#6: Danielle Fong - An Engine Powered By Light

We have a way to convert fuel to high-temperature heat, that high-temperature

heat into light, and then that light into electricity through

matched solar cells. It would be a solid-state internal combustion.

Well, do you want to just hop right in and tell us the background, basically,

of how you got here, what you're building, the end-to-end

Yeah. Well, I've been obsessed with energy ever since

I was a kid. This is partly because of the PSYOP that

is SimCity. You can't really start your SimCity without electricity. It's

not quite true in real life, but that got me going. I actually

visited a coal power plant when I was five. or

let's just call it an enrichment trip that my mom managed to

score me. And when I was in grade five

or something, I learned that the highest temperature in

the entire solar system was actually achieved on Earth in

fusion power plants. And in addition to

this being fascinating, the promise of effectively untapped

energy on Earth was incredibly exciting to

me and motivating. And when I dropped out of school later,

long story, but basically tyrannical teacher, doors were unlocked,

ex-hippie parents that didn't send me back. And I learned that

I could, well, basically talk my way into

university if I got the right tests done and then just were connected

to professors. And that's what I did. I grew up in Halifax,

Nova Scotia, actually in Dartmouth, but I bussed over to the university there

and I learned Computer science first, because I was really fascinated by

the computer. It was the access to the internet. It was all this, you know, it was just

post-internet bubbles, a lot of money. But then in

my third year, I really wanted to shift into physics, focused

on physics, and ultimately got so excited and picked

up to do research and ultimately chose to do that for my graduate

studies. So went to Princeton, actually, to study

nuclear fusion. And it was amazing because of the concentration of

talent there and the legacy of the projects. But essentially, the

glory days of Princeton as a fusion research center were at an

end. Basically, after the Cold War, a lot of projects

got canceled, and nuclear fusion Princeton among

them, towards an international project. So as the last

gasp, they ran tritium to actually make fusion

power, which was very, very, very successful, but it makes it radioactive. So

it's the last thing that we did. And that's at all of the records. And

that's what attracted my attention in the first place. And everyone It

had not come back and still has not come back to that initial level. And

my professors were at the top of

their careers, but still scrounging for money. And

I was just like, my goodness, Facebook is worth $14 billion.

Can you imagine? 14 billion. What an outrageous amount. That's the

same amount as Eater. That's the actual same as the entire

global fusion project, which will deliver too

late to make a difference for climate change. I

need to tap into the entrepreneurial timeframe here to make a goddamn difference

because Well, why was I interested in energy at that point in

addition to like the sort of it's really cool gut

level stuff It's like I need to make an impact on

the problem of my generation, which is clearly climate change We don't have an

answer for how to shift off of mondo quantities of

oil to like Standing up a whole other energy system about

that. How am I gonna do that? so I moved out here to Silicon Valley

and my first company tapped into a An

observation I made in the physics of compressed air basically

figured out that instead of wasting a ton of the heat

of compression during the air compression, and then wasting the

energy on expansion because the air gets really cold and cold air has

less pressure, You could capture that energy by

directly injecting water mist and

inject it back in during expansion to

provide that energy as heat, which ultimately

turns into pressure, which turns into more power. And

it's a very simple physics observation and there's a

lot of engineering to make it really work, but we proved that it

could and really changed, you know, I

was reminded of in physics

they teach you about thermodynamics and they say here's the Carnot cycle it's

the most efficient cycle but we can't do it because you

can't compress and expand isothermally like no one's really figured out

how to really do that I mean you can kind of have a limit case but

you can't do it quickly and basically we prove that you can do it quickly so

we can start Approaching more efficient thermodynamic cycles. It

really is possible. So a sort of four minute mile

effects Like you can kind of break the limits of these Typical

considerations and real heat engines but be also like

we fucking did it and it still is going to be really I

think ultimately a really good way to do compression expansion of

gas. The other thing that we learned was we did this through

the venture ecosystem and we had, you know, a top investor,

absolutely top. And we brought in more top investors, including

people, you know, individual tech billionaires like Bill Gates

and Peter Thiel and several others. who basically managed

to support us by being really exciting

and public about what it can be and what we were doing, signed

and building in public, like we were sort of a media darling, until

sort of the last gasp of that clean tech era.

And unfortunately, the technology was sort

of acquired for much less than it could have been. So

I think that, which is a complicated story, by

the way, and bits and pieces, some is still with

the venture capitalists, some is a tank business that's effectively acquired,

which was supposed to be exclusive and now actually in

some of them still do it. And so there's actually quite a lot of industrial potential,

right, you know, right today of all the IP that still exists. So

it's very interesting. do you still do you still feel like that's like so

technically that solution do you still feel a lot of like conviction that that's

the right way to do things or like that yeah so so so

technically if you look at it air compressors are like

at like as capital equipment order of magnitude more

narrowly conceived of as compressors it's like 30 billion

plus is the market size every year of sold equipment revenue,

okay? And then if you include the actual energy that's associated with

that, that probably doubles or triples the

number depending on where you use it in sort of industrial circumstances

or so on. And then if you look at more generally, it's

like, well, you know, many engines from gas

turbines to internal combustion engines, effectively there's

a compressor there And so you can really look at it and you can replace that.

Now, that thinking is really valid in the absence of

something that has the really attractive properties

of my new company, which is in being radically higher

energy density than compressed air can be. So for energy

storage, except in very

specific circumstances, I think that it's

not the answer long, long term, because For

very long duration storage, you want to use a fuel that you can store

like hydrogen. And there are many different ways to store on-site hydrogen

for fuel for long duration beakers.

And then for smaller stuff, if it's a vehicle, you want it to

be very lightweight. It's a fuel. But the reason where

you can use a compressor for energy storage is

where essentially it can use

the home or the building that you're with as a heat reservoir, and

it's sort of like you're doing a Carnot cycle with that. And so it's

a really, you store energy alongside your moving

heat around, and there's almost always a need to move heat around. So

in situations like that, especially if there needs to be compressed

air on site, it's 100% because then you're

saving money on your compressor, you're saving money on the energy, you're

saving money on the thieves, and you're getting energy storage which you can

tie to the grid. So would I want to cause that to

occur after I have a very stable, you

know, largely controlled energy tightened under, you know, with, with,

with the capability to do that. I may yet be tempted much

as much as Elon may be tempted to do a supersonic electric

jet every time he pays for like his fuel on

his jet. Every time he's like, God, I wish I could do

Yeah, totally. And so today you're building a new kind of

energy technology, but it's a, would you, would you call

it more portable? Like it's a, it's a version of it that is intended

to be a little bit more expeditionary or yeah, able

Absolutely, absolutely. This is a rethinking about, you

know, I think a lot of things in the past have been thought

about and really funded from what would be good for the world, which is

very reasonable. Bill Gates funds a lot of stuff from this perspective because

he's got lots of money, he's generous, like what would be the best for the world? And

providing a service for the grid is absolutely a

huge service for the world. But the problem is to really

get it to be like at scale, it needs to also

economically service that grid. And so it's very competitive at

the very beginning, slugging it out for cheap kilowatt hours. that

you just hatched too rarely, no one's figured out how to

Like, it's, yeah, it hasn't worked with big solar, it

hasn't worked with nuclear, like, plugging into the grid is

like a logistical challenge that makes the energy creation seem

Right, and so they will demo

you to death, and then watch your startup die on the vine, and

then they will be like, oh, startup's dying. Is there a technical problem? Or

it's like, No, actually

there were like over the past decade, like 2000 battery

companies or whatever. Many of them went after the grid. And by

the way, now the grid is actually, it is taking off. There's

going to be 80% increase year on year in energy

storage deployments. for the grid. Okay. It's

lithium ion, sodium ion may cross, but it's,

it, it's, it's that, and it's not even remotely enough, by the way,

it's like 11 gigawatts. And like the amount, the

order of magnitude that it really needs to be is like

near the end of this decade, it needs to be on the order of terawatts installed

per year to like make up for their shortfall,

according to all of the supposedly agreed on things.

So anyway, that's why that's

how much energy storage there needs to be there. And people really

know that, like, if you're a billionaire, you know that, like, And

so a lot of people publish it. But what you need to solve if you're

the entrepreneur is you need to solve the way to get down

to the learning curve to something where someone who has a lot

of value, enough to get you enough profit margins so that

you can actually scale on revenues. not investor

money to get to the next stage, right? And

so the model of success is really the way that Muon did it,

which is like, first, we're going to find this, you know, the

special market, which is like roadsters, okay? And

it's going to be expensive, but it's going to be totally new. They're enthusiasts. Then

we're going to do a sedan, which has a replacement value, and it's going

to be really well executed, but it's not going to compete at the

bottom level in terms of value. And then we're going to start going

into the mass market. You absolutely must do that,

and the grid takes you away from that as a technology. And

the advantage that we're working on is we're using

some of the most efficient, power-dense, high-capability

throughput methods of physics to actually unleash power, and

that's combustion. So, if you think about it,

a flame can produce power as fast as a rocket can

produce power, or a torch, or a firework. It's

incredibly rapid, the chemical process of,

at high temperature, hydrogen or carbon linking

up with oxygen. Once you have a high temperature flame,

we're using the incredible power density of

fireworks. and high-pressure sodium

lamps, basically the incredible propensity of sodium

to act like an antenna to send out electromagnetic signals,

light of a very particular wavelength or color. And

the amount of energy of each of those photons, you can think of this as a

quantum energy source that converts heat into

energy at a very particular wavelength, is 2.1 electron

volts and what we noticed was that there was a

material that was used as the top layer in the

most efficient sort of space solar cells that

matched that color almost exactly like

within 90 percent or thereabouts and so the efficiency

of converting that light to electricity could be extremely high you

know we thought you know, extremely high. We've tested 60% and

we think under higher concentrations and

higher with a little tuning, maybe we can get that to 70-80%.

And so we realized that that's one

part. We have basically the two parts of an engine. We

have extremely a way to convert fuel

to high temperature heat, that high temperature heat into light,

and then that light into electricity through matched

solar cells. And that if you could build a transparent internal

combustion engine at atmospheric pressure this way, it would be

a solid state internal combustion engine. It could have dramatically higher

efficiencies, be much smaller, not produce sound

and vibrate, and you could shrink it down and provide a higher

efficiency well at the same time tapping into the incredible energy

densities of fuel. So people don't really

realize this but gasoline has 70 times

the energy density per unit weight of a lithium-ion battery and

that really makes things like liquid fuels the

only solution for long-range aircraft and a

lot of different things. And there's been enormous advances in

the production of various types of synthetic fuels. So

hydrogen is one that people know a lot about. You can use pure

hydrogen or mix it with like natural gas or

another fuel. But people are also making great efforts and

success into starting to make synthetic methane, which

is like a natural gas. Starting to make synthetic alcohols like

ethanol and methanol. and starting to make ammonia, which has

no carbon at all. So what's been missing is

a way to convert any of those fuels into power while

tolerating it, and internal combustion engines don't do that. So

we can potentially provide maybe double or more of

the efficiency of an internal combustion engine genset system, and something that

doesn't make loud noises and vibrate, and something that

can be shrunk down to go on a

backpack or a small robot or a vehicle, power all

kinds of things from forward operating bases to burning man camps, and

use any fuel from biofuel to a synthetic fuel that has

no net carbon. And this is a pathway towards

market adoption if we can sort of deploy out

ahead of that using the fuels that are out there available

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a reframe of what And

like basically an engine does, like most people take fuel and convert

it into the heat and then you use the heat in some way. Like either you're, you know, exploding

a piston back and forth, or maybe you're, uh, you know,

heating up water. Like that's actually a vast majority of energy is

Actually, those are the big two. So really, uh, today, you

know, if you look at the number one way that we use energy, the absolute

number one way that we use energy is probably heating buildings. The

number two is an internal combustion engine

converting it into pressure, pressure into mechanical energy, mechanical energy.

So the number, basically the number one use of energy in

the world is actually heating buildings. And I believe the number two

is automobiles pushing people down

the road and basically the way that works is you compress

some air you heat it up with an explosion and that it

has higher pressure when it expands than when you compressed it so

that turns into mechanical motion sometimes electricity

in a hybrid And then the number three is steam. So heating

up boiling water by heating it up through a boiler or

some heat exchanger and turning that into

pressure. Pressure into a turbine spinning

and the turbine spinning into electrical energy. So

a lot of different conversion processes, all of them basically relying

on heat. And we actually have basically a

similar thing. We can use that heat. The thing about the engineering of

it though is that we, to make our process work,

we get the heat to as high a temperature as possible. And

so that triggers the almost exponential increase in brightness when you

add sodium. If you need heat,

so say for example, you're looking at the number one

energy use in the world, heating up buildings. Well, you

could have a light cell there that converts. the

fuel energy into electricity and then like uses

it or sells it back to the grid and then just you have whatever

the inefficiency is of heat so say for

easy math say we finally with gen you know generation

n reach 50 efficiency this right so those

are kind of low so why don't you sure okay So basically,

as you put it, simply, the idea is to

take the energy that's in fuel, turn it into high

temperature heat, and go from heat to light.

And this is by adding an illuminant, which we supply through

sodium, for example, using table salt.

The sodium, if it's heated to a high temperature, emits extremely bright,

almost monochromatic light, yellow light. You

go from heat to light, then light to electricity by

choosing solar cells that have

a material that's optimized to accept the energy level, the

whole amount of the energy level of that high-energy yellow

photon unlike silicon. And then

you have electricity, which you can process with electronics and

So these are the parts of the process. Like how, for the combustion step, the

fuel to heat step, like how hot is it getting? Like

what, I mean, do you have a particular type of

Yeah, let me try to think about, I was going to jump up

a meta level step and sort of motivate. why

I made the decisions the way that I did. So yeah, so

I was really looking at how do I create a company that

can provide really unique value even at small scale, starting

out right away. And it struck me

as more and more batteries showed up everywhere that like at

small scale, if you have a very convenient source of

power, it will show up in innumerable ways that

are of great value that you simply never would have imagined if

you had to strap a generator to it. And so I started thinking,

okay, where are the real limitations? Where are people still suffering despite

those limitations? And it was really in where something is weight constrained,

particularly for something that you have to carry or

something that's like a drone or a robot that has to carry itself. So

practically any of those things, really exciting, but things like Boston

Dynamics or battery-powered drones or even, you

know, power packs to power sort of like Burning Man sound

systems, you're getting order of magnitude 30 minutes,

one hour. And worse for things like drones,

the more battery that you carry, the heavier it is, the more energy

that you have to expend. It's called the rocket equation,

so you really get screwed. So power density,

or energy density rather, but also with power density, the full

density of the full system, stuck out as the most important

single thing to try to solve for. that people like the military

would pay a lot for, that backpackers and Burning Man people would

pay a lot for, and then it would ultimately, like the battery, show

up in a million different places you would never think about once you

had finally made it. Including, you know, automobiles

and other stuff, but also all the stuff that it enables. From flying

cars, I'll name different things, to jetpacks, to robots

that, you know, like the Boston Dynamics robots, they have a time limitation

of about 30 minutes. I think Optimus will be about an hour. It's

like just fundamentally held back. It just doesn't have lights out.

Anyway, so the question then is like, okay, fuel's so

great, what's the problem? Well, engines are one big answer

to what's the problem. like if you just think about what is

it what is the take to implement an engine on something not only is

it a big engine block that is heavy and making noise and

making sound and making pollution and vibrating but

like it doesn't shrink down very well and like once you're

small and you're poorly or if you're poorly matched

to the power needs your efficiency is like actually

real world, 10%-ish. Which means for every 10% of

your useful power, you are spending, you have to

deal with, 10 of the equivalent watts

of heat so there's like plenty of reasons that

you don't want that and then okay so we can

probably beat on convenience factors by a lot internal combustion engines

and efficiency if we can figure something out and then there's fuel

cells and fuel cells they just are not nearly

as robust basically they're bottlenecked there's a part

of the fuel cell that's a membrane. And essentially, protons

have to get past the membrane. And there's a bunch of different ways to do it. But essentially, every

single one of those, it's limited in how fast they can do

it. And like, even if it's somewhat unlimited, as you increase temperature, as

you increase temperature, it starts to degrade faster exponentially. So

everything's sort of fundamentally on this limit and so for fuel cells you end up

with things which are expensive because you're making a lot of these and you have

to stack them and have many of these membranes and heavy

and they don't last very long so it's like some trifecta

that you can't surface and so fuel cells which have been the theoretical answer

to this for like as long as I can remember and as long as My

co-founder, who was 70 and went to MIT when he

was 15, as long as he can remember, fuel cells are not a

Are they really used in anything? I've actually never, I've

There are specialty applications. So, you know, they were used in the space

shuttle. They're used to produce electricity and water. Very

nice to show. They actually came before the battery. There

are small numbers of fuel cell vehicles. There's some number

of fuel cell weather balloons and some number, they start

out fuel cell drones. In general, when you start talk, basically

the competition is stiff. Oh yeah.

You have to not, if you're delivering, if you're getting more efficiency, for

the lightweight applications, that's exciting because you don't

have to use as much fuel. But fuel's not that heavy anyway. And so if your

thing is really heavy, you get excluded. And

that basically keeps you up the learning curve. And you just can't get

down the learning curve unless Toyota decides to subsidize you.

In which case, they do subsidize you. And then they say, why are we paying

$2 billion to make fucking fuel cells if

no one is buying into this? So to me, not

a good idea to do as a company. So what you have to

do is have something where all, unlike the fuel cell, you

can't have a bottleneck anywhere in the process. So

combustion is not a bottleneck at all. And so I started to

investigate, sort of inspired, this is jumping ahead a

few steps, but thinking about the intensity of the maximum intensity of

radiation and, and really inspired by

the maximum brightness that I'd ever seen from like fireworks

displays. Like, gosh, this is like lighting up our

faces from like a kilometer away or something. How bright is

that? I started investigating what the essential physics

were. And I found, and it's almost counterintuitive, but

basically you can thermally excite sodium.

And it emits almost unlike a black body, which emits all kinds of

different energies. And so it's a little harder, it's harder to collect efficiently.

It really emits almost all of its energy as

one light. And it continues to scale as you increase

in density, although not linearly, but as the square root. And

it continues to scale almost exponentially as you increase in

temperature, which is really interesting. So it

goes as e to the minus 2.1 eV over kT.

So T is temperature. As temperature gets closer to the amount

of energy in the quarta, it goes way,

way up. And so I

was like, okay, if I have high power density of this particular

kind of photon that is like incredibly well-tuned to

this material, can I turn that into an electric generator?

Is it going to get bottlenecked in the solar cell maybe? Well, I start

looking into this. Turns out the material is a direct bandgap semiconductor,

which means unlike silicon, which normally has

to be very thick because in addition to the photon itself going

through the silicon, it needs to catch a wave of a phonon of

some thermal fluctuation inside the silicon to actually excite an

electron. It has to be some finite thickness. This is

a direct bandgap material and it doesn't have any requirement of

phonon to absorb a photon. So in other words, The

light can directly excite the electronic. There's no

friction. There's no heat transfer from the material required. And

so it can be 10,000 times thinner. It has 10,000 times

more absorption coefficient. So these are typically very

thin film materials. And that's one of the reasons they're used for aerospace. They're

so light. But it also means that the actual thickness of

the material is about 50 microns, which is about,

it's about half of my hair thickness. sort

of average human hair. And that means

that electrons don't have very long to go from when

they're excited in this special kind of material, which

means that you can have very low resistance, which means you can

have very high current densities with very little losses

there. So it's like, okay, does it get saturated any other way? Oh,

it turns out it actually goes, as long as you can carry the

current, it actually goes the other way with this. And as you

have higher concentration, you get higher voltage and you get more energy

out. Oh, goodness. Well, that's really good because now you

don't need as much material because this is relatively expensive space

aerospace stuff. But if I can shine 25 times the

brightness of the noonday sun on it, then

I don't need as much. And also, if it's more efficient, I

don't need as much. And so I'm starting to get many

orders of magnitude factors down the learning curve of

what this material can be. And now, because it's more cost

effective and more efficient, now it can

be applied to all kinds of different applications. Efficiency matters,

flexibility matters, quiet matters, portability matters,

long range matters, being able to consume any material. So

another nice thing is we could use biofuels that don't have to

have as much processing to like eliminate

all of the sulfur. You could have it run through and then just

condense with water and then just process that. So

there's lots of, you can just, you have a lot more flexibility. Anyway,

This is exactly the kind of conversations I love having. I mean, I have

so many questions. I'm, I'm curious to learn more about the, basically

like I have like questions about each step. So maybe we can just go through each one. I mean, so combustion,

combustion, I'm curious how that temperature

can be controlled in a way that basically doesn't like melt

the person carrying the fuel back or like... So

Very good question. So this is something that we, you know, we have to figure out.

So, so basically the first thing is that you separate, in

a product, you separate the flame with a wall. It's

a transparent wall. And then that transparent wall, there's a gap, which

may ultimately be a vacuum gap. And then that's where

the solar cells line. And so there's a separation. And

the transparent tubes, we use a lot of quartz for

experimentation. Quartz is not the maximum temperature, but

it's very resistant to thermoshock. So while we're learning and we're sloppy, it's

really ideal. quartz in the long term isn't ideal

because a couple different temperatures the

salt that we add actually produces sodium silicate out

of quartz and so it's only at certain temperatures

but it's also the case that like it does eventually

soften. It starts to soften. And so the ideal material

where we are essentially basically trading

off between quartz, which is the easiest to work

with, but not long term, sapphire, which has higher temperature

capabilities, is more expensive and is very fussy because it

does thermally expand. So even though it's very strong, it

can have thermal stresses and it's very, very hard as well. So

You have to be very mindful of how to design around

that. And then polycrystalline alumina, which is hard

to get in larger scale, but is

what is used in high pressure sodium lamps is impervious to

the sodium. And unlike the sapphire is tougher

because it doesn't have, it's a polycrystalline. So

it doesn't have the same ordered behavior. The sapphire

expands, it's not isotropic. So

there's a one axis that expands a little more when it heats up. So

yeah. Anyway, basically, yeah. So, so, so your

question was, how do you control the temperature and how do you do

confinement? So one of the neat, so, so, so how

do you control the temperatures? This probably actually feed to the whole process. And, and,

and this is one of the areas where, you know, we're really, there is a lot

of experimentation in front of us, but basically what we've taken

is the central architecture of an incinerator. And

what an incinerator does is it has a

heat exchange that takes energy from the

exhaust that was previously in the incinerator and it passes

it into the air coming in. And what we have found

is that there are materials that can tolerate both salt and

air and exhaust streams. We can tolerate it

all, ceramic materials. that have a high enough heat transfer rate

and are strong enough and can be made with a fine

enough wall size that you can do

a huge amount of heat transfer out of

the exhaust and into the air coming in And

the hope is to get that delta T and a sort of reasonable

device down to the sort of one, 200 degrees C

delta T mark so that before the air even

sees the fuel and has a chance to chemically react

and get that energy from the reaction, it's already like 14, 1500 degrees

C hot enough to actually vaporize salt. And

if you do that, then the process should

be very efficient because then, you know, normally when you operate like

a propane air fuel, and by the way, nothing more American than

propane and propane accessories. And this is by

scientific apparatus and prototypes count, really. It's

basically, uh, basically, you know, a barbecue with extra

steps. Um, but the, you know, a really hardcore,

easy bake oven. Um, but the, it is actually, sometimes

you, you can sometimes, because it turns out that blood

absorbed, because of the salt in your blood, it absorbs the

sodium light pretty well. Like really pretty well. So when

you actually introduce, you know, close, like, especially by

hand, holding something and introduce close to the flame, like

sodium, the amount, even though it's the same amount of energy and going up

and out of the flame, the amount of energy just radiating out

into your, your hands or face. It's like, it's something to behold. It's

really, uh, and I, frankly, I know we're just starting, but

it's like, what's it like to have a thing glowing right there? That's

like probably putting in. order of

magnitude, like several hundred watts directly

Uh, so, um, so, so basically we use

this material. We, we found a vendor. I mentioned to

everyone, you know, we really need a lot more. Like

everyone talks a good game about reshoring American manufacturing and

so on, and you know, really hyper America above all, but let's

be realistic. There are so, there's so much manufacturing capability

elsewhere. And a lot of our stuff is retired or semi-retired and

the generational. Like skills have not been supplied and

the, and the, and the, the pay for technicians. is

is lower than engineers even though there's a shortage so

this is stupid and everybody needs to reorient what the skills are

and what's important and what the shortage is there's so many there's so much low-hanging

fruit in the domain of the tangible and like the

actual skilled trades and like that's where a lot of the invention

typically you know in industrial revolutions comes from it actually comes

from the people doing this stuff it's like we need a complete rethinking of

this we can't just be hyped about people doing some

new stuff in the Western world and be like, oh,

things are back. It's very challenging to rely

only on American vendors for things like ceramics and

our transparent tube materials when Chinese vendors will come back. with

1 10th or 1 30th the price per thing

and Anyway, we fucking they don't even make like literally

this stuff like we have been I mean we've been Finalists

quite a lot, but you know somehow government and nonprofits never, you

know, they seem to think we're we're too much Mavericks So we're

natural enemies or something. They never quite funded us and But ARPA-E has

funded like high temperature heat exchanger stuff.

And practically speaking, all of the stuff that I saw in the

in the actual midway discussions about this like is so

far behind the fabrication capability in Honeycomb and

Illumina. that we have just obtained for $8 a part.

It's so crazy to me. So like, you know, I really hope we don't end up

in some sort of trade war with our partners because you know, I

have to tell you guys that like we are papering over our

lack in, in, in, in the supply chain. We're having

a lot of money and getting a lot of stuff and other suppliers downstream of

us. We don't know about, there's other things that are reliant and like we

don't have it integrated. It is not integrated yet. Do not be

stupid. Okay. Anyway, so anyway, the

point is, even though RPE hasn't solved high temperature heat exchangers, incinerators

and like Chinese manufacturers of honeycomb have solved high

temperature material that can be used for really high temperature incinerators.

And that is the one best way to get the temperature up

and get the efficiency really up. now we are using another

way as well to get the temperature up well there's lots

of different tricks that we use the other big one and that we are

using that is really it's kind of cheating it's propane

oxygen which is like a rocket and you know that

if you have a rocket and you have a fuel and an oxidizer, it

can hit really high temperatures. So the exhaust plume is really bright. And

that it is, and that it is. And frankly, it wouldn't actually

kill us to have an oxygen concentrator in

products if it started out. It's an easy way to get high temperature.

But to get high temperature and high efficiency, you really

have to make sure that the gas that is leaving after

it has already reacted, after it is below the temperature at which

salt is condensing, it's no longer in vapor form, after

about 1,500 degrees C. Instead, the value

to the system is to transfer that heat into the air

during heating. And that is what we're solving this month, I

hope. Basically, I tried the stupidest thing that could

possibly work, and it worked. Oh,

I love my job so much. I mean, it is literally like, you

know, Thomas Edison, Thomas Edison, like, well, it is, it

is like that. It is like, and Thomas Edison, like, knew all

of the stuff that I would like, you know, that he would benefit from to do essentially

invention at a high speed. So really talented instrument builders,

a system where you're basically completely living on top of it, a

bunch of stock that's at hand. And then he couldn't have imagined Amazon

Prime and McMaster, but those things also exist. And

also the ability, we can now pretty transparently draw

about, mechanically, some more complicated stuff and get that turned around

in kind of a week. And then you

try, somewhat systematically and somewhat intuitively, through

a process of observation and not through a process of writing

up results and trying to persuade your colleagues, but persuading your goddamn

self, in a tight team, we can actually understand something. That

thinks so much faster. That is how to actually cover

the surface area that there is at the beginning of an invention process. And

I have the ability to build it in public, fucking put

it out to broadcast just even if I'm just ambiently

Oh, I recorded Oh, this would be good. Or Oh, I'm thinking I'll just tweet

about it. It's now in an exo brain. I had 87 million

hits last year, and tweets and what's more like, there

are a lot of connections that we raised A million dollars, basically, in

uncapped saves from Twitter, basically. And

a lot of people have come in and have offered free

samples of 3D printing or different stuff, or

even yourself. And I'm supporting, we're getting

supplementary income from AdShare and Hyper America

blankets and eventually flags. I

need one of those. We should put one back here. I'm going to get one and then

I'm going to try to conspire to find somewhere to

do it. Maybe in the machine shop in Astana. So

basically, like, I have these enormous benefits and

I'm taking every advantage, you know, it's also a cinematic kind

of thing. So I can, even before people understand

like what it is or, you know, how it's useful. Like

a lot of people are understanding that, but I've still got, you know, Oh, you're doing

fusion or, which I was doing fusion. And

someday this may convert power from fusion, but this is explicitly a

chemical reactor and we're not doing fusion yet. We're not doing fission yet.

or ever. And maybe, you know, anyway, uh,

and the, or people are

like, this is a more efficient solar panel. And I'm like, it is more efficient. I

mean, they kind of got part of it. Like it's more efficient. We have non, a

different, it's more, it's like we found a more efficient solar

panel for a more efficient sun that we could put in

your pocket, dump a bunch of sodium into the sun and

then, then it'll work. Actually, that's one of the things that

they discovered first in astrophysics. The sodium, the

d-lines, you know, the upper atmosphere of

the sun is basically glowing with the sodium. And that also

is true of planet glow. And it's used in astrophysics because

if you shoot, if you have a laser that's that wavelength and you

shoot it straight up, then at the ionosphere, there's

enough free sodium around to be like

a spot and so if you send out a grid of

a laser that splits it out you can know where it's

shifting and then you use that to recompile uh like

restack the layers and this is called adaptive optics and it's

it's responsible for the best essentially that's one of

the ways it's it's one of the best ways to do

to do any imaging so yeah i've

never heard it before there's so many of these you know wacky effects you

know uh put electrodes in a pickle it's

yellow fucking like yeah this it's true and

it's it's actually true the most efficient lamp you know, what's glowing

down there is sodium vapor lamp. It's the world's most efficient lamp in

terms of efficiency. And sort of the second

or third most efficient can sort of contend between high

pressure and LEDs. Now, LEDs might slightly

engineer out, but I wouldn't say for quality. But, you know, but

high pressure could actually could be made more efficient. And depending on

who I'm talking to, I'll use a different analogy you

know one of the best ones is it's like it rings like a bell it's like there's a

heavy mass in the center and that's a nucleus like a tuning fork and

then yeah it's like and then there's a light thing that's on top of that

heavy mass that's the bell and that's the outer electron and

basically you whack it and what happens against anything it's

like well it's heavy so it's not going to give too much so the

the only thing that can give is that light thing on the outside and

so that's where all the energy goes and it goes like crazy And that's,

that's a classical analogy, but that's basically what it is.

Although it's, you know, but because of quantum mechanics, it

doesn't just go at that frequency. Uh, it also goes

in, in, in units of photons. And

so it's actually, it's a, it's a, it's a quantum emitter. So in, in,

in, in various types of company, you know, for example, if there's someone around,

I know they're a physicist and then there's someone else around, they're being a bit of a jerk. They're

kind of a gatekeeping nerd or whatever. I was, when they asked, you know, what I'm up to and

I'll say, Well, I'm working on a quantum energy converter and

I'll just bait them and they'll be like, that's fucking bullshit. Like,

there's no way you're misusing that. Right. You

know, that sounds like a Marvel superhero. Like, dang,

you're not working on a quantum energy converter. I'm like, actually, here it is. Atomic

emitter is essentially used in fireworks and illumination flares lit

up whole battlefields in Vietnam, part of fireworks from their

invention in China. This is a quantum energy emitter.

It emits quantum light and photons. And this photoelectric

effect, the PV cell is, in fact, you

know, Einstein Nobel Prize, a quantum absorbing quanta of

energy and extracting it out. And it's it's completely quantum. So

I have a question about the incandescent

step. What happens

to the salt? You're effectively vaporizing it,

right? Does it deposit on the walls

of the thing? Squeegee, a

little, a small squeegee to... So the answer is

So basically the liquid salt is not only

transparent, but it actually has an intermediate, what's called an

index of refraction, which is what anti-reflection coatings

use. So in fact, the liquid salt acts as a anti-reflection

coating if it is in molten form. And so

essentially in order to get it transparent, the wall needs to be

hot enough for it to melt, which is above about 800 degrees C,

but you know, not hot, not too hot. So as to

be destroyed. And so that's, we're relying on that process.

It's also the case that, you know, if it's basically it reforms,

so you see it, the sodium and the chloride, they are

their own, each other's perfect partners. And why are they

that? So If you think of the periodic table, on one side

of the periodic table, there's first all

of the elements that have just one

electron on their outer shell, that's really lonely, and

really wants to get somewhere else, okay? And

then on the other side, the absolute other side, you have

everybody's happy family, it's noble gas,

and all the shells are filled, and so they don't go

out much. And then you have, you know, the

halides, the, the, you have fluorine, chlorine, bromine,

iodine, all these sorts of things. And these are really horny

for that electron. I mean, these are the horniest and

there's all, but they only have a slot for one electron. So they

have to get with each other. Like it's the

most energy that can be gotten out. And so that's, what's

going to be the stable situation. If you have any kind

of period of time. where the temperatures are high enough to overcome

the activation energies. So if you get

to a very high temperature and then you pass it through some finite

time that isn't just like a shock, essentially all

or almost all of the sodium and chlorine reforms

into sodium chloride. They're

extremely attracted to each other and this is what we observe. And

then it first is it's that

forms into particulars as maybe droplets so they they may freeze depending

on the temperature and then if it's a cool wall they

can deposit on the wall and get stuck if it's a hot wall it

forms a liquid and depending on the liquid Depending on

what the wall type is, it will form a meniscus. So it will actually

wick itself. And this is the most interesting thing we've discovered. So

basically, molten salt has a very high surface tension.

A few different reasons for this. Basically, same fundamental

attraction between the sodium and the chloride that's making things

really electrostatically connected. That thing also

works as a liquid in it. It pulls itself in. You

can kind of think of how strong the surface tension is as

like, what size of droplets does it form? If

it's a really thin liquid and it's heavy, it forms little droplets and

then it immediately drops. If it's got a lot of surface tension and it's light, it

forms giant droplets. So this forms droplets twice as large

as water. and basically if you have something

so it's really attracted to itself but along a surface or

along a channel that has a size that's you know

some considerably smaller than that droplet size what instead

happens instead of just a droplet is it wicks and

actually travels along the The

surface like a candle and a in a cotton wick so

we basically we were spending a bunch of time making ceramic ceramic

wicks to basically Regenerate 99.9. I

can't tell you how many nines. I'm gonna get I'm gonna get one easy but

you know, I think three or four and then finally part it so

particulars, so Yes, we can take particulates out.

We will take particulates out just like diesel engines. But

the fact is that sodium chloride particles are

produced all the time, every day by 70 percent

of the world's surface, the oceans, which have salt water and

like waves. And the salt particles are an essential part of

like how precipitation actually nucleates. And here in San Francisco,

like the actual marine layer that comes in, that is from

salt particles that are traveling in and condensing water

at a relatively lower relative humidity than it would without the

salt particles. And that's called the marine layer. And so

it's not the worst thing to have some salt particles get out,

which is the current condition when we run something out of our fume

hood. So, you know, forgive me. But ultimately, other

than intentionally using this for geoengineering, we'll just

filter it out and capture 99.9%. That's

the hope. You don't have to, it may, but I think basically we

have just used, I mean, we use pure salt, but we have just used table

salt and table salt will totally work. And it will be something like

once every two months sort of, sort of thing is, is,

is our basic hope. Maybe if you run it flat out. There's another

thing we're experimenting with where we're actually in in putting the salts

directly into the fuel But then of course you have to use that

fuel So, you know, I don't know. Yeah, yeah VC

could be very excited about it sell the razor model, but I I No

one will care. Like, I think it's more important to just be

able to like, Oh, the system is at this level of salt depletion. And

then the other thing is that the efficiency will not drop off very

rapidly as the salt is depleted. So it

will be still, you know, 80 plus percent. Yeah.

I'd relatively, you can just have a reservoir. So it's, it's, it's, it's

really a small amount. It's sort of on the order of milligrams that

Yeah. Okay, I have one more question about the kind of

general process, but then I do want to talk about like the business side and things as

well. My final question about the process is just about, so

you mentioned that the efficiencies that you can get from the photovoltaics

Those numbers are higher than like anything I've heard of, but like, you know,

a Tesla... Yeah, no, so there are things that

are out there called photonic converters, which convert, for example,

laser power into electricity on

the other end. And that's that kind of range, basically

60 to 80%, you know, depending. But 80 is aggressive, but

70 is demonstrated. But

for solar, because solar has infrared, UV,

all of the visibles, and every single one of those, it's like a different car that

can travel at a different speed. There's only one main speed on the highway.

You can't really go much faster than that or whatever. And most

silicon highways are too low a speed to get the energy, the more

energetic energy from the more energetic photons from the sun

and the more energetic photons from what we're from what we're doing um

so but the most efficient and the most interesting

number and the one with the most question questions on

it they're all the most interesting questions it's like well how efficient can

the fuel to light power be like what's the physics around that and

the thing is the theoretical physics around that are like well

theoretically i can't see any reason why it can't be you

know upwards of 80, 90%, 100%, but

practically are all of my actual limitations, which

is like, well, it has to

be a physical wall. You need to actually hold the

gas in, and there's a certain amount of finite emissivity

on that wall. And also, there are holes, even if you

have a heat exchanger. So for example, the honeycomb that I described

before for our heat exchanger, those have straight holes. If

you just have straight holes, then a ray can

make its way through those holes and just escape out instead

of reflecting. Or instead of, you know, so if you have wiggles

or you have a few different ones, then no longer the race can escape. And

so that's advantageous. But now you have wiggles, so you have different things. So

you're like, OK, pretty complicated. So now you're actually down to like a

real design, like, OK, how much benefit am I going

to do? So with investors, I basically say, here's

the learning curve I want you to think about. OK, as far as

a product. So every time you're comparing to another technology, there's like

a minimum that we're going to do. And there's like the two

main factors. So there's the fuel to

light efficiency and then there's the light to electricity efficiency. If

we get a fuel to light efficiency of 60% to

eventually 70 to 80% how does that multiply out? And

if we have electrical or light to electrical efficiency of 60 to

80 to 70 to 80% how does that play out? 60 x

60 is 36. That's really good. That's better than internal

combustion engines by a solid factor. In real world use, maybe twice as

good. If I have 70 x 70, what's

that? That's almost 50%. That's when you start competing

with conventional combined cycle

plants because those are huge. Those are expensive. Those can't throttle.

Those can't be shrunk down to be close to where people might need

cogeneration. Those are like massive plants. And

then if you have 80 times 80%, That's

64. That's really the most efficient thing that in most places

where you're going to have a fuel to any height of electricity thing.

That's completely revolutionary, you know, sort of future tech. And

the reason that makes the biggest difference, you know, what, what really makes the biggest

difference is you sweat out the last parts of that efficiency because you've got less than

half to go. Okay. After you're about 50, what's the point? Well,

the point is less heat management, actually. It's like, you

know, you can get along lasting, but at small scale and for really

good, you know, the difference between a 50% efficient thing

and a 75%, not saying we'll ever get there, but that's a factor of

two in heat management that you have to do. So that really starts

to matter. But that's really in the sort of, you know, It's

not that we're dreaming, but we're already a zillion dollar

company by the time we're approaching that. But

in terms of physically, is it feasible to achieve

an 80% yule to light? Well,

basically, flares, burning in air, sodium

illumination flares, which could be capable of millions

to 16 million lumen kind of outputs. They

had just burning in free air, 30% efficiency. So no

heat regeneration, no recycling, no trapping the infrared and

keeping it out. No way to control it really. It's just one particular

mixture. If you look at the radiative efficiency of high pressure sodium

lamps, significantly more than half of the energy out

are, are photons in the band that you could capture efficiently.

It's like almost all, and like, it's, it's more than more than 50% of

the energy out is radiative, radiative light. And

so without

an infrared meter with a finite size, so

there's still a lot of energy that is from an arc that is maybe

wasted in the electrode and conducted along a relatively small

thing. So I really think that we

will basically achieve above 50% efficiency from

fuel to light. And then getting

into the 60-70% range is a feasible

target before we send out a product. And

then it really could go further, because if

you look at what are the fundamental limits in terms of what

are the Carnot efficiencies, A, the Carnot efficiencies are really high because

of the high temperature. B, it's a chemical engine, so it's actually kind of

unlimited. directly by Carnel, there's like somewhat different

calculation involves chemical potentials that we should do.

But that's like in the sort of 80-90%, so

that's sort of fundamental thermodynamic limits. And then from a

microscopic perspective, you basically just, you have

energy that's available to be released as soon as the chemicals meet

each other. carbon or hydrogen or nitrogen

and oxygen, or like, nitrogen with H,

and in the case of ammonia. And that energy has

to go somewhere. And it can go to conduct other gases and

mix with them. It can turn into infrared, which it turns

out is extremely difficult to do in a gas. It turns out, I

thought, oh, Carbon dioxide and water, those are infrared gases.

What's the emissivity? You have to have ray

lengths of like order of magnitude or meter before you can start having

significant emissivity. And you can trap the infrared as

well. So it's really just things that are glowing inside the system. It's

a way to lose heat. And then there's conduction. Well, if

I can keep the walls alive, if I can

keep, you know, An air gap or a vacuum gap, I

can really limit the amount of conduction losses. And then with

the heat exchange from the exhaust, I can eliminate that loss. And

then I also have to eliminate optical losses. So anytime I have produced

light, I wanted to ultimately meet the cells. So

mirrors everywhere else, or at least white, try to have

some redirection so that the absolute brightest part of

the light can't just go into a light trap. So if I

incorporate all of that in a sort of fundamental physics, it's like, where can I

get to? It's like, actually, the sun's

the limit. Like, it's like, you know, energy doesn't leave

the sun except to like to compress itself and like, leave the

sun, you know, so you can... It's close

to that. But there are a lot of nuances.

For example, the sodium itself, it doesn't just send

out the light. It also absorbs that light. Now, most of

that time, it absorbs the light and then re-emits it. But

what it means is that because there's trapping, You can't just

increase the amount of sodium that you add to a flame and increase the brightness

without bound. It's linear up to a point, and then it

starts to scale as the square root. So when you start getting to

1,000 parts per million, you increase it by another factor

of 10, you only get 3.1 times as

much. But basically, most of those are not fundamental

loss factors. You work them out, and it's like, well, that's pretty low.

And then in fact, what I am actually doing

in terms of to get the demonstrated results that have high output

power and calculated efficiency is

like, well, I need to achieve this while getting the temperature to

be very high without it down mixing to sort

of for energy to leave the system without getting a chance to

actually excite the sodium. And that is all about building

a thing where we have mastered the slain and we have not

overheated any of the parts so that they are melting or cracking or

exploding. And we're making great, exciting progress

Yeah. Let's talk about that. So, I mean, I think that, so

that's like the theory of the case, right? Like we want to, there's the three steps and

you want to make them as efficient as humanly possible. What are the, like,

how do you do it? Like in practice, I mean, your approach to

this is, I think, very cool. Like you're in the lab, you're building things every day,

you're experimenting every day. Like, do you want to just talk a little bit about how you

With the Proviso that we're not close to done yet, like,

what's the pattern that has taken me, you know, this far

and at every step helped me make it more real? And

after a long period of like, reading about similar

technologies and actually watching a huge amount of science YouTube

and a lot of demonstrations and so on, it was finally time

to put down the books and really see it for my own eyes. And

that really honestly sponsored, spiritually,

so much of the motivation to go forward. it's unlike

anything else to like I mean it's I

can't exactly advise it but like when I

got my first like oh my friend like my my old

investor sponsored some of the first research and I used it to get a

high-end black swords torch and I had my

dad help set it up at the time I've since

grown quite a bit stronger but at the time I couldn't easily do all

of the propane welding stuff just because of the grip strength.

We set it up in my parents' old garden shed. They very

graciously allowed me to take over and turn it into a science shed. And

the simplest dumb thing that would work, take a spoon, a

steel spoon, and have the torch directly aim at

it. And I'm like, okay, how good is this really? I was seeing an

after image the next day. And like, my dad got

a picture. I'm like, ah, do you have it? Like, is it okay? And,

right, and so and, and, and honestly,

I remembered a piece of advice from Richard Muller, who

actually studied, there's sort of a genealogy of

physicists that studied under Alvarez, who

ultimately studied under Compton. Compton, who developed the

sodium lamp, the low pressure sodium lamp. They met with Richard Muller,

he was part of the Berkeley Earth, sort of like, basically, a

bunch of Republicans are like, we're not totally sure that the The,

you know, liberal conspiracy of global warming is at the level,

on the level we needed to find a scientist to find out if it's on the level, you

know, factoring out all the biases of like the weather stations are closed to people.

Can you do this for us? It's like, okay, yes, I'll do this. And like, he

does this, it's like definitely still happening. It's like basically

factored out. Anyway, he became quite famous for this,

but there are a few other things. He also did, I think, physics for future presidencies. Anyway.

He told me that the most important thing to understand about

an experimental investigation is that you

have to convince yourself and you are the hardest one to

convince. And that this is actually the main problem with

academia and like all the experimental. Everyone is trying to

convince each other with papers and

persuasions and reports and everything else. And

frankly, the people aren't really reading it. They're not actually persuaded. It's

not actually a loop. Like the actually tight loop that

should be going on is the actual demons, you know, investigation.

And what's much, much closer to it is like the Wright brothers getting

the loops down until they could actually fly the thing and then demonstrating it.

Or like Richard Darwin. making tons of observations

then writing about it and then eventually publishing this whole thing

like once it's actually understood and like you are not allowed to

do that and like wait that long in academia today everyone is

trying to convince each other of different things you know people are very

terrified of outcomes you know even in this in a normal company

who would do the experiment here like What's the

liability on that? Like, so they'll put a lot of barriers around

it and like what the safety is. I bet that would be a hundred times slower

or something. Like, you know, so, so, so, so you

have to convince yourself. about what really is

important and what, what you're observing and

like where you are and what, what would be helpful for the

investigation. And I have always benefited

from like, there is a lot of art

effort is like, Liz, usually like free, free

on the table. Like, you know, you should take advantage of it. And

like, um, especially at the beginning of a

project when you don't have much burn rate and you don't necessarily have

a lot of organizational inertia say behind say people with particular skills

or like an invest in one particular thing you can do the exploration

to really have a sense of whether it's easy or not and in

a kind of idea map and like you can extensively do this

you can do this giving yourself the time

and real focus to be able to master, or at

least get to a working level, the necessary things

in order for you to do the fundamental investigation quickly. So,

for example, I'm not a trained machinist. Actually, my co-founders

are trained machinist, and I've employed a lot of really

exceptional mechanical people. But myself, I

am not a trained machinist. However, it is so useful

to just be able to, oh, I need a part. I

can turn this out on this manual mill, and

in a matter of minutes, then do the

heat treat myself and that means that I kind of call this the fast CPU model.

I can at any time during the day, either during the

day or like after a bunch of people have gone home, this is at night or

on the weekend, convert an idea into a new observation or

a significant new experiment because now I have a new part. And

so that, if I didn't have that capability, if I didn't learn

how, okay, how am I going to machine ceramic honeycomb? I don't really find

a lot of information on the web about this. We didn't just have,

you know, oh, well, let's try the Amazon diamond

bits. And like, thank you very much, Pete Lynn at Otherlab for

suggesting this particular relatively cheap and pretty good mill.

You know, I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't even be thinking of the things that I'm

trying. I wouldn't be jobbing it out necessarily. Instead, I can really do that.

So, so we have spent a lot of time, the three

co-founders, myself, my old partner, Steve Crane, and

John Maple, who also went to MIT, got his

PhD there and focused on solar concentrators and

lighting. So a lot of adjacent things. You

know, we kind of view things as a little different sort of, you know, kind

of imagine master craftsmen in You know,

take your pick Europe, Japan, China, sort of learning their

craft and then teaching and then, and, and,

and then really understanding it up to the point where, okay, now we can

like accept an apprentice and like do this knowledge transfer. Because

that's the other thing. My goodness, is it depleted? We really have

retired generations of handy people and then. you

know, yes, there's a lot of social mobility, and that means a lot of

Americans travel, but there's therefore even less, you

know, communication of knowledge across generations. And

when you don't pay people involved in manufacturing enough

or craftspeople enough, And that just work just isn't happening. That

is where talent moves away from or it only lives in

particular niches. And so therefore a lot of different kinds

of mechanical things or things that are new or

old, be they machining ceramic or, or, or, or

crafting furnaces that can work at 2000 C

wall temperature to like 3000 C flame temperature. Like

these are. Crafts, lost crafts

that need to be learned and mastered and then taught

again. And, and we, you know, don't despair about

this because I think, you know, to some extent a vital curriculum is

one that is continually, you know, kind of rediscovered and reinvented and

we have tools to do it, but we have to recognize that like that's the

situation that we're in. And then from, and then from the motivational standpoint,

it's really. What is exciting me the most? What

are the largest open questions that I think that myself or

investors will have or how it will really play out inside the marketplace? Some

conversations with people. So for example, there

are a lot of different... This is a new idea for how

to do what's called thermophotovoltaics, most of which are

either broadband or they have some specialized emitter, but it's more

broadband than us. Essentially, they

turn heat into photons and photons into light, and they just do

the photon production in a different way. Different, usually

lower band gap cells. Army is like,

oh, probably not going to wear a thing like this. But

we could have it on a like, Boston Dynamics dog or

cart, you know, something. And I'm like, okay, you

know, so sometimes we're Palmer lucky

and Andrew reaches out. It's like, Hey, can you show us something? And

I'm like, I can show you some, but it's currently hooked

up right now. Like, and like, he's like, can you

build something into the back of the truck and show me? And I'm like, these guys

are gonna like definitely be looking at how robust the thing is.

So I spent a lot of time just thinking, okay, you know, outside

of fully operationalized thing, how could

I make something that is really robust for testing in free

air and provides the salt? This led to

sort of lightsaber experiments. The lightsaber experiments, which

shot a flame through a sort of collar that ended

up being a kind of ceramic wick to provide the salt ended up

really giving us an understanding of how, how the salt behaves. So

that's, that's led into everything else. So some of it

is, it's very intuitive, explorational work.

And then some of it is you, you push on the other part of the

bicycle and you're like, okay, let's review, let's go analytical. Let's

think of it. Okay. What measurements are we doing that we need

to analyze? What measurements are we not doing that we really need? You know, so

maybe temperature, maybe instead of doing you

know, visual and then manual on mass flows, like,

let's make sure all of that is closed loop, you know, recorded controls

instead of backing everything up. Okay, now let's improve that.

So now we can run a series of different experiments.

So it's, it's about getting leverage. with

different mindsets when you get stuck, mapping what

are the things that you need to know, and then judging when it's

time to do a next significant iteration on design of a platform that

will ultimately either directly translate to

a prototype product or we'll

inform the next one. So

that's kind of the motivational part. I have to usually hype myself

up to do these experiments because it's like, okay, turn

on the fire, make sure I've put the thing together. In some cases, there's

sort of two branches. We want to have a

really controllable ignition, but there's a

lot of things to do to make sure that that's controllable, and you can't have salt

bridging shorting out an electrical arc, so it's

a little tricky to figure out. So instead, we've been literally igniting

it open and then assembling the thing, so it's a little bit of a dance. You

put the thing together and then you run testing. Listen

to a lot of music, listen to a lot of it during the day, a little

quieter at night, quite loud. And then, you know, it's

a somewhat meditative discipline. Try to think about what I'm going to do. and

then rehearse all of the actions and then do it. And so

far that's been performing very well, which is

not to say that there aren't occasionally some interesting problem

solving that needs to happen in real time. The coolest thing

about what I'm doing, though, is that height interactivity.

It's literally like I can't play video games anymore because the

dopamine is so great in what I'm doing. And even

the payback time, It's like between thought

and and and glowing experiments sometimes which like You

know sometimes things a little bit disappointing sometimes things do as

well as you expect sometimes things outperform like 10x

what you think and you're like, holy shit and and

sometimes you'll get multiple of those every day and honestly I,

I've read a lot of biographies of scientists. That is unusual. You don't

normally get it. Sometimes you might get it sort of, you know, real, real

Eureka after many years of work, you know, some of

it's block and tack and problem solving and just handling all

of that. And to run a company properly, you know, I

certainly have to do a lot of that. It was just January. I have to handle, although

I, luckily Steve has been handling and

merely, you know, complaining about handling with chief operating officers kind of

stuck. finances and stuff like this. We're

handling that too. I'm taking in incoming investors.

Investors want to know what we're up to. And we tell them, yes, we

are accepting money, but here are the terms. Don't negotiate with us. And we

find that to be much more effective with our time. Actually,

finding that if we tell them, You know, these are

the terms it's uncapped, no discount safes. And like, you

know, if it's all if it's if you're if you're priced out of that, totally understand.

We're happy to just build. We usually find the people are like, no,

I want to, I I've, I've still want to, but if you

let the venture capitalists actually get hot and then go

excited to negotiate that they're actually literally hot

to do that. And if you tell them that you're

not, they, they can't do it. Like you'd never get there. But like, if

you just tell them the thing upfront, I have

a hit rate, like more than 80% in terms of like meetings

that I've taken online. So it's like, anyway, so

that's fairly motivating too. But I would say

fundamentally what I do is a

lot of energy management. And I mean that sort of as spiritual inventive

That's awesome. I think, okay, I think we're almost at time.

I have one more question though. And my question is just, How

does someone learn about this? Like if there was, if there was like a person who

is a freshman at some school or maybe like just dropped

out of school and they need to study something to be very helpful to

Physics is a fucking great curriculum. And if

you learn and actually do research in physics, you'll probably also learn to

do programming, scripting and things like Python as

well. And that's all. And, and, and

by the way, if you can, You

talk through conceptual things and you can figure out how to do that with CHOP GPT. It's

pretty helpful, although not always right, sometimes a little

misleading. So just mix it in here and there. But it's a

really rigorous course if you take in any university a physics degree.

And there's also a huge amount of, in addition to engineering

degrees, there's an enormous, enormous amount that you

can learn by starting to just pick an interesting and

achievable physical project of the real world And then talking,

maybe filming about it, maybe making content, showing the process

openly and trying to show the people who come up behind you different

ways to do it, try to teach while you do that. And then

after you learn and you get some feedback on

what's good, you can pick out another project and another project. And

that's really how the day-to-day blocking and tackling of

solving things in the real world, more than in an engineering course

where it's more handed to you, that's where the practice can be

learned. And the social media can help you a lot because you

can create value even when you're learning because some

of the best teachers are those who have just learned something. And so they

can relate stuff that they've just learned to special relevance. So

I highly encourage building in an open source and

there's a lot of different discords. For example, like

YouTube, there are different channels. For example, Tech

Ingredients is an amazing sort of father and

sons like invention house out in New Hampshire

where they're always building and documenting fully

all their methods and how they did it and like how it's working and so

on and they give incredible videos. And then

Styro Pyro does the same thing a little more shoot from the hip with

a little more dangerous shit and does it

himself and builds Things

like lasers and explosives and other very dangerous things.

And basically shows you how to do it and says, do not do this at home, but

you can do this maybe. And his discord is

filled, just replete with really amazing people. So the young people

I've seen who are getting really far in hardware, in

addition to the, you know, learning at work and online.

And at a university, they're really doing a lot, you know, they're

getting involved in, in communities of builders where people

share what they're up to, whatever level that they are and

are often in a lot of communication. I personally suffer when

I am in a discord channel and it's going off all the time. So I

can't exactly recommend this, but people do send to do this.

And if you're, if your mind is wired up that way, like I know a lot of people

who are getting a huge amount, it's basically part of a hive brain. And

when they encounter a technical problem, like. can often throw it

to the channel and they get a lot of different directions. But chat

GBT also, what I do is I get it to I tell

them what I'm trying to do. And I tell it like, please

act like a council of like, you know, Robert Oppenheimer, the Wright brothers, Mary

Curie and Grimes, like, Please tell

me like, and like, and tell me what your emotions are and like, you

know, take different jobs and their position. You're my team,

you know, go and like, here's where we are. And they're like, for example, I

did this early on when I'm first pitching people. I like explain what

the idea is and they just start asking questions and then I just answer and

it's like shark tank. But I'm not in an

anxious state. And Grimes,

pretty interesting actually, the shadow of Grimes in

the discussions about this. Usually

it was really helpful to have a

rather different perspective in the mix to

keep the discussion able to traverse large explorations

and refocus. When you

do that, it is smarter, a lot

smarter, and it can give you feedback. It's

often very positive, so it'll give you positive feedback on what your

progress is. The main problem, if you

look at it... There's like a replit, like

100 days of code, and you look at it and it's just exponential

fall off on that 100 days of code. And that's the

problem with remote learning. Essentially, we haven't

figured out how to close the circuit with the motivational stuff. And

actually, that is the key energy. Like,

when you really look at people who have made a big difference, it's not like

they learned it from some school somewhere. At some point, they really started

self-learning by really focusing on it with a

lot of attention and deliberate checking.

And then the advantage of sometimes schools is, well, you

find community to do that in so that you can kind of unstuck

yourself, like, and carry on and not be in

the, you know, not have to be in

a 0.01th percentile of carrying through just some,

you know, Repl.it automated, you know, day

of, day of code thing. Instead, it's like some other feedback

mechanism. So you have to construct the feedback mechanism. to

get you to do the real stuff the core stuff of what you're

trying to do and if you do that then like you

can cover enormous ground and the way to do that is to

push on your actual interests find where your heart

is curious and then go and if it is in the area of

like There's a well-known set of tools

that are really helpful for understanding about something, like calculus,

or statistics, or physics, say

it's thermodynamics, or say it's classical mechanics, or

say it's quantum mechanics. If you find some analogy and

then you find it interesting and you can find ways to apply those

world models and sort of novel dimensions to have the world make sense to

you or maybe explore some other sort of invention, then

you're on the path to really making a difference, a unique difference. And

when you have a unique perspective and you can make a unique difference, you

can prove your value to so many other people that you can work with,

and that really will get you to your start. So

believe in yourself, follow your inner curiosity, do the

hard stuff, and don't get focused by what

people want to teach you or high status things. Really, really

That is the perfect way to end this. Thank you so much. It was super fun