Bill Gates Powers ‘Next-Gen’ Nuclear Plant & The Hidden $18K Cost of Home Ownership

0:00Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not play play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best I do it! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a new ride is coming to Disney World, but not everyone is happy about it.

0:40Then it pays to be authentic. B-Real has been acquired for a nice chunk of change. It's Wednesday, June 12th. Let's ride.

0:52Yesterday, one of the goats of the sporting world and an American hero to boot dropped out from his marquee event. No, Tiger Woods isn't pulling out of the U.S. Open. It's Joey Chestnut who is out of the 2024 Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest. News dropped yesterday that the 16-time champ cannot participate because of his sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, the plant-based meat company that launched a vegan wiener to rival Nathan's famous hot dogs. Neil, this is unthinkable. This is the earth without the moon, the road trip without snacks, morning brew daily without Let's Ride. What happened here?

1:27Fourth of July is canceled as far as I'm concerned. This is such a bummer. This really raises two questions, though. Does Nathan's really consider Impossible Foods vegan hot dog a competitor? In their press releases about this news, they said that Joey Chestnut was the Michael Jordan of competitive eating who signed with Nike. And if he won, you know, so he had a Nike contract. Imagine if he had an Adidas sponsorship as well. So they're saying they're Nike and Impossible Foods is Adidas on that respect. And then also another question is, how much is this Impossible Foods deal worth for Joey Chestnut?

2:02Because last year, Chestnut was paid$200 ,000 to compete in the Nathan's 4th of July hot dog contest. And he had this$1.2 million four-year contract going forward for Nathan's. So this Impossible Foods deal must be a hefty chunk of change for Chestnut to say, no, I'm not eating in this market competition. I'm sticking with Impossible Foods. It's great PR for Impossible Foods because you're right. It puts it on the same level playing field as Nathan's famous hot dogs. You know what I'm looking at is the betting markets, though, because last year, Joey Chestnut had minus 5000 odds reveal. He's just such an overwhelming favorite.

2:37So suddenly it's wide open. So checked out the betting odds because there's going to be a new champ this year unless a deal is. I think they're going I think cooler heads are going to prevail here and they're going to reach a resolution because having Fourth of July hot dog contest without Joey Chestnut when he's out there and he could be there just because of a sponsorship. dust up, I think they're going to figure something out. Now let's hear a word from our sponsor, the purple prince that was promised, Yahoo Finance. Neil, what's one thing all MBD listeners have in common? Smart, devilishly good looking and a fan of dad jokes.

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3:44I'm Christian McCaffrey, pro running back, and Abercrombie is an official fashion partner of the NFL. I'm not kidding when I say NFL by Abercrombie broke the internet last year, and I think this season's lineup is even cooler. And so does my wife, who keeps stealing all my hoodies. Stay fit for the season and Abercrombie's newest arrivals. Shop NFL by Abercrombie in the app, online, and in store.

4:12A new era for nuclear power in America got underway yesterday. A Bill Gates-backed startup he co-founded in 2008 called TerraPower broke ground on a new type of nuclear reactor in a small town in Wyoming. This project won't resemble the big hulking reactors of old. No, these will be smaller and cheaper while still delivering the same carbon dioxide-free electricity that has always been the promise of nuclear. Gates and TerraPower are riding a wave of support for nuclear. Lots of startups are jockeying to build the next gen of reactors. While the Biden administration wants to triple nuclear power generation by 2050 and is offering tax credits to speed things along.

4:52Both tax credits and a more cost-efficient reactor are going to be necessary to make that vision a reality because new reactors are prohibitively expensive. The only two new nuclear power plants that have come online in the last 30 years were at Plant Vogel in Georgia and cost$35 billion to build while finishing seven years behind schedule. So Bill Gates has poured over$1 billion of his own money into TerraPower with the hopes that a smaller, simpler reactor can usher in another golden age of nuclear power. What makes these reactors so special, Neil? So I haven't worked at a nuclear plant like Homer Simpson, but I do now have a general sense of how this all works.

5:31Inside of a reactor is a core where the reaction known as nuclear fission takes place, and that produces heat. But for this heat to generate power, you need to send it from the core to another section of the plant where you can turn that heat into electricity. So in the 90-plus plants currently in operation in the United States, the way you move the heat from one section to the other is water. It's super simple. But the problem with using water as a circulating fluid is that it needs to be very highly pressurized, which means you have to put in this heavy piping and thick containment shields to prevent accidents.

6:05Bill Gates, on the other hand, wants to use liquid sodium instead of water as a circulating fluid because it's way more efficient at this job and can do it at much lower pressures. So it needs less shielding, less piping and can overall bring costs down. Yeah. One of the advantage of using a liquid metal like liquid sodium is it's just very chemically stable at very high temperature. So it doesn't require the immense amount of pressurization that water does. The boiling point of liquid sodium is 1 ,155 Kelvin, which is around 1 ,600 degrees Fahrenheit. That's almost triple that of water. So you don't have to put it under this immense pressure because it just boils at a hotter temperature.

6:44Yeah, so it's a much simpler nuclear reactor in general. That is the name of the game here. We want to simplify these nuclear reactors so it doesn't cost so much money, doesn't require just an immense amount of dollars in time to bring online. And so they think that making it simpler gives both a safety and a cost benefit. It's still not cheap, though. It's not cheap, and there's still a lot of hurdles remaining. And one of those is procuring the fuel to run the reactor. And what's interesting here is there's only one type of enriched uranium that can power this particular reactor. And it's only made in Russia, which the U.S.

7:22does not buy nuclear fuel from anymore. So Bill Gates' TerraPower needs to find another way to get this particular type of enriched uranium over to Wyoming to power this reactor in the first place. That's just another hurdle. And this thing is not going to come online until 2030, maybe even later. So the cost that the company estimates is around$4 billion with the energy department contributing half of that. So that's definitely pricey. It's pricier than most renewable energy plants or modern gas-powered plants. But they do have a secret weapon here, which is Bill Gates. He's basically said that he knows it's going to be expensive, especially the first one as they work through the learning curve.

8:02But he said he's not here to make money. He's very much putting his money where his mouth is. And he says, I just want to bring these power plants online. I have deep pockets like we're going to make this happen. So the secret weapon here for TerraPower is the fact that they have Bill Gates backing it. Energy experts say that bringing more nuclear power online is absolutely key to transitioning to a clean economy because wind and solar are great, but they fluctuate over the course of the day. In Chicago, how are you supposed to power all these homes and businesses with solar power? I mean, it's half it's half it's dark out half the day.

8:35Currently, half of all zero emission electricity generated for the grid in the U.S. comes from nuclear reactors, and the Biden administration wants to triple that by 2050. So we'll see. It's also a lifeline for these communities where they've had these coal plants and these mines that are closing down. Hundreds of coal plants all across the country are closing down, but they're actually amazing sites for nuclear reactors because they already have these transmission lines. And TerraPower does have one customer already as a California utility. And just so happens that in this little Wyoming town, they have this transmission line that goes right to California.

9:10So that is one sort of lifeline for these communities that have lost a lot of jobs with coal plants closing. Maybe they'll be able to to rejuvenate with with nuclear power. All right. You must be this tall in order to listen to this next story, because it's about a major new ride coming to Disney World. Tiana's Bayou Adventure, which is set to open later this month in Orlando. But it's not an expansion of the park. It's replacing an existing ride. Splash Mountain. Never heard of it. Back in the summer of 2020, as protests for George Floyd swept across the country, Disney said it would shut down Splash Mountain and swap it out for a new ride.

9:46Splash Mountain, while an iconic log flume ride, is based on a 1946 Disney movie called Song of the South, which contains racist stereotypes about African-Americans and plantation life. Enter Tiana's Bayou Adventure, the first marquee attraction based on a black character in Disney's 69 years in the theme park business. Tiana is the princess from 2009's animated musical Princess and the Frog, and the ride itself is a love letter to New Orleans in all its multicultural chaos. The log flume will journey along the same tracks as Splash Mountain, but everything else has been ripped up and replaced with a new setting, storyline, and state-of-the-art animatronics.

10:24Toby Disney finally seemed to distance itself from its central role in the culture wars, but this new ride will be a test of whether people have moved on. Yeah, last year when Splash Mountain finally closed down, people were starting these makeshift memorials. They were like leaving things at the entrance. Some fans jarred up water and brought them back with them. And 100 ,000 people signed this petition. So it was this really big hubbub. But if Disney is like, this happens basically any time we revamp a ride. In 2017, they closed the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, which is another just iconic ride.

11:00and they remade it around Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. Everyone was very, very upset about that. There wasn't even a culture war around that particular thing. They just didn't like change. But then when it opened, everyone loved the new ride. So this does seem to be something that Disney has withstood in the past. They are, of course, going to update their rides to more modern material. So they basically say, just try it out. See how it is first before you get mad at them. Right. I guess whenever you do anything, anything changing at Disney World, People get upset and then a few years later they're like, oh, this is perfectly great.

11:32They're pouring in$60 billion into their theme park business, which just so happens to be their most profitable unit and their unit that produces the most sales of any, like the movie business, the TV business. All is small cheese compared to these parks. So they're pouring so much money in. And the reason what they're doing with Tiana's Bayou Adventure is that's just sort of a portal into extracting more money from you related to merch. They're selling a hot sauce around it. They're going to do a Disney Plus TV show around Princess and the Frog. So this is just one tentpole of a broader strategy to sell you more stuff around this particular piece of IP.

12:12I am just happy it's on the same ride tracks as Splash Mountain, though, because have you ever been to Splash Mountain? I did. I've been on Splash Mountain once, and my hat flew off as we were going down. I thought I lost my hat, but it turns out the guy behind me had caught it on the way down. So that's my one memory of Splash Mountain. But I do like the general log flume rides in general because I don't like very scary roller coasters. So that's like the nice moderate way of doing things. So I'm excited to go on this ride. The banana you might eat for breakfast has a darker history than its bruised exterior might betray.

12:42A jury in federal court just found the popular banana brand Chiquita liable for deaths during a Colombian civil war. The Florida jury ordered the Banana Company to pay$38 million to the families of eight men killed by a far-right paramilitary group that Chiquita bankrolled from 1997 to 2004. It's a landmark case that stretches back to the late 2000s when Chiquita admitted to paying the paramilitaries$1.7 million as part of a DOJ investigation. Chiquita benefited from the group terrorizing farmers in the region, allowing the company to buy up land for pennies on the dollar and convert plantain farms into more profitable banana farms in the process.

13:22This is a very unusual and groundbreaking case. It is not often that a corporation is financially held liable for human rights violations, especially beyond the country's borders. Yeah, it said this is actually the first time that a major U.S. corporation has been held liable for rights abuses in another country. and advocates for human rights and advocates of the victims here said it was a powerful message to corporations everywhere that you cannot finance bad things going on in other countries and get away with it. So they said this was a warning shot to others. And it's also a warning shot to Chiquita because this opens up the pathway for a bunch of other victims to get compensation.

13:59I mean, back in 2007, with a settlement with the DOJ, they pled guilty, this company, saying that, yes, we did pay this paramilitary group known as the AUC. And they say it's because we were being extorted. They said they would harm our employees, harm our property if we didn't pay up. So that's their defense. And in general, they say that these claims have no legal basis. But they weren't, at the time in 2007, they didn't pay out any compensation to victims. So the victims filed a lawsuit and it's been winding its way in courts through 14 years. So finally, they get some sort of retribution here.

14:34Just going to Chiquita's Wikipedia page is a wild experiment. experience. It used to be called United Food Company, and it just has sections on sections of controversies. There is this Honduran Banana Republic area. There's the Banana Massacre in the 20s in Colombia. The list is just so long. This has just been a company with a lot, a very bloody history in a lot of different countries. So it is interesting to see it finally come to fruition. A bunch of lawsuits kind of rolled into one, and finally justice was paid to these families of victims stretching back to the early 2000s, but also much further than that.

15:08Up next, it's not your imagination. Owning a house in 2024 is a lot more expensive than it has been before.

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15:44Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from EPCLIS. After an initial dosing phase, about 4 in 10 people taking EPCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab, LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies.

16:19EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EpGliss. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Searching for real relief? Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. You're well aware that since the pandemic began, the cost to buy a home has surged with a median price of 40 percent since March 2020.

16:53But as all the homeowners listening to this know, buying a house is just the start of your journey dipping into your bank account to keep a roof over your head. Setting aside the mortgage, you've got to pony up for maintenance, insurance, internet, energy, taxes, and all of those costs have been soaring too. A new report from Bankrate found that U.S. homeowners are now paying an average of$18 ,118 a year on hidden fees linked to owning a home. That's a 26 % increase from four years ago. As bank rate analyst Jeff Ostrowski put it, simply upkeeping your house is like buying a used car every single year.

17:31He warned first-time buyers to be prepared for a rude awakening and to build up a savings buffer to deal with the rising costs of home ownership. Yeah, it shows you home ownership is definitely this wealth builder. That's what we've all been taught, but it's certainly isn't cheap in the process. The same bank rate analyst said, until you own a house, it doesn't dawn on you how much money you're throwing into the house every month and every year. It actually, reading this, made me feel a lot better as a renter because, yes, you're not building equity in your home. It feels like you're throwing money away into a pit, but it is very expensive to own a house, and it's only getting more expensive.

18:06You just see that in the rising costs, even compared to 2020. Yeah, one of the main factors here is homeowners insurance. I mean, insurance rates have jumped across the board in the past couple years. Last year alone, home insurance rates jumped 11.3 % nationally. A lot of that has to do with all these natural disasters that are threatening homes, fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, all of that. They're jacking up premiums. And homeowner insurance industry writ large across the U.S. lost over $100 billion last year. Some are even pulling out of markets altogether. So you're not paying insurance, but it's also terrible.

18:40So this is what's happening. The insurance industry is completely being roiled and you're seeing that in increased homeownership costs in general. Another study that I found interesting too was the longer that you own a home, you feel like things should get cheaper because you fix things up. You redid the bathroom, you redid the kitchen, but some things definitely don't get cheaper. A survey from Tractor Supply found that homeowners who own their house for a decade or more spend$721 a month on lawn care. You compare that to homeowners who have owned their house for less than a year and they only spend$142 a month.

19:12So once you put that new grass in, once you put the new landscaping in, the upkeep becomes more and more. So it's not like homeownership gets cheaper. It almost snowballs into larger and larger costs. And, yeah, it's just brutal. If you look at some of the states where the hidden housing costs are the highest, it's places like Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, Jersey, places that either have really high insurance rates or have very high tax rates. the lowest amount of additional ownership costs according to Bankrate, Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana. So maybe head south if you don't want those hitting costs.

19:46B-Real has secured the bag. The social media company that was really fun for about three months back in 2022 sold to the French video game and app developer Vudu yesterday for 500 million euros. If you don't remember B-Real, it rose to prominence on the back of its unfiltered take on social media. A timer goes off at a random point during the day, prompting you to snap two pics in quick session, one from the front camera and one from the back-facing camera on your phone. No filters allowed. But despite its innovative approach to the space, Be Real has seen user growth stagnate since 2022. Downloads have fallen from a peak of about 35 million in the third quarter of 2022 to 5 million in the first three months of this year.

20:30Still, it's not a small app by any means with monthly active users somewhere in the 20 to 40 million range. What does Voodoo want with it? Well, it wants Be Real to be profitable. It plans to turn on the monetization switch by introducing paid advertising onto the app for the first time, because who doesn't want to see a brand take an unfiltered selfie? I think the general consensus around this deal was like, what? Be Real? 500, over$500 million? That's an insane exit for a company that really hasn't grown at all since 2022 did not have a path to monetizing either until Voodoo said, let's stuff your app with ads.

21:09So I think this is a pretty incredible exit for Be Real, probably one of the best social media exits of the last decade or so. And they did say, they were like, we're the most successful social media company in the last decade, maybe since TikTok came. And you can't argue with that, at least from a dollars and cents point of view. I think Voodoo saw that people were logging on the app six days a week still on average. So that is just a very engaged user base. Even if that user base has stagnated in recent years, they probably think that they can turn on some paid acquisition growth. The advertising piece is very interesting to me because they said that they want to be integrated in a quote, extremely fluid format to avoid damaging the user experience.

21:51I don't exactly know how they're going to do that. Some people on Reddit were speculating that before you would get the opportunity to take a picture when the B-Real timer goes off, you'd have to watch like a 30-second ad. That does not feel seamless or fluid by any means. Just in general, though, if we zoom out, it was a great day for France's technology industry because Voodoo is a France-based company. The accusation came on the same day that this one-year-old AI startup called Mistral AI, another French startup, raised 600 million euros at an almost 6 billion euro valuation. So it's been a very it was it was a day of a lot of culmination.

22:29France has been investing in its technology sector. And these two deals happened on the same day. This Mistral deal was was the biggest deal for an A.I. company outside of Silicon Valley. So this is really the French champion. Maybe the premium placed on Be Real, which is also based in France, is because they just wanted to keep it in the country. So Macron has really started to promote this tech sector with Mistral, Voodoo, Be Real. They have a few kind of success stories here that they can say, look, our investments are starting to pay off. For our final story, here's a riddle for you. What is 75 ,000 square feet, has 120 fuel pumps, and allegedly the world's cleanest bathrooms?