Forget Blue Zones. Japan has a Green Zone 🍵
Okinawa was the original Blue Zone, the place the entire longevity industry obsessed over. But Japan's #1 prefecture for HEALTHY life expectancy today? Shizuoka.
Green tea capital of Japan. Birthplace of wasabi, 400 years ago.
Coincidence?
Build with Japan podcast by @coral_capital ft @HayanoMotoshi@j_n_justice
Runway (@runwayml) recently committed $40M to Japan. I caught up with co-founder and CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela (@c_valenzuelab) in a Tokyo bar lined with sci-fi classics to learn more.
The company started 8 years ago with a simple goal, generate anything you want with AI. It's now moved well past video into world models that simulate the world itself. Runway makes the videos humans want to watch, and it's now making the videos robots want to watch. Train video models at enough scale and they stop being pixel generators, they start encoding how the world actually works.
Japan was supposed to be the hard part. He kept getting told you need an office, a country manager, and years of relationship building before a Japanese enterprise signs anything. Runway had none of that and is already working with major companies including Yamaha Motor and SoftBank. Japan is now their third-largest market.
We also got into why he calls some of the biggest AI labs storytelling labs, and why he runs Runway like a neural network in continuous learning.
Thanks for coming on Cris!
Scott Nolan (@ScottNolan ) was employee ~30 at SpaceX. He spent over a decade at Founders Fund backing Anduril, Radiant, and Crusoe Energy. In 2023, he went looking for a company enriching uranium domestically. There was none. So he started General Matter (@generalmatter ).
The U.S. once produced 86% of the world's enriched uranium. By 2013 it was zero. Russia filled the gap. China is scaling fast. Meanwhile, every advanced reactor company in America was hitting the same wall: no domestic fuel supply.
General Matter is changing that. $900M DOE contract. First facility in Paducah, Kentucky, the exact site where the U.S. last enriched uranium. And just weeks ago in Tokyo, a $2.4B EXIM financing deal to supply Japanese utilities.
Why is this important to Japan? Because 70% of Japan's oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz. Because Japan currently imports all its enriched uranium from Europe. Because Japan has been burned by energy dependency in 1941, the 1970s, and right now.
One pellet of enriched uranium contains as much energy as 100 barrels of oil. You can stockpile it for years. The energy density alone makes nuclear the most defensible base load option for an import-dependent economy.
I sat down with Scott over sushi in Tokyo to talk about all of this. Enjoy.
(00:00) Intro
(01:17) The $2.4B EXIM Deal
(04:43) Why General Matter Had to Be Started
(11:51) The Uranium Supply Chain
(15:40) SpaceX and Nuclear: The Parallel
(19:54) Japan's Energy Security
(25:58) Safety Myths and Next-Gen Reactors
(31:10) Enrichment Economics
(37:18) The SpaceX Approach to Cheaper Enrichment
(46:43) Japan Supply Chain Partnership
(56:50) Why Peter Thiel Joined the Board
(01:02:10) Founders Fund on Japan
(01:09:02) Definite Optimism and the Anduril Playbook
(01:13:10) General Matter's Culture
(01:15:27) Five-Year Scaling Plan