#211 Scott Nolan - CEO of General Matter on Uranium Enrichment

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Scott Nolan, welcome to the show, man.

Thanks for having me.

Excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited to have you.

I've been, you know, I've been really interested in the energy grid.

I think I started looking into that probably about two years ago.

And now I'm terrified at the U.S.'s grid and

our power consumption versus how much power we actually produce and how we're relying on China for all these things.

And so with what you're doing with enriching uranium and

being involved in nuclear energy, I'm just fascinated in the subject.

And so, yeah, thank you for coming.

So it's going to be very educational for me.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

This is this is a really important topic, which we'll get into, but

you know, our company's mission is to restore U.S.

leadership in enrichment to restore U.S.

leadership in nuclear energy because that's what we see as the future of the grid, the future of U.S.

growth, power growth.

And we'll get into all the geopolitical reasons why that's really important.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Everybody starts with an introduction, right?

So

here we go.

Scott Nolan, CEO of General Matter, the American enrichment company enriching uranium in the U.S.

to

fill the nuclear gap.

Former SpaceX engineer who helped develop the original Falcon propulsion system and Dragon capsule subsystem.

You worked with NASA to return U.S.

cargo capability to the space station.

You're a partner at the Founders Fund, where for over a decade you have led investments across across energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, space, and transportation.

Cornell Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering graduate, Stanford MBA, where you are co-president of the Entrepreneurs Club, and you're a visionary taking on the geopolitical and technical challenges of nuclear energy and driving towards real energy independence.

It's quite the background, man.

Quite the background.

So a couple of things we just got to knock out real quick.

One is

everybody gets a gift.

Thank you.

Vigilance Elite gummy bears.

Awesome.

Legal in all 50 states.

Perfect.

Made in the USA.

Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Later.

Cool.

You know, it's bad form to show up empty-handed.

Oh, man.

Love presents.

I knew you may give some gummy bears.

So, what I brought is a replica of the thumper from the Dune movie, if you've seen it.

So we can get into why this is relevant later.

Oh man, that's awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah, the quick version is,

if you've seen Dune, if you've seen Dune 2, you know that the Thumper calls in the worm, and the worm is what makes the spice.

And in that movie, in that society, the spice powers all these different things like space travel.

And so it's this really, really important element, basically.

And House Atreides is sent to this planet to go mine it,

you know, to

continue progress of their civilization.

So

we view there as being a bunch of analogies there with uranium and uranium refinement or enrichment.

I can see that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Last thing, then we'll get into it.

So I have a Patreon account.

It's a subscription account that we've turned into a community.

They've been here since the beginning.

And when I started this thing in my attic,

excuse me, and they're still with us today.

And so they've been just extremely supportive of me.

And they're the reason I get to be here with you.

So one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

So this is from Dylan Stockman.

You invest in a lot of others.

Who is someone who you've invested in financially or not that enhanced the trajectory of your life?

There's probably been a bunch.

Direct impact on me, it's going to be hard to not say Elon.

So Founders, you know, first I worked for Elon and SpaceX,

did a few other things, and then joined Founders Fund.

And Founders Fund invested in SpaceX, invested in

Neuralink, invested in Boring Company.

And so I think just looking at the SpaceX example, yes, I worked there early on.

But some of the impact that they had much later on me was through the Starlink network.

So just the concept of having internets, you know, internet comms, internet

coming from space, from a space constellation, is something that seemed like sci-fi one or two decades ago.

And now it's real.

So I'm a customer, directly impacted me, founders fund investment.

So that's what I'm going to go with.

There's a follow-on question.

Also, do you believe a person with financial backing can outperform

a driven individual with less capital?

I think the driven individual with less capital wins.

I think so, too.

That's cool to hear.

All right.

You ready to get into the interview?

Let's do it.

Me too, man.

So I just want to start off with a question.

Like I said, I've doven into the energy grid,

where the transformers come from, where the solar panels panels come from.

I mean,

there's this big debate on, you know,

clean energy and renewables and fossil fuels.

And I just, I don't understand why we're not taking nuclear more seriously.

Or maybe we are, you know, with the, with the, the new administration, although it's only been six months, but, but it just, it seems like it's the cleanest.

It packs the most punch.

It's the most sustainable.

I mean,

and that's, you know, I don't know much about the energy industry, but I mean, from everything I've read, that seems to be true.

So why aren't we taking this more seriously?

I think we are now.

That's the good news.

So I think for many decades we did not.

If you think all the way back to the 50s, 60s, everyone thought nuclear was going to be the future of energy.

At one point they said, energy will be too cheap to meter.

So cheap that it won't even be worth having the power meter on your house.

That was the idea.

Obviously, that hasn't happened.

Today, nuclear is about 20% of the grid, so

still a pretty important chunk of where electricity comes from, but it hasn't really grown in a long time.

I think in the last couple years, we're seeing both political parties now come together to say, okay, we need more baseload energy.

Everyone's now acknowledging that nuclear is clean.

It is green energy.

it's no particulate emissions, no carbon emissions, it's baseload, so you can rely on it.

So, if you're running a huge AI cluster, you can actually keep the 99.999% uptime that you need.

You don't have to rely on storage, you don't have to rely on weather.

So, I think it's just the strictly superior energy source.

I think that's it's been the reality for a long time, but public perception was not, you know, is that that's not the case.

We can get into why that is.

Yeah, why is that?

So I think you had this environment where

I mean, we, we could be leaps and bounds ahead of where we are right now in everything

had we taken, you know, our, our,

our energies a lot more seriously.

Yeah, if you look at the grid, Our production has been pretty flat since 2010.

In that time frame, China's doubled their grid, and they were the same as us in 2010, so they're now twice as big.

So that just shows you 15 years, you can double your grid if you want to.

And electricity production is highly linked to GDP.

And so if you want to grow your GDP, you grow energy production, you do things with that energy.

We could be far, far ahead of where we are, but

what's the best time to plant a tree?

It's like 20 years ago or today.

So I think finally people are coming around to the fact that we need to grow the grid.

We need to do it with clean, clean sources, scalable sources, reliable, and that's just nuclear.

And so

I'd say it was in the last couple years that politically there's been support for nuclear, both under this administration and a bunch of recent actions that are going to be very helpful, as well as the prior administration.

And so we're finally seeing that unblock.

The prior administration was into nuclear as well?

Yeah, there was support for it.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, it's a couple couple years ago really started pushing on nuclear as something that needed to happen.

So there was a large desire for these new advanced reactors that are even safer

than existing ones.

Existing ones are already the safest form of baseload energy, but even safer, smaller, easier to construct, hopefully much cheaper.

So there was a push around that starting a few years ago.

And in 2024, the last administration created a program for availability of that fuel for those reactors, because all those reactors have no source of fuel right now other than foreign adversaries.

And so we don't produce that fuel in the U.S.

So the last administration did realize that and said we need to create programs to encourage U.S.

companies to actually make this fuel.

And so that was something that happened in 2024 that

we are now a part of that program, but it's getting even more support under Kurt administration.

There's been recent executive orders a couple of weeks ago that dealt with nuclear by this administration.

That's going to further accelerate things.

So it's become totally bipartisan the last couple of years.

I mean, do you think it's the fear of nuclear weapons?

Like, is it a misconception between nuclear weapons and nuclear power

that

has created the setback?

I think there's two things.

There's the fear of weapons.

There's also the fear of accidents.

But if you look at the most famous U.S.

accident, Three Mile Island, no one actually died from Three Mile Island, from radiation exposure, from anything else.

What happened there?

So,

good question.

So, Three Mile Island was a famous meltdown that happened in the U.S.,

in Pennsylvania.

And so, there were two reactors on Three Mile Island, an island of land.

in a river,

and a series of operator mistakes caused one of them to have a meltdown.

And what that means is the fuel overheated, there was

some issues caused by that, and then potentially some

the fear of a meltdown is that you get some radiation leakage, but you have containment vessels that contain all these things, and that's where a lot of the cost from nuclear comes from: is making sure that in no circumstance can any radioactive material ever release from the facility.

And so, Three Mile Island,

one of the reactors

shut down, melted, partial meltdown due to human error, series of human error that due to process controls would not occur today.

But

even so,

this thing that people view as this crazy disaster, and I think it happened right after a movie came out called The China Syndrome, which was about a nuclear meltdown.

So this movie came out and right after this accident happened and just drove the U.S.

into a state of fear about nuclear that lasted decades.

And so

fast forward to today, one of those reactors is still out of commission, but the other one Microsoft is planning to turn back on to power AI.

So they renamed Three Mile Island to

Crane Energy Center, I believe.

And so one of those reactors is going to come back.

So this thing that people really worry about, they cite Three Mile Island, they cite accidents.

Hey, nuclear can't be safe.

Nuclear is extremely safe.

It's the safest form of baseload.

And even the worst accident in the U.S.

history, which was caused by human error that would not occur today and can't occur with the more advanced reactors, even that one results in zero deaths.

And so, by not building nuclear, we instead did lots of other stuff.

We did coal,

natural gas, wind, solar, all of those things we need, but none of them are as safe as nuclear.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, do you think that do you think any of the setbacks are

big oil and gas gas industry?

I don't blame them.

I think the fossil fuels industry, oil and gas, have been doing what they've

on their mission.

Let's have U.S.

energy independence.

Let's

pull from the natural gas reserves we have.

Natural gas being half the carbon output of

other types of fossil fuels.

And so, you know, that's been a big part of how the U.S.

actually reduced its carbon emissions the last few years was natural gas.

So I think those companies that are just laser focused on what they're trying to do, I think the fact that nuclear has not become bigger is a U.S.

policy decision, and it's the nuclear industry

maybe not pushing hard enough for progress, really defending themselves, because there's a lot of great people in nuclear who have believed in nuclear for decades and diligently worked away at it.

And it should be much bigger than it is.

Can you

help the audience understand

how much we could advance?

You know, talk about

how important energy is in everyday society and

especially with

the AI boom hang happening right now and all the data centers that we need and how much power that's going to consume.

I mean, can you go into that a little bit on how important this actually is?

Yeah, just to set the stage overall, if we just talk about the U.S., U.S.

has 94 reactors operating, produce 97 gigawatts, call it 100 gigawatts of electricity, and that's roughly 18.5% of our grid energy production.

In terms of how big this could be, I think total, so,

you know, call it 5x that for the overall grid average production.

And then total installed production capacity in the US is like 1,250 gigawatts.

So a lot of that's not operating all the time.

That's like peaker plants.

It might be wind, solar.

Not everything is baseload.

And then just to calibrate internationally, US and China neck and neck in 2010 on production capacity on the grid.

Since then, China doubled.

By the end of the decade, it'll triple.

So you can double and triple the grid if you want to.

They've done a lot of that through nuclear, but much more with coal.

And so other countries are expanding and they're doing it not in the cleanest way.

So us doing it with nuclear, us doing it with other things,

you know,

it displaces manufacturing that might happen there with a cleaner source of energy here.

So

geopolitically, if you think about us versus China, people are worried about conflicts of all types, AI conflict, kinetic conflict, economic.

All three of those come back to energy.

So if you want to have the USB being the lead on AI, manufacturing, or economic influence, you need to have the most energy.

It's directly linked to GDP.

As a company, we believe in high-energy societies,

societies that consume and use effectively a lot of energy.

And if you look at all the countries on Earth, there is not a single country that is low-energy and high GDP.

So,

sent us a graph:

energy consumption versus income per capita in 2022.

I'll overlay that on the screen, but it

shows high income, low energy countries don't exist.

Yeah.

If you want poor countries to get the standard of living that we have, it's going to take more energy.

So that's you can you know, we can we can look at the global lens and that's simply the reality.

If you want everyone to have a good quality of life,

you know,

be able to heat and cool their homes have refrigeration have all the things we have it's going to take a lot more energy and there's there's no way around it one of the big oh is this India are they do they produce more energy than us as well

per capita

no let's see

Where's Indian here?

Yeah,

per capita, no, but

overall, yes, India, China,

huge, huge production and consumption.

I mean,

on top of that, I mean,

I've been talking to a lot of innovators, a lot of tech innovators.

We just had Dino Mavrouk is on, who's founder of Sauronic.

I've been talking to a lot of AI types.

Alex Wang, had Sham Sankar in.

I mean, they're all talking about how much energy that we need, you know, in in in the race to AI and so

I mean I've heard of these mini reactors that people are starting to

build I don't are those I mean are they using those yet is that legal not yet they're not using them yet this show is sponsored by better help these days it feels like there's advice for everything cold plunges gratitude journals screen detoxes but how do you know what actually works for you Using trusted resources and talking to live therapists can get you personalized recommendations and help you break through the noise.

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In terms of the AI demand, If you just project out AI demand, it's going to be equal to our grid by 2030.

It's just this exponential growth curve.

And those are always hard to predict, but reasonable predictions say it needs as much as we have on the entire grid by 2030, which means we have to start right now expanding production of reactors, of fuel.

And so to your question, are they using them yet?

No, not yet.

There's a lot of companies building, designing and now building and will be testing advanced reactor types.

And I expect those to, we should start seeing those plug into the grid in about five years

and so we need to do that now if you know it's five years out okay AI is gonna

consume equivalent to the US grid today in five years potentially crazy we need to go full speed on reactor licensing construction deployment and all those reactors need fuel so existing reactors need fuel advanced reactors need fuel I think a lot of people forget about this you think okay I built a nuclear reactor,

and

nuclear physics is really complicated, but maybe it's like a, you know, almost like a perpetual motion machine, but it's not.

It consumes fuel.

You reload the fuel every year to five to ten years, depending on the reactor design.

And you need the fuel production, too, and that's what we're working on.

What happens if we don't advance and AI sucks up that much energy?

But in five years,

what would happen?

If it soaked up all that energy, then you just don't have enough to go around so i think at a minimum you see electricity rates go up for homeowners

for your for for businesses if that happens you know in california there's occasional brownouts i think you see that more if there's not enough to go around so you're getting brownouts you're getting more expensive electricity You're probably losing manufacturing to overseas where there is available electricity, or you're not getting AI.

So you're just going to halt that progress.

Man.

I think the good news is a lot of the AI builds that people are doing, the big data centers, are looking for a gigawatt plus.

And so a big part of how they're planning to get that electricity is by bringing new production online.

Often behind the meter or

plugged into the grid for some smoothing so that they don't have to have

perfect uptime.

They can use other sources like natural gas.

But we're going to see a lot of new capacity come online to feed AI densitors that they are bringing online, and that could actually benefit the grid.

So if we do this right, a big data center builder will figure out production on their end and probably over-design a little bit, so that there's margin, and be able to feed back onto the grid.

So the rest of the, through AI growth, through new nuclear that might happen at those sites, we should see rates actually come down over time

and production go up.

And so it's the usual innovation cycle where, in theory, if we're just thinking about the world as a fixed-sum, zero-sum game, the pie is only so big,

things get worse when you have more demand.

But in reality, as you develop new technologies to meet this demand, you're going to see things get better.

Let's talk about your company.

Yeah, so companies general matter.

What we're doing is enriching uranium to make nuclear fuel for these reactors.

The reason we're doing that is the U.S.

currently does not

have

a significant amount of uranium enrichment for fuel production.

So the U.S.

U.S.

cannot currently produce its own nuclear fuel in any quantity beyond R d quantities.

Are you serious?

So where do we get it from?

So currently we

We get all of our, so there's five steps in making fuel.

You have to mine it out of the ground.

You then turn it into a gas for enrichment.

You then enrich it, which is just, it's essentially a refining process.

So enrichment is separating the element of uranium into its two to a couple different types based on its isotope, which is how many neutrons it has.

So it's really a refining separation process.

So a lot of people hear enrichment and they think, okay, this sounds dangerous or sounds like there's going to be a lot of radiation or there's going to be some sort of dangerous chemical reactions.

It's actually just separation.

So we don't even have any, you know, in an enrichment plant, there's no nuclear reactions happening.

You're not making anything go critical.

That's what they call it when there's a chain reaction.

And there's no chemical reactions.

You are doing phase change.

You're taking some material from a solid to a gas, but you're just separating it.

So that's the middle step that the U.S.

doesn't currently do.

We'll talk more about that.

And then you bring it back down into a solid, which is called deconversion.

And then you form it into a pellet or a particle, a pebble, whatever form the reactor needs, that's called fuel fabrication.

So these five steps, the U.S.

has mining.

We have mining in Texas,

Wyoming, Utah, Colorado.

So there's mining.

Canada has mining, you know, a lot of mining for uranium, and Australia has great deposits as well.

So U.S.

and its allies have plenty of uranium.

On conversion, we have one conversion facility in the U.S.

that's operating in Illinois.

And then Canada has one too.

That's again going from solid to gas.

But enrichment, the U.S.

has no commercially operating capability.

So we get all of our enrichment from foreign companies, which are state-backed entities.

Most of it's overseas.

So that's we get we get enriched uranium product from Russia, from France,

and from a European consortium of a couple countries that produce.

And then that consortium, at the request of U.S.

utilities, built a facility in the U.S.

to produce some of what we need, but it's still less than a third.

So two-thirds comes from overseas, one-third produced by a foreign company in the U.S.

using their technology.

And then on the downstream side of making the pellets,

Good capability in the U.S.

for doing that right now.

Some of the more advanced forms of like little pellets that are maybe poppy seed size called triso.

It's got some ceramic coatings around it that...

Did you say poppy seed size?

Yeah, they're poppy seed size.

So to get into the details of some of the fuel forms, there was a type of fuel that was developed decades ago and tested for a really long time.

So it's been proven to be really robust.

But you take a tiny piece of uranium and you coat it with ceramic.

And that ceramic means that even in the worst case scenario where your reactor somehow disintegrates, these little pellets are self-contained, so they can't even release any radioactive gas.

So it's another layer of safety on top.

So a bunch of the advanced reactor types are doing that.

But if we zoom out,

you know, to really have domestic capability, you need all the steps.

And so the step that's missing right now is enrichment.

And that's why we're working on enrichment.

Why don't we have enrichment right now?

We used to have enrichment.

Global map of enrichment right now, Russia's about half.

Europe's about 40%.

China's roughly 10%, growing really fast.

So the 10% was a couple years ago.

It's north of that now.

And the U.S., just in terms of how much total enrichment we're doing, it's less than 0.1%.

And so you ask, how do we get here?

These things are usually,

it's usually overconstrained.

There's a bunch of reasons why we got here.

We didn't think we needed it.

We thought

maybe nuclear isn't growing anymore.

It's fine.

We have these reactors.

Up until a couple of years, there wasn't an agreement that we needed more reactors.

And so why build a bunch of new capacity in the U.S.

for enriching if we're not going to build a bunch more reactors?

We can just get this stuff from...

We can get enriched uranium from our allies in Europe.

and,

you know, other countries as well.

And if you rewind to the history of this, in the 50s, the U.S.

built a bunch of enrichment.

This was

the Cold War era.

We were the world leader in enrichment.

We had these plants spread out throughout the country that used an old technique that was expensive.

It required a lot of energy to do it.

But we had the most capacity.

And we built up a lot of enriched uranium that we stockpiled.

And those stockpiles, we knew they would last a really long time, you know, decades and decades.

And so with the fall of the Berlin Wall, we said, let's start trading with our former enemies.

We're allies now.

We can work together.

Free trade is good for the world.

And we can get this product elsewhere.

And so over the next couple of decades,

we move towards free trade and imports and decommission those old facilities.

Assuming that that would be a fine thing to rely on with a bunch of different partners.

But now we're in a position where we need to grow nuclear energy.

And if you look at how much enrichment the U.S.

is going to need,

right now we produce less than a third of what we need.

And

the administration a couple weeks ago said

we are going to quadruple our nuclear energy by 2050.

So now we went from producing a third of what we need, less than a third, to less than a twelfth.

And so

we need to create a massive amount of new nuclear reactor builds.

We have 94 now.

We've got to quadruple that.

And the fuel production we need to increase much more than that.

How much, when you're talking about a poppy seed, I mean, that's like nothing, how much energy does that produce?

So a pellet roughly an inch tall of conventional enriched uranium,

that one pellet

which roughly like coke can dimensions just shrunk down to one inch tall would contain as much energy as

a ton of coal or a hundred barrels of oil.

Wow.

And yeah, that's that's also if that that pellet is conventional nuclear fuel, which is about five percent enriched.

And when you run that through, most of the energy is still in there.

So you you put it in.

You know, the way that nuclear reactors work is you have uranium inside.

The fissile material is uranium-235.

You get uranium-235 in proximity to itself

and

it starts releasing neutrons which create heat and it forms a chain reaction.

These chain reactions are controlled in reactors through the control rods that they have through water in the vessel.

And so it just, it's basically a heat generator.

And you take the heat.

Traditionally, you boil water.

You either do that directly, you know, all the rods are sitting in water and so they're making heat.

The water is heating up.

You can either keep that really pressurized, like a pressure cooker, and exchange the heat and run a steam turbine outside, or you can actually just let the water boil and use the steam there

to power turbines directly.

So that's how reactors work.

And

like a really simple analogy I give is it's almost like a compost heap.

It's like, you know, food scraps and yard waste spread out isn't going to do anything.

But you pile it enough, you start getting some heat production.

And that's essentially what a reactor is doing.

Except it's doing it with a much different type of reaction.

It's a nuclear reaction, and it's doing it with uranium.

And so that's how every reactor works: it's just fuel held in some configuration with some element of control over how much heat's produced and some coolant that's around it.

Wow.

So one little one-inch pellet is equivalent to a ton of coal or a hundred barrels of oil.

Yep.

That's also enriched at conventional levels, 5%.

So the big reactors we see today, the ones with the Homer-Simpson reactors, the ones with the huge cooling towers, those run on 5% fuel.

So in nature, when you dig up uranium, it's about 0.7%

uranium-235, which is the fissile material.

And so you do this enrichment process to get it up to 4.95, 3 to 5%.

A lot of reactors want to run at 4.95.

And so you get it up to that level.

And that just means it's more potent energy.

And so for any given reactor size, you get that heat production happening at that enrichment level.

If you're talking about the advanced reactors, a lot of them want to go to 10%

or just under 20%

because you're going to get that much more energy density.

Your reactor core can get smaller.

or you might not have to refuel it as much because you can just let it run all the way further down as it burns up.

And so that makes economics better.

So, if a lot of people want to go to 20% because a smaller reactor core means you can build that reactor in a factory, then maybe you can just ship it to the site.

So, now you avoid a huge construction project.

And as you build things in factories,

the cost just naturally comes down as you build more and more and scale up.

Wow.

Wow.

So,

how are you enriching?

How did you get into this anyways?

Yeah, good question.

It's not something people really wake up one morning and say, I want to do enrichment of uranium.

It's pretty esoteric industry.

For me, the background was,

you know, I'd worked at SpaceX early on and seen what it looks like when people just stop doing something and completely lose the capability.

And,

you know, in SpaceX as an example,

I was always in, I was in aerospace.

I always wanted to do aerospace, rockets, airplanes.

And during college, I worked at Boeing.

And I worked on a big government project,

but knew

it wasn't moving that fast.

We weren't making that much progress.

I knew that there was a future that we never had in space and found out about SpaceX, went to work there.

We were 30-something people.

And the whole point of SpaceX was let's make humanity a multi-planetary species.

A lot of people at the time were really focused on satellites

and saying, okay, there's this revolution in satellites.

They don't need to be school bus-sized satellites that are a billion dollars.

We can make smaller ones using modern technology,

computer chips, all the things that are just off-the-shelf available through the electronics industry.

Let's put those into satellites and use them.

And so satellite costs came way down.

and satellites got much smaller.

But there was still this step of launch.

Launch was still bottlenecked, still super expensive.

And so SpaceX's whole thing was, let's bring down the cost of launch.

Let's restore U.S.

capability.

At the time, 2002,

that SpaceX got started, that was really the focus.

And then this became really urgent with the loss of the space shuttle and the grounding of the space shuttle by the mid-2000s.

And so it was really clear, hey, we need this capability if we want to have a future in space.

So

that SpaceX experience is really analogous to what I saw a couple of years ago in Nuclear.

So Post-SpaceX did a bunch of other things.

It started at Founders Fund in 2011.

So Founders Fund's a venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

Big investor in a bunch of companies, including SpaceX,

Palantir, Andrel,

Facebook.

Long list, Airbnb, Spotify,

but most known for some of these incubations of companies that are solving big national security problems like Palantir and Andoril.

And spent over a decade there meeting many different nuclear reactor companies.

And in the last couple years, you know, nuclear companies and other forms of energy.

So, last couple years was really focused on energy, not even on purpose, just it was where a lot of interesting stuff was happening.

And

starting a couple years ago, the common refrain from every every nuclear reactor company was, we don't have a source of fuel.

We need this more enriched fuel, enriched to 20%, because we want to make our smaller reactors.

We want to make them in factories.

We want to get really low on cost and high-quality, low-cost, the whole Six Sigma manufacturing strategy.

But let's use those concepts and apply them to nuclear reactors instead of treating every single one as a bespoke one-off construction project.

We're going to factory produce these.

So that's pretty much everyone's vision.

But they said to pull that off,

you've got to make it smaller.

You can't build a huge thing, a thing the size larger than a factory in a factory.

You've got to make small things.

And so if we're going to make the reactor small, we need more energy-dense fuel.

How small are they making these reactors?

So one company that Founders Fund invested in makes a reactor that fits in a shipping container.

So you can truck it to the site, drop it off, put some perimeter security around it, put some active security around it, and

minimal site preparation you can operate.

That's how much would that power?

Those that are in a container like that, one megawatt.

So that's meant to just replace a diesel generator.

So not a lot.

But if you can make them cheap enough, you can tile them together and build...

you know, a big array of them like you see with...

Solar.

Yeah, solar, gas generators, grid scale, battery storage, same thing.

So that's one approach.

I think you go that small and it's going to have some really unique applications that are off-grid or, you know, defense-based resilient power.

You can go bigger and still achieve some of the same things.

So it's a question of

there's this range called micro-reactors, which is anything from a megawatt to 20 megawatts.

And so different people have different opinions of what's the optimal size.

But you can go as small as a shipping container.

And there's people trying to go smaller for other applications.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

So

all these ones taking the small approach, they need this more enriched fuel, enriched to 20% because we want to make the small core.

And what everyone said was, yeah, we don't have a good source of fuel.

We really need to figure this out.

And so I would ask, well, where are you going to get your fuel today?

And the answer was, hey, only Russia and China make this fuel.

They're the only ones going to 20%.

And so I would naturally, you know, ask,

why don't the U.S.

enrichment companies make this fuel?

Is it a lot harder than making the fuel up to 5%, enriching up to 5%?

And they would say, what do you mean, U.S.

enrichment companies?

We're not really enriching in the U.S.

There's there's people trying to and trying to get commercial going, but we're not doing it today.

And so I spent over a year looking for a company to invest in.

at Founders Fund that would that was doing this, that could do this,

that had a path for bringing the cost down and bringing production up,

and

regrettably couldn't find one and said, okay, what would it take to,

getting back to your question of how did this all start, just asked, what would it take to start a company to go do this?

And it was,

you know, you are going to need financial backing

to your question of who would win

a really dedicated, passionate founder without much capital or someone with capital, a a lot of capital.

And

capital is important for this.

I'd say, why not have both?

And so you need the capital, you need a great founding team.

Ideally, the team would have both

people from the nuclear industry, that's mandatory.

You need the best people plucked out of the nuclear industry who are scattered everywhere.

That's part one.

But part two is you need people from Silicon Valley, the tech industry, the hardware industry.

And this was actually the formula that Andrew used, that Palantir used, even SpaceX used.

And then part three is you need a team that can get security clearances and

is like highly passionate about this problem and has worked on things before with the government.

And so zooming out, I realized, wait,

that's us.

We need to incubate a company.

We need to, you know, pull together the team.

And then it felt like I was the right person to run it.

And so that's how we got started.

That was 2023 was that process.

And then really got going full speed in 2024.

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How much progress have you guys made?

We've made pretty good progress for, you know, a year and a half in.

At least we feel like we have.

So

one of the first things we did was, even before starting the company, we had a lot of conversations with the DOE.

You know, going back to that question of

what's the best way to start a company, it's by understanding if there's a need.

And so some of our first conversations were with people within the DOE saying,

hey, this

seems like a need based on all the startups that we're talking to.

They say that they have to get their fuel from foreign providers.

Is that really the case?

And the DOE would confirm that yes, we currently get all of our enrichment from foreign providers.

And we asked, is this something that we should go and try and do?

Is this something the DOE would be supportive of?

Because this is a controlled technology.

And

again, same thing.

Yes, this would be good.

We could use more people doing this.

This would be a good thing.

We also talked to the DOD.

People on our team were involved in the DOD at the time.

were looking around saying do we have an answer to this field problem and the answer was we have a stockpile but someday that runs out and it would be great if we could get production going

and then we talked to the reactor companies and not only did they not have a source of enrichment or a source of fuel at the enrichment levels that they needed but they also pointed out hey it's also really expensive at the prices we're going to have to pay these other companies

it's going to be more than half our cost and so We do want to get the cost really low and we're going to do the factory builds.

But even if we got the cost of the reactor to zero, we can only have this unless the fuel cost comes down.

And so that was very similar to the space industry 2000s, where, yes, the satellites had gotten a lot cheaper and smaller, but the launch cost was still there.

And so if you really wanted to erode the total cost, you had to hit the launch cost next.

And so we're trying to do that with fuel.

So our whole mission was

Let's make let's bring back domestic production of enrichment.

Let's do it, yes, at low enrichment levels, but also at the HALU levels, the 20% that all these reactors need.

And let's figure out how to do this much, much lower cost so that we can make nuclear better than every other form of energy.

It's already the safest baseload, the cleanest baseload.

We're also going to make it the cheapest.

And so that's the whole North Star: let's bring back domestic production.

Let's make nuclear so cheap and safe and reliable

with

fuel supply chain certainty throughout that it becomes the dominant form of energy.

So that's the goal.

That's how it got started.

Wow.

So it doesn't sound like you had a ton of red tape government bureaucracy shit to deal with.

The DOE stepped up and said,

we are going to help catalyze this HALU production.

by

being the market maker.

We're going to be the off-take partner.

So they created a $2.7 billion government program, contract ceiling, to purchase enriched uranium from providers.

And then the DOE would then hold on to that and sell it to the reactor companies as they needed it.

That's the start of that program in early 24.

So we applied to that, and

we submitted what we thought was a really strong application.

And in October of last year,

the DOE selected us as one of the awardees in that program.

So that one was us and three state-backed entities.

The French company, the European Consortium, and a company in the US called Centris that spun out of the DOE a few decades back.

And so it's, you know, us and those three government-backed entities

were the only startup in the mix.

And so we were in stealth for a long time.

And when that got announced, I think a lot of people wondered, who are we?

And so now we've started talking about what we're doing.

how much of this will you be able to produce

depends on the year but we're we're going to be producing by the end of the decade that's our commitment to the industry and to our government partners and we're going to try and you know go as fast as we can on that and the sooner we get started the more we can produce because our production will naturally ramp but the the goal here is by the you know in the 2030s we want to make sure the u.s can actually produce what it needs to consume for all its reactor fleet today and for future reactors.

So the goal here is restore domestic independence on fuel production and do that in the 2030s.

So this means, you know,

at least a couple large facilities that we'll have to construct over the next decade.

Do you know where you'll put those facilities?

Right now,

we do have a few states that

we're deciding between.

So these are all pro-energy states, pro-nuclear energy states who have taken actions to prove that they're really, really excited about nuclear energy and really want to do things.

And so that's currently our top ones that we're looking at that are for a big commercial greenfield facility

are

Texas, Wyoming, Utah, Washington.

And so we have some, you know, there's front runners there.

There's ones we're really excited about.

We're excited about all of them.

But over the next couple of months, we're going to be making some decisions about which one is really the first one we go to.

How big will these facilities be?

The way to think about it is it's, you know, people think about nuclear and they think of,

you know, either the classic cooling towers with steam coming out.

Ours is going to look very much like a Amazon warehouse or a data center.

Or like a pharmaceutical plant.

That's just a rectangular building.

Gotcha.

And the size of these buildings depends on how much capacity you want, but we're talking a few hundred thousand square feet.

So think, hey, it looks like a big Amazon warehouse and there's a lot of equipment inside, but it's a self-contained thing.

I mean, how many, I'm just curious, how many differences?

You're talking about poppy seed size with ceramic around it.

You're talking about an inch, inch high.

I mean,

what's the biggest?

Yeah, the

traditional reactors operate off of these small fuel pellets that are the inch high ones.

And then they assemble those into fuel rods that then get bunched together and then go into the reactor.

Okay.

So classically, the biggest you would have would be those one inch little cylinders.

Some new reactor concepts are using the poppy seeds, but they form them into larger spheres.

So for that, you've got something that's roughly the size of a golf ball.

Okay.

And those will be sitting at the bottom of the reactor generating heat as gas flows over them to cool them off and to harvest the heat.

So these little tiny poppy seeds get, you know, basically formed together into that golf ball size.

Okay.

And then some people are even trying to use molten salt approaches where the whole coolant that flows through contains the uranium in it.

And so you have a mixture of fluids.

And in that case, it's just, it's basically like a liquid flowing.

What about the waste?

Is there any waste?

There's, yeah, the waste that people talk about is really spent fuel.

That's the way to think about it.

It's just, hey, we took this pellet classically, the one inch tall metal sort of pellet, and we put it in the reactor for a while, and a lot of the U-235, it reacted.

It released heat.

It released neutrons.

It's something else now.

And so it decays into other things.

And so now you've got that pellet, and what do you do with it?

You put it in water, cool it off for a period of time, and then they put it into cement cylinders.

And these cylinders are,

you know,

probably roughly 10 feet across,

bigger than human size, but nearly indestructible.

That's how they're designed to be.

And today we just keep them next to the reactor that they were operating at, and they sit there.

If you look at all those, and

there's ways to potentially recycle some of that spent fuel and get more energy out of it, which is something people are talking about and thinking about now.

But

that would just, you know, that's a longer conversation about what are the benefits of that.

Even if you don't do that, and you just take these pellets that we've run through and put to the side and you put them all together in a pile,

all the nuclear spent fuel that the U.S.

has generated over the entire history of nuclear energy, if you put that all into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, it would be half-filled.

So when people

that's it.

And it's metal.

People think of nuclear waste or spent fuel as

green ooze that's going to trickle out and get in the water supply.

These are our spent metal fuel ingots,

again, that all together are only half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

So this is not actually a big deal.

I think the waste issue has been a red herring.

I think it's been something that people bring up.

who don't want nuclear energy as, hey, we can't do nuclear energy until we solve the waste issue.

And good good news, there is no waste issue.

So let's do nuclear energy.

That's my perspective.

Wow.

There's still things we could do about waste.

And should we store it all together in one place that's very inert and stable?

That's a discussion.

Should we somehow recycle it and get the remaining energy out of it?

Because

there's still U-235 in there.

We could still utilize that energy.

That's a conversation, but yeah, we should not let this idea of waste waste be a stopper for doing more in nuclear.

What do you think we should do with it?

I think for now what we're doing is not terrible.

Just keep it where it is.

The U.S.

should decide on what are we going to do with this long term.

Is that one site where we can just store it?

Is it a couple sites?

And so we should continue looking for places to place it as a backstop.

But, you know, recent, some of the recent executive orders talk about how should we think about recycling.

Are there ways to do better?

Recycling may not be as cost-effective as just going and mining and producing new fuel.

France does recycling and reprocessing, but the U.S.

doesn't.

So there's some economic argument there about what's the total cost of these different solutions.

So I think that's something we'll just, the industry is going to be looking into for the next few years.

What else has the government done to

quadruple our energy energy production by what when did you say by 2050 by 2050 yeah yeah so we're just taking action now so

really

the last couple years there's been the programs to

if you if you zoom out there's fuel side and there's reactor side on the reactor side there was a program that was about deploying advanced reactors there was a couple of companies that were involved in that that started a few years back and so uh terra Xenergy are both part of that.

That's a program to try and accelerate their deployment.

So that's probably the first action that was taken in recent history that's really spurring things.

And then you have the Halo Availability Program a couple years back that launched a couple sub-programs under that that are funded by that Halo availability program, one of which is the enrichment that we're working on.

And then with some of the

there was a Russia sanction pretty much across the board, except for a couple categories.

And uranium actually got banned from Russian imports

middle of last year.

And so that triggered another program focused on the lower enriched uranium.

So you had the ARDP, the Advanced Demonstration Reactor Program.

You had

HALU and LEU enrichment programs.

And then what we saw a couple of weeks ago were a couple, four executive orders focused on accelerating nuclear.

So these are some of the biggest actions that have been taken in a long time.

So yes, you have more funding for things, but that's like the gas.

But there was this break on things, and the executive orders are meant to address the break.

And so you had, you know, a lot of people say it's all about regulation.

That's been the thing that stopped it

these

I don't think that's the whole story and we can get into that but these executive orders they're gonna focus on the regulation piece because they can't tell the industry what to do the industry's got to actually go go do it but the executive orders did address four different things

one was the supply chain

one was the doe So supply chain meaning fuel and other elements that,

elements of workforce and things that need to go into the industry.

So how do we support that and bolster that?

Second executive order was around the Department of Energy

and

saying, we haven't done anything new with reactors for a long time.

Pretty much any reactor we build is going to be R ⁇ D.

And so we should treat it like R ⁇ D.

And the Department of Energy has the right to test reactors under R ⁇ D.

So we should give them more top cover or ability to go test these reactors on their land.

So this creates an alternative for companies just trying to get started to prove out what they can do.

And now they can do that on DOE land even more than they could before.

So that's one action.

There's another executive order that said the Defense Department should stand up the capability to deploy its own reactors so that they can

have

energy resilience on their bases.

Another executive order said the NRC should reform.

Historically, it just looked at risk and said, we need to get radiation risk as low as possible, even lower than background levels in some cases.

This policy was known as ALARA,

as low as

reasonably achievable.

And there's really no floor on that.

So

that meant that, well,

the safest nuclear is no nuclear.

And so there's naturally a bias towards really restricting nuclear and you know just creating an incredibly high safety bar that's higher than any other source of energy and so this executive order said hey let's take a look at the regulations and let's update them let's not deregulate let's just re-regulate and think about given modern technology how should we be thinking about this yes every energy source has some risk but Nuclear has a lot of benefits and we should factor those in just like we do for air travel.

There's risk, but there's benefits.

So you can't say that it has to be zero risk.

Otherwise, you're going to do other things like driving to somewhere, and that's higher risk.

So, same thing on energy.

And so, there was NRC, DOD, DOE in the supply chain, and all four of those executive orders went out a couple of weeks ago.

And they all just get back to the core themes of let's get more industrial activity, more economic activity in the US.

Let's remove unnecessary regulations that just slow things down.

Two,

really let's bring stuff back on shore and have our own capabilities so that worst case, we can produce what we need.

We should still trade, but let's make sure we have a backstop to that.

And then three, if we want to have national security and be able to have influence across the globe, we need to be leaders in these industries.

And so for nuclear, we need to lead.

And we need to turn around the trend of 87% of reactors that are out there in the world are designs from other countries, not the U.S.

And so as people deploy those reactors, that comes with fuel contracts and really locks them in to be dependent for a long time on these other countries.

And so the U.S.

should be actually leading there and being able to work with our allies to give them reactors and give them fuel.

Now, I got a question.

I mean,

as somebody who's jumping into this with both feet and you're going full speed ahead, I mean, with the polarized political climate of the country right now, I mean, do you worry that,

and I think you you said by the end of the decade, so there will be a, you know, there'll be a change.

Do you worry that

political

rivalries are going to get in the way of your success?

I don't think so.

This, yeah, this has been a really bipartisan issue.

So even the programs that we're working with the DOE on, those were under the last administration.

And then this administration's doing great things to try and accelerate nuclear too.

And I think last couple of years you saw this bipartisan support emerge where people who were more focused on clean energy realized nuclear emits no carbon and no particulates, and it's safe.

And the waste issue, the spent fuel issue, is so small compared to the waste we generate through every other form of energy.

This is the cleanest baseload.

It's the safest baseload.

We should do this.

And then

on the other side, people who are more focused about energy production and cost realize with the new technologies, nuclear could actually be the cheapest, the most economical, and our best path for just expanding production

like we haven't in a very long time.

And so I think

this combined with the safety profile of existing nuclear and the even better safety profile of advanced nuclear,

I don't think there's going to be a lot of disagreement.

People have realized, hey, this is one thing we can come together on and say that this is positive.

And I don't think there's any reason for it to become a political thing.

That's great.

Even some of the states we're looking at, Washington, for example, that's a classically blue state.

But they're doing a lot of things in nuclear.

And so I think everyone's come around to this.

That's good to hear.

Will we be able, maybe we already are, I don't know, but I mean, will we be able to mine our own uranium here?

We already do.

We already do.

Yep.

So on the five steps, just to go back, so mining, converting into gas, enriching, deconverting back into solid, and then fuel fabrication.

The mining,

we already do it, and we've been doing it for a long time in Utah, Colorado,

Arizona, and with newer techniques in Wyoming and in Texas.

And so there's a bunch of places in the U.S.

that have uranium that we can go mine either through conventional techniques, which is classic mining underground or open pit,

or the new modern technology, which is

in-situ recovery, ISR, which essentially people are just, they drill wells, they flow a fluid through the underground and then pull it back up, and that fluid manages to dissolve and extract the uranium.

And so that's a newer technique that looks more like fracking or something

to get uranium.

So we do mining in the U.S.

Our allies do a lot of mining.

Canada does mining.

They have great ore deposits.

So does Australia.

So between us and our allies, there's

plenty of mining and plenty right here in the U.S.

Do you think we would wind up exporting

enriched uranium?

Yeah, I think we could.

Our focus is let's get the U.S.

back to completely meeting its own needs.

But when you think about other countries that want nuclear

and they say, hey, you you know, why can't we have nuclear energy?

Why can't we have nuclear fuel?

I think the U.S.

should, at some point, be the provider of that fuel, especially if we can do it really cheaply.

So think of an argument of a country like Iran that says, we want nuclear energy for commercial use, non-military use.

If we told them, hey, we make a lot of fuel, we do it.

at very low cost.

Why don't you buy it from us?

You don't need to enrich.

I think that could be you know a win-win if they're willing to agree to that.

And I think at some point, if the U.S.

is producing a lot of fuel at low cost and we're willing to sell it at that low cost to other countries much cheaper than they could ever produce it for,

and if they're new to nuclear and we're building new reactor types and we say, look, let us do this for you.

We're going to give you the reactors, we're going to give you the fuel.

It's going to be far more economical than you could ever do it for.

And, you know, there's going to be some details that have to be worked out and who's in control of that.

But you have to imagine if they should say yes to that, unless they have other goals through enrichment.

And so that quickly reveals who's being genuine about just wanting clean, safe nuclear power and who has other things in mind.

Great point.

Well, Scott, let's take a quick break.

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All right, Scott, we're back from the break.

And

yeah, this is this is like a master's class in nuclear energy.

So thank you.

But

do you see nuclear,

how do I say this?

Do you see everything moving towards nuclear in the future?

Automobiles, planes, rockets?

Do you think that's going to power neighborhoods?

I don't think everything.

I think grid, I think we're going to see nuclear increase from just under 20% to hopefully much more than that.

Cars,

I'm more skeptical.

You know, it's the reason we use fossil fuel and batteries in cars is because it's so energy dense.

And while, you know, a nuclear piece of nuclear fuel is very energy dense, a reactor is not quite as energy dense.

And, you know, you have safety concerns with that.

What if the car crashes?

All those sort of things.

And you could design around that, but I think it it just makes a lot of sense a lot of sense to just either do electric or fossil fuels for cars i think if you're talking about a neighborhood that's a grid that should be more nuclear nuclear should be the future of that airplanes people have talked about nuclear airplanes in the past um out in idaho they actually tested a reactor that was meant to be for an airplane but reactors are still pretty heavy Probably better off just, you know, either doing electric or what we have today for airplanes.

So I think,

there's some people who might think, okay, nuclear should be every single source of energy.

And I would argue it still could be,

even if it's not used in those applications, because those applications run on fuels.

But what if your nuclear was so cheap that you could use it to make like synthetic aviation fuel or synthetic automobile fuel?

That's conceivable.

That's a further way away, I'd say.

Let's get started with deploying a bunch of reactors.

Let's get their cost down.

And then when their cost is really low, then we should do those things.

But it's going to be step-by-step.

It's going to be gradual.

That's like a 20-year project, I think, to get to get everything.

How far do you see some of these mini reactors going?

Yeah, if we go back to the one I was talking about earlier, so containerized, one megawatt of electric, two megawatts thermal.

I think those could be, you know, you're going to start in really more niche applications like the remote Alaskan village that doesn't have a good source of electricity and solar is unreliable, wind's not going to work.

Okay, we're way up there in middle of nowhere, Alaska, and we need to actually import diesel every summer through a tanker and then we store it and we just run our diesel generators.

Examples like that are just seem like a no-brainer for a nuclear reactor that could be containerized and run for five to ten years.

Or an army base

that is going to run off of small ones like that, maybe for radar, maybe for some other critical systems.

I think those applications we're going to see right away.

And I think for the small ones, you could see as they deploy into those applications, they get more experience building things in the factory.

The factory cost comes down.

All of a sudden, you realize, okay, these small ones, maybe you can combine like the generators, like the solar panels, like the battery storage.

And we could have parking lots of these that...

in aggregate produce a pretty good amount of power.

I think at some point once you're trying to go to bigger amounts, like, okay, we we need to do a gigawatt, maybe there's a more efficient way where maybe it doesn't have to be in a shipping container, but it should be truckable or put on a train and it should be able to be made in a factory.

So then you're getting more into the mid-size, which people, you know, those really small ones are like generally called micro-reactors.

How big are they?

Like one to 20 megawatts

shipping container size to something

a bit bigger than that.

You know, not quite 20 times bigger, but a few times bigger because this is how things scale.

And then the SMRs, the small modular reactors, that's generally considered 20 to 300 megawatts.

And that's where you're still, now you're getting into a little bit of construction project.

You're going to prep your site.

You're probably going to dig barriers for the reactors to go.

You're going to have to pour some concrete,

build some structures.

But the idea of modular there is, hey, we bring in the reactor core and then separately we'll bring in maybe the cooling loop, and separately we'll bring in the turbines, and we'll plug it all together there.

But we can keep it pretty simple versus one big integrated thing.

So once you go to the traditional style of a gigawatt scale reactor, it's a lot more complicated.

You're doing a lot more assembly and construction on-site in an integrated way, which much more complicated.

Still has merit because the amount of power you're getting out of that is a gigawatt plus.

And so the payoff is pretty big.

And so if we can get good at those construction projects, that's a viable path too.

So people ask me which one do you think wins, which reactor wins.

I think these are three pretty different segments where the really big reactors,

that's straight onto the grid.

You're competing at grid scale, grid energy costs.

You have to hit really low cost.

Middle end of the spectrum.

It's about speed and about, yeah, how fast can we build this construction project?

This can't be a 10-year project.

It has to be a five-year project or less.

We need energy now and we need it.

We don't care if it's quite as cheap as the grid, but we want it to be extremely reliable.

So 100% uptime.

And so that's going to point you towards small modular reactors that many people are working on.

And that's probably for data centers.

So data centers has been a huge push for this.

Previously, they went out and they looked for stranded electricity.

You know, where can we find a few hundred megawatts?

Where can we find a gigawatt of stranded stranded wind in West Texas or solar that's not being used?

Or where is there maybe solar on wind in a natural gas pipeline and we can just put it all there?

Those sites are largely

now claimed.

Everyone's been searching for them the last couple of years.

People found them and people locked them up and they're building data centers on those sites.

Now it's about, okay, we need new production or we're not going to, you know, those days are over where there was just latent supply.

We need to create supply of electricity.

And so that middle segment, I think, is for the data centers.

That's where we're going to see rapid adoption.

Day one, it's going to be higher price points than you could get from the grid, but it's certain and you can do it in bulk.

So they're going to sign up for that.

And then I think the micro reactors are a whole separate story of, you know, we're not even thinking about the grid because we're going to places where either the use case has to assume the grid is not working or there is no grid.

I think that's where we're going to see that first.

So I think there's room for many of these different reactor designs to succeed.

And the biggest variable I think of between them isn't what fluid they have inside the system, isn't exactly whether they use the poppy seed size, kernels, trisoparticles, or golf ball size or little cylinders.

It's how big a reactor are you making and how much does it cost to build.

How about the transmission point?

Transmission's the next big piece.

So you've got fuel, you've got the reactors, and now what about actually moving the electricity around?

I think

that's going to be a challenging piece.

And that's something we hear from friends in the data center world is that

the grid is going to be challenged to grow as fast as we need it to with a bunch of bottlenecks.

You've got, you know, it takes a long time to build transmission lines based on environmental permitting and the supply chains.

You know, an example of supply chain issue is transformers.

So transformers now have a long lead time.

We didn't build up a ton of capability in the country for making as many transformers as we now need.

So now there's wait times and lead times.

Yeah, so I think we're going to see supply chain challenges there that are going to they will bottleneck how fast we can go.

And so

do you see new companies getting stood up to actually address the transformer shortage?

I think you could see things like that.

Are we already at the point where a private entity can put in its own reactor?

Or is that

so for these data centers, you know, that you're talking about all the land that's, you know, that has

everything going for it, the land, the gas and all that, that's all sucked up and is being built on or has been built on.

So now, you know, what

can

can the data center just buy their own reactor and just totally bypass the public grid.

Yeah, so Utah just put out

legislation that

actually did that.

So previously in Utah, my understanding is you weren't really allowed to do behind the meter generation.

You had to produce and hook into the grid as a way of supporting the grid and helping make sure that Utah's grid was strong.

I think there's enough of this concern over bottleneck that recently reg

legislation and regulation said if you can't get the power you need from the grid, you can go do a a reactor behind the meter and that was Utah I think other state many other states allow for this too

the real you know the real thing we're gonna have to wait for on that front is seeing some of these smaller reactor formats and reactor designs actually get licensed by the NRC and so that'll be a few years

you know that'll be them doing some testing initially on DOE land for example proving that the reactor works if they're small enough they can do that out at Ed Hoe National Lab

in a facility that they call the Dome.

So it's an old containment dome from a different reactor that they, you know, emptied out.

The dome is there, and they can bring reactors in and test them.

So what we're going to see probably starting 2026, 2027 is reactors going in there,

putting in small amounts of fuel, proving that things work the way they expected to.

using that data in NRC license applications showing, hey, we ran it at a small scale.

We see that the models actually hold.

We see that the predictions are true.

And here's all the reasons why not only will it work, but it'll be extremely safe.

So then that's a two-year process.

And then we're going to see them building them in parallel with getting approvals or preparing to build them and then shipping them to the site.

So all in, you know, that's three, four years.

before you're seeing them behind the meter.

So it's actually, it's not that these companies are not allowed to do that.

It's that we're just at a point right now where we're still a couple years out from seeing those shipments of reactors.

Gotcha.

Do you think this gets to the point where

it goes down to the consumer, like consumer grade?

Under their home?

Yep.

Something like that.

I think that's a long way out.

I think at some really tiny scale, you start to lose scale efficiencies.

So now you have to build something so small that,

you know, you have all the systems.

You're trying to build a really compact.

you're trying to make it safe

i think you're going to get so little power out of that for the average home you know average home consumption is so small that that's not doesn't probably doesn't make sense just like you know at any of our homes we don't have like a natural gas mini turbine that's making our electricity we just get it from the grid so i think the grid still has a major role to play and it's going to help us unlock the bigger formats that are going to be more cost effective

rooftop solar is maybe the one exception it's like you already have a roof, just put some solars on it.

You don't have much civil cost of building the structure that's going to hold it.

But in general,

people don't produce their own power because it's just so much more efficient to do it in some sort of centralized manner.

Will the lines be able to handle the load

that we need?

I mean, I think

by 2030,

that AI and the data centers will suck up all the energy that we have right now.

Yeah, their demand is projected to be the the same as the grid capacity today.

Good news is I think a lot of that stuff is not really going to hit the grid.

So if they're finding an isolated site to put their data center and they're going to put reactors there and maybe they're going to put natural gas there,

that's not going to really put a big load on the grid.

So the grid in that case could stay pretty much the same.

If we are trying to quadruple nuclear production though, and maybe double the grid overall to keep up with China or do something like what they did, then yeah the grid's gonna have to expand quite a bit have a major overhaul huh

do you do you see

I mean does does oil and gas and

wind and solar do they have a place anymore I think so yeah why

if this is the cheapest yep and the most efficient

why why would those have a why would we need them

I think you could do it could you do it all with nuclear yes other than the automobiles, but.

Yeah, yeah.

And then even the automobiles, maybe they run on fuel.

Maybe, you know, there's nuclear companies that have an explicit plan of saying, we're going to build a reactor who's relatively large and so low cost that we can actually do the sustainable aviation fuel production there or other forms of fuel.

We'll do carbon capture, which costs energy,

takes energy.

adds cost, but our nuclear energy is going to be so cheap, we can afford to do the carbon capture, or we'll co-locate with some industrial process.

We'll grab that carbon, and we're going to turn that into a fuel.

And that fuel could be used by cars, by airplanes.

What do you mean, carbon capture?

You mean pulling carbon out of the air?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a couple approaches.

One is pull it out of the air.

People are working on technologies for that.

One is sit right next to an industrial facility that just would normally spit out carbon.

And we're just going to grab that carbon and use it in our process.

So those are the two general categories that I've seen of people that want to do carbon capture for fuel production.

And doing that takes energy, takes electricity.

But if you have cheap enough nuclear, you could do it.

So I think going back to the, will everything run on nuclear?

It's possible.

It's possible that that happens.

But to get there, we've got to make nuclear much cheaper.

So then to your question of what about the other forms of energy?

I think,

you know, nuclear is 20% today.

Until it's really taking off, we need to do everything.

And the data centers are going to need a lot more power in the next few years.

How are we going to do that if reactors are three years away?

So we're going to see expansion of other things.

We're going to see solar at some of these sites, solar with a bunch of grid-level storage.

Maybe that grid-level storage can run on old batteries that are recycled or cheap.

So it doesn't need to be really expensive.

Maybe there's a path there for people that really need power today and are willing to pay for it.

You're going to see solar.

I think rooftop solar can make sense because you already have the roof, put the solar panels on.

And then, you know, I think wind has fallen out of favor quite a bit.

There's still places where there's good wind resource and we can use that and it's cost-effective, but it's intermittent, so you have to plan for that.

And so

AI data centers, hyperscalers, they want really, really high uptime.

And so I think that uptime is going to look like maybe it could be a combo of wind and solar in some places, which are supplemented by natural gas, which could kick in when the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining.

And then nuclear.

But nuclear is the ideal answer for them because it's safe, it's potentially really low cost, and it's no carbon emission.

Man, what does this world even look like in 10 years, man?

Yeah, I think everything's changing so fast.

Space, the auto industry, energy,

AI,

Neuralink.

I mean,

what does it even look like?

Yeah,

I think it'll be good.

I think it's going to be exciting.

I think the AI side, to me, feels the hardest to predict because it's such an exponential curve.

But automotive, I think, you know, electric vehicles are getting better and better.

You know, I have a Tesla.

I like it.

I have also a regular internal combustion car.

I like that too.

So I think we're going to see more electric cars.

They'll get cheaper.

They'll be more competitive.

Power, I think power is going to be the big story.

I think as we want to grow the economy, as we want to do AI, as EVs come online and gain market share, I think it's all going to be about energy production.

And I think that's ultimately going to come back to nuclear.

It's going to be a big part of the growth.

And then that's going to come back to the fuel.

Do you think I mean, I know you said we were, this is kind of where I was going when I was asking if we're mining uranium right now.

Do you think we will continue to mine our own uranium

or will we take the oil and gas approach where we import,

you know, from

because we sat on a lot of reserves.

And now that everything's it sounds like everything's starting to move towards nuclear, maybe we shouldn't have sat on those reserves

because those reserves are going to become obsolete and we missed a major opportunity, you know, if this happens that we can never revisit.

Yeah.

Do you think, and I mean,

me being a novice, that just sounds like a mistake to me.

Like, we sat on these reserves, we didn't do anything with them.

Now we're moving into nuclear.

Those become obsolete.

We just missed out on a shitload of money, you know, for the United States by not using those reserves for ourselves or exporting it.

And so do you think that will happen with uranium as well?

Luckily, it's still there.

It's still under the ground.

So we can start going after it.

And companies are.

So there's new mining projects in at least Texas and Wyoming that came online starting last year and are ramping this year.

So we're going to see more uranium production in the U.S.

You know, some countries do have better ore deposits than the U.S., really high ore deposits.

So as you go and mine, it can be really easy to get the uranium that you need.

So it can still make sense to trade with other countries

if they can produce much cheaper than we can.

But we have really large deposits that can take care of what we need for a while.

And so I think we're going to see that production come online.

How big are our deposits compared to Russia or China?

Let's see.

Compared to places like Australia, Canada, Kazakhstan, like Russia gets most of its uranium out of Kazakhstan.

Our deposits are not as good as theirs on uranium, but still years and years of production capacity.

And so if we're even producing a fraction,

you know, mining a fraction of what we need, we're talking decades of potential production in the U.S.

And I think it's similar to oil, where people thought that we were at peak oil at one point, and then you discover new ways to find more.

So discovery technologies get better, extraction technologies get better.

Even these new technologies in mining are an example of that, where some of the deposits people are going after now are not really ore-rich deposits.

But through new techniques like

in situ recovery, where you do the pumping and then extraction out of the ground with no standard mining equipment, no digging, no open pits, much more self-contained and

no uranium released in the process, you can do that much cheaper.

And so it's going to be one of these classic things where people predict that our reserves are at the limit and we're out.

And then technology actually is the answer of how you get much more out of the system than you ever thought you could.

So same thing happened in fracking where, you know, we thought that the U.S.

did not have as much accessible fossil fuel as it did.

And then fracking came around and figured out, wait, there's ways to extract this natural gas.

And not only is that good for energy cost or energy independence, but this natural gas has half the carbon emissions per unit of electricity than coal.

And so we should be doing this.

And so that was, you know, that's been the story the last decade or two.

Did you just say Kazakhstan has some of the richest uranium?

So

let me ask you this.

Do you see, as the world moves towards nuclear, which it sounds like it is,

do you see a power shift happening?

Do you see a country like Kazakhstan rising up in the food chain and in big oil and gas countries

coming down?

Oil and gas, I think fossil fuels is still something like 80% of US power production.

So in terms of geopolitical power shifts, I think fossil fuels will still be really important for a long time, for decades.

Okay.

So it's not going to be sudden, but I think on the margins, you're going to see countries like Kazakhstan potentially become more important as people think more and more about where are we getting our uranium.

Countries like Australia, Canada, Canada already mines a lot, so does Australia.

As they step up and decide how aggressive do we want to be on uranium production, on mining, I think it is up to many of the countries what their future is.

Will they be pro-nuclear?

Do they want to do not just mining, but other things in nuclear?

Do they want to have reactors?

It's a complicated playing field that's going to depend on production, how fast new reactors are built, which countries do that, what trade agreements are set up.

But it's absolutely like over the next decade, it could be tectonic shifts in policy and in which countries are important and which ones become really the focal points for international negotiations.

How focused is Canada on that?

They have a great industry and they have great ore deposits.

And so there's a company in Canada called Cameco that does mining at a couple of these sites that are known to be really good and does a lot of production.

And then they do conversion to the gas as well.

Canada runs on a different reactor type that doesn't actually require enrichment of uranium.

They just use plain uranium and use heavy water to actually make the reaction happen.

Those are called can do reactors.

And so they classically haven't had an enrichment technology because they've chosen to do this other reactor type.

So

Canada is

pretty active in nuclear and in uranium mining.

Where are we going to get the water in all these western states to cool these reactors?

Luckily, the water, yeah, good question.

Same question applies to data centers.

So historically, a lot of data centers used evaporative cooling, and so you ran through a lot of water.

The newer data centers are doing closed-loop cooling.

So no water evaporation.

You do have big heat exchangers sitting outside.

but you're not evaporating water to cool.

And some of the, very similar to data centers, some of the modern nuclear reactors,

what people call these Generation 4 reactors, just the latest in technology, in safety, in cost.

They also use closed-loop cooling.

So one of them, the ones we talked about, the shipping container size reactor, no water use.

The fluids flowing around are other fluids like helium and CO2.

And so to cool off, you just run it through a big fan and heat exchanger system, just like a radiator on a car.

And so you don't need any water for cooling, so no water consumption.

In fact, like if you can get if you can get nuclear cheap enough and

now we're actually producing the electricity and using that for some purpose and we have a bunch of thermal left over, could we use that thermal energy to do things like desalination?

And so do you actually go from something where you might think, okay, nuclear reactors, we're going to use up a lot of water.

And maybe the old designs did use water, but the new ones don't.

Could you actually go from

water consumptive to actually water creating?

Wow.

Yeah, I think we're going to see a lot of cool things.

I think a lot of it's going to be driven by energy.

I think the next decade is going to be all about energy.

Even Sam Altman from OpenAI had some

recent hearing or talk where he talked about

just the evolution of AI.

And so you've got algorithms.

Algorithms run on chips, but ultimately ultimately the chips need electricity.

And what he said,

thinking back to this interview, the algorithms are going to get better and better and better and cheaper, and the chips will get cheaper and cheaper.

But at the end of the day, you have to get the electrons, and the electrons have a fundamental price.

And ultimately, it's going to come down to that.

So I think even the AI,

the AI competition between different companies in the US, between different countries, it's ultimately going to come back to the electricity production.

So I think, yeah, next decade is going to be all about power production, AI, military.

If you think you need kinetics and military, that comes back to manufacturing.

If you think economics, okay, we have to have the biggest economy so that we can just have the most productive capacity, energy.

So I think next decade is going to be all about energy.

And we've stayed flat for a decade, for 15 years.

We haven't done anything more like 20 years.

Our grid's been pretty stagnant.

And if we want U.S.

leadership, it's going to have to grow.

So I think that's that's going to be the story we see.

And it's going to be about solving

different supply chain needs, whether it's fuel, maybe it's transformers, maybe it's transmission.

All these things are going to come up.

It's going to be chips.

Are we actually, you know, when you talk about China has doubled their power or doubled what we have, correct?

Are they...

I mean, they also have a lot more people.

So are they seeing the benefits of having that much more power production than we do?

Or is it equivalent because they have so many more consumers of energy?

I think a lot of that

we have to go back to that chart and see exactly where is China today, where were they before in terms of per capita.

But I think a lot of that production, the doubling of their grid relative to our grid, a lot of that's gone into manufacturing.

And so

we've shifted manufacturing from the U.S.

to overseas.

A lot of that's in China now.

We've let them do it.

A big part of that people people thought was, well, Chinese labor is much cheaper.

But a lot of these processes can be automated.

And so once you automate it, it just comes back to energy cost.

And so China said,

let's double our grid.

Let's let's keep going.

Let's work on tripling our grid.

And we'll do it in the cheapest way possible because we want to win on manufacturing and get all this economic activity over here.

Meanwhile, the U.S.

has said

You know, we have a bunch of regulations which are good and probably some that are unnecessary and have slowed us down.

And so we haven't done the growth and, you know, we've been very thoughtful about emissions, environmental impact, carbon.

Meanwhile, China's doubling, tripling their grid, and has done a lot of that with coal.

And so we've shifted manufacturing here that would have been cleaner

over there and just probably ended up net producing more carbon than

than we would have, more pollutants than we would have, and just kind of outsource that.

But as we know, carbon flows everywhere.

So if you're really worried about carbon emissions, letting China double their grid with coal and move manufacturing, energy-intensive manufacturing there is not actually the answer.

The answer is the U.S.

has to unblock building here, doing industrial activity, do it cleanly, do it with nuclear or other sources, even natural gas, half the carbon emissions of coal.

And the world would be way better off.

And so I think their grid doubling hasn't just meant that everyone there has a better quality of life.

I think it just means that we've taken a lot of manufacturing from here and done it over there.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

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Do you have any insight on

from a consumer standpoint, just a household,

what kind of energy prices can we expect

by 2030?

It's going to depend a lot on

how we implement all this.

So you have huge variation between states, so I think a lot of it comes down to regulation.

So

some states,

you've got retail electricity costs in the single-digit sense.

California, I think you can get into the 30s.

So between states, you can be triple.

So clearly, that's not technology-driven, that's regulated, regulatory-driven.

And so, I think a lot of how this plays out is going to be: what do we do on the regulatory side?

We have cheap sources of energy.

People could have them.

You know, the grid is currently capable of shipping electricity to people's homes at the level that we consume them, consume electricity.

So,

with net new sources coming on the grid, it should get cheaper.

But that's going to depend on

a lot of different factors.

It's going to depend on who sets the rates,

how electricity is priced.

Do you have some infrastructure costs and then some generation costs?

So

will there be separation of transmission and generation costs everywhere?

What is the balance between those two?

How much are we paying for the transmission?

How much are we paying for the generation?

There were some shifts in that in California where it was more bundled and as people did more and more rooftop solar, I think it was separated because the utilities were having a harder time paying for their existing infrastructure.

And so, how that all goes in each state is going to be the real driver, I think.

I think we have the ability to produce as much electricity as we want through all these different methods, but how that actually makes its way to people's homes depends on state-level and federal-level policy,

as well as things like NEPA, which is the environmental regime for

standardizing a lot of these federal approvals on large-scale infrastructure projects,

which has slowed down things like new transmission lines.

And so the degree to which that gets reformed or looked at, or how can we still have all the safety that we always had, that we want, the environmental protections, but how can we streamline this to help things go faster?

I think you're going to, you know, big, big picture.

You've got two curves.

You've got the demand curve and you've got the supply curve.

And if the demand curve for electricity, whether it's AI data centers or people's homes, starts really outpacing supply, that's when prices go up.

If you can outrun demand with supply, prices go down.

And so it's, you know, demand is going to be what it is.

People are going to get EVs.

People are going to want to use AI tools.

Those tools require data centers.

That's going to happen.

That demand is going to be there.

It's up to us how quickly do we bring on supply.

So I think it's that balance between supply and demand that's going to really drive where prices go and where what people experience.

Have you ever heard of Steve Quast

and his company, Space Build?

I know you had him on recently.

I listened to part of the podcast.

It was really interesting.

Yeah,

he had mentioned that China

is putting or has put a nuclear power plant in space

and that

we could have the capability of doing that

nuclear or solar and

beaming energy into

something like an antenna.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, there's a few startups working on this right now, actually.

So there's a few startups that are saying,

you know, space launch is going to get extremely cheap with Starship.

And so we're planning on launch costs getting so cheap that you could deploy a huge solar array in space and beam it down, whether it's laser or microwave, or even trying to just put mirrors up there and reflect sunlight.

So there's a few companies doing that.

I think there's, you know, we need to see the launch costs come down by a lot with Starship succeeding and really scaling.

And early years of Starship are going to be dedicated to Starlink launches, I would imagine, just to get the rest of that constellation up.

you know we need a few years for for starship to really start doing high volume commercial launches And then we need a few components in that overall architecture to probably come down in cost

to let those use cases make sense.

But it could be anything from beaming power to like a forward deployed unit that needs to be somewhere really remote and still have the ability to power things,

beaming light onto an area, similar applications,

or doing things like, hey, how can we redirect energy for industrial use

affordably, where maybe it makes the difference difference between that industrial process working or not working based on the energy cost there.

So I think we're seeing it on the solar side.

On the nuclear side, I actually don't know what the U.S.

is working on there or what's planned.

And, you know, I would think that that would probably be under a DOD program that would be compartmentalized if that was the case.

But

yeah, it sounds like China's doing things and

that has a lot of implications.

so you were at space when there was only 30 employees yeah 35 somewhere around 35.

wow yeah it was cool how was that it was fun um you know i think when you're in when you're in the middle of these things

you don't really understand the the gravity of it or the implications of it

um you know back to 2002 the u.s had

something like 20% of global launch capacity.

Today, based on everything SpaceX has done over over 23 years.

People forget that.

It's been 23 years.

It's not some five-year overnight success.

It's over two decades of building.

It took a long time.

We went from 20% of launch capacity to now,

I believe it's like 90% of

total mass to orbit in the world, 80, 90%.

No kidding.

Yeah, so the U.S.

went from

you know, third place, second, third place, to now wildly first place.

And if we hadn't done that, China would be the leader in launch capacity.

And so,

yeah,

23 years of hard work.

Have lots of friends who are still there, been there the whole time, you know, working on the mission.

So

it's been incredible to watch.

Back then, it was early days.

We were 30-something people.

You know, we were designing test stands.

We were designing the first engines that powered the Falcon family of launch vehicles, first the Falcon 1, then the Falcon 9, and just working through the inevitable challenges of engineering you know we were doing a clean sheet redesign of a rocket engine saying okay north's our mission we want to make humanity multi-planetary we want to before that's going to happen we're going to have to commercialize space if space is going to become commercialized launch has to get way cheaper a tenth the cost ideally less You know,

you can't spend all this money to put something small with only limited utility into space.

And at the old launch cost, there were only a few applications that made sense.

So let's bring launch costs down.

And that means we can't use the same technology we've been using.

We can't do that with the space shuttle.

Space shuttle has been running.

This was the mindset at the time.

Space shuttle has been running for over a decade and we see what those costs are.

It averages out to like a billion dollars per launch.

That's not going to work.

We have to start over and we're just going to question everything.

So some of the principles that we had there were, you know, it all started with a mission, a very, very clear mission.

We're going to optimize on dollars to get a kilo or a pound of payload into an orbit.

That's it.

Don't care how we do it.

That's what we're doing, bringing the cost down.

And so that meant we have one goal, and we're just going to rethink everything to get there.

We're going to rethink what our engine technology is.

We're going to just go with the simplest,

lowest cost, reliable engine we possibly can.

And so instead of going with a more exotic engine type that some people talked about at the time,

we said we're going to go with a really proven one.

This thing is not even going to be that efficient, but it's going to be so low cost that instead of one exquisite engine on the bottom of this rocket,

we're going to have nine.

We're going to have nine really low cost ones.

Together, they'll equal the output of the big one.

Won't be as efficient.

We're going to need a little bit more fuel to get there.

Maybe our payload that we can bring up slightly smaller relative to the total fuel.

But our vehicle is so low cost that we're going to win just on dollars, back to that North Star goal, dollars per kilo to orbit.

And so, yeah, 2003, when I joined as an intern, that was the mindset.

There was an employee handbook I opened on the first day, and

I think the first line was something like, this is not a science experiment.

We are not here to do new science.

We're here to do engineering, really low-cost engineering.

And so the team that was assembled to do that was some people from aerospace so that we knew what the range of technologies was.

We knew how things had to be done, what are the real requirements.

And then people from the automotive world who knew how to build, you know, machines really cheap.

I think half the guys on the team on the weekends did hot rods and they did drag racing.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

So a lot of the people came out of the drag racing community.

Just how can I have the highest performance machine for low cost?

I don't care how pretty it is.

It's just going to, it's going to perform.

And so,

yeah, it's SpaceX culture back then was really almost equal parts aerospace, automotive, and then kids straight out of school who wanted to work hard on something,

you know, had the had the latest training.

So we knew all the analytical techniques, but didn't know much about the industry.

And these people from the industry, from automotive or from aerospace or from wherever would just be the, you know, the gray-haired people who just taught us what we had to do and worked together to go as fast as we could to get capability back and so when i got there 2003 we were designing test stands that our engines were going to go into and then by 2004 we were testing engines by 2005 they were really working well 2006

i then got to go work on the dragon program

and worked on a couple subsystems there for controlling the temperature, controlling the pressure inside the capsule.

And that capsule was, you know, going up to the space station.

That was the plan.

So by this time, the space shuttle had been grounded.

So we'd had the accident with the space shuttle, and we'd put that fleet on pause.

And there was a big need by NASA.

NASA said, we need capability to go back to the space station.

And we need to be able to take cargo up there.

We need to be able to return cargo from the space station for experiments that we're doing for astronauts that are up there.

At the time,

we were totally relying on Russia to get cargo and

astronauts up and down.

And so NASA wanted to create a new domestic capability for that, both a capsule and a new launch vehicle since the space shuttle was grounded.

And so SpaceX competed with a bunch of other providers, was selected to have a chance to actually deliver.

And NASA set up this contract

that was milestone-based and fixed price.

It was not a cost-plus contract.

SpaceX had to perform.

It was, if you hit this threshold and you do this thing, you will get paid.

If you fall short or run out of time, you fail.

Sorry, you're out.

And so there were a couple companies selected.

Only SpaceX completed it.

The milestones were set to be difficult on purpose.

We worked really hard to make those happen.

We worked with NASA on that.

NASA was a great partner throughout.

We made sure every safety scenario was planned for.

thought about every way that things could go wrong and just eliminated those possibilities.

And then ultimately, yeah, Dragon completed that program,

docked with the space station, proved the ability to bring cargo back and forth, and I think did the last missions in 2013.

So, yeah, those early days starting in 2002 went all the way from core concepts, architecture, proving things out on a small Falcon 1 vehicle with one engine, to then getting that vehicle working and going all the way through Falcon 9.

Wow.

And then, yeah, the last

five plus years has been people now working on the next generation vehicle of Starship, which whole new effort, whole new engines, whole new architecture.

But that's what's going to get space launched down another 10x, which then unlocks all those different applications like, you know, solar energy production in space for some things and space constellations and maybe a bunch of other things too.

Wow.

You think we're going to Mars?

Yeah, I think we're going.

Do you really?

Yeah, I think it all, I mean,

next year is the next window.

And I think

internal goal at SpaceX is

let's ship something in 2026.

Damn.

Yeah, if you don't go 2026, you have to wait, I think, a couple more years before a good window opens again.

So there's urgency.

What's the window?

That I should know.

I think it's...

You can always go.

But when the planets are very close, the energy that's required is much lower.

So if you want to get there quickly, something like a six-month journey, you've got to go in one of these periods.

And these periods, I think, are every,

could be wrong, I think they're every three or four years.

Yeah, they're not every decade, they're not every year, it's in the middle.

So you miss this next window, you're waiting a little bit.

And so I think, you know, NASA has sent stuff to Mars.

We obviously have the rover.

But sending more to Mars, first missions will not be people for probably a while.

I think we'll prove we can send something, prove we can land something.

Then we'll ship actual large amounts of cargo and mass to prepare for humans to go there.

And then maybe the next window, you're doing people.

That would be my guess of what evolution could look like on that.

Wow.

Let's talk about the Founders Fund.

When did that start?

Founders Fund started in 2005.

This was, yeah, Founders Fund was originally, you know, if you think back to venture capital in the 90s,

it was very much this idea that,

hey, we should invest in, you know, same old stuff, software companies,

by the late 90s.

Well, let's talk about the 90s first.

So I think the 90s were obviously dot-com.

That was the big story of the 90s, where you had all the internet companies, and ultimately only a few of them survived, but there was this seemingly golden era in

startups and internet, and mostly in consumer internet, in search.

And the bubble popped early 2000s.

And by early 2000s, most of the VCs were, you know, it was extremely discouraging.

People felt like, hey, this was a one-time thing.

Did we all go crazy?

Were we too, did we have a rational exuberance?

Were we too excited about the future?

And by early 2000s,

Venture capital had become, I think, much more conservative to where it wasn't investing at the time in ambitious projects.

People just had a lot of battle scars over the late 90s.

Felt like maybe they had been too excited.

So by early 2000s, a lot of conservatism, a lot of looking for more classic, easy to predict and understand businesses like enterprise software, and viewing businesses as a horse and a jockey.

So the jockey might be the founder or the CEO, and the horse is the business and the technology.

And hey, you know, maybe the horse is great, but the jockey's not so good.

Let's swap out the jockey a couple years in.

And so that was the mentality of venture capital, which was look for good businesses.

Look for businesses that are pretty easy to understand.

Let's not take a ton of risks.

We did that in the late 90s.

That didn't turn out well.

We overestimated how big these companies can become.

And let's view.

Our role as venture capitalists, and this is all before Founders Fund started.

Industry mentality was let's view the role of venture capitalists as helping build these companies and replace management and bring in new management as we need to.

And so when Founders Fund started in 2005, it was actually coming from those experiences of some of the team at Founders Fund.

You know, really the founders of Founders Fund, Peter, Luke, Ken, lived out that PayPal experience where they had investors that were much more that conservative attitude and didn't trust the founders of the company to run the company.

And so Founders Fund came about in 2005 with the purpose of empowering founders to run their companies forever.

And so the thinking was, hey, all the best companies that exist are going to be founder-led.

That's, you know, companies that started in the 90s

or even earlier.

So if we think about Amazon, still founder-led.

Apple, founder-led for a very long time.

And so there was this belief that founders should run their companies because they have the moral authority and the vision to do that.

And if the founder is not so good, maybe the company will fail.

But to achieve like really industry-changing companies, you need that founder mentality behind, here's what we're doing, here's why we're doing it, and every decision is going to be aligned with doing that, even if it doesn't optimize for the quarterly number.

And so Founders Fund started at 05.

initially backed a lot of different founders out of the PayPal network.

So a lot of consumer internet things early on.

One of the first big bets was

actually Facebook,

but a bunch of other ones as well.

Spotify was an early investment.

Then I think the first incubation happened

mid to late 2000s, originally within Peter's office, Palantir.

And Palantir was really a response to the terrorist attacks on 9-11,

where the conversation after that that between policymakers was really, are we going to have safety or are we going to have security?

And I think you had Shaman recently on a podcast.

I think he talked about this, but this concept of trade-offs by policymakers, you know, Palantir was there to solve where it said, well, we have this trade-off sphere or this efficient frontier that we can trade between.

Do we want safety or we want privacy?

And Palantir said, no, we don't need to make that choice.

We can do technology that does both.

And so that was really the first incubation by the Founders Fund team to say,

let's actually solve a national security problem through technology and let's work with the government really closely to build out the tools that are going to help us

trade information between different departments in a really secure way with privacy controls and make sure that something like 9-11 never happens again.

So yeah,

Founders Fund started transitioning from maybe more of the consumer internet sort of world coming out of the PayPal experience in 2005 to then by, you know, helping incubate, pull together the Palantir team.

2008 comes around, and SpaceX is now going through its launches, had a couple launches that didn't work, but was on a great trajectory to actually get the next ones to work, and Founders Fund stepped up to lead.

one of the critical rounds in SpaceX to help it have the money to do those additional final launches and keep momentum through that.

And then by 2011, really starting to think a lot about,

you know, not only is there this core element of backing founders and running their companies, but how do we invest in things that aren't, you know, there's going to be a bunch of important companies that are building consumer internet and in enterprise software.

But how do we back things that otherwise won't happen?

These core technologies, whether they might be biotechnology,

they they might be energy, they might be space,

things that are maybe even controversial at times,

defense technology, like with Andrel.

At the time, nobody wanted to invest in defense in Silicon Valley and even Google was canceling their program to work with the government on defense software.

And so by early 2010s, you saw this evolution.

or expansion from just let's back founders unilaterally, whether we succeed or fail, we are there for the founder and we're going to let them run their company the way they see fit to

now let's do that while also backing important things that otherwise are not going to happen.

And so that was really the evolution from 2005 to 2011 when I joined.

Got to be a part of a bunch of important investments across a bunch of different technologies.

And yeah, now it just continues.

What are some of the ones that stick out to you the most?

To me, like oddly, a lot of people asked for for a long time, what's your favorite company in the portfolio?

And I was biased, but I thought objectively SpaceX.

You know, working on this thing that wasn't going to happen without SpaceX, bringing down the launch cost dramatically, leveraging that into

enabling a bunch of other constellations, including their own constellation of Starlink.

And so, so much exciting stuff to do there.

That was a really important one.

A friend out of business school, so I did business school between SpaceX and

Founders Fund, and a friend out of there was,

you know, he was thinking about going into the investing world.

And during business school, he did a little bit of investing, but he quickly, you know, he was focused on Latin America.

And he saw that in Brazil, consumers were paying like 100% interest rate for their credit cards and getting completely ripped off by the existing banking system.

And he said, hey, I'm going to...

Someone should start a bank and make this more like the U.S.

and make sure that consumers actually get a fair deal.

And so he started a company called New Bank down there

that started with a credit card for people and has expanded a lot.

Turned out to be a really important company for consumers in Brazil.

Today worth tens of billions.

So big impact.

Let's see.

Neuralink, we're investors in.

So that one's been pretty cool to watch where It went from a concept to demonstrating it, you know, in monkeys playing Mind pong.

I don't know if you ever saw that video.

If not, it's worth watching.

You can search Neuralink Monkey Mind Pong.

And you'll see a monkey that's playing Pong with a joystick.

It has a Neuralink in.

It's happily enjoying some banana smoothie every time it wins the game.

And then you see halfway through the video, they remove the cord that's actually connecting the joystick to the computer.

And the monkey keeps playing, thinking it's playing.

But all it's really doing is reading off the Neuralink thing.

Wow.

And it's still winning at Pong, and it's still getting the banana smoothie treats.

And when I saw that, that's when we knew this is going to work.

And so fast forward to today, now I think

you've got some very famous people who have used it, like Nolan,

people who had accidents, quadriplegic, couldn't move at all, and now actually have jobs that are just internet-based jobs.

So just completely changing these people's lives.

That's been a really cool one to see.

Do you have any fear of Neuralink?

No, I don't.

No.

I think what we're going to see the next decade of Neuralink is going to be people with quadriplegia, ALS,

them getting cured.

I think the companies talked about other applications too, like blindness and deafness.

Could you actually use it to not just read what the person's thinking and express that onto the world, but could you actually take inputs like from a camera and help them see again?

People even who are born with blindness?

So

yeah, that doesn't make me scared at all.

That makes me really excited.

Now, people will think about merger with AI

down the road or like, how do you have human AI symbiosis?

I think that's far enough away.

And

it's going to be anything like that is going to be completely voluntary for people that, hey, if, you know.

That's that does not even enter my area of concern at this point.

It doesn't.

No, because first, I think it's so far away that we're going to figure out a lot of things before then.

And second,

you know, will I ever get a Neuralink?

I don't know.

Like, maybe if it doesn't look like a good idea, I wouldn't do it.

But I think for many of these patients today that are paralyzed or ALS or blind or deaf or missing limbs, how can we actually use the Neuralink type device to let them get full capability back?

That's what excites me about Neuralink.

So yeah, we've had a chance to be a bunch of, to be a part of many cool companies.

Even some that are more conventional.

Like a friend of ours

at Founders Fund started a company for cancer therapeutics.

So specifically dealing with types of cancer and really looking for the target on the cancer that they could go after.

And they ended up selling that company and now the same target that they were working on is now showing up in a bunch of drugs from that company that they sold to and then other companies.

So it's, yeah, a lot of this stuff is really futuristic and feels more distant, but then also getting to back unconventional approaches in things like cancer therapeutics and watching patients eventually get cured from that

has been really cool.

I'll bet.

I'll bet.

What are you guys focusing on now?

I'd say the founder's fun thing is it's always it's always seemingly a black box from the outside.

It's seemingly random.

And so, you know, one saying is that once there's a theme of what we're doing or like there's a category that you can be a part of,

it's already something Founders Fund probably won't invest in.

It's probably already too late.

So people talk about commercial space now and all the things happening in space, but the Founders Fund first investment in SpaceX was 2008.

And so

in terms of what categories are we investing in now,

it's really the anti-category that it always has been.

It's always been what's the thing that's coming, but isn't yet yet obvious?

And that's not something that the Founders Fund team is so smart that they can figure out.

It's that the founders bring those ideas to Founders Fund.

The founders of these companies say, hey, this is the important problem no one is solving.

Or everyone thinks about this problem this way.

And the reality is that you should think about it this way, this very different way, this orthogonal way.

And it might not make sense to a lot of people, but here's the reasons why they make sense.

And,

you know, here's all the questions you might ask.

And here's all, let's go down the rabbit hole together and figure out what the answer is.

It's those types of companies that founders fund backs.

And so

it's completely without a theme.

I think the biggest theme is it should be something that can change an industry and is like N of one, just like a totally unique company that is unlike anything else.

Well, Scott, we're wrapping up the interview, but I mean,

what are some

problems in the country or maybe in the world that you think that founders and innovators should be looking to solve?

I think a lot of it's going to come back to the energy stuff that we talked about.

I think it's going to be energy growth.

I think everything comes back to energy.

So if it's manufacturing, if it's AI,

It's going to come back to energy production.

If it's economic growth, it comes back to energy production.

So I think we're in this period of immense need for more energy.

And there's a lot of companies that could could get started.

There's people starting reactor companies, we're working on the fuel for the reactors, there's going to be things like transformers, and so I think it's a huge range of things people should do, but it's not going to just be energy.

I think what should people do?

It's, you know,

I think the guideline that Peter at Founders Fund has given to people, which I find really

inspiring and

like it's a good, it's a good rule of thumb:

do something that matters,

that that otherwise won't get done, and that only you can do.

And I think if you can find that thing to work on,

that's more important than anything else.

So, I think that's a sweet spot.

So, I'd say search for those things, and until you find them, just try and be part of teams doing things that you think are important that you can contribute to, and don't worry about the role, just figure out a way to add value.

Great advice.

Great advice.

Thank you.

Last question: if you had three people to recommend for for the show, who would it be?

We've talked about a few people today.

It's like the toughest question I asked, huh?

Well,

there's so many people that you should talk to, but I mean, yeah.

You haven't had...

I've mentioned a few people today.

Mentioned Peter.

Peter's great.

You could go on for

10 hours with Peter.

You'd get into a lot of different things.

Talk to about Sam Altman and what he thinks about where AI is going.

I think that one could be good.

I think Elon at some point would be really interesting.

Perfect.

Perfect.

Well, Scott,

thank you again for being here.

And that was a fascinating interview.

I hope to see you again.

And I just want to wish you the best of luck.

Cool.

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