- Duration: 39 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KSJRVPRSKWHPHBNH7TPF5DEK (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01KSJRVPRSKWHPHBNH7TPF5DEK)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Building public style stuff you want to get out there, or just in the industry, we can start there and then we can dive into the questions that we have. [Staff Sheehan]: I think that industry overall, I think that there’s a lot of excitement right now around defense tech specifically. You know, Soft Week was, I’ve, I’ve was was crazy in a good way. Just like a of a attention to a lot of attention to the field. And there is still a lot of we’re we’re like still on the nuclear up and up here. There’s still a ton of momentum. So like I think overall this is a this is great. This is like good timing. I’m also kind of I’ve had a lot of outreach recently. Because of my um you know I left my last company as a whistleblower on on uh technology transfer to china that was not not let’s say not kosher um and uh with what’s going on with china recently i’ve had a ton of outreach on that so I’m actually like I feel like i’ve now become like a an expert in like don’t let china into your capital stack for founders and for venture capitalists, you know, because of my litigation and my experience here. [Michael Houck]: Any advice on that that you want to put a post out to like give founders who might see it? [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, let me think about what the best way to pitch that is. And I might want to like send you a voice note or something like that. I just need to like, I got to be a little careful with that because, again, I’m like still in litigation. So, you know, I just gotta be careful with how I vocalize that. [Michael Houck]: We’ll follow up on that for the voice note. I totally understand. No worries there. Okay. So, diving in. And if you want to skip, we have a long list. So if you want to skip any, just let me know. We can move on to the next one. We’ll start off with if Project Omega succeeds, obviously, when it succeeds, beyond your wildest expectations. What changes about like everyday life for people? [Staff Sheehan]: Well, I mean, the thing that I joke about is that you won’t need to worry about charging your iPhone anymore. You know, but a lot of small electronics, there’s a lot of things that we take for granted that, you know, that have been improved by radioisotopes. Smoke detector is the example that I think we’re using in a post- more recently, but also like well logging gauges for oil and gas drilling, a lot of industrial sensors, every bit of like cancer radiotherapy. Like we wouldn’t, we would have so much worse, there’d be a much worse survival rate for cancers if we didn’t have these radioisotopes for therapy. So, yeah, we have. [Staff Sheehan]: I think like there are a lot of really strong applications for radioisotopes that we haven’t even thought of And part of that is because we don’t have availability of these radioisotopes. So I think that that’s probably like that’s that’s you know an iPhone that never dies is probably like the thing that you can like think of as like the cool example. But like, you know, a lot a lot of of small electronics that of small electronics and even going to larger things. Like, think about like, you know, think about like LLMs and GPUs and, you know, being able to power an LLM on chip. Think about how AI has changed the world. [Michael Houck]: Think about how AI has changed the world. [Staff Sheehan]: And now we’re looking at physical AI and the limitation of physical AI is getting power to your physical AI. [Staff Sheehan]: So you won’t need to worry about necessarily getting power to your, you know, to your, the power source, you will not, the power source for your LLM or for your physical AI, you know, won’t run out. Maybe you might need power to still like, maybe you might need supplemental power, right? Because these radioisotope power sources are like A size. They’re not going to like, you know, fully power a humanoid robot. But at least you’ll be in a situation where the brain won’t, the brain of the system won’t die. And you won’t have to like run, you won’t be running out of battery and then losing your entire, you know, losing all your progress. It almost gives you like an it almost gives you how like you know how like in video games, it’s like, would you like to save your game? It almost gives you that ability to do that with like all of the new innovations that are coming out. Out. Love it. [Michael Houck]: And then I’m gonna, I think another thing that we need to also like have a separate post for, and we need to have many separate posts for this, is space. [Staff Sheehan]: Like you can’t like you can’t leave Earth’s orbit unless you have unless you have a nuclear power system. You need a nuclear power system for the moon. You need it for anything interplanetary. You need it for definitely anything interstellar. So this is what powers space exploration going forward. I mean, we’re at a pretty good idea of what low Earth orbit looks like, but to get out of that, it’s a power space exploration already, right? It’s what they use in Curiosity and the rovers, but it’s what we’re going to need to use to power everything, you know, because the sun isn’t that powerful the farther out you go. Sweet. Yeah, you should definitely jam with. [Michael Houck]: my buddy uh Brett Adcock if you guys don’t know each other because you know between the humanoid robots space exploration, I feel like there’s uh there’s something there for the two you guys to jam on. Oh, cool! I never met him. I don’t know. [Staff Sheehan]: Uh, does he do does he does he do like physical aid? Is that his jam? The robotics? Yeah, he’s the founder of uh figure, the robotics company. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I have heard of figure. Oh, nice, that’s awesome. Um Okay, so let’s move it to a little bit more of a geopolitical lens. So what happens if the US specifically does not solve this problem? If the US doesn’t solve this problem, I mean, China will. [Staff Sheehan]: China is working on beta-bull ticks. They’ve been hush-hush in some ways about it, but they’ve been public in other ways. This is a problem they’re currently working on. They’re also working on nuclear recycling. So, everything that we’re doing, China is also competing on, and they’re also pushing heavily on because I think that they realize what this unlocks. They realize the strategic advantages that this brings if you really get it right. That’s one of the reasons why I’m so sensitive. Like in Project Omega, every person in the business is a US citizen, every single person. [Staff Sheehan]: We do not have a single. Like in as full-time employees in the business we do not have a single non-US citizen and that’s that’s just I mean that’s that’s part of just making sure that everything that we develop here stays here and and we don’t give we don’t give China an advantage in a in a field where they are actively working to compete and they’re actively trying to push as hard as they can to beat us. And what happens if they do? Like what’s the second order effect? Well the second I mean the most immediate second order effect right you know we’re talking about energy and energy has a lot of long term effects but it also has short term effects. The biggest short term effect is going to be is going to be on Pacific Islands. A war in the Pacific is a war over fuel and it’s a war over energy supply. Because you run out of energy before you run out of bullets. So the most immediate effect, if China beats us in this, is that going to have a logistics-free supply chain in the Pacific, which would be a massive competitive advantage over us if there were to be any sort of conflict. And it’s also a deterrent. I mean, realistically, I think like, would we be able to compete with them? It’s an open question as to whether or not we’d be able to compete with them if they had, you if they had virtually unlimited energy in their logistics tail and we didn’t. You know, it’s then I think like, I think that they would be a lot more bold if they knew that. I think that like we would definitely say goodbye to Taiwan. We would definitely say goodbye to a lot of other contested areas. And we know that they want to encroach on many of these places. It’s not like we know it’s a problem. And right now we’re doing well because we have deterrence, but giving them this energy silver bullet would significantly weaken all of our deterrence. [Michael Houck]: Let’s get a little more personal with the next one. One. What personality traits do you think are required to work in this kind of field on this kind of like frontier tech? And I guess, more specifically for you, why do you keep choosing these insanely difficult problems? It’s impact, right? [Staff Sheehan]: Like, it’s the biggest impact. [Staff Sheehan]: I think that, I mean, look, these insanely difficult problems take a long time. They take a long time to address and take a long time to tackle. But look at, I mean, hey, look at SpaceX. They’re probably the biggest IPO in human history coming up. And I think that’s definitely something that we could talk about. I’m going to a SpaceX IPO event in June with one of our investors. Actually, our investor that introduced you. I’m Alex. [Staff Sheehan]: So, like, yeah, maybe we’d both make a post about that. But yeah, so the SpaceX IPO is, I think, like waking people up to like, yes, we should be trying to tackle these huge problems. Because like, even if look, even if SpaceX doesn’t become interplanetary and a $20 trillion business, they still have created an insane amount of value with Starlink and with all of the other applications of their technology, bringing the cost of launch down, enabling the space economy to grow. You know, sure. Like, I think that if you look at some of their early comments, they wanted to have a colony on Mars by this year or by last year. And okay, they didn’t accomplish that. But nobody would argue that they have not been successful, right? Like they, they, uh, they, they aimed, they aimed real high and they landed, I mean, as literally the highest of anybody. Um, yeah, I guess, like, for you. Like at what point in did you realize you wanted to work on this type of this type of stuff like in terms of difficulty level in terms of scale etc um I don’t know that’s a good question when did I realize I wanted to do this stuff uh I don’t know I was pretty I was at a pretty probably at like a pretty young age um I wanted to do big, I wanted to do big things, but I didn’t know how to get from point A to point B. [Staff Sheehan]: I think we have like a post, like an origin story post that I wanted that I didn’t, that’s the only one that I didn’t approve last night. Hope you guys are proud of me. I spent like an hour going through everything. [Michael Houck]: Oh, God. [Staff Sheehan]: And I’m texting you guys at like 12.30 p.m. My, you know, Eastern time. Stay awake. So, yeah, it was just, you know, it’s just things have been so busy. We’ve had such great traction. You know. Yeah, good problems. [Michael Houck]: Good problems, but it’s been so, so, so busy. [Staff Sheehan]: So, um, yeah, so I think like, this could tie back into that origin story post and maybe how we like remake it a little bit. I like I like I spent honestly more time on it as an EMT than as a firefighter because when I showed up at the firehouse, they were like, oh, you have your EMT license and you’re the youngest person. Now you take the, now you take the crappy job. So like, and now you have to go carry really overweight people down. Flights of stairs. Good luck. Have fun. There is no glory in this. Not saving any damsels in distress from burning conflagrations. [Staff Sheehan]: So, yeah. [Staff Sheehan]: I’m just trying to think of like, maybe that post we could retool a little bit and just like, you know, say like, you know, I started out as a, you know, I’m just like, I’m almost like thinking of how to like cut it back a little bit in some of it. And like my software company was like me and like, you know, and this, this don’t, we’re not going put this in a post, but just to give you the kind of like background internally, it was like me and my friends that I played World of Warcraft with and like we wanted to make money and I would go out and get like contracts and stuff like that. You know, like Odesk type stuff. And then we ended up being good at it. And so we just like, we like, yeah, we made good enough money to call it a business and paid for college. So it worked out. [Michael Houck]: It’s a post to me, man. That sounds like a great post to me. Oh God. [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah, you know, I’m bring my nerd street cred back. I almost almost lost it going, you know, almost, almost lost it starting another business. And I’ll, my first one I, first one I started Gildies from Little Warcraft. [Michael Houck]: Hey, I played with that too, man. All right. [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah. So that, yeah, it was a But yeah, it was literally like we were like an ODE, we were like Odesque mercenaries, pretty much. [Staff Sheehan]: But yeah, I mean, like, I don’t know, I thought that I think that when I was doing that and like when I decided to go to college, that’s when I was kind of like, all right, I want to try and like tackle some bigger problems. [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah. I think I’ve got I’ve fluctuated to be honest on like how big the problem I wanted to go after was But I think like after I finished my PhD I did when I was running catalytic so like 2015 2016 when I was kind of like you know, I was I was running a business my second business catalytic innovations and it was like like we had pivoted into like a very niche industry where we could make some money, but it was still a very niche industry. And I was kind of like, eh, I kind of want to go big or go home. But maybe, maybe the answer to your question is like 2015, 2016, when I like, you know, after I finished my PhD and I really like started doing hardware entrepreneurship. [Michael Houck]: Do you think most people, I guess, did the realization for you happen? In tandem with maybe thinking that other people and most people in general are thinking too small, or was it just more of like a personal thing for you? [Staff Sheehan]: Um, I didn’t think most people were thinking too small. I just thought, I think it was more, yeah, it was more like a personal thing for me. Um, uh, let me think. Um Yeah, it’s probably just more like a personal thing. It’s probably just more like a personal thing. Like, that’s how I wanted to, it’s how I want to spend my time. You only get so much time on this on this world. And so I want to spend it trying to solve big problems. [Michael Houck]: Okay, what about Project Omega has been the hardest? The chemistry, the engineering, the physics, or the regulation? [Staff Sheehan]: Like it’s a combination. [Staff Sheehan]: It’s a combination. I mean, like, I just don’t, it’s not, the regulation has not been like hard. I think we’ve had a good time with it. I think one of the challenges has been around, one of the challenges has been around like material. Like, you know, yeah, so yes, in a way it’s regulation, but I would say like, getting, one of the challenges has been getting our getting our hands on like the actual material and getting, getting everything built up properly and like that sort of thing. Like, so I’ll give you an example. We do cold work in Rhode Island, and the only place in the United States where you can actually do hot work with spent fuel is Idaho National Lab. There’s very limited resources at NATIO National Lab, and so everybody’s fighting over resources at NATIO National Lab. Not like fighting is not the right word, but like having friendly debates over resources at INL. And I think that we need to, I mean, realistically, yeah, it’s like it’s the difficulty of the technical difficulty of the work cross with the challenges. Of accessing material. [Michael Houck]: Okay. [Staff Sheehan]: It’s a combination of technical difficulty of the work and the challenges of accessing the material. So, like, you could wave your hands and call that regulation, but it’s not really regulation. It’s kind of like, you know, the material itself is government material. Like, it’s, you have to work with the government because it’s their material, right? Like, you are, it’s like entering into a space where there’s group that has all the stuff. They want to get rid of it, but they also don’t want to get rid of it in a way that’s going to cause them excess liability. Yeah. So, you know, it’s like, it’s a regulation, regulation is oversimplifying it. That’s probably what maybe that’s what I’m I’m going to say that. [Michael Houck]: What’s your recruiting pitch for like top talent that you find to come work on this problem with you? [Staff Sheehan]: It’s the biggest problem in the nuclear industry. Come solve it. And we have the and we already have the right team. I think, you know, I was fortunate to get a handful of really talented folks early on, and then everybody wanted to come work with all of us. So, you know, it’s like a good team recruits a good team. That’s true. [Staff Sheehan]: And I think I was fortunate, you know, to a lot of those connections, you know, some of those connections came from people who wanted to invest, like people that I knew through my network. You know, one of my most talented early hires, she was someone that I worked with in the past. You know, I mean, her, Johanna. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Staff Sheehan]: You know, it’s like, you know, she was, she like was. She was in charge of like everything at DIU. She was in charge of keeping DIU together, you know, and so she was much higher level than the folks that I worked with directly. [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah, so yeah, I think that that’s I think it’s like a strong team builds an even stronger team. And that’s why I’ve tried to build the strongest team early on. And now we’re, now we’re, now we’re cooking. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: they say those first few hires are the most important because they set the tone, they bring their networks and they sort of, you know, when someone new joins, they can immediately see how serious of a place this is, you know? [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah, exactly. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: what’s the strongest argument against Project Omega? [Staff Sheehan]: The strongest argument against Project Omega. [Staff Sheehan]: I don’t know, people make a lot of arguments against us. I don’t think any of them are particularly strong, but the strongest, I think the strongest is. [Staff Sheehan]: how do you make the economics work at scale? [Staff Sheehan]: I think that that’s probably the strongest. Because our pilot plant, we’re making strategic materials, right? And so those are going into really high-value markets. But once we get to large scale, once we get to large scale, we need to make things work with. REPU. We need to make things work with, I would say, like lower-value materials than what we’re doing on the small scale. We also are going to add a lot of these materials into markets. So, like, it’s like, you know, what happens when you flood a market with something that was historically unavailable? So, I would say, like, there’s uncertainty around doing this at large scale. But we need to solve the problem. And we’re only going to find out. When we find out. So, like, I think when we get to large scale, we are going to need to make sure that the first plant, you know, that the first plant has economic fallbacks, right? Like ways that it will make money, even if plan A doesn’t work out. That makes sense. [Michael Houck]: Let’s see, maybe one or two more here. [Michael Houck]: Okay, so I will just go personal again. Have you ever, I guess, along the journey, seriously, not necessarily just with Project Omega, but just in general, have you ever seriously doubted yourself? How did you move beyond that? [Staff Sheehan]: Seriously doubt myself, yeah, all the time. Like, it’s just like that’s part of life. [Staff Sheehan]: I think. [Staff Sheehan]: I think you just have to have, look, doing startups, doing what I’ve done for a living for my, essentially my entire life, except for my PhD, is like, it’s like my friends who do, do this are like, one calls it surf in the chaos. It’s a lot of ups and downs, you know, and like the ups are. In a lot of cases really up and the downs are really down. And like, I mean, you’d see like famous entrepreneurs like like Elon Musk. If you look at some of his interviews about about SpaceX, know, I’m to SpaceX ‘cause it’s timely with the IPO coming up. Um like if you look at some of his interviews from like twenty ten to twenty fifteen. You know, before he was as famous as he was after that, like after Tesla became more successful, like he was like breaking down crying at times, like on an interview in front of a reporter. Like, you know, and that, you know, it’s like, I’m sure that, you know, when he got his liquidity events and things like that, I’m sure it was the total opposite. You know, but like, it’s a, it’s, uh, there are big ups and there are big downs, and you have to build resilience so that you don’t let the big ups go to your head and you don’t let the big downs crush you and you don’t let your doubts take advantage of you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: 100%. [Michael Houck]: Okay, Jacob wanted two more little ones here at the end. One is what’s a book everyone should read and why? And then two is what kind of kid were you growing up? [Staff Sheehan]: What do you mean? Like, sorry, the first one was what kind of book should I read? [Michael Houck]: What kind of book would you recommend everyone should read? Okay. What kind of book would I recommend everyone should read? [Staff Sheehan]: I don’t know, like, read the most, like, depends on who you are, right? If you want to read to learn something, like, you know, and you’re, and your life is, like, you kind of boring, then, like, read, like, you know, read some of these like hardcore entrepreneur books and like hardcore like business stuff. Like, if you’re trying to read to like learn how to do things like that, um, if your life is already really exciting and you, um, you know, and you need to like read so that you can sleep at night, then find the most like bullshitty escapist thing you possibly can so that you know you can take your mind out of what you’re doing in the day and what the madness of your day, and you can kind of like calm yourself down. And then, what was the second question? What kind of kid were you growing up? [Michael Houck]: Like, what was your, what were you like, I was a nightmare. [Staff Sheehan]: Ask my mom. [Staff Sheehan]: Okay, that’s all we got for today. [Michael Houck]: I’ll let you know where Jacob will, when we’re ready to go with these. We’ll rework the origin story one, as we talked about two. And then let’s hop on and do another one of these in like a month or so. We’ll keep going from there. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that sounds great. And we can hopefully kind of like, you know, condense these down. [Staff Sheehan]: Yeah, I gotta, I still gotta, I, I wanna, let’s, let’s see. I like the, by the way, just like, on couple of minutes we have, I really like the Yucca Mountain one. I’d to post that ASAP. That was a great one. Cool. Okay. Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Jacob now. Yeah. [Staff Sheehan]: Awesome. Appreciate the time, brother. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. See you. Bye.