"The Process Of Building Credibility To Deliver In This Space Is Grueling" Featuring Dr. Mike Laufer, Kairos Power

[MUSIC] For our COBT listeners and viewers, it's made our mic and bread. Here was something super special. We've got Mike Laufer, he's the co-founder and CEO of Cairo's Power. If you're following the nuclear space, which at this point, all of us are at some level. It's one of the most exciting spaces anywhere. You know that Cairo's is a very innovative company based in California, doing things in New Mexico and Tennessee. It's a large company. What you'll hear today is they've made a lot of progress. They've got over 500 people. I've toured it. It's a really impressive facility and group of individuals. Mike, we can't wait to jump in and talk to you about what's happening at Cairo's and how you see the world. Thank you so much for making some time with us. Thank you for having me and I'm super excited for the conversation today. All right. Well, Mike Bradley, what would you tell us about what's going on in the world? Well, Maynard, I'd say the marketer about two things, right? It's about fourth quarter earnings. And it's also about this winter storm essentially. First of all, you know, just before we get to the winter storm issues, tomorrow we're going to have basically after WMC meeting. Most people expect that that is going to leave rates unchanged. Obviously, Powell's press conference is going to be what people are going to be listening for. If they don't cut interest rates or they do cut interest rates, you know, that will be a big surprise. But, you know, expectations are going to leave interest rates unchanged. As far as WTI, we're up to around $62 a barrel. We've moved quite a bit in here in the last couple of weeks. And I think a lot of that has to do with just bearish positioning. We've talked about that. It's like max positioning bearish in financial contracts. And so the path at least resistance doesn't look like it's down. It looks like it's up because of short positioning. And also we're talking about these storms as well. There's estimates anywhere from a million and a half to two million barrels per day of US oil production is offline right now. And so that's probably adding a little bit of a, a little bit of tailwind for oil prices. As far as gas, US gas prices went to as high as roughly 745 and M. Recall roughly, you know, two or three months ago, we were down to $275 and $3 an M. So we're almost doubled here. I like to look at the strip. The 12-month strip, we're around 425 and M. That's up around $0.75 an M since the storm started. So that's a better barometer. What's going on? Now as far as why we're here, obviously very, very cold weather. But everyone talks about the demand side and not the supply side from a supply standpoint. US gas production before we went into these storms was anywhere from 111 to 113 BCF a day. We've punched down to 95 BCF a day right now. So we're down about 15 BCF a day in US gas production. As far as US energy, we got as high as 19 and a half 20 BCF a day. We're down to around 10 BCF a day right now. So down between 8 and 9 BCF a day of LNG exports. So there is some, you know, there is an impact going on right now. The question is, is it durability of gas prices? The prompt gas price is going to come plunging down, which whether basically stabilizes here, the issue is how high we're going to stand in 12-month strip. And that's going to be a function of, you know, sort of future weather. But also if there's any infrastructure damage that has occurred with these storms, we don't know that yet. We're going to have to see when things stall out. But you know, we expect gas prices to stay pretty healthy, the 12-month strip, not the prompt. It's going to come down later whether it gets a little bit warmer. I was talking just as an aside, I was talking to power CEO this morning. And observation was, you know, this is not a 3, 4 or 5 day thing. This is a 10, 11, 12, 13 day thing, which is really that quite unique. Yeah. Well, basically Friday Saturday and Sunday we're going to start to get really, really cold again. We're going to see what happens there, what happens to PGM. But PGM basically for price is skyrocketing right now. And so, like I said, it's temporary. It just shows you the sort of the fragility of the grid right now. And we haven't had any problems yet. But if weather stays like this for another week, two weeks, like you said, then we're going to really test the grid. I'd say as far as, you know, the S&P 500 right now, to their markets down, you know, S&P's up a little bit today, but the Dow is down about 400, 500 points today. And the reason it's down that much is because you have health insurers like Humana, United Healthcare. And they're getting, they're getting whacked to their down anywhere from 10 to 20% on, on issues with basically reimbursements for Medicaid stuff of that nature. I'd say the thing that we've been talking about for the last week or two is just the cyclical sectors are the best performing sectors in the S&P. You have energies up 10% and you have materials up 10%. And what people will realize is silver is, year to date is up 50% already silver. It's already up a couple hundred percent of the last year, year to half, two years. Gold's up about 20%. Copper's hitting all time high. And you have in some of these copper stocks, you're up 25, 30% this year. And so we've kind of been saying that we think the cyclical sectors, energy materials and stuff might be the winners. It looks like they're the winners right now. As far as energy and we'll kind of finish it up here, the energy sector, you know, obviously we said it's one of the best performing sectors, but the best performing subsector and energy right now is oil services. Oil services is up around 22 to 23% year date. The big three which is Halibur Baker and SLB. They're up on average 27%. SLB is up 32 to 33% this year. Those are huge, huge moves. And we can talk all about that. I just want to throw that out there. I think what people are expecting is that spending is going to be better than expected. Not right now, but probably towards the end of this year into 2027. The last thing we'd say is given our guest today is Kyra's. We just wanted to throw out what SMRs have done this year. SMRs are up on average 20% this year. Over the last year they're up on average 165%. So that is an area that people have a lot of interest in. And so we're going to really love talking to our guests about this as well. Okay, great. Well, Brett, let's jump in all of us. Mike again, thank you for coming. When we were talking to your team a little bit about getting you on and some of the things we talk about, it jumps out as you learn about Kyra's that you guys started in 2016. I mean, this is you have been doing to say you were doing it before it's cool is an understatement. So I really got to jump on it a long time ago. I wonder if you might take us back to, I need to mention, you're a split personality. You're a Stanford Berkeley guy. So take us back to those days and the early days of Kyros and what your vision was at that time because the world has obviously changed 10 times over since then. Yeah, it's hard to believe Kyros just celebrated our ninth anniversary in December. And we've grown really steadily as you mentioned earlier, we're over 500 people now and it's people ask me all the time. Is this what you expected? And I say, well, I don't know if it's what I expected, but I'm not really surprised. I mean, I think this is what this is what it takes to deliver real hardware at scale in this space. And we're dealing with a complex technology system with lots of interactions and all the physics in the system. So going back to the origins, yeah, I've been working on this technology since about 2007. So it's been almost 20 years because I get hard to believe. I know I crossed the divide. I did my undergrad work at Stanford, mechanical engineering, and then I had kind of a second life looking at nuclear proliferation and weapons and security issues. And then this was kind of in the first nuclear retisants of that period and was trying to figure out kind of how to combine those interests and figured that really trying to commit to realize the potential for nuclear power was a good place to put energy and ended up at Berkeley, which is a great place to study all kinds of things that are not light water reactors. We kind of joke about that that Berkeley nuclear engineers make. They get exposure a lot of different unusual things. And I really had the the fortune opportunity to join a lab with parapeters in my advisor. And we got to really explore a lot of unusual technical safety and licensing issues for this type of reactor. And during that time period, we were following SpaceX in real time. They were working through all of their early failures. And we were really trying to look to other field and industries of how we could accelerate innovation in the nuclear space. This was in real time. And then figuring out how to translate that into commercial effort that really came a few years later. But by like 2015, 2016, it was clear that we needed a commercial driver and really a strong commercial case to figure out how we're going to get this technology to market as quickly as possible. I think one thing that's interesting and encourage everybody to go to the Kyros home page and look at, learn about the company. But one of the things you do on the home page is you talk about, we want to make this cheaper than natural gas. And I was thinking, as you were talking about the first, as I understand it or appreciate it, the 2005, 6, 7 era when nuclear was having a bit of a comeback. That was in an era where it was sort of pre-shale natural gas prices were really high. And so it's just interesting to me, you're one of the few that I've seen nuclear companies talking about. We're going to drive costs down to that level. We're going to be hyper competitive, but that flavor, that fuel was the fuel that in a way, the shale gas, it kind of killed the previous nuclear renaissance if I'm not overstating that. Yeah, I think, and that story is linked into the early commercial case for Cairo's and and how we kind of figured out what market we wanted we wanted to play. Now, that market has changed in terms of the the customer base and the demand, but we made a deliberate choice really to focus on the US domestic domestic electricity market as the the easiest point of entry in terms of execution and delivery, but also it was the most challenging market in terms of cost and price pressure. And so looking ahead, that boom of natural gas build, we basically in 2000, 2005, built the early commercial case for Cairo's in terms of what was going to replace natural gas. And we felt very strongly that there was this opportunity in the 2030s that was probably unique opportunity for the US system to get a new technology and at scale when these natural gas plants were going to reach kind of the end of their their first life cycle. And we didn't know what was going to happen at your gas prices. We didn't know what was going to happen with carbon prices, but you know, as we talk about kind of Cairo's unique strategies, we wanted to be in control of our destiny here. And so we had to set targets that were going to allow us to be competitive, you know, in a wide variety of scenarios, not just the most optimistic scenarios. So that that's some really hard challenges. And I'm sure we'll talk about the market has completely changed, right? Because it's basically as a replacement market at the time where we're placing existing assets to you know, a growth market now, which is just trying to get capacity on as quickly as possible. And everyone is trying is struggling to catch up to see how quickly they can accelerate schedules to deliver that capacity, including us. It's interesting. We a few of us were up in Canada last week and there was a Canadian oil producer who said the way to run an oil company is to have the lowest cost of supply because you have no idea what's going to happen to the price of the commodity. And I was struck by that you're doing something kind of similar here, which is you're saying, we're going to design this, we're going to build this, we're going to make this happen. But I'm going to be aiming for the lowest possible price because I don't know if, you know, we're paying for a quote, green electricity. I don't know what else I'm competing with. I am going for, I think that's what I find. It's unique about how you talk about the business. And probably it shows up in the philosophy of how you're attacking things. You have such a focus on the cost of the service you're going to provide. Yeah, I think that our understanding has matured quite a bit. And I'd like to talk a little bit about that because, and I apologize if it kind of goes a little bit down into the weeds, I'll try and pull us back up. It's all right, we're weed people. So, you know, it's kind of, if there are two things that kind of, I think, people, say, how do you understand what Kairas is doing? They're two fundamental aspects of our approach that are fairly different from I think how others are doing things in the nuclear space, although there are some newcomers now who are speaking a lot of the same, you know, language that we've been talking about for many years. But the value of iterative hardware demonstrations, being able to design, build, test, and recycle that experience back is one, an incredibly challenging thing to do in the conventional nuclear space. But it is such a powerful, just fundamental strategy and approach when the challenges of nuclear as it exists are not just high costs, but the cost uncertainty. For many years, we kind of said, we're not, we're not deploying a product yet. And we've kind of transitioned there. But we're basically trying to establish costs in that cost certainty and confidence and credibility with our customer base is incredibly difficult to earn. But when we are building real hardware systems, we're also collecting real data on the costs and the schedules that go into the systems at a very granular level. And that data is uniquely valuable. And so being able to collect that data and establish that cost certainty, it just, it keeps us focused on understanding where are the high value parts of the system, you know, from the value chain perspective. So we can capture that. But also, where do we need to own things in terms of controlling costs and schedule? And the other side of Kyrus' strategy is vertical integration. So both of these kind of, I've been adapted from the SpaceX model and lots of people are talking about them. But becoming a vertically integrated nuclear delivery company is, it's an easy thing to say, but it's not an easy thing to execute or do. But those two strategies have been virtuous together. And they really keep the entire team focused on understanding where are the drivers of cost and schedule and where are the opportunities for us to self-perform capture value, but also establish costs or need bring down costs. So that, that thread has continued throughout Kyrus' complete existence and it's kind of deeply ingrained in our engineering culture at this point. So I wonder if, if I might, Mike, when I, when I did go on the tour with you guys, one of the things that was striking is your discussion of, you know, a lot goes into this. It's not just the reactor piece. And so part of what I remember you guys talking about is upstream, and these are my words, but upstream and downstream of the reactor, everything around it, there's, there's no reason to be waiting to produce and design and engineer those things later. Let's go ahead and do it now. There's a lot we could be doing while we're focused on the reactor. I'm not saying that in quite the right way, but it's sort of a full system approach, and which ensures you're probably doing more things at one time than you would be if you were just doing it sequentially, but it also, as you said, it gives you a lot of information about what needs to be changed, what needs to be modified as you go, but as I say, put that in, in my language, if you don't mind. Yeah, so this is not how we framed it in the early days, but in retrospect, it's a, it's maybe a cleaner way of describing things. Our goal, fundamentally, is to essentially accelerate the pace for iterations, so that when we get to the first of a kind nuclear system, virtually nothing is first of a kind. So we have established and de-risk the system in a, in retrospect, what looks like a very comprehensive and systemic way, but in reality is very much a non-linear path. And the value of going through those iterations, if you're doing non-nuclear versions of the hardware and demonstrating at scale and temperature and the chemical environment, you can gain huge amounts of insights into operations and performance that you just can't get. And I'm thankful every day that we're putting the investment into taking that risk off the table in, I say, we're at a scale, the cost of those systems are not always negligible, but I think about the counterfactual of the money that we save by not having to do, or not pushing that risk onto the, onto the product later on. And you know, maybe the extreme example is if you go into a nuclear project and you, you have to say, well, my cost overruns might be 50 to 100 percent on what the initial estimates are if you are kind of just looking at historical performance, being able to spend a little more upfront and bring down that cost certainty, you know, dramatically is, you know, for the strategic planner is an obvious investment, but it's really hard. If you had gone to the vocal project and said, well, you can spend a billion or two dollars pre-construction to narrow down your cost certainty, that would have obviously been a good decision, but it's really hard in the moment to say, I'm going to make this investments, you know, at risk, and I don't know what the schedule consequence is going to be. So, Kyrus is trying to navigate and figure out how to do those iterations quickly, much slower costs than they would be executed in the full first nuclear system, but by the time we get to our first reactors, many of those systems will have gone through multiple iterations, you know, at the component level, you know, five, six, you know, ten times so that we take a lot of that risk and uncertainty. Awesome. We really know what the costs are going to be when we get to that first nuclear. And just to, um, that really feeds, because everybody's always curious about the regulatory and permitting piece of nuclear that this feeds in, if just thinking this through, because by the time you're asking for an approved design, you have confidence in it because you've tested it, and that means you're not going to be learning something, modifying it, going back and getting another approval. You're going to dodge that whole multiple approval loop that gets so expensive, again, my words, but I think that's how I understand it. Yeah, I mean, we, so we've been engaging with the NRC since the fall of 2018. That was when we had kind of earth. first formal meetings with the NRC staff. It was very clear in the early days that the economic potential for technology was gonna be very closely connected to a few key regulatory approvals in terms of what was gonna be required to establish a sufficient safety case for the system to ensure health and safety the public are protected. So we started that process really early and what we found was that one coming in with a lot of technical credibility and reasonfulness, there was an opportunity to unlock a lot of new pathways and opportunities with the NRC. I think that that external pressure was something that we really benefited from because they couldn't just say no, we've never done this before anymore. It was, well, if it's reasonable, they had to give it a fair consideration. And when it was backed up with technical strength, we have found a very high level of reasonfulness. We always want things to go a little bit faster and we've pushed for that and we've shown that the NRC can go faster and we're always gonna be pushing for more efficiency there. But the NRC is something that we've, it's their next journal stakeholder that we've had a lot of success with. We've had the first construction permit for our Hermes one reactor, which is a smaller reactor that won't produce electricity. And we found that there was an opportunity because I haven't really talked about the technology, but essentially our safety case relies on the really robust intrinsic safety of the fuel and coolant combinations. So, trisofuel we use at the common to other reactors is highly robust to very high temperatures. We don't get even anywhere close to those temperatures that are gonna push the fuel to its potential failure point. And then the salt is basically this backup barrier. It was built for, or designed for reactors that would have the fuel all dissolved in it. We don't have dissolved fuel. So it's this tremendous backup barrier that can absorb, if anything does get out, it can be absorbed by the salt. So it's a fundamentally simpler case and we just don't have scenarios that can release material. So establishing that safety case was really important and we've done that with the NRC. Our smaller reactors have the same exact safety case as the bigger reactors, but again, it's kind of making it, giving the NRC things that they can say yes to and then kind of building that case along the way. So we found an opportunity to go in for Hermes II and now we have the construction permit for essentially our first commercial demonstration project real right next to Hermes I. - So you referenced this in your background. When you were at Stanford, you were a Mecky, but you also did some international sort of security work. And then as I understand it, a lot of that thinking showed up in the design because as you said, you wanted something that was safe, could get approved, which didn't have the proliferation and all those other concerns that have gone with nuclear in the past, but you might elaborate on all that. - Yeah, to some degree, it feels a little bit like a former life in terms of really having that be the focus. The proliferation questions come up and security questions come up quite a bit in terms of looking at the facilities. I would say in that life, I kind of, I was interested in how the development of civilian nuclear programs, either did or did not lead to development of weapons programs. And the quick summary is that, well, there's definitely a lot of technical infrastructure involved, the proliferation question is primarily a political decision. And so, yeah, at that point, I wanted to focus on addressing clean energy needs and realize the potential for nuclear to play a tremendous role, both in decarbonization and just in reducing error missions in general with this huge public health consequences. So there's value there and that, the proliferation risks were really primarily a political challenge and better solve through those means. So I think in my current life, we are focused on the US market so that has certain implications in terms of what you need for the security of the system. But the security side is probably where that overlap falls in. And again, the default is rely on kind of intrinsic qualities and things that are passive. And there's a part of our engineer, those, you know, it always work hard to really remove a part from the system. So engineers like to add in and be proactive to put solutions in. But the more elegant and often cheaper solution is to find that you don't need something in the first place because you've made it impossible or you remove the needs. So those kind of fall in across and definitely on the security side, we have a lot of those same kind of intrinsic qualities that we're putting into the design. So you mentioned the fuel and then you mentioned the coolant. Maybe talk a little bit about the size or the market where you feel like your solution is going to be the most applicable. You signed a big important transaction or a deal with Google, perhaps you want to leave that in as well. Yeah, so I'll take like a moment to just kind of go back to some of the early days and some of the decisions here. You know, we used to, we used to joke that the, we went through a number of early design studies and we talked with a lot of utilities and you know, those relationships have continued and been very constructed by logs. But we used to joke that the right size for the reactor was the biggest reactor that we could deliver as our first of a kind, you know, overlapping with the smallest reactor that a customer would buy or pay for and you know, crossing our fingers that that wasn't an all set, right? It wasn't a given that those would be overlapping in terms of where those numbers would fall. We ended up kind of taking some of that off the table by really, we have to deliver a nuclear system that demonstrates the complete integration of all the systems and really provides the cost certainty for what our commercial offering is going to be. So Hermes one is that reactor. And then, you know, Hermes two is a scaled up version but has the same architecture and many of the systems are actually not, you know, they're the same size. So it's not really a total scale up of everything in the system. So Hermes two will be 50 megawatts. That's based on the data that we have right now for the fuel qualification. We have an effort to get confirmatory data. We can push our fuel actually much harder because it's not as extreme as some of the conditions that it was originally planned for. So we can do an operate on that. And so our commercial offering would be a 75 megawatt reactor and the standard delivery would be two reactors. So that, that offering a basically 150 megawatt, you know, incremental delivery. So if we look at our agreement with Google, we have the Hermes one, it's our Hermes two, which is 50 megawatts and then six reactors, 75 megawatts each to get to that 500 megawatt by 2035 target. And, you know, it's a, it's kind of a, it's a, it's a very big deal for us and it allows us to plan infrastructure and supply chain and development and really focus on the execution there. The value of that is really being able to have a sequence of projects that allows us to plan and come down that learning curve. And being able, everyone accepts that first of all costs are going to be higher. The question is how do you set yourself up to come down that learning curve? And in the nuclear space, we have historical examples where we have been able to come down the learning curve. We have examples where we haven't. And so it's definitely not a given. And a lot of what Kyrus is doing is basically trying to set ourselves up not just for the first demonstrations, but being able to realize that potential in the early deployment phase. - Maybe just while we're on the Google thing, do you mind just telling the rest of us, give us a sense of kind of all the work that Google put into figuring out, okay, you're our guys. And then whatever you can tell us about commercially, how they, how you structured it so that they could allow you to some flexibility and take some risks, but maybe not, you know, they could cap their risk or maybe just talk a little bit about the process and then the arrangement, if you will. - Yeah, so I talked a little bit about the original market strategy for Kyrus. Things have obviously completely changed over the last two to three years as basically we lost all of our extra capacity in the system. The pre-talk about, you know, extreme weather can put, you know, big strains in the system, 'cause they're just not a lot of slack in the system these days. And the hyperscalers are acutely feeling that pressure 'cause they can't go out and just get a couple hundred megawatts of capacity anymore that the way that they used to, you know, five years ago. So I would say, you know, the hyperscalers started showing up a lot more frequently at nuclear events, you know, and kind of becoming part of the dialogue. Many of them have built really highly capable teams, you know, the Google team is really first rate in terms of their understanding of nuclear technology and a broader array of technologies. We really appreciate the way that they lean in in a variety of different ways. And, you know, the conversations, you develop, they kind of got to understand us, but really kind of diving into our technology and our approach and understanding, I think, what's different and what's unique about Kyrus, in terms of how we're going to execute our projects. I think established a level of comfort with our approach. And then there's a question of how do we bridge the gap to find a way to meet their needs and how that sets up. And I say Google has a portfolio of different energy options. We're a part of that mix and we're a little bit longer term than some of their other more near-term strategies. But I do appreciate that they have a portfolio approach and we're really proud to have them as a partner in there. One thing that was important for them to understand what our approach looks like and to kind of provide a thoughtful way to link in a commercial strategy that allowed that to happen. So consistent with Hermes II as the demonstration and the first part of that delivery and then being able to find an appropriate way to structure a process to deliver an additional 450 megawatts in that by 2035. And Chyrus is definitely motivated to move as quickly as we can. But setting targets which are achievable and realistic is also important. Because one of the things I'm talking a lot about these days and there's a lot of noise in the system and a lot of companies. And the excitement is great. But one of the key lessons from our experience at date is that the process of building credibility to deliver in the space is grueling and challenging and a huge amount of hard work. And I can't give enough credit to the Chyrus team for all of the dedication that goes into that. And it can be lost so quickly if we kind of overextend or overpromise and making sure that we set up to deliver is the most important thing. And I think Google, we've found a customer and a partner who appreciates that as well. And we're thrilled to have them as our first customer. Yeah, Mike. Thanks for being with us. What really kind of stuck out to me is this issue of like, you want to be cheaper than gas. I think that's really interesting because no one talks about affordability. No one talks about being a lowest cost molecule out there. I think that's unique from that standpoint. So maybe talk to me about that. Maybe what's going to differentiate the winners and all losers. Everyone seems like they're a winner right now. But over the next say, five or 10 years, what differentiates the winners and losers in this space? So I'll say there's always going to be like the immediacy bias. Our hypothesis has been consistent that it's really about project execution and delivery. And the conventional way that nuclear projects are deployed in the United States is not been one that has worked out all that well. The vendors they own, the technology around the nuclear part of the system, there's a set of partners to design the conventional island. There's a large EPC company typically that has kind of the oversight over the construction. There's the owner with kind of the architect engineer. There's all these parties who are kind of involved in these projects. But the lessons from other industries and the best in class nuclear deployment is that you really need centralized decision-making and control and authority over the project. And you need to have a party that is competent who can actually do that. And I would say there's a lot of baggage that comes in with the conventional nuclear mindset of saying, this is how nuclear construction has been done. And this is how it will always have to be done. And this is how the NRC requires it to be done. So therefore, thou shalt always do it this way. And it really, like, very quickly constrains people. And then once the project gets going, the incentives are completely misaligned because anyone who kind of raises their hands say, well, I've got an idea that can save money on this. But if that idea has any schedule risk at all, it's shut down immediately. Because the macro project lesson is, you do not introduce any new schedule risk. And so it creates incentives, which are basically, everyone is just get their work done and stay under the radar, basically. And so it doesn't work in terms. And then as projects get bigger, all these problems multiply. And if you have thousands of people on site and you need all of them to be there, you're not using them very efficiently. It creates all these execution problems. So this is what Kyrus is doing through different phases. The first couple of years, we're really focused on the nuclear system, the hardware. This is what most of the reactor companies are focused on. How do we get a better reactor, better pipes, better heat, like better components? Like that all needs to work. We need to check the box on that. But the biggest challenge is you've got to put that in a building and that building has a whole lot of stealing concrete. And like, it's the way you conventionally do it is not very small or modular. So we're at the point where we have our first reactor system, which is relatively mature compared to our future plans. We're understanding where cost and schedule risks really come in. And we actually, because we're working in an iterative way, we say, all right, well, now we know where the opportunities are. We're going to put the time in to de-risk that. And so we're putting a lot of effort into nuclear pre-cast concrete, which is not the most exciting. It's not the topic that's going to get people kind of riled up in their chairs. But in terms of transformative impact, that is where we'd be seeing the true potential. And it mates well with our technology. And what we're finding on the project execution site is we're starting with things that smaller scale, chirous is self-performing. We are that hub. We are the stakeholder who cares the most about the projects. And we're testing partnerships. Like we can't do everything ourselves. That's been true all along. But we're testing relationships and partnerships to make sure that those partners can deliver rather than just handing them the keys to the whole project. So can they actually do the concrete? Can they do the rebar? These are all things that we need to validate. And getting those good working relations and partnerships are so valuable. And I'm just-- I'm thankful that we're getting to test them. If we had to take that risk on the multi-billion dollar commercial project at the first swing, I would be terrified. Mike, thanks so much again for taking some time to chat with us today. You've highlighted something that I think is really important to talk about, especially in the modern moment that's going on right now. And that's your focus on iterative hardware at the point. Do you feel like there was something in particular that has kind of driven others to kind of move more in the direction that you all are kind of have always leaned into the iterative hardware piloting demonstration? I mean, you are on your second engineering test unit to my understanding at this point right now and on nuclear demonstration unit of the reactor technology. So do you feel like the developers are jealous or there's some other force? Or what has brought the rest of the community to kind of realize what you guys have known? Well, I can't fully project into what others are thinking or motivating. So I won't try and go too far down that rabbit hole. I've had a number of people approach me at different meetings, different contexts. I think there's a lot of recognition about the ground that Kairos has paved. So I think I like to think that we've kind of knocked down barriers that have made it easier for others to do that. I'll say it's pretty weird kind of being on the other side of that conversation where I'm rooting for them. And I want-- there's more than enough demand in the space, right? So there's risks. There's risks that some are many in the space are not going to make it. And that's probably the tough reality. But any individual case doesn't make it easier for us to make our case stronger that we're going to be the ones who can actually make it. It's weird for me being on the other side of saying, well, I actually know the pain that you're about to go through in the next couple of years because we've experienced it. And one of the great examples is now we're starting to actually get some of the key lessons from the second engineering test unit. So I've talked a lot about the lessons from the first one. One of the biggest ones was what is a complete design? And we were living this day to day. It was like our team on the ground and some of our partners were waiting in real time. We need a final design for this piping lab. Or we need a final design for how these components are going to go. And they're waiting for it. And the engineer is like, well, we just need a little more time. We just need a little more time. And we're describing this process. This is exactly the same process that played out with the AP1000s with Westinghouse in that built. Right? They didn't have a complete design. And so now when we go in and say, we know exactly what it means to have a complete design. And we have metrics that now track that. But now that we're kind of on E2, we have a different set of lessons that are emerging for how we execute kind of the modular version of that design in series that are kind of starting to come in and how we get those efficiencies. And there are a lot of assumptions that people make. And you can have the right strategy. But most of the risk is in execution. It's not about having the right plan. about working through all of that. all those bumps along the way. And with the second engineering test unit, which is for background for the listeners, is basically a full scale non-nuclear mockup of the Hermes primary salts. So it's a fairly large test, but it gives us that data at scale for the build and operations, just not a nuclear system. So there's no nuclear fuel in it. So it allows us to go faster. Now we had to modularize it because there's a practical reality of building it while we were decommissioning the first one. Now it's like, all right, well, we have the experience of building these skids and sequins. Now we can start thinking a little bit about the process for Hermes execution. How are we going to optimize that process and build out a whole large number of them in a more efficient way? And having that process to go and enforce the team to get the lessons learned is not always people's instincts, but it always provides huge difference in value. And I can kind of see the speed bumps that others are about to hit along the way. And it's kind of weird being on the other side of that. But I think it is the right approach. It's different. And it does have its own set of challenges that I think we've had to build a unique organization. And I'm very proud of this. A lot of what we do is inspired by the SpaceX model and SpaceX remains an instructive example. But things like the regulatory overlay have required us to establish our own version of that that will work in the nuclear space. And that's come through through nine years of hard work. And it feels like we have a pretty strong head start or running start ahead of others who are trying to do the same thing. And I think that's important. Would you talk Mike since we're right here on it? Talk a little bit about the team. We mentioned there, you have over 500 people. There are all kinds of flavors, certainly on the technical side. But as well, you've got finance and others. But maybe just talk about that team, where they are, what they're doing, how you found them, how you keep them all in sync, trying to accomplish all this. Yeah. So organizationally, we've tried to take inspiration from agile technology companies, but put our own flavor on. And we've had to evolve as we've matured and grown. So the reality is that a lot of-- I think what allows us to be efficient and to move quickly is there's a lot of concentrated knowledge and decision making that comes through myself and Ed Landford, our chief technology officer. And so the two of us have unique visibility across a huge spectrum of activities and programs across the company in a way that allows for-- the goal is to have pretty efficient decision making. And the ambiguity about what to do or what not to do is that paralysis can be very challenging. And so I have basically direct responsibility over finance, commercial, external affairs, and other kind of on the business side, the operations side, and people. And then Ed basically has-- and we work in close coordination-- but Ed has kind of full visibility and oversight over engineering, manufacturing, construction, operations programs. And so that allows understanding to flow across the different worksrooms. And one thing that I'm really proud about is having an organization that can have people be flexible who can go across to meet the needs in the moment has been really valuable. So for example, the first engineering test unit, we basically finished the first round of construction. And then there's about a year before we started up, the full operational test program for that facility. And we were waiting for a couple of key things to be able to do that. But that wasn't a situation where we just had a bunch of people sitting around. We had high-roads people who were able to focus on other projects and other builds at our site in Albuquerque. And so we were able to maintain really high efficiency and keep people busy and keep people productive in that time period. I'm not thrilled that we had that delay in the startup of VT1. But it was not consequential in a cost perspective. And we were able to pull up other programs and have big advancements in our fuel development program and our salt development program. And that progress in parallel just keeps everything in balance. And I think what Kyrus has to do is we have essentially four major deliverables or worksrooms that needs to all come together in a semi-coordinated way. And managing-- I see a big part of my job as managing the risks so that everything is moving along together across those worksrooms. If one of those is falling behind, then having what others serve ahead. So if we're-- I don't want to point-- this is all hypothetical. But if salt is falling behind, it's not that valuable to put a lot of resources into fuel to have them surge ahead because they all need to come together in a coordinated way. And so having people who can kind of balance projects across those is uniquely valuable. So we look for people who are flexible in terms of where they can apply their skills. But in general, just we're looking for people who are wildly competent. That's basically the fundamental thing that we're looking for is, can you just solve-- work through problems, can you deal with ambiguity and certainty? And that's really challenging for a lot of engineers. So finding the right people is not easy. And we're really proud of the team that that's here today working hard. That's true. That is a unique animal. An engineer that is comfortable with ambiguity. We know what you're thinking there. I guess one question. When Mike was doing the market lead in, he talked about copper prices being up, silver prices being up, gold prices being up. When you think about the year planning, your supply chain, your materials, and people would be included, how are you assessing those risks that you'll be able to get even if you're making improvements, building things, if input prices are moving around. How much of that is a risk as you look at the business? So carous-- our ambition is to be a vertically integrated nuclear company. So that means that we're self-performing a lot of the manufacturing and the integration parts of the supply chain, particularly for the nuclear parts of the system. It doesn't mean that supply chain goes away. It just means that supply chain evolves or looks different. So we end up with actually probably a larger number of suppliers because we're going down in the deeper to raw materials or commodities or off-the-shelf components in our procurements. We're going to be sensitive. To some degree, we can't be immune to market variability in those pricings. But we're removing a lot of middle layers of value at their so-- I'd say the general philosophy is that there's less sensitivity to those because we absorb a lot of that value. And so if prices are going to go up on steel, we're going to see that directly. And we'll have that come in. But it's not going to be go through a couple of layers for other companies putting their margin on top of that. So there was some discussion about Tesla on having their deeper supply chain, giving them a little bit more resiliency during the pandemic because they were less sensitive to those intermeney suppliers. But at the end of the day, there's always going to be something in there that's going to-- you're going to be dependent on. So getting in front of those has been really key. So we have tremendous building strong partnerships on things that are crucial for our fuel supply, our salt supply, key raw materials for construction. And then there's a lot of steel and concrete in the buildings. And so this is kind of the current effort initiative right now is really understanding what does the supply chain look like for concrete and for precast concrete for these systems. And it's a very different world than if you're trying to understand how that all fits together. And we're learning a huge amount. And we go into it assuming we're not going to know everything. We try and find the right partners who can help us learn and see value in coming along for the ride with us. But it's very different when you're partnering with the companies who are this deep in the supply chain. And I said, when you see a supplier get excited about an opportunity and willing to put their money into the investment, into that delivery, that's usually a signal that there's a lot of the value chain is there. So just to give it away, we should always have the valuation of, well, maybe we should put a little bit of our energy and investment into that to share some of that part of the value chain. And it's always a big-- balance with basically what we're what we're resource to do and what are people can actually physically and humanly do in a working day. Awesome. Well, we're going to have to wrap up. It makes me sad, but Mike and Brett anything from you guys as we close out. Google is sort of like cutting edge kite company. TVA has been around for decades and decades and decades. Maybe talk about those relationships, the pros and cons, which what each brings to you to you from a relationship standpoint. Yeah. So in August, we announced our first, actually, I mean, the first, you know, binding power purchase agreement for advanced nuclear in the US. It was signed with TVA. It's kind of a three party deal. Part of that is just kind of the quirks of the regulatory environment in the TVA service territory. So Cairo sells power to TVA TVA sells power to Google. Google pays Cairo is kind of a premium for kind of the clean energy attribute associated with with the delivery from from Hermes to and trying to figure it like there are lots of technical problems that we have to deal with every day. There's also challenges on the commercial side and the finance side that are we're off and dealing with new situations. We've had a long relationship with with TVA and part of that has been just getting them exposed to what we're doing and establishing credibility. Part of it is also you have Cairo is is we are self performing our work on the Hermes reactors. And so we have a strong partnership with TVA, but they're not directly in their line of responsibility for the projects. And so that allows us to operate. We want to kind of share knowledge and be a good partner and a good member of the community. And we really value the public engagement that we get in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, specifically. It's a tremendous community and we're honored to have their support, but it's important that we earn it and we we do our part to keep it and TVA sees that we value. We value the people in the community and I think so it's easy to have that that bridge that builds the relationship there and Google sees that as well. There was a mention a couple of weeks ago that some aspects that they really appreciated was the culture was was a big part, but also our community engagement is really strong. And I think it's a credit to our team for again, not just on the technology side, the delivery side, but also on the community engagement side to lead that effort. So recognizing that it's a broad approach and we find that you know, those are values that TVA and Google share they want to they want to do right by the communities that they they're serving and that they're coming into and you know, building those bridges not just on the cool technology side is is really important. Mike, thanks so much again for joining us here and maybe piggybacking a bit on what you just offered there. You know, kind of this new paradigm of folks and particularly, you know, mentioning yourselves as the first with the binding PPA with an established utility. You know, this new trend of reactor designers and vendors thinking about how to become operators and how to, you know, sell power directly to kind of customers is a pretty significant challenge and a let you know, something that we've not really seen in this country before. So where do you think you guys at Kairos or you see me, you folks at Kairos see the best opportunities or the biggest challenges in making that transition over the next couple of years from a design company to a more operations, you know, sales power, that sort of. Yeah, it's a great question. The good news is that like it's not a it's not a tomorrow problem in many cases is it's actually a today problem. So it's in that broad category of the areas that don't just magically happen. You can have the great plan, but you need to figure out and work out the kings. So we worked through a lot of operational issues with our first non nuclear engineering test unit. It was, you know, it was unique, right? And we had, you know, PhDs who were on, who were doing operations shift on that system, you know, in the middle of the night, which was running 24/7, that's not something you want to have in perpetuity in terms of how you're, you're running plants or systems, but it kind of gave our team unique perspectives and it was, that was a really exciting phase for people to be able to be part of that operational experience. For each of you two, we're taking a much more, I would say pragmatic approach in terms of structuring an operations team. And that team realizes that they're not just preparing for each of you two operations, but a lot of what they're preparing for is also nuclear system operation. And we kind of, you know, we internally have the joke that before we, we basically start generating a nuclear reaction and heat in the reactor system, the operation of that is going to look exactly like the engineering testing and non nuclear system because you have to go through all the electrical heating systems and all of the startup and commissioning stuff. So we're building informality into that process now, which frankly adds more work to what people need to do just to get the system up and running, but it's a really important learning experience that flows into there. I think in the long term, I'm confident that we will be positioned for optionality in terms of what different customers will need on the operation side. And I think, you know, every utility and every customer is going to have their own specific needs and we'll have to be adaptable. So setting up so a world where Kyrus can provide, you know, the operators directly, we can operate a world where we can kind of partner with with a utility that wants to be an operator and partner with us or provide training for utility that wants to own that in the future. All of those are possibilities, but they all start from Kyrus having the capability to know the most about how to operate our systems and not relying on someone else to figure that out for us down the road. And we're getting that experience in a very real way with our non nuclear test systems. We're also getting it with other parts of our manufacturing production program. So our salt production facility is going to be a large, you know, basically facility to manufacture salt. It has a lot of overlap in the operation sense with reactor systems. So there's commonalities in the operation side that we see and is it being able to find efficient ways to have knowledge flow across those types of programs. I think gives me the confidence that we can establish the programs that we need and do them in an efficient way. Mike, you've been fantastic. This is, I recommend everybody can't go on a tour. You go crazy. We'd like to go, we haven't been in Mexico or Tennessee and I was going to joke with you. I'm from Tennessee, so I recognize some of those accents in those videos. But my last question for you is, will AI, the use of AI and managing complexity and variables and systems and all the things that we think AI is good at? Is it going to meaningfully improve your business as you try to execute on all this? So my instinct is that in the long run, yes, because in general, the ability to incorporate more data and more lessons will, it has huge potential to add a lot of knowledge and insight. I don't know that we're quite there yet in terms of the near term benefits, but that there are analogies in kind of the nuclear world where you just want to collect as much data as you can and you don't know what you're going to need or use it all for. And I feel like that type of approach to understand the reliability of our systems and what works and what doesn't work. We're already leveraging these tools to some degree in terms of the operational experience database that we're building now. That's kind of where probably near term benefits will come, but I would say one thing that I like about the Internet, I don't know, like one thing that is important about the iterative approach is that in order to really buy into it, you don't know what lessons you're going to learn through the iterations and you have to be open minds about what they'll be. If you didn't know what the lessons were going to be, you would just do that and you get what you needed and you'd fall through. So I think that I would approach the impact of AI in a similar way. I know that it's going to have a large impact across a wide swath of life and engineering. We don't know what it is, but I'm willing to kind of see how the iterations play through and we'll learn from how it works with their operational experience and then we'll see how it can feed into design and provide efficiencies there. And I have to believe that at some point it will be able to provide insights and efficiencies that would not otherwise be possible, but I'm not going to make a prediction about when that transition would happen. I get to think it, I'm pretty confident that it will happen at some point. So big game, 129, are you cheering for Stanford or Berkeley? I probably have to maintain my allegiances on the undergrad side, but I try to be as neutral as part of the game. I love both schools and they're both wonderful places. Fantastic. Mike, thank you to you and your team for this. We really appreciate it. Thanks to all of you. Talk to you soon.