#219 Isaiah Taylor - CEO of Valar Atomics

Isaiah Taylor is the audacious visionary behind Valar Atomics, an El Segundo based startup on a mission to reinvent atomic energy and fuel the future of mankind. Isaiah Taylor dropped out of high school at 16 to start a business and write software for the world's largest hedge fund, but his real obsession, inherited from his physicist great-grandfather, is nuclear energy. After ten years of obsessive research, Isaiah founded Valar Atomics with a radical plan to reboot the atomic age with mass-manufactured nuclear reactors which can make energy for AI and reverse combustion itself, turning atmospheric CO2 and water into carbon-neutral jet fuel and gasoline cheaper than drilling for oil. In one year, Valar Atomics has already built a 100,000-pound prototype reactor, the first step on their journey to making civilization beautiful again with abundant energy. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://aura.com/srs https://bubsnaturals.com – USE CODE SHAWN https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://hexclad.com/srs https://ketone.com/srs Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order https://moinkbox.com/srs https://preparewithshawn.com https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://ROKA.com – USE CODE SRS https://shopify.com/srs https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. Isaiah Taylor Links: Valar Atomics - ⁠https://www.valaratomics.com⁠ X - ⁠https://x.com/isaiah_p_taylor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Welcome to Sephora.

• 0:31Speaker 02

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• 0:55Speaker 01

  Hi, I, uh... Let's get you a basket.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Isaiah Taylor, welcome to the show.

• 1:07Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here in this incredibly inspiring room. Lots of mementos in here that are sick, so yeah, I'm excited to talk.

• 1:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, thank you, thank you. Yeah, I'm, uh, so I guess in the past six months, we have really dove into the tech space.

• 1:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:24Shawn Ryan?

  And so we got connected through our mutual friend, Augustus Dorico, and The Rainmaker. And when he was here, he was telling me all about what you were doing and that you guys were best friends.

• 1:35Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:36Shawn Ryan?

  And I've been really interested in the power grid for a couple of years now. It seems very weak and...

• 1:44Speaker 05

  Yes, it's a lot of work to do.

• 1:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and I think, who was, I think it was Scott Nolan that told me what the data centers and AI and everything, that by 2030, AI will be using... The exact, the equivalent of the energy that we all use today in 10 years. So all of our energy grid will be sucked up by 2030.

• 2:03Speaker 05

  I think it's either all the energy grid will be sucked up by 2030 or we'll fall behind. Right? We'll fall behind on AI, which I think is unacceptable, right? So this is a red hot screaming problem that that has to be solved. It's a national security issue. So I think if you're working in energy, you're working on something really important.

• 2:21Shawn Ryan?

  So you're building basic, is it mini nuclear reactors?

• 2:25Speaker 05

  That's right. So small modular reactors, the technical term, there's sort of three categories. Uh, micro reactors are zero to 20 megawatts. SMR, small modular reactors are 20 to about 300. And then above 300, you're just sort of the classic gigawatt scale, um, large reactors. So we're kind of in the lower range of SMRs. Uh, our first commercial unit will be around 25 megawatts electric.

• 2:48Shawn Ryan?

  What does that, what does that mean? For, for somebody like me, that means nothing.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  So it's, yeah, it's a good question. So a 25 megawatt electric, uh, unit will power a small town. So if you want to do, you know, if you want to power a big town, you put several of them next to each other. And this is a common strategy for nuclear. Pretty much every nuclear site doesn't have just one, uh, nuclear unit on it, has several.

• 3:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  But we sort of take that to the logical conclusion and we say, we don't just build. Normally it's like four, right? So you have a site and you put like four units on it. We want to have a site and put hundreds of units on it eventually. To start off with, if you want to make a gigawatt, you know, put 40 down, right? So 40 units next to each other at 25 megawatt electric nameplate is a gigawatt of power. Now you're powering like a big city, right? Or you're powering several towns, several cities, a significant portion of the grid. And when we look at AI demand, we're looking at demand for data centers as large as a gigawatt, which has never happened before. This is a, like a brand new idea of doing a data center that large. Um, it's, we're super excited about it.

• 3:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What is a small town? What, give me a population size.

• 3:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I think, you know, that's probably going to, a 25 megawatt electric unit is going to be a town of, uh, probably like 15,000 people.

• 3:58Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:59Shawn Ryan?

  And one could power that entire town.

• 4:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:01Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:02Shawn Ryan?

  You know, just at breakfast this morning, I mean, just.

• 4:07Shawn Ryan?

  I love stories like this. You know, we weren't going to talk about your life story. We're just going to go nuclear, but I just, man, just kudos to you. Twenty-six years old, dropped out of high school at sixteen, came from nothing, building. Sounds like you had a great family that you're very close with, but not, not a... I guess what I'm getting at is you didn't have a big trust fund or anything like that to get started. You did it on your own and, and you are a hell of an innovator.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Well, I didn't do it on my own, but I certainly didn't do it with a trust fund. You know, my parents are extremely supportive in just always being there for me. You know, I talk to my dad, you know, basically every week on the phone. We talk for a couple of hours and he's always, he's always just believed that I have what's necessary to fix large problems. I'm not sure where he got that idea, but he has always believed that. And so I'm extremely grateful to him. And then I've been helped by many other people, right? You know, our investors at Valor couldn't do it without them. My team members of Valor couldn't do it without them, you know, previous companies that have started employees there. So, you know, it's a, I'm standing on many, many shoulders at this point.

• 5:15Speaker 05

  Not so much financially, but, but from other people. But yeah, we, I grew up, you know, very poor. We grew up on food stamps most of growing up in various, you know, rough places around the country. And it was really just that my parents were, you know, my dad was, was doing his best to provide for his family with the hand he had been dealt and was extremely focused on us, on his kids. I like to say that my dad will, will, will prove to have been one of the greatest investors in history.

• 5:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 5:47Speaker 05

  Not because he invested money into his stock, but because he invested in his children. And I do hope that Valor Atomics will be one of the most valuable country, you know, one of the most valuable companies of all time. And my dad invested in me to be able to do that in terms of educating us and giving us work ethic, especially giving us opportunities to get our hands dirty.

• 6:07Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it sounds like you're well on your way. So.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Hope so.

• 6:10Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 6:11Shawn Ryan?

  But everybody starts off with an introduction here. So, here we go.

• 6:17Shawn Ryan?

  Isaiah Taylor, visionary behind Valar Atomics, an El Segundo-based startup on a mission to reinvent atomic energy and fuel the future of mankind. A 26-year-old self-taught innovator who dropped out of high school at age 16 to start a business and write software for the world's largest hedge fund. A fierce advocate for nuclear renaissance, challenging outdated regulations and pushing for innovation to power AI, industry, and beyond. Have a radical plan for mass-producing small modular nuclear reactors to create carbon-neutral jet fuel and gasoline that is cheaper than drilling for oil. In just one year, Valar Atomics has built

• 6:58Shawn Ryan?

  a 100,000-pound prototype reactor, the first step on their journey to making civilization beautiful, again with abundant energy. A Midwesterner with Christian roots, your great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, giving you a personal connection to the atomic age.

• 7:16Speaker 05

  Wow. Yeah, we can talk about Westminster too. Westminster confession of faith. If that's what we're getting at, it's also great. But, no, Midwesterner, that's right, yeah.

• 7:24Shawn Ryan?

  But, so a couple of things to get through. One, I have a Patreon account. It's a community, it's a subscription account, and they've been here with me since the beginning. And so, one of the things I do is I offer them, each and every guest that comes on, they get to ask a question. And so, this is from Ian Lane. "Coming from a non-traditional path in a legacy tied to the Manhattan Project, how do you reconcile the historic weight of nuclear innovation with your vision of making it scalable, clean, and decentralized? And what's the biggest misconception people still have about nuclear energy today?"

• 8:06Speaker 05

  So I think the first half of the question, and thank you for the question, Ian, right?

• 8:11Speaker 05

  And thank you for supporting Sean, that's awesome. So I think the first half of the question is like, how do you go from a heavy centralized industry to smaller, more mass manufactured lighter type of industry? And then what was the second half of the question there? And what's the biggest misconception people still have about nuclear energy today? Yeah, so the first half is like, how do you go from this really big thing to this small thing? I would point out that this is something that's happened before in other industries. And the way that you do it is you start small and you move very, very quickly and learn as fast as you can with talented people. So I think SpaceX is the great example here.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  So the space industry before SpaceX was really concentrated around these very large rockets that were very expensive to build, took a long time to build, did not launch very frequently. And when SpaceX set out to create what they've created now, they started much smaller, right? They created the Falcon 1. Falcon 1 was a tiny rocket. It was really too small to make any sense or be economical, but it taught them how to build rockets from scratch, right? And it gave them a test platform to test their construction methods and their engineering and their motors and these sorts of things. And then they got into the Falcon 9 and now they're building Starship. So I think that we're going to follow a very similar track here where over time, I believe our reactors will slowly get larger.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  But the first thing to do is you have to make sort of a minimum viable thing that your team can build and can build quickly and learn lessons, right? It's all about learning. We really are having to reinvent nuclear. We can't just take the designs that we had in the 1960s. Those designs don't work anymore for a few reasons. It's not that they technologically don't work, it's that they economically don't work. So we don't have the tool chains and the labor to do massive engineering projects and massive construction projects anymore. This is something we were really, really good at in, you know, the 50s and 60s. As a country, as a civilization, we were great at building large civil infrastructure. And over time, we sort of got worse at that. We can talk about why, but the fact is we got worse at that and we got better at manufacturing, right?

• 10:22Speaker 05

  If you're gonna bring nuclear back today, I believe that the form factor of your reactor should be reflective of that change, where you're going toward more smaller manufactured things rather than these like really big civil works projects. So, the short answer is like, you start small and you move quickly and you'll learn fast with smart people, and that's exactly what we're doing.

• 10:42Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:44Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. One more thing, everybody gets a gift. Nothing crazy. Good job on sleek gummy bears, legal in all 50 states. Not that you have to worry about that living in LA.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, legal in all 50 states, that makes it sound like it maybe shouldn't have been legal, but are these like CBD or something like that?

• 11:03Shawn Ryan?

  No, man, they're just gummy bears.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 11:06Shawn Ryan?

  Just regular gummy bears made in the USA.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  Let's go. Alright, I'm looking forward to that.

• 11:10Shawn Ryan?

  Some of the best junk food around.

• 11:11Speaker 05

  My kids are gonna enjoy that as well. I have a gift for you.

• 11:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 11:16Speaker 05

  I have two gifts for you. So, I have two hats, which both say, "Make Nuclear Great Again," and this one still has a sticker on it. Stick the sticker off. "Make Nuclear Great Again." We have a black one and a white one.

• 11:29Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  And both of them are for you. We're past Memorial Day, and the president has started wearing his white "Make America Great Again" hat, so I made a white "Make Nuclear Great Again" hat.

• 11:39Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  But both of these are for you.

• 11:41Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 11:43Shawn Ryan?

  You're gonna have to sign this white one.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Let's do it, yeah.

• 11:45Shawn Ryan?

  So, yeah. That's awesome. I was gonna say, great hat.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you. Well, now it's yours.

• 11:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. But, yeah, you know, like I said, at breakfast, you were kinda talking about, you know, how you met your wife and how you grew up, and so, I wanna cover that stuff, cuz I just, you know, you met your, not to get ahead of myself here, but you met your wife in first grade, I think that, that's awesome, man. So, let's start with your life story. Where'd you grow up?

• 12:10Speaker 05

  So, I grew up around the Midwest. I was born in Normal, Illinois, and my life has been very normal since then, so that tracks. And moved around the Midwest, moved to Colorado when I was, I believe, around six, and that's when I, when I met Sophie. So, Sophie, my wife, we met in first grade, we were in school at the I don't know that we said many words to each other in in first grade. She was very shy. Uh, but I thought she was cute. Um, and so we got to, you know, know each other the next few years, went to church together. And um, we were really just sort of a common denominator in each other's lives. Both of us moved all over the country many times for various reasons.

• 12:51Speaker 05

  Uh, but we we kept running into each other, um, you know, at at various places and reunions and these sorts of things. And I just had a huge crush on her, you know, since forever. So, um, but she is a, she is amazing. She's, I mean, it's like ridiculous to even like try to put words to that. Um, but I've always, I've always known I wanted to marry her. Uh, and I did so.

• 13:11Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. And you said, did you say you moved fourteen times before you were sixteen?

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 13:18Shawn Ryan?

  That's a lot of moving around.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, we did a lot of moving around. Yeah.

• 13:21Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you move around so much?

• 13:22Speaker 05

  You know, it was, it was essentially, um, my dad working very, very hard to find whatever work he could to provide for us. Um, essentially every move was, um, you know, a way to, a way to keep providing for the family. Um, so it gave me a really interesting perspective on the United States. I've a lot of seen a lot of different parts of the United States in the Midwest and the American West. And, uh, really fell deeply in love with this country and its people. Um, and so that's really motivated, uh, a lot of my life.

• 13:49Shawn Ryan?

  And you guys were on food stamps?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah, we grew up, you know, quite poor and, um, you know, grew up in in neighborhoods where, you know, our car was stolen. We'd come home from church and there's people getting arrested on our front lawn and, um, and surprisingly, you know, you'd think that that would cause my parents to like, you know, try to keep us insulated and, uh, like inside, but but actually like we explored all around, you know, you know, friends with all the, all the neighbors, that sort of thing. Um, and watching very, very different lifestyles from ours, you know, it's like friends with the guy who stole our car. Um, and, you know. And I think like the fact that we were friends gave him some access to be able to steal the car and like, you know, we forgave him and we got the car back and whatever. But yeah,

• 14:33Speaker 05

  like it was a, it was a very dynamic childhood that exposed me to probably a lot of risk and learned how to take proper amounts of risk and how to not get myself into dangerous situations, how to get myself out of dangerous situations, that sort of thing. So it gave me a very unique perspective. It also taught me to work extraordinarily hard. My dad has worked unbelievably hard every single day of his life that I've ever known him. And I've always just deeply admired that.

• 15:03Shawn Ryan?

  What does he do?

• 15:04Speaker 05

  So he's done a bunch of different things, really just whatever he could find to do. And he, you know, he worked in marketing for a while. He worked in software consulting and just slowly worked his way up the chain. So now he's a, you know, a successful consultant in software and, you know, doing well for themselves up in Idaho. But I'm counting, counting the days until I can, you know, buy him a very, very nice estate up in North Idaho. So yeah, it's exciting.

• 15:35Shawn Ryan?

  Good son. Good son.

• 15:37Speaker 05

  We'll see.

• 15:38Shawn Ryan?

  So you dropped out of high school at age 16?

• 15:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 15:43Shawn Ryan?

  Why did you drop out of high school at age 16?

• 15:46Speaker 05

  So there were two reasons. I always knew that I wanted to start this company. Well, I won't say always. I've known since middle school that I wanted to start this company. I've always been obsessed with nuclear and, you know, I was obsessed with nuclear because of my great grandfather, who was a nuclear physicist on the Manhattan Project. And I was very close to my great grandmother, who only died a few years ago. Actually, she died when she was 100. And I was very close to her and I kind of grew up talking to her about the Manhattan Project and the history of nuclear. So I was always obsessed with that. And I've known since I was about five years old that all I really want to do with my life is make thousands of machines. But I didn't really know like which machines I should make. I just knew I needed to make thousands of machines. It's just something that I've always wanted to do.

• 16:32Speaker 05

  But I thought nuclear was like sort of covered like I thought people generally had it in hand because I would read these books about the history of nuclear and there's hundreds of different designs of reactors and they're all super sophisticated, super genius designs and there's a million smart people in the field and so I kind of had the mentality that like they've got it under control, they don't need me, right? And so that was my mentality, it was more of a hobby. But when I got to middle school, I started looking for who is the Elon of nuclear, right? What's the Tesla or the SpaceX or the Ford or the Apple of nuclear? Like who, who has really taken this thing and created a trillion dollar company around it? And the answer to that question is no one.

• 17:13Shawn Ryan?

  In middle school?

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:15Shawn Ryan?

  You're doing this research in middle school?

• 17:17Speaker 05

  That's right. I mean, I was, I was obsessed with Elon way back in the early days before Tesla, actually, back when they were launching Falcon 1 for the first time. And I was sort of like, who's doing this, you know, in, in nuclear? And again, the answer was like nobody and that really surprised me. And I started reading, I'd always read about the physics and I'd read every physics textbook I could find, that sort of thing. But when I got to this, I was like, well, what does the business landscape look like? Like who's figured out how to make money from this? And found that nobody had, like, nobody had been able to build a huge business that was extremely successful and was scaling all over the world to build nuclear power. That kind of stopped me in my tracks. And I was

• 17:57Speaker 05

  like, wait, why has nobody cracked this? And that launched sort of a multi-year research project of like, how would you fix nuclear? There must be something wrong here, what's going on? And, you know, by the time I was like 15 or so, I, I had basically figured it out in my head, like, I think I know it's wrong. And so I wanted to start a company. But again, grew up very poor. I didn't know that venture capital was a thing. I didn't know that existed. And all I knew was that in order to start SpaceX, Elon had sold Zip2, which is a company that he started, and then PayPal. And that had given him enough money to then go start SpaceX and he put a lot of money into that. And so I figured that's probably what I needed to do. And I knew there were already

• 18:42Speaker 05

  many, many smart people in the field with PhDs in nuclear engineering and nuclear physics who are smarter than I was ever going to be. And so when I was thinking about how do I go about fixing nuclear energy and starting this company, I realized that the biggest problem for me to tackle was not going to school, going to college. It was gaining wealth and gaining business experience. And so naive, you know, my naivete said, well, then college is a waste of time. And so I dropped out of school to start a business. I was 16. By that point, I had already taught myself software engineering. So by the time I was a 16 year old, I was already making six figures in my parents' basement, writing

• 19:23Speaker 05

  software. You know, just read books. I found a book on C sharp on my dad's shelf. My dad's not a software engineer, but he's just a curious guy. So, you know, he had a book on C sharp. I picked it up. I read it, wrote some programs. And yeah, by the time I was 16, I was making really good money doing that for various people just on a contract basis. So, you know, I thought, well, I've got a little bit of money here. I can go start a business. I can sell that one. I could start another one. I could sell that one. And then I'll get to starting Valor. So that was my plan.

• 19:56Shawn Ryan?

  What did your parents think about you dropping out of school at age 16?

• 20:00Speaker 05

  They were surprised. I don't know. Maybe they weren't that surprised. They were like a little bit hesitant, but I don't know. I think, you know, my dad's like philosophy of life for us was like, by the time you're 14, like you're generally an adult and you know what you're going to do. And, you know, you can do what you want. So, I mean, he like explicitly told me that.

• 20:21Shawn Ryan?

  Were you in some type of an accelerated educational program or?

• 20:25Speaker 05

  We were in a bunch of different schools all over the place. My mom is a very, very intelligent woman. She just finished her college degree a couple of years ago, actually. She dropped out of college to have my sister and then me. But she's just naturally very, very smart. And I talked with her about math and physics and that kind of stuff all the time. She did a great job of, of teaching us. And so, you know, and I, I had the opportunity to go to a, a great public school in Colorado as well that had some really fantastic teachers in it. One particular physics teacher, Mr. Hlethen, if you're watching this, was very inspiring to me and taught kind of a core of guys in that class, physics, and really

• 21:07Speaker 05

  kind of took us under his wing to do that. And so, yeah, you know, I felt like I had understood the fundamentals well enough. And again, there's already so many smart people in nuclear who are like the smartest people in the world and are going to be, always going to be smarter than I am. And the problem is like, not the technical side, not the physics, but nobody's figured out how to, from a business, scaling, manufacturing perspective, take this as a company and scale it all over the world. And that's what I was obsessed with and that's what I was focused on. So it just made the most sense for me to drop out, start my own business, get experience, try to get some money. And that's essentially what I did. It didn't work out nearly as well as Zip2 and PayPal. But it worked out like well enough and I, I learned a ton. And then I also learned that like venture

• 21:52Speaker 05

  capital exists and then you can, you can go raise money. So that was an eye opener. You know, I figured that out when I was, you know, like, early, early twenties and I realized, okay, maybe I don't actually need to spend the next decade of my life trying to start companies that I don't care about in order to get to the one that I do care about. And so I was able to, to start this.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  Welcome to Sephora.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I got you.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Serum moisturizer or moisturizer syrup.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Let's get into layering.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  My concealer is making me look worse.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty, only at Sephora.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Hi, I, uh...

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Let's get you a basket.

• 23:10Shawn Ryan?

  So how, so did you use VC?

• 23:13Speaker 05

  Yes, so we're a VC-backed company, an amazing set of investors who I'm extremely grateful to, in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. I started the company, I filed it on July 4th, 2023. So we're coming up on the two-year anniversary of filing the company. But for the first six to eight months, I was really just raising money. It was essentially me, my friend Elijah, and I had written this, like, 200-page memo on how to fix nuclear energy. And it was essentially just me running around, like, handing that to people and, like, saying, like, "Hey, can I have a couple million dollars to go do this?" And I finally found somebody who said yes, so...

• 23:48Shawn Ryan?

  No shit?

• 23:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:49Shawn Ryan?

  What sold them? What do you think sold them?

• 23:51Speaker 05

  I mean, I think, so I'll tell you, you know, who it was. Steve Marcus is the founder of Riot Ventures, which is a great deep-tech fund in LA. And the thing that's super unique about Steve is, you know, first of all, he's MIT-trained. Second of all, he started a bunch of his own companies before he got into venture, which means that he just thinks for himself, right? And the problem in venture today, that nobody's really figured out how to solve, is that it's full of people who don't think for themselves. And I would say that if you read my memo, you would see that there are the ingredients in there that are going to be a trillion-dollar company. And if you have the confidence in your own intellect to be able to read that and break down the assumptions, you can find that, right? But if you're looking at it from more of a signaling perspective, or, you know, what

• 24:36Speaker 05

  are other people going to think about this? You might not get there. So it really took a very unique person who understands the world on his own terms to write that check.

• 24:45Shawn Ryan?

  How many people did you have to pitch to before you...

• 24:48Speaker 05

  Um, I pitched eighty different VC firms.

• 24:50Shawn Ryan?

  Eighty different VC firms.

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I got eighty notes.

• 24:54Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean that, what do you mean that a lot of the VCs don't, people involved don't think for themselves?

• 24:59Speaker 05

  Um, they just straightforwardly don't. Uh, VCs do not, do not trust their own, um, intellect to understand a concept in front of them. What they're trying to understand generally, um, this again, it's a, it's a split, right? There's a couple of VCs who are incredibly smart people who think for themselves, who trust their own minds to understand concepts. Uh, but that's like a very small portion. Pretty much all of the rest of them are trying to figure out like, is this company gonna get funded in the next round or two? Which really has very little to do with the concept in front of them and more to do with like, what network is this person from? Who does he know? And I was from zero network and knew nobody.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  I was like literally living in a town of twenty thousand people in North Idaho, um, with, with like a crazy idea. So, uh, that, like, that was just not something that they were, they were used to. They were not looking at me and the idea. They were looking at like, where am I from? What networks am I in? Am I gonna get future capital down the road? Um, which I think is a really bad way to underwrite companies. Like, that's not how you should invest. You should invest based on who the person is, what their concept is, how, how well do they understand the world? And do you agree with how they see the world? Uh, but that's a rare person.

• 26:11Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. And so when, when you're in middle school, thinking about starting a nuclear reactor company?

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 26:20Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what, what, what were some of the deficiencies that you, I mean, why nuclear? Were you just, were you into power? I mean, did you, did you research how weak the power grid is and how?

• 26:31Speaker 05

  So obviously, like, my family history on the Manhattan Project gave me a predisposition to be interested in nuclear. But I would like to think that I was extremely objective and wanted to find genuinely like the cheapest way to, to make power. That's, that's really what I cared about. And I was willing for that to not be nuclear. In fact, for a while, I would say it was actually a little bit anti-nuclear, maybe a little bit as like a, a personal like anger, um, that. You know, this thing that I had been obsessed with for a long time wasn't happening, right? It was really confusing to me. So nuclear today makes about 6% of world energy, right? So the electricity, about 6% of the global electric grid comes from nuclear reactors,

• 27:14Speaker 05

  which is really small, way too small. And the fact that that's true and that you can look at all the most recent nuclear projects and they're over-scheduled and over-budget and like not worth it, made me think for a while like, okay, maybe I missed something. Maybe nuclear is not as good as I thought. And so when I was, when I was 14 or 15, I kind of went through this like journey and this process of like, all right, well, I'm going to back all the way up and try to think about like, what is the best form of energy? What is going to be cheapest over the next 100 years? Because I recognize that energy is going to matter over the next 100 years, way more than it's ever mattered in the past. As an economy, we are trending toward advanced manufacturing and AI. And

• 27:58Speaker 05

  what does that mean? Well, essentially, it means that what we think of as like producing things today is a mix of inputs from labor to raw materials to a little bit of energy. But advanced manufacturing and robotics and AI basically turn everything into an energy function. So like, you've got a, you know, we've got a cool water bottle right here with the Sean Ryan Show branding on it. Today, like if you're going to purchase this bottle, there's a mix of like costs that go into this. And some of them are labor costs and some of them are raw material costs. And then there's a bit of energy cost in that. But if the factory is completely automated, then there's no labor cost. And if the materials are also automated, right? Like there's autonomous mining equipment that gets the

• 28:43Speaker 05

  aluminum, right? And then it's run through an electrolyzer to get, you know, to electrolyze the box site. And then it's run through an automated factory. Well, what's the cost? It's just energy, right? So like eventually, this thing is just going to cost energy. And so I realized like, that's, that's where we're heading. And what that means is, we need a ton of power. And like civilisationally, like nationally, we need a ton of power if we're going to compete. So I knew that this was incredibly important. And so I backed up and I said, like, what is the best form of energy? And I looked into every form of energy generation. I looked into solar, I looked into wind, I looked into geothermal, oil and gas, fusion, basically everything that we have on the table today.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  And I came back to nuclear, I realized nuclear really is the best. But we've been doing it wrong. We've been building it all wrong. And so that's kind of what I focused on.

• 29:34Shawn Ryan?

  We're going to go into a little bit of conspiracy land.

• 29:36Speaker 05

  Okay, that sounds great.

• 29:37Shawn Ryan?

  If you, let's talk about Nikola Tesla. You looked into that stuff, I mean, somebody that's.

• 29:42Speaker 05

  Are you talking about is this zero point energy?

• 29:44Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  Okay, so I don't know a ton about zero point. I've looked into it a tiny bit. Nikola Tesla is a very inspiring figure to me, for sure. And I think we need a lot more people like him. I will say my default frame is energy is abundant in the universe. So would I be surprised to find a cheat code where you can find just enormous amounts of energy? I would not be surprised by that at all. Like, I think that there's this mindset that there are no cheat codes and that you have to like, you know, you have to suffer for any outcome. And there's a human sense in which that's true. But in the physical world, I think like it's a lot more abundant than people assume. I think nuclear is a cheat code. Compared to energy generation in the past, nuclear fission is a cheat code.

• 30:33Speaker 05

  Like, it's free energy. It's just abundant free energy everywhere. So the concept of something like zero point existing wouldn't surprise me. That said, I'm really focused on technology, not science. Right, so we're a technology company, not a science company, which means we're using engineering to take known scientific principles to make energy cheap throughout the world. So my basic thought on that is like, if somebody cracks zero point, they'll beat me. But I don't think they will. I don't think they will.

• 31:04Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they will? Yeah, yeah. It's just a fascinating subject to me.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:09Shawn Ryan?

  I've been through it a couple of times, but I never really got anywhere.

• 31:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 31:13Shawn Ryan?

  So, well, what are some of the, what are some of the challenges? I mean, we were talking at breakfast and, and.

• 31:21Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it's to to build a nuclear facility, I think you said it takes 20 years worth of paperwork.

• 31:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, 20 years of all kinds of nonsense, sometimes worse, right? And that's mostly characteristic of nuclear in a very specific scenario, which is in the West in the last 30 years. If you look outside of those two parameters, you'll find much, much better performance, right? So if you look outside the West, China, you'll find much rap, you know, much more rapid building of nuclear power. And if you look outside the last 30 years, you'll also find much more rapid building of nuclear power. But we're in this weird eddy of last 30 years in the West, we forgot how to build nuclear reactors properly. And this was really what I figured out when I was I was 15.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  I I kind of figured out a couple of things that I identified as here's how you would go about fixing nuclear. So the first one is I realized that the reactors just need to be smaller. This sounds, you know, super basic, but but I think it's true. We're really good at building small things and we're really bad at building big things. So especially now, right? In the 50s and 60s, we were building huge civil infrastructure projects and we were super good at that. And we had massive pools of labor that were really good at that, right? People who could lay rebar really, really well, people could do mass concrete laying. You could build very large structures who are super good at large scale welding.

• 32:48Speaker 05

  And those skills and pieces of labor sort of atrophied over the last 50 years, which is unfortunate, but but it's true. And then the other thing is like tooling. So we don't have the capacity for like extremely large scale forging anymore, right? We're just not good at forging extremely large objects as well as we were. So I looked at both of these things and and saw that like, okay, if you're going to reboot nuclear today. You need to be inside the labor and tool chain that exists, which means smaller objects. Right? We're really good at making objects about the size of a bus. If you try to make an object larger than approximately a bus in at least the Western supply chains, you're gonna have a really hard time, right? The tools just don't exist. You're gonna have to be making custom tools.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  You're gonna have to be using pools of labor, which cost a lot of money. And like, there just aren't enough people trained. So that was kind of my first conclusion is like, it's probably gonna be a bus-sized object. And then if that's not making enough power, then you just make more of them, right? And that's very in line with manufacturing. You wanna, you wanna make the same thing over and over. That's how you get deep efficiencies. The second thing that I realized was that the reason that hasn't happened yet is essentially because the regulatory environment has become too restricted for one specific thing, and that is testing. So the regulatory framework for testing became very onerous and pretty much impossible. And so people have had these ideas before. People have thought about like, well, maybe we should try to make reactors smaller.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  And there's been a lot of people who've tried that. But they kind of ran into the brick wall of nuclear regulation. And we're not able to get those prototypes off the ground. And so taking these two conclusions, my formulation for like, how do you fix nuclear energy when I was 15 is, we're gonna make smaller reactors. We're gonna find a regulatory framework where we can rapidly move through prototypes, which means we're gonna find a very unconventional regulatory path to do testing. And then finally, once you have a nuclear site, we're gonna build tons of reactors on that site, right? So you don't just build one, you don't just build four, you build 100 or 200 or 1,000 all in the same place.

• 35:01Speaker 05

  And the reason for this is that the most complicated part of nuclear is not actually the physical reactor itself. Reactors are medium complicated. Like, I would argue that a nuclear reactor is less complicated than a diesel engine, for example. It's significantly less complicated than a diesel.

• 35:16Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, shit.

• 35:17Speaker 05

  It is, yeah. They're mechanically simple machines. The thing that's complicated about them is the permission to do them on a certain patch of land, right? So you pick a piece of land and the process to go from it's an empty patch to the reactor sitting there through permitting, through environmental work, through community buy-in, through construction, security. There's a lot of factors that go into getting nuclear to happen somewhere. Once you've done that, you've done the hard part. And so the natural conclusion is you should double down on that, right? So you already have a nuclear site. Why not keep building reactors there and keep doing that like way more than anyone thinks is possible? So this is really sort of the core DNA of valor, and these are conclusions that I had when I was 15, and I've really been working on that for the last 10 years.

• 36:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. We haven't built any meaningful nuclear facilities in about 40 years, correct?

• 36:08Speaker 05

  So we've built two.

• 36:10Shawn Ryan?

  We've built two.

• 36:11Speaker 05

  So two units turned on in Georgia. Vogel one, I'm sorry, Vogel three and Vogel four. So these were sort of additions to an existing plant, and those turned on in, I think, 2019 and 2020, I believe, is when those turned on. So we have two. Now, that project was a disaster. It was eight years over timeline and about $15 billion over budget. So it's a travesty, really. It was, power should be cheap, right? The whole point of nuclear is that it's cheap. That should be the point of nuclear, at least. So I would say that that was a failure. And Hinkley Point C in the UK is another example of this. Many years over budget, billions and billions of dollars over budget.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  And so our only recent examples of building nuclear in the West are essentially failures.

• 37:00Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What is, like I mentioned, we talked a lot about bureaucrats and bureaucracy and how it gets in the way. And so what are some of the reasons that nuclear has been pushed to the side and stalled? And why have we not been innovating?

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:20Shawn Ryan?

  You know, in the nuclear sector?

• 37:22Speaker 05

  So it's all downstream of public perception, right? We can talk about the regulators locking things down too much, which is absolutely true, especially when it comes to testing. But the reason they did that is essentially responding to public sentiment. So what drove public sentiment away from nuclear? Well, I think it was a combination of like, people naturally fear new things. The atomic bombs and the, you know, the nuclear bombs sort of being associated with nuclear. And then I think some really specific intentional propaganda. You know, I believe that rivals of the United States have continuously funded environmental groups to spread a narrative about nuclear and even to sue nuclear projects.

• 38:06Shawn Ryan?

  Who, who stemmed, where did that stem from?

• 38:09Speaker 05

  So I think there's a couple of sources. Russia is known to be a source of this.

• 38:13Shawn Ryan?

  No shit.

• 38:14Speaker 05

  This is public record now that Russia, most recently, like in the last five years in Europe, funded far-left environmental groups to advocate for shutting down nuclear power in Europe so that Europe would become more dependent on Russian natural gas.

• 38:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  This is just public record.

• 38:34Shawn Ryan?

  I did not know that.

• 38:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I mean, they, they fell head over heels for the PSYOP. That nuclear was unsafe, that it was not clean, right? This is sort of the, this is the biggest scandal of environmental policy, environmental advocacy in the last 50 years is that the, the environmental, you know, the environmental groups in theory have good goals, right? You want the earth to be clean, you don't want to pollute it, you want our kids to be able to live in beautiful places with nature. And so on the surface, it's very easy to get people to, to get on board with that mission. But nuclear energy is so obviously the best possible solution to clean power. It's, it's just pure physics.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  It emits no carbon, it emits no particulates. The only thing that you, you have to deal with after running a nuclear reactor is incredibly, incredibly small, safe pellets that you encase into concrete casks. And they have no effect, no effect on the environment at all, right? So there's basically no impact to the environment. And they provide clean power, you know? So like, this is a very, very obvious thing that environmental groups should love. But they were co-opted. They were co-opted by external money that wanted the nuclear industry to fail and wants the United States to fail and wanted Europe to fail or become more dependent on other sources from our rivals. And so I think that, you know, and a lot of people just bought into that, a lot of people.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  You know, there's always good people in any bad thing. And the good people just believed the narrative. They believed that nuclear was unsafe and they believed that, you know, nuclear waste was a huge problem. And neither of those things are true. Nuclear waste is not a huge problem. And nuclear reactors are the safest form of power generation on Earth, full stop.

• 40:25Shawn Ryan?

  And so are you, are you saying that Russia funded US?

• 40:32Speaker 05

  That's correct.

• 40:33Shawn Ryan?

  NGOs to basically, you know?

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 40:37Shawn Ryan?

  Shit on the nuclear?

• 40:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 40:39Shawn Ryan?

  Just like they did in Europe?

• 40:41Speaker 05

  Yes, the Sierra Club. If, if any members of Congress want to start some investigations, I would start by looking at the Sierra Club. And the advocacy that they did against nuclear, especially around environmental law, they figured out how to essentially shut down nuclear by suing over safety regulations and environmental policy to prevent nuclear projects from happening. And obviously, you know, mass sort of social advocacy against nuclear. And I believe that they had significant foreign funding to push those narratives.

• 41:12Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What are some of the government players that get in the way? I have DOD, DOE, NRC.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is an interesting one, right? Like, let's, let's talk about why regulations exist and what the, what the good case for regulation is, right? So, nuclear has the potential to cause harm to humans and the environment if it's done wrong. And we need to do a lot of it, right? So the natural conclusion to that is you need a regulator. A regulator is going to protect the public and protect the environment from things going wrong in nuclear energy. This is the same for any mass industry, right? If you have a chemical plant, you have regulators which make sure that those chemicals aren't going to leak into the river, right? If you have even a coal station, right, or a natural gas station, you're going to have regulators which make sure that it doesn't blow up and it doesn't, you know, kill people. So this is a good thing that we have as part of society.

• 42:05Speaker 05

  Now, what, one thing I think people miss about regulations is that regulations really, regulators in particular, really only know how to regulate things that exist. They don't know how to regulate things that don't exist yet. And what that means is that you have to always have an open space for innovation. Right? We're an innovative country. We're a country that has that sources a lot of our power, power in the political sense, from technology. We are a technological society that wields power throughout the world through our technological supremacy. And if you if you want that to maintain, if you want that to stay true, you need innovation. You need

• 42:45Speaker 05

  to continue allowing entrepreneurs to push what technology is forward every year. And the way that you do that is you allow them to innovate and you allow them to test. So the mistake that regulators sometimes make in various industries is that they try to apply the same regulatory framework to existing technology. They try to take that and then apply it to innovation. That doesn't work, right? Because innovation is new, right? Innovation is about technology that doesn't exist yet. And you can only regulate things that exist, like you're putting down guardrails around a thing that exists. So some industries have figured out how to do this really well. So I would say aviation is a good example.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Aviation has a robust test framework where if you have an idea for an airplane, you can go take it out into the desert, you can build your plane, you can fly it, and you can even crash it, right? You try not to crash it, but like, there's a regulatory framework that allows you to test. And what that means is that in aerospace, you get to very, very quickly move through these different prototypes, and aviation is now this incredibly safe thing, right? It's safer than driving, right? Flying on a commercial jet is safer than driving your car. And the only reason that's possible is because the regulators have created this space where innovators can just like test stuff. So that's what's been missing in nuclear primarily. You can talk about all sorts of other problems with the NRC. We should talk about Alara, talking about linear no threshold, some of the bad policies

• 44:11Speaker 05

  that have, you know, taken the sort of existing industry and corrupted it and made it expensive. But I would say even more fundamental than that is that you have to test. If we're going to be dominant in nuclear, you have to allow innovators, entrepreneurs, technologists to create a small reactor, turn it on, and test it out. If you can't do that, you don't have an industry, or at least you won't have an industry in a decade or two. Who is the NRC? So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a commission created by Congress in the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. It's sort of gone through a couple iterations in various acts of Congress since then, but it has five commissioners and it's responsible for regulating nuclear. And I would say it's not done a good job of that.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  And the evidence for the fact that it has not done a good job of that is since 1979, the NRC has approved four construction permits. Four.

• 45:07Shawn Ryan?

  Since when?

• 45:08Speaker 05

  Since 1979.

• 45:09Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  In the meantime, China has built dozens of reactors and is currently building 30. Right? So there are 30 nuclear reactors under construction in China today.

• 45:19Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 45:20Speaker 05

  And that's a brand-new thing for China, right? China's like just gotten into this. But since 1979, the NRC has granted four construction permits. That's a dead regulator, right? That is a regulator which needs rapid overhaul, fundamental overhaul, and the Trump administration is working on that, so I'm very grateful about that.

• 45:40Shawn Ryan?

  What is, I mean, it sounds like the Trump administration's been very easy to work with for innovators like yourself, and so what are they doing that's different?

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Listen, I think this Trump administration is gonna usher in the nuclear golden age. I am unbelievably excited about it. This administration is very unique. I have never seen such a density of talented, motivated people working in government before. If you talk to the people who are in the White House, who are in the agencies today, they are not the people that you would normally see, you know, working in government. In many, many cases, they are people who are taking sometimes 10x pay cuts, right? They're making 10% of what they were making in the private sector, but they're doing it out of a spirit of national service, right? They believe that this is an existential threat to the country to fix these issues, to be able to make power again.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  And so you have people making genuine life sacrifices to work in government and to fix it. And I mean, you have to give President Trump credit for that in bringing this unbelievably talented, motivated group of people together to do that. This is all, it's all action, right? If you go into any of the agencies today... You would have seen in the last, you know, 20 years, really, you would have seen a lot of policies and a lot of papers and a lot of thoughts and very little action. And today it's all action everywhere.

• 47:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Are you in contact with Chris Wright, Secretary of Energy?

• 47:11Speaker 05

  So Chris is like probably the best example of this and it's like, you know, easy for me to say because I'm in nuclear and the DOE is leading the charge on this. But from Chris, all the way down through his staff, you have the most motivated people I've ever seen, picking up the baton from the president. There's these executive orders that went out three weeks ago and they basically gave the mandate to the Department of Energy that we need to turn on nuclear reactors immediately. And in fact, they set a date. So by July 4th, 2026, the president has ordered that the DOE allow three advanced reactors to turn on on American soil outside the national lab system. So this is unbelievably exciting. It's what the nuclear industry has been waiting for, for decades. This is what we need.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  This is that test framework that we have to have in order to, to beat China. And again, like the reason this is happening is that the administration recognizes that we must beat China on AI, on manufacturing. We have to reshore the ability to, to build things in the real world. And so I would say everybody in the administration is absolutely focused and dialed on how do we allow American entrepreneurs to move forward and to do what we do best, which is innovate and build the best technology in the world.

• 48:24Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect. Well, Isaiah, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about how bad our power grid is.

• 48:32Speaker 05

  Sounds good.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Wilmo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 50:17Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Isaiah, we're back from the break. I wanted to talk about some of the vulnerabilities in our power grid system, and I think you would be the perfect guy to talk to about that. Yeah. So, you know, I've dove into this quite a few times with different guests. The first one was actually a guy that made a documentary about how vulnerable our grid is. And I mean, he's talking about how much of our grid is manufactured in China, from solar panels to transformers to vulnerabilities in power stations and how they're not guarded. And I mean, everybody sees them, drive by on the side of the road, and it's got a chain link fence, and maybe if you're lucky, some barbed wire up top. And he talks about, you know, how somebody could get in there and just shoot those up

• 51:00Shawn Ryan?

  and basically disable them, how it would take years to get a new transformer because they're so... They're so large that that it would it would and they come, most of them come from China.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 51:12Shawn Ryan?

  It would take, I mean, they would have to take overpasses out to get them in place. Talks about Trojan horses and malware and the grid system.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 51:20Shawn Ryan?

  And so anyways, without without covering all of it, I want to talk to you about, you know, what what kind of vulnerabilities do we face?

• 51:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, first off, I would just point out that the grid is old. Like, I think fundamentally, the grid is it's an old piece of infrastructure. And it's part of this whole decay problem that we've had in the United States where we've stopped building physical world technology. And we've also stopped building physical world technology that has anything to do with like civil infrastructure. And part of this is a legal problem. It's because our environmental laws became extremely overbearing and made it hard to do anything. And it's also because we stopped manufacturing here, right? So we should make transformers in the United States. We should make a lot of transformers here. There are a few companies working on this, right? Maddox Industrial Transformers, a great American company that's working on making domestic transformers, super, super awesome.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  I hope that they can scale fast enough to what we need to do over the next few years. But the other thing I'd point out is I think technology over time becomes more decentralized. This is a this is a common thing that happens as technologies mature is that you figure out how to do them in different ways. One of the big issues with our grid is how centralized it is, which creates vulnerabilities across a large spectrum.

• 52:32Shawn Ryan?

  Will you will you get a little more, what do you mean by a centralized grid?

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the grid is so interconnected with itself and so interdependent on itself that if you hit one piece of grid in one state, you might be taking out a piece of infrastructure in other states. A grid is a very balanced, tricky thing, right? You're you're trying to keep perfect, perfect synchronism between many, many, many moving parts. It's physical machinery, it's the load side, it's transformers. All of these are highly sensitive pieces of equipment, which are syncing up around this 60 hertz, right? So 60 times per second, switching the polarity of an electrical field. And many very complicated pieces of equipment plugging into that. And the larger you make that system, I would argue, the more fragile you make the system, right?

• 53:21Speaker 05

  Because a failure in one area can cause a failure in the entire thing. There's lots of protections and safeguards that we try to add to to make sure that doesn't happen, but. There's a fundamental principle here, which is that a centralized system is a vulnerable system, right? If you can take out one piece of it, the rest of it goes down. We saw this in Spain, right, a couple of months ago. And so I think the, other than the very obvious things to do, right, which is secure infrastructure, apply cybersecurity, you know, companies like Galvanic working on that, and trying to manufacture things here and making sure that we actually are building new grid infrastructure. I also think that we move toward a concept called microgrids. So, microgrids are exactly what they sound like. They are smaller grids.

• 54:05Speaker 05

  And rather than trying to have a perfectly in-sync, extremely large system, you have more smaller systems. So that no matter what, if you take down, you know, this piece of infrastructure, you've taken down like one town, right? Or maybe two. But you're not, you haven't taken down an entire state.

• 54:22Shawn Ryan?

  So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where one of your reactors could power a small town.

• 54:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 54:29Shawn Ryan?

  So you, so each town would have their own reactor? And that would be a decentralized grid?

• 54:34Speaker 05

  That would be decentralized. I think that it's probably not one town to one reactor. It's probably a cluster of towns to a cluster of reactors. But I think that we're certainly moving closer to that and less how it is today, which is like groups of states, right, that are sharing grids with each other and then sharing vulnerabilities with each other, especially as I think loads become a lot more spiky, right? So what is a spiky load? Well, it means like you have a data center which is consuming a ton of power, right? Previously, data centers were like 50 megawatts max. That was like the biggest data center. And then it became a couple hundred megawatts. And now we're looking at gigawatt scale data centers. We're going to start to see microgrids evolve from huge power demand sources, which is

• 55:18Speaker 05

  good, because trying to add a massive load to the grid is going to exhaust not just the resources, but, you know, trying to follow the demand for that load becomes increasingly tenuous. And the consequences are just larger. So, you know, I think, again, if we want to fix this problem, like, there's really simple things to do. Fix the environmental policy to make it possible to build grid infrastructure, right? So we're talking about NEPA, we're talking about state-level reforms. Build things in the United States again, transformers and other power electronics, and build smaller grids, right? And I would also argue it should be somewhat generation-led, right? You find a good place to generate energy, it's a good place to put 10 nuclear reactors,

• 55:59Speaker 05

  100 nuclear reactors down, build a microgrid around that for data centers for manufacturing, and then start to share that energy, start to expand that grid out a little bit. But I think that the old style of massively centralized systems is probably going away a little bit, and that's a good thing. Another reason that I think that we went this sort of like centralized direction was that our power generating units used to be much larger. So you'd have gigawatt scale power generation, which needed a very large base to hook into, right? So you had a gigawatt scale reactor, reactors traditionally were not load-following, now they are, but they traditionally were not load-following. And so you have to plug into a really, really broad base of demand.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  And now that reactors are load-following, and that the reactors that we make are going to be smaller, you actually can, you know, just put a couple of these reactors onto a single grid, or even 10, and you're only at 250 megawatts. So smaller, more decentralized, much, much less vulnerable to centralized attack.

• 56:59Shawn Ryan?

  So if we're talking about decentralized power grids, does that mean that we would have to reinvent the entire grid to make it decentralized? Because if everything's centralized right now...

• 57:10Speaker 05

  We're gonna have to, we're gonna have to reinvent the, like, let's not kid ourselves. Over the next 30 years, we're gonna have to reinvent the entire grid, no matter what, right? Even if we decided that we're gonna continue with centralization, in order to triple our grid capacity, you're gonna build a lot of infrastructure, right? So I think this is a, this is not an option to not reinvent the grid. The grid will be reinvented, and it's either gonna be reinvented with more bigger centralized infrastructure, or it's gonna be reinvented around dynamic, smaller, decentralized infrastructure. And I think that second one is the right way to go.

• 57:41Shawn Ryan?

  It definitely sounds like it's the right way to go. I mean, now redoing our entire grid, I mean, that is a, that is a huge project, but it seems like, it seems like nobody has, it almost seems like everybody's scared to touch it. The only, the only, the only place that I've seen...

• 58:00Shawn Ryan?

  Upgrade their infrastructure. And this is just from, from, from a visibility standpoint, you know, I have, I have family in Florida. I'm from Florida. Hurricanes wiped the grid out. You go back down there and you see what they build and they, it's not wooden telephone poles that look like they're going to fall over. They're these, they're these huge metal.

• 58:19Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 58:20Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe steel. I don't know what the hell they are, but they're definitely metal.

• 58:23Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 58:23Shawn Ryan?

  Um, power lines. Is that what it would look like or are, what is, what's going to carry the load on a decentralized grid?

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. New power line infrastructure. Uh, again, I think one of the reasons that people are afraid of this issue is, is that we haven't properly brought private industry and capitalism into that solution set. Right? Uh, America is incredibly good at using its technologists to solve thorny problems and we use the profit incentive to do that. Right? People like me, people like my employees who see an opportunity to solve an enormous problem and make an enormous amount of money in the process. Right? This is how we as Americans figure out how to solve the hardest problems on earth. And the, the way that you can muck up that process is by introducing laws and legislations that make it impossible to fix the problem with the profit incentive through private companies.

• 59:15Speaker 05

  And the way that we've done that is through, again, environmental policy, through some of the centralized federal regulatory programs around the grid. Uh, when you try to, to manage all of this at the top, you become very bad at governing. Right? The, the higher you try to govern a thing, the worse you become at governing it. Now, there's a too small version as well. So there's some, there's some middle point here, but the middle point is much further toward, uh, decentralization than it is towards centralization today. Um, there's a, there's actually a concept here, um, that I'm sure you're aware of called anti-fragility.

• 59:50Shawn Ryan?

  I'm not aware of that.

• 59:51Speaker 05

  So this is a Nassim Taleb, uh, concept and there are systems which, uh, benefit from chaos and there are systems which are punished by chaos or degrade from, from chaos. So, uh, this is generally called like fragile, robust and anti-fragile. Right? A fragile system, uh, it, a glass is a good example of this. A, a glass is a fragile thing. If you knock it with a hammer, it could shatter. A steel cup would be an example of a robust thing, right? If you knock it with a hammer, you know, it's probably fine. But then there's this third category of thing, which is called anti-fragile. And what that means is like, the more you knock it with the hammer, the better it gets.

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  And I would argue that what you just mentioned in Florida is a good example of this, where the fact that they have hurricanes which knock out the grid infrastructure actually means that they have a better grid, right? Because the chaos of that situation has allowed them to figure out how to evolve and to get better. And if you look at human systems, the best human systems are anti-fragile. And capitalism is an anti-fragile system, right? Private companies using the profit incentive to fix problems on a smaller scale, on a decentralized scale, is extremely anti-fragile. If you add chaos into that, people actually learn and get better and grow, rather than becoming more fragile. So when you're thinking about governance, I think this is just a general property of regulation. It's like, you need to figure out how to make that system anti-fragile,

• 1:01:19Speaker 05

  which means allowing for variance. You have to allow for different people and different companies to do things different ways. And that's exactly what microgrids are, right? Utah has a different idea of what a microgrid is than ERCOT in Texas, for example. And those different ideas will look slightly different in the world, and they'll have different outcomes, and then we can compare and contrast. And we could say, oh, they did that really well here, let's copy that over there. Oh, Florida figured out how to make this resilient, let's copy it in California, right? Whereas if you try to keep everything highly centralized at the top, you don't go through that learning process, and you become increasingly fragile over time. So I think that today, that's exactly where our grid is. It's very fragile. And it's fragile because it's centralized, because it does not admit a variance,

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  because it's done the exact same way everywhere, because it's federally regulated by environmental policy, you know, FERC would be an example, other regulations that touch that for power electronics. And so if we want to fix this problem, you need to use capitalism to fix it. That's what we're really good at as Americans. And to do that, you have to decentralize. You have to let different companies, you know, try different strategies and fix the problem.

• 1:02:26Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think, this may be a little off-topic from what we're talking about, but I always wonder, you know, Why are we not putting the power lines underground? That that seems to be where they would be the least fragile.

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  So and the technical reason for this is resistance. So you're going to lose power. Power does not travel through the cable. It travels through the electrical field around the cable.

• 1:02:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  And so if a power line is underground, you have resistance with the ground. The the electrical field, the electromagnetic field is actually traveling through the dirt. And you're picking up all sorts of resistance along that. So burying cables. Now, maybe we're making up energy that we don't care about that. And we just decide to bury it. But another way to think about this is like, keep it above ground because it's cheaper that way. And because you lose less energy. And then have it more decentralized, right? Which means like, one cable set going down doesn't destroy the whole grid. That's a that's an alternative way to do it. And then you don't really have to worry about the fact that they're above ground or that one transformer got blown up or, you know, these sorts of things. If it's broken up into smaller risk areas and it's diversified, then you just don't have to worry about these problems that much. And and the system solves itself.

• 1:03:36Shawn Ryan?

  So if the electrical current is actually on the exterior of the power line.

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Shawn Ryan?

  Is what it sounds like.

• 1:03:42Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:03:43Shawn Ryan?

  Question for you. Could you put the lines in a pipe?

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:03:48Shawn Ryan?

  Like a like a covert or something?

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, another way you can do this is with insulation, that sort of thing. Again, anything underground is is more expensive, right? You're digging, you know, you've got groundwork, you're thinking about ground stability, these sorts of things. And these are problems we figured out. So the the short answer to your question is like, yes, you certainly could bury the lines. And that would solve some of the vulnerability problem. And my argument to that would be like, let's try that. Let's try that in a microgrid. And let's try another grid over here that has above-ground infrastructure. And we're going to learn a lot of lessons. And maybe we'll find out that the buried infrastructure had a different vulnerability than the above-ground did. But if this one goes down, this one didn't. And we learn and evolve through time. And that's really how technology works. All of technology is something that learns and evolves through time. It's not static.

• 1:04:35Speaker 05

  I guess this is one thing that people miss about technology is that it's constantly changing. And the danger of regulation, and I think one of the tasks that the next, you know, ten to fifteen years of American law and policy is going to have to figure out is to figure out how to allow technology to evolve in that way and how to try to decentralize a lot of the the policy that we've put in place. Because frankly, we're getting outbuilt. We're getting outbuilt all over the world. China is building not just nuclear reactors better than us, but now they're building cars better than us, right? We didn't expect that to happen. And in all these cases, I would say that we're not properly allowing entrepreneurs to to build the right technology and we're centralizing it too much.

• 1:05:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you know, I guess China too, I just had this gentleman Steve Quast on, I don't know if you've heard, he's got a company called Space Built. And he was talking about how China's mining helium three off the backside of the moon.

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

  Okay, yep.

• 1:05:32Shawn Ryan?

  And do you know anything about helium three?

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  I do, yeah. You know, I think this is one of these things, China, China is not just outbuilding us with technology, they're doing some really interesting things in science as well. I don't particularly think that helium three is the right scientific solution. I think that our energy technology is better than helium three. But it's a good example of like, China is outbuilding us, they're outbuilding us in the physical world. And we were sleepy. Frankly, the American technology industry has become sleepy in pretty much everything except software, right? In software, we still have an edge and we've led in AI in many cases, and we've certainly led in software products.

• 1:06:15Speaker 05

  But now we're starting to bump up against physical limits in software, right? Because we need data centers and we don't have them. We need powerful data centers and we don't have it. So even where we have been excelling, which is software, we're starting to hit the limits of the fact that we just haven't been building enough. So in every area, we have to fix this with the way that Americans do things, which is private companies motivated by profit, solving a huge problem. And the way that we do that is through decentralization, through deregulation, through through allowing Americans to go build.

• 1:06:47Shawn Ryan?

  When you're talking about a decentralized grid and testing and all these things, I mean, I don't, I mean...

• 1:06:55Shawn Ryan?

  Knowing not much, you know, I would think that you can't take a, a small town of 15,000 people and say, hey, we're, you guys are going to be our test case. Maybe you could.

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Shawn Ryan?

  But. And if so, is, is that what you would do to test the microgrid? Or would you, would you do something like, hey, we're going to power this data center? We're going to power this shopping complex or?

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  No, that's exactly right. Yeah, no, I think it's, it's going to be piloted in data centers. It already is being piloted in some data centers. And that's where I, I think the natural evolution here is that you're going to have these, what I call industrial power campuses. At Valor, we call these Gigasites. A Gigasite is essentially a place where we build many nuclear reactors. We power data centers. We power aluminum electrolysis. We power advanced manufacturing. We create chemical fuels. So there's a great amount of power. And that power begins to be sold outside of that, you know, very small industrial grid. Well, large power, small footprint, industrial grid. And we begin to serve communities outside of that. So I think it's going to be a natural evolution. And there needs to be regulatory change for that to happen. Only a few states have like, sort of figured this out and gotten ahead of the ball and, and

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  drafted and passed legislation to make this legal. Utah is, is one of them. That's where our first nuclear project is in the United States. But there are.

• 1:08:11Shawn Ryan?

  What do you power in there?

• 1:08:12Speaker 05

  So we, I went on Bloomberg a couple of weeks ago with the governor of Utah. And we announced together that we have the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Emery County, Utah, where we're going to be turning on our first test reactor. So super exciting. The goal is July 4th next year. Incredibly, incredibly important, important moment for the United States if we can hit that, hit that date. Extremely excited about it. We'll build more reactors there as well. And I do think we'll power data centers there. And beyond the data centers, again, there will be electrolysis. There will be manufacturing and, and we'll see where it goes after that. You know, our, our thought here is that we need to begin building power for the most critical things.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  And if we allow ourselves to deregulate and decentralize, the problem will sort of fix itself. Right? Because people need power and there's these new generation sources coming online in their own grids. And you can start just to hook it up. Right? One, one small project at a time, which again, you can use the profit motive for that. You'll have companies who are in the business of, you know, hooking up this line to that line and separating this grid from that grid and, you know, beginning to do that in a, in a natural fashion, which is what we're really good at. What are some of the red pills that nobody, the nuclear red pills that nobody's talking about? Yeah, nuclear is really counterintuitive. People do not understand the magnitude of nuclear.

• 1:09:35Speaker 05

  So before I talk about nuclear, let's, let's talk about coal for a second. So coal is really cool. I, I like coal a lot. If you're holding a chunk of coal in your hand, you're holding a pretty extraordinary thing, right? You're holding a chunk of energy. And that's super exciting. So, you know, if you're digging and you find a chunk of coal, what have you found? Well, holding it in your hand, the chunk of coal that fits about the size of your hand has so much energy in it. It has enough energy to propel you, your body, about five and a half miles into the sky. Right? If you expended all that energy on pushing you up off the surface of the planet, you would go about five and a half miles into the sky.

• 1:10:17Speaker 05

  If you put that into a car, right, which is a big, heavy thing, you know, it could take all your, your family and your groceries and everything, you can go about 10 miles down the road with, you know, that, that chunk of coal. So it's an extraordinary, extraordinary thing. And it's served us very well as humanity to be able to do that. Now, one very, very counterintuitive fact about nuclear is that nuclear fuel is spread all throughout the earth. Right? There's a couple of caches and deposits of uranium and thorium that are more concentrated, but nuclear in general is just like spread throughout the earth. So about 10 parts per million of every just rock outside has, you know, 10 parts per million is nuclear material.

• 1:11:00Speaker 05

  There's trace nuclear material in basically every rock that you pick up outside. Here's a crazy fact for you. So we talked about this chunk of coal that fits in your hand and, and how much energy it has in it. If you go outside this studio right now and you find a rock that's the same size, and you ask how much energy is in that nuclear energy? The answer is about 100 times more energy than the chunk of coal. Are you serious? Every single rock that you pick up outside of the studio is as if you're holding a 100x chunk of coal in terms of energy. If you take those trace amounts of uranium and thorium and you were to fully fission those in a fast reactor, you would get 100 times more energy, which is, to take our

• 1:11:44Speaker 05

  original example, enough to propel you about 30 kilometers, your body off of the earth. So about a third of the way to space. Every single rock that you find out in the garden on the side of the road. Wow. So nuclear is, it is the future, right? You can look at that and say, okay, when we discovered nuclear energy, we essentially discovered that the entire planet is as valuable as a coal mine, right? Which is very valuable and very energetic. So I think people underestimate radically how much nuclear fuel there is. It's under our feet at all times. We could be using it. We should be using it.

• 1:12:27Shawn Ryan?

  You had mentioned being able to convert, I don't know the terminology, you mentioned being able to convert nuclear into burning clean gas or something like that. Can you elaborate on that?

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  Yes, so this is really, really exciting. We talked a little bit before, I think before we started the cameras here, about what does the future of energy look like? Do we use all nuclear or do we continue using oil and gas? A very contrarian thing that I believe is that I think that humanity continues to use hydrocarbons, right? So we're talking about diesel, jet fuel, gasoline, for a long time. And in fact, I think that hydrocarbons are sort of the perfect fuel. It's hard to imagine a better fuel than a hydrocarbon. It's very dense, it can be a liquid, it's non-toxic, it has elements you already find in the atmosphere, it's one half of an oxidation reaction, which means the oxygen's already there, so you only have to carry half of it, right?

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Normally with chemical energy, you need to carry two buckets around, right? And then you mix the buckets and you get heat. Well, hydrocarbons, you only carry one bucket because the other half of the bucket's in the air. It's oxygen. So it's sort of the perfect fuel that you could imagine.

• 1:13:41Speaker 05

  But where does it come from? Right, so right now it comes from underground, which is fine. It's served humanity very, very well. We've propelled ourselves to the civilization that we are today, essentially through drilling oil and burning it. And that's awesome. But I think we can do even better. The way that we do even better is that we are eventually going to get hydrocarbons from the air. What do I mean by that? Well, the air already has all the ingredients for a hydrocarbon. It has carbon and hydrogen. Right, so the carbon is in CO2, which is everywhere in the atmosphere. The hydrogen is from water, which is also everywhere in the atmosphere. And all you need to do is energize CO2 and water. So it's sort of think about this like reversing combustion.

• 1:14:24Speaker 05

  Right, so when you have combustion, you start with a hydrocarbon and you mix it with oxygen and you get energy out of that and you get CO2 and water. Right, so that's combustion in a normal engine. We kind of do the opposite. We start with those combustion ingredients, the CO2 in the water. We put energy back into them and we get a hydrocarbon. So I believe that that process will be driven by nuclear. And what that means is we're essentially using hydrocarbons as a distribution mechanism for very cheap nuclear power. So if you have a bunch of nuclear reactors all on a campus, again, we call this a gigasite, you're producing huge amounts of power. And we can certainly push electrons in a wire and produce electricity, but we can distribute all of that valuable energy in another way,

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  which is to build hydrocarbons and then ship the hydrocarbon. Right, so this is like us producing energy, forming it into a hydrocarbon and then shipping that energy in the form of a hydrocarbon. And I do believe that as nuclear becomes cheaper and cheaper, that the price of that hydrocarbon is going to become significantly cheaper than oil. It'll become cheaper than drilling oil and refining it and distributing it.

• 1:15:32Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. You know, I am kind of surprised to hear you say that we still have a place for fossil fuels.

• 1:15:39Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:40Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, we see, you know. Obviously Tesla, you know, they're doing the, they, I saw, I think it was last week, they started the robo taxis in Austin. You know, a lot of the cars are going to batteries. Talked to Dino Mavrukas, the CEO of Sironic. And he's talking about how they're powering their small boats and batteries. Some of the bigger ones are doing diesel. But I mean, why do you, why wouldn't you want to put a, a small modular nuclear reactor in something like, like a naval vessel?

• 1:16:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:12Shawn Ryan?

  Or, or a car?

• 1:16:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Shawn Ryan?

  And, and get rid of all this shit?

• 1:16:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I, I think the short answer is like EVs are going to continue to be a massive thing. I have a Tesla Model 3. I love it. It's amazing. I never have to fill it up. Um, I also have a gas car as well, and that's useful for, for other use cases. I think the answer is we're going to do a lot more of both. We'll have a lot more battery powered things and we'll have a lot more hydrocarbons. And the reason is there's something very irreplaceable about a hydrocarbon. And those things are energy density, right? So energy density, meaning how much energy do you get per weight? And per volume? So if you have a container, right? You have like a box that you're putting your, either a battery in or you're putting a fuel tank in. Um, hydrocarbons are about 40 times better than batteries.

• 1:16:59Speaker 05

  Right? So you, in the same amount of space, you can carry 40 times, uh, sorry, the same amount of weight, 40 times the energy. That's pretty irreplaceable for things like aircraft, for example, right? A, uh, an F-35 Lightning is never going to be powered by lithium ion. It's just not, right? You have to get the, the power density of a hydrocarbon to run that thing. Um, there's a, a class of ships, right? Which will always need something with the energy density of a hydrocarbon. You just can't fit all those batteries. And they're going to be too heavy, uh, to run, you know, a long range ship. Short range ships for sure, smaller ships for sure. And then absolutely there will be some nuclear vessels as well. But there's just this really broad, uh, set of use cases where you need energy density.

• 1:17:43Speaker 05

  And hydrocarbons just have such incredible irreplaceable energy density. Uh, the other thing is there.

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  And nuclear wouldn't fill that.

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  So for cars, for example, I don't think so. I don't think that we'll have nuclear cars. Or let me say it another way. I think we will have nuclear cars, but it will be nuclear generated diesel. That then goes into a car. Gotcha. Or nuclear generated electricity that powers a car. Nuclear reactors don't like being small. There's sort of a minimum size that you want to build a nuclear reactor and trying to get it smaller than that is a very, very difficult engineering challenge. It's a safety challenge, it's a weight challenge, it's an exotic materials challenge. So there's sort of a good form factor for a nuclear reactor. And then, you know, what it does is make really cheap energy and you can transfer that energy to other forms. You can turn it into electrons, power a battery.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  You can turn it into jet fuel, power a jet. But hydrocarbon is such a beautiful thing. It's a liquid, right? I think we take hydrocarbons for granted. The fact that hydrocarbons are a liquid is this insane unlock. Like, think about the fact that you can like pour energy into a container. That's irreplaceable, right? If you need to go and take fuel to somebody in a remote location, you're not taking a battery, right? You're taking a canister of fuel, unless you're prepared to carry 40 more containers for the same amount of energy. And so, yeah, there's all of these places where hydrocarbons are civilizational level technology, which we should not replace quickly. One more example of this is actually distribution.

• 1:19:18Speaker 05

  This is very counterintuitive. So I like to point out to people, we talk about the energy grid, the electrical grid. And we think of the electrical grid as the way that we move energy around the world. But the electrical grid is actually a very, very small fraction of how we move energy around the world. It's very tiny. How we actually move energy around the world is by shipping hydrocarbons. The numbers here is about 8%. 8% of energy movement is electric. 92% of energy movement is hydrocarbon. So, just an example. We talked about, you know, different scales of power, gigawatts and megawatts.

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  The largest electrical site on planet Earth is the Three Gorges Dam in China, right? So it's the largest concrete structure ever created by humans. Massive, massive hydroelectric dam in China. It has a nominal nameplate generation of about 22 gigawatts. In practicality, it makes about 17 gigawatts. Huge, huge energy facility. And it distributes these through massive electrical cables that snake all throughout China. We have a pipeline coming down from Canada called the Keystone Pipeline. The Keystone Pipeline is a pipe about this wide. It's standard steel, right, about that thick. And you can calculate how much energy does that thing push?

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  And you can, this is gonna be a chemical energy figure, not electrical, but it's basically the same thing, it's just energy. The Keystone Pipeline moves about 50 gigawatts of continuous power. So about two, three gorgeous dams, we can call it six gorgeous dam if you want. Two to three times the three gorgeous dam worth of power in a pipeline that's this big.

• 1:21:01Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:02Speaker 05

  So hydrocarbons are civilizational level technology. They are required to move energy between nations to power high-energy density formats to get to Mars, right? If we want to go to Mars, we're doing that with hydrocarbons, right? Starship is powered by methane, right, which is a hydrocarbon. So there's all of these use cases, which I think are very underappreciated. And we'll continue to use hydrocarbons for a very long time.

• 1:21:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, earlier also, we had talked about how Russia is influencing NGOs and lobbying firms and stuff about, you know, to create a narrative against nuclear. And so I'm curious, I mean, when it comes to energy, I mean, it's obviously a very profitable business. And so when you are a threat to oil and gas.

• 1:21:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Shawn Ryan?

  Green energy, I mean, do you, do you feel like you have narratives against you that are put on through them? I mean, I read something, I don't know, maybe about six months ago, that said that, remember the big power outage in Texas when they had that winter storm? Was that last year or two years ago?

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  Two years ago, yeah, something like that.

• 1:22:11Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I had, we had all heard, you know, oh, it's because, you know, the solar panels were freezing and the wind turbines were freezing. What I actually read was that the pipelines.

• 1:22:22Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:22:22Shawn Ryan?

  From gas.

• 1:22:24Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:22:24Shawn Ryan?

  Were freezing and the gas industry was really on top of it and had created this narrative and pushed it out that it was, oh, the wind turbines had froze and the solar panels had snow and shit on them and they couldn't produce and so. So it was a, if it was true, which I don't know if it is, then that's, maybe you know, was that true?

• 1:22:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, that's, that's absolutely right. The, the freeze in Texas was very related to, to gas. Yeah, absolutely. There's temperature profiles where, where gas doesn't work as well, especially if you don't build it for that. And this was a very uncharacteristic event for Texas and it hadn't really been, been built for that. Yeah.

• 1:23:00Shawn Ryan?

  So it is true. So, I mean, so right there, I mean, oil and gas was on, on their game and pushed a narrative which, which

• 1:23:10Shawn Ryan?

  was an allude, it was a false, false narrative that was, that was, you know, the, the blamed

• 1:23:19Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:23:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yep, wind and solar.

• 1:23:21Speaker 05

  People.

• 1:23:21Shawn Ryan?

  So is that happening to you? Are there, is oil and gas, is, is wind and solar, are they, are they pushing narratives out about nuclear to hinder your business?

• 1:23:31Speaker 05

  I think that industries will always sort of jockey against each other and PR firms will always try to find ways to shift blame. Um, I do think that in the eighties, there's good evidence that the oil and gas industry, um, you know, funded some of the narratives against nuclear. Um, I put this in sort of like, I don't call it fair game. It's not something that I would do, but it's something you should expect in business. In business, you should expect counter narratives.

• 1:23:56Speaker 05

  But, you know, what's more interesting to me today is like, how much of the physics is inevitable? Because at the end of the day, you can only lie to people for so long. And I do think that people have been lied to about nuclear. And one of the reasons that I'm so excited to be building now is that we're building in the information age. Right? So the fact that you discovered that narrative, right, about what was happening in ERCOT is a product of the fact that we live in an age of the internet, right? So these narratives only last for so long. Uh, in an age when information travels at the speed of light. And we all have X and we all have podcasts that we listen to and these sorts of things. So I think that, uh, nuclear has been under this narrative burden coming from

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  rivals and maybe oil and gas a little bit, maybe renewables and, you know, just various people who didn't want nuclear to happen. But the jig is up, right? You know, I think everybody's starting to recognize that nuclear is the cheapest and the safest and the cleanest form of power on Earth, that it is going to power our future. And also that the demand for energy is so enormous that I think it's kind of pushed away a lot of the competition feeling between the generation sources. Like, listen, guys, we need to triple the grid, right? Like, there's no boxing each other out. If you can get nat gas on faster than I can get nuclear on, power to you, right? We're all going as fast as we can and we're still not going to be able to catch up to the actual demand for generation. So I think there's a little bit more camaraderie than there was maybe 20, 30 years ago.

• 1:25:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, also, when it comes to the safety of nuclear, I mean, we had talked, I talked about this with Scott Nolan as well. But, you know, he was talking about you take the seeds or whatever you call them and you put them in the concrete. You had just mentioned that. You know, something that didn't come to my mind when I was interviewing Scott is, you know, what are some things that could happen? What if, I mean, China's obviously our biggest adversary at this point. And so what would happen, you know, when you put those seeds or those pellets, pellets into concrete and bury them when they're obsolete?

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:26:01Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, what would happen if China were to bomb?

• 1:26:06Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:26:07Shawn Ryan?

  Whatever facility holds those inert pellets?

• 1:26:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this is one of the things that they look at when they design these casks. They look at various kinetic events, they look at impact events and analyze that exact question, what would happen? And the short answer is that the amount of energy that you would need to actually cause a dispersal event, it's like, it's way more worth it to bomb something else, right? The outcome of that's like, yes, you could, you could put such a strong kinetic there that theoretically, if you kept bombing it, you could get through the concrete and you can get through the containment and then you can get through the trisov particle ceramic itself. And now you've got some physol product dispersal and you can map how that dispersal works.

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  And in theory, you could imagine some people getting cancer and, you know, probably not that many, right? Unless it's like stored in the center of New York City, which is unlikely. But once you do all that math, you realize, well, with that level of ordinance, it was, there are a lot more interesting targets to hit, right? The outcome that you're gonna get from that is like, not at all worth the amount of ordinance that you need to do something like that. Not trying to give people ideas, but like, that's just not a very highly leveraged use of a terrorist event, right? The other thing is, of course, we have lots of safeguards and protections around the nuclear fuel, right? Not just fences, but like armed security and these sorts of things.

• 1:27:37Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I mean, I think like the, the nuclear waste concern has been highly overplayed. People have played it up to a degree that's, that's just not commensurate with the facts. Because it's kind of the easiest target for nuclear, right? It sounds scary, like, oh, there's nuclear waste, and people don't know what that means. But the fact is, nuclear waste is the safest form of waste of any power generation. No kidding. It's the safest. So if you even, if you look at, you know, I always hesitate to compare nuclear to oil and gas, because I have a great deal of affection for oil and gas. I think that oil and gas has powered the modern world. We would not be anywhere close to where we are as a civilization without oil and gas. But it has downsides, right?

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  We may be farther if we had we gone with nuclear earlier. Absolutely, absolutely would be farther if we had gone with nuclear earlier. But still, I'm, I have an enormous amount of gratitude for the oil and gas industry for powering humanity to this point. But we did that with trade-offs, and those trade-offs are known, right? You are at a much, much higher risk of cancer, living near a coal plant than living near a nuclear plant. That's just fact, that's just scientific empirical fact. The reason for that is that coal ash and, you know, the types of stuff that you're digging up from underground, when you burn it, gets into the surrounding environment and can cause cancer, right? And as a civilization, we have to make these trade-offs. We have to say, we need power, right? Power is existential. If people don't have power, they die during the winter, or they die in heat stroke during

• 1:29:06Speaker 05

  the summer. And so, you don't get to choose between zero deaths and zero deaths. You're choosing between civilizational existence or die-out and some level of death that is going to happen, right? And in coal, there's a number, and gas, there's a number, and solar, there's a number. And actually, nuclear has the lowest number. Nuclear has the fewest deaths per generated power of any form of energy generation. So it is simply the safest. What would happen if China were to hit your reactors? So our reactors in particular, we get a lot of benefit out of two things. One is the fact that our reactors are very low power density. So what does that mean?

• 1:29:50Speaker 05

  It just means per unit volume of our reactors, there's not as much fissile material inside of them. So we have a lot of benefit out of the box in just that our, you know, as a target, it's a low, low-density target. Right? You don't, you don't get a lot of bang for your buck. The other thing is that trisoe itself is an extremely, extremely powerful ceramic. Right? So you are, it's interesting. The, the strength of a sphere scales inversely with its size. So what that means is the smaller the sphere, the stronger it is proportionally. And so you take that to the limit, and this is a technology that American scientists invented. The reason they did this is that you can, you can wrap these very, very small beads of uranium about this, you know, the tip of a ballpoint pen

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  in these extremely strong ceramics. And proportionally, that ceramic coating around the uranium pellet is actually stronger than a containment dome. Right? So if you look at a traditional nuclear reactor today, you have these big concrete containment domes. And those domes are built to answer the question you asked, like what if you dropped a bomb? What if you crashed a plane, these sorts of things? And so they have these highly engineered, strong concrete domes to try to prevent that. But we actually build the dome into the fuel with trisoe. So the fuel itself contains all of these tiny domes around them. And those domes are actually are stronger than a massive engineered concrete dome.

• 1:31:10Speaker 05

  So in some sort of kinetic event, you are much less likely to have those ceramic spheres bursting essentially than, you know, than what would happen if you crashed one into an existing nuclear dome. Interesting, interesting. Thanks for explaining that. Let's talk about some of the, some of the ethos of Valor. Yes. Valor is a very unique place. It's very unique in nuclear. We really fundamentally believe that in order to build nuclear reactors, you need to build nuclear reactors. This sounds facetious, but it's not. It sounds exactly like what it sounds like. There's a philosophy that came from the 50s and 60s,

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  which says that you kind of do a long design period for nuclear reactors, and then you do a long licensing period for nuclear reactors. And at the end of that, you have a design and a license, and then you hope that somebody comes and buys your design that's stamped by a regulator, and you do a construction project and build it. The problem with that is that we've stopped building reactors. And so that system only works if it's something you're doing constantly. Right? It's something that works in steady state. But if you ever stop, you've lost all of the skills to do that. Right? The people who were there have retired or died. The people who could have done those exact pieces of construction have retired or died. We don't have the tooling anymore.

• 1:32:35Speaker 05

  So you actually have to build nuclear to build nuclear. And for us, it means starting very small. So we start with a very small, very simple, very safe reactor that we can build very quickly, and we get experience in the hardware. And we started that really on day zero, hiring the first in engineering in the company. And we designed what's called a thermal prototype. So that's what's sitting in Los Angeles today. A thermal prototype is essentially, you build a nuclear reactor, but you don't put uranium in it yet. You put electrical resistors, and you can get those electrical resistors up to the same temperature as a nuclear reaction. So you get to essentially simulate, what if this were a real nuclear reactor with electrical heat? And so that's essentially what we've done. We did it in one year.

• 1:33:19Speaker 05

  It's the fastest that a thermal prototype has ever been developed. It's also the most sophisticated thermal prototype ever developed. It genuinely is a nuclear reactor. We built a nuclear reactor in one year without putting uranium in it. And now the next step for the company is to go do it again, but actually put uranium in it and actually turn it on. And this is going to give us a lot of experience, right? We're actually going to have to split the atom, which is something that not many people can claim. And then we'll do it again, and we'll do it again. And that's how this is going to progress. It's going to progress through real hardware, through real prototypes, through actually splitting atoms. And you can always get more sophisticated later. But you start very simple, very, very safe, and you get real experience as fast as you can. How far out are you from splitting an atom?

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  So the goal today, as set by the president, is July 4, 2026. So we're going to try to hit that date. I'm confident that we're going to hit it. How do you split an atom? So nuclear fission is not as complicated as it sounds. Like I said, it's significantly simpler than a diesel engine. So here's how it works. You have nuclear material, which in most cases is uranium-235. So the 235 isotope of uranium has fewer neutrons than the normal naturally occurring isotope, which means it's unstable. And that instability means that when you hit it with a neutron, it will split into fragments. And that explosion into fragments at the atomic level produces an enormous amount of heat.

• 1:34:47Speaker 05

  The energy of those fragments is heat, essentially. Now, how do you do this? How do you make sure that those neutrons hit those atoms? Essentially, what you do is that you assemble uranium into a certain pattern with what's called a moderator. So a moderator scatters neutrons geometrically. So there's sort of a configuration of moderator, which in our case is graphite. We use pure graphite. It's essentially crystalline carbon. And uranium, and if you configure it the right way, you can model it where if a uranium atom splits, it releases a neutron, and that neutron will hit the graphite and it'll scatter around.

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  And then it'll eventually hit another uranium atom. And that uranium atom will split, release two more neutrons, and those will scatter around. And then hopefully those two will hit uranium. Those will cause two more splits, and so you have four neutrons, and then eight, and then 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512. That's an exponential growth function. So you have an exponential growth of neutrons that are especially more and more neutrons scattering around inside of this graphite core, and the graphite is responsible for making sure they scatter back in to hit more uranium. And eventually, you have heat production. Right? That neutron production rate goes up and up, and the heat goes up and up. And so now you have a hot core.

• 1:36:11Speaker 05

  And you can use that heat, right? So what you do then is you take a fluid and you pass it through the core and the fluid gets hot. And so you have hot fluid coming out of the reactor and you can use that hot fluid for useful things. You can spin a turbine with it. You can create hydrogen with it. You know, you can heat a home if you really want it to, right? There's lots of ways you can use that heat. And so you cool that as you run it through something useful and then it comes back into the reactor and gets heated up again. So you have essentially a heat loop and you're heating it up with uranium that's undergoing fission in a nuclear core. Actually mechanically pretty simple, right? Kind of a stable core, fluid looping through it. That's basically it.

• 1:36:51Shawn Ryan?

  Another rabbit hole here. Are you familiar with CERN?

• 1:36:54Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:36:54Shawn Ryan?

  What's going on over there?

• 1:36:56Speaker 05

  Lots of conspiracies about this. Sounds, sounds similar to me. Yeah, CERN is doing particle acceleration. And, you know, I don't know too much about what they're doing. I've heard some of the fun conspiracies. I will say I'm probably less susceptible myself to like scientific conspiracy. I think that people feel conspiratorial about scientific topics because it's generally driven by the government. And the government has done some sketchy things, right? The government's done some weird stuff. And so they see, you know, the lab coats and the government money hidden underground and they're like, there's some weird stuff going on there. I tend to think that there is weird stuff going on in the government that does need to be rooted out, but it's probably less

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  on that sort of like edge science. It's probably more medical things and, you know, things having to do with like censorship and social media and those types of topics rather than than the scientific. To be honest, like, American scientists are very smart, but they're, they're really slow at this point. You know, I would be more impressed with, well, you know, CERN is not American, but Western scientists, let's say that. I would be more impressed if if Western scientists at this point were being, you know, maniacally competent. Like, that would be a deviation from what I think is actually happening, which is we're all kind of like wasting time. I think most of the scientific apparatus today is like wasting time.

• 1:38:25Speaker 05

  We're kind of pushing paper around instead of doing really, really unique edge research. And that's because of how how it's funded and how the universities are today, which is, you know, they don't like taking risks. They don't like pushing boundaries. You have to say the right things. So I think it's pretty unlikely that we even have the competence to be doing anything too nefarious. Yeah.

• 1:38:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's good to hear. Isaiah, let's take another quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about the size of your reactors, who's interested in them and a lot of that kind of stuff.

• 1:38:58Speaker 05

  Awesome.

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• 1:39:44Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Isaiah, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to talk about, you know, the size of these things that you're building. I want to know how fast you can build them. And so, you know, I've read, we talked about earlier, 100,000 pound?

• 1:39:55Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:39:56Shawn Ryan?

  Reactor. What is 100,000 pound or how big is it?

• 1:39:59Speaker 05

  So it's actually pretty easy to visualize. It's the size of a shipping container stood on its head. So 20-foot IsoCube, and it's basically the whole reactor vessel kind of sitting inside that frame. You can kind of think about this like a big water bottle, right? It's a shipping container-sized water bottle, and it's full of nuclear-grade graphite, and we'll put uranium in that eventually. So just a big, old, heavy water bottle. One of the really unique things about our design is how simple it is. We try to keep this as simple as we possibly can. Complexity means cost, it means time, it also means less safety, right? So you want to keep things simple, very understandable, easy to manufacture, easy to build.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  We'll make that a little bit bigger over time, so it'll go at least 1.7x larger, and that'll be a little bit more powerful. But to start off with, we have essentially one big vessel inside of a container, and we have other containers on the side as well which do other things. So that's like the main nuclear vessel, and then we have a power conversion skid next to it that actually spins a turbine and has the helium flowing through it and that sort of thing. So we keep it really simple, and we try to keep it manufacturable. That's really the thing that we focused on: safety and manufacturability. We want to build these really, really fast. How big are you going to go? So, this is a good question, and I think I am purposefully trying to make sure I don't think I know the answer to it.

• 1:41:24Speaker 05

  I have ideas, but part of the whole point of technology is like you have to discover things by doing them and by getting closer to them. So I have lots of thoughts on like how big you should build the eventual reactors that power the entire world. I think that we know that the next reactor we build, the 1.7x scale-up of the current one that we have in Los Angeles, is the right size to hit an amazing price, to be able to make the cheapest power in the world, and to build them really fast. So like, that's good enough, right? And we'll start to scale with that. Over time, I think it's likely that we'll get bigger and better, but every time you get bigger, you have to... the safety gets harder, right? So like, you have to pay a lot more attention to what happens in an emergency scenario, how to get the energy out of the core.

• 1:42:10Speaker 05

  And it gets harder to build. You have to have more advanced tools. It's harder to transport, right? The logistics get more difficult. And so we think this size is like a really great way to hit the ground running, put gigawatts of power down onto the grid, power data centers, beat China on AI in the very immediate term. And then over time, this is similar to SpaceX, right? Where they start with the Falcon 1, which is a small rocket, and then Falcon 9, and now Starship is this huge rocket. You want to get bigger over time because you're going to figure out those toolsets which allow you to do that, you know, a little bit at a time.

• 1:42:46Shawn Ryan?

  So it sounds like, and we're kind of discussing, I mean, you want a model that's easy to manufacture and get out the door.

• 1:42:54Speaker 05

  Just print these things out.

• 1:42:55Shawn Ryan?

  How fast can you make it?

• 1:42:57Speaker 05

  So it's a good question. And the reason that we built this thermal prototype was to prove that we can make it really fast. So this is truly extraordinary, what the team has done in the last year. We have one of the most talented nuclear teams on planet Earth. They have deep, deep experience in nuclear. You know, the founding engineering team at Valor had over 90 years of experience with this exact type of nuclear reactor, which is a high-temperature gas reactor. So unbelievably experienced team, and they have moved very fast. So we spent about six months in engineering of the reactor. So this was all on paper, right? Design, CAD, analysis, this sort of thing. And then we spent four months fabricating it, assembling it, and commissioning it. So four months, yes.

• 1:43:39Shawn Ryan?

  Four months.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:43:40Shawn Ryan?

  How fast do you think that will get?

• 1:43:42Speaker 05

  I would like to see us pumping out this model of reactor essentially every two and a half weeks. And the reason of that two and a half week constraint is it's about as fast as you can get some of the welding procedures. So you're welding a nuclear pressure vessel, the heads, you know, the body, the flanges, all these different things. And there's some like serialized timelines in that welding procedures and heat treating and these sorts of things that are hard to compress below two and a half weeks. And so what we do instead is we parallelize at that point, right? So we make multiple vessels at once. So on a particular site, we could be going even faster than, you know, three and a half weeks. But sort of the time from like one unit start to one unit end, it will probably stabilize around three weeks.

• 1:44:26Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think you'll stay in El Segundo?

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  So South Bay LA, El Segundo, or as we affectionately call it, the Gundo, is an amazing place to have a highly innovative company, to have access to the best engineers in the world. Truly, the best engineers, the most talented fabricators, machinists, live in South Bay Los Angeles, and that's why we're there. I think over time, you know, the business will operate in many, many different places around the world. We'll have nuclear reactors operating in many countries, in many states, thousands of reactors all around the world. So I'm not sure exactly where the center of gravity will go, but as long as there are very smart people in South Bay LA that, you know, are working for us and that we need access to, it makes sense for us to be there.

• 1:45:10Shawn Ryan?

  How many, is there, is there kind of a limit of, I mean, we had talked about making a chain of these nuclear reactors and putting them all together to create more power for a bigger grid size, or whatever you want to call it?

• 1:45:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Shawn Ryan?

  What is the, if you thought about, what would be the most amount of these that you would connect together for a single

• 1:45:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:32Shawn Ryan?

  decentralized grid?

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  I mean, I would put it in the thousands. I would say we could have thousands of reactors chained together on a single site. If you look at that total power rating, you're looking at like 50 to 100 gigawatts, which would be by far the largest electrical generation station on Earth. But it would actually be similar to some of the larger oil refineries that we have today. So I think that's, that's sort of the limit, because if you build much larger power stations than that, you're vulnerable to attack and that sort of thing. You don't want to have all that technology centralized. So it's more of like a, how big is that station compared to all of your other stations? And compared to all the other generation? Again, you don't want too much centralization, because that makes you vulnerable.

• 1:46:17Speaker 05

  So I think that we will get into thousands. That puts us into the same classes, like the largest oil refineries in the world, in terms of continuous energy output.

• 1:46:27Speaker 05

  But if we're also, you know, if we have 15 different sites that are in the thousands, then, you know, maybe you go even higher. There's really not a fundamental limit there. It's really just how much demand for power is there.

• 1:46:39Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting. And you're doing something in space as well, correct?

• 1:46:44Speaker 05

  Not yet, not yet.

• 1:46:45Shawn Ryan?

  What do you want to do there?

• 1:46:46Speaker 05

  But I believe that, so first of all, space and nuclear go well together for a couple of reasons. One is solar panels, if you're at the level of planet Earth, work great because you have a lot of sunlight and you don't have any shadow and, you know, you can get a lot of power. As you move away from Earth, move away from the Sun, solar irradiance becomes weaker and weaker. Right? So if you want to push a, you know, a vessel out to the edges of the solar system or out to, you know, some of the further planets, you need nuclear. You have to have nuclear. The Sun's not going to power you that far. So nuclear for in-space transit is very interesting. We don't think about in-space transit quite as much yet. Maybe we will someday, but there's a lot of smart people working on that.

• 1:47:29Speaker 05

  What I'm more interested in is making power on Mars. So, you know, we want to go to Mars. I think a lot of people in my generation are very excited about Mars. We talked a little bit about this before with the frontier, right? Americans are always looking for a frontier. And I think a lot of people in my generation see Mars as that frontier and it's very exciting.

• 1:47:50Speaker 05

  But one of the first things that Mars needs is power, need a lot of power. And it's not just for the local generation. It's not just to make electricity, to turn on the lights and, you know, operate the AC, you know, on a Mars base. It's also to get fuel to come back to Earth, right? So when the first starships land, these are methylox starships, right? So that means they have liquid methane and liquid oxygen burning in the Raptor engines. And like we talked about before, methane is a hydrocarbon, right? So what we're talking about is liquid hydrocarbons powering the rocket to get to Mars. Now, these rockets are supposed to be reusable, right? So they're supposed to be able to land on Mars and then come back and get more cargo. And they're supposed to be able to go back and forth. Well, where do you get the methane from on Mars?

• 1:48:36Speaker 05

  We don't have methane infrastructure there. We don't have fracking and natural gas and like all the things that we have on Earth that get us methane on Earth. So what you can do is the same thing that we'll do here on Earth, which is we'll generate hydrocarbons from nuclear. And in some ways, the challenge is actually easier on Mars. So for instance, the the atmosphere is basically CO2. So we we don't have to worry about difficult carbon capture systems. You're basically just pulling in the atmosphere to get your carbon. And then the hydrogen is going to come from ice. So there's lots of ice mixed in the the soil on Mars. And so we can actually process water out of the soil. We can run that water and that CO2 through the same systems that we use on Earth to generate hydrocarbons, and we can do it on Mars.

• 1:49:20Speaker 05

  This is super exciting. And also very counterintuitive. We talked a little bit before about how amazing physile material is in this rock that has so much power in it. An interesting thought experiment is to think about, let's say you have a starship that takes off from Earth and gets to Mars, and then it needs to make its own fuel to get back. The question is, how much uranium do you need to take with you on that starship to get back, you know, from the surface of Mars to Earth, right? So you're taking off, you've got a bunch of fuel, and then you have a chunk of uranium to power our nuclear reactors to make the fuel to get you back. How much uranium do you have to take? You know, a starship is a huge, huge thing. It's the largest flying object. It's basically like a flying skyscraper, right? So you would imagine you're going to need a lot of uranium.

• 1:50:05Speaker 05

  The answer is actually a cube about this big. You need a cube of uranium about this large to generate all of the fuel to get that starship back to the surface of Earth again.

• 1:50:15Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:50:16Speaker 05

  So it's an unbelievably energetic and powerful format for space exploration and for terraforming on Mars.

• 1:50:22Shawn Ryan?

  Where are you gonna? When you do these fields of chained reactors, are they going to be above ground, below ground? What's that going to look like?

• 1:50:31Speaker 05

  They'll be above ground. They'll be very simple. You know, we've already got one unit sitting in LA that we've been testing. We've taken it up to pressure, up to heat, and been testing all the mechanical components. And essentially, they'll they'll just look like a bunch of those next to each other out in the desert. You know, we're starting in Utah. We've got our first reactor turning on there in the next year, which is super exciting.

• 1:50:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is it going to be one?

• 1:50:50Speaker 05

  Just one, and then we'll build another one, and we'll build another one, and we'll just keep doing that, right? Off to the races.

• 1:50:56Shawn Ryan?

  Awesome, awesome. Who are some of the? Who are some of your customers? Who's really interested in this?

• 1:51:03Speaker 05

  So I think data centers are like the really obvious screaming need today, right? We have to beat China on AI. The Trump administration has made it clear that this is a national security priority for them, that we have to beat China on AI. So powering data centers is sort of like the really urgent concern. Beyond that, I'm really excited about advanced manufacturing and reshoring manufacturing to the United States. If you think about some of the reasons that we exported manufacturing to other countries, one of the big reasons was labor cost, right? So it's cheaper to get foreign labor to operate these factories. I think that was a mistake, by the way. We shouldn't have done that. We should have found ways to make the manufacturing process cheaper and to do more with less. But this is a decision that we made. When we bring it back, it's going to be more automated, it's going to be more advanced,

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  and it's going to use more power, right? When you replace sort of hand labor with machines, you're essentially replacing it with energy. And we need a lot of energy to do that. And so I'm really excited about how we start to expand these power campuses to make more power and have a factory next door and power the factory, to have metals electrolysis next door, right? So to make magnesium and aluminum through electrolysis. So, you know, I think these campuses sort of expand into industrials. We can absolutely make power for the grid. We can make power for like communities around us. And then the really, really big goal where Valor becomes, I would argue, the most valuable company on earth, is when we begin to make liquid fuels. We begin to make hydrogen, we bond it with CO2,

• 1:52:32Speaker 05

  and we can sell diesel, jet fuel, gasoline on the market at a better price than the oil and gas industry can. And that makes our demand for our products practically infinite, right? The nice thing about hydrocarbons is that they're a liquid commodity, right? And there's $4 trillion of demand for them all around the world, and we can make a lot of those.

• 1:52:51Shawn Ryan?

  What about, I mean, I just feel like there's so many other sectors that would be interested in this other than data centers. I mean, DoD, defense being one. I mean, you know, me being a SEAL, working for the contracting for CIA, I mean...

• 1:53:06Shawn Ryan?

  Overseas power, especially in the Middle East

• 1:53:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:53:09Shawn Ryan?

  In poor countries is hard to come by and more fragile than what we have here.

• 1:53:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:53:14Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I mean, I could see, I mean, you're talking about one of those nuclear reactors powering a small city. I mean,

• 1:53:21Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  We're talking about FOBs, you know,

• 1:53:23Speaker 05

  Forward Operating Bases Overseas, very remote. I mean, is there any DoD interest in Absolutely.

• 1:53:29Shawn Ryan?

  Forward deploying these things into forward operating bases and even, even a major airbase like Bagram. I mean, it just seems like.

• 1:53:37Speaker 05

  So this is, this is really one of the most critical capabilities that we could give the American military in the next 10 years is the ability to generate their own power on bases and to generate their own fuel, right? We want to make JP5. Most of the military runs on JP5 from generators to APCs to tanks to aircraft run on JP5. And so we want to be able to make those on a remote site. You remove a lot of the complex logistics of trying to source that fuel from many different places. You remove a lot of the casualties as well. Many of the casualties that come in, you know, forward deployed locations come from trying to move fuel around and people driving trucks and these sorts of things. So if we can make the fuel on site, that's incredibly important. This was one of the

• 1:54:18Speaker 05

  executive orders that came out about a month ago was for the military to set up their own capability to deploy these reactors like mine, like others on military bases. So we're extremely excited about that. I do think that, again, this is one of the most critical capabilities that we could give the United States military is to make their own power and to make their own fuel and be energy independent wherever they need to go in the world.

• 1:54:40Shawn Ryan?

  Anybody else? Anybody else interested?

• 1:54:43Speaker 05

  Other, other customers?

• 1:54:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:45Speaker 05

  You know, I, I think energy is this interesting thing where everybody needs energy, right? So the, the customer basis is somewhat infinite. It's an $8 trillion market. And what we focus on is where can we deliver high impact immediately, which is AI, manufacturing and defense? And then as we begin to make more and more power, we're really just making energy cheaper, which is going to benefit everybody, right? If you want power in your house, I think in the next 10 to 15 years, the power is going to be cheaper because Valor Atomex is making very cheap reactors and we're powering them and those prices are going to come down. So, I mean, the goal of Valor generally throughout time is to continuously push the price of energy further and further down.

• 1:55:30Speaker 05

  And I genuinely believe there's no lower limit to that. Energy can be as cheap as we want it to be and you continue to march down that path every year of figuring out how to make it cheaper and cheaper. And that is going to be very exciting. How much is one of these reactors? What's the first one going to go for? So, I'll tell you what the market pricing is for reactors and then I'll tell you that we're going to beat that by a lot. The market pricing is $5,000 to $7,000 a kilowatt. So if you have, if you want a gigawatt of energy, you're talking about $5 to $7 billion to purchase that gigawatt. We will significantly beat that price. So our goal is to be cheaper than everybody else. I think we'll be more than, more than cheaper than everybody else and just to continuously do that year after year.

• 1:56:15Speaker 05

  How long will these reactors last? We plan, we plan around 20 years. And I say plan around because you design a reactor for a certain time period and you say after that, you can decommission it or you can reevaluate. You can inspect it and you say, does this have another 10 years in it? And you decide yes or no. You can maybe recommission it for another 10 years or you just decommission it at that point. So we do our engineering around 20 years. Now, a lot of the reactors that we have today were originally designed for 20 to 30 years, in some cases 40, and they've ended up running for 60, 70, and some have been licensed to keep going even further than that. So nuclear is a very long-term technology. Part of this is the fact that there's not that many moving parts, actually.

• 1:56:58Speaker 05

  They're, they're pretty solid, they're pretty stable, especially our architecture that we use, uses helium. Helium is inert, so we don't have a lot of like chemical reactions and corrosions in the core, that sort of thing. So I think they'll last a long time, but we plan around 20 years. Are you working with Scott Nolan at all? So Scott's working on uranium enrichment, which is extremely important. We need to be able to enrich more uranium. We've built our reactors around low enriched uranium. So he's working on solving the HALU problem. So HALU is high SA, low enriched uranium. It's essentially uranium enriched from 5% to 20%, anywhere in that range. We use below 5%. And the reason we do that is it exists today, right? Scott's solving a problem of we just don't have HALU, right?

• 1:57:43Speaker 05

  Russia makes it. We're not buying it from Russia. We have some stockpiles, which we're trying to figure out how to make available for test quantities. But if you need these sort of like advanced types of reactors, you need HALU. We kept it simple, right? We just said, let's use what's off the shelf. Off the shelf is low enriched uranium. It currently powers 20% of the American energy grid and there's lots of it. So we start there. We can use HALU over time as it becomes available, but we like to keep it simple to begin with.

• 1:58:10Shawn Ryan?

  Do you ever see yourself kind of scaling down to maybe a mini, like a very small reactor?

• 1:58:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:58:18Shawn Ryan?

  You see this movement of people that want to live off grid?

• 1:58:21Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:58:21Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, in being in control of their own energy. And so what I'm curious about is, you know, somebody that's running a farm or that wants to be self-sufficient on energy, not connect to the grid. I mean, is there a world where there's a scaled down version that's not a shipping container? It's maybe the size of a, I have no idea, a shoebox that can power your individual home?

• 1:58:43Speaker 05

  So a shoebox is about as small as you can get a critical sphere in theory, which means any machinery you add is going to be larger than that. So there's sort of a minimum size of a nuclear reactor, just based on pure physics. And the physics here is essentially the mean free path of a neutron, meaning as a neutron travels, what is it going to hit? And can it be reflected back and cause more fission? And that size is actually like pretty large. So our reactor that we have in LA, it's sort of one vessel in a shipping container. That's about as small as you can make a reactor moderated by graphite.

• 1:59:19Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:19Speaker 05

  And graphite's really nice. It's a cheap material. It's abundant. It's easy to get. If you want to go smaller than that, you have to start getting into different moderators and that can get really expensive. So for instance, beryllium is a moderator that people have used for like outer space where you need a really, really small reactor that fits on a satellite. The issue with beryllium is A, it's extremely toxic, B,

• 1:59:42Speaker 05

  It's extremely expensive. It's essentially emeralds. Beryllium is essentially putting emeralds in your nuclear reactor. And so, yeah, we think like nuclear is a technology that works really well at the ship a container plus size.

• 1:59:57Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:59:58Speaker 05

  You can scale out. Again, it's like bus-sized infrastructure. And you can do many of them. You can make tons of power and the power is really cheap. When you get to smaller use cases, you're probably looking at, you know, using diesel, using solar, you know, using things that fit in a smaller container. But yeah, nuclear reactors, they don't like being small and then you have these safety concerns and you have radiation, that sort of thing. It's nice to keep them in their own little park.

• 2:00:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. You know, back to, sorry, I have a lot of questions popping in my head right now. So, back to DoD, I mean, and I know you want to talk about a shift in nuclear policy.

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:00:35Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know,

• 2:00:38Shawn Ryan?

  how, is there a timeline on when DoD will start to utilize these reactors? I mean, I talked to guys like you quite a bit within the last six months. Just amazing innovators and what you guys are doing. And time and time and time and time and time again, no matter who I'm talking to, whether it's Palmer or Dino or you or your friend Augustus, I mean, it's always policy that gets in the fucking way of innovation. And it's, I mean, it's killing us. But you just said China's built 30 nuclear reactors.

• 2:01:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Shawn Ryan?

  And...

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  And what are we doing?

• 2:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  What are we doing?

• 2:01:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Shawn Ryan?

  You know, we're bitching about nonsense.

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:01:19Shawn Ryan?

  And, and so, I mean, is there, is there an actual timeline on when DoD is going to implement this?

• 2:01:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:01:26Shawn Ryan?

  Or is this just in discussions?

• 2:01:28Speaker 05

  So, I would say in DoD, it's in discussions. DoD has a project called Pele. Project Pele is this shipping container-sized reactor. They want it to turn a test model of this in the dome next year. And that's a test model and hopefully it'll evolve to something that can start deploying on bases. I would say the problem is no longer in the policy side, it's now on the engineering side. But that's only because of the executive orders that President Trump signed a month ago. I think that genuinely was opening the gate, right? The gates are now down, we now have the ability to build, we can build at speed, and it's essentially an engineering problem from here. So I believe that the DOD will buy the units that work, right?

• 2:02:11Speaker 05

  And so we're going to make the units that work, and we're going to be able to show them working, and they'll be able to purchase them. But it's hard for governments to purchase things that don't exist. You know, that's always like this chicken and egg problem, where the DOD wants something to exist in theory, but they're not really technologists, and so there's like this interplay between private corporations that have an idea of a product, and the DOD that has capabilities that they need. And the way that we crack that chicken and egg is that we build a reactor that we know works, and that they can purchase. So we're going to be doing that as fast as we can. That unit that turns on next year is that first proof point. So I do hope that we can put assets on military bases in the next couple of years. What would you say your biggest hangup is, specifically? Hangup meaning blocker in our path?

• 2:02:56Speaker 05

  Yeah. Or, yeah. The blocker, I mean, this is an amazing thing to say, and I'm very grateful that this is now something I can say, is now engineering. The path before us is set by our ability to build the reactor as fast as we can, to build trisoe, to put all of these ingredients together, to test the systems, to make sure they're safe, to manufacture them. This was not true up until about a month ago, which is very, very exciting. But you have one built. You have one built. Yes. And so, what's the hangup? It doesn't sound like an engineering problem. Yeah, so the question is, what's stopping us from just going and putting uranium in the unit that we have today? So, we need fuel. That's sort of the next engineering challenge, is that we need to put trisofuel into that

• 2:03:41Speaker 05

  reactor. One of the things that Scott talked about on his episode is that we've really under-invested in nuclear fuel, and this is not enriched uranium that we're talking about now, it's wrapping that uranium into the trisoparticle. So this is something that we invented in the United States. So you'll hear this over and over, right? A technology we invented here and we kind of let it sit on the shelf and other countries, you know, scaled it out. So unfortunately, China has the largest trisoe production capability in the world today, of course, and it's being set up domestically as well. So that's sort of the long lead today is getting fuel to turn that reactor on. But I'm excited. I think that we'll get it on in the next year. Perfect, perfect. Anything else with policy shift that you want to chat about?

• 2:04:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's really interesting. If you think about where nuclear policy was in the United States from its inception, nuclear policy started as essentially what I would call protectionism, right? We wanted to protect what we had. And what we had was essentially a total monopoly on nuclear energy and nuclear technology. We're the only ones who knew how to do it. Germany was trying to figure it out. Britain caught up pretty fast. The USSR caught up pretty fast. But in the very earliest days, this was a total American monopoly. And our first policies around nuclear were built to protect that monopoly and to keep this as sort of like a closely guarded government secret that doesn't get, you know, anywhere else in the world. But as things happen in technology, other people did figure it out, right? USSR figured it out.

• 2:05:11Speaker 05

  They became very good at building reactors. China figured it out. They're now getting very good at building reactors and reactors are getting built all over the world. So the new directive from the Trump administration is about dominance. And I'd say this is a shift from protectionism to dominance. The new nuclear policy in the United States is that we need to be the best in the world. We need to be the gold standard of nuclear again. We need to, that means we need to build fast. We need to build safe and we need to build reactors that are cost competitive. They need to be cheaper than whatever China can put in the ground. And in order to do that, you really need to have a, an administration that is fully aligned on making that happen. And that's what I'm so excited about. There's really never been a better time in the last 40 years to build in nuclear energy.

• 2:05:55Speaker 05

  And it would not have happened without the, the leadership of the president. He really did put his foot down and say, we are going to be energy dominant. We are going to sign these orders which empower the DOE to finally start testing reactors again, which changed the NRC to allow us to actually go build them. And It's also the people around him as well. You know, I've noticed that there's just this massive shift from analysis to action, right? From paper to getting stuff done. You know, I was, I was hearing, you know, the other day that the, the shift in the feeling of added, you know, the, the shift in attitude is from, you know, what 50 papers did you sign this week to what 50 things did you get done this week, right? What happened in the physical world? And that is very exciting to me.

• 2:06:39Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, me too, me too. We're getting into, we want to talk about the, the actual cost of how much cheaper is nuclear?

• 2:06:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. So this is something I think few people understand. A lot of people, when they hear about nuclear energy, what they're thinking about is it's stable, it's clean, you know, you can, it lasts for a long time. There's these attributes of nuclear that they're thinking about. And very seldom are you hearing, it's just going to be so much cheaper. And this is really a product of how poorly we've been building nuclear in the West for the last 30 years, is that it became very expensive. And, you know, opponents of nuclear will say, nuclear is, you know, $150 to $200 a megawatt hour, whereas other forms of generation are less than 100. And so nuclear looks like the expensive option. I would appeal to the past.

• 2:07:31Speaker 05

  I would say, what was nuclear energy before we kind of mucked it up, right? Before we over-regulated, before Three Mile Island, before we kind of tripped over our own, our own feet? What was nuclear doing? And what's fascinating is that if you go and look at the original costs of nuclear from the 1970s, it was and remains the cheapest energy that humanity has ever experienced. And that's adjusting for inflation, right? So if you take, what did nuclear energy cost in the early 1970s and adjust those numbers to today? It was around $35 to $40 a megawatt hour, which is cheaper than the cheapest energy on earth today. So we've actually gotten more expensive in, in every way since the early 1970s. And again, we're not talking about nominal 1970s dollars.

• 2:08:15Speaker 05

  This is inflation adjusted, which proves to me from a physics perspective and an engineering perspective, that nuclear can obviously be the cheapest source of energy because we did it before. We've already proved it. And so we just have to get back there. Now, what's also interesting is that even in the early 1970s, that was only, what, 20 years since we even invented nuclear, right? It was 20 years since we turned on the first reactors. And so that technology was like, pretty new, and it was already the cheapest energy on Earth. So where would we be if we had continued to march down that line? Where would we be if we had continued to let innovators innovate? And make these things cheaper as, as technology does over time? And that's what I'm really excited about with Fowler. So the first goal is, we're gonna get back to

• 2:08:59Speaker 05

  energy being, you know, nuclear energy being the cheapest. And then we're gonna go further. It's gonna get cheaper and cheaper, and that's gonna be really exciting.

• 2:09:07Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think I've read that 90% of the cost is lawyers and all this bureaucracy type shit.

• 2:09:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, so.

• 2:09:13Shawn Ryan?

  True?

• 2:09:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, this is one of these things where you, when people talk about cost, they're really only able to look at historical examples, and they look at how projects have gone, and they total up the costs, and they say, well, this is how much it costs. But as technologists, you have to take a step back and look at things more fundamentally. And you have to ask, how much should things cost and why? And there's a way of looking at this that I love. It's something I believe Elon invented. It's called the idiot index. Have you heard of this?

• 2:09:42Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 2:09:42Speaker 05

  So the idiot index is a really fun way to look at technology. Essentially, what you do is you look at the finished costs of a good, right? So how much does a thing cost on the shelf? And then you look at the cost of the materials that it's built out of. And you divide the, the finished cost number by the material cost number, and you get a factor, right? So for an example, an iPhone costs, let's say, a thousand dollars, and it's probably like 200 bucks of, of material, right? So divide that and you get a factor of four. So that'd be an idiot index of four. And that's pretty characteristic for like, mature projects, mature products, is they generally have idiot indexes anywhere from like, two to seven. You know, a car is, is probably one of the lower ones.

• 2:10:25Speaker 05

  If you buy a car for 30K, the material cost in that was somewhere around like 10 to 15K. So it has an idiot index of like, two. So mature technologies end up having an idiot index from, from two to seven. The reason it's called an idiot index is because if the number is really high, you're an idiot. Right, if the number is super, super high, it means that you're doing something wrong. And the goal of technology is to continue pushing that number lower and lower. Again, you know, with with space as an example, as far as I can tell, when Elon started SpaceX, space in general had an idiot index of about 70. Right, so 70 is an extraordinarily high number. What that tells you is the rocket that's standing there was 70 times more than the materials it's made out of in terms of cost. So you're doing something wrong there, right?

• 2:11:10Speaker 05

  It shouldn't cost that much.

• 2:11:13Speaker 05

  Nuclear is about 140. 140? 140. So nuclear is is about two times worse than space was before SpaceX. And it's, you know, 10 times to 12 times more than it should be for a mature, commercial, you know, piece of industrial equipment. Right, so that tells us that we have an enormous amount of doing things wrong in a system that we need to solve for. So then the question is, well, how do you do things right? And the only way to do things right is to start from first principles. You have to look at the design and you have to say, how do we make this cheap? How do we manufacture it easily? How do we keep it safe? And the safety has to do with the cost, right? Because if you have a very safe reactor, you spend a lot less time and energy on engineering safety, right?

• 2:11:57Speaker 05

  A very simple, very safe reactor is easier to make safe than a reactor that's like less safe by design and then you end up adding a bunch of safety Band-Aids on it. Let's put it that way. So just start with something that's much safer, much simpler. And then the other way that you drive a lower idiot index is by doing the same thing over and over. Repetition is really the fundamental way that you drive an India index lower. This is again, why we make the reactors very small and why we have this model of making many of them on a site. I call this, you do well what you do often. Right, so whatever you do over and over again, you're going to do better and better. And so you want to get into this pattern where you're making the same reactor with the same tools, with the same people, and they get better at it.

• 2:12:40Speaker 05

  And that's what's going to allow us to pull all of that cost out of the system. And we'll get to cheap reactors, which are more like industrial pieces of equipment, right? Maybe an India X of 10, hopefully get down to seven, maybe even five.

• 2:12:54Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into China versus the US with the AI race. And before we get into that, I want to ask you about espionage. You know, and I talked to Augustus about this. I brought up that, you know, when I worked overseas, China would set up brothels.

• 2:13:13Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:13:14Shawn Ryan?

  All over the Middle East.

• 2:13:15Speaker 05

  I could see that, yeah.

• 2:13:16Shawn Ryan?

  And pretty much anywhere the US was at, and they would set them up. And you'd get the State Department guys and all these people going in there that are, you know, working for NGOs, USAID, State Department.

• 2:13:27Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:13:27Shawn Ryan?

  You know, insert government agency.

• 2:13:30Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:13:30Shawn Ryan?

  That's operating at some capacity overseas. And people go in there, fall in love with the, you know, Chinese spy slash prostitute.

• 2:13:40Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:13:40Shawn Ryan?

  Next thing you know, they're giving up information. I told Augustus that at lunch after our interview. And I asked, you know, and he goes, man, that sounds exactly like Silicon Valley and El Segundo.

• 2:13:54Speaker 05

  It sounds like San Francisco for sure.

• 2:13:56Shawn Ryan?

  You see these guys, they're nerds, they come up.

• 2:13:59Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:13:59Shawn Ryan?

  They build something, they get rich.

• 2:14:01Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:14:01Shawn Ryan?

  And then they have a super attractive Russian wife or Chinese girlfriend or whatever.

• 2:14:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:14:08Shawn Ryan?

  And that wife slash girlfriend is selling secrets back to, you know, wherever they came from. I mean, how are you, are you concerned about that? And if you are, how are you, you know, how are you taking that, that type of a threat seriously?

• 2:14:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, so first off, I am definitely concerned about that. I'm especially concerned about that in places where we do have the technological edge today. Right? So I think AI is like a really obvious example where of course China is doing that. Like they would be foolish not to, to do that. And we would be foolish to assume that they aren't.

• 2:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:14:40Speaker 05

  So that is absolutely happening. There have been known cases of that happening. So you have to be very careful about it. The other thing that I'd say today, though, is that, to be honest, we're so far behind in nuclear that China doesn't care to steal anything from us, right? They're so far ahead of us, they've built advanced reactors. We've never built an advanced reactor on American soil. We've never split an atom in an advanced reactor on American soil. And China has, in three now, I believe. And so, this is going to be a concern, and we're thinking about how to address this threat over the next few years as we begin to pull ahead of China. But, to be honest, where it stands today, they're just ahead of us. They don't care to steal, you know, they view what we're building as, you know, toys, essentially,

• 2:15:25Speaker 05

  right now, that they're past, which is a very sad place to be, and that's why we have this urgency of the moment. I would say we have a window to catch up. And the reason we have a window to catch up is because American entrepreneurs are the most innovative people on Earth. We genuinely are. We're incredible at building innovative technology, using first principles thinking, and incredible engineers, and building something that's never existed before. Pretty much everything that China's doing on nuclear is stuff they copied from us, but it's stuff they copied from us back in the 60s and 70s and 80s. And then they've sort of brought to a new point of maturity through experience since then. And we're still back there, right? We're still trying to just get this stuff working. So, it will be a concern as we pull ahead, but today, like, you know, man,

• 2:16:08Speaker 05

  we gotta start splitting atoms before they even care.

• 2:16:11Shawn Ryan?

  How far behind do you think we are?

• 2:16:13Speaker 05

  I think today, we are probably four or five years behind, if Valor is doing it. If other companies are doing it, we're decades behind. I think Valor is the only company that's moving even close to fast enough to get anywhere close to China. And that is something I think about a lot, and we're gonna go as fast as we possibly can.

• 2:16:32Shawn Ryan?

  And five years, DC, let's say, let's say they administer it, let's just say, you know... After Trump's term here, you know, goes back to the Democrats. I mean, are Democrats on board with this?

• 2:16:49Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I think that nuclear-

• 2:16:52Shawn Ryan?

  This is a bipartisan issue that everybody's taking seriously.

• 2:16:54Speaker 05

  Nuclear became bipartisan during the Biden administration. Now, I will say, you know, I think obviously there will be another Democratic presidency at some point. And my appeal would be that you should take a look at what the president did and put the partisanship aside and keep fueling that fire because it is so important. It is such a national security issue that we have power, that we power our civilization, that we reassure, that we win on AI. You know, this should not be a partisan issue. This should be completely bipartisan. And it was beginning to be, I think, you know, the Biden administration, more than other Democratic administrations before him, were pushing nuclear. They, you know, started

• 2:17:37Speaker 05

  to make a couple of movements. The one flaw, I think, in this for Democrats is that they tend to be very protective of bureaucracies, right? They tend to be protective of the sort of like class of people who are generally Democrats, who sit in government positions and have government jobs and do the paperwork. And I think that, you know, obviously Republicans are a little different from that. They don't have the same classes of people. They don't have the same loyalties toward bureaucracies and bureaucratic systems. And so the Trump administration has been able to very, very quickly change the tone overnight, which is amazing. And so my, my appeal to be whoever the next Democratic administration is, whether

• 2:18:17Speaker 05

  that's in four years or 12 years or whenever it is, that I would appeal to you to set that aside and understand that we need to build and this is a national security issue. And that there are lots and lots of ways that we can use those people to build even more, right? There's a certain amount of bureaucrats in government who, who today, I would say are sort of governing an empire of dirt, right? They're, they're governing a whole lot of nothing, right? And we have to peel that bureaucracy back to start building again. But as we start building more and more and more, you're going to need to add people back in because industry is going to grow and it's going to get bigger and it's going to make more power. And there will be lots of opportunities for, for bureaucrats to do the good work that they do in making things safe and, and checking things out

• 2:19:00Speaker 05

  and those sorts of things. But you have to let the industry-

• 2:19:03Shawn Ryan?

  I've never heard anybody say, let the bureaucrats do the good things that they do, ever in my life.

• 2:19:09Speaker 05

  Let me counter this for you for a little bit. So, one of the things that's very unique about American culture is that we have had very functional bureaucracies before. Bureaucracies can do things, they have a huge failure mode, which we all know now, right? Which is that they get slow and they don't do anything and they stop progress and they take 10 years to do a single piece of paperwork. But, you can sort of think about some of the great engineering projects of the last 100 years as bureaucratic projects to some extent. So, the Apollo landings, right? Landing on the moon, had bureaucrats, right? There was a lot of paperwork involved in that. You had a lot of people checking designs, checking document flow, ensuring security,

• 2:19:53Speaker 05

  ensuring, you know, all of the things that go into checking the boxes to make sure that nobody died on the moon, right? And we had a successful outcome to that mission. There was an army of people involved in that effort. And you would call many of those people bureaucrats. Lots of engineers too, and I would say the ratio was a lot better, right? The ratio of bureaucrats to engineers was a lot better. But you really do need, what I would say is, people who dedicate their life to making the machinery of government turn. And so you do need that, but you need to not let them run the ship, right? Engineers need to run the ship. And I would say administrations need to run the ship. You need to have an executive who's running the ship.

• 2:20:35Speaker 05

  And those people, you know, need to help the president run the ship in the right direction and not become a thing that is purposeful in and of themselves, like the bureaucracy for the bureaucracy. That's where it gets really bad.

• 2:20:46Shawn Ryan?

  You know, my fear is, I mean, you know, the country is very divided right now. Has been for eight, 12 years, you know, maybe longer. Probably since 9/11. You know, it's just gotten worse and worse and worse. And you see, you see, you know, Democrats come in and they undo everything that the Republicans did. And you see the Republicans come in and they undo everything that the Democrats did. Just because the country's become so tribal.

• 2:21:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Shawn Ryan?

  And so, you know, my question to you is, you know...

• 2:21:20Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people aren't going to be happy with how things are going.

• 2:21:22Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:21:22Shawn Ryan?

  In this administration, wouldn't be surprised if it flips.

• 2:21:25Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:21:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wouldn't be surprised if that party end does everything, you know, the cycle just keeps continuing, right? And so what my, my question to you is, are you building relationships with? I mean, I know right now we have, you know, we have a, a Republican heavy House, we have a Republican heavy Senate. We obviously, you know, President is Republican.

• 2:21:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  You know, so if that switch, it might switch, you know, in a year and a half, midterms. You know, are you building relationships with Democrat politicians?

• 2:21:55Speaker 05

  Yep. Yeah. And I think the, the place where this mostly happens is at the state level. Right? So state level and somewhat in Senate and House. But I think that today Republicans are leading the charge on energy dominance. And I would appeal to Democrats that when it's their turn again, that they should pick that up and do even better. Right? Like that's, that's going to be the, the charge. And I think that's how they'll win because energy really is something that's good for the American people. And it's good for, for American interests and people want to vote for that. They want to vote for cheaper prices, for stable power, for security, for manufacturing, for jobs. All of these things are downstream of energy.

• 2:22:36Speaker 05

  And again, I think the, the right, the right sentiment was there. Especially in the last Democratic administration before that, you know, I think previous Democratic administrations were a little bit anti-nuclear. The Biden administration, I would, I would say was like pro-nuclear, but not willing to rock the boat. Now the boat has been rocked, right? Trump, Trump just rocked the boat and we're charging forward. And so I think that's a great tee up for a Democratic administration to push that ball even further and take that win. So that would be, that would be my appeal.

• 2:23:08Shawn Ryan?

  I think that's great. What I'm asking is, you know, are you developing the relationships that you need for when there is a turnover? Because there will be a turnover.

• 2:23:17Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:23:18Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and so are you having discussions with? You know, Governor Newsom in your state about about this and

• 2:23:24Speaker 05

  Yep, I would say not so much in California, but in other in other Democratic states, yes. California unfortunately has a moratorium on nuclear. And it's, you know, may or may not be repealed. That would be awesome. But yeah, I think like there's some, there's some shift that's going to have to happen. And whoever's willing to run forward on that shift, Nevada is a good example. Washington, Washington State is a good example of places where that shift could take place. Illinois is having a moment where they're trying to figure out if they're going to be pro nuclear or not. And so the short answer is yes, but Republicans have the ball today. And they are, they're running really fast with it. So whoever has the ball next and is willing to run with it as fast. I'm going to be very excited to work with.

• 2:24:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I hope you, I hope you build those relationships.

• 2:24:10Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:24:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, you're gonna need them.

• 2:24:11Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 2:24:12Shawn Ryan?

  But Isaiah, kudos to you, man.

• 2:24:16Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:24:17Shawn Ryan?

  Like amazing what you're doing. 26 years old, dropped out. It's high school at 16. I mean, and now you're, you're building nuclear reactors. I mean, that is just

• 2:24:29Shawn Ryan?

  really cool, man. And variance and with your backstory, you know, growing up, nothing came easy on food stamps to who you are today. I mean, that, that's, that's inspiration for an entire generation.

• 2:24:42Speaker 05

  Well, thank you so much for having me on. This has been a really great time.

• 2:24:45Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Congratulations. I hope to see you again.