Can we Break Free? Bret Speaks with Michael Shellenberger
Bret Speaks with Michael Shellenberger regarding his recent gubernatorial campaign in California. They discuss the difficulty inherent in running for political office outside of the two major parties. In addition, they touch on topics ranging from nuclear power to Covid, and how we might go about escaping the modern predicament we have landed in.Find Michael at his website: https://shellenberger.org/Buy Michael’s latest book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/San-Fransicko-Progressives-Ruin-Ci...
Nations and states that they decided how to respond to COVID based on California, like, in other words, California culture determined how we responded to COVID more than Gavin Newsom.
And the Swedish culture determined is why they had a different response to COVID than, say, Germany or South Korea.
These things come from within.
They're not imposed by, they're not imposed by WHO has less of a role than we think, and culture has more of a role.
Unfortunately, somebody made it virtually impossible for you to get ivermectin, even though it might have been just the thing to protect your family.
Is it hard to get?
Yeah, very.
Okay.
It was confiscated at the border.
Yeah.
Your doctor could say, yes, this is what you need, prescribe it, and your pharmacist would refuse to fill the prescription, they made it extremely difficult.
- But whether or not there were school lockdowns or school closures came from within.
- There was certainly a patchwork of different reactions across the country, but certain things were centralized, like thou shalt not have ivermectin.
- Okay, yeah, yeah, so it's complicated.
- Yeah. - Welcome to my house.
Thank you.
Thank you for welcoming me to your house.
Welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, Michael Schallenberger.
Thank you, Brett.
A pleasure.
We have been traveling in... I don't know that circles can be parallel.
I have a feeling they can be, but geometry aside, we have been traveling in parallel circles for some time.
This is the first time we have met.
That's right.
Corresponded a little bit.
Yeah.
Um, I think the... I'd like to start by offering you an apology.
Now I have said this to you privately, but I believe I misjudged you.
And I think it is very important that when you misjudge a person that you put things right.
So the substance of my misjudging you has to do with our disagreement, which we still have, over nuclear power.
You are a strong advocate for fission power.
As a part, or maybe the crucial piece, of the solution to the environmental problem that you and I both agree is paramount.
You know, I think some of our friends on the right remain to be convinced of that.
But nonetheless, we have a serious environmental problem.
Part of it is about the way we fuel our civilization.
And the question of whether or not nuclear power, and in particular, uranium-based fusion power, plays an important role in that is a question.
But because of your strong advocacy for nuclear power, I wasn't so sure about you.
And I have now seen you discuss many more topics, and Um, my sense is, you know, maybe you have something to teach me about nuclear power.
Maybe I have something to teach you.
Um, but regardless, I read you as a well-intentioned guy trying to get humanity out of a pickle.
And in that we are both on that same mission.
Um, I feel, I feel bad that I, uh, I assumed the worst of you.
Well, thank you very much.
Well, apology accepted.
So let's set the stage a little bit.
Many in my audience will be familiar with you.
Some will not.
You are...
Fresh from a, I'm sorry to say, a defeat in your attempt to get into a runoff with the Governor of California.
My condolences.
I don't have a vote in California anymore, but had I a vote, I certainly would have cast it in your direction.
And I advocated that my followers and people who pay attention to me should have done the same.
And I'm sorry it didn't work out.
Maybe not that surprising in light of the way power avoids confrontation with honorable people.
So, in some ways, it saw you coming and it understood the threat, even if others didn't necessarily know what you had in mind.
It could be.
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And I should also, before I let you talk a little bit about your experience running for governor, I should also point out that you have written a number of books, Apocalypse Never and San Francisco, which every time Heather says it, she says San Francisco and then has to correct herself.
Yeah.
But are these the only two books you've written?
I co-authored a prior book in 2007, but these are my sole-authored two books, sole-authored books.
Well, congratulations.
Thank you.
I have not read both of them, but I have read in both of them, and they're quite an interesting read.
Thank you.
I would recommend people take a look at them.
So, all right, what is the experience?
We're now, what, a week out from the election?
Less than a week out.
Um, you know, I, how am I doing?
Well, I told you that, you know, on the one hand, I'm the kind of person that I always need a goal or a project that I'm working on, or I get bored and slightly depressed.
So I pretty quickly, you know, I, we knew that we were, we were unlikely to win because we weren't raising the money that we needed to raise.
So we knew that about a month ago.
Um, So I spent some time being disappointed before the election, certainly some disappointment after.
I tried to start working on my new book and I just decided not to yet.
I'm going to have to turn to it soon, but just basically been binge watching some television and Continuing my routine, you know, I started a serious running routine when I ran, when I decided to run for governor, and I've been maintaining that, and that's been very positive for my psychological health, so I would say I'm doing, I'd say I'm on my road to recovery.
Excellent, excellent.
Well, I don't know how much you know about what I was up to during the last presidential election, but I put together a proposal to get us out of the death spiral of the The duopoly has us in.
We also did not succeed, you will notice, in disrupting the duopoly's plans and Joe Biden has ascended to the office.
But nonetheless, I do think one of the meta lessons of the moment for heterodox thinkers like you and me and Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard and Justin Amash and all of those people who have looked at our system and thought there has to be a better way.
We have to recognize that Effectively, power has figured out how to make itself very difficult to displace.
And to the extent that we patriots who long for a democracy open enough that better people could simply ascend to office and do the right thing based on the wise counsel of whoever they might have advised them.
And all of us who see that need to recognize that it might be time to team up, because each one of us who tries to do this independently is going to discover the same thing, which is, it's not an open system.
It's a system that may have a way to Formally enter it, but it does not have a practical way.
Mm-hmm So, I don't know.
Do you know Andrew Yang?
We follow each other on Twitter, but I don't know him personally.
Yeah, we haven't met him.
So, and Justin Amash?
I mean, I know he was a libertarian presidential candidate, but I don't know him personally.
Yeah, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Same.
Okay.
Yeah, so somehow you and I are finally meeting.
Yeah, but there are many of us out here who I don't like to use the terms, you know, that suggest that these are enemies, but at some level something has hijacked our democracy and it is doing terrible things through malignant governance.
And maybe, maybe it is time we put our heads together and figured out how to, how to dislodge it.
Yep.
All right.
Nuclear power is the issue on which I became aware of you first.
Do you want to talk about that or do you want to start with your signature issue from the campaign?
Oh, sure.
I mean, we could go either.
I mean, you got me thinking about politics just now.
And just to affirm, it's a very hard question.
I mean, I think there's some questions around what is the question and what is important for us to talk about.
I've certainly spent a bunch of time talking about homelessness, spent a bunch of time talking about nuclear.
You're asking some questions, I think, what I hear you asking about are questions around how do we translate this really exciting, interesting, heterodoxical movement that once was known as the IDW and may still be known by some of us that are loyal to the IDW.
But how does that translate into political change?
I have friends on the political right who think that I am deeply naive for attempting to be an independent.
Dave Rubin, Chris Rufo are friends of mine that are now fully Republican.
Dave is, I believe he's a Trump supporter.
And Chris Rufo works closely with Governor DeSantis in Florida.
I have other friends, close friends, family that just think Republicans are evil.
I think that Trump is a would-be dictator.
We talked a little before.
I voted for Clinton and Biden.
I did not vote for Trump.
There's things about Trump I do not like.
There's other things about Trump that I actually appreciate, including changing the Republican Party's position on entitlements, changing the Republican Party's position on gay and lesbian, affirming gay and lesbian relationships, and taking a stronger position against military intervention abroad.
But there's other things, the way he spoke about women, the way he spoke about disabled people, some of the personality stuff, and the chaos.
There's a lot of big clown energy in Trump that I think was destructive and needed some stability, which is why I voted for Biden.
But obviously Biden, I think you and I would probably agree, has been a terrible President.
So what do we do?
Well, let me just say, Biden has been an absolute disaster.
A predictable one.
I didn't vote for him.
I didn't vote for Trump either.
Did you vote for Justin Amash?
No, I voted for Tulsi Gabbard.
Okay.
Yeah, you know, the fact is, and this is something I believe people in your position and my position need to confront others who are fed up with our system over.
I know far too many incredibly smart people who have arrived at what I think is the incredibly foolish choice to not vote.
And the problem, as I see it, is that when you don't vote, you become indistinguishable from all of the people who don't vote because they're apathetic.
And I get that you don't have a vote in front of you that makes sense and that you personally may feel that you're protesting by not voting.
But why would you deny the power of your vote to all of those of us who are trying to figure out how to dislodge the duopoly before it's too late, right?
So my point would be a protest vote, an actual protest vote, is very powerful, potentially.
If enough of them, you know, most of us are fed up.
If we were to actually allow ourselves to be counted as something different than apathetic, then we would be a force to be reckoned with.
Yeah.
But I'm also disappointed that when somebody like yourself Um, stands up and, you know, takes the risk of daring to, you know, run in the open for governor.
What I hoped would happen, what I tried to get to happen by Trying to call attention to your candidacy on Twitter.
So I hoped that all of the people that we are in conversation with would stand up and say, Hey, this is the moment, right?
This is the moment for a real challenge to be made.
And, um, you know, there were a few who did, but I, I must say, I was disappointed not to see, uh, the.
You know, I hate the term influencer.
I think it's a terrible term and the problem is influencers are not leaders and we need leaders.
But all of the people in the vast heterodox influencer group, I think, could have made the difference.
Well, let me say something about the run because...
You were right to detect an opportunity, which is that we have an open primary system in California, so it's the top two vote-getters, and it means anybody can vote for anybody.
So Democrats can vote for Republicans, Republicans vote for Democrats, and anybody can vote for Independent.
I ran as an Independent, which in California is called No Party Preference.
Yep.
So the opportunity here was to, and we had a weak Republican field, so the opportunity here was that everyone assumes the governor would come in first, and there's an opportunity to come in second.
I came in third.
It looks like I'll probably have around 4% of the vote, and the person that came in second will have something like 13%.
There was a scenario to get to be in second, but we needed a lot more money.
And we got in late.
I was intending to back the former mayor of San Diego.
He decided not to run because he didn't think he could win.
And he didn't decide not to run until January.
So I only got into the race in early March.
So we had three months.
So long story short, we didn't have the money.
We didn't have the time.
I don't think we should be, I mean, I think one question is, and, you know, if we had had more money, could we have come in second?
I think so.
If we'd come in second, could we have won in the general?
I think there was a shot, would have still been difficult, but we would have done better than the 40% that the 38 to 40% of the Republicans always get in California.
So I just wanted to lay that out there because I think, We don't want to overread what happened here.
And then I think it's also more challenging at the federal level with the presidential election than it is in open primary state.
I was disappointed.
I'll tell you something.
I was disappointed because the whole time I'm campaigning, Andrew Yang is talking about the need for a third party candidate.
And he never endorsed me.
No, I didn't go asking for it either, so it's not like I'm not crying about it.
But I thought it was a little weird.
Like, here you have somebody who is actually running in an open primary, and Andrew Yang's out there talking in the abstract.
So for me, it was not, it wasn't, I wasn't upset about it.
It was more weird.
Like, why would you talk abstractly about supporting somebody independent rather than actually supporting somebody that was independent?
Well, a number of things.
There are four or five things in there that I think need a response.
One of them is, I think Trump did us one huge service, which was that he demonstrated that the duopoly could be Yeah.
even at the top level.
And he did that under the red banner, but he basically commandeered the Republican Party over the objection of the power brokers and demonstrated that they could not outfox him.
Now, I think he was...
The very same character traits that allowed him to do that made him the wrong guy for the job, for sure.
But, nonetheless, the knowledge that it is possible is very interesting.
And with respect to your point about Andrew Yang in particular, and I must say, I have not met Andrew in person.
He and I have corresponded, and I consider him a friend, and I greatly appreciate what he's doing.
But his failure to show up for you, I think, is emblematic of a larger issue, which is the kinds of people who break first, who enter this world and start trying to think outside the box about, well, you know, could you come in second in a California open primary?
And then once you have the attention of the public, because who is this person who came in second?
You know, you could at least change the conversation if not be elected to the office.
That's a pretty clever ploy, right?
Right.
I mean, I don't mean to use the word ploy negatively as a strategy.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
It's a tactic.
It's a tactic.
There's an opening in California.
Yeah.
Wouldn't it have been marvelous if this had worked?
Yeah.
But you got to be a little bit of a lone wolf to think that way, right?
And so you have lone wolf disease.
I have lone wolf disease.
So does Andrew Yang, Justin Amash, Tulsi Gabbard.
And so the problem is all of the people who see this opportunity before it's obvious are also people who have a little trouble confederating.
And a little trouble.
Well, something like IDW.
That's supposed to be the banner, but nobody liked IDW.
Well, look, I think IDW, you know, personally, I hope I don't get myself in trouble with my brother who coined the term.
But my sense is that IDW was a prototype and that effectively the mission becomes how do we make the 2.0 version and the 3.0 version until we get something that self-catalyzes at a level that it actually can build power responsibly.
Um, and you know, I thought it was a very responsible group, but it was, you know, It was an abstraction, and in order to do what you were talking about, for example, or what I was talking about with Unity 2020, or what Andrew Yang is talking about with the Forward Party, you have to be... You know, I'll borrow from the Christians, right?
You have to be in the world, but not of it.
You have to be strategically minded enough to play the political game without allowing the political game to take you over.
Yes.
And I very much, I mean, I don't know why.
I mean, Eric came out strongly for you.
Yes, both you and your brother did.
That was great.
Yeah.
But the question is there are a lot of people who have a lot of influence who I think weren't sure what to make of you and so it was just easier to say nothing.
Yeah.
And I really wish that they had realized it is inexpensive to say I don't know this person there might be something about them that is off but they look good to me and they could hardly be worse than what we've got.
Oh, sure.
Or even doing a Zoom call with me.
That's super cheap.
Right.
Well, you know, I mean, I guess we're listening to the six hours of Joe Rogan that we recorded.
I mean, that was, you know, we did a lot of podcasts.
But yeah, I think you're right.
I was going to say, I think there's a bigger, I think one of the questions is, is there room for a third?
I don't want to say party necessarily because I think, just setting aside that even pre-politically, I was telling you I was watching this Netflix TV series called Borden about parliamentary system in Europe.
Yeah.
What's so fascinating is that, you know, the parliamentary elections and then they form a government with multiple parties in a coalition government.
Sure.
So you can be, you can get 5% of the vote.
And have a lot of sway over what a government does.
And so take the Greens of Europe.
The Greens, the most famous thing, of course, is that they got, I mean, here in Germany, and we can get into nuclear, I don't mean to make this about nuclear, but the Greens have exerted extraordinary influence in terms of energy policy over center-left political coalitions by being a small minority.
In the United States, There is some of that, right?
You have AOC, you have the kind of, you have minority, political minorities exerting some power within a political coalition, but you're still sort of either Democrat or Republican.
And so one question is, is that just baked into the system?
Or is there a room for a third?
And I thought about the promise of the IDW Was that it was saying we're not going to be classified as liberal or conservative, as Republican or Democrat.
So, for me, that was my initial attraction to it.
I saw people pushing back on a set of, pushing back mostly, to be fair, on the radical left, but also not aligning with Trump and Trumpism.
And Barry Weiss's article in New York Times Magazine is, I think you were in.
Yep.
You know, sort of you, Joe Rogan, Claire Lehman, Um, you know, but it also had people like Ben Shapiro, who's clearly a Republican, clearly a conservative.
So for me, that was always exciting, though, because it was like there was a space that was being formed.
Now, it seems like there's been some conflicts within that space.
There's been some, I mean, I know that there were some conflicts around Trump.
There were conflicts around COVID.
Trump strained it and COVID.
Trump and COVID were probably the biggest two issues.
Maybe we'll have disagreements about an inquiry.
We can certainly get into them.
I don't want to hesitate to do that.
But to say, for me, the initial excitement of it was that there is this disruptive third path.
And it seems like I want to continue to try to hold that.
But it seems like a set of other folks in there are like, They're like, we're out and we don't want to do it.
Well, look, I think we have to not over-interpret the effect of Trump and then COVID on something like the IDW.
You know, painting with a broad brush, IDW was the right idea.
And we can see that, you know, it's one thing people are sometimes freaked out if you start at IDW because what is this, you know, Yes, the name throws people immediately.
But the Hidden Tribes Report.
says that there is a vast group in the middle.
Hidden Tribes is a report that came out of a study group in which they surveyed political attitudes of Americans.
And what they found is what they call the exhausted middle.
A substantial majority of us agree on most things.
Even the things that we are famously unable to agree on, we basically We basically agree on abortion, you know, very few people want to be on it, you know, close to conception and very few people want to tolerate it close to birth, which means we have to draw a line and it's not going to be a comfortable one, but most Americans are in the, you know, line drawing mindset.
And the point is, issue after issue we are this way.
That stands in stark contrast to what happens at the ballot box, which has increasingly become about teams, right?
Where we, you know, we are on a razor-thin margin between blue and red, and we can't, we don't barely see the other side as human.
And the point is, that is actually a distraction from the real process of governing, and I would argue by some kind of design, whether that design is intentional and conspiratorial, or whether it's evolutionary and emergent.
Something has kept us divided so that our true power is never manifest in government.
And I, you know, I would argue that, um, what effectively happened was during the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party shifted strategies.
And what it did was it went from being a representative of working people, And, you know, was it a clean representative?
No, the unions were dirty and there was all kinds of corrupt politics going on.
But basically, the Democratic Party represented working people.
And the Republican Party represented corporate interests.
And the Clinton administration caused the Democratic Party to become a direct competitor to the Republican Party.
And their real constituents became a different subset of the corporations.
And the American public was shut out and been playing political theater ever since.
Right.
The point is, there is no party that represents the American people.
Were there one, it would be wildly popular.
And that raises the question about why nobody ever builds one.
Right.
And.
And the, you know, you say, is there room for a third party?
And we've got parliamentary systems, and is there something about the structure of our first-past-the-post voting that makes it impossible to have a third?
Well, I do think that a third is unstable, but a second would be good, because really what we have are two, you know, slightly different flavors of the very same corrupt system and no representative of the people.
And so, you know, the politicos effectively deal with the electorate as an annoyance, right?
They have to answer to us every so often enough to win power that they then peddle to their actual constituents.
And, you know, who loses?
We do.
So, yes, IDW is the way to talk about it.
Doesn't have to be IDW.
It could be any group of people that's willing to put aside an honest conversation.
And yes, there's room for something political, but one has to, you're not going to go through the front door.
That's the, that's the thing we all keep learning.
And what is the, what is, what is not going through the front door look like?
Well, like the open primary, you mean?
Open primary is a great example.
Some alternative... Well, I would say, at the point that they instituted an open primary, they created a shift in a strategic opportunity that maybe they hadn't noticed.
You noticed it.
Right?
It's like, oh, I've got to come in second, and then we have a head-to-head race between, you know, the name brand candidate and the maverick, and that's at least interesting, right?
Right.
So, yeah, you noticed a strategic opportunity.
I did something related with Unity 2020, which was, there's a reason that you can't That's because any time you try, no matter who the major party candidates are, you are accused of endangering the Republic by spoiling the election and throwing it to the greater evil.
So, Unity 2020 was a very carefully architected plan to avoid that critique, right?
A center-left candidate and a center-right candidate would agree, we would draft these two people based on their Their capacity, right?
Their integrity and their courage.
And they would agree to govern as a team.
And only when they couldn't reach agreement, only when they couldn't come to consensus, would the person in the president's role make the call.
And then after four years, they would run in the reverse positions.
So the point is, everything about that plan was about neutralizing the asymmetry between right and left.
And, you know, given a fair shot, most people would like some courageous, capable patriots in the White House talking about every issue, figuring out what's in the American public's interest and taking their best shot, right?
That's got to be better than what we have.
Right?
Yeah.
So, anyway, that is also a strategic loophole, right?
In other words, we have a system in which we elect a president and a vice president, but nothing says that you can't, between those two, have an informal agreement to do something else.
Now, Andrew Yang got pretty far through the front door, right?
Well, no.
You didn't think he got very far?
I mean, he noticed a loophole too, or maybe something did, which was that effectively you could mount a campaign on social media and Goliath didn't understand social media well enough to stop it.
But what happened to Andrew Yang is that he got stopped by the major media, right?
You remember the nonsense where they put up, you know, when they were like showing the chart of how well the different candidates in the Democratic field were doing, and in Andrew Yang's place they put up some randomly chosen Asian man?
Oh, I don't remember that.
And, you know, during the debates, they cut off his mic.
I mean, it was low-level power games that stopped him.
But, you know, okay.
And then, you know, Justin Amash, he's really interesting.
You talk to him about what life actually looked like inside the U.S.
House of Representatives and how different it is and how virtually impossible it is for your representative to make anything occur in that body.
Because of the way power has been reapportioned through changes.
So, I don't know.
It sort of seems like we've got a puzzle that's more a question of can you strategically figure out what the enemy hasn't anticipated and find a way to actually, you know, Squeeze through the cracks, then, hey, people are sick of this.
Let's run and win, right?
Right.
That should work, but it doesn't.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like, you know, the challenge, it's a translation problem from cultural formation, what we call an IDW, to political viability.
And what was so striking for me, as somebody that was outside of politics, was how powerful identity is.
So there's just a lot of people, even though like I have been on Fox News, Joe Rogan, you know, I got Bill Maher at the end.
My books have sold to Republicans.
Republicans go to the ballot box and I go, who's the Republican guy?
You know, there's just still, and partly that's because we did not reach enough people, but I was more famous than the Republican.
I had more Twitter, you know, more social media followers, more publicity than the Republican, but because he was the Republican guy, the voters I decided with the Republicans.
So there's an identity problem here, too, that I was struck by.
Similarly, in the recall election, a fairly no-name Democrat, but the most high-profile Democrat who ran, had more votes than the most qualified Republican, who's the former mayor of San Diego.
So identity is so powerful.
And these party names, of course, these party identities are super old.
So I'm struck by how much of the problem is in the political structures themselves and how much of it is just in the consciousness of the voters, which is very, very low.
I mean, people think about the products they buy more than they think about the political parties and the candidates.
Yeah.
Well, I agree, although there's another loophole that is, to me, glaring, which I thought it did not, you know, I watched at a distance the struggle that you were facing in this election.
And, you know, I hesitate to say this into a camera because I don't necessarily want Goliath to understand it.
But here's the thing.
Goliath is kind of a numbskull.
I don't think he's going to get it even if I say it.
Goliath is blind, right?
That's the whole point.
Or he's very nearsighted.
Well, I mean, you know, my riff on this is that Goliath, modern, so there was a Goliath, a real guy who probably had a pituitary tumor.
Right.
And that's why he was a giant.
He wasn't defeated by David.
He was defeated by a guy But anyway, it's probably a true story.
And the point is these pituitary tumor giants are feeble.
They're powerful, but they're feeble.
Right.
And Goliath, our Goliath is a composite.
It's, you know, they're, you know, people who meet inside the DNC and presumably the RNC and conspire.
Right.
But there's also this emergent property that's very powerful.
But the thing about emergent properties, Like all products of evolution, they're really powerful against things that assembled them.
They're moronic when it comes to fighting things they've never seen before.
Right.
So being novel and coming at them from a direction they don't expect is key.
Yes.
But anyway, the glaring opportunity that I see that I don't think most of us yet get is this was an election in California.
Now it happens that I'm a Californian by birth, but I don't live in California.
Right?
Why was I voicing an opinion about a California election?
And the answer is, well, a California belongs to me too.
Yeah.
I may move back here.
And even if I never do, I'm an American and California is an important part of America.
And I have an interest in what happens here.
All right.
I do not want to see it collapse.
I also have almost all of my family lives in California.
So I have an interest here that way.
Even if I didn't, let's say I was Jordan Peterson, right?
And I'm in Canada.
I still don't want California to fail.
It's part of the West.
Right.
Right.
And so anyway, my point would be, I think that in order to do what you were doing, Less focus on, you know, the focus on what to do with California if you win the seat.
Yeah, that's important.
Yeah.
But who needs to recognize you as an important player in that?
They don't have to be Californians.
Yes, I agree.
No, we wanted—and I'm glad you raised it.
That was the way I felt too, is that this is important for the country.
California is super important for the—I mean, so many things start in California and then they move east.
So, I totally agree with that.
Let me ask it this way.
What would have done that?
What more would have done that?
Just slightly more vision on the part of our friends, frankly.
Yeah.
Just more endorsements and stuff.
Yeah.
I guess the point is, look, it's very, very inexpensive to say, you know, to say what I said or what Eric said.
Oh yeah.
The point was, Do I know this guy backwards and forwards?
I don't, but I can see what's in the office and I can see that this guy is way clearer headed and why wouldn't, you know, given that we've got a machine, Politician.
Yeah.
Doing what the machine wants and that it's obviously a disaster which you can, you don't have to drive very many blocks to see it.
It's not visible, right?
Why would we take a gamble on something different, right?
What are the chances we could actually do worse?
Yeah.
I think they're actually pretty low.
So, you know.
Who in particular were you surprised that you didn't see?
Speak out.
It wasn't even that.
What I was hoping would happen is that there would be a active conversation amongst those people, right?
And that basically, I mean, look, I'm coming from having watched when Heather and I released our book last September.
We were, probably as a result of our heterodox stance on COVID and the response to it, completely frozen out by mainstream media.
And censored too, right?
Utterly censored and slandered.
I mean we are slandered to this day on our Wikipedia pages of all things.
But the point is the book still got into the top five New York Times Best sellers across all categories.
Right.
How did that happen?
It happened because a whole network of people who aren't supposed to matter actually matter more in the mainstream media.
Right.
Right.
And so if that wide group of people, you know, from Russell Brand and England to Jordan Peterson, you know, if that yeah extended network of people had said we're all concerned about California We're all intrigued that there's somebody running who isn't one of the mainstream offerings There's I mean, you know, you're on the dark horse podcast.
You're a true dark horse, right?
Yeah, that's what you are and if There had been a recognition, hey, it is a moment for a dark horse candidate to show up and, you know, frankly, I wouldn't want to be governor of California.
They've set you up.
That's a bad set of responsibilities to be handed at this moment because they've already done a good job of wrecking the system.
So, you know, not only do you have to steward it well, but you have to steward it well enough to get it out of a tailspin, right?
Yeah, it would be a tough job.
Right.
But nonetheless, here's, you know, I'm sitting on a couch with a guy who actually looked at that and didn't say, yeah, not for me.
You said, OK, yeah, I'll do it.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it's interesting.
I think that the people that did not do more to support my candidacy, I think were mostly on the political right.
And they tended to be people who had given up on California, including people that had moved.
And I think had, I would say people that have either given up on the, on the, um, on California, given up, and then to some extent given up on politics and are skeptical that much can be achieved in politics.
Whereas the people that were supportive, they weren't all on the left, but I associate you and your brother, even though your COVID position, I think of you as more center left.
Now, maybe that's not a label you would use.
I disagree.
Reluctant radical.
And what that means is I believe only radical change will save us.
Radical change is frightening, but I don't think we have a choice.
Okay.
I'm not center-left.
Okay.
Your brother is more center-left.
He's closer to the center.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I think people, now there are other people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Neil Ferguson, who are probably conservative.
Peter Boghossian, our mutual friend in Portland.
I think he would define himself as a liberal.
He does.
And would probably be like a Social Democrat in Europe or something.
Yeah.
So, I mean, he was enthusiastic.
Melissa Chen has become a friend.
She's, I think she's at a conservative magazine, but is probably pretty center-left if you really look at her policy agenda.
So, you know, I mean, I think those are the folks.
I think the folks that are fully Republican, that are skeptical of a third way, that have renounced IDW or are skeptical of IDW, were the ones who did not show up to be supportive.
So yeah, I mean, I think it's, I mean, look, I think I'm mostly happy.
There's a way in which I kind of think it's good that I didn't know.
How little support we would have gotten, which we got good support, but I'm glad we didn't know how little we would have gotten in advance, otherwise I wouldn't have run.
Right.
And by running, we were able to force this issue.
You know, the coverage has changed of homelessness.
In particular, it's gone from being viewed pretty narrowly as a housing affordability issue to an untreated addiction and mental illness issue.
And if anything, I think the coverage is still, it's much more balanced now, I would say, than before.
We're now seeing in Seattle, they're shutting down the homeless encampments slash open drug scenes.
I'm not sure where the Portland conversation is at, but it does seem like some of it's changing.
I think you did change the conversation.
And I think that that was hugely important.
I think you substantially changed the conversation.
That makes me feel happy.
I feel it.
And I also have one observation to make.
You know, it's very hard to see outside of your own, I don't want to say bubble, but even just your own circumstance.
Yes.
Something that I think was invisible to you, which I wish I had conveyed earlier, but it took me a while to figure it out.
Is that part of what happened to you was that nobody who wasn't in California had any idea what the actual The mechanism of the race meant about timing, right?
So the point was, I don't think people understood that June 7th was the date on which they would have needed to show up to matter, right?
They thought they were looking at November.
Right, exactly.
And so if this could, you know, I'm dreaming of a white paper that could be sent out that says, look, Here's the candidate.
Here is why this is actually, uh, potentially viable.
Here's the date that matters, right here, you know, whatever the other parameters might be.
And then, um, and then the question is, can you get people out of the, you know, we're, we are all so used to being burned.
We didn't know about the article we read that we tweeted or whatever it is.
Everybody is so on edge about making errors that I think it's just far easier when you see, you know, I don't know what a Michael Schellenberger is and I don't really understand how it is that he's running for governor.
It's easiest just not to touch the issue.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Well, this is good.
I think we can come back to nuclear at the end.
I'd like to talk a little about COVID and censorship.
So I stayed out of COVID for the most part.
I wrote an early piece that basically was pretty much echoing the mainstream view, which was that we needed to take some pretty significant actions.
This was in March, April 2020.
And then I decided to go write San Francisco and I basically stopped working on it.
For the campaign, I had a lot of people that were, and you may know that Steve Kirsch is on my board, my non-profit.
Oh yeah, so Steve Kirsch is a longtime friend and supporter and has been on my board of directors and I know he's a friend of yours now.
But I knew very little about it.
I stayed most out of it.
I saw that you and Claire were fighting.
I saw this thing going on.
I was trying to be nice.
Claire was fighting.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'm interested in how you look back on the last couple of years and what you take from it.
I will say I have been censored On Facebook for climate information.
And then the only time I've ever been censored on Instagram was just a week ago for posting images of my tweets saying that mask mandates were pseudoscience.
And what I tweeted out was from the New York Times.
It was from David Leonhardt, his piece on mask mandates.
So it's the only thing I've ever had censored.
Catch me, tell me where, what, when you look back over the last two years and also just catch me with your views because I know I'm sure your viewers know, but catch me on that and looking back and how would you summarize it?
Yeah, I mean, there are a couple different threads there.
Yeah.
One, personally, I don't think I had any choice about what I did.
I'm sure there are small things I could alter.
There are a couple things I got wrong, which I wish I hadn't, but I thought actually in light of how much one could get wrong, that actually we got almost everything right.
Okay.
And that that's important.
But I mean, basically, Um, when I, when I came into the public eye, I came into the public eye for being the person who faced with an accusation of racism.
You said, no, that's not true.
Right.
I can establish that if you're willing to listen.
And so the point is I got famous as it were for saying difficult truth things.
Yes.
That's what I always do.
Right.
Right.
And the problem is sometimes it wins you friends and then it will turn some of those people to enemies on the next topic.
Right.
And my feeling is look, you either signed up for somebody who will do that, in which case, you know, there's nothing that guards me against being wrong other than the fact that I try really hard not to be wrong because Frankly, reversing course is painful and costly.
Um, but you know, you're either signed up for somebody who will say the uncomfortable stuff, no matter how many people disagree with them and no matter how forcefully, or you're not really on board with that.
And so my feeling is, okay, I did what I always do.
In this case, it had, um, Terrible effects in many regards.
I mean, Heather and I lost more than half our family income in a single hour as YouTube demonetized both our channels.
Wow.
They remained demonetized.
Wow.
For things that we were right about, right?
But then you had a best-selling book.
Best-selling book.
We don't know how well it would have done if we hadn't been actively accused of spreading misinformation, which has now been redefined by the federal government, by the Department of Homeland Security, as malinformation.
Have you gotten the memo?
No.
Oh, smartness is smartness.
There are now three types of informational terrorism.
One of them is misinformation.
That's when you're incorrect about something.
The next one is disinformation.
That's when you're incorrect and you know it.
Intentionally.
And malinformation is when you're correct in a way that causes distrust of the government.
So that might be where you ended up running afoul of Instagram.
Wow.
So back me up in terms of All right.
What did you get right?
What did you get wrong?
And what is the jury still out about on?
Okay.
Well, there's a question about what the evidence says.
There's a question about what people have now acknowledged.
And there are big gaps here.
So, I would say that there are several major threads to the conversation.
The first one is, where did the virus come from?
I was very early on lab leak.
I won't go all the way back into the history, but it became obvious very quickly that while some of the evidence was ambiguous, all of the evidence that wasn't ambiguous to the wet market or to a cave.
Okay.
And I said so.
Okay.
And I was pretty clear that this is true.
I wasn't 100% sure of anything, but...
So the three big issues, origin, there's origin, masks, lockdowns, and vaccines.
Would you say those are the four big issues?
No, I would say the three biggest issues are origin, early treatment, and vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Okay.
I would say there is a fourth that the public has yet to really understand is even an issue, but it is.
The evolution of viral variants.
Where are they coming from?
Why do they look the way they do?
What would we do if we wanted to shut them down?
Right.
So that's a fourth thread.
And then there's the lockdown and mask question.
Masks are actually one thing I got wrong.
Early on, I thought I was one of the first people anywhere that I was aware of who was masking.
In fact, at the point that COVID became, it became clear COVID was going to transform the way we were interacting, at least for the time being.
Um, we, we had a, our studio was downtown and my son and I would go late at night when we wouldn't interact with anybody.
Um, and we would, we took all of the equipment to do our podcast out of this.
We would get into our house and we would go to the Home Depot and we would buy the stuff for our set and we built this thing.
And I got a reputation as the bandit of the hardware store because I was masking.
Right?
Nobody else was masking.
This is all in Portland?
Yeah.
Nobody's masking in Portland?
Early on?
No, no, no.
I was masked way before they were.
And is your view now that masks, are you, I mean, do like, N95s?
You think N95s don't work?
I wouldn't say N95s don't work.
I would say if properly worn, N95 masks have some effect.
Right.
But the mask mandates don't require an N95 mask.
The cloth masks don't seem to work at all.
I was struck on social media how much people mixed up masks and mask mandates.
Right.
They're the same thing and they're not.
Right.
So, okay, so that's easy.
So then what about the vaccines?
Well, hold on.
Masks, I got wrong.
Okay.
Lockdowns, I think I got right, which was there was a place for lockdowns, but they needed to be More intense than they were, they needed to be short duration, and they needed to be paired with excellent quality testing, which frankly, we still don't have.
Right.
Which, I don't know, I can't imagine why we don't have it.
I think that's a problem money would solve, and the fact that we haven't dedicated enough money to have tests that are worth anything is conspicuous to me.
let's say a yes painful six week very intense lockdown and the reason for that is that that gives it enough time most of the transmission was at home so six weeks gives it enough time to burn through you know places where we are corralled together such that at the point you lift that six week mandate you have a small number of places where active covet still exists
And if you had good testing, you could figure out where they were, and you could apply some very local solutions so that the rest of us could have gone back to life.
Given that we never had good tests, I would not favor that plan.
But were I in charge, I would have infested very... Sort of an Asian, East Asian approach.
Korea, Hong Kong... Well, yes and no.
You know, good A good test would be key and then a epidemiologically sensible lockdown in which the virus was given a chance to be not contagious in any given group so that, you know, you would have hotspots but you could find them and the rest of us wouldn't be infecting each other.
So I think I had that right but we don't know.
Okay.
We didn't do that.
Okay.
Lab origin I think I clearly had right and I think almost everybody now gets it.
So the other two are early treatment and vaccines.
Early treatment and vaccines and you asked for vaccines first.
Yeah.
I initially was excited about the vaccines.
I initially assumed that I would be vaccinated.
I became, and Heather and I really, became immediately alarmed at the point that the vaccines were announced because of what was said about them, right?
Heather and I, because we're biologists, looked at what we were being told about these vaccines, and on the one hand, what a marvelous, fascinating way to vaccinate, right?
This is a really radically different way And, you know, in our book, which was finished, we literally emerged from writing the last or the first draft of the book that we then submitted to the publisher.
We emerged, we were in the Ecuadorian Amazon figuring, finalizing the book.
We emerged back to where our phones connected to the world and heard about the novel coronavirus.
Anyway, the book was written before COVID.
It has an addendum that includes COVID, but the book is not about COVID.
In the book, we say vaccination is one of three great triumphs of medical technology, right?
The other two being surgery and antibiotics.
So, we're big fans of vaccines, and these vaccines are really fascinating, and we were compelled that it was a pretty interesting idea, but we were absolutely alarmed at being told that they were safe.
Because they couldn't possibly be, right?
We didn't know that they did harm, but the point is safe means you know it doesn't do harm.
And the gamble involved in this radical intervention in the immune system was so great that I thought, well, you're telling us you know that these aren't going to cause autoimmune disorders or tumors or neurological disruptions.
Right?
It was just the number of things that these could induce that you would have to, you would need years following them to know for sure that they didn't do it.
And we were told, oh no, they're, they're safe and we know it.
We accelerated the process of testing.
These are safe.
And it's like, whoa, I know you just lied to me.
Right?
And so the fact that they lied to us and said they were safe when they couldn't possibly know that caused us to think we want, you know, we weren't initially eligible.
Um, because we're healthy and, uh, not that old.
And so we were like, okay, we'll wait as long as we can and we'll give time for an adverse event signal to show up because that's the safer thing to do.
And the longer we waited, the more frightening that picture became.
Right?
So what is the state of this discussion?
Well, I don't think most of the public has any idea yet how much harm has been done.
Right?
I don't think the public has caught on to the fact that we either have no information on how dangerous they are because the one system we have for collecting that information is now dismissed, or we do know how dangerous they are and it's incredibly dangerous, but we have an adverse event signal that is greater than all of the other vaccines combined, you know, over the course of 30 years.
So the signal, we built a system to detect an adverse event signal that That system is firing off alarms at an unprecedented level, and we're ignoring it.
Now, the public does know about myocarditis, and it knows about blood clots, and so it knows that there's some sort of an issue, but it hasn't yet understood how deep the problem is.
Hopefully, we will stop gaslighting the injured You know, and find out how many there are, find out how sick they are and find out whether we can treat them.
Um, but for the moment, we're still pretending that it's a tiny, tiny number of people, which, uh, seems very unlikely.
And then there's the toughest of all of these, which is early treatment.
Um, so we were effectively told that there was, um, you know, you could either face COVID or you could be vaccinated.
Well, that's only because we ignored the medicines that really do work.
Right.
And what, I mean, I, I, I, Steve Kirsch was advocate of this.
And of course I saw the 60 minutes that covered one of these trials, which was right here in Berkeley, by the way, at the local, um, horse, uh, arena where the workers, you remember this?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The, uh, the workers got these two different early treatments.
So for fluboxamine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what, like, what's the deal there?
Well, the deal is unfortunately, um, of a nature that, you know, there are two mutually exclusive ways of viewing it.
Either those of us who believe early treatment works are all Woefully misinformed and incapable of seeing that we've made an error or something has endeavored, has spent mightily to prevent information on early treatments that work from making it to your doctor, your pharmacist, you know, the mainstream media.
I don't think this is ambiguous at all.
The evidence is quite strong.
But the sophistication of the camera It's a great question.
Because here, okay, so we've got fluvoxamine, which is usually used for depression.
We've got a strong signal that it is very effective against COVID.
It's not part of the standard of care.
It's incredibly compelling.
So what happened with that particular?
That's a great question.
Because here, okay, so we've got fluvoxamine, which is usually used for depression.
We've got a strong signal that it is very effective against COVID.
It's not part of the standard of care.
And why is that?
Because there's no money to be made is the obvious answer.
Because it's generic at this point, is that why?
Yeah.
Is the story, is the story, I've heard the story where sort of one of the reasons they that they thought that these drugs were that fluvoxamine or other psychiatric drugs would work was because psychiatric patients were not getting COVID?
Is that true or is that a sort of urban myth?
I don't know.
Steve would be the guy to ask about that.
I have not been particularly excited about fluvoxamine because I think by and large, you know, these psychological medications are a Faustian bargain and we have better drugs.
We have drugs that work better than that.
What are those?
Here's where things get very ugly.
There are two primary, and then there are a bunch of other things that seem to contribute.
The two are Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
Now, Hydroxychloroquine is one I got wrong.
I did not spot that early.
I bought the story, right, at the point that Trump talked about hydroxychloroquine, and then, you know, the scientific chorus erupted and said it doesn't work.
We thought it was promising, but it doesn't work.
I assumed that that made sense.
It turns out it doesn't.
It's a very important anti-COVID drug with very low toxicity, and the tests that were done actually specifically gave people a toxic dose in order To make the, uh, the compound unthinkable.
Um, but it does, it does, there's very strong evidence that hydroxychloroquine is very effective against COVID.
Um, there is equally strong evidence that ivermectin works.
Ivermectin has two utilities in this crisis.
One of them is that it is extremely effective at treating people who have COVID.
Now, the earlier you give it, the better.
And one of the ways that the evidence for its utility has been obscured is by making what are called underpowered trials that do things like treat people with too little or treat them too late in the course of the disease for it to be effective.
But if you treat people early with a sufficient dose, ivermectin turns out to be very, very Very effective at keeping people from getting severely ill and it's extremely low toxicity.
So, there's effectively no reason not to give it and it has been used effectively in many parts of the world to control the pandemic.
Now, the really interesting thing about it is because it's so safe as a drug and it really is among the safest drugs that we have, it can be given without A positive COVID test.
In other words, if you think you have COVID, we can just give it to you.
We're not putting you at significant risk.
What's more, because it has prophylactic effectiveness, we can give it to the people you live with and keep them from getting sick.
So I did get one thing wrong with ivermectin, which was I put too much weight on a study that came out of Argentina, which said Over a thousand people and it appeared to be a hundred percent effective.
And I thought, well, that's pretty powerful evidence.
There was then some concern about the quality of the data.
I didn't want to get it wrong.
So I actually contacted the primary investigator.
I said, can I see the data set?
He did not provide the data set, and I became further alarmed that there was something about this study that was unreliable.
I believe we now know what happened, which was that this researcher, Hector Carvalho, ran the study, but he ran it as a tally.
He didn't keep the data in the way that a proper scientific experiment would.
What he basically did was counted Case numbers of cases of COVID and it's sloppy.
So when I discovered that that was the case, I went to my audience and I said, look, I have said that this study suggests that this is nearly 100% effective as a prophylactic.
I would now rate the quality of this study, you know, I would give it a zero evidentiary weight.
That changes the overall picture for ivermectin's value a bit, but not much.
So, I got that wrong, and I got hydroxychloroquine wrong, and I got masks wrong.
But other than that, I think I got just about everything right.
And so, what do your critics accuse you of?
And what is your response to your critics?
My response to my critics is that they don't actually know what they're talking about.
But what is their criticism?
Or what is their criticism of you?
And what's that?
The criticism, uh, the one that is most intense at this point is, you got Ivermectin wrong.
We now know it doesn't work.
And you, uh, for reasons of pride or because you made money or something like this, won't admit it.
Now, frankly, even at this late date, if I thought ivermectin didn't work, the best thing I could do for my family, for my future, would be to say, hey, I got this one wrong.
Here's how it happened.
But it doesn't work.
It's just not the case.
It does work.
And the fact that people have been ...kept from having access to this drug, and then been left with a choice.
Do you want to be vaccinated or not, when the real choice is, of the available treatments and preventatives, which is the best from the point of view of the cost-benefit analysis, right?
For almost everybody, and maybe even for everybody, these vaccines were far too radical in their mechanism of action to be contemplated.
And for most people, they could be kept safe with these alternatives.
Problem is, there wasn't any money to be made.
And so is the disagreement about the evidence turn on this issue of not prescribing ivermectin soon enough or at high enough dosages?
Well, have you heard of the TOGETHER trial?
No.
Okay, you probably did run across it at the point that it finally emerged.
So, the TOGETHER trial was a complex trial that tested many different drugs, including fluvoxamine.
This is where the fluvoxamine evidence comes from, or at least the primary evidence.
Anyway, it tested many drugs against placebo.
And supposedly we knew eight months ago now that the result for ivermectin did not, was not statistically, they used a different kind of statistics, but it was not statistically significant in favor of ivermectin, which is not the same thing as saying ivermectin doesn't work, but it is a negative result, right?
We didn't see the study for seven months.
We saw the headline.
We saw, you know, slides from a PowerPoint presentation that said, no, ivermectin is not effective at keeping people safe and keeping them from getting very sick.
Seven months later, the actual paper is published and we're able to finally scrutinize what was done.
And it's insane, right?
I mean, there are things built into this trial that still have not been explained that absolutely sabotage it, right?
Like there's a weight cut off for the dosing.
So the dosage that the paper says that they give is a viable dose, but they cut it off and they don't keep increasing it the heavier you are.
And so the point is what this does is it takes people who are the most vulnerable to COVID And underdoses them, right?
So, anyway, the point is, the public got the headline seven months before they got the paper.
They read the title of the paper, they read the abstract, but until you get to the methods section and start asking questions about, well, what exactly was done in the study and what effect would that have on a drug that works?
It dramatically underpowered the trial.
What's more, The evidence that the TOGETHER trial produced does suggest that ivermectin is effective.
In fact, the PI, who's the first author on this paper, says that he believes if they had added more patients to the trial, they would have shown a positive effect for ivermectin, right?
He said it's a matter of the size of the study, not the effectiveness of the drug.
He said that to Steve Kirsch in an email, okay?
This is not evidence that people think it is of the drug's ineffectiveness.
It's evidence of what happens if you underpower a trial with an effective drug is you still get an effect.
What's more interesting is that this isn't the only time we've seen this issue where the person that supposedly generated the evidence that says that the drug isn't effective privately says something very different, right?
The other time we saw this was the meta-analysis done by Andrew Hill.
So there were two major meta-analyses on ivermectin.
There was one from the Bird Group headed by Tess Lorre in Britain that said ivermectin is extremely effective at preventing people from getting seriously ill, going into the hospital, and dying.
And then the other meta-analysis was Andrew Hills that said it wasn't effective.
Tess Lori had a Zoom call that she recorded with Andrew Hill in which he acknowledges that Ivermectin works and that he thought he was pressured, he says he was pressured by Unitaid to change the conclusion of his meta-analysis and he hoped that it would be six weeks before he had more data so that he could change the conclusion back to saying that Ivermectin works.
It's the same pattern again and again.
Every time you look deeply into these supposedly conclusive studies that suggest it doesn't work, you discover there's some sort of shenanigans going on where the PI believes something different than what's in the paper, and the evidence in the paper actually does suggest that there's an effect.
So, how many of these do we need to see before we just realize somebody doesn't want the evidence to conclude that ivermectin works?
And do you think that this is motivated by a concern that if people were using ivermectin, then they wouldn't get vaccinated?
I'm a little hesitant.
I think it's clear what's going on.
I think what's going on is so ghastly that for me to say it raises issues of credibility.
Oh, come on, say it.
I will, I will.
But you realize those people, when they hear me say it, they'll think, oh.
Well, you can edit it out if you don't want, right?
No, but I won't edit it out.
Okay.
But I do think Pharma is not in the business that you and I think they're in.
Right.
Pharma is in the business of selling compounds for which it has intellectual property rights that it can plausibly argue are useful for conditions that people want treated.
Right.
It is not in the business of making people healthier or safer.
And unfortunately, There were several drugs that were already out of patent, highly effective, and very safe that would have taken what turned out to be a many hundred billion dollar new market and killed it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's, it's not a conspiracy in the sense that it's, there's a profit motivation you're describing, which is that they wanted to sell a lot of vaccines and they saw cheaper alternatives.
Well, the problem is, If I'm right, then it implies an indifference to human suffering and death that is pretty hard to fathom.
I guess unless, I mean, I guess to be devil's advocate, I guess you could sort of say, well, I mean, when I look at this stuff, like, for example, the school lockdowns, You know, were the teachers union in California, which so we had a lockdown, you know, for 2020, 2021, Europe was sending back the kids to school.
Are the teachers in California, were they indifferent to the impact that shutting down the schools would have on kids?
No, I mean, I think they cared.
They were just...
Over, they were just more obsessed with their own health and safety than they were.
And they make up reasons about how the kids would be educated over Zoom.
And it would be just, just the same.
And people find all sorts of ways to justify things that they want.
They do.
They do.
Unfortunately, if you're in the business of rapidly generating a radically novel vaccine because you believe that a pathogen is so dangerous that it requires extraordinary investment to shut it down.
And in the same breath, you are, um, Intervening, uh, in people's access to a common medication, um, that many have built successful medical protocols around treating their own patients.
It's hard for me to imagine, um, the rationalization that would actually involve those who did it not understanding that they were condemning, uh, Likely millions to death.
Help me understand.
Where do you sit in relationships?
There's a bunch of COVID dissidents.
There's Vinay Prasad.
Yeah.
UC San Francisco.
There's Caridy.
What's his first name?
You mean Aaron?
Yeah.
Aaron Carioti.
Aaron Carioti.
There's Jay Bhattacharya.
Yeah.
And who else am I missing?
These are some of the big... Robert Malone.
Robert Malone.
Garret Van Den Bosch.
How do you like... Ryan Cole.
Yeah, like what is the state of play among the dissidents?
I mean, Vinay strikes me as fairly mainstream, but he's also harshly critical of the public health establishment.
How do you kind of, how do you, where do you sit in relationship to these other I'm very troubled by Vinay as much as I want him to be a good guy on the right side of history.
The way he divides this puzzle makes no sense to me.
Which is how?
He sees certain issues very clearly and then other issues he What do you disagree with him on?
The wisdom of vaccinating anyone.
Right?
The utility of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
He doesn't support ivermectin?
No.
I see him on both sides of this issue and the places that he's right I want to cheer him on.
And the places where he's wrong, I just think, how can somebody who sees part of this picture so clearly miss so much?
And I'll tell you, I mean, you know, maybe I'm just around the bend, but my sense is that there is a, what I call the middle ground scramble.
The middle ground scramble is on.
And the point is, If you imagine that something endeavored to prevent the best treatments from reaching the public in order for it to sell reckless and expensive treatments, and in fact to mandate them, well, that thing needs to be scolded.
And all the people who fell for it need a way out.
And so the last thing any of these people want is for the dissidents to have been right.
Right?
If the dissidents were right, then the reckoning that is coming is a thing to be feared.
Right.
So what they want is somebody nicely positioned in the middle.
Somebody who will scold those who did wrong, but, you know, slap on the wrist level.
and will not validate the dissident perspective.
So we can still dismiss those, those dangers.
People who spread misinformation, right?
And unfortunately, what I see is Vinay exploring this space.
And I don't know that he knows what he's doing, but I think the point is there is a hunger for somebody who was not part of the bullshit CDC narrative.
Somebody who saw through it to say, Oh, but those COVID dissidents, they were wrong as can be.
And the, you know, whoever, Figures out the dimension of that niche is going to be very Powerful and very well rewarded because it lets the people the perpetrators off pretty much scot-free you know, the ill-gotten gains will remain in their bank accounts and You know the service of doing away with us dissidents is Part of the bargain.
Mm-hmm.
So anyway, I'm not I'm not very pleased with that middle ground scramble thing I see it as its own pathology, but you know, I think the community of dissidents contains some really fine doctors and some very good scientists and We also, you know have discovered who has the courage to say what they see and who doesn't.
Mm-hmm Should we move on to the topic that part of me wants to avoid because I'm concerned about disrupting the... The bon ami.
The bon ami, as it were.
Well, but if there's conflict and disagreement, that'll make it the most interesting part of the podcast.
No, I think it'll be good.
And actually, I'm going to confess my level of insanity before we even embark on this.
This is a signature issue for you going back how far?
I changed my mind on nuclear between 2007 and 2010.
2007 and 2010.
So we're talking about more than a decade of commitment to the idea.
Yes.
Yes.
There's a part of me that actually entertains the possibility that I've seen something in nuclear that, when you hear it and think about it, is going to cause you to change your position again.
Okay.
Now, I know, rationally, that can't be right, because you probably know more about nuclear than I do, although I've spent a good deal of time thinking about it.
Yes.
Let's find out where this goes.
Okay.
You want to lay out the case for nuclear?
Sure.
So, let's see.
Let's start with the fact that nuclear energy emerges from the lab.
So, we learn that we can split the atom at the lab level.
And that is important because I think that a lot of people think that the ability to split the atom begins with the bomb program.
But the bomb program begins after we realize we can split the atom at the lab level.
I think it's also important because I think there's still some sense among some people that we can make nuclear go away.
But when you understand that it comes out of physics, at the lab level, then there's no way to get rid of the knowledge of nuclear fission, of splitting atoms.
The first application of nuclear energy is to make a weapon.
We make two bombs, we drop them on Japan.
So the first application is to use the weapon to end a war.
And afterwards, it's a shocking event.
So it's a shocking event to... And by the way, I'm working on a new book on nuclear, specifically on nuclear.
It's a shocking event because of the power.
And I should say, too, that people have been thinking about this power For since really the end of the 19th century, but really with Marie Curie and Pierre Curie in the early, very early 1900s with the discovery of radium, there's a sense in which there's atomic energy and once you release it, it'll be enormous.
So there's huge, so it's a shocking event.
It's before the bomb is used, it is understood by a small group of people as having significant implications for the relationship between nations.
And that people understood that it would mean that small nations would be able to defend themselves from invasion from large nations.
And so this is known as the nuclear revolution in military.
So it changes this old calculation, which is that large states can swallow up small states or can invade easily and take over small states.
So suddenly we realize that small states can defend themselves.
And it also then quickly gets to appreciating a paradox, which is that There's no way to properly win a nuclear war, and that it's two scorpions under glass in Robert Oppenheimer's famous picture, and that one nation that would use nuclear weapons against another nuclear-armed nation would be committing suicide.
So that, I think, creates a paradox, which is that something so Dangerous could create a form of safety in the form of deterrence.
And this is a very confusing point.
In fact, my wife said to me the other day, she goes, Because when Putin was, when there was a stuff around Ukraine and Putin was sort of saying, reminding everybody that he has nuclear weapons, that the U.S.
getting too close to him could result in nuclear war, my wife said, but you don't think that that's possible?
And I said, well, sure, it's possible.
And she said, but you don't think it would happen?
And I said, well, this is the paradox is that if you If you stop fearing nuclear weapons, then they don't work anymore.
And so the reason that nuclear weapons work to keep the peace is because there is a possibility that they could be used.
So I don't want to get too far down the track, but so one thing about nuclear weapons, though, is that they genuinely pose Something close to an apocalyptic threat, if not apocalyptic.
There's a debate about whether nuclear winter is probable or not, but we know that full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union, which are the two countries with significant weapons, are one of the only ways that we can imagine for civilizations to destroy themselves so quickly.
So I do think that nuclear weapons do pose a significant threat to civilization, and I also think that they have spread peace between nations, and that that's occurred between the United States and the Soviet Union, Soviet Union and China, and now we see it between India and Pakistan.
And so that's first observation.
Second observation is just the time around nations acquiring nuclear weapons is the most dangerous moments.
And so I get nervous.
It's when North Korea gets the bomb that everybody gets nervous, but then some years pass and things stabilize.
Just to cut to the chase of my book, in terms of weapons, I think that it's time for the Western Alliance to have three nuclear umbrellas rather than one.
I think it's time for Japan and South Korea to have their own nuclear arsenal and defend themselves and potentially Australia from an increasingly aggressive China before China takes too many small islands, and that it's time for Western Europe to defend itself, and that means Britain, France, and Germany.
In terms of the energy... So, hold on.
Let's pause there because you've said a lot, and I want to say a lot of what you've said I don't disagree with.
Okay.
I do think, you know, I would phrase the paradox this way.
If we have nuclear weapons, they will be used in earnest, and it could be existential.
Used?
What do you mean by used?
Do you mean detonated?
I mean they will be used aggressively.
Do you mean used as deterrence or used as detonated?
I think the paradox is this.
The deterrence works.
It makes for a more peaceful year to year.
Things are more peaceful because of the threat of nuclear war.
But if you have that as a permanent mechanism, eventually The dice will be rolled in an unfortunate way, and they will be used in earnest.
That's not what I, and I don't agree with the last part.
No, no, I'm adding that part.
Okay.
And I think it's frankly just statistically the case, which is, you know, as you point out, if there's really no threat of them ever being used, then they're not an effective deterrent.
So the fact of them being an effective deterrent says that there is a danger that they will be used, and then the question is, whatever the magnitude of that danger is, spread it out over enough time, and it says, oh, they're going to be used.
I'm not with you on that last part.
I know.
Okay.
I know, but I'm just saying.
I was with you all the way up until that very last sentence.
And this is a mirror of where we're going to end up with nuclear energy, interestingly.
I didn't see this coming, and I now do.
So my point is actually, I think it's just a mathematical question.
We agree that they work as deterrents, and that says that we can't afford to use them for that purpose.
After World War II for a good chunk of time.
And then this also raises the specter of my brother's point.
I don't know, have you heard it?
No, we didn't have that.
My brother, and by the way, I love my brother.
I think he's one of the most insightful people on earth.
This particular point of his is one I am not fond of at all.
Okay.
His point is we need above ground nuclear testing in order that people are reminded of just how dangerous these weapons are so that we will not use them.
I don't agree with anything.
Right.
Well, let's put it this way.
At the level of thought experiment, I think he's right, which is that just as you point out that the deterrence requires the actual threat, it also requires that people understand how serious that threat is.
I don't know how much that is increased by an above-ground nuclear test, because it's not like most people can observe it.
We don't need it, right?
There's sufficient fear of nuclear weapons and nuclear war for there to be deterrence.
In fact, I think that a significant quantity of the fear of nuclear energy is displaced fear of nuclear weapons.
All right.
You will find that mine is not.
We'll see.
Yeah, we'll see.
We'll see.
Yeah.
But in any case, we've arrived somewhere interesting.
I agree on the basic picture, that year to year the world is less inclined towards war because of the specter of these weapons being used, but that if they were used in earnest, The net benefit might be radically reversed.
Could be.
Yeah.
Especially in a major exchange.
Yeah.
Okay.
So now let's get to nuclear energy and see where we end up.
You want to pitch in?
Oh yeah, sure.
So...
So, nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is the controlled fission process to create heat, to generate steam, to turn a turbine and generate electricity.
But nuclear energy is also, by generating significant quantities of heat without combustion, is effectively a way to reduce humankind's environmental footprint from energy to close to zero.
So, humans use about half of the ice-free surface of the earth.
Most of that is for food production, but even food production can become significantly shrunk at the footprint if you have sufficient quantities of energy.
So, the picture here is of gigantic vertical farming.
So, can I See if I understand this well enough that I can anticipate the connection between those.
Yes.
The Haber-Bosch process radically increased the amount of food that we could produce.
Interestingly, it is also downstream of a weapons technology.
Very interesting.
The Haber-Bosch process was invented basically because although nitrogen is extremely plentiful, the accessible nitrogen isn't.
And so what Haber-Bosch Primarily, Bosch did.
No, it was Fritz Haber.
Bosch industrializes it.
Okay, so Haber figures out how you can use energy, primarily from fossil fuels, to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and turn it into a compound that is then usable for bombs because, of course, nitrogen is extremely explosive.
The same technology then results in the massive ability to increase the amount of food we can produce because that nitrogen works as a fertilizer.
And so I forget what the figure is that something like a third of the protein in all of us is actually the result of Haber-Bosch recovered nitrogen.
Basically fossil fuels allowed that nitrogen to be brought into a biotical, not even a A biotic process to be made into food, which is then incorporated into us.
That's right.
And so, in terms of environmental impacts, we were dependent on manure and guano.
And so, and there was obviously strict limits in the amount of manure and guano we could find.
But more than that, if you have to use manure from cows or some other animal species, you are massively increasing the land footprint.
So hay rubash allows for a power density improvement.
And so from an environmental perspective, energy density and power density are the key mechanisms.
So if you shrink You know, if you want to save more environment, then you want to use less environment.
And by environment, we can, in this case, if we talk about land.
So what nuclear does is it radically reduces the amount of natural resource required to sustain a high energy civilization.
So true sustainability, meaning a high energy human civilization plus a planet that dedicates increasing amounts of landscape and other material throughput to nature or wild nature or wherever we want it to be, parks, golf courses, would be one that moves from energy dilute fuels Wood to coal to petroleum and natural gas to uranium.
Right.
So, just to put that in slightly different words, what Haber-Bosch did with fossil fuels could be done even more environmentally efficiently if you use uranium as the source material and you use fission to boil water.
Yep.
Okay, I don't disagree with any of that.
Yes.
Uh, so first of all, I want to, I have my own way of thinking about nuclear and it involves us navigating the difference in some of our terminology.
I would say nuclear is not one process.
It is two opposite processes.
Fusion to me is the solution that you're looking for.
We cannot yet do For decades, right?
In other words, it's fusion compared to fission is so difficult that we have yet to manage it in a way that is other than interesting at a research level.
We may be close or we may not.
Hopefully we're close.
But the moment we have fusion power, then I'm totally on board with that analysis.
My concern is fission power.
And in particular, I am most alarmed by uranium.
There are other processes in which fission can be used to generate energy that reduce some of these hazards greatly, and there are even some that have now positive externalities in terms of burning spent fuel.
I am very cautious about anything on the fission side, but I'm open to the possibility that there are solutions there that we should engage and maybe some that we have to engage now that we have all of the nuclear, the spent fuel that we've got stored up.
All right.
Is it time for me to deploy what I think is the argument that reverses this whole picture?
Sure.
Okay.
What should we do with the spent fuel?
Okay.
Well let me address that, but let me back into it by addressing how I think about energy transitions, and then I want to say something briefly about fusion.
So we mostly move towards new fuels because the new fuels become more abundant and cheaper than the incumbents.
Now, that's not to say that some amount of scarcity and rising prices of the incumbent fuels doesn't encourage the move to the new.
But let's just take the most salient example, which is that the United States Has reduced our carbon emissions by 22% between 2005 and 2020.
That 61% of that reduction occurred by moving just from coal to natural gas, which produces half the carbon emissions.
Similarly, the move from wood to coal mostly occurred because coal was so much cheaper and abundant and more useful than wood.
There was some wood scarcity in Britain, but it's been exaggerated.
Yeah.
Coal mostly opened up new possibilities for producing concentrated heat, particularly the steam engine, but even before that we had process heat.
So wait, I want to put in one piece of the puzzle that I think belongs here.
Wood is renewable.
It is also part of a cycle, right?
Which is to say that to the extent that what you do is cut down a piece of forest, burn the wood, and then that forest regrows, the carbon that's been put into the atmosphere is then recaptured by those trees.
So there's at least in principle an equilibrium to be had there.
Right.
Now wood is not a good fuel.
It is Right.
Right.
So I'm not arguing it's a solution, but at least the fact of an equilibrium existing there is significant and useful.
Yeah.
When we liberate fossil fuels, we're taking eons worth of accumulated carbon and releasing it suddenly in a small number of decades.
Yeah.
And that is not part of an equilibrium.
And so that is alarming and dangerous, and I assume it animates you as it animates me that that's not a good idea.
Right, right.
So go ahead.
So, the way I think about energy transitions is that the main event is making the new energy cheaper and allowing it to replace the older energy.
Now, that's a little contrary to conventional wisdom on climate policy, which is to try to make the incumbent energy more expensive.
But if you look at how we actually reduce carbon emissions in the real world, it's by making the clean energy source cheaper, which is mostly gas.
So, my view of nuclear is that it's super young.
People think it's old, but that's an illusion.
Uranium as a fuel, but nuclear as a process is very, very young.
And we all illustrate this by saying that we had a steam engine.
That existed about 60 years before the Watt steam engine, called the Newcomen steam engine.
That was highly inefficient because the condenser, it didn't separate out the condenser.
So, we really, it's revolution in terms of the steam engine revolution, which of course gives us trains and factories when we have a modest, some modest technical change to the end-use technology, which is the steam engine.
That, I think, is still a process that could be occurring with nuclear power plants, but may be stretched over an even longer period.
So, I'm going to agree with you that fusion will be superior to fission.
I think we will have it.
I think it is much further away than almost anybody that I know thinks it's further away.
If I had to guess, I would say next century, not this century.
And I would say that I think that we'll get it when there's demand for it, meaning somebody really trying to get it.
And the reason I think that is because when I look at other energy transitions, like how did we get fracking in the United States?
We got it because a set of people really wanted it and there was demand for it.
There was a high demand for gas, a high price, and the U.S.
government really wanted it and the entrepreneurs really wanted it.
So that's how I tend to think about these technologies is that there needs to be a demand pull and a technological push.
There has to be something that people really want the technology and there has to be governments kind of pushing to get it.
Oh, now you've got me really wanting to win you over because the point then is uranium-based fission is then an obstacle to what we really need, which is fusion.
I don't think so.
I think it's actually a path to fusion.
So here, I'll steel man your, imagine your argument is going to be here.
The reason that you say that there was demand that, you know, we can leave aside whether we think fracking is a decent technology.
I mean, I think it is destructive, but obviously it has had a huge upside as well, both in terms of our security, fuels where we couldn't get them before it has made us safer.
Right.
And you know, what is liberated is comparatively clean.
But I think part of what's implied in what you're saying is that because it was the same people in the same business as the fuels that were now so expensive, they innovated their way to this, how do we keep getting fossil fuels out of the earth?
And the answer is, oh, well, some of it's inconveniently trapped, you know, in rock strata.
Can we, you know, break those strata apart and liberate it?
Right.
Whereas the point is there's nobody in the fusion business.
Right?
The fusion business is a speculative business.
And because of that, the point is the uranium-based nuclear industry isn't pursuing fusion, it's a competitor.
Right.
So, I don't like to hear that you think it might be next century, but I do think the fact that it always seems to be a few decades away Yeah, I mean it's sort of based on, the reason I come to that is that I think, I don't think that there's any scientific, I don't think there's any, like nobody thinks that it's scientifically impossible But everybody thinks it's technologically very difficult.
And the things in nuclear fission, I see a lot of people, engineers, who think things should be technologically simpler, and then they get into them and they discover they're much more technologically difficult.
So, I mean, our bathroom model was a complete nightmare compared to what we thought it was at the beginning.
And that's like a stupid bathroom.
Right.
Like, nuclear power is much more complicated and difficult The fracking revolution was much more difficult.
You know, it wasn't just fracking, it was that they did horizontal wells, and then they had underground maps.
They were able to map three-dimensionally using LiDAR and other technologies.
So it was a combination of underground, it was a combination of horizontal drilling, fracking, and 3D mapping that combined to get this really sophisticated Okay, so let's get to the issue of the used fuel rods.
Actually, let me put a piece of information that I didn't know until relatively recently on the table.
Apparently, nuclear fuel, before it goes into the reactors, is Not perfectly safe to handle, but it's pretty close.
What happens to it is that in the process, in the reactors itself, all of these isotopes are created.
Some of them are extremely dangerous, things that were not loaded into the reactors like plutonium, for example.
Right.
And at the end of this process, what you get out is physically so hot that it has to be actively cooled for something like five years.
Eighteen months.
18 months.
Yes.
Okay.
18 months.
Pools of water.
That's the way to say it.
18 months before you can put it into dry cask storage.
Correct.
Okay.
So we're going to get back to dry cask storage, but 18 months, that's better than five years.
It used to be five years?
I know I've got that number from somewhere.
I've only heard, 18 months is the number I've heard.
Okay.
But yeah.
Now, a lot of fuel rods, even at 18 months, we just leave them in the pools.
Right.
We are not moving everything to dry cask storage as soon as we could.
But in principle, you could move anything.
You know what, actually, you might be right on.
It's 18 months.
The fuels are in their fission process for 18 months, and they could be in the pools for five years.
I think they're in the pools for five years.
And the reason that they're in the pools for five years is that the amount of decay heat is so great that if these things are uncovered, they actually literally catch fire.
The solution to this, ultimately, well, you have to be vigilant about keeping them with circulating cold water for some period of time, yet to be determined.
Maybe we'll add it to the notes here, but I think it's five years.
You could move it to something called dry cask storage.
Now, dry cask storage... We do, yeah.
...is not a great solution, but it's better in that it doesn't require any vigilance.
It's basically a steady state in which no energy is required in order to keep the stuff cool.
It doesn't catch fire, etc.
So, what we've got is a problem where we've been accumulating fuel Most of the fuel that we've accumulated is now in the range where it could be put into dry cast storage.
I don't know what the percentage is, but a lot of fuel that could be put into dry cast storage isn't.
It remains in the fuel pools.
Well, in the United States?
I believe so.
That's not my understanding.
My understanding is that it all goes into dry cast storage.
Really?
Yeah.
Because the pools would get full.
The pools would be filled.
And they're not constructing new pools.
They're just moving the...
So, but you're right that...
So, yeah, so it comes out of the reactor, goes into the pools, and it comes out of the pools and goes into dry cast storage.
We agree that once in dry cast storage, it's fine.
I don't agree at all that it's fine.
Okay.
But it doesn't require vigilance.
It requires some vigilance.
It requires that you protect the site.
Yes.
Right?
But it does not require, you know, the fuel pools will go dry in a small number of hours if the power that circulates the water is Is turned off.
This is what we learned at Fukushima.
Well, the rod, the fuel, they didn't lose.
Those fuel rods, they stayed.
They did match.
Well, I think there was evidence that they became uncovered through Herculean efforts of very courageous people.
They were kept wet and we didn't get one of these massive fuel pool fires.
But, you know, let's put it this way.
If one of those pools had cracked so that it couldn't be filled with water, we would be in a whole different situation.
Well yeah, they'd have to be taken out and put into cool water.
And it's not obvious that you could do it.
The tangle that you had after the earthquake, um, you know, in other words, I think the number of scenarios in which the Fukushima site could have gotten away from control, right?
Where you wouldn't have had these heroic people maintaining control over the site, but a small number of, a small bit of extra bad luck would have resulted in the site becoming ungovernable.
Like Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was ultimately rendered governable.
Right, but let's work our way to the accidents.
Let's just finish the fuel cycle.
So we have a cycle where the fuel rods, they split atoms for 18 months in the reactor core.
They come out, they go into pools of water for five years.
I think that's probably right.
And then they go into dry cast storage.
Let's consider what risks there are in the dry cast storage for a minute, because let's come back to the pools, which I agree is a sensitive part of the process.
They're just these old used fuel rods that are in cement and they're in a steel and concrete at the site of production.
At the site of use.
At the site of... Yeah, the site of... Yeah, I see it, Shane.
The site of the fission process.
The site of electricity production, not the site of the fuel rock production.
There are some countries that are, like Sweden, that are now going to move them into an underground repository.
That was a proposal to do that in Nevada.
As a newcomer to this field, I never understood why they wanted to do that.
What was wrong with keeping them above ground?
So, one thing is you asked, well, could you make a bomb out of the used fuel rods?
So, it's worth pointing out that the used fuel rods have been enriched, the uranium in them has been enriched to around 5%.
To get bomb material, they need to be enriched over 90%.
So we've already, we don't have the enrichment high enough for the new bombs, but plus now they've been, the fission process has occurred.
There's still a lot of energy that could still be released, but the current process is so inefficient that most of the energy cannot be released without what we call reprocessing the fuel rods.
The French do that.
They then take those used fuel rods and they put them through a mile-long facility to reprocess the fuel rods.
And from that, they were able to extract more and more fuel.
That process is, nobody disagrees, is more expensive than what we do, but it has the benefit of creating plutonium, which the French then can use for their weapons program.
We create plutonium, just so there's a lot of mythology about it, but we create plutonium for our weapons in a different process.
Yeah.
So I will say, although I think the proliferation issue is real.
Yeah.
Almost none of my objection to uranium-based fission is based on that.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so we can set that aside.
So then we're, now we're dealing with the pools issue and the risk of a, um, really, uh, let's call it a meltdown combined with a fire where you'd have significant quantities of radioactive particles released into the natural environment outside of containment.
Yeah.
So, um, let's just do a, uh, a proof of concept.
Yeah.
At Fukushima, we had a triple meltdown.
One of those meltdowns in Reactor Building 3 was different than the others.
It was more catastrophic, although Reactor 4, the building got severely damaged.
The explosion in Reactor 3 was different, and the likely reason for that was that Reactor 3 was running MOX fuel, mixed oxide, which actually includes plutonium reprocessed from decommissioned weapons.
So anyway, it is on the one hand efficient to use that material to generate some energy, on the other hand it creates a worse meltdown scenario.
None of the fuel pools, so these are large elevated pools, None of them cracked in any of these explosions.
Terrible things happened.
And these were about hydrogen gas explosions, not nuclear fission explosions.
Well, the one in Building 3 looks to have been a prompt criticality.
There does appear to have been a nuclear detonation, but the explosions that ripped apart the buildings were hydrogen explosions.
They were hydrogen explosions just So the people who are watching get it.
The idea is that the radioactivity actually tore apart the water, producing hydrogen and oxygen, so that inside the containment buildings, you had hydrogen building up with oxygen, and then it takes nothing to... Yeah, some sort of ignition.
Something ignites it.
This left a terrible, terrible mess, including buildings that even robots couldn't go into and last more than, I don't know, an hour to even survey and do cleanup work.
Right.
Anyway, so it was a terrible mess, but it was not nearly as bad as it might have been.
Right?
Had one of these fuel pools cracked, these are elevated fuel pools up above these reactors, right?
Had one of these fuel pools cracked, and there's no reason other than luck that we didn't get a crack, it would have emptied of water, the fuel rods were so hot that the zirconium cladding would have caught fire, and you would have had this radioactive smoke pouring out of these fuel pools until the fire burned itself out.
There wouldn't have even been any way to fight such a fire.
Right?
The radioactivity would have been so intense that there would have been no way for human technology to successfully contain it.
It just would have had to go out.
Well, right.
Or it would have been like Chernobyl.
Well, in Chernobyl, there was a mechanism and people did die, but it was a small number of people who died.
And we were talking about, you know, the reactor core, not an accumulation of a bunch of cores sitting in a pool that would have gone dry.
Now, mind you, Didn't even require a crack in a fuel pool.
Yeah.
The power had simply remained out and heroic humans had not been able to restore circulation.
The water would have boiled off and the same thing would have happened.
It would have been on fire.
So my point to you begins with The reactors we presently have are structured in a way that events that are plausible could result in something that would make one of these sites ungovernable.
And I don't regard Chernobyl as ungovernable.
Well, I mean, what does ungovernable mean?
It means that human beings can no longer remain on site to do the heroic work necessary to control the release of the pent-up fuel.
Well, I'm not so sure.
I mean, in other words, I think if the fuel rods in the pool were on fire, I think that the Japanese government would go send people to put the fire out, firefighters.
So let's just remember Chernobyl.
Chernobyl, we had an explosion, a fire.
And melted fuel exposed to the environment.
And melted fuel in the basement of the reactor.
You had fuel rods, raw fuel rods, thrown by the explosion out of the building.
Yep.
So strewn around the environment.
Right.
And so basically, after that accident, About 28 firefighters died at the accident.
And then let's say another, you know, 50 or another, you know, another, about 50 total then a few weeks later.
Then you get, so we, so we had, and some of, and then you have over a period of years, maybe 200 of the first responders died.
And some of them that died in circumstances, which are they drank too much or they were killed in car accidents, we're not totally sure.
But like, let's say a couple hundred people died.
Then we had an increase in thyroid cancer, about let's say 4,000, which is a highly treatable cancer.
You remove the thyroid gland and you take thyroxine.
So, nobody wants to get cancer but a lot of us will get it and if you get cancer, it's not a bad one.
It's not a bad one.
So, 4,000 premature deaths over an 80-year period from thyroid cancer.
No increase in other cancers, according to the United Nations investigations.
Yes, there's a question about how good those numbers are, how sensitive those measures are.
There's also a question, let's say that Chernobyl, obviously the reactors were very different and there was a part of the Chernobyl disaster that was very rushing in nature because the way the reactor was structured On the other hand, what if a Chernobyl-like accident happened at Diablo Canyon?
Who fights the fire?
The firefighters.
What if they don't go?
Well, they have to go.
It's like saying... What happened in Uvalde?
What happened in 9-11?
Well, we had heroes going into those buildings.
But what I'm saying is, there's a question.
First of all, we know what happened to those buildings.
We do not know what happens if Diablo Canyon does what Chernobyl did.
We do not know the psychology of people and who has what authority to order whom to fight what fires at what cost to their families.
Let's go back to this.
I want to address that.
I don't want to skip over, but I'm going to continue the Chernobyl conversation.
So, with Chernobyl, we did have significant radioactive release.
And I think what I would say, and I suspect you would agree, is that we're not saying that the radiation release didn't cause any cancers.
What we're saying is it didn't cause enough cancers to detect an increase over the baseline of cancers that had been occurring before that.
In other words, we don't see an increase in cancers, non-thyroid cancers after Chernobyl to kind of go, so it's not to say that no one did, it just says that a lot of people die, you know, we have a significant percentage of people that get cancer Right.
And that's a significant percentage of people that die from cancer.
So if I did have an increase, it was not detectable at the levels at which we're able to monitor cancer mortality.
Right.
I would argue that it's a nightmare scenario in the sense that what you're talking about, first of all, people do not intuit the difference between the danger of radiation, which in large measure people are too afraid of, and the danger of radioactive particles, which people are not afraid of enough, and the danger of radioactive particles, which people are not afraid of enough, That radioactive particles are a particular medical hazard have evolutionary experience with them.
And therefore, we do not have mechanisms that protect us, whereas radiation is a fact of living in the universe.
And we are pretty well protected against transient radiation exposures being below a threshold.
Yeah, to be fair, the people in Fukushima that lived in Fukushima province after the accident and who lived in areas where they had high levels of consumption of radioactive particles in their food and diet, Many of the people, the farmers who lived around there, did not have elevated rates of cancer.
According to whom?
British Medical Journal.
Okay.
Now, the problem is that I have now watched the British Medical Journal engaged in COVID shenanigans.
I've watched the Japanese government engaged in all kinds of post-Fukushima shenanigans, like adding non-radioactive material to radioactive waste to bring it below a threshold that made it legal to burn, transporting radioactive material around Japan transporting radioactive material around Japan to mask the signal of the difference between the exposed population and the unexposed population.
So the point is, look, I would love to say, let's just look at the evidence and see how dangerous these things actually were.
But at some level, one gets the idea that lots of people are not really interested in the evidence being reviewed in an objective way.
And when they have control over what access we get to the evidence, I become agnostic about how good that evidence actually is.
Okay.
Well, so one of the characters in Apocalypse Never, who I have told the story of the evidence, is Jerry Thomas.
She's a professor at Imperial College London.
Her mother died of leukemia.
She's been very concerned about cancer.
She ran the Chernobyl tissue bank, which is the bank of all the tissues of the thyroid glands.
Goes back and forth to, you know, dealt with victims of Chernobyl, deeply sympathetic person, never been on the payroll of the nuclear industry, independent scholar.
And she walks, I'll have her walk the reader through the evidence.
And the picture is basically, it's not like that there's no risk.
It's just that these risks are outweighed by other risks in people's, look, in other people's lifestyles.
You and I, well, not only in other people's lifestyles, but the problem is we have a human bias issue.
Yes.
Right?
If you have, you know, 19 kids and two teachers gunned down at school, it captivates the imagination and we become focused on it.
If Policy about the quality of the food that children are eating kills, you know, 20 times that number every year.
Right.
We don't notice it.
Right.
Right.
And so there's no question that wrapped up in the nuclear issue The nuclear power issue is the question of the relative costs and benefits and that it's hard to look away from 4,000, you know, deaths from thyroid cancer because we can say, Hey, those are probable cancers.
You know, those people died from something that was spit out of this one building, right?
We get that.
We don't get that, um, The way we generate, you know, coal is dirty.
Right.
Right?
It puts particles in the air.
People breathe those particles.
They have respiratory issues, you know.
So, you know, a proper analysis would look downstream of all of these technologies.
Right.
And it would be dispassionate about, you know, yeah, a certain number of people are going to die as a result of nuclear accidents.
That's unfortunate, but we have to compare it to the number of people who would die from other consequences of nuclear technology.
Air pollution is the usual comparison.
Right.
So, I'm not in any way discounting that a proper analysis might look at a shocking number of nuclear deaths and say, yes, but in comparison to the technology we didn't deploy, it's actually fewer.
Right, right.
My concern, and I don't know if we're at the place to position it, but You still haven't told me what we do with the waste.
Okay.
You and I agree dry cast is better than fuel pool.
All right.
Well, let me say one thing about two about the, um, there's also, I want to say something about the deaths, um, because I think it's a point of confusion.
World Health Organization says 6 million deaths a year from air pollution.
Um, and then we say 4,000 deaths from thyroid cancer from Chernobyl.
In both cases, we're talking about, Premature deaths and almost all end-of-life.
It's the same as the famous 400,000 tobacco deaths a year.
The vast majority of people, it's end-of-life and so it's a contributor to end-of-life, not a sole cause.
By contrast, 105,000 people this year will die from drug overdose and drug poisonings.
Instantly.
Right.
And there's nobody that says it contributed.
They say the fentanyl killed them.
It wasn't their obesity or their cigarette smoking or their alcoholism.
It's just the fentanyl.
So, we have a hundred and five.
Just to put these numbers in perspective.
Right, right, right.
Look, I think this is very important.
People don't do this analysis well.
In fact, this completely polluted our understanding of COVID.
You really want to say how many years of life were lost, right?
And so the point is, you know... A 95-year-old obese woman who smoked.
Because of COVID, it's kind of like, what are we talking about here, guys?
Right.
I mean, you know, it's sad, but the point is, we ought to have said, well, why am I, you know, vaccinating this 12-year-old, increasing their chance of myocarditis in order to protect very old people?
What society puts children at risk to protect very old people?
So, yes, that kind of analysis has to be done here.
And we're terrible at talking about it.
And the news media, particularly, I mean, we're good at talking about it in podcasts.
We have some time to stretch into it.
But even I, when I was early advocating for nuclear, would say air pollution kills six million people a year.
And it's not really correct.
It's more like you should.
And so what I try to say now is I say, According to the World Health Organization, air pollution shortens the lives of 6 million people a year.
Now, with COVID, it's even trickier, because you could say the same thing.
You say, COVID shortened the lives of a significant number of people.
The language doesn't really help, because if you say, fentanyl shortened the lives of 71,000 Americans, it misses the fact that some of these guys were in their 20s, and they could have lived until they were 100.
No, we need to get good at this and we need to start talking about things like all-cause mortality and years of life lost.
We should reserve the word killed for things where it's like fentanyl killed 71,000 people, air pollution shortens the lives of 6 million.
I think it's the right way to say it.
Right, and in fact at some point, this is not the time, but we should talk about my early work as a graduate student.
I worked on become feeble with age and it has to do with avoiding cancer.
And basically all of these things, your ability to repair your tissues is, well, it's set differently for each tissue, but you basically have an amount of repair you can do.
So anything that expends that reserve capacity accelerates you towards death, right?
Right.
And so there's a question about how much of your capacity is burned up by these things.
And we really ought to be thinking in that more integrative.
I agree.
Okay.
All right.
So let's get to the tech.
Yep.
So, so, So first, let me say before I say anything about the fuel, the pools.
If we think there's a problem with pools, we should fix the pools to the extent we can.
So I'm a heretic among environmentalists because I'm prim-nuclear.
I'm also a heretic among prim-nuclear people in that I am skeptical of The alternatives to the water-cooled nuclear tech that we have.
Part of my reason for my skepticism started in 2015 when I go to China, and we're at a workshop among nuclear engineers in China about alternatives to water-cooled nuclear.
And the daytime, they all get up and give their presentations about how we can cool nuclear with helium gas, we can cool it with fluoride and beryllium, we can cool it with lead, we can cool it with sodium.
And it's all very promising because then you can't have meltdowns because the fuel's already melted in a combination.
Or the gas-cooled means the way the gas-cooled plants.
Britain, by the way, is mostly carbon dioxide, gas-cooled, nuclear.
That if there's a loss of coolant, there's convection heating so the fuels don't melt down.
They just heat the whole plant up and then the heat dissipates and so you don't get a meltdown.
Problems.
So you're talking about in the reactor?
Yeah.
Actually, the whole building.
Yeah.
So that's the daytime.
Then you get to the nighttime and we go out for dinner.
And since I'm an anthropologist, not a STEM person, the evenings when all the Chinese engineers are drunk are the most informative parts of the meeting.
And I kind of go, what's the real deal?
And they're kind of like, these designs are, you know, really far away and they're hard for us as the top nuclear engineers in the world to operate.
And then you get to your average Joe operating, Homer Simpson operating a nuclear plant.
They need to be safe enough for, okay, not Homer, but somebody.
Nuclear power plant workers tend to be paid more than coal power plant workers, but they still need to be able to work in Springfield, Ohio.
So, I tend to be a technological conservative in that I have seen a lot of engineers.
Engineers can be arrogant, and then there's just a different issue which has nothing to do with that, which is that it's just you don't know what you don't know.
So we didn't know what was going to go wrong with our bathroom remodel.
Imagine what happens when you get to a totally different kind of nuclear power plant.
So I tend to want to see incremental improvements to the water-cooled systems we have.
And so if we've got a concern, and if we think there's a concern with the pools, I'm open to seeing the fixes.
The fixes that we've made in terms of loss of coolant Not necessarily for the pools, although it would probably apply, is we've basically started moving water uphill.
So if there's a loss of power, and that's what they've done at Diablo.
They have big pools of water uphill.
But then, what you really should do, I mean, the first thing is, if you have a loss of coolant on the reactor cores, you need to get water over the reactor cores right away.
In Fukushima, for a variety of reasons, they hesitated, and they should not have, to pump seawater over the cores.
It would have destroyed the cores.
It would have completely destroyed them.
But that should have been an obvious thing.
There's like five other things that went wrong at Fukushima, as usual.
So it's understandable that engineers would look for a different nuclear tech.
I tend to think, I look at nuclear and I go, this is this really radical technology.
It's not even using combustion.
Yeah.
You get to, you know, you go from coal to gas.
It's a big improvement, but you're still burning something at the end of the day.
You get to, I look at nuclear and I go, you know, it's like, I look at jet planes.
Jet plane technology, jet has not changed fundamentally since 1945.
Yeah.
It's improved enormously, but what's really improved is the system around the technology.
So you see air miles traveled graphs, air miles travel just skyrockets, and crash and mortality from jet planes goes down.
Well, what's going on?
Are the jet turbines themselves better?
Yeah.
But what's really better is air traffic control, maintenance, operations.
We've figured out all the stuff.
Human factors.
So you look at, you know, there's a collaboration at one point between hospitals and nuclear power plants in terms of like human factors.
And it was like the nuclear, the hospital guys were like, the nuclear power plants are doing human factors at whole other levels, you know?
And part of it was Three Mile Island.
was one of the most important things ever to happen to the nuclear industry.
They went from running the plants 55% of the year, which is the capacity factor, to now they run 92% of the year.
And they just did it because they basically eliminated They eliminated accidental shutdowns of the reactors.
They improved the fuel reloading times.
The second best thing for nuclear was Chernobyl.
The third best thing was Fukushima.
That's a dangerous game there, my friend.
Well, except for you kind of go, you know, Fukushima, nobody was killed by the radiation.
That's not true.
You don't think it's true?
Well, it depends what you mean by the radiation.
Yeah, lots of particles escaped Fukushima and people will die of bone cancer and we won't detect anything.
Okay, in that sense.
Yeah.
Okay, contributed.
Maybe, yeah.
Lots of people will have lost lots of years of useful life, which is not, in and of itself, an argument against nuclear power for reasons that we just asked.
I mean, like they did at Chernobyl.
Right, people were inside there.
Bad guy.
Acute radiation sickness.
Acute radiation sickness, yeah.
Although I'm not convinced nobody did.
There is reason to wonder whether or not there are people absent from those analyses, but I agree with you.
We don't have good evidence.
We don't have clear evidence.
So you kind of go, so then you kind of go, all right, well, so then if you just use the basic World Health Organization math, my friend, the climate scientist, James Hansen, calculates that nuclear power has Saved, again, the language, we don't have the right language, but has prevented the premature deaths of two million people because of preventing ordinary air pollution.
All right, so I'm now going to lay my argument against nuclear power out for you and your friend James Hansen, who I hope becomes my friend James Hansen because I'm quite an admirer Here's the problem.
What do we do with the fuel?
It's expensive.
Okay, I think it's best where it is.
At the site of electricity production.
I see no reason to move it.
I think we will, in the next century, reuse that fuel in new reactors that are fast reactors that reuse the fuel.
But where it is now, it's the best place for it.
There's no need to transport it.
We can just keep it on site.
Yeah.
It's fine where it is.
Stepped into my trap.
Okay.
I mean, there was no way out of my trap, but you stepped into it.
Okay, so it's the best place for it.
Yes.
It's a terrible place for it.
Okay.
It's not saying it's not best.
Okay.
Here's the thing.
Because we've never figured out what to do with that spent fuel, and it just keeps accumulating... In the drycast storage.
In any version.
Look, the fuel pools... I agree that the pools are the most sensitive place for it.
The most likely place for us to lose control of one of these sites, which has not happened yet.
It happened in Chernobyl.
It didn't happen in Chernobyl.
The fires were fought.
A number of people died fighting fires doing heroic things.
I'm talking about something that would prevent a site from being manageable where you would just have to let it unfold.
But why would anybody do that?
Because... Like, wouldn't firefighters be like, we're not gonna go do our job and put that fire out?
Well, first of all, I don't know anything about the psychology of Firefighters who are downstream of the awareness of what happened to the firefighters who fought at Chernobyl.
It's possible that in, you know, in the context of certain cultures that it is possible to simply order people to go to their deaths fighting nuclear fires and the like.
It is possible to reward people's families Enough that somebody would rationally do so.
But it doesn't mean that I think if Diablo Canyon was to be in a serious crisis that we necessarily know what would happen.
And effectively, what we have to know is that every single one of the 400 civilian nuclear reactors operating on planet Earth today That the proper structures are in place to get somebody to fight that fire, even if it is at the cost of their life.
Then there's a question about do we reach levels of radiation so high that actually it is implausible that you could fight, you know, that the fire is too big and the level of radiation is so high that you actually can't get anybody to do the work because it is too devastating too early.
Okay, but so let's deal with the first issue.
We have firefighters.
So, how many firefighters do we think died in 9-11?
Was it hundreds, right?
I believe so.
I'm not sure.
So, I mean, we have firefighters that sign up for a job that is, by its nature, dangerous.
That they rush into buildings that are at risk of collapse.
They are surrounded by stories of people dying.
We have militaries which are formed of young men that, contrary to their instinct for self-preservation, Die.
Often fighting to protect, you know, Afghan girls.
And we have... And Iraqi people that they've never met before.
Right, but there's a difference between entering a scenario in which you feel you have a pretty good chance of surviving and a hopeless scenario, which is what happened at Chernobyl, right?
People walked into a hopeless scenario and did the work.
Yeah.
Right?
And thank goodness that they did.
The question is, can we rely on that 100% of the time?
Wow.
Nothing I know about humans tells me that you could rely on that 100% of the time.
But then what would be the specifics?
In other words, okay, but so we could imagine that at a chemical refinery, right?
Yeah.
So what makes nuclear different?
I mean, in other words, why would they be less likely to... Well, you know, I'm...
Not certain I know enough about what chemistry we're doing in chemical plants, but my sense is chemical plants we have conceivable protective gear for virtually any scenario that would unfold.
Yeah.
So it would be possible to manage your way through it, but radiation is a different A different animal altogether.
In other words, the fact that you can be exposed to such huge amounts of radiation that you effectively fail on the spot is a hazard.
Well, it's actually... I mean, I don't think that there's... I mean, it's a hot fire, right?
So the acute radiation sickness is not happening faster than the fire.
Let's say you have a fire in one of the pools.
You send in a bunch of firefighters and you're like, look guys, this is a bad one.
Send them in in what way?
Well, I mean, send, I mean, they're gonna be, they're, the same way you send them into any fire.
Well, but are they shooting water out of hoses into a fire, into a pool that's cracked?
I don't think, no, it'd probably not be water.
Okay.
Probably some other, probably some other fire retardant.
Do we have that fire retardant that you could pour into a cracked pool that actually shuts down that fire?
I mean, it wouldn't be water, right?
I understand.
It would be some sort of fire retardant.
Sure, some sort of.
Same thing they did with Chernobyl, right?
where they're spraying material to put out the fire and to cover up the radioactive materials.
- I don't think Chernobyl's issue was a fire.
- It was a fire.
There were, there was certainly fire, but that wasn't the primary issue.
Basically getting the material back into the core and then covering it so that it was not emitting.
Well, they put out the fire and then the days that followed they had these guys called liquidators that would go in for very brief periods of time.
Yeah, shovel the stuff off.
And maybe they'd have a stopwatch and they would go in and It is what it is.
No, because a fuel pool fire is a different animal, right?
If you had that material on fire from its own internal heat, I don't think there is anything that you could do.
Or if there is, I want to know what that plan is now.
I don't want to find out about it after some fuel pool has cracked and dried.
But do you doubt that there is a plan?
I mean... I doubt that there's a good plan.
I would suspect the plan is better now than it's ever been.
I am entitled to know it as a person living on this planet with these reactors.
But I would suspect that it's basically a plan to get material onto the burning I want to know what the material is.
I want to know what the mechanism of delivery is and how tolerant it is to the chaos of a one-off accident.
Something like happened at Fukushima, where we got very lucky.
You had multiple meltdowns, right?
You had the aftermath of a massive earthquake, right?
All sorts of challenges.
A tsunami that killed 15,000 people instantly.
Right.
Didn't contribute to deaths, but killed 15,000 people instantly.
Right.
Killed instantly, right.
Right.
Yeah.
Swamped the generators and all.
But I want to know what those plans are.
I want to know what the material is.
I want to know, are you delivering it by helicopter?
If not by helicopter, by what other means?
What kind of energy does it require?
How effective is it?
How tolerant is it to the different ways that a pool could fail?
How tolerant is it to the number of hours after the pool has failed that you get there?
In other words, how much fire has occurred?
How much further damage to the pool?
How much melting?
All of these things are highly relevant to whether you can get anything to stick to these elevated pools to shut down that fire, because my contention is That what we've got currently is a system in which we mine uranium, we enrich it, we then put it through a reactor and we make materials that are as toxic as anything on earth.
And then, we don't have a plan for long-term storage, which means... Well, no, but we just agree that we do have a plan for the long-term storage.
We're talking about the pools.
No, no.
We don't have a plan.
I mean, the dry-cast storage isn't going to... Those fuel rods in dry-cast storage are not going to catch on fire.
No, they're not going to catch on fire, but how long do they remain contained?
Well, why is that even a concern?
Because, ultimately, I believe If you don't have a plan for long-term storage, and I don't think Yucca Mountain is a plan, obviously it didn't unfold that way, but if you don't have a plan for long-term storage, every bit of this stuff that you produce is ultimately going to find its way into the environment, and that's my concern.
Okay, but that's a very... Alright, let's... I'm glad we're switching to this, so let's...
Let's agree that, um, um, I'm going to get back to you with, uh, and we're going to look at how do we deal with a fire at the, uh, spent fuel pools.
Yep.
And what do we do if there's a loss of water in the pools?
It's an interesting question.
I suspect that there's a very detailed description, but, but you've inspired me to look into it and we'll do it.
So let's go to the long term used fuel rods in the steel and cement.
So we have a lot, so we can agree.
Let's just say, I am quite heartened to hear that you're a fan of dry cast storage.
And I think you would join me.
In saying, we are insane to leave anything in a fuel pool that is ready to be moved, that to the extent that we have materials that have built up, it is crazy to have it in some system that requires vigilance when it could be moved to some system that is potentially durable for us.
No, as soon as we can get into... I've gone to the casks, I've wrapped my arms around them, I've held a Geiger counter.
The dosimeter next to them, I'm totally satisfied with.
Great, so this is something on which you and I are totally united.
No matter what else we conclude, it makes sense for us to move everything as soon as it can be moved into a stable form.
Yeah, I can't imagine... I don't know why anybody wouldn't want that, but we can look into it.
I can't imagine it would be cheaper to keep it in the pools than in the dry cast storage.
I believe so.
It's been years since I looked at this, but I believe that this is is that it is expensive to move it to dry cast storage.
But it is in dry cast storage.
Some of it.
I mean, at Diablo Canyon, at Diablo Canyon and Palo Verde, I've seen it, it's in dry cast storage.
And besides, they would just accumulate, if it wasn't, the pools would be... Filling up.
Yeah, and they can't be, those rods, they can't be too close together.
Right, obviously, you create fissure if you do that.
My belief is that they are overpacked in these pools, And I will be very, so you're in a better position to get this information than I am.
Yeah, the principle being we should get them into drycast storage as quickly as possible.
As quickly as possible.
Any rational plan would involve.
Okay, so let's deal with the rods and the drycast storage.
So it seems like we can agree that there are dangerous substances in the world.
Yep.
Beyond the materials in the drycast storage.
There are very few things worse than isotopes of plutonium with a 200,000 year half life.
But we would agree that there's things in the world that can poison people.
Yeah.
And that we would want to avoid them.
Well, but let's put it this way.
There's a lot of stuff.
Part of the problem with these reactors is that they create this mixture of different levels of toxicity.
You know, strontium and cesium isotopes that are quite dominant in there, have a half life of 30 years.
So anyway, you get this weird mixture.
Okay.
But let's say my neighbor's got solar panels on this roof.
Okay.
When they take them down, they put a big cardboard box on the driveway and they send up the guys to rip them off the roof.
They rip them off the roof, they chuck them in the cardboard box.
As soon as they're chucked into the cardboard box, they're considered hazardous waste.
Why?
Because the hazardous metals in them, including the lead for soldering them, becomes pulverized and is at risk of being inhaled.
The Europeans have solved this by delicately taking down the fragile solar panels and into Africa where they use them for a few more years and then they go to the non-dump and then they sometimes disassemble them with other electronics and people are exposed to hazardous materials.
So in terms of risk comparison, the steel cast storage has less risk of being in the environment than the solar panels.
No, no.
The question is, how long a plant... Let's assume... I mean, the solar panels, there's no time at all.
They're just, they're hazardous right away.
Yeah, I'm not real worried about the solar panels for obvious reasons.
It's not that I'm not worried about the lead, but the point is, are these a significant contributor to the excess toxicity that we face in modern times?
The solar panels are a bigger contributor than the used fuel rods.
No, no.
This is exactly the problem.
Nuclear energy is quite clean.
It is not as clean as the industry would like us to believe.
There are emissions from these plants, but it is comparatively clean while things are going well.
Right.
It runs the risk of being the dirtiest process on earth all of a sudden, right?
And so it does not make sense.
You cannot take the instantaneous measure and say, well, this plant is comparatively clean.
No, but we're talking about travel.
Okay, but I'm just saying, in other words, your question is, and this is why I do think, by the way, it's displacement, is that you kind of go, what are we going to do with these used fuel rods over the long term?
And I'm like, keep them safe on site until they end up being reused in future reactors.
If they do, and if they don't, then they're just like any other dangerous thing that we monitor.
No, no, no, no.
First of all, we are in far too much danger of all of the structures that keep the lights on failing catastrophically.
I mean, the danger that we run from a solar storm knocking out a third of the power grid of North America simultaneously, for which we don't apparently have a backup plan.
That danger is high.
People would die.
A lot of huge numbers of people.
Nuclear reactors might well become little nuclear volcanoes in such a scenario.
Uh, no.
If there was power outages, they would power down.
Well, but they can't just power down.
That's the problem, is you have to cool the fuel for five years.
So the point is, what you need is sufficient power of governance to deliver diesel fuel to those reactors in their shutdown condition for as many years as it takes to get the grid back up.
Well, years.
I mean, not years.
No.
I've never seen years as the estimate.
Do you know why?
And this is the craziest thing of all.
This tells you how dangerous it is to depend on government to protect you.
The transformers on which the grid depends cannot be ordered off the shelf.
It takes something like a year.
If you were to order one now, it would take a year for it to be delivered.
But Brett, if the whole grid goes down, I'm talking about a third.
Okay, a third of the grid goes down.
Yeah.
Because I was thinking about Texas.
You know, where it's like a cold start would definitely take weeks to get the whole Texas grid back up.
If the Transformers are fried by a solar storm, you have to replace them.
Yeah, but so I kind of go, if we lose a third of the grid for years, Yeah, the military needs to keep the nuclear plants operating, but, like, you're talking about, like, mass death.
I'm talking about an accelerating pattern of chaos that the military might lose its ability to reliably deliver diesel fuel to those generators.
So then why would you be—so, but it's actually, like, it reminds me of these conversations where people are like, what if there's a big earth—like, one of the big earthquakes that hits California?
No, no, no, no, no.
This one is far dumber than that.
But in either case, you would be, like, There would be a lot of death going on that has nothing to do with nuclear.
I don't know why that death is such a focus for you.
My point is you don't want a process that creates positive feedback where chaos that would come from the grid going down Would then be compounded by nuclear reactors that were dependent on that grid, turning into little nuclear volcanoes.
Well, you're saying... Making it a refugee crisis.
Yeah, but so you're saying that if there was, um, we need to basically keep the cool water running through the pools.
And then, by the way, you'd be pumping, by that point, like, if you're pumping cold water into the pools, um, with diesel generators, you're, that's the, that's the, and the power plants power down.
I have to say, I just find it a strange, it's an odd thing to be worried about when you've got, like, all of civilization is broken down.
Like, why is the nuclear the concern?
Isn't that a kind of displacement?
No, not on the slightest.
First of all, you're dealing with an evolutionary biologist, so it's not that weird for me to think on longer timescales, right?
Humans, all of us, along with every other creature, are the result of a three and a half billion year Long winning streak in which none of us who are here have failed to reproduce even once, right?
So we're here and it's an amazing bit of luck.
The idea that we are playing with technologies that not only put many, many, many people in jeopardy, but that potentially put the entire project in jeopardy, you know, the human project coming to an end, frightens me.
And even a small risk of that is something we would have to engage in very, very sober.
But the risk would be losing your entire electricity grid.
No, no, no.
Not the spent fuel.
Losing the electricity grid and not having a plan for restoring it quickly is a recipe for chaos.
Let's put it this way.
If I compare two scenarios, one in which chaos erupts because we have not taken care of our nuclear grid problem, But there are no nuclear reactors connected to it.
And the same scenario in which the electric grid going down is compounded by the fact that there are nuclear reactors that are depending on it, right?
I far prefer the former scenario, right?
It is much less likely to turn into an existential level crisis if we have only the electric grid, which will be a disaster and thousands, maybe More than that, maybe millions would die, right?
But that is survivable, right?
You compound that with these doomsday devices that you've hooked into a grid that is insecure even relative to solar storms that are happening relatively regularly.
I mean, doomsday device... I know, that's a prejudicial term for me.
I mean, we're talking about keeping some pools of water going, right?
No, we're talking about many pools of water, geographically distributed.
60 sites.
Managed.
You are talking about pools that have to be successfully managed by a government that hasn't noticed the problem with the electrical grid that it could solve for a small number of billion dollars and year after year does not.
Okay, but you trust that government to keep those pools cool?
Well, I mean, I'm trying to like, it's like we're, first of all, we're in a really wild scenario, which is that you're asking me to think of a scenario where electricity, a third of our electricity has been lost for multiple years.
Is that what the scenario is?
If I can compel you.
I don't even understand the scenario behind this.
It sounds like... I thought what you were saying is... Solar storm knocks out a third of the electrical grid and it doesn't come back up for... Five years.
Let's say six months.
Okay, so six months.
We have six months... By the way, I don't think there's any scenario That we have planned for that brings it back up in six months, but let's just be generous.
Okay, so we have six months to keep 20 nuclear power plants, uh, cooling pools operating.
To keep them operating without a failure long enough to cause one to dry.
Okay, why are you more worried about that Than all of the other things that could cause chaos in the system.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be worried about it.
It just seems highly, like, it just seems... I'm curious about the selective concern.
Here's why.
It seems like it'd be displaced from apocalyptic concerns about nuclear weapons.
As an evolutionary biologist, I'm very concerned about anything that could end humanity.
Wait, wait.
Yeah.
The electric grid going down without nuclear reactors plugged into it will be a catastrophe, but it's a survivable catastrophe.
Yes.
Right?
That heartens me.
The Holocaust was a catastrophe, but we survived.
All of us, including Jews.
Okay?
Much better than a scenario that Causes us to blank out.
So any time we set something in motion that takes a disaster and turns it into an existential threat to humanity, my sense is, hey, wait a minute.
How sure are we that that's a good idea?
But how, I mean, but how does, I mean, it seems to me you're, you're, you're saying that the, that the keeping those pools operating, that the pools, the cooling water pools of the used fuel rods.
Yeah.
At a time when, for managing those for six months, I don't, I'm trying to see how that's an existential threat to humanity.
Oh, because, first of all.
I mean, I'm not even sure they're an existential threat.
If they were all on fire for six months, I'm not even sure that's an existential threat to humanity.
Well, that we could talk about.
That we could talk about.
Like, frankly, I think that's actually an open question.
If you took all of the spent nuclear fuel and liberated it into the atmosphere.
In the pools.
In the pools.
Not in the, because we've agreed that the canisters are fine.
There's no scenario for those to catch on fire.
Okay.
Okay.
Let's grant that.
Okay.
First of all, I'm not convinced that if civilization fails because of a massive release of radioactive particles, that ultimately we don't see 200 years down the road the dry cask storage fails too.
But what would that even look like?
I mean, you just have like, I mean, what would it look like if it fails?
It's in steel and concrete.
Well, it is in steel and concrete.
So, and like, let's say it was exposed to the air.
Like what would it do?
Well, my point to you is if you've got something with a 200,000 year half-life in these things, then even if it's 5,000 years or 10,000 years down the road where the thing is broken open by natural processes, Then that's still an issue.
Now, it may not be an issue from your perspective.
Well, I'm just trying to figure out like what it does.
I mean, in other words, like lead is, it's not like there's no half-life.
It's just, it's just a permanent, permanent toxins.
And so, I don't understand even how you get to a scenario where the stuff in the, like if you break open all of the steel and concrete canisters, and also like why are we worried about 200 years from now?
I thought we were talking about a solar storm that hits today.
Right.
Well, first of all, just teleport yourself into my shoes here first.
Okay.
My feeling is there's actually a fairly simple calculation, which is until you can tell me what we do with the spent fuel that actually stabilizes it so human vigilance is not required to keep it from spilling.
Wait, wait, wait.
Why?
Why?
Why can't we rely on human vigilance?
Uh, because the very same people that you think are going to be good enough to manage 60 fuel pools that can't endure a single failure to keep water on them, the same people that you have charged with the job of doing that have failed to notice the problem with the nuclear They have failed to mandate, well, we'll find out if they have failed to mandate that all fuel that can be moved to dry cask storage should be moved there as quickly as possible, right?
My point is these people are failing all the time all around us and it is bad when they fail at the level of vaccine safety and effectiveness, but it could be catastrophic if they fail at the level of Nuclear power plants and vigilance in the face of a totally foreseeable, but apparently unforeseen failure of the grid.
See, I think you're just placing your anxieties about nuclear weapons and war onto the plants.
I'm really not.
Well, I know you think you're not, but I'm suggesting you might be because you keep... You know, as we get to the fuel rods in the canisters... Yeah.
Like, first of all... I'll grant you that.
Let those go.
I'm not sure that I should, but... Yeah, I mean, I just kind of go... I mean, I think it's interesting psychologically because I hear it a lot.
People go, well, what are they going to do, like, a thousand years from now to protect people from those canisters?
And I'm kind of like...
Yeah, but here's the thing, right?
I get why that seems like, look, what we're going to do is come up with a solution good enough that we can come up with a better solution later.
I get that.
On the other hand, we've done that.
We've done it with the WIT project in New Mexico.
Yeah, and it's amazing.
Oh, it's beautiful, except for the Motherfucker who put kitty litter in the... Oh, you should have seen that coming, the cat litter!
No, no, I'm not saying that.
It's more like, how many people died from that?
That's not the point.
I need to explain this to my audience so they understand why it is or is not the point.
The Whip Project was a salt cavern that was supposed to be used to store byproducts of the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
And so stuff like the contaminated clothing and other materials were put into barrels That were moved into these salt caverns.
Right.
And when the idea was stabilize them for 10,000 years, right?
And then there's the funny question, well, what kind of signage do you put up so that people 5,000 years from now know not to dig here because there's stuff buried that they really don't want to unbury.
So that's an interesting thought experiment and all of that, right?
But, and the fact is, people in New Mexico fought the WIP project.
They said it's not good enough, blah, blah, blah.
Couldn't quite articulate the argument.
And then what happens?
They run out of cat litter.
Now, cat litter was being used, clay cat litter was being used to absorb liquids in the barrels that they put in the salt caverns, which is pretty cool.
Cat litter has surface area, it's useful stuff for soaking up things.
But somebody who wasn't too swift, they ran out of clay cat litter.
Now, my argument would be there's no way they should have been using cat litter.
They should have been ordering stuff that was mandated to be of a particular nature so that nobody could possibly have made this error.
But somebody was like, well, we're out of cat litter.
Hey, Fred, why don't you go down to Kmart and get us some more cat litter?
And Fred went down to Kmart and bought, quote unquote, organic cat litter, which is all very funny until you understand that what organic means in this case is not that it was made without pesticides, but that it's made of organic material like wood pulp from newspapers or wood chippings or whatever.
So they put the wood-based cat litter in the barrel to absorb the stuff.
And wouldn't you know it, chemistry unfolded because of course it would unfold.
And so there were gases produced and one of these barrels exploded and the exploded barrel injected plutonium and people were contaminated Plutonium was showing up in their pee and all of that.
So the point is, look, you've got a salt cavern that we thought was pretty good for 10,000 years, except it wasn't even good for a century.
Well, except for... Here, let me try to paint a different picture.
Manhattan Project.
Yep.
Project to make the bomb during World War II.
Spread across multiple sites, including Hanford in Washington, Los Alamos in New Mexico, and Oak Ridge in Tennessee.
Those sites, particularly Hanford, are just a nightmare of toxicity.
The uranium is a radioactive material migrating underground towards the Columbia River.
It's World War II and they're just throwing shit everywhere.
Uranium mining, no protective gear.
Yeah.
Fast forward, look at that picture, 1941 to 45, and then you look at how they mine uranium today.
How they operate nuclear power plants today.
Yeah.
It's like looking at jet planes.
Yeah, look, I love your jet plane now.
No, no, but yeah, so just to kind of go, so, you know, but yet we had the Dreamliner, and they put these fucking lithium batteries in, and everybody knows lithium when it combines with water.
Yeah.
You have problems, you have fires, you have jet planes go down.
Well, wait a second, I thought that jet travel had become a lot safer, and yet here we have Dreamliners.
Going down, and Boeing is now impacted and whatever, but at the same time we go, we love jet travel.
And the difference between jet travel and nuclear, I think, is not the higher mortality, because that mortality is higher with jet travel.
Sure.
It's the fact that- The higher mortality measured instantaneously.
Yeah, okay.
But it's the- it's the- well, you know, I can't get pollution on here, but okay.
But it's the association of- it's the reminder that with nuclear, it's opened up a whole new world.
Of danger, of a potential, I agree, I don't think it's paranoid, a potential for civilization to end.
Annihilation.
Yeah.
For annihilation and that's absolutely terrifying at a species being level beyond our own.
It's unconscionable.
It's not our right to take out the species.
There are a lot of people who have yet to live who have a right to live.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so that weighs heavily on us as it should, but then there's displacement, psychological displacement, onto the energy.
And it's not to say there's no dangers of the energy, it's just to say they're not, it's not, it's not sweet generous.
It's not, it's not, there's other, if there's a big earthquake, a big one in California, And we have big problems.
Diablo Canyon is going to be one of the safest places to be in California.
And if the grid goes down, I suspect it would be that the nuclear power plants would actually be in better shape than the rest of the grid, and that we would get them up and running right away.
I mean, here's another example.
Russia invades Ukraine.
Yeah.
There's a firefight in front of Chernobyl.
One of the administrative buildings catches on fire.
Everybody spazzes out, but the behavior from both the Ukrainians and the Russians was, we're going to take really good care of Chernobyl.
Yeah.
Now there's some evidence that there was some digging on site.
I haven't looked into it yet.
That may have exposed some of the Russian soldiers to some high radioactivity.
But the interesting thing about the, and there's a bunch of nuclear plants in Ukraine.
But the interesting thing about the behavior from both sides is that nobody wanted to create a nuclear disaster.
It's in nobody's interest to create a nuclear disaster.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's a better metaphor for the situation.
Well, look, there are a couple things I've got to say to you.
One, I may be the only one, but you're barking up the wrong tree with respect to displacement.
My fear is really about losing control of nuclear material and the consequences while they may not happen.
All I can do is take your word.
Yeah, on the other hand, I'd tell you if you'd hit an actual... It's hard to know.
I don't think it's hard to know in my case because I've thought so deeply.
I'm not arguing that the answer with respect to nuclear weapons is clear.
I agree with you and I've done the analysis myself.
I believe that the net impact of nuclear weapons is probably a reduction in war over my lifetime.
Yes, I think ultimately they will be used in earnest and that's unacceptable, but I can't Well, that's interesting to me.
What?
There's a disagreement that we didn't get back to.
Right, right.
But again, I have a simple model.
No, no, I know, I know.
Look, we've covered it, but let's come to the issue of Okay, well I want to get to, well there's two questions I have.
One is, what is our disagreement, and maybe it's not, it may not be important, around, you think, it sounds like what I hear you saying, so you think it's inevitable that if you have nuclear weapons, they will be detonated.
Yes.
So that's the first thing.
I don't think so.
Okay, I don't think so.
But the second issue is, what do you want to do with nuclear energy?
Let's do that one first, and then let's come back to that one.
That one's easy.
Okay.
That one's easy.
We're spending far too little on nuclear fusion.
Okay.
And so, look, I have a basically, so first of all, I believe our system has to change.
I'm a founding member of the Group B movement.
I believe that we are looking for a civilization-level change.
It has to be opt-in, it has to protect human freedoms, it has to be architected to be evolutionarily stable.
The part of me that is thinking about issues like this is like how do we get through the bottleneck of the 21st century so that we're around three centuries from now, right?
So, I do worry about those long-term issues and I worry about them a lot.
So, that may be part of why we aren't seeing eye to eye here.
But I would say… I mean, I would like to know more about what that is because I don't know what that is.
Well, let's put it this way.
We spent… this statistic is now old.
It's probably… 8 or 9 years old now, but we were spending something like $120 billion a year globally on text messages.
Right?
We could be spending that on FusionM or not.
We're spending a pittance.
Your argument is that we're under-investing in fusion.
If we pour more money into fusion, then we're more likely to get fusion sooner.
Well, yes.
And I know that there's a diminishing returns problem in there.
There's no amount of money we can pour into fusion that causes us to find it tomorrow.
So, I do think we should be spending tremendously more on fusion.
I think in the meantime, we should be We're shifting everything we do that can be done electric to electric, which obviously creates problems with limits on things like lithium.
But nonetheless, I believe that what we want is an electrically powered world to the extent possible.
And then we want fusion to be the plug and play solution that takes all of that electric stuff and doesn't require us to do anything new with it.
We just turn it off.
Right.
Right.
So that I do think is the issue.
And we do have to get through the failure of governance issue, which is likely to take us out in the meantime, which is part of why I was so enthusiastic about your campaign for governor.
What about the... now, often people that have your view are in favor of alternative to the existing water-cooled fission nuclear.
Let's put it this way.
Which I'm skeptical of, but which nonetheless, I respect the position.
Cards on the table.
I don't trust the nuclear industry at all.
I don't think we should be keeping the current reactors open because I think their designs are all flawed and they are like ticking time bombs.
And I know we could do vastly better.
Were the nuclear industry to be, and frankly, you know, it's evolution in the market that turns an industry into a danger.
I'm not arguing that they're bad people, but I am arguing that the profit motive causes the wrong corners to be cut.
But were we to have some mechanism for governing nuclear fission, And we were to upgrade to fourth generation technologies, liquid salt, thorium, you know, closed fuel cycle, whatever it is, right?
There are things I'm open to an argument about, right?
How do we, how do we get through the gap between now and the beginning of viable fusion?
I'm open to the possibility that there are fusion based answers.
I don't think they're uranium-based, but I could be convinced.
The uranium-thorium thing, it's not about the fuel, it's about the cooling.
It's about the cooling and what happens in the event of a meltdown and things like this.
So, I'm open to the possibility that there are fission-based technologies, though in principle I would rather we not have to use fission because it's all too dangerous, I think.
But the uranium stuff, and especially the current generation of reactors that we have, are my real concern, right?
They are too dangerous and look... So you want to shut it down?
I mean, like, how quickly would you want to do that?
It's like 20% of our electricity.
Well, 60% of our zero-carbon power.
It's 20% of our electricity.
On the other hand, we are so wasteful of electricity that you really don't need any more power.
Now, I understand that what I'm saying is a fantasy here, but the point is, could you use 20% less electricity if you were just more thoughtful about your own life?
Yeah, you could.
Maybe you couldn't, but most of us could, right?
So, the idea that it's 20% of our energy Means, well, thank goodness it's not more because 20% is an amount that you could just be efficient about, right?
I do think that there is value in alternative technologies, you know, wind and solar and tidal and all of these things.
No, I don't think it's a silver bullet.
I think the silver bullet is fusion.
Mm-hmm.
That's what I think.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let's get to the... So we don't agree on that, which is fine, but I think we've achieved disagreements.
Productive disagreements.
Yeah, but we've gotten to the bottom of it.
Yeah.
What makes you so sure that if you have nuclear weapons that they'll be used?
I detonate.
Oh, I think you're sure of it, too.
No, I don't.
I don't think so.
No, here's why.
You said yourself that in order for deterrence to work, you have to have fear that has to be based on the possibility that they would be used.
Correct.
So if it's a possibility, how long do you have to extend the time before that possibility becomes probable?
It's Zeno's paradox.
No, it's not.
You just, I mean, why?
No, because the distribution of the puzzle doesn't mean this happens.
How low can the risk be and still function as a determinant?
How close to zero can you get without losing the determinant?
Well, so first of all, I mean, it's worth pointing out that it's an unresolvable... It's not something that you and I are going to be able to muster any evidence to resolve.
It's a thought problem.
Yeah, it's a thought problem.
I mean, it's an interesting one because I've never... It's in the literature.
Like, this is all the books, basically, that have ever been written on the bomb.
It's in there, there's a lot of people that say it, and it always struck me as a statement of faith, rather than a statement of... What?
Mine's a statement of math.
But it's not math!
I mean, math, it's a statement of... If there was a one in a billion chance of a nuclear exchange, would it function as a deterrent?
I think it's higher than that.
Yeah, how high?
It's fair.
I mean look, we're just not... I think there's a risk of scientizing this and creating false precision by quantifying it.
No, no.
It's literally like... it's kind of like... No, no, no.
Look, I'm not making an argument that I know or that the number is even stable enough to estimate.
My point is if the number is Not zero.
Half a percent a year.
We're talking about a very short ride, right?
How many years do you get to play that game?
Yeah, well let me introduce another piece of this.
Let's say, so the two countries that, I would say two countries that are most at risk of nuclear conflict, and I'm not alone in this, are India and Pakistan.
Um, they get into, so first of all, they keep fighting wars and the number of people that die in the wars goes down.
Yeah.
And, um, recently there was a, there was a, you know, a battle between India and China.
And it was like, like a joke, like in terms of, cause both sides are like, we don't want this to escalate.
Right.
So, but let's say it did.
And you had a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan.
Why do we think it would, A, escalate beyond Kashmir?
Oh, it might not.
It might not, yeah.
So, in other words, it's actually, I think it's important because there's sort of a common idea that if anybody used, and I actually, there's a concept called nuclear taboo, which is that, which I agree exists, which is that leaders actually don't want to use nuclear weapons because if they do, they would violate a taboo.
Now, Putin did violate a taboo by invading Ukraine, and he's being punished for it.
But it's not inconceivable that you could imagine that in 10, 20 years, that Europe and Russia would be back to where they were in 2021.
Yeah.
But there is an argument that if they use the nuclear weapons, they would be more like Nazi Germany in their ostracization.
But I think part of the nuclear taboo that I don't agree with, or that's part of that story, which is that if nuclear weapons are ever used, they would set off a chain reaction.
And I think that chain reaction stuff comes from the apocalyptic mentality, which is more like, no, if nuclear— and Vipin Narang, who's a professor at MIT, who I rely on a lot for nuclear games, you know, playing out games, he thinks that if a nuclear weapon were used, the whole world would just— everything would come to a halt, and that there would be a huge effort to basically prevent escalation.
I didn't think that's true.
I'm not saying it's a guarantee against it, but I think that there's a non-apocalyptic scenario for nuclear weapons.
I don't love it.
I'm not promoting it.
I don't think it should reduce our fear of it, but I also think there's a risk of thinking that any use of nuclear weapons would necessarily escalate.
Yeah, I'm agnostic about that.
I think there's a possibility that once, you know, Let's put it this way.
Everybody likes being in the club.
We're there from a nation that has never used these things, right?
We're the only nation who has.
Yeah.
And as soon as that Number of nations that have used them goes up.
I think it does do something to the taboo But no, I don't necessarily believe in fact, I don't I would expect probably not that if somebody launched Nuclear weapons that it would necessarily result in you know, an exchange of everything we got.
Yeah Yeah, like Russia could use tactical nukes in Ukraine and I don't think the United States is gonna respond by bombing Moscow Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
That's pretty clear.
So we're agreeing on that.
Yeah.
Um, so, um, well to recap, I mean, it seems like we have an open question around what happens to the, the, the, the cooling fuel rods in the pools.
And you've inspired me to have a better answer than the one I have right now.
And we, uh, We have a disagreement about what we should do with today's nuclear plants.
I think we should try to make them safer and better and expand them.
And you would like to see them, if not shut down overnight, phased out and more money put into fusion.
Well, I would like to see them phased out.
I am willing to entertain the question of whether or not there are fourth gen nuclear solutions that But ultimately, I would like us to have our eyes on the prize, which I believe is fusion.
And I would like us to prepare for a fusion world by moving, you know, how much of a hardship is it having an electric car?
My feeling is it's kind of awesome.
You can say the same thing about motorcycles.
As far as I know, you can't say that about planes.
You can say that about boats, but there's a large fraction of the world that could be rendered electric.
And then the point is whether that's frickin... It's tricky with lithium, but yeah.
Well, we have issues.
We have big issues right now.
We have big issues.
I'm not arguing.
It might be more hydrogen.
I'm a little bit more like a hydrogen.
I think hydrogen was early not wrong.
My view towards hydrogen is similar to fusion, which is that, I think we'll have it.
Interesting.
I was a fan of hydrogen.
I must say my excitement about it dropped when I saw Elon is doubtful about its utility.
I would love to get you two in a conversation about helium.
What am I talking about?
About hydrogen.
Yeah, helium.
We have a different problem.
But he has a big lithium problem right now.
A huge lithium problem.
But let me come to this other question of climate, which is...
I think that there is a trade-off then, in terms of nuclear acceptance and climate alarmism.
Yep.
And that a more consistent position, ironically, and I think it's proof that people are not consistent in their views, climate alarmists should be more pro-nuclear.
Oh, I have heard this argument from you, and I don't disagree about this.
But then climate skeptics, would be much more comfortable being anti-nuclear, but they line up the opposite of that, which means that there's something else going on, and it has to do with, I think, deeper worldview issues around trust in institutions, around energy abundance, around belief in the system.
And so your views, I think, I think you're more I'm skeptical of the broader system that we live in, of the civilizational system that we live in.
And I mean, that part of me is, it seems like there's part of you that is the evergreen part, the traditional environmentalist.
You don't mean evergreen color, do you mean?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
But I mean, I think you have a, I mean this totally respectfully, but you have a kind Skepticism of our high-energy civilization that is very mainstream on the left.
Well, I have a healthy respect for unintended consequences, which is often not a feature of the left, right?
The left tends to be very excited about solutions and under-aware of the danger of unintended consequences.
It goes the other way with nuclear.
The left has traditionally been anti-nuclear.
But again, I don't even consider myself anti-nuclear.
I consider myself radically pro-nuclear, as long as we're talking about fusion.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, I kind of look at, I mean, I wonder if you would agree that there's, that if I were to look at your thinking, that you've got a skepticism of our system that extends towards vaccines, nuclear fission, the electrical grid, Deep ocean drilling, you know, credit default swaps and leveraging in markets.
Yeah.
Let's put it this way.
I think I have a very rational approach to this, which is I'm watching the scale of the disasters that we inflict on ourselves get larger over my lifetime.
I'm watching the number of people and the interconnectedness of those people go up in a way that is clearly dangerous, and I'm trying to... Look, I think if we recognize the size of the problem we are creating for ourselves, Then it doesn't become a world of austerity on the other side of it.
It becomes a renaissance, right?
Where suddenly there is a lot to be done upgrading our civilization so it is no longer rickety and fragile.
Retooling it so that rights are protected in a way that we can live well, we can live lightly upon the earth.
But it's a small, but it's more small is beautiful.
It's more of a small is beautiful vision than a high energy Civilization vision, no?
I don't think that.
Okay.
No, look, I'm... You don't want to be decentralized?
Well, let's put it this way.
I think we... I want everything that can rationally be decentralized, decentralized.
But I think there's an awful lot that has to be governed at a higher scale.
Okay.
You do?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Like, because I mean, the way I think of it is...
Economies of scale, where you have higher levels of economies of scale and centralized production, allow for more distributed consumption, meaning we can reduce the cost of food and energy and products when their manufacturer is more centralized.
Yeah, look, I think we've got, you know, my dissertation work was on trade-offs, and I think we have the tensions between a lot of competing concerns.
Yeah.
When it comes to the governance issue, I subscribe to something that I borrowed from the Catholics, interestingly, which is a principle called subsidiarity.
Which is, everything should be governed at the lowest level that it can effectively be governed.
Yeah.
And for some things, that happens to be global.
But it means that you should not default.
Okay.
You're more flexible than traditional greens would be.
I think I like that principle.
I'm the same way.
Now, but what about for production?
Is production governed?
If it's part of energy and food and products, let's say.
Well, elements of it need to be governed.
It's really easy to externalize harms, you know, nicotine, pesticides. - Regulated. - Right, so there's stuff that I wanna see forbidden because it's too damaging to contemplate.
That can't be done locally.
But, frankly, you know, again, I want everything as low level as possible, but there are certain things that only the global level will do.
And that frightens me because at this moment I'm watching a push towards global level governance that I think has very little to do with externalities and protecting us and has a lot to do with centralizing power.
So, I'm sympathetic to the idea of, hey, nothing but global governance.
But on the other hand, we're messing with global processes.
I mean, it's interesting because, of course, let's come back to the COVID stuff, because there's a way in which there's certainly an argument, and I'd be curious if you disagree, that regardless of all the stuff that happens, nations and states, that they decide how to respond to COVID based on California, like, in other words, California culture determined how we responded to COVID more than Gavin Newsom.
And the Swedish culture determined is why they had a different response to COVID than, say, Germany or South Korea.
These things come from within.
They're not imposed by, they're not imposed by WHO has less of a role than we think, and culture has more of a role.
Unfortunately, somebody made it virtually impossible for you to get ivermectin, even though it might have been just the thing to protect your family.
Is it hard to get?
Yeah, very.
Okay.
It was confiscated at the border.
Yeah.
Your doctor could say, yes, this is what you need, prescribe it, and your pharmacist would refuse to fill the prescription.
description they made it extremely difficult but whether or not there were school lockdowns or school closures yep came from within there was certainly a patchwork of different reactions across the country but certain things were centralized like you know shall not have ivermectin okay yeah yeah so it's complicated yeah well Brett what a fascinating what a wonderful conversation Yeah, this has been a great conversation.
I'm glad we did it.
Me too.
And I do think, I'm very curious to circle back after we have both brushed up a little bit on the places that we recognize were a little hazy.
Yeah.
Because, well frankly, what I hope is that people watching this conversation Somewhere in this they will think, huh, wouldn't it be cool if governance sounded like that on the inside?
People comparing perspectives, hearing each other out, realizing what they don't know, rather than what clearly does happen, which is people who have a financial interest are the only people in the room and their blind spots are ignored because it's... Yeah, they don't trust the deliberation.
They don't trust the deliberation and they don't trust...
Right.
I think the political leaders don't trust that they could say something on a podcast and then have a different view in some other contexts.
People at Williamsville said to me, and I took it as a compliment, was like, I can't see Gavin Newsom sitting down with Joe Rogan for three hours and being able to have the conversation.
I was with Adam Carolla, who's sort of a center right talk show host in LA, and we talked for like an hour.
And they were just like, it's so different from when Gavin Newsom came in.
It was just trying to, like, repeat his talking points in different ways, but there wasn't even any curiosity or... Well, you know, what Michael Kinsley said, he defined the term A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.
Yeah.
Right?
And so the problem with sitting down with Joe Rogan, and the whole beauty of Joe Rogan, or not the whole beauty, but a large part of it, is that you've got an open conversation.
Nobody, including Joe, knows exactly where it's going to head.
Right.
And so the point is, you can't do that on script.
For one thing, it would be deathly boring.
Yeah.
And for another thing, people talk when they're not faced with a list of talking points that they're supposed to get through.
And so, you know, Gavin Newsom sitting down with Joe Rogan.
But then again, I didn't make it into the runoff, so maybe the lesson is that that's not how politicians are able to do it.
Well, but that's just the thing, right?
Those of us who see the problem with the duopoly need to level up strategically.
We need to figure out how to confederate because Well, we still need somebody to prove the possibility.
Donald Trump proved the possibility.
Yeah, I guess so.
That's right.
And I guess to be fair, some amount of the chaos was him thinking out loud, right?
I mean, look, it was like the speculating about solutions to COVID.
Right.
You know, some of, you know, some of those things he was right about.
He was right, but the drug became politically so toxic that nobody would touch it.
But, you know, the thing is, Trump proved it was possible to beat the duopoly, but the personality characteristics that allowed him to do that were exactly the ones that should have kept him out of office.
So what we need is somebody who can learn the lesson of Trump having beaten the duopoly and carry a character that is capable of handling the responsibility of the office along with them.
I believe it's possible.
I believe the number of people who can see the necessity for this is going up.
I hope you're right, brother.
Amen to that.
It's been great.
It's been great, Brett.
A pleasure.
Thanks for coming.
I'm glad we finally met and I look forward to the next one.
