Episode 21 Stanford, Silicon Valley, and Companies That Change the World

Stanford has helped shape Silicon Valley through generations of founders, faculty, research, and networks built around risk, experimentation, and long-term ambition. Antonio Baclig, Founder and CEO of Inlyte Energy, shares how his path from climate-focused research to grid-scale battery innovation was shaped by Stanford, Activate, and the broader startup ecosystem.

The conversation connects university spinouts, technology licensing, founder networks, failure, AI, manufacturing, energy storage, China's battery supply chains, nuclear power, data centers, and the future of energy independence. It also looks at why abundant materials such as iron and sodium may matter for the grid, and why community remains central even as AI changes work and entrepreneurship.

Episode Show Notes

Hosts

Emanuel Petrescu
Kevin Carney

Guest

Antonio Baclig, Founder and CEO of Inlyte Energy

Topics covered

• Stanford University's relationship with Silicon Valley
• How Stanford alumni, students, faculty, and researchers contribute to startup formation
• Examples of companies connected to Stanford, including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo, Google, DoorDash, Fervo Energy, and Inlyte Energy
• Stanford's technology licensing culture and startup-friendly structures
• Antonio Baclig's path from Hawaii to Harvard, Stanford, and Inlyte Energy
• Climate change, clean technology, and grid-scale battery storage
• Why Inlyte Energy focuses on iron sodium batteries
• The difference between risky lab-stage innovation and commercially viable technology
• Battery storage for solar, wind, data centers, and grid reliability
• Supply chains, China's role in battery manufacturing, and energy sovereignty
• AI, automation, future jobs, and the role of higher education
• Community, networks, and why startup ecosystems still matter
• Failure, resilience, and the culture of trying again
• Nuclear energy, small modular reactors, and the need for storage
• Space exploration, solar power, and future battery possibilities

Episode Timestamps

00:00:18 - Stanford, Silicon Valley, and startup ecosystems

00:01:14 - Antonio Baclig introduces his background and Inlyte Energy

00:02:50 - Hawaii, local culture, and environmental protection

00:04:20 - Stanford-connected companies and startup history

00:06:08 - Fervo Energy, Stanford Climate Ventures, and founder networks

00:07:18 - Comparing Silicon Valley with Austin's startup ecosystem

00:09:28 - Returning to Stanford after years in industry

00:11:06 - Faculty, equity, startups, and Stanford's ecosystem

00:12:31 - Engineering, material science, and startup formation

00:14:03 - Google, PageRank, and Stanford technology licensing

00:15:07 - Licensing patents and helping founders reduce friction

00:16:45 - Risk, battery chemistry, and startup timelines

00:19:09 - Risk, capital, Columbus, DARPA, and proof of concept

00:20:29 - Networks, Silicon Valley, and the future of startup communities

00:21:35 - AI, work, community, and what comes next

00:23:10 - Activate, trusted founder relationships, and startup mentorship

00:24:21 - AI, employment, Luddites, and white-collar disruption

00:26:26 - Robots, automation, and advice for the next generation

00:28:20 - Manufacturing, automation, and learning fundamentals

00:31:28 - English majors, AI, and hiring

00:32:15 - College, community, critical thinking, and questioning information

00:36:55 - Veritasium, learning, and effort

00:37:59 - Failure, startup challenges, and learning from risk

00:39:14 - Starting companies and making the world better

00:39:34 - California's culture of experimentation

00:40:20 - Creative destruction and failed ventures

00:41:06 - Amy Edmondson, C12 Energy, KoBold Metals, and learning from failure

00:43:02 - Inlyte Energy, China, batteries, and energy competition

00:44:17 - Solar, wind, battery materials, and domestic supply chains

00:48:33 - Energy sovereignty, supply chains, and storage

00:50:11 - Grid-scale batteries and replacing diesel generators

00:52:21 - Stanford connections inside Inlyte Energy

00:55:12 - Inlyte Energy's stage, pilots, and deployments

00:56:04 - Nuclear energy, Oklo, and the economics of power

01:00:08 - Space exploration, solar power, and batteries beyond Earth

01:03:36 - Where to find Antonio Baclig and Inlyte Energy

01:05:07 - Curious Pundits closing notes

Episode Links

• Hawaii State Senator Brenton Awa commends man who beat up a tourist who was throwing rocks at a monk seal
• Tim Latimer's LinkedIn post “Ringing the Bell”
• Patrick Boyle's video “Forbes Has a Fraud Problem!”
• Odd Lots episode on recruiting in the AI era
• Veritasium video on cognitive effort and learning
• The Right Kind of Wrong, by Amy Edmondson
• LinkedIn profile of Antonio Baclig

About the Podcast

Hosted by Kevin Carney and Emanuel Petrescu, two curious minds exploring ideas, culture, and everything in between. Curious Pundits is a conversational podcast where each episode starts with a topic that caught our attention and unfolds into thoughtful, unscripted discussion. We follow curiosity wherever it leads, across disciplines, opinions, and perspectives, without pretending to have all the answers.

Their main ventures are 1307 Digital and Organic Growth.

Entities mentioned in this episode

People

Antonio Baclig
Tim Latimer
Dave Danielson
Richard Wang
Amy Edmondson
Joseph Schumpeter
Derek Muller
Nassim Taleb
Mark Carney
Sam Altman
Steve Wozniak
Larry Page
Sergey Brin

Companies and startups

Inlyte Energy
Fervo Energy
Federal Telegraph Company
Hewlett-Packard
Varian Associates
Sun Microsystems
Silicon Graphics
MIPS
Yahoo
Google
StubHub
Loopt
DoorDash
Voya Energy
Molekule
KoBold Metals
C12 Energy
Xiaomi
BYD
Oklo
Blackstone

Universities and academic institutions

Stanford University
Harvard
University of Texas at Austin
Stanford Material Science and Engineering
Stanford Engineering School
Stanford Business School
Berkeley

Programs, incubators, and organizations

Capital Factory
Hacker Dojo
Stanford Climate Ventures
Activate
Lawrence Berkeley Labs
Stanford Office of Technology Licensing
One Ventures

Technologies and concepts

PageRank
Iron sodium batteries
Sodium metal chloride batteries
Zebra battery
Grid storage
Battery storage
Solar energy
Wind energy
AI
Automation
Humanoid robots
Nuclear energy
Small modular reactors
Geothermal energy
CO2 sequestration
Technology licensing
Creative destruction
Startup ecosystems
Network effects
Energy sovereignty
Domestic supply chains

Books, podcasts, and media

The Right Kind of Wrong
The Theory of Economic Development
Odd Lots podcast
Veritasium
Forbes 30 Under 30

Places

Silicon Valley
Stanford
Austin, Texas
Hawaii
California
San Francisco
Ocean Beach
Marin County
Mountain View
Palo Alto
Berkeley
Alabama
Switzerland
Canada
Toronto
Ontario
Alberta
Romania
China
Strait of Hormuz
Davos, Switzerland
Moon
Mars

Events and missions

Artemis II
Gold Rush

Transcript

[00:00:18] Kevin: today's topic is about the relationship of Stanford University to the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley. For what it's worth, I used to live and work in the area, and then at some point I moved to just outside of Austin, Texas. And I went looking for aspects of the startup ecosystem in Austin, Texas, and realized how small it was relative to Silicon Valley, which made me realize how large Silicon Valley was, which I never really realized because I had never lived in any other high-tech center. And there was a program at the University of Texas at Austin that was a feeder system into something called the Capital Factory, which was a feeder system into the larger startup ecosystem. And it got me thinking about the relationship of Stanford University to Silicon Valley. And today's guest, and I'm probably gonna get your last name wrong again, I'm sorry, Antonio... Baclig

[00:01:14] Antonio: Baclig, yeah.

[00:01:15] Kevin: Baclig of Inlyte Energy. As you can tell from the sweatshirt, Antonio is affiliated with Stanford. He's an alumni, and he started and runs a company that is a part of this Stanford spinouts into the ecosystem. And as we get further along, I'm gonna list other companies that we all know who spun out of Stanford, many of which were founded by students and backed by members of the faculty and administrators. So Antonio, why don't you introduce yourself

[00:01:46] Antonio: Great to be here. Yeah. Nice to meet you, Kevin, Emanuel. Yeah, I wore the sweater. I'm a Stanford alumni. Before that I grew up in Hawaii. I think that kind of gave me a sense always in my life that the Earth is a island that we have to protect. And so I decided in undergrad I'm gonna devote myself to stopping climate change. And worked for a startup before that. I went to undergrad at Harvard. I worked for a clean tech startup, Clean Tech 1.0. From there I decided I really wanted to work on batteries, so I went to Stanford Material Science and Engineering. Spent eight years there doing my PhD and postdoc looking for the best battery for grid storage. And out of that got the idea for Inlyte Energy. We make salt and iron batteries, or we call it iron sodium. Super abundant materials, safe, very long-lasting. And I can talk more about that but, really great for grid storage. And I founded that five years ago. I'm the CEO.

[00:02:49] Kevin: Okay.

[00:02:50] Emanuel: Before we dive right in the subject, I do like to make these interventions because I just today, I think I saw news about a gentleman that was decorated or was awarded... one of the Hawaii senators has awarded him... I don't know if has any meaning, for one might say standing up, but we actually did was he kinda beat up, as they said in the news, showed some local culture, to an... a hole... not to make any kind of words to what it was... that was throwing rocks at some animal seals.

[00:03:23] Antonio: I saw that. Yeah.

[00:03:25] Emanuel: I just figured out that the the local culture is something very important and people do stand up for that. So I kinda like applaud in a sense. Obviously we're not pro-violence, but some people need to get reminded. And what the senator did was saying that he hoped that all the airlines will play that video to all the planes that will land in Hawaii to all the tourists so that they know what can possibly happen.

[00:03:57] Antonio: Yeah. There was a tourist who was throwing rocks at a monk seal and he got arrested, right And that's the thing about Hawaii is so many people live there, first of all and come and visit that if we're not cognizant about protecting the environment, it's gonna be trampled. That's really important.

[00:04:16] Kevin: I hadn't heard that story. I'll look it up later.

[00:04:19] Antonio: Yeah.

[00:04:20] Kevin: I wanna talk a little bit briefly about the extent of Stanford participation in the startup culture. I'm just gonna list a number of companies. And then I wanna talk about or ask you questions about your personal experience being plugged into that, for lack of a better word, ecosystem, and how that helped you get Inlyte going. So I gotta check my other monitor. So I went to ChatGPT and said, "Please generate a list." The oldest one was in 1909. A company called Federal Telegraph Company. Hewlett-Packard was started by two Stanford alumni. Varian Associates, Stanford alumni. Sun Microsystems, Stanford students. Silicon Graphics, it says, "Professor research spinoff." MIPS. Now, I have a weird... I don't know if it's really a personal story of MIPS, but when I first came back to California in 1982, I worked for a small company called Plexus Computers, and at one point when they were in financial trouble prior to going under, we moved into half of our space and leased out the other half to this startup, MIPS Computer. So I remember when they were like, I don't know, 20 guys in the other half of the building. Yahoo! was started by Stanford students. Google, most famously, was started by Stanford students. StubHub, Loopt, which is... I know of them, but I don't know a whole lot about them. They do some kind of real estate stuff. DoorDash, which started as paloaltodelivery.com. Inlyte Energy, and that's the end of the list, but there was somebody missing. I forget who, but there was some other notable company that for some reason didn't make the list.

[00:06:08] Antonio: There's a million. Yeah ... if I can add to the list, actually. Listeners may or may not have heard of Inlyte Energy. We're still small. We're an early stage- startup, but we're building on 40 years of technology. But I actually wanted to shout out another company called Fervo Energy. And maybe someone's heard of that because they just got listed on the NASDAQ last week. So now- Okay ... they're a public company. They were started maybe six or seven years ago. And, Tim Latimer... I knew him at Stanford. He went to the business school there. He just wrote a post on LinkedIn called Ringing The Bell: Reflecting on Fervo's Journey. He actually included a page from his application to Stanford. He specifically applied to Stanford because he wanted to start a geothermal company. And he went there and he did that, and now it's a public company. He shouted out this class by Stanford Climate Ventures with Dave Danielson. I was in that class with him and saw the origins of that. This is real. This is a real thing. It's happens for a hundred years.

[00:07:18] Kevin: One of the things I learned... So when I first got to Texas, and I was surprised by the differences, to give you a frame of reference. So I'm going to these co-working places looking for like, where's the action And these co-working places were really small, and I didn't understand that this was it, but the entire co-working place was smaller than the training room at the God, what'd they call it It was in Mountain View. The Hacker Dojo. Like the Hacker Dojo was so large that the ones in Austin would literally fit inside their classroom. And I didn't have any frame of reference. I didn't know that the Hacker Dojo was big because I hadn't been to a lot of co-working facilities. And when I got to Texas, I didn't realize that these tiny ones were it, because I didn't fully understand the smallness of it. So I contacted people and I wrote an article and it went up on a website until they changed their focus and it got taken down. But in the course of interviewing people for that, I learned that Stanford has done things over the years to make starting a company more palatable to everybody concerned. And one of the most interesting things to me is done to placate parents of students. So at most universities you have a time limit in which to finish your PhD studies. But at Stanford, these students are like, "I'm gonna go try this company. If it works, and if it doesn't." And all these parents are like, "I'm not paying $60,000 a year in tuition for you to not go," right So Stanford, at some point, started allowing students to suspend their studies indefinitely and pick them up whenever they wanted. Like in theory, I'm gonna get their names mixed up, but Sergey and... the Google guys. And Larry, yeah. I forget their names, right Larry.

[00:09:14] Antonio: Yeah.

[00:09:15] Kevin: But at some point, those guys could go back to Stanford and say, "We wanna pick up our PhD studies where we left off-" Yeah... 25 years ago, and they would, right Yeah. No questions asked.

[00:09:28] Antonio: I actually saw that. So I was in the material science department and I always made a point of going to the PhD defenses, because you just learn so much from those.

[00:09:37] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:09:37] Antonio: And while I was still a student I went to a defense, I don't remember his name but he did his PhD with Bob Sinclair, who's now retired. But he had left for industry for basically 40 years. It was his whole career and... he didn't start a company, I think he just went and joined one of the- Yeah ... Silicon Valley startups. And then at the end of his career, he came back and he finished his PhD with the same professor, Bob Sinclair, who was still there. And the PhD defense was so cool because he, showed data that he had taken decades ago, and data that he had taken recently, and he didn't really distinguish between the two. It was just here's, some data, here's other data. But yeah, it's incredible.

[00:10:18] Emanuel: Can you imagine going to school and then sit next to your colleague, Larry Page, founder of Google and whatnot And ironically... Sam Altman is in Stanford. I don't think he graduated, but he was at Stanford. Correct

[00:10:31] Kevin: Who was that

[00:10:32] Antonio: I don't know. Sam Altman

[00:10:34] Emanuel: Sam Altman.

[00:10:35] Kevin: I don't know.

[00:10:37] Emanuel: This needs to be checked out, but I'm...

[00:10:39] Kevin: But for what it's worth, that does happen. Now, I don't know if they made special dispensation, but I think Steve Wozniak was studying computer science at Berkeley when he stopped and Apple became a thing. And many years later, he went back to Berkeley and finished, and it didn't work out, if I remember correctly, because of his celebrity status in the classroom. It's "I'm sorry, dude, but you're too disruptive just by virtue of being who you are," right So it didn't work out.

[00:11:06] Emanuel: Poor guy.

[00:11:06] Kevin: Other parts of his life worked out, right So I also learned that Stanford allows faculty and administrators to take equity stakes in companies. And I've always wondered if this doesn't create some kind of a... like a moral... I don't know if dilemma is the right word. If you've got a number of students, five of which have started a company that you have an equity stake in, are you gonna give those students some form of preferential treatment I don't know.

[00:11:35] Antonio: Yeah. It's really common at Stanford, not to say all, most professors have startups or have students who start companies but it's extremely common for that to happen. And I would assume much more than other universities. It's just all part of the ecosystem and the professors I work with in material science they really care about their students. And they know startups have a high chance of failing. It's all a long game. I think that's the atmosphere that I've experienced at Stanford and the Bay Area is, everything's a really long game and you don't know somebody that's maybe going to start a company now might end up working with you in the future or vice versa. So yeah, I would think that's not so much of an issue just because everyone realizes that there's many different paths.

[00:12:31] Kevin: Okay. And then the other thing which kind of surprised me at the moment that I learned it, but quickly made sense, is that the big action is not at the Stanford Business School, it's at the Stanford Engineering School. That's where people are inventing new things, some of which can be commercialized, and yourself, you came out of the School of Material Sciences, right I understand why Stanford has a business school- Yeah ... but spinning off the bulk of the startups is out of the engineering side of the campus, which I thought was really interesting.

[00:13:05] Antonio: Yeah. And to that point I brought the story of Tim Latimer, and he was in the business school, but yeah, that class I mentioned was in the engineering school, Yeah ... because then that's where I met him. And Sam Altman did go to Stanford. I just checked that. Oh, he did. You were right, he dropped out, yeah.

[00:13:22] Emanuel: Yeah.

[00:13:23] Antonio: Awesome.

[00:13:24] Emanuel: It's like a famous graduates, but also famous dropouts.

[00:13:28] Kevin: Yeah, infamous graduates. On a somewhat segue, and we tend to wander all over, but there's an Irish finance guy who does YouTube videos about the world of finance, and he basically did an episode that Forbes Magazine has a 30 under 30 problem. If you find yourself on the cover of Forbes Magazine as a 30 under 30, he's "Start looking for a country without an extradition treaty, because you're probably gonna need one."

[00:13:59] Antonio: Okay. That makes me feel better that I wasn't on it. Yeah.

[00:14:03] Kevin: Now, I put this question to Emanuel as we were preparing for this episode, but I was really shocked to discover that Google does not own their original patent. Like the thing that made Google better than the other search engines of the day, is an algorithm called PageRank. Stanford University owns that patent and licenses it to Google for a really modest amount. I think it was like a dollar a year or something ridiculous. And yet, that's the secret sauce. That's how deeply embedded the university is with the startup ecosystem. They literally have an office of technology licensing, and they- Yeah ... apply for the patents.

[00:14:43] Antonio: Yeah. Many universities have that at this point. I don't know if Stanford was one of the first. But they did, Stanford did eventually get hundreds of millions of dollars for that stake in Google. They were compensated in retrospect.

[00:14:55] Kevin: Oh yeah, They made out well- Yeah ... long-term. Yeah. Yeah, Definitely. Yeah. But the whole point of the patent was not to make money off of the patent, but to remove a friction from the founders.

[00:15:07] Antonio: And there's a lot that can be done there to help founders and startups. If you're taking equity versus cash, and what are the terms of that. And so that is it's not just having an office, but having one that wants to help the founders. And I didn't have a lot of experience with that because Inlyte Energy... So I worked on sodium-based batteries at Stanford, sodium metal-based batteries which were actually pretty novel batteries that I was working on at Stanford. We did file a patent there. Eventually I decided, okay, that novel work, that's actually too risky to start a company, and then I got excited about iron and salt and went off and started a company. I hadn't worked on it at Stanford and I didn't really have to license something from OTL at that point, but-

[00:15:59] Kevin: Right.

[00:15:59] Antonio: Back when I was working on this more novel and risky chemistry we filed a patent. I met with the people at OTL about what if I wanted to start a company from this ' cause That, was a possibility. And one of the things they told me was the rule is Stanford owns the patent, and they could license it to someone else to start a company. It doesn't have to be me that invented it. But they said typically we feel that the inventor has the best shot at making the company. They basically told me we would have to put it out there, but if you gave us a good plan and you could just present yourself as being credible to start this company, then we'd likely license it to you.

[00:16:45] Kevin: You actually touched on something that I find myself coming back to in various episodes, the idea of that technology was too risky to start a company. Do you mind talking... what was so risky about that technology

[00:17:03] Antonio: Yeah, great. You can think about risk in different ways but one of them is just time. That development of hardware takes time. And in the battery world, if you look at when a certain chemistry was demonstrated in the lab to when it was commercialized, it's 20 to 40 years. And what I worked on is a battery with a sodium potassium alloy, and briefly when we published our paper, we were the number one hit on, I think Reddit science or something. But, we needed a few big innovations to make it something that would last a long time and be safe. And we had one thing that we had found that was really exciting, but we need a few more innovations that for me, I would not bet that they would happen within a few years. Startups- they have to raise money. You have burn rate you have to get the market. Investors expect a return within a certain timeline. And that's hard to bet on something that could take five or 10 years with a lot of research. And so that was something that really excited me about the iron sodium battery that we work on. It's based on the sodium metal chloride battery. So sodium metal chloride batteries were first invented in the '80s. So this is a fully commercialized technology sometimes called the zebra battery. But it's been commercialized as a nickel based system. It's being used in mission critical applications right now as a premium UPS system. But it was originally designed for vehicles with a small cell size and and just a high cost point. And so the idea I had to start Inlyte was with one innovation, we can take this high cost point but very proven, safe, long lasting battery, and we can make it very low cost, and that's switching from nickel to iron. So that's what got me excited. It's something that's both fundamentally attractive, but also based on this proven technology.

[00:19:09] Kevin: Would you mind if I segued into a slightly different topic and then brought it down Yeah. I'm somewhat of a... it started out as a casual interest and grew into a bit of an obsession, like the history of capitalism, money, and banking. Christopher Columbus had the same issue that you just described. He went to private investors and said, "I wanna sail west to get to India," and his basic pitch was, "We don't really know how much it's gonna cost. We're gonna make an enormous amount of money, but we don't really know how much, and yeah, people might die," right And they're like, "No, I'm not investing in this." so it took somebody with even deeper pockets, Isabella in his case, but in our modern economy it tends to be DARPA- to fund the basic core technologies. And then a generation later, Magellan could get private backers because Columbus had done the proof of concept, right That's great. So that basic idea hasn't changed. Yeah. You went back to a 40-year-old... Not, back to, but you went to- a 40-year-old technology- because it had been de-risked by a variety- of factors, right Yeah. Whereas if you had been waiting for the one that required the extra innovations, you don't know how long that's gonna take, and the investors are like that's just too risky for us. Yeah. Like it's the same dance, different tune.

[00:20:29] Antonio: Yeah. Risk, innovation, capital... it's, yeah been going on for a long time and it's evolved in many ways. And I think to me now, and to segue onto a different topic. But, what's so interesting to me about this question, as I was reflecting on it the last couple weeks since you told me about this episode, is Stanford and Silicon Valley it's such a example of a powerful network, right Network effect where you have so many startups coming out of this space. And now in the AI world that we're coming into you have examples of one-person startups, right The one-person unicorn. Because now people have so much more capabilities with AI. So I think this is a interesting question is what makes Silicon Valley and Stanford and... but also is that gonna carry on into the future Do we, need those networks And I don't have an answer, but I would say I think we do. But I think it's pretty interesting.

[00:21:35] Emanuel: I might say that's actually the solution to a problem some have started to raise the concern of. Probably not breach that threshold that will start panicking the entire world, but is something worth of debating at least for certain people. And AI will inevitably take over many, if not most jobs. Hopefully, I would start with the politicians, but I don't think they'll give up their job so easily at first. So what do you do then Let's say we don't end up with a Matrix type scenario where we become batteries ourselves assuming there's better ways of getting energy. Then what's left for us Well... having a great life, and we all know that there's three things that naturally will help you live longer. One of them is eat healthy, do exercises, and the third one, and fairly more important some might say, is the community that you're a part of. And community can be translated, transitioned into a network. So regardless of what the future might have for us, good or bad, I hope for the best, I think networking and coming up with solutions, with coming up with being parts of these type of communities is the answer to the problem that will arise. And some people, it's human nature, will never get satisfied, and they will want more. "Okay, we have AI to do this. We have robots to do that. What's next What's next What's next" So I don't think in the next couple of generations we'll reach that threshold again. So to your point...

[00:23:10] Antonio: Completely agree ... community, yeah. Yeah. Completely agree. The community is so important. That's what's really important to me in starting Inlyte coming out of Stanford. And I also wanna shout out the Activate community, which is another network of startups. It's a incubator actually based at Lawrence Berkeley Labs originally, and now it has multiple locations. But I went to the one at Berkeley. So I left Stanford, crossed the Bay, and founded Inlyte, as an Activate fellow. Along with a lot of people. Tim Latimer... bringing up again, was an Activate fellow. Richard Wang who's now founded two companies Voya Energy being his most recent, and was an Activate fellow and one of the mentors to me. So I kinda was able to follow these footsteps, right- of people who had come out of Stanford, founded a company, been an Activate fellow, then go on to do that. And you just learn so much from having relationships where you trust the person, and you can ask them kind of anything and be really vulnerable about your company and what you're doing. And they can give you advice, and that's that's why, yeah, I do think these networks are still really important.

[00:24:21] Kevin: Maybe 10 years ago, I read an article that had some charts and data in it, and basically they claimed that most of the startups that later become publicly listed come out of either Stanford or Harvard. Now, that doesn't mean that if you go to the University of Illinois and you wanna start a company that becomes financially successful, that it's hopeless. But Stanford and Harvard have the communities that you've spoke about. And yeah, it matters greatly. I'm personally still uncertain about the future of AI. Sometimes I think that the doom and gloom predictions of it's gonna eliminate all white collar work yeah, that might happen. But in the entire 600 or so year history of capitalism, we've basically said that over and over again. And in some regards, there's people in history who are not misrepresented by history, but misunderstood by people who read history. Like the Luddites were not technologically ignorant, right They were just afraid for their jobs, right They understood what was happening and they just didn't like it, right So it's not too dissimilar from what's happening today with AI. And I forget where I read this, but somebody was talking about how over the last 40 years as productivity improvements and automation eliminated blue collar workers, white collar workers were like "that's just the way it is." Now that AI has the ability to disrupt white collar workers- they're like, "This is an emergency. We we need to do something about it." We've been having that conversation- pretty consistently now for 600 years. Now- Yeah ... maybe this time it's real. This one feels like it has a lot more potential to create permanent widespread unemployment, but we've believed that before, so I don't really know how this is gonna unfold. And I change my mind every month or so. We'll see.

[00:26:26] Emanuel: What do you Antonio think exactly And I was just thinking the other day because I saw again a short video, I consume a lot of short videos, probably more than I'd like to admit, where this company from guess where, California started shipping humanoid robots that apparently are operational and can do something besides just hitting the wall or falling off the stairs and stuff like that. We'll see how that plays out, but inevitably they'll be there, right In the next couple of years, two to five to 10 years. I would even be afraid for blue collar jobs because think about how much weight, for example, such robot can carry. Think about construction, right You get one of these robots and most likely you don't need... first of all, it's a logistical cost to build certain things. And even a small house or a big one has a logistical cost to get the cranes, to get the materials there before you even start working. That's essentially can be eliminated. Not to mention that you have all these pre kinda like somewhere 3D printed houses. So I'm assuming those robots could do an excellent job of putting the bricks together like Lego. One thing that they may need will be energy and batteries. So one might say that your job is safer than most of them, but where do you see all this and how it has perhaps impacted you And a question that I'm asking more and more people is what would you do if you were now at just starting university without having the AIs, the ChatGPTs, the Geminis, the Perplexities at your fingertips born into that era. You matured alongside those things. So a couple of questions there.

[00:28:10] Kevin: Can I rephrase the question In 10 years, you have a child who's gonna go to university.

[00:28:16] Antonio: Yeah. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

[00:28:17] Kevin: What kind of a conversation do you think you're gonna have with them

[00:28:20] Antonio: Yeah. Cool. Lots of thoughts there. Let me return to the university to talk about jobs for a second. I think there's a lot of unknowns about how things will play out. But for me we're a company looking to set up large scale manufacturing in the US. We have an existing pilot manufacturing line, but we're looking to scale that up. And we're very excited by the prospects of being able to use more automation to make that more efficient and to make all our employees more efficient and to be able to produce these ultra low cost batteries for the grid. And so for me it's not a matter of we're not... we'll need lots of employees, but it's how do you enable them the most In a sense a conveyor belt on a factory is a kind of a robot. It's something that works automatically, right There's lots of levels of automation and I think we're still pretty far away from, okay, here robots, just go over and run the factory with no humans. I do think that's a long way in the future- Yeah ... For many reasons. But being able to apply automation and now have with AI the potential for anybody in the factory, not just the highly trained engineers, automation engineers, but potentially any employee could now get in there and write some code to make something more efficient. And because the people at the front lines of the production, they now are gonna be empowered to make factories much more efficient and that's very exciting to me and could mean that the gains of productivity can be passed down, not just to the very top but spread more widely. Yeah. But getting onto this next point or question about... in 10 years... my daughter's eight. I have a four-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter. 10 years she's gonna be going to college. Some of my friends are asking a question even... should they go to college at all if they could learn so much just from AI But assuming she does go to college, and I'm planning to encourage her to do that what would my advice be And I would say it's the same that I tried to pursue in my own path which was just to learn really deeply and to learn fundamentals and see where you go from there. I think higher education... what it should be teaching is for people how to think. How to think about- kind of everything. And I think that's more important now than ever because you have AI that you can ask a question and it comes back with an answer that it says it's 100% confident in. And actually critical thinking is more important than ever now because that's- Yes ... you can't trust it. I think learning how to learn is extremely important and I still think humans are the best ways to learn that from.

[00:31:28] Kevin: One of the podcasts that I listen to is the Odd Lots podcast, which is a Bloomberg- Yep ... podcast. And in a... it's not a recent episode to the podcast, but I'm a bit behind, so a recent episode in terms of my listening was the chief operating officer, I think of BlackStone, the very large- asset management company. And they asked him a question of, "In what way has AI changed your recruiting and hiring practices" And his answer gave me pause, right He was like, "Oh, we aggressively pursue English majors now." and his rationale is, and I'm paraphrasing, he used a lot of words, right But I gelled it down to- Yeah... English majors make better AI wranglers. Huh. And I thought, now, isn't that an interesting statement, right

[00:32:12] Antonio: Yeah, that is really interesting.

[00:32:15] Emanuel: I wanted to add to the previous answers that Antonio said. Couple of things I wrote it down. First, I have a young daughter as well. Would I want her to go to college Yes. Specifically for... we just mentioned earlier... for the community- and the experience itself. And yes, it costs a lot of money. For me.. okay, I like to tell people I'm 22. I'm 22 and 18 this year. But even the experience can't be matched in any other form. So even if it costs a lot of money... actually do the work, especially if you're at that age between 19 and 20 to 23. You could go to college just for the experience in itself. I would definitely recommend. I personally don't believe that higher education should teach you how to think. I believe that it should be done within the first seven to 10 years of a human's existence. Now I'm gonna make a note here saying that I'm European, East European. I was born and raised and stayed there for 30 years. And North America has a big flaw in the sense that you have it too good sometimes here, and it's working sometimes against. And I see it now because I've been living in Canada, I'm in Toronto, Canada for the past 10 years- and, I like to complain a lot, but as Nassim Taleb said, "You'll definitely want to live in a place where you can complain a lot." so most likely I'm in the right spot and I see what's happening there. And again, to make a note on Kevin's note again, English majors just for a certain type of segment for the AIs. Nevertheless, I don't think this will play well in the long run, and I have probably seven billion something people to stand with this argument that don't speak English. Many actually don't know. We tend to think that everybody speaks English, and even though you go to places where everybody can have a conversation more or less complex, the reality is that English is by far the most spoken language, even by not natives, but also as a second language by far. And it's important to remind that whenever you build something. Now, the main point is I did search, so if you see me typing in, it's because I wanna do some live searches to bring this up. But I know Xiaomi, they say they have a factory that's fully automated that don't require any kind of like humans on the floor. They need some humans to guide the computers and whatnot, but nevertheless, and Xiaomi build... It's a cell phone company that most recently, for the past couple of years, they've been known as a car company, as far as I know. Haven't seen any phone and I haven't driven any Xiaomi cars, but I've seen a BYD and it's amazing. It's a great experience. There's all kinds of legends. Again, it's saying, "Don't believe everything that you read on the Internet," Abraham Lincoln said. So that's why whenever I see a video about the CEO of Ford that's driving a BYD or a Chinese car model, that doesn't want to give it away, I tend to ask is it true Is it true Probably it's true because the source was credible so far. But again, that critical thinking... we call it critical thinking here in North America- but it's actually more than that. It's questioning everything. And as you said, now it's more important than ever. Now, it might be a flaw for me because when I was born, it was still in the communist era, probably the most sadistic of all the communist regime. That's why it ended up in a a bloody revolution. And I remember... for example I have these memories. I don't remember colors since I was a kid. Because it was nothing colorful. Not even on TV- not even outside we didn't have commercials, we didn't have anything colorful. So that's what prompted me to get to this type of thinking. And speaking for myself here, I tend to exaggerate a bit more. But having a harsh time sometimes can help you develop this kind of like critical thinking, and this is probably something that we should do first, I think, as parents, as members of the society at the end of the day to help raise the next generation by... I don't wanna make it sound in the wrong way, but make it a little bit harder and not so easy. There's value in... the reward is much higher when you actually put some work to it. Sports- Yeah ... School, and everything else. So those are my comments as well. just gonna- actually-

[00:36:55] Kevin: I wanna comment that layers on top of that. So there's a guy, I think his name is Derek Muller, and he makes his living with two YouTube channels. One of which is called Veritasium, and he got his PhD at a university in Australia. He's a dual Canadian-Australian national. He got his PhD at a university in Australia where he was able to design his own PhD program.

[00:37:15] Antonio: So he literally has a PhD in teaching physics with videos. That's his PhD study, right That's cool.

[00:37:23] Kevin: And as part of his thesis, he had to run a whole bunch of experiments, and what he learned is if you want someone to pay attention to a video, you have to, metaphorically speaking, tell them that what they know is wrong first. And if you don't do that, they just tune out the rest of the video, and they don't learn anything. And it has to do with just what you were talking about, the amount of effort you have to put into the subject, right The more effort the people watching the video put into it, the more they got out of it.

[00:37:57] Emanuel: And Antonio was-

[00:37:57] Kevin: It directly segues into what you were talking about.

[00:37:59] Antonio: I love that. What I was gonna say is that in terms of going through challenges and I think challenges are the best learning opportunities. You don't want something to be too traumatically challenging. Yeah, but get that right level and it's the best learning opportunity. And to tie it back to startups... a startup is one of the hardest challenges that you can do. But I guess to even then tie it back to Stanford and Silicon Valley what you see here is lowers that hurdle in the sense that you're always interacting with people who have been through startups. Everyone is aware that the failure rate is very high... so when that happens people are not cast out... that's part of life and you find your next thing and you work on something else, and you take those lessons and sometimes investors are looking for founders that have... whether they've succeeded or failed, they've just had so much lessons from that, right I'm just thinking of all these examples in my head of people who founded companies, didn't work out, have gone on to next... sometimes five companies right before it succeeds. And so being able to take on these challenges but know that you'll still get to keep going if it doesn't succeed is very important.

[00:39:14] Emanuel: Nassim Taleb- Yeah ... I quoted earlier also said he recommend to graduates to go start a company, forget about going and doing volunteer work or anything working for a not-for-profit organization or anything like that. If you wanna make the world a better place, go and start a company.

[00:39:31] Antonio: Yeah.

[00:39:32] Kevin: And I want...

[00:39:32] Antonio: There's lots of ways to make the world a bit... but yeah.

[00:39:34] Kevin: I want to make a comment that this actually precedes what we typically call Silicon Valley. The wetsuit was invented on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. The mountain bike was invented in Marin County back in the late '60s- Oh, I love that ... early '70s. Yeah. Yeah. Hot tubs did not start in California. They started in Japan. But someone in Southern California's "We need to sell hot tubs to people in America. This is great," right Yeah. So the idea that you're gonna try something and that it may or may not work, that's probably been happening in California since the Gold Rush.

[00:40:07] Emanuel: Culture of failure, that's how they call it, and something unimaginable- Yeah ... in my day, in my upbringing, right It will be the end of the world. Might as well go and live by yourself somewhere in the mountains.

[00:40:20] Kevin: So along with my little bit of obsession of how economies work, Yeah ... the creative destruction guy is Joseph Schumpeter, and he wrote a book. It's The Theory of Economic Development and, it's all about this concept of creative destruction. You could say that for the past probably since the Gold Rush, California has been an incubator in creative destruction, and most things don't work. We tend to not talk about them because they didn't work, and we know about the mountain bike, and the wetsuit, and the hot tubs, and the integrated circuits, and Sun Microsystems. But we don't know about all the thousands of ventures that they seemed like a good idea at the time, but they just didn't take off.

[00:41:02] Emanuel: Yeah. You're looking for a book or something in your...

[00:41:06] Antonio: Yeah. I was looking for Amy Edmondson's book. I was gonna call her out. I think it's at my other office. The Right Kind of Wrong is the name of it. The Science of Failing. Big plug for that book and Amy Edmondson's work. But my own path... I had been in a startup before Stanford that didn't pan out, it was a venture-backed startup. It was very exciting. I was just a early employee there. And the founder of that company, Kurt House, has gone on to create, with Josh Goldman, KoBold Metals, which is one of... in my opinion, one of the most exciting startups out there. So you know, for him... that first company, C12 Energy, arguably the reason we didn't take off was just because we were 10 years too early. We were trying to do geologic CO2 sequestration in the US, and there was never the climate legislation that we thought was gonna come during Obama. We thought that was happening and it didn't end up happening. And I think it was about 10 years too early. But all of those lessons he's taken on into now one of the most exciting companies out there. And what I took from that is I really wanted to be part of a early stage venture and, have that shot to really change the world. But I'd seen the ups and downs at C12, and I wasn't just gonna get gonna do anything. I wasn't gonna start a company for its own sake. And I actually entered Stanford wanting to start a company, but also wanting to just focus on the fundamentals and learn about material science and batteries, and see what came from that. So I actually didn't join the startup clubs at Stanford. But I ended up just falling into it at the end, where I became so passionate about this iron and sodium battery that I realized, I had to start the company. Yeah, learning from those failures is really important.

[00:43:01] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:43:02] Emanuel: I have another three-in-one question for- Okay. Okay ... you, which is first of all- I would like you to tell us more about your company and what you do. You said so many times you're so passionate about something that I know next to nothing, so I want to educate myself a little bit more. But also want to ask about the more than an elephant in the room in the world, which is China who on one side many tend to say that they dominate the space of energy, including innovations in batteries and whatnot. We know they don't have all the tech yet there, and they don't have the sort of, say, brains behind creating what's required to succeed. Nevertheless, they have some money, so they might purchase that. And also they have again, their own Stanford University, which is the government of China, who has a generous budget and has invested significantly in technology, including this one as well. So I'm assuming there is a concern on your end with everything that's going on, especially right now with energy being on, the topic of the conversation of more people than we anticipated at the beginning of the year, for example.

[00:44:17] Antonio: Oh, yes, for sure. Yeah , we have a huge shock right now in the energy world that's gonna manifest in many different ways. Let me just talk about Inlyte, first of all and China. What got me so excited about iron sodium is... so first of all I took a perspective of looking at the periodic table and because we now have such abundant sources of energy in solar and wind that are now the lowest cost form of electricity that we can add to the grid. But we only get them when the sun shines and the wind blows. And so to harness this abundant, cheap energy we need abundant, cheap storage on the grid, ways to store that electricity. So I did a whole survey of all the ways to store electricity from physical ways, electrical ways, electrochemical. I concluded that batteries were the most cost-effective ways to scale that up. And then within batteries I basically started at the periodic table and I said, "Okay, what elements do I wanna use in a battery that could create the best batteries for grid storage" which is gonna be different than transport. So in cars, in drones, you want the highest energy density batteries and lithium-ion batteries... lithium itself is the starting point I think, of that. There's different types of lithium-ion batteries, but I do think lithium-ion batteries would dominate there for energy density. But on the grid, what you want is just the lowest cost of storage. And energy density is important, but it's not the only factor. And so that, that took me to sodium metal. I can walk through the whole thought process, but it's probably going a little too deep for this podcast. But essentially you get to the alkali metals. Lithium is the most energy dense, but it's not as abundant, and sodium metal is right below it, and it's far more abundant. It's used industrially as its metallic form. And then everything below that potassium, pretty abundant, but some safety risks, and and then everything else is expensive. So it really was about sodium metal. And I went through this whole chain of logic that had me conclude sodium iron and this sodium metal chloride iron was, actually the best way to make a sodium metal battery. And then I got excited because the technology's been around for 40 years. So that was how I started Inlyte, was looking for the lowest cost materials which are most abundant. Now, how is it tied to China Because it turns out that building a battery based on abundant materials is something that any country can do. Actually we don't need these supply chains that have been... there's globalized supply chains for lithium-ion batteries that China is dominating now. They've invested capital over decades, and they dominate 70 to 90% of every stage of the processing of lithium-ion batteries at every stage of the supply chain. And that's really hard for any other country to compete against. And right now the US buys most of its batteries from China. But we're seeing in the Strait of Hormuz that you have a world that global supply chains are under threat, and it gives China leverage over us. Not only that, rare earth is actually more talked about... but batteries... there's another form of leverage. And if we need energy to power the AI future and China's producing the sources of energy this is... it's not a great place for the US. What we discovered is actually batteries that are based on abundant materials, you can form based on supply chains within the US, or in any region. We call it domestic anywhere. It could be Europe who wants to create- its own not only manufacturing, but whole supply chains for batteries. That's completely possible with this technology. It's something that's lower cost materials and also lower cost manufacturing. It's a simpler manufacturing process than lithium-ion. Requires less energy, less water. So there's a lot of advantages. And again, that's why we think scaling up in the US is not only possible, but actually really really preferred in this environment we're in.

[00:48:33] Kevin: I wanna add something kinda like to layer on top of that. So at the last Masters of the Universe meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made some statements that the entire world stopped and took notice, and I'm just gonna paraphrase a little bit of it. And he said something like, "A nation that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, and defend itself has surrendered some of its sovereignty." Now, he was talking about being as self-sufficient as possible in food, energy, and armaments industry. But what he said dovetails exactly into what you were just describing. Nations need to be self-sufficient in terms of energy generation, distribution around the country, and the future of energy is going to require battery storage. There's no two ways about it. We are going to get... So there's an economist I pay attention to. His name is Steve Keen. And people are constantly objecting to solar and wind because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. And recently he started saying "the Strait of Hormuz is not always open." Yeah. And he's not wrong, right

[00:49:49] Antonio: That's a good point. Yeah.

[00:49:50] Kevin: So more and more, nations are going to start to accept the reality of they need to do more internal energy generation. And for a variety of reasons that you stated, solar and wind are gonna be a larger slice of the energy mix for everybody going forward. Yeah. Absolutely. And batteries are a big piece of that.

[00:50:10] Antonio: Absolutely.

[00:50:11] Kevin: I actually didn't realize... I went to your website and I read up about it, but I actually didn't realize that your central focus, if you will, is cheap storage. But- Yeah ... yeah, I get it. That makes total sense. For what it's worth, and this is for listeners and viewers, these are not small batteries. These are batteries- Yeah ... that you pour a concrete pad and you install the battery on the pad. Yeah. So it's someplace where you have space available for that function. So yeah cheap storage it seems to be it ought to be the thing that's most important.

[00:50:43] Antonio: Yeah. And if I could just add to that ... For me, that was the table stakes is something super cheap, abundant materials. Now, there are others that you can lots of other materials that you could make a battery that you could argue this will be a very low cost battery, and there's plenty of battery startups. But for me, what I was looking for is something not only very cheap and abundant but, also that's high performance in safety, in lifetime, in round trip efficiency, in response time. You go down the list... and energy density. And, so that's again, what got me excited here, is a technology that's been developed over many years to be this premium UPS technology and now we can just make it really cheap. And what that unlocks is new use cases. And so one of these use cases- Yeah, we're making really large batteries, picture 20 foot shipping containers full of batteries. And one use case that's coming up now is replacing diesel generators at data centers. Or anywhere but, especially data centers are getting a lot of community pushback because diesel generators create a lot of emissions. They are very loud, and people don't want them next to them. Even if they're used for backup, they still have to run periodically, for maintenance. And even if the grid is very reliable they still end up being run. And that is now... companies want to replace diesel generators. And it's really hard to find something that's safe and energy dense enough and low cost enough to do that but we have a solution that works for that.

[00:52:19] Kevin: Yeah. I totally get it.

[00:52:21] Emanuel: Then next question to tie it up to today's topic essentially. Many of your colleagues or people that went to Stanford or you went to school with are working on this project, and how...

[00:52:32] Antonio: Oh, yeah.

[00:52:33] Emanuel: Fundamental, how fundamental are they in the success, essentially

[00:52:36] Antonio: Thank you. I wanted to bring this up, so thank you. It's a lot. So, the network is not only about me knowing other founders and being able to learn from them who had gone to Stanford but also a lot of my core team... my... one of the first people I brought into the company, co-founder, VP of Engineering, Will Gent, we did our PhDs together at Stanford. And so I trusted him very much, brought him in. Ben Count, our Chief Commercial Officer, we met while I was at Stanford. He had done a master's there and then had come back to the campus and we met there. And then years later probably seven, eight years later, I ended up hiring him to join my company. Daleep Goswami our president, we met through Activate, but he had done his PhD at Stanford. He dropped out to start a company called Molekule. And, then years later he ended up at a venture firm at One Ventures that invested in us, and then he came over to our side. This core team... so much of us have our roots at Stanford which I think reflects the people that go to Stanford that are interested in joining something like what we're doing to change the world. And I had another thought I was gonna add to that. But even our scientists, it's been a feeder for a lot of our roles.

[00:53:55] Kevin: For what it's worth, 10 years ago when I interviewed people for that article, one of the ideas that came up was people who go to Stanford self-select to go to Stanford. Yeah. And one of the things they self-select for is they want to be a part of that ecosystem. Yeah.

[00:54:11] Emanuel: That was exactly the question I was about to ask, so thank you for...

[00:54:14] Antonio: Yeah I can see it. I can see it. Not everyone. I have plenty of friends that went to Stanford and are not in an early stage startup but actually a lot of them are.

[00:54:25] Kevin: Yeah. It's part of what Stanford is now known for.

[00:54:29] Antonio: Yeah.

[00:54:30] Kevin: In the same way that Berkeley is known for Nobel Prize winners, Stanford is known for incubating startups.

[00:54:37] Antonio: And I think that's that mentality that, again of people who will join an early stage startup when it's only a couple people- Yeah ... and there's huge risk or even almost at any stage of a startup there, there's a lot of risk. It's just this mentality in Silicon Valley that, okay, this company fails, you can go join another one. You know- you can always get a new job. And that kind of risk-taking, I think it's just part of the community that's really important for these startups to be able to hire people.

[00:55:10] Kevin: Yeah. I get it.

[00:55:12] Emanuel: At what stage are you with the company So I'm gonna do evaluation and all that. Let's see. We've got some investors here.

[00:55:19] Antonio: Oh, yeah. We're about 30 people now. We are just wrapping up our series A right now... so series A company. We're gonna be in our first pilots this year. So, we did our factory acceptance test with our modules just last December, and we're gonna deploy our first modules into Southern Company's site in Alabama later this summer. Soon ... and then data center in Switzerland, NTS's data center scheduled for Q4. So yeah, that's... it's gonna be a real kind of inflection point for us this year- where our values will be out in the world and we'll be able to prove the performance of them.

[00:56:00] Kevin: Yeah.

[00:56:01] Emanuel: Babies go, out on their own.

[00:56:03] Antonio: Yeah.

[00:56:04] Emanuel: Then I need to ask because I asked some other guests as well. Oklo and other similar companies a few of them both from California, I forgot which one, Rye Energy or something. They're investing in and reinventing essentially the atomic energy, which populate the narrative induced by Bill Gates saying that it's cheap safe and abundant, which I tend to agree because again, I don't know a lot. Oklo, as far as I know, they're first and they've been very popular and they've been raising a lot of money and they're listed but they haven't delivered anything so far. Their first smaller reactor would actually be, in all places Romania. So that's where- They chose that. But again, nothing so far. How do you see this approach and especially because I'm in Canada and I actually see the billboards and I see a lot of advertising pushed by the government, by the local government, the provincial government, and federal as well, on all types of energy. Obviously Alberta is pushing on oil and there's nothing else for them. But Ontario... billboards... atomic, nuclear and so forth. There's a functioning nuclear facility in Pickering, which is next to Toronto. I also have the address there and each year or every two years they actually send the iodine pills just in case, to be there. And how do you see that I was born in '86, so there's no secret anymore. So just a few months, two, three months after Chernobyl. There's still this vivid memory of what it may imply... a tragedy, a nuclear disaster. Nevertheless, how do you see all this essentially And I'm assuming that if we look deep enough, I'm pretty sure we'll find a couple of Stanford graduates or dropouts in those companies, Oklo as well, if not the founders.

[00:57:57] Kevin: Probably.

[00:57:57] Emanuel: But there was...

[00:57:58] Antonio: Yeah I'm an all... first of all, I'm an all of the above person on energy which which means yeah, I fully support the nuclear endeavors whether it's... I think Oklo's doing small modular reactors not totally sure. I don't wanna say the wrong thing about the different technologies, as I'm not the expert there. But I will say that in my perspective is that the energy transition is going to happen not based on government mandates, but based on economics. And I do think nuclear's gotten a resurgence, especially from the data center world who are just looking for power and any form of power that they can deploy quickly. But ultimately that is pushing up electricity rates... not nuclear itself but the whole search for power is pushing up electricity rates in the US faster than inflation. And that's one of the aspects of public backlash. So economics is really important to energy, and I think that's how change is gonna occur. And I think that there's maybe a distant state where nuclear power becomes... there's that dream from the '50s, too cheap to meter, right Maybe that eventually will come, but I see that taking a long time. And I think that when you look at economics for me it's solar and wind. Solar and wind are the lowest cost forms of electricity, and let's harness that. But either way nuclear reactors operate best at constant power. They're not able to ramp up and down very quickly. And on the grid you need to respond. You have to match supply and demand at every point. So actually batteries are important to a nuclear powered future as to a solar and wind powered future. But I think we should be pursuing all of these.

[00:59:53] Kevin: That makes total sense to me because let's say that a modular nuclear reactor is generating five gigawatts steady state, and for whatever reason, 4:00 in the morning there isn't five gigawatts of demand. What do you do with it Do you throw it away or do you store it, right

[01:00:07] Antonio: Yeah.

[01:00:08] Emanuel: Question I asked another guest, because I'm passionate about the future or scared, I'm not sure. Passionate about sci-fi and so forth. We already started exploring the space a few years ago, but right now there is a motivation again, a big motivation, and we know that all the Silicon Valley billionaires, tech billionaires are actually exploring space. Most likely we'll have, during our lifetime, a formal or attentive colony on the moon, and if not Mars. Again, last time I remember Elon Musk was saying that he'll go to Mars no later than 2026 or 2027. I haven't seen him saying anything else since, but nevertheless, it will happen. Let's say not in our lifetime, Mars, although I plan to live a thousand something years, so assuming that will happen. But most likely the moon and so forth, but not even, right There's more things will happen in the orbit. I'm assuming more space stations. We also have the commercial travel, the leisure travel as well. So far for the eccentrics and the ones that can afford, but we're not far from actually needing to go there constantly and actually do some work. And one might think that a way of getting the energy harnessing is an important aspect, and you said solar and most likely that's the best way to do it. You have all those panels that can absorb 24/7 the sun, unless somebody puts something against it. But also storage, right Again, coming back to batteries, which will be... yeah... one might argue fundamental in the success of this campaign. So we could make a good argument saying that we have the technology to go there, but we can't because of one, two, three, and one of those one, two, three will actually be the storage of the energy required to do all those things. And I'm assuming we're waiting for those robots to exist so that they can accompany a human mission on Mars and carry all the crates and all the baggage and all the stuff that they, people will take or that will hold from Earth.

[01:02:11] Antonio: Yeah. I'm very excited about this, and my kids we're all very excited about the Artemis II mission. We were following it. But my one thought here is, yeah, making moon colonies or Mars colonies there's abundant solar energy there. You can put solar panels there, but then you need to, exactly, you need to store that energy. And batteries are too... I don't think they're ever gonna be lightweight enough to actually launch into space. It makes economic sense to do that. But again, abundant materials. If you can have abundant materials that you can get anywhere, including other planets and celestial bodies, you could make batteries there. And we haven't done the analysis of the moon or Mars yet but, I'm very curious to do that. I bet with sodium and iron we could probably make our batteries on the moon too. But we'll get back to you on that.

[01:03:03] Emanuel: Oh, whenever you start doing that sign me up and I volunteer to help with whatever research- Nice. ... I can do. And most likely it'll be a type of 3D printing materials that will be sent there and built from whatever is there. So that was like my question tied to the how cheap and abundant are those materials. Cheap, we don't know if they have any value because we haven't harvest them yet. But I'm assuming it can be made significantly. The moon, the lunar division sounds better- Yeah for your company. Sounds good.

[01:03:36] Kevin: Anyway, thank you. I've enjoyed this conversation.

[01:03:39] Emanuel: Where can people find you, connect with you Where they can find more about your company And is there anything that we haven't asked that you would like our audience and everybody else actually to know or look after or be more aware First of all, if you go to Hawaii, don't throw rocks at any animals. Yes. Yeah. And not just to Hawaii, anywhere around the world if you go and I won't come to your house and throw rocks at your dog.

[01:04:06] Antonio: Yeah. Please don't throw rocks at anything. Yeah, my company is Inlyte Energy, I-N-L-Y-T-E. You can find us at inlyteenergy.com, and I'm on LinkedIn. So please look me up on LinkedIn. I think we're at a interesting point in the world. We're very excited at Inlyte at what we're building to replace diesel generators. I think I wanna tell people is that there are new technologies coming that can do this. Let's not assume that we only have the technologies that are in existence today. There are actually new technologies that because we're building on old technologies, we can actually go very quickly to scale up that we can replace diesel, we can replace natural gas plants. We don't have to be at the whim of the the energy markets, that we're seeing right now. So, let's build this future.

[01:05:02] Emanuel: Oh, thank you so much. Inlyteenergy.com.

[01:05:06] Antonio: Yep.

[01:05:07] Emanuel: Follow Antonio on LinkedIn. Since we're talking about following... I am a marketer. I wouldn't be much of a marketer if I wouldn't shamelessly plug in a request to go to curiouspundits.com, that's where you'll find us, me and Kevin. Links to this episode, previous episodes, future episodes. We also find links to wherever you like to listen to your podcast, being Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and essentially if there's a platform, we most likely are there. Give us a comment. Let us a note, telling us that you liked or disliked or what we get wrong, especially me and Kevin. We might confuse stuff. And give us a five star rating if you want because that will help more people like you listen to guests such as Antonio that are essentially changing the world and are passionate about it. And I would like to extend the invitation to come again, maybe let's say even in a year or so, the end of the year, and talk about the success of your company, talk about Stanford and how- Yeah impactful. Do they have any stake in your company, just to be clear They don't know any patent ...

[01:06:21] Antonio: Not Stanford itself, no.

[01:06:22] Emanuel: Yeah. That's important. Good to know for the investors, right Nevertheless, thank you so much. My name is Emanuel.

[01:06:30] Kevin: My name is Kevin. Thank you for listening.