Catalyst with Shayle Kann

For years, the prospect of commercial nuclear fusion felt a long way off. But recent breakthroughs—like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s historic 2022 net energy gain—have marked a new chapter in the quest for fusion. Proving the physics in a lab, however, is a lot different than building a power plant that can compete on the open grid. Massive hurdles remain across physics, financing, and scaling.

In this episode, host Shayle Kann sits down with Carrie von Muench, COO of Pacific Fusion and a former venture capitalist. Carrie brings a unique, investor-minded perspective to this singular challenge.

Shayle and Carrie dive into topics like:

Net facility gain, and the difference between breaking even at a target level versus breaking even across a facility’s tech stack.

The distinctions between steady-state and inertial fusion

Why Pacific Fusion is focused on building modular reactors

The company’s strategy of utilizing widely accessible commodities like oil, plastic, metal, and water instead of specialized materials that rely on shaky supply chains.

Unpacking the “ignition cliff;”the point at which a nuclear reactor shifts from relying on outside inputs to producing energy itself

Why Pacific Fusion emulated pharma's multi-tranche funding strategies to create milestones around capital deployments and de-risk its early execution

Resources


⁠Catalyst⁠⁠: Is nuclear fusion getting close?


Catalyst: The state and future of nuclear waste


Catalyst: Building a domestic nuclear fuel supply chain


Open Circuit: Inside Meta’s massive nuclear push


Latitude Media: ARPA-E awards record $135 million to speed commercial fusion energy


Latitude Media: General Fusion’s $1 billion deal and the return of the SPAC


Latitude Media: Trump Media’s bizarre fusion play for TAE Technologies

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

While much of the world has been focused on the war in Iran’s impact on the energy sector, another arguably more impactful market has been largely overlooked: fertilizer.

The global fertilizer market is in a precarious spot. Roughly a third of the world's seaborne fertilizer trade goes through the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the war in Iran began, China, the world’s top phosphate producer, halted exports of the crucial compound. As a result, the longer the strait remains closed, the more the threat to our global food supply escalates.

In this episode, Shayle speaks with Josh Linville, vice president of Fertilizer at StoneX, to make sense of the global fertilizer market and its cascading impacts.

Shayle and Josh cover topics including:

The current state of global fertilizer markets

The tenuous relationship between natural gas prices and the cost of producing nitrogen-based fertilizers in Europe

How stalled shipments of fertilizer could impact supply and demand for next year’s planting season

The impact of Chinese phosphate export restrictions on the global market

How a prolonged closure of the Strait could impact food supplies around the world

Resources

Josh Linville’s X account


Open Circuit: Iran, energy shocks, and the case for distributed power


Latitude Media: DOE’s second ‘Energy Dominance’ loan was reworked to embrace coal


Latitude Media: This isn’t demand destruction. It’s rationing.

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

Even though autonomous passenger vehicles have entered the mainstream in cities across the country, autonomous trucks still lag behind. But Humble Robotics thinks it has cracked the code with a new design that completely does away with the tractor-trailer model we see on the highway every day.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Eyal Cohen, founder and CEO of Humble. The company built its electric trucks from the ground up. Fully cabless, they combine the tractor and trailer into a single platform designed to optimize energy efficiency, unit economics, and roadway safety.

Shayle and Eyal explore topics including:

The differences between autonomous passenger and freight vehicles

The challenge of transporting heavy payloads at high speeds

Why Humble has shifted away from LiDar in favor of a camera-centric approach offered by visual language models (VLMs)

The unit economics of electric and autonomous freight

Why Humble is embracing a "hub-to-hub" model for its trucks

The evolving regulatory landscape for autonomous trucking

Resources


Catalyst: Volts crossover: Six big energy questions


Latitude Media: Can the Tesla Semi finalize decarbonize trucking?


Latitude Media: Rivian and EnergyHub are teaming up on managed charging


The Green Blueprint: A billion-dollar play on electrified transport

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

As the utility-scale solar market collides with an era defined by massive load growth, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) firms are rethinking their strategy to meet the moment.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to George Hershman, CEO of SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar and storage construction firms in the US. George offers a unique perspective into the state of the market as well as the logistics of building gigawatt-scale projects and insights into how automation is changing the EPC game.

Shayle and George discuss:

Why George believes rising demand can help solar move past boom-and-bust cycles

How SOLV is taking on larger projects without needing to increase its workforce proportionally

How automation helps SOLV build and install utility-scale solar faster

The logistics bottleneck impacting EPCs’ ability to scale

How AI-driven simulations can help optimize installations


Catalyst: Can AI revolutionize EPC?


Catalyst: 2026 trends: Gas turbines, Texas’ load queue, and China electrifies


Catalyst: Scaling America’s domestic solar supply chain


Latitude Media: Can the US bring solar installation to below $2 per watt? 


Latitude Media: This former solar installer is all-in on software-only sales

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.

As the race to build out artificial intelligence accelerates, the infrastructure required to support it is undergoing a remarkable transformation. In February, Google announced a plan to spend $175 billion to $185 billion in CapEx for 2026— a figure roughly equivalent to the GDP of Hungary.

In this special live episode, recorded at Transition-AI 2026 in San Francisco, Shayle sits down with Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI infrastructure. Amin pulls back the curtain on how the hyperscaler is rethinking everything from data center reliability and behind-the-meter power generation to real-time inference.

Shayle and Amin discuss:

How Google’s shift from focusing on training to inference can enable more distributed, smaller-scale data center deployments

Why Google is moving away from traditional "five nines" reliability for certain workloads in exchange for doubling compute capacity

How on-site generation can serve as a "bridge" to manage interconnection latency

Google’s milestone agreement with utilities for one gigawatt of demand response

How software can co-optimize chip design, building cooling and power generation to create superefficient and flexible "AI factories"


Catalyst: The rise of flexible data centers


Catalyst: Will inference move to the edge?


Catalyst: The mechanics of data center flexibility


Open Circuit: The natural gas ‘bridge’ becomes a highway


Open Circuit: Are investors losing faith in the AI infrastructure frenzy?


Latitude Media: Energy Vault is expanding into infrastructure for AI


Latitude Media: The rise of the AI infrastructure asset class

Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Max Savage Levenson. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.

Catalyst is brought to you by FischTank PR, an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability-focused PR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early-stage and established companies. Learn more about their PR approach and how they can support your company’s messaging by visiting fischtankpr.com.

Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com.

Tune into Critical Capital, a brand new podcast from Crux and Latitude Studios. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. Join us every other Tuesday for in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, finance, and global markets. Listen here, or wherever you get podcasts.