01:19:54 · Isaiah Taylor, Ty Morse
[01:19:54] S1: I have always appreciated Palmer for not letting, like, not letting it slide. Right? Like, he is... You know, he's actually a very warlike person. He's a very nice person, but he's he's, like, always at war with, like, somebody... But, like, that's the the nature of reality is, like, every CEO is at war. They're just... Like, a lot of CEOs are, like, kind of in denial that they're at war. They wanna try to, like, think about something else. They wanna go to the beach or whatever. And, yeah, like, I... That's something that I very much very much appreciate about Palmer. And, you know, actually, shout out to to him for in the early days of the company. Was one of the first, like, well known people to, like, vocally defend us and come to our defense when we were in the early days with this crazy vision that we wanted to go fast. And, you know, spent a lot of time actually defending me on Twitter in the the early days where people were saying this guy's a high school dropout, like, is he doing? You can't do this without a nuclear PhD. So, yeah, I I will always be very appreciative of that. [01:20:56] S0: There's this idea of doing things like just attacking the critical path, and that's like the thing that is in bold red letters on the screen, but then you also have to be doing things in parallel at the same time Yes. To make sure that basically, like, all these different things come together to achieve the critical path at some point down the line. So how do you kind of think about parallel pathing and structuring that the best?
01:21:17 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:21:17] S1: Things have, like, a certain amount of inevitable time. Like, there there are certain things that even if you have the most talented people in the world in front of you, and all the tools, and all the stuff, just takes a certain amount of time. Like, a good example of that is like heat treat. Right? Heat treat just takes time, and there's nothing you can do about it. Right? Because if you go hotter, then you're gonna melt the metal, and you're gonna get a different phase than you want. And if, you know, it's... If you think the the heat will penetrate faster, you know, you're actually just gonna, like, mess with the phase on the surface. So, like, there there's a certain amount of soak time for a metal part that is inescapable until... You know, now I say that a lot, I guess maybe there's, like, ways that you could use, like, electromagnetism or something to heat it up. Actually, someone should think about that. Could you just, like, microwave parts to heat your... Anyway, this is a distraction. Maybe someone's already doing that. I'll bet someone's already doing that. The point is, there are, like, irreducible time, you know, there are irreducible time frames to to some things, and I think one big mistake that companies make is, like, you have to stay focused, but also you have to start the clock on some really important things. And a super good example of that is where we are right now. One of the really unique things about Valar is that we are not going... We're not turning this reactor on, we're under the pilot program, but we're not turning it on in a national lab. This is not a national lab where we are here, and I love the national labs, they have done insane work in the history there. I mean, actually, my grandmother was born in a national lab, literally. My grandmother was born in Oak Ridge, so I have a deep affection for them, but if we were to go try to turn this plant on in a national lab, that would be a crutch. Right? And I know that as a company that needs to scale and wants to make thousands of these, we have to go and learn how to take a patch of dirt and turn it into a nuclear site. And if we did that in a lab, we wouldn't learn that. Right? And there's just... There's irreducible clock time. Right? I think one of the big things that people don't understand is there's two different types of time.
01:23:23 · Isaiah Taylor
There's like normal time, and there's clock time. Right? And clock time stops for no man. Right? Clock time keeps ticking no matter if you're Elon Musk or you're, you know, a dude on the street. Right? Clock time just keeps ticking. So clock time is the most valuable and most difficult asset. There's other types of time, right, like an engineer hour is like a fungible type of time where you just hire 10 more engineers and now you have 10 times the time, right? The clock time is not like that. And, you know, we have to start the clock ticking on really, really important things as soon as you can. Now, you can go overboard with this and start some clocks that you weren't ready for yet and distract yourselves and lose focus and fail. That's very possible. So there's an art to that. And I think Valar has stepped out and, you know, honestly, we're ticking on a lot of clocks that people thought were impossible. We are, you know, halfway through a lot of clocks that we literally were told was not physically possible. And by experts, by industry experts, by names that you would know, that, you know, later this year they're gonna see those those clocks resolve in our favor. So, yeah, you you have to be you have to be cognizant that like, more money doesn't solve the problem. In a in a problem with an air... An irreducible clock time problem, you can't throw money at it. This is one big mistake that the nuclear industry has been making for, you know, a decade and a half, and one thing that that was very surprising to me is that when we started the company, we had only raised a few million dollars. One of the most common complaints that I got was like, you haven't raised enough money, you're not gonna be able to win. I'm like, well, listen, like, I know people with billions of dollars in this industry who aren't doing anything. So money is actually not really the primary thing in this game. Like, there's something else. There are other factors than just how much cash you have in the bank, and it turns out that that was true. So, yeah, clock time and in the irreducibility of certain problems forces you into parallelism, and it forces you to take, again, capital risk and time risk and people risk and all these things. But fundamentally, that's what's going to allow you to to win.
01:25:27 · Ty Morse
[01:25:27] S0: When I think of the things that scare me the most, it's always the things that I just can't predict will be problems, and then they end up being problems. They're effectively like unknown bottlenecks Yeah. Unpredictability. How are you trying to think forward, I don't know, a year or two years, maybe more, to figure out where are the future bottlenecks and unknowns so that you never run into a problem where there's literally some paperwork that you have to fill out and it's like the deadline's next week and you just didn't even realize that it was a problem until now.
01:25:56 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:25:56] S1: Yeah. So the most fundamental answer here is that we keep the overall pace of the organization very high. Right? Because if you have an organization pace that's extremely high, you will be able to figure out a lot of different ways to succeed. Right? And and some things that look like, you know, irreducible bottlenecks, you could figure out a way around, you could engineer a way around, etcetera. But the other thing is is what I said before, which is to think about the end state. Like, what has to be true for us to have a million reactors? Like, I think about that concretely all the time. Like, there's decisions made in this plant, in this room, that look weird, until you think about like, well, we're trying to do that a million times, like, and and this, obviously, this plant is not ready for that, this one's not ready to be made a million times, but we learned some lessons on this that will contribute to doing this a million times. And so, yeah, you you have to think backwards from, like, what needs to be true for this for this to to take place, and and then the other thing is, like, you have to have a certain amount of paranoia. Like, I have a hard time going to sleep at night, thinking about all the different possible bottlenecks it might present, and, like, that's the downside of being a founder, like, just... You're gonna have to do that.
01:27:07 · Ty Morse, Isaiah Taylor
[01:27:07] S0: When we were walking through, you said, you know, for this one, we are gonna have all the wires underneath the floor Yep. But for future ones that we want it to just be modular, so you can just plop this crate down and suddenly it all fits together and [01:27:18] S1: Yep. [01:27:18] S0: What all, like, learnings have you have you gotten from this initial facility? [01:27:22] S1: Yeah. I mean, we've had thousands of of things that we've learned here. I mean, honestly, really simple things about, like, how do we serialize concrete versus MEP versus plant production. Right? Like, how do you do these things in the right order and do them extremely fast? Like, we built this really fast. Right? This was a bare patch of dirt in September. But we now know how to do it a lot faster. And when we go and do that, we're gonna do it again. There are not too many things that I can say specifically here yet because they are really, really valuable, honestly. Like, these these lessons, these, like, painful lessons we've learned, like, are our moat, and they're the value of the company. [01:28:08] S0: Let's say everything works, and you're ready to scale to a gigasite, and you're putting, a thousand of these things on a little plot of land. [01:28:14] S1: Yeah. [01:28:15] S0: How do you actually do that? What does that look I [01:28:17] S1: actually don't think it works that way, by the way. [01:28:18] S0: Okay.