The Pomp Podcast - #1319 Isaiah Taylor | Nuclear Power Can Save The World

Episode Date: February 29, 2024

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

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Isaiah Taylor. He is the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics. Valar is an atomic energy company focused on mass manufacturing nuclear fission reactors. If you

don't know what that is, this episode is for you. Isaiah walks us through what it is, how it works, what are the risks, and what could the future look like if they are successful. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you do as well. Here is my conversation with Isaiah Taylor. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you

by base base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain what exactly is base it's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users with near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds base is shaping the future of the on-chain world base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem whether you're an emerging creator a seasoned developer or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily,

BASE is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at BASE.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBASE. Again, that's at BuildOnBASE to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Before we get into this episode, I also want to tell you about a brand new product

called Velo. Velo is faster, easier crypto data. Everyone in the industry is always looking for what's the price, what's going on on the exchanges, where are assets flowing or not flowing? How is things like open interest and derivatives actually playing out in the market? Well, that's where Velo comes in. It's faster and easier crypto data. You can go to VeloWaitlist.com today. Myself and a couple of friends, we invested in the business.

We're advising the founder and we think it's pretty cool. This one is something that keeps me informed on a daily basis, so you should check them out at VeloWaitlist.com. That's V-E-L-O Waitlist.com. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Isaiah here with me. I thought a great place to start is just let's go right to your website.

You guys obviously put this on your website because this speaks to who you are and what you guys are building. On your website, the first thing people see is it says, Engineers Wanted. We're building a company by solving one of the hardest problems in physics. using historically unpopular fuel within a very short timeline, not to mention tackling complex manufacturing and creating an unproven commodities market along the way. The odds are against us, but we wouldn't have it any other way. What are you doing? That sounds like a death mission.

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

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

Let's go through first taking the air in. Walk through that process specifically. Do you just have a big fan that like rather than blow out is like sucking in uh a bunch of air and going into like a product that you built or how does it work yeah so a carbon capture there's a bunch of different ways to do it we'll probably use a calcium based so uh basically how this works is that calcium will um sort of bond to the co2 in the air and um you know it'll form another compound and then you can go cook that compound or you can dissolve it in a solution and you get the CO2 released out. And so there's a cycle, but yeah, the short answer is there's a fan, the fan, you know, moves air across a substrate and then you, you know, you cook that, the CO2

back out, absorbs it, you cook it back out in some way. And yeah, so, so exactly right. Big fans. Now, as you're doing that, at what point does the fuel or the energy source get introduced to the process? Yeah. So it doesn't take too much energy to capture carbon. Actually it does take energy but not not an enormous amount um the i guess like the energy difference between bonding the co2 with the substrate and then releasing it back out is not enormous um it does take energy to run the fans but there's like this trade-off of like how big is your plant versus how fast are the fans running and so you can choose to like spend more on fans or spend more on energy uh that part is not the super energetic part the thing that's like takes a lot of energy is creating

hydrogen um really what we do is recreate hydrogen so i can kind of tell you the backstory in a little bit on how we got here but the most important thing we do is we make hydrogen and once you have hydrogen um it's nice like hydrogen's expensive you could theoretically sell it for a lot but it's like impossible to transport so where this really becomes a big scalable business is bonding it with co2 where we get a hydrocarbon but the energy usage you know the reason we need scaled nuclear is is creating that hydrogen What is the use? When you say jet fuel, is it literally just for jets or are there other uses for the end byproduct? Yeah, I mean, listen, like hydrocarbons are the world literally runs on them.

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

but on the flip side it's like they already work so well they're they're so power dense um and uh yeah so so they're already awesome um but yeah as far as like end use cases you know burning burning methane is how most of the world produces electricity uh well so either either methane or coal i think it's about 40 percent of uh of electricity in the u.s is generated by burning methane natural gas and turbines and i think it's 30 percent globally uh and then globally like the rest that's coal so like hydrocarbons are how we get energy today. And it's just because they're so transportable that you can stick them in a bucket. That's something that's just really misunderstood and not appreciated is that you

can carry energy in a bucket. You can pour this liquid in there and now you can move megawatts of power around. And that's huge. So in the announcement of the business, you had this tweet and you said, all of our greatest ambitions, interplanetary life, artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotech need energy that is orders of magnitude cheaper and more abundant than we have now. In 1970, we stopped our centuries-long march of making energy cheaper. Why did the progress stop? Yeah, you know, there's two reasons. And it's kind of hard to separate these things and understand the real core reason. I think there probably is one core reason, but it might have been a confluence of events.

The two basic reasons are, one, we started to reach a limit on how efficient it actually is to drill, transport, and refine oil. And then the other reason is we started to have these political fears about oil. And that includes this concept of peak oil, which people talk about for a long time. It also includes the environmental movement. So we both reached a max efficiency on literally just like the machinery and the tooling and the labor that goes to like drill and refine oil and then also there's like these political headwinds that arose at the same time so those two things um in the geopolitical as well so it's political and geopolitical meaning like who owns the oil where does it come from and then also resistance to

developing it domestically those two things i think combined to set us back as far as the what's called the adams curve which is our you know cost and consumption of energy diverging over time when the progress goes stagnant how hard is it to restart do you need one company do you need 10 companies do you need five governments like like how much you know kind of um re-energy energizing of that momentum is needed to really kind of get going again Yeah. So that's such a great question. The core answer to that question is actually the reason that it took me as long as it did to start this company. I've been thinking about this since I dropped out of high school, really, since I was 17. And it took me a long time to realize

that there was a single lever that I could pull that I think could actually restart this thing. But I do genuinely believe that single companies throughout history have been able to create massive, massive movements and swings and really reshape entire industries, governments, all sorts of things. But they start in one place. SpaceX is the most recent example of this. It's like if we were sitting here in 2001 and it's like, can we really restart space travel? Can one company really do that? Is Elon really that guy? You would have had some skepticism in, you know, in the early 2000s that, you know, it's like, listen, man, like Space Launch, it's so many different vendors, it's so many different contractors, there's different governments involved, there's regulatory agencies, you know, who's going to make the rocket engines, who's going to weld up, you know, the pressure tanks.

and um but then it turns out that like one company with a really really clear focus mission pushing you know for for a decade in the same direction with passion can actually change a ton a lot can change really quickly and once you have that like one spike then a lot of other things in the periphery get changed like regulations shift a little bit and vendors appear where there weren't vendors before labor forces grow these these sorts of things so um i think that's a similar position to where we're sitting right now, which is like, yeah, there's a lot that needs to change to, uh, to make energy cheaper. But I think we have found that spike in energy and it comes down to mating, you know, an old established industry, which is hydrocarbons with a much, much cheaper

source of energy, which is nuclear. And I think when those things come together, it's a really beautiful marriage. What in that process, uh, are the things that you feel most confident you can figure out and kind of get going? And then what are the things that seem, even for you who's in this day-to-day, has studied it, is betting your time, energy, and reputation on this, seem the least likely to actually be successful or to kind of get the breakthrough? Yeah. Counterintuitively, nuclear is the most straightforward part of this. We know how to make nuclear reactors. We've made many, many nuclear reactors, both in the United States and in other countries of all kinds and forms with, you know, hundreds

of thousands of hours of operation and recording data and things going right and things going wrong and iterating. We have not done that as much recently, but we have done it in the past to a really large degree. My great-grandfather was at Oak Ridge, which is where they developed a lot of the advanced, you know, nuclear prototypes they could talk about today. And this was like the 60s and 70s so yeah i would say then like the nuclear side it's much more of a of a question of like can you get this thing to a higher technology readiness level where where it's ready to manufacture then there's a market waiting for the other side um and then you know on on the far end of the spectrum like making jet fuel that's also pretty well proven like we we make

synthetic fuels in a variety of ways today um so i guess if i had to look at the whole stack and say like what am i least sure about right now it's probably cheaply producing hydrogen which kind of sits in the middle so you have like nuclear heat and then you have hydrogen production and then you have making hydrocarbons and i would say making hydrogen is probably that risk area right now so that's actually why we're currently testing that in the lab and how much of this can you test on a small scale and kind of like get individual components and say yep this looks good this looks good like let's go build the big thing yeah versus nah man we just gotta we gotta build the full thing and you know hit the green button turn it on make sure that it works yeah no all of

it um we like if there's a spectrum of like doing the giant thing in 10 years versus taking small steps and building whatever we can and scaling up i'm like far far on this end where we're we we want to make the smallest possible thing we want to completely to work from end to end And then we want to learn from that. And then we want to take the next step and make it a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger. I'm kind of a practice maximalist. Like theory is great.

And personally, like I have a lot of intellectual curiosity about theory. And it's really fun to debate with people and write papers. But industries move forward on practice and heuristics, not on like sort of paper research. Like if you kind of look into the development of a lot of like really, really advanced industries where they're doing crazy stuff it really happens through practice and heuristics like the jet engine is a great example of this like we didn't really understand the thermodynamics of jet engines until they were already being used in commercial operations for

like 30 years but that's that's a pretty underrated thing that people don't realize like we didn't really understand what was happening in a jet engine until 30 years after people were flying around in them um and that's because people were experimenting right They had a lab and they're like, well, what if we put the fuel at this temperature? Can we add a bunch more thermocouples to this hot section and figure out the temperature gradients that way? Do we really have to know the theory behind that? Now, there's usefulness to modeling and prediction.

There's a lot of things that you have to do in that direction for safety, but you have to practice it. You have to actually do it. Why is the government not pushing so much of this? Like when we hear certain technologies, as you describe multiple times, unpopular, I may use the word controversial, even to some degree, with some of the things that you guys are going to be working on here. Is the government scared? Is the government bought by, you know, old world kind of non-innovative companies and executives? Like what's going on and why is the government not kind of more persistent in seeing this happen? yeah um i i think there i think there are three phases there was one phase you know it's sort of

post-war the post-world war ii era where the government was on its a-game like we were going to the moon we had just done the manhattan project we were setting up the national labs it was it was the get shit done era of sort of the federal bureaucracy and um that really was a product of just a lot of eternal spirit like we just had government spirit you know uh like yes this we are capable of going to the moon and it's this like top-down like congress funded way of getting science and industry done but that that takes like so much cultural virtue if that makes sense um it takes everybody having like a highly patriotic sense of the mission and uh it's somewhere along that line like we kind of lost that like group group society like american like spirit

of like doing things collectively um and so like that's one function of like why why we are not able to move like with incredible speed anymore as far as like is it bought by people there was definitely a time in which um you know a lot of like our regulators were bought by various interests that didn't want to have nuclear happen oil and gas is a really obvious one you can go and you can go and trace all that down where, where oil and gas basically stopped nuclear development from happening. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think that actually oil and gas companies now are actively looking for ways to be part of the next generation of energy production. And now we're kind of in that mode where the government might not actually necessarily

know what's fastest and what's best, right? They, they might not actually have a clear picture of what is the best and fastest way to move an industry forward. And that's where it falls on our shoulders. Like, you know, regulators are default risk averse. They want things to not blow up. That's great. And entrepreneurs have to go out and prove to them

this is the right way to do it. What has been the response so far from some of these industry players? Are they trying to help you? Are they kind of, hey, cute idea, kid, you know, we'll see you later. what has been kind of some of those conversations or at least things you're aware of so at this moment yeah yeah i mean look it's uh you know i am a kid you know i'm 24 and uh it is a cute idea

so you know if anyone's saying that right now like i don't fault them um i think uh you know i have a lot to prove and that's fine but i would say the reaction's been generally positive i've certainly had a lot of those conversations where it's like yeah okay like good luck actually getting this thing across the line. It costs my company $3 billion to make this one over here. You're going to do it with a couple hundred million? Sure, kid. I certainly have gotten a little bit of that. I would say overwhelmingly, though, the writing is on the wall with nuclear that people are starting to understand the incentives that have brought us to where we are in nuclear and that those things have caused pretty big price distortions.

Somebody coming up with the right model to break through that actually is quite compelling. I would say the vast majority of people I've talked to in the existing industry, when I kind of lay out the, you know, our plan and how it addresses, you know, addresses like the incentive problems in the market are like, wait a minute, that could actually work. And I want to be part of that. So that's been the overwhelming impression so far. And what are the skill sets you need to build this? Like you obviously have an understanding of some science. You've formulated this after thinking about it for a long time. You're not going to do it alone though.

So what are the skill sets that are necessary? Great question. Let's make this the header clip. Let's put this all over X. Thank you for giving me the platform. Look, man, we need extremely, extremely cracked people to work on this. And it's a few different skill sets, but the most important thing just at the outset is people need to be crazy fast, crazy dedicated, be willing to take risks and try things that haven't been done before and mostly just move very very fast that's like the it's almost a personality trait that i'm looking for initially with that but then particular skill sets are like thermohydraulics people um anyone who's worked with pressure vessels and welding up pressure

vessels to do the right thing at the right time uh nuclear physics of course we need people to be doing you know core modeling and this kind of stuff and thermal modeling on the core and then i would say like chemical and process engineering if you've worked in the oil and gas industry If you've worked with Fischer Trop, we want to talk to you. And yeah, anyone who can machine really well and weld really well is always going to be useful. And then on the other one is electrical engineers currently looking for extremely fast-moving electrical engineers. So yeah, that's what we're looking for right now. So let's say that you're able to combine your plan, the right team, and capital.

You've already raised some money. I'm assuming that you'll have to raise a lot more. Yep. what is the end product better than? And what I mean by that is like, you know, the, the ultimate, are you saving people money? Are you saving them time? Do you have a product that's 10 X better? Like, how do you evaluate, okay, if we get everything right and actually build what we think we can build,

how much better are you than alternatives? Yeah. Um, quite frankly, the end product is, is cheaper jet fuel. Uh, it's cheaper jet fuel, cheaper methane, um, cheaper gas, cheaper diesel. and that is actually really really sexy doesn't sound that sexy when i say it but but no it's very sexy and the reason is there is a five trillion dollar industry currently trying to provide cheaper energy by drilling by moving oil around by cracking into the right chains of hydrocarbons super fun industry by the way it's really awesome i love it um but it can't get much cheaper than it is right now. And if you want to go out and build a massive, massive company today

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

industry, whether you're recruiting them, potential competitors, or potential partners, what are they most impressed with given the progress to date people on the outside who may not understand the industry really well they would look and say oh you raised some money sounds like a really you know ambitious idea but what are the things that insiders are really impressed with yeah i think the thing that's that's sort of most surprising to the insiders off the bat is is like i said before this sort of um really really counterintuitive uh market shift so i think that everything about companies are determined by who's the customer and what's the product and there are a lot of things that's that's actually kind of counterintuitive

but this is how technology works technology kind of forms itself and shifts itself to a certain customer in a certain market so like pcs are the ways that they are because they're serving business customers max are the way they are because they're serving creatives and technology sort of morph themselves and shift themselves. And it's not just the shape of the technology, it's the shape of the companies that service that industry. So like SpaceX, it's a very different company than any of the subcontractors that we're putting together,

the rockets for NASA. And so I think the thing that's really, really interesting right now is that we have figured out a model here where we can actually do mass scale nuclear and the market's right. And the incentives are right. And we just have to do really, really hardcore engineering together. But that's really, really fun because for a long time, it doesn't, it hasn't really mattered how hardcore your engineering is.

Like you can get super, super cracked, hardcore engineers in a room, and you can create an incredible design for a nuclear reactor and then not sell it to anyone because like no one's buying nuclear reactors. So we've got a model here that actually allows us to do incredible engineering. and seriously make money at the end of the day how much money can you make when we are so i i'll describe it as like a curve um what we want to get to is where we are on the style of curve where we are reinvesting uh profits on selling hydrocarbons into uh sort of increasing scale of sites and decreasing cost of replication on our units

So we want to have very, very large sites where we're making jet fuel, and we want to be sort of turning those on in a rolling fashion, selling the fuel. And then we have this rolling process of reinvesting the profits from selling those hydrocarbons into bigger factories, bigger units, more verticalization. um and uh like this is the this is the type of thing where if that that could take us you know 10 years uh to the point where where that's where cash is coming from the reinvestment and then another 10 years after that like look we could be making hundreds of billions of dollars free cash flow and do you just stay with a jet fuel or are there other things that you can do a lot of these processes uh and kind of industrial manufacturing uh you know businesses what i've learned over the years is like there's all kinds of waste and byproducts and other things you can monetize and

you know get creative how do you think about okay we're going to go build cheaper jet fuel we're going to do it in this really kind of unpopular way what are the expansion opportunities from there once you've kind of earned the right by focusing on the first thing yeah so jet fuel is is like a really good hydrocarbon to make because it is in like serious serious demand it's going to stay in serious demand. There's high volume for it. It's easy to transport. But there are a variety of other hydrocarbons for other purposes. I think the thing that there's a whole spectrum of hydrocarbons we can make and sell depending on where we're located, like methane for use in nat gas turbines. This is how most countries make their electricity is

pipelines of nat gas. And so that's exciting. But beyond that, the chemical market, man, And it's super interesting to me. I love the chemicals industry. It's a $5 trillion industry that nobody really thinks about that much. And part of my thesis is that there's a massive portion of those chemicals that can be made cheaper, like I said, if you have cheap heat. So fundamentally, we're a cheap heat company. And we figure out how to sell mass-scale cheap heat to the commodity market. now as i see this being built um the manufacturing itself seems like uh it's going to be something

you have to figure out theoretically and then you have to go actually do um how dependent are you on international supply chains how like american or domestic uh oriented is it and do you see that as a plus or a minus like you know depending on how much dependency you have on other areas of world uh certain inputs to that manufacturing process can determine whether you really control your own destiny or you see risk there as well so i think that one of the things that tesla kind of proved for everyone is that the whole question of like international dependency is more an issue for like horizontally structured companies than it is for vertically structured companies and what i mean by that is like well while all other automakers were having serious

supply chain issues tesla for the most part wasn't and it's because if you actually kind of do the work the deep verticalization work and you design your product around verticalization you design your your manufacturing process around that um there are way fewer dependency points you're still always going to have a few dependency points like you know tesla had to figure out these presses and this kind of stuff but but you get to reduce the surface area of that a lot what it means is you have to in-house a lot more engineering and in order to in-house a lot of engineering you have to have a massive terminal market like tesla was able to do that because they're like you know we want to be the largest automaker and that's a that's going to be really

big company right so so they had the justification to do that a lot of you know companies working on hard things maybe just don't have a big enough terminal market to justify in-housing this you know stainless press system right um for valor like yeah we're highly focused on verticalizing everything and in fact we're willing to trade off some efficiency we're willing to trade off um a lot of things for being able to control our destiny and that's that's for two reasons one you know not not being dependent on others but really it's speed like we want to we want to iterate really really fast and that means we're going to spend a little bit more on verticalizing for sure and what exactly like give me some examples maybe of how you think of implementing

that because it theoretically sounds awesome right and i think the point about tesla uh makes a ton of sense but for you all specifically like what does that mean the way that people perceive the nuclear industry is wrong there are there aren't very many if at all like nuclear reactor companies there are components companies that make components for nuclear reactors and then there are integrators that you know sub out designs and you know rough parameters and then get those parts in those components and then integrate them so there's like there are purchasers integrators and then suppliers there are very very few companies in the world who are like yeah we make nuclear reactors and we own like all of that process so even just like the most

you know fundamental parts of that which is like can you make your own core can you make your own control rod drives again like you're going to buy down some stuff that that's going to take a little bit longer and you're going to have to hire some really talented people who've thought through these problems before but for us like it's it's worth doing it's worth doing because because at the end of the day you know if we can get that machine to work there's a massive market on the other end and when you're doing this do you have to do it in one manufacturing facility like is it just like build one massive plant kind of like gigafactory equivalent you just have one of them or is the idea basically you build them all over the world and it's all about cutting down

transportation time um you know how do you kind of think of like okay we're successful there are these other components about geography uh uh site selection there's regulation of the country that you go into there is the cost and speed of transportation of the quote-unquote cheaper jet fuel now with things like the houthis and and kind of global supply chains you kind of get a new chess piece on the board so how are you thinking about that today Yeah. So spiritually, it's going to be much closer to the Gigafactory type layout. And again, we're coming out of this era where it made a lot of sense, but it didn't make sense, but it made temporary sense to fracture everything. We saw really, really cheap

suppliers be able to pop up because there was some temporary... Let's say you have a process and you have labor running that process and then china's like look we copy pasted that process but our labor costs 20 of the you know of that price and so you know we just shaved you know let's say 30 off your off your total in the short term it's like oh wow let's go horizontalize everything and we'll just be an integrator and at the end of the day we can make all the stuff for like 20 to 30 cheaper we can dominate the market right so that that's the era that we're currently coming out of um the thing that that model misses is innovation it misses that okay sure china figured out how to copy paste your process with cheaper labor but what you're missing is that like a

little bit of r d spend and a little bit of creativity could have gotten you a 50 cheaper process right um and and so that's where we want to have a much closer tighter model where it's really really smart people thinking about innovating the entire process and pushing those costs down and so yeah like could it could it be cheaper to sort of like run this like regulatory play where you're doing different regions and trying to integrate things together that it's short-term thinking we want to push these cost curves down over and over and over for decades and when you talk to investors what is their uh excitement right and i'm assuming the mission is a big one um but what are they excited about and then what are they scared of what why

do you not have you know five billion dollars in the company's bank account right now because every investor is clamoring over you to uh to give money for this crazy idea yeah um well we'll get there we'll get there um i think that the initial uh hesitation i'll say like when we were going and raising the initial hesitation people had uh was just we don't know how to underwrite all of technical areas at once right there's a there's several different you know areas of of uh you know complex engineering that we need to do and we need to put it all together and um most firms you know do not at least at the small scale don't have those three experts sitting in the room at any one time and so i think that's probably something that uh is going to not be as much

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

until Valor. All the other companies trying to pursue that, I just think they have the wrong market. Electricity is a terrible product at the end of the day. So I think the thing that's really exciting is we get to actually ride that dark horse into the city, but we're going to ride it it on the back of hydrocarbons, not electricity. And there's very compelling evidence that the more energy a society consumes, the more prosperous it becomes. If you drop the cost of some of that energy, obviously people will consume more of it. How much more prosperous can we get? I think the future is very, very exciting. I'm definitely a techno-optimist. I think that we're going to continue building this technological machine that we all live in right now.

And it does not have a strict limit that I can perceive today. But I think we're at an inflection point where there are a couple of pillars coming together. So the three pillars that I've identified, and honestly, I'm not sure if I invented this or not. I've tried Googling it to see if other people have been talking about this. And the only articles that come up are ones that I co-authored, so I'm not exactly sure. But the three pillars are, so I'll have to say, if anybody came up with this and it wasn't me, please DM me so I know that. Dexterity, energy, and intelligence are these three pillars. So dexterity being the ability to actually physically manipulate the world, right? You

might have the right idea of how atoms and molecules should be shaped in your head, but can you actually enact that energy is you know just obvious it's a property of of the universe and then intelligence is like we said sort of the know-how on how to move things around how to arrange them how to construct them so dexterity energy and intelligence in the agrarian era everything was human so dexterity was actual fingers energy was the chemical energy in your biological system that you got from eating food which originally came from the sun and then intelligence was of course human intelligence in the industrial age uh you know starting in the in the 1800s we started to make machines a little bit dexterous right so so we gave machines the

ability to you know move cotton in the right way to make clothing and then eventually to sort of stamp out you know cars and cars cannot move around and then intelligence was like a little bit embedded but it was more just kind of mechanical constraint and then energy shifted from like the biological energy of our bodies to energy latent in hydrocarbons in the crust so mostly coal um so we're getting into a new era now so this is a green age and industrial age i think that the next era gets really really exciting mostly because of the decreasing cost of intelligence so we're starting to figure out how to like bake intelligence into things that's that's operating in a much higher level we're also kind of figuring out

dexterity more although i think that was always not as big of a problem as intelligence was and now the problem is that energy has been stagnating so intelligence is going vertical dexterity is going vertical energy is stagnating and so that's why valor is working on this i I think, in order for us to get into this future where the cost of all material things are dropping significantly and we're able to terraform the earth to make it more pleasant to live in and to create more dry land for people to live on and get into space and be creating space habitations and terraform other planets. We've got the intelligence trending toward that direction.

We've got the dexterity trending toward that direction. But energy is the short stick right now. And so that's what I'm working on. and i guess one of my last questions for you is just you all are successful uh you get all these smart people you get all this capital you're able to create cheaper jet fuel is there a world where the machines consuming the fuel actually have to adapt to the cheaper jet fuel whether that is uh the companies and they change you know cost structures and kind of the financing mechanisms and things like that or maybe actually the fuel has an advantage or maybe a disadvantage you know

There's some difference in the fuel that changes the structures as well. And it kind of feels like those are the second or third order effects that if successful, either new problems could spawn or new improvements that are built on top of cheaper jet fuel that previously weren't possible, similar to what we've seen with SpaceX having cheaper launch, then there's a bunch of new use cases that get unlocked as well. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think like increasing or stagnant energy cost is a sickness. Like I think it's a societal sickness. and we're trying to cure it.

So I think my simple answer to that is like, a lot of things get better overnight really, really quickly. Just for instance, why are cars ugly now? Why are all cars ugly? Like, I think it's because fuel costs too much. Why are, it seems like a lot of the electric cars coming out now actually kind of look better than some of the gas cars.

It's because they have different constraints on the shape of those things based on, you know, their fuel consumption. If you look at like cars pre-1975, There's real artistry and beauty built into these things. And then after that, they became sort of like, you know, mechanistic functions of fuel consumption. And why do dishwashers suck at washing dishes?

Well, it's because they are being tuned for energy efficiency, not, you know, function of dishwashing. There's a lot of things in our society that are like built around the price of energy, they're stagnating or getting higher, that I think once we can fix that, once it's really, really cheap to put methane

into a pipe and create electricity, It's really, really cheap to move jet fuel to another country and run your jets. There's a lot of things that suddenly get solved we're not even thinking about right now. The last topic, it's very intertwined. El Segundo, the Gundo. Also, EAC feels like maybe Gundo is the home base, HQ. Maybe actually it is the heaven that you ascend to in EAC once you have finally adhered to the religion. Talk to me about both of those and kind of how they reinforce each other and why you think they're so important.

Yeah. Yeah. So Gundo is obviously we're right here. Nelson Gundo, Valor HQ. I moved here late last year. And it's a fantastic moment that we're having. And I think it's going to grow into just a lot of incredible companies and dense talent. I think that I moved here.

I decided to set up the company here because I really fell in love with the place. And I fell in love with the talent base. It's just incredibly, incredibly talented and smart people that have been working here for a long time. They're also deeply patriotic, which is super important to me. i think both this like gundo and eac thing uh have this note of you know pride and joy in your own you know people in your nation and in moving that people in that nation forward through time technologically and even in terms of things like you know having more kids and that kind of stuff there's this deeply like societally optimistic uh thing that we're doing here um yeah so i i think

you're right this is uh it's i'll call it hq uh and uh maybe we can call mars the heaven that you ascend to in this uh in yak i love it where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about uh valor atomics yeah so valoratomics.com uh if you are any of the types of engineers that i spoke of or even if you're just a super talented engineer and you want to submit your resume anyway you can do it there you can also find me on x.com uh search for isaiah taylor fowler atomics so yeah that's where you can find me and uh is there any one last message you want to leave with people if they come and they work at the company what's going to happen i mean if i leave a message with everyone it's just consume more energy and and have more kids uh having kids

is wonderful there should be a trillion humans and we should be using the power of 1500 stars and guess what energy is free like fundamentally in the universe energy is free more humans are better. Let's get out of this de-sell mindset and start building again.