#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 Did you know that there are companies out there that only make money by selling your data?

They're called data brokers, and the data that they broker are things like your name and email and phone number, and even the names of your family members. They literally sell your information to scammers and spammers. They are the bad guys. But luckily, there are good guys, like the sponsor of today's episode, Delete.me. Delete.me is a service that helps you keep your personal information private, and they're

actually helping me do that right now. All I had to do was go to their website and fill out a little questionnaire, and they've now removed my information from literally hundreds of data broker websites. And I know that this is anecdotal and it's just me, but I have seen a decrease in the amount of spam calls I've gotten ever since I used their service. I think it's so cool how it's like just 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