Sachin and Adam
00:22:53 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:22:53] S0: Yeah. I think that... I mean, you know, you're looking at many of them right here. I think the more you can design your system for modularity, the more control you have over your supply chain, more effectively you can partner with folks, more redundancy and resiliency you have, the more likely it is, again, that you can... The more you can absorb and the more likely it is that you can maintain schedule and budget. But we... Yeah. We certainly have looked to a lot of other first of a kind projects to learn what tends to work and not work and are trying to draw on that experience here. [00:23:19] S1: I wanna ask a question about, like, the science and art of company building. Obviously, you know, in this conversation, you've pulled on a few different threads about how you guys are approaching company building. But do you have any kind of, like, guiding philosophies or way in which you guys have built Pacific Fusion?
00:23:35 · Carrie von Muench
[00:23:35] S0: I think the simplest way that I think about it is our job is to hire a lot of the best people in the world and empower them to do the best work of their lives fundamentally. I think when when you talk about what it looks like to do that in practice, there are various things big and little that come to mind. This is one just like simple, silly example. But I remember a decision that we made, like when we built our first budget was that we're gonna feed everyone lunch every day, isn't a big... It's like not a big thing. It might sound like a luxury, but it actually makes a huge difference to have people not need to leave to get food and like take a beat to eat together and get to know each other and support each other and then go back to work. I think you generally end up with better work that way when people are well fed. We have... We've hired a lot of our early hires were from referrals, like hire the best people you know, and then have them hire the best people they know tends to work out really well and becomes especially important when you're working in an environment where safety really matters. Like having that trust at the beginning makes a big difference. And I think, yeah, never underestimate a talented engineer and what they can come up with when you resource them to do something real. That's been really fun for me and really humbling for me to see what people can do and just, like, repeatedly be surprised by what our team does. In hiring, we have not compromised on hiring people who treat other people well. Like, that really, really matters. I think if we can build a team that that brings out the best in each other and runs really fast at the goals that were... That are laid out, that looks pretty different than an environment that becomes more and more political. So that's been a big priority, and it's been fun to see it pay dividends pay dividends over time.
00:25:06 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:25:06] S2: On the more general topic of energy, it's been this marked shift where Silicon Valley are caring a lot more about energy all of a sudden. I wanna, like, sort of deepen out, like, why do you think people are caring about energy right now? [00:25:17] S0: Well, we're seeing energy as the bottleneck to technological progress right now in a way we haven't seen in a long time. I think the AI revolution has certainly shined a big spotlight on how much more energy we need, how fast. And I think for a lot of people, losing the AI race is not something you want to contemplate. Losing the AI race because you can't build enough power fast enough is not a place that we want to be as a country. And as mentioned, our adversaries are building a lot of new power generation capacity really, really fast. For various reasons, we've made that hard in this country. So, yeah, it's become right the picks and shovels now for most of the industries we really care about. And we have, like, I I think one sort of misconception misconception in in the the energy industry for a while was, oh, we don't need more new technology to be able to build highly scalable power. And yes, we do. Like, we clearly can't build fast enough to meet demand right now. We need more scalable sources of firm power. And if we can do that, we can live in a country and in a world where energy is not the bottleneck to technical progress, not the bottleneck to human quality of life. That's the world we're trying to build, and it requires us to to, yeah, build these new sources of power generation like fusion.
00:25:17 · Carrie von Muench, Sachin
[00:25:17] S0: Well, we're seeing energy as the bottleneck to technological progress right now in a way we haven't seen in a long time. I think the AI revolution has certainly shined a big spotlight on how much more energy we need, how fast. And I think for a lot of people, losing the AI race is not something you want to contemplate. Losing the AI race because you can't build enough power fast enough is not a place that we want to be as a country. And as mentioned, our adversaries are building a lot of new power generation capacity really, really fast. For various reasons, we've made that hard in this country. So, yeah, it's become right the picks and shovels now for most of the industries we really care about. And we have, like, I I think one sort of misconception misconception in in the the energy industry for a while was, oh, we don't need more new technology to be able to build highly scalable power. And yes, we do. Like, we clearly can't build fast enough to meet demand right now. We need more scalable sources of firm power. And if we can do that, we can live in a country and in a world where energy is not the bottleneck to technical progress, not the bottleneck to human quality of life. That's the world we're trying to build, and it requires us to to, yeah, build these new sources of power generation like fusion. [00:26:23] S1: And on a personal level, what's one of the use cases of abundant energy that you care about?
00:26:29 · Carrie von Muench
[00:26:29] S0: I... I'm a general believer that technology is a huge force for good. Yeah. And I think we can talk about that in a lot of different ways. I really care that we can make things in this country. I think if you can't make physical things, if you can't make cars, if you can't build houses, if you can't, like, build stuff here, we end up in a really, really bad spot. We think about our kids and our grandkids and future generations. And to build stuff, you need power. I think you can talk about AI. Right? People talk about that a lot. I think that it is one of the biggest technological revolutions, if not the biggest technological revolution of our time. And you can talk about how you wanna use AI and what this means for the economy and otherwise. But at the end of the day, we wanna harness its full potential and if we wanna be the arbiters of that technology here in The United States, we need to be able to more power. I... You know, personally, the climate mission matters to me too. I think it's important that we decouple economic progress and human prosperity from climate change, and this gives us a chance to do that. And so, yeah, I I think broadly, when you look you look abroad, when you look at what's happening in Europe, elsewhere, when you're dependent on when you're dependent on adversaries, in some cases, certainly people you don't wanna be dependent on for power, you end up in a really, really bad spot in a country. A Patriot wanna see us win. If we're gonna win, we gotta build more power.
00:27:40 · Adam Miller, Carrie von Muench
[00:27:40] S2: And what's your mental model for how energy relates to economic growth? A lot of people talk about it in, like, a purely causative way where we have more energy and then we just have more growth, better living standards. Is it more so that we we have all these things we wanna do and build and that requires energy? So then if we have more energy, then we could do those things. Like, how does energy and growth relate together? [00:28:03] S0: Well, I think it's it's, in some ways, a pretty simple supply demand equation. You just gotta keep the price piece in mind. So if you have more and more abundant supplies, something like energy, cost goes down to customers, and you can do a lot of things. Right? It fundamentally changes the unit economics of every industry that depends on a lot of energy, and it ends up lowering the bills for customers. Right? All of us are energy customers in our homes, and those those ratepayer metrics also really matter. So I think fundamentally, more energy, more power supply, lower prices, faster economic growth. [00:28:31] S2: Yeah. On on that point, so you mentioned it changes the unit economics of certain industries having lower energy. What are the industries whose unit economics would benefit the most, might unleash more growth in those industries?