with
the venture capitalists, some is a tank business that's effectively acquired,
which was supposed to be exclusive and now actually in
some of them still do it. And so there's actually quite a lot of industrial potential,
right, you know, right today of all the IP that still exists. So
it's very interesting. do you still do you still feel like that's like so
technically that solution do you still feel a lot of like conviction that that's
the right way to do things or like that yeah so so so
technically if you look at it air compressors are like
at like as capital equipment order of magnitude more
narrowly conceived of as compressors it's like 30 billion
plus is the market size every year of sold equipment revenue,
okay? And then if you include the actual energy that's associated with
that, that probably doubles or triples the
number depending on where you use it in sort of industrial circumstances
or so on. And then if you look at more generally, it's
like, well, you know, many engines from gas
turbines to internal combustion engines, effectively there's
a compressor there And so you can really look at it and you can replace that.
Now, that thinking is really valid in the absence of
something that has the really attractive properties
of my new company, which is in being radically higher
energy density than compressed air can be. So for energy
storage, except in very
specific circumstances, I think that it's
not the answer long, long term, because For
very long duration storage, you want to use a fuel that you can store
like hydrogen. And there are many different ways to store on-site hydrogen
for fuel for long duration beakers.
And then for smaller stuff, if it's a vehicle, you want it to
be very lightweight. It's a fuel. But the reason where
you can use a compressor for energy storage is
where essentially it can use
the home or the building that you're with as a heat reservoir, and
it's sort of like you're doing a Carnot cycle with that. And so it's
a really, you store energy alongside your moving
heat around, and there's almost always a need to move heat around. So
in situations like that, especially if there needs to be compressed
air on site, it's 100% because then you're
saving money on your compressor, you're saving money on the energy, you're
saving money on the thieves, and you're getting energy storage which you can
tie to the grid. So would I want to cause that to
occur after I have a very stable, you
know, largely controlled energy tightened under, you know, with, with,
with the capability to do that. I may yet be tempted much
as much as Elon may be tempted to do a supersonic electric
jet every time he pays for like his fuel on
his jet. Every time he's like, God, I wish I could do
Yeah, totally. And so today you're building a new kind of
energy technology, but it's a, would you, would you call
it more portable? Like it's a, it's a version of it that is intended
to be a little bit more expeditionary or yeah, able
Absolutely, absolutely. This is a rethinking about, you
know, I think a lot of things in the past have been thought
about and really funded from what would be good for the world, which is
very reasonable. Bill Gates funds a lot of stuff from this perspective because
he's got lots of money, he's generous, like what would be the best for the world? And
providing a service for the grid is absolutely a
huge service for the world. But the problem is to really
get it to be like at scale, it needs to also
economically service that grid. And so it's very competitive at
the very beginning, slugging it out for cheap kilowatt hours. that
you just hatched too rarely, no one's figured out how to
Like, it's, yeah, it hasn't worked with big solar, it
hasn't worked with nuclear, like, plugging into the grid is
like a logistical challenge that makes the energy creation seem
Right, and so they will demo
you to death, and then watch your startup die on the vine, and
then they will be like, oh, startup's dying. Is there a technical problem? Or
it's like, No, actually
there were like over the past decade, like 2000 battery
companies or whatever. Many of them went after the grid. And by
the way, now the grid is actually, it is taking off. There's
going to be 80% increase year on year in energy
storage deployments. for the grid. Okay. It's
lithium ion, sodium ion may cross, but it's,
it, it's, it's that, and it's not even remotely enough, by the way,
it's like 11 gigawatts. And like the amount, the
order of magnitude that it really needs to be is like
near the end of this decade, it needs to be on the order of terawatts installed
per year to like make up for their shortfall,
according to all of the supposedly agreed on things.
So anyway, that's why that's
how much energy storage there needs to be there. And people really
know that, like, if you're a billionaire, you know that, like, And
so a lot of people publish it. But what you need to solve if you're
the entrepreneur is you need to solve the way to get down
to the learning curve to something where someone who has a lot
of value, enough to get you enough profit margins so that
you can actually scale on revenues. not investor
money to get to the next stage, right? And
so the model of success is really the way that Muon did it,
which is like, first, we're going to find this, you know, the
special market, which is like roadsters, okay? And
it's going to be expensive, but it's going to be totally new. They're enthusiasts. Then
we're going to do a sedan, which has a replacement value, and it's going
to be really well executed, but it's not going to compete at the
bottom level in terms of value. And then we're going to start going
into the mass market. You absolutely must do that,
and the grid takes you away from that as a technology. And
the advantage that we're working on is we're using
some of the most efficient, power-dense, high-capability
throughput methods of physics to actually unleash power, and
that's combustion. So, if you think about it,
a flame can produce power as fast as a rocket can
produce power, or a torch, or a firework. It's
incredibly rapid, the chemical process of,
at high temperature, hydrogen or carbon linking
up with oxygen. Once you have a high temperature flame,
we're using the incredible power density of
fireworks. and high-pressure sodium
lamps, basically the incredible propensity of sodium
to act like an antenna to send out electromagnetic signals,
light of a very particular wavelength or color. And
the amount of energy of each of those photons, you can think of this as a
quantum energy source that converts heat into
energy at a very particular wavelength, is 2.1 electron
volts and what we noticed was that there was a
material that was used as the top layer in the
most efficient sort of space solar cells that
matched that color almost exactly like
within 90 percent or thereabouts and so the efficiency
of converting that light to electricity could be extremely high you
know we thought you know, extremely high. We've tested 60% and
we think under higher concentrations and
higher with a little tuning, maybe we can get that to 70-80%.
And so we realized that that's one
part. We have basically the two parts of an engine. We
have extremely a way to convert fuel
to high temperature heat, that high temperature heat into light,
and then that light into electricity through matched
solar cells. And that if you could build a transparent internal
combustion engine at atmospheric pressure this way, it would be
a solid state internal combustion engine. It could have dramatically higher
efficiencies, be much smaller, not produce sound
and vibrate, and you could shrink it down and provide a higher
efficiency well at the same time tapping into the incredible energy
densities of fuel. So people don't really
realize this but gasoline has 70 times
the energy density per unit weight of a lithium-ion battery and
that really makes things like liquid fuels the
only solution for long-range aircraft and a
lot of different things. And there's been enormous advances in
the production of various types of synthetic fuels. So
hydrogen is one that people know a lot about. You can use pure
hydrogen or mix it with like natural gas or
another fuel. But people are also making great efforts and
success into starting to make synthetic methane, which
is like a natural gas. Starting to make synthetic alcohols like
ethanol and methanol. and starting to make ammonia, which has
no carbon at all. So what's been missing is
a way to convert any of those fuels into power while
tolerating it, and internal combustion engines don't do that. So
we can potentially provide maybe double or more of
the efficiency of an internal combustion engine genset system, and something that
doesn't make loud noises and vibrate, and something that
can be shrunk down to go on a
backpack or a small robot or a vehicle, power all
kinds of things from forward operating bases to burning man camps, and
use any fuel from biofuel to a synthetic fuel that has
no net carbon. And this is a pathway towards
market adoption if we can sort of deploy out
ahead of that using the fuels that are out there available
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a reframe of what And
like basically an engine does, like most people take fuel and convert
it into the heat and then you use the heat in some way. Like either you're, you know, exploding
a piston back and forth, or maybe you're, uh, you know,
heating up water. Like that's actually a vast majority of energy is
Actually, those are the big two. So really, uh, today, you
know, if you look at the number one way that we use energy, the absolute
number one way that we use energy is probably heating buildings. The
number two is an internal combustion engine
converting it into pressure, pressure into mechanical energy, mechanical energy.
So the number, basically the number one use of energy in
the world is actually heating buildings. And I believe the number two
is automobiles pushing people down
the road and basically the way that works is you compress
some air you heat it up with an explosion and that it
has higher pressure when it expands than when you compressed it so
that turns into mechanical motion sometimes electricity
in a hybrid And then the number three is steam. So heating
up boiling water by heating it up through a boiler or
some heat exchanger and turning that into
pressure. Pressure into a turbine spinning
and the turbine spinning into electrical energy. So
a lot of different conversion processes, all of them basically relying
on heat. And we actually have basically a
similar thing. We can use that heat. The thing about the engineering of
it though is that we, to make our process work,
we get the heat to as high a temperature as possible. And
so that triggers the almost exponential increase in brightness when you
add sodium. If you need heat,
so say for example, you're looking at the number one
energy use in the world, heating up buildings. Well, you
could have a light cell there that converts. the
fuel energy into electricity and then like uses
it or sells it back to the grid and then just you have whatever
the inefficiency is of heat so say for
easy math say we finally with gen you know generation
n reach 50 efficiency this right so those
are kind of low so why don't you sure okay So basically,
as you put it, simply, the idea is to
take the energy that's in fuel, turn it into high
temperature heat, and go from heat to light.
And this is by adding an illuminant, which we supply through
sodium, for example, using table salt.
The sodium, if it's heated to a high temperature, emits extremely bright,
almost monochromatic light, yellow light. You
go from heat to light, then light to electricity by
choosing solar cells that have
a material that's optimized to accept the energy level, the
whole amount of the energy level of that high-energy yellow
photon unlike silicon. And then
you have electricity, which you can process with electronics and
So these are the parts of the process. Like how, for the combustion step, the
fuel to heat step, like how hot is it getting? Like
what, I mean, do you have a particular type of
Yeah, let me try to think about, I was going to jump up
a meta level step and sort of motivate. why
I made the decisions the way that I did. So yeah, so
I was really looking at how do I create a company that
can provide really unique value even at small scale, starting
out right away. And it struck me
as more and more batteries showed up everywhere that like at
small scale, if you have a very convenient source of
power, it will show up in innumerable ways that
are of great value that you simply never would have imagined if
you had to strap a generator to it. And so I started thinking,
okay, where are the real limitations? Where are people still suffering despite
those limitations? And it was really in where something is weight constrained,
particularly for something that you have to carry or
something that's like a drone or a robot that has to carry itself. So
practically any of those things, really exciting, but things like Boston
Dynamics or battery-powered drones or even, you
know, power packs to power sort of like Burning Man sound
systems, you're getting order of magnitude 30 minutes,
one hour. And worse for things like drones,
the more battery that you carry, the heavier it is, the more energy
that you have to expend. It's called the rocket equation,
so you really get screwed. So power density,
or energy density rather, but also with power density, the full
density of the full system, stuck out as the most important
single thing to try to solve for. that people like the military
would pay a lot for, that backpackers and Burning Man people would
pay a lot for, and then it would ultimately, like the battery, show
up in a million different places you would never think about once you
had finally made it. Including, you know, automobiles
and other stuff, but also all the stuff that it enables. From flying
cars, I'll name different things, to jetpacks, to robots
that, you know, like the Boston Dynamics robots, they have a time limitation
of about 30 minutes. I think Optimus will be about an hour. It's
like just fundamentally held back. It just doesn't have lights out.
Anyway, so the question then is like, okay, fuel's so
great, what's the problem? Well, engines are one big answer
to what's the problem. like if you just think about what is
it what is the take to implement an engine on something not only is
it a big engine block that is heavy and making noise and
making sound and making pollution and vibrating but
like it doesn't shrink down very well and like once you're
small and you're poorly or if you're poorly matched
to the power needs your efficiency is like actually
real world, 10%-ish. Which means for every 10% of
your useful power, you are spending, you have to
deal with, 10 of the equivalent watts
of heat so there's like plenty of reasons that
you don't want that and then okay so we can
probably beat on convenience factors by a lot internal combustion engines
and efficiency if we can figure something out and then there's fuel
cells and fuel cells they just are not nearly
as robust basically they're bottlenecked there's a part
of the fuel cell that's a membrane. And essentially, protons
have to get past the membrane. And there's a bunch of different ways to do it. But essentially, every
single one of those, it's limited in how fast they can do
it. And like, even if it's somewhat unlimited, as you increase temperature, as
you increase temperature, it starts to degrade faster exponentially. So
everything's sort of fundamentally on this limit and so for fuel cells you end up
with things which are expensive because you're making a lot of these and you have
to stack them and have many of these membranes and heavy
and they don't last very long so it's like some trifecta
that you can't surface and so fuel cells which have been the theoretical answer
to this for like as long as I can remember and as long as My
co-founder, who was 70 and went to MIT when he
was 15, as long as he can remember, fuel cells are not a
Are they really used in anything? I've actually never, I've
There are specialty applications. So, you know, they were used in the space
shuttle. They're used to produce electricity and water. Very
nice to show. They actually came before the battery. There
are small numbers of fuel cell vehicles. There's some number
of fuel cell weather balloons and some number, they start
out fuel cell drones. In general, when you start talk, basically
the competition is stiff. Oh yeah.
You have to not, if you're delivering, if you're getting more efficiency, for
the lightweight applications, that's exciting because you don't
have to use as much fuel. But fuel's not that heavy anyway. And so if your
thing is really heavy, you get excluded. And
that basically keeps you up the learning curve. And you just can't get
down the learning curve unless Toyota decides to subsidize you.
In which case, they do subsidize you. And then they say, why are we paying
$2 billion to make fucking fuel cells if
no one is buying into this? So to me, not
a good idea to do as a company. So what you have to
do is have something where all, unlike the fuel cell, you
can't have a bottleneck anywhere in the process. So
combustion is not a bottleneck at all. And so I started to
investigate, sort of inspired, this is jumping ahead a
few steps, but thinking about the intensity of the maximum intensity of
radiation and, and really inspired by
the maximum brightness that I'd ever seen from like fireworks
displays. Like, gosh, this is like lighting up our
faces from like a kilometer away or something. How bright is
that? I started investigating what the essential physics
were. And I found, and it's almost counterintuitive, but
basically you can thermally excite sodium.
And it emits almost unlike a black body, which emits all kinds of
different energies. And so it's a little harder, it's harder to collect efficiently.
It really emits almost all of its energy as
one light. And it continues to scale as you increase
in density, although not linearly, but as the square root. And
it continues to scale almost exponentially as you increase in
temperature, which is really interesting. So it
goes as e to the minus 2.1 eV over kT.
So T is temperature. As temperature gets closer to the amount
of energy in the quarta, it goes way,
way up. And so I
was like, okay, if I have high power density of this particular
kind of photon that is like incredibly well-tuned to
this material, can I turn that into an electric generator?
Is it going to get bottlenecked in the solar cell maybe? Well, I start
looking into this. Turns out the material is a direct bandgap semiconductor,
which means unlike silicon, which normally has
to be very thick because in addition to the photon itself going
through the silicon, it needs to catch a wave of a phonon of
some thermal fluctuation inside the silicon to actually excite an
electron. It has to be some finite thickness. This is
a direct bandgap material and it doesn't have any requirement of
phonon to absorb a photon. So in other words, The
light can directly excite the electronic. There's no
friction. There's no heat transfer from the material required. And
so it can be 10,000 times thinner. It has 10,000 times
more absorption coefficient. So these are typically very
thin film materials. And that's one of the reasons they're used for aerospace. They're
so light. But it also means that the actual thickness of
the material is about 50 microns, which is about,
it's about half of my hair thickness. sort
of average human hair. And that means
that electrons don't have very long to go from when
they're excited in this special kind of material, which
means that you can have very low resistance, which means you can
have very high current densities with very little losses
there. So it's like, okay, does it get saturated any other way? Oh,
it turns out it actually goes, as long as you can carry the
current, it actually goes the other way with this. And as you
have higher concentration, you get higher voltage and you get more energy
out. Oh, goodness. Well, that's really good because now you
don't need as much material because this is relatively expensive space
aerospace stuff. But if I can shine 25 times the
brightness of the noonday sun on it, then
I don't need as much. And also, if it's more efficient, I
don't need as much. And so I'm starting to get many
orders of magnitude factors down the learning curve of
what this material can be. And now, because it's more cost
effective and more efficient, now it can
be applied to all kinds of different applications. Efficiency matters,
flexibility matters, quiet matters, portability matters,
long range matters, being able to consume any material. So
another nice thing is we could use biofuels that don't have to
have as much processing to like eliminate
all of the sulfur. You could have it run through and then just
condense with water and then just process that. So
there's lots of, you can just, you have a lot more flexibility. Anyway,
This is exactly the kind of conversations I love having. I mean, I have
so many questions. I'm, I'm curious to learn more about the, basically
like I have like questions about each step. So maybe we can just go through each one. I mean, so combustion,
combustion, I'm curious how that temperature
can be controlled in a way that basically doesn't like melt
the person carrying the fuel back or like... So
Very good question. So this is something that we, you know, we have to figure out.
So, so basically the first thing is that you separate, in
a product, you separate the flame with a wall. It's
a transparent wall. And then that transparent wall, there's a gap, which
may ultimately be a vacuum gap. And then that's where
the solar cells line. And so there's a separation. And
the transparent tubes, we use a lot of quartz for
experimentation. Quartz is not the maximum temperature, but
it's very resistant to thermoshock. So while we're learning and we're sloppy, it's
really ideal. quartz in the long term isn't ideal
because a couple different temperatures the
salt that we add actually produces sodium silicate out
of quartz and so it's only at certain temperatures
but it's also the case that like it does eventually
soften. It starts to soften. And so the ideal material
where we are essentially basically trading
off between quartz, which is the easiest to work
with, but not long term, sapphire, which has higher temperature
capabilities, is more expensive and is very fussy because it
does thermally expand. So even though it's very strong, it
can have thermal stresses and it's very, very hard as well. So
You have to be very mindful of how to design around
that. And then polycrystalline alumina, which is hard
to get in larger scale, but is
what is used in high pressure sodium lamps is impervious to
the sodium. And unlike the sapphire is tougher
because it doesn't have, it's a polycrystalline. So
it doesn't have the same ordered behavior. The sapphire
expands, it's not isotropic. So
there's a one axis that expands a little more when it heats up. So
yeah. Anyway, basically, yeah. So, so, so your
question was, how do you control the temperature and how do you do
confinement? So one of the neat, so, so, so how
do you control the temperatures? This probably actually feed to the whole process. And, and,
and this is one of the areas where, you know, we're really, there is a lot
of experimentation in front of us, but basically what we've taken
is the central architecture of an incinerator. And
what an incinerator does is it has a
heat exchange that takes energy from the
exhaust that was previously in the incinerator and it passes
it into the air coming in. And what we have found
is that there are materials that can tolerate both salt and
air and exhaust streams. We can tolerate it
all, ceramic materials. that have a high enough heat transfer rate
and are strong enough and can be made with a fine
enough wall size that you can do
a huge amount of heat transfer out of
the exhaust and into the air coming in And
the hope is to get that delta T and a sort of reasonable
device down to the sort of one, 200 degrees C
delta T mark so that before the air even
sees the fuel and has a chance to chemically react
and get that energy from the reaction, it's already like 14, 1500 degrees
C hot enough to actually vaporize salt. And
if you do that, then the process should
be very efficient because then, you know, normally when you operate like
a propane air fuel, and by the way, nothing more American than
propane and propane accessories. And this is by
scientific apparatus and prototypes count, really. It's
basically, uh, basically, you know, a barbecue with extra
steps. Um, but the, you know, a really hardcore,
easy bake oven. Um, but the, it is actually, sometimes
you, you can sometimes, because it turns out that blood
absorbed, because of the salt in your blood, it absorbs the
sodium light pretty well. Like really pretty well. So when
you actually introduce, you know, close, like, especially by
hand, holding something and introduce close to the flame, like
sodium, the amount, even though it's the same amount of energy and going up
and out of the flame, the amount of energy just radiating out
into your, your hands or face. It's like, it's something to behold. It's
really, uh, and I, frankly, I know we're just starting, but
it's like, what's it like to have a thing glowing right there? That's
like probably putting in. order of
magnitude, like several hundred watts directly
Uh, so, um, so, so basically we use
this material. We, we found a vendor. I mentioned to
everyone, you know, we really need a lot more. Like
everyone talks a good game about reshoring American manufacturing and
so on, and you know, really hyper America above all, but let's
be realistic. There are so, there's so much manufacturing capability
elsewhere. And a lot of our stuff is retired or semi-retired and
the generational. Like skills have not been supplied and
the, and the, and the, the pay for technicians. is
is lower than engineers even though there's a shortage so
this is stupid and everybody needs to reorient what the skills are
and what's important and what the shortage is there's so many there's so much low-hanging
fruit in the domain of the tangible and like the
actual skilled trades and like that's where a lot of the invention
typically you know in industrial revolutions comes from it actually comes
from the people doing this stuff it's like we need a complete rethinking of
this we can't just be hyped about people doing some
new stuff in the Western world and be like, oh,
things are back. It's very challenging to rely
only on American vendors for things like ceramics and
our transparent tube materials when Chinese vendors will come back. with
1 10th or 1 30th the price per thing
and Anyway, we fucking they don't even make like literally
this stuff like we have been I mean we've been Finalists
quite a lot, but you know somehow government and nonprofits never, you
know, they seem to think we're we're too much Mavericks So we're
natural enemies or something. They never quite funded us and But ARPA-E has
funded like high temperature heat exchanger stuff.
And practically speaking, all of the stuff that I saw in the
in the actual midway discussions about this like is so
far behind the fabrication capability in Honeycomb and
Illumina. that we have just obtained for $8 a part.
It's so crazy to me. So like, you know, I really hope we don't end up
in some sort of trade war with our partners because you know, I
have to tell you guys that like we are papering over our
lack in, in, in, in the supply chain. We're having
a lot of money and getting a lot of stuff and other suppliers downstream of
us. We don't know about, there's other things that are reliant and like we
don't have it integrated. It is not integrated yet. Do not be
stupid. Okay. Anyway, so anyway, the
point is, even though RPE hasn't solved high temperature heat exchangers, incinerators
and like Chinese manufacturers of honeycomb have solved high
temperature material that can be used for really high temperature incinerators.
And that is the one best way to get the temperature up
and get the efficiency really up. now we are using another
way as well to get the temperature up well there's lots
of different tricks that we use the other big one and that we are
using that is really it's kind of cheating it's propane
oxygen which is like a rocket and you know that
if you have a rocket and you have a fuel and an oxidizer, it
can hit really high temperatures. So the exhaust plume is really bright. And
that it is, and that it is. And frankly, it wouldn't actually
kill us to have an oxygen concentrator in
products if it started out. It's an easy way to get high temperature.
But to get high temperature and high efficiency, you really
have to make sure that the gas that is leaving after
it has already reacted, after it is below the temperature at which
salt is condensing, it's no longer in vapor form, after
about 1,500 degrees C. Instead, the value
to the system is to transfer that heat into the air
during heating. And that is what we're solving this month, I
hope. Basically, I tried the stupidest thing that could
possibly work, and it worked. Oh,
I love my job so much. I mean, it is literally like, you
know, Thomas Edison, Thomas Edison, like, well, it is, it
is like that. It is like, and Thomas Edison, like, knew all
of the stuff that I would like, you know, that he would benefit from to do essentially
invention at a high speed. So really talented instrument builders,
a system where you're basically completely living on top of it, a
bunch of stock that's at hand. And then he couldn't have imagined Amazon
Prime and McMaster, but those things also exist. And
also the ability, we can now pretty transparently draw
about, mechanically, some more complicated stuff and get that turned around
in kind of a week. And then you
try, somewhat systematically and somewhat intuitively, through
a process of observation and not through a process of writing
up results and trying to persuade your colleagues, but persuading your goddamn
self, in a tight team, we can actually understand something. That
thinks so much faster. That is how to actually cover
the surface area that there is at the beginning of an invention process. And
I have the ability to build it in public, fucking put
it out to broadcast just even if I'm just ambiently
Oh, I recorded Oh, this would be good. Or Oh, I'm thinking I'll just tweet
about it. It's now in an exo brain. I had 87 million
hits last year, and tweets and what's more like, there
are a lot of connections that we raised A million dollars, basically, in
uncapped saves from Twitter, basically. And
a lot of people have come in and have offered free
samples of 3D printing or different stuff, or
even yourself. And I'm supporting, we're getting
supplementary income from AdShare and Hyper America
blankets and eventually flags. I
need one of those. We should put one back here. I'm going to get one and then
I'm going to try to conspire to find somewhere to
do it. Maybe in the machine shop in Astana. So
basically, like, I have these enormous benefits and
I'm taking every advantage, you know, it's also a cinematic kind
of thing. So I can, even before people understand
like what it is or, you know, how it's useful. Like
a lot of people are understanding that, but I've still got, you know, Oh, you're doing
fusion or, which I was doing fusion. And
someday this may convert power from fusion, but this is explicitly a
chemical reactor and we're not doing fusion yet. We're not doing fission yet.
or ever. And maybe, you know, anyway, uh,
and the, or people are
like, this is a more efficient solar panel. And I'm like, it is more efficient. I
mean, they kind of got part of it. Like it's more efficient. We have non, a
different, it's more, it's like we found a more efficient solar
panel for a more efficient sun that we could put in
your pocket, dump a bunch of sodium into the sun and
then, then it'll work. Actually, that's one of the things that
they discovered first in astrophysics. The sodium, the
d-lines, you know, the upper atmosphere of
the sun is basically glowing with the sodium. And that also
is true of planet glow. And it's used in astrophysics because
if you shoot, if you have a laser that's that wavelength and you
shoot it straight up, then at the ionosphere, there's
enough free sodium around to be like
a spot and so if you send out a grid of
a laser that splits it out you can know where it's
shifting and then you use that to recompile uh like
restack the layers and this is called adaptive optics and it's
it's responsible for the best essentially that's one of
the ways it's it's one of the best ways to do
to do any imaging so yeah i've
never heard it before there's so many of these you know wacky effects you
know uh put electrodes in a pickle it's
yellow fucking like yeah this it's true and
it's it's actually true the most efficient lamp you know, what's glowing
down there is sodium vapor lamp. It's the world's most efficient lamp in
terms of efficiency. And sort of the second
or third most efficient can sort of contend between high
pressure and LEDs. Now, LEDs might slightly
engineer out, but I wouldn't say for quality. But, you know, but
high pressure could actually could be made more efficient. And depending on
who I'm talking to, I'll use a different analogy you
know one of the best ones is it's like it rings like a bell it's like there's a
heavy mass in the center and that's a nucleus like a tuning fork and
then yeah it's like and then there's a light thing that's on top of that
heavy mass that's the bell and that's the outer electron and
basically you whack it and what happens against anything it's
like well it's heavy so it's not going to give too much so the
the only thing that can give is that light thing on the outside and
so that's where all the energy goes and it goes like crazy And that's,
that's a classical analogy, but that's basically what it is.
Although it's, you know, but because of quantum mechanics, it
doesn't just go at that frequency. Uh, it also goes
in, in, in units of photons. And
so it's actually, it's a, it's a, it's a quantum emitter. So in, in,
in, in various types of company, you know, for example, if there's someone around,
I know they're a physicist and then there's someone else around, they're being a bit of a jerk. They're
kind of a gatekeeping nerd or whatever. I was, when they asked, you know, what I'm up to and
I'll say, Well, I'm working on a quantum energy converter and
I'll just bait them and they'll be like, that's fucking bullshit. Like,
there's no way you're misusing that. Right. You
know, that sounds like a Marvel superhero. Like, dang,
you're not working on a quantum energy converter. I'm like, actually, here it is. Atomic
emitter is essentially used in fireworks and illumination flares lit
up whole battlefields in Vietnam, part of fireworks from their
invention in China. This is a quantum energy emitter.
It emits quantum light and photons. And this photoelectric
effect, the PV cell is, in fact, you
know, Einstein Nobel Prize, a quantum absorbing quanta of
energy and extracting it out. And it's it's completely quantum. So
I have a question about the incandescent
step. What happens
to the salt? You're effectively vaporizing it,
right? Does it deposit on the walls
of the thing? Squeegee, a
little, a small squeegee to... So the answer is
So basically the liquid salt is not only
transparent, but it actually has an intermediate, what's called an
index of refraction, which is what anti-reflection coatings
use. So in fact, the liquid salt acts as a anti-reflection
coating if it is in molten form. And so
essentially in order to get it transparent, the wall needs to be
hot enough for it to melt, which is above about 800 degrees C,
but you know, not hot, not too hot. So as to
be destroyed. And so that's, we're relying on that process.
It's also the case that, you know, if it's basically it reforms,
so you see it, the sodium and the chloride, they are
their own, each other's perfect partners. And why are they
that? So If you think of the periodic table, on one side
of the periodic table, there's first all
of the elements that have just one
electron on their outer shell, that's really lonely, and
really wants to get somewhere else, okay? And
then on the other side, the absolute other side, you have
everybody's happy family, it's noble gas,
and all the shells are filled, and so they don't go
out much. And then you have, you know, the
halides, the, the, you have fluorine, chlorine, bromine,
iodine, all these sorts of things. And these are really horny
for that electron. I mean, these are the horniest and
there's all, but they only have a slot for one electron. So they
have to get with each other. Like it's the
most energy that can be gotten out. And so that's, what's
going to be the stable situation. If you have any kind
of period of time. where the temperatures are high enough to overcome
the activation energies. So if you get
to a very high temperature and then you pass it through some finite
time that isn't just like a shock, essentially all
or almost all of the sodium and chlorine reforms
into sodium chloride. They're
extremely attracted to each other and this is what we observe. And
then it first is it's that
forms into particulars as maybe droplets so they they may freeze depending
on the temperature and then if it's a cool wall they
can deposit on the wall and get stuck if it's a hot wall it
forms a liquid and depending on the liquid Depending on
what the wall type is, it will form a meniscus. So it will actually
wick itself. And this is the most interesting thing we've discovered. So
basically, molten salt has a very high surface tension.
A few different reasons for this. Basically, same fundamental
attraction between the sodium and the chloride that's making things
really electrostatically connected. That thing also
works as a liquid in it. It pulls itself in. You
can kind of think of how strong the surface tension is as
like, what size of droplets does it form? If
it's a really thin liquid and it's heavy, it forms little droplets and
then it immediately drops. If it's got a lot of surface tension and it's light, it
forms giant droplets. So this forms droplets twice as large
as water. and basically if you have something
so it's really attracted to itself but along a surface or
along a channel that has a size that's you know
some considerably smaller than that droplet size what instead
happens instead of just a droplet is it wicks and
actually travels along the The
surface like a candle and a in a cotton wick so
we basically we were spending a bunch of time making ceramic ceramic
wicks to basically Regenerate 99.9. I
can't tell you how many nines. I'm gonna get I'm gonna get one easy but
you know, I think three or four and then finally part it so
particulars, so Yes, we can take particulates out.
We will take particulates out just like diesel engines. But
the fact is that sodium chloride particles are
produced all the time, every day by 70 percent
of the world's surface, the oceans, which have salt water and
like waves. And the salt particles are an essential part of
like how precipitation actually nucleates. And here in San Francisco,
like the actual marine layer that comes in, that is from
salt particles that are traveling in and condensing water
at a relatively lower relative humidity than it would without the
salt particles. And that's called the marine layer. And so
it's not the worst thing to have some salt particles get out,
which is the current condition when we run something out of our fume
hood. So, you know, forgive me. But ultimately, other
than intentionally using this for geoengineering, we'll just
filter it out and capture 99.9%. That's
the hope. You don't have to, it may, but I think basically we
have just used, I mean, we use pure salt, but we have just used table
salt and table salt will totally work. And it will be something like
once every two months sort of, sort of thing is, is,
is our basic hope. Maybe if you run it flat out. There's another
thing we're experimenting with where we're actually in in putting the salts
directly into the fuel But then of course you have to use that
fuel So, you know, I don't know. Yeah, yeah VC
could be very excited about it sell the razor model, but I I No
one will care. Like, I think it's more important to just be
able to like, Oh, the system is at this level of salt depletion. And
then the other thing is that the efficiency will not drop off very
rapidly as the salt is depleted. So it
will be still, you know, 80 plus percent. Yeah.
I'd relatively, you can just have a reservoir. So it's, it's, it's, it's
really a small amount. It's sort of on the order of milligrams that
Yeah. Okay, I have one more question about the kind of
general process, but then I do want to talk about like the business side and things as
well. My final question about the process is just about, so
you mentioned that the efficiencies that you can get from the photovoltaics
Those numbers are higher than like anything I've heard of, but like, you know,
a Tesla... Yeah, no, so there are things that
are out there called photonic converters, which convert, for example,
laser power into electricity on
the other end. And that's that kind of range, basically
60 to 80%, you know, depending. But 80 is aggressive, but
70 is demonstrated. But
for solar, because solar has infrared, UV,
all of the visibles, and every single one of those, it's like a different car that
can travel at a different speed. There's only one main speed on the highway.
You can't really go much faster than that or whatever. And most
silicon highways are too low a speed to get the energy, the more
energetic energy from the more energetic photons from the sun
and the more energetic photons from what we're from what we're doing um
so but the most efficient and the most interesting
number and the one with the most question questions on
it they're all the most interesting questions it's like well how efficient can
the fuel to light power be like what's the physics around that and
the thing is the theoretical physics around that are like well
theoretically i can't see any reason why it can't be you
know upwards of 80, 90%, 100%, but
practically are all of my actual limitations, which
is like, well, it has to
be a physical wall. You need to actually hold the
gas in, and there's a certain amount of finite emissivity
on that wall. And also, there are holes, even if you
have a heat exchanger. So for example, the honeycomb that I described
before for our heat exchanger, those have straight holes. If
you just have straight holes, then a ray can
make its way through those holes and just escape out instead
of reflecting. Or instead of, you know, so if you have wiggles
or you have a few different ones, then no longer the race can escape. And
so that's advantageous. But now you have wiggles, so you have different things. So
you're like, OK, pretty complicated. So now you're actually down to like a
real design, like, OK, how much benefit am I going
to do? So with investors, I basically say, here's
the learning curve I want you to think about. OK, as far as
a product. So every time you're comparing to another technology, there's like
a minimum that we're going to do. And there's like the two
main factors. So there's the fuel to
light efficiency and then there's the light to electricity efficiency. If
we get a fuel to light efficiency of 60% to
eventually 70 to 80% how does that multiply out? And
if we have electrical or light to electrical efficiency of 60 to
80 to 70 to 80% how does that play out? 60 x
60 is 36. That's really good. That's better than internal
combustion engines by a solid factor. In real world use, maybe twice as
good. If I have 70 x 70, what's
that? That's almost 50%. That's when you start competing
with conventional combined cycle
plants because those are huge. Those are expensive. Those can't throttle.
Those can't be shrunk down to be close to where people might need
cogeneration. Those are like massive plants. And
then if you have 80 times 80%, That's
64. That's really the most efficient thing that in most places
where you're going to have a fuel to any height of electricity thing.
That's completely revolutionary, you know, sort of future tech. And
the reason that makes the biggest difference, you know, what, what really makes the biggest
difference is you sweat out the last parts of that efficiency because you've got less than
half to go. Okay. After you're about 50, what's the point? Well,
the point is less heat management, actually. It's like, you
know, you can get along lasting, but at small scale and for really
good, you know, the difference between a 50% efficient thing
and a 75%, not saying we'll ever get there, but that's a factor of
two in heat management that you have to do. So that really starts
to matter. But that's really in the sort of, you know, It's
not that we're dreaming, but we're already a zillion dollar
company by the time we're approaching that. But
in terms of physically, is it feasible to achieve
an 80% yule to light? Well,
basically, flares, burning in air, sodium
illumination flares, which could be capable of millions
to 16 million lumen kind of outputs. They
had just burning in free air, 30% efficiency. So no
heat regeneration, no recycling, no trapping the infrared and
keeping it out. No way to control it really. It's just one particular
mixture. If you look at the radiative efficiency of high pressure sodium
lamps, significantly more than half of the energy out
are, are photons in the band that you could capture efficiently.
It's like almost all, and like, it's, it's more than more than 50% of
the energy out is radiative, radiative light. And
so without
an infrared meter with a finite size, so
there's still a lot of energy that is from an arc that is maybe
wasted in the electrode and conducted along a relatively small
thing. So I really think that we
will basically achieve above 50% efficiency from
fuel to light. And then getting
into the 60-70% range is a feasible
target before we send out a product. And
then it really could go further, because if
you look at what are the fundamental limits in terms of what
are the Carnot efficiencies, A, the Carnot efficiencies are really high because
of the high temperature. B, it's a chemical engine, so it's actually kind of
unlimited. directly by Carnel, there's like somewhat different
calculation involves chemical potentials that we should do.
But that's like in the sort of 80-90%, so
that's sort of fundamental thermodynamic limits. And then from a
microscopic perspective, you basically just, you have
energy that's available to be released as soon as the chemicals meet
each other. carbon or hydrogen or nitrogen
and oxygen, or like, nitrogen with H,
and in the case of ammonia. And that energy has
to go somewhere. And it can go to conduct other gases and
mix with them. It can turn into infrared, which it turns
out is extremely difficult to do in a gas. It turns out, I
thought, oh, Carbon dioxide and water, those are infrared gases.
What's the emissivity? You have to have ray
lengths of like order of magnitude or meter before you can start having
significant emissivity. And you can trap the infrared as
well. So it's really just things that are glowing inside the system. It's
a way to lose heat. And then there's conduction. Well, if
I can keep the walls alive, if I can
keep, you know, An air gap or a vacuum gap, I
can really limit the amount of conduction losses. And then with
the heat exchange from the exhaust, I can eliminate that loss. And
then I also have to eliminate optical losses. So anytime I have produced
light, I wanted to ultimately meet the cells. So
mirrors everywhere else, or at least white, try to have
some redirection so that the absolute brightest part of
the light can't just go into a light trap. So if I
incorporate all of that in a sort of fundamental physics, it's like, where can I
get to? It's like, actually, the sun's
the limit. Like, it's like, you know, energy doesn't leave
the sun except to like to compress itself and like, leave the
sun, you know, so you can... It's close
to that. But there are a lot of nuances.
For example, the sodium itself, it doesn't just send
out the light. It also absorbs that light. Now, most of
that time, it absorbs the light and then re-emits it. But
what it means is that because there's trapping, You can't just
increase the amount of sodium that you add to a flame and increase the brightness
without bound. It's linear up to a point, and then it
starts to scale as the square root. So when you start getting to
1,000 parts per million, you increase it by another factor
of 10, you only get 3.1 times as
much. But basically, most of those are not fundamental
loss factors. You work them out, and it's like, well, that's pretty low.
And then in fact, what I am actually doing
in terms of to get the demonstrated results that have high output
power and calculated efficiency is
like, well, I need to achieve this while getting the temperature to
be very high without it down mixing to sort
of for energy to leave the system without getting a chance to
actually excite the sodium. And that is all about building
a thing where we have mastered the slain and we have not
overheated any of the parts so that they are melting or cracking or
exploding. And we're making great, exciting progress
Yeah. Let's talk about that. So, I mean, I think that, so
that's like the theory of the case, right? Like we want to, there's the three steps and
you want to make them as efficient as humanly possible. What are the, like,
how do you do it? Like in practice, I mean, your approach to
this is, I think, very cool. Like you're in the lab, you're building things every day,
you're experimenting every day. Like, do you want to just talk a little bit about how you
With the Proviso that we're not close to done yet, like,
what's the pattern that has taken me, you know, this far
and at every step helped me make it more real? And
after a long period of like, reading about similar
technologies and actually watching a huge amount of science YouTube
and a lot of demonstrations and so on, it was finally time
to put down the books and really see it for my own eyes. And
that really honestly sponsored, spiritually,
so much of the motivation to go forward. it's unlike
anything else to like I mean it's I
can't exactly advise it but like when I
got my first like oh my friend like my my old
investor sponsored some of the first research and I used it to get a
high-end black swords torch and I had my
dad help set it up at the time I've since
grown quite a bit stronger but at the time I couldn't easily do all
of the propane welding stuff just because of the grip strength.
We set it up in my parents' old garden shed. They very
graciously allowed me to take over and turn it into a science shed. And
the simplest dumb thing that would work, take a spoon, a
steel spoon, and have the torch directly aim at
it. And I'm like, okay, how good is this really? I was seeing an
after image the next day. And like, my dad got
a picture. I'm like, ah, do you have it? Like, is it okay? And,
right, and so and, and, and honestly,
I remembered a piece of advice from Richard Muller, who
actually studied, there's sort of a genealogy of
physicists that studied under Alvarez, who
ultimately studied under Compton. Compton, who developed the
sodium lamp, the low pressure sodium lamp. They met with Richard Muller,
he was part of the Berkeley Earth, sort of like, basically, a
bunch of Republicans are like, we're not totally sure that the The,
you know, liberal conspiracy of global warming is at the level,
on the level we needed to find a scientist to find out if it's on the level, you
know, factoring out all the biases of like the weather stations are closed to people.
Can you do this for us? It's like, okay, yes, I'll do this. And like, he
does this, it's like definitely still happening. It's like basically
factored out. Anyway, he became quite famous for this,
but there are a few other things. He also did, I think, physics for future presidencies. Anyway.
He told me that the most important thing to understand about
an experimental investigation is that you
have to convince yourself and you are the hardest one to
convince. And that this is actually the main problem with
academia and like all the experimental. Everyone is trying to
convince each other with papers and
persuasions and reports and everything else. And
frankly, the people aren't really reading it. They're not actually persuaded. It's
not actually a loop. Like the actually tight loop that
should be going on is the actual demons, you know, investigation.
And what's much, much closer to it is like the Wright brothers getting
the loops down until they could actually fly the thing and then demonstrating it.
Or like Richard Darwin. making tons of observations
then writing about it and then eventually publishing this whole thing
like once it's actually understood and like you are not allowed to
do that and like wait that long in academia today everyone is
trying to convince each other of different things you know people are very
terrified of outcomes you know even in this in a normal company
who would do the experiment here like What's the
liability on that? Like, so they'll put a lot of barriers around
it and like what the safety is. I bet that would be a hundred times slower
or something. Like, you know, so, so, so, so you
have to convince yourself. about what really is
important and what, what you're observing and
like where you are and what, what would be helpful for the
investigation. And I have always benefited
from like, there is a lot of art
effort is like, Liz, usually like free, free
on the table. Like, you know, you should take advantage of it. And
like, um, especially at the beginning of a
project when you don't have much burn rate and you don't necessarily have
a lot of organizational inertia say behind say people with particular skills
or like an invest in one particular thing you can do the exploration
to really have a sense of whether it's easy or not and in
a kind of idea map and like you can extensively do this
you can do this giving yourself the time
and real focus to be able to master, or at
least get to a working level, the necessary things
in order for you to do the fundamental investigation quickly. So,
for example, I'm not a trained machinist. Actually, my co-founders
are trained machinist, and I've employed a lot of really
exceptional mechanical people. But myself, I
am not a trained machinist. However, it is so useful
to just be able to, oh, I need a part. I
can turn this out on this manual mill, and
in a matter of minutes, then do the
heat treat myself and that means that I kind of call this the fast CPU model.
I can at any time during the day, either during the
day or like after a bunch of people have gone home, this is at night or
on the weekend, convert an idea into a new observation or
a significant new experiment because now I have a new part. And
so that, if I didn't have that capability, if I didn't learn
how, okay, how am I going to machine ceramic honeycomb? I don't really find
a lot of information on the web about this. We didn't just have,
you know, oh, well, let's try the Amazon diamond
bits. And like, thank you very much, Pete Lynn at Otherlab for
suggesting this particular relatively cheap and pretty good mill.
You know, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't even be thinking of the things that I'm
trying. I wouldn't be jobbing it out necessarily. Instead, I can really do that.
So, so we have spent a lot of time, the three
co-founders, myself, my old partner, Steve Crane, and
John Maple, who also went to MIT, got his
PhD there and focused on solar concentrators and
lighting. So a lot of adjacent things. You
know, we kind of view things as a little different sort of, you know, kind
of imagine master craftsmen in You know,
take your pick Europe, Japan, China, sort of learning their
craft and then teaching and then, and, and,
and then really understanding it up to the point where, okay, now we can
like accept an apprentice and like do this knowledge transfer. Because
that's the other thing. My goodness, is it depleted? We really have
retired generations of handy people and then. you
know, yes, there's a lot of social mobility, and that means a lot of
Americans travel, but there's therefore even less, you
know, communication of knowledge across generations. And
when you don't pay people involved in manufacturing enough
or craftspeople enough, And that just work just isn't happening. That
is where talent moves away from or it only lives in
particular niches. And so therefore a lot of different kinds
of mechanical things or things that are new or
old, be they machining ceramic or, or, or, or
crafting furnaces that can work at 2000 C
wall temperature to like 3000 C flame temperature. Like
these are. Crafts, lost crafts
that need to be learned and mastered and then taught
again. And, and we, you know, don't despair about
this because I think, you know, to some extent a vital curriculum is
one that is continually, you know, kind of rediscovered and reinvented and
we have tools to do it, but we have to recognize that like that's the
situation that we're in. And then from, and then from the motivational standpoint,
it's really. What is exciting me the most? What
are the largest open questions that I think that myself or
investors will have or how it will really play out inside the marketplace? Some
conversations with people. So for example, there
are a lot of different... This is a new idea for how
to do what's called thermophotovoltaics, most of which are
either broadband or they have some specialized emitter, but it's more
broadband than us. Essentially, they
turn heat into photons and photons into light, and they just do
the photon production in a different way. Different, usually
lower band gap cells. Army is like,
oh, probably not going to wear a thing like this. But
we could have it on a like, Boston Dynamics dog or
cart, you know, something. And I'm like, okay, you
know, so sometimes we're Palmer lucky
and Andrew reaches out. It's like, Hey, can you show us something? And
I'm like, I can show you some, but it's currently hooked
up right now. Like, and like, he's like, can you
build something into the back of the truck and show me? And I'm like, these guys
are gonna like definitely be looking at how robust the thing is.
So I spent a lot of time just thinking, okay, you know, outside
of fully operationalized thing, how could
I make something that is really robust for testing in free
air and provides the salt? This led to
sort of lightsaber experiments. The lightsaber experiments, which
shot a flame through a sort of collar that ended
up being a kind of ceramic wick to provide the salt ended up
really giving us an understanding of how, how the salt behaves. So
that's, that's led into everything else. So some of it
is, it's very intuitive, explorational work.
And then some of it is you, you push on the other part of the
bicycle and you're like, okay, let's review, let's go analytical. Let's
think of it. Okay. What measurements are we doing that we need
to analyze? What measurements are we not doing that we really need? You know, so
maybe temperature, maybe instead of doing you
know, visual and then manual on mass flows, like,
let's make sure all of that is closed loop, you know, recorded controls
instead of backing everything up. Okay, now let's improve that.
So now we can run a series of different experiments.
So it's, it's about getting leverage. with
different mindsets when you get stuck, mapping what
are the things that you need to know, and then judging when it's
time to do a next significant iteration on design of a platform that
will ultimately either directly translate to
a prototype product or we'll
inform the next one. So
that's kind of the motivational part. I have to usually hype myself
up to do these experiments because it's like, okay, turn
on the fire, make sure I've put the thing together. In some cases, there's
sort of two branches. We want to have a
really controllable ignition, but there's a
lot of things to do to make sure that that's controllable, and you can't have salt
bridging shorting out an electrical arc, so it's
a little tricky to figure out. So instead, we've been literally igniting
it open and then assembling the thing, so it's a little bit of a dance. You
put the thing together and then you run testing. Listen
to a lot of music, listen to a lot of it during the day, a little
quieter at night, quite loud. And then, you know, it's
a somewhat meditative discipline. Try to think about what I'm going to do. and
then rehearse all of the actions and then do it. And so
far that's been performing very well, which is
not to say that there aren't occasionally some interesting problem
solving that needs to happen in real time. The coolest thing
about what I'm doing, though, is that height interactivity.
It's literally like I can't play video games anymore because the
dopamine is so great in what I'm doing. And even
the payback time, It's like between thought
and and and glowing experiments sometimes which like You
know sometimes things a little bit disappointing sometimes things do as
well as you expect sometimes things outperform like 10x
what you think and you're like, holy shit and and
sometimes you'll get multiple of those every day and honestly I,
I've read a lot of biographies of scientists. That is unusual. You don't
normally get it. Sometimes you might get it sort of, you know, real, real
Eureka after many years of work, you know, some of
it's block and tack and problem solving and just handling all
of that. And to run a company properly, you know, I
certainly have to do a lot of that. It was just January. I have to handle, although
I, luckily Steve has been handling and
merely, you know, complaining about handling with chief operating officers kind of
stuck. finances and stuff like this. We're
handling that too. I'm taking in incoming investors.
Investors want to know what we're up to. And we tell them, yes, we
are accepting money, but here are the terms. Don't negotiate with us. And we
find that to be much more effective with our time. Actually,
finding that if we tell them, You know, these are
the terms it's uncapped, no discount safes. And like, you
know, if it's all if it's if you're if you're priced out of that, totally understand.
We're happy to just build. We usually find the people are like, no,
I want to, I I've, I've still want to, but if you
let the venture capitalists actually get hot and then go
excited to negotiate that they're actually literally hot
to do that. And if you tell them that you're
not, they, they can't do it. Like you'd never get there. But like, if
you just tell them the thing upfront, I have
a hit rate, like more than 80% in terms of like meetings
that I've taken online. So it's like, anyway, so
that's fairly motivating too. But I would say
fundamentally what I do is a
lot of energy management. And I mean that sort of as spiritual inventive
That's awesome. I think, okay, I think we're almost at time.
I have one more question though. And my question is just, How
does someone learn about this? Like if there was, if there was like a person who
is a freshman at some school or maybe like just dropped
out of school and they need to study something to be very helpful to
Physics is a fucking great curriculum. And if
you learn and actually do research in physics, you'll probably also learn to
do programming, scripting and things like Python as
well. And that's all. And, and, and
by the way, if you can, You
talk through conceptual things and you can figure out how to do that with CHOP GPT. It's
pretty helpful, although not always right, sometimes a little
misleading. So just mix it in here and there. But it's a
really rigorous course if you take in any university a physics degree.
And there's also a huge amount of, in addition to engineering
degrees, there's an enormous, enormous amount that you
can learn by starting to just pick an interesting and
achievable physical project of the real world And then talking,
maybe filming about it, maybe making content, showing the process
openly and trying to show the people who come up behind you different
ways to do it, try to teach while you do that. And then
after you learn and you get some feedback on
what's good, you can pick out another project and another project. And
that's really how the day-to-day blocking and tackling of
solving things in the real world, more than in an engineering course
where it's more handed to you, that's where the practice can be
learned. And the social media can help you a lot because you
can create value even when you're learning because some
of the best teachers are those who have just learned something. And so they
can relate stuff that they've just learned to special relevance. So
I highly encourage building in an open source and
there's a lot of different discords. For example, like
YouTube, there are different channels. For example, Tech
Ingredients is an amazing sort of father and
sons like invention house out in New Hampshire
where they're always building and documenting fully
all their methods and how they did it and like how it's working and so
on and they give incredible videos. And then
Styro Pyro does the same thing a little more shoot from the hip with
a little more dangerous shit and does it
himself and builds Things
like lasers and explosives and other very dangerous things.
And basically shows you how to do it and says, do not do this at home, but
you can do this maybe. And his discord is
filled, just replete with really amazing people. So the young people
I've seen who are getting really far in hardware, in
addition to the, you know, learning at work and online.
And at a university, they're really doing a lot, you know, they're
getting involved in, in communities of builders where people
share what they're up to, whatever level that they are and
are often in a lot of communication. I personally suffer when
I am in a discord channel and it's going off all the time. So I
can't exactly recommend this, but people do send to do this.
And if you're, if your mind is wired up that way, like I know a lot of people
who are getting a huge amount, it's basically part of a hive brain. And
when they encounter a technical problem, like. can often throw it
to the channel and they get a lot of different directions. But chat
GBT also, what I do is I get it to I tell
them what I'm trying to do. And I tell it like, please
act like a council of like, you know, Robert Oppenheimer, the Wright brothers, Mary
Curie and Grimes, like, Please tell
me like, and like, and tell me what your emotions are and like, you
know, take different jobs and their position. You're my team,
you know, go and like, here's where we are. And they're like, for example, I
did this early on when I'm first pitching people. I like explain what
the idea is and they just start asking questions and then I just answer and
it's like shark tank. But I'm not in an
anxious state. And Grimes,
pretty interesting actually, the shadow of Grimes in
the discussions about this. Usually
it was really helpful to have a
rather different perspective in the mix to
keep the discussion able to traverse large explorations
and refocus. When you
do that, it is smarter, a lot
smarter, and it can give you feedback. It's
often very positive, so it'll give you positive feedback on what your
progress is. The main problem, if you
look at it... There's like a replit, like
100 days of code, and you look at it and it's just exponential
fall off on that 100 days of code. And that's the
problem with remote learning. Essentially, we haven't
figured out how to close the circuit with the motivational stuff. And
actually, that is the key energy. Like,
when you really look at people who have made a big difference, it's not like
they learned it from some school somewhere. At some point, they really started
self-learning by really focusing on it with a
lot of attention and deliberate checking.
And then the advantage of sometimes schools is, well, you
find community to do that in so that you can kind of unstuck
yourself, like, and carry on and not be in
the, you know, not have to be in
a 0.01th percentile of carrying through just some,
you know, Repl.it automated, you know, day
of, day of code thing. Instead, it's like some other feedback
mechanism. So you have to construct the feedback mechanism. to
get you to do the real stuff the core stuff of what you're
trying to do and if you do that then like you
can cover enormous ground and the way to do that is to
push on your actual interests find where your heart
is curious and then go and if it is in the area of
like There's a well-known set of tools
that are really helpful for understanding about something, like calculus,
or statistics, or physics, say
it's thermodynamics, or say it's classical mechanics, or
say it's quantum mechanics. If you find some analogy and
then you find it interesting and you can find ways to apply those
world models and sort of novel dimensions to have the world make sense to
you or maybe explore some other sort of invention, then
you're on the path to really making a difference, a unique difference. And
when you have a unique perspective and you can make a unique difference, you
can prove your value to so many other people that you can work with,
and that really will get you to your start. So
believe in yourself, follow your inner curiosity, do the
hard stuff, and don't get focused by what
people want to teach you or high status things. Really, really
That is the perfect way to end this. Thank you so much. It was super fun