Must-Watch: Limitless Energy Masterclass from Atom-Splitter Isaiah Taylor

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