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.
01:28:19 · Isaiah Taylor
[01:28:19] S1: Like what you're saying, we're like, oh, now I'm ready to scale. Like, it's so more it's so much more organic than that, and it's so much more driven by the regular pace of the organization. Like, I don't think you'll be able to to say at a certain point, like, oh, now you're scaling. Like, we're scaling right now. Right? Like, we built a reactor. We're about to turn it out. It's gonna make power. We're about... We're gonna do it again. We're gonna do it again. We're gonna do it And the tick rate of the organization will get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And soon the tick... You know, at some point the tick rate will be an hour, and then it'll be a minute. Right? And we'll be building millions of reactors. So, you I feel like I've spent a long time talking about other people's mistakes, and that's only because the mistakes I've made are very precious to me, and I don't want to reveal these secrets. But this is something I think the nuclear industry does too much is they're like, oh, we're gonna do all this engineering and design, and then we'll scale. It's like, no. If you aren't already in the process of building a reactor and then another one and then another one, you have not started the work of scaling yet. Scaling is a thing you do. It's a thing that your organization does. It's not a thing that you can design to and then start doing one day. It's a thing you're doing or you're not. It's a thing that's in your DNA or not. And, you know, I would say that Valar has been just built from the first day of the company to do that.
01:29:44 · Ty Morse
[01:29:44] S0: Let's end it on what does July 4 of this year signify?