Podcasts about national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 12, 2024 21:40

In the final episode of The State of the World, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan sits down with former California Governor Jerry Brown to discuss the challenges we face as a global community and pathways forward. This episode was recorded on January 9, 2024. The State of the World is a special series on IGCC's Talking Policy podcast that explores the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. The series is part of a suite of activities celebrating IGCC's 40th anniversary. Since 1983, ⁠⁠IGCC⁠⁠ scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we've created The State of the World, a Talking Policy miniseries featuring faculty from across the University of California on the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. Archival audio used in this series is from NPR; the University of California, Irvine, audio recordings collection; Freesound.org; the Internet Archive; the Library of Congress; and the United States Government. Used with permission, where applicable. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

university california world state npr irvine library of congress uc freesound internet archive united states government jerry brown state of the world archival national labs igcc

The State of the World, Ep. 4: Democracy

Talks from the Hoover Institution

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2024 30:29

In episode four of The State of the World, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan speaks with political scientists Emile Hafner-Burton and Courtenay Monroe about democracy—what it is, why it's under threat, and what we can do about it. Emilie is IGCC Research Director for the Future of Democracy and a professor at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy and the Department of Political Science. Courtenay is a professor of political science at UC Merced and chair of IGCC's steering committee. This episode was recorded on January 4, 2024 The State of the World is a special series on IGCC's Talking Policy podcast that explores the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. The series is part of a suite of activities celebrating IGCC's 40th anniversary. Since 1983, ⁠⁠IGCC⁠⁠ scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we've created The State of the World, a Talking Policy miniseries featuring faculty from across the University of California on the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. Archival audio used in this series is from NPR; the University of California, Irvine, audio recordings collection; Freesound.org; the Internet Archive; the Library of Congress; and the United States Government. Used with permission, where applicable. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

What Is The Role Of Future International Collaboration: Risks And Opportunities | Hoover Institution

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2024 85:27

The Hoover Institution held a conversation on What is the Role of Future International Collaboration: Risks and Opportunities on January 22, 2024 from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM PT. Dr. Thomas Mason addressed aspects of research openness and the daily need to protect the information that is critically important to universities, National Labs, the federal government, and the private sector. The conversation was followed by a 30 minute Q&A. As a national security science laboratory Los Alamos National Lab has worked to strike the right balance between openness of research and protection of information for over eighty years. The talk addressed the historic importance of open international collaboration in fostering rapid innovation with economic and national security benefits while still recognizing the need to manage the risks that come with international engagement. SPEAKER Thomas Mason is the President and CEO of Triad National Security, LLC (Triad) and serves as the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Most recently he was the Senior Vice President for Global Laboratory Operations at Battelle where he had responsibility for governance and strategy across the six National Laboratories that Battelle manages or co-manages. Prior to joining Battelle, Thom worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for 19 years, including 10 years as the Laboratory Director. Under his leadership, ORNL saw significant growth in programs, new facilities, and hiring while achieving record low safety incident rates. Before becoming Laboratory Director, he was Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Neutron Sciences, ALD for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), and Director of the Experimental Facilities Division. During his time in Oak Ridge, Thom was active in the community serving as Chair of the Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation as well as Innovation Valley, the Knoxville-Oak Ridge area regional economic development organization. He moved to ORNL from the University of Toronto where he was a faculty member in the Department of Physics and previously worked as a Senior Scientist at Risø National Laboratory and a Postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories. For the past 30 years, he has been involved in the design and construction of scientific instrumentation and facilities and the application of nuclear, computing, and materials sciences to solve important challenges in energy and national security. Thom has a Ph.D. in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics from McMaster University and a BSc in Physics from Dalhousie University. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS BY Norbert Holtkamp is a Science Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Holtkamp is also a professor of particle physics and astrophysics and of photon science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University BACKGROUND International collaborations and research openness have been enormously beneficial to the United States supporting rapid advances of world leading Science & Technology in our country. They brought a large group of incredibly talented people from around the world to come work with US science and technology industry. In the end, many of them stayed which provided a pipeline for innovation and business growth helping to maintain a standard of “world leading.” The simple fact that others successfully try to copy the process should encourage the US to continue. In a changing world though where the standards of research openness are not shared anymore, managing the risks better than in the past becomes essential. Research openness and specifically international collaboration with friends and opponents always carries the risk of unwanted release of information. Industrial espionage in the private sector does have negative economic impact, can threaten national security, or lose competitive advantages. Over the past few years, there has been a significant rise in the systematic collection of intellectual property on a broad scale within the domains of private, public, and national security sectors. This development has had a profound impact on the global research community. Research openness is commonly understood and shared by much of the World's science community and led by the US, for long was captured in a quite simple National Security Decision Directive (NSDD-189). Essentially: “It's open until it's classified”. While NSDD-189 wasn't abandoned officially yet, effectively it has been in many instances. New definitions “CUI = Confidential but Unclassified Information,” central control of international collaboration agreements, top down managed travel restrictions of “going to” or “inviting in”, strictly enforced Conflict of Interest agreements are all existing elements in a new world that grapples with the balance between openness and benefit from it versus risk of losing. The US needs a pipeline of trained engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Without inviting a substantial foreign national contingent into our schools and universities from which many will typically stay, it is not clear that US demographics would even allow the US alone to fill this pipeline. Whether it is the academic or private sector: it is essential to understand in more detail how international collaboration provided and can provide in the future economic benefit, intelligence insight, faster scientific discoveries, and sometimes even aiding diplomatic efforts and continue to bring the best and brightest innovators to the US. As part of the project, each of these elements (faster scientific advance – economic benefit – intelligence & insight – demographics & talent recruiting) will be addressed.

united states ceo director university world president science technology opportunities research toronto risks senior vice president industrial physics thom bsc mcmaster university hoover institution dalhousie university senior scientist postdoc oak ridge ald los alamos national laboratory battelle international collaboration laboratory director national laboratory ornl holtkamp slac national accelerator laboratory national labs science fellow thomas mason

The State of the World, Ep. 3: Climate Change

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2024 24:36

In episode three of The State of the World, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan speaks with Richard Matthew and Fonna Forman about climate change. Richard and Fonna explain the science of where we are and how we got here, and offer ideas about the role individuals have to play in finding solutions. Richard is research director for climate change and international security at IGCC and professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy and Director of Strategic Engagement for the School of Social Ecology at UC Irvine. Fonna Forman is a professor of Political Science and founding co-director of the Center on Global Justice at UC San Diego and co-chairs the UC Global Climate Leadership Council. The State of the World is a special series on IGCC's Talking Policy podcast that explores the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. The series is part of a suite of activities celebrating IGCC's 40th anniversary. Since 1983, ⁠⁠IGCC⁠⁠ scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we've created The State of the World, a Talking Policy miniseries featuring faculty from across the University of California on the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. Archival audio used in this series is from NPR; the University of California, Irvine, audio recordings collection; Freesound.org; the Internet Archive; the Library of Congress; and the United States Government. Used with permission, where applicable. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

The State of the World, Ep. 2: War

university california world state npr political science santa barbara irvine library of congress uc research director freesound internet archive united states government state of the world archival national labs igcc

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2024 33:04

In episode two of The State of the World, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan speaks with ⁠Neil Narang⁠ and ⁠Brandon Kinne⁠ about the evolving nature of war and peace in an era where great power competition exists alongside terrorism, non-state armed groups, rebel organizations, and transnational violence. Neil is associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Research Director at IGCC. Brandon is an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Davis. The State of the World is a special series on IGCC's Talking Policy podcast that explores the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. The series is part of a suite of activities celebrating IGCC's 40th anniversary. Since 1983, ⁠IGCC⁠ scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we've created The State of the World, a Talking Policy miniseries featuring faculty from across the University of California on the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. Archival audio used in this series is from NPR; the University of California, Irvine, audio recordings collection; Freesound.org; the Internet Archive; the Library of Congress; and the United States Government. Used with permission, where applicable. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

The State of the World, Ep. 1 : China

All Digital Additive Manufacturing

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 17, 2024 30:39

China is the United States' most complex relationship. Defined by both cooperation and competition, tensions have risen sharply in recent years. As China's power grows—it seems—so does the potential for conflict. Since 1983, IGCC scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we've created The State of the World, a Talking Policy miniseries featuring faculty from across the University of California on the biggest global challenges that will shape our future. In our first episode, Talking Policy host Lindsay Morgan speaks with Susan Shirk and Tai Ming Cheung to assess the state of U.S.-China relations, as a more assertive China and elections in the United States signal a transforming relationship. Susan is the founding chair of the 21st Century China Center, a research professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, and director emeritus of IGCC. Tai is the current director of IGCC, and a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. Archival audio used in this series is from NPR; the University of California, Irvine, audio recordings collection; Freesound.org; the Internet Archive; the Library of Congress; and the United States Government. Used with permission, where applicable. Any unauthorized duplication is strictly prohibited.

3DP & AM Chat: Rick Neff | Additive Manufacturing Consulting | hosted by Adam J. Penna | October 12, 2023

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2023 23:19

Rick Neff from Cincinnati, OH“Your guide to success in Additive Manufacturing. Conference Speaker. Help save time and money for innovators in the additive manufacturing space."1:00 - Getting started in Sales and Aerospace (Pratt & Whitney) 2:45 - Cincinnati Incorporated experience - Laser specialist - applications 3:17 - Oak Ridge National Labs - Additive Manufacturing - Robots - Lockheed Martin - aerospace tooling 6:04 - Adoption phase of Additive Manufacturing at a company.8:40 - Working through technology adoption - finding applications 9:35 - Composites processes for building tools - high temperature thermoplastics 12:00 - Firehawk Aerospace hybrid rocket engines 14:22 - AM changes since 2020 - Virtual Events - Live Event energy 17:27 - Overcoming challenges by providing education18:39 - Successfully adopting AM CAD, DfAM, CAM, Simulation, Post Processing + Utilizing Contract Manufacturers and Maker Space and National Labs and Service Bureaus and Consultants.Rick Neff: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-neff/*Support local music by Eugene Snowden: https://amzn.to/3iZpCu2Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/alldigitalam9283/donations

BEST OF TST 7/19/23 - Godzilla Minus One: Adam Bomb

Physics World Weekly Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 9, 2023 120:01

BEST OF: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb, was the vessel for the creation of this wonder weapon. He is the physical receptacle for the knowledge of atomic power to be manifest. The Japanese Emperor Hirohito was also said to be the embodiment of the sun goddess, made manifest as the ultimate source of life and creation. The atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in the Land of the Rising Sun, one of which was Nagasaki, the eastern hub of western Christianity in Japan - a religion based on Person sun worship. As an open test of the weapon's power, as with napalm dropped on Tokyo months prior, the atomic bombs ripped open the eastern gate in the most horrific occult operation perhaps ever conducted. These bombs are not just atom bombs, they are the ADAM BOMB sparking a new form of BIG BANG. What cosmic horror will they bring forth? The new Godzilla Minus One movie from Toho is taking on the issue with post-war Japan dealing with fallout and the famous kaiju and titan, while the advertisers promote it as a sequel to Nolan's Oppenheimer film. It is an odd way to promote a film that is also being juxtaposed to Barbie. In esoteric terms the Barbie movie is the XX and Oppenheimer is 0 hour, the X and 0 representing the alchemical marriage. The July 16, 1945, Trinity bomb opened a gateway and Apollo 11, July 16, 1945, opened and penetrated the heavens. The fiery and bloody holocausts of Dresden and Tokyo, leading up to the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan, are the sacrifices needed to invoke the old ones by opening the gateway of the east. Toho is the EAST gate and Hollywood is the WEST gate. The trinity bomb itself is named after the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who Oppenheimer quotes after detonating the bomb. Most of the Manhattan project was also run by Jewish men and a woman, who must have been versed in Kabbala, and the Judaic word Shiva, meaning seven days of mourning. In other words the ultimate weapon was created to bring about the ultimate destruction, an inversion of the ultimate creation of the world through the seven days of creation; through this destruction emerges the old world of resurrected gods. The Hindu Mahabharata also describes such weapons in ancient times and as Oppenheimer himself said, Trinity was “not first atomic bomb, but [the] first atomic bomb in modern times.” If the National Labs are built on energy vortexes and Oppenheimer himself, once suicidal, then described as charismatic, before questioning his life's work, was possessed by the spirit of the ‘evil' he created, we are witnessing far more than history. This the creation of the new MAN, a new Adam with the power of the universe God created. This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5328407/advertisement

New director looks to the future of the UK's national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 9, 2023 30:59

Our podcast guest is Dave Newbold of the Science and Technology Facilities Council

science new director national labs

From The Weather Channel to AT&T: One meteorologist's unique career path

Across the Sky

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2023 51:27

We all use weather forecasts to help get us through our days and plan ahead. The same is true for corporations. Whether it's for planning outdoor maintenance or business continuity, weather forecasts play an important role in day-to-day operations. Mark Elliot, the principal meteorologist for AT&T, has his hands full helping a major telecommunications company maintain operations in any conditions. Before joining AT&T, Elliot spent the first two decades of his career as an on-camera meteorologist at The Weather Channel. Though different, it turns out the two jobs have a lot in common. In this episode, Elliot shares stories about his time at The Weather Channel, discusses what he does in his current role for AT&T, and explains why meteorologists are becoming an essential part of more and more companies. We want to hear from you! Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions or comments to podcasts@lee.net. About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Headliner and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Joe Martucci: Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of, the Across the Sky Podcast, a Lee Enterprises podcast. We appreciate you listening, whether it's on your favorite podcast platform or on your favorite local news website. We are talking about the phone companies in weather. Believe it or not, phone companies hire meteorologists. And we thought there would be no better person to talk to than then Mark Elliot, who is the principal meteorologist for AT&T, of course, one of the country's biggest phone companies here. He's also been on the Weather Channel for nearly 20 years. You can still see him there on occasion. And join with me to interview him. We have Matt Holiner in the Midwest and Sean Sublette down in Richmond, Virginia. Kirsten Lang is out for today. Guys, how's it going? Matt Holiner: Going pretty good. Yeah. Matt Holiner: I really enjoyed this interview because I got to reconnect with Mark a little bit. I actually got a chance to work with him in my, brief summer internship at the Weather Channel in the summer of 2013. And, he was typically in the afternoons. I was most often in the mornings, but I got to work all the shifts, so I did get a chance to work with him there. It was good talking about the experience of being at the Weather Channel because it is just an amazing place if you're a meteorologist to work at. But also hearing why he made the shift from being at some would call it a dream job at the Weather Channel to working for At T, and the change that came with that. It was a really interesting conversation. Sean Sublette: Yeah, I like that as well. The things that he learned at the Weather Channel, how he was able to apply those and his new job and the rationale for making the jump and just trying to understand, well, why does AT&T need a meteorologist? And once you stop to think about all the hardware that's scattered all about the country and it's outside, then it all begins to add up. But, yeah, so he has a lot of interesting things to say about that. So it's a good episode. Joe Martucci: Yeah, good episode. We're excited to show you here. So let's dive into it. Mark Elliot is principal meteorologist at AT&T Joe Martucci: You're listening to Mark Elliot on the across the sky podcast. We are here with our special guest for today on the across the sky podcast. Mark Elliot, principal meteorologist at at and T, which we're going to talk plenty about. You may know him from the Weather Channel, where he has spent nearly 20 years in front of the camera talking to audiences all across the country. He's still doing some freelance work. Now, he is a graduate of Rutgers University, which I might just say is the best university on the planet. But we'll let other people decide that one. And got his master's of science at, Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech. Mark, thanks for coming on the podcast. We appreciate it. Mark Elliot: My pleasure. Thanks for the invite, guys. Joe Martucci: Yeah, no, absolutely. We're looking forward to diving into everything. Corporate meteorology is a growing, exploding part of the field Joe Martucci: But I do want to ask this, because and I'm even thinking about this know, if I put my non weather hat on. Why would AT&T need a meteorologist? What are you doing there? I, know it's important work, but can you explain what's going on? Where did the motive to have a meteorologist at AT&T come? Mark Elliot: And, you know, even stepping back from, like, not necessarily anything specific to my current job at AT&T corporate meteorology is a growing, exploding part of the field. That these companies are realizing that it is a strategic advantage, it's a monetary advantage to have forecasters, to have meteorologists with experience that can talk about these complicated patterns, complicated science, and put it onto the company level, talking about how weather will directly affect them. It's slightly different from what you'd get from, the National Weather Service or from a National Weather Channel. It's more those places, while they have access to where the weather will be, don't necessarily have the same access to the company's internal data of where their stuff is, what's there, what's important, how are each one of those assets affected by the weather? And once you start thinking about it that way, it makes a lot of sense for companies big and small to have some sort of weather connector, weather service of some kind that is giving them information, and AT&T recognized that as well. Joe Martucci: How many people work? Are you the only meteorologist there? Do you have a team? How does that work? Mark Elliot: We're a small but mighty team. I'm not the only one, but, it's one hand or less that is, making up, the lot. We do a lot of work with just a small number of people. We're talking about United States, Mexico, areas around the world where there might be data connections under the ocean. Yeah. It's a global reach, as you can imagine, for a company with that name. Sean Sublette: Yeah, for sure. Mark, one of the things, and again, I don't want you to give away any kind of secrets or anything like that, because I think in our own minds, we can understand. Okay, well, anything from space weather, of course, affects communications, as well as heavy precipitation, or any other kind of thing that affects telecommunications. That's kind of where my mind is. And as you alluded to, this is becoming a growing field. We already know that this has happened a lot in the financial industry, in the energy industry over the last ten to 20 years. In particular, use that information to leverage your position against your competition. How does the weather affect a telecommunications company like AT&T? Sean Sublette: what other kinds of things, without you giving away too much, how does the weather affect a company like AT&T or any telecommunications company? over what I kind of mentioned. Mark Elliot: Yeah. And you're right. you're right and more right. Almost every type of extreme weather could have an extreme impact. And so it's our job to basically forecast the risk. It's not necessarily a weather forecast, it's a risk forecast. And then we have other teams that go out there, and they are trying to take that information and mitigate or minimize that risk as much as possible. So, first things first. It's about for these companies, companies big and small, that have corporate meteorology. It's about protecting the people, right? You want to make sure your people know what they're getting into day by day. So first on the list is people. Second is probably places the assets that are fixed and are out there, whether those are buildings, whether those are communication towers. In my case, any type of weather that could affect something sticking up into the air, whether that's a building or a tower or anything else. And obviously, you don't need me to tell you what that might be. Lightning, tornadoes, extreme wind, flooding, all really important to those fixed assets. And then there's mobile assets, things that are moving around. Whether it's company fleets, they need to know what they might be driving into. it's really far and wide, I would say. I think a lot of corporate meteorologists and AT&T included, we focus a lot on Tropics because they are such big players when they come into an area. But also wind in general, strong wind can have an outsized influence. Tornadoes, while really important, as we know, are really small scale. And so they often can be really troublesome and problematic and destructive in those local areas. But for a national scale, they might not be as important, right? It's all about perspective and what that individual company needs at the time. How do you handle the lightning situation with all these cell phone towers? Matt Holiner: And Mark, I'm curious about the lightning, because I would imagine the most common thing that you might have to deal with are just general thunderstorms. Not necessarily severe thunderstorms, but just regular thunderstorms that have lightning and all those cell phone towers. So what goes into the forecast? And, are there any special preparations to try and protect those towers ahead of time? And then what happens when those towers inevitably do get struck by lightning? How do you handle the lightning situation with all these cell phone towers sticking way up in the sky, certainly attracting some lightning, right? Mark Elliot: They're big, tall, pointy objects. And it's what we've always said, like, don't be the tallest object out in the field, and yet that's what towers are. That's what our buildings are. and so we use the same technology that any tall building would have. There is lightning, mitigation on top of these tall, pointy objects, just like the Empire State Building is struck multiple times a year, and yet the building is still there. A lot of these towers have lightning rods of some kind in order to ground them. So that the charge can flow through and not destroy everything. But there's also always all kinds of alerts that go off if things go wrong. And so then the tech teams can go back out there and figure out what went wrong and fix it up. Meteorologists are constantly monitoring the weather across the country Joe Martucci: So this sounds to me is this like a 24/7 kind of job where you guys are always looking out for what's happening across I'm assuming the whole country, right? Mark Elliot: The weather doesn't really stop right for that's true weekends and holidays and you know what you're getting into when you sign into this field. We are not really staffed 24/7, but we're also not staffed either. I mean, when it's a big event, we're going to be up watching it anyway. So we might as well be helping the company through it, kind of thing. US meteorologists, we get not excited, but we study this. We want to see what's happening when big weather happens. And so if we were going to be up watching it, we're going to be forecasting for it, kind of thing. If people in the business are interested enough in it, you better believe the meteorologists in the business are interested in it too. But what I will say is that a lot of our work happens very early. I'm not a morning person by nature. I don't know if you can see it in my eyes or hear it in my voice. But we start roughly 05:00 A.m. Every day in order to get the bulk of our forecasting work and risk analysis done before other decision makers get up and start making their plans because the weather affects those plans. And so my busiest time of the day is often that five to eight a M Eastern time frame. And yet the company doesn't work on those hours. And so there will still be meetings and special projects and all kinds of stuff for someone on the West Coast after their lunchtime and next thing you know it you've hours. You know, it's it's not a job that has fixed nine to fives. It's not an easy role to slide into if that's the goal. Are you doing longer term climate risk also as a company? Sean Sublette: So let me jump in next we talk about those short term threats, whether it's a, ah, winter storm, ice, snow, wind, lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, all that stuff. But are you kind of evolving also into a longer term climate risk? Like, hey, we've got these assets on the coastline or near the coastline. Are we worried about those for 10, 15, 20 years? Are you doing kind of this longer term climate risk also? Mark Elliot: As a company, yes. As me, not as much. I'm involved in some of those discussions. But there's an entire other team that is looking at long term climate risk. In fact, there's some great partnerships with AT&T and argum National Labs putting out publicly available climate risk down to the location. So it's called Climar Climber Climmrr. And it's publicly available. It's from AT&T Labs, basically At T's Innovators and the Argon National Laboratory. And you can put in, an address if you have a building, if you have your home, and you want to know what the climate risk may be there, for that location in the years to come. We've made it available because we think that should be a public good, as AT&T made that choice to put that out there for everybody. And then, of course, we use that data both in short and long term ways. We can use it in the short term to be kind of an extra data point. If we're looking at flooding, like, will this cause flooding to our assets? Well, we can take one more piece of data. Know, you have the Ero from the Weather Prediction Center. You might have the flood risk from FEMA as part of your decision making, but maybe you also bring in the Argon National Laboratory. And it's saying in 50 years there's pretty much no risk here because of local elevation or because of small scale changes that might be even more fine tuned than your FEMA data. That can help us lower or raise even a current day's forecast of risk at a location. So we're using it. And then, of course, for long term site picking, if you had a choice of putting a new building here or here, and one of them is saying, this is going to be underwater in 20 years, and one is saying it's not. That's an added piece of data that you can start to use the data. Part of this is really important in the long run. Mark Elliot: Trying to communicate risk in Mexico was a challenge for me Matt Holiner: So, Mark, besides the early mornings and the occasional long hours, what would you say is the most challenging part of your job? Mark Elliot: Oh, challenging part. I mean, I didn't do a lot of international, forecasting at the Weather Channel. Right. It was very much us. Based. Trying to figure out the right way to communicate risk in Mexico was a challenge for me because I'm not a Spanish speaker. if you're doing forecasts internationally, you don't have the same kind of available data that you would be used to using if you were looking at a front approaching the US. Or coming through the US. Watching typhoons in the West Pacific was not really in my day to day, and now it, was, I'd argue, interesting and a new challenge because of it. Matt Holiner: And is there any part of the world that AT&T is not concerned about? Or do you literally have to look. Mark Elliot: Across the whole globe? Matt Holiner: Or is there some area that you can say, you know what, we can skip that part of the forecast. Mark Elliot: It's different. we care about it differently. I'm not spending a lot of time in, say, Central Europe, but we know those patterns influence what happens downstream, and eventually it comes to us anyway. So if you're not at least paying attention to where there's big pattern changes know, really life threatening weather. Communication is life saving. And so if we have the ability to help a community because of destructive weather, AT&T is probably going to be there in some way. And once our people are there, we're forecasting spot forecasts for wherever they are. So if the weather gets bad enough and our people are going to help, whether it's reestablished communication or whatever the case may be, we're also involved so that while they're there, they're getting spot forecasts from, us. Joe Martucci: Awesome. Well, we're going to take a brief break here and we'll come back on the other side with more from Mark Elliot on the across the sky podcast. Mark Elliot started at The Weather Channel right after graduating from Rutgers Joe Martucci: And we are back with the across the sky podcast hosted by the Lee Enterprises weather team. I'm here with Matt Holliner and Sean Sublick. Kirsten Lang could not be with us today. Mark Elliot is with us here. He is our guest for today principal, meteorologist at AT&T and longtime meteorologist at the Weather Channel. We'll dive into this a little bit, so, and correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, I think you started at The Weather Channel right after Rutgers. Is that true? Mark Elliot: It is, pretty rare. Joe Martucci: That's what I was going to get into, because from my perspective as a meteorologist, the Weather Channel is like the I just, it always feels like something you work towards for a while and you get that moment. I mean, it's great you started there right off the bat, but I have to ask, how did you do it? Mark Elliot: Yeah. So, it's a combination of really hard work and a little bit of luck. I mean, let's face it, it requires a little bit of both. Joe Martucci: Yeah. Mark Elliot: I will credit Rutgers as you should. Go ahead, Joe, jump in there. Joe Martucci: All right, we got an R. We got an. Mark Elliot: Yeah. Joe Martucci: Yeah. Mark Elliot: I will credit Rutgers and Rutgers meteorology for really giving me the opportunity to be able to be seen by the Weather Channel. So here's how this went in kind of a short form version. So at Rutgers, and I guess before and after I was a bit of an overachiever, I did the double major program at Rutgers, which meant that my electives were things like organic chemistry for fun. Joe Martucci: I'll tell you why, you know, as well as imark organic chemistry at Rutgers is not an easy class. I know a lot of people who took it and did not do so well on the first go around on that. So that's a toughie at Rutgers. Mark Elliot: Non a grades at Rutgers. I, mean, it wasn't too far down, but I had a, huge GPA, I had two different majors, and I did all of these internships while at Rutgers. At Rutgers sanctioned and helped organize. So I had a TV internship at News Twelve New Jersey. I had a National Weather Service internship at Mount Holly at the New Jersey office. I was doing research within, or at least data collection and analysis. I don't know if I'd really call it research, looking back on it, but for the Rutgers Pam site, so the photochemical assessment, monitoring. So I was getting into field work and figuring out what the big profilers did and what they meant and all this and that was all through Rutgers at the same time. The Rutgers Meteorology Club and kind of my year and right around my year, of being there were the first ones to really organize and start sending student groups to the American Meteorological Society conferences and the student conference in particular. So I saw a table at a conference for the Weather Channel for student internships, and I gave them my resume, which also had know, Weather Watcher, right? The Re weather watcher program, which is TV. It had radio experience from WRSU because I worked, on there and was doing their news team weather reports occasionally. So I had all this stuff on the resume, and I handed it into a summer internship, thinking like, oh, my gosh, ah, this is going to be so amazing. And I didn't even hear a no, right? And I didn't get a yes no, much less a yes. I heard nothing. And I'm like, well, I got nothing. And I'm about to graduate senior year. And I am internally, and rather externally, I think, also panicking. my friends were signing up for grad schools. They knew what they wanted to research. They were getting job offers. They were moving. And I was just applying to job after job after job and not even hearing no's, still nothing. And I applied to National Weather Service Puerto Rico. I was like, I'll learn Spanish. That's not what they wanted, right? But I was applying to anywhere because I liked all things weather. I didn't have a focus. I think that actually hurt me a little bit. I wasn't like, I'm only looking at tropical things. I'm going to go to grad school for tropical meteorology, and I'm going to work at CSU and do long range forecasting. There wasn't a goal like that because I just wanted to be in the field. I just wanted to do something weather. So I was about to graduate, and my in room dorm phone rang. and my roommate answered, thinking it was a joke or a prank or whatever, because somebody called saying they were from the Weather Channel. And once he realized it was real, he changed his tone a bit and got me the phone. And it was for a because I had Rutger's Radio, the WRSU experience, on my resume. it floated around the building for, I think, about a year and a half. And somebody was going on maternity leave. And they said, do you want this job? It starts in August. There is no moving expenses. There is no help finding a place to live. It goes from August to November. It is four days a week max. It is 35 hours a week max. There is no benefits. You cannot work at the month of December or else it triggers you to be full time and you're not allowed to be. So it's literally this, do you want it? And I said yes, I do. And so I went to the Weather Channel for a part time job in radio and stayed 18 years, is the long and short of it. Joe Martucci: Wow, that's incredible on a lot of fronts there. Because even still, even with the WRSU, which is great, I feel like, to get it, as I'm sure a wide pool of applicants, is a big testament to your skills and everything you've done. And obviously, you made a very long career out of it, being there for 20 years, and even still freelancing there now, what's it like working there? I've never been there. I know where it is, but I've never been there. When you're there, does it just feel like, special? Because for the people who are listening, for a lot of us meteorologists, you grew up watching The Weather Channel because you didn't really know anybody who was interested in weather growing up. That was the same for me. I knew nobody that was going to be a meteorologist in their career until I went to Rutgers. So when you get there, is it just like, wow, I made it? Is that how it feels? Mark Elliot: In many ways, at least I always did. I always got that thrill putting on the blue jacket, right? There was something about I didn't care what time it was when I went into the field, you put on that blue coat and you're walking down the hallway of a hotel with no power, and you're like, you got a strut, right? You got a different feel about it because everyone knows that brand. It's one of the most well and well respected brand. It wins the most respected news brand year after year after year after year. But away from that, in the building, it is very mission driven. But people you see on air, on air, because they have mission and purpose, and they're trying to communicate this science and keep people safe. You're soaking up so much weather knowledge communication knowledge Mark Elliot: They look at it, and I looked at it as someone listening right now, we could save their life if we give them the right info, if we give them the right information that they can use and react to the right way or not do the wrong thing, which I think is often more often the case. So that mission, and purpose was very apparent. Like, people knew why we were there. And then you're surrounded in a room of other meteorologists like you. How where else can you go where you have a severe weather question? You can go up to Dr. Forbes or you have a hurricane. that's coming up. And you can go to a director of the National Hurricane Center. You could just be like Rick first name, right? forget Dr. NAB. Joe Martucci: Dr. NAB, tell me what's up. Mark Elliot: What's with this question? That's awesome, having that kind of knowledge base. And then you have the people that we all know that have been there since we've all been watching, right, since it started in the early eighty s, more or less. And you can have a question for Jim about broadcast, or Mike Seidel about field work, or Kelly Cass name, the broadcaster, the longevity of the people there. And, the skill that comes from that is really impressive. And so you're just a sponge. You're soaking up so much weather knowledge communication knowledge. Weather communication knowledge, which is its own little, microcosm of interesting. And it's not just meteorologists, right? You have producers and directors and news gatherers and they're all the best of the best in that room putting a show together. And you're part of that team. And so you're learning how that works and you're learning how it goes, and you're the expert, because it's not just the News channel, it's the Weather Channel. And so your knowledge is important and they value it. So it was really a special place and, it was not something I didn't enjoy anymore. Right. So that wasn't the motivation for leaving there. I still go back. Right. That says something. How many people leave their jobs and still go to hang out because it's still fun for them? Joe Martucci: Yeah, I understand. Did you feel like you missed out by leaving local weather to go national? Joe Martucci: Let me ask you this too, because I do feel like a number of people who are working on the Weather Channel, they might start in local news and then work their way up to the Weather Channel. Did you feel like you missed out maybe by not taking working in that local news setting and going right to national? Or is it something that, hey, I'm at the Weather Channel, I love it here, I'm here. Mark Elliot: A little of both, maybe. I feel like it would be difficult for me to have left the Weather Channel and gone to local because there have been many who have done that. And so I might not know enough to be able to speak to it, right. Because I wasn't in that world long. An internship, is not the same as being a chief meteorologist at a local spot. But I was used to following the weather and my ship changing no matter where the weather was that day. So I would go where the weather could kill you. I would jump around to the middle of the night, I would be in the evenings because there was lots of severe weather. I'd occasionally move to the afternoons and then back to the overnight. I would follow the weather. You don't really do that in local. You've got your set time frame. The weather might be boring for a long stretch in one location, whereas if you're looking nationally, there is always a weather story somewhere. And so for me, it was always like, man, if I had to just look at one market, what would that feel like after looking at a national scale for, as long as I did? You guys can tell me I'm wrong and be like, local, best. And it's super interesting. And we get to do the school talks, and we get to be part of the community, and I would find all the things that I would love about that. But it's very different from looking at a national scale and talking about where the big story is only well, I'll. Joe Martucci: Say as somebody who literally just came from a school visit to talk to you right now, Mark, it's always good to be a part of the community. I do like it that way. But, I mean, hey, listen, again, when you're at the weather mean, you made it. I mean, you're so I know, Matt, you had a question, so, god, I don't want to take up too much. Mark Elliot: Not I'm not putting down local by any stretch. I think I love being in a community that way and being really focused and that kind of thing. but your original question was, do I feel like I missed out on not starting in that route? And I think I did some of those local feel type things at the national network. Right? I came in through radio, and so I was on local radio stations, some of them live and part, you know, people that were listening didn't know I wasn't in their sound booth with their board radio board in front of me. Right. We tapped into it virtually and digitally, but I was kind of part of those local communities. And then again, I'm dating myself a little bit, but video on the Internet was a new thing, and so I was doing local forecasts on your local on the eigth page, I think they actually called it that. How weird is that thinking, back on the days of weather.com, in the early 2000s or so, where kind of mid 2000s, probably when video was coming out on weather, but your local page had a video of just the New York City forecast that was new. And so that was me. They didn't have the full on air people doing that shift all the time because they had their full on air shift to do. So I would be jumping in. So I got some of that trial by fire local TV and local Feel experience at the national network, which was different, but pretty cool to be able to say I did it that way. Matt Holiner: Yeah, Mark, I know exactly what you're talking about, because when I was interning at the Weather Channel, I mean, at the time, it was really cool to me. But I got to do some of those. Joe Martucci: Local web forecasts. Matt Holiner: They let me do it near the end of my internship. I had to do a few sample videos for it to make sure I was good enough. And boy, when my first thing showed up on weather, it was just amazing. As, somebody who is in college to be on weather, it was fantastic. It was certainly not the same as being on the actual Weather Channel. Being on the website was pretty cool. And I felt the exact same way about being at the Weather Channel. Being in that building, and just the knowledge, the immense knowledge of the TV business, but also the forecasting business, meteorology be around, all those other meteorologists. It was a fantastic place to work. When was the moment that you realized you need to make a change? Matt Holiner: So my question for you is, when was the moment that you realized you need to make a change? What caused you to make the shift from being at the Weather Channel, for some people, their dream job, to then switching to a very different role at AT&T? Mark Elliot: I don't know if I did realize it just kind of happened. A lot of it was on a whim. So the real answer is, I was doing my CCM certification, the certified consulting meteorologist, through the, AMS. And I had a mentor who was encouraging me to do that project. I was doing it on my off time, it was COVID time. And so shifts were really strange at the Weather Channel. Times were moving around, some people were working from home, I was working in the studio. But more often than not only at the times of extreme, severe weather, right? Dr. Forbes had stepped away, mostly retired. And I was certainly not taking that role as the severe weather expert, but I was on the expert staff at that point, and often being told to, follow where the severe weather would go, but there isn't severe weather every day. So I was using some of that time to really think about what else was out there and what else was happening. And I was like, I think basically I'm a consultant. I come in now and I talk about just the most extreme weather, and I have to be able to make that digestible, but you have to be able to communicate differently. And you're doing some post analysis reporting, and a lot of things that a consultant would be asked to do. So I'm like, okay, this is different. This is not just a broadcast seal anymore for me. I'm going to try for the consulting meteorologist seal, which the process was epic, some will argue harder than getting the master's degree that I have to get the I won't necessarily swear by that, but it was a long process. It's doable, and it's fulfilling, and it's important. So if you're thinking about doing it, you should for people that are listening. But it's not quick. really by answering one of the questions that comes in the written exam, if you will. I wound up on a wormhole on the AMS site. And I stumbled into this job post for a tropical expert meteorologist that could do communication, and kind of briefing style communications that, could help lead a team to some degree and focus on the big weather stories of the day. And I was like, can do that, can do that, can do that, can do that, can do that. Do you ever see a job post and you're like, is this written about me? And then the kicker was, and it's in Atlanta where I was already living. And I was like, and I don't have to move for it. And so basically it was a thought experiment. And I was like, okay, well, what would it be like if I took a two decades broadcast resume and tried to make it sound like I was doing all these other things? Because I really was. But that's not what you're thinking about when you're doing broadcast meteorology. And there are so many skills that translate from broadcast meteorology to corporate meteorology and many other big data science or communication or PR type jobs. And so I basically said, okay, let's see, I'm going to use this next day. And instead of working on this or that, on my off time, I'm going to redo my resume. It's time to refresh it anyway. I basically was like, this will be fun. What else could I do today? And I applied to this job and I got an interview. And then I wound up getting the job. And then I had a really tough decision because again, I didn't dislike what I was doing. And I didn't necessarily sit there and say, I need to find something else. I don't like this anymore. I'm not interested in this anymore, or I'm not learning more. I'm not making a difference here. It was none of those things. It was a shiny new toy. And after a lot of reflection with myself and my family and asking, could this be a better work life balance for us? Could this be better for my young kids? Because again, I was bouncing around. I didn't know where I was going to be, right? That, could be sent out quickly. I didn't know what shift I was going to be on. I would miss events with the family. It was hard to plan stuff. And we said, okay, maybe this will have a little bit more regularity to it. It's a corporate world after all, and it is different in that way. And so I took the risk. Ah, so again, it wasn't like, I'm going to switch. It was like, I guess I'll switch. So hold on. Joe Martucci: Let me go puke in the corner. Mark Elliot: Because, yeah, it was frightening. It was a big change. I'm still not used to being the new guy. I'm surrounded by people that have 20 to 60 years of experience within at and t, and now I'm here, like. Joe Martucci: I have a year and a half. Mark Elliot: It's very different, but not necessarily in a bad way. Sean Sublette: No, I think you're right. A lot of those skills you do in broadcast do come back, or they're applicable in so many other areas. Communications of risk of scientific principles. You take a very complex situation, and you need to distill it into actionable information. Sean Sublette: One of the things that I've really admired about the weather channel is doing that this is submersive mixed reality stuff, that they continue to do, and I know you had some involvement in some of those as well. take me through as much as you were involved in production and actually recording the things, because I know any of us who have done broadcast meteorology, you're used to standing in front of a green screen and looking at something off camera and getting your bearings, kind of. How is that, in terms of doing IMR and producing and all that? How big is the team for that? For one thing? Mark Elliot: Yeah, there's a lot of questions there. And I guess I'll start with, I was doing some pieces there that were basically IMR before it was called that. Right. So there's a whole series of what was weather wizards that started as, could we open up a kitchen cabinet and do some sort of experiment at home with kids, or for yourself, and learn about the weather through cooking it up in front of you? And so we did a whole series of those, and basically started running out of good ideas. And that was a small team. I came up with a lot of, them. We had one producer, she would come up with several of them as well. We'd script it out. We'd think about what kind of graphics might pop up next to us, but it was mostly filmed handheld down in an experiment that you were doing. And we said, okay, what if the wizardry was not because of dry ice anymore and food coloring? It was because graphics would show up in front of you in the real world. And so we started doing these outside weather wizards that the graphic would be part of the environment that you were in. Thunderstorms would happen next to you, or you'd pan up, and suddenly you'd be up in the cloud, and you'd watch a raindrop change. Snow, sleet, rain kind of thing, as it went back down, and then landed back where I was, next to my shoe, stuff like that. And that technology kept evolving and kept growing all the way up to what's now classic, I guess not classically, but now known as IMR. That immersive mixed reality, where the entire room around you, more or less, is a green screen, and everything can be changed, whether it's the floor, the background, the walls, all of it. When it was a smaller thing, I was writing a lot of them, right? We won tele for the safest room piece, which is basically walking through a house and almost like, what if I was mayhem today? And I just stood back and all this stuff would happen around me, to the house, to the outside, and show people where you really need to be and why. So that won all kinds of awards and really kind of, I would argue, cemented the weather channel on going down this graphically heavy path. Because it is, I remember it, it. Sean Sublette: Was really well done. Mark Elliot: Yeah, I wrote most of that with a team, right. And really the graphics guys on that who are still buddies of mine, they did incredible stuff, like two x fours that would crash through a wall and when I bent under a two x four that wasn't actually there, a shadow would go across. Right? Like those little things that really make an IMR feel like IMR. So now it's done mostly back inside. But you've seen some of these things where walls of water come into an actual town and show you what that actual town could look like if storm surge happened or if a flash flood happened. You can't feel what that's like without that, you're not going to go there when that's happening. And so it's those graphical entries into that world that are really effective communication tools. Like 9ft of storm surge. Okay, who cares? That's not the right answer. But 9ft is suddenly above an actual building and you've seen that building and you know how high that is. That's a totally different communication thing. So as those have got more and more elaborate and more and more people were doing them, the teams got bigger and bigger. Lots of graphic artists, lots of writers. I only did a couple of those official IMRs. The whole staff was then brought in to do more of them because they were epic, right? And everyone wanted a chance to be able to be in that room and they should have been. And I'm glad that we all were. They're really great communication, tools. I think Stephanie Abrams did one with wildfire. Like, you're not going to be in a forest to see what it's like when a wildfire goes a football field a second, but we were able to show that with graphics and her standing there on the little silver disc. And then a lot of those ended with a climate story. Like how is this type of extreme weather changing as the world is changing? Are we getting more of these, less of these? Is things happening faster or slower? You can't show that without a graphic. And so to have that graphic happen around you was really epic. they're really cool pieces. When we have hurricanes or snowstorms, how do you guys determine who goes where? Joe Martucci: Mark, I want to ask you one more and then we'll get you out of here. Because this is maybe I'm just curious about this myself, but when we have hurricanes or snowstorms, how do you guys determine who goes where? How does that happen? Are you in the meeting for that? Who's deciding that? Is it a lot of discussion? Is it pretty easy? Mark Elliot: It is a war room. There's a whole bunch of people yeah, from the very higher stuff, people, that are in charge of TV, in charge of storytelling, to the people that are in charge of scheduling and VPs of talent. And then meteorologists are in the room, producers are in the room. I mean, it is a whole fleet of people. And the meteorologists have a say, as well. even all the way down to, like, you're sent here and you're there and you're like, I think the storm is changing. I think we need to be mobile to be here. All of that is still like, you're in constant communication. And the best part of being at a place like the Weather Channel for field work is that you have a building worth of people watching your back, that you have people back there that are focused on safety. And if you ever said, like, I can't do this broadcast, I'm not safe here, or for security reasons, for weather reasons, for anything, it was never a question. It was always like, yes, we'll do something from the studio, we're not doing it live. it was never asked, why you were never pushed to do something where you said, it's not safe here. Joe Martucci: interesting. I always love seeing the map where it shows everyone, like, your face and everybody's faces and where they are on the coast for a hurricane or snowstorm. Mark Elliot: I thought that was always real on a weather. I always think it's interesting when meteorologists talk about how they got started Joe Martucci: Anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it on up? I mean, this was great. We love hearing from you. Mark Elliot: I mean, I always think it's interesting when meteorologists talk about how they got started or what made them interested in weather. And, so many people I've talked to about this cite, a tree falling. I know that is tied to my experience. I don't know if you guys have any of that in your kind of origin story, but I think if you're the right age kid and something that seems permanent, like a giant tree can fall in front of you, or near you or hit something, you know, that also should have felt permanent as a young kid. I think it does something to our brains. Like, I never looked back, after watching a tree ball for why I wanted to do weather. It was always my answer, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it was weatherman. And the second part of that is my dad was involved in national preparedness, emergency preparedness for the VA hospital system, which in recent times, has turned into more like cybersecurity and terrorist act and stuff. But back in the early eight, late eighty s and early 90s, that almost exclusively meant where could weather disasters happen? And so he would be sent into areas that had weather problems. And I would watch the Weather Channel because there was a channel on that was talking about where my dad was. And so I just never stopped. I still haven't stopped. I still watch it as a viewer, even when I'm not there every day. So, yeah, I think that the origin story of trees falling or family connections are really important to young minds and how they get into the science of weather. How'd you get into weather? We should have asked that earlier Joe Martucci: Yeah, and we should have asked that earlier, and I apologize. How'd you get into weather? I say this all the time. I said it when I was at school earlier. It's something that for a lot of people, you know, at a young age, and you definitely are in that category, and it's hard to just fall into weather. I feel like I don't really see too many people who just fall into weather as a career. Mark Elliot: Well, I wasn't sure what I wanted to major in, and I took an Elements of Meteorology class and I just kept going. It's usually not that Elements of Meteorology because I had to fulfill my one science requirement and I never looked back. Right. Or I always wanted to be a meteorologist. I guess I should have followed that. People actually make careers of this. or, I am a meteorologist and I've known since I was yes. Joe Martucci: Yeah, that was me. I mean, really, one of the first things I ever remember in my life was about wanting to be a meteorologist. Anyway, Mark, we really appreciate the time, really insightful. We got to hear about your AT&T career, your Weather Channel career, more about you. So thanks a lot, we really appreciate it and we'll chat with you soon. Mark Elliot: Yeah, thanks for having me. Anytime. If you, come up with more questions again, I used to talk for a living, so I'll talk some more. Joe Martucci: Well, keep that in mind. For sure. Companies are realizing the value of having a meteorologist Joe Martucci: Awesome interview with Mark Elliot. He has many stories, as you would if you, worked for the Weather Channel for 20 years and working at the one of, if not the largest phone companies I know, I always see the commercials about is it AT&T or Verizon? Or is it T Mobile sprint. Now, I'm not too sure, but point is, his job is very important at T, like Sean said at the know equipment and tech all across the globe. It's a big, you know, I'm glad that he's enjoying it. So, Matt, what'd you think? Matt Holiner: Yeah, when you're working for a big international company like AT&T, what stood out to me was when he mentioned that one of the most challenging parts of his job is not just forecasting for the US. Anymore, which he had plenty of experience with at the Weather Channel. But that's all the Weather Channel has to worry about is the US. But AT&T, this is a global company, and they have assets across the globe. And so they're going to be concerned about the weather happening all over the planet. So a huge mean in some ways. His job almost got even bigger. Now he has to look the entire planet worth of weather. That is just a huge responsibility on him. But you know that I think this is also I always bring this up. I think we need more meteorologists, and I think we're seeing that. I think companies are realizing the value that having a team of meteorologists working for especially these really big companies, because they know specifically what they want and what weather information they need, and then they can go to their meteorologist. Rather than having to contact the media or the National Weather Service, they have a team working on what they know is most important for them and where their assets are located and getting these really specific forecasts. So I think this is something that we're probably going to see more and more, especially starting, of course, with these really big companies, but maybe even more medium sized companies actually thinking about getting some meteorologists because the weather has an impact on so many businesses. So I think this, isn't going to be an exception, these companies having their own meteorologists. I think we're going to see more. And more of it. Sean Sublette: Yeah, I agree. This kind of comes under the umbrella of weather risk management. The forecasting has gotten so much better in the last 20 years. But there is an overload of data, right? So you need a professional to go through the data that's important. Distill the most critical information to your business, and help those decision makers within a business manage risk. be sure your resources and your hardware are safe, and that's not something you can get. I love my brothers and sisters in broadcast meteorology, but you're not going to get what you need in a two and a half or three minute weather forecast if you've got a lot of assets that need protecting. So I think that, there's a lot of growth in there and the whole weather risk and ultimately climate risk management as well. So it was really nice to hear Mark talk about that as well, share some of those Weather Channel stories. Joe Martucci: Thanks again, Mark. We appreciate it. Always good to have another Rutgers guy on the podcast, too, if I may end. Across the Sky has a full slate of podcasts coming up on Mondays Joe Martucci: All right, so we have a full slate of podcasts coming up for you on the following Mondays. Sean, do you mind if I turn it over to you to talk about next Monday's episode with Mike Mann? Sean Sublette: Yeah. So a, very special episode we've got we're going to record next week, drop it, a week or so after that. Mike Mann. world famous climate scientist. He has written several books. The most recent one is called Our Fragile Moment. I had a chance to preview it a couple of weeks ago. It's an exceptional book. If you've always wondered, how do scientists know what the climate was like, 1000, 100,000, 10 million years ago? He walks through all of that in a very nice, easy to digest book. So we're going to talk to him about that book, and what else he's working on in the podcast next week. So very excited to have Mike Man on. Joe Martucci: Yeah, we're happy to have him on. And then on the 23rd, we're going to have Paul James from HGTV Fame here to talk about the science of changing leaves. And I think we're going to have a winter forecast for you on the 30 October as well. November 6, we're going to have, someone talk about tips to prepare older loved ones for extreme weather. That's with Dr. Lauren Sutherland from Ohio State. And then we got another big one. Sean keeps landing all these big podcast guests for us. Sean, this is the first time I've. Sean Sublette: Said this publicly, so I think most people who are into science have heard of Neil deGrasse Tyson. He likes to say your personal astrophysicist. He's got his podcast, he's got the Star Talk thing. He's got cosmos. He's all over the place. He's going on a book tour. He's going to be down here in Richmond. And I have scored a 15 minutes interview with him. It's going to be a little ways away. I'm going to do it in November. But we will turn that into a podcast as well. So I am uber excited about that one. Joe Martucci: We're over the mood. Sean Sublette: I am over the mood and the stars excited to talk to him. I only have 15 minutes, so I got to make it count. Joe Martucci: If he's going to talk for 15. Matt Holiner: Minutes, I'm sure we'll have plenty of commentary and plenty to digest from that 15 minutes because he is fantastic to listen to. Sean Sublette: Yeah, I, went through his new book when I think you all knew I Went to Italy. I read his new book on the flight over and back to Italy. And I will tell you all this because your meteorologist first chapter of his new book talks all about, the lowest, layers of the atmosphere. So he talks all about the atmosphere first. The book is called To Infinity and beyond. So he basically starts with the ground and works up. So, of course, you've got to start in the atmosphere before you get to outer space. So we talked about that, which I thought was just terrific. So, yeah, it's a couple, ah, three, four weeks away. Joe Martucci: yeah, that'll be our November 13 episode right now. So you can circular your calendar for that one. And of course, all the other ones we have coming out on mondays, too. So for John Sublette, Matt Holiner and Kirsten Lang, I'm meteorologist Joe Martucci thanks again for listening to the Across the Sky Podcast. We'll be back with you next Monday.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

covid-19 united states tv new york city chicago internet technology pr mexico news italy radio spanish new jersey forbes watching oklahoma press unique va companies corporate climate snow midwest weather west coast guys richmond elements lightning ohio state att innovators verizon rutgers university rutgers georgia tech career path fema atlantic city t mobile gpa neil degrasse tyson tornadoes csu meteorologists thunderstorms nab empire state building ccm headliner central europe national weather service vps weather channel meteorology georgia institute ams tropics im r rutger ero star talk at&t richmond times dispatch distill national hurricane center tulsa world paul james to infinity i went american meteorological society lee enterprises sky podcast mark elliot national labs mike mann t labs stephanie abrams wrsu

The World Ahead: An IGCC Miniseries

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2023 3:11

The world is changing rapidly. A grinding war of attrition is being fought in Europe. Democracy and liberalism are being challenged around the globe. China is rising as an economic and technological superpower and competitor to the United States. Arms control is breaking down. And the climate crisis is threatening to exacerbate conflict, displacement, and inequality. Since 1983, IGCC scholars from across the University of California and the UC-managed National Labs have used rigorous research, training, and policy engagement to improve policies and practices in ways that help reduce conflict, foster global cooperation, and build a more peaceful world. To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we are creating a Talking Policy miniseries that will give listeners access to expert analysis—without the jargon. Simple, punchy interviews will help unpack these daunting questions and put things happening locally—whether in Los Angeles, Lagos, or Lausanne—into a broader context of what's happening globally. The series will explore threats to democracy, as well as democratic resilience; the global implications of China's rise; nuclear weapons proliferation and how to limit their spread and use; and the security implications of climate change.

united states university california europe china los angeles simple democracy arms lagos miniseries uc lausanne national labs igcc

TST 7/19/23 Godzilla Minus One: Adam Bomb w. Derek Murphy

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 20, 2023 120:01

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the Atomic Bomb, was the vessel for the creation of this wonder weapon. He is the physical receptacle for the knowledge of atomic power to be manifest. The Japanese Emperor Hirohito was also said to be the embodiment of the sun goddess, made manifest as the ultimate source of life and creation. The atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in the Land of the Rising Sun, one of which was Nagasaki, the eastern hub of western Christianity in Japan - a religion based on Person sun worship. As an open test of the weapon's power, as with napalm dropped on Tokyo months prior, the atomic bombs ripped open the eastern gate in the most horrific occult operation perhaps ever conducted. These bombs are not just atom bombs, they are the ADAM BOMB sparking a new form of BIG BANG. What cosmic horror will they bring forth? The new Godzilla Minus One movie from Toho is taking on the issue with post-war Japan dealing with fallout and the famous kaiju and titan, while the advertisers promote it as a sequel to Nolan's Oppenheimer film. It is an odd way to promote a film that is also being juxtaposed to Barbie. In esoteric terms the Barbie movie is the XX and Oppenheimer is 0 hour, the X and 0 representing the alchemical marriage. The July 16, 1945, Trinity bomb opened a gateway and Apollo 11, July 16, 1945, opened and penetrated the heavens. The fiery and bloody holocausts of Dresden and Tokyo, leading up to the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan, are the sacrifices needed to invoke the old ones by opening the gateway of the east. Toho is the EAST gate and Hollywood is the WEST gate. The trinity bomb itself is named after the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who Oppenheimer quotes after detonating the bomb. Most of the Manhattan project was also run by Jewish men and a woman, who must have been versed in Kabbala, and the Judaic word Shiva, meaning seven days of mourning. In other words the ultimate weapon was created to bring about the ultimate destruction, an inversion of the creation of the world through the seven days of creation; through this destruction emerges the old world of resurrected gods brought about by the destruction of the atom and creation of a new Adam. The Hindu Mahabharata also describes such weapons in ancient times and as Oppenheimer himself said, Trinity was “not first atomic bomb, but [the] first atomic bomb in modern times.” If the National Labs are built on energy vortexes and Oppenheimer himself, once suicidal, then described as charismatic, before questioning his life's work, was possessed by the spirit of the ‘evil' he created, we are witnessing far more than history. This the creation of the new MAN, a new Adam with the power of the universe that God created.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5328407/advertisement

BEST OF TST 6/28/22 - Incurring on Disclosure: Idaho's Atomic Marvels

America Adapts the Climate Change Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2023 120:01

Modern UFO investigation did not begin with the AATIP, but instead goes back to Project SIGN, GRUDGE, and BLUEBOOK starting in the late 1940s. Recent reports from the U.S. military and pentagon date back to at least the second World War with incredible detail about “discs” even before Kenneth Arnold accidentally coined the term “flying saucer” in June, 1947, after witnessing UFOs near Mount Rainier. Even Roswell was pre-dated by Arnold's experience, and his was pre-dated by Maury Island three days before in Washington State. All of the incidences took place in the Pacific Northwest, just west of Arnold's home in Boise, Idaho, a state that today has the highest per-capita rating of UFO sightings. Knowing that these objects have traditionally been attracted to National Labs during the Manhattan Project, nuclear missile silos, and ICBM tests, it makes sense that Idaho would be home to much lore considering that it is also home to the Idaho National Laboratory which built the first nuclear power generator, powered the first city with nuclear power, and experimented with new nuclear technologies. Now the INL has been contracted to build micro-reactors for space travel called MARVEL, which shares a synchro-mystical connection to comic book movies dealign with multi-dimensional travel - the very realm many believe the UFO originated. In parallel is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory publicly working on breaking into the ‘mirror-verse' while building an ion-accelerator to conduct similar research to CERN.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5328407/advertisement

Battelle and the Innovations in Climate Resilience Conference – ICR23

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2023 86:42

In episode 185 of America Adapts, we're highlighting some of the experts and speakers that attended the Innovations in Climate Resilience conference hosted by Battelle. Conference experts weigh in on topics such as national security, climate risk modeling, public health and climate justice, adapting in the built environment and much more. The three day conference was held in Columbus, Ohio. Experts and practitioners from the private sector, NGOs, federal, state, and local governments all converged to exchange ideas and knowledge. Notably, representatives from the National Labs played a significant role in the conference, showcasing their innovative work in the resilience space. Additionally, the episode features insights from a diverse range of resilience experts associated with Battelle, the organizer of the conference. • The role of National labs in climate adaptation. • Battelle and their adaptation efforts. • National security and climate change. • Public health and the emerging need for climate resilience. • Emerging sectors in the climate adaptation universe. • NEON – National Ecological Observatory Network • Computational neuroscience…and climate change? • The challenges of reliable climate risk modeling. • Infrastructure Resilience. Experts in this Episode: • Lou Von Thaer – President and CEO of Battelle • Holly Neeber - CEO at AEI Consultants • Dr. Jordan Branham - Senior Climate Risk & Resilience Analyst, Argonne National Laborator Argonne Labs • Dr. Paula Mabee - Chief Scientist and Observatory Director, National Ecological Observatory Network • Andrew Bochman - INLer & Atlantic Council Global Energy Center Non Resident Senior Fellow • Dr. Sweta Chakraborty - CEO, We Don't Have Time North America • Dr. John Balbus - Acting Director, Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, Department of Health and Human Services • Melinda Sych - Chief Commercial Officer at Battelle • Pranjal Gupta - PhD Candidate - Computational Neuroscience • Ashley Nguyen – Student and winner of Battelle Climate Challenge • John Conger - President, Conger Strategies & Solutions • Michael Janus - Senior Vice President & General Manager at Battelle • Monika Serrano - Resilience Program Manager at Turner Construction • Taylor Dimsdale - Senior Fellow, Climate and Disaster Resilience, Fors Marsh • Lisa Avedon - Marketing and Communications Leader at Battelle This episode was generously sponsored by Battelle. Check out the America Adapts Media Kit here! Subscribe to the America Adapts newsletter here. Donate to America Adapts Listen to America Adapts on your favorite app here! Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter:https://www.facebook.com/americaadapts/ @usaadapts https://www.linkedin.com/in/doug-parsons-america-adapts/ https://www.instagram.com/america_adapts/?hl=en Resources and Links in this episode: https://www.battelle.org/conferences/conference-on-innovations-in-climate-resilience Conference Agenda: https://www.battelle.org/conferences/conference-on-innovations-in-climate-resilience/agenda https://www.linkedin.com/posts/battelle_innovators-in-climate-resilience-battelle-activity-7008891639926599680-gugr?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop https://www.battelle.org/laboratory-management Donate to America Adapts Follow on Apple PodcastsFollow on Android Doug Parsons and Speaking Opportunities: If you are interested in having Doug speak at corporate and conference events, sharing his unique, expert perspective on adaptation in an entertaining and informative way, more information can be found here! Now on Spotify! List of Previous Guests on America Adapts Follow/listen to podcast on Apple Podcasts. Donate to America Adapts, we are now a tax deductible charitable organization! Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Strategies to Address Climate Change Risk in Low- and Moderate-income Communities - Volume 14, Issue 1https://www.frbsf.org/community-development/publications/community-development-investment-review/2019/october/strategies-to-address-climate-change-low-moderate-income-communities/ Podcasts in the Classroom – Discussion guides now available for the latest episode of America Adapts. These guides can be used by educators at all levels. Check them out here! The 10 Best Sustainability Podcasts for Environmental Business Leadershttps://us.anteagroup.com/news-events/blog/10-best-sustainability-podcasts-environmental-business-leaders The best climate change podcasts on The Climate Advisorhttp://theclimateadvisor.com/the-best-climate-change-podcasts/ 7 podcasts to learn more about climate change and how to fight ithttps://kinder.world/articles/you/7-podcasts-to-learn-more-about-climate-change-and-how-to-fight-it-19813 Directions on how to listen to America Adapts on Amazon Alexahttps://youtu.be/949R8CRpUYU America Adapts also has its own app for your listening pleasure! Just visit the App store on Apple or Google Play on Android and search “America Adapts.” Join the climate change adaptation movement by supporting America Adapts! Please consider supporting this podcast by donating through America Adapts fiscal sponsor, the Social Good Fund. All donations are now tax deductible! For more information on this podcast, visit the website at http://www.americaadapts.org and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts. Podcast Music produce by Richard Haitz Productions Write a review on Apple Podcasts ! America Adapts on Facebook! Join the America Adapts Facebook Community Group. Check us out, we're also on YouTube! Executive Producer Dr. Jesse Keenan Subscribe to America Adapts on Apple Podcasts Doug can be contacted at americaadapts @ g mail . com

Manufacturing innovation at US national labs: Chris Heckle

Ceramic Tech Chat

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2023 22:01

The U.S. national laboratory system serves a unique role in the country's research and development landscape. Chris Heckle, director of the new Materials Manufacturing Innovation Center at Argonne National Lab, talks about how the national labs contribute to the innovation ecosystem, overviews the research that takes place at Argonne specifically, and describes how the new Materials Manufacturing Innovation Center aims to improve and expand the labs' support for industry. View the transcript for this episode here.About the guestChris Heckle is director of the Materials Manufacturing Innovation Center at Argonne National Lab. She came to Argonne from Corning Inc., where she served as research director for inorganic materials research and Asia research labs. The Materials Manufacturing Innovation Center is a new initiative at Argonne that aims to accelerate the scale-up of advanced materials and process technologies. Learn more about working with the Center at this link.About ACerSFounded in 1898, The American Ceramic Society is the leading professional membership organization for scientists, engineers, researchers, manufacturers, plant personnel, educators, and students working with ceramics and related materials.

innovation manufacturing us national heckle argonne argonne national lab national labs american ceramic society

S4 E1: Keeping the Lights on in Ukraine

energy war russia ukraine russian lights electric grid direct current national labs

Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2023 18:34

Season 4 of Direct Current opens with a race against the clock, as the Department of Energy and National Labs join forces with industry and international partners to get emergency shipments of electrical grid components to Ukraine — before Russian attacks plunge the country into darkness.

Quantum internet networking, ARPA-E, and DOE's National Labs – Ep 200

Oil and Gas Onshore Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2023 42:19

In this episode our host Elena Melchert talks with Conner Prochaska about his time at DOE including his work as Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff at ARPA-E, as DOE's first Chief Commercialization Officer for DOE in 2018, and then as Direct of for DOE's Office of Technology Transitions related to moving research results from lab scale to the marketplace. DOE's Blueprint for the Quantum Internet https://www.energy.gov/articles/us-department-energy-unveils-blueprint-quantum-internet-launch-future-quantum-internet Bohr Quantum Technology https://bohrquantum.com/# This episode is made possible by TechnipFMC Click here to take it one question survey and receive OGGN hardhat/laptop stickers Brought to you on Oil and Gas Global Network, the largest and most listened-to podcast network for the oil and energy industry. More from OGGN ... Podcasts LinkedIn Group LinkedIn Company Page Get notified about industry events

internet office chief networking blueprint oil quantum senior advisor arpa e national labs gas global network oggn

Idaho National Labs and the Next Generation of Critical Infrastructure Security

@BEERISAC: CPS/ICS Security Podcast Playlist

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2023 32:20

Podcast: Hack the Plant (LS 33 · TOP 5% what is this?)Episode: Idaho National Labs and the Next Generation of Critical Infrastructure SecurityPub date: 2023-03-06For today's episode, I'm joined by Zach Tudor, the Associate Laboratory Director at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). INL is a Department of Energy national laboratory, is the nation's leading center for nuclear energy research and development. Zach is responsible for INL's Nuclear Nonproliferation, Critical Infrastructure Protection and Defense Systems missions.We discuss how INL partners with the private sector to test challenges to critical infrastructure, and the cutting edge work INL is doing to secure the next generation of critical infrastructure."Honeywell has been one of the big players that has been working with us for quite a while. And Hitashi. Schneider Electric. They will provide us some of their systems that are critical in energy critical infrastructure, industrial control systems, and we will tear it down in a methodological process that we have developed here…[to] start building an understanding of where the risks are and the supply chain of our critical energy infrastructure." - Zach TudorOther topics we cover: What work is INL doing to secure the next generation of critical infrastructure? How can we make our critical infrastructure systems more resilient? How is data security managed with emerging technologies such as 5G, or self-driving cars? What strategies should the government and private industry use to categorize risk and mitigate it in a way that actually has measurable impact? Join us to learn more.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Bryson Bort, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

energy next generation idaho 5g honeywell schneider electric inl listen notes critical infrastructure infrastructure security nuclear nonproliferation bryson bort national labs

Dr. Brent Park - The U.S. National Labs

NucleCast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 27, 2022 30:07

Dr. Brent Park is a physicist and a former government official; appointed to a position at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) – by the President and in just 6 weeks confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate on March 22, 2018. Brent develops policy and technology solutions to real world challenges by leading and coordinating R&D program-development efforts in high-performance computing, big data analytics and decision applications, cyber security, mechanical and electrical engineering, materials science and engineering, physical sciences, and nuclear science and engineering. Prior to joining NNSA, Brent served as Associate Laboratory Director at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and was the director of NNSA's Remote Sensing Laboratory.

president park senate nnsa national labs

EP32: Mpro inhibitor designed using the MedChem Tool in Nanome at Oak Ridge National Labs

Science Metaverse Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2022 18:50

we're joined by Dr. Andrey Kovalevsky, Senior Scientist in Structural Biology & Biochemistry at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Andrey and his team used neutrons and x-rays to map part of the internal structure of the coronavirus to create an accurate 3-D model. Specifically, the scientists mapped the main protease (Mpro), an enzyme involved in the virus replication, to which they had added a preliminary small molecule discovered using high-speed computer screening and virtual reality (VR). Using the MedChem tool in Nanome to look at the enzyme model, the scientists virtually constructed different small molecules by modifying their structures to see if any newly designed compounds could fit, or bind, to a key site on the Mpro enzyme surface. A strong enough binding could inhibit, or block, the enzyme from functioning, which is vital to stopping the virus from multiplying in patients with COVID-19. References: Kneller et al. (2021). Structural, Electronic, and Electrostatic Determinants for Inhibitor Binding to Subsites S1 and S2 in SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease. J. Med. Chem. 64, 8, 4991–5000. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c01475 https://neutrons.ornl.gov/content/jou...https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-rel...https://www.rcsb.org/structure/7SI9

covid-19 tool vr med designed electronic sars cov biochemistry structural s2 doi andrey senior scientist chem oak ridge inhibitor oak ridge national laboratory structural biology national labs nanome

S2. Ep.28 Dr. Thomas Glasmacher, FRIB Laboratory Director (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams) - Michigan State University

The Michigan Opportunity

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2022 23:04

What has 1,600 users, 620 employees, 124 colleges and universities, 52 countries, & 13 National Labs, all working under one Michigan State University facility? The FRIB. Join FRIB (Facility for Rare Isotope Beams) Laboratory Director, Dr. Thomas Glasmacher and our host Ed Clemente on this week's podcast. Dr. Glasmacher is responsible for the 620-employee FRIB Laboratory, which is equivalent to a college within Michigan State University. Thomas joined the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at MSU in 1992 as an NSCL Fellow and performed research in intermediate energy nuclear physics. The FRIB has the capability to produce most of the same rare isotopes that are created in the cosmos, which then decay into the elements found on earth. Approximately 1,600 users are engaged and ready for science at FRIB. They organized themselves in an independent FRIB Users Organization, with 21 working groups specializing in instruments and scientific topics. Members are from 124 U.S. colleges and universities, 13 national laboratories and 52 countries. You can also read the transcript from our conversation.

rare michigan state university facilities approximately msu beams isotopes laboratory director national labs glasmacher

The Secret Teachings 6/28/22 - Incurring on Disclosure: Idaho's Atomic Marvels

inclusion transitioning stem initiative pride month institutions publications journals name changes half life berkeley lab national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2022 120:01

Inclusion in STEM: the Name Change Initiative

A Day in the Half-Life

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 9, 2022 32:27 Transcription Available

A Day in the Half-Life explores what working in STEM is really like, and that means conversations about inclusion. So to celebrate Pride Month, we're releasing a special episode about making research & academia culture more inclusive for transgender scientists.Publications are an essential part of career growth for scientists. But what if you no longer use the name on past work? How can you claim your intellectual labor? Transitioning to one's preferred identity can be challenging on its own. Journals and Institutions shouldn't make it harder. The Name Change Initiative, launched in 2021, aims to make the logistical hurdles to accomplish this as simple as possible for our transgender colleagues – and anyone else whose identify changes during the course of their career. The Name Change Initiative is a coordinated effort among U.S. National Labs and publishing institutions, led by Berkeley Lab, that focuses on making it easier for transgender scientists to change their name on published works. In this interview recorded last year, two initiative leaders join a transgender scientist who has faced the difficulties of transitioning openly and changing her name on past work, to share their stories.

National Labs talk Climate Risk Part 2

Beyond the Data

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 7, 2022 26:43

This part two of a two-part series. Listen to part one here: https://beyond-the-data.simplecast.com/episodes/national-labs-talk-climate-risk-part-1

resilience infrastructure climate risk national labs

National Labs talk Climate Risk Part 1

Beyond the Data

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2022 30:44

For more from Andy Bochman, join us at Utility Analytics Summit 2022 in New Orleans, May 10-12. Andy will be delivering the closing keynote session on May 12. His session, “Predicting the Future to Protect What Matters Most" will marry state-of-the-art climate forecast data with an emerging methodology for prioritizing protective and adaptive actions based on consequence.As an added bonus, save 20% on registration with code UAIPOD. If you register before April 1, that's a total savings of over $350. This discount is exclusive to “Beyond the Data” listeners. Register with the discount today: https://www.utilityanalyticssummit.com/2022/register?code=UAIPOD

future data new orleans register predicting climate risk national labs uaipod andy bochman

US Intel Agencies Reportedly Hacked Cloud Servers Containing Wuhan Lab Virus Samples

Global Reportage: Unbiased and Uncensored News

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2021 4:13

The US and China are mired in a high-stakes info war related to the origins of the novel coronavirus, with US officials alleging that the virus may have been created in and leaked by a Chinese biolab, and the People's Republic directing questions to the World Health Organization about the mysterious 2019 shutdown of a US military lab in Maryland. US intelligence agencies have gotten their hands on genetic blueprint data from virus samples being studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and are studying the information to see if it can help uncover Covid's origins, CNN reports, citing multiple people said to be familiar with the investigation. The news network was not told how agencies supposedly got hold of the sensitive information, but its sources said it may have been hacked from computers connected to external cloud-based servers which were involved in creating and processing the data. US spooks are said to have tapped into the Department of Energy's National Labs and their supercomputers to help process the information in accordance with President Biden's request in May that intelligence put a report on his desk about coronavirus's possible origins by the end of August. Biden made the request after his administration walked back on its earlier assumptions that the virus appeared to be of natural origins (a position long-supported by China and the WHO). Intelligence agencies have reportedly faced several problems in interpreting the information, including the need to recruit government scientists with the appropriate security clearances and knowledge of Mandarin. “Obviously there are scientists who are cleared. But Mandarin-speaking ones who are cleared? That's a very small pool. And not just any scientists, but ones who specialize in bio? So you can see how this quickly becomes difficult,” one source, who was not authorized to provide his or her identity, said. http://globalreportage.org/2021/11/28/us-intelligence-agencies-reportedly-hack-cloud-servers-containing-wuhan-lab-virus-samples/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/global-reportage/support

Ep.22 – Chasing Funding for Researchers at National Labs

This Academic Life

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2021

The grant culture in research institutes (i.e. academia, industry, and national labs) has been evolved over the past decades and led to an environment where chasing fundings has had a significant impact on shaping the new culture. In this episode, Dr. Anastasia Ilgen, a Principal Member of Technical Staff at the Geochemistry Department, Sandia National Laboratories, shares her experience and insights on writing proposals and securing research funding. She discusses how to build cohesive research programs and design proposals with an appropriate combination of risks and likely successes. Guest info: Dr. Anastasia G. Ilgen is an experimental geochemist, specializing in chemical reactions at solid-water interfaces. She leads several research programs at Sandia, and is active in the American Chemical Society Governance. She grew up next to the active volcanoes on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia. She enjoys hiking with her family, traveling, cooking and baking, and taking care of her numerous pets. https://www.labpartnering.org/experts/d93065b9-0e86-452f-a296-3d1024837e6d https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/careers/chemical-sciences/profiles/anastasia-ilgen.html Reference list: Music by RuthAnn Schallert-Wygal (schallert.wygal@gmail.com) Artwork is created using Canva (canva.com) Contact list: If you have any comments about our show or have suggestions for a future topic, please contact us at info@thisacademiclife.org. You can also find us on the webpage https://thisacademiclife.org and on Facebook group “This Academic Life”. Cast list: Prof. Kim Michelle Lewis (host) is a Professor of Physics and Associate Dean of Research, Graduate Programs, and Natural Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University. Prof. Pania Newell (host) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at The University of Utah. Prof. Lucy Zhang (host) is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Support This Academic Life by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/this-academic-life

125 | Institutional Incubator | Wells Fargo

Energy Cast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2021 27:30

We discuss a new energy incubator model between financial institutions and national labs with Wells Fargo's Ramsay Huntley. For pictures and more info, visit http://www.energy-cast.com/125-wf.html

interview energy podcasting podcasters wells fargo institutional incubator danforth science center nrel national labs

E65- Partnerships Across the National Labs & Academia

The Space Policy Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2021 52:56

What are the National Labs and FFRDC's and how do they partner with universities on advanced research and funding for the US space enterprise? What challenges arise with student citizenship and national security topics? How can graduates be inspired to join the space sector opposed to other competitive industries? Join Aerospace's David Miller as he talks to Dava Newman (MIT), Ann Karagozian (UCLA) and Robert Braun (JPL) as they explore this and more.

partnership academia david miller national labs

National Labs are Hiring

TJ Trout

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2021 32:56

Lew Monroe has details about positions open at New Mexico's National labs on News Radio KKOB

national hiring new mexico national labs news radio kkob

Ep. 280 Clean Energy (r)Evolution with Danny Kennedy

Green Planet Blue Planet Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2021 46:37

Danny Kennedy has been championing clean energy and climate protection for 25+ years. His aim is to facilitate 700-fold increase of solar PV installations by 2054... He leads the California Clean Energy Fund, connecting entrepreneurs everywhere to capital to build an abundant clean energy economy that benefits all. He is also the President of CalCharge, a public private partnership with the National Labs and universities of California, unions and companies, working to advance energy storage. Kennedy co-founded Sungevity, the company that created remote solar design, and Powerhouse, solar’s premier incubator and accelerator. Kennedy authored the book Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy – and Our Planet – from Dirty Energy in 2012. Prior to starting Sungevity, he worked at Greenpeace and other groups on climate and energy issues for 20 years. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/julian-guderley/support

california president revolution powerhouses greenpeace clean energy pv our planet danny kennedy national labs sungevity

EV - 162 CRT Diversity Training with Casey Petersen pt.2

Embrace The Void

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 15, 2020 71:48

My guest this week is Casey Petersen (@CaseyAPetersen), a research and development electrical engineer at Sandia National Labs who took issue with the diversity and racial awareness training at the National Labs. We discuss his video challenging Critical Race Theory and its use in diversity training and school curriculums. (NOTE: This discussion happened prior to the release of Breonna Taylor's grand jury testimonies)Casey's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyNW9nlFDBkStudy on bias perpetuation through AI lending: https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/mortgage-algorithms-perpetuate-racial-bias-in-lending-study-finds/Brookings Age Racial Disparities in Covid Deaths: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/16/race-gaps-in-covid-19-deaths-are-even-bigger-than-they-appear/Racial Disparities in Covid Deaths: https://voxeu.org/article/racial-disparity-covid-19-deathsFryer Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.htmlResponse to Fryer: https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-policeDHS Violent White Supremacist Threat: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/politics/white-supremacy-dhs-draft-assessment/index.htmlDHS Violent White Supremacist Definition: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/reference-aid-us-violent-white-supremacist-extremistsEditing by Lu Lyons, check out her amazing podcast Filmed Live Musicals! http://www.filmedlivemusicals.com/podcast.htmlMusic by GW RodriguezSibling Pod Philosophers in Space: https://0gphilosophy.libsyn.com/Support us at Patreon.com/EmbraceTheVoidIf you enjoy the show, please Like and Review us on your pod app, especially iTunes. It really helps!If you enjoyed this and want to discuss more, start a conversation with me here: https://letter.wiki/AaronRabinowitz/conversationsRecent Appearances: I was on The Philosophy Guy podcast discussing whether Social Justice is a Religion (it's not). https://thephilosophyguy.fireside.fm/92Next week: Animal consciousness with Jeff Sebo

ai space video religion animal social justice breonna taylor critical race theory petersen racial disparities fryer diversity training htmlmusic sandia national labs national labs

EV - 161 CRT Diversity Training with Casey Petersen pt.1

Embrace The Void

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 8, 2020 68:39

My guest this week is Casey Petersen (@CaseyAPetersen), a research and development electrical engineer at Sandia National Labs who took issue with the diversity and racial awareness training at the National Labs. We discuss his video challenging Critical Race Theory and its use in diversity training and school curriculums.Casey's Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyNW9nlFDBkStudy on bias perpetuation through AI lending: https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/mortgage-algorithms-perpetuate-racial-bias-in-lending-study-finds/Brookings Age Racial Disparities in Covid Deaths: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/06/16/race-gaps-in-covid-19-deaths-are-even-bigger-than-they-appear/Racial Disparities in Covid Deaths: https://voxeu.org/article/racial-disparity-covid-19-deathsFryer Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.htmlResponse to Fryer: https://scholar.harvard.edu/jfeldman/blog/roland-fryer-wrong-there-racial-bias-shootings-policeDHS Violent White Supremacist Threat: https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/politics/white-supremacy-dhs-draft-assessment/index.htmlDHS Violent White Supremacist Definition: https://www.dhs.gov/publication/reference-aid-us-violent-white-supremacist-extremistsEditing by Lu Lyons, check out her amazing podcast Filmed Live Musicals! http://www.filmedlivemusicals.com/podcast.htmlMusic by GW RodriguezSibling Pod Philosophers in Space: https://0gphilosophy.libsyn.com/Support us at Patreon.com/EmbraceTheVoidIf you enjoy the show, please Like and Review us on your pod app, especially iTunes. It really helps!If you enjoyed this and want to discuss more, start a conversation with me here: https://letter.wiki/AaronRabinowitz/conversationsRecent Appearances: I was on The Philosophy Guy podcast discussing whether Social Justice is a Religion (it's not). https://thephilosophyguy.fireside.fm/92Next week: CRT in Federal Diversity Training with Casey Petersen pt.2

ai space video religion social justice critical race theory crt petersen racial disparities fryer diversity training htmlmusic sandia national labs national labs

1307: AI In Manufacturing - A Second Set of Eyes

The Tech Blog Writer Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2020 21:54

There has been a lot of hype around the potential for AI in the manufacturing industry, but historically, AI has been too expensive or complex to deploy at scale. But now, with pressure to maintain quality products and keep up with irregular consumer demands with fewer people on the factory floor, new solutions are emerging. With this in mind, Neurala launched VIA (Vision Inspection Automation): new software to help manufacturers ensure quality inspection on the production line while scaling with increasing consumer demands. With less data required and faster training, VIA was created to improve ROI by increasing inspection rates, decreasing human intervention, and allow smaller batches of product to be inspected. It will also enable production facilities to avoid wasted resources by catching defects early while giving manufacturers the flexibility to train and run multiple AI models based on changes in products they produce or levels of consumer demand. Dr. Massimiliano Versace, the co-founder and CEO of Neurala, and the company visionary joins me on Tech Talks Daily. After his pioneering research in brain-inspired computing and deep networks, he continues to inspire and lead the world of autonomous robotics. He has spoken at dozens of events and venues, including TedX, NASA, the Pentagon, GTC, InterDrone, National Labs, Air Force Research Labs, HP, iRobot, Samsung, LG, Qualcomm, Ericsson, BAE Systems, AI World, Mitsubishi, ABB and Accenture, among many others. His work has been featured in TIME, IEEE Spectrum, CNN, MSNBC, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, Fortune, TechCrunch, Venture Beat, Nasdaq and many other media. Max is a Fulbright scholar, has authored dozens of academic publications, holds several patents and two Ph.Ds: Experimental Psychology, University of Trieste, Italy; Cognitive and Neural Systems, Boston University, USA.

united states ceo university time ai italy fortune nasa cnn tedx roi samsung pentagon msnbc manufacturing hp cognitive boston university nasdaq accenture boston globe chicago tribune lg techcrunch qualcomm fulbright ericsson mitsubishi irobot trieste abb venturebeat bae systems gtc second set ieee spectrum neural systems national labs interdrone tech talks daily

National Labs Pivoted to Help Fight COVID-19. Here's How.

Critical Update

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2020 20:24

As governments of all sizes respond to the novel coronavirus pandemic, scientists and researchers at U.S. national laboratories are harnessing advanced technologies—and creating new networks of collaboration—in the global fight against COVID-19. In addition to their own work with gene-editing and advanced modeling, the labs are opening up their cutting-edge systems and supercomputers to other scientists through the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. Nextgov’s Brandi Vincent talks with the Energy Department’s Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar, Director of IBM Research Dario Gil, Argonne National Laboratory’s Rick Stevens, and Sandia National Laboratories’ Joe Schoeniger and Oscar Negrete.

covid-19 director technology coronavirus public health under secretary supercomputers pivoted energy department argonne national laboratory rick stevens national labs nextgov

National Labs Respond to COVID-19

covid-19 respond national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2020 9:32

Ep. 149 - Michael Reichenberger, Idaho National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 16, 2019 53:05

In this episode we discuss... Michael Reichenberger’s entrance into the nuclear industry as a mechanical engineer How fission detectors measure neutrons in nuclear reactors The design, development, and deployment of Micro-Pocket Fission Detectors in a test reactor Advantages of the Advanced Test Reactor for nuclear fuels and materials testing Benefits of real-time sensors in test reactors and how they impact development of commercial reactors The potential value of real-time sensors in the operation of advanced reactor designs

energy benefits idaho nuclear advantages sensors detector fission national labs

Venture Capital Meets Fusion Power with Malcolm Handley [Idea Machines #2]

Idea Machines

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2018 79:55

My Guest this week is Malcolm Handley, General Partner and Founder of Strong Atomics. The topic of this conversation is Fusion power - how it’s funded now, why we don’t have it yet, and how he’s working on making it a reality. We touch on funding long-term bets in general, incentives inside of venture capital, and more. Show Notes Strong Atomics Malcolm on Twitter (@malcolmredheron) Fusion Never Plot Fusion Z-Pinch Experiment. ARPA-e Alpha Program ITER - International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. NIF - National Ignition Facility ARPA-e Office of Fusion Energy Science Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air Transcript [00:00:00] This podcast I talk to Malcolm Hanley about Fusion funding long-term bets incentives inside of venture capital and more Malcolm is the managing partner of strong atomics. Strong atomics is a venture capital firm that exists solely in a portfolio of fusion projects that have been selected based on their potential to create net positive energy and lead to plausible reactors before starting strong atomics. Malcolm was the first employee at the software company aside. I love talking to Malcolm because he's somewhat of a fanatic about making Fusion Energy reality. But at the same time he remains an intense pragmatist in some ways. He's even more pragmatic than I am. So here in the podcast. He thinks deeply about everything he does. So we go very deep on some topics. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Intro Ben: Malcolm would you would you introduce yourself? Malcolm: Sure. So I'm Malcolm heavily. I found in strong [00:01:00] atomics after 17 years is software engineer because I. I was looking for the most important thing that I could work on and concluded that that was kind of change that was before democracy fell off the rails. And so it was the obvious most important thing. So my thesis is that climate change is a real problem and the. Typical ways that we are addressing it or insufficient, for example, even if you ignore the climate deniers most people seem to be of the opinion that we're on track that Renewables and storage for renewable energy are going to save the day and my fear as I looked into this more deeply is that this is not sufficient that we are in fact not on track and that we need to be looking at more possible ways of responding to [00:02:00] climate change. So I found an area nuclear fusion that is that it has the potential to help us solve climate change and that in my opinion is underinvested. So I started strong atomics to invest in those companies and to support them in other ways. And that's what I'm doing these days What did founding strong atomics entail? Ben: and he did a little bit more into what founding strong atomics and Tails. You can just snap your fingers and bring it into being Malcolm: I almost did because it was extremely lucky but in general Silicon Valley has a pretty well worn model for how people start startups and I think even the people getting out of college actually no a surprising amount about how to start a company and when you look at Fusion companies getting started you realize just how much knowledge we take for granted in Silicon Valley. On the other hand as far as I can tell the way [00:03:00] that every VC fund get started in the way that everyone becomes a VC is unique. It was really one story for how you start a company and there are n stories for how funds get started. So in my case, I wasn't sure that I wanted to start a fund more precisely. It hadn't even occurred to me that I would start a fund. I was a software engineer and looking for what I could do about climate change. I'm just assuming that I was looking for a technical way to be involved with that. I was worried because my only technical skill is software engineering but I figured hey, but software you can do many things. There must be a way that a software engineer can help. So I made my way to The arpa-e Summit in DC at the beginning of 2016 and went around and talked to a whole lot of people if they're different boots about what they were doing and. My questions for myself was does what you're doing matter. My question for them was how might a software engineer help [00:04:00] and to a first approximation even at a wonderful conference like the arpa-e summit. I think you'd have to say mostly these things are not moving the needle mostly in my terminology. They don't matter and it really wasn't clear how a software engineer could help and then because I was curious because I'd read many things about. Companies claiming that they were working on fusion and they were closed and made an effort to hit every Fusion Booth. I could find and a one of those booths. I said, I'm a software engineer. What can I do and they said well the next time this guy comes to San Francisco, you should organize an audience and he'll give a talk and won't that be fun? So that guy is now one of my science advisors, but that was. The first part of my relationship there. So he came I organized the talk we had dinner beforehand and is like how close is fusion and he says well, it could be 10 years away, but it's actually [00:05:00] in infinite time away. And the problem is we're not funded. So then you say well how much money do you need and it turns out to be a few million dollars you say that's really really dumb here. I am in Silicon Valley my. The company I work for is sauna making collaboration software for task management just raised 50 million dollars in here. These people are credibly trying to save the world and they're short two million dollars. Maybe I can find some rich people who can put some money in the answer was yes, I could find a rich person who is willing to put some money in and Rich. By and large unless they're really excited about the company do not want to put money in directly. They don't want that kind of relationship. So you work through all the mechanics here and you run as you can convince people to put money in but you need to [00:06:00] grease the wheels by making a normal VC structure in this case. And then before, you know it you wind up as the managing partner of a one-person VC fund but single investor. And then you say well, I've had a surprising amount of impact doing this. What should I do? Do I keep looking for that technical way to be involved and my conclusion was there's really no contest here. I could go back to my quest of how how is the software engineer? Can I help climate change or look? I've already put four million dollars into Fusion four million dollars of other people's money, but companies have four million dollars that. Born kinda half without me and several of them are doing way better making way more progress than they would have without me. And now I have all these contacts in the fusion industry. I can build a team of advisers. I'm in all of these internal discussions about [00:07:00] what's coming next in federal funding programs, and I'm invited to conferences and that kind of thing and it was. So obvious that the way to keep making an impact on climate change was to keep doing what I was doing. So that ends with my now taking the steps towards being what I call a real VC. Someone who goes out and really raises the next Fund in a much more normal way with multiple LPS and a much more significant amount of money. Ben: Got it Malcolm: Ray's right now in the baby if you see they VVC or. Ben: So you invest in babies? Malcolm: No. No, I'm the baby. That's and Tina that raises a whole bunch of questions. Why did you structure the venture as a vc firm? Ben: So one is why did you decide to structure it as a VC fund instead of say a philanthropic organization if you just wanted to redirect money. Malcolm: The short answer is [00:08:00] because I can get my hands on way more money. If this is a for-profit Enterprise, so my all P was very generous and trusting and also very open-minded and part of the four million dollars that I mentioned before actually was a donation. It was a gift to the University of Washington to support Fusion research there because. That particular project that we wanted to support was still an academic project for the others. The companies were our for-profit companies and there's just no good case to say to someone who has money. You should give money to support these for-profit things in a way that gets you know profit if they actually work you can tap a lot more money if you offer people a profit motive. And I think you create a stronger chain of [00:09:00] incentives. They are encouraged to give more money. I am more encouraged to look after that money. I have a share of the profit with my fund if it ever makes a profit and and finally you get a more traditional control structure. I don't yet have. At an actual Equity stake in these companies because we did a convertible note or a y combinator safe, but I sit on the board of the companies. They all know that my investment will turn into voting equity in the future and it's just a much cleaner setup. So I think there were no downsides to doing it this way and a lot of upsets the bigger question, which I. Contemplated the beginning of all of this was even for for-profit money is a fund the right vehicle or other other [00:10:00] options that I should pursue. That's something that I spent a lot of time looking into it after creating the first fund what other options are there, right? (Alternate structures) So one approach is you say, well there are four or however many companies here. I like what they're doing, but they're. Really annoyingly small by Annoying. I mean they are inefficient in terms of how they spend their money and their potentially leaving Innovation on the table. So the companies that I've invested in are all about four people maybe six, but that kind of size and they have one or two main science people in each company those. Interacts with other scientists a few times a year a conferences those scientists at the conference's are of course not completely trust to love each other. They are all competitors working at different companies [00:11:00] each convinced that they're going to crush the other guys and that's the extent of their scientific collaboration unless they have a couple of academics universities that they're close to. And when I think about my background in software, I never worked in a team that small I had many more people that I could turn to for help whenever it was stuck. So one thing we looked at seriously was starting a company that would raise a bunch of money and buy these four or so companies. We would merge them all into one. This is called the Roll-Up. And we'd move everyone to one place. They would certainly have a much larger pool of collaborators. They would also have the union of all of their equipment right? So now when someone had a new idea for an approach to Fusion, they wanted to test instead of needing to contemplate leaving [00:12:00] their job starting a new company raising money buying. Or scrounging a whole lot of equipment and then yours later doing the experiment. They could practically go in on the weekend and do the experiment after validating their ideas with their co-workers. Right? I think there's a lot to recommend this and it was seductive enough that I went a long way down this path in the end of the the complexities killed. And made it seem like something that wasn't actually a good idea when you netted everything. Complexities of Roll-Ups Ben: Can you go into a little more detail about that? Yeah, which complexities and how did you decided it was not a good idea, Malcolm: right? So it's much harder to raise money for because you're doing something much less traditional as I guess that's not necessarily harder in some ways. If you come to the market with a radically new idea. You're so novel that you. [00:13:00] Breakthrough everyone's filters and maybe you have an easier time raising money seen it go both witness. Yeah, and my existing investors was not enthused about this. So I would have certainly had to work past some skepticism there on top of that you have to convince all of these companies to sell to you and that looks really hard. The CEO of one of the companies told me look I'm a lone cowboy. I think he said and made it very clear that he was used to executing independently and didn't want to be part of larger company. Potentially. I could have bought his independence by offering him enough money that he couldn't refuse but that's not really the way you want to build your team. Other companies were enthusiastic but it would getting [00:14:00] the majority of these benefits would have required people moving. Yeah people and companies and these companies have connections to universities. Of course, the people have families they have whole lives. It wasn't clear that people wanted to move. It really looked as if everyone was really excited about a roll up that happened where they lived. Yeah on top of that. These people are cordial to each other at conferences. And at least think they wanted to collaborate more but they're also pretty Fierce competitors. So you also had to believe that when these people were all brought into one company. They would actually collaborate rather than get into status contests and fights and that kind of thing. Not to mention all the more subtle ways in which they might fail to collaborate and it really big wake-up call for me was when the [00:15:00] two technical co-founders one of my companies started fighting these people had known each other for decades. They were best men at each other's weddings. They had chosen to found the company together. No asshole VC had bought two companies include them together and force them to work together. This was their choice. And it got to the point where still they could not work together. I went down I spent two days at the company watching the team Dynamic interviewing each person at the company one-on-one and made the recommendation that the company fire one of the founders. So you look at that and then you're like, well these people say they're happy to cooperate with everyone at these other companies to I really believe that so. Huge caution, I think yeah other people cautioned me that the [00:16:00] competitive factors would be reduced. So I had one guy who went through YC not doing Fusion just a regular software startup say look when we were doing way see we were in the same year as Dropbox and it was clear the Dropbox was crash. And if we had known that actually we were part of some big roll up and we were going to share and dropboxes success. We would not have worked as hard on our little company as we did wanting to match their success. Yeah. (Holding companies and how they worked) So eventually I looked at the third model the first model being the VC fund at the second model being the roll up. The third model was a holding company and this is meant to be a middle ground where we would have a company that would invest in the various Fusion companies that we wanted to support. They would not be combined. I [00:17:00] guess. I'm neglected to mention several of the other advantages that we would have gotten with the holding with the roll up in addition to a unified team of scientists. We would have had the pool of Hardware that I did mention right we would also been able to have other infrastructure teams. For example, we could have had a software team that worked on modeling or simulation software that all of the different Fusion teams could use so the idea with the holding company was we would still be able to centralize things that made sense centralist right things where you could benefit by sharing. But we would have these companies remaining as separate companies. They could raise money from other people if they wanted to or we couldn't provide the money when they needed it. They wouldn't have to move they would be independent companies. But the first thing that we would do is say a condition of taking money from us is [00:18:00] you will give all of your experimental data and enough. Of the conditions of your experiments to us so that we can run our own simulations using our own software right and match them against your experimental results. We would of course encourage them to use our modeling software as well. But that's harder to force. So the idea was software is something that really can be shared right? We would encourage them to share it and by having access to their. Their detailed data, we would be able to validate what they were doing and being much more informed investors than others so we could make better investment decisions. We could tell who was really succeeding and who might be struggling or failing so we couldn't make better investment decisions than other investors, which would help us. It would also help the companies [00:19:00] because our decision to investor to continue to invest would be a more credible signal of success or the value creation and they could use that to to shop it around to raise money from other people. So to the benefits there would be still internalizing some of the externalities while keeping people with their independence, but allowing resource sharing and better signal. For further support raise so much more flexible sharing sharing where it made sense and not where it didn't and then in an optional way later later on we might have said, well, it turns out that the number of our companies need the same physical equipment may be pulsed Power Equipment, which is a large part of the expense for these companies so we could have bought that. Set it up somewhere and then said you're welcome to come and do experiments on our facility and you could imagine that over time. They would decide that the [00:20:00] facility was valuable enough that someone from the company moved there. And then maybe they do all their new hiring their and the company's gradually co-locate but in a much more gradual much smoother way than. In the roll-up where we envision seeing a condition of this purchase is you move right having just talked up the the holding company's so much. Obviously I decided I didn't like that either because that's not what I'm doing one of the death blows for the holding company was doing a science review of the four companies that I've invested in so far. Plus several other approaches by this point I built a team of four science advisors. We put all of these seven or so approaches past the advisors for basic feedback is this thing actually a terrible [00:21:00] idea and we haven't realized yet or what are the challenges or is this an amazing thing that we should be backing and the feedback that we got was that one of them was? And should definitely be back right for a bunch of them. The feedback was waiting to see another one. Was it an even more precarious position because of execution problems to more that received favorable feedback did not and still do not have companies associated with them but feedback was positive enough that we. Pay people to work on them inside basically shall companies so that we own the IP if something comes to that but what did we not so sorry just to interrupt right now. They're in universities right now. They're dormant. They're dormant. Okay a common theme in Fusion is someone does some [00:22:00] work gets some promising results and then for one reason or another fails to get. Funding to continue that it sometimes the story is then the Republicans got into power and cut the funding or they got less funding than they wanted. So they bought worse equipment and they wanted and therefore they weren't able to achieve the conditions that they wanted but they still did the experiment because of the bad conditions that got bad results. So they definitely didn't get any more money from that a whole host of reasons. The promising work doesn't continue. Yeah, so in both of those cases there are promising results and no one is working on this got it. Yeah another sad Fusion story. So so bunch of things came out of that science review, but what did not come out of it was oh yes here. We have a pool of for companies that are all [00:23:00] strong and deserve. And have enough overlap that that some sort of sharing model makes sense on top of that. It was becoming clear that even a holding company was sufficiently novel pitch as to make my life even more difficult for fundraising. Yeah, so it just. Didn't look like something that was worth taking that fundraising hit for given that the benefits for seeming to be more theoretical or in the future than then in the present Alternate Structures Ben: So with a VC fund to my understanding you are sitting on already given capital and your job is. To deploy it I'm going to use air quotes as [00:24:00] quickly as possible within a certain limit of responsibility. Would you ever consider something where you do something there there these private Equity firms that will have a thesis and the look for companies that meet these a certain set of conditions and only then. Will they basically exert a call option on promised money and invest that and it seems like that's that's another structure that you could have gone with. Did you consider anything like that at all? Malcolm: Right edit your description of a VC fund and yes, we may I please one is you're not sitting on a pool of money that is in your bank account. Some of the money is in your bank account, but there's a distinction between the money that is committed and the money that is raised. [00:25:00] So you might say I want to have a VC fund that has 40 million dollars over its lifespan if you wait until you have raised. All 40 million then the deals that you'd identified at the beginning that you are using to support the raising of your fund will likely be gone. It can take a long time to raise even a moderately sized fund. Yeah, unless you're one of those individuals leading very Charmed lives where in weeks they raise their entire fun, but for the rest of us the fundraising process can be 6-12 months that kind of thing so, You have a first close where you've identified or where you have enough and money committed to justify saying this fund is definitely happening. Right [00:26:00] we're going to do this even then maybe your first clothes is 15 million dollars. You don't need all 15 million dollars to start making your Investments right now. So you have 15 million dollars. Right, but over the life of the fund you do Capital calls when your account is too low to keep doing what you're trying to do. Right? So the LPS get penalized heavily if they fail to produce the money that they have committed within a certain amount of time after you're calling it got it you could in principle call all the money at the beginning but you damage your friends metrics if you do that. Got it. Funds are. Graded through their internal rate of return and I remember exactly how this is calculated. (Internal Rate of Return (IRR) ) But part of that is how long you actually have the money. So if you got the money closer to when you're going to spend it or invest it, you look better got it. So that's the first edit. The [00:27:00] second edit is I wouldn't say my job is to deploy the money as quickly as possible. Mmm. My job is to deploy the money for the best results possible. I measure results in terms of some combination of profit to my investors and impact on the world. Right because they think Fusion is well aligned to do both. I think these prophets are pretty consistent. So I'm not trying to spend my money as quickly as I can. I'm trying to support a large enough portfolio of companies for as long as I can. Large portfolio of companies because they want to mitigate the risk. I want to include as many companies in the portfolio. So that promising ideas do not go unsupported. That's the impact and also so that the company that succeeds if when ultimately does is in my fund so [00:28:00] that my investors get a return got it and then I want to support them for as long as I can because the longer I'm supporting them. The larger return my investors get rather than that later value creation accruing to later investors. Got it. Also. longer. I can support them the greater the chance that the company has of surviving for long enough and making enough progress that it can then raise from other investors investors who probably will know less about fusion and be less friendly to Fusion. Why not start the Bell Labs of Fusion Ben: okay, there's there's a bunch of bunch of bookmarks. I want to put there the first thing is one more question about possible structures. So a problem that you brought up consistently is the efficiency gains from having people all in the same place all sharing equipment all sharing code all sharing knowledge that. Does not happen [00:29:00] when you have a bunch of companies, why are you so focused on sort of starting with companies as or groups of people who have already formed companies as as the basic building blocks. So for example, you could imagine a world where you create the Bell Labs a fusion where you literally just start from scratch. Hire people and put them all in the same place with a bunch of equipment and aren't working together without having to pull people who have already demonstrated their willingness to go out on their own and start companies. Malcolm: Yeah, great question and the bell Labs diffusion is an analogy of it gets thrown around a fair amount including to describe what I was trying to do. Although I agree. It's slightly. I think there are two answers to that question. One is [00:30:00] by the point that I was really considering this. I already had invested in for companies. So partly the answer is path dependence got it and partly the answer. Is that by the time I was clearly seeing the problems with the rollout especially but also the holding company it was. It didn't seem as if just starting a company from scratch was really going to change that some people make the argument that actually the best plasma physicists aren't in companies at the moment. They are in Academia or National Labs because the best ones don't want to risk their reputation and a great job for a two-bit company that's going to have trouble. And therefore the if you could come along and create a credible [00:31:00] proposition of the legitimate company that will do well fundraising and prove that it will do well at fundraising by endowing it with a lot of money in the beginning you may then hire those people right? I know some people who are convinced that this is possible. You still have to deal. The asshole complex that is common with infusion. These people have had their entire careers which are long because they are all old or they're in PHD programs basically to become quite sure of the approach that they want to take for Fusion, right? So it was difficult to find a team of four. Experienced knowledgeable and open-minded advisors for my science board and not all of those people are able to be hired for any price. I think if you want to actually stock a [00:32:00] company with these people you need more people right and they all need to be able to be hired and you still need to convince them to move and you still need to convince them to work on each other's projects. So it I think it's an interesting idea. I have real concerned about the lack of competition that you would get about all the areas that I just mentioned and on top of that when I looked into the situation around the software sharing and the hardware sharing more closely. I became less convinced that this is actually available. What's that on the software side many people don't even believe that it's possible in a reasonable time frame to create simulation software that [00:33:00] can sufficiently accurately simulate the conditions used by a whole range of different approaches to Fusion at the moment. We. Many different pieces of software or yeah codes as the physics Community calls them that they're each validated and optimized for different conditions different temperatures different densities different physical geometries of the plasma that kind of thing. There are some people who believe that we can make software that spans a sufficiently large range of these parameters. As to be useful for a family of fusion approaches. There are even people who claim to be working on them right now. Yeah, and when you dig more deeply you discover, yeah, they're working on them, but they haven't accomplished as much of that unified solution [00:34:00] as they think they have is they say they have so you talk to other people who use these and they're like, yes. Yes, I think those people really have the. I think they might be the people who can do this. They're not there yet. So the notion of spinning up a team of software engineers and plasma physicists and numerical experts and so forth to try to do that came to seem like a bigger lift with much more dubious payback in the relevant time frame than I had initially thought similarly on the hardware side. It is really costly in many ways to reconfigure physical equipment for one experiment and then reconfigure it for another experiment is really bad when you have to move things between locations as well or move a team to a site and configure everything there and then do your experiments for a month, but [00:35:00] it's still bad even. All the people and all the equipment are in when se you get to the most consistent results. If you can leave everything set up and you want to be able to keep going on Saturday or keep going on Monday because you weren't quite done with those through experiments. So to what degree can you really share these results these certain not these results. She killed to what degree can you really share this equipment? Yeah, definitely to some degree to a large enough to agree to justify. Spinning up a whole company. I'm not convinced got it on top of that. If I were to start a company doing this, I would need to find a CEO build up a whole team that I don't have to build when I'm investing in other companies, right? Should I be that CEO of many people assumed that I showed her that I wanted to or something like that. I think it's a really hard sell for [00:36:00] investors that I'm the best person to run this company on the other hand. It wasn't actually clear who should do it. Incentives: How do you measure impact and incentivize yourself? Ben: Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense. I want to [00:37:00] go back to you're talking about incentives previously both that your incentives are to both have impact and make money for your shareholders. Yeah, I want to ask first. How do you measure impact for yourself in terms of your incentives you. I mentioned something along the lines of company's existing that would not otherwise exist. So like how it's pretty easy to know. Okay. I've like made this much money. It's a little harder to say. Okay, I've had this much impact. So how do you personally measure that? Malcolm: Yeah, the clearest example of impact so far is another project called fuse annoyingly. Annoyingly the same name is spelt differently. So this is the fusion z-pinch experiment Fu [00:38:00] Ze at the University of Washington. And it's the group that we donated to (Fusion Z-Pinch Experiment. https://www.aa.washington.edu/research/ZaP) it is all four of the companies that have given money to so far are supported by our pennies Alpha program (ARPA-e Alpha Program:https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=arpa-e-programs/alpha ) its Fusion program and all four of them got less money than. Rpe would have liked to have given them. So the time that I became involved with the fuse project they were behind schedule on their rpe milestones and we made them a donation that enabled them to hire an extra two people for the rest of the life of the project that enabled them to catch up with their milestones and become the. Most successful of the fusion programs that are P of fusion projects that are PE has [00:39:00] when I say most successful what I mean is they are hitting their Milestones they are getting very clean results. So there they have a simulation that says as they put more and more current through their plasma. They will get higher temperatures and higher densities basically. Better and better Fusion conditions and that at a certain point they will be making as much energy as they're putting in at a point beyond that they will actually be getting what we call reactor relevant game getting a large enough increase in energy through their Fusion that they could run a reactor off that this and the way we plot their progress is. We look at the increase in currents that they're putting through their pastor and check that they are getting results that match their theoretical results for them. It's especially clean because they have this theoretical concern this theoretical curve [00:40:00] and their experimental results keep falling very close to that curve. So it's a really nice story because the connection between the money that they got. From strong atomics and the people that they hired and the results that they were able to the progress they were able to make with those additional people and the scientific validity of what they were doing is clear at every step. Yeah. So so that's one way that I can see the impact of what I'm doing another way. That's more. Is by being involved in the field and trying to make sure that it all makes sense to me. I wind up having insights or coming to understandings the turn out to be helpful to everyone. So I spent a long time [00:41:00] wondering about the economics of fusion. Companies are understandably mainly focused on getting Fusion to work and they don't spend that much time thinking about the competitive energy Market that they're likely to be selling into 15 or 20 years from now and what that means for their product. I spend time thinking about that because I want to convince myself that the space matters enough to justify my time. So I went through the stock process. And came to the conclusion that the ways that the companies were calculating their cost of energy were wrong. They were assuming that the reactors would be operating more or less continuously and they would be able to sell all of the electricity that they made whereas the reality is likely to be that for five or hours or so every day. No one [00:42:00] will buy their electricity because wind and solar producing cheaper electricity. See, right. So the conclusion that I've come to is well so scratch that so the companies often conclude that they need to be demand following they need to make their reactors able to ramp up and down according to what the demand is right that has other problems because the reactors are so expensive to build and so cheap to run. That ramping your reactor down to follow the demand doesn't actually save you any money. And so it doesn't make the electricity any cheaper. So I worked through all of this and came to the conclusion, which I think most people in the fusion space agree with know that you actually need to have integrated thermal storage. Your reactor is producing typically hot molten salts. Anyway, right and rather than turning that into [00:43:00] electricity. You should store the bats of hot molten salt and then run the reactor continuously and ramp up and down the turbine that is used to go from hot molten salts to electricity interesting turbines are cheap. They have low fixed costs. So you can much more affordably ramp them up and down plus if you were going to be demand following you were already going to be ramping your turbine up and. All I'm saying is keep the turbine demand following right make the reactor smaller so that it can run continuously. Right which is the most efficient way to use a high Capital cost good and then have a buffer of molten salt. So that's the that's a kind of insight that have come to by working through the economics and overall the investment case for Fusion. That I hope will help all the companies not just the ones I'm [00:44:00] investing in. Incentives for LPs Ben: so those are those are your incentives is that combination of impact profit and you also have LPS because of the VC fund structure. Where do you see there? What are their incentives in terms of what they want to see out of this? All right out of your firm Malcolm: my current LP is anonymous and so there's a limit to what I can say about their incentives sure, but they care about climate change. They basically by into my argument that climate change is real and worth mitigating, right and. Fusion is a promising and underinvested potential mitigation. Does the profit motive increase impact? Ben: And to go a [00:45:00] little farther into that this is just a comment about impact investing as a whole so the question is could they get a better return? By tape putting that money into a this definitely putting you on the spot, but I think you could probably make an argument that they might get a better return just on the money putting the money in some other investment vehicle. And so they probably want to see that same impact that you want to see and. I guess the the thing that I'm interested in is does having the profit motive actually increased impact and if so how Malcolm: regarding the potential for profit. When [00:46:00] I started doing this, I thought it was really a charity play. I guess more politely only in Impact play but set up in a for-profit structure so that if it happened to make a profit then the people who had enabled it to happen would be able to share in that profit right as I have. Looked at the space more closely and refined my argument or arguments in this area. I have come to believe that there's a meaningful potential for profit here. This is all hinges on what you think on the chance that you were saying for Fusion working. It's very clear that if you shouldnt Works in a way that is economically competitive. The company that gets there will be immensely valuable assuming that [00:47:00] it manages to retain and say p and that kind of thing. So I've taken stabs figuring out the valuation of one of these companies the error bars are huge. So I got numbers around 25 billion for my low-end valuation closer to a trillion for the high-end. It's really hard to say, but the numbers are big enough on the profit if it works side right that it really boils down to do I think it's going to work that is a hard thing to put numbers on but by investing in a portfolio of them you increase your chances. Risk, Timescales, and Returns vs. Normal Firms Ben: something I know from other VC firms is that. You have to they have to limit their risk. They don't make as risky Investments because of their LPS because they feel they have this financial duty [00:48:00] to return some amount to their LPS in a certain amount of time right? I do you worry about those same pressures. Have you figured out ways around them ways to extend those time scales. Malcolm: I don't think I'm going to be subject to the same pressures because anyone who gives me money is going to be expecting something very different. Yeah, so instead of being subject to those pressures. I think that the same psychology manifests for me as limiting my pool of investors. So it's a real problem. It just plays out differently. Got it. That's it. A few things are different for me because I'm pitching the fund differently a normal fund cannot look at a space and say it's really important that something works in this space, but [00:49:00] it's not clear which company might succeed because there's real science risk, right so normally. Normally the investors to Silicon Valley can decide that this company or these two companies should be the winner and they can all agree that they're going to put all their money in there and they can anoint a winner it will win because it's getting all the money shorter than major Scandal that does not work for in when investing in companies with a heavy science risk. That's why I think you need to invest in a portfolio of companies and a normal fun has trouble doing that because they are obliged by their investment thesis that their investors have signed off on to spread their money out across different different sectors. Okay. So again, that doesn't make life. Magically easy [00:50:00] for me. It means I need to find investors who are on board for doing something different specifically investors who are wealthy enough that they are diversifying their Investments by investing in other funds or Vehicles besides mine and are not expecting diversity from me. But having found those investors, I will then be in a much better position because I can concentrate. In one sector and really solve that or at least strongly supported Is Money the limiting reagent on fusion? Ben: got it that makes a lot of sense. I want to shift and talk about Fusion itself. Okay a little bit more. So I'm sure you've seen the the fusion never plot. I'll put a link up in the show notes. (Fusion Never Plot: http://benjaminreinhardt.com/fusion_never/) So the question is this plot makes it look like if you pour more money in it will go faster. Do you think that's actually the case or is [00:51:00] there something else limiting the rate at which we achieve Fusion Malcolm: if you have to leave the existing spending. Then adding money is a way to make it go faster. But a cheaper alternative is to spend your existing money more wisely the world's Fusion spending and America's Fusion spending to a first approximation all goes in to eat. The international thermonuclear experimental reactor this International collaboration in France. (ITER - International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines) This thing came about because the next step for a fusion experiment in America and Russia was too expensive for either country to pursue independently, even though everyone's first inclination was surely to keep competing. So became a collaborative [00:52:00] Endeavor and. It's now a collaboration between many countries that things expected to suck up 20 billion or more and has a depressing schedule that ends with Fusion Energy on the grid and 2100. Okay, America puts on the order of a hundred fifty million a year into either directly and say 500 million a year. Into what are called either relevant projects domestic projects where you're trying to learn about something some problem that's relevant either but you're learning in a way that is smaller cheaper better controlled right than a 20 billion dollar massive building where everything is inevitably really complicated the. Other placed in America spends money is on [00:53:00] Neff the national ignition facility, which is really a weapons research facility that is occasionally disguised as an energy research facility. Another way that it's been described to me is the perfect energy research facility what these cynical people meant was it's too small to. (NIF - National Ignition Facility: https://lasers.llnl.gov/) Actually get to ignition or energy Break Even but it's big enough that the people working on it can tell themselves that it might get there. If only they work harder If Only They dedicate the rest of their career to this. So it has large numbers of people who really care about Fusion Energy much more than bombs working on. Because it's the best way that they can see meaning the best funded way that they can see to get there but they don't actually seem to believe that it's [00:54:00] going to get there. They just don't have any choice. So we spent a lot of money on these two programs and that funding would be more than adequate for forgetting to. If we spent it on anything more modern it is not controversial to say that these techniques these two facilities are the best Fusion approaches and experimental setups that we could come up with in the mid-80s the mid-90s when they were being designed that's a fact that's when they were being designed. They've had limited upgrades since but yeah, that's. That's the overall story. What is controversial is weather continuing to support them is the best move. There are people who believe that we need to keep putting money in there [00:55:00] because we're going to learn a lot if we keep doing that science or because if we don't put the money in there, then the money will get pulled and probably stand on bombs or something like that, but it won't come to fusion and so. Better bad money in a fusion than worse money somewhere else, right. My personal view is that eater is such a ridiculous energy project that it harms the entire Fusion field by forcing people to pay lip service. To the validity of its goals that we would be better off admitting that that thing is a travesty and that there are better ways to do Fusion, even if it meant losing the money now, I'm not certain about that. But that's the gamble I would take good news is we probably won't have to take that Gamble and it [00:56:00] looks as if the federal government is becoming much more open to to a yes and approach to funding. The mainstream approaches diffusion if and eater and a variety of projects for alternative approaches and more basic Research into things like tritium handling tritium breeding hardening materials to deal with high-energy neutrons. Lasting longer in the face of high-energy neutrons that kind of thing. So I think there's real momentum towards building a in inclusive program that can support everyone and that is of course the best much as I would take the gamble with killing eater and killing them if they do produce real scientific results, and and if we can have all these things that's a wonderful out. Government Decision Making and Incentives Ben: on that note who ultimately [00:57:00] is the decision maker behind where government Fusion money is spent and what are their incentives? Malcolm: This is America. Is there ever one person who's the decision maker about some Ben: maybe not one person but is it is it Congress is it unelected officials in? Some department. Is it the executive branch? Do you have a sense? Is it some combination of all of them? Malcolm: The money flows through the department of energy a sub-department of the doughy is rpe, which has its 30 million dollar Fusion program and will hopefully have a new and larger Fusion program in the near future. (ARPA-e: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPA-E) There's also the office of Fusion science in an office of Fusion Energy and science ofes that funds a lot [00:58:00] of the mainstream Research into Fusion ( Office of Fusion Energy Science https://science.energy.gov/fes/ ) arpa-e is to my knowledge created by Congress and fairly independent of the doughy, but there's still feuding. I think without describing malice to anyone. It is a great Testament to many people's conviction and political skills that they were able to get America to fund niff and either more or less consistently over decades at a high cost and. Those people are highly invested in those projects continuing. I don't know whether that's because they genuinely believe that that's the best way to spend the money or fear that the money would disappear from Fusion completely [00:59:00] if it stopped or don't think that the Alternatives actually have any scientific credibility or. Are so now trapped by the arguments that they've been making strongly and successfully for decades, but for one reason or another or many reasons, they strongly believe that we need to continue to do these so there is a tension between people who want to fund the Alternatives and the people who want to fund the mainstream fusion Who are the government decision makers? Ben: and who are these people do you have any sense of actually who they are? Like I'm not asking you to name names, but like what is their role? What is their nominal job title? Malcolm: I think it's a bunch of civil servants within the Dewey Congress has a role like cotton Congress gets to decide how much money to provide and that's often attached to a. About how that money will be spent right there have been [01:00:00] Congressional hearings on Fusion the covered either and whether we should continue to fund either it's a lot of different people. What are the roles of Academia, Government, Industry, and Philanthropy? Ben: Okay? Yeah. I'm just really interested in dating you down until I like where we're the incentive structure is set up along those lines in in your mind in sort of an ideal world. what do you see the ideal rolls of the the four Columns of Academia government private investment and philanthropy in making sort of an epic level project like Fusion. Yeah happen. Malcolm: There's a ton of room for government support on this. The federal government has National Labs that have the best computers the best software which is often classified the best testing sites many in many [01:01:00] ways. The only testing site. And lots and lots of experts the one thing that the federal government lacks is a drive to put Fusion Energy on the grid as quickly and as commercially successful as possible. I don't rule out that the federal government could develop that drive but. It seems like a long shot given that there's a lot of disagreement about climate change and energy policy and that kind of thing. So I think that the ideal would be that the federal government supports Fusion research with all of its resources Financial expertise modeling modeling software. Modelling hardware and testing facilities in partnership with Private Industry. So [01:02:00] that Private Industry is providing the drive to get things done. So I imagine a lot of research done at the federal government so that if the current crop of companies bottom out if it turns out that their techniques don't work. We have more Fusion research coming down the pipeline to support a later crop of companies, but we would have companies working closely with the federal government to try to build reactors getting assistance in all those ways from the federal government and providing the drive. The company's would have this. Call of Fusion Energy on the grid that they would be working towards but they would get to use the federal government's resources for the areas that they're focusing on. There are also the areas that the companies are not focusing on areas that are largely common [01:03:00] to all companies and therefore no company views it as on their critical path to demonstrating reactor relevant gain, For example, for example tritium is toxic to humans and difficult to contain. It turns out even hydrogen is difficult to contain it leaks through metal surfaces, but we don't talk about this because hydrogen is. Astonishingly boring and section in small quantities. So we don't care that it leaks out of our containers we do care when tritium leaks out of containers because it's heavily regulated and toxic right? So any Fusion company that's handling Trillium is going to need a way to contain tritium with very low leak rates. Also, the world does not have very much true. You can't actually use tritium as a [01:04:00] fuel for Fusion. You have to breed tritium in your reactor from lithium. So the real inputs to the reactor if it is a deuterium tritium reactor will be do tarian and lithium and you'll be breeding tritium from lithium in your reactor. So we also need to study how we're going to breathe. The tritium right? We're making mathematical calculations about the tritium breeding rate how much tritium we will get out after doing Fusion relative to the amount of tritium. We had before doing fusion and these tritium breeding rates are close to 1 if they're below 1 or really not enough above one. We're screwed, right? So there's important work for academics. And the federal government to do to better understand trillion breathing rates [01:05:00] and what we can do to increase them and write how to make this work. Companies aren't incentivized to look at things on critical path Ben: Right and at the companies are not incentivised to look into that right now because they don't feel like it's on their critical path Malcolm: investors Pope maybe including myself have made it clear to these companies that. What they will reward the companies for is progress on the riskiest parts, right? This is valid you want to work on the Unruh Burning Down the biggest risks that you have, right and everyone perceives that the biggest risk is getting through Fusion conditions. Sorry. In many of these companies are already getting to Fusion conditions, but everyone perceives that the biggest risk is getting Fusion to work getting reactor relevant games from Fusion, right? So compared to that these risks are small and it's [01:06:00] valid to the further, right? If you're a single Company If you're looking from the perspective of a portfolio, which the federal government is best positioned to do which is. Going to be somewhat well position to do then your risks are different you're willing to say I have a portfolio of these companies. I don't care which one succeeds I'm doing what I'm doing, assuming one of them will succeed. Now. What can I do to D risk my entire portfolio, right? You look at it differently and then these problems start to seem critical. So with my second fund one of the things I want to be able to do. Is support academics or maybe for-profit companies that are working on this but the federal government isn't even better fit for this it is perfectly positioned to do this. What does the ideal trajectory for Fusion look like? Ben: I think a good closing question is in your in your Ideal World. would Innovation infusion come into being what would the path look [01:07:00] like? Imagine Malcolm? King of the universe and we started with the world we have today what would happen Malcolm: I think the federal government would do the heavy lifting but it would rely on private companies to really provide the drive. It would the federal government would also support the longer term. Things that are critical but not the highest risks such as the tritium issues today - and perfect. Why do so few people invest in fusion Ben: there anything that I didn't ask that I should have asked about Malcolm: one question that comes up quite often is why so few people invest in Fusion? Yeah and why it is. That I'm the only one with the poor. Ben: Yeah, if you could if it's there's a possible payoff of a trillion dollars, right? And that's even if it takes 20 years the AR are still pretty good. Malcolm: Yeah, the way I think of it [01:08:00] is there's a funnel where. It's like a company's fun offer acquiring customers. But in this case, it's an industry's funnel for acquiring investors and investors are falling out of this funnel at every stage. The first stage is of course, you have to believe in anthropogenic climate change, but we have lots of investors who believe in. Why do you need to believe in climate change to fund fusion Ben: quick question. Why why do you need to believe in that in order to want to fun fusion? Malcolm: Okay, that's a fair point. You don't have to but it's the easiest route. Okay. If you don't believe in climate change, then you have to believe purely infusions potential to provide energy that will be cheaper than fossil fuels, right. I believe a zoo that but it is a higher bar [01:09:00] than I believe the climate change is going to encourage people one way or another to put a premium on clean energy. Got up when I do my modeling. I'm not taking into account carbon taxes or renewable portfolio standards, but it's nevertheless easier to convince yourself to care about the whole thing. If you think that this is an important problem, right? Otherwise you could do it just because you think you can make a whole ton of money, but it is a high-risk way of making money, right? So one way or another let's say you decide you're interested in well. No, I think that's carry on with the. The funnel for a climate change. Yes. Yes, because there are a few more places that they can fall out and these places might apply to an ordinary profit seeking investors as well, but it's less clear. So you've decided you believe in anthropogenic climate change [01:10:00] and you'd like to see what you can do about it. Maybe you then narrow to focusing on energy. That's a pretty reasonable bad energy is something like 70% of our emissions when you track everything back to the root. So perfectly reasonable Pace to focus within energy. There are lots of different ways that you might think you can do something about it. There's geothermal power. There's title power a long range of long tail a large range of long tail. Ways that you can make energy and a lot of people really get trapped in there or they decide they're going to look at the demand side of energy and think about how they can get people to drive less or insulate their buildings better or whatever. And in my opinion most of these people are basically getting stuck on [01:11:00] things that don't move the. Yeah, the don't add up to a complete solution. They are merely incrementally better. So when you look at things that might move the needle on energy, I think that the supply side is way more promising because the demand side is huge numbers of buildings cars people whose habits need to change on and on if you can change the supply side then. It doesn't matter as much if we are insulating our houses poorly driving too much that kind of thing. If we have enough energy we can doesn't matter we can make hydrocarbons. From the raw inputs and energy and we can continue to drive our cars and flat our planes and heat our cart heat our houses that have natural gas furnaces and that kind of thing. Ben: Well, if you have if you have absurd amounts of energy, you can just literally pull carbon out of the air and stick it in concrete right? Malcolm: That's [01:12:00] the other thing. So, I believe that focusing on energy Supply is the right way to go because. With a distributed Grid or not. We have many fewer places that we make energy than where we consume energy and what you said, we're looking at significantly increased demand in the likely or certain case where we need to do atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration. It takes the energy it takes energy to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere and it takes probably. More energy to put it into a form where we can store it for a long time. Right? So I think you need to focus on the energy Supply even within that we have lots of ways of making clean energy that aren't scalable and there's a wonderful book called sustainable energy without the hot [01:13:00] air (Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) that catalogs for the United. All the ways that they could make energy renewably and all the ways that they use energy and is more or less unable to make the numbers add up without throwing new clear in their got it nuclear or solar in the Sahara and then transfer transmitting the energy to to the UK. So that's it. You can probably make Renewables work. If you can start but the problem with Renewables is that well Renewables come in two forms that are the predictable forms like Hydra where we control when we release energy and then the variable Renewables like wind and solar where they make energy when Nature cases for those. We need something to match the demand. That humans have for energy [01:14:00] with the supply that nature is offering and you can try to do that in some combination of three ways. You can over build your Renewables to the point where even on bad days or in Bad seasons, you're making enough energy. You can transmit your energy. You can overbuild you can space shift your energy. By building long distance transmission lines and you can time shifts your energy through storage. Right and it turns out that all three of these have real costs and challenges storage is an area where people get pretty excited. So this is the next point that people fall off. They say wind and solar are doing great. storage isn't solved yet, but gosh it's on these great cost curves and like I can totally see how storage is going to. A solved problem and then Renewables for work and I think there are two problems with that is that these one is [01:15:00] storage actually needs to get a lot cheaper. If you want to scale it to the point that we can use it for seasonal storage. Right? And we need a solution to the seasonal problem. There are places like California the. Vastly more Renewable Power sometimes if you're in the other times of year in California, it's by a factor of 10 or 12. Wow. Yeah, so it's not a day by day. It's Yeah by month and and that's critical because if you are cycling your storage daily just to to bridge between when the Sun's shining and when people need their power you get to monetize your story. Every day you get the entire capacity of your stories roughly right used 365 times a year for the 20 years that your plant is left. Right? If you're cycling it seasonally meaning once a year you get to sell 20 times [01:16:00] the capacity of your storage rather than 20 times 365 times the capacity of your storage. So your storage needs to be one 365th of the price. To hit that same price Target. Yeah. This is a really high bar for storage is economics. So the first problem with betting on storage is it needs to drop in price a lot to really solve the problem. The second problem is lots of people are investing in storage. So if you want your money to make a difference in terms of making you a profit or having an impact on the world. You need to out-compete all those other people working on wind and solar and storage. you're going to play in that space and that leaves something like nuclear. There are compared to Fusion plenty of people investing in various nuclear fission approaches. So again, your company can make a difference your money can make a difference there. [01:17:00] But and it'll be a bigger difference than in wind and solar and storage but a small difference than Fusion. So say you get all the way to I think I want to invest in Fusion. what you now encounter is an industry where everyone you talk to will tell you that their approach is definitely going to work unless they're being really nice and that everyone else is approach is definitely not going to work so. Pretty understandable at that point to give up on the whole Space. So in this is the step before that you have to to get over the hurdle where Fusion is always 10 years way. It's been 10 years away for as long as most of us have been alive, you have to decide that you even want to look at Fusion then you hit the problem where everyone says nasty things about everyone else to a first approximation if you spend a long enough time there you might find a company. The convinces you that they are different that all those other people are crazy [01:18:00] and they're worth investing in but I've talked about why investing in one company is a bad idea to invest in multiple companies. You have to find some advisors or just be Reckless enough that you can so you have to find. Enough advisors who are open-minded or you have to be sufficiently Reckless to just roll a dice on these companies or maybe just sufficiently Rich that you're going to roll the dice on these companies, but it's a real hurdle to find advisors who are experienced and credible and open-minded enough to support investing in a portfolio of these companies. Yes, even then, If you're a regular VC fund which you probably are if you have enough money to do this, right we have the problems that I mentioned earlier where your Charter is to invest in a diverse [01:19:00] set of companies and you can't put enough money in these companies to infusion to support a portfolio of companies. so that is the funnel did ends with as far as I can tell just strong atomics coming out the end as the only fund supporting a portfolio of fusion companies. That's why in my opinion. There are not more people investing in Fusion in general along the way. Outro I got a lot out of this conversation here are some of my top takeaways. There are many ways of structuring organization that's trying to enable Innovations each with pros and cons that depend on the domain. You're looking at Malcolm realize that a VC fund is best for Fusion because of the low return from shared resources and the temperaments of people involved just because there's a lot of money going into a domain. It doesn't mean it's being spent well. I love the way that Malcolm thought very deeply about the incentives of everybody. He's dealing with and how to align them with his [01:20:00] vision of a fusion filled future. I hope you enjoyed that. It's like to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at been underscore Reinhardt. I deeply appreciate any feedback. Thank you.

america ceo university california founders community money washington france space san francisco phd research nature russia office government international rich washington dc innovation market united kingdom risk impact financial congress target sun holding silicon valley republicans idea companies capital equity scandals hire summit large breakthrough alpha funding pope fund investments ip pace pe enterprise supply dynamic vc academia vehicles machines lp alternatives gamble fusion congressional labs funds hardware philanthropy experienced ze lasting venture capital incentives typical grid milestones annoying testament fierce spinning alternate sahara dropbox looked tails charter reckless complexities endeavor general partners hydra modelling lps returns mmm renewables charmed neff yc reinhardt zap roll up arpa sustainable energy hot air rpe columns magically graded breakeven bell labs handley trillium astonishingly fusion energy renewable power internal rate ideal world vvc power equipment national labs ben so ben well malcolm ray ben malcolm ben right if only they

Ep. 111 - David Kropaczek, Oak Ridge National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2018 55:17

In this episode we discuss... David’s work as Director for the U.S. Department of Energy innovation hub, Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors Core design and refiguration of fuel between cycles Influence of temperature on water density and its effect on the reactor Inherent safety of light water reactors PWR and BWR reactors Independent analysis of reactor core design and fuel optimization Global trends and interactions in the nuclear field Focus of CASTLE, energy innovation hub at NC State CRUD-induced power shift and CRUD-induced localized corrosion Pellet clad interaction Thermohydraulics, dry spots, and departure of nucleate boiling The Future of CASTLE and its contributions to the nuclear industry

director future energy global influence focus independent castle nuclear consortium inherent oak ridge pellet crud pwr bwr national labs lwr

Ep. 110 - Lou Qualls, Oak Ridge National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2018 45:49

In this episode we discuss... Lou’s background in fusion and personal journey in the nuclear space Lou’s work as the national technical director for molten salt reactors Stellarator versus tokamak plasmas The important roles of neutral beams and pellets Challenges in nuclear fission Uses of hydro reactors in scientific testing A deep dive into Project Prometheus and space power initiatives The resurgence of interest in molten salt reactors The Advanced Reactor Technology program within the U.S. Department of Energy Common challenges among developers and ways in which we can overcome them Interactions of fission products with salt Designing for contingency versus replacement

energy challenges designing nuclear fusion interactions plasma oak ridge msr qualls national labs stellarator

Ep. 109 - Kurt Terrani, Oak Ridge National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 31, 2018 41:49

In this episode we discuss... Kurt’s background in microelectronics and early interest in nuclear energy Kurt’s work as a nuclear fuel materials expert at Oak Ridge The importance of modeling in establishing predictive practices The value and role of national labs in driving big innovation within the industry The Transformational Challenge Reactor Program Stagnancy within the nuclear industry and ways in which we can overcome it Whether or not advanced manufacturing will have a true impact on nuclear economics SMRs and how they can benefit nuclear economics Challenges of proving safety within the NRC regulations and guidelines Pushing the boundaries of new materials within the nuclear industry

energy challenges fuel nuclear arc nrc smr oak ridge smrs ornl national labs

Ep. 108 - Phil Ferguson, Oak Ridge National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 30, 2018 64:23

In this episode we discuss... Phil's background in nuclear engineering and personal journey in the nuclear field A deep dive into spallation and how it occurs The Spallation Neutron Source The process of conceptualization to commissioning for SPN The evolution of the fusion industry over the last 40 years Requirements and inherent challenges in achieving fusion Different types of pellets and their uses Strategies for mitigating damage to the wall of the fusion reactor vessel The ITER Home Fusion Experiment Challenges in developing fusion across both national science approaches and private fusion companies

strategy energy nuclear requirements fusion oak ridge iter ornl phil ferguson national labs

Ep. 107 - Alan Icenhour, Oak Ridge National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2018 48:31

In this episode we discuss... Alan’s background in the Navy and personal journey in the nuclear space The role and history of ORNL in the Manhattan Project and across the broader nuclear field Information that can be shared from Navy nuclear experiences to the private sector Characteristics of plutonium 238 and reasons for use The evolution of radioactive waste disposal Alan’s work as Associate Laboratory Director at ORNL Creating and implementing a long-term strategic plan for ORNL Development of radio isotopes in other industries, like actinium 225 for targeted alpha therapy in cancer treatment Development and production of californium 222 A deep dive into the Transformational Challenge Reactor Project Learnings and innovation from accelerated deployment and advanced manufacturing techniques

energy development navy nuclear characteristics radioactive manhattan project oak ridge isotopes ornl national labs

Ep. 73 - Kemal Pasamehmetoglu, Idaho National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2018 52:56

In this episode we discuss... Kemal’s background in thermodynamics and personal evolution in the nuclear industry from Los Alamos to Idaho National Labs A deep dive into the Loss of Coolant Accident Scenario Complete loss of coolant versus partial loss of coolant and the aftermath of both Kemal’s research in nuclear fuels and especially light water reactor fuels Kemal’s thoughts on the relationship between the US government and nuclear industry and ways to overcome its flaws Idaho National Lab’s GAIN (Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear) Kemal’s focused role on a new test reactor and its significance in research and development in nuclear technology Building support for nuclear in US Congress A behind the scenes look at designing a versatile reactor

energy building loss idaho nuclear thermodynamics los alamos kemal national labs

Ep. 14 - Mark Peters, Idaho National Labs

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2018 29:22

Episode Content: Mark's background in geology and how that ties in to spent fuel disposal His lab career starting at Los Alamos, then Argonne, then INL INL's history and role in developing nuclear technology New technologies that help bring advanced reactors to fruition Specifically how INL helps facilitate the commercialize new reactor technology How the National Labs work with industry and role of R&D in US competitiveness INL's work as the "underwriter's lab" of storage technology How the various contributions of the national labs work as a whole system How competing on ideas drives science forward Smartgrid, cybersecurity, and design with resiliency in mind The importance of multidisciplinary learning and Mark's insight looking towards the future of technology

energy national idaho nuclear peters labs r d inl los alamos smart grid argonne mark peters national labs

Ep. 13 - John Kotek, Nuclear Energy Institute

Titans Of Nuclear | Interviewing World Experts on Nuclear Energy

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2018 45:55

Episode Content: John's career at the Department of Energy, the National Labs, as an ANS congressional fellow, and in the private sector Serving on the Blue Ribbon commission for nuclear waste management Why deployment time is key to cost reduction NEI's national nuclear energy strategy: Preserve, Sustain, Innovate, and Thrive An explanation of "negative pricing" and the unintended consequences of tax credits The long term strategic advantages that come form being a global energy supplier Pros and Cons of various mechanisms the government can use to support the industry How SMRs alleviate some of the market problems nuclear faces today Some of the other all-stars at NEI: Maria, Dan, John, Pam, etc. A key tale for nuclear reactor innovators...

energy institute serving pros cons nuclear ans preserve innovate sustain nei blue ribbon kotek nuclear energy institute national labs

S2 E4: 17 Labs in 17 Minutes

america energy labs direct current national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 24, 2017

The Department of Energy’s National Labs are the crown jewels of science in America. But their work is so diverse that it’s hard to cover all 17 of them in one podcast episode. So naturally, Direct Current took on that challenge.

This Lab Is Your Lab

united states energy department national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 30, 2017

As we head into July 4, enjoy "This Lab Is Your Lab." A song meant to highlight some of the amazing work being done across the Energy Department's system of 17 National Labs, the crown jewels of science in the United States.

Europe, Nukes, and Cybersecurity

Pod Save the World

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2017 46:31

Tommy talks with former Deputy Secretary of Energy, defense policy and Europe expert Dr. Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall about the future of Europe in the wake of Brexit. Then they discussed nuclear weapons in the US and Pakistan, cybersecurity, the advanced science being done at our National Labs, and how government can recruit more women into national security jobs.

europe energy brexit pakistan cybersecurity nukes deputy secretary national labs

The Future of Water & Wildfire (Live at AAAS)

covid-19 water wildfires aaas national labs

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 1, 1970

COVID-19 is dominating the headlines, but the pandemic isn’t the only threat to human health. Water is an essential part of life, but changes in the water cycle can have disastrous results. The National Labs are working to understand and predict them.

National Labs Respond to COVID-19