Nuclear Race to Power AI: Valar Atomics, Fuse, Not Boring

Isaiah Taylor https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaiahptaylor/⁠ (Valar Atomics), JC Btaiche https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcbtaiche/⁠ (Fuse), & Packy McCormick https://www.linkedin.com/in/packym/⁠ (Not Boring) join Molly O’Shea https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ to explore how nuclear energy—fission and fusion—is at the heart of America's industrial resurgence and the race for AI dominance. Isaiah unpacks Valar Atomic https://www.valaratomics.com’s plan to scale modular fission reactors across the U. S., breaking decades of regulatory stagnation and reimagining how America powers its factories and data centers. JC shares Fuse https://www.f.energy’s rapid-fire progress in fusion technology, from breakthroughs in pulse neutron generation to vertical integration strategies that echo SpaceX. Packy ties it all together with insights from his investing & writing in Nuclear through Not Boring https://www.notboring.co, explaining why energy-rich, hardware-driven businesses will define the AI age... Bonus we talk about his popular essay The Great Differentiation. Together, we dive into: • Fission to fusion, atoms to AI, and Detroit to D. C. • The role of next-gen nuclear in energy sovereignty • The strategic urgency to outpace China • Regulatory tailwinds post-EOs and DOE testing • Why AI’s energy demands are the catalyst • How differentiated brand, design, & execution will define the winners in an AI slop world This conversation is part of Sourcery’s “Made in America” Mini-Series recorded at the Reindustrialize 2025 Summit. Connect with us: 1. Isaiah Taylor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaiahptaylor/ 2. JC Btaiche: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcbtaiche/ 3. Packy McCormick: https://www.linkedin.com/in/packym/ 4. Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea 5. Sourcery: https://x.com/sourceryvc Brought to you by: • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, and travel. As a Sourcery Listener you get: 75,000 points after spending $3,000 on Brex card(s), white-glove onboarding, $5,000 in AWS credits, $2,500 in OpenAI credits, & access to $180k+ in SaaS discounts. On top of $500 toward Brex travel, $300 in cashback, plus exclusive perks (like billboards..) visit → https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. Visit: turing.com/sourcery • Kalshi https://kalshi.com/sourcery—The largest prediction market and the only legal platform in the US where people can trade directly on the outcomes of future events: https://kalshi.com/sourcery • Fourthwall https://fourthwall.com/—The #1 way to sell merch online — Fourthwall is the easiest way to launch a fully branded merch store—used by big brands like MKBHD, Acquired, & even the Smithsonian. 100+ products. No upfront cost. Visit Fourthwall to start today: https://fourthwall.com/ Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ (00:00) The American Atomic Age (01:15) Isaiah Taylor on U. S. nuclear industry (03:34) Why modular reactors are the key to scale (06:47) China’s nuclear lead (08:32) Valar’s path to criticality & DOE testing (11:06) Foreign funding & misinformation campaigns (13:01) Nuclear myths: “It wouldn’t fill an Olympic pool” (15:29) Why Gen IV reactors are meltdown-proof (17:29) AI as a tailwind for nuclear infrastructure (19:21) Misconceptions in nuclear & energy performance (21:13) Pressure to deliver in this presidency term (22:59) The future of global energy (24:26) JC Btaiche: Building the world’s highest-power pulse system (26:41) Fuse’s strategy: revenue today, power tomorrow (28:34) Fusion’s role in reindustrialization (33:12) The AI-power constraint: “Energy = Intelligence” (35:31) Can we catch up to China in energy? (38:13) Packy McCormick on vertical integration (41:11) The Great Differentiation: Why brand matters in the age of AI

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The main bottleneck for data centers for compute for model is not really as much GPUs or construction capacity. It's literally how do you power the data centers? Jensen Huang mentioned that 1 gigawatt of power to power a data center is around $60 billion billed. That's how much revenue Boeing makes a year.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Energy is an undercurrent underneath everything. You care about the fact that we're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere every single year, and you look at all the options that we have for generation. Nuclear is the most obvious solution. It makes an enormous amount of energy and it has an extremely small impact on the environment.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  If there's all this AI slap out there and there's all this sameness, that just creates this very big opportunity to do different stuff. We saw it with John Collison at Stripe doing Cheeky Pint in like a pub, Vlad Tenev doing the announcement about crypto token stocks in this like beautiful palace. It wasn't a Steve Jobs presentation. It was like a very unique kind of net new thing.

• 0:49Molly O'Shea?

  We are behind a lot, especially against China.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 0:54Molly O'Shea?

  So China is like seven to 14 years ahead of us. Do you think we can catch up to China? Are we left in the dust already?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I believe we must. This is probably a controversial statement and...

• 1:15Molly O'Shea?

  Isaiah Taylor, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Good to see you, Molly. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:20Molly O'Shea?

  Thanks for coming. I know you're like one of the first people of the day. So what's it like downstairs at Reindustrialize?

• 1:25Speaker 01

  It's entertaining down there. There's a, there's a lot of people in the building. We got some protesters outside just to make sure that...

• 1:30Molly O'Shea?

  Protesters?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have some fun protesters outside the building, but you know, it just gives you some aura as you're walking up. It makes you notorious. I'm like, man, I'm like Tony Stark walking up here. So yeah, it's fun.

• 1:40Molly O'Shea?

  What are they protesting?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I couldn't really tell, honestly. I think probably the fact that a lot of the people here are making defense tech. So yeah, it's a, it's a fun way to walk up in the morning.

• 1:49Molly O'Shea?

  Great. Well, all right. We'll see about that. Let's talk about you and let's talk about Valor. So for people who don't know what Valor is and your background, could you share more on that?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm the CEO, founder of Valor Atomix. We are making nuclear reactors built for planetary scale. So nuclear, in the last 40 to 50 years, has been sort of a one-off industry. You have a plant built here, a plant built there. There were a couple of models and units of reactors built and duplicates around the world, but nobody has really been able to manufacture lots of reactors and plug them in in series. And that's what we're working on. So we have our first, what's called a non-nuclear reactor prototype in LA. We're doing temperature testing on it, pressure testing on it, and we're looking at criticality next year. So we're getting really excited.

• 2:31Molly O'Shea?

  What's the current state of nuclear in the US? It seems to be laggard, but it seems like there's a lot of energy, no pun intended, around it.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, nuclear in the United States has been paused for about 46 years. It's been paused essentially since Three Mile Island. And there's some good reasons for that, some bad reasons for that. The industry sort of took a pause when Three Mile Island happened to reevaluate, make sure everything was safe. And unfortunately, when you pause an industry, it's kind of hard to restart it again. The tools atrophy, the labor's not really there anymore, the regulator's not in practice. And so we're really trying to reboot this and start over. But when you reboot an industry, you have to make sure that you are designing the reactors in a way that makes sense for the new methods of building things, right? We build things differently in the United States than we used to 50 or 60 years ago. We don't do as well at like very large-scale manufacturing or very large-scale construction.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  We're much better at modular manufacturing. So that's really what we focus on, is building a modular reactor that can be manufactured here and that we build thousands of throughout the United States.

• 3:34Molly O'Shea?

  So what role exactly does Valor have in America's reindustrialization?

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I mean, I think energy is one of the most important inputs that you could possibly give the reindustrialization movement. Cheap energy is how we make metals, right? It's how we would make aluminum and steel and all of the base metals that we use to make parts. If you think about what's happening over the next 100 years in manufacturing and reindustrialization. We're essentially taking what was an extremely labor-heavy industry into being an energy-heavy industry, right? So we're, instead of, you know, the manipulation of machines with, you know, hand laves and these sorts of things, you have automatic laves and automatic CNC, you have robots moving parts around. So we're really just starting to consume energy to create physical goods. And that's also true at the materials layer as well, right? So at the layer of making the steel, making the aluminum, you're essentially just consuming energy.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  So if we have cheap energy, we have a real shot at making, you know, all the stuff that we need to make for our nation and for other nations around the world. So it's very exciting.

• 4:31Molly O'Shea?

  There's plenty of bottlenecks around this. You mentioned almost 50 years of stagnation. What exactly are the regulatory hurdles that are impeding on any progress?

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think people miss the function of regulators. Regulators are really supposed to take technology that exists and add guardrails around them, right? So once you, a new technology is created, it's invented, it's tested out, now you want to do many of these, you know, pieces of technology around the world. This is a really general statement, right? It could be reactors, it could be cars, airplanes, and you add guardrails around that. The thing that you have to be careful about with regulation is that you need to still allow innovation to happen, right? So regulators and innovation don't play super well together. You really want a space of freedom to explore and to test things out, and that's what we've been able to do really well in things like cars and airplanes. We haven't done it so well in nuclear, right?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  If you want to go and turn on a test reactor and see how your technology works and, you know, get good at constructing small reactors before you do big ones, historically in the United States, it's taken five to six years, right? And five to six years is too long of an R and D cycle, right? You really want R and D cycles to be 12 to 18 months at most. So that's really what's been missing. I'm really excited today, though. There's a massive opportunity to do this in the United States now. President Trump signed some executive orders about a month and a half ago, which really opened up the opportunity for nuclear companies to turn on test reactors here. So. We're working on that and we're really excited to do that for the first time next year.

• 6:00Molly O'Shea?

  That's great. What exactly are the executive orders that he signed?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  So he signed four of them. The one that's most relevant here is revitalizing nuclear testing at the Department of Energy. So the Department of Energy is a test authority in the United States. It has the authority to basically take a prime contractor and allow them to split an atom out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere it's very safe to do that. And that allows us to gather data, right? And data is the most important piece for a commercial regulatory process. If you want to take a reactor concept and scale it out all over the United States, you really want to have tested that somewhere and made sure that it's safe and make sure that you understand the characteristics. So that's what we're going to be doing. That executive order essentially takes the legal structure that's there in the DOE and points everybody in the same direction to say, let's do this quickly next year.

• 6:47Molly O'Shea?

  So I want to pull back a little bit further on the geopolitical

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:53Molly O'Shea?

  issues and tensions.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Well, energy is never geopolitical at all, so I'm not sure what there is. No, I'm just kidding.

• 7:00Molly O'Shea?

  Interesting. Yeah. Okay, so we are behind a lot, especially against China.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:09Molly O'Shea?

  So China is like seven to 14 years ahead of us. They are cranking out nuclear reactors. What exactly is going on there and how far behind are we?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  So China has had a lot of success in building one type of reactor over and over and over again, which is really what we need to do. In order to do something well, you have to do it often, right? And if you have the same design that you're doing over and over, you learn a lot, you get better at it over time, you shore up the supply chain, you have a labor base that understands that system. And they've been really successful at that. So they are ahead of us in terms of scale. Now, they're also ahead of us unfortunately in terms of new test reactors. They're also turning on innovative types of reactors that were invented in the United States in the 70s and 80s. And they sort of sat on the shelf and we never really tackled them. We ran into a bunch of regulatory roadblocks and then we never turned them on. And China is now sort of taking those ideas and actually turning them on on the mainland.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  So they're being both very experimental and actually figuring out how to scale out. And those are all the things, you know, those are the ingredients you need to have a mature industry. So it is a, it's a scary place. You know, I think that China understands that energy dominance over the next hundred years is going to be even more important than energy dominance was in the last hundred years. And it was already pretty important, right? So this is a, this is a four alarm, five alarm fire type situation that we need to get ahead of immediately. So valor is a key part of getting ahead of that.

• 8:32Molly O'Shea?

  Is it realistic to think that the US can do this alone or will we have to work with allies?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  You know, I was talking to Eric Prince about that last night. He pointed out that Willow Run, which is about 20 minutes from here, is an airport here. And from about 1941 to 1944, that airport cranked out about 8,600 B-24 Liberators. That's one aircraft every 63 minutes. Right? So when the United States recognizes that there's a problem, we get to work and we can solve it really quickly. So I think that we can absolutely solve this. It's solvable through, you know, very smart people who are working together with private capital and getting it done. And I think that we have the ingredients to come back right now. I think there's a window of time in which we, we could actually catch up and we can get ahead. So, you know, we're working on that day in and day out.

• 9:21Molly O'Shea?

  You were recently on the Sean Ryan podcast. You've been making rounds in the media circuits.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  Have I? I've been, I've been trying to let people know the urgency of what we're trying to do. Right? There's a, you know, there's a lot of things going on in the United States. We're trying to reindustrialize. You've got tariffs happening. You've got all these different things. Energy is an undercurrent underneath everything. Right? Energy is, is the determinant factor to whether or not we can have industries here. Right? If you have expensive energy, it doesn't matter how, you know, how well you're doing. The factories and how well you're bringing up the labor and all these different components, your energy is too expensive, you can't build anything. So this is a really, really fundamental thing that we need to get right.

• 10:04Molly O'Shea?

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• 10:49Molly O'Shea?

  Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, ServiceTitan, Hims, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid, trust and use Brex. Start today at brex.com/sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery. One of the points that you talked with him about, these still go to geopolitical tensions, was about Russia and funding campaigns that affect public perception of nuclear in the US.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's always been funny to me that the environmental lobbies seem to be anti-nuclear. And that's funny to me because nuclear is so obviously, so clearly, the best climate solution that you could find, right? So if you care about the fact that we're putting more CO2 in the atmosphere every single year, and you look at all the options that we have for generation, right? How do we put energy into the grid without putting CO2 into the air? Nuclear is the most obvious solution. It makes an enormous amount of energy, and it has an extremely small impact on the environment. It's even smaller than solar or wind because the physical devices are so small that disposing of those devices takes up less space in a landfill, for example. So it's obviously the best climate solution.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So why is it that the environmental groups have historically been the groups that are anti-nuclear? I actually believe that, you know, there's been a lot of foreign funding into our environmental groups to try to shut nuclear down because it is such an incredible technology. This was sort of a theory for a long time, but it's actually proven now that this did happen in Europe over the last 10 years. So Russian groups funded far-left environmental groups in Germany to shut the reactors down in order, you know, to make it so that Germany would have to buy Russian gas, right? And this is something that's a matter of public record now. There's a big investigation into it. So I think that that's probably something that's happened a lot more than we recognize. And fortunately, I think that now that we're sort of in the age of the internet, age of the information, it's harder to pull plays like that, right?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  It kind of, it doesn't last for that long. You have enough people that Google, you know, how large is nuclear waste or how safe are nuclear reactors? And they start to actually read about it and understand it, and it doesn't last for that long. Eventually, you know, people kind of wake up to it. So I think it's a great time to be building.

• 13:01Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think the biggest misconceptions are around nuclear waste and reactors? Is there still, are there still misconceptions? I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm in an echo chamber, but I feel like everybody's on the same page.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I think, I think there's definitely a little bit of a bubble in, let's say, American tech or, you know, American reindustrialization. And that's because I think we're all very, very tuned in with energy needs, right? We all recognize that energy is so important for what all of us need to do. Reindustrialization, artificial intelligence, national security, all of these things are energy issues. So I think that we're a little bit more tuned into it, but there, there is still pretty broad-based misunderstanding of nuclear and especially nuclear waste. I like to point out to people that if you took all of the nuclear waste ever generated inside the United States, right? And by the way, we, we generate a lot of power with nuclear today. About 20% of our power comes from nuclear. But if you took all of that waste over the last 70 years, it would not fill up an Olympic-sized swimming pool, all of it.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Right, so we're talking about a very, very small amount of physical material. And when you have a small amount of physical material, it's actually very easy to protect. Right, so we can encase it in concrete, we put it in safe places. And the comparison to that is, you know, carbon in the atmosphere and particulate matter in the atmosphere. And we talk about oil and gas. And oil and gas is fantastic. I love the industry. I think that it's powered humanity to this point. But if you do a comparison here, oil and gas puts about 600,000 sedan-sized blocks of carbon into the atmosphere every year. Right, so imagine 6,000 Toyota Camrys of solid carbon into the atmosphere every year. If you replaced all of that power output with nuclear, you would have one sedan-sized block of nuclear waste encased in concrete safely stored underground.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Right, so it's just such a power-dense technology that we really know how to deal with the waste of it. And we don't know how to deal with the waste from other forms of generation.

• 14:53Speaker 04

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• 15:29Molly O'Shea?

  I want to talk about more of security around these facilities with geopolitical threats. Have you had to think about this when you're building out your reactors? When you think about your office, like all that kind of stuff? Like, how sensitive do you have to be around privacy, protection, resilience?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So, off the bat, you know, we have a lot of security at Valor, you know, physical security, cybersecurity. And these are really good things to be practicing. Now, there's two things to notice here. One is... Our rivals are far ahead of us today, right? When you're building in defense tech or deep tech or these new technology areas, you're often worried about China copying your IP and scaling it out. And these things have happened in nuclear. Unfortunately, they've happened so much that China is ahead of us at this point, right? There's a certain extent to which China doesn't actually want my IP because they have something better already running in the mainland, right? So there's a lot of catch-up that we have to do before we even get to that point. Now, we practice it anyway and we practice these good cybersecurity practices

• 16:33Speaker 01

  because eventually we will surpass them. But I like to highlight, like, we have a lot of catching up to do before that's even the main problem. Now, on the physical security of the plants and cybersecurity of the plants, there's different types of reactors. Some nuclear reactors are vulnerable to meltdown if they're operated poorly, right? So if you had a cyber attack on a reactor, you could feasibly see a meltdown scenario if the control rods were operated incorrectly and various things were to occur. There's another type of reactor you can build called a Gen 4 reactor, where the worst that somebody could do is turn it off, right? So we get this question a lot, what would happen if a terrorist accessed the control room in your facility? And the answer is they could turn the reactor off and that would be kind of annoying. We'd have to turn it back on again. So this is a difference in technology.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It's, you know, Generation 4 reactor is incredibly passively safe. You basically can't make them melt down. It's a pure physics issue. So that's the type of reactor that we build.

• 17:27Molly O'Shea?

  Right. This might be a wild question because this is so physical and it's in energy and industrials, right? So we're seeing AGI come into the scene. Maybe you call it superintelligence now, whatever you want to call it. But how does AGI and AI advancements, how do those affect getting nuclear online sooner and all of these reactors up and running?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So this is probably a controversial statement and you know investors probably really, really want to believe that AI is gonna like help us build ton of reactors. I actually think that if you're looking for an investment that is protected from AGI, it's something like this where it's extremely physical, you're bending steel, you're stacking blocks, you're building plants, you're laying concrete. It's gonna be a long time before AI touches that level of the physical world. There are a lot of things that are gonna be automated first before that. The other thing I'll say is that our customers are gonna be data centers, right? They're gonna be people who want to actually power the AI. So interestingly, nuclear is sort of like the derivative to AI. If you believe that AI is gonna go vertical, you should probably invest in nuclear.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  You know, because A, you're gonna power it, B, you're gonna be very insulated from, you know, the deflationary effects of that. And yeah, of course, we use LLMs and these sorts of things to help us do work management and help us control information and these sorts of things. But at the end of the day, this is a matter of we need to bend a lot of steel, we need to weld it together, we need to stack the blocks.

• 18:57Molly O'Shea?

  Well, sorcery is partnered with Rex. We'll get you a hat.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 19:02Molly O'Shea?

  They're really cool, they're like reflective.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  That I actually, I could see that, you know, if I'm running around outside on the road later today, I will be seen at all times.

• 19:10Molly O'Shea?

  They're technical fabric, you know?

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Okay, nice.

• 19:12Molly O'Shea?

  For technical founders.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  For technical founders, fantastic.

• 19:16Molly O'Shea?

  But Rex is all about performance and efficiency, especially in spending. I wanted to know more on the performance side of nuclear and energy, if there have been any trade-offs you've had to make or maybe misconceptions or people driving you the wrong way that you thought you had to accept in energy, but you've rejected it. So like, what are some things that you've been told? That you thought were like truths, but actually no, you could kind of just run through walls.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So nuclear is generally presented as high uptime, right? So reactors run 24/7 and they run for a long time. You only have to refuel them every 18 months. They last forever. And, you know, very safe as well, right? So it's an extremely safe way to make energy, but then expensive, right? That's the trade off that's presented. So you're going to pay a lot more, but you get stability and you get safety. I actually think that's totally wrong. Nuclear will be all three of those. It will be the safest form of power generation. It will be the most reliable form of power generation and it will be the cheapest. And I think this is, this is a very techno-capital observation, right? Like techno-capital eliminates trade offs of that kind all the time.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  You think that you've sort of hit the efficient edge of a technology. And then somebody says like, no, actually this is better on all three categories. And that's exactly what nuclear has the opportunity to be here. So we expect the plants will essentially be the safest, cleanest and cheapest form of energy across every category. And that's really what we need to accelerate in the next 100 years. If we want to see energy that's 10 times cheaper than today, you really need a breakthrough like that.

• 20:56Molly O'Shea?

  What are you most looking forward to for the next 12 months for Valor?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  We're going to go split an atom for the first time. Yeah, it's going to be very, very exciting. I actually have a counter on my phone, the deadline to when we need to split an atom in order to hit this executive order. So yeah, we've got a lot of work in front of us.

• 21:13Molly O'Shea?

  Are you feeling any pressure from this presidency term to get as much accomplished as possible? Because we don't know what the next one will bring.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I would just say that this administration has thrown down the gauntlet to the nuclear industry and said, all right, you've been complaining for, you know, 20 years that this thing is wrong and this thing is broken. And, and the Trump administration just said, all right, we're fixing all of that. Let's see if you got it, right? Let's see if you actually have the goods. So yeah, the gauntlet's been thrown down and we're working very hard.

• 21:40Molly O'Shea?

  CalShe has a market out right now that there's currently a 13% chance that the US grants a new license for a nuclear reactor. Do you think that's realistic?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  I will absolutely take the other side of that bet. I think you have to define what they mean by that. If it's an NRC license or if it's a DOE license, right? Those are different things. We're going for DOE authorization next year and split the first atom. So maybe there's some clarification on that. NRC license, we'll see, see on that one.

• 22:08Molly O'Shea?

  There's always fine print.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, it looks like NRC.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Okay, NRC license. That's an interesting one. You know, that's also not a bad bet either, I would say. There's a couple of companies working on NRC certifications. I mean, look, the United States, you know, sometimes we get in front of ourselves and we trip on our own feet and we kind of get lost in the bureaucracy. But when urgency, you know, is knocking at the door and we recognize that there are real problems, we know how to get up and move. And I think that's happening right now in nuclear. So, yeah, I would take the other side of that.

• 22:39Molly O'Shea?

  What odds would you put against it?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  NRC, you know, this is not under my control, you know, as a CEO, because we're going through the DOE license. So you're really asking about whether or not my competitors are going to be able to do this in time. And that's always a hard bet to take. But I would take, you know, 99 to 1 that we turn on a reactor next year.

• 22:58Molly O'Shea?

  Lastly, as we close out, what do you think the largest source of global primary energy consumption will be by 2030?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  2030?

• 23:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  That's not very much time.

• 23:10Molly O'Shea?

  No.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  It'll still be around like 8 or 9% nuclear. Solar is going to tick up a little bit. But honestly, oil and gas is growing as well. I think what's more interesting is like 2050. Where are we at 2050? I do believe that most of the world is nuclear at that point. I think that there will be some solar. But if valor is successful at building the cheapest form of energy that's also the safest and also the most reliable and also comes online fastest, there's no reason why we won't scale all around the world and make the world's energy. And that is the mission of the company, is to make the world's energy. So let's say 75% by 2050 is valor. And then another 25%, you know, we'll let people sort out.

• 23:49Molly O'Shea?

  It'll be the rest.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the rest of them, yeah.

• 23:51Molly O'Shea?

  Go global.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  I mean, listen, like, you know, SpaceX, you know, launches 80% of the world's, you know, kilograms to orbit, right? You have these, you have these power laws about when you find a technology that is actually scalable and is actually cheap, it takes everything, right? And that's very much our intention here.

• 24:09Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Well, Isaiah, it was a pleasure to have you on as the number one first guest of the day.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I win.

• 24:16Molly O'Shea?

  We have like 50 more of these.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  We could just probably close it up now, right?

• 24:19Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, mic drop, shut it down, turn off the lights, let's go.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  That's right. Exactly. Go enjoy, re-industrialize.

• 24:25Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, Molly.

• 24:26Molly O'Shea?

  J.C. and Paki, welcome to Sorcery.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Awesome to be here.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Great to be here. Are we your first founder-investor duo on Sorcery or no?

• 24:36Molly O'Shea?

  I think so.

• 24:37Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  Oh, awesome.

• 24:38Molly O'Shea?

  I think so, at least in the last 48 hours.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  We'll take it. You've done what, 50 podcasts in the last 48 hours?

• 24:45Molly O'Shea?

  I think I'm approaching 172.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 24:49Molly O'Shea?

  A lot of hours of footage.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  People are gonna love all that content.

• 24:51Molly O'Shea?

  You wouldn't believe how many hard drives we've had to fill up.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Is that true, actually?

• 24:56Molly O'Shea?

  People don't talk about the file sizes on 4K video.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Should we?

• 25:02Molly O'Shea?

  No. Let's talk about Fuse. J.C., could you bring us up to speed on Fuse?

• 25:08Speaker 00

  Yes, so Fuse, our mission is to accelerate the world's transition to fusion energy. We work on fusion technology for both defense, national security, as well as long-term, clean, safe, abundant, and on-demand energy generation. And so we've built the world's highest pulse power system ever called Titan. We fired that for the first time in March of this year, and we livestreamed it and published the results in Nature. We also built, a couple of weeks ago, published in Nature another paper on the most efficient neutron delivery system, and pulse neutron system, that we also published in Nature.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  And more timely, just yesterday, on July 16th, on the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Project, we announced a partnership with Los Alamos National Lab. It was very interesting spending time at Los Alamos and hearing the tagline of the project, there's many, but one of is, you know, "Build a bomb to end the war." And that successfully happened in 1945. And 80 years later, I believe, we're now in a sort of war, or there's a very existential threat.

• 26:24Speaker 00

  You know, fusion, I believe, is going to help in, you know, ending this next phase of war and maintaining US and Western society and values, supremacy and leadership in the world.

• 26:38Molly O'Shea?

  Low key about it, but that's huge. Paki, from your perspective, you've been kind of like scouring the space for a while. Like you go super deep into it. You've written about it all over. Could you explain FUSE's positioning within the map?

• 26:53Speaker 02

  I would love to. So we did a couple of years ago, Julia DeWall and I did a podcast called Age of Miracles that J.C. was on. We did half the season on fission, half the season on fusion. And in both cases, I kind of wanted to just understand, like, energy. I wanted to understand why we weren't doing fission when it was like this miracle source of power. I wanted to understand how close we were to actually like getting to fusion power. But like at no point in that series that I think I was doing this as a way to meet companies that I might invest in. Because fission seems capex intensive, fusion seems capex intensive plus unproven. And so it's kind of more like, I want to get the base. Energy goes into everything else that I'm interested in investing in. But like, I don't want to actually invest in any of these companies. The big difference, and there's like, you know, J.C. will do better at telling you like the technical differences

• 27:38Speaker 02

  and all the different kind of generator designs. And it's like mind numbing, the combination of different generators and fuels and all sorts of stuff. But the big difference, I would say, with FUSE and anybody else is they're already making revenue and that they're not going straight shot for commercial fusion power. But they're selling radiation kind of on the way up towards or down towards, depending on how you want to look at it, towards eventually doing commercial fusion power. And so like, it's a real business that is going to generate cash flow. And by making kind of more pulse power generators and more of the components that they need to sell radiation, bringing all the components in the eventual reactor down the cost curve. And you could talk about the kind of like three things that you're optimizing for here.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  But like the commercial business and government business in the short term helps get towards the power business. And to me, that's just like the most beautiful business model in all of fusion because it is an actual business model.

• 28:33Molly O'Shea?

  Well, we're all sitting here at Reindustrialize in the beautiful city of Detroit. I have to ask you, what is FUSE's role in reindustrialization?

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a great question. And I think Paki did a really exceptional job writing a long memo on the company, which I still encourage a lot of people to read. And part of what was there is how hard it is from the supply chain. So when people talk about Fusion, everybody's focused on Q greater than one. But in my mind, we can perhaps do that and show that Q is greater than one. But all the components, the supply chain, the reliability of the millions of parts that would go in a Fusion generators need to be on par to meet the promise of Fusion, which is a baseload power source, right? If Fusion is not operational, a Fusion power plant is not operational 99.9% of the

• 29:28Speaker 00

  time, or if you have to rebuild it every few months, it's pretty much useless. So therefore, there's a whole supply chain ecosystem that needs to be built that doesn't exist today, frankly. And therefore, there's a lot of components, there's an ecosystem. And even when you think about... So I'll give you one example of how it died and why we need to revitalize it. The National Ignition Facility, which is at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, is the most powerful laser on the planet. They're the only facility that's demonstrated Fusion breakeven. They have these very specialized components that they've built in the 1990s, early 2000s, and they've supported a whole ecosystem of suppliers.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Some of them are even overseas, close allied countries. And those companies died because after NIF was built, there was no demand. And so we've lost a generation of know-how, of supply chain, of manufacturing, of reliability, of optimization, and we really need to rebuild that. And FUSE has invested significantly in vertical integration and bringing manufacturing in-house. Titan has 40,000 parts. We make roughly 75% of them in-house, and we're continuing to increase that percentage because otherwise, we have no way to get to the economic price point, as well as the technical requirements, and third, meeting just the timeline.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  So there's how do we make Fusion economically possible with supply chain components in a large way. Second is continuing to meet the technical requirements for highly demanding technical specs. And third, continuing to respect timelines so we're on time and on budget.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Can I jump in with a question? So obviously, I've gotten obsessed with this kind of vertically integrated model. I came up with that thesis for the fund in part by seeing what you're doing at Fuse and seeing that if there's a piece or a component that is over cost or slow or whatever, you can just go make it and it's beautiful to be able to iterate that fast. Do you think it's just a function of where we are, though? Like, in an ideal world, in 15 years, is there an ecosystem that's developed? And do you actually build less of the components? Or do you want to stay that vertically integrated throughout?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Well, so the choice to vertically integrate is a really painful one because every time we try not to vertically integrate and we start and we keep paying that same lesson over time, it's like, oh, this is a trusted supplier that seems to have worked with defense companies for like a decade or so and is supplying others so we can trust them. And then we get disappointed more often than we would like. And sometimes you're not. There are some vendors we've worked with that are really great. And that's really awesome because that's one of the things we have to do. And so I'm really betting and hoping that over time, while we will still continue to take on the risks that we must take in order to continue to hit our timelines and milestones,

• 32:31Speaker 00

  I really hope and believe that there's going to be a time where supply chain in America becomes as reliable. And China has, for example, been reliable in electronics manufacturing. And so that's why people then feel the need to vertically integrate 10, 20 years or 30 years ago, right? And so there's examples of how an ecosystem of highly efficient suppliers is really rewarding to build fast. And right now, the only reason we have to do it, and I believe companies like SpaceX have to do it, is because just the culture of suppliers now, they're always late because it increases your cost plus budget anyway. So there's really little incentive to be on time and on budget.

• 33:12Molly O'Shea?

  Power and energy has become one of the hottest topics right now because we've entered this cascading transformative evolution of AI and it's just increasing demand across the board. And so we're just seeing so much uplift in sentiment around the new administration, around the tech industry and that sort of thing. I'm curious from your perspective, going in and out of the White House, what is the sentiment there? And have they taken to views well? What's the relationship like?

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I think people are starting to realize that the main bottleneck for data centers, for compute, for model, is not really as much GPUs or construction capacity. It's literally how do you power the data centers? And Jensen Huang mentioned a couple months ago, that 1 gigabyte of power to power a data center is around $60 billion to build. That's how much revenue Boeing makes a year. And so that's really untenable and uneconomical, and third, also unaffordable completely. And I think that kilowatt hour,

• 34:26Speaker 00

  the dollar per kilowatt hour is directly related to how much GDP outcome we can produce, how much compute you can use. And I believe more energy directly equals more intelligence. And so therefore, our limiting factor to building compute is not the training models, is not the data centers, it's literally how much power we can have. And right now, there's -- and first, US has become, we've made it really hard to build. And people realize that. You see a lot of people from Secretary of Energy to the President and others in this administration that really realize that. It's very hard to build in America. And then

• 35:09Speaker 00

  second, energy is really the limiting factor for AI and a lot of other technologies that are on the agenda. And then third, China has been building really, really fast. If you look at their growth rate, they're surpassing and exponentially increasing their power capacity, and that's really concerning.

• 35:31Molly O'Shea?

  Do you think we can catch up to China or are we left in the dust already?

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Um, I believe we must, and so whatever it takes, we need to do to get there. And the sense of urgency is felt by very smart people. And I feel, I believe that this country is built on, you know, hope and optimism, but also on being the underdogs and doing whatever it takes to win. And so I'm, you know, I'm committed to, to winning that race. There's, there's no, no choice for us to fail. You know, you just can't afford for China to become, uh, you know, for, for fusion or nuclear, what, uh, you know, other countries have become for, for oil.

• 36:06Molly O'Shea?

  What do you think, Paki?

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Hmm, no, I, I mean, I think you look at the solar charts out of China and they're terrifying. Uh, you look at nuclear plants being built in China versus nuclear plants being built here, and it's terrifying. You look at, you know, the, uh, their ability to export them to other countries and desire to do that while we kind of sit back and I think for a lot of years, just pretended that nuclear was dangerous and unsafe and unclean and all of those things. And thankfully now I think we're, we're waking up. I mean, we're here at this conference, there's like multiple nuclear companies here. There's one fusion company here, I think, the, the only one here, which is, which is great. There's a lot of companies working, you know, not necessarily on solar panels here, but I'm like, what you do with a ton of solar panels. So there's Terraform, which Casey does, there's other companies doing similar stuff.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  I think if we can build that kind of machine around, uh, energy production so that we can just like put as much power as we possibly can and find uses for it, we can catch up. But it's like certainly not easy to be able to do that.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, one, one more thing as well, and just when we think about how do we beat them, I think we can be incremental, you know, I think we have to think differently. And when you think about fusion, it's the energy density equation. Like if we solve fusion first, that's replacing from an energy density perspective, it's a million times more than oil or coal. So even if they built like a million coal plants faster than us with one fusion plant, we can beat all of those, uh, from an like an energy output perspective or energy density. And I think how much they need to produce in order to beat us. So I think one way to win the race is really to continue doing what the US has done historically, which is lead with innovation and with new technologies.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny. Isaiah at Valor Atomics kind of makes this point about the fact that China certainly is putting more nuclear online than we are, but they're using kind of old US designs to do that. And like where we potentially win is on the innovation. Fusion is like the next kind of like bigger example of that where ideally we get to commercial fusion power quickly and then just roll that out. And I think that could be a big source of advantage.

• 38:13Molly O'Shea?

  With all your accomplishments to date, what are you most excited for in the next year? What's the next unlock?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  Well, we're bringing new facility online and we're very excited about that. We'll also be announcing a new facility later this year. So we're continuing to build, growing the team and continuing to serve customers.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  You got to get you out to one of these too. I went up for the test fires in Montreal and it's so cool. It's just like red light, these like pulses happening. I felt it's like one of the coolest days I've had in the past couple of years.

• 38:45Molly O'Shea?

  Sounds like a rave.

• 38:49Speaker 00

  We work hard and play harder and so it's pretty cool. I'm very happy to pack and made it.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  And the team is just absurd. It's like, yeah, the combination of like J C, who I think like if you can't tell already is like one of the most exceptional founders out there, people who've served in senior positions in the government, the number two kind of nuclear scientists in Iran who came over here to kind of work on our side here. And then just like everybody that I met who was like, you know, working on the machines, like top to bottom, just like an unbelievably cool team. I've like, I, maybe this is like the wrong way to think about it and like says more about me than the companies, but like one of the things that I like is, you know, however, like Percent dumber, I feel than the people that I'm like talking to up and down the stack of the company and I've like maybe never felt dumber than I did at Fuse. They're like,

• 39:38Speaker 02

  here's how you like plug something in. And I'm like, oh, that's amazing. That is so cool. But like, it was like so cool to see, because like you hear about Fusion is this thing that is like 20 years away. And then to go there and see this like kind of messy, like not in a dangerous way or anything, but like facility where there's just like wires and like there's like things happening and being built all over the place. It was like very cool, admitted very tangible and real that Fuse is like an actual business that's doing stuff right now.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  We gotta get you the next one.

• 40:04Molly O'Shea?

  I'll be there. Just invite me. Send me a, send me a Cal invite.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  You need to do it like months in advance now, by the way. I tried to get like a last minute conversation with somebody in Malian. She's like, are you kidding me? Like, I can't do this.

• 40:13Molly O'Shea?

  You send me like the week of. I'm like, Packy, I'm like in Paris right now. Like, how am I gonna get there in time?

• 40:19Speaker 02

  I'm not that fancy, so I'm able to hop on, but I understand that you're in Paris sometimes, so.

• 40:24Molly O'Shea?

  I need a mobile kit with me.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  You do.

• 40:26Molly O'Shea?

  I do.

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• 41:10Molly O'Shea?

  But yeah, so as we, as we shift over to the Packy side of this conversation, roaming around, I mean, we saw a robot on stage today, which was a part, one piece of the great differentiation that you wrote about not too long ago, which I thought was like a really good solidification of like what brand personality has become and how important that is for companies today. We're in like a sea of AI slop left and right. Like, people are not creative anymore. And there are some real leaders in this space that are super creative and putting a stamp on it. So from the horse's mouth, tell us about the great differentiation.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Nay.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  No, so the idea behind it, actually, before I wrote this piece, a great differentiation, I think you summarized it well, that kind of like there's, if there's all this AI slap out there and there's all this sameness, then like that just creates this like very big opportunity to do different stuff. And, you know, we saw it with John Collison at Stripe doing cheeky pint in like a pub that like another founder who's not Irish like can't pull off doing the Guinness in a pub thing. Like it's very much like their thing. Or Vlad Tenev doing the announcement about crypto token stocks in this like beautiful, you know, palace in Cannes and like this well-produced thing with James Bond music in the background and like drawing on chalkboards. It was just like unlike, it wasn't a Steve

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Jobs presentation. It was like a very unique, like kind of net new thing. Seeing more examples of that from like the companies that have like taste or the companies that like understand that to stand out, like you actually do need to do something that's both different, but like different in a way that's, that's unique to you. I wrote the piece, I had actually written a full other draft. Like I've done this a few times where I like start writing like a kind of negative like impacts of AI draft. I'm like, that's a negative version of the story. Like, let me talk about the positive version. And then I saw the Robin Hood thing and I was like, that is what I'm talking about. And I think like, one of the things that I wrote about the piece that I think is true is like, it's understandable that if you're making kind of, you know, like B2B SaaS and love B2B SaaS, you know,

• 43:21Speaker 02

  there, there are some great B2B SaaS companies out there. I don't think we get to the spot that we're at here at Reindustrialize, that people haven't been building software for the past 50 years. Like this is not enough. But if you're building a product that like lives in this little screen and like looks kind of like, you know, people have to be familiar with these products, you don't have that much room to kind of roam on, on your branding and messaging. A lot of these companies like do, JC has, you know, has pulse power generators that like shoot just like a ton of energy at like this very small target and make red lights and, you know, loud, loud noises. There's robots on stage. And roll has, it's like anime, but it also has its like kind of full, you know, autonomous drones that it can fly out and take video of. And like for these companies, there's just like actually an opportunity to just show off what you're doing. And like that

• 44:06Speaker 02

  in itself is differentiated because it's so hard to do that. Like just actually getting the thing done, like kind of creates all of this unbelievable content for you that, that other people just like definitionally can't copy. I mean, I think like, I wrote about Rainmaker in the piece right before Augustus got blown up and I think did like an unbelievable job of handling it, but he's doing something that's just like so far outside of what other people are doing that everybody's going to talk about it. One of the reasons that I like investing in this type of company and writing about this type of company is because there's just this like built in marketing and passion that people have for this stuff that I don't think that you can get with a lot of other types of companies.

• 44:43Molly O'Shea?

  I agree. I mean, I think it's like, we're only going to experience more and more, but we're also going to experience more and more of a slop, but also like extremely high quality production of everything. People are going to go to war for good product and good, I don't know, like marketing on it. It's like you're telling a story, but now you have to tell a story like even better than anybody else.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  And I think like, I haven't seen your user numbers, but I would imagine like since AI has come out, like your numbers have probably spiked. Like you're a human with a personality and like people, I'm sure come to Source for you for the news and for the founders, but also because like they've just gotten familiar with you. Like that stuff matters more now too. And like, that's, that's awesome. Like I think whenever I get like a little sad about kind of like, I see like a, you know, a stupid reply that is like clearly AI generated or something, I get a little sad and then I get happy that like, it does always kind of like, you know, there, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So like, the more of that stuff there is, the more people want people and fresh stuff and like things that nobody can copy. And so like the market is kind of self correcting in that way, which is awesome.

• 45:48Molly O'Shea?

  Every negative comment is a bot. Just remember that.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Ah, I was wondering. Okay, good.

• 45:54Molly O'Shea?

  They're all bots.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  I feel a lot better now.

• 45:56Molly O'Shea?

  Every dunk that I've had, it's all bots. I'm not worried about it.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Good, me too. I got, I got absolutely ripped by people for saying that, for saying that you could summarize books with.

• 46:08Molly O'Shea?

  That was so funny. Backy, that was hilarious.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  And those were real.

• 46:11Molly O'Shea?

  That went really viral.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  It went really viral. I think it was like 12 million views.

• 46:14Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  And I think, like, there is just this visceral, like, I understand why people are mad if they like, didn't get the joke. I said that you could summarize like Anachron and how, which to me seems like the least summarizable book imaginable and like would obviously defeat the whole purpose, but people didn't pick up on that. But there, there is, I can see, like, I understand that there is this like, negative reaction to like, there are people out there who are like, I don't need to read the book. I'm just gonna like do the chat GPT summary. And like, it completely misses the point. I think like, you know, I think I called AI super sass last time and I feel really good about that, that, that bet going forward. But I think like it to me like really calls into question like what we're doing here in a lot of cases. Like if you're using chat GPT to summarize and her and I was like in an extreme example, like,

• 46:59Speaker 02

  why are you doing it? Like, what is the point of of doing that? And I think that's true with some jobs and some other things. So I don't know. I think the most interesting thing about AI is like what it's teaching us about ourselves, as cheesy as that sounds, but it is like very weird to see kind of how humans respond to this new thing that we have.

• 47:16Molly O'Shea?

  If online shopping made us realize how lazy we were, this is going to unlock another level.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  I see it in myself too. Sometimes like I I will take my if I'm like stuck in writing an essay, I'll like take the draft, I'll put it in Claude and ask for feedback and like the feedback is bad. And like it always like tries to move me more towards average and I ignore it. But like I just have a tick where I'm like, well, instead of just sitting here and like thinking like it'd be more productive to just like ask Claude for feedback and it's like actually not and like not being comfortable sitting there and just like being silent and thinking through a problem is like really bad. I noticed it in myself of like had to delete, you know, X and I'm trying to like take my brain back and I'm sure I'll re-download it. But like I do think like there has to be an active and it can't like climate change, I think teaches us that like

• 48:05Speaker 02

  asking people to like, you know, do the good like doesn't actually want to make an impact. Like you need to do something better. You need fusion as opposed to telling everyone to like turn off their lights because people are just like, aren't going to do that. I wonder what that is going to be for attention because I think that's like dark that Elon is doing like all of this great stuff. And then in introducing waifus that are like taking over people's, you know, all of their time. Like it's insane to me.

• 48:28Molly O'Shea?

  Before we wrap up, or I guess as we wrap up, there's something I need to address. Packy, we were recently called out by Will O'Brien for being a part of the Irish Cabal. How do you feel about this? What's your response?

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's rich coming from a guy with an accent. I'm just like a regular old American dude. I will say, we were texting me, you and Will, and I was reading a book on Esalen. And like, literally, everybody involved in that, and in charge of Esalen, which is like this center out in California that was, you know, a part of, a huge part of like, kind of, Western and American psychological and drug and whatever else history. Like, everybody who led Esalen was Irish, and like, specifically from Cort County. So I, you know, as a descendant of Irish people, I'm kind of proud that, I don't think we get enough credit, actually, for the impact that we've made.

• 49:19Molly O'Shea?

  We should get a lot of credit. I mean, we invented Halloween.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Is that true?

• 49:24Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Awesome.

• 49:26Molly O'Shea?

  I know. Groundbreaking. Okay. Well, J.C., Packy, it was lovely to have you on. Thank you so much.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us. Thank you.

• 49:35Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email, and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.