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.
00:49:02 · Ty Morse
[00:49:02] S0: What are the best examples?
00:49:03 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:49:03] S1: One example, you know, that I'll give is to credit my nuclear review team here, my nuclear licensing team. You know, this is a hard thing to do, like, going from a patch of dirt in September to a nuclear plant ready to make power sitting here in July is an enormous challenge, and it's and it's especially big because we actually have power operations that we're planning for here, and it's not a DOE. It didn't start as a DOE site, and so there's all these layers of complexity that have to come through. And a couple months ago, we realized that, know, again, I think it was like in a stand up, we started asking like, okay, what's critical back to this, what's critical back to that, and we started to realize that there's this area of our licensing process like nobody really had a good understanding of. And so we started to pull on that thread and pull on that thread, and within about an hour, we realized that there was a huge gaping hole in our our work product that was imminently due in order to stay on timeline. And so we called a war room. There is a a trailer just over there. So if you walk, like, 200 feet that way, there's, like, a construction trailer. And we said, clear out the trailer, set up chairs, set up a screen, and call in everybody who is not working on hardware critical path, people who have nothing to do with the nuclear operation, people who, you know, have nothing to do with engineering, people who are working in accounting, our photographer, like literally everybody, we are all going to sit in this room and we are just not going to stop working on this problem and asking the question of how do we solve the next problem until it is done. And the people who have no context on the plant, they're not gonna be able to answer the technical questions, they're gonna be able to coordinate, right, and they're going to be able to say, has this question been answered, have we really understood what the regulation is saying here, Can we find somebody who knows the answer to that question? And it was over a weekend. I made this call on a... I think it was a Friday morning, and the war room wrapped up on a Tuesday morning. So, yeah, it's it's a maniacal search of truth and then being willing to do unreasonable things to fix problems.
00:51:20 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:20] S0: This morning we were driving in your car and I was kind of talking with you about like urgency and timelines and being maniacally urgent. And I really believe that if you look at someone like Elon, he's effectively this injector of urgency in all of his companies. He like unfucks bottlenecks and injects urgency. [00:51:39] S1: Yep. [00:51:40] S0: So with this sort of thing, how are you thinking about like, injecting as much urgency as possible Yeah. In the right places?