Dueling Presidential interviews, SpaceX’s big catch, Robotaxis, Uber buying Expedia?, Nuclear NIMBY

25:54So I thought that was like the most compelling product of the whole thing for me was the possibility of a sled, like a skiff that you could do anything you want with would be really exciting for societies. And congratulations to the team. And it's going to take a while, but I could see them having that robot actually. I think congrats to a need. He just got promoted. I saw that. He's in charge of all AI. I think he's in charge of all manufacturing and sales in North American. Oh, okay. Well, there it is. So I'm trying to meet Afshore. Yeah. I mean, listen, guys, I have big news. I just bought my first Tesla.

26:32Oh, you did? Did you go with a plaid? Yeah. Model S plaid, yeah. Yeah. I test drove it for two weeks and sold itself. And I was using the FSD. I use FSD everyday. I use FSD and it was like really impressive. Super impressive. I've tried Tesla a couple times over the years and I never really never really worked for me the quality Just didn't feel like what I like given what I had before the car was you were an Audi guy, right? But Audi guy. Yeah. Yeah. How are you guys? And so yeah, that's yeah, that's like anyway. It's a it's a big milestone I really I thought the FSD was the selling and then the speed on the plot.

27:08It's just insane It's better than my RS7 like I am incredible with all of my Tesla's I put it in show mode because when it's in that plaid mode or whatever like coffee It's my favorite. I love it. I get on the line. But if you have passengers, the kids in the back seat would hit like literally nauseous because it's too fast. You have to be careful with the passengers there. It's so fast. It was awesome. Awesome. All right. Well, there you have it. Robo taxi start waiting. Get to it last week. We almost put the show back a day or two just to do it. In other news, Uber is exploring a bid to purchase.

27:39Expedia breaking news. This was dispeled as we got here on the show. They said this was like very preliminary third party talks and that there's no serious talks going on about this. Financial Times reported that advisors were trying to look at if a deal structure would be possible between Uber and Expedia. Expedia's got a $20 billion market cap. They popped 8 % on the news. Obviously, Uber, on the other hand, trading at 170 billion market cap or so, that dropped 3%. If you didn't know, Dara was the CEO of Expedia from 2005 to 2017. He's still on the board. And it looks like this was a trial balloon.

28:18You know, Uber's two biggest businesses, rides and Uber Eats, but they also do freight and train booking. Star has been pretty clear he wants to create a super app, like you have in China or some other markets. Speed has got a lot of cool products, hotels .com, or a bit of a trial -lossity, or... And I think the most interesting one, free -brage, you know what I'm talking about, this is VRBM, vacation rental by owner, it was like Airbnb before Airbnb existed. And if you look at this chart, since there are left, the Dara effect, Expedia has gone exactly sideways. The revenue has grown modestly.

28:56What do you think of this deal? Chema, I'll just go right to you with this one since you like to stupid. Stupid, okay. There you have it, folks. Reason number one, it's stupid, and reason number two, I mean, this is a $20 billion market cap business. You probably have to pay a control premium of 50%. So the question is, if you were going to spend $30 billion today in the public markets, what would you spend it on? And I think the most important lens that you have to use to answer that question is, what reinforces a note that I have while also being inoculated from the risks of AI? and I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data.

29:49So the problem that Expedia has is the same that booking and a bunch of these other folks have, which is that the principal heartbeat of the company, flight information and other things, are licensed to them by third parties. And so what they are is a UI in a front door. I think it's way too early in the evolution of AI to know that that's safe. And in fact, I think a more reasonable assumption is that those things are pretty fragile. And part of what may explain the doldrums of the stock is that I think people are anticipating a world where, for example, I don't know if you saw, but perplexity launched something this week.

30:24It's just in test mode. They whitelisted me into it, but it's basically a checkout concept. So you tell perplexity what you would like it to buy and then it will go and complete the transaction for you. So in the example of flight bookings, you could go directly to United because a perplexity will just show you all of the flights. They'll show you the exact prices and then it'll go and execute that for you with your payment method. But in a world that looks like that, where these companies have the money to pay for the data feeds, the existing V1 .0 generation UIs, I think, are in trouble. So it would just be a very bad capital allocation decision.

31:09Now that's okay to get things wrong, but not for $30 billion wrong. You can probably do it for a couple hundred million dollars wrong or maybe even a billion $30 ,000 wrong because you can absorb that as a $150 or $60 billion company. But 30 billion is too big of a price to pay for that kind of risk. I would agree with you. And there's other things they could buy like we ride or pony AI and a bunch of these AI companies that are doing self -driving. So why not double down on that freeberg? The one thing you and I talked about was kind of VRBO, which is a very cool marketplace. And that feels directly in the Uber kill zone.

31:43What do you think about them? just maybe carving out and buying VRBO and having an Airbnb. Contemporary. Just by Waymo. Why don't they just go to Google and give them $30 million of Uber stock and just carve in Waymo? Isn't that the better? I think that's what's going to happen. I've been hearing rumblings of that. So I think that Dara knows Expedia better than anyone. He ran the business for what a decade or so. Yep. And so he knows how that business this operates. And so if he's looking at this thing and the stock price has been flat roughly since he left in 2017, if you look at the underlying financial performance, you could kind of start to construct a rationale for buying Expedia this cheap.

32:25And it would be very accretive to Uber, even if there are these big strategic risks on the horizon. So just to give you some numbers on it all, Uber has got about 150 million monthly active users, Expedia has about 45 to 50 million customers a year that use the service and pay for stuff. So there's a real opportunity to think about the Uber customer base that's installed as being almost an opportunity to market to them Expedia services and Cross -L. So Expedia on an annual basis is spending about 8 billion a year in sales and marketing and about 720 million a year in G &A costs. So and they're running about 3 billion EBITDA right now.

33:12Run rate. So if you cut about half the G &A in an acquisition because you don't need all the people that overlap with Uber's people, you know, and you cut about 30 % of the sales and marketing dollars because you can cross sell into the Uber install base. You could see a scenario where you could increase Expedia's EBITDA by 75 to 100 % maybe getting it as high as $6 billion. And while Expedia's market cap trades at $220 billion, this is off of obviously the recent news that they might get acquired. If you kind of assume a 40, 50 % price premium to the last 90 -day average of the stock price, which is kind of typical or common for a deal like this, they're probably paying $26 billion for the company.

33:51And they got about $4 billion in that cash. So you're kind of paying about 22 billion enterprise value to buy Expedia So 22 billion of enterprise value and if you can bump the EBITDA up to six billion a year That's a pretty low multiple. I mean you could kind of see yourself Rationalizing this just from a financial basis that you're paying four times EBITDA to buy this thing And Dara knows this thing and he would have great command over what needs to be done over there And he would have a great sense of what to change and what's gone wrong. And there's a lot of interesting assets inside of Expedia.

34:25VRBO is a great one that's been under monetized and under utilized. I don't know if you've used the UX on VRBO versus Airbnb. There's obviously some influence that Eric could have with people that he knows well that could go in and fix that interface and make it a better service. And even as AI starts to step in and hotels maybe integrate better with agents and so on. And they show up in a more ubiquitous way. There's other things that Expedia does like build vacation packages and travel packages that are high margin products that they sell that are a little bit different than what you're used to with just booking a flight.

34:56Booking flights makes no money for anyone, but vacation packages is where all the money's at. And so theoretically, Expedia could be smarter about how they build vacation packages and personalize them for families, and that's where they can make real margin, like 20, 30 % margin. So I could see a story where this all starts to click for the board at Uber saying maybe it makes sense. Darin knows what he's talking about. We could buy this thing for four times, pro format EBITDA. This could be hugely accretive for us. So I think that's why this is happening, why this conversation may be happening.

35:25That's just me trying to understand. I think it's a good steal. What the rationale might be? Can you scope back and explain how would they drive up EBITDA so much? So they're spending about $8 billion a year run rate on sales and marketing at Expedia right now. And Uber has got 150 million active installed users that are using this Uber services every The idea would be customers. Yeah, beyond actually paying customers. So if Uber could cross sell some number of Expedia services to their installed base at Uber, which they could test and do a little experiment and see if it works, they may be able to reduce the marketing dollars that Expedia spending to acquire customers through other third party sources like Google and Bing and other places.

36:06So there's a rationale. That's where I think the logic breaks down. I don't think Uber customers and want to be cross -sold on booking a hotel. See, this is where I think like MBA thinking is very different than product thinking. Like an MBA looking at this would say, well, you know, Expedia and Uber are both in the travel business. Their apps both involve booking trips. So we can cross sell Expedia from Uber and then cut Expedia's marketing budget. I think that's how an MBA would sort of hand wave over it. I think the way like a product manager would look at this is to say, what is the user want to do?

36:43And I know that when I use the Uber app, I just want to basically make a couple of clicks, set my destination, get my car, and then move on. And there was a product initiative a few years back at Uber where they tried to capture the user's attention during the ride, and they added like this. That's right, yeah, that whole ad thing, that ad thing, that ad thing. That's an ad thing. It's actually pretty good. Well, it was like an entertainment stream or something inside the app. No, but they dialed it way back because I don't see it anymore. It was just clutter. Would you trust Darra's judgment on this, Saks?

37:16If Darra were to think about what the Uber user would want, and he could rationalize some percentage of them, they could cross sell expi -de -a -services into. I mean, ultimately, I think it's his decision, right? Well, if you're describing, it's basically a private equity play. Darra's going to come in as a private equity buyer effectively, and he knows the business and will run it to reduce cost, may boost some revenue. And maybe there was a justification for that. But if you're trying to justify it based on cross selling, I don't think users of the Uber app will wanna be cross sold when they book a taxi, okay?

37:50They just wanna be able to affect their transaction as efficiently as possible. And just to finish the point I was making on that whole entertainment stream that they had, they dialed that product way back, because it got in the way. You'd be in the Uber app, trying to figure out how to change your destination or something, and all of a sudden you're being shown like some entertainment product. It's not what users want it. And it was always kind of a banana's idea to think that just because the user books and Uber that you own their attention during that ride, because during that ride you're really competing with every app on the iPhone, right?

38:27I mean, and that's the problem is you want to get in and out of the Uber app. It's about transacting efficiently. What about not the moment when you're when you're writing in an Uber, but the moment when you say as an Uber user, Hey, I need to book travel. I got to go on a vacation to often. I never get to go on my Uber app for that. The only time I open, but what if they put that feature in there? What if they had a towel that said book your travel here? You know, when I open the Uber app, when I want to hail a taxi, that's what it's like. I bring a guy. There are large number of people who maybe don't have a, you know, an assistant to book their hotels in advance and like that would be most people, J .K .L.

39:01I would not think to go into Uber to do that. It would just be clutter. Well, no, but they already have a hotels .com partnership. And then the Uber one membership has been growing pretty nicely. And the advertising is doing a billion dollars a year. And that is just the money printing machine because you know that this person's in Uber Black. You know that they're going to the four seasons like these users who are, you know, they have a real ad business at Uber. The more Uber tries to promote some unrelated product and what I mean by unrelated is it doesn't help you get to where you're going at that moment.

39:33It's clutter in the app. What about Uber Eats, Zach? Yeah. It's working pretty well. It's working great. Yeah. Another cross promotion is working. That is highly related to the space seat booking a car to pick up some food. Yeah. It's still the taxi business basically. I think the hotel's integration is good. I think there's something here that we have gone through a cycle where apps and attention were highly consolidated with a few. Now the pendulum has swung the other way and apps are very narrow features that are really well described. Okay, so that's sort of where we are. That's why we have the billions and billions of apps in the app store.

40:10The question is does the pendulum swing back to these super apps? And I think the big question is not whether it swings back to the super apps, But whether there's a new substrate that puts itself between the user and all of these services so that they become data oriented services. And this is where the question is, if you rely on an agent or you rely on a beeftub version of search, whether that's chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, Why would you care where all of this stuff was done? You're not going to care. And this is, I think, the big mistake in this thinking is that that real estate is actually much more fragile than I think we all think it is.

40:52And I think a much better way to think about this is in the future, none of this UI real estate is actually worth anything. The question is, do you have a data asset that's valuable or do you do a service that's viable because, agentically, there'll be all of these unemotional bots and workflows doing this work for you. So I think Saks is right in the sense that whether it's there or not, it will matter. Could he run it like a private equity business where now Uber Corporation owns two services? Sure. But you're probably just better off for these agents to go and cannibalize all of search because you'll be able to just get a data feed for what Expedia has to create Expedia, for a few million dollars or tens of millions of dollars.

41:35You don't need to pay $20 or $30 billion for this. The thing that I've talked to Dar about is when they said he told me when they do something that's adjacent to what they're already doing, it explodes in terms of engagement. So they're doing like teens and rental cars and then package delivery and every time they do one of those adjacencies, it just takes off with the membership and to your point freeberg. They have those 150 customers who have their credit cards in there and manage it's explosive. So that's what I think the real vacation is in the J .C. to ordering food. I think hotels would be I don't think flights would be because I think the flights work really well with the existing apps but things where you have proprietary inventory like VRBO or hotels I think those would be very powerful and those have 20 to 30 percent commissions which are in line with the commissions that Uber's already getting and the commissions on things like flights is very small, like a couple of dollars.

42:31So I think for hotels and VRBO would be brilliant. For the other stuff, I'm not so sure to your point. Chama. Well, it just to finish my thought. Yeah. Was that you'll notice that Uber eats a separate app from Uber, right? I mean, I know you can get to the eats part with an Uber, but they created a separate app for a reason is because whether you're using Uber Eats or Uber, the goal is immediate gratification. I want to get to where I'm going. I don't book it six hours in advance. I call it right now and the most important thing to me is wait time. This is why Uber is beating lift is But since you do all on the wait time is lower.

43:04Yeah, same thing with food I'm not thinking about booking my dinner right now. I'm not gonna do it in advance if you browse through the restaurants The most important piece of day to they show you in addition to the rating is the number of minutes it takes for to get to you So those apps are all about immediate gratification and that's why you don't want other things getting in the way of them now Now I guess the claim is somehow you're going to be able to cross sell the booking of a vacation or a hotel that you have to think about days or weeks in advance. This is a completely different state of mind.

43:35I just don't think that there's much option to cross sell that. What about the brand? What about the brand? What about the brand? What about the brand? What about the brand? I don't think the attached rate is going to be high. What about the brand value set? Because you know those people are going to another app to book their flight in their hotel. What if that other app was called Uber Travel? There might be some value in that. I can see that. I think that would be the rationale where I could see the Expedia brand. Yeah, so maybe what you could do is take VRBO, rebranded as Uber, hotel, or Uber, travel, whatever you want to call it.

44:07Exactly. And then maybe you could push people to download that app. Well, the thing, the counter I give to this, you could quantify the value of the installs, right? So yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you could quantify because Expedia is spending on it whatever you're right now. I use the Bomb Boy app to book hotels. I use United to book my flights, and I use Uber to do my rides and obviously for eats. When you are using it, there's a tab up top. In the UIs, quite nice in Uber, where it's rides and eats right next to each other, I could see a third one, like hotels or travel, being right there. And all of a sudden, yum yum, you just get all that inventory right in there.

44:43And I frequently will book my hotel, and I'll book my ride for the next day in advance on Uber, and I do those things. And then when I get to my hotel, I'm ordering food to my room. So I think this actually could work really well as a third tab in the app for travel. And you could actually, because when you use it in the Uber app, it's its own tab, and it's the exact same experience. I believe in super apps. And they just launched a bus. That's like a bus service in New York for 18 bucks to go to JFK. That's really awesome. I think we're a little bit disconnected because we don't book our own travel.

45:16But okay, let's keep moving here. Down the docket. All right, this big tech investing in nuclear power is off to the races, Chema. Amazon just announced a $500 million investment in free nuclear power projects. All of these are focused on SMRs. Those are the small modular reactors. Amazon is working with Dominion Energy to develop a small modular nuclear reactor. During existing nuclear power plant in Virginia, in total Amazon plans to invest $35 billion in Virginia -based data centers by 2040, and they want to power these by SMRs. And this is a big trend. Google is purchasing energy directly from Cairo's power, another company building SMRs.

46:02Microsoft, as you heard, was reviving one of the three -mile island nuclear power plants. So this is kind of interesting, Shabbat. We went from nuclear not being on the table, everybody being against it, the Germans shutting down their reactors, post Fukushima, and now Big Tech is the customer for these with AI, and they're putting down very large deposits and payments to build them in America, and I haven't heard any opposition. Maybe you could just speak to Chimapko. Well, what we've seen here in terms of opposition to these versus the opportunity, and everybody's writing checks. Yeah. Well, they're not writing checks.

46:39So this is what I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here, but these press releases need to have an asterisk on them. So in the hierarchy of deals, right, just to unpack this for a second, there are deals where you give me X and I give you money. That's not what this is. Then if you degrade that kind of deal structure, in a lot of heavy industry, you have deals that are called takeer pay, which is there is something that's working and you need to basically take this or you need to give me the monetary equivalent of what I'm selling you. That's not what this is. What this is is sort of this conditional obligation where the beginning of the deal starts with a very important statement which is if it works and if these approvals happen and there's a whole bunch of nested ifs, then payments can happen.

47:31So while these are important deals because they show that there are potential buyers at the finish line, what it doesn't do is solve the two things that you need to get to the finish line, which is the actual risk capital to finish building these things and technically de -risk them, and then the regulatory approval that you need to make sure that they're allowed. So, I think that these deals are good. I think it's a great signaling, but I think it's important to understand the nuances of these things. These are not things where there's money really trading hands. And until that you see that where irrespective of what happens the balance sheet is investing from an Amazon or a Google where there's corp dev folks writing $100 million or billion dollar checks into these companies It's not yet quite there.

48:24This is more the step before which is sort of Can you create some marketing and and some buzziness to hopefully induce somebody to then rip in billions of dollars of risk equity capital? freeburg your thoughts on SMRs and these customers showing up and then I guess you could comment on the nature of the deal structure here because some of them are you know contingent on the new power plant turning on some of them do have deposits as my understanding will look that up and fact check it there could be a range of deals here. Yeah, I don't know the nature of the deals. I did I think talk about this a year ago.

49:03It was also like my prediction for the year with to buy the uranium stocks predicated on what I think is a really important point, which is as GDP per capita grows, energy consumption per capita grows. And if you looked at the projections of GDP per capita in industrialized nations, there was no way, there is no way, to meet the energy demand. And this was even pre -all this crazy AI build out, which is probably part of the GDP growth. But there is no way to meet the energy demand without nuclear. There is not enough solar, geothermal, or wind build out potential that's happening that the stop gap measure is going to have to be, and probably the right long term solution, is to have a significant amount of base load come from nuclear.

49:56And so what's the fastest way to do that nuclear build out? Well in China, they have the regulatory authority and the mandate stated. They're going to build 300 gigawatts with 300 facilities or whatever the number is and that's what they're doing very large Facilities that make a gigawatt of power each in the US It seems that because of the regulatory structure here and the way that utilities are regulated and the way that the states have authority and the environmental laws and all the other things that it might be the fastest path to solving this energy gap problem is SMRs and And that's why we're and these things produce tens of megawatts.

50:31So again a gigawatt is a thousand megawatts and you know, we need to kind of probably grow our energy production in the United States by several terawatts over the next decade or two. So this SMR may be the fastest path. Now that could change meaning we could end up seeing much larger facilities get built out But if there's regulatory change in the US and there's more availability, but fundamentally, we are going to need to use uranium to make electricity to meet the demand of the growing the GDP that it seems we're going to be growing it. I think this is just such a necessity. It's great to see the SMR is getting some attention.

51:13I just don't know if they're actually going to get turned on. How long it's going to take? I don't know what this election cycle is going to bring in terms of regulatory change. I think we talked about it with several of the candidates when we were doing the interviews. Sax, if we are able to get a bunch of these SMRs built here in the United States, maybe if you're up, follow suit, what would this do on a geopolitical basis into our relationship with the Middle East, our energy independence, and of course the AI raised to intergeneral intelligence. I'll let you take it whichever direction you want to go.

51:47Well, I don't think we're going to because I don't think anyone wants a nuclear power plan in their backyard. It's really simple. I mean, no matter what the benefits are for AI or for America's global competitiveness, I just don't think your typical community wants a nuclear power plan in their backyard. And I don't think it matters that much if it's a small module or one either. So you think they'll get blocked by local communities? Yeah, and probably for good reason. I mean, I don't want a nuclear power plan in my backyard. Do you? I feel like this is suddenly become a little bit of a luxury belief where liberal elites are always talking about how we need to have nuclear power now, but there you know they're not going to have a nuclear power plant in their backyard.

52:27So it's easy for all of us to genie -flect about what a great idea this is, but let's face it, these things are going to be built probably in poor or working class communities, and inevitably there's going to be some accident. You can tell me how safe they are to. You're blue in the face. I don't believe it. You know planes aren't supposed to fall out of the sky either and it does happen and You know they're gonna set up a power one of these power plants somewhere and You know, it's probably gonna have a DEI program and something's gonna happen. I mean something's gonna happen and then the fallout is Literally gonna fall out on on the people in that poor community So I don't think this is gonna happen.

53:09This show really had the diversity of views doesn't it? Yeah, it's like, look, this is a perfect example of liberal business elites demanding something that isn't going to affect them. It's not going to affect them. Your take on a non -binary trans lesbian with purple hair, putting a small nuclear reactor, 200 miles outside of Austin, Texas, go. What your tinfoil had in the fridge. Yeah, close to your ranch, do you, Cal? I mean, I think there's plenty of land outside of the triangle here in Texas, where there is no density and you could put one and it have no problem with there being one 100 miles 200 miles.

53:52It is going to work there. It's going to service it. I mean, literally, you would have to, it doesn't take that many people to service these. So yeah. I think there's plenty of space in the United States to put these and maybe freeburg you talk and educate us on the safety here. Do you believe what Saks is saying that it's going to have a meltdown in his belief? I believe that. I think Saks is point of view to be honest is the point of view that will be held by a large number of people just like they have been with a lot of other. Is it the right point of view though? Tell us from a science perspective.

54:27Well no, no, I don't think it is. is I think that the same argument would have been made around. We shouldn't have airplanes at all because they can fall from the sky. We should keep everyone on the ground where they're safe. Why would you want to get on an airplane? Why would you want to have airplanes flying over your home? We should all ban airplanes flying over our home. They could crash in our home. It's the same sort of argument. And the reason I'm not going to argue the point is because of the point I made earlier, which is that it ultimately becomes an economic necessity that for us to meet all of the demands of AI, all of the demands of industry, we want to re -industrialize the United States et cetera, et cetera, we need to increase electricity production capacity on the continent.

55:04And there is no way to generate enough electricity on this continent fast enough using other means than there would be if we just got these systems set up. So you believe they will end up in a bad of necessity? That's your thing. I think globally this is the case and we're seeing it in China. Now, whether the US ends up coming up, like - We're not going to worry about a nimbi problem. That's right. They don't have to worry about what we're going to do. That's right. And fear. And we may we may end up in China is the end in Nimbi by yeah, and we may be the we may end up being the Luddite state and we'll end up just saying you know what we're not going to adopt new technology including now in the gene editing and cell cell therapies and I'll go through the list of new technology.

55:41So I think there's a argument that there's a low probability of a high risk event. But the fact is that the progress that it enables is worth so much more than the risk that we would be taking on. There's a simpler solution to all of this without having to go and create these reactors, which is, I don't think that we have a very good grasp of the material science broadly speaking. I don't think we really understand how to build next -generation materials. I don't think our specialty chemicals capabilities are all that strong. The way that they're going to be over the next five or ten years just with better compute.

56:13So I think that there's going to be a lot of interim steps that increase the generally available energy density without going to nuclear. I think there's going to be a lot of businesses to do that. That'll be much safer, easier to regulate, easier to test, easier to underwrite, and I think the government will get behind those. So I'm not as negative as you are on the only solution being nuclear. The countries and the businesses that have a lower cost of electricity and a more abundant source of electricity will end up winning as the economy continues to progress towards a much more kind of digital state and automated state over the next decades.

56:47So if we're going to be slower, we're going to suffer the consequences of that as a country. So we'll see how it plays out. I just think that economic incentives will ultimately drive hopefully a change. Would a possible solution be to give an economic incentive to the people who would be in the surrounding areas. Obviously, these things could be 50 or 100 miles from anybody's homes, but even the people who work there or people who might have, I don't know, some homes that weren't near it, could you give them no taxes, etc., et cetera, essentially give them incentives to allow this to go through a free bargain your mind.

57:21Do you think that kind of incentive would work? Taxes or some kind of payoff or subsidy? I'm not sure. I haven't thought much about what the incentives or subsidies would be. I think that - You're going to have to give them incentive because no one's going to want to live within 200 miles of one of these things. What would be the number of things that we're going to offer? I think that people have a very deep fear of what is deemed to be cataclysmic technology. I do think a lot of this was rooted in the evolution of the atomic age where we basically have these nuclear warheads mounted to missiles that can travel at 20 times the speed of sound and land on your city and wipe out your city.

57:57I mean, that is also nuclear technology and people can flake the two as being similar. And even three mile aisle and there were no deaths. It was a shocking scary thing for people, but statistically speaking and historically speaking and technically speaking, it's a lot more complicated to explain to people what happened and why and why now is different, and no one has the time for that. No one wants to hear that. They want to hear a very simple, do you really want a nuclear power plant in your backyard? No way. What about you? No way. All right, let's vote to stop it. And they're right. You compare it to commercial airlines, but commercial airlines, that's the technology that's been around for what, like 100 years.

58:36That's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. It's been a lot of it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it right now. I mean, I think this is an important discussion I'd like to actually my point about commercial airlines. We've had that technology for over a hundred years It was honed and refined over many decades and Commercial airlines now have become this is going on almost a hundred this is going on a hundred years of use right? You know that there's been incidents every decade or two and that is true That's not true.

59:07You're saying something that's not true The reason nuclear has been discredited is because of three mile island and Fukushima and first of all it's not been discredited. It's been in these names for live in infamy. It's social fear mongering like you were doing right now with no data and no facts to try and make it a political issue that drives everyone to want to shut their minds down and not listen to the actual facts and data. And this fear mongering is what keeps us from being competitive, which keeps us from having progress. You talk a lot about that. I'm not fear mongering. I'm just glistened.

59:37I'm just saying I don't want one near me. Now, if they're, hold on a second, I'm not saying you can't do it. There were only six steps that cheer nobles. I'm not against doing it somewhere where the community is in favor of doing it. So if you can find a place that wants to do this, I would not stop it, just to be clear. I'm just saying I don't want one near me. Let's get to facts. Take care, I'll just give me a second. Yeah, yeah. I don't think you're gonna find many takers even among poor communities. It's a great adversarial point. Let's go to the facts. 140 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries around the world since the time that we first had nuclear reactors Which has now been almost a century there have been three incidents Chernobyl Fukushima and three mile island at the Mill island there was zero deaths at Fukushima There was one death and a Chernobyl there were 46 deaths the fallout from those events has been that we shut down energy Production we shut down nuclear reactor technology and we fear mongred our way into losing the most abundant available.

1:00:36Can I just ask a question? What's the energy? Do those deaths actually include the second and third order effects of all this radiation? At Chernobyl, there were 15 people who got thyroid cancer, 35 operators and first responders who got radiation sickness. And then the background radiation effects, there's a lot of kind of noise around this, but it's not a significant number as you may otherwise think. Same with Fukushima. Why is it that whole region is still unenhabited then? They had a radiation event, there's radioactive material that has covered that area, that will be radioactive for a long period of time.

1:01:05Now, to understand what happened there and why that won't happen again, requires talking about the difference in the technology between Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, and Gen 4 systems. A lot of what's being rolled out now are these Gen 3 nuclear reactors. And the Gen 4 systems, which we highlighted a little while ago, do not have a meltdown possibility. Right, we talked about this, the one that went online in China in December. Those new systems, the Gen 4 reactors, cannot melt down. You cannot have an incident like you did with the Gen 1 and Gen 2 systems. And the Gen 3 systems are abundantly safe. China is building hundreds of them.

1:01:39It is a totally understandable science. If we want to spend the time looking at the data and understanding the engineering and the material science work and all the effort that's gone in billions of dollars over decades, the biggest stumbling block and the biggest wall has been the fact that people have this fear -mongering activity that they tell people this dismiss it. It's too scary. We don't want it in our backyard. Let's move on to the next opportunity. That's what's killed it And if you just put these things 50 miles away the radiation even in the meltdowns didn't go past those was my understanding So we even if you want to just the easiest steel man you this is down You don't have that possibility and the SMI am in your 100 % agree Don't even work these SMRs.

1:02:23They don't work If there's a new how can you say for sure what the safety record is gonna be? No, that's just to be clear, SMRs don't work yet. We have theoretical ways in which we can profile and model that they work, but we don't have a functional one that people can look at and inspect. As part of that, we haven't been able to test how they fail. Those are also theoretical. So I think let's put SMRs off and must just be very accurate. We don't have a functioning working version of one because they don't work yet. Maybe they'll work in the future. Let's hope that they do. There's about, you're talking about Freeberg, is a step before them, which is the Gen 3 reactor, which has a different safety.

1:03:00There are SMRs operating in China, Russia, and India today, and there's about 65 being built at this moment, right? And that's outside the US. So that's why the US is kind of observing and trying to catch up and adopt these technologies that are being used by, call it economic competitors and economic partners around the world. It's important for economic prosperity in the US for us to have a degree of competitiveness as an electricity prices, if China races towards $5 per kilowatt hour for electricity, and we're sitting here 20 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, what's that going to do to our economic competitive risk?

1:03:33We are at $5 in the generation. You're saying solar, right? We can fix that tomorrow. We already rely on a nuclear reactor that works and to Sachsis Point, it just happens to be millions of miles away. So if it goes, we're all going to go anyways. Yeah. The scalability of solar in terms of getting us to a terro -water production capacity is the the limiting block to mop that in order to get to a terrible. I think that's a material science problem. I don't think that's you don't need to be. It's not so bad to think that other countries are taking the early adopter risk. It's not just that. That would be, that's the decade to the making sense.

1:04:05That's going to, but if they're, if China runs away with this and they have so many of these running and then they're able to power AI and solve problems, we're not, we're going to have to get our act together and start standing these up. I don't think just have to be 50. Every Navy submarine has got a nuclear reactor on board. And we have so much base in this country, these things could be 100, 200 miles away. But I don't think a million of these are limiting factor in our ability to innovate. I don't think it is today. In these data centers? Certainly. It's not the limiting factor in our ability to innovate.

1:04:36It's not the limiting factor in, like for example, why? We're asking us to charge up every car, every night with electricity, with a battery rather than using gas. Let me just make my point. So we just saw OpenAI launch strawberry. Is the reason why Microsoft or Google or Meta not responded with their own version? An energy problem? No. We're still rate limited by innovation and just raw intellectual horsepower and capability. Meanwhile we are trying to solve the energy problem and people are taking different approaches. There's storage that's coming online very aggressively. the solar capability itself is ramping up aggressively.

1:05:18We're also forcing these utilities to actually be deconstructed so that there's more efficiency in the energy markets. All of this if you unpack why it costs 20 cents a kilowatt hour, it's not because of a generation problem. It is not. It's graft, it's corruption, it's old legacy infrastructure. All of that can be replaced in a much simpler and safer way. So I think by the time that you are rate limited by energy, you'll have the plethora of solutions. My issues with the SMRs is the ones that are promising these next -gen, whiz -bang performance characteristics. They're all theoretical free -proof.

1:05:53So even when you say there are SMRs working abroad, there's no like next -generation reactors working abroad, they don't work. What do you, where is an example of these modern next -generation reactors actually working? Where? Well, we talked about the Gen 4 one that went live in China. There's several SMRs and several countries that are active producing power. You can call it a small modular reactor. What I'm talking about these next gen materials, the things that Kairos and these other guys are trying to do. Where is a functioning working version? They have them. I mean, like we have one in India, we have one in China.

1:06:25I'll show you the, I'll send you links to them here. There's about 50 of them that India is actively building right now. And they're competitive with Kairos, right? They all have kind of common design concepts, but they're different companies. Anyway, I'm just saying like they're getting rid of. farm in just freeberg maybe you can educate us in the distance it could be from a city reasonably in terms of building a grid to move the energy from could it be 200 miles from a major city 300 100 what's it what's it what's it where we want you could put power but action wherever you want but it has to travel as long as you got the copper to move it right you'd be like once yeah I'm just trying to think reasonably move it is I guess what I was getting at but okay Well, they haven't folks a good debate here on the all a good debate.

1:07:10I still love you all Will they will lay copper from some country that has an SMR? Like do right all the way to Washington state. I was just thinking like if Canada and Mexico have you know economic incentive to do this or they're more bold Maybe they build them in their countries and They'll be selling you to the United States right they'll take the I mean if you're Cairo's and you can't put this in the United States but you could put it in Mexico and then come up with a, you know, a way to get it past Trump's border wall. You may be able to put it into the United States, but we won't know until we know it works.

1:07:47I just, I'm sorry, I keep going back to this tricky little issue of it. It doesn't work. Well, I mean, I think Frabert, I'm with you and that even with the disasters that have happened, those are with Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors. There hasn't been one in a long time. And the fact that I believe those things, we can spend those up right now. these Gen 2 Gen 3 reactors do them all day long. I think that they're very safe. They're very well. The three and four. The three are back yard. The three are going to be fine with me whenever. I would be fine with him whenever. In 100 miles from the backyard.

1:08:12No problem. 100. It's four that's producing a gigawatt of power. Would you own like 10 miles outside Austin? I don't think you should put a 10 miles outside of any city. I know that they're doing that in India. They're doing that in China. I would think, you know, if you look up the footprint of Fukushima, I mean, that was a complete disaster. They put that below sea level. They told them not to put it there. and they put it near a bunch of people who, you know, were living within miles of it, single digit miles of it. There's no reason for this to be any closer than 50 or 100 miles, and I would be totally fine with it being 50 to 100 miles from where I'm on my ranch right now.

1:08:48Absolutely no problem with that. I think this is a classic luxury belief where it's easy for you to espouse this for everybody else for the nation because you know the downsides aren't going to fall on you. No, but 50 miles from 100 miles from where we use them and maybe it would be safe. Would you be comfortable with putting them in the desert? Yeah, but in that case, they won't get it. Okay, then we're done. That's how we're running wind and geothermal today. We're putting these sites in random places and solar and then we're running cable and we're, you know, producing time and delivering it to solar just because they don't want it to be an ice -saurant, right?

1:09:20That's why we're doing that with solar. So we don't want people to look at a giant solar thing. Like I said, not against doing it. if you can find a community that's willing to do it. And if you put it where there's no humans, then yeah, that's gonna work. So there we go. We resolved our issue. We got the compromise here. Here we are. I just don't want to solve any world problems. Yes. We're gonna get my guitar. And we're gonna sink in by yeah. SM to work at this place. You better get some robot employees. I can't wait for you guys to lay millions of miles of copper cabling now. I'm finally in the truck.

1:09:51I'll lay that pie. Genius. You need me to lay pie. I'll do it. Genius. No, it's sexy. You want to go visit a nuclear power plant? No, zero. Let's go. Yeah. How's that going to be? Any progress? Sax is not interested in any progress. OK, if we can go back to the 50s, that's what he wants. Let's get to hold. You're like virtue sign language. I'm virtue sign language is a proud nuclear. Yes. It's a luxury belief. You're promoting something nuclear power is a luxury fully for the near first. Because I got to put these things in poor communities. And so it's never going to affect your life. They're putting in the data that are sacked in like the identity politics in like Oregon like it's easy for you to say, oh, I support nuclear.

1:10:29Look how progressive I am look how smart I am you have an internalized the downsides. I just want to see you. Everything I did politics for you, Saks. Everything you see. No, this is not a politics and rich. Everything I'm defending the poor. You're going to put these things in poor communities. You're genuinely reflecting, Saks. Look at that. I'm just a Robin Hood over here. I'm defending the right of communities to say no to this. You are a science experiment. You're my favorite after some time. I'm defending the right of local communities to say no to your science experiment. Okay. That's what comes down to you.

1:11:02Freeberg is trying to put this at the same 200. Wow. Wow. The 200 shows. Zach, let me ask you a serious question. It's not serious when you start like that. If trouble loses, what's the next four years of this fog going to be like? What are we going to do here? We lose. He's moving in New Zealand. There's going to be a law fair all over the place. Absolutely. They're going to come for you. Do you really think so, David? Yeah, I do. I mean, look, I'm definitely not the top of the list. He wants at the top of the list, right? He has no choice but to go all in. They're already doing law fair against him.

1:11:42But I think the point is just that if they're not defeated, they're going to keep doing it because there's no downside for it. I will comment on the California Coastal Commission ruling that was based on Elon's political tweets, which is why they stopped additional launches at a Vandenberg. First of all, how they set up on the Coastal Commission has authority over a Vandenberg and the operations just seems to me like there's something wrong. the coastal commission was set up with the coastal act in 1976 in California as a way to give the beaches back to the people and the public and create a commission to regulate building along the beaches.

1:12:20It has since grown into effectively a much larger entity with much more authority, which potentially after the Chevron ruling in the Supreme Court may get peeled back and may get dialed down. We'll see what happens. But as of now they have the ability to block launches out of Vandenberg, which they did and in their decision they said it was because of Elon's political tweets. Again, starting at the beginning of the show about the success that they had with the starship this week, it's incredible. It deserves to be recognized on the merits of what they accomplished. But to bring in his political tweets to make a decision about the progress of SpaceX and allow public space to be used to further that that calls and further that activity seems to me abhorrent and it's ridiculous.

1:13:02and it's exactly what's wrong with the bureaucratic morass that a lot of these institutions have grown into. Do you think they're gonna be pro or con? SMRs. Exactly. Yeah. No, I'm serious. Do you think they're gonna be con? They're con. What the coastal commission does is they block everything. They block everything and they do pictures of the entire coastline. If you build like a shed on your beachfront property, But they will know it and they come to you and they're like no sheds. You cannot build any structures on the beach They're just like really really it's a value it's a value of decision that the state of California made in 1976 the state of California the the citizens voted and said we want to preserve the coastline and I think that that's a reasonable value for them to assume and vote for and it was a majority vote and so they established the coastal Commission but how the the coastal commission extended into having authority over Vandenberg and launches from there for SpaceX to me is part of this kind of administrative growth.

1:14:04We see all these administrative bureaucracies get started that have a very simple objective preserved the California coastline. But now they have authority to determine whether or not launches can happen. And this is one person who wants to be like, yeah, reference his tweets. And the vote was 6 '4", to increase these. So who is this one person? No, one person in the official context. I think she was retweeting it. There was a tweet from her. Yeah, this is when I'm don't understand it. for it. I mean, in a way, she said the quiet part out loud. So in a way, she does the favor, which is she acknowledged that all of this law fair against SpaceX and Elon is political.

1:14:42She basically pleaded guilty to it. Look, she's proud of it because she doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. She thinks this is her job as a bureaucrat. She says to punish people who tweet things that you're not supposed to say. That basically is what it comes down to. And I mean, this is the truth about law fair. They're using the agencies of the federal government to exact reprisals against their political opponents. And if there's not a punishment for that, it's going to keep going. And they filed a, he launched filed a lawsuit. And it's a six -four decision. So I think there's a Biden -Harris administration could stop that.

1:15:18They could say no more law fair, but they don't do that because the tone was set from the top. And Trump is saying he's going to be a dictator and he's going to do a bunch of law fair when he gets in there. So, you got to settle it down. That's exactly what he said. Is it been another? Okay. Okay. You can't wrap a show like that. That's just not cool. I'm just gonna wrap up so we can move on. Well, then don't make a slight comment. It's like just do something else. Talk about something else besides Trump at the end. Like, I just give it my opinion. I'm not allowed to get my opinion on the show.

1:15:45What are you grateful for right now in your life? I'm grateful for you doing all the work on the events and making them spectacular. I'm really excited for Sac's live from our logo. Oh god, I will totally go to Mar -a -Lago for election night. Can we get a booth there? I don't keep hilarious. You keep saying it. It's not clear you would be invited. Yeah, of course I'm inviting. Trump loves you. I don't care if you remember, but I'm being your friends with everybody. Neither you nor I gave the hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket to go to dinner with proxies. That Trump loves me. He enjoys time.

1:16:16He's very selective. It's for friends. Traumatic at it. Traumatic at it. five. Okay, I'll do it remote. It's fine. You can do it. You don't want Jake out there. It's fine. Go with me. Wait, when is he? I don't want to be at a party. I'm not invited to. It's in true. It's in two weeks and three days. Four days. Come on over. Five. Please. It's like just waiting every day for it to drop. Whatever it is. I just hope whoever wins wins like significantly. So we don't. Yeah. Please win by 30 elect. No, no. four Right now the only candidate who looks like he could get a landslide is Trump. Yeah, it does feel otherwise It's gonna be very close.

1:16:56So you're rooting for Trump if you want a landslide. I mean, I'm going to I'm going to reveal my vote on the Election special I will have my Really hard to figure out. I'm sure the audience will be

1:17:10Did you guys vote yet? Did you guys want? Yeah, I got my ballot on my I got my ballot on a desk here Yeah, I'm ready to go ready to go. All right everybody. This has been another wonderful episode. Oh meetups There are 200 episode meetups happening. Thank you to all the fans who got together take pictures and share them on social and App mentioned us all in calm slash meetups every couple episodes fans get together around the world and talk About the favorite bestie Stipically Priever and we'll see you next time

1:17:46winners ride. Rainman David Saad We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with I'm going to be West. I swing up. Can you walk? I'm going to leave. Why? What? What are winners riding? I'm going to be West. Besties are gone. I'm going through. That's my dog taking a wish. You're driving away. We're going to die. Oh man. My hamlet, the cashier will meet me at the place We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all It's just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that house What your, that beat, what your, your, your beat Beat, beat, what?

1:18:29We need to get merch, these aren't that bad I'm going on, lilin'

1:18:38I'm going on, lilin'