Catalyst with Shayle Kann

In 2020, China exported about a million cars a year. Now, it’s tracking somewhere around twelve million — surpassing the historic peaks of giants like Japan and Germany. 

Yet this massive global shift feels nearly invisible in the U.S. A 100% tariff on Chinese vehicles, combined with strict rules keeping Chinese hardware and software off American roads, has effectively built a regulatory wall around the domestic market. But in virtually every other corner of the globe, Chinese automakers are dramatically reshaping markets — from Europe and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Canada.

In this episode, Shayle sits down with Michael Dunne, the CEO of Dunne Insights and author of the upcoming book Car Wars. Shayle and Michael map out the chaotic dynamics of the global auto market and consider what’s actually happening inside China’s automotive powerhouse. And they explore the biggest question of all: can America permanently shield legacy automakers, or is it just delaying an inevitable wave?

Shayle and Michael discuss topics including:

- How China successfully applied its massive manufacturing capacity to the automobile industry.

- The market forces governing China’s massive car exports

- Unpacking the two tiers of Chinese automakers: Legacy scale giants like BYD, Geely, and SAIC versus the "Teslas of China” like Xiaomi, Xpeng, Leapmotor, and Nio.

- Why China’s expansion is already forcing major European and Japanese automakers to plan for closures and layoffs.

- How regulatory frameworks in China are accelerating the commercialization of autonomous driving far quicker than in the U.S.

- Concerns over cybersecurity in Chinese automobiles

- Driving with Dunne podcast

- Catalyst: Repurposing EV batteries for grid storage

- Catalyst: Demystifying the Chinese EV market

- Catalyst: Has Humble Robotics cracked the code on autonomous trucking?

- Open Circuit: The AI race is really an electro-industrial race, led by China

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

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.

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.

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.

While global electricity demand is unquestionably rising, we may nonetheless be underestimating the scale of necessary future generation.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Nic Fulghum, senior energy and climate data analyst at Ember. Nic is the co-author of Ember’s annual Global Electricity Review. This year’s installment, released in April, demonstrates that renewable sources – and solar in particular – are continuing to grow exponentially, even as those markets mature. In 2025, solar generation grew by a remarkable 30% year-over-year globally; its highest rate in eight years.

At the same time, global fossil generation declined in 2025, driven by drops in coal generation in both China and India. But as solar surges, how quickly grid-connected batteries can step in to absorb peak demand remains to be seen.

In their conversation, Shayle and Nic dive deep into the data behind global electricity generation in 2025 and consider the future of the grid. They explore a range of topics, including: 

- Why Ember’s report focuses on generation instead of capacity

- How solar continues to maintain exponential growth rates

- Why fossil generation has dropped in China and India

- How battery storage is being used to shift midday solar peaks to shoulder hours

- What the US’ LNG supply glut means for its power grid trajectory

Resources

- Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026

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

- Catalyst: More 2026 trends: Solar costs, oil oversupply, and the startup slump

- Catalyst: Scaling America’s domestic solar supply chain

- Open Circuit: Clean energy didn’t collapse in 2025. It adapted

- Open Circuit: State of the transition: Oil shocks, power prices, and grid bottlenecks

- Latitude Media: The Iran war doesn’t give China an energy advantage. The US did

- Latitude Media: Putting numbers on China’s cleantech influence abroad

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.

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.

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.

Amidst the increasing urgency of powering data centers, a new solution has entered the mix: send them out to sea.

In this episode, Shayle speaks to Garth Sheldon-Coulson, co-founder and CEO of Panthalassa. The company is building 85-meter steel "nodes" – taller than Big Ben – that it deploys into the deep ocean. These untethered, self-propelled nodes harness wave energy to power AI clusters, then beam their data back to land via satellite. The technology isn’t without its fair share of logistic complications, but it nonetheless offers a pathway to powering the AI boom that’s largely independent from grid or fuel constraints.

Shayle and Garth cover topics including:

- The physics and mechanics that power Panthalassa’s nodes

- The significance of building an autonomous fleet

- The energy generation waiting to be tapped in the open ocean

- The logistics and unit economics behind scaling Panthalassa’s technology

- Why deep-sea compute is well-suited for long-running workloads like inference and reinforcement learning

- Catalyst: AI scaling pathways: On grid, on edge, off grid, off planet

- Catalyst: How to build more hydropower

- Latitude Media: Are Thiel-funded floating data centers enough to make wave energy pencil? 

- Open Circuit: Grid utilization vs expansion: The 100 GW debate

- Latitude Media: What geothermal can learn from offshore wind’s demise

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 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.

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.

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.