No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:51:40 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:51:40] S1: Exactly. Like, yes. In theory, could we go to know, hyperscaler who wants a gigawatt of power in a place? Like, yes. And and certainly, we will at some point. But we can also just put a gigawatt on the ground. Right? And we can do that on our own timing at our own pace, and that pace is going to be faster than anyone else in the world. And and the question flips around, which is if I have, you know, a gigawatt of power with land and fiber, is someone gonna put a data center there? It's like, yes. Absolutely. Right? And so, yeah, I think, like, in the long term, we'll maybe start to do some of these deals where a dedicated customer wants their own giga site for their hyper cluster or something like that, but it'll be driven by speed even in that case. Right? We'll go to the customers who say, you know, and we want it delivered in a year. Right? Not the customers who say, oh, we're thinking about this in three to four years. So really speed and scale. If you honestly, if you ask me any question and you keep digging back, you will find speed and scale. Like, that really is what nuclear is missing. It's missing its its Ford moment. It's Toyota moment. It's SpaceX moment where you have a company that realizes that the actual thing that nuclear is missing is scale deployment. And and that's really what we care about. And so the Giga site and we've got a site here. We're gonna build more reactors here. We have a a planned Giga site nearby. We get to go with conviction, build power. And, I'm absolutely confident that load will follow.
00:53:10 · Sarah Guo, S0, Isaiah Taylor
[00:53:10] S2: How do you if you just think of your primary objectives as speed and scale [00:53:14] S0: Yes. [00:53:15] S2: Given safety. Right? How do you, like, drive that personally as CEO? What do you wake up every day and, like, think about problems to solve or what to focus on? [00:53:24] S1: Yeah. This is one of those things that I think is the probably the most irreplaceable attribute of a company is its internal pace. We call it tick rate. [00:53:33] S2: Mhmm.
00:53:33 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:53:33] S2: Mhmm. [00:53:33] S1: That's a sort of a metric that we've designed around going critical in in new systems, but you could probably translate that to any industry. You know, in software, it's probably something like, you know, new, continuous integration builds per hour or something like that. But, I think it's the hardest thing to replicate. You have to start it from the first day of the company. It has to come from the CEO, and the first five team members have to have it deep in their bones. The first 20 team members have to have it deep in their bones. They have to be trained that when they hire people, they're looking for that in their you know, in those people's bones. And that's also not enough. Also, once you're in that setup, I have to constantly and I this is really what I do, go around the organization and speed things up. Right? You know, continuously ask. My two step's laughing over here because she's seen this happen many times. You know, I go I go war mode on things. Right? So, like, look around and, like, okay. That's going slow. And we will we will set up a a literal war room, and I guess not literal war room, but we'll set up a physical war room, and we will say, how do we turn a six month timeline into a four week timeline? Right? And maybe we'll hit eight weeks. Right? But it's not six months. And I I think I've realized, like, there is no autopilot for that. There's no automatic mode that makes a company faster inherently. There are lots of things you can do to set it up for success. But [00:55:00] S2: But you have to push.
00:55:00 · Sarah Guo, Isaiah Taylor
[00:55:00] S2: But you have to push. [00:55:01] S1: You will always I will always have to push, and I will always push. And it's because I know that the physics are here. Right? I know that energy will be a thousand times cheaper than it is today. I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that. And it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's gonna be in the future decades or the future centuries because that time is up to us. Right? It's up to us how quickly we go down that path, how quickly we make energy more abundant, and that feeds into everything else. So it's it's highly motivating for us, and we are are tackling it as fast as we can. [00:55:36] S2: People in their daily lives thinking about what happens for them if this works and get very cheap abundant nuclear energy. Like, imagine that future for us.
00:55:48 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:55:48] S1: Energy is the fundamental input to the quality of human life. If you look backward into time and say, how did humanity go from one standard of living to the next? It's always unlocked by cheaper energy. Right? So when we went from essentially a solar powered world, which is what we were in agrarian age, like, literally human muscles were solar powered because you were either eating plants or eating animals, and both of those things were essentially chemical energy that is built up by the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. Life was hard. Right? Life was really, really hard. When we got into underground hydrocarbons, you had this massive explosion of quality of life, right, where we have, you know, heat in the winter and we have AC in the summer, where we're able to drive cars to get to the hospital. Even really simple things. You know, we're in a an aluminum strut building right now. Every one of these these struts that you could see behind us are made of aluminum. There was a time when aluminum was considered a precious metal, where kings would literally make jewelry out of aluminum because it was that rare. And the thing that changed it to a literally structural metal that we'd make buildings out of, is energy becoming cheaper. Right? We figured out you know, Charles Hall here in The United States figured out aluminum electrolysis, and cheap enough energy means that you can actually just separate that oxide from the aluminum, and you can have pure aluminum metal. And that is that is entirely downstream of of energy. So I would say that the standard of living that we enjoy today is entirely downstream of the fact that we figured out you can make pretty cheap energy with hydrocarbons. Now our goal is not pretty cheap energy. It's insanely cheap energy, and that's gonna be unlocked by by nuclear. What it will look like, I think, is fundamentally unpredictable, but I I have a few ideas. First of all, I'm very, very excited about transportation. Like, if you think about the fundamental limits of why is it that I can't go see grandma every week, you know, on a plane? Like, why is it just so hard to do? Why is it so expensive? Why is it so complicated? It really just comes down to the fact that we've kinda squeezed as much juice out of jet fuel as we can. Right?
00:57:59 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
It's just hard to imagine jet fuel getting 10 times cheaper than it is today, and it's polluting the environment and all of these different things. If you could make energy 10 times cheaper, then you probably could go visit grandma every other day. You know, just on a on a Saturday, it takes thirty minutes, and, you know, she lives across the country, but you you go and visit her on the weekend. I'm very excited about what I would call hyper techno industrialism. This is a term I invented for Okay. [00:58:28] S2: Haven't heard it.