Build The Future
Build The Future shares the compelling visions of the future and the stories of those building it. We explore frontier technologies, innovative research, and ambitious projects from around the world that will shape our future. Our guests are entrepreneurs, thought leaders, researchers, and anyone else actively working to build the world we want to live in.
Build The Future
#78 — Isaiah Taylor — Nuclear Fission, Energy Abundance, and The Frontier
Today, we're talking with Isaiah Taylor the founder of Valar Atomics — a new energy startup using nuclear fission to create oil & gas from thin air. At Valar, their goal is to bring the cost of energy down 10-100x and unlock a new era of superabundance.
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Welcome to the Build the Future podcast. My name is Cameron Weecy and I'm your host. I've always been fascinated by the ideas and the sentiment that drove American culture in the 1960s with the space race, a culture galvanized to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, whether it's food, transportation, cities, biology or anything else. It was this cultural mindset, rooted in optimism, that the world tomorrow would be better than the world today, a mindset where people were compelled to build things and I quote JFK not because they were easy, but because they were hard. It's this desire to build and to dream that seems to have been lost in something we're here to bring back With Build the Future. We're here to promote the ideas and stories of those who see how the future can be better and promote their plans to get us there. It's our mission to get you to dream about the possibilities of tomorrow, to dream about the future that you want to live in, and inspire you to go build. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Build the Future podcast.
Speaker 1:Today we're talking with the founder, valor Atomics, isaiah Taylor Valor. They're building the future of energy using nuclear fission to sequester carbon and turn it into hydrocarbons, so creating oil and gas out of thin air. I get super hyped up every time I'm talking to a founder of something this ambitious and this world changing, and I hope you'll feel that energy coming through in the conversation and recover energy culture, which is a recurring theme on the podcast here, and what the world looks like when we bring the cost of energy down to 10 to 100x. So phenomenal conversation I hope you enjoy. Let's jump right in. All right, we're here on the Build the Future podcast talking with Isaiah Taylor today about energy, our future and Valor Atomics. Isaiah, before I kicked you off on a thread here about how lovely our energy environment is here in the US, you're teaming something up, so tell me how much you love our regulatory environment.
Speaker 2:I was just saying. It just fills me with just a great deal of anger to read about our energy environment today in the United States. And the problem is you have a lot of good intentioned people who sit at various places within this industry, but if you actually ever step back and look at the physics and the engineering of what's going on in energy, it will make you truly angry. As an engineer and a lover of science and manufacturing and really just like a lover of people and wanting people to have good things, it will make you angry and it should. And what I mean by that is like if you just look at the energy that's out there, that's like latent in the universe that's created here. There's so much, it's so abundant and it's also really easy to capture. Like nuclear reactors are not that hard. It sounds insane to say that, but it's so true. They're not that hard.
Speaker 2:Like when I say that people are like oh my gosh, they just spent $30 billion turning on the vocal plant in Georgia. And you start to like dig into the vocal plant in Georgia and understand why did that take $30 billion? It's like this insane tree of decisions and every like individual line of that decision making process makes sense in a local frame, but it's an irrational structure that's built on a few bad premises and once you have those like few bad premises at the top and the few bad inputs at the top, everything after that becomes worse and worse and worse and more irrational and more expensive and takes longer, and so it's really difficult for people to look at that and have the conviction to say this machine is broken, because any level of that you can find good people who are making acting rationally within their frame. You actually do kind of have to be crazy enough to like look at the entire picture and say like guys like listen, uranium is basically free heat.
Speaker 2:It's free heat. Uranium is free heat. Okay, can we, can we get that far? Right, so then we've gotten that far. Can we say also, you can build it in such a way that it's fundamentally safe, right. So right now we spend a ton of engineering effort and cost on trying to make pressurized water reactors safe and nobody, very few people, are willing to say well, actually we could maybe spend like hundreds of billions of dollars less and not use pressurized water reactors, because pressurized water is like fundamentally not very safe, right, but you kind of you have to reach a certain level of like crazy and a certain level of angry which I have in order to step back and make a statement like that.
Speaker 1:What really got me really just like aggravate on this was when someone was telling the story about how they they like there's a sidewalk by one of these plants and it was not the right distance and so they spent like six months and millions of dollars or something like tearing up the sidewalk to move it like six inches to the right. It's like what are we doing? Right, and everyone does, obviously, you know, freak out like, oh, it's so expensive, it's so dangerous. You have all these sort of myths that you know people started to dispel, but culturally we haven't sort of really fall in love with the idea of energy consumption. I think that's part of the problem, because people are like, oh, more energy is good for humanity. So I wanna, you know in your, it's sort of. One of the things I wanted to jump into in front run is in your ex, formerly known as Twitter bio. You have.
Speaker 1:Kardashev, scale climber Malthus, disrespector Age of man, enjoyer Asimov. Energy is good, and let's start there. So what do people not understand about energy, isaiah? Like what is this sort of like thing people don't understand broadly, and why is energy and more energy good?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll start by just kind of trying to set the table stakes here. Every second the sun releases more energy which will never be used, just into the blackness of space. Then all of humanity has ever consumed. So I'll say that again, more energy than humanity has ever consumed is being released by the sun every second, just into the void right, never ever going to be utilized.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like we are so so far off from actually using the energy that we could, it's laughable, like it's almost accurate to say that humans don't consume energy compared to our, even just the frame of our earth. I would even say like there are literally billions of years worth of nuclear isotopes in the earth's crust, billions of years of energy at current human consumption rates. And then you look at like solar energy, and then you look at the energy stored in other planets, you look at energy in the asteroids, so, and then, if you are able to even step outside to further rings, there's just there's so much energy. It's like almost more accurate to say that humanity like doesn't really consume any energy. In our reference frame it's a decimal point of a decimal point. So that's one thing like just to just to set the reference frame, like we don't really use much energy.
Speaker 2:The second thing is we should. We should use energy. And the reason for that is, I like to say, if you're using energy, what you're doing is you're accelerating a process that was gonna happen without you. So we know, because of the laws of thermodynamics, that, like, everything is going from the state of lower entropy to higher entropy. That's just the history. That's the story of matter and of energy. Things are getting further apart, they're getting diffuse, they're seeking, you know, thermodynamic equilibrium.
Speaker 2:So if you are consuming energy quote, consuming energy you're really actually just like redirecting energy to a different pathway, right, because it's going to be consumed in, I would say, a wasteful manner without you, and I would call, for instance, just the sun, you know, beaming energy off into the blackness. I would call that wasted in the sense that, like, it is happening, whether we do anything about it or not, and it is not serving our ends as mankind. And so that's the second piece. It's like one, we're not really using that much energy. Two, anything that we do use was going to be depleted anyway. We might as well redirect it toward our own ends in our goals as mankind.
Speaker 1:Especially when you view it in that frame, the idea of like, oh, make sure you turn your lights off. It's like it's hilarious, it's like it's pitiful. It's like why are we having this sort of low level conversation? Like no one should ever have to worry about. Like whether the lights are on or not, or whether or not they're like they're, washing machine is more efficient. Like we're focused on the wrong problems. Like efficiency the language of efficient efficiency probably shouldn't exist, you know, in this frame it's like efficiency for what?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the like the energy efficiency framing has destroyed a lot of really beautiful things. So I love cars. Like cars are just really really near and dear to my heart. I love how they look, I love how they move, I love driving them. And something really sad happened in the 70s when we suddenly cared about fuel efficiency, and that is that cars basically just started becoming like a function of two things. One is like regulation and the other is fuel efficiency. You can kind of solve for what a car looks like, as those you know, as a function of those two things, and the regulations obviously like tie into the energy efficiency thing too. So like cafe standards.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I always laugh about is like there's all these people on Twitter who are like Americans in your gigantic cars, you're so wasteful, this car should not be this big. And I always laugh because I'm like do you know why cars are that big in the US? It's cafe standards. So the way that the federal government regulates the shape of vehicles they have to have a certain power consumption for a certain footprint of the vehicle.
Speaker 2:The power setting of the vehicle. It's not based on the passenger count, it's not based on the weight. It's literally the displacement, like the 2D displacement of the vehicle. So if you were to take a picture of like an SUV from above and you were to outline, you know all of the visual, you know contours. That sets your baseline for what you're allowed to consume as far as fuel. So the natural incentive there is for automakers to just make cars a little bit bigger and fatter and meatier, because then they get more budget as far as like fuel consumption and there's like 50 different things like this that we have built into our incentive structures around, you know, not consuming energy, which are quite silly, quite silly.
Speaker 1:What does the world look like if we are consuming more energy? So, and then also, can you, for the unacquainted, explain the carter-ship scale?
Speaker 2:Yeah, carter-ship scale is all about what category of energy are you using? So type one society is characterized by a couple of things. One is like using the latent chemical and nuclear energy on that planet. So that'd be type one. And it's also characterized by other things like terraforming and ecological control, some extent of like we're not constantly worrying about hurricanes and we're not constantly worrying about the temperature of the atmosphere and the ice caps melting. We kind of have those things managed the way that we want them and the like downstream impact of that is that we also, you know, can make sure that various species of animals are not dying out, because we have some measure of, you know, influence over the environments that these animals live in. But we sort of have the latent energy of a planet captured. So that's a type one civilization.
Speaker 2:And I like to say there's a category of companies that are type one companies. So I would say Valor is a Kardashev type one company. We are focused on allowing humanity to actually utilize the latent energy that is in the Earth's crust. Another example of a type one company would be Rainmaker Augustus's company. So he's working on controlling the weather. That's characteristic of type one, the one that's missing and like let me know if you know who's working on this is like the actual physical terraforming. That's another thing about type one societies is they generally can control the topography of things and maximize. You know human living and animal species and you know, whatever it is, that our goals are for the actual topography of things.
Speaker 1:I think a mutual friend of ours, I think Nasjak, was really excited about terraforming the salt and sea at one point. It's sort of a starting that project.
Speaker 2:but Okay, let's go Jack, let's get on it.
Speaker 1:We used to dream about, like we used to have these big, bold, grand, ambitious plans. Like you say, oh, let's terraform this thing. Today Everyone's like that's crazy. You wanna do what? Oh, you wanna control, like, utilize the energy of the planet. You wanna, like, make it rain, you wanna build mile high skyscrapers or anything. It just that sort of the boundary of people's imagination is capped and I can't figure out what happened.
Speaker 1:Like you know, you read those reports from the 50s and the 60s, when, you know, in a post-war era, I don't know. It's like, hey, let's go, like let's dream as big as we can. And the archives are full of vision to the future that are compelling, and they're all worked out. And like we're sitting here today like what should we go build? What problem should we solve? How should we solve them? All the work has already been done. It's just like you have to go to the Library of Congress or you go to eBay and you buy one of these like manuals that sort of is printed out in a spiral bound thing. Like you know, like this, and you just say, okay, what were they planning? And then you sort of you go from there.
Speaker 2:That's so true.
Speaker 2:That's so true on like on a million different technology sets. So much work has been done for us already. All of the not just like the theoretical science but even like prototyping and testing has been done, Like you can find, yeah, just like hundreds and thousands of pages of actual tests that were done in America, you know, in Antarctica and all these different places that we were looking at, like how could you actually build the best possible nuclear plant? Could we actually control the weather? So, yeah, I totally agree. It's very disappointing. Speaking of, like these bound notebooks, this is just a call to whoever's listening. Request for startup. I really want somebody to make a printing company that basically just takes some of those really aspirational, like awesome old government reports and binds them into like a really nice binding Like. I would buy those and just like put them on my shelf. I'd pay a lot of money for those. They're so, so inspiring. The aesthetics are incredible. You'd want to kind of like make them look nice. But, yeah, request for startup, Somebody please do that. That's a great idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but like why we got demoralized. As a nation, we became demoralized and I think one of the so that word demoralized is interesting. What does it mean for a group of people to be moralized? Well, one of the things it means is that you believe that what you're doing is moral, what you're doing is right, and we stopped believing that what we were doing is right.
Speaker 2:I would say, technological development and climbing the Kardashev scale and these things that we're talking about are, like really uniquely American. It's not that other countries haven't, you know, other countries have worked on some really really incredible technologies and lots to admire, but there is a distinctly American spirit of innovation that I think was perfectly exemplified by the Apollo missions. Just, you know, guys hanging out in Florida and in Texas just deciding to go to the moon, like we're going to the moon. If you read Jules Verne, you know in the early 1900s he's a Frenchman, right, but he has this like visceral understanding of, like the American spirit. That's like we are in the swamps of Florida but we are going to the moon. And I think a huge part of that was that we believed what we were doing was right and at some point we just lost our confidence that what we're doing is the right thing to do.
Speaker 1:There's beautiful scene from one of Jules Verne's books, from the Earth to the Moon. You have the gun club and their house.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what I was thinking about, yeah.
Speaker 1:And do you remember that scene where everyone was getting all riled up, everyone was excited, you know, people were in the streets. They were like we're going to the moon, we're going to the moon. And then you had that. There's this one end of the chapter. It's, this British playwright was like doing a tour to the US for much ado about nothing, shakespeare's play. And people were so like, again, they're like what do you? They thought it was sort of a commentary on, like, you know, their mission and their sort of enthusiasm. So like, on opening night people ran into the, into the like the theater, and they ripped up the seats and they tore it out and they were like, don't you dare bring that attitude over here.
Speaker 1:Like much ado about everything, like we're not, we're not tolerating this, and like that is certainly not the sort of the zeitgeist today. Getting back to the future, it's like how do we tap into that spirit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, one of the most important things to do, I think, is to remoralize, and that means gaining conviction again that what we're doing is right. I think that the mission of Valoratomics, which is to provide abundant energy to mankind, is morally right. It's there's nothing wrong. It's not just that there's nothing wrong with this, Like environmentalists would try to say that there's something wrong about consuming energy. I wholeheartedly reject that, but I also think that this is a specific positive good. It's a specific positive good to lift people out of poverty with energy. That's one of the things that giving people energy does is that it allows them to do a lot more with less. If you look at energetic societies and societies that have high standards of living, those things are really really highly correlated and especially, I think, as AI and robotics start to take off, energy is going to again become a really, really important leverage point for people being able to eat food and see their loved ones and get cheap houses and all these sorts of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's the thing I think people fail. It's like all the good things that everyone has access to now is directly tied to the energy that was put into making it, and the cost is I mean, the cost for most of these things is constrained by energy. Okay, so I want to sort of be a little expansive on all the things energy can enable, but before we do that, tell us about Valor and how you're going about making energy abundant for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Valor is something that I have been thinking about for a long time. It's sort of a five or six year problem that I was trying to solve in my head and with research and having conversations I recognized from pretty early on that nuclear energy, the physics of nuclear energy, is just this unbelievable boon to mankind. It's uranium, is free heat. It really is this tiny, tiny little amount of substance can power homes for years, they can power transportation for years, but we've gotten really, really divorced from that in the nuclear industry. So we've gotten very, very far from the base physics for a variety of reasons. The biggest is really regulatory, but there's also risk taking and lack of belief and other problems, but the core of it is really regulatory. So I started thinking about how can we get around this chicken and egg problem we have here, where like nobody the regulators aren't going to change what they're doing because there's no real pressure to do that. The American public perceives nuclear as being very dangerous. Nobody really understands how cheap we could do this if we really wanted to and because of that, like there's not really big incentive for regulations to get better, we have to jumpstart the system. We've got to apply the leads to the terminals and actually like jumpstart this engine. The way that I want to do that is really interesting and you might find it extremely unorthodox, but it's quite beautiful when you come to see the whole picture. So what we want to do is we want to mass manufacture nuclear reactors, but we want to do that in a way that will look very, very different from any other nuclear that you see today, because we're going to start from the physics and we're going to start from the engineering and we're just going to build reactors the way that they really ought to be built.
Speaker 2:And you might say well, okay, why is nobody doing that? And the short answer is because it's illegal. It's illegal to do that. So, okay, it's illegal. How do we do it? Well, the answer is we do it outside of normal operating environments where you would normally operate nuclear. We're talking about other countries, we're talking about audit C, we're talking about places that the NRC is not used to regulating and maybe is going to make exceptions for or will simply be outside of their jurisdiction. Okay, great.
Speaker 2:So you've got mass deployed nuclear out in the middle of nowhere. Well, what do you do with that? You've got a terawatt of energy out in the desert or out at sea. What do you actually do with that? Well, one thing you could do is you could try to string like long range, high voltage direct current lines into local grids. That's actually that was my first idea about five years ago. I wanted to. I wanted to do that. There are other startups that are actually wanting to do that in Indonesia.
Speaker 2:But the problem with that is it's it's still a regulatory problem. It's actually still a civil infrastructure problem. So the problem with that is like grids can't support that much energy and even if they could, you still have to get this like regulatory approval to stretch lines across the ocean. You have to get regulatory approval to tie into these grids. They don't really have the capacitance for it anyway. There's all these issues with that.
Speaker 2:So what do you do? What do you do with this like infinite free energy that you have out in the middle of the water? Well, what we do is we actually synthesize fuel, so we create oil and gas, and that sounds crazy, but it's not nearly as hard as it sounds. You basically just pull carbon dioxide out of the air and you can also pull water out of the air, or you can pull out of the ocean or you know wherever you have access to water, and you split the water apart into hydrogen and oxygen and then you bond the hydrogen with the CO2. And that makes a very simple hydrocarbon called methane.
Speaker 2:Methane is natural gas. It's how 40% of electricity is generated in the US and 30% of electricity globally, so it's a really good place to start. Once you have methane, you can also make a variety of hydrocarbons on top of that. You know jet A and diesel and you know basically the kerosene type. Fuels are just longer chains of these hydrocarbons. Right, and all you really need to do that is the sort of physical structure to allow those reactions to take place, and a lot of energy, a lot of energy, and so that's what we're going to harness nuclear for.
Speaker 1:So when you have the hydrocarbons like synthesize, you have the methane out in the middle of the ocean like don't you run into the same problem of like transferring the electricity like piping, like grid lines? It's like, how do you move from point A to point B?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a really good question. So it turns out that moving hydrocarbons around the world is a lot easier than moving electricity. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but one way to think about it is like hydrocarbons are their own battery. So if you have a battery that's made of lithium ion, it's supposed to take a charge. The chemical you know reality of that thing is different than the charge that it's holding. So you have a ton of weight that's basically disassociated from the energy itself. Hydrocarbons are very different. The battery with a hydrocarbon is actually just like the metal container, right, and the energetic substance itself is poured into that container.
Speaker 2:So I would say like today before we have like a sort of a very robust global infrastructure of direct like high voltage lines. It's actually far easier to move lots of energy around the world by putting it into tanks. So like there are massive tanker ships that transport LNG all around the world. What we're up right now is actually significantly it's greatest and definitely powered by LNG that's coming from Texas. So yeah, we're liquefying methane in Texas and we're loading it into these like massive LNG ships and shipping across the ocean to Europe, because you know they used to be getting it from Russia and they don't want to do that anymore. So now they're getting it from the US.
Speaker 2:So yeah, there's a lot of different ways. The other nice thing about like hydrocarbons is just there's this massive, massive industry around moving hydrocarbons around. It's really one of the most incredible industries in the world. I've got a lot of friends who work in hydrocarbon. I would just say transportation right, so you're getting it from point A to point B, and really some of the most incredible technology and incredible people work on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all the time. That's permanent. That's what I wanted to tee up, because I think there's this existing infrastructure for oil and gas all over the world we move. What's the total annual volume? We're moving in oil like tens of billions of gallons.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know the barrel count. I know that it's around $1.5 trillion of methane alone, and then you've got separate trillions for various grades of liquid hydrocarbons after that.
Speaker 1:So, as long as you set up the, you produce it and you can load it into one of these tankers, you're pretty much good. And then, because at the end destination whether they're going to the port at Houston or Port in Great Britain or Port in somewhere in Asia the infrastructure is already in place, it's like cool, we're going to suck it out and it's going to be already piped in, versus like how do we?
Speaker 2:yeah.
Speaker 1:I think that's a very sort of underrated component of all this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think absolutely Like we're. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to energize like some existing rails, right, so we have trillions of dollars of normal energy rails, which today is almost entirely hydrocarbons. That includes, like coal, by the way. So, like coal is a hydrocarbon. It just has a lot of like oxygen and sulfur and other things in it which makes it like particularly weird to burn, and it's it exists in kind of varying grades of purity as well. But coal is also a hydrocarbon and it's also one of the big ways that energy gets around the world tends to be on trains, right, so you can sort of pour it into an open train and move it to your power generation station. But, yeah, like, this is currently how we get power to people and I would say it's a beautiful system. I really love it. Like there, there's there's some real beauty to that system today. Also, you know, pipelines themselves are a lot easier. Counterintuitively, they're actually a lot easier to lay than than high voltage lines.
Speaker 2:The interference it has to do with, like the interference of the electrical current with the ground.
Speaker 2:So if you, if you're putting a pole, like an electrical line high up in the air, you don't have to worry about, like ground interference, but then you're paying the cost of actually like stringing a line above ground. So there's this, there's always this trade off with electrical transfer and I'm sure, like in, let's say, 20, 30 years, our, our interconnectivity of our grids will be way better. But there's there's also this like completely separate problem with it, which is capacitance. So like, even if you have perfect connectivity all over these grids, if one area, like has a sudden demand surge and this other area, you know, has less, or if everybody has a demand surge or everybody has less, storing that energy and having capacitance for that is really expensive. We don't have cheap ways to store lots of power today. It's, you know, you're you're either looking at like batteries, which are really expensive, some places like pump water from location to location, so like if you have a lower pond and a higher pond, you could pump the water up, and that's like, that's kind of like a battery, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the things we do, man, to like, try and like, make this fit a different system.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah, yeah, well it's. You know there's, like I said, a lot of this has to do with people that are acting rationally with within a local frame and and I have a lot of respect for everybody who works in energy, because they really are working on some of the most important stuff in the world, like getting Gigawatts of power around to the people who need it. Is is amazing and, you know, capitalism rewards people for doing that. But yeah, man, I just want to see it. I want to see it go 100x like. I want to see us use a hundred times more energy. I want to see our NACS stations, you know, just peaking constantly and burning tons of methane and giving people tons of energy and yeah, that's, that's where we're headed.
Speaker 1:It's where is you know, using the like, the infrastructure to do that? Hydrocarbons is already there, right, more or less, versus like, I think it's. It's an often overlooked point Like, well, we have to go build it, this whole new electric grid with the end of storage, with the transportation like routing and all that. It's like there's other, there are other solutions here, which is like I don't know why I'm super excited about what you guys building.
Speaker 2:It's just like yeah, that's, that's exactly right. Like people are talking about spending trillions of dollars on like trying to retrofit you know Nat gas systems to use hydrogen, for example, and that's very expensive because you have to like, you have to rework all of those pipelines, you have to retrofit all of these turbines to burn hydrogen. It's like guys like what if we actually just made gas cheaper? Like what if we just made the gas ourselves and made it really cheap? I like that better.
Speaker 1:What do you like? Is it again, is this just like a frame thing? Or most who aren't looking like the higher order of the system. They're like okay, like what is actually mean necessary here and everyone sort of incentivized to, you know, focus on their own, their own piece. So if, like rationally, it's like okay, how do we have all this infrastructure? What's actually going to lead to better energy production, consumption?
Speaker 2:One of the issues here is just that again, we've stopped really innovating and we've stopped looking at the, the base properties of physics and thinking about how we can apply them. I would say, like the energy industry, how it is today, is just like really focused on efficiency and optimization, because the base level is basically understood like or at least everyone thinks it's understood. Everyone thinks like okay, this is, these are the base prices, these are the regions where gas comes from, this is what they'll cost and it's all like priced in, and everything after that is trying to solve for those base conditions and we just forgot that the base conditions aren't true. Like energy, base energy really can be a thousand times cheaper If you, you know, utilize some of these properties of physics that are, that are underutilized.
Speaker 1:You quick like Explain like I'm five on hydrocarbon synthesis.
Speaker 2:So actually, let me, let me just start from like energetic Chemistry. So so when you're talking about chemistry and getting energy from chemical fuels, you're really talking about like the, the difference in in bond energies. So if you have a free-floating Molecule like H2 that wants to be bonded with something else, it has low bond energy in that state. So you have a bunch of free-floating H2. Now compare that Well, and actually let's say, let's say you have sort of three buckets and in one of them you have free-floating Hydrogen. You have another bucket with free-floating carbon atoms and then another bucket with with free-floating Oxygen molecules. So you've got hydrogen and a bucket oxygen, a bucket and carbon in a bucket. All of those things have relatively low bond energies, amongst them bond strength. I should say. If you were to reconfigure all of those Into water and CO2, what will have happened between those two states is that you suddenly now have extremely tight high strength bonds between those things. So water is a very high strength bond, co2 is a high strength bond and so going from this, like these buckets of separate elements, to this bucket of water and CO2, a lot of energy was released in the formation of those high strength bonds and that right, there is like the basis of all chemical fuels. We're really talking about Taking things that are, you know, loosely bonded and getting to tight bonds and the release of energy in that process. So a hydrocarbon, specifically, is actually a little bit down. That's that process. So if you think of like completely free-floating hydrogen to completely bonded water and CO2, a hydrocarbon is like 10 steps down that path, which is actually, if you think about, a little bit of a waste of energy, because if you you started out with that bond, that was like free-floating and you got to a loose bond, you used up a bit of energy in that process.
Speaker 2:But the reason we do it is because hydrogen itself is a really difficult thing to work with. It permeates through metal and brittle's metal. It's very, very volumetrically not dense. When you add a carbon atom in there, though, it actually becomes a very beautiful and tractable chemical. It's like not toxic, that's that's a huge thing. It doesn't in brittle metal. It, you know, doesn't, doesn't seep through things. You could pack a ton of it in a very small space. So the presence of the carbon in there is really it's just something that makes it tractable. It makes it useful to us in engineering.
Speaker 2:So, but yes, as far as like the practicality of that, like there's a variety of catalysts that will, you know, perform that that bond to, to various groups. So, like, the simplest one is methane at CH4. We've known about the the process to create methane from, you know, from hydrogen and CO2, for a long time. It's very simple, it's called the Sabati process. There are, you know, a variety of Processes to make stuff out of longer chain, like Fisher-Trop synthesis. But, yeah, like all this stuff has been known for a long time and, honestly, we've just been sleeping on it.
Speaker 1:Well, it's all is new again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly sweet.
Speaker 1:Thanks for that little primer not to date the conversation, but you know the fun sort of like battle that's happening online when Palmer sort of jumped to your defense, your defense, but he had this. You have this sort of like statement that he made that I'm curious to get your take on. Which was so? My personal bed is on large-scale GMO macro-eligity cultivation the Pacific Desert, but the fusion fission powered stuff has a place. Yeah, your thoughts.
Speaker 2:So I this is this is something I have interacted with a few times. It's interesting like people are looking at biosynthesis for a lot of different things. The problem with that is your, your energy source, for that is still solar and that just means you're gonna be working with low densities. There are other people working on like terraform industries is working on like solar to fuel. Prometheus fuels is doing that as well.
Speaker 2:You know, I would class the algae stuff generally into the kind of the same category, which is like you're trying to. You basically are worried about the actual Synthesis part rather than the energy source part, and if you're doing algae, your energy sources sunlight. So it's similar to like oh, could we just do what terraform is doing, but without the solar panels and without the generation equipment. So it's an interesting concept. I would just say the hardest part of doing this is actually getting the energy. Like that's that's the hard part. We've known for a long time how to synthesize Hydrocarbons and like great, you know, amoebas can do it, fantastic, but like they're still gonna need to get their energy from the Sun. That means it's always going to use up a lot more space, a lot more land. It's gonna be like just less dense, and density is really, really important if you want things to get cheap.
Speaker 1:It was either outcome. I mean like also it's good that you know we have more people just taking bets and like working on this space. It's like I think there's a lot of people get lost in the sort of dialogue like, oh, it's like this approach is out of it, like the fact that we're like we have to be taking multiple approaches to all the all these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And like everyone who's working in this space, I absolutely love like, if you are trying to figure out how to get more energy into people's hands, like you are my friend hands down. That's true about people who are, you know, trying to solar max. Like I've got a lot of friends who are solar, solar maxis, and I'm like dude, power to you, like I'm gonna beat you, but like power to you.
Speaker 1:No, but no pun intended, of course.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:So what is sort of you know what sort of things we doing 10, 20 years from now, when we have sort of abundant energy, like abundant energy, at what point does this valor sort of cash out into, not like financially, but in terms like this sort of changing the landscape? Because there are? Is it all just like all sort of like Hydrocarbons, ultimately, are sort of being synthesized through carbon sequestration, through this, you know, process powered by Nuclear?
Speaker 2:yeah, I think so. I think it absolutely will be, because I think at the, in the terminal frame, that's the cheapest way you can possibly do it. So I don't I don't see like gas drilling going away anytime soon, because it's gonna. It's gonna be a long time before valor is producing trillions of dollars of hydrocarbons. Hopefully won't be that long. I want to be producing trillions of dollars hydrocarbons in like 15 years, but you know, until then, and even maybe at that point, it's still gonna make sense for them to operate existing wells and that kind of stuff. So like I don't think that, I don't think the hydrocarbon, like the drilling industry, is like going anywhere anytime soon.
Speaker 2:But like, yeah, in the long frame, if we do nuclear right, it is going to be the cheapest source of energy Without the slightest comparison. Like it won't even be funny and that actually that is how it is today, like that is how it is. If you actually look at the uranium itself right, the you're pulling uranium out of the ground and how much energy is in that stuff is incomparable. Like it's just simply not even comparable to To any other energy source that we know. The problem is that all of the other infrastructure around that consumption is like Irrationally expensive today and that's that's what we need to fix that Well, that's what Valarins, you know, needs to fix. But yeah, to answer your question, like, what kind of stuff are we doing? For one thing, we're gonna be using a lot more inference, like AI. Inference, so, like energy, is already starting to be the bottleneck on AI, microsoft is is trying to get some nuclear stuff spun up to run their data centers. You know, hit me up, hit me up, microsoft will figure some out.
Speaker 1:We'll call Satya. We'll be like, hey, get on this.
Speaker 2:He just needs to be able, he needs to be willing to do something a little bit unorthodox in other places. But yeah, so like long term, that's. One big thing is like there's going to be a lot more compute applied to every aspects of our lives, which is going to be awesome because you will basically have a, you know, a super computer that's actually consuming a lot of power, thinking about your everyday life and optimizing things for you, which will be super fun. But in the physical world we'll also do things like the. You know the basis of transportation will drop.
Speaker 2:So, like right now, energy is, I think, like 40% of transportation costs. So if we like significantly drop that, that's just like transportation getting 40% cheaper overnight. So we're talking about, you know, flying to visit your grandma is suddenly 40% cheaper. That's fantastic. There are other, I would say another class of things is just like automation and manufacturing. All like materials that have that have energy as an input are going to get cheaper, which will have cascading effects into into other things. And then you know, if, if, like the robotics and AI industry kind of figured their aspects out, like like what Optimus is doing and what figures doing, then that just really amplifies it then. Then you know, cheap energy translates directly to cheap consumer goods.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So like anything about how this links to food production, so you know if they're doing any sort of vertical farming, you know?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not just vertical farming, but like, like, how much does it cost to get the phosphate you need? Like, how much does your potash cost? How much does your? You know, ammonia, like those things are also products of energy. Those are, they are. There's a significant component of our food which is just like, how much does your energy cost? So, yeah, it's almost hard to find a sector that's not going to be directly affected by by energy getting cheaper. Also, this is kind of hard to imagine right now, but, like you know, starship launches with Methilox, so Starship is methane and liquid oxygen, and I think I read like the Falcon 9 is about $250,000 worth of methane fuel per launch. So like, yeah, I would like to see that go down to like 50k, right, like let's, let's, let's launch five times cheaper Elon, let's go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, like you know, it's the cost of energy, the cost of compute, the cost of, or cost of, intelligence and the cost of like going to space and all of it. I mean pretty much all of these things are linked to our energy consumption and we drive that cost down to like the world is going to be very, very different as a result. We're playing this sort of, you know, restricted frame. It's like oh, this is. We have all these limitations People are talking about erroneously like oh, what's like we should probably limit the number of flights people ever take every. It's like that. No, we like other other direction 10 exit, like you should be able to like today. But you know, I want to go see my, my cousins and my grandmother. Get on a plane and go do that and everybody should have, should have access for 50 bucks.
Speaker 2:Here's another thing like we should be able to do those things frequently. But also the aesthetics of our world should be less shaped by energy consumption. So, going back to like what cars look like, if you go back and see what cars look like in the 60s, like they were beautiful works of art, what they weren't is energy efficient. You have these, you know wings coming out that look beautiful and like don't actually work great in a wind tunnel, but we have them because they looked great and they like beautiful and that's like. That's how cars should be. We should not be like.
Speaker 2:The purpose of wind tunneling should be like limited to safety and like order of magnitude, energy cost difference, not like optimizing the shape of this thing to the perfect decimal to make sure it's like optimally, optimally energy efficient, like I want. I want the car to be a work of art, like in fact, there are many things in the human experience that should be a work of art. Apple gets to do this because, like energy doesn't really have much to do with this thing, right. Like they get to make this beautiful because the energy input is not something you think about on a phone, but in areas of the human experience where, where energy is a large factor, things tend to be ugly because we optimize around energy and like the constraints of, like energy efficiency and the constraints of beauty are too big and I would like to see humanity curve back toward making things you know more power, hungry and more beautiful.
Speaker 1:What's the, what's the aesthetic of the future that most resonates with you, that sort of you think should guide and shape are the things we build.
Speaker 2:I like future Rome. So, like I like this concept of like future Roman. I think that Heinlein Robert Heinlein did a really good job of portraying that, so he has like his concept of I think it's new Rome on Mars is really, really intriguing, like it's. It's. He has this. He has this idea that as you sort of go out to new planets, you have this like colonization filter. So if you think of the people came to to America, there's this really strong filter and like the character of who those people were. They had huge risk tolerance and they had gusto and they had agency and all these things and a certain amount of intelligence to although that wasn't the main thing, which I think is important, by the way. Yeah, heinlein has this like idea that like one of the ways that humanity excels is like we keep going to new places, which keeps introducing this filter of people that are like increasingly like high agency. Yeah, I think I think that's like very coupled with like the Roman aesthetic. So I would say, like future Roman makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah like the preservation of agency or the sort of it's like where was it? I don't know where I was like having the frontier I mean a frontier to pursue, like always allows certain people to like hey, you know, I'm comfortable and excited about what is. But for those people, you know, like you and I share this sort of like, I'm like no, like what is new, what is like what is out there, to explore how do we create it, and like that's, that's, you know, to certain things that can be very disconcerting to people, is like I, like the like my day to day life in Paris, you know, like let's keep it, keep the same.
Speaker 1:It's like yeah, we should also be building, building new things like let's preserve this sort of historical and be creating the new.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that actually the, the coupling between those things is really important. Like I'm actually not aesthetically attracted to some of the like EX stuff, you see, where it's just like purple lights and metal everywhere there, there there actually is, there is objective beauty and it's not actually just like whatever is most technologically efficient. But on the other hand, we should be like maximally on the frontier, pursuing like technological excellence. We, you know, we should have a cohesive home, we should have a cohesive society and nation. That's like the Roman aspect. But then, yeah, we should also be at the frontier, pursuing things as hard and as fast as we can. So I'm yak on the frontier, I'll say that Totally.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's it's so funny how, like the discourse sort of gets like model on the last, like let's just build cool things, like I like the future, like let's create it, the there's like this interesting idea. Like with digital pre visualization, like we sort of visualized and imagine these things and give people the sort of reignite there they're wondering, they're ought to be like, oh, that's what we should be, like we should, in theory, actually in practice, be able to design a gigantic skyscraper that is literally made out of wood.
Speaker 1:It's like a tree, it's like we sort of growing or something, or it's like it's like not feasible today, like that should be the sort of world where it's like, oh cool, like let's build this, let's try and geo engineer that, or you know innovate on this.
Speaker 2:So Well, we have the ingredients, so the like the three pillars of basically everything man made our intelligence, energy and dexterity. We have all three of those ingredients. Like we have intelligence from our own minds, but we're also starting to, you know, teach microchips to be intelligent. Dexterity is sort of a long battle that's mostly, I would say, hampered on, like how intelligent are your systems? So, as soon as, like, we have a GI, I think that, like, robotics will, will quickly follow, and then energy is what Valor is working on. Once we have all three of those, those ingredients in our hands, like there's actually nothing stopping us from converting, you know, the asteroids into O'Neill cylinders. And we should, we absolutely should.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's one of my favorite sort of visions of the future. It's like they planned the whole thing out. They solved all the techno that there's like, well, how's this gonna work, how's that gonna work? Oh, we need, you know, moon or launchers or like moon or modules to be able to, like, extract the materials and then ship them out into, lower, the like into you know L five, and then you have these robotics to be able to construct it. It's like you have all these studies from NASA, you know, back in the 70s and 80s, just like I saw something that's where the other days.
Speaker 2:Some of those, those illustrations of, of the O'Neill colonies, those are so, so cool yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's that. It's like one of those things where, like, we're able to stand on the shoulders of giants like Rick Gaites, don Davis and Gerardo Neal sort of like. I mean Gerardo Neal sort of put forth the idea and that it was visually brought to life by Don and Rick and Sidney and a few others, and like that's what you and I resonate with, like, oh, we see the aesthetic. We're like, oh, that's what could be possible and that's what resonates with you know, larger swaths of people who's not even going to read the, you know NASA settlement design study, but they will see the art and be like, oh, I want, I want that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but, like, in order to make these things possible, I'm going to go back to like we we have to be remoralized as a nation, like especially amongst the young men. Like we need to. We need to have no like guilt about what we're doing. And it's it's kind of hard because most media, like if you look at wired or you look at like any of like the media publications that talk about tech, they will, like default, try to convince you that tech is bad. Like that tech is morally wrong, that money is morally wrong. Like they will try to make you think that if you are a tech billionaire or trying to become a tech billionaire, that you are a bad person.
Speaker 2:And we need to throw that back on their face strongly. We need to say like, no, this is morally good, it's actually good that we're doing this. It's bad that you're trying to stop it. Actually, and, yeah, like we need to, we need to take back like the moral narrative from them. So, like that's that's actually something. I think that is important for podcasts like this and other aesthetic projects, because, yeah, like we have to believe it again.
Speaker 1:What was the, if you're a point anyone to any resources or, like you know, books or movies or things like, where do you go to sort of like feel that sort of more, like re, re, sort of invigorate your spirit with that sort of moral imperative?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question. So I mean the. For me personally, the moral imperative is explicitly Christian. So I'm a Christian and I think that I think that God created the universe to be fundamentally abundant and he also gave mankind authority over it. So for me it's like actually quite simple, like where I'm, I'm directed by God to take authority over the earth and over the universe and to to shepherd it. So like it's pretty simple.
Speaker 2:But as far as the like, the aesthetics go, I actually find just a lot of inspiration in the past. I need to, I need to start consuming some of like the futurist stuff. But but the past is very inspiring to me, even just as it was. Like Apollo 13 will like never not be just an incredible, incredible aesthetic experience of like resolve and grit and, you know, just prowess in the face of adversity. Like we need that mentality again. Like everyone, everyone in that building was like absolutely convinced that that what they were doing is the best possible thing that they could be doing with their time, and that showed up in the competence and in the prowess and in the ambition.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one, one person that I want to throw on your radar is Sambar Kingdom, brunel. It's sort of this like guy who is sort of mandate from heaven like building tunnels, building bridges, and he just like like this one guy was like, was it Robert Moses in New York? He's just like one guy's like I'm on this mission, how do we build things? He's did it. He's like everyone sort of like had the, had the mandate, like, okay, this is good, we need to like elevate people from poverty. You know, bring bring sort of the world to. You know, increase energy consumption, like build the future that we want to live in. So I mean, that's that's the whole point, man. It's like how do we get people to dream again, feel that like doing these things is good and can be good, and then sort of getting them like, okay, well, what can I do? How do I step up and take, take some responsibility for building the future that I want to live in, life?
Speaker 2:So it's all about we also need to embrace the cowboy a little bit more, so like when societies grow rich, they become slowly less cowboy and they become more risk averse. But like great things are really built by cowboys, they're built by frontiersmen. If you want to read a book that I think really encapsulates that really well, the right stuff by Tom Wolf, absolute classic of you know, american, just American dudes being guys, it's fantastic and like we need that attitude again for sure, totally.
Speaker 1:We're, we're gonna find you, we're gonna get involved. Now, obviously, you're hiring, so where, where can people work with channel people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are. I mean, we're building the future of energy. We want all mankind to have abundant energy and specifically abundant hydrocarbons today. So if you are a world class engineer, world class operator or investor, you can find me on xcom Isaiah underscore P, underscore Taylor, or just search Isaiah Taylor and scroll through tweets until you see somebody genuinely unhinged to saying that nuclear should be basically free. And yeah, give me a follow and apply.
Speaker 1:I did. This is a bit of blast. Thanks so much for coming on.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good talk to you Thanks for joining us for this episode of the build the future podcast. If you loved, it would be really grateful if you share it with a friend or post a review on whatever we're watching or listening to this. That's it from us. We'll see you next time. Until then, go build.