The Atomic Exchange Podcast

In the 54th installment of the Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous unpack reports that the Trump administration is moving to repeal the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” the legal backbone for major federal greenhouse-gas rules. They then pivot to SpaceX’s FCC filing for “orbital data centers” and the bigger question behind all the hype: is AI-in-space technically and economically realistic?

In the 53rd installment of the Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous break down Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They unpack his claim that the rules-based order is breaking down, why “going along to get along” no longer works, and what value-based realism should mean in practice for Canada. They also discuss why the speech is being read as a “stick it to Trump” moment, what parts of that miss the point, and what Canada’s path forward could look like on trade, energy, and strategic autonomy.

In the 52nd installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous break down a Nature Communications paper asking a simple question: can wind and solar reliably power an entire country year-round? They walk through what the study finds when you add storage, overbuild, and bigger grid connections, then explain why key real-world constraints like transmission and practicality change the policy story. The takeaway is straightforward: renewables can cover a lot, but reliability still needs firm power like nuclear, hydro, or gas.

In the 51st installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous break down Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book More and More and More and its core claim: societies do not “transition” neatly from one fuel to another, they stack new energy sources on top of old ones. They explain why common transition narratives can be misleading, why “clean” shifts often just move the material and emissions burden elsewhere, and what that means for real-world policy. Tune in for a clear, practical conversation on how energy actually changes, and why the details policymakers miss matter.

In the 50th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous step away from nuclear for a milestone conversation with Dr. Mohit Bhandari, Chair of Surgery at McMaster University. They talk about why mentorship matters (especially for young men), how strong careers are actually built over decades, and why persistence beats talent more often than people think. They also dig into practical ideas you can use right now: creating a clear personal vision, learning when to say no, and choosing principles that keep you grounded as life gets busier. Tune in for an honest conversation about success, meaning, and becoming the kind of person others can rely on.

In the 49th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome back Professor Andy Wu of Harvard Business School to break down the reported U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro and what it could mean for Venezuela’s future. Rather than reading it as a pure geopolitical matter, they take an interesting management lens: analyzing how PDVSA was misrun, why output collapsed despite massive reserves, and how that failure fed sanctions, foreign dependence, and instability. They also wrestle with the hardest part of the operation: who takes over next, what a realistic “turnaround plan” would look like, and what the U.S. should prioritize if it wants a more stable outcome. Tune in for a focused conversation on Venezuela, oil, and the management choices that shape geopolitics.

In the 49th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome back Professor Andy Wu of Harvard Business School to break down the reported U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro and what it could mean for Venezuela’s future. Rather than reading it as pure geopolitical matter, they take an interesting management lens: analyzing how PDVSA was misrun, why output collapsed despite massive reserves, and how that failure fed sanctions, foreign dependence, and instability. They also wrestle with the hardest part of the operation: who takes over next, what a realistic “turnaround plan” would look like, and what the U.S. should prioritize if it wants a more stable outcome. Tune in for a focused conversation on Venezuela, oil, and the management choices that shape geopolitics.

In the 48th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous dig into Ford’s decision to end the all-electric F-150 Lightning and shift toward extended-range and hybrid models, what the sales gap reveals about demand forecasting, and why incentives and policy shifts do not fully explain the miss. The conversation then moves to the European Commission’s proposal to soften the 2035 internal combustion ban into a 90% emissions reduction target, and what that says about competitiveness, industrial policy, and the risk of government-driven whiplash for companies trying to invest long term. Along the way they compare buyer archetypes, explain why trucks are a unique stress test for batteries, and outline how policy volatility becomes a cost of capital. Tune in for a grounded discussion on EV adoption and the politics of the transition.

In the 47th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous welcome Professor Paul Nary of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to unpack how major industries evolve when a new technology takes over. They explore classic boom and bust patterns, what signals a shakeout, and why predicting timing is so hard even when the signs are obvious. The conversation shifts to AI platforms, energy as the real constraint, and how firms build a prudent portfolio of investments, partnerships, and acquisitions to preserve optionality without betting the company. They close by connecting vertical integration, thin markets, and uncertainty management to real examples from electric vehicles, computing, and the race to build infrastructure fast enough. Tune in for a sharp, framework-driven conversation on AI, energy bottlenecks, and corporate strategy.

In the 46th installment of The Atomic Exchange Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Goran Calic and Michael Tadrous break down their new research on how large language models struggle with nuclear regulation. They open with a recap of closed-door briefings at the Canadian Nuclear Association and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, then explain embeddings, how vector spaces and cosine similarity drive retrieval, and why small differences across regulations blur together. The episode walks through accuracy and distraction tradeoffs, omission risks that cascade downstream, and live tests showing that even with many retrieval attempts models still miss or mix sections. They close with practical fixes, from human-in-the-loop workflows and structured prompts to rewriting regulations into machine-readable formats that reduce error at the source.