00:38:25 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:38:25] S1: Yep. This is something I've actually thought about for a long time. I I guess I read that on social media like eight or nine years ago when that was sort of going around as a basis, and I'm very grateful to him for it because it's a really good framework, and the idea here is that you run as fast as you can through two way doors, and you take your time and deliberate on one way doors. Super useful framework for making decisions. The problem is, we also have to run really fast through the one way doors. We are at the place that we are at as a company because we have sprinted through some one way doors. And, you know, there's a bit of instinct here and just, you know, make it work. That's happened. I think a lot of it is you have to think all the way back to the fundamentals. I think that people don't really read laws that much. Like, don't really read laws and regulations, but you can read this stuff, right? Like, it's out there. And actually, now there's like Claude, so you can even go faster with, you know, OpenAI and Claude and ChatGPT and these things. But even before that, you know, the laws were out there and the regs were out there, you can go and read them. And there's a lot of stuff that you can just boil down to the fundamentals of like, why can't we do this faster? And you read the regs and it's like, well, actually the regs say you can, or they don't say you can't, but people just kinda haven't been. And actually, I'll say one big advantage that Valar has is we don't flinch when it comes to risking large amounts of capital on things that really matter. I'm really giving away some of the secrets right now, but I don't think that anyone is going to, you know, suddenly overnight gather the risk tolerance that we have in this area, so I could say it out loud, but...
00:40:08 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:40:08] S0: As someone that also risks a huge amount of capital with... [00:40:11] S1: Yeah. Listen, man, like, have to you have to swing big. And when you're working on a problem of this importance, right, I genuinely believe that this team is working on the most important problem in the world. We are working on making energy 10 times cheaper. It's hard to imagine a more important problem than that. When you're working on a problem like that, you're gonna have to take some big swings. And some of those swings are gonna be zero or one swings where, you know, if you spent $40,000,000 on that site and it didn't work out, you're out of the game. Right? But guess what? I took that swing and, you know, another party didn't, and now they're behind. Right? So that is... It's a it's a high stakes game, but you have to play it. Right? And especially if you want to build the most important things in the world, like if you want to actually change the nature of how humanity consumes energy, and you can't get yourself over that level of decision making, and aren't ready to just absolutely barrel through a couple one way doors, you know, I'm gonna go faster than you. [00:41:13] S0: If you are full steaming it through all these one way doors, you also have to be incredibly good at basically pulling rabbits out of hats. [00:41:20] S1: Oh, [00:41:21] S0: yeah. When things don't work. Yes. And so what are the best examples of you pulling rabbits out of a hat, and how do you actually do that?
00:41:29 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:41:29] S1: Alright. So a lot of the the rabbits that we've been able to pull out of hats, obviously can't talk about. There's some amazing stories that we'll tell someday, but one that that I will talk about, just one small example, it was very important to us to demonstrate that we could move this reactor via c 17. We built it to be containerized, we built it under the weight specs of the maximum load of a c 17, we engineered the plant to be able to take those g loads and stresses, but none of this matters if you don't actually fly it, so we were like, we want to actually fly this thing. And we went, you know, we spent a lot of time with the Department of War on the logistics of how that's gonna work, We did a bunch of studies with them on the loads of a C-seventeen and worked with load masters on, okay, what is this plant going to experience in flight? We did engineering studies on our side to figure out, is the plant going to survive the transportation? Know, we had people, you know, who were worried for us in the Department of Energy that, are you sure you guys really want to fly this thing because, like, we don't want this plant to break and you're part of our pilot program, like, we want you guys to do a critical, like, that would, you know, if you, you know, snap an important component, and we're like, yep, we know, but listen, this is a really important thing for us to demonstrate that we can do this. So we get through all this work, right, and it's months of analysis, months of engineering, reengineering on the plant, refabrication of things that weren't going to take the G loads, you know, hundreds of people within the Department of War that coordinated that operation, and we get to three days left until we fly. Right? The Secretary of Energy is gonna be flying with us, the Under Secretary of War is gonna be flying with us, the CTO of The United States is gonna be flying with us, We have some senators on board. We're meeting the governor down there. The stakes are pretty high. Right? We get a call from the loadmaster at the base where we're gonna take off from, and he says, guys, the loader truck that is supposed to load your reactor onto the C 17 cannot take the loads of this vessel. Your vessel is too heavy for the loader truck. And I think this is actually two days before.
00:43:42 · Isaiah Taylor
And so we all start getting on the phone, and we start calling all around. Who has a high enough capacity loader truck? And it turns out, okay, there actually are high capacity loader trucks, and it's normal for a base to have these high capacity loader trucks, but, you know, maintenance cycles, whatever it was, we just happened to not have one at this base at that time. And we're like, okay, can we drive one up? And we start thinking about the logistics of how do we move the assets around and, you know, time is ticking. And the problem is that we need to actually try and do a test fit up of this, so even if we got a truck in time the day of, we're not sure that it would, you know, it would work for other reasons, so we have to do a test run. And so our steel team got together and said, what if we just built a truck with forty eight hours notice? And they started working on it, they started drafting, we took the existing specs of the truck, we took the existing specs of the vessel, and started fabricating. And there's these specialty rollers that have to get integrated into the surface, and they have to take a certain amount of load, and these are loaded onto pallets, you have to integrate with those pallets, and we basically just said, start sending us engineering drawings, right? And so we got into, okay, what's the exact interface between the pallet loading system and the base wheeling system and the motor, and how do we basically bridge that gap in in twenty four hours? And literally twenty four hours later, we had fabricated a truck that we then used to load our nuclear reactor on a C-seventeen. Probably one of the most ridiculous works of rapid engineering and fabrication in history, and literally, like, we were flying in these rollers. Like, you have to, like, we had to go buy these rollers, and you have to weld them into the line so that they could actually roll the the pallets onto it. And, yeah, many many all all nighters pulled throughout that process in forty eight hours from the mission having that come up. So, honestly, a lot of having the ability to pull rabbits out of hats is having a team that is utterly relentless. And we have a team that is utterly relentless. When I look at, you know, the... All the different people in the world who are working on nuclear and working in nuclear, I have a lot of respect for many of the teams out there.
00:46:00 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
And, you know, obviously, nuclear is a big market. There's there's a lot of room for all of us. But when I look at the relentlessness of our... Of this team, it is incomparable, and it's the most exciting job in the world to work with them. [00:46:14] S0: With everything about this, you're trying to basically figure out what is the most aggressive timeline that you can reasonably, I think, achieve, and then make sure that you hit it. And I think you're constantly running in the background. Are we actually gonna hit it? Like, are we on track to do that? Yep. When things go wrong and you you... The timeline slips or you predict that it could slip [00:46:35] S1: Yeah. [00:46:35] S0: Things don't go your way [00:46:37] S1: Yeah. [00:46:37] S0: What does going into wartime mode in War Room look like?
00:46:41 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:46:41] S1: My chief of staff is laughing over here because she knows what war... What wartime looks like. Yeah. I mean, I I think, like, to some extent, you have to you have to keep you have to keep cool and gather information. Like, it sounds super boring, but, like, I try to understand the total information state as precisely as I possibly can. I really, you know, really hate people who do not tell you what is going on in extreme detail. I hate generalities. Know, people know this about me, like, I do not want a generic answer to any question. I want the most precise answer that you can possibly give. And if that takes you thirty seconds to give me an answer to a one word question, that's okay. That's probably like one of the... That's not the only fireable offense, but it's one of the only fireable offenses of working with me is like giving non precise answers. If you don't have the detail, that's also a detail that I need. Right? It's like, I ask a question and you give a detail, or you say, I actually don't know the answer to that question. And so then we go together to ask a person, and we follow that chain all the way down to what the actual root truth is. I have a friend, Josh Steinmann, who actually today was... Now you'll know when we're recording this, but today was appointed to the Department of War's board of technologists. I don't remember the exact acronym. Great guy. And he likes to say nothing in the world takes more than fifteen minutes, it's just who's fifteen minutes. Awesome, awesome line, and this is really true about diagnosing problems, like there is somebody in the world who knows the problem and who knows what's wrong, and it will probably take fifteen minutes to fix, but you have to know who it is, and you have to be relentless in finding out who it is and getting to them. Know, going to war for us means like spending an inordinate amount of time getting to know the actual truth of the situation to the ground level of reality. And then, honestly, like, once you know the situation, you know what you have to what you have to do, like, it is being willing to do unreasonable things. We have done some unreasonable things on this site in the last couple of months.