Bonus: Thomas Healy | Powering the Planet When the Grid Can’t

Bonus: Thomas Healy | Powering the Planet When the Grid Can't

This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Today on the show, we're talking with Thomas Healy, founder and CEO of Hyliion, about something most of us only think about when the lights flicker, the Wi-Fi dies, or the utility bill shows up looking like it was calculated by a hostage negotiator.

We're talking about energy. Everyone loves to talk about saving the planet. Thomas is trying to power it, and not with vague green energy fairy dust or another shiny pitch deck promising utopia by Q4. He's building real-world energy tech designed for the brutal, unsexy problems that actually matter: overloaded grids, exploding demand from AI and data centers, industrial facilities that can't get enough power, and the inconvenient fact that our energy infrastructure was not exactly built for the world we're shoving into it.

This episode is brought to you ad-free today by Hyliion. Thanks to them for making this all possible. Here we go with Thomas Healy. So [00:01:00] everyone talks about saving the planet, and you're trying to power the planet, from the sound of it.

Thomas Healy: That is correct. Yeah. We are here to provide the electricity, whether it's for data centers or commercial buildings, uh, or even the military, because energy is kind of in a crisis mode right now.

Jordan Harbinger: We're in the middle of a war where all kinds of energy sources that people who know about energy sources were paying attention to, but everybody else is like, "Oh, we use liquid natural gas for stuff?" or, "There are data centers in the middle of the Gulf? I didn't know that. I thought all that stuff was in, I don't know, Seattle or whatever."

So all this energy stuff is kind of front and center right now in the war on Iran because we can't get oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and we're not pumping as much LNG out of Qatar. So your timing is good, I think is what I'm trying to say here.

Thomas Healy: Yeah. Energy is really what's gonna be the driving force behind AI and data centers and, uh, you know, the new models that are coming out.

They're amazing what they can [00:02:00] do. And the foundation behind all that making it happen are not just chips, but it's also the electrons needed to power those chips. And the big question is where is it going to come from? And most people look at it, and they say, "Well, hey, as long as the electricity's still coming into my house, and when I flip the light switch, the lights turns on, I'm good."

Well, the reality is no. The, there's some massive demands coming onto the grid, and it might even have an impact on people's houses. Like, over the last six years, the number of blackouts that have happened in the US have actually doubled. And so that trend is only gonna continue to get worse as more things like data centers or, uh, more electric vehicles or things like that are being put onto the grid.

Jordan Harbinger: You know, I, I remember first hearing about this in, I don't know, I wanna say, like, 2010-ish when people said, "Yeah, it's cool that Tesla's inventing an electric car, but it can never be anything more than a small market share novelty because our electric... It doesn't matter how many charging stations Elon builds across the US, it doesn't matter if you have a charger in your house, [00:03:00] it doesn't matter if every house, y- you know, has a mandated charger that's installed, which isn't gonna happen.

There's not enough ways to get the electricity from the power plants to those chargers, so it's never gonna happen." And it seems like we're having that problem, plus now AI, which nobody had envisioned back in 2010, or very few people had envisioned back in 2010, and that's ubiquitous. And it's like, oh, that's cute.

You think your electric car uses a lot of energy. Wait 'til you see what this brand-new thinking machine does that millions or billions of people are using. And I've heard, and, and maybe you know something about this, I've heard that data centers, and of course this is an exaggeration, but they literally can't get enough power.

Like, it's just they're limited by the amount of electricity essentially. Like, yes, you need certain amount of chips and things like that, but mostly if you put one of these online, you almost need, like, your own power plant to run this thing.

Thomas Healy: That is where the industry's heading. They're going behind the meter or on-site power generation where you're not dependent on the utility.

You take the approach where I'm gonna [00:04:00] bring my own turbines or fuel cells, or in our case, KARNO power modules, behind the meter on-site, make those electrons yourself, control your destiny from a power standpoint. And we're seeing this across the board, and there's some areas, like let's take Ireland and Virginia, they've already come out and said, "Look, the grid cannot handle what is coming on board.

If you're a data center provider, you have to bring your own electricity." And, you know, if you look at Virginia, 70% of the internet flows through Virginia. That is, like, the hub of data centers, and they're already saying, "We can't do more. You gotta bring your own power."

Jordan Harbinger: Why does 70% of the internet run through Virginia, other than the CIA trying to look at everything or what?

Am I close? What is it? What's going on there?

Thomas Healy: No comment. Yeah. Uh, no, it's, uh, uh, that, that's where data centers have been built out. It's near the coast, uh, and so the, you know, connections with Europe come in there. So, uh, that's really just been the location where data centers were built and have been made.

But obviously now that's [00:05:00] changing, and you hear about data centers going wherever there is excess electricity.

Jordan Harbinger: Is that where America Online was, by the way?

Thomas Healy: I actually don't know. I bet, I bet you it is. It would make sense it would be there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, 'cause I, I vaguely remember a friend going to work for AO- 'cause, you know, I'm old enough where going to work in tech meant working for AOL, right?

So he, I think he went to Virginia, and I could be wrong. I'll have to look that up.

Thomas Healy: AOL is not gone. I got an email- I know ... today from someone with an AOL email address, which I was like, "Wow, that's a blast from the past." Oh my gosh. Haven't seen that in a while.

Jordan Harbinger: So I won't at this person, but I interviewed the head of, the former head of the CIA and former head of NSA, which narrows it down, but whatever.

And I emailed him to check in on him a few years later, and I looked, and I guess I hadn't noticed before, but his email was @aol.com and I was like, "Wait, you were the former head, you're general, right? You're the former head of the CIA, former head of NSA, and you're just logging into the You've got mail."

Like, that's just what he's, that's what he's using still. [00:06:00] And I thought, thank God you have technical advisors because if you're still using AOL, I don't know what policy you're writing over at NSA, right? I mean, it just, it must be so far over this man's, this man's head. Unbelievable. I was, I've never... And, and I couldn't say anything publicly, right, for years 'cause it's like you can't really at the, somebody in that position doing something like that.

All right. So tell me a little bit about the, the Karno Power module, because you hear about, I think it was Bill Gates buying, I don't know, Three Mile Island nuclear power plant or something like that to run essentially a Microsoft data center AI thing near it. And, and it was... I'm sure I'm butchering this, but it just, I remember people saying, "Oh, this company wants to buy a power plant, like a nuclear plant or a regular plant to run a data center," and people were alarmed about this, right?

Because it's like, oh, these billionaires already control a lot of stuff. Now they're gonna control chunks of the power grid. Is that something we want to, to allow? And, uh, the answer is we might not have a choice. If you wanna use ChatGPT, that thing's not gonna [00:07:00] plug into the substation down the road. It needs, it, there's gotta be a reactor powering that thing at some point.

Thomas Healy: Yeah, and if you look at the history, like data centers have been coming online for years and years and years, and they've always just gone with the model of buy the electrons from the utility, buy it from the grid. The problem is now the grid is saying, "We don't have the capacity," and that's what's forcing these big tech companies to go down the path of saying, "All right.

I'll make my own power then. I'll go buy Three Mile Island, uh, do either nuclear or gas turbines." But the problem is, is like we're already starting to hit a lot of roadblocks there. If you go buy a brand-new GE Vernova power plant or you attempt to buy one, you're looking at 2030-something until that actual asset is gonna actually show up at your site.

People aren't wanting to wait that long to go build out these data centers. I'm sure you've probably gone and experienced, you know, Claude, and 4.7 just came out and these models are getting so much faster, so much more advanced. I personally think it goes exponential, right? This isn't a [00:08:00] linear progression.

As soon as mo- models can start learning from themselves, uh, it's gonna consume more and more power and, uh, and that's where, you know- That's gonna be the, the kinda question mark going forward is where can I get electrons electricity? So for the KARNO Power Module, we've really invented a new way of producing electricity.

It's a, a box that, um, about the size of the bed of a pickup truck, and you can-- We've got-- That's our smallest size, but you can stack these things together and get the amount of electricity you need. And the, the big selling point is it basically gives you power plant level performance, but out of this small modular box that you can control at your own site.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So what's in the box? Uh, that sounds like a movie quote. But what's going on inside the box is actually what I would like to know, because is there a nuclear reactor in the box? Is there a giant solar panel unfolding from the box? That's what people are wondering. How does this thing generate electricity?

'Cause if you have a magic energy box, I wanna buy some stock in your company.

Thomas Healy: Um, have you seen Back to the [00:09:00] Future? Uh, Delorean. Yeah. Right. So no, it's a real technology. So it's based on Stirling engine technology. So if you go back 200 years ago, the steam engine was prevalent, uh, the diesel hadn't come out yet, right?

But there was this idea that came up of a Stirling engine, which the whole concept is you have trapped gas, and when you heat something up, it wants to expand. And so you take that trapped gas, you add heat to it, and it starts to expand, and you use that motion to actually produce power. And then for us, we use it to produce electricity.

And so for 200 years, it's actually been thought that Stirling engines were kinda like the euphoria of power gen. It was like, wow, this has super high efficiency, very low maintenance. It's got all the right characteristics. Super difficult to manufacture, though, and almost impossible to manufacture. So what we did is we said, well, manufacturing's had a major breakthrough over the last 200 years and really over the last decade, thanks to 3D printing.

So what if we take those really, really complex [00:10:00] parts and we 3D print, but metal 3D print, those heat exchangers, those unique components, and bring this 200-year-old technology to life? A-and that's what we've done. So yes, it's almost like this magic box, like you mentioned, but, but it's, it's based on a 200-year-old concept that we've taken and, and obviously advanced it tremendously over that time.

But, you know, we're, we're bringing kind of the euphoria of power gen to life.

Jordan Harbinger: So how does it work? Because I'm vaguely familiar with, what is it, thermodynamics, where, like, energy doesn't come from nothing. So if you heat up whatever gas is in the box, you need energy to create the heat. So do you plug the box in, and the box creates more energy than goes in?

I mean, that seems like it violates some kind of math equation that I can't do off the top of my head.

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so we're, we're not violating physics. Okay. Good. So the way it works is you do send fuel in, so you could send natural gas, you can send diesel, propane, hydrogen, ammonia. We're truly fuel agnostic because all we're trying to do with that fuel is make heat.

So think of it more like [00:11:00] a candle burning, right? We're, we're bringing fuel in, we react it, we make heat, and then we have trapped helium on the inside that is expanding due to that heat, and then once it expands, we have like a radiator system like on your car, and we cool that heat back down, or that, cool that trapped gas back down.

It compresses, uh, and then we heat it up again, it expands and compresses, it expands. And we do that 20 times a second, and we use that expansion as our motion to move a linear electric motor, and then that's what makes the electricity. So it's an engine. It is, but when, when you say the word engine, everyone goes to like, oh, you put fuel in and you explode it, and then that's gonna push a piston.

Uh, this is a totally different concept. So it's kind of like you got engines, you got turbines, fuel cells. This is the, a new type of technology called Stirling. It's

Jordan Harbinger: like an engine, a, a lung engine. I don't know, between lungs and an engine. Yeah.

Thomas Healy: I've never heard it explained that way,

Jordan Harbinger: but it actually makes a lot of sense.

[00:12:00] Yeah. Yeah, with the gas and stuff. I mean, I'm, I'm not an engineer, as you might have guessed, but that's quite interesting. Okay. And so you throw the fuel in there, and you've got some sort of battery that can ignite the fuel that heats the gas, and that's more efficient than just creating a gas engine or, or

Thomas Healy: turbine system.

It is. Uh, and, and there's a lot of benefits. So one is, uh, the efficiency that you mentioned. So we're at about a 50% efficiency. That's our target to go fuel in to electricity out, 50%. If you compare that to like a, a car engine might be at like 35% efficiency. A small turbine might only even be in the high 20s, low 30s of efficiency.

So we've actually got a pretty good step up. We're more at the efficiency level of what like power plants are. Another fun fact to throw at you, if you plug your iPhone into a wall outlet, the average electron in the US is only 36% efficient. So you know, we're even more efficient than, or g- a [00:13:00] good bit more, close to 50% more efficient, uh, than most of the electricity out there on the grid.

And then you throw on top of that, you put it on site, so now you control your power being made. It's truly fuel agnostic, so if natural gas is cheap today, use that. If propane costs make sense, use that. If you need on-site storage, use diesel. And then it's also got an amazing emissions profile because it's not like that car engine where you're exploding the fuel.

We actually use a proprietary process called flameless oxidation. I won't get into all the details of it, but it's a super, super clean way to react that fuel. And so we can even surpass California's strictest emissions standards with zero after treatment system running on natural gas.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. So you don't need l- I don't know, what it be, like a catalytic converter type of thing on the exhaust.

Yeah, 'cause I'm thinking a neighbor of mine, he freaked out as soon as we lost power for a day. I got solar panels and batteries, but whatever. Uh, this guy got a diesel generator, and so I always know when the power [00:14:00] goes out, my lights flicker for one second, but the batteries kick in, but I hear brrr, right, from his generator, and I'm like, "Cool, bro.

You couldn't have fricking got some solar panels for your roof?" But whatever. White noise, uh, helps me sleep. So this guy, he needs a KARNO, right? Because it sounds like he can either use the same diesel he's got stored in his backyard in that ugly tank, or he could grab some, whatever, ammonia, what- I, I can't remember everything else that you listed.

Natural gas, a propane container that he's using on his grill, and then just reattach the thing to his KARNO and wait out the next 12-hour brownout or blackout we got here in California. And it's nicer, because that diesel engine, that thing stinks, man. Like, his yard, you would not wanna go outside, open any windows, and it's kinda irritating 'cause I have to close my windows 'cause I don't want diesel exhaust fl- I don't want a, a truck parking lot in my kitchen when the power goes out.

I can't blame the guy. He wants his electricity, as do I. But it sounds like with KARNO, it, it probably smells a little bit like something, but [00:15:00] it's not gonna be nearly as gross as a diesel engine that's pumping out mostly unfiltered exhaust into the air.

Thomas Healy: One of the big reasons that you get that smell out of that, uh, kind of emergency standby diesel engine is because it's not efficient.

And so that's one of the big benefits is since we have such that high efficiency, uh, I've actually never smelt anything kinda coming out of our, our box. But, you know, what's been pretty interesting is the sound profile of it as well. So one thing I'm sure we'll touch on, we haven't gotten into it yet, the Navy is actually planning to use our systems for their brand-new unmanned autonomous ships.

Now, the big driver for that was because it's a super low maintenance system. But they actually went ahead and they started testing it for how much noise does it make, what's its heat profile, and they came back to us and said, "This is the quietest thing we've ever tested outside of nuclear."

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I was gonna ask.

I was gonna ask if it was quieter than nuclear. Yeah, that's interesting.

Thomas Healy: Yeah. So it's just, it's very quiet. Now, one [00:16:00] nuance for the audience is when you say the word generator, uh, like my mind automatically goes to that box sitting outside your neighbor's house and, uh, the loud, only turn it on when, uh, the power goes down.

Our vision with our system is this is y- this is how you make your electricity. Like, you remove your dependency from the grid, and if you have our box, you wanna be running it 24/7, 365. What we found is it's actually cheaper to make your own electricity than it is to source from the grid. And so it kinda switches the mindset.

Now this box is your power plant, and the grid is actually more your backup generator.

Jordan Harbinger: Wait, it's actually ch- Hold on a second. It's cheaper to make my own electricity? After the price of the c- 'cause of course my solar panels are cheap too, but they were expensive to install, right? They've, they're gonna need a couple years or whatever, several years of savings.

Can I ask what the pricing is of these units? Are, are they a standard size? You said you can stack 'em.

Thomas Healy: Yeah. So our standard [00:17:00] box is 200 kilowatts. Now, 200 kilowatts, to put it into perspective, one of those would power an entire Home Depot. Two of them would power an entire Walmart because of, uh, refrigeration systems.

Wow. So these initial boxes aren't your household units, right? These are going to commercial, industrial type sites. For frame of reference, pricing is around half a million dollars a box. To your question of, well, does it actually make sense when you incorporate in that upfront cost? And the answer is yes.

So we've built out models. We actually looked at every state in the US and what the average electricity cost is versus, uh, the cost to buy natural gas to make f- make our own electricity. And in every single state, it was cheaper to do it yourself. Now, the question is, what is that payback? How long does it actually take to overcome that upfront cost?

Uh, usually it's in the, the, you know, single, low single digit number of years that it takes to pay it back. And so for most customers, that's great, right? So if you look at the data center world, [00:18:00] they're just caring about, how do I get power and get it fast and get behind the meter? If you look at more the, the commercial building, like the Walmart or the Home Depot example, they're looking at it as, this is a business decision.

Does it make sense? Is it cheaper to actually make my own electrons? And the answer is yes.

Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible because I'm, I'm ... Look, I don't want one for my house, right? 'Cause I don't need to power a Home Depot, and I'm already connected to the grid. Depends. Could be in a huge house.

I could have a huge house.

Yeah,

yeah. Listen, uh, if I buy stock in Hyland, I probably could afford something that needs one of the units to, to, to cool it off in the summer. But, uh, here's the thing, that's shocking because I'm thinking, "Okay, I don't need to power my house, but what if I'm a builder and I'm building a new subdivision?

I've gotta build all those utility connections, and I've gotta get those electrical wires in there, and then maybe everybody wants an uninterrupted supply or a backup supply, so they're gonna get generators and/or solar panels for their house." And I say, "Don't worry about this. None of you need solar panels.

None of you need a backup generator. In fact, the whole neighborhood's just going to [00:19:00] be, we have our own power plant. We have this thing right here, it's gonna power, I don't know, 10 houses," whatever that equals. Uh, however many hou- normal sized houses equal a Home Depot. And we've got a couple of these things stacked up, and they're maintained by the same people who, I don't know, cut the lawn or whatever.

Depends on, on, on the maintenance, right? And it's got a propane tank that the HOA pays to go and swap out every month or however long, every week. So, like, you don't even need to say, "Oh, we need a couple dozen million dollars," or however it is, to build- high voltage wiring to every home out here in this mountain subdivision or anything like that.

And that's, that's if they're close enough to the grid. I mean, if you build something out in the middle of nowhere, you have to have solar power because otherwise you're gonna have, what, 50 miles of wiring going to your place? That's not gonna work either. So this is really cool. I mean, this is like a really unique and novel solution, and it ends up, for sure it ends up being cheaper than wiring something new.

I mean, I can't imagine how much that costs.

Thomas Healy: If [00:20:00] we wanted to go redo our electrical grid in the US, it's a $5 trillion expense if I have my numbers correct. And so we're not doing that. And then you couple that with the fact that 60% of our grid, our transmission lines, are already pa- at or past their life expectancy.

And so it kinda begs the question, well, why would you not just move to this model of do a generator on site, make your own electricity, especially where it's cheaper, and it can hopefully go solve this, this kind of, this gold rush of AI and data centers and energy consumption, uh, that frankly the US is not winning at.

Uh, if you look at China, uh, they, they put about 500 gigawatts of power onto their grid last year. The US put 50 gigawatts of new, uh, power onto our grid. So China is doing 10X more than what the US is doing, and they're doing it all because of this data center race.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, I love watching China.

They're doing a great job building nuclear plants and clean energy as well. [00:21:00] Part of it though is they're giving electricity to people that have never had it, whereas those same class of people, if you will, in the United States have had power for 100 years . So, so there's that. But also they're going, "Hey, why don't we build really high," I don't know what you'd call it, "density transmission wiring because we don't know that this is just gonna power a village.

This village might be a major metropolitan area in 10 or 20 years, and it might have an AI data center." So instead of building one little wire that kind of worms its way down the mountain, they'll build a huge conduit that has enough electricity to power 100 times as many people or homes, I, I would say, in that area, and we don't have that, right?

I mean, we would have to replace probably even the ... I'm talking out of the wrong end here. We'd have to replace a lot of the infrastructure. I'll leave it at that. The wires at least, possibly also the poles 'cause I don't know if they can hold, you know, 10 times more or whatever than they already do. I have no knowledge of that.

So it just seems like a Herculean task to do that. I can't imagine, [00:22:00] man, that Europe's in a better situation. When I lived there, they don't have electricity on electrical poles like we do here. Maybe high voltage wires that trans- I don't know what they're called, the ones that look like, like a massive Eiffel Tower-like structure.

They have some of those. But they, in a neighborhood they don't have that. It's all buried, which that's gotta be even harder to go, "Hey, we need five times more of this 'cause we have more population density and data centers." I don't know, what do you do? You dig up the whole neighborhood and replace that? I mean, if ours is 5 trillion, to replace it in Europe has gotta be like three times as much.

So I, I don't know, 'cause everything there is more expensive as it is, labor and everything.

Thomas Healy: And the other thing they're facing is they don't have as low a cost fuel as we do, right? I mean, we've, we're pretty fortunate in how low cost our natural gas is. Europe doesn't have, uh, those same sort of economics, and so that's where the efficiency of our product really comes into play where, go back to that example of a grid in the US is 36% efficient.

If we can move that to 50% efficient, that's a 50% increase, right? So now [00:23:00] for every drop of fuel you use, now you're gonna get 50% more electricity out of that same drop of fuel. We could maybe go solve this energy crisis just by being more efficient at how we use the fuel.

Jordan Harbinger: So people are probably wondering, how did you find this crazy huckster who invented a magic energy box?

Where is he from? This doesn't even add up. But you, look, you're from Carnegie Mellon. Most people, what, you're probably barely making it to class and, and you're starting a company. What, what sort of... What were you looking at where you were like, "Oh crap, this might actually work. What's going on here?" You know, your, what's your Doc Brown moment where your, your hair stood on end and you realized you built something, or you could build something pretty incredible?

Thomas Healy: So this has been a 10-year journey. It's been anything but the straightforward path. And so founded it while I was in school. I actually started this company as an electric vehicle company, which some of your viewers might have heard about us back from that sort of time. 2020, we took the company public on the New York Stock Exchange.

Uh, it was a, a great going public event, [00:24:00] and our focus was big semis, make 'em electric. We actually q- acquired this KARNO power mo- module technology out of GE Aerospace a few years back, and so when we went public, GE saw what we were doing. They said, "Hey, wait a second. You need electricity to charge those trucks, charge the, the batteries on board.

We've got this skunkworks team at GE that is developing this new form of power generation. Would Hyliion and GE wanna work together on it?" Us, we were like, "GE calling a, an earlier stage company? Absolutely. Where do we sign? Let's work together." Fast-forward, we ended up acquiring that whole technology out of GE, and then if you look at the electric vehicle space, it's gotten decimated, especially for semi trucks.

And so we actually made the decision, let's move out of the electric vehicle space and double down and go all in on power gen with this technology we acquired out of GE, and that's what we've been doing for the last few years. We're now starting to deploy units out with customers. The Navy's already operating our [00:25:00] systems.

Like, we're, we're hitting that momentum now, and thankfully, over that same time, the need for power has frankly been skyrocketing.

Jordan Harbinger: What ha- what happened, why, why is the truck thing... 'Cause I always kinda thought, "Oh man, we need self-driving trucks," which will, you know, be electric because I- I'm scared to let machines drive things too, but I also know that truck drivers, the- all the incentives are wrong, right?

You're like, "Hey, we can't tell you not to sleep much, but we do need this here in a superhuman amount of time. I can't tell you not to use weird drugs to stay awake, but you do need to stay awake for a superhuman amount of time for multiple days in a row," and it's, it's just obviously dangerous. How come that wasn't kind of like the first thing that we electrified and created automated?

I don- I don't really understand that. You're deep in this, so I'm curious what you think.

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so why it hasn't been electrified, the availability of electricity is a big thing, so there is no across-the-country, uh, charging network for semi trucks. That doesn't exist, right? And the amount of electricity these things use [00:26:00] is huge.

If you plug 10 semi trucks, EV semi trucks into the grid, that will consume the same amount of electricity as the Super Bowl during game time. So that's 10 trucks. There's three million trucks in the US, right? And so, uh, that's a huge thing to shift from using diesel onto electric. And then what we saw happen was the cost of electric vehicles was skyrocketing.

There were government mandates that were coming out that were gonna force, uh, fleets to use electric, and those all got lifted or removed. And, uh, and we just saw this kind of pullback from fleets wanting to actually adopt it, and that's where we said, "Hey, we've got this awesome power gen technology.

Let's just apply it to stationary power, data centers, uh, and let's go down that path as a company."

Jordan Harbinger: So you're building this. You, surely, you said this wasn't a straight line to success. Did you have any like, "Oh, this is probably gonna fail" kind of moments?

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so the this might fail, uh, moment was we were [00:27:00] in the electric vehicle space.

We, uh, had both our electric truck and this Carno power module technology, and we saw all the other peers around us starting to go bankrupt. And so, uh, there's companies, you know, I won't name names, but, uh, there were about 15 EV companies, and most of them, uh, have n- are no longer with us. They're no longer around.

And so, uh, I was looking at it as the CEO of Hyliion and saying, "All right, well, this guy isn't able to raise capital. This one just filed bankruptcy. This one's going through layoffs. Why are we going to be any different," right? The whole industry is moving away from electrification, uh, and we were very fortunate at when this was all going to on, we still had 300 million of cash on our balance sheet.

And so looked at it and said, "Why don't we restructure our company, and why don't we shift and pivot and go down this, um, this power gen sector and move into a new industry, a new market, and that will put us on a, uh, you know, hopefully, uh, that will put us on a path to be [00:28:00] successful?"

Jordan Harbinger: It's gotta be tough to be in an industry even if you think, "We're different.

We could make it," because at some point investors just get They just get a whiff of this whole thing isn't gonna work, right? It doesn't matter that you're company number 14 and the first 13 were total bunk. It just looks like another electric truck company? Did these guys not learn their lesson? What's wrong with this guy?

And it's like, no, no, no, this one was a nonsense from the jump. This guy only had a PowerPoint. These people never got their prototype going. These people made a hybrid, blah, blah. It doesn't matter. They're just kinda like, "Well, uh, you're just, yours are green, so what?" Like, what's the difference? So it's probably good to pivot and go, "You know what?

Shelf that. We've got some IP out of it, cool. Here's a new thing that no one's ever seen that isn't gonna be judged by the other 12 crappy ones that came before it." Is there any wisdom to that?

Thomas Healy: There is. Uh, just like, you know, I've used the expression before, all boats rise with a high tide. Well, all boats sink with a low tide too, right?

Yeah, sure. And, uh, and that's what we are [00:29:00] seeing happening in the electric space. And thankfully, you know, we've moved into power gen, which is in a high tide space right now. Uh, and if you look at, like, data centers, I mean, just what? Oh, two weeks ago we saw a sneaker company, Allbird, uh, shift from being sneakers to now an AI company, and I think their stock went up 700% in the day.

Uh, and so there's this huge momentum behind AI and, uh, you know, the next thing that's gonna happen is, well, like, wait a second, in order to make AI happen, you need power.

Jordan Harbinger: That, I didn't look into that. I, I, I own a pair of Allbirds. They used to sponsor the show, so I can't, I gotta be fair here. But whenever a company goes, "You know what?

Shoes, those are nice, but let's be AI," something's w- a little weird about that. You know? Something's just... It's almost like a troll where they're like, "I bet you people will jump on our stock if we just say we're an AI company now, even though we made canvas shoes y- last week." I don't know. I'll have to look at what they're doing, but it's quite a pivot to go from making shoes to [00:30:00] something, something AI.

I mean, it, it's, like, imagine if you had ChatGPT footwear. That would be weird, right? Okay, it's weird the other way around, too. I don't know. People would probably buy

Thomas Healy: some ChatGPT sneakers.

Jordan Harbinger: I would definitely buy that, but only as a bit of a, a, a yuck. Like, I don't think I would... I'm not really counting on...

Can you imagine Michael Jordan endorsing ChatGPT basketball shoes? I mean, it's, it's possible. They do have the, if, and if any other shoe company would have the money to- Pay him, it would be them. All right, so did you have any prototypes of this thing, just totally crap? I mean, is there, and I know I'm asking you tough questions, but whenever you build something that has fuel in it, I'm like, okay, wh- when was the first explosion, literally, maybe in this case?

Thomas Healy: Uh, so I cannot think of an explosion. Probably, I could give you some funny stories. I mean, any new technology, yes, you always have things that don't work, uh, you know, things that, uh, you never would've expected come up, like, uh, and we've gone through that and, and still have 'em and, and we'll continue to have those.

But there's been, you know, some funny moments as well. Like, you know, I, I [00:31:00] mentioned, hey, this whole thing is powered off of heat, right? And so we've got this laboratory that, uh, we, we make a lot of heat in the lab and, uh, we use it to test systems. Well, uh, the facility o- owner had installed the wrong sprinkler heads in the building, and so they were supposed to be rated for a certain temperature.

Well, guess what? They weren't. So we're running in our lab, and we're just making heat like w- you know, you normally would, and all of a sudden the, uh, the sprinklers go off, and we now have a counter on the wall in the lab that says, you know, "1,321 days since the last flood."

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you got to test the waterproof capabilities of the Hylian unit.

Yeah. So

Thomas Healy: we've had stuff like that, but then in product development, uh, you have learnings like, uh, whether it be mistakes that you just missed from an engineering standpoint and didn't design it well. We went through some of that last year where we had to, to take apart and, and redesign it and make it better to get the performance out of the engine.

Uh, you also have [00:32:00] quality supply issues. That's, you know, one of the, the big things. Like, you know, we had this instance where, um, there's two parts that get glued together and, you know, our engineering team specs out this Loctite glue that's got an activator and that gets used with the glue. And, uh, and then sure enough, these systems were being assembled and, uh, the activator wasn't being r- used correctly, so then guess what?

The glue doesn't work, and then you have a, a slew of issues because of that. So, but that's all part of new technology development, and this is cutting-edge stuff that we're, we're developing, which is super exciting.

Jordan Harbinger: I can imagine fielding that call. Like, "Hey, we only ordered one, but we got two units," and you're like, "Uh, can you send a picture?"

Like, "I'm pretty sure that, uh, we might need to send out a technician to figure that one out." Like, "Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Here it is. Look, there's two in the box," and it's like, "Oh gosh, who bought the...

We gotta fix this Loctite issue, bro."

Yeah, um, that, uh, that sounds like it could be, could be a problem. I would imagine t- Have you [00:33:00] ever had anything that really cost you a lot of real money or credibility temporarily?

Like, is, is there any sort of extreme like, oh my gosh, you know, this, this thing really blew it in the middle of, in a public way?

Thomas Healy: Um, I, I mean, I think I would go back to- We went public and we raised 700 million going public, and, uh, it was all on this, this vision, this, you know, momentum of let's go electrify semi trucks.

And that story ended up evolving very differently than what anyone had really expected, right? I mean, there were, as I mentioned, there were about 15 companies that all went public doing that same thing. And then, you know, a few years into it, we're looking at it and saying, "Things have changed." You know, mandates have changed, costs have changed, uh, b- you know, fleet buying decisions are changing.

Let's pivot. And, you know, that pivot came at a time where we had already invested hundreds of millions of dollars into developing this electric powertrain. And, and it was a system that actually worked. That was like the, the [00:34:00] really awesome thing was we had trucks out on the road. They were running, they were working.

We were already doing customer demonstrations, on-road trials, all that stuff. But we made the decision right before we actually hit the button on manufacturing because we knew that delivering to customers, because we knew as soon as we started delivering to customers that they own that asset. Now we need to stand behind it for the next X number of years and have field service and technician support and all that.

And so we pulled the rip cord right at that time. Now, we also tried to, you know, take a very diligent process. Obviously, this was not like a, a wing it decision, right? You know, we, we looked at could we sell this technology? Would someone be interested in moving it under their roof and acquiring it? And, and unfortunately, it was at a time where everyone else was reducing their spend in that sector as well.

And so the, the companies that you would normally go to to acquire a technology or a new company, they were saying, "We've already implemented hiring freezes," or, "We're doing our own layoffs. We can't go acquire what you guys are [00:35:00] doing. We're, we're moving away from this."

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense. Yeah, it's, it-- You would think even maybe a truck company like y- I don't know, Mack Truck is like, "Oh, all right.

Buy something that puts us 10 years ahead of the competition, and we already make trucks? Okay, let's figure this powertrain thing out." That's kind of interesting. Yeah, I guess timing really is everything when it comes to this. You know, I was reading the other day an article about demand spikes on the power grid, and it was something like it had to do with nuclear and fossil fuel plants, and you're probably gonna have to step in and help me out here in a second.

But basically, nuclear power plants, they're really good at creating a, a consistent amount of power, but what they're not necessarily good at is, oh, everyone turn down their air conditioning 'cause we have a heat wave, and we need, I don't know, X number of kilowatts or gigawatts or whatever more today than we did yesterday.

They can't really do that well, so you almost need a sister power plant that uses fossil fuels that can go up and down with demand. And it seems like the KARNO device kind of helps with that because [00:36:00] depending on how fast you can start one of these things up, which it sounds like it's relatively quick, it seems like that could handle demand spikes on smaller scales and then, of course, if you stack them on larger scales.

Thomas Healy: You're spot on. So- Whether it's nuclear, whether it's gas turbines, whether it's fuel cells, they do not like these spiky transient loads, right, and power fluctuations. What they prefer to do is just be set at a power level and kinda hum away at that. And not only does the grid not operate that way, but data centers and these new generation of data centers that are running AI are actually way worse than anything they've seen in the past.

And so when we're talking to data center companies, the first question is usually-- The first question is, "How fast can I get units?" The second question is, "How well do you handle transients?" And what's great about our system is we're actually on kind of the upper end, if not at the highest point, of being able to handle transients very well.

And so if you're thinking about building out, like, a big gigawatt data center, [00:37:00] it's probably too big to go string a bunch of our systems together to power the whole thing. Maybe not. We're seeing some demand coming in that might actually look at that. But, but what we more would envision is go buy a GE Vernova turbine for the first 900, uh, gigawatts or 900 megawatts of power, and then that last 100 megawatts of power, put something like a KARNO power module in there to handle the rest of it, because we can handle the, those transients, and then you can spool up and spool down your turbine over a longer period of time.

Jordan Harbinger: I mean, literally, how fast can you start one of these things? Is it like starting a lawnmower, or is it like, no, no, it's gotta warm up for an hour? Or, y- you know, how does it work in that way?

Thomas Healy: If it is bone cold, hasn't been turned on for days, you're looking at five minutes to get full power out of the system.

If it's in a standby ready mode, you're talking seconds, and we're, we're up and, and giving you power. So- Jesus.

Jordan Harbinger: Like a big battery almost at that point. I mean, it's not much slower than a, a battery. That's incredible. Cool. [00:38:00] You said it can run on 20-plus fuels. So ammonia, what was the other one? Natural gas, hydrogen, I don't know, gasoline, diesel, whatever.

What's the-- What are some of the weirdest ones? 'Cause I can't name 20 fuels now that you mention it.

Thomas Healy: Uh, so weird one, cow farts. No. Methane- Oh, methane ... coming out of cows, right? Fun fact, 800 cows, the farts that they have, uh, that can power a full KARNO power module, 200 kilowatts of power out. So, uh, cow farts- And I wanna see that

Jordan Harbinger: attachment

Thomas Healy: cable.

Uh, that's a pretty unique one. We work with companies that, like, capture the methane coming off of landfills. We work with the military a bunch, so JP8, and then oil and gas sites where I'm sure you've seen, like, flaring sites, right, where they just got the flame going, and all they're doing is burning off fuel that has some contaminants in it, and it's not pure enough to actually pump it into the pipelines or use it in a, a generator.

And so one of the nice things with ours is we can take pretty [00:39:00] crappy fuels and still make electricity off of them, and you're not going to significantly hinder the life of our product because of that. And so our motto is kinda more, "Give us what you got." And even with that, we can even switch fuels on the fly without even turning the power module off.

So we did a demo where we were running on natural gas, we switched over to hydrogen, we moved over to propane, and y- we didn't even tell the generator that we were switching the fuels. It just sensed it, and then it, it changed things appropriately and kept running.

Jordan Harbinger: That is super cool because I'm, I'm thinking, yeah, I've driven past factories that flare, or I don't even know, chemical plants or something like that that flare, and they've, they've kind of constantly have that torch thing in the sky at night that looks kind of cyberpunk dystopian, you know, those things.

And I would imagine there's tons of places like this that are using a ton of power and are also just burning off a ton of stuff like that 24/7 that instead could just be routed into a couple of these units, and they could save, I don't know, hundreds of [00:40:00] thousands of dollars on power over the course of the th- I mean, it's, it seems like a really obvious way to do it 'cause again, you don't have to build a power plant that converts this thing and cleans the ga- the whatever's coming out of there and makes it nice.

It seems like you can just dump this chemical residue that's flammable in from that side, and then when that runs out, this side has a tank full of the other stuff, and it just switches off as it builds up. And, you know, that's really incredible. That's really, really cool. The way that this is gonna get deployed, it just almost seems limitless.

So what, what's the catch? I mean, are other people working on this kinda thing? 'Cause this sounds like such a cool tech. It seems like you've gotta be racing against other talented teams.

Thomas Healy: There are other people out there that are doing, like, similar ideas to go after the same concept. So there's companies like Bloom Energy who are doing fuel cells, which have a lot of benefits, but there's also some things that fuel cells Don't shine at, but at the end of the day Bloom is killing it.

They, they got tons of systems out there. Uh, and their stock, uh, for anyone watching has been [00:41:00] fascinating journey over the last 12 months. It's done well, uh, very, very well. There's companies out there also doing like other linear generator technology, but different. So, you know, going back to that, that concept of this is the euphoria of how to make power using a Stirling concept.

There are some people doing that on smaller scale than what we are, but no one that's actually doing it at our scale. So like for instance, NASA, most satellites actually have Stirling engines on them, uh, to produce electricity for the satellite, and the reason they used a Stirling was because if you're sending this thing into outer space, there's no one there to maintain it.

There's no one there to do an oil change, change a spark plug, right? But, you know, the power level that they have is much, much lower than ours. NASA actually has, we're doing some work with them. We're, we're actually working on this concept of put a Karno on the moon. I'm sure you've seen, uh, this race to build out infrastructure on the moon, and so neat thing.

Nuclear makes a lot of sense for outer space power gen. [00:42:00] Uh, the problem with nuclear is all nuclear does is make heat. You then need to couple it with another technology to actually take that heat and make electricity. So you could do a steam turbine or you could do the Karno power module to make the electrons.

And, uh, and so we're looking at outer space, but I went down that tangent because, uh, NASA's actually had a Stirling engine running for 17 years that they have not had to touch or do any maintenance on.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy to me. That's really cool. Yeah, you're right. If you need, if nuclear, then what, you gotta put water up there too?

That's expensive to ship and move. It's not gonna happen. Yeah, not gonna happen. It seems like this could also power a train. I mean, you've got these huge diesel engines. I don't know how much power they use in kilowatts. I guess you'd, you'd, I'd have to look that up, but it seems like you could put a couple of these units on there and then suddenly you've got a essentially an electric train, a freight train.

Thomas Healy: Yeah. It, we're, we're looking at that path. So fun fact on trains, trains are actually already electric, but what they do is they take that diesel engine and they convert [00:43:00] it into electricity, and then the electricity is what powers the train. And so it's even like that much easier of a drop-in because they're already designed to run on electric.

We're just a better way of converting that diesel into electrical energy.

Jordan Harbinger: I did not know that. I just assumed since there was an exhaust that the thing was a, it was a diesel engine powering the whole thing. So the powertrain is electric, but the power plant is diesel. I did not know that. That's, that's crazy.

So this sounds almost too good to be true, man. Where does reality start punching back? What are your frustrations and problems that you have with this thing where you're like, "Oh, we still gotta work this out"?

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so it's a new technology, so any time you're building something new, you're gonna have learnings, you're gonna have things that didn't go as expected.

We shared some examples on today's call, but, you know, that's a, a prime thing we're going through of we're just getting the early ones out there into customers' hands, and we then will need to take it and go scale it. Now, one unique thing we touched on a little, but additive manufacturing is really was this unlock to take this 200-year-old tech and bring it to today.

And so in order for us to scale [00:44:00] manufacturing, we need to buy more and more 3D printers. Now, these aren't the 3D printers that, uh, most people- Not the ones from Kinko's ... are familiar with. Yeah. The, the, from the UPS Store.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Thomas Healy: Yeah, yep. You know, it's about the size as the room I'm sitting in is the size of our 3D printers, and they're sitting there, uh, actually, you know, 50 yards away, uh, in this facility.

They're sitting there 24/7 making parts and, uh, producing parts for the KARNO power module. So that's gonna be, you know, our next chapter is how do we continue to scale production. We're already working on it. We're already buying more printers, getting an install base built. But, you know, my long-term vision is, you know, if I had a crystal ball, why wouldn't this be the power source for the next 20, 30, 50 years, uh, of how we, we envision how electricity's made?

And every commercial building, maybe eventually houses as well, you have this box that sits outside and makes all the electricity you need. And so if we're gonna go after that vision, we need a lot of manufacturing capacity.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it seems to me that [00:45:00] this is just a better solution even as a backup than most of the stuff that we see.

You know, hospitals have these generator systems that are just, like, expensive and loud and pollute. There's so many cool uses for this tech. You mentioned the military's using it. I don't know how much you can talk about that, but what are they using it for? I mean, uh, the applications are endless, but are they gonna, is it going on boats?

Is it going in planes? What's it, where is this going?

Thomas Healy: Step one is ships, boats, uh, as you mentioned. And so we have been selected as the power plant for the brand-new Navy unmanned vessel. Oh, yeah. So it's this- You mentioned that, right ... it's this 200-foot ship, uh, that it's super cool. Like, you think of a ship today, it's got cafeterias in it, it's got sleeping quarters, restrooms, medical.

Like, it's got all this stuff designed to house humans. On the deck is where they have, you know, all their equipment and weaponry. Well, if you're an unmanned ship, you get rid of all that, so now the hull of the ship is purely just engines and fuel. [00:46:00] And so we are the engine down in the, under the hull, and then on top of the deck it's got these two I-beams that go down the sides of it, and they can mount whatever systems, uh, radars, weapons they want onto it.

And the whole goal for the military's end is they just have these ships that are just out roaming the ocean. Now, the reason they're using us is because there's no one on board to do an oil change, and so you can't use a diesel engine. You have to move to a lower maintenance solution.

Jordan Harbinger: That's a game changer for, I'm thinking, patrol- patrolling areas where there's piracy and things like that.

You can either have a bunch of ships out there with the support vessels for months at a time patrolling a tiny little area, or you essentially have a bunch of these drone boats that can work 24/7 and don't have to have, like you said, food, sanitation, climate control, medical bays, sleeping quarters, all that stuff is just, that's just unused real estate.

So you can make the things smaller and have the same kind of amount of payload on it, makes it way more efficient, and then you can have 10 of- you can run [00:47:00] 10 of them instead of running two, and patrol a much, much larger area. That's really cool, man. That's really, really cool. So data centers, remote power, the, the military using this kind of thing for the ships, AI, I mean, there's just a limitless amount of things I feel like you can do with this.

I mean, the energy landscape just totally changes if you guys win this. It just totally, totally changes.

Thomas Healy: Yeah. And it needs to change, right? Our utility grid in the US, uh, the, um, civil engineer group, uh, Auto- American Society of Civil Engineers came out and said that our US grid is a D+ rating. So it is not good, and we're gonna then go try to throw all this stuff on top of that, like data centers, and, uh, it's not gonna be able to handle it.

We need to transform how the, the grid is shaped, and we think this distributed model just makes a lot more sense than how it's structured today.

Jordan Harbinger: It seems like this system would've prevented or at least changed something. Remember that Texas grid failure a couple years ago where people died, and it was something [00:48:00] to do with- I was in

Thomas Healy: it.

I, yeah. Oh, you were in it. Okay. So you do

Jordan Harbinger: remember it quite well, I would imagine. Yeah, it's, it seems like this would've just been a stopgap for that.

Thomas Healy: Absolutely, right? And then to your comments earlier, your neighborhood still would've had power. This little box at the end of the street would've been chugging away, making all the electrons, and, uh, and then same thing, like, you know, the, the H-E-B grocery stores still would've been up and running and had power, and, uh, yeah, it, it...

Sure, maybe there's, you know, some areas that, that would still have these, you know, brownouts or gr- or blackouts, but, uh, but then you have these sites where they've taken this proactive model where just make power on site. And so not only does it help with solving, like, the H-E-B store problem, and yeah, they s- their lights will still be on, but then that's another facility that you just took off the grid, and so now the grid has more power to give to others.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's pretty darn cool, man. What has to happen in, say, the next, uh, two or three years for all of this to actually work? You mentioned that you need more manufacturing [00:49:00] capabilities with the 3D printers. Are you in a situation where these things are on order and it's like, "Hey, we got a eight-month lead time because we're printing these things 24/7, but we d- we don't have enough, I don't know, manufacturing capacity"?

Is that kinda where you're at now? Or, or what's the bottleneck, I guess? I'm curious kinda what's standing in the way from this really rolling out everywhere? Yeah.

Thomas Healy: We are in a position where we are supply constrained, not demand constrained. So we've signed up LOIs with various customers that total to nearly 500 units, and we are deploying about 10 units this year.

And so we've got a lot more demand than production capacity right now. Obviously, our goal is we go change that, but this is a progression. Uh, like any new technology, get the initial ones out there, make sure they work correctly. From there, start to scale up. From there, add more production facilities, and just keep scaling and scaling and scaling.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. Yeah. So you've got these LOIs, letters of intent, for people to buy a bunch of these units. What, what about the military? Are they still buying a bunch of these?

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so demand from the military's growing, so we got that [00:50:00] Navy program already working, but we expect another 50 million of military contracts, roughly 50 million, coming in this year alone.

And so that's gonna be a huge propellant for us from the standpoint of it's not just the Navy anymore, it's other branches of the military coming in. The Air Force already signed off that we are an approved technology that they can use. I mentioned some of the work we're doing in exploring with NASA, so as well as we're looking at the other branches or, you know, or starting to work with the other branches as well.

So this really can change the way the military thinks about power, right? They're so used to rolling in these diesel engines that burn a bunch of fuel, that need a bunch of maintenance, and what if you could just move to a very easy to operate, low-cost, uh, low operating cost solution?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I m- I follow the Iran war like a lot of people do, and you see these like, oh, they made an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, and I'm like, surely that thing has communications.

There's people sleeping overnight there that are working there. There's, there's ... They're guarding the place. They've got ant- maybe [00:51:00] even air defenses. All that needs power. Where does that come from? And the answer is a bunch of diesel generators that are probably making a bunch of noise, a bunch of pollution, a bunch of heat.

They gotta fly the fuel in, and it's like, or a tank of fuel, and then you slap one of these things down, and it's basically a power plant for the whole place, which is just crazy to think about and really incredible.

Thomas Healy: And we don't care what fuel you give us either, right? So if diesel's there, great. If it's gasoline, that works, too.

If it's propane, all right, right? It ... You have one asset that can run on all these various fuels.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and the military being a giant logistics machine, that's probably music to their ears 'cause it's like, oh, we don't have to have this one specific type of fuel for all the generators in all the areas.

It's like, well, all right, you only have jet fuel from this plane that's inoperable that you're gonna have to blow up? All right, siphon it out and put it in this thing. Use it to power the building for the next three days 'til the plane's stuck in the mud. That's really cool. I also, I was reading earlier about modular nuclear generators.

That was like, everyone was so excited about these. Oh, you're gonna have a [00:52:00] nuclear reactor in the basement of your house or, like, at least big buildings could have their own nuclear reactor, and there was some setback recently where it was like, eh, yeah, maybe not. Maybe that's not actually gonna work, and there was no replacement for it, but it sounds kinda like this might actually take the place of something like that.

Thomas Healy: Yeah, so we could take the place and you can run us off of the conventional fuels like we've discussed, or we can partner up with nuclear, right? Which that's the other cool thing is nuclear still needs something to take that heat and make electrons, so that's where we come into play, and, and we're already in discussions with some of those nuclear companies.

Now, I think the big question mark with nuclear is who's willing to put, have one in their backyard, right? Do you wanna be near the power plant, and what if something were to go wrong? Obviously, I say that with also knowing that technology has advanced a ton. This stuff has become safer, but it is still nuclear.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah, it is. And, and just making it-- Look, I don't have a problem with nuclear. I'm very pro-nuclear, but am I pro my crazy neighbor having it in his basement when he decides to, I don't know, make [00:53:00] bombs in his backyard? It's like, well, maybe not that guy, right? I don't know. There's, there's just gotta be a certain level of competence before I'm comfortable with somebody having a nuclear reactor in their backyard.

Yeah. Very true. So man, thank you for coming on the show. This has been fascinating. It's a really interesting technology. It seems like we're probably gonna be hearing a ton about this in the coming months and years. So yeah, I appreciate your time.

Thomas Healy: No, thanks for having me on. Enjoyed the discussion, and, uh, let's go see if we can change the world and make some electricity while we're doing it.

Right on.

Jordan Harbinger: Big thanks to Thomas Healy for joining us today, and big thanks to Hylian for bringing us this episode ad-free.