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SPEAKER_03: Hey everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. Super excited about today's guest because we're not going to be talking about an app today.

SPEAKER_05: No, we're not going to be talking about enterprise software today or venture capital and angel investing. All those things are great. We talk about them here on This Week in Startups, but I wanted to, in 2021, open up the aperture

SPEAKER_07: a bit and talk about some bigger topics and how startup companies are trying to take on climate change, right? This is a big topic for us. And if you look at what happened during the pandemic, one of the most interesting things that happened was we learned what a world without a bunch of cars spewing carbon into our atmosphere would look like. And lo and behold, people could see mountain ranges they previously couldn't see. You could see the stars at night. The air suddenly got better. And we have the possibility, we have the technology already to be fully on sustainable energy that does not cause global warming and does not cause pollution.

SPEAKER_05: One piece of that puzzle that we have stopped using, and we'll get into it with our guest of why we stopped using nuclear energy fusion, why we stopped pursuing these alternate energy solutions is a big question I have.

SPEAKER_07: And so today on the program, Bob Mumgaard from Commonwealth Fusion Systems is here. Welcome to the program calling in from Boston. Yes, Bob?

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, glad to be here.

SPEAKER_05: Okay, now, you've just recently raised $84 million, and you're on track for a demonstration

SPEAKER_07: fusion reactor by 2025. Do I have that correct?

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, that's right. Yep.

SPEAKER_07: Okay, so explain to the audience what nuclear fusion technology is, and what nuclear technology

SPEAKER_14: is, and why you're pursuing this.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. So, you know, most people have, you know, a complete dependence on fusion, they just don't know it. They depend on the sun.

SPEAKER_15: Like, the way the sun is powered, and 99% of the entire universe's energy gets made is through the fundamental process of fusion, where you take light elements, combine them together, and release just gobs of energy out of that process, and slowly actually build up all the elements that make, like, us up. And that process, you know, we've known about it for about 100 years, actually, that that's how the stars worked. But we've never actually harnessed it on Earth. The process that we talked about nuclear power that we use on Earth, it's actually the exact opposite of that. It is taking heavy stuff and splitting it up to lighter stuff through a chain reaction. And that's what we get, you know, about 20% of our energy from today. That's nuclear power. But there's been a big effort over the last about 50 years, really, to figure out how to build fusion power. Because if you were able to, if you're able to do it on Earth, you would have a really fundamentally new energy source, something that was very different than anything that we have so far.

SPEAKER_07: And just to be clear, when you are doing a fusion reaction, what is actually happening? And does this exist already in the world? Or are you doing this for the first time?

SPEAKER_20: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: So, essentially, what we have to do to get a fusion system to work is you have to build basically a star in a bottle. And it's like very sci-fi. It's like how you like, you know, look up in comic books or Spider-Man or, you know, old Keanu Reeves movies. And in order to do that, you have to create a machine, effectively, that takes materials, small amounts of fuel that is equally accessible to everyone. It's everywhere. It's basically hydrogens. And combines them together at really, really hot temperatures, like hotter than the center of the sun, like 10 million, 100 million degrees. And in that process, unleashes a lot of energy by converting a tiny bit of mass to energy as the fuel turns into helium. And so, we've been researching this for a long time. We understand how it works in stars. And we actually built a whole bunch of machines on Earth, about almost 200 of them funded by like governments at places like MIT, which is where CFS came from. And we've steadily gotten better and better and better at this, but we've never actually built a machine that will make more power out than it takes to run. So, interesting science, but not something that we're going to power the world up with. And really, what we're seeing now is a generation of startups, including CFS, but also National Labs, who are getting close to going above that line and making a machine that can make more power up than in. And then CFS is one of those companies that's attempting to do that.

SPEAKER_26: So, for people who have no background in this technology, like myself, the amount of energy

SPEAKER_07: it takes to heat the hydrogen is tens of millions of degrees. So, you have to power that with some energy source, correct?

SPEAKER_05: Is that electricity, is that kerosene, is that nuclear reactor? How does one heat that hydrogen? And what you're saying to me is, you're spending so much heating it up to create the fusion reaction that you're actually losing energy.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: That's historically what's happened. And it's actually like the way you heat it up is surprisingly mundane. Like, we heat it up effectively using a microwave oven. It's just like, you take about 3,000 microwave ovens, maybe a little more, and you gang them together and you microwave a grain of rice. You do that for a few seconds. And if you insulate it well enough, if it's like perfectly insulated, it'll get really, really, really, really hot. And if it gets hot enough and it's insulated well enough, it'll actually start to fuse just like it would. And in fact, we do this in particle accelerators all the time. Um, and if you can get it insulated well enough, you can actually make more power from that reaction than it took to heat it. Um, and so you're really, uh, you're, you're building. And when I say more power, like think about, think about it in terms of millions, factors of millions. So in these reactions, you get 200 million times more energy out per fuel in then say, burning a hydrocarbon. So that means my entire life, like my entire, my house, my whole thing, like, is like fuel like this big for my entire life. And that's exactly why the stars are still here. Like if the stars were burning coal, like we do today, like the stars would have burnt out after 5,000 years. Like we never even have this, but because they're doing fusion, they're billions of years old.

SPEAKER_26: And when you said like this amount, you, you held up your hands to essentially the, what

SPEAKER_33: would be like a pint glass of beer.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_33: Since you're from Boston, I'll use an analogy that you can, it's like a pint glass, right?

SPEAKER_05: It's, that's the amount of fusion that would have to occur. And so let me ask a really stupid question. When the sun has always been amazing to me that it burns in what seems to be such a predictable

SPEAKER_27: way that we can have an existence on earth for some millions of years.

SPEAKER_37: How is the sun stable and it doesn't just go and burn out or explode in a colossal cataclysmic

SPEAKER_27: event? It's almost like it's so perfectly designed to send the exact amount of heat to us.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah, it's a good question. So actually, I'm a plasma physicist by training. So this is like going back to grad school here. And it's, it's a good question.

SPEAKER_15: So the way the stars actually work, uh, is there an equilibrium by their very nature that the gravity is pulling everything really, really close. And it's basically building its own thick blanket to keep heat in. And at the core, it's getting hot enough and dense enough that fusion actually starts to happen. And that produces heat, which wants to make the whole thing expand. And so the sun actually, it's not perfectly stable. It actually has cycles where it expands and contracts ever, ever, ever so slightly. And we can actually track those. And we do track those things like sun cycles and things. We don't, not quite sure exactly how it all works yet, but those stars are all doing that. And they're, they're running us a fusion cycle inside their core. And eventually they do run out of fuel and then they explode. So, and that's a supernova. So you, you know, we, we got to get out of the solar system before, before that happens. Luckily, you know, we have 4 billion years to do that, but you know, 4 billion years is a long time, but really we got problems to solve like in the next 40 years on earth, um, that will tell us whether or not we even have that opportunity.

SPEAKER_07: How stable is what you're doing in creating this fusion reaction? In other words, we have from science fiction, from fantasy, from, you know, books and movies and our collective consciousness. When we say fusion power, that it is incredibly unstable.

SPEAKER_37: And that if you screw up, Bob, we all die. Is this, I mean, you're laughing, but if you screw up, do we all die? Does it leave a giant crater using 3000 microwaves to heat up this hydrogen?

SPEAKER_43: What happens if it goes wrong?

SPEAKER_25: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: Uh, the way to think about it is, you know, people think of like things being really, really hot, right? Like they think about like lava, like you've got, you know, lava, like melting through something. And then that's how, you know, you can depict things. And if you're, you know, Doc Ock or something, but the reality is that the total amount of energy inside this, this plasma that that's an effusion system is only like the same amount of energy in like a pot of boiling water. It's actually not much energy. It's just very, very hot. It's like, you have a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of mass. It's very, very hot. And so it's, it's less like lava and more like a candle, like in the wind. And literally you can blow it out. So, I mean, if you, the, the way that one of the problems in fusion is it constantly keeps going out, um, and so you have to really create these, these conditions that are completely not on earth.

SPEAKER_45: They're in, they're in space, right? Like stars are in space. You don't, you know, walk through the forest to find a star.

SPEAKER_15: So like you have to recreate that on earth, which means it's a, you know, a fairly complicated machine, um, just to enable the life support for it to go.

SPEAKER_07: Okay. So when we get back from this quick break, I want to, I want you to describe for the audience what this machine, this fusion reactor would look like and what is the hardware and the components of it in order to make this reaction occur with the right temperature,

SPEAKER_03: the right pressure, uh, and the right heating in order to create that reaction.

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SPEAKER_07: Check it out. Odoo dot com slash twist. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Bob Mumgard is here. He is with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is CFS dot energy.

SPEAKER_52: There's a dot energy domain name. Apparently, they've raised $84 million in new investment recently. I read about that and I just thought this would be something amazing to get you on the pod and talk about it.

SPEAKER_07: Okay. So we understand what a fusion reaction is sort of. It's what occurs in the sun. It requires a massive amount of energy to turn hydrogen and create this reaction. I think we're in sync so far, right?

SPEAKER_53: Yep.

SPEAKER_05: We understand why it does this and why it doesn't already exist. If we've done this, we know it exists and we've done various permutations on it.

SPEAKER_07: What is this physical device going to look like and how far are we away from having it?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So the way to think about what this thing is, is it's basically like a magnetic bottle. So you use very strong magnets to bottle up the star. And so, you know, people think it has like a sphere. It's actually, you know, the other thing, donuts, right? Like Homer Simpson, what can donuts not do? Like one thing donuts do very well is they can make magnetic bottles. And if you build a machine, which is an acronym and, you know, technical speak called tokamak, but it's by far the most researched thing using a magnetic bottle. Yeah. Tokamak. Yeah. Thanks. Russian thing. But if you, if you build one of these and like, you can build one of these in university and there's like 155 of these that have been built. It's a magnetic bottle that inside in the donut, sort of the jelly of the donut, like is the plasma. Very, very, very hot. And then it's very, very well insulated. It's compressed by the magnets. And we've done this over and over again. And we've gotten better and better and better at it. And if you actually like look at the figure of merits that you need to do for fusion, like how hot you get it or how well insulated it is, we've actually beat Moore's law and almost all those figures of merit at places like Princeton and places like the national labs in the Bay area and places in France and people that do this for a living, you know, entire departments at national labs that do this. So we've gotten a long way. We've come just from nothing to something that's sitting right below where you would have a plasma that would make more fusion power than it takes to heat it. And we've been sort of stuck there for a little while. And we've been trying to figure out, okay, like, how do we get past that? And really, we only had two options. And one of them was an option that was completely closed to us until just recently. And that's really where CFS comes in.

SPEAKER_57: And so you have this donut-like reactor.

SPEAKER_05: It's a giant size. I'm looking at some images online of these. These have been in construction. And we've been working on these for how many decades? When did this work start?

SPEAKER_07: And what have we accomplished in these Tokamak fusion reactors to date?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, so we started them, you know, actually the Soviets started them. It was a big deal, like the Taunt era, right?

SPEAKER_15: Cold War and international exchanges of scientists and, you know, subterfuge and all of the spy stuff. And actually, by the 70s, we had made an international science effort to advance these. And what we were able to do is to take them from, you know, cold, not insulated plasmas all the way up to the point where they can make just under more power than it takes to run. So they've gone, you know, from sort of like temperature of a flame to temperature of the sun in that amount of time. And we've now developed all of the understanding of how to make these things work. And it's actually like an incredible feat that physicists and engineers around the world have done, all funded by taxpayers and the open science sort of spirit, to be able to build these machines, predict how they work, and actually have them work according to the predictions. Which is, you know, when you know you've got something really, really good. Like, we can't like make drugs work according to predictions, but we can actually make 100 million degree plasmas work according to predictions.

SPEAKER_07: So we, we've made 250 of these in the world. And the challenge now is to have the energy that it takes to run one of these be less than the energy coming out of it. That's where we are after 40 or 50 years, 50 years of working on this.

SPEAKER_41: Is that right? That's, yeah, pretty, pretty accurate.

SPEAKER_15: And, you know, that's sort of like the point where it goes from being an interesting science experiment to like, oh, this could be useful. Um, and, you know, sort of from the bench to, to something out in the market. And, you know, it's still got a little ways to go. Like we got, we got some more work to do, but it was interesting enough. And the, the potential payoff is so big to be able to build an energy source like this. Like, you know, this is a, uh, you know, that, that going back to the pint glass, right? If every, if every glass of beer powered everyone for their entire life, like we wouldn't need that much beer sort of sad.

SPEAKER_05: So you're aiming in 2025 to have one of these that reaches, is there a term for, you know, net energy positive, just to say it in plain language?

SPEAKER_68: Yeah. Break-even.

SPEAKER_05: Break-even. Great. So we're almost at break-even and you have to get us past break-even. And then is, you know, just one notch above break-even the breakthrough, or is there like, you've got to get 10x past break-even?

SPEAKER_15: So if you think about where we've come from, so we've gone from, you know, 13 orders of magnitude, you know, 13 zeros behind the decimal place, almost nothing to just below break-even. And we, we got to get above break-even and just a little bit beyond that. And, and we now know enough that you can design machines up there. And so I'm sure you've, you've, uh, on what we're doing here, seeing the eater machine, the big, huge machine in France that they're building. That's, that's all the nations of the world basically saying, Hey, let's go build the largest construction project in Europe to get above break-even and a tokamak.

SPEAKER_45: And the consensus is they can do it, but man, is it big and expensive. And that was really the, the only option we had when we decided to do that.

SPEAKER_15: And what, what we're doing at CFS is we found that there's from a technology related to the magnet, instead of a magnetic bottle, we found that you can make it much, much, much smaller, like, like factors of like 50 smaller, um, by putting in this new type of magnet. And that's what we're, that's what we're doing now.

SPEAKER_62: Got it. So the magnets could be the big unlock here.

SPEAKER_57: If we get the magnets, right, then maybe it doesn't have to be as big or as costly is, is that what happens? Exactly. The efficiency.

SPEAKER_15: Yep. Yep. It's like, now you go from having to build something that's like the size of, you know, an office block to something that, you know, fits on a tennis court. And so this is like, you know, in sort of the tough, couldn't think about like tough technology, like hardware based technology. This is the type of breakthrough you look for, right? This is like something where you've got a good established science basis now underpinned by universities. You've got a new technology, you know, that came in that suddenly changes the game, you know, whether that's DNA and fast gene sequencing, right? Like those types of things and, and fusion and fusion's case, it's, we've gotten so far in the science, we have climate change bearing down on us and we're sitting right below the point where it's useful. And all of a sudden this magnet comes up, you know, let's put these things together and let's, let's change the scale. And, and that's really what led to CFS two years ago.

SPEAKER_52: So the ITER fusion project, ITER is this multidisciplinary or multi country project in France that's building a giant reactor.

SPEAKER_77: Is that correct?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Funded by the, the EU and Japan and Russia and China and India, the United States, Korea, it's basically the industrialized world.

SPEAKER_52: And it's, uh, according to their website. Right. It is 72% completion to first plasma plasma.

SPEAKER_07: What does that mean?

SPEAKER_80: Uh, so 72% completed to the point where they, they turn it on and they make a plasma inside

SPEAKER_15: of it that, that shows the machine works, but they still got about 10 years to go beyond that before they start to make more power than it takes to run.

SPEAKER_07: Got it. If you succeed in making these magnets a magnitude better, 10 X better, a hundred X better. What do you have to do?

SPEAKER_14: Twice as good? 50% better?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So in these machines, like we've built so many of them, we understand them well enough to know that the performance goes like the magnetic field to the fourth power. So huge lever on it. Right. And so even a factor of two, you're talking about, you know, factor of 16 on the other side. So we're aiming for just a factor of two, which was granted a factor of two beyond what people

SPEAKER_63: have been working on for a long time, but a new material allowed us to do that.

SPEAKER_27: Got it. Got it. And they're spending $20 billion on the Eater project.

SPEAKER_84: More.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Wow. That's incredible. If you succeed in your mission to make the magnets better, you could potentially upgrade

SPEAKER_05: the magnets in what they're doing, or they could leverage your technology or you'll be building is, is, I guess the question is, and you can answer this on the other side of

SPEAKER_07: our quick, uh, sponsor break is how many of these and at what scale do we need to build them? Will there be one per country? Will there be one per state? Will there be one per city, one per neighborhood? What is the footprint in 20 years of fusion reactors, uh, in America and around the world? If you succeed, when we get back on this week in startups, Hey everybody, I want to take

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SPEAKER_07: code twist. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Bob Mumgard is here, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS energy, CFS dot energy.

SPEAKER_89: So when we left and we were talking about, God, the E-T-E-R, is that my pronouncing that correct? E-T-E-R, I-T-E-R, that $20 billion project is going on. They're just getting, I guess, they're 70% of the way to having the plasma flowing, which means it works.

SPEAKER_07: You're working on the magnets to make all of these around the world better. So if you succeed with your magnets, I guess you become the source of magnets or you're making your own proprietary reactors. Is that the business model here? What's the business model for you? And then how does it manifest in the real world when you and I are in our 60s or 70s?

SPEAKER_89: I'm not sure how old you are, but, you know, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, is there

SPEAKER_69: going to be one of these in everybody's backyard or in everybody's DeLorean or Tesla? Or is it going to be like one, you know, per country or?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, it's a good question.

SPEAKER_15: I think, you know, to tackle the question of like, what does it mean to do it at scale, which is, you know, really what we're talking about here. It's like, what do you have to do at scale for the energy system? I think, you know, there's some like crazy numbers if you think about it. It's the energy systems, the largest market in the world, like, you know, just oil and gas, publicly traded oil and gas companies, largest in the world are only a tiny fraction of the entire energy market. And so to solve climate change, you know, we're talking about replacing trillions and trillions of dollars of energy infrastructure with something, something that doesn't emit where what we have today, we know we have to get rid of it. And so that's the level of market opportunity that all of the clean tech sides are going after. And what fusion really allows you to do is you basically can build a machine that's big enough to power like a town. It's not like a machine that's like powered an entire region or city. It's like the size of the way we power our stuff today. It's like, you know, and you see a gas plant. It's like, oh, you put a fusion machine there. And you get rid of the pipeline and you get rid of the smokestack and that machine, if you know how to build it, its fuels are equally accessible to everybody. So it's a machine that makes power from effectively nothing. And so it's like a complete reimagining of the way we do energy. Like, like one way to think of it is up till now, we've done energy through like hunter gatherer style.

SPEAKER_94: Like we have like rooted around to the ground.

SPEAKER_41: You like dig or you like wait to trap the wind or the, or the, or the sun. Right. And what this is, is like, okay, build it.

SPEAKER_15: If you got the blueprints and you got the tools to build it, you can build it, you can run it and you get energy. And that's a really, you know, it's like, why is fusion in all the sci-fi? It's because that's profound. And what we're trying to do is to try to make that into something that then can be, you know, a product, right? It's not a giant international project, you know, good luck to them. That's great. But it's something that it's not quite like put in your basement, but something that you could put into the existing infrastructure as we turn over the infrastructure to clean energy.

SPEAKER_05: And what do you think the timetable is for that? If you were to, you know, bet your life savings on it, because you've already bet your career, it seems, and your entire reputation on it. So we might as well ask this question, like, you're all in on this. What is your, if we were to pick an over-under to a city, but one city, one city in the world

SPEAKER_89: is powered, you know, whatever, a hundred thousand people, a million people, something in that

SPEAKER_07: range. But let's pick a town. A hundred thousand people in a town are powered by a fusion reactor and fusion energy. Am I referring to it properly, fusion technology, or is it called nuclear fusion technology?

SPEAKER_97: Fusion energy is the-

SPEAKER_07: Fusion energy is the proper way you would say it. Why do people say nuclear fusion technology?

SPEAKER_41: That's a good question. It's a bit redundant, right?

SPEAKER_15: Fusion is a nuclear reaction, but it's the opposite reaction of the one everyone's used to. So, you know, it's confusing to refer to it as nuclear often, because like nuclear is synonymous with fission, with splitting the atom, it's like, you know, and we don't refer to, you know, burning something as chemical combustion. So we call it fossil fuel energy, right? And it's fusion energy.

SPEAKER_21: So fusion energy, when will a town, if you had to pick an over-under, if we were to make

SPEAKER_27: a bet, a betting line, what year is that, that a million populous city is powered by

SPEAKER_03: one of these?

SPEAKER_15: That it's a, it's a really, really good question. And, you know, if you were to go back even just five years ago and ask that question, the answer would unanimously be, ah, it's like after 2050, it's like, ah, 2060, somewhere in there.

SPEAKER_103: 30, 40 years, got it. Three or four decades of work.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah. But what we see now, and one of the things that's driving money in the space and then

SPEAKER_15: causing the flywheel to accelerate in fusion, is that there are legitimate technology approaches that could push that significantly earlier. Is it 2025? No. Is it 2030? Well, if we hit everything right, maybe. Is it 2035? There's some good chances on the table to do that. And so that's, that's a, a big change in how people have thought about this technology and where you see governments accelerating their investment, passing new legislation about it, where you see research getting more to it.

SPEAKER_07: invested, if we were to pick a number, is it a trillion dollars, a hundred billion dollars?

SPEAKER_89: What would have to be invested to make that an almost certainty and nothing life is certain,

SPEAKER_07: but is there a number where you said, Hey, if we put a hundred billion or 250 billion, or even a trillion dollars or $10 trillion towards this, it's going to happen.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. It's, it's billions, but not tens of billions.

SPEAKER_27: So for as little as $10 billion, we could make this a certainty, which then leads me to

SPEAKER_05: wonder why are, is every government, and we're in the middle of a stimulus package, spending trillions of dollars and people are spending tens of billions of dollars on solar.

SPEAKER_27: Why are we not just giving 10 teams in America, a billion dollars each?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, it's a, uh, well, you know, first, like, it's not clear.

SPEAKER_15: Why are we doing that? We, to some extent we are increasing investment. And in fact, they just, right before the end of the year, they passed a fusion bill first time in a long time. That was part of the energy package that said, Hey, let's put cost shares and competition from federal money going out to try to do basically what we did with SpaceX and orbital and going, building, you know, rockets. Let's try to do that in fusion because there's enough people. There's about 20 companies that are doing this. There's about $2 billion of private investment already in the space. So let's, let's put a little bit more on there and see where this can go in the short term. Like who's got, who's got legs to, to take the next step where the next step in many cases is,

SPEAKER_41: is either, you know, aiming for just above, uh, you know, breakthrough, like going beyond breakeven, um, like CFS or, or getting ready to do that, um, for other companies.

SPEAKER_15: And, and so you're seeing that come in both from the private side and from the government side. And it's not clear that, you know, dumping a hundred billion dollars is a good idea in this space, right? There's only so many trials that you, you can do. There's not so much, so much you can do within reason on, on speed.

SPEAKER_41: Um, but you know, it's at the, it's at the starting gate,

SPEAKER_89: which is interesting because I don't know if you remember this during the Obama era, uh, Solyndra, Tesla, they all received, you know, a couple of billion dollars,

SPEAKER_03: a couple of hundred million dollars to see if, you know, we could actually get electric cars on the

SPEAKER_33: road and Fisker and Solera, Solyndra and famously all those things went bust, but Elon paid back all those learns early. And if they had been equity, can you imagine if even 1% or 10% of that money was equity versus a loan

SPEAKER_05: that would have paid off and the government would have made a profit on it. And so our government at the end of 2020, I understand Trump in the COVID relief put in like $325 million in financing for fusion energy, something very modest and they're matching those dollars. Is that the idea they're going to match the dollars?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So that's, that's one idea. Um, and that's the idea that was in the, the fusion bill is that it's, it's actually modeled just after, uh, you know, Elon's other play on SpaceX, which is, you know, Hey, these companies are trying to do something really hard if they do it, let's, let's give them, you know, take the receipts and pay them back like half. So, so match on milestone based reimbursement, which, you know, is very, very successful. You know, you look at the, uh, crew dragon dropping off people, the international space station, you're like, Oh, that is a direct, um, resolve of doing this. And, and even in that case, the, the taxes that have been paid on just building those rockets actually paid back with the government spent, um, to, to run that program.

SPEAKER_89: When we get back from this final break, I want to know what a country has the best chance of

SPEAKER_07: becoming the leader in this space. If not America, France, China, who has the intelligence in terms of people like yourself,

SPEAKER_89: colleges like MIT, whatever. I'm not sure where the fusion energy brain trust comes from. I want to know if we are educating enough brain power, because at the end of the day, what I know about startups is you're only as good as your team.

SPEAKER_07: I want to know who's got the best funnel of intelligent team members in the world to make fusion happen and to save the goddamn planet when we come back on this week in startups.

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SPEAKER_05: forget about solar, forget about wind for a second. Fusion is the long game. There is no

SPEAKER_33: other solution out there that comes close to this, correct, Bob? That's what we think. Yeah. I mean, is there anything when you go and debate, you know, energy, you know, after having a couple of pints in Boston with a bunch of brainiacs from Harvard and MIT, whatever, is there any other technology that somebody says,

SPEAKER_37: forget fusion, this is going to be the solution? Or is it not everybody universally agrees fusion is

SPEAKER_15: the holy grail? Yeah, it's it's in the long game. Everyone always gets there. It's like, yeah, you know, if you want to take the population of the earth, and you want to put them at the level of sustainability, the level of energy use the level of their lifestyle that you can get in the West, and you want to do that sustainably, and you want to recycle everything and make the economy circular and you don't want to ruin the planet. Like that amount of energy is a lot. And there is even if you like think about and I'm a big pro solar person, big pro wind, even if you think about the the long game on those, like eventually, you've got a lot of solar wind. And it's sort of at a level that's like, Oh, man, that's, that is a lot. So fusion always, everyone always gets there. Eventually, it's okay, like, you know, Sim City 2000, the final power plant you got was fusion for a reason. It's like, right, that's where it goes. The question is, can you get there soon enough?

SPEAKER_07: And like, who's going to get there first? So that leads me to what I've learned about

SPEAKER_05: building startups, which is, you're only as good as the talent that can join your team. And is that the

SPEAKER_07: same in your line of work fusion energy? And if so, where do fusion energy scientists and entrepreneurs come from? Who is the number one source of those brainiacs?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, it's, it's, you know, so it's an international effort, right? So there's people that are working on this all over the world, basically, you know, you get to a certain level and countries start to invest in this. And so like, you know, China's got a big effort pouring money in Europeans are building the largest fusion machine ever attempted. The UK is doubling down to get their industry on board with fusion. But really, the United States, you know, we have a really, really fundamental advantage, which is, it's not just, you know, fusion brainiacs, like people that know how stars work and plasma physicists, and we like those people a lot. But it's also people that know how

SPEAKER_45: to build companies and build ecosystems to take those scientific results, and as quickly as possible, pull them out and put them into a package that can then be supercharged with finance and with

SPEAKER_15: manufacturing and going. And that I think the US is clearly clearly the leader so far, and I think you're seeing it accelerate, and you're seeing entities, you know, like CFS, really, you know, take advantage of the people that came before and clean tech, right, you see more and more money coming

SPEAKER_45: into clean tech, you see more and more funds that are allocating significant parts of their portfolio to

SPEAKER_15: these types of technologies, you're seeing more venture capitalists understanding what it takes to build bits, you know, go from bits to atoms and how to transition that. And you're also seeing talent, like coming out of the forges of, like, SpaceX, 30% of CFS is SpaceX alumni of some sort, right, you're coming out of companies that have now done this a few times, either from the clean tech, you know, back before the recession, or from the most companies in aerospace, or, you know, even medical devices and things, you're starting to see a confluence of all that happening in the United States. It's not just infusion, it's in it's in technologies that are across the energy spectrum.

SPEAKER_07: If I'm correct, scientists who understand the fusion reaction are but one component here, you need material science scientists, and financiers and people who have figured out

SPEAKER_05: how to get raw science, material science, and actually result in a product as well.

SPEAKER_03: So it's not just about the scientist, brainiac, it's also the person who knows how to packages for

SPEAKER_07: you to get a customer, your customer would be a state in the United States, correct?

SPEAKER_41: Oh, no, actually, you know, the if you look at like, who buys power plants, or who buys power? Yeah, it's, it's a surprise. Yeah, yeah, most people don't know where their power comes from.

SPEAKER_15: So you have everything from utilities, you know, traditional like con ed, you know,

SPEAKER_33: sort of sort of stodgy quasi government, or the private companies that are government regulated.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, the government regulated, and it really depends on where you are, like, if you're in the

SPEAKER_41: southeast United States, it's heavily government regulated, if you're where I am, it's actually a fairly open market. You have, you know, private infrastructure investors, big pension funds that own power plants, basically. And you also have people like, like Google and Amazon or Ford, who buy power. And so when you see like Google say, Okay, we want to go and and be 100% clean energy,

SPEAKER_15: like they're out there, you know, writing, underwriting the financing and spending the money to get things built, that are power plants. And then they write a contract to take the power.

SPEAKER_05: And in fact, Google said not only do they want to be carbon neutral, they said they want to be carbon, they want to pay for all the carbon they've used in the history of Google, if I remember correctly. And then they want to be a net, what would it be that they're removing carbon from the atmosphere, like on a net basis, like, so they'd like to be net positive on that. So in a way, your

SPEAKER_141: customer is ultimately going to be those server farms with all of our data on them.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, a lot of people don't realize this. But you know, if you're surfing on your phone, like, the power your phone uses is it's not the power that's coming from your charger overnight power your phone uses is all those giant data centers. And it's quite a bit of power. And, and it's not going to go down. And same way, you know, you want to recycle, you know, our electronics and turn them into new products, instead of dumping them and across the ocean, like, you're going to need a lot of power to do all this. And this is now seen, you know, broadly, as we're going to need lots and lots of electricity, you're gonna need lots and lots of heat, and we're gonna need to do all that.

SPEAKER_30: How far are you away from selling Google on buying 10 reactors from you?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, it's still a little early for that, you know, like, proof is in the pudding, like, okay, we've been working on this a long time, we talked about doing this for decades, but we think we're really close. Now, we're the type of people at MIT saying, okay, let's push it across the line. Let's show up somewhere where you can push a button, make a star in a bottle that makes more power than it takes to run gets everything real hot to the point, you got to shut it down, pour water on it and cool it off again, and then go again. And at that point, that's the point that you start to say, Okay, now let's start to find where we're going to build the first one and harness that heat and turn it into electricity or turn it into a Google, Facebook, Amazon,

SPEAKER_05: would love to make an early bet on you and say, Hey, I'll, I'll give you $100 million for the first

SPEAKER_69: two or whatever. What do you think one of these reactors will cost? You know, the first, I mean, obviously, the first one's going to cost billions of dollars in terms of research up until now. And I think the United States, based on a note I have here has put $50 billion into fusion already, over 50 years or something. So the first one will cost theoretically 50 billion, but you can

SPEAKER_05: advertise that over, you know, 500 of these. So what do you think they'll retail for, you know,

SPEAKER_89: to power some giant data center? I'm sure it's it depends is the answer. But ballpark, are these going to be worth $1 billion each? And how does that compare to building a nuclear reactor, which I think is really what you're up against, right? This is going to be compared to building a solar farm, a wind farm, a nuclear reactor, or one of those. Am I correct? Yeah, that's ultimately the beauty,

SPEAKER_15: the beautiful part about fusion, right? Is that or actually all of energy, the beautiful part about all of energies, you know, the metrics, like you build a plant, you add up what it costs to build, you amortize it about how much energy uses. And, and that's a commodity, you know, comes out of a wire with electrons. And so the good thing about fusion is, it's a machine that makes power without fuel, and it makes a lot of power out of a relatively small machine. And so when you add it all up, it looks very, very competitive, if you can get it down the scale that we're aiming to get it, you know, you're still in these cases, you know, investing the better, better part of a billion dollars to build one of these. But that's something that people do all the time, like, you know, a solar farm, a good utility scale solar farm is $1 billion. And so this is at the in the channel that people are used to doing from a finance from procurement from a building perspective.

SPEAKER_62: So they're not going to be shocked when they see your price tag and the 10 cents or 7, 8 cents,

SPEAKER_07: 9 cents a kilowatt hour that nuclear cost, this will be similar, much cheaper, aiming to be cheaper

SPEAKER_15: than that, aiming to be, you know, below 5 cents a kilowatt hour. So if 5 cents, a kilowatt hour happens

SPEAKER_07: for fusion, and nuclear is currently like 10 cents, I think, and it's going down to nine, maybe or eight is the target. And this you do five, what does that do to nuclear reactors and solar, and I guess

SPEAKER_41: solar and wind would be much more than nuclear? Depends on where you build them. Really depends on where you build them. But the, you know, the really important thing here is that, you know,

SPEAKER_15: if you get into the right ballpark, like a, we have to build all of the above, like, you know, talked about the trillions of trillions of dollars that that have to be replaced in infrastructure for fossil fuels, like, it doesn't matter what fossil fuels cost them, or we're not going to let people build them, right? Then, so we're going to build something. And we're going to build the thing that's most cost effective for the application that's there. So if you're like in the middle of a desert, like, yeah, it builds solar farms, right. But if you're, you know, outside of a major metropolitan area with a big industry, or a data farm or things like that, you need to think about, you know, what's that look like? Is that a gas plant? Well, maybe that's not the right approach anymore. Maybe that's a fusion plant in the future. Maybe that's a nuclear plant.

SPEAKER_05: So coal, natural gas, they're, they're done in our lifetime, 20, 30 years from now, the idea we're, and right now, am I correct that solar and wind and renewables are cheaper to build? And we've sort

SPEAKER_13: of crossed that Rubicon now? Yeah, we've crossed that Rubicon for, for, for many places in the United

SPEAKER_05: States. Yeah. Yeah. So nobody's building gas power plants and coal plants to, you know, generally speaking, nuclear is kind of frozen. People are scared of building nuclear, but we're going to have a couple of more nuclear plants in the United States is the plan. Yeah, that's about right.

SPEAKER_89: Yeah. So it'll be a, a three horse race. If I, if I'm reading you correct between fusion,

SPEAKER_07: nuclear and renewables, and all three of those could be part of the mix, correct?

SPEAKER_80: Yeah, absolutely. And, and you're already seeing, you know, people, people gear up for that,

SPEAKER_15: um, and figure out what the future of the grid looks like. And it's, it's a really exciting time to be in energy. You know, it's like, it's exciting time to be in climate, super impactful. Like you want to do some of your life, like probably, you know, climate, sustainability, energy is where you, it's an area where you can make a really big impact. And then on top of all

SPEAKER_45: that, you know, even within energy itself, there's lots of really good ideas. And fusion is now in the

SPEAKER_52: three or five years ago. If, um, you succeed in building this one of the biggest offenders for our climate. And, you know, this sounds crazy. Um, and I think a lot of people don't know this, but there was a very small number of cargo ships on the planet and they spew from my understanding. Oh, a type of fuel that is incredibly dirty to get these containers from China to the EU

SPEAKER_05: into america and i don't know if there's 30 or 40 of them that are in constant i just had the

SPEAKER_69: ceo flexport on who manages like all these you know uh the the transit of all these shipping

SPEAKER_05: containers is it on the road map to put a fusion reactor on a giant cargo ship and power it or is that too insane to put those on over the water uh it's not necessarily like technically the

SPEAKER_13: the you know something you would uh couldn't do like you could figure out if you built the ship

SPEAKER_15: big enough and stuff that safety wise there's no no reason you you wouldn't do it but you know we have other ways to solve those types of problems like now if you use a fusion plant or a a heat you know heat source effectively to to make fuel right like if you make fuel then you can close and make that that the whole system zero carbon right like okay like that that's a way to do it or make make

SPEAKER_41: hydrogen even in which case you close the whole thing for zero carbon and the smokestack is water instead of particulates um and so there's there's some really good ideas fusion to then make hydrogen energy yeah exactly yep fascinating and and people are looking into doing that you know with renewables

SPEAKER_15: and with nuclear and and and this is i think a a an underappreciated fact by a lot of people is okay like we're going to electrify everything we can right let's let's get evs like you know ggm they're going to stop making gasoline cars in 2035 evs well just because you have an ev if you plug it in where's your electricity come from okay we got to change all that to be zero carbon oh but there's stuff like how to fly on planes which we don't do right now but i assume we're going to get back to that it's like how do you make that zero carbon or how do you make steel zero carbon all of that stuff agriculture you grow your grow your crops how do you do zero carbon agriculture all of that is all right for

SPEAKER_45: innovation right now with effectively the largest market poll in history amazing if you look at

SPEAKER_89: those container ships um you know they're the size of like six football fields and they produce

SPEAKER_07: i just looked it up the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars that is bonkers you know when people are looking at them just to think the amount of mileage of your gas power car

SPEAKER_26: is insignificant to getting one of those container ships to flip over to something sustainable uh and so are you super positive that humanity is going to beat climate change with fusion if we just get

SPEAKER_62: fusion right climate change is a non-issue correct you know i think that fusion is definitely definitely has

SPEAKER_15: a chance to do that but i'm actually super positive on on fixing climate change overall like and i'm part of the fusion as part of the mix i i'm ceo of fusion company like we're going full speed as hard as we can but i also don't think it's right to be you know fatalistic about this that you have a lot of people that are like me and like our team who are trying all these different things and like if with a little bit of creativity around finance a little bit of of support like you're seeing seeing people do things that that we didn't think were possible before and you know i think that we just you know we are in this middle middle of this pandemic and we started the show talking about you know getting

SPEAKER_45: rid of all the cars like okay we got rid of all the cars the city's got clean but we only reduce carbon by 10 percent but still it's 10 percent like like we only have to do that 10 times over right yeah yeah

SPEAKER_15: it's not like inconsequential and at the same time you know we've managed to shorten the time to vaccine through science and through engineering and through finance through finance right right um and like that is that's the same type of thing that we need to do for climate and you're starting

SPEAKER_45: to see funds that are just pure climate funds you're starting to see collectives of entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_07: that are doing lower carbon fund which is an investor in your company i don't know when he came in but so your company has raised a quarter of a billion dollars to go after this correct there

SPEAKER_05: yeah yeah somewhere around there you have 100 people 200 people working there uh i think right

SPEAKER_179: now it's about 130. you will not have a commercial product until 15 years from now 10 years uh 10 years

SPEAKER_41: well we won't have the the fusion commercial product until 10 years from now of course we're always doing

SPEAKER_15: really interesting things but now we're really we're aiming at the fusion thing as the primary thing

SPEAKER_89: got it so you might have some revenue source between that and now maybe selling some parts to other people building stuff if i had to yeah exactly and yeah and like you know parts are useful

SPEAKER_26: other things besides fusion so things like that yeah and building one of these toka macs is that what

SPEAKER_89: they call toka mac close enough yeah no you say it i want to make sure i get it right so i can say it

SPEAKER_161: at a dinner party toka mac toka mac so is building a toka mac like a huge carbon footprint or is it

SPEAKER_15: just like building a building yeah it's it's effectively it's funny it's like we you know we're we're getting ready to build our our net energy um toka mac called spark and it's a building you know first and foremost it's a shed it's like a shed like any other shed and it's full of equipment that's like kind of a weird mix of equipment but none of it is is crazy specialized um in terms of you know it's like stuff you find in arc furnaces and things which you can get um and then at the core of it is this fusion machine that is you know a machine that's made out of metal it's machined out of steel and it's the same type of people that build rockets and you know we got a lot of people that build rockets on staff and so it's following in that same mold but of course the energy payout and something like this is so big because the you know the fuel that you're talking about you know is so inconsequential and the machine makes so much power you know it's like you know like it's a tennis court that's

SPEAKER_26: replacing miles of solar panels bonkers and now are you going to be putting these on rocket ships as

SPEAKER_05: well and is this how we get to mars i've heard elon talk about fusion being a component of getting to

SPEAKER_89: mars but it's not required but it would certainly be a boost so to speak yeah i mean yeah we we don't

SPEAKER_15: typically look that far out there's actually some fusion companies that you know that that's one of the part of their business model you know for us is like the fact that we've got to you know build 10 000 power plants no matter what they are on earth to solve climate change the fact that fusion could be a part of those 10 000 power plants that's enough for us if uh there was one thing that

SPEAKER_05: could be done in society that would advance your mission what would it be is it educating more people is it getting you more resources is it regulation what do you need to be removed from your path that will accelerate this because i think we all want to see this accelerated so when you wake

SPEAKER_07: up every morning are there things you say if we just didn't have this regulation if we just had this much more money if we just had this many more smart people or we just had this raw material is there

SPEAKER_33: something there that would accelerate your process or is this just heads down we've got to do the work

SPEAKER_121: and it's going to take time yeah it you know it's it's head down do the work and then you know

SPEAKER_15: frankly there's like death by a thousand cuts right so it's like oh you know like regulation is a little bit it slows you up a little bit here slows you up a little bit there and then really you know the the big thing on a lot of this is you know a really vibrant ecosystem right if you can if we can build and we're we're seeing it in the united states and hopefully as we come out of the pandemic and we see

SPEAKER_41: investment in uh in recovery that you know these ecosystems are really smart people interdisciplinary people attacking this problem with the finance behind them whether that's from government loans

SPEAKER_15: or government grants or that's from you know special carve-outs of long-term you know mutual funds and investment funds or venture capital that are willing to to go um into longer terms like all of that is is

SPEAKER_41: all part of this solution you know it helps fusion it also helps other things um and that's what we

SPEAKER_15: want to see more of and i think you're starting to see that happen um even just in the the last year i mean like we closed a 80 85 million dollar round like when when oil was going negative and one of our investors in that round was was equinor the big norwegian oil company um and so you're seeing people

SPEAKER_78: turn to this uh and we like to see that accelerate interestingly uh when you when you look at what

SPEAKER_05: you're doing uh there is a device um in financial markets of the early investors getting taken out by later stage investors so i'm curious if you've thought about your decade one investors being the

SPEAKER_89: venture industrial complex but decade two being the people who do spax or private equity or you know those large funds taking out the earlier investors so if a venture firm has a 10-year uh horizon for a

SPEAKER_05: return i wonder if you if you're on a 20-year timetable if in year 10 the investors can turn over

SPEAKER_15: right uh so in our case like we we even predated this our venture funds that are investors and us people like like bill gates's breakthrough energy ventures or steve jervison's future ventures like those funds are actually built to be 20-year funds like the idea of like a 10-year venture capital fund is sort of like a a perversion of what venture capital started out as like we started out venture

SPEAKER_133: capital building chips right in silicon valley for a reason like yeah building big machines that made

SPEAKER_41: other machines yeah exactly and and building machines that built other machines and it sort of migrated into what we're going to do software and then then apps it's like that's that's all great and

SPEAKER_15: everything but you know there's still a whole lot out there that you know people experience their life not just sort of a pandemic it's sort of like only on a computer screen but you think about the variety of stuff that underpins our our society and most of that stuff is is atoms and most of that stuff is

SPEAKER_45: is at some point going from science into a product and that takes time it takes head down it takes a coalition around them of of the around the entrepreneur of talent and of regulation and the

SPEAKER_15: government and of long-term investors and all of that and and i think you know we've seen that that engine in the united states um really rev up over and over again and and clean tech and infusion is doing

SPEAKER_05: it again when your customers are looking at this uh and trying to figure out how to contextualize what's about to happen it turns out like the i'm trying to think of the second order impact of what you're

SPEAKER_07: doing so anytime this technology gets made there's some things that happen that are either unintended you know in a bad way or a great way if you look at clean water and you look at clean water as a function of energy right like if you just take desalinization that's energy right taking salt is

SPEAKER_69: just energy you got to get the membrane you got to use gravity whatever it is to get the salt out

SPEAKER_05: then you look at food food is about water and about energy on the margins right there's some energy used like you mentioned agriculture but really water is a big part of that the sun right and so being able to have greenhouses um you know that have light in a world where energy becomes free or

SPEAKER_27: close to free because that's really what this does right energy is going to get close to free or a

SPEAKER_15: magnitude cheaper half yeah eventually it'll get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as you get better and better at building it but you know we always try to avoid from free like you still have to build

SPEAKER_195: stuff still breaks down yeah but you're saying maybe half yeah yeah you could get yeah it could

SPEAKER_15: get cheap and more importantly like the externalities even when they're priced in of carbon and pollution you know still don't make it more expensive than we're paying today does this mean

SPEAKER_07: we could solve water and food security as well as part of energy so you know the way that we

SPEAKER_15: describe it like you know companies got sort of you know this collection of really really fun right people have you know got a 10 things we know to be true right like like what do we absolutely know about and one of them is that in the end the only two markets are our energy and gray matter right like energy and creativity and you can basically with enough energy you can reduce things to that

SPEAKER_41: right and that's like the equivalent of your server farm um running all the uh the computers and ai right

SPEAKER_15: it's like okay energy and gray matter and so you know you start to run things out on oh yeah you

SPEAKER_45: could desalinate and you could you can make enough water you could do vertical greenhouses near the

SPEAKER_15: point of consumption with leds inside to to take electricity and turn yeah you can see lots of

SPEAKER_05: things like literally whatever the most expensive crop is could be made in vertical farms with energy right at like the source and then you start thinking about like there are deserts in the world and they could be if you desalinized and we just took some of the water out of the ocean which there's plenty of of of course desalinizing you can kill some wildlife and there's brine and these issues but those are all surmountable you could take swats of desert in africa in america and the southwest

SPEAKER_27: and over time convert them into rain forests or forests and if i'm correct and i'm no genius at this forests are good for global warming trees absorb carbon correct like this is a good part of if we

SPEAKER_15: had more trees that'd be better so yeah you could see like and this you know the more energy that we have that doesn't come with consequences for future generations for the environment the more we can do and think about these types of things right the you know we want to remove the constraint of sort of searching around and dealing with the the downsides of producing large large energy flows whether that's going out and having to drill in the middle of the ocean or whether that's the carbon that's in the air and like these energy sources both renewables and and fusion down the line allow you to do this at a bigger and bigger scale um and and we think that's not just the solution for for climate change you know that's that's a truly sustainable solution long term it's crazy when you think about

SPEAKER_14: we could be sitting here in 40 years and this entire or oil infrastructure that we've built

SPEAKER_05: from the cars to the pipelines to the rigs out in the middle of the ocean they're all going to be deprecated there'll be no use for them they'll be like some vestige of like

SPEAKER_33: a world that we our children's children will not even be able to understand like what was that

SPEAKER_15: yeah well think about the last thing about the ocean yeah think about the last time that you uh ever heard of anyone lighting up a whale oil lamp right yeah it was probably good that we stopped

SPEAKER_207: doing that and wow you know the number of people off nantucket who lost their lives getting those

SPEAKER_69: whales the number of wells who died to make us you know be able to read past sunset i mean

SPEAKER_15: and it really is incredible light bulb powered by coal at the time was a really good idea well maybe we should stop building the coal we still need the light bulb though and you know it's sort of the the evolution of of progress in a sense um to more and more benign ways to to make our lives better and and really you know the uh crux of you know we look at it as the the next battle for our generation is to do that with uh zero carbon energy hey bob i just want to tell you like

SPEAKER_07: uh i appreciate you and thanks for doing this like i don't mean to get cheesy and stuff like that but you know you you you get to you know our age you have kids and you worry about the planet you worry about the planet that you know they're going to inherit and people like you and your team are busting your asses to save the goddamn planet and i think that that's just tremendous so thank you and i'm sure you're toiling away and nobody's saying anything to you and there's no high fives but

SPEAKER_21: you know we owe you a debt to do this like this is important work and you're hiring correct oh yeah

SPEAKER_15: definitely hiring um and you know it's a it's a really good time to to look at you know those types of of problems and say like hey you know what do i want to do after the pandemic what if i could go work on and and we think energy is is certainly a fulfilling way to do it i may want to put a

SPEAKER_69: million in this i may want to put a million or two in this when's the next round coming around i may need to get a put try to get my beak wet here bob put a couple of million in this

SPEAKER_216: to make me feel asleep well at night knowing i'm not just investing in apps well we're building the

SPEAKER_15: magnet now so next basically in june we'll turn on the world's strongest magnet and that's twice what it was before and at that point is really the the go point to build the the spark tokamak an energy fusion tokamak and we got a uh team ready to go we got uh building building permits coming and we're getting ready to do it so it'll be something that's got to be an interesting one

SPEAKER_05: when you show up at the building and you file your stuff and you're like hey um i just here's my paperwork i'm building a fusion reactor and the person's like okay let me look that up and there's

SPEAKER_69: no page that says like what your requirements are for fusion right what happens when you submit a

SPEAKER_207: fusion reactor to city hall they do they even know what to ask you you you typically talk to them

SPEAKER_220: first yeah but do they understand that's not a cold call well you know they don't understand what

SPEAKER_207: you're building right like this is the first time anybody's ever come and said can i build a fusion

SPEAKER_15: reactor here the good news is we built so many of these before that you could come see them so like

SPEAKER_221: you know the first thing you've built before right so they're not scared to death yeah yeah you can

SPEAKER_15: actually come crawl over it at mit which is where we uh the the previous record setter is that we evolved from so you know we're not we're not doing things that are completely you know outside of a comic book um there's some grounding in reality here when can i get one as an arc reactor to put in

SPEAKER_69: my chest like iron man and have unlimited fuel service don't answer yeah we just need to get these server farms and these ships you know you know and everything else off of it factories etc all right listen brother uh congratulations if there's a chance to invest in this man let me bet let me wet my beak because this would be a really great great uh uh experience to be on the ride with you congratulations and thank you and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups you