E8: The Fusion Marathon

There’s this joke that fusion is always 30 years away. 50 years ago, it was 30 years away. 20 years ago, it was still thirty years away. Today, though… we might be within a decade. We spent the first half of the season on nuclear fission, and the last episode on many of the other energy sources that will play a role in meeting humanity’s growing energy demands and building an Age of Miracles. All of them will be critical. But there’s a growing chorus of people who believe that if we’re going to meet the demand for 3-5x the amount of energy we use today, and do it with clean energy, we’re going to need clean energy. And that as we climb the Kardashev Scale – the framework for measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy it can use – fusion is going to be our ladder. In today's episode, we’ll cover the basics of fusion energy – what it is, how it works, why it matters, how progress is measured, and what the main approaches are. Thank you to this episode’s guests: Clay Dumas, Andrew Côté, Sehila Gonzalez, Ian Hogarth, and Ryan Umstattd. SPONSORS: RIPPLING SPEND | WEIGHTS AND BIASES | GIVEWELL | ANROK Imagine total control over your company's spending with Rippling Spend, the all-in-one platform for expense reports, corporate cards, and bill pay. Visit for a free demo and one month free trial. Advanced training for building production-ready RAG applications. Learn from experts to overcome LLM challenges, evaluate systematically, and integrate advanced features. Includes free Cohere credits. Visit to start the RAG++ course today. GiveWell spends 50,000 hours every year doing deep-dives into different charitable programs to try to find the ways to do the most good for your dollar. Visit to find out more or make a donation. Select PODCAST and enter Econ 102 at checkout to make sure they know you heard about them from us. Anrok is the enterprise-grade solution that automates sales tax compliance worldwide. Visit to claim your free nexus study and take control of your SaaS tax strategy. – A huge thank you to our presenting sponsors for Season 1: Range Fund Holdings: Visit or contact your financial advisor to learn more about the Range Nuclear Renaissance ETF and start investing in the future of energy. Secureframe: Get 10% off your first year of Secureframe: Pilot.com: Get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months, go to Clean Air Task Force For the full list of resources referenced in this show:

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E8: The Fusion Marathon is an episode from Not Boring by Packy McCormick.

This episode is 55:22 long.

This episode was published on Dec 8, 2023.

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