For me it was a magazine. As a kid, somewhere I ran across a copy of a National Geographic about the energy crisis (I think it was this one: https://www.goodrea

For me it was a magazine. As a kid, somewhere I ran across a copy of a National Geographic about the energy crisis (I think it was this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1157137.National_Geographic_A_Special_Report_In_The_Public_Interest_Energy_Facing_Up_To_The_Problem_Getting_Down_To_The_Solutions https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1157137.National_Geograp...). It might have been in a waiting room or lying on a table at school, I don't remember. But it made an impression on me at an early age that solving energy problems was very very important to the state of the world. So as a kid, I played at things like 'building' a solar cell out of glue, wire, and can lids, or trying to make a nuclear reactor out of strangely colored rocks. When I was ten, I thought that if you would spin a magnet in space you could make a perpetual motion generator. After all, I knew that things in space would spin forever if nothing touched them, and a generator was basically just a magnet spinning near wires. Eventually I met some engineers who explained to me about things like electrical resistance and inductive back-voltage (Thank you Sam and Ernie). In my early teens, I kept trying to find ways to get around the things that would prevent a perpetual motion machine, and each new idea would teach me a new thing about physics. By my later teens, I had learned enough physics to give up on perpetual motion, but I was still interested in energy. I got into fusion, and spent a lot of my senior year of high school coming up with bad fusion reactor designs. I learned a lot of new physics that way too. At Georgia Tech I met a kindred spirit (Thank you Nick), and together we started a fusion startup. I don't know if I never would have been interested in energy if not for seeing that magazine, because energy issues have been everywhere during my lifetime. But I remember that magazine is where it started for me.