#1319 Isaiah Taylor | Nuclear Power Can Save The World

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder & CEO of Valar Atomics. Valar is an atomic energy company focused on mass manufacturing nuclear fission reactors. In this conversation, we talk about what it is, how it works, risks, and what the future will look like if they are successful. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Get Better Crypto Data: Do you want faster, easier crypto data? Sign up for Velo Data, a new product that we have been working on to solve this problem: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠velowaitlist.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Isaiah Taylor. He is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics. Valar is an atomic energy company focused on mass manufacturing nuclear fission reactors. If you don't know what that is, this episode is for you. Isaiah walks us through what it is, how it works, what are the risks,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  and what could the future look like if they are successful? I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you do as well. Here is my conversation with Isaiah Taylor.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase.

• 2:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Before we get This episode, I also want to tell you about a brand new product called Velo. Velo is faster, easier crypto data. Everyone in the industry is always looking for, what's the price? What's going on on the exchanges? Where are assets flowing or not flowing? How is things like open interest and derivatives actually playing out in the market? Well, that's where Velo comes in. It's faster and easier crypto data. You can go to velowaitlist.com today. Myself and a couple of friends, we invested in the business. We're advising the founder and we think it's pretty cool. This one is something that keeps me informed on a daily basis. So you should check them out at velowaitlist.com.

• 2:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That's V E L O waitlist.com.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys, bang, bang. I've got Isaiah here with me. I thought a great place to start is just let's go to right to your website. You guys obviously put this on your website because this speaks to who you are and what you guys are building. On your website, the first thing people see is it says engineers wanted. We're building a company by solving one of the hardest problems in physics, using a historically unpopular fuel within a very short timeline, not to mention tackling complex manufacturing and creating an unproven commodities market along the way. The odds are against us, but we wouldn't have it any other way. What are you doing? That sounds like a death mission. What are you doing? And why is this so important?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, some of the best missions in the world have been death missions. So, um, no, I think we're going to win though. It's definitely a hard challenge, but I think we're going to win. So what we're doing is going to sound pretty counterintuitive, but we are creating jet fuel and other hydrocarbons and we're creating the amount of thin air. So this is, this is strange, but all of the ingredients for jet fuel and diesel and gasoline and methane, and all the hydrocarbons are already in the air, right? So the ingredients are hydrogen and carbon. That's what makes it the hydrocarbon. And you can get the carbon from CO2 in the air. You can get the hydrogen from water. And so, yeah, we are literally making jet fuel out of thin air. In order to do that, you, you need an energy source though, because this is a, you know,

• 4:16Speaker 02

  hydrocarbon is an energetic molecule in the sense that because there's. Oxygen throughout the atmosphere and there's hydrogen, you have like a high potential energy state. And so in order to get back to a hydrocarbon, you need a lot of energy from somewhere. And for us, that energy source is nuclear fission. So that's where the unpopular fuel source comes from. It's it's all it's both like an unpopular source, which is nuclear, and then also an unpopular product, which is jet fuel. Um, but we love that matchup. It's very, very counterintuitive, very contrarian. And at the end of the day, I think it'll make us all trillionaires. So yeah, we're we're happy with it.

• 4:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's go through first, taking the air in. Walk through that process specifically. Like, do you just have a big fan that like, rather than blow out, is like sucking in a bunch of air? And going into like a product that you built or how does it work?

• 5:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so carbon capture, there's a bunch of different ways to do it. We'll probably use a calcium based. So basically how this works is that calcium will sort of bond to the CO2 in the air. And you know, it'll form another compound and then you can go cook that compound or you can dissolve it in a solution. And you get the CO2 released out. And so there's a cycle. But yeah, the short answer is there's a fan, the fan, you know, moves air across a substrate. And then you, you know, you cook that the CO2 back out absorbs it, you cook it back out in some way. And yeah, so so exactly right, big fans.

• 5:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, as you're doing that, at what point does the fuel or the energy source get introduced to the process?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it doesn't take too much energy to capture carbon, actually. It it does take energy, but not not an enormous amount. The, I guess, like the energy difference between bonding the CO2 with the substrate and then releasing it back out is not enormous. It does take energy to run the fans, but there's like this trade off of like, how big is your plant versus how fast are the fans running? And so you can choose to like spend more on fans or spend more on energy. That part is not the super energetic part. The thing that's like, takes a lot of energy is creating hydrogen. Really what we do is recreate hydrogen. So I can kind of tell you the backstory in a little bit on how we got here. But the most important thing We do is we make hydrogen. And once you have hydrogen, it's nice. Like hydrogen's expensive.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  You could theoretically sell it for a lot, but it's like impossible to transport. So where this really becomes a big scalable business is bonding it with CO2, where we get to a hydrocarbon. But the energy usage, you know, the reason we need scaled nuclear is is creating that hydrogen.

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the use? When you say jet fuel, is it literally just for jets? Or are there other uses for the end byproduct?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, listen, like hydrocarbons are, the world literally runs on them. And that's, that's not just true right now. It's going to stay true. And I think it's going to become more true. Like even as we are electrifying a lot of different things, I'm all for electrification of certain things. I own a Tesla, but you know, it makes a lot of sense for driving around in LA traffic. The instant acceleration, the fact I can plug it in, don't have to go to the gas station. These things are nice, but man, like the whole world runs on hydrocarbons. Jets, like aircraft are never going to run on lithium ion. It's just not going to happen. It's possible that some other battery tech will come up that suddenly allows us to have like intercontinental airliners without hydrocarbons.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  But on the flip side, it's like, they already work so well. They're, they're so powered dense. And yeah, so, so they're already awesome. But yeah, as far as like end use cases, you know, burning, burning methane is how most of the world produces electricity.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Well, so either, either methane or coal. I think it's about 40% of, of electricity in the US is generated by burning methane, natural gas and turbines. And I think it's 30% globally. And then globally, like the rest of that's coal. So like hydrocarbons are how we get energy today. And it's just because they're so transportable that you can, you can stick them in a bucket. That's, that's something that's just really misunderstood and not appreciated is that you can carry energy in a bucket. You can pour this liquid in there and now you can move, you know, mega watts of power around. And that's, that's huge.

• 8:35Anthony Pompliano?

  So in the announcement of the business, you had this tweet and you said, all of our greatest ambitions, interplanetary life, artificial intelligence, robotics and biotech, need energy that is orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant than we have now. In 1970, we stopped our centuries long march of making energy cheaper. Why did the progress stop?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, there's two reasons and it's kind of hard to separate these things and understand the the real core reason. I think there probably is one core reason, but it might have been a confluence of events. The two basic reasons are, one, we started to reach a limit on how efficient it actually is to drill, transport and refine oil. And then the other reason is we started to kind of have these like political fears about oil. And that that includes like this concept of peak oil, which people talk about for a long time. It also includes like the environmental movement. So we both kind of reached a max efficiency on literally just like the machinery and the tooling and the labor that goes to like drill and refine oil. And then also there's like these political headwinds that arose

• 9:43Speaker 02

  at the same time. So those two things, and the geopolitical as well. So it's political and geopolitical, meaning like who owns the oil, where does it come from? And then also resistance to developing it domestically. Those two things, I think, combined to set us back as far as the what's called the Adams curve, which is our, you know, cost and consumption of energy diverging over time.

• 10:10Anthony Pompliano?

  When the progress goes stagnant, how hard is it to restart? Do you need one company? Do you need 10 companies? Do you need five governments? Like, like, how much, you know, kind of re-energizing of that momentum is needed to really kind of get going again?

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's such a great, great question. The the core answer to that question is actually the reason that it took me as long as it did to start this company. I've been thinking about this since I dropped out of high school, really, since I was 17. And it took me a long time to realize that there was a single lever that I could pull that I think could actually restart this thing. But I do genuinely believe that, you know, single companies throughout history have been able to create massive, massive movements and swings and really reshape entire industries, governments, all sorts of things, but they start in one place. SpaceX is the most recent

• 11:13Speaker 02

  example of this. It's like if we were sitting here in like 2001 and it's like, is, can we really restart space travel? Like is that, can one company really do that? Is Elon really that guy? You would have had some skepticism in, you know, in the early 2000s that, you know, it's like, listen, man, like, space launch, it's so many different vendors, it's so many different contractors, there's different governments involved, there's regulatory agencies, you know, who's going to make the rocket engines, who's going to weld up, you know, the pressure tanks. And, but then it turns out that like one company with a really, really clear focused mission, pushing, you know, for, for a decade in the same direction with passion, can actually change a ton. A lot can change really quickly. And

• 11:57Speaker 02

  once you have that like one spike, then a lot of other things in the periphery get changed, like regulations shift a little bit and vendors appear where there weren't vendors before, labor forces grow, these, these sorts of things. So I think that's a similar position to where we're sitting right now, which is like, yeah, there's a lot that needs to change to, to make energy cheaper, but I think we have found that spike in energy. And it comes down to mating, you know, an old established industry, which is hydrocarbons, with a much, much cheaper source of energy, which is nuclear. And I think when those things come together, it's a really beautiful marriage.

• 12:35Anthony Pompliano?

  What in that process are the things that you feel most confident you can figure out and kind of get going? And then what are the things that seem even for you who's in this day to day has studied it, is betting your time, energy and reputation on this, seem the least likely to actually be successful or to kind of get the breakthrough?

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, counterintuitively, nuclear is the most straightforward part of this. We know how to make nuclear reactors. We've made many, many nuclear reactors, both in the United States and in other countries of all kinds and forms with, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours of operation and recording data and things going right and things going wrong and iterating. We have not done that as much recently, but we have done it in the past to a really large degree. My great grandfather was at Oak Ridge, which is where they developed a lot of the advanced, you know, nuclear prototypes that get talked about today. And this was like the 60s and 70s. So, yeah, I would say that like the nuclear side, it's much more of a question of like,

• 13:42Speaker 02

  can you get this thing to a higher technology readiness level where it's ready to manufacture? Then there's a market waiting for it on their side. And then, you know, on the far end of the spectrum, like making jet fuel, that's also pretty well proven. Like we make synthetic fuels in a variety of ways today. So I guess if I had to look at the whole stack and say like, what am I least sure about right now? It's probably cheaply producing hydrogen, which kind of sits in the middle. So you have like nuclear heat and then you have hydrogen production and then you have making hydrocarbons. And I would say making hydrogen is probably that risk carrier right now. So that's actually why we're currently testing that in the lab.

• 14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And how much of this can you test on a small scale and kind of like get individual components and say, yep, this looks good, this looks good, like let's go build the big thing versus nah, man, we just gotta, we gotta build the full thing and, you know, hit the green button, turn it on, make sure that it works.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, all of it. We like, if there's a spectrum of like, doing the giant thing in 10 years versus taking small steps and building whatever we can and scaling up, I'm like far, far on this end where we're. We want to make the smallest possible thing. We want it completely to work from end to end. And then we want to learn from that. And then we want to take the next step and make it a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger. I'm kind of a practice maximalist, like theory is great. And personally, like I have a lot of intellectual curiosity about theory. And it's it's really fun to debate with people and write papers. But industries move forward on practice and heuristics, not on like sort of paper research.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Like if you kind of look into the the development of a lot of like really, really advanced industries where they're doing crazy stuff. It really happens through practice and heuristics. Like the jet engine is a great example of this. Like, we didn't really understand the thermodynamics of jet engines until they were already being used in commercial operations for like thirty years. But that's that's a pretty underrated thing that people don't realize. Like, we didn't really understand what was happening in a jet engine. Until thirty years after, people were flying around in them. And that's because people were experimenting, right? They they had a lab and they're like, well, what if we put the fuel at this temperature? Can we add like a bunch more thermal couples to this hot section and like figure out the temperature gradients that way? Do we really have to know the theory behind that?

• 16:07Speaker 02

  Now, there are, you know, there's usefulness to modeling and prediction. There's a lot of things that you have to do in that direction for safety. But you just you have to practice it. You have to actually do it.

• 16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Why is the government not pushing so much of this? Like, when we hear certain technologies, as you describe all the times unpopular, I may use the word controversial even to some degree. With some of the things that you guys are going to be working on here. Is the government scared? Is the government bought by, you know, old world kind of non-innovative companies and executives? Like, what's going on? And why is the government not kind of more persistent in seeing this happen?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, I, I think there, I think there are three phases. There was one phase, you know, it's sort of post-war, like a post-World War II era where the government was on its A-game. Like, we were going to the moon. Uh, we had just done the Manhattan Project. We were setting up the National Labs. Uh, it was, it was the get shit done era of sort of the federal bureaucracy. And, um, that really was a product of just a lot of eternal spirit. Like, we just had government spirit, you know? Uh, like, yes, this, we are capable of going to the moon, and it's this, like, top-down, like, Congress-funded way of getting science and industry done.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  But that, that takes, like, so much cultural virtue, if that makes sense. Um, it takes everybody having, like, a highly patriotic sense of the mission. And, uh, it's somewhere along that line. Like, we kind of lost that, like, group, group society, like, American, like, spirit of, of, like, doing things collectively. Um, and so, like, that's one function of, like, why, why we are not able to move, like, with incredible speed anymore. A- as far as, like, is it bought by people? There was definitely a time in which, um, you know, a lot of, like, our regulators were bought by various interests that didn't want to have nuclear happen. Oil and gas is a really obvious one. You can go and, you can go and trace all that down where, where oil and gas basically stopped, uh, nuclear development from happening.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  I don't think that's the case anymore. I think that actually oil and gas companies now, um, are actively looking for ways to be part of the next generation of energy production. Um, and now we're kind of in that mode where the government might not actually necessarily know what's fastest and what's best. Right? They, they might not actually have a clear picture of what is the best and fastest way to move an industry forward. And that's where it falls on our shoulders. Like, you know, regulators are default risk averse. They want things to not blow up. That's, that's great. And entrepreneurs have to go out and prove to them this is the right way to do it.

• 18:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What has been the response so far from some of these industry players? Are they trying to help you? Are they kind of, "Hey, cute idea, kid. You know, let's see you later." What has been kind of some of those conversations or at least things you're aware of at this moment?

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it's, you know, I am a kid. You know, I'm 24 and it is a cute idea. So, you know, if anyone's saying that right now, like, I don't fault them. I think, you know, I have a lot to prove and that's fine. But I would say the reaction's been generally positive. I've certainly had a lot of those conversations where it's like, "Yeah, okay. Like, good luck actually getting this thing across the line. It costs my company $3 billion to make this one over here. And you're going to do it with like a couple hundred million? Sure, kid." Like, you know, I certainly have gotten a little bit of that. I would say overwhelmingly, though, the writing is on the wall with nuclear that people are starting to understand like the incentives that have brought us to where we are in nuclear.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And that those things have caused pretty big like price distortions. And somebody coming up with the right model to break through that actually is quite compelling. I would say the vast majority of people I've talked to in the existing industry, when I kind of lay out the, you know, our plan and how it addresses, you know, addresses like the incentive problems in the market are like, "Wait a minute, that could actually work and I want to be part of that." So that's been the overwhelming impression so far.

• 20:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And what are the skillsets you need to build this? Like, you obviously have an understanding of some of the science. You've formulated this after thinking about it for a long time. You're not going to do it alone, though. So like, what are the skillsets that are necessary?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Great question. Let's make this the header clip. Let's put this all over X.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Thank you for giving me the platform. Look, man, like, we need extremely, extremely cracked people to work on this and... And it's a it's a few different skill sets, but like the most important thing just at the outset is like, people need to be crazy fast, crazy dedicated, be willing to to like, take risks and try things that haven't been done before and mostly just move very, very fast. That's like the it's almost a personality trait that I'm looking for initially with that. But then particular skill sets are like thermo hydraulics people. Um, anyone who's worked with pressure vessels and welding at pressure vessels to do the right thing at the right time. Uh, nuclear physics, of course, we need people to be doing, you know, core modeling and this kind of stuff and thermal modeling on the core.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  And then, um, I would say like chemical and process engineering, if you've worked in the oil and gas industry, if you've worked with Fisher Trop, we want to talk to you. Um, and, uh, yeah, any anyone who can, you know, machine really well and weld really well is is always going to be useful. And then, uh, on the and the other one is electrical engineers currently looking for, you know, extremely fast moving electrical engineer. So, yeah, that's that's what we're looking for right now.

• 21:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's say that you're able to combine, uh, your plan, the right team and capital. You've already raised some money. I'm assuming that you'll have to raise a lot more.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Um,

• 21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  what is the end product better than? And what I mean by that is like, you know, the the ultimate, are you saving people money? Are you saving them time? Do you have a product that's 10x better? Like, how do you evaluate? Okay, if we get everything right and actually build what we think we can build, how much better are you than alternatives?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, quite frankly, the end product is is cheaper jet fuel. Uh, it's cheaper jet fuel, cheaper methane, um, cheaper gas, cheaper diesel. And, um, that is actually really, really sexy. Doesn't sound that sexy when I say it, but but no, it's very sexy. And the reason is there is a $5 trillion industry currently trying to provide cheaper energy by drilling, by moving oil around, by cracking into the right chains of hydrocarbons. Super fun industry, by the way, it's really awesome. I love it. But it can't get much cheaper than it is right now. And if we, if you want to go out and build like a massive, massive company today that makes a lot of money. If you can go and make cheaper jet fuel, you're sitting really pretty.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  That's what we want to do. After jet fuel, you know, there's a lot of, there's actually a massive chemical market too. And a lot of those chemicals are, I would say like the price is pretty well indexed on your price of heat. So like, how cheap is your heat can affect the price of, of your chemical commodity pretty quickly. And so there's a lot of like really, really fun things we get to tackle down the road. Just like, you know, how, you know, how cheaply can we make, uh, you know, the, the plastic feedstocks? How, how cheaply can we make polyethylene? How, how cheaply can we make, uh, you know, ammonia, these, these sorts of things? If we get the cheapest heat in the world, so that's what we're working on.

• 23:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When you were talking to other people in the industry, whether you're recruiting them, potential competitors or potential partners, what are they most impressed with, given the progress to date? People on the outside who may not understand the industry really well, they would look and say, oh, you raised some money. Sounds like a really, you know, ambitious idea. But what are the things that insiders are really impressed with?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the thing that's, that's sort of most surprising to the insiders off the bat is, is like I said before, this sort of, um, really, really counterintuitive, uh, market shift. So I, I think that everything about companies are determined by who's the customer and what's the product. And there are a lot of things, that's, that's actually kind of counterintuitive. But this is how technology works. Technology kind of forms itself and shifts itself to a certain customer in a certain market. So like PCs are the ways that they are because they're serving business customers. Macs are the way they are because they're serving creatives. And technology sort of morphed themselves and shift themselves.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  And it's not just the shape of the technology, it's the shape of the companies that service that, you know, that industry. So like SpaceX, it's a very different company than, uh, you know, any of the subcontractors that we're putting together. You know, the rockets for NASA. And so I think the thing that's that's like really, really interesting right now is that we have figured out a model here where we can actually do mass scale nuclear and the markets right and the incentives are right. And we just have to do really, really hardcore engineering together. But that's really, really fun because for a long time, it doesn't, it hasn't really mattered how hardcore your engineering is. Like you can get super, super

• 25:19Speaker 02

  cracked hardcore engineers in a room and it can create an incredible design for a nuclear reactor and then not sell it to anyone because like no one's buying nuclear reactors. So we've got a model here that actually allows us to do incredible engineering and seriously make money at the end of the day.

• 25:35Anthony Pompliano?

  How much money can you make?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  When we are so I'll describe it as like a curve. What we want to get to is where we are on the style of curve where we are reinvesting profits on selling hydrocarbons into sort of increasing scale of sites and decreasing cost of replication on our units. So we want to have very, very large sites where we're making jet fuel and we want to be sort of turning those on in a rolling fashion, selling the fuel. And then we have this rolling process of reinvesting the profits from selling those hydrocarbons into bigger factories, bigger units, more verticalization. And like this is the, this is the type of

• 26:24Speaker 02

  thing where if that could take us, you know, 10 years to the point where, where that's where cash is coming from the reinvestment and then another 10 years after that, like, look, we could be making hundreds of billions of dollars of free cash flow.

• 26:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you just stay with the jet fuel? Or are there other things that you can do? A lot of these processes and kind of industrial manufacturing, you know, businesses, what I've learned over the years is like, there's all kinds of waste and byproducts and other things you can monetize and, you know, get creative. How do you think about, okay, we're going to go build cheaper jet fuel. We're going to do it in this really kind of unpopular way. What are the expansion opportunities from there once you've kind of earned the right by focusing on the first thing?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so jet fuel is is like a really good hydrocarbon to make because it is in like serious, serious demand. It's going to stay in serious demand. There's high volume for it. It's easy to transport. But there are a variety of other hydrocarbons for other purposes. I think the thing that, you know, there's a whole spectrum of hydrocarbons we can make and sell depending on where we're located, like methane for for use in in nat gas turbines. Like this is how most countries make their electricity is, you know, pipelines of of nat gas. And so that's exciting. But beyond that, like the chemical market, man, is a is super interesting to me. I love I love the chemicals industry. It's a $5 trillion industry that nobody really thinks about that much. And, you know,

• 27:53Speaker 02

  part of my thesis is that there's a massive portion of those chemicals that can be made cheaper. Like I said, if you have cheap heat. So like fundamentally, we're a cheap heat company, and we figure out how to sell like mass scale cheap heat to the commodity market.

• 28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, as I see this being built, the manufacturing itself seems like it's going to be something you have to figure out theoretically, and then you have to go actually do. How dependent are you on international supply chains? How like American or domestic oriented is it? And do you see that as a plus or a minus? Like, you know, depending on how much dependency you have on other areas of the world, certain inputs to that manufacturing process can determine whether you really control your own destiny, or you see risk there as well?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  So I think that one of the things that Tesla kind of proved for everyone is that the whole question of like international dependency is more an issue for like horizontally structured companies than it is for vertically structured companies. And what I mean by that is like, while while all other automakers were having serious supply chain issues, Tesla, for the most part, wasn't. And it's because if you actually kind of do the work, the deep verticalization work, and you design your product around verticalization, you design Your your manufacturing processes around that. There are way fewer dependency points. You're still always going to have a few dependency points like, you know, Tesla had to figure out these presses and this kind of stuff. But but you get to reduce the surface area of that a lot.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  What it means is you have to in-house a lot more engineering. And in order to in-house a lot of engineering, you have to have a massive terminal market. Like Tesla was able to do that because they're like, you know, we want to be the largest automaker. And that's a that's going to be a really big company, right? So so they had the justification to do that. A lot of, you know, companies working on hard things, maybe just don't have a big enough terminal market to justify in-housing this, you know, stainless press system, right?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  For Valor, like, yeah, we're highly focused on verticalizing everything. And in fact, we're willing to trade off some efficiency. We're willing to trade off a lot of things for being able to control our destiny. And that's that's for two reasons. One, you know, not not being dependent on others, but really it's speed. Like, we want to, we want to iterate really, really fast. And that means we're going to spend a little bit more on verticalizing for sure.

• 30:22Anthony Pompliano?

  And what exactly, like, give me some examples, maybe of how you think of implementing that? Because it theoretically sounds awesome, right? And I think the point about Tesla makes a ton of sense. But for you all specifically, like, what does that mean?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  The way that people perceive the nuclear industry is wrong. There are, there aren't very many, if at all, like, nuclear reactor companies. There are components companies that make components for nuclear reactors. And then there are integrators that, you know, sub out designs and, you know, rough parameters. And then get those parts in those components and then integrate them. So there's like, there are purchasers, integrators, and then suppliers. There are very, very few companies in the world who are like, yeah, we make nuclear reactors. And we own like all of that process.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  So even just like the most, you know, fundamental parts of that, which is like, can you make your own core? Can you make your own control rod drives? Again, like, you're going to buy down some stuff that that's going to take a little bit longer. And you're going to have to hire some really talented people who have thought through these problems before. But for us, like, it's it's worth doing. It's worth doing because because at the end of the day, you know, if we can get that machine to work, there's a massive market on the other end.

• 31:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you're doing this, do you have to do it in one manufacturing facility? Like, is it just like build one massive plant, like Gigafactory equivalent? You just have one of them? Or is the idea basically you build them all over the world? And it's all about cutting down transportation time? You know, how do you kind of think of like, okay, we're successful? There are these other components about geography, uh, site selection. There is regulation of the country that you go into. There is the cost and speed of transportation of the quote unquote cheaper jet fuel. Now with things like the Houthis and kind of global supply chains, you kind of get a new chess piece on the board. So how are you thinking about that today?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like spiritually, it's much, it's gonna be much closer to the Gigafactory type layout. And again, like, we're kind of coming out of this era where it made a lot of sense. But it didn't make sense, but it made temporary sense to like fracture everything. Um, we saw like really, really cheap suppliers be able to pop up because there was like some temporary. Let's say you have a process and you have labor running that process. And then China's like, look, we copy pasted that process, but our labor costs 20% of the, you know, of that price. And so, you know, we just shaved, you know, let's say 30% off your, off your total. In the short term, it's like, oh, wow, let's go horizontalize everything. And we'll just be an integrator.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  And at the end of the day, we can make all this stuff for like 20 to 30% cheaper. We can dominate the market, right? So that that's the era that we're currently coming out of. Um, the thing that that model misses is innovation. It misses that, okay, sure, China figured out how to copy paste your process with cheaper labor. But what you're missing is that like a little bit of R and D spend and a little bit of creativity could have gotten you a 50% cheaper process, right? And so that's where we want to have a much closer, tighter model where it's really, really smart people thinking about innovating the entire process and pushing those costs down. And so, yeah, like, could it, could it be cheaper to sort of like run this like regulatory play? Where you're doing different regions and trying to integrate things together?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  That is short term thinking. Um, we want to push these cost curves down over and over and over for decades.

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  When you talk to investors, what is their excitement, right? And I'm assuming the mission is a big one. But what are they excited about? And then what are they scared of? Why do you not have, you know, $5 billion sitting in the company's bank account right now? Because every investor is clamoring over you to give money for this crazy idea.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we'll get there. We'll get there. I think that the initial hesitation, I'll say like when we were going and raising, the initial hesitation people had was just, we don't know how to underwrite all of these technical areas at once, right? There's several different, you know, areas of, you know, complex engineering that we need to do, and we need to put it all together. And most firms, you know, at least at the small scale, don't have those three experts sitting in the room at any one time. And so I think that's probably something that is going to not be as much of an issue once we actually have the expertise in-house and can show them like, yeah, we're making

• 35:00Speaker 02

  hydrogen over here, we're making jet fuel, you know, here's our core that's coming online. And then, yeah, so, but then on the excitement side, like, it actually is really, really exciting to be part of energy and to have a new fundamental play with energy. And nuclear has always been that like, sort of dark horse. It's always been this like, what if we could just make energy way cheaper? Because the economics of it are crazy, right? Like, people don't realize that the economics are insane. A dollar of uranium turns into like $48,000 of electricity. Like, the gap there is enormous. And so it's this dark horse that's always kind of on the horizon, but it just has the wrong market until valor.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Like, all the other companies trying to pursue that, I just think they have the wrong market. Electricity is a terrible product at the end of the day. So I think the thing that's really exciting is like, we get to actually ride that dark horse into the city, but we're going to ride it on the back of hydrocarbons, not electricity.

• 36:02Anthony Pompliano?

  There is very compelling evidence that the more energy a society consumes, the more prosperous it becomes. If you drop the cost of some of that energy, obviously, people will consume more of it. How much more prosperous can we get?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I think the future is very, very exciting. I'm definitely a techno optimist. I think that we're going to continue building this technological machine that we all live in right now. And it does not have a strict limit that I can perceive today. But I think we're at an inflection point where there are a couple of pillars coming together. So the three pillars that I've identified, and honestly, I'm not sure if I invented this or not. I've tried Googling it to see if other people have been talking about this. And the only articles that come up are ones that I co-authored, so I'm not exactly sure. But the three pillars are, so all I have to say, if anybody came up with this and

• 37:00Speaker 02

  it wasn't me, please DM me so I know that. Dexterity, energy, and intelligence are these three pillars. So dexterity being the ability to actually physically manipulate the world, right? You might have the right idea of how atoms and molecules should be shaped in your head, but can you actually enact that? Energy is just obvious. It's a property of the universe. And then intelligence is, like we said, sort of the know-how on how to move things around, how to arrange them, how to construct them. So dexterity, energy, and intelligence. In the agrarian era, everything was human. So dexterity was actual fingers. Energy was the chemical energy in your biological system that you got from eating food, which

• 37:45Speaker 02

  originally came from the sun. And then intelligence was, of course, human intelligence. In the industrial age, you know, starting in the 1800s, we started to make machines a little bit dextrous, right? So we gave machines the ability to move cotton in the right way to make clothing, and then eventually to sort of stamp out cars, and cars can now move around. And then intelligence was like a little bit embedded, but it was more just kind of mechanical constraint. And then energy shifted from like the biological energy of our bodies to energy latent in hydrocarbons in the crust, so mostly coal. So we're getting into a new era now. So this was agrarian age and industrial age.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  I think that the next era gets really, really exciting, mostly because of the decreasing cost of intelligence. So we're starting to figure out how to like bake intelligence into things that's that's operating in a much higher level. We're also kind of figuring out dexterity more, although I think that was always not as big of a problem as intelligence was. And now the problem is that energy has been stagnating. So intelligence is going vertical, dexterity is going vertical, energy is stagnating. And so that's why Valor is working on this. I think in order for us to get into this future where, you know, the cost of all material things are dropping significantly and, you know, we're able to terraform the earth to to make it more pleasant to live in and to create more dry land for people to live on

• 39:16Speaker 02

  and get into space and, you know, be creating space habitations and terraform other planets. We've got the intelligence, you know, trending toward that direction. We've got the dexterity trending toward that direction, but energy is that is the short stick right now. And so that's why that's what I'm working on.

• 39:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And I guess one of my last questions for you is just, you all are successful. You get all these smart people, you get all this capital, you're able to create cheaper jet fuel. Is there a world where the machines consuming the fuel actually have to adapt to the cheaper jet fuel? Whether that is the companies and they change, you know, cost structures and kind of the financing mechanisms and things like that? Or maybe actually the fuel has an advantage or maybe a disadvantage, you know, there's some difference in the fuel that changes the the structures as well. And it kind of feels like those are the second or third order effects that if successful, either new problems could spawn or new improvements that are built on top of cheaper jet fuel that previously weren't possible, similar to what we've seen with SpaceX having cheaper,

• 40:16Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, launch, then there's a bunch of new use cases that get unlocked as well.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I mean, I look, I think like increasing or stagnant energy cost is a sickness. Like, I think it's a societal sickness. And we're trying to cure it. So I think my simple answer to that is like, a lot of things get better overnight, really, really quickly. Just for instance, why are cars ugly now? Why are all cars ugly? Like, I think it's because fuel costs too much. Why are, it seems like a lot of the electric cars coming out now actually kind of look better than some of the gas cars. It's because they have different constraints on the shape of those things based on, you know, their, their fuel consumption. If you look at like cars pre 1975, there's real artistry and beauty built into these things. And then after that, they became sort of like, you know, mechanistic functions of fuel consumption.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  And why do dishwashers suck at washing dishes? Well, it's because they are being tuned for energy efficiency, not, you know, function of dishwashing. There's a lot of things in our society that are like built around the price of energy that's stagnating or getting higher. That I think once we can fix that, once it's really, really cheap to put methane into, into a pipe and create electricity. It's really, really cheap to move, you know, jet fuel, you know, to, to another country and, and, and run your jets. Like, there's a lot of things that, that suddenly get solved, we're not even thinking about right now.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  The last topic, uh, it's very intertwined. El Segundo, the Gundo, uh, also IAC feels like maybe Gundo is, uh, the home base HQ, maybe actually, uh, it is the heaven that you ascend to in IAC. Once you have finally adhered to the religion. Talk to you about both of those and kind of how they reinforce each other and why you think they're so important.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so Gundo is, uh, obviously we're, we're right here in El Segundo, Feller HQ. I moved here, uh, late last year. And it's a fantastic moment that we're having. And I think it's going to grow into just a lot of incredible companies and dense talent. I think that, you know, I moved here, I decided to set up the company here because I really fell in love with the place. And I fell in love with the talent base is just incredibly incredibly talented and smart people that have been working here for a long time. They're also deeply patriotic, which is super important to me. I think both this like Gundo and Yak thing.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Have this note of, you know, pride and joy in your own, you know, people in your nation and in moving that people in that nation forward through time technologically and even in terms of things like, you know, having more kids and that kind of stuff. There's this deeply like societally optimistic thing that we're doing here. Yeah, so I, I think you're right. This is, it's, I'll call it HQ. And maybe we can call Mars the heaven that you ascend to in this, in Yak.

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Where can we set people to find you on the internet or find out more about Valar Atomics?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so valoratomics.com. If you are any of the types of engineers that I spoke of, or even if you're just a super talented engineer and you want to submit your resume anyway, you can do it there. Also, find me on X.com. Search for Isaiah Taylor Valar Atomics. So yeah, that's where you can find me.

• 43:40Anthony Pompliano?

  And is there any one last message you want to leave with people if they come and they work at the company? What's going to happen?

• 43:46Speaker 02

  I mean, if I could leave a message with everyone, it's just consume more energy and, and have more kids. Having kids is wonderful. There should be a trillion humans and we should be using the power of 1500 stars. And guess what? Energy is free. Like fundamentally in the universe, energy is free. More humans are better. Let's get out of this D cell mindset and start building again.