#46 - Isabelle Boemeke - Why Nuclear Power Is The Rad Future We Need

37:57However, in the 60s, you have this entire anti-establishment vibe that's starting to brew. So you have the women's liberation movement, the civil rights movement that are very tied to this anti-establishment feeling, right? It's all about anti-government against the big man. This is probably around the time of Vietnam War as well, right? Anti-Vietnam War, exactly. It was a time when people were felt very, they felt very disillusioned by the government and they felt like they were lied to. And in many cases they were lied to. And also it was coming off the back of a bunch of like really poor environmental protections, right?

38:43Also really poor environmental protections. It was like a river on fire. yes the quayoga i always mispronounce it but the quayoga river had caught on fire 12 times and a river just spontaneously combusting because it was filled with shit and chemical dumps and right this is the point is it's like water should not be on fire catch on fire yeah you must be doing something seriously wrong to make a whole body of water catch fire right and this was a time when companies were just dumping their waste right there was no environmental regulations no environmental regulation whatsoever so it was all of these things coming together right but i think the most important thing is the anti-establishment feeling because nuclear was so hopelessly tied to the government in every country but especially in the United States, which is what a lot of this environmental movement happened.

39:40And also the first actions by a lot of our most beloved, speak for yourself, but a lot of the biggest environmental organizations was anti-nuclear weapons. So Greenpeace, their first act was trying to stop a nuclear weapons test off the coast of Alaska. So they rented a little fishing boat called Greenpeace and at that point they were called the don't make a wave committee based on the idea that this test would create these massive waves and so they went off the coast and tried to stop the test. They didn't succeed but they did succeed in raising a bunch of awareness and getting people involved and later on Greenpeace expanded into other things like whaling and also being against nuclear electricity.

40:35So a lot of these environmental organizations, they ended up arising as anti-nuclear weapons organizations and then later on also being against nuclear electricity from a fear of radiation and waste and some of the other things that we've heard about. But all of these factors are what made the anti-nuclear movement so strong in the 1970s. And then, of course, if you have already all the people, if you have already all of these things, making people feel like this technology is not safe, it's tied to weapons, then you have one accident and it's all it takes to confirm your feeling that this is a dangerous technology.

41:19When in reality, if you think about the fact that people can bring up two accidents that led to any fatalities in the history of nuclear, commercial nuclear electricity to me that speaks about how safe this technology is and not how unsafe it is but right and of course it has the the additional sort of uh thing working against it is that when there was an accident it's a very like visualizable thing yes it's like smoke or whatever like toxic smoke billowing out of this huge factory and um the idea of it like melting down into the earth and so on and meanwhile if you actually look at the stats i would love this our world in uh data chart i'll make sure that it's put up by my face right now um uh that shows the the number of deaths per unit of electricity that is produced by that that thing um nuclear is actually one of the safest it's like absolutely tiny um whereas coal is killing people left right and center but because it's just happening all the time because we're so used to the idea of like a you know a power plant with a big tall chimney and like black stuff coming out of it we're like oh that's just standard we've seen smoke before smoke isn't bad right um people are just okay with it it's like this silent invisible killer it's like it's like the idea of like plane crashes versus people are often more scared to fly than they are to drive right you know it's orders of magnitude more dangerous totally and this is one of my favorite things ever, favorite clip from the anti-nuclear movement.

42:56So we talked about accidents. In 1979, the United States had its worst accident, worst that didn't lead to any deaths or anybody getting sick, but it was the worst accident. It was at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. After that accident, which unfortunately happened 12 days after the premiere of the China Syndrome, which is a thriller about a nuclear power plant meltdown. Bad timing. Featuring Jane Fonda, who was iconic at the time already. So after this accident happened, a bunch of musicians got together and they decided to throw this big concert series called No Nukes in Madison Square Garden.

43:41So for several days, they were singing on stage and protesting and talking trash about all things nuclear, both weapons, but also electricity. And at one point, a band goes on stage and they sing this song that says, give me the comforting glow of a wood fire, but take all your atomic poison power away. Which is hilarious because obviously we know now that burning wood is way worse for human health than nuclear. It's estimated that 40 ,000 people die in Europe from air pollution caused by burning wood directly. And more in the United States as well and around the world, obviously. But this is just one example of when people go with the vibes instead of the data.

44:27And to be fair to them, there was way less data back then. It was a newer technology, so people didn't have all the information. They didn't know how much the three-mile island accident also, how much damage it would cause. but yeah a lot of it was based on vibes and to your point you know nuclear when when there is an accident it makes it into the news and it's how going back to the bombs question how different do you think things would have been had the counterfactual happened you know that we had discovered nuclear energy first before any bombs were made when i started writing my book I wanted to do this whole first chapter that was about, it was a fiction story about what the world would look like had we developed electricity before weapons, had the world been introduced to electricity first.

45:22And obviously I went down all this super cool, high-tech sci-fi worlds, right? Would we be... You tried to like tell the story of the meme, like, you know, the classic... Literally society... Society if men go to therapy or whatever. Society of Men went to therapy and nuclear electricity was developed first. Yeah. Yeah. So the flying car, the whole thing, the whole shbang, less air pollution.

45:50But that's one of the interesting things about writing a book is that hopefully you get more evidence and you develop a more sophisticated worldview. view. And in the beginning, I thought, wow, the world would have been so much better if we were introduced to electricity because we would have developed clean energy much sooner. All countries on earth could have had 100 % clean electricity by now and we would have energy abundance and all those things. But then I realized, what if we had spread nuclear technologies all around the world without the understanding of the bad side of it, without the understanding of what the impact of developing nuclear weapons would be?

46:39And what if it was just easier to develop nuclear weapons because we didn't develop the safeguards in the first place that would prevent the proliferation?

46:50And I think about that as it relates to AI, because we are doing that with AI. we are developing first the positive side, the helpful chatbot, the friendly assistant, the person who just says yes sir to everything you say. But that is arguably nice. However, that also means we don't know how bad the bad is. And I think in the case of nuclear, yes, it sucked that the weapons were developed first, but at least gave us the motivation to form international cooperation and to develop safeguards to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

47:39Sure, it delayed the transition to clean energy. I'm hoping that we're wise enough to now pick it back up and be able to develop in an even safer and better way. And we were able to prevent the proliferation of weapons. So not to be a bummer, but I am glad this is how things played out, especially now that I can compare with AI, because we don't know what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki of AI are. There are lots of speculations. We haven't seen it, at least that we're aware of yet. And so there's not an incentive to create very strong international cooperation. no yeah no i i actually very much agree with you um i also though why because people keep saying yeah what will be the chernobyl or you know hiroshima of of ai and once we get that then it's fine all the sane regulations are actually going to come about and i'm like okay sure well first of all that hiroshima it might be a lot bigger than hiroshima first of all um because ai is already becoming so embedded in all of our systems um and there's many different flavors of AI and there's also you know it's like choose your type of catastrophe as well because it's like is it like a bad actor using it for a bad thing or is it like loss of control blah blah but um what worries me even more is that because it's become so hard to make sense of anything in the world now in part mediated by AI because it's like we're gonna have just like we're gonna be a watching like fake videos where it's just you can't discern truth from fiction and there's so much propaganda already like the world is the internet is now just a sea of propaganda or every every different you know political conflicts etc and all the culture wars everything is culture wars including ai it's already happening to the point where you look at a conflict you just can't tell you can't tell exactly and so some kind of ai mediated disaster could happen and there's so much culture war noise already would we be even able to tell you know like the grid went down in spain we still don't really know what caused it now could that been a cyber attack yes it could be could it have been like you know someone using ai to do that who knows like that we might be having all these red flags go off because a lot of stuff is going wrong and we just we can't really tell so that's why that's what concerns me with ai and that we don't have it's not as convenient as something like well there goes a bomb or oh shit those bad guys got hold of a bunch of enriched uranium um it's it's trickier it's much much trickier i would say the hiroshima of ai would be literal robots in the street murdering people you know that's the most obvious one like okay yeah seems bad yeah pretty bad did you see the video of the robot spazzing out on the guy was in there and it just starts like um it was funny was it it was an optimus no it wasn't i don't think it was no it was it was some i don't know it was in some lab somewhere and it was like hanging up on a thing um and you know it like some program got loaded into it which made it do it and the guy's like shouting like oh why did it there's actually been a second video of it i'll put them both up because they're quite entertaining um giving west world yeah i mean it's it's the thing i think that people you know the the i think terminated to is probably the best one of the best movies ever made not because of its like messaging but just because of like it's just a masterpiece in general um but in that like it's oh it's like this idea of like it's got this red eyes and it's it is evil it has evil intents to kill humans but like whereas the one freaking out and it's thing that could have actually killed someone because it's like a powerful machine doing this and someone just standing by if it gets them in the right way like human skulls are not very strong um it seems like it's again it's more like an accident where it's not like see heat seeking people out to kill them but it's just going haywire um that seems more plausible but it's also funny it's right it's like and so we just laugh at this stuff i'm like no someone that could have actually killed someone in the wrong place or like if there was a child walking by it like for sure oh for sure yeah so what what advice would you give the ai industry like as someone who studied what went right what went wrong in terms of like you know as as a you know for them to be more responsible, like in the way, you know, like the IAEA did, you know, you, you, you hold them up as an example of like responsible international cooperation that found a way to reap as much of the benefits from, from nuclear and minimize the downsides, the harms and so on.

52:41Like what, what lessons should be drawn from that by the AI industry? So I'll just walk you through the steps of how it works for nuclear at the IAEA. So let's say I'm a country and I don't have nuclear electricity. I don't have nuclear research. I don't have any nuclear programs in my country. And I want to develop a nuclear electricity program because I want clean electricity. So I go and start a conversation with the IAEA. And I basically have to sign a piece of paper that says, I will develop a nuclear electricity program and I will not pursue bombs. And in exchange for that paper, the IAA will assist me because it's not easy to start a nuclear electricity program.

53:31You can't just go on eBay and order a reactor. And there's a series of things. You need to have a regulatory body. You need to have all these things in place in order to have that program. So it's a lot easier if you go to an international organization like the IEA for help. So you sign the piece of paper, you say that the IEA then helps you develop your program. And also in exchange, you give them access to your facilities. So they send inspectors every year to go inspect your facilities. I think they have some local, they have some people that stay there longer, depending on your program. They write reports about it to make sure you're complying.

54:16And that's pretty much it. So 31 countries in the world have nuclear electricity. And out of those 31, only seven of them have weapons. Out of those seven, five of them begin with weapons and then develop electricity later. All of that to say, it works. that you can point to a couple of examples where they started with a nuclear electricity program and later developed weapons, I think shows that how successful it has been, not the opposite. Because in reality, most countries just want cheaper electricity. Having a nuclear weapons program, it's kind of a headache. Now there are countries that really want nuclear weapons, right?

54:56And they'll do it without a nuclear electricity program. That's literally what Israel and North Korea did both. They both have illegal nuclear weapons. They both have illegal nuclear programs. In the case of nuclear, though, the biggest proliferation concern is in the enrichment portion and then also in the reprocessing waste portion. Those are the big areas to be concerned. The fuel that goes in your reactor to make electricity, that's not really the part people are concerned with. Now, not a lot of countries have the ability to enrich uranium because that's another thing. So you can have a nuclear electricity program.

55:36That doesn't mean you get an enrichment program. Some countries do, some don't. You need fancy centrifuges, right? You need to have very fancy centrifuges, lots of them. and it costs obviously a lot of money. And most countries, again, they don't want to put all that money into enrichment because they would rather just buy cheap fuel from Russia or some other country that sells it to them. And then in the reprocessing as well, this is not a walk in the park. Reprocessing nuclear waste is not an easy thing. So for you to set up that entire program without any help because the IAA is not going to help you, it's a nightmare.

56:14However, if you have a lot of money and you really want to do it, you're probably going to do it illegally. Which goes back to the point that you don't need to fake a nuclear electricity program to get your weapons, if that's your goal. As a matter of fact, I would argue that having a nuclear electricity program actually makes it harder because you have all the IAEA inspectors constantly up in your business asking questions and going to your nuclear facilities and gathering information. right the whole iran situation really just unfolded because of a report that the iaa wrote on how they were enriching uranium oh really yes wait what we thought what happened so they the iaea went and did their inspection and were like seems like you're being a little bummy or what basically let's yeah that's basically well they've first of all iran has had a nuclear program since the 50s.

57:10Right. So it's not, you know, the IA has been working with them for decades. They started with a nuclear electricity program. Then they started pursuing some military stuff, always unsure. Right. And then the Obama administration made a deal with Iran where it relieved some of the sanctions in exchange for an agreement that they wouldn't enrich uranium to a certain percentage. And people had problems with it because, you know, it would expire after a certain date and blah, blah, blah. But it was working. And the Trump administration walked out of the deal. And so Iran started enriching uranium to higher levels again.

57:55So in May of 2025, the IAEA puts out this report saying that for decades, Iran had been playing with some undisclosed nuclear material at three different nuclear locations in the country that were also undisclosed. And they also said in a different report that they had enriched uranium up to 60%, which is way higher than you would need for electricity production alone, and even for research. And they had increased the quantity of uranium and reached up to 60%. So those are the reports that led to the actions that we saw later taken by the United States. Is that perfect? No. But again, the IAEA does having people on the ground, having boots on the ground, gathering information, I think does give some visibility on what's happening.

58:53I think that faking a nuclear electricity program, going through the IAEA, having IAEA inspectors on the ground, inspecting your nuclear facilities, even if you have clandestine facilities, which was the case with Iran, the IAEA eventually caught on and wrote a whole report about it. and led the United States to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. Yeah, I mean, it seems like a no-brainer to have some kind of international authority overlooking these things because it's just you have a bunch of actors, most of whom are good, but some might be bad, and incentives for them to do bad things, and having the ability to just like mutually, you know, surveil one another essentially makes people stay in line.

59:38Right. How is the IAEA funded? What are their incentives? The IAEA is funded by a bunch of different governments. It's like a shared pool? Yeah, it's a shared pool. It's very much like the UN. It is a part of the UN. So it's funded by different governments. It's actually a functioning, useful version of it. Because I don't know, I've been very red-pilled against the UN lately, just seeing the way they generally operate. I mean, I'm sure there are downsides, and I'm sure there are ways it could be run better. But I think it's very impressive. I think it's very impressive that, again, we have so many countries with nuclear electricity.

1:00:16We haven't really seen a huge proliferation and spread of nuclear weapons. And also this report in Iran. I mean, those are undisclosed facilities, right? And sure, it took them a while. They didn't immediately catch on, but eventually they did. Now back to your question, how does that relate to AI? What's the advice? from my understanding, it's a lot different, obviously. You know, it's a lot easier to buy equipment for data centers. It's a lot easier to set up a data center to build an AI. So I don't know exactly how that translates, but from the few conversations we've had with a couple of different people, there is something you can do, like you can track chips.

1:01:04because obviously a few companies in the world. It's basically just NVIDIA. Basically NVIDIA making the chips. Is there a way to track those chips to make sure they're going to, you know, countries or companies that have - You just want to know where they are. As a global consciousness, you want to know where these different things are. But let's say you do have an IEA equivalent to AI. It could be an A-I-E-A. Oh God. Oh my God, just to get everybody so confused. The AIEA. Honestly, not a bad idea. But let's say you do have something like that. Okay, I'm a company that's trying to develop this super powerful AI.

1:01:47Or let's just say you were a company that want to build AI and you're saying you want to build narrow AI to solve protein folding. Is there a way to ensure that your AI is going to be used for that? I don't know the answer to that, but is there a case to be made that to develop AGI, you need such an immense amount of compute that you could have an idea of which companies are trying to pursue that just sheerly based on the number of chips that they're buying for the data center? Do you have any visibility on that? I mean, fortunately, yes, because as you say, it's like mostly NVIDIA chips, some TSMC chips.

1:02:34It is relatively trackable. You need a large data center, which is usually visible from space in some way. So, yeah, all the while it's just like two core companies creating essentially the substrate on which these things run. means that you can actually then keep a free track on it and it requires an immense amount of capital to do that's the other thing as well right um there's also limited brain power in terms of researchers who can actually move the frontier forward so there's there's a number of like scarce resources which are also relatively trackable um which i think is in in our favor as a species um to be able to like self-manage this um but at the same time what's sort of lacking is it's just like it's become um almost anathema the idea of like you know I get it as well like it's like who watches the watchers that's why I was asking like who funds the IAEA what are their incentives how are the ways for that to become corrupted because all these things are corruptible and I think it's testament that the maybe you know you say that the IAEA has not been corrupted has maintained like it's just doing its job well um that's that's a very it's a very positive sign and it surprises me when i mean i don't know if actually that many people are against the idea of some international governing body of ai but i imagine a lot of silicon valley are because they just don't want to be governed by the way there are people i get it like right there are people who say that the iaa was corrupted oh really and that their report on iran was purely incentivized by u.s and israel interests right and so there are people who think that right um um i mean it could be true could be true exactly but at the same time i could totally believe that iran would say that or anyone who wants you know it's it's propaganda in both directions it's like and i can totally believe that iran was also doing sketchy stuff right they've done plenty of it so i don't i don't i don't have i don't have an evidence to say that they've been corrupted but i'm sure there are people who do believe that yeah but the question is okay so let's say you set up the AI version.

1:04:53Let's say you set up the AI version of the IAEA and you can track the chips and you can track those things. Yeah, you could have governments that are funding it, right? But to your point, a lot of people feel an almost allergic reaction. And it's funny because a lot of my followers are very yak, like just accelerate. And they are confused by my stance because they think well you you saw what regulations did to nuclear you saw what the anti-nuclear movement did to nuclear electricity and yes but again I am glad that we have safeguards in place I'm glad that we don't have every single country on earth with nuclear weapons I think that's a good thing say why it's a good thing because I think a lot of people don't intuitively grok why that's a good thing, surprisingly.

1:05:45Okay. So it's funny to even have to explain that, but let's just say every country on earth has nuclear weapons. What happens if some crazy president of some random country launches a nuclear weapon and it leads to nuclear war between several different nations? I mean, you just increase the chances of nuclear war happening because you increase the chances that a crazy president is going to launch a nuclear weapons attack. The more poles there are, essentially, the more likely, you know, the more boundaries there are between different clusters of nuclear weapons, the more likely it is that there's some kind of exchange happens.

1:06:30Right. Right. Yeah. That's a very intellectual way of saying the more weapons, the more. Yeah. the more the more yeah the more weapons but not just the more weapons the more individual yes exactly identities that have a weapon like if every single person on earth to the most extreme example had a weapon there's probably going to be a bunch going off just on the street down the road at some point in the next week just because because there are crazy people people get to fights people get into gunfights you know like it's it'll happen with that kind of frequency so the more actors have a potentially very very dangerous thing the more likely some kind of conflict will happen and to the point that it will effectively become inevitable.

1:07:07Right. Yeah, exactly. And so I understand, I understand a little bit of the reaction against, we don't want the governments telling you what to do. And there is always the, but China, to borrow from our friend Tim Urban, but China. There is always the idea that if we don't develop it, China is going to develop it, which to be fair, in the case of nuclear electricity is literally what happened. China is now building nuclear, big nuclear in four or five years and at costs that are comparable to methane gas in the United States. So they have dominated the nuclear electricity market period. And the second one is Russia.

1:07:51So it's a valid point. And unfortunately I wish I had more answers. I do believe we should at least have a conversation about what safeguards look like and have a plan.

1:08:13I don't know. I'm really, I cannot talk about this. I'm really depressed because I see the necessity for it and I just don't see incentive for it. Yeah. well i mean it sounds i mean i think i think it's going to happen anyway um agi no uh the thing that usually pushes creates an incentive for there to be some kind of safeguards or for there to at least be more transparency and an ability for different people to check in on others you know for the different actors to almost like self-surveil which you know like this idea of surveillance where it's like surveillance from beneath as opposed to because i agree surveillance from on the top implies like one world government and now you're just opening up like 1984 or brave new world you know pick your dystopia but those type of nightmare scenarios which we don't want but at the same time we need an ability to be able to like check on one another that someone's not doing something really really sketch uh you know just like taking a dark gamble for the whole world just for a little win for themselves.

1:09:20And Alison Dutman, a previous guest on here, she talked about this idea of surveillance. So instead of surveillance, it's from beneath where it's like, and you can do this sort of cryptographically, basically. It's like using zero knowledge proof protocols. It's not like everyone has a camera on everyone at all times. It's like there is a way, you know, there are like some methods of keeping track of what's happening but only when certain um like alarm switches are tripped you know a trip wire goes off in some sense whatever you design that to be does the system actually become transparent and everyone can be like wait what's going on and everyone has a look so the information is being recorded um and again maybe is that by like actual people going to the different sites checking it out or some other like more advanced method but the information is there but no one actor can just like take control of it all it needs like a certain number to have been opted in to for the sort of alarm system to go off and people to then be able to go and check on one another um there's something directionally in that it's beyond my pay grade to know exactly how to design it but that's that's the kind of it's it's decentralized and therefore not um hijackable by like some crazed lunatic but it provides the ability for civilization to actually keep an eye on what's going on you would still need obviously you would still need these different companies or governments to sign right up for that right oh yes and so this gets to my point so and the way to incentivize that to happen is from the public there has to be enough public concern to be like hey fuckheads we're watching you like you can't just keep doing this stuff unilaterally and like again gamble with all of our futures just because you're the ones making you know your shareholder number goes up for you um and that so that will require funnily enough some kind of essentially you know people's movement of like no we want more transparency on ai we want to have more of a say on the technologies are just being like force-fed to society um what you know we want to know what's being built um now it's not to say that like because i agree like you don't want like populist populism to like dictate everything because it's i agree that joe schmo does not understand ai enough not as well as a ceo of an ai company i think the ai ceo should have more say because they obviously just have more expertise but it shouldn't be they have a hundred percent and i think that i think it's inevitable because people are like you're just seeing the ai backlash welling up and anyone who's saying that it's like oh it's fine the people are just being silly they have no idea what's coming like you see these and i don't want it to be like this kind of like horrible luigi mangi-oni type sort of backlashes but that's going to become more common as more and more people feel disenfranchised by AI.

1:12:22So many people are losing their jobs faster than new jobs are being created. And you're just going to have this critical mass of like general backlash. And, you know, if I was a tech CEO, I would be getting ahead of that by like asking like, hey, come and examine me. I think we should be examined more. Be the good guy. Take the lead on this. Be more democratic effectively because this backlash, I think it's coming and that we don't want it to be we don't want the same thing that happened with nuclear energy where the backlash was so strong and so stupid that then you don't get any of the upsides and everything gets shut down um so yeah i mean it's it's a bit of a chicken and egg but it's generally speaking more transparency is better and i don't know it feels like people who are like trying to fight against that because they think oh well transparency will lead us to being regulated it's like well what are you even fighting for here and that's the point i was going to make so much of the argument that i and others make for an abundant future is about human lives we just want people to have better lives be it have an air conditioning at home so they are not melting in the summer or you know freezing in the winter if all of this is in service of human lives what good is it to create a technology that will make lives worse for everybody and people will come and say well we're gonna have so much abundance and like sure you can you can increase energy consumption in the united states by a little bit and that will improve some people's lives.

1:14:07The vast majority of Americans have somewhat comfortable lives. So are you going to 10x the number of goods that people can buy? And how is that offset against the fact that nobody's going to have jobs or meaning whatsoever in their lives? jobs are meaning related but not identical right

1:14:39yes i think they're more tightly correlated than we would like to believe especially in a place like the united states when i moved here i was shocked that every time i met somebody new the first question was what do you do I didn't experience that in Brazil. I don't know. People ask about other things. But here it's very much your identity is tied to your job. And obviously people have hobbies and

1:15:13but what we've witnessed in the past decade or so as more people had free time or as more people had more free time and as their quote-unquote quality of life went up, we used a lot of that free time to fight online and to create all sorts of stupid culture wars. Remove jobs from that equation and let people just live wall-y lives of consumption where they're glued to their video game or TV, VR all day long. I fail to see how that's not going to create a massive crisis of meaning and potentially the extinction of the human species. Because if you have people all day long in VRs talking to their AI companions, not have it's already happening by the way young people are not getting into relationships because i mean this is what i observe right of from people online talking about relationships the smallest little thing is a huge red flag and this person disagrees with you they're toxic and they're a narcissist.

1:16:44So there's already this huge push towards any inconvenience that somebody presents means they're not the right person for me. It means they're toxic, gaslighting. Better to be single. Better to be single. I mean, how many women have you heard saying that? So often. Well, men too. Men too. Yeah. Both. Mostly women. Especially women. Oh, totally. and it's a good relationship is hard work the person is never perfect like even when i have as probably good a relationship as anyone i know we still fight all the time there's many things about him that drive me crazy and vice versa but that's part of it and it's just like you know but if i've been force-fed the idea that no they have to be perfect and do all the things that you like and it's like well that's yeah you're not you're just never going to be satisfied you're never satisfied you you break up a relationship go to the next one and then you're not satisfied again and then you end up single because better to be single than with a toxic narcissist and then especially then when you couple that with the wave of ai like relationship bots whatever you want to call them right like bots companions is a fluffy word for it but like ultimately the thing that gives you emotion some form of like emotion like emotional stroking of your head through words um and they're becoming they're going to get better and better and better at being exactly personalized to what makes our egos feel like we're seen right the resistance is just like going to become so insurmountable for like persons to actually get into enough of a relationship where they actually get married and have kids oh forget about it yes yeah and it's it surprises me that people more people don't see that right it seems it seems fairly obvious at this point especially getting to the point of having kids, because also we live in this world of crazy consumption, not only of material goods, but of trips and experiences.

1:18:37It's one of the reasons why also people don't want to have kids earlier is because they don't want to give up their lives. Right. The opportunity cost. They don't want to downgrade. They, you know, they'll say, oh, I get to travel every week and, you know, go to all this fancy restaurants and having a child is expensive. And I don't blame them. That's the society we're living in. But when you pair all of these things, the fact that people are already struggling to have real relationships and that they don't want to have kids because they don't want to stop having all these experiences and they don't have enough money for it.

1:19:13How is it that taking away their jobs and the only thing maybe that's giving them meaning and then just slapping them in front of a VR or a video game or whatever that is keeping them entertained all day long? How is that better for humanity? Right. I mean, I'm literally rereading Brave New World now and it is becoming increasingly that sort of, it's just like everything is built around consumption and removal of emotional, any kind of emotional annoyance. Yes. It's like you, you instant gratification. It's just like instant gratification on steroids. And yeah, I mean, some people though truly think, I mean, let's, this is the win-win podcast, right?

1:20:03It's like, what is the win-win here? Like, this is a like thing I wrestle with always. It's like, well, but if, you know, this idea of wire heading, if you could plug into a machine, which you will never feel a negative emotion. isn't that isn't that radical abundance and i would argue no it's not because true radical abundance means you also have the abundance of actual like you need like negative emotions that like push you to strive and achieve something because if like basically you're going to zero achievement if you're just in this thing of you might it might feel like you're being achieved well maybe but then then again maybe you're if you're feeling it then it's real.

1:20:48Right. So it's, it really does touch on this like fundamental question. Like some people truly believe that that is actually the optimal. We should just go to that. And it's just about maximizing hedons, you know, or eutalon like moments of pleasure. Um, there's probably a lot of clinical evidence though, that hedonism is not good long-term for happiness. And that Jordan Peterson talks a lot about this, how the only way to have a meaningful and good life that makes you feel proud is to carry the biggest, to make the biggest sacrifice that you can, to carry the biggest burden that you can, meaning do the hardest thing that you can at any given moment.

1:21:31And that's like on the opposite end, right? Of the spectrum of how you see the world. the truth is probably somewhere in between yeah but this gets into a very religious conversation about what's the meaning of life literally what is the meaning of human existence what is it is it to just be happy in front of a computer consuming maybe we don't know the answer to that right that's what's so so crazy and I my personal opinion is that it's not because every time I do that I hate myself if I spend a whole day in front of the tv just eating and watching content I feel horrible but maybe that's just because I grew up in a society that no I feel it too we grew up in quite different societies right at the same time we're quite similar people in some ways maybe some people do truly just like that is I mean that's the concept of like retirement actually if you think about it someone like works all their life used to be the American dream right work all your life to raise enough money to have a family and so on and then you get to a certain age and it is time to retire where you become officially a person of leisure where you just consume so in some ways it's a goal but the thing that makes the goal meaningful is that you went through the arc of doing the dream doing the strife working so that you can get to this like this reward but if you don't have the the sort of mountain to climb to get to the reward then does the reward actually mean anything right um i mean i always sort of say when someone asks me the meaning of life it's like the meaning of life is to discover the meaning of life but again what is that so it's it's it's a process it's not an outcome it's a process The meaning is in the process and the doing.

1:23:30Right. It really is. Yeah. And you see that very clearly when you have kids. You know, the little things, the figuring out the feeding schedule and, oh, they, you know, they went to the bathroom every day this week. It's all these little things that you're constantly tweaking and trying to figure out. Those are the things that bring you satisfaction and reward in figuring out how to make them better, healthier and all of the things. It's the same in your life, right? When you begin a project, you have no idea if it's going to work out. And then you make a series of moves and some of them work and some of them don't work.

1:24:13But then the ones that do work, you celebrate even more because of the failures before. I mean, everything in life is like that. But yeah, maybe it doesn't matter because you have, maybe it doesn't matter because you're plugged into a computer or you have a neural net in your brain that is just canceling out any of the negative feelings you might have associated with not having built something. And maybe we're just like old people. Maybe we're just the de-growthers. You know, old people being like, stop mashing with humans. I mean, I think if you get to a point where you are truly, you can manipulate emotions, brain chemistry, et cetera, so much that you don't ever have negative emotions, you are truly a new species.

1:25:02Right. That is no longer a human. So that would be the death of humanity. Yes. It's the birth of something new. The question is, is that new thing better? maybe we can't conceptualize of it because of our human brains that we need the sort of the differential to have meaning that said look at all religious texts look at and i do think there's a lot of wisdom in almost all of the wisdom religious texts in in different ways um they all relate to this idea of like you know why did god create evil so that that so that actually something happens if we're just in this like to me it's like the kind of like this like thing where everything is instant gratification and so on, is it effectively like a heat death?

1:25:45Yes. Well, definitely that. If there is no way to chemically or physically alter our brains so that we don't experience negative emotions, then we're new species, to your point. But if we're just not experiencing bad emotions because everything is catered for us, well, I don't know. That didn't make any sense, actually. Now that I think about it.

1:26:15I don't know that it did. But okay, this is a different way to put it. If we can chemically or physically alter our brains in a way that makes us not experience any negative emotion, to a point we're a different species then. But if we don't experience negative emotions because there is no friction in our lives, because everything is just there, the food is there, the entertainment is there, everything is just available at all times, then I think we're still grappling with the same human issues of needing to strive for something, needing to build something. And we're still going to have to deal with the depression that comes with that.

1:26:56I mean, when you hear to like yogis and such talking about Nirvana and maybe it's not yogis, but you know what I mean? Those type of people, those people, oh God. uh the the spiritually advanced whatever you want to call them people who dedicate their entire lives to spirituality the sort of you want to get to this this state of nirvana etc where you don't have right you you don't actually have these negative emotions um that is a sort of again that would be that kind of state you you've you've eradicated that but again isn't the value in the getting there in the first place right but you don't you once you once you sort of almost break through then you no longer care about the the journey because you're in this that you're in this state is basically almost like a timelessness that's interesting then because it makes me think there's nothing i want to be less than a very spiritually advanced person who's just like i'm okay with everything and imagine what would the world look like if everybody was in that state constantly would we have innovations and we wouldn't need them presumably right people would just like live i mean i don't know assuming people still do like do we need to still do basic bodily functions like eat and such right maybe not maybe that is maybe that is the goal right yeah by the way like i love that we're exploring this conversation we're getting to the point where maybe that is the goal because that is the only goal because otherwise there is no society but once you get that i feel like at some point i mean again someone joked about i remember i read this but it's like why why did god create the universe he created it because he was bored because he'd done everything and he was like in this state of perfect bliss and he's like okay that's cool but like i want something new now so let's start this sim going yes and there's actually a bunch of strife and there's really bad things that happen and it's like let's see how people overcome it he's like right she or he or they they them it they them yeah it's that it's that it's pronouns maybe um it's so maybe it is the goal maybe we should be striving for it but it will kick start the cycle again i don't know it it also just makes me think we you and i both know people who are just higher hardwired for working on very complex problems.

1:29:33And I would think myself not as extreme, but I do like figuring out hard problems. That's why I set out to do this crazy nuclear electricity thing. But there are people who are much more extreme than me. And then what do those people do in a society like that? Do they also just practice to become enlightened? Maybe. I think a lot of them go into video game design, design their own games, which by the way is if we did live in a post-scarcity society i would like i'd be just going all in on games i'll be like all right you know i kind of did that for a chunk of my life but that's because again it's like it's some people are just so hardwired to need to have some kind of scarcity to compete for right which is fine but that's that's why i think games are so good because it's for the people who have like um perhaps too much of that it's a way for them to channel that energy right and then what happens to the human body at that point because you don't even need like let's just say you're just gonna live in your vr and you have like machines that are stimulating your muscles enough so they don't atrophy atrophy and you have a machine that's feeding you food yeah that's kind of a that's like the extreme version of that right yeah like i I think a lot of people who just hate their bodies or you know don't like doing physical things naturally gravitate to that that seems like their their like our friend I won't say her name but lives down the road she would love that right right right she's just like yeah I'd be done with this if I could be done with a silly body that would be fantastic there are some people who truly believe that live that way so I guess in a win-win future for those who want that they should have the freedom to do that similarly for those who don't want that i would consider myself i like having a body i like climbing mountains i like the feeling of pushing it to the limit i should have the freedom to do that too so really what it comes down to actually in this win-win future world would be of like radical abundance is that you can choose to live the kind of life you want and right what when coming back tying this back to ai and this idea of like like this sort of wall-y world where everything is provided, and I was like, you know, on tap, everyone's just fat, like wire-headed, et cetera.

1:31:50What I don't like about that is that it's like it will become the default state of the world because people have forgotten what it's like to have the striving to actually go out and do the thing because it's just the world is, the incentives are so strong that everything becomes that way. It's just the consumption machine is so good at convincing you to consume that you lose your agency to remember what it was like to not do that definitely that will be the the default exactly and that's where i think my fear of this stuff is is like when i see when i notice my own social media addiction i don't like it because i feel like my agency's been taken away because it's like mega powerful super algorithm is so good at getting me wound up that i end up just scrolling for hours and i'm like come up for air like what hell.

1:32:37It also just takes you away from all the things that makes you, at least for me, from all the things that make me enjoy life, which is exercising, communicating with friends, spending time with my child, learning a new hobby. All of those things are things that bring me pleasure. And I feel that with social media, I spend hours a day just engaging with people that I don't even I know there might be bots for all I know. And getting angry over stupid stuff, like the CEO of Astronomer cheating on his wife at the Coldplay concert. You weren't angry, you liked the memes. You were just enjoying it. But, you know, those are not the things that make me personally happy.

1:33:23But yeah, to your point, maybe there is a huge subset of people that would be happy with that and they should have that possibility. So probably the end is going to be a bunch of Wally type people and then a bunch of hardcore homesteaders that are just doing everything the old way, you know, growing their own food and doing their own things with hopefully a lot of tech that can help them. Technopastoralism. Yes. Finally, we got to the topic of technopastoralism. I would love to grow my own food, but have little robots that tell me the quality of the soil and that can detect if there is some pest and find out solutions for that pest as well.

1:34:01So I can grow my vegetables. Helps me with educating my children, but I'm still the one helping, you know, doing the work. I would love to live in a home like that, like a very pastoral landscape, but that is enabled by a bunch of really cool advanced technology. But maybe that's just the smaller subset of people. Yeah. But it's, I agree. It's a great aesthetic. Like I could see myself leaning into that because I love technology, but I'm also a farm girl. I love animals. I love dirt. I love open air and mountains but i really like i don't want to do you know i've spent many years cleaning out stables and like wallowing in mud and like there's sometimes i want to do that but i don't want to do day in day out to have like the animals and such around me so you just like right again it's like choosing choose your adventure yes yes yes choose your strife but to be fair i think nobody's gonna say no to that right i imagine no one would do but but the current incentives are not taking us there that's the thing at least some of the incentives like i think the incentives generally the incentives on the internet has just become it's just all about engagement and attention right we're being attention farmed we are the factory farmed animals and in service of these big social media platforms trying to keep us on there as long as possible so that is taking us away from techno pastoralism right um or whatever's peat persons you know thing of techno pastoralism is great sign me up for that you have your toilet that tells you what your poop was like where your poop you go you need some vitamin c that'd be great yeah and then they like they like send you out this this highly specific vitamin c that's you know your body needs at that given moment i literally invested in a company that is doing that it's like a small toilet right I don't remember the name of it.

1:35:57I'll have to put it up. But yeah, people are leaning into that. But yes, so you're saying basically we want a highly techno-powered future that maximizes people's choices. And if you want to be - And that lets humans be humans. Yes. And not some sort of - In all of its diversity. In all of its diversity. Yes. Exactly. Yes. If you want to be a disembodied floating head, go for it. Go for it. That's fine. I don't care. Yeah. Just don't force it upon me. Right. And I won't force my mountain stuff upon you. Right. Right. Exactly. I like it. So it feels like with nuclear, the biggest kind of hurdle is facing right now is its economics, because most like to build a new plant, it seems like that's at least a five, but more like 10, 20 year investment.

1:36:48And that is at odds with the way most sort of funding things, you know, most investors want short-term quick returns right um certainly on the scale of years if not quarters so what kind of in incentive structures have you seen whether it's like subsidies or so on that have actually worked and helped make nuclear come faster come faster i got the question nuclear is very nuclear is definitely extremely expensive in the west that's not the case in China. China is building like traditional large nuclear reactors in about four years. And it's, they're building it at a cost that's comparable to methane gas in the United States.

1:37:34Very cheap. But that's China, right? They build everything faster and cheaper. Now let's talk about the United States. Well, wait, why do they build everything faster and cheaper? Well, cheaper labor. Oh, okay. A little bit of cheaper labor, manufacturing capabilities, materials. They're just generally better at building big infrastructure projects, which the United States has gotten very bad at, the West in general, but especially the United States. And they also have something which every country that has been successful at deploying nuclear at scale has, which is the government is basically the one pushing for the projects.

1:38:19So in the case of France and some other European countries that were successful, the government also owns a utility company, the company that provides electricity for all the people. So they're the ones that initiate the projects. So obviously they're not going to build just a couple of plants. plants, they're going to build several of them. Like in the case of France, they built 57. If you build 57 of anything, you're going to get pretty good at building it at some point. You're going to get very fast. You're going to bring the costs down. In the case of the United States, utilities are their own, you know, obviously we have over 30 utilities or something crazy like that.

1:39:04And they each choose their own nuclear project. they each choose their different design and even in the largest utilities they're mostly going to build maybe four maybe five plants so you don't really get those economies of scale with only building five plants and the knowledge is mostly lost there are so many conspiracy theories as to why nuclear got so expensive in the United States but this is one of the main reasons why let's say your utility in the 70s, you build four nuclear reactors, you don't need any more electricity, so you just don't build any more. And the people who have worked on that project that have all the knowledge and know-how, that knowledge is then lost.

1:39:51Nuclear was getting expensive already in the late 70s for a variety of reasons. One of them is changing regulations, but then also supply chain issues and also issues related to the oil shock. Yes, very interestingly. When the oil shock happened in the early 1970s, France, for example, went all in on nuclear because they didn't really have other sources of energy. They didn't have any other options. So they had to go nuclear. The United States had good fossil fuel reserves. So they leaned more on that in producing their domestic fossil fuel. Also something to do with interest rates. So the projects were already too expensive by then.

1:40:43After Tremaya Island, which we talked about in Pennsylvania, there were 120 reactors that were ordered. All of them were canceled. In part because of the public backlash, backlash, but also in part because they were already getting expensive. So utilities were like, why the hell are we going to risk building this project? It's probably going to be over budget and people are going to try to stop us every single step of the way. So from the early 80s until 2013, there were no new nuclear reactor projects in the United States. Just think about that the impact of decades of no growth in an industry right imagine all the people that ended up going elsewhere yeah all that tacit knowledge is lost the community is broken up all of it is lost you don't have new talent coming in i was just talking i was i had a podcast recently with a guy who was telling me that he thought about studying nuclear engineering this was in the mid 2010s and he went to the nuclear engineering department and it was just like cobwebs and like two people.

1:41:52It was so depressing. So he ended up going into mechanical engineering, I think. And so we've only built two reactors in the last three decades in the United States. I know. Vogel 3 and 4 in Georgia. And they're like running over big time, right? And yes, they were supposed to cost$15 billion. they ended up costing$36. Not very good. It also took them about 13 years to be completed since they started with the plans to build a reactor and so on. And so when people talk about nuclear being too expensive they usually talk about something called the levelized cost of electricity which is just a metric that tries to compare the cost of electricity from different generating sources.

1:42:44It does that for every source of energy. And so nuclear's LCOE in the United States ranges between$140 to$180 per megawatt hour. Just remember that number. For utility-scale solar, it's between$60 to$120 per megawatt hour. So a lot cheaper. If you're talking about utility-scale solar plus batteries, it's between$100 to$100 per megawatt hour. So you're getting already, if you're adding batteries, which is only fair because if you're comparing very intermittent source of energy, right, like solar with nuclear, you have to add the cost of making it more reliable. So that's already getting to costs that are competitive with nuclear, right?

1:43:29And for rooftop solar, the LCOE is about$150 to$300 per megawatt hour, so a lot more expensive. And so people point to levelized costs of electricity to say, see, nuclear is the most expensive source of electricity, but it doesn't take into account a lot of different things. For example, it doesn't take into account that for renewables, you have to build a lot more transmission lines because you can't buy just a huge patch of land in the city to build a solar farm. It's usually more remote. And so you have to build transmission lines, which are very expensive, very slow as well. So once you add the cost of transmission lines, that LCOE goes up for renewables.

1:44:14It also doesn't account for the fact that after 30 to 40 years, the levelized cost of electricity for nuclear really goes down because they have recovered the initial huge upfront cost of building the plant. And by that point, it's only the operating maintenance plus fuel cost, which comes down to like$40 to$60 per megawatt hour. And nuclear plants can run for up to 80 years, while renewables, you know, like solar and wind turbines, you have to replace the whole infrastructure every 20 to 30 years. So that's why I don't like to focus on levelized cost electricity so much, to talk about why nuclear is too expensive.

1:44:56But it is a huge problem to solve, because to your point, most companies don't want to make this huge investment, that are not going to see the return for 30 to 40 years. So that's where the government can really come in and help. So the U.S. government, already under the Biden administration, had passed the Inflation Reduction Act that would give subsidies and tax credits for nuclear projects. And now the Trump administration is keeping all of those incentives. They are just changing a little bit the dates. So if you start your nuclear project after 2034, you don't get any of the tax credits.

1:45:40They're basically saying, get your shit together. Do it now. Do it now, and then you're going to get the cost of it down. So it's entirely possible, obviously, to bring the cost down. Like China is doing it. The United States did it. Even in the 70s, while some of these projects were going up, other projects were very successful. and, you know, weren't over budget. So a lot of it comes down to bad project management, honestly, and just not having the know-how. Like Vogel 3 and 4, this was the first time we built that reactor in the US. And people just didn't know how to build those things. Yeah, it's like, it's called the first of a kind.

1:46:21It was first of a kind. It was literally first of a kind. So for us to look at the first of a kind nuclear project and say, oh, nuclear is too expensive. yes every first of a kind thing is really expensive so hopefully the way to bring the cost down is just build right because it surely we have the the like optimal design down pat now that's where people disagree that's why you see a lot of the small modular reactor stuff coming up so what happened was you know we weren't building real clear because it It was too expensive. You can't justify$32 billion to build one reactor. So they're like, huh, what if we make the reactors smaller so that even if it is expensive, it's$1 billion.

1:47:12It's not$32 billion. The aeroballs are smaller. Right. Which makes sense, right? However, it fails to understand that we tried small reactors in the past. In the 50s, the US government tried to build a bunch of small reactors. And what happened was that they were too expensive. They couldn't compete on a megawatt hour basis with fossil fuels because you have maintenance costs and security costs and all of those things. And a lot of these exotic reactor designs are very technically challenging. So they would have to be turned off all the time for maintenance and repairs and corrosion and all of these things.

1:47:52So also a lot of these small modular reactors back then, they operated at very low capacity factors. So they were only producing the maximum amount of electricity a small percentage of the time. And the reason why we ended up with big reactors is because they realized that if we just made it a little bit bigger, we'd be able to compete with fossil fuels. And that's how we got to one gigawatt. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't possibly figure out a way to solve all of those technical issues and make the small reactors able to compete with fossil fuels. Right. It's just going to be the landscape is now different as well.

1:48:35Although I guess we have more natural gas now, which is also very, it's like the cheapest, right? I would say that it was much easier to compete with fossil fuels in the 50s and 60s than it is nowadays. Probably, right? I don't know. Right. But I would imagine. If you have the tech, I mean, they were just like cowboying in these nuclear reactors, you know? True. Fewer regulations, I mean, you name it. It was just way easier to build. The army had these like micro reactors, portable micro reactors that they would bring with them to power remote bases and stuff like that. It was just cheaper to have diesel generators.

1:49:12And that's what they did because they couldn't justify the cost. And I'm going to be honest, I talked to a lot of nuclear engineers and people who run these companies and they'll tell me, I know it's never going to be able to compete with fossil fuels or with large nuclear. It's just never going to be able, but it can be used for remote locations or, you know, very niche applications like industry and stuff like that, like powering some industrial application or something. So all of that to say, while it is very exciting, we don't know. It's a big unknown and it's a big if. And I think it's a huge mistake to only focus on small modular reactors and totally forget about a technology that we have made almost perfect in the seven decades since the discovery of nuclear fission.

1:50:10And, you know, nuclear reactors are super, nuclear reactors are incredibly reliable. They run at full capacity almost all the time, like 94 % of the time, which is crazy. But this happened over decades and decades of optimizing fuel and figuring out little kinks. We don't know how long that would take with small reactors. And we don't know that we would ever get there to a point where it's competitive with fossil fuels. So I'm happy with what we have right now in the US government, which is they're allowing all these new reactor companies to go to the Idaho National Labs or some other federal land, build their prototype.

1:50:50If they've proven it's safe, if they prove that it works, then they can get a license and they can go sell their power. I'm happy with that. in the meantime we're also building the large reactors that we know work and that we've made safe that we've made incredibly reliable as well yeah the good old trusty boys they're the good they're like they're good man they're like the labradors we need the good man no they're not the labradors because the labradors are like no it's like a solid yeah they're like the shire horses yes yeah big yeah and it's fine you can go build your little race horses and have fun with them but yeah let's not kick the old shire horses out when they're still and maybe in 50 years we're all gonna have just you know all this little crazy horses who knows but we can't just turn away right now right at a point where but it but is it really an you know an either or you know again with coming back to this idea of like these sort of false zero sum thinking, right?

1:51:50We can, because now you, you know, you hear of, of Facebook and Google and Amazon, they're all investing in small modular reactors because they need clean energy to power their data centers, you know? And it's, I like that they're doing that. Like that, that is investment going into, into that. So the small modular reactors? Yeah. Well, that's like, they're going to buy the electricity if they build them. Oh, I see. Some of them are investing in the companies as investors, but the majority of them are just making contracts that say, if you build your reactor and sell me electricity at this cost, I will buy it from you.

1:52:25I see. So they're actually not doing the hard work themselves. They're not doing the hard work themselves. And they're going to build a data center either way. Exactly. And they'll probably just then power it with whatever filthy electricity they can get their hands on. I also think that they're going to be able to buy electricity at much higher costs than let's say a utility, right? Because they're rich and they're going to pay whatever for, but what if you can't build a reactor? What if you build a reactor, but it's, you're not going to make money, you know, selling at that cost at that price.

1:52:55So there are a lot of ifs and you say it's not an either or yes. However, it took a lot of effort from a lot of people saying what I just said to get to a point where anybody even considered building a large reactor because for the last 10 years or so it was all about forget about large nuclear it's dead it's all about small modular reactors so it's important to keep repeating it because i think the the vibe is like oh forget about it's old technology let's just build the new stuff yeah that we have no idea if it's going to pan out or not what can be because what what excites me about the idea of nuclear is it's a lot of potential for it to become almost a circular economy because i was reading into like the idea of the thorium fuel cycle um and these gen 4 breeder reactors that actually produce more fuel than they consume so that like feels kind of like perpetual you know perpetual motion style breaking physics essentially it's like if you can get one of these boys going the you're truly creating like limitless clean energy um plus then you know so you can basically take spent fuel and turn it into new fuel um is is that just science fiction pie in the sky stuff that i'm barking up the wrong tree or is there some truth to this and can you talk through like where like what what can be done to incentivize more of that there's there's definitely a lot of hype on all of those topics so like the thorium for example a lot we call them thorium bros but so niche so niche there's a lot of people in the nuclear space advocacy space that came to nuclear because of thorium myself included i the first tweet i saw was talking about a molten salt thorium reactor you're a thorium i'm a i'm a thorium bro i guess yeah you should make much for that thorium ho yeah well i'm not anymore because um with a strikethrough yeah so there's like all this like, oh, thorium is three times more abundant than uranium.

1:55:01And like, yes, but when you talk about the reserves that are economically mineable, let's just say, it's the same. Plus there is a lot of uranium in the ocean, not a lot of thorium in the ocean. So it's like, it's kind of a useless statistic. Okay. In some places like China, yes, they have a lot of chunky thorium reserve, so it might work for them. But ironically, China is not building a bunch of thorium reactors. They have one experimental thorium reactor, just building the technology. Out of those 150 that they're building in the next, at this point, 12 years, most of them are just large light water reactors, which is the boring old stuff.

1:55:50So I think that should tell you something, right? we've also run reactors on thorium in the point in New York actually which was shut down not that long ago at one point they ran on thorium it was just more expensive thorium is not fissile so it needs to decay into something else to be converted into uranium-233 I believe so that's why people say oh it's better for non-proliferation yes it takes a couple more steps but it's not fully proliferation proof as well so there's a lot of hype around it i think unfortunately what i've learned is a lot of it just comes down to cost and to what is economically viable at any given point and it's easy to make up all this you know conspiracy theories as to why we didn't use thorium oh it's because it's not easy to make bombs with.

1:56:51It was just more expensive. But it is, I'm definitely super pro innovation. So I'm excited that the US government now is pushing all these new companies to go into, you know, the middle of nowhere and build their reactors and let's experiment with it. I'm all for that. If at the same time, we're still building the large ones. In terms of the waste, again, there's a lot of also fluff around it. Like nuclear waste can be recycled. just like plastic can be recycled. But it's very expensive. It's very challenging. It creates a whole other type of waste, which is liquid waste, from chemical processes that you need to do basically to separate the uranium from the actinides and fission products and stuff like that.

1:57:45So all of this stuff is really complex, and I wish I had like, yes, it's going to be fully circular and we're going to, you know, have mining free nuclear in the future. I think in reality, it's always more complicated than that. And I don't like when that's used to distract from the conversation and gets people excited about something that doesn't exist and gets the focus away from things that we know work. yeah i mean it's again a sort of an ill of no it's a a tendency we have as a species to always fancy like focus on the new shiny thing totally and just get bored of the current thing because it's it's we can be progress focused without throwing out the good stuff that we already have yeah sometimes it's just once we've you've actually solved it Right.

1:58:43You're basically, that's what you're effectively arguing for, that like nuclear energy is effectively solved. Yes. It's just, we need to set up our economic system, you know, the incentive structures so that we think more long-term. Like, so their economic system will invest in things that have long-term benefits and stop being so short-sighted. And also the nuclear industry in the West has to get their shit together and build stuff, be better project managers and build stuff on time. There are a couple of companies trying to solve for that by creating developer shops for nuclear projects. So that means they can build 40 reactors in the United States so they can carry that knowledge forward and bring the cost down in that way instead of just building four and having all of that knowledge concentrated in utilities and so on.

1:59:34So there are people trying to solve for that. But yes, the technical part of it, of how to make a lot of clean electricity, we have solved. Why don't you start a nuclear school? Oh, wow. That's literally like fast track, fast tracking, smart engineers, kind of like a Khan Academy or something like that. But for nuclear, have you considered that? Because you guys, you have a nuclear scaling initiative, right? It's a nonprofit. Yes. Yeah, that's more policy focused and that's more like advocacy policy focused. But I do try to share all of those experiences online as much as I can because there's so much excitement right now around nuclear.

2:00:19And there are so many companies out there that are very ambitious, very bold, but that everybody who understands anything about nuclear engineering will tell you this is never going to pan out and not because they think it is because they can point to a previous company that tried doing the exact same thing and there has been no advance in material sciences and then we talk to those people and you bring up the issues that those companies face and the companies face in the past and they'll act completely shocked because they didn't know about it so then they didn't even study you know the things that make made the technology they're trying to build not work in the past.

2:00:59That's what's so concerning to me. But again, it almost makes me sound like I'm anti progress, which I'm, I'm really not. I just don't like when it takes all the oxygen in the room. Right. Right. Complete pivot. Tell me about writing a book. What was it like? Hell, is it really that bad? It's pretty bad. What was the worst part of it?

2:01:28So I, the first conversation I had about the book was in April of 2022. so this is three years ago and I didn't really want to write a book but I felt like I needed to write an accessible book about nuclear because right now if you go and try to buy a nuclear book the options are very limited or very dry or very technical just not written for the average person I don't like using the word but for the average person and I started the process and our mutual friend Simon Sinek said you're gonna hate it it's gonna be so painful but when it's done you're gonna be incredibly proud of yourself and glad and all those things but just don't don't forget that you're gonna hate it and I started writing the book and you know I created an outline and I started writing the chapters and I was for months I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

2:02:28This is so fun and so easy because you're just putting down information. But then you start the editing process of the hardest, hardest, hardest part is ensuring there is a flow to it. That you're not just starting something completely different in a new chapter. And also ensuring that there is, it's exciting for the reader, right? Because you might want to start the book with some technical thing. But that's not really exciting for the reader. You don't get a lot of attention with that. So the editing process of just trying to ensure that all the transitions were smooth. And then this is the hardest thing is if you change anything, all of the transitions come undone.

2:03:14And so you have to go through all of it again. And you have, so that means you have to read your book hundreds of times. And when do you read a book from beginning to end in one sitting? Never. Right. And so you constantly keep going back to it and starting from the beginning. And I have to say, I used to read books and get to the, like some page and say, oh my God, I've already, this person already wrote this a thousand times. Why are they writing this again? But now that I've written my own book, I understand. And it's because it's really hard to get the full thorough line in one sitting. So you just have to write your book in chunks.

2:03:57And so you might naturally repeat it. You might miss. And there's only so many, you know, obviously it goes through a thousand editors and so on. But there's only so much that people can catch and bring it up to your attention even because they might think it's something. I remember there was one moment when, because I think you sent me a chapter to have a look over. And I was like, this is so good. wow you like you must be nearly done I thought the other chapters are of this style and you were like yeah yeah and then we spoke a couple of weeks later and you're like my editors told me oh no I think it was actually Simon said it's like no no no your beginning is not it needs to be changed in this way and then you were like you basically almost had to like rewrite the whole thing or literally the whole thing yes that must have been a dark moment yeah so it was Simon I he very graciously offered to take a look at certain parts of the book and I said okay let's start with the beginning so I read it to him like the first chapter and he's yawn he's like

2:04:56bad sign and then he just goes why are you telling me this and I go what are you talking about he's like why are you telling me all of this I don't care about this he goes nobody's gonna care about this subject as I was starting with energy why how energy is important why energy is important how it works. He's like, nobody gives a fuck about this. You need to start with something that intrigues people, that makes them curious to want to learn more. You can get into like, it relates to them, I guess. It relates to them where it's just like something that is interesting or a story or something like that instead of just facts, facts, facts.

2:05:36And then you can go into the facts and stuff way later in the book, which was great advice in hindsight, but caused me a lot of pain because I had to completely restructure the book, which means the whole thing came it was a new book so then I worked for months and months and restructuring all of that and it takes a long time and then even when you're done with that I still go through the book and I think of things I would change so what was the best bit about it I mean it hasn't technically released yet while we're recording this so I guess you haven't had that big reward yet but yes I don't know I'm curious to see how people react first held it in your hands oh the book was that like a moment or was it actually kind of like whatever by that point I had seen the cover proofs and all this stuff but it is very cool to hold it in your hands and see the illustrations and the cover and the blurbs and everything together and what I like about it the most is I think the cover is stunning.

2:06:35So what I envision is that people look at the cover and be like, wow, what is this book? And then read the subtitle, the untold story of nuclear electricity and how it will save the world. And then go to the blurbs and be like, these blurbs are insane, but also amazing. Just to read one out. Tech that helps the planet. That's hot. Rad future is smart, bold and genuinely hopeful bowmaker makes the case for nuclear electricity in a way that's fresh and inspiring paris hilton you got paris hilton to blurb your book this is incredible michael bloomberg simon sinek tim urban of course former uh win-win guest um at grimes almost a win-win guest long story there um this is amazing um paris how did he get paris interested nuclear she's actually she's a big tech investor um obviously extremely smart is obviously extremely smart and accomplished woman and what i like about paris is you look at her you look at the character she played for many years as this like dumb blonde girl but she's an incredibly smart businesswoman and that's what I felt like we we connected over it's you know isotope content is silly and funny and all of the things but it's talking about a serious topic and I'm doing serious work as well so that's how I sold her on it awesome um so would you recommend to me who've been thinking about doing a win-win book to do it or not yes i mean it's gonna be hell but it's worth it do you think the thing i worry about is where everyone's attention spans are so short um and actually that's why i like the way you've structured it because you've got the tldrs in there you've made it for the current gen like the modern times.

2:08:40But that's what worries me is, is like, do people even read books anymore? Even if they don't read the book, which a lot of people won't, some people will read parts of it. You can get a photo of a section and post online. You can go on podcasts and talk about it. So you're still finding a way to share the ideas. And I have to say, even if nobody read the book, it would still be valuable for me as a thinking process. Nothing will make you really explore your ideas in the same way that writing a book does. Because you're just... In something like an essay, it's shorter, it's lower commitment. For some reason, having it printed on a piece of paper makes it that much more serious.

2:09:33And I think it makes you think harder through your ideas. so to finish up we didn't do this last time rapid fire predictions oh my god predictions yeah i'm terrible at that stuff okay let's go it's just it's fine just purely based on vibes vibes first number that comes into your head your intuition is probably actually you're one of the i'd say most calibrated intuition people on this topic because you've just as you said just read written a book um but yeah first number that pops into your head okay Okay. COP28 gave a goal of tripling global nuclear capacity in the world by 2050. Probability that we actually achieve that goal by 2050.

2:10:1565.

2:10:19Probability that Germany will reverse its anti-nuclear policy and begin the planning process for a new nuclear reactor by 2030. 26. Germany. probability that by 2035 China's installed nuclear capacity will be greater than that of the US and France combined. US and France combined. By 2035? So 10 years.

2:10:51I don't remember the numbers. I would have to look it up. Let's just say 59. Okay. Probability that the first commercial small modular reactor in North America or Europe will be connected to the grid and delivering power by 2030. Zero. Wow. Like commercial, like a utility bought it. Yes. Not like a prototype. Zero. Okay. What's your date that is your 50-50 point where you're like, it could happen by then?

2:11:2535 36 well it's not that far away then so like in 10 within 10 15 years you could have one that like some data center bought and they connected it you know but now if you're saying probability that by 2035 you're gonna have like scalable small modular reactors that are competing with fossil fuels, I think that goes down to like 20%. Probability that by 2030, public support for building new nuclear power plants in the US will consistently poll above 80%. Right now we're polling at around 60 % to 70%. Favorability. By what date? 2030, so five years. Above 80%.

2:12:2445. So you think we're like kind of reaching the max favorability? The highest approval rate for nuclear was 62%. It was a year before Fukushima. Oh shit. And then it went down. And now it's at 61 % according to Gallup. So it's one point behind. but to consistently pull over 80 i think it's it's something that is going to take a little bit longer especially because people we need more reactors being built and people seeing the benefits and all of that we haven't talked about fusion but probability that a commercial fusion plant will achieve sustain their energy gain and deliver electricity to the grid by 2040 again could be a prototype well that it's it's connected to the grid but it's not something that it's like it's cheap it's like no not even okay yeah but it's going it's but it's it's above q or whatever and it's it's a net positive by 2040 yes this one i really don't know mainly because i have no idea how the advances in ai are going to influence, fusion research.

2:13:43I would say low, like lower than 50. Probability that we have AGI by 2040. Sorry, just your first answer. 100. Oh, wow. Okay. By 2040, that's like 15 years away. Yeah. Okay, by 2030.

2:14:1046. Probability that we survive it. As in like the human species as we know it makes it for another 500 years.

2:14:26I don't know. This is way like. You can reject the question. I can. Okay. I'll reject the question. Some people reject it because I'm effectively asking you PDO and some people just don't want to answer it. And I, I respect that. Yes. I will reject the question. Okay. Probability that aliens visited us in the last hundred years? Putting me on the spot here. Have you read? You don't answer the question with a question. Probability that aliens have visited Earth in the last 100 years. However you define alien. 65%. Probability that you write another book in the next 10 years.

2:15:1347 oh okay so you are you really are a glutton for punishment i just the process is really cool and once you write a book i feel like you have ideas for a second book right it's kind of like birthing a child you you know if you've given birth once it's like well it was rough i didn't enjoy pregnancy but i can do this again yes i'll do it again yeah because the upside is pretty cool Yeah. And you haven't even tasted the real upside yet. Right. We haven't actually had the release in the party. Any messages you want to give the win-win fans to leave them with? Maybe go down the like P-Doom rabbit hole.

2:15:50I know. I'm just smiling now. Oh shit. My message is that the main thing we should try to do in the next couple of decades is to keep the future human. Amen to that. Oh, and that techno-pastoralism is really cool. Yes. Let's lead the way. I think we should start like making art of it. And I tried AI art. It's very poor. I need to hire a proper artist. Nice. See? There you go. Keeping humans in the loop. Yes. Thank you very much. Thank you. I love you. Thank you for coming. You too.