Relentless

Isaiah Taylor is the Founder of Valar Atomics.Valar just became the first startup in history to power an NVIDIA Blackwell with a nuclear reactor.

Timestamps:
0:32 Manufacturing nuclear reactors is a SpaceX style problem
2:58 Scaling from 1 reactor to 10
4:31 Why it’s so tempting to iterate on paper instead of actually building reactors
7:37 Having contact with reality - modular shielding
10:09 Steel is cheaper than software engineers
11:09 Why the idiot index is so high in nuclear
16:02 Becoming a nuclear company
18:57 It's important not to lie to yourself
21:55 Obsessing over critical path 
24:54 Nuclear reactors are relatively simple
30:35 Safety is a function of iteration speed
30:55 Why Valar had to vertically integrate
35:01 Designing a Toyota Camry vs a Ferrari 
38:07 Running through 1-way doors
41:13 Pulling rabbits out of a hat
46:13 Wartime mode
48:49 Being willing to do unreasonable things
51:20 How Elon injects urgency into his companies
56:56 Relentlessly chasing the goal of making energy 10x cheaper
58:32 What’s changed over the last 3yrs
1:00:51 Designing safe nuclear reactors
1:13:05 Learning from SpaceX - optimizing for scale
1:18:07 Having a high tolerance for looking dumb
1:19:50 How Palmer Luckey handles hit pieces
1:20:55 Inevitable time
1:25:26 Predicting unknown bottlenecks
1:28:08 Scaling
1:29:45 July 4th will be a rebirth for nuclear in the United States

Ryan Petersen is the Founder and CEO of Flexport.

Timestamps:
0:03 Pablo Escobar was a logistics guy
2:29 The explosion in tariff fraud 
8:58 The Dutch East India Company
11:20 History of global trade
14:39 1,000x spice markup
17:53 The British East India Company
24:02 How the British got 20% of China addicted to opium
27:44 The Forbes family & opium trade
30:40 Jewish trading networks
37:33 It’s illegal to criticize the King of Thailand
38:58 Strait of Hormuz
45:58 Maritime chokepoints

This conversation on how we're going to power the AI data center buildout is between US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright and Scott Nolan, Founder and CEO of General Matter.

Jim Belosic is the founder and CEO of SendCutSend.

Lulu is a PR & Comms expert who works with many of the best startup founders in the world.