Ep 157: Scott Nolan on the AI Energy Crisis & America's Nuclear Renaissance

**Scott Nolan** (0:00)
I joined SpaceX in 2003
The company was maybe 30 people. I remember getting there on day one and reading the employee handbook, and on the top of page one was, You're a partner at Founders Fund, you're the founder and CEO at General Matter. We enrich uranium for nuclear energy. That's the one step the US doesn't do at any scale. We have to import it from Russia. In 2010, we were completely tied neck and neck with China, on grid total capacity. In the 15 years since 2010, they've tripled. The whole thing is, how do you bring down cost?

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:30)
What are the new possibilities for nuclear?

**Scott Nolan** (0:31)
If you just think, how are we going to power things on the moon, especially the dark side of the moon, nuclear just makes the most sense by far. We're going to have a science fiction future that everybody was promised as long as we don't stop it.

**Joe Lonsdale** (0:50)
We're attempting to re-industrialize in America, but power is too expensive. China has gone in the last 15 years from the same amount of power as us to three times the amount of power. They're adding a Texas to their grid every year. What are we gonna do? Scott Nolan is a partner at Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. He was a leader at SpaceX early on, and he's building General Matter. He's identified the key bottlenecks in the nuclear industry. He's gonna help us enrich uranium. He's putting billions of dollars to work to help ensure the nuclear supply chain is ready to scale nuclear massively and help America re-industrialize in the next 10 years. Let's learn about it from him. Welcome to American Optimist. Really excited to have our friend Scott Nolan here with us. Scott, thanks for joining.

**Scott Nolan** (1:26)
Yeah, thanks for having me on.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:27)
Scott, you're a partner at Founders Fund. You're the founder and CEO at General Matter. Before we go into the company, tell us a little bit, what's your background? Where did you come from?

**Scott Nolan** (1:36)
Yeah, I was always an engineer. So my background started with, you know, with science technology, probably in middle school, high school. I was, you know, just building model rockets. That's what I did for fun.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:46)
Where'd you grow up?

**Scott Nolan** (1:47)
Pennsylvania.

**Joe Lonsdale** (1:48)
Pennsylvania, building model rockets. I guess Peter Thiel at PayPal said a lot of them built bombs. You didn't build bombs as long as the bomb is more...

**Scott Nolan** (1:54)
No bombs. It's like a controlled bomb, you know. You would have to go to the hobby store and go buy your solid little rocket motors made by Estes and you could buy the different sizes. So they're basically like, you know, explosives but inside a rocket motor.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:10)
How high would these things go?

**Scott Nolan** (2:11)
A few thousand feet if you built them yourself and put enough motors on it.

**Joe Lonsdale** (2:15)
Sounds, it could be dangerous if you wanted it to. That's impressive.

**Scott Nolan** (2:18)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess it could be. They were small, but started up doing that. And then in college, led a rocket team at Cornell. And so did that for a few years there. And Cornell has this internship program. And so got to work at Boeing during college, got to see what a cost plus government program looked like. Thousands of people going extremely slow. Decided I didn't want to do that. Didn't want to go back to Boeing. Instead went to SpaceX, which I was fortunate had just gotten started, and started off there as an intern.
One of the early team members there had reached out to a bunch of Cornell professors and said, who here, do you know anyone on campus that likes rockets or would be interested in what we're doing? And my name popped up and then ended up joining as an intern and then full time after that in 2004

**Joe Lonsdale** (3:04)
So going back to that a little bit, you saw what cost plus looked like for our listeners. What does that mean? How is Boeing different than SpaceX having experienced both of those?

**Scott Nolan** (3:11)
Yeah, so the US space industry had been going on since the 60s, and there was all this hope that there would be all this progress. And then it never really materialized the way people thought it would. And then the question was, well, why not? And I think the program I was on was, like I said, a cost plus program. And what that meant was as much as everyone at Boeing might have wanted stuff to move really fast and be exciting and innovative, the fundamental business model was you do work, and you get paid for the cost of that work plus some additional amounts. So you might make 110 percent of the amount of money that you spent on the program.