David Kirtley, Founder & CEO of Helion Energy

30:57We didn't accelerate. We slowed down. Why did we do that? And had to come back an advisor for many years who said, David, are you Eisenhower or Pat? Do you lead from behind the scenes, orchestrating the field and then letting your generals go off and, you know, move the, go forward? Or do you get in the trenches? Do you get in the tank, get in the trenches and then actually go and lead on the front lines. And they spent many years telling me that I should be Eisenhower. I should be behind the scenes, set a set of specifications, hand it off, and let it just execute by itself and not pay attention to it.

31:41It turns out that's not me. And it turns out that's none of the founders at Helion. It's get to the front lines and get in there and solve the problems. And then train folks, motivate them, give them the resources they need, and then let them go continue the thing because there's something over here, another battle to fight, another fire to put out, another manufacturing line to build, another hiring pipeline to open, another fundraise to do to go and jump onto that and put all your effort into that thing and solve that problem. And then build the team to go do that and then they can go run and then go and build a business that way.

32:22And that turns out that one that resonates with me as a human, but it also has been, I have seen the most effective. And I've been told it doesn't scale. People tell me that all the time. And I don't think that's right. I think that as long as what you're leaving behind when you go solve some part of the business is a part of the organization that is still operating in founder mode and going forward at velocity, at high speed, and hopefully accelerating, if I've done a good job, then you can go off and focus on something else for a while. And then check in every once in a while, see how it's going.

32:59Do you ever get tempted to take this technology and work on something that's easier and faster and lucrative? Because it sounds like that's kind of how you started, until you really focused. And so I just wonder how much like temptation is there maybe from yourself, but also from outside investors or whatever to like do the easy thing. There is constant external pressure to do that. A specific one is we use a fuel called helium-3, a rare isotope of helium that is safe and clean, but pretty rare. And we very early found, in fact, we didn't invent this. this is one of the earliest ideas in fusion is using this fuel, which is most people in fusion don't use this.

33:47They use a different fuel and, and people don't use it because it's pretty rare and expensive. And so what we developed very early as a way to make it, to actually make it here on earth. And we've shown we can make it. We have now have a whole process to filter it and isolate it for ourselves, but we could go sell it. We go sell it today. And it's, you know, total, total addressable market. if you really squint at it is maybe several hundred million dollars. So it's a reasonable market and it's useful and would be good for humanity. In fact, it's used for medical imaging as a product. And it's not our goal.

34:25It's not the trillion dollar market. It's not clean, safe electricity for all of humanity. It is very niche, but we could do it today and have customers that have come to us asking for it. And we say no. We say no. Because one, it's not, it doesn't solve the problem we want. And I worry that I've watched businesses get diverted by that early stage, much smaller, easier to grab product and then stop there. And we don't want to do that. The other part is I also look at market dynamics is that you look at how markets like that change. Yes, it's super lucrative now. Great, you go solve that problem.

35:10I drive costs lower. And now very quickly, it's not as lucrative. And I think we've had the freedom. This gets to something we were talking to earlier, but we've had the freedom to say no because of some of the investors that we've picked, because of the work we've been through. Yeah, yeah. If they were interested in a three-year return or even a five-year return, then they would be pushing us very hard. And I may not be able to say no. By really focusing folks that really are looking towards that global scale deployment of clean electricity as the market, that has given me the space as a leader and as the CEO to be able to focus the team on that.

35:54And it's a monthly conversation at Helion. I bet. So you were saying that, you know, the idea of Fusion was started back in the 30s. They were researching it and did all this great work. And over the years, it's always been like, oh, Fusion's 20 years away, 20 years away. What has happened that now makes it not 20 years away? In fact, according to you, it's three years away, right, with this Microsoft deal. Like, what has changed to make that happen? Yeah, we broke ground on our power plant for Microsoft earlier this year. And so we are absolutely pushing forward and believe we can deploy electrons on the grid by 2028.

36:37And what's enabled that has been other technologies. There's been a tremendous amount of progress in fusion. Our understanding of the physics of those 100 million degree gases today is not what it was 20 years ago and is not what it was 20 years before. And so there's been a tremendous amount of that work that has been done. And I cannot never discount how great that has been and how great some of the government funding that supported that, the basic science, has been. But in parallel to that, Moore's law happened, that the price of compute or the way we think about it is the amount of power that you can pack into a chip into silicon has so radically changed in the intervening decades, literally decades of Moore's law that that has applied to us.

37:25I think back to what the folks in the 1950s and 60s did in fusion. And I am in awe of that work because you had work with the computer didn't exist. So this was like hand calculations of really tough physics, things that we wouldn't even try to do by hand anymore. And they were able to build machines that did fusion by we haven't talked about the mechanisms of fusion too much. but large amounts of electricity. In fact, they were able to take our current Polaris right now is running at over 100 gigawatts of peak electricity into the machine and large amounts of electricity coming out of the machine.

38:08And they were able to build systems before the transistor existed that could commute large amounts of current in very short periods of time. And it's with vacuum tubes. It's absolutely amazing to me. and in the intervening times silicon has now evolved to where we can i'll give you hard numbers here we need to be able to to turn on electricity in uh we measure it in nanoseconds in 10 nanoseconds of time we have to be able to and when i started my career that was very hard to do 10 nanoseconds is less than a gigahertz a gigahertz cpu is off the shelf you can get it anywhere now. But it used to be really hard.

38:50We have the amount of data we have to collect for every pulse where we do fusion is measured in tens of gigabytes of data. And that hasn't changed. That has always been the case. We've always needed that amount of data. But again, when I started my career, we talked in kilobytes and megabytes. And that's just not the case anymore. We can actually handle that. And so we're not talking about gigabytes anymore. We're talking about terabytes of data that we collect at Helion. And that's things that we can do now. The other big one is fiber optics, is that in these systems, we have in Polaris, for instance, we have tens of thousands of large scale semiconductors that are commuting, that are switching for doing the electricity.

39:35And each one is controlled by a fiber optic. And that fiber optic has to respond again in nanoseconds of timescale. That used to be really, really hard. but you can go buy a 10 gigabit, so that's way less than a nanosecond, fiber networking card from Best Buy today. And it has just totally transformed our ability to diagnose these systems, to understand what's happening inside of them, to control them, to run them. Because the physics has never changed. The gas, this high speed, 100 million degree gas has always moved so fast that we needed one nanosecond or tens of nanoseconds of timescale. and now we can do it.

40:13And also high-speed computing just in itself, we have a small programmable logic brain on every single, distributed all over the machine. We used to need big supercomputers to understand what was happening real time in these, but we don't anymore. We just put a little programmable logic all over the machine and there's a large network bus that runs the whole thing over ethernet. And that has now enabled us to do what we, We, what was 20 years ago, very, very hard and expensive to do. And 20 years before that was impossible to do. Wow. That is so cool. Tell us about your latest machine. Our seventh generation machine is called Polaris.

40:54We named that after a star that does helium fusion, also happens to be the north star, the guiding star. Polaris lives in a building we call Ursa, named after Ursa Minor. the little dipper. That's the constellation that Polaris lives in. That's how we name the plants and we name the generators themselves that go inside the plants. We finished most of the mechanical construction last year and were able to begin making plasmas in December of last year for Polaris. We spent this year now hooking up more power to Polaris, not just making these fusion plasmas running at millions of degrees, but now it's superheating them to tens of millions of degrees.

41:41And in Polaris, we are now have, it's fully complete and we've been running now at full power doing fusion for several months now. And so now it's an optimization, it's tweaking, it's getting the power up, it's getting the power out that we're focused on. I have a question. It sounds like it takes a ton of energy to make energy. This is sort of like that 50 ,000 foot. But the goal here, unless I've really misunderstood this whole conversation, is that you make so much more in the output than you did in the... What is the ratio? What most folks in fusion are trying to do is make fusion reactions that have tremendous what we call yield, energy out per energy in.

42:30What we're trying to do is a little bit different. Our goal is to be very, very efficient with all the electricity we put into it. And so this is what we proved in 2014 during our Y Combinator time is that we could take electricity from the wall, put it into fusion electromagnets, the parts that do the work, and then recover 96 % of that electricity before you've done any fusion. So now the fusion part only has to make up that last 4 % and a little bit extra to sell. Most folks in fusion lose most of the energy they put in and most of the energy they pull out. So they're in the efficiency of maybe, if I'm being generous, 10 % efficiency.

43:16A lot of folks are less than 1 % efficiency. And what that means is the fusion process has to make up all that loss. It has to be much more energetic. It has to be bigger, more complex, more expensive, take longer to build. And so by focusing on efficiency of it, of what do we care about? What's the product? it's not fusion, it's electricity. And so I better be saving every electron I put in, I should pull out and save as much as I can. And so therefore, our goal is now fusion for us, we want to make on the order of one and a half to two times the electricity we put in as output. Most people in fusion are what, 30 times to 300 times the energy.

43:58And so that's the goal for what we do. And in Polaris right now, when we turned it on earlier this year, we're already recovering over that 90 % of that electricity that we were putting. That's amazing. Wow. I feel like I've been sitting here with my mouth hanging open this whole conversation. I'm learning so much, David. I'm so excited. I feel like I'm going to know just that little bit more about fusion than I used to, which was not much at all. Um, so this is real. You signed this deal with Microsoft with, I might add a penalty clause in it. Maybe you don't want to answer this question, but if something were to go wrong between now and 2028, what do you think is going to be the thing that's go goes wrong?

44:45Could you predict? Yeah. I mean, what I'll tell you is it's, it's almost a thing, you know, is that not everything is going to work the way you think it will. And so what we like, Like that's the thing you really know when you're doing something that no one's ever done before is there will be unexpected delays, whether they're business or they're engineering. There'll be new things you learn. Some will accelerate you. Some will decelerate you. And so what we've done is we've built the business to solve problems, to be. And that's part of founder mode is not saying, wow, there's a problem. I can't solve it.

45:17But it's how do I solve it? Or I think that might be a problem. How do I invest today so that if it's a problem tomorrow, I will be able to solve it tomorrow? And so we've now, that's how we've been successful of building six generations of machines is trying to see as far ahead as we can and plan for that. And so the things I worry about are the things, a lot of the things we're talking about. What if we're not 95 % efficient, but we're 94 % efficient? What if we're 93 % efficient? How do we build the systems to be able to evolve that? What if we haven't had this problem and I've been very fortunate for it, but what if we have delays in permitting?

45:57What if we have delays in actually doing the building? There are financial penalties on a PPA. I think any real agreement that you have with your customer and Microsoft's our customer should have that. Like we should be holding businesses accountable for delivering what they say. And so that was a requirement for us is that we wanted a customer that would have that as part of the contract. And so it's now building the systems in place. Okay, we're 93 % efficient. What do we do? Well, we've built now the manufacturing capacity that's bigger than what we needed for the bare minimum because we're going to need some more power electronics.

46:36We're going to need to do more fusion. We're going to have to squeeze it a little bit harder. We're going to have to get to a little bit higher temperature. So let's now build those systems already so that we can handle that and build the manufacturing and the engineering to be able to support that as we learn. And so a lot of it is starting to think as much as you can around what are the things that may not work out exactly as you planned so you can build the knobs to tweak that so you can adjust. And then keeping a company mindset that's problem solving based and excited and optimistic about solving problems.

47:08And in some ways, that motivational piece is almost the harder piece than the manufacturing piece. So you just said, like, you're a problem solver, you iterate, you build. But sometimes there's problems that you have literally no control over, government, you know, regulatory, that kind of thing. Did you have any kind of setbacks where it's like, oh, my gosh, they're not going to let us do this thing? And I have no workaround. Did you ever have a moment like that? I think when we founded the company, there were a few of those we were really, really worried about, the existential company killers that I don't have much control over.

47:44And regulatory was one of those where, I mean, I think Sam and I, I'm sure, talked about this 10 years ago, which was even if we were able to solve all the technology problems and build those prototypes that we eventually did that did fusion, you might get regulated in a path of like traditional nuclear fission power and not be able to deploy quickly, that it takes 10 years to license a machine, that it takes a billion dollars in studies before you're ready to go build something, even though technology and the physics doesn't warrant that. And so we started investing in it. We started building, honestly, building relationships, meeting those regulators.

48:26I remember 2018, I called the Washington Department of Health, who now is our regulator. But at the time, they regulated particle accelerators in hospitals. I said, you don't know about fusion yet, but you're our regulator. Here is our proposal for our fifth generation machine and how I want you to regulate it. And here's a check. Let's go start the process together. And it took years of us working with them to us to understand what drives them, then them to understand us of what are the real safety concerns. This is big industrial power. Well, I was just going to ask, we are all familiar with what the concerns are with nuclear power.

49:07And we actually talked about it at the beginning. But what's the what's the thing that people are worried about with fusion? Like, what's the big disaster? Is it just an explosion because it's so heavy and hot? And like, what is it? The biggest concerns we have in running Polaris today is mostly high voltage. It's the electronics. And so when we run these machines, we have large amounts of pulse power, large amounts of stored electricity that then very quickly, 100 gigawatts worth goes into the fusion machine. And then very quickly, large amounts of electricity come out of the machine. And so we don't want humans in that environment.

49:44And so that's the biggest one where we actually, when we're running Polaris, no one's in the building in that 27 ,000 square feet. Those aren't the hardest ones, though. It's probably the biggest real safety concern. This is still an atomic process. You're fusing atoms together. And much like a particle accelerator in a hospital, you do make ionizing radiation. X-rays, you make neutrons. Those come off of the machine. And so you want to shield humans from that. It's actually an interesting story of when I went to the Department of Health and I said, this is our shielding permit. This is how we're going to protect humans from the machines that are making like your particle accelerators that are making ionizing radiation.

50:24They said, great. Where is the patient? Because our calculations always have a patient inside the room with the machine. And I said, no patient. They're outside the room. Like we're going to have just like in a hospital, we'll have what we call a vault. We'll have a concrete room with a door that closes and you have operators on the outside. but we only have operators. And they said, oh, this radically changes this. We can go forward and go, we can do this quickly. And that's been really enabling for us is to be able to build systems. We can monitor and operate those. But while you're running these machines, when you're doing fusion, you're not in the room with the fusion machine, just like you're not, you don't, other than the patient, you're not in the room with those big particle accelerators.

51:06Speaking of Moore's Law, you could use robots at some point, right? For if you needed, you know, mechanical things, beings in the room with Polaris. Yeah, there's work being done all over the world on what we call remote access and remote handling for using robots that do that. I have a question from Paul, because I said that I was interviewing you and I said, what question would you ask, David? And he said, I'm going to read it. presumably you've already done simulations where you achieve net power. Can you manufacture things that are as perfect as the software? What's the hardest thing to make as perfect as the software?

51:49Does that make sense? That's a good question. That's a great question. There's sort of two classes of things I think about that are as hard to make as perfect as the software. One is that the physical machines themselves are large. They're 40 feet long. But the accuracy of some of the smallest parts, we measure in thousandths of an inch, one thousandth of an inch. And so you have to be able to manufacture components that both can have the scale when they're all put together of 40 feet long and be as accurate as one thousandth of an inch. This is well better than one part in a million. And that's hard to do.

52:33That's really, really hard to do. And it's taken us a lot of work to do that. And early in Helion, it was really hard to do. This is a really great question because we have a technology we use now, which seems like magic to me sometimes in that laser trackers is that is that and this is some of the things like scanning lidar you might have for electric cars now and you can build in Polaris in the building of players we have little retro reflectors little mirrors all over the building and all over the machine and real time we monitor we have laser trackers that can monitor the precision location within a thousandth of an inch over the whole building.

53:17And real time, as we watch when it gets cold out or hot outside, the building moves and shifts and we can detect that now. And that's been so enabling. When we built Trenta, our sixth generation machine, it took us almost a month to align all the parts. We put all the parts on large rails, we align the rails, and then we had to tweak them in three dimensions. And we had people out every day with tape measures and even laser tape measures, adjusting it, little hammers, shims, all kinds of things. And now we just put retro reflectors on everything and we were able to align it in, let's say hours, though it might've been faster than that.

53:58And it worked versus weeks and a month. And it was like in our schedule budget, I had budgeted a month to align this. And they're like, David, it's done. And I'm like, what do you mean it's done? It can't be done. I'm going to come down here and I'm going to like check the measurements because you just told me you accelerated from a month to an hour. And that's, that's the power of some technology development or technology evolution. The other is the same thing as a timescale is that we have the, the, a hot gas moves quickly. And so you have to control it to this very high speed, one billionth of a second.

54:35And it's very easy to simulate one billionth of a second. This gigahertz computer can go do it, no problem. But doing it in real life is hard. It's things like the fiber optic cable I mentioned is great, but depending on the length, the speed of light in that fiber optic cable has a given time. And that's longer than the time we care about. And so you have to now measure and understand the length of that fiber optic cable because the speed of light will limit you to a given timescale. And so doing it in real life, in real space, the physical limits of the speed of light, the speed of electrons moving in wires, the turn on time of a real semiconductor versus a computer model.

55:16Those are a lot of the things that we spend a lot of time on, is understanding those details and getting them right. Some of the things that have gone the most wrong have been not getting those right. On Trenta, it took a month to align the machine. I didn't plan for a month then. On Tredaris, I planned for a month because I had learned my lesson, but not on Trenta. And so that we just burned schedule on that because we didn't get it right. And on Polaris, it went faster, which is great. But similarly on some of the details of timing and how do you get everything to be as accurate in time as possible, we've spent a lot of time on that.

55:52And it's been some of the hardest challenges. In fact, just because you don't learn that lesson until you build the whole machine, until you have these large scale systems. The small scale on the bench works perfect. No problem. Go on the big scale where now the fiber optics are much longer and you missed it. And so you got to go build that in the computer system to correct for that. And we can do that. But that's been some really interesting engineering challenges. You have a lot on your plate, David. I know. How do you do all this? Yeah, this is a lot. We're overwhelmed. But I do wonder, one thing that I'm imagining probably isn't one of your 99 nine problems is competition.

56:32And not because there aren't other people, companies working on this, but I just get the feeling that that's not something that you lose sleep about at night. Is that right? Generally, we don't worry about fusion competition or even natural gas and other power system competition. I think the need is so great in the world, especially with AI data centers and the power need there in electric vehicles. And as we've gotten cheaper and cheaper electric vehicles and more and more of them, the need for clean basal electricity is so big that the competition is with ourselves. It's just how do we build as absolutely as fast as possible?

57:11We do think about it from the point of view of giving away the technology, sort of publishing schematics and how we think about how we talk about it. But really, at the end of the day, it comes back to how do we just build as absolutely fast as possible. Well, I guess fission, if it cleans up its image, could be a competitive technology. I don't know if that's true or not, but. I think it will always come down to timelines. Our goal is to get to where we're building fusion on assembly lines, a gigafactory of fusion generators where they're coming off the assembly line. They're being then deployed very quickly as well.

57:52One of the things that I was surprised by that went better than expected, because we were told by every expert that you couldn't do this as part of founder mode. We were told by experts, you can't do this. It's not a thing that's ever been done, which is for Orion, our power plant, we were granted a determination of non-significance for the environmental permit. And this is like - Such a legal word. In the weeds of how environmental permits work. But it's a classification given to some solar farms. It's not even given to most of them because the environmental impact can be so big. And they said, no, no nuclear power can ever have it.

58:38Fusion power is too new. It'll never happen. And we went through multiple years of working with the experts of these are the real concerns of fusion. These are the hazards of fusion. And they said, no, like this is your classification. And what that means is we could start building today and we could break ground. And we got that determination. We got a lease approved and then had had we're moving Earth within the hour of the lease being signed. Because of of the scale of the impact of fusion is so low that you can move that fast. And I don't know that uranium-based nuclear power will ever be able to do that.

59:17Will ever do that, yeah. So the goal is non-significance, which is kind of funny when you think about it. The environmental impact is so low that we can do the study, deploy it. And then our goal is right now we still deploy site by site. You say, I'm going to go to this community. I'm going to build a plant here. You spend a year working with the community and the local environmental agencies, the utility. You go multiple years, you now then go deploy a plant. Our goal is to change the metric here and make it not like building airports where you go and work at building the site, but like building airplanes.

59:54We're up in here in Everett and right by the big Boeing plants, watching the planes come out of the building every day. And that's where you want fusion. If you were going to deploy terawatts and trillions of dollars worth of power plants and generators. You have to do it in that way. So now we build machines right now on conveyor belts behind me here at Everett. And that's weird perfusion. David, what do you do to relax and have fun in your minimal amount of time that you have? I have a nine-year-old son who's in ice hockey now, joined an ice hockey team. So I have become one of those parents at the, I love my Saturday ice hockey games.

1:00:36And so that's fun. And then a lot of, you know, trying to take some of the engineering, the science, iterative development things that I have done and bring that home. It's Halloween season. It's my favorite season. And so it's a lot of how do you build animatronics and how do you take some of that engineering, the computer programming and bring that home. And then so lots of fun projects along those lines. Oh, I bet. Does your son like those? Mostly, mostly. Sometimes it's cringe is the word that I've learned. Get familiar with it. Yeah, it only gets worse, David. It only gets worse. The thing about this interview to me that feels so profound is that I feel like, you know, generations will look back on this weird time in history when power was expensive and limited.

1:01:33And man, David, if Helion solves this, it's like as big as the Industrial Revolution kind of thing. I mean, do you ever step back from all the things you have going on and think about that? I do. Even when we were in Y Combinator and the business case for Helion and the problem that we were trying to solve was big. It was fossil fuels. We're still growing. We're still powering more coal, using more coal than we ever have before for humans. And we were going to go solve that. We were going to go solve that. We were going to go replace fossil fuel plants. But at the same time, power usage in the United States, at least, was growing at 2 % per year, not a rapidly growing market.

1:02:26And in fact, if you look back at the cost of electricity levelized to inflation, the cost of electricity was decreasing then, 10 years ago. That changed. That changed with the massive growth in the EV market and now large-scale data centers. we're now seeing not 2 % growth per year in electricity infrastructure and deployment in the United States, but 20%. We're no longer seeing prices go down a few percent per year. They're radically increasing all over the world, including the United States. And so the problem is much bigger than what we, the problem we are trying to solve now is much more pressing than it was when we founded the company.

1:03:08And so to me, the pressure to solve the problem, to deploy absolutely as fast as possible at scale. And not just one power plant. But I guess what I say to the team sometimes is if we demonstrate that you can do Fusion at low cost and efficiently, and that's all we do, that we have failed. If we deploy one power plant that puts electricity on the grid from Fusion for the first time, historic achievement, we've failed. We have to be at a place where we have built a product and a business that can build generators, gigawatts per day of deployed power at scale and deploy it in the world and create both the business, the technology, the regulatory environment to be able to go do that, that's when we all have succeeded.

1:03:54Because the world needs that. And the demand is increasing. And it's increasing at a rate that we haven't seen before. And I think that I worry folks are underestimating the growth and the pressure we're going to find for energy and electricity specifically. You're selling this power to utilities, at least in the residential sense. Is that right? So this gets into some of the really interesting nerdiness around the power utility market and how electricity is done. That for Orion, our PPA with Microsoft is to deploy 50 megawatts of electricity to the grid. And it will be to Microsoft, but through a utility.

1:04:37In this case, the Chelan Public Utility, the PUD. And so it'll be electrons that go on the grid, and then Microsoft will be able to pay us through a power marketer constellation. But what we're also working with is our second customer, Nucor, who's a large steel manufacturer, to not do that, but in fact, to put the generator right on their site, 500 megawatts, about 10 times as big, right on their site and give them power directly. That one's called behind the meter. And that's something that we don't really do industrial scale. Almost always, it's a large central generating station that goes to the grid on a transmission line and then goes to a data center.

1:05:18But our goal is to be able to put generators on the data center, on the manufacturing, on the factory sites and provide them power directly. It's much more efficient and you can do some really cool engineering things around tailoring how you provide power, not for the grid, but you're providing it for a data center which wants different kinds of power. It wants DC, it wants higher voltage, it wants intermittent loads. And so being able to dial that to the data center needs or to the steel manufacturing facility's needs, it would be really powerful from an engineering point. We're pushing that as fast as we can.

1:05:52That makes total sense. But like I said, for residential, unless you're going to build something that can actually be attached to someone's garage, we're still all going to get this power from our utility. Is that correct? For residential power, I think that's absolutely right. Fusion fundamentally is still large-scale industrial power. We're going to make them absolutely as small as we can, and they're still going to be big. It's still going to be a 25 ,000 square foot building, and it's going to have a substation, and it's going to be industrial-scale power. And so we want modular where you have one generator per town, but it'll still be at that industrial scale.

1:06:27At the scale that we're trying to deploy, I think that's okay, that we We want to be able to deploy throughout the world as fast as possible at large scale. And so some of those large industrial facilities are going to be required. And that infrastructure is already built, right? That infrastructure is already built. It already works. So that does seem like the most efficient way to get this energy to the world. Here's your goal. I think that's the goal. What we are looking for is the new stuff that comes online, that new AI data center doesn't require lots of new transmission lines. So now you can take Fusion, put it on site there and power that data center directly rather than having to build a bunch of transmission lines also, which is a real tough problem.

1:07:12Right. I mean, AI companies are going to go bananas when Fusion actually works for them. I mean, because the cost of running their companies are so expensive. I mean, do you get people calling you up saying, hey, how's it going? What's the timeline looking like? Yeah, when can you deploy? Because we're ready for you. So that's, for instance, having Microsoft as a first customer. That's a lot of the driver there. And we were working with Microsoft since 2015. Almost right after Y Combinator, we started working with them where they were visiting us, watching our prototypes in development. We were working with their experts.

1:07:53They have a whole nuclear power and electricity teams, shockingly. Probably not shockingly since they're one of them. Not shockingly, yeah. They deployed massive amounts of power. And as we built our systems and proved that they did work the way we expected them to. This is just such a long game. I'm just so excited to be on the sidelines, like, you know, cheering for you and learning more and watching this. And I cannot wait to see how this all plays out. I feel so optimistic after talking to you, David. And next time you are on a field trip and you want to come visit and see a working fusion system, come out.

1:08:36I do. I do too. I'm going to see a working fusion system. I'm not joking. Carolyn and I are going to go on the road and we're going to stop by and we're going to see Polaris and everything there. I can't wait. Perfect. Going to be great. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I feel like our listeners are going to, this is going to be such a treat for them to have heard all of this story. I know I learned a lot, so I'm totally psyched we got to have this long form conversation with you today. Yeah, much better than 15 minutes. Too much to cover here in 15 minutes. Awesome, David. Best of luck over the next few years.

1:09:15And I just, I cannot wait to see what happens with Helion. Thanks for having me. Thank you, David. Thanks. All right. Bye. Bye. Carolyn, that was so interesting. That was complicated and there were definitely some very complicated scientific concepts. But for the most part, I think the way David explains it, it's pretty digestible and pretty understandable. And it's actually so cool to learn stuff like this. I know. I feel like I'm smarter than I was this morning when I woke up. I certainly understand fusion better. Yes. I loved that conversation. And it is such a long game that he's playing. Yeah.

1:09:55I kept thinking about like, this is like pharmaceutical. This is like biotech where there's just, you have to, you have to be in it for the long haul because drug development takes forever. And so does nuclear fusion. I mean, it is, it is world changing if this stuff works, which he's proven that it can work. It's just a matter of deploying it commercially, right? Scaling and deploying. Yeah, scaling and deploying. And I thought it was really interesting that he's building that, or he's manufacturing in-house his own helium that he could sell. Part of me, I wanted to ask, although maybe it's just a whole such a tangent, but why not license that to people since it's so desirable?

1:10:37But I'm sure that it's probably like, well, that will help, that will distract him. It's losing focus. And he was so adamant that focus is so important, which obviously is. I love how Y Combinator taught them how important focus was and forced them to focus. Yeah, that's great. You know, because that makes me feel like we add value to the hardest of hard tech. Yeah. I definitely would like on our little field trip when we go to see, we're going to go see Stoke, right? We're maybe going to see Charm. We're going to go see Boom, but we're going to, we got to go on a little field trip, social radars on the road, field trip to these things and see it because I think you saw it, you'd come away with your mind blown even more than hearing the description because these are, this is a big operation.

1:11:28Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. I would love to do that. That's a great idea. I can't wait for that episode to come out. It's going to be a great one. It's going to be a great one. I'll see you on the next one. Okay. Bye. Okay. Bye.