Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…So I think about this in a couple of ways. One, the need. We look to the world and we know the world needs clean, low-cost, safe electricity. And just to meet our needs today, and not to even talk about the needs of tomorrow or the needs of AI or any of the growth that’s probably coming. Just to meet today. But fundamental to that is it has to be a product that people will buy. It has to be a generator that is making that electricity at low cost. And it’s got to be soon. So a lot of what I think about is how do we do those two things together? And a lot of that is scale, and a lot of that is thinking about… And not big scale. In fact, it’s the opposite of that. It’s small scale. It’s how do you build a product that’s mass-producible, that you can build quickly and learn quickly? And what I’ve found in my career is that they’re actually the same thing. And that the faster you can build a thing, the faster you can learn if that thing works, the faster you can now iterate on that and build the next thing. And so what I have spent my career building is teams of humans and a company that are builders, that can build high-technology things quickly. If you want to do R&D, you don’t want large-scale, multinational, complex, huge systems. You want to actually take the smallest thing you can build that accomplishes the mission—and in fusion, there is a minimum size—but accomplishes the mission, and then build it quickly and build whole teams around building it quickly and incentivize folks to move quickly, iterate and learn. And the irony I think of one of the things that I’ve discovered is that by focusing on manufacturing, by focusing on low-cost, very rapid manufacturing, you actually get to do science faster. And at the beginning of my career, I would never have guessed that. I would have thought the way to do science is to make a giant demonstration particle accelerator somewhere. Like to make a large complex science experiment is the best way to do science. And what I’ve found is actually small, iterative, just building as fast as possible gets you there faster, because you can learn, you can build, you can iterate. You can solve the problems, and then you can learn the fundamental physics, learn the scaling, learn the FRC, and the B to the 3.77 power and learn those things way sooner than if you would have just started on one mega project and then waited decades to get to the answer. There’s a profound truth in that, something about the constraints of pushing for the simple, for the low cost, for the manufacturable. That pushes everything, pushes the science, pushes the innovation. In fact, you should maybe explain that you’re, I believe, on the seventh prototype. The rate of innovation here is insane. Can you maybe speak to all the different prototypes you went through, what it took to just iterate rapidly? And maybe it would be really interesting for people, like what can you say about the teams that’s required to make that happen? Like what kind of people are required to make that happen at that fast rate? And we’re not talking about software here. We’re talking about everything, the full stack. All the way down to the physics at 100 million degrees, at speeds of 1 million miles per hour. I mean, it’s insane. Anyway, so how do you iterate the prototypes, and what kind of teams make it happen? So at Helion, we’ve built seven systems. The first six were a series of prototypes that we built end to end that were focused on scaling the process of making these field-reversed configurations, compressing them to thermonuclear fusion conditions, and demonstrating that you can do fusion and then increasing the scale, increasing the temperature and the energy. The very first ones were named after beer. Actually, the most successful was the Inductive Plasmoid Accelerator, the IPA. And it was the first system that showed that the team could make these FRCs and hold onto them and understand some of the stability criteria, the heating criteria. And then we started increasing the field. Now, okay, great, we can hold onto one of these FRCs. We know how long and how to make them, but now can we squeeze on them and start doing fusion? Increasing in pressure and temperature. What we noticed is, you know, machine after machine, we always used Starbucks. We were in Redmond at the time, Redmond, Washington, and Starbucks cups sitting on top of the machine as the, this is the scale. They were too small to have a human really in the picture all the time, so the Starbucks cup was enough. And so then we switched to Tall, Grande, Venti. And then the biggest, Trenta, was the biggest system that came online in 2020. That was a system that showed 100 million degrees and was the first system that did deuterium and helium-3 fusion. In fact, as far as we know, the only bulk deuterium-helium-3 fusion that has been done and also showed the 100-million-degree fusion temperatures from an FRC. And throughout that time, the earliest work was government funded, government grants, SBIRs and other types of government grants. And actually the team involved, myself and the rest of the founding team, were really good at winning government programs, doing fundamental science, but moving very quickly. And there’s a lot of ways to think about how to iterate and how to build quickly. I want to talk about the teams first, and then we can talk about some of the technology. It uses to do that, but a lot of it is thinking about if your goal is to get the product, electricity, out to the world as soon as possible, then you should be looking at everything you do through that lens. And so that’s thinking about the materials you choose. You want to, at every turn, choose commonly available materials. If you have to wait for a supply chain for an ultra-rare material, it’s going to take you a lot more time. And so do everything you can to engineer a system that uses simple aluminum alloys, simple copper alloys. And if you have to use tungsten, and maybe you have to use tungsten in some of your systems, which is a hard-to-find alloy, make sure you’re using commonly available thicknesses of tungsten sheet.…

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