IIWI Fellow, Melissa Graves, and IWI Emerging Technology Focus Area Deputy Director, Hugh Harsono, speak with Lee Robison, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of General Matter, about the strategic importance of rebuilding America's uranium enrichment capability. The conversation explores the decline of the U.S. uranium enrichment industry, the risks of reliance on foreign suppliers, and why domestic enrichment is essential for both advanced nuclear energy and national security. Robinson also discusses the role of private industry in addressing national security priorities, arguing that close collaboration between government and commercial innovators is essential to strengthening America's energy security, industrial base, and long-term technological leadership.
The transcript below has been edited for readability while preserving substance.
Melissa Graves: Hello! I'm Melissa Graves, a Fellow with IWI's Emerging Technology program.
Hugh Harsono: And I'm Hugh Harsono, Deputy Director for the Emerging Technology Focus Area at IWI.
Melissa: Today, we're joined by Lee Robinson, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of General Matter, a company working to restore domestic uranium enrichment. Our conversation goes beyond nuclear energy to explore what it takes to rebuild critical industries, the role of private-sector innovation in national security, and how government and industry can work together to strengthen America's industrial base.
Hugh: We hope you enjoy the conversation. If you have comments or questions, we'd love to hear from you at EmergingTech@irregularwarfare.org.
Melissa: Lee, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here. Tell us about yourself.
Lee Robinson: Yeah, Melissa, Hugh, it's great to be here. Thank you for hosting me. So as you mentioned, Chief Operating Officer of General Matter. What is General Matter? General Matter is the private sector organization, the American private sector organization that's focused on bringing uranium enrichment back to the United States. So we are designing, building and operating our own organic enrichment capability.
My background is military and finance. So I started my career in what's called private credit, lending to energy companies all around the United States, both alternative energies that turned into renewable energies, and the traditional energies like the fracking boom that happened down in the shale plays in the US in the late 2000s. Left that, joined the military, went right into special operations as an intel officer in the Army, specifically with an organization called the Ranger Regiment. Got to see how we conduct a different part of American diplomacy all around the world, and also spent a little bit of time inside the intelligence community in D.C.,
My last stint on active duty was a place called Defense Innovation Unit, which is all about bringing commercial technology into the federal acquisition system. And me and a handful of others started our energy portfolio, trying to fix how the Department of Defense at the time, now the Department of War, was acquiring capabilities on energy generation, distribution, and usage. Did a lot of work on batteries, did a lot of work on generation for all of our bases all around the world. And the last projects that we were doing, which really were the only way we were going to fix how the Defense Department acquires electrons at scale, were putting micro reactors onto our installations. So that turned into what is now known as the Janus program.
That project and doing the diligence for that project, I found what is the worst supply chain in America. It's not just the worst supply chain in energy. It's by far the worst supply chain facing really the Western world. And that is uranium. If you know anything about the nuclear industry, you'll see that it is divided into two. You have nuclear reactors. We've got 94 of them on our grid today that provide about 20 percent of all power. And there's a whole lot more development happening in the nuclear reactor space. And then almost similar to oil and gas, you've got a fuel industry and that fuel industry, unfortunately, more or less does not exist in the United States, despite it being developed in the United States as part of both the Manhattan Project and then as part of early Cold War programs and then industrialized in the United States.
It unfortunately, after the end of the Cold War, went overseas, and it runs mostly through Russia and China today. Fifty percent of all enrichment, which is the primary refinement capability for uranium, is in Russia. Roughly 20 percent of all enrichment is in China. The remainder is in two state-owned enterprises in western Europe, so we, America, do not have a seat at the table when it comes to the uranium fuel supply chain and we should. Sorry, a little bit of a long-winded way of saying, COO of General Matter, looking forward to the conversation
Melissa: So it's really great to have you here. And I just want to give the listeners or the viewers a little bit of my perspective and how you came onto my radar in the first place. Because I had the opportunity to meet you back in April, 2025. At the time, you were coming to the Citadel as part of a larger AI private sector group of people. And I have to tell you that your bio really threw me, because I was looking at bios of people that were straight AI. And then I look at yours and it's uranium. And I was like, What is happening here? Why is someone related to uranium coming to the Citadel to talk about AI. And that was really confusing to me until I met you and I started digging into it. And I have to credit you with really shaping how I understand geopolitics today and understanding the challenge that the U.S. has with uranium has really upended my worldview of geopolitics.
And so I just want to ask you today, can you speak to the viewers who were very much like me? Like, why are we talking about uranium in 2026? Because once you wrap your head around it, you realize you're involved in some of the most relevant conversations related to energy and geopolitics.
Lee: Yeah, Melissa, what you find is I think every large-scale purchaser of electrons goes through what you just went through, which is you start thinking about, I need to build a capability. So if you're an AI company, I need to build a bunch of data centers. Or if you're any form of a manufacturing industry, say you're part of the steel industry, I need to build a steel plant. I'm going to need a site, and I'm going to need a whole lot of electricity. Okay, where am I going to get my electricity from? Well, today I'm probably going to get it from natural gas. If I'm lucky, I might be in a good place for some renewables, maybe geothermal. But long-term, those are near-term solutions that are usually going to be higher cost down the road. It's a bridge solution. What is it a bridge to? It's a bridge to nuclear fission. The long-term solution for just about every large-scale buyer of electrons—and you're seeing this today, even with Walmart making some decisions in the last couple of weeks about buying power from nuclear facilities—but the large-scale solution is going to be nuclear fission. Okay, you see that? That's the next bottleneck.
Well, when you look at nuclear fission, what is holding back those reactors from deployment of more power? Right now it's 20 percent of the grid. What is holding it back from keeping up with the grid as the grid expands? Or expanding the amount of energy mix that's coming from nuclear? Well, what's holding them up is there's siting, permitting. They actually know how to do that relatively well. They're learning how to build better. But what's going to hold them up in the future? The bottleneck that's looming is where are they going to get their fuel from? That fuel supply? It comes with some pretty awful decisions if we don't start building both enrichment facilities and the rest of the fuel cycle in the United States.
So the bottleneck, I think of it as like Russian nesting dolls, right? The bottleneck on U.S. economic might is probably AI and manufacturing, and also keeping the cost down for mom and dad for their utility bills. And then the bottleneck inside of that is nuclear fission, getting reactors online. And then the bottleneck inside of that is enrichment. So what we've done is we've decided we're going to run right at the primary bottleneck. The one that if you overwhelm that one, then it releases the pressure on everything else. So we're focused on making sure that those ambitions, whether it be AI manufacturing or just keeping the cost down, those ambitions are not going to be held up by nuclear fuel.
Hugh: That sounds very interesting. And I think you draw a very good connection for our viewers, specifically between AI, nuclear energy and energy infrastructure as a whole. My question, to follow up to your current statements are, how should national security professionals think about energy security, especially so down deep into the supply chain? Because we talked a little bit about nuclear reactors, innovation in nuclear, but then a lot of what General Matter is doing is focused on the American portion of that supply chain. So why should those nuclear professionals care about something that seems so far away and seems so far into that long-term planning for infrastructure?
Lee: Yeah, Hugh, great question. Depends on what part of national security to figure out exactly why you should care about it. But in all cases, energy is a major factor. So let's say you're joining the military, right? And you're seeing, how am I going to be able to project power overseas? Well, projecting power overseas means I need to move a lot of equipment. If you look at how we move equipment today, well our our single largest capabilities of moving things are aircraft carriers. How are those powered? Those are powered by nuclear reactors. Our single greatest capability to project power overseas is submarines. How are those powered? Those are powered through nuclear reactors. That fuel supply for those submarines and aircraft carriers, it relies on the exact same supply chain as those commercial power plants do in the U.S. So if you see just how are we going to project power overseas?
Well, we also when we do go overseas, we have to stand up facilities. We have to stand up facilities that create this long supply chain of fuel. That supply chain, if you look, I think I believe there was math done in the midst of the Global War on Terror where it cost us something like $450 for every gallon of gas that was coming into Afghanistan. Well, I'm in California and my gas is pretty expensive, but I think my gas is still only about $6 for every gallon. And hopefully that's going to come down at some point soon. But $450, you can't withstand that at any large scale.
So we need to figure out a better way to detach the tether from these long fuel supply chains, because not only are they expensive, they're also a massive target. What you learn as a military officer is, go after the vulnerabilities. What are the first vulnerabilities you go after? Tankers. If you cut a military off of its fuel supply chain, that military stops movement completely. You take away all capability. So if you have a military perspective and you're concerned about projecting power, you are definitely concerned about energy. It is the primary piece of your logistics.
If you have, let's say, the other side of diplomacy, you're a member of the State Department. Well, what is your greatest piece of soft power? It's U.S. economic might. U.S. economic might relies on strong amounts of energy, an abundant source of energy. Probably one of the greatest things that happened to U.S. diplomacy over the last twenty years was the fracking boom. Because what it did is, it kept us—it allowed us to island ourselves if needed and it allowed us to supplant sources of energy overseas that were otherwise coming from potentially adversarial nations. Well, what if we had to do that on potentially uranium? Because right now, our adversaries are building Belt and Roads that are nuclear Belt and Roads. They're building nuclear power plants all over the world, and those nuclear power plants come with a tail of fuel that might be generations long. So if Russia comes into your country and builds you a nuclear power plant, it then also signs you up for a fuel agreement. So now your economy—you might have just gotten a couple of gigawatts of electricity. You might have doubled the power in your entire economy from this power plant that Russia just built you. And now it is entirely reliant on all fuel system coming from Russia. Well, when Russia asks you to make a U.N. vote, and they dangle that thing over your head, you might be a little bit more pressed to make that U.N. vote, even though you know it might be the wrong decision. That's not a great place for U.S. diplomacy. Because we don't have an option right now to be able to say, don't take that Russian reactor with its fuel supply. Take this American reactor with our domestic fuel supply. And the reason why we don't have that as an option is not because of the reactors. We actually have great companies that have built reactors and we have companies that are coming right behind them, building additional reactors, whether it be the SMR—the small modular reactors—or the micro reactor group, but they don't have a fuel supply. We have a giant gap and that gap is the enrichment gap.
Melissa: Okay. So, all right. Walk our viewers through why we have this gap in the first place and also how much effort is it going to take on the part of the United States to fill that gap?
Lee: Yeah, Melissa, I mean, this is a long time coming and it is probably all well-intentioned of how we got here. There were some great decisions made. In fact, if I was in their position, I probably would have made the exact same decision, but I don't think there was a long enough vision to it. So let's wind back the clock a little bit to how we got here. If you look at the nuclear fuel supply chain, government always owned production on enrichment. And the reason why government owned production on enrichment is because it is the difference between whether or not a country is a weapon state. Because to become a weapon state, you need two things: you need weapons and you need enriched uranium. In fact, the Manhattan Project, if you break up the Manhattan Project, there was three locations. There was Washington State, there was New Mexico, and there was Tennessee. Tennessee was all doing enrichment. So it was one third of Manhattan Project. In fact, if you go back to the movie Oppenheimer, you'll see them dropping the marbles in the giant jar. One of those giant jars, that was enriched uranium.
So because of that, the Department of Energy, and governments around the world that were doing this, made it government production. But the U.S. is pretty smart when it does government production because it knows it's not as good as the private sector of doing this type of thing. So it focused only on the thing that it had to do, which was enriching the uranium, and the rest of the fuel cycle built around it. But when you have government production in the middle, it's really challenging to actually build around it something that's gonna be vibrant. So what happened was the government built a capability in the early 1950s that was gaseous diffusion.
They built two major plants, one in Portsmouth in Southern Ohio, and the other one in Paducah, Kentucky. The vast majority of it was done in Paducah, Kentucky. In fact, I would say that's where we industrialize enrichment. It's really where we won the Cold War because it's what unlocked a whole lot of power onto our grid. Those two sites were based on a technology that is uneconomic today. It's a technology that is just far too energy dense. It's something like a high single digit percentage of all electricity in the United States was going to those two sites when they were operating. So those operated for, in one case, I believe those operated for fifty years and the other one it operated for sixty-five to seventy years. What happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a leap-ahead technology was developed. And that leap-ahead technology produced the same output for about one-tenth the amount of electricity.
And that's what all the other states went to, all the other nations that were conducting enrichment. At the time, we're talking about a handful of Western states and Russia. That's what they all moved to. They moved to what's called gas centrifuge. And that gas centrifuge, because it was more economic, they were producing at a far lower cost than the Americans.
So you keep progressing on. We have this industrial might of enrichment that's at a laggard technology. And we have our overseas competitors that are producing mostly for their own needs with a much lower cost base. What happens when the Cold War ends? Early 1990s, the Cold War ends and Russia is kind of our friend at that point, or at least perceived as we might be able to be friends with Russia. They have this nuclear industry that is vibrant and in dire need of additional capital. The U.S. created this, what I think was a genius program at the time, called Megatons to Megawatts. We wanted to reduce the amount of weapons in the world while also maintaining some nuclear safeguards inside the nuclear industry, which was destitute. So what we said was, hey, let's take your WMDs, let's break them down, take your uranium, maybe downblend it to something that's useful for our power plants, and we'll buy it from you. What were the consequences of that? It stood up an enrichment industry in Russia that then became the dominant commercial provider. And it destroyed the rationale for U.S. enrichment because we had a cost basis that was far too high. It only took twenty years for the entire U.S. industry to disappear.
So if you look at 2013, in Paducah, Kentucky, the last plant is closed. And they've been decommissioning ever since. After 2012, shortly thereafter, all U.S. mines get shut down. We went down to zero uranium mined out of the ground as of a few years ago. And they've been restarting. The mining industry is coming back and coming back in a big way, in part because they see the rest of the industry standing up. The only converter, which you have to go yellow cake, turn it into a gas with a converter. The only converter shut down in 2017. It is also restarting right now. Zero enrichment providers in the U.S. that are American owned at commercial scale. There is one enrichment plant that was started up in 2010 that's owned by one of those Western European state owned enterprises. And then the fuel fabrication side, that was relatively vibrant because that was necessary for all the individual reactors, but they weren't getting their fuel from U.S. ’sources.
So what happened by the end of the 20-teens, you have effectively a long tether that leads all the way back to Russia for a significant portion of U.S. electricity.
Hugh: That's quite a history. I think it's very interesting just to hear that background, especially for our listeners. I think the next relevant question that I would have that kind of came to mind as you discussed all of this is public-private partnerships. So I know that the Department of Energy has been making a big push to deploy and streamline a lot of the nuclear reactor development, right? So whether that's streamlining permitting, for development, providing funding for companies looking to deploy nuclear reactors. How do you kind of reconcile this big push for deploying nuclear assets while having that very limited domestic uranium enrichment capabilities? And how do you kind of see public-private partnerships, especially in your current role at General Matter, playing to close that gap?
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. So let's say, how do we win on the global stage? Right? Because that's really what we're trying to get to. We're trying to make it so that the Chinese and Russian nuclear Belt and Road can't beat American options. And the way to not be able to beat American options is to have a low cost and high reliability. But to get to a low cost and high reliability, you have to have start points. You got to catalyze an industry. And that's what the U.S. Government is trying to do right now. And I think they're doing a really good job at it. So you look at what Secretary Wright's trying to do, he's put a ton of focus on getting the commercial nuclear industry going. And they're doing that through reactors and they're doing it through fuel and they're doing it through really smart initiatives. And actually, it's not just Secretary Wright, but I think Secretary Wright is leading the charge across outside of the Department of Energy. This is a holistic government approach to catalyzing an industry, to getting both startups and legacy incumbents moving and developing capabilities, building systems.
So if you look at last week, Westinghouse received, I think, a seventeen billion dollar loan commitment from EDF, Energy Dominance Fund, inside the Department of Energy. That allows them to build several more sites all around the country. And as you get more being built, we saw this with the Vogtle plants down in Georgia, the first reactor was very expensive. The second reactor was significantly less because you had the learning curve. You just had more people that knew what they were doing. And it's not just more people in construction doing what they're doing, or HVAC systems doing what they're doing, but it's also designers knowing what they're doing, operators knowing what they're doing, regulators knowing what they're doing. Regulators being able to say, hey, this is what happened over at the Vogtle plant, let me talk you through that anecdote. That's incredibly important. We need more experience, expertise in building and catalyzing this industry.
So let me just talk through a couple of things on what the government's doing. The government has done really smart procurement. So smart procurement means firm fixed price, milestone-based procurement, where you gotta deliver something to actually get the money. We're on a contract right now that is supposed to catalyze the development of enrichment capacity in the U.S., specifically enrichment capacity for those small modular reactors. And the way that contract reads is, it's a handful of milestones that all lead to standing up significant amounts of capacity, with a large payment at the back end after we succeed on the contract. Which means we gotta put our money at risk. We gotta be able to do the thing. And from the government's perspective, there is no money at risk until it is done, until the deliverables there. So we're shifting away from cost plus contracts that don't always have the most aligned incentives. So that's one thing is smart procurement contracts where it's firm fixed prices contracting. You know, I'm a former contracting guy for my time over at Defense Innovation Unit. So, you know, as a contracting hammer, every issue I see is a contracting nail.
But smarter contracts for procurement, subsidizing loan guarantees for the development of both reactors and fuel plants in the United States. So that's what EDF is doing. But there's also a couple other organizations that are doing that. If you look at the Export-Import Bank, they've got programs where they're trying to do exactly that. Subsidizing the development of infrastructure overseas that might be relevant for the nth of a kind. So the first one we're not going to go build in, you know, let's say Sub-Saharan Africa, but maybe the fifth one we might build in Sub-Saharan Africa. So if you look at DFC, DFC is doing exactly that, trying to subsidize through loan guarantees, building infrastructure overseas. That is a direct counterpunch to the nuclear Belt and Road. You look at making it so it's more appealing for overseas utilities to both buy U.S. reactor capabilities, but also buy U.S. fuel for the current reactors they have on their fleet. Well, that's where Export-Import Bank comes in with multiple programs that they've had. People have often seen U.S. airplanes from Boeing are sold along with a loan guarantee from Export-Import Bank. Well, the same thing is going to happen for both reactors and for the fuel that comes with it.
You look at where they're catalyzing R&D efforts. So we make sure that we're always in front of everybody on the next nuclear technology. Well, that's exactly what just happened over the last couple weeks when you had a handful of advanced reactor companies go critical for the first time. A major, major milestone that has not happened in a very, very long time. A major milestone was just accomplished by three separate companies using three very different technologies. The only way you do that is with a smart program where you deploy technical expertise to help guide the hand of really hungry young engineers.
So all of that is leading to more workforce coming into this environment. I mean, you've got mechanical engineers that are now taking nuclear engineering programs and they wouldn't have done that 10 years ago. More companies getting in the environment because they see, hey, all this infrastructure has been built. So actually there might be a fast track for me to be able to develop my power plant. More capital getting into the environment. The venture capital industry, they've been there for a few years and they're going here more in scale. There's large venture checks that are being written to companies over the last year plus. But also, since this is a piece of infrastructure, you need debt investors. The debt investors are just about there. And you're starting to see them get behind these technologies because what they see is it's de-risked. You had a major technology risk. Technology risk is not good for debt investors. That technology risk is shifting to just an execution risk.
And we're learning how to execute on these things. So you've got major banks like JP Morgan, Bank of America that are putting money behind these initiatives. I just saw the whole JP Morgan team, and this is the exact type of thing they want to lend to. So once you have that, then you've got you've got American engineering might, you got American workforce might, you've got American capital might deploying to this industry. Those are the three things that America does best, better than anybody else. Once those three things happen, I just don't see a world where we could lose.
Melissa: So let me stop you there, Lee, and let me just kind of push back on what I'm hearing and give you a chance to kind of clarify. So it sounds like we figured uranium out, General Matter and other companies, you've got it and there's venture capitalism and there's de-risking and yay, we won. Is that the correct interpretation on my part?
Lee: No, we just started the game, right? Like this is, you know, this, I don't know, pick a game. This is the first inning and we scored a run, right? But our pitcher hasn't even started pitching yet.
Melissa: Okay, so walk us through that. Like what game are we playing here? Because I'm getting the sense from you that there are stakes ahead of us in coming years. And I don't think people are aware of that. I don't think I was aware of that until very recently. So, you know, for those of us who aren't like following energy on a daily basis, what's at stake here?
Lee: Yeah, geopolitical stability, full stop. Geopolitical stability is at stake. And let me explain why. If you look at post-World War II how all international organizations and also the U.S. federal government that's focused external was structured, it was structured around one thing: make sure only countries that have weapons of mass destruction are allied nations. And even then, we want it as limited as possible. Keep the group of weaponized countries as small as possible. If you look at the UN Security Council, right, that's the original group. If you look at how the State Department is structured, it's structured around nonproliferation. If you look at how the intelligence community is structured, especially prior to the Global War on Terror, it is structured around nonproliferation. If you look at how the Department of War is structured, it is structured around counterproliferation in many cases, which is a little bit different than nonproliferation. It's really when you go past the point of, you kind of lost that nonproliferation, now you've got to go do something about it. But it's also structured on nonproliferation. If you even look at how the Department of Energy is structured, it is partially to support commercial capabilities, but it's got this organization called NNSA, National Nuclear Security Agency, that has a significant portion of its ongoing budget that is entirely focused on making sure that weapon states keep to a very small few. That could end. That whole regime— not that it was a waste of time, it kept us very safe for about seventy plus years—but that whole regime could be over within 10 years. And here's why. Nuclear is happening in the world. It's just not going to be American if we don't try and lead from the front.
And our allies are facing the exact same issues we're facing. They're facing energy insecurity. It's even worse in many countries than it is in the United States because we are lucky enough to have great shale plays and a really good oil and gas industry, right? But if you look at like, what is South Korea facing? That is an energy insecure country. What is Japan facing? It's an energy insecure country. What is Eastern Europe facing? They're facing an energy insecure country that's relying entirely on Russia. All of them see the way to get more electrons onto their system is through nuclear fission. But the problem with nuclear fission is it requires another fuel cycle to stand up, and that fuel cycle runs through enrichment.
So what they're seeing is, I need to build power plants. And I need to change my baseload power energy mix to more fission. And I also need to, if I'm allowed to, build enrichment facilities. So many of them are saying, hey, please let me build enrichment facilities. The U.S. Government has, through treaties, kept others from being able to do that. Because you know if you can build it for this, then you can build it for the other thing that nobody wants it to have. So if we do not build enrichment facilities in the United States, what you might have happen in the next five to 10 years is many of our allies will have enrichment capabilities and build enrichment at scale. And it creates issues for—the more enrichers that you have overseas, the more potential you have for states to become a weapon state. It's a very short jump. The more potential you have for an insider threat in one of those states that we don't have any control over walking an enrichment capability over to an adversarial nation.
If we look back, the countries that are inside the Security Council, they're not the only weapon states. Who are the other weapon states? North Korea, Pakistan, almost Iran. Where did all three of those guys get their enrichment capability? Came from an insider threat that stole schematics from a foreign enricher. So you could foresee a world 10 years from now where you have five more weapon states, if not more than that, with then more proliferation risk. Or you could see a world where no enrichment facilities are built anywhere outside of America. That second thing is the world that we're trying to make.
Melissa: So I just want to sit with what you said for a second, because it's amazing, but it's also terrifying at the same time. Because at the heart of all this, we're talking about nuclear energy, and that brings a lot of baggage, and that brings a lot of fear. And I think some people are thinking about the fact that, as you so beautifully laid out, Lee, like we spent decades trying to reduce the number of nuclear weapons to shift to other forms of safer energy. Now, at a time when it feels like geopolitics is as hot as it's ever been, we're like, hey, let's amp up nuclear. For some people, that sounds really terrifying. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?
Lee: Yeah, I would make the distinction that power is not weapons. So it takes capability and intent to get to those two things. Capability—enrichment capability—yes, in the wrong hands can be used, with probably a lot of capital and a lot of shielding from a host nation, can be used to get to weapons. But there is a pretty big divide. Commercial enrichment only goes up to 20 percent U-235 content. Weapons enrichment is over 90 percent. So if you see somebody going beyond 20 percent, there's no power plant in the world that runs off of that. So they're doing it for some other reason. And it takes building a significant sized facility to do exactly that.
So I do want to make the mark that there is a difference between the two. And power, what the US has done over the last, really since we started standing up nuclear power plants since say the mid-1960s, late 1960s, early 1970s, we've gotten really good at safety. The entire nuclear industry, where it has been very successful—it may not have been built fast enough—but what has been very successful is its safety record. It knows how to build power plants. It knows how to regulate power plants. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is excellent at what they do. It knows how to, it basically learned what there is to learn on handling uranium. It knows how to handle these products. And in places where they're pushing the bounds of physics, the Department of Energy has gotten very good at doing that in the government domain in a very safe way.
So from the commercial industry, especially when I look at my own company, our engineers probably have safety front of mind more so than any other one area.
Hugh: As we kind of wrap up our discussion with you, what I want to think about is, for a lot of our listeners, they may be thinking this is such an abstract concept, right? This is something that's so high level and something that's potentially not even in scope for them. What are some ways that you found that are prudent for folks to kind of get involved or to even learn more about the space in terms of nuclear energy, the nuclear enrichment domestic supply chain capabilities? What do you kind of see that would be helpful for some of our listeners and viewers to be able to work in, or at least read, to familiarize themselves with the subject matter more
Lee: Yeah, Hugh, first thing you want to do is you want to learn more about the subject right? Like the scariest thing is something you don't know about. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is all over the place. It's the reason why we say all nuclear is local. It's the reason why the communities that consider themselves nuclear communities understand the capabilities and they want more of it. So if you go to a community that's got a nuclear power plant, you go to a community that's got a fuel cycle facility, typically they want more of that there because they see that it's a safe and also reliable source of jobs in their community. So we're building in Paducah, Kentucky for a good reason, because that's the most experienced community in the country for enrichment. So first is, come to understand it.
And then I'd say, look into the fields that it touches. Because this is a high growth field. If you're making an employment decision, say you're early in your career, you're interested in becoming an engineer, or you're interested in going into construction, or you're interested in going into somewhere in say even inside the beltway, you should take a hard look at the nuclear industry. Because more than likely, it could use someone of your skill set. Because the skill sets, they're not nuclear only. The skill sets, at least how we view it is, the skill sets have underlying fundamentals. So in engineering, for example, the vast majority of our engineers are mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, and electrical engineers. We are turning them into nuclear engineers through some extreme subject matter experts that are sprinkled over the top.
That is true for the construction market. Most nuclear facilities require all the exact same capabilities that go into building a data center, or building a natural gas generation plant, or building a steel mill. It just requires a little bit in addition to that. But the vast majority of the workforce are people that are experienced on all of those other items.
If you're interested in, say, geopolitics, start reading up on how the structure post-World War II came about. Start getting to understand the nonproliferation world. I think for some reason, we kind of lost sight of that post-roughly Cold War. I think if you were to talk to someone that was coming of age, probably in the 1960s and 1970s, they maybe had a little bit more of a push to learn more about that world. But for some reason, if you came of age, say in the late 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, you completely lost sight of how important that nonproliferation structure is.
So I think we need to get a lot of that back, because if we don't get it back, we're gonna miss out on both an incredible industry that's being developed under our feet. And also we're gonna miss out on potentially it being taken by adversarial nations.
Melissa: What I love about what you're saying, Lee, and I definitely got this impression when I met you last year, is it seems like there's an excitement in the field that General Matter is in, regarding American manufacturing and American innovation that, you know, in a lot of ways, we're going back to some of maybe the U.S.'s most critical innovations after World War II, during World War II. And I sense, correct me if I'm wrong, that's happening again. And if that's the case, and we do this correctly, what does it look like in 10 years from now? Like, how is the U.S. different if we get this right?
Lee: Oh, man, Melissa, crystal ball on basically the reindustrialization of America. So I spent the first 10 years of my career lending to companies all throughout the U.S. In manufacturing industries, aerospace industries, energy domains. And what I saw was, by and large, we were amortizing developments that came about in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We weren't building new plants, or at least not nearly at the scale that we needed to build it. That's changed. So right now, you're seeing the initial part of a ramp up that I'm hopeful is exponential of people building in the U.S. Because we've figured out a way to build so that we are cost effective with our competitors, our global competitors, mostly with our global competitors in East Asia.
And now that people have figured out a way to become cost competitive, it means the restrictions that were pushing business leaders to build plants overseas instead of building them in America, those are released. So in 10 years, what you could see, is you could see the revitalization of all of the internal part of America, the entire Midwest. You know, you think of like what people consider the rust belt. Well, let’s shakes some of that rust off and turn it back into a steel belt. You could see those communities who have been hammered since probably the mid-1990s, those communities turning back on. We're seeing it in Paducah, Kentucky, the amount of investment that's going into Paducah is a multiplier of what we're putting in. I think we were just the first one to make an announcement, but there are others coming right behind us. The capital that's ready to be deployed to develop these workforces, to develop these capabilities, it's there.
So 10 years from now, oh, man. Ten years from now, I think Paducah, Kentucky is probably three times the size at least. But that's just one of many communities that look like that. And I think 10 years from now, you see manufacturing being a much larger percentage of our overall economy. I think we are still 25 to 30 percent of the global GDP, if not even increasing that. And our GDP mix may move more from services to goods.
That's a really powerful place to be. I think it's exciting to be an American, especially because of what's going to happen in the next 10 years.
Melissa: I love that you said that, and I love that we're doing this a few days before the 250th celebration of the country. I mean, it's nice to be able to talk about this and to be able to talk about it in a positive way. And I think it's exciting to think about the opportunities that are ahead of us.
We're almost at the end of our time. I want to ask you one more question, because I think your insight into this in particular is really, really important. And I think, Lee, what has distinguished you in my mind is that you speak both languages. You are so at ease talking about defense, but you were also so at ease talking about nuclear and energy, and you also understand the private sector world as well as anybody I've ever met. And as somebody who has existed in both worlds, understands both worlds, for our viewers, what insights can you give to them that would be helpful? Because my perception is that a lot of people understand one of those. They understand defense, they understand national security very well, or they understand private sector, AI, technology, whatever. But a lot of times it doesn't feel like those two constituencies are speaking the same language. What are your thoughts on that?
Lee: Melissa, I hope I give an answer that holds up to the preamble of that question.
Melissa: Sorry, I meant that in the best way possible.
Lee: That is possibly the most flattering thing anybody's ever said to me. Let me give one piece of advice here, and it's going to be grounded in an anecdote from my own personal experience. When I was 27, I had just finished my MBA that I was doing at night. I was in the midst of probably like my sixth year in private credit, working in the center of New York and really loving my job. I was able to turn manufacturing facilities back on or on for the first time because we were able to open up the capital taps for small and medium sized businesses all around America. My financial institution was allowing me to dabble in some relatively new technology. So it was cool, right?
And I didn't feel like I was having enough of an impact. And I felt like I could stay in this sliver of finance for my entire career and build a great career for myself, but not be able to do that much across the rest of the economy, and also not learn that much. I felt like I was hitting diminishing returns of what I could both do for the economy and also what I could learn. So I went to what is the most different thing I could do that I'm almost certain I would have an impact doing? And I walked into an army recruiter's office. And it is the middle of Manhattan. I walk into an army recruiter's office and I'm asking this guy, as I'm like looking at the walls, like I'm in a museum, just pointing at pictures on the wall and saying, what does that guy do? That guy's jumping out of a helicopter. That looks really cool. What does that guy do?
And these staff sergeants came over to me, and they just walked me through, this is the army, and this is how we operate. I did the exact same thing with the Marine Corps and the Air Force and the Navy. And six months later, I'm in basic training. Completely changed the entire direction of my life. Best decision I ever made. Because I was fortunate enough to be in the right place, right time, that I found a great opportunity with the special operations community. They almost immediately deployed me after sending me through some awful, great, but awful training. And got a fantastic opportunity to spend some time inside of the intelligence community at a moment in time when the U.S. was shifting away from the Global War on Terror to more of a great peer competition. And then had a great opportunity to go to a hedge fund that's probably the best hedge fund in the world and work with geniuses in a different domain.
And the entire reason is because of a willingness to make giant leaps into the unknown. So what I would say to young people, focus on building out new experiences wherever possible. And if you think you really want to do that thing, but you don't know exactly what it's going to lead to, and you're deciding between that or the safe route, take the other one.
Melissa: I love that, that's great advice. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been an honor to talk with you, I’ve learned a lot. You know, these are important conversations and I think we need to hear from people like yourself. So thank you for spending time with us today. To our viewers, thank you for your attention and we'll keep exploring emerging technology related to irregular warfare. This has been our podcast episode today and we'll see you next time.
Lee: Thanks Melissa, thanks Hugh.
