AI Data Centers, Nuclear Power, and the Limits of Capitalism - Robert Bryce

Robert Bryce, welcome to Dad Saves America.

Pleasure to be with you, John.

So, we've known each other for a while. I think we first got introduced via John Mackey.

It would have been John Mackey. Yeah, you know, so our mutual friend John has been on the show, dear friend. Um, you are one of the few people I know that that truly seems to understand the energy landscape from almost every angle. You've been doing it, you know, focusing on it as a reporter, as a writer, as an author. You got this new book, A Question of Power, Electricity, and the Wealth of Nations. And so I thought what we'd do today is to some extent play your greatest hits for people who don't know anything about energy.

Sure. But I want to start with something that's very salient and I think going to become increasingly a political issue and that is um the buildout of the data centers.

Sure.

That are enormously power hungry hungry. They are powered by these Nvidia and and AMD GPUs that if you're a gamer, you know, right pump out tons of heat and suck a lot of power out of the wall. But you put a h 100,000 of them in a giant warehouse and now you have a data center. And it looks like they are causing new demand that outstripes the available supply and and pushing up prices which on grids that are regulated means that the public grit large the both businesses and and and um households are starting to see in some cases higher electricity bills because of the data centers that are powering their cloud computing and their Siri and their chat GBT. in Gemini.

Right?

So, how do you understand what is going on there? How should your typical householder understand why a is that true and why is it happening?

Sure. Well, this is the issue of the moment, right? I mean all across the US in fact all around the world now um local local utilities, state governments, federal governments are looking at AI and the development of some rapid roll out of chat GPT, DeepSync uh uh Perplexity, Claude, um Grock, all of them, you know, looking at massive increases of power demand where by massive I mean tens of gigawatts and for perspective here in the US for the last 20 years, electricity demand has been effectively flat. I mean growing at less than 1% a year since 2000 really and now suddenly suddenly you're seeing this massive increase in demand um coming primarily from data centers for artificial intelligence. And so this has set off a mad scramble that really began I would say 18 months ago or so um uh you know in about uh you know mid 2024 early 2024 and now it's unlike anything I've ever seen and I've been writing about energy and power for 30 years that that we're short transformers we're short switch gear we're for short um uh breakers we're short high voltage transformers we're short electricians um And every I mean everyone it's the most crowded trade in the energy and power business today is people trying to site data centers and build them and get enough electricians get enough workers get enough uh transformers all these other the kit turbines gas turbines where the wait time now I heard this summer in from an XL energy executive 6 to seven years.

Wow.

Now I've heard other estimates four to five years but gas turbines.

For for natural gas fired gas turbines which GE VNOVA is has commanding uh market uh market uh power in that segment but it there are only three players G Vernova Seammens and Mitsubishi and their order books are years long now.

I um.

So but but back to your key point about your key question about cost.

And one layer just to add on to just the scope the sense of of size is and I don't know I don't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head but the most recent GDP data I think suggested that almost all of the GDP growth.

Right.

Has in the AI data center construction like all of it like if you take out AI related.

Spending stuff.

There's been no GDP growth. And that's a stag and and then the numbers truly are staggering John in terms of the the scale of the money that they're spending but let me give you an idea on the scale of the of power demand that they're looking at so electric power research institute just uh uh a few months ago estimated that by 2030 AI demand alone in the US will be around 50 gawatt. Well, what's 50 gawatt? It's roughly equal to the power generation capacity of Pennsylvania, which has 13 million people. It's roughly equal to the power generation capacity of Sweden. So, when you're talking about 50 gawatts, I mean, this is an enormous number. We we live in Texas, you and I, and the power generation capacity of Texas now is all in everything, solar, wind, batteries, you know, nuclear, etc. is about 140 gawatts. So, I mean, we're just talking about a massive amount of new demand that no one foresaw 2 or 3 years ago. And so, so what has this done? The knock-on effects, massive increases in demand for gas, natural gas, massive increases, and suddenly real affection for nuclear energy, which was considered a dead industry just a few years ago.

Yeah.

Um, but back to your question about the consumer, which is where I what I really care about, right? You know, when I what motivates me in my work, I care about the people who work for a living. And I mean work by turning wrenches, growing things, building things, fixing things. The people who have their names on their shirts at work. I love those people. And what are we seeing? Massive increases in electricity prices across the across the country. And in some places, like in New Jersey, we're seeing 20 30% increases just in the last few months.

That's.

Just in the last few months.

Oh yeah. And that's not now you can't say that's all data centers but it part of it is part of it is this massive demand for new power uh new power availability and part of it is an uh the historical over reliance on solar and wind and underdevelopment of dispatchable uh electricity generation sources like uh gas, nuclear, coal, etc.

Okay, I'll keep this quick. Be sure to hit that like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the bell so you won't miss more Dad Saves America as our videos come out each week. And it also really helps us because when we reach out to guests, they look at how many subscribers there are to decide if they want to come on and share their ideas. So, please subscribe to the channel. It really helps us out. And thanks for watching. Now, back to the show.

The um at at an event earlier this year that we were talking about before we started rolling. I met um former Governor Rick Perry and then I'm I'm waiting at the Southwest Airlines to fly home from California and we end up sitting next to each other and and yapping up the the whole the whole flight back.

Sure.

Uh very affable. I mean classic like classic old school politician of just being like so like such a magnetic personality.

Sure.

Um he's involved in a firm that I I was reading you write about called Fermy.

That's right.

And the way you didn't put it very charitably. You're like this firm is now worth something like $22 billion in market capitalization on the basis of the value of its IPO and it has built nothing.

It's a it's not a as as Jim Kramer who never met a stock he couldn't hype. He said it's not a business. It's a business plan. And but it's indicative of the froth and I would say irrational exuberance in this AI land rush, right? AI/power land rush. And so what is Fermy? It's I think their official name is Fermy America. But uh Rick Perry, former secretary of energy, former Texas governor, is one of the co-founders of this company. And I think their latest market cap is 12 billion something like that. His stock holdings alone are worth $500 million. I mean, it's a remarkable remarkable story, but they don't have any tangible assets. They don't they aren't actually they haven't moved any dirt. They're not actually building anything. They put out a business plan that said, "We're going to build this massive uh power and data center complex near Amarillo. In fact, it's right next to Pantex, the nuclear facility outside of Amarillo." And they went public in October the second, I think it was, or October 1st. They have a market cap of like, you know, for a b just a business plan of billions of dollars. I mean, it's just I've never seen anything like it. And I in that in that article in my on my Substack, I compared it to pets.com, right? We're in the middle of a craze now. How much of this is real and how much of it is is just froth? Well, I wish I knew, right? But there is very uh clear and and enormous power demand coming from the hyperscalers, the big tech firms, you know, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, you know, tens of gigawatts. There's no doubt about that.

But are we in the middle of a bubble? Is it part of a bubble? I think so. When will it end? I wish I knew because then I put my money down and figure out where to put the money. There's a uh there's a diagram that's been floating around that a lot of people have noted which shows what what looks like circular financing going on between Nvidia and Open AI.

And AMD and Intel and.

Cloudflare I forget like there there's a set of firms.

And Oracle.

And Oracle and they've all and they've all said.

We're going to invest 300 billion here and then turn around and take your 300 billion and give it back to you so you can build things.

Which smells bubble.

It smells bubble right but you know I've talked to people who I admire and I who I trust and they say the AI change the AI business the AI revolution is one of the most important technological developments in our lifetimes are they right I don't know I mean I use Perplexity I use Grammarly I use AI as a matter of course in my reporting um and it's impressive and getting more and more impressive almost by the day. So, I don't doubt its power, but I also am just trying to be as sober as I can. I got no dog in the fight. I don't have money on any of them. I haven't invested in the nuclear companies. I am just as a reporter trying to figure out, okay, what what's real here?

Well, and and I'm not trying to pick on Governor Perry because it's like it's.

We can it'll be fine.

He's fine. I mean, he's a big boy. I like him. I mean, it's Hey, you know, God bless him. If he can put out a business plan and people think it's worth $12 billion, that's interesting. You know, more power to him if it's not if it's all above board.

Yeah. Nice. More power to him. Exactly.

Power to the power guys. Yeah.

Um I think the thing that uh this is pointing to though is it's like it's it's pressurizing this issue that you've been writing about for years, which is the centrality of of power of electricity. There's an economist um named Julian Simon who I I know you know about well.

He's got a book called The Ultimate Resource. This is back in the 80s. He was he was doing battle with the still living um to this day. But Paul Erin.

And still wrong Paul Early.

Yeah. The most perennially wrong person to ever be in ever grace the Tonight Show.

Been 60 years. But that's okay. He's lived a long time.

So you've got this debate. Paul Erlick, uh, biologist, author of The Population Bomb in, and I think 1968 or 69.

A book sponsored by the Sierra Club, by the way.

Yes. Uh, co-architect in of the in the Club of Rome of the China One child policy.

Advocate for essentially the destruction of humanity intentionally, like as in like reducing fertility on purpose because we're like a virus on the planet, right? I mean, him and his ilk look at us that way. they use that kind of language. Um, his uh foe intellectually at the time and they actually made bets against each other which Simon handily won was was Julian Simon. Julian Simon says no people aren't just cattle that that graze. We are creative. The human mind is the ultimate resource. The human mind turned this bubbling black poison into something useful.

Into gasoline.

Yeah.

Into gasoline. And it's like and and my favorite example of sort of this sense is that gasoline that powers our cars used to be dumped in rivers because it was just a waste product in the in the production of kerosene for lamps.

Right?

So, we what is and isn't a resource is ever changing as we discover ways to do do something useful to humans with with the things we have and build and and then we create problems along the way. Simon calls energy a very particular kind of input or resource. It's sort of like the resource master resource.

The master resource the the resource for resources the re the thing it's like so so let's like take that step back to that level. What what does that mean? Why how should I as a normal person as a as a dad as a householder as somebody paying bills? How should I understand what energy is?

Well, let me you know what's said all night in in in political uh uh relations or and interviews. Answer the question you wish you was asked. Right. So energy yes broadly energy energy is is what fuels humans. This is what makes us more human. It is what allows us to uh to quote another uh person tell our desan to reach our ultimate potential. Right? the you look at people in the developing world who don't have electricity, don't have mobility, don't have transportation, they live in the dirt, right? I've only been to India once and what was so stunning there that I saw myself, people said, well, what do you really remember? And I said, I thought I knew what poverty was. I had no idea what poverty was, right? So the difference between the energy rich and the energy poor is obvious, right? And that energy we turn into wealth. But yes energy but but the master resource increasingly and in fact now it is very clear electricity is the key to the economy that electricity is the economy other analysts have said oil is the economy I can I can take that as well but for the last really decade of my reporting career I've been focused on power and electricity and power grids and this is the key now to modernity and the countries that have cheap abundant reliable electricity are ones that are going that are succeeding in the world. And now in the new age of AI and we're in an arms race with China, make no mistake there. The ability to have cheap, abundant, reliable electricity to not only keep the economy going, but to now fuel this next tech technological uh era is absolutely key. So one other just quick point. So when I think about this, what do I how do I think about the electric grid and where we are with with electricity, the the electric grid is the mother network. It is our the most important energy system in our society. The it is the master it is the mother network. It is the network upon which all of our other key societal uh systems uh depend on traffic lights, hospitals, uh refineries, um you know the list goes on. GPS, communications, all of it depend all of those systems that define modern modernity all depend on electricity. And so we ignore the fragility and the importance of our power grid at our extreme peril.

You've uh done both a documentary and then a series called Juiced about this about electricity in particular.

Sure.

Um, it's I did a video uh earlier this year in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish grid going down.

Yeah.

And I was very surprised because you know this is Dad Saves America. this is sort of about another country that it really it it it it got a lot of views and people were like wow this is I didn't really know any of this and it is amazing how many things that we just fundamentally take for granted that aren't.

That we aren't taught about what the grid is how it works and I would like to actually like get an introductory walk through of what the grid is and then and then we can talk about some of the other stuff that's scary like EMPs and oh yeah.

Transformers and the vulnerabilities and cyber attacks. There's all kinds of stuff that that the grid ex the grid exposes us to by by its necessity.

Sure.

But what is the grid? Break down the parts of it from that that connect there is a thing called a power plant.

Yeah.

That produces electricity. And then there is me in my home at my outlet plugging in my charger for my iPhone or plugging in my refrigerator.

And every everything between there and there is the grid. Everything.

Yes.

But let me let me back up for just a second and John and just say what is what people forget and what you it's a really good point about the fact that we take it for granted. We forget how short the electric age is. Right. This is not We haven't had electricity for a long time. My grandmother was born in a home in in a house outside near Billings, Oklahoma, in a house that didn't have power. I My friend Chris Cawan, his dad, Ronald Cawan, remembers the day he lived on a farm near Venita, Oklahoma. He remembers the day in the 1940s when his farm was connected to the grid and he didn't have to read at night with a kerosene lamp. He remembers it vividly and he's still alive. So this idea of electricity and the miracle that it is because it truly is a miraculous development in human history and the that the electric age is not that old and in fact for people living today electrification is within living memory and further that there's still depending on whose numbers you believe a billion people or more who uh uh still don't have power in their homes. And then there are another uh 3 billion people who live rough in in broad terms in electricity poverty. That is they live in locations they live in countries where per capita consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt hours per capita per year. That 1,000 kilowatt hours per capita per year is roughly the amount of electricity that my kitchen refrigerator uses. Right? So, not only are we extraordinarily electricity rich in the United States and in Western countries, but the the disparity between the electricity the rich and the electricity poor is staggering. And it is the most obvious and and uh recognizable uh disparity in the world today. And it really is what defines the rich versus the poor countries.

And I mean, this is a big theme in your book. And you've got this image, the image of the planet at night, which for a long, as I started getting into all these big ideas and economics and whatnot, one of the most striking images is always.

North Korea, South Korea.

North Korea, South Korea at night. You see this bright lit up.

Yeah.

Electrified society in South Korea and then a black void in North Korea.

And how does Kim Jong-un do what he does? He keeps his people in the dark. He keeps them in the freaking dark. Well, it's easy to control them if they're in the dark and they don't have any access to any communications, no access to the internet, all of which depend on electricity. So, this, you know, he is a feudal lord because he's able to keep his people isolated in that way, right? And that was what, you know, the bright lights big city. Why did people leave the farms in America? Because of the bright lights in the big city that gave them freedom. Think about the importance of electricity at night or lighting at night for women and girls. Remember, for centuries, they wouldn't go out at night. I mean, for millennia, they wouldn't go out at night because the danger of being assaulted, murdered, right? Well, so why were electric street lights so important because it made cities safe at night. For women, it gave them an opportunity to work in factories in the city and that they could be safe in the city. So, it's just incredible how, as you point out, that we take it for granted. But back to your earlier question about what is the grid. So everything that's attached to the electricity system is the grid and my Steve my friend Steve Brick provides this this very clear image. Right. So you have the power plant which as you talked about could be running on nuclear power, coal, gas, solar, wind, hydro producing electrons, right? Either with a spinning system or with uh with solar with an electro the um the photovoltaic effect. But then that's moving electricity through wires, through transformers, through breakers, through switch gear, uh, across towers into, you know, the outlet here or into these lights here. That's all the grid, right? And it's an enormously complex, enormously complex system that runs on 60 cycles per second. And it's just kind of difficult in the in Europe, it's 50 cycles, but it's difficult to imagine. It is considered the world's biggest machine. It is also very clearly one of the world's most complex machines.

This is one of the things about the grid that I'd never heard until until looking into this and meeting people like you that it is like it is like a single machine because it has to run.

Yeah.

Synchronized that.

That's a miracle that it does.

So what does that mean? What does it mean 60 cycles per second, 60 hertz?

Right. Um because I mean it even has impacts on like you know we're shooting on video digital video but the frame rates are are a reflection of our electricity system. For example, this is getting geeky but it's a geek geekiness in my world of video and film.

Uh the frame rate for video like if you're watching a sports game is 59.94 frames per second being refreshed.

Yeah.

And that number is directly correlates to the hertz of electricity. And it's why like in Europe because it's 50.

Right?

It's 50 frames per second. So like when you watch like a show on the BBC, it's 25 frames per second cuz it's an it's it's a one half of 50 hertz.

Whereas in the US, you know, it'll be 30 frames per second. Or if it's film, you have to do this crazy conversion between 24 frames a second and 60.

So if you know I never knew that interesting. Yeah. So like that that frequency that wavelength.

Right?

What is that all about? And why does that why is that like this clock ticking?

Yeah. Okay. So I I I know electricity pretty well, but when you start getting into the physics of the system, there's a great British analyst who by the way was at uh the ARC conference in London in February, uh Katherine Porter, who is fantastic. I mean, she's a genius level explainer of what the grid is and how it works and did a great piece, by the way, on the Spanish blackouts and what caused it. But you're right. So the the the globally more countries, as I remember, use 50 Hz than 60 Hz. But let me take you back to the the idea of the grid and how it developed.

Where we are today really is an extension of what Edison started on Pearl Street in Manhattan in 1882. I mean really the entirety of that design that he came up with back then is still the way we use it today which is an alternating alternating current. Well, his system was DC, which was direct current, right? So, there's no oscillation.

And then there was a Westinghouse that was alter.

Westinghouse. And it was clear that we went to alternating current because it was you had you could transmit the power further with less with less loss of power along the way.

Um, and so that was a key development. Edison used DC. We we use AC because of our ability to move the electricity and move the juice from one place to another. And so that that system that we have and you asked about well synchronization so let's go back to uh wintertorm Yuri here in Texas and uh in 19 I'm sorry 2021.

Mhm.

Four years ago now.

The big Texas freeze.

The big Texas freeze um there was a possibility of the grid going black. I mean it came within a few seconds of collapsing completely. Okay. So there was talk in the aftermath about well what had what would have happened if the Texas grid had gone dark? Well you have to go through what's called black start which means you have to get you isolate parts of the grid. You get it up and running at 60 hertz and then you bring on other generators so that they can be synchronized with that existing heartbeat of 60 hertz per second. Right? And you can only do it gradually. But as I you know I said before it's a miracle it all works. It is just stunning that the damn thing works given the complexity and given that it all has to be tuned to the same heartbeat of 60 beats per second and you can't just add it willy-nilly. No, it all has to be tuned together. And so that black start was an example of well okay so what happens if things fall apart right and things do fall apart. Well, one of the things that was so dangerous, so eye opening after the winter storm Yuri was a lot of these units, which are power plants, you know, that are usually big diesel gen sets, a lot of them didn't have enough fuel to act as black start units.

So, you couldn't start them.

So, you couldn't you didn't have enough juice to start them. But that idea that anytime now you start a new generator, you know, if there's a a sudden surge in powers, power plants go off, when they come back on, they have takes for them a little while to synchronize themselves to the existing grid's heartbeat, if that makes sense.

Yeah. So you have this sort of circulatory system.

Yeah.

That is moving in in synchronized and has to stay within a fairly narrow band as I understand.

Very narrow.

Of of frequency in order for it to work and not literally blow things up on the ground.

And that's what happened in Spain was that you had too much uh these inverterbased resources which means solar and wind. They don't provide what's called inertia. This is where the things get get get complicated. But if you think of it as water pressure, so you know if you let's say you're you're watering your lawn and your neighbor turns on their sprinklers and they're filling their swimming pool. You're watering your lawn or your garden and the water pressure in your hose goes down a little bit, right? The flow rate declines a little bit. Well, you know, it's not going to change that much. It's going to take you longer to water the garden or to wash the dishes because the flow rate is less is lower, right? The water is the flow of the water is has has declined. You can't have that in the grid. You have to keep that water pressure, which is the the voltage has to be exactly the same all the time. And if it falls, that voltage falls. And this is what we have had hap had happen in in Spain was the inertia of the grid which again think of it as pressure it fell and then once that fell the inertia that that you're not getting from solar and wind which you get from big spinning machines right like you know big uh uh turbines big nuclear steam power plants they don't have that so you lost inertia and then the system fell system declined or rather uh u shut down but again That's an example of this this sensitivity and the fragility of the system right so you that you unlike the water is a engineers like to think of it I do too of electricity as water but the difference is on the power grid you can't change you have to keep that pressure that water pressure exactly the same all the time one of the things that this was one of these weird details of the way the electricity grid works that I I didn't know about which was that the physical one of the it almost seems like an accident that one of the buffers that keeps things sort of stable because there's going to be disruptions, right? I mean, you know, like I you when you drive down the street and you look at the the electricity poles in your neighborhood and you think all of this is essentially one interconnected machine that has to stay running all the time.

And then you see like a line gets taken down during a storm like we just had a big heavy rain and two trees on my property fell. This stuff's happening all the time. So, I guess the physical turbines, these giant heavy things, if they're disrupted, they keep spinning for a while and that ends up being this like inertia literally like in physics.

Right?

That keeps the grid from being destabilized.

Right?

And I'd never encountered that before. I had no idea that that spinning mechanism and the fact that, you know, if you spin your bicycle tire, spin it, spin it, spin it, and then you stop, it keeps spinning. That's inertia.

Yeah.

That that's actually an essential piece of keeping our electricity running and functional.

Well, and you know, we we started talking about AI and data centers and so I you know, I've written six books. In my fifth book, I went back and did a smaller, faster, lighter, denser, cheaper. I did a deep dive into the age of computers. When Inia, which was the first general purpose computer was turned on in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania, it drew so much power that it dimmed the lights in that part of Philadelphia for a few seconds, right? because of the massive amount of power it drew, right? Which.

It's like that scene from Christmas Vacation where he plugs in the the lights on the house and.

So well why what is happening is well you have a massive new demand coming onto the grid and the lights dim because the generator with the power plant the suddenly that new amount of of load has slowed the rotation of the the the generation of the flywheel in the power plant.

Wow, I didn't know that. And so it slows. How does it why did it slow?

It slows slightly because it's adapting to new demand, right? So it's as though imagine you're driving on the on the highway and you're in a headwind and suddenly there's a strong burst. Well, your car slows down a little bit, but then it your the engine revs up a little more to get you back up to cruise control speed or whatever. Same thing with why the lights dim when you have big new demand come online is that the at the power plant or on the system itself where that inertia has suddenly taken a slow a slight hit and it has to catch up. Is it? Um.

So but think about these electrons that are moving. They don't move quite at the speed of light. They move slower than the speed of light, but you think of those electrons are actually catching up, right? They got they got kind of slowed down a little bit and then they're like, "Oh, we got to get back together."

I I imagine that it's that the speed the slowdown the demand causing slowdown to do with the fact that electricity is produced by friction.

So like motion like it's Yeah. I mean, I know like I I I quickly sound like a child because I have a child like like I keep trying to get down to like, well, how is the how are those electrons moving? It's we've got this thing that.

Is but Richard Fineman describes it almost exactly that same way. You think, well, it's childish. And he was asked to explain it one time and he said, "Well, something moves over here and so it moves over here." I mean, he was like, "Well, what happens in between?" Well, I don't know, right? But he used that same analogy, right, of something spinning over here and it makes it move over here. And it is it is both simple and in insanely complicated. Um, and as I said, it's a miracle that it works. But I think that, you know, for me, the big picture now is so where does all this go? And I'm trying to think as I'm doing my reporting about, okay, we have to think about China and AI. We have to think about China and CO2, but what do we have to think about here in the US? It's grid security and making sure you mentioned the transformers being damaged. Well, we've had a couple of instances now in the last 15 years where some, you know, unknown local yals, somebody went to large transformer stations and shot them up with high power trans with high power uh firearms. They're never caught. Well, that's a vulnerability, a strategic vulnerability for the entire US grid because those transformers are omn, you know, they're we see them all the time. So, there's a there's an overall vulnerability that I think we have to deal with. But then the other thing that I think is worth talking about as well is when we think about AI and the grid, what is happening? All this new demand for AI is going to be filled with natural gas. I'm pro- natural gas, but we're making the grid too dependent on natural gas. Well, and and closing coal plants and making the grid more vulnerable because of all these the solar and wind that's online. So, all of these things are are have to be grappled with in a system that complex. We have 3,000 different more than 3,000 different electricity providers in America. 3,000. And they all somehow it all works again. Well, I want to I want to flesh out some of the component parts before we get to some of these macro issues and go deeper into them like China and like like the role of these so-called renewables um or as unreliables as some people might call them. Alex Epstein. Let's go.

Um, so one piece of the puzzle is that, okay, so you've got these, you've got power plants that have historically involved big moving turbines with inertia.

Going at a rate that produces a frequency 60 Hz here in the US that needs to be maintained to plug in and for all to work to get. It's like it's a highway. Everybody's going 60 miles an hour. If you want to get on the highway, you've got to get up to speed and get up to 60.

Um.

And stay there.

And stay there and not, you know, because.

58, not 62.

Can't have any of that traffic. So, no rubbernecking, none of that stuff.

In control systems, they actually have the the hertz of the system. They will display it. I I've been in several the RTO's in New York and in Texas, they display that frequency to three digits, right? It's not just 60, it's 59.95. and they keep that they that's the biggest display in the whole room.

So, so that's the generation and that's like the heartbeat. Then you have like which you referenced here moving the electrons from that place that's miles away from my house to my house. And one of the things that's happening is these transformers are doing something.

Why are they called transformers and what do they do? They change the voltage from the power plant to the to the distribution or or or transmission system and they they turn they either convert the voltage up or they convert it down. And this was Westinghouse's great contribution, one of the great industrialists in American history. George Westinghouse um understood this and was one of the early uh developers and commercializers of the transformer. And so before.

There's a movie about Edison versus Westinghouse called Current Wars talks about.

And Edison was in favor of DC and Westinghouse said no AC is the way to go and so you had in in the history of of of electricity in America Westinghouse made a transformative contribution by putting a transformer system in Niagara Falls and con conveying that power to Buffalo and I think he stepped it up to I think it was 11 uh kilovolts, right? But that was that that uh the transformer itself is a little miracle of how the the way the the copper is wound inside the system allows you to step the voltage up or step it down. And that was a step change. I'm talking transformational step change in the history of electricity because suddenly instead of having to DC power plant which could power a neighborhood or you know a few city blocks you could have an AC system where you could have one power plant fuel a whole town or a whole city and that and you could move the power further and that was Westinghouse's great contribution one of his many he was also marvelous industrialist in in in railroad safety and a whole lot a lot of other really underappreciated like Frank Spraen one of the great underappreciated um genius geniuses of the electric era.

Yeah, it's amazing though what a long shadow Edison casts relative to Westinghouse because they um they were titans at similar in some ways similar impact. I mean and yet we all know Thomas Edison and Westinghouse is doesn't isn't even a hundth of the notoriety in the public imag or another who I consider the greatest and most important and unsung hero of the electric age Frank.

Um, and I talk we and uh um in you mentioned earlier our documentary Juice, how electricity explains the world. Um, my colleague Tyson Culver who I know you know uh we had a whole segment on Frank Sprag. Sprag was a graduate of the Naval Academy. Worked worked for Edison for uh about 11 months. Went to work for him in 1882 or 1883. It was the day the Brooklyn Bridge opened. Only stayed 11 months. Went out on his own. went on to perfect the electric motor, the electric street car and the electric elevator. And he was a genius. I mean, a certifiable genius. Also then went on to uh uh uh install safety systems at uh Grand Central Station, the electrification of of rail in Grand Central Station. So, an enormously important figure in American history, in world history. Um, and he's virtually unknown, but because of his contributions, the the electric street car, perfected the electric street car in Richmond, Virginia, moved to New York in 1889 and perfected the electric elevator at the uh postal telegraph building at 250 Broadway. It's a building which still stands and there's no plaque, nothing, but it ignited the age of the skyscraper. So, Sprag, you know, was not a self-promoter like Edison, but he was just an enormously influential man. It's really interesting to just remember that you don't get urban density without the elevator. You don't like you're not going to walk up and down 50 flights of stairs. In fact, when I when I was living in New York City.

When I don't remember exactly when this happened. It was like maybe it was 2003. There was a northeastern grid.

Um, blackout that originated in I think in Canada above Michigan.

And I was on 40 the 42nd floor in in Time Square and we you know me and my then girlfriend now wife had to walk down the stairs and then walk to our apartment.

And then within a couple days I I it was like oh you don't need that many days without electricity for this society to totally collapse.

Yeah. Why don't why don't they have skyscrapers in a lot of a African countries? Because the grid is unreliable.

You get stuck in the elevator.

You don't want to get stuck in the elevator. But remember, you know, again, this idea of electricity and the and modernity and for nearly all of human history and in our film, Juice, how electricity explains the world, we interviewed Jesse Oabel and he says this. He said, you know, that electricity changed the height, changed the geometry of the city because for effectively all of human history, the tallest buildings were only four or five stories high. Why? Because, as you point out, now imagine now you and Lisa are married, but you know, imagine you got a kid, you got groceries, and you get home and you're not going to walk up 30 flights of stairs. You can walk up three, maybe four, maybe five, and then that's it. Right? So for all of human history, the the civilization was flat because you, you know, people can't walk up that many stairs. And I'm I'm 65 now. I don't want to walk up a whole lot of stairs, right? So the elevator did in fact ignite then the era of the skyscraper. And when the postal telegraph building was completed, it was the tallest building in New York City at 12 stories.

Yeah.

And so we take it for granted now. And Burr Dubai in in in in Dubai is what 160 stories. I mean, it's a kilometer high, 1,000 meters. I mean, it's just like, are you kidding me?

But this was all made. So, not only did Sprag, who you know, I my my daughter Mary makes fun of me because she knows I'm I'm such a fan of Sprag, but not only did he perfect electric transportation across the horizon. Then he did the same thing vertically. And his key insight was making sure that you could travel vertically as quickly as you could travel horizontally. So you think about an elevator you're walking your your walking speed and the elevator speed are sometimes the elevators go faster but they move at least as fast as you can walk.

The so you have to come back to this transformer moment we have these words that we hear that we don't think about high voltage lines.

Yeah.

So those big thick lines are carrying alternating current at a high voltage so that it can go over long distances. And then you've got a transformer on either side that takes, let's say it's at Niagara Falls, and you've got the turbine being moved by the falls.

It's stepping it up to high voltage. So it'll move with a minimum of loss.

To Buffalo to Buffalo and then stepped down so it can be used in your house.

Yeah. You got another transformer and this set of coils that does this thing that I don't fully understand to take it back down. So now you're about now you're at 120 or 240 volts.

Right.

Into the wall. Plug it in and it works and it's all one connected machine operating in a single a single frequency. And think about it, you know, now theoretically, I've thought about this a fair amount, but I could in theory, if I were small enough, I could just jump through the the outlet here and end up on the beach in Santa Monica. Now, now Texas is not interconnected perfectly with the rest of the grid, but we do have a couple of interconnections, but think about that. You know, that the system as a whole in the United States, it's not perfectly interconnected and Texas is somewhat islanded. But yeah, and and that all really starts with Edison and Pearl Street in 1882. That that basic model of central power plant with because before that you'd have a power plant with one house, right? Edison's idea was no, I'm going to have and he charged per light bulb. He called them lamps and he so what was what was Edison selling? He was selling light. And then the big change was then he then they realized with Sprag effectively after the the development of the electric motor then they became not just electric lighting companies it became power companies because then they were selling power which for manufacturers you want something that spins so you can turn a belt so you can turn a light turn a drill. So.

And and it's like it's it's it's easy to forget some of these things even though they're like in our consciousness publicly. It's like Edison General Electric, the light bulb, the tungsten light bulb is that image of Edison.

Um, we have then we have then this system and there's this idea of base load.

Yeah.

What is that? and and and and how how does the stack of energy sources work because you know what I even as I was coming to the office today and you know getting my head into this conversation I was listening to a video about how the cost of electricity has been.

Mapped, and I know you've, you've pointed to this work: societies with more wind and solar have higher electric costs across the board. So if you put, like, um, and this is very controversial, right? I know, oh, you know, they've mapped it in states, and some states like Iowa, they have high wind, and their costs are lower. But you look at Germany, you look at Spain, you look at, at, at, uh, uh, Australia, you look at Britain. As the penetration of, of these weather-dependent generation sources has increased, their power prices have increased. Oh, gee, what a coincidence that is.

So, so, so to, I, I think one of the things that seems like that that I, I needed to understand to understand why, um, wind and solar are so challenging, was this idea of base load. So, what is that, and how do you get it, and why is base load important for how everything works in our society?

Sure. Well, I want to come back to solar and wind. I hope we can and talk about land use because this is the other key issue with, with weather-dependent generation. But why is, why does base load matter? Well, let's go back to the, the synchronous generation and the fact that you need this spinning system, right, to make the thing work, right? So, you have the inertia, to have the amount of, of water pressure, right, to move the power through the line, right? To move the electricity through this copper, aluminum, steel, aluminum system of distribution, you have to have pressure behind it to force it to go, right?

Electron, they are, they're.

Otherwise, they're just going to sit there, right? You have to have, how you have to have water pressure behind them to get them moving. So, what do, what do we consider base load? Well, nuclear would be one of the ultimate sources of base load. You put the nuclear plant online, it runs full out, and it'll run for two years without slowing down until they need to refuel. Generally, the same with coal plants, that they'll run as base load resources.

So, consistent, reliable, steady source, uninterrupted?

Right. Electrons flying out of that thing.

Right. And that they pro, then provide the base upon which all this other stuff works. And what we've seen in Spain, in the wake of the blackout in April, April 26th, was it? Um, they're now using more base load. They're, they're keeping more spinning generation online because of what they learned, right? Which, oh gee, what did you learn? Well, you need that spinning generation. So, that base load is key. And, you know, it's been used as a kind of a pejorative by promoters of wind and solar because, oh, well, that's yesterday's power. No, it's not. That's the key to the stability of the grid.

But what we have done, uh, in the last few decades is add more and more intermittent resources, solar and wind. And then we've added gas, which I'm pro-natural gas. And my first book was on Enron. And Enron was a great promoter of gas to power for a lot of reasons, including their ability to trade gas and power. But now, what we've had is that now we can use gas and as...

They didn't contribute to the positive brand among...

But the, but, you know, the, the grid demand is not constant, right? So, during Winter Storm Uri, we had power demand in Texas of 80 gigawatts or more, 90 gigawatts in some cases, because so many people were home, were using heat, and they wanted power. Well, but the average demand in Texas, I may be wrong, within a few gigawatts, 50 to 60 gigawatts, right? So, during hot summer days and cold winter days, that demand goes up. So, you, the grid has to be able to respond. And usually, that has meant dispatchable gas generation. So, you can turn gas turbines on and off, and you can even use reciprocating engines, which are becoming, have been long been in use, but data centers use reciprocating engines for backup. But so, you just think of the, you know, just as the demand, or just as the, the 60 Hz of the power in the, in the grid is always changing, so is the power demand. It's, it's daily, right? So, it goes down at night when people are sleeping, it goes up when they go back to work. And so, that constant change in demand has to be adjusted for all the time. So, you have base load here, and then you're adding in incremental resources, gas, some coal is dispatched, but then you've also now dealing with more intermittent sources like wind and solar, which then require yet more flexibility with the grid.

So, you've got an assumed level of power that this, that coal and nuclear can deliver?

Historically. Yes.

Or have delivered, and, and because of physics, are good at delivering in a consistent way, because of physics?

And they just stay on all the time.

Um, natural, then you have the fact that there's changes in the demand all the time, but they're not, it doesn't go up and down to zero. There's a base that's always there, and then there's a variability on top of that. And that, and gas, and and gas turbines, are you can turn them on and off more easily? Is that the basic, like, they can be spun up to address the power and then draw pulled back on in, in more easily, like than nuclear or then, or then coal?

Yeah. Yeah. Generally speaking, yes. And we're using some gas as base load now as well. And, um, so think of it, you know, nuclear and coal, some gas, and then above that, then gas coming in and out, solar and wind coming in and out, and then you, the new development in batteries, which I'm starting to believe some of the battery story, because it's become important here in, in Urkott in Texas, uh, because they can provide power and, and for short increments at, at full power, and, and they have some attributes that are helpful to the grid. But when the, you know, grid planners, grid operators have to plan for the deepest, darkest days of winter, the deepest, darkest days after hurricanes, they have to be ready to deploy at full power to make the system resilient. And this is one of the things that I think is, we alluded to it, mentioned it before, but the system is becoming more fragile because of all this addition of more weather-dependent generation. And that was what we saw in Spain.

So, you have this idea that of peak load. So, we've been talking about base load.

Yeah.

And variables, but then you have peak load, which is a term that we, we can use in a lot of different contexts, but it, I wonder if it even originates with, with electricity.

But, but so, what is peak load?

Sure. Well, peak load is the amount of power that's demanded when, here in Texas, it gets to 100 degrees on July 19th, my birthday. Um, and so power demand on those days will reach, you know, I think the recent peak is in 80, 90, you know, less than 90 gigawatts. But then at night, once the sun, once it cools off, that demand will, will slack down to, you know, 60, 70 gigawatts. But the, the, the grid has to be able to handle those times of peak demand, because that is when everyone is turning on their air conditioners, and you, the system has to be able to respond. So, that is when you see more of these peaking resources. When some batteries, uh, there's an interesting company based in Houston called Enchanted Rock that uses, um, reciprocating gas-fired engines that they'll, they'll fire up to meet that demand in, during the maybe a few minutes, a few hours when peak demand, when the, when load is peaking. And that is when the power prices are highest in, which is an energy-only market. So, that, that is how we've been meeting that peak demand. But the challenge is making sure we can do it consistently. And right now, in Texas, the, the challenge for power, uh, developers is building enough dispatchable capacity, uh, to meet that peak demand, because they're not rewarded for providing the capacity, which gets into capacity payments and a whole, you know, tar pit of of acronyms and discussions about how the grid works.

So, so, so, okay, so we've got this network. We've got people needing power at different times, some of which hit a lot of people at the same time, like the heat of the midday in July.

When they come home from work at 5:30, and they turn on the air conditioner and the television, and the...

Then boom. Or, or, or everybody's watching the Super Bowl. Or some, I'm sure there's social events that sometimes can cause this, but...

So, dispatchable power, what do you mean? But what does that mean, dispatchable?

You can just turn it on and off, and do it so, do so quickly, right? So, nuclear power plants, you know, the ones we have in Texas, we have about four gigawatts. These are massive machines. They're 1,100 gigawatts or,000 megawatts each. You don't want to be turning them up and down because they, once they get going, they just want to keep spinning. They want to keep going, right? But if you have, let's say...

Because of inertia, and because of all the, all the...

Because of inertia, just the cost on the system, right? Of just running it up and down. Whereas if you have, let's say, a bank of, well, you know, one of the things that's kind of promising is you have, say, you have a data center. You know, you're Microsoft, and this is, they've done this, I think, in South Dakota. They build a data center, we'll just say 20 megawatts. Well, they have 20 megawatts of backup diesel gen sets, or they may be fueled with natural gas. Well, so that's 20 megawatts of power that availability power capacity that the data center may not need all the time. So, if the power demand in that region spikes, you could take that 20 megawatts of capacity at maybe 10, 2 megawatt gen sets, but you could turn them all on at once to help meet that peak demand. So, that's an example of a dispatchable resource. And data centers now, I mean, you look at anyone that you see, they all have their own backup supply, they all have their own backup system of power generation to make sure they can keep that, that, that silicon lit, keep those computers going, even if the grid fails.

So, one of the things, you know, we have this story, this sort of gets us now into the crux of the, the talk of energy transition.

Yeah.

And, um, we...

Can I just cut to the chase? It's bull.

It's always been there. There is no energy transition. It's a marketing term, like renewable, like green energy, like, you know, clean energy. It's all marketing. So, so, yeah, let's, let's cut right to that. So, what I happen to think that most of the talk about the catastrophic disaster from CO2 emissions is overblown. And, and, but we're not going to in this conversation try to adjudicate that. It is what it is. Believe what you believe, viewer, and we'll deal with that another time. But the fact is, there is a desire, there is a belief among some people that we need to move to non-hydro, we need to move to non-hydrocarbon based, non-emitting...

Energy sources. And, and hence, transition to clean energy.

With air quotes.

So, what's going on there? What is meant by that, and what's reality? Well, the reality is that, particularly here in the US and in Western Europe, we've seen a very effective, and give them credit, an enormously effective and enormously well-funded propaganda campaign. And I don't use propaganda lightly, but a propaganda campaign funded by some of the richest people, largely by some of the richest people in the world, including Jeff Bezos, Lauren Powell Jobs, uh, uh, John Doerr, among them, uh, uh, to fund these NGOs, climate activist groups to push this concept of the energy transition. I'll cut ahead. There is no energy transition. Yes, we're adding more alternative energy, wind and solar. They, those additions of those wind and solar, uh, uh, capacity, that, that generation has not displaced effectively significant quantities of hydrocarbons in the global marketplace today. We're still using roughly 30 times more hydrocarbons globally than we are wind and solar. And, and, and I can point you to the numbers, and I've published this many times on my Substack, Robert.substack.com, on substack.com, that the growth of hydrocarbons has been outstripping the growth in wind and solar consistently, not just for a few years, but for decades.

So, what's going on? Why have we been inundated with this propaganda around the energy transition? It's money, John. It's always about money. It's always about money. Who's, who stands to profit? Quibono. And so, we've had this effort to, uh, uh, and been very effective in some, in some locations, you know, California, in, uh, um, in Britain, in Australia, in Germany. Very well-funded, very powerful interests pushing this idea of the energy transition, saying we have to quit using coal, oil, and natural gas. Quit using hydrocarbons. I don't call them fossil fuels. Quit using hydrocarbons because of climate change. Well, the reality is that we would die without hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons, for whether you love them, hate them, or not, or not, doesn't matter. They are here to stay. And so, the entire notion of the energy transition is a made-up political effort by very well-funded, very, uh, powerful interests to both push this catastrophe narrative around climate change, but further to, to push the economic interests of big banks, big law firms, big corporations, and big NGOs to make money by deploying wind, solar, and batteries. I think it's just that simple. And I don't, that's not a cynical view. I've been reporting on this for a very long time. When you look at who makes money off of this idea, big banks, big law firms, big, you know, big NGOs, and big corporations. This isn't, there's no charity here.

But, but Robert, I heard that China, with their efficient autocracy, is like leading the charge on the energy transition.

Oh, now you're seeing from my, himnil, right? This is what they, we've heard over and over and over again.

But they're, they're, they're BYD is is doing the electric cars like crazy, and all of our, all of the solar panels in the world are getting made, I guess, by Uyghur slaves. But that, so be it. That's...

Just ignore the, ignore the genocide in Xinjiang where solar panels and solar modules are coming from. Just ignore that. Like Bill McKibben in his book doesn't even mention the word genocide.

That's okay, because look, we can have queers for Palestine. We can have communist all. We can have communist justice powered by slavery. You know, in, in the post-modern world, hypocrisy doesn't exist because there's no such thing as truth. So, let's live in their world where there's no such thing as truth. Except that China's leading the energy transition. So, what, what's wrong there?

I'm sorry. It's just plain bull. It's just not true. If you look, and, and I, in fact, I'm working on an article about this right now, and I've written a lot about China, and I've written a lot about the coal business. Coal demand globally continues to rise inexorably. And I've been writing about it now for more than 15 years about what is happening in the coal business. And so, let's step back to this idea of China and the rest of it. Why are so many countries, including China and India, building so much coal-fired capacity? Well, it's obvious. You know, coal, for, what, love it or hate it, doesn't matter. For those countries, they're looking at coal as an abundant resource. It's cheap. It's the, the deposits are, are widespread geographically. It provides energy security. And the technology needed to build coal plants, whether they're subcritical, supercritical, etc., is widely available. And you can, you don't even need any special technology to store the coal. You can throw it out on the ground. You don't need a pipe. You don't, it. So, for a country like Bangladesh, like Vietnam, you know, countries that are building coal-fired power plants, this is what they, they're looking at the universe of options: coal, oil, coal, gas, nuclear, wind, solar, and they're looking at coal and saying, "Well, we want to build coal." Indonesia.

I mean, one of the things that, to that point of storage, and we, we'll come back to it and talk about batteries later, but...

Sure.

It's, it's easy to just forget the basic kind of physics thing of potential energy, like that that little block of coal is sitting there, and that is potential energy. It's stored. It's energy stored in a non-volatile form. And that is super awesome.

And it's, and it's energy security.

Yeah.

And it's energy security that you have it right there.

If I need more heat, I need more power, I need more electricity.

And I can look at the size of the coal pile and I can tell how many days of resource I have, right? Um, whereas with natural gas, it's a just-in-time fuel. Love me some natural gas. But you don't, it's delivered via pipeline, and it is delivered just in time, which may, maybe we can come back to and talk about the data center and AI business. But back to coal. So, let me just give you a couple of quick numbers. So, CO2 emissions in China and India are the story. The US really doesn't matter anymore. The West doesn't matter anymore. The growth story in CO2 is all about China and India. And for all of their talk, and it's just that Xi Jinping's very, you know, very clever about all this. All of their talk about reducing CO2 emissions. It's, they're building coal plants. And what is happening in China today? Latest numbers, about 240 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity are being built in China. Not in permitting stage, not in blueprint state, not being built. They're under construction. So, for reference, that 240 gigawatts is larger than the entire coal fleet in the US, which is less than 200, about 190 gigawatts. So, the, so China is building in new coal plants more capacity than all of the coal power of the entire United States.

That's right. And when they finish this 240 gigawatts of new capacity, their coal fleet in China will be roughly 1.3 terawatts, 1.3 million megawatts. It will be, their China's coal fleet will be as large as the entire electric grid in the United States.

Wow. Coal, coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind, solar, every, all the, the electricity generation capacity in the US is 1.3, 1.4 terawatts. China's coal capacity will be the equivalent size of the entire US grid. So, this idea, oh, well, we're going to solve climate change and energy transition, electrify everything, you know, the Sierra Club crowd, oh, offshore wind, you know, solar batteries. It's a, it's a grift. It's a grift when we look at the global story and see what is really happening in China and in India, um, and other countries around the world. It is, they're, they're going to build coal plants. Why? Because they know what we've already talked about. Electricity is the key to modernity. And they're not going to do without it.

The, um, so you have the politics of all that get incredibly messy and and diabolical very quickly, cuz it's like, it, it looks like the, like Western European young people and elites are...

They've been brainwashed.

Well, and are brainwashed in a way that actively sabotages our society while turning a blind eye or even being sympathetic to China, which is doing the literal opposite.

Yeah.

To power itself. It's weird. Like if you...

And yet they claim, oh, they're leading the green revolution and they're the ones that are the, the latest term, electrostate. China's becoming electrostate. This is what I've been working on, this story I'm working, article I'm working on right now. What a crock of crap. I mean, it's just, you look at what is happening. I, I'm, I'm in favor of natural gas and nuclear. Look at the growth of natural gas alone. Far greater than the growth in wind. Far greater than the wind, the growth in solar. Doesn't fit the narrative, so we don't hear about that. But this is what's been so, as a reporter and one who's, I'm independent. I've been happily independent for a long time and just looking at it and just marveling at the narrative that has been prevailing in legacy media outlets over and around China and how great China is. And I'm thinking, what are you talking about? You don't know anything about the numbers. You don't know anything about the reality of what is happening in China.

The, so, what's the, I have seen two things. I, I have seen, on one hand, talk of solar in particular, now being cheaper than hydrocarbons, which is to say, you know...

Sure.

Oil, coal, gas. Uh, that it's cheaper.

And then I've also seen sort of technology presentations, te, like people who are not like communists. They're like, they like technology. They want to see, they want to see us have. They're not degrowth. There's a degrowth crowd that just thinks humanity is a virus, that Paul Ehrlich said we should just do less, we should just have less, sorry, have have fewer kids.

Enjoy, enjoy poverty.

Let your grand, let your grandparents die because you don't have reliable power at the hospital. They're, they're old anyway, those folks. That's it. We can have, we can be Canada and just start proactively paying people to kill themselves.

Or, um, and like, I know Trudeau is no longer the, no longer the prime minister, but he's spoken very glowingly about China and its ability to do the energy transition. So, it's a perfect example of the weird politics. Um, but I have also seen technologists saying, you have these power law things taking place where solar and these technologies, we're just going to have unlimited abundant power. Like...

It's okay. We're gonna, it's, it's all good. Solar is going to work.

Yeah. So, why is that just all, like, what's the, what's going on with solar? Why is, why is China, that's producing the cheapest solar panels in the world with slaves and whatnot, why aren't they using more solar? Why isn't the growth of solar outpacing the growth of coal plants in China if they're so good at this and they're so great and they're so cheap?

Well, okay. So, a lot of, a lot of issues there to unpack, but let's, let's start. Okay. So, what about solar? Well, I believe in solar. I have 8 and a half kilowatts of solar panels on the roof of my house. It's my second solar system on my house. I live, you know, a few miles from here in South Austin. Why did I do it? Well, I got three big fat subsidies to do it. So, of course, I'm not, you know, what? I'm opposed to energy subsidies unless I'm getting them, John. So, let's be clear.

Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, but, um...

I actually did the same thing on our last house. I, I put on, I put solar on. There was a giant fat subsidy, so it was paid for by other people, so it was cheaper to me.

Yeah.

And it was like, "Oh, look, now, now look at how low my energy bill is." It's like, "Yeah, that was like a $30,000 installation."

Exactly. Mine, mine was 30,000, and half of the year, I pay no electric bill.

So, my electric, so my electric bill was like 300 bucks.

So, 30,000 is a lot more than 300. That's a lot of months.

That's a lot of months of prepaid power. But on a cash on cash basis, it's a very attractive return. I've done the analysis, like 12, 14%. We, good luck getting that guaranteed in the market, right? And that's pre-tax. So, you know, again, I'm opposed to subsidies unless I'm getting them, right? You know, it's like, well, hell yeah, you're going to give them to me, I'm going to damn well take it.

So, but the claim is that the, it's cheaper, not, not through communism, not through like spending other people's money, but it's cheaper in general. Cheaper if you just look at the solar project in isolation and not the grid as a whole. So, there's this artificial term called levelized cost of energy, and it's been popularized by Lazard, and they put out these reports saying, well, of course solar is cheaper. There is no doubt that if you just isolate the solar project by itself and you discount all these other ancillary costs, transmission, etc., the cost of maintaining the grid, etc. Yes, I can. I'll, I'll, I'll grant you that. Looks cheaper for that one part of the deal.

So, let me make sure I understand that. If I, without Uncle Sam or City of Austin stealing other people's money and giving it to me in the name of...

Rainbows and climate and unicorns.

Um, if I just go and buy a solar panel setup and I pay full freight, and then I use that power to the, until the thing's dead, the cost per, the cost of that energy might technically, in that narrow case, be cheaper than if I tried to get the same amount of electrons out of buying gas or or other, other source of nuclear energy.

Might, might.

Okay. Do you live in Winnipeg or do you live in Phoenix? Do you want batteries to have power all the time, or you just want to power during the time when it's sunny in Winnipeg in January? So, there's huge amounts of variability depending on where the system is, what it's connected to, if it has batteries, all of these other things. So, it's just too glib to say it's cheaper. You know, and I understand why they make those claims. But here's the reason. So, is it instantly not cheaper if you add a battery so that my, when the sun goes down, I can still power my house?

Well, here's an example. So, let's just assume you, you buy, you know, with the massive amounts of money you're making here in Emerging Order, the foundation, you go and buy a ranch out in, let's say, Big Bend in, in Texas, and you look at the cost of extending a power line to your house versus putting solar and batteries and powering your house. Well, if you're going to have a, if you have a big house and air conditioning, well, it might cost you, I don't know, 30, 40, $50,000 upfront to add solar and batteries, right? So, that might be cheaper than extending the power line from, you know, wherever from, you know, Presidio or wherever would just been Big Bend, right? Where you're isolated. Well, that's a different story than if you're here in the center of town where it's much cheaper for me to just connect to the grid. So, when you hear solar is cheaper, well, okay. Compared to what, and where, and when, and, you know, what are, what are, what are the, the scenarios here? But I think the broader issue, and it's one that I've been reporting on for a long time, is, you know, these, these promoters of of these alternative energy technologies, and, you know, there are some very prominent academics in America, you know, uh, uh, Bill McKibben as an academic, Jesse Jenkins at Princeton, uh, oh, uh, Mark Jacobson at Stanford, saying, oh, well, we just can do all this with wind and solar, wind and solar, wind and solar. The fundamental problem, besides, you know, let's take the cost issue away, is, okay, where are you going to put it? If you want to power the entirety of, let's say, Britain, you you would need to cover effectively all of Britain with solar panels and wind turbines. Well, people live there, and they don't want these projects near them. And this is something that I've spent a very significant amount of my career in the last 15 years collecting this data into the renewable rejection database. And so, now, I was just looking at the numbers. Since roughly 2015, globally, there have been 1,121 rejections or restrictions of wind or solar projects and batteries around the world.

To bring it up to up to date, between January of 2025 and October of 25, in England, Ireland, and Scotland alone, just in this 10-month period, there have been 53 rejections or restrictions of solar and wind.

What does that mean? What does that mean? Rejected. Rejected by who? Local, local communities, local councils, local governments saying, "We don't want to cover our farmland, our ancestral land, our cultural heritage land with wind and solar projects." And this is happening all around the world. And of course, it doesn't fit the narrative. And you see, you know, these activists, and McKibben may be the most aggressive and and and u and vocal, um, uh, promoter of this idea. Oh, we could just put it out there, you know, out there in Trump land, you know. We'll just put it out there where, you know, those Trump voters or those hillbillies, we'll put it out there, you know, and we'll cover tens of square miles with solar panels. Well, it's easy to do it if you're in China, where their land use policies are somewhat different than they are here in the US.

This is why these people like it. You can just plow over personal property rights and the rest of it. But for all this promotion around alt energy, and I don't call it clean, I don't call it green, I don't call it renewable, it's alternative energy. The fundamental problem is land use. And this is something that these land use conflicts are raging all over the world. Um, and in fact, just in the last day or so, in Australia, the Institute for Public Affairs there has released their own renewable database. They have 150 examples of community-led opposition to wind and solar projects and and battery and transmission projects in Australia. So, this is, this is why natural gas and nuclear are so important, because they have small footprints, and you could put them near loads. So, the difference with solar and wind is the best resources are far from town. So, not only do they require a lot of acreage, a lot of hectares, a lot of land, you have to build transmission to connect them. So, you know, this idea of solar is cheaper. Okay. Well, compared to what? But then it's always about three things: Where are you going to put it? How are you going to connect it? How are you going to pay for it? And the, where you, or where you going to put it. I've documented it over and over again from Maine to Hawaii, from Greece to to to to Ireland. Local people are saying, "We don't want these projects. Take them where the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow. We don't want them here."

Where the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. I think that's called Germany, right? So, this is one of the things that's really weird. Germany went whole hog into this stuff.

And their power prices are among the highest in Europe.

Among the highest in Europe. They don't get...

Among the highest in the world. Yeah.

They don't get a ton of sun.

No. I seem to recall like that Germany was this place where engineering reigned supreme. How did this happen? How did the Germans, like the engineers of the world, become like physics deniers?

Weather deniers, and they're blowing up their nuclear plants.

Yeah. They're actively destroying them, just like in California. And, you know...

I, I don't know. I, you know, my son Jacob lives in Berlin. Loves Berlin. He's not crazy about the Germans. I don't know. And they'll all be serious before long, so don't worry about it. But...

Does he like the Islamic call to prayer? Because that's coming.

But it is a remarkable delusion that is underway, collective delusion. And it's not unique to Germany. You see it in Australia. You see it to some degree in Canada with the federal government. You see it definitely in Britain with...

Canada. Another hotbed of sunshine.

Right. With with Kier Starmer and the Labor government in Britain. You know, this insistence that alt energy is going to be the salvation, and that we have to do something on climate change. I, I was, I mentioned the IPA. They invited me, and I went to, went to Australia for a couple of weeks in June with my wife Lauren, and did several speaking engagements. And I just kept asking, "What is wrong with you?" I mean, truly, what is wrong with you people? You have the, some of the world's best coal resources. You have more uranium than any other country in the world, and yet you won't build coal plants. You know, you're killing your coal plants, and you won't build nuclear plants. But there's this, it's not unique to Germany, although I think in Germany, it's a, that this collective delusion is stronger, which I think has something to do with their collective guilt around World War II and so on, but that somehow they're going to lead the way, and that they're going to show the rest of the world how to decarbonize. All they've done is show the rest of the world how not to run an industrial economy. And you see what is happening there with the cut off from natural gas from Russia, with higher power prices. Industry is failing. Industry is leaving. And, you know, it's, it's all, they don't lack for energy. They lack the ability to pull the energy out of the ground. And yet, they won't do it.

The, um, my friend George Yates, I talked to him recently. He's an oil and gas guy in Dallas, and he's been working on projects in Britain. He said, you know, the problem is, there's not, there's no shortage of energy in, in Europe and in Britain. He said, the problem is that it's being kept in the ground by ideology. And I thought that was a really interesting point. You know, that it's not, there's nothing technically, there's nothing, uh, uh, uh, in geological terms that is keeping them, uh, energy poor. It's ideology that's keeping them energy poor. I, I have never been able to square or escape the fundamental hypocrisy on the climate change story around nuclear energy.

Yeah.

Because if clim, if you don't want to depopulate the planet, which I think most, most of the loudest voices actually do, and they say it explicitly, but if you're just someone who's like, "No, no, no. Climate change is a serious problem. It's gonna, it's gonna reshape our coastlines. It's gonna flood our cities." Like, this is, you're not accounting in present value terms for the, the coming cost of disaster.

Yeah. We can't afford not to act. I think that would be the...

A steelman version of their argument. There is costs that are not, this is, this is cataclysm. Cost is too great. We have to act now. We have, or we can even say, like, look, let's just imagine that we had to move Miami and Manhattan. And let's just put a price tag on having to move those city centers. That's super expensive. If you bring it to today, transitioning to a carbon-free energy scheme is better than that. Let's just imagine that, that there's a world where that's true. The same, this same movement, as you said, in Germany and in California and around the world, but not in China, of is actively tearing down and destroying the nuclear power plants.

Yeah.

Oliver Stone did a documentary several years ago. He was actually here in Austin. I think you were probably in that room when he was, but he, he debuted, he, he was doing like a screening tour, and he came to Austin with his film about nuclear power, and he pointed out, like, he showed, like, the size of land mass to generate the same amount of kilowatts of electricity as a nuclear power plant.

Yeah.

And it's monumental. Australia's got all this uranium. They could be doing it. Um, and it doesn't produce carbon emissions, and we know how to deal with the waste. And it's also the safest power source ever. There's like, basically no deaths, right?

And the worst scenarios, which we've experienced, Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, which was a Soviet government catastrophe, um, uh, Fukushima. The, the Japanese, they don't even, you add all of that up, and it's like a blip compared to everything else in terms of human catastrophe. Sure, it's not zero, but we live in a world of real trade-offs.

You can't tell a story that's remotely close to the truth in which nuclear power isn't the safest energy source and the, and energy dense. And Team Climate wants us to destroy it all.

It, it really is the tell, isn't it? It's the tell. So, you mentioned the, the, the land use. So, the power density of nuclear is unsurpassed. 2,000 watts per square meter. It's 2,000 times greater than wind. So, the footprint of, of nuclear, a nuclear power plant is roughly 2,000 times smaller than a wind project. It's roughly 200 times smaller than a solar project. So, I'm, I'm an, you know...

And it doesn't need batteries, and it runs 24/7.

I don't want, yes. I don't want to say I'm an environmentalist because that's become kind of such a hackneyed term, but I'm an avid bird watcher. I'm an avid outdoorsman, avid hiker. I want to preserve wildland. I want to preserve open space. I, I hate the wind business for a lot of reasons, including that it kills birds, right? It's a landscape-destroying monstrosity.

And, and whales on the ocean front.

Oh, yeah. Whales. I remember, I'm old enough, John, to remember when environmentalists cared about whales. I mean, and they don't anymore because they're so enamored with this idea of wind and offshore wind, which the only thing dumber than onshore wind energy is offshore wind energy.

Why?

Well, look, onshore wind energy is a bad idea. It's, it's, they've running, they're running out of places to put it. The opposition to onshore wind energy is enormous and growing all around the world. Offshore wind energy. Look, anytime you put anything in salt water, it's going to cost you a fortune, right? So, oh, you're going to put a big, you know, some massive wind turbine out in the middle of the ocean in salt water and tell me it's going to be cheaper or blah, blah, blah. No, it's bull. And yet, what have we seen in New York?

Yeah.

The envir, the environmentalists, the environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council, led by a woman named Kit Kennedy, no relation to Bobby Kennedy, they were the ones that pushing for offshore wind. Riverkeeper in New York, Andrew Cuomo, now running for New York mayor, uh, was it, went hand-in-hand with those groups to close Indian Point, the nuclear plant in Buchanan, New York, which is in our first documentary. It's a crime what they did there. This was a, from a, a footprint of one square kilometer. One square kilometer produced roughly an eighth of all the, a quarter of all the power in New York City.

Wow.

I mean, one out of every eight elevators, one out of every eight street cars was running off of just one, the reactor, just one reactor. And they closed it. Why? Because of this fear-mongering from the left and from these climate activists. But you're right. If, if, if they're serious about CO2 emissions, they have to get serious about nuclear. They won't. They refuse to.

Um...

There's some exceptions, but they're rare. They're out, and they get, and they get ostracized. People like Michael Shellenberger.

Right. And so, there are a few of the, the, the climate realists on the left, and that they, you know, the ecomodernists, they call themselves, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, you know, Alex Trembath, a lot of people are now saying, "No, we have to be pro-nuclear." Um, uh, oh, who wrote the Whole Earth Catalog? Um...

Long Now Foundation guy.

Uh, Stewart Brand. Yeah. Right. Um, among the more prominent ones. And, you know, I've been, I've been saying the same thing for 15 years: natural gas to nuclear, right? This is the way forward. But I think that there are a lot of reasons for that, you know, why we have to be serious about nuclear. Technological leadership is one of them. We can't seed this market to the Russians and the Chinese. Um, but I just want to jump back, and I'll make one quick point, and then I'll, I'll stop this long, uh, homily here on nuclear, although I could go on. If solar is so cheap, and solar is so great, and so on, why are the Chinese building more nuclear power plants than any other country in the world? If they're stupid, are they just? They must be stupid, the Chinese. But yet, what are they doing now? They're, I think they have 30 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity under construction today, more than any other country in the world. If solar was so great, why aren't they just building solar? Well, because they understand. I mean, this is a society run by engineers. China, it's clear.

So...

It is. I heard it put, um, this is a very, like, high-level, abstract way to think about the difference between China and the United States, but...

China is a society of engineers, dominated by an engineering mindset.

Yeah.

And in its governance, that they're...

Long-term thinking.

You have engineers. Um, and there's a lot of problems with that, including top-down social planning, engineering, society, stuff that is antithetical to individual liberty. But they're engineers. Like, "Oh, let's build things. Let's build stuff." And let's actually have...

They're damn good at it.

America, going back to the founding, is a country of lawyers. Our politicians are lawyers. Our presidents are often lawyers. Everything we do. Lawyers coat our country like bacteria.

Slime.

I mean, they really do. Everywhere you go.

And why are they lawyers? Because they couldn't do the math to get into engineering school.

But I mean, going back to the founding, the founders, there was a preponderance of lawyers. There was a sense, you know, standing out of the British common law. I love America. I think America's better than China. But this, we are renowned globally as being extremely litigious as a society in general.

Sure.

And even in the places that the, that left-wingers claim they love, like, um, Scandinavia, where...

They're actually less regulated than us in many respects, and more capitalist than us in many respects. Um, they are high-trust societies that are less litigious than we are.

Yeah.

They don't run into nearly as much red tape, nearly as much contract dispute as we do. Um, it seems like the lawyer blob is one of the forces standing in the way of, of, of nuclear rollouts, of the construction of a more, more housing supply. Um, the lawyer class, the lawyer mindset, and like the, the, like safetyism that comes along with that, the, the everybody's, everybody gets to have veto power over everything, NIMBY to the max, all the time. What role do you think that is playing in keeping, like, people that can see physics works and want to use physics to do things like generate power?

Sure. I, I'll answer first by saying I agree. You know, I will take all of the points you just made, and I'm pro-US and bullish on the US for, you know, and, and I love this country and proud to be an American. Um, and I think we are still, for all of our myriad faults, we're the best house in a bad neighborhood. Um, but it is true what you said, that we have, we're a society that's run, that's governed by lawyers, and that has come with, you know, uh, this stultifying effect throughout large parts of the society, particularly on permitting, building things. And I could argue it both ways. One is that that's, in many cases, a good thing, and that it's pretty deliberative, right? And...

You don't just get to plow through a neighborhood. You don't just get Moses-style. You don't just get to run over and bulldoze local communities, and that they have a say. And that's one of the things that I've seen over and over across rural America. I've seen it around the world. Local communities fighting wind and solar projects, fighting high-voltage transmission projects, saying, "We don't want this here," and "We have rights." And so, you know, that's where this glib notion about, oh, well, we'll just pave a whole province with solar panels, you know, the Bill McKibben, you know, Jesse Jenkins thing. We'll just, we'll just cover entire areas that are state-sized areas with solar and wind, and it'll be fine. Well, no. No. People live there, and they care, and everyone cares about what happens in their neighborhoods. I don't like that term NIMBY because I think it's pejorative. Everyone, everywhere cares about what happens in their neighborhood. And of course, they should, right? Because we have an ownership society, and that's one of the things that makes America such a unique place. It's based on this, this strong understanding and strong protection for individual property.

It is.

So, I, I take that point, but I just, you know...

What will we trade it for? You know, and, and, you know, we could talk about the debt, which is something else that really concerns me. But it's just, you know, but I, I think...

We're lurching in the right direction. And I have many criticisms of Donald Trump and and what he's doing, but on the energy front, I think, and Chris Wright and Doug Bergam are doing almost everything they're doing, I'm fully on board with 100%.

So, what is happening? What, you know, um Chris Wright appears to be an incredibly knowledgeable, energetic, like thoughtful, very clear spoken. Yeah. um I think fundamentally correct and and dispassionate and like he gets it like he clearly like understands physics and reality and the kinds of stuff we've talked about that isn't just a bunch of unicorn dream handwaving but reality like we need to have affordable energy if if cost of living is a concern in this country the input into everything being cheaper is better for cost of living um what what's the Trump administration doing? What what what are things that are being done? What has happened so far this year that you that you like and what what what is the scope of action for them in general? Like how much how much can they do in the time they've got right now?

Well, let's start with offshore wind. Um they have gone straight after the offshore wind grift and thank I mean I could almost kiss Trump for that alone. I mean truly and you know and I like I said I have many criticisms of what he does and how he acts but that alone I just think is is is so refreshing and so um needed because the Biden administration just effectively gave and almost all foreign corporations these these permits to build offshore wind projects in known locations where the North Atlantic right whale habitat known habitat of the North Atlantic right whale which is a critically endangered species. I mean, imagine imagine if the oil and gas industry was trying to do something similar. The CR Clubers and the NRDC and the rest of them would be they'd be screaming bloody murder, but but because it was offshore wind, oh well, you know, climate change, you know. So, yeah, we we'll let Norway build a bunch of whale killers and and also destroy the Jersey uh the Jersey shoreline and the viewshed and the coastline and the seascape and the fishing. As a northeasterner that spent every summer on the Jersey shore, Yeah. I I know firsthand the the the people that are like it's just it's just outrageous. I mean outrageous on so many different levels. I mean is it dead? Is that is that project dead?

There I think there are only now one or two offshore wind projects now that are still going forward. So on that alone I think the Trump administration has just been I mean just fantastic and uh fully supportive of that. But let's go through the list. You know they're opening more uh federal land to oil and gas drilling. Absolutely. including in Alaska in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and in areas that are known as naval resource ra naval reserves that were identified as areas that were designed for energy security in the US. They're they're planning to allow drilling. Will that happen? We'll see. Keeping coal plants open. Um relaxing regulation around drilling. Um uh you know that's on the hydrocarbon side. We have to keep our coal plants open. I'm I'm pro natural gas, but we need energy diversity and we have more coal than resource than any other country in the world by far. We're not the Saudi Arabia of coal. We're the whole OPEC of coal. I mean, it's just not even close. So, why wouldn't we burn our own coal? But second, I think, you know, so those the coal, the drilling, natural gas, they've been pro- natural gas, uh pro uh building pipelines. But I if I had to say one thing that I think is the absolutely essential and Chris Wright has been part of this. I think it was in August, it might have been July now where the president signed four executive orders on nuclear power in the Oval Office. And those four executive orders designed to speed the roll out of the domestic nuclear fleet and ex and accelerate the development and deployment of nuclear reactors in the US are the most important endorsements of nuclear power by sitting US presidents since Eisenhower's Adams for peace speech in 1953 and we have seen pretty remarkable progress in that regard. And you know, I'm very sober about the roll out of nuclear, and there are a lot of hurdles that have to be overcome, but to have the sitting president of the United States become so passionate and so pro- nuclear is potentially transformative. And now we have to get in gear. But that I think if I look at all of this and now they're responding on on on uh strategic elements in China and some other things. But if I have to look at the totality of all of it, that endorsement and that focus on nuclear reforming the nuclear regulatory commission getting moving on nuclear uh power is I think will historically I'll make a prediction here historically be seen as a landmark move.

In I don't remember the exact year of the China Syndrome uh movie and Jack Jack Lemon too, right? Yeah, Jack Lemon. I love Jack Lemon. Jane Fonda could uh not so much. I can't unsee this. Yeah, it's like Hanoi Jane, you know, being a propagandist for North Korea. But even more recently, there's a video of Jane Fonda on a Zoom call at the start of CO gleefully talking about how the lockdowns and catastrophe were this incredible moment for the left to seize power and put our ideas into action. I mean, it is so transparently diabolical. It is shocking and it's just worth people knowing that this is who these people are, right?

Um, but what is the security the legitimate security concern around nuclear power if we if we put nuclear plants all across this country or are we creating a black swan risk of some kind of some yet to ever occur nuclear calamity? Are we setting up the potential for um uranium theft and proliferation of could be nuclear materials for weapons? You know there there there was a very conscious scar.

So let me flip that John. So what you're asking about is security broadly. I mean energy security everyone's fears around nuclear. But let me flip that and say well what if we don't build it? What if we don't build nuclear power plants? Our grid is less secure. How do we assure the security of our most important energy network, arguably the most important network in our entire society? Well, we need diverse fuel sources to make sure that the grid stays resilient and affordable and reliable. So, if we if the you know the other way to flip that question is, well, if we don't build it, we could well be truly again totally screwed, right? Because we're making our grid less and less resilient. So if we think about nuclear power as a key to our long-term affordability, resilience, reliability of our most important energy network, then let's compare that risk of not doing compared to the risk of doing.

Okay. So let's so let's talk cost benefit analysis. Yeah. So let's talk about that risk of doing. Okay. You mentioned Fukushima earlier. I've been to Fukushima. I was there uh very fortunate. It was now uh two years ago almost two and it's almost three years ago.

So there was a tsunami. Set set the stage what happened at Fukushima very quickly. Sure. So everyone knows that and associates associates the the failure and the the inundation of the plant with radiation leaks, massive radiation leaks, etc. So there was there was a just there was a hurricane tsunami or tsunami that that hit Japan and and it was 40 it was 15 m high and the standby generators at at what was the problem at at at at at Fukushima the power plant lost power. So nuclear power plants you have to have power running. So you keep the water the way the design was of the water it was a water cooled reactor you have to keep the water moving in the reactor otherwise they overheat and what we saw they exploded hydrogen exploded um and then you had this you know spread of radiation but here's the here's the reality at Fukushima not a single Japanese person died of radiation not a single one not one.

Has there been increased rates of death or anything like that? Nope. There were two people at the plant who died. They drowned. They evacuated the entirety of of Fukushima Prefecture. It's an odd place to go because there are no people there. But it's um it was remarkable to go and actually see it and understand, oh, now I get it. Now I understand what happened to physical place, right? And it was the the it was caused by the fact that they put the standby generators at 7 meters above sea level and the tsunami hit at 15. And they didn't count on that. If they put them up higher, we wouldn't even know the name Fukushima, right? Because they would have kept the power running at the power plant. But this this irrational fear that's been created because of the accident at Fukushima around radiation, that's the problem.

Well, it goes back before that, right? Because it's our fear of radiation that's the danger, not the radiation itself. And this is what these scallowags, these people, these unmentionable NOS's at the Sierra Club and NRDC and the rest of them, Andrew Cuomo, have been fmenting fear around radiation now for decades and give them the China syndrome. Oh, it's it's going to kill us all. Well, then I I get it, right? You can hype it because it's colorless, odorless, you can't smell it, can't feel it, can't taste it. And so it's this been but it's been viewed as this bogeyman that remember Spider-Man touch you know had a radioactive something right you know that the radiation is somehow dangerous the reality is that this this fear-mongering around radiation has been the problem and is the problem and that the that and we have to move past this irrational fear of radiation to move toward an understanding that we're being we're being hit by radiation all the time and that the amount Sunlight Right. And that the amount or even from from the ground. But this idea that we're that the radiation from nuclear power is dangerous and somehow is connected to the bomb. This this is the problem.

What's the chance? What's the connection between proliferating nuclear power and the potential for mushroom clouds? Well, it's almost zero effectively, right? Because when you create a nuclear b nuclear weaponry, you have to have very highly enriched uranium. the the nuclear power plants that we have now in the US run on uranium that's been enriched to about 5%. You can't make a bomb out of that. I mean, you could blow it up and you could create some radiation around it, but you know that that that's not an issue. But it's when one that the left has been very effective at at promoting fear and fear sells. You know, no one ever got elected by saying things are going to be fine. No, it's like, oh god, be be careful because the other guy's terrible. You got to elect me. I mean Paul Erlick Paul Erlick in his in a paper I think said he he opposed nuclear energy because giving because its potential to be cheap and abundant would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. He's referring to humanity that we're too stupid and dangerous to have cheap.

Yeah. We shouldn't have we shouldn't have cheap energy and and you know and that's been I it was Loveven or Erlic or Amory Levens you know but the same ilk the same idea that we we're using too much energy and my response to that is well I'm sure you use way too much energy. I always use just the right amount. You know it's like everyone else is wasting it. I never waste it. And so the idea is, you know, that we would use too much energy is, I think, is just disgusting on a whole lot of levels be particularly given the level of grinding energy poverty that still exists all around the world. And so I I look at the nuclear power sector. We we've seen a strong resurgence of interest, a strong resurgence. We mentioned Fermy America, you know, their plans to build SMRs and nuclear plants in Amarillo. uh there is a very robust segment of the US economy or the the nuclear sector on focused on small modular reactors. Um my son Jacob and I have been working on a project there we call it uh SMR intelligence US. There are now 33 companies in the US now developing small modular reactors and it's just a remarkable remarkable potential there. But now we got to get busy. We got to build the damn things.

What uh is an SMR? What is a small modular reactor? What makes it different? because I do what I understand to be the case is that the current sort of um typical nuclear power plant in the US is about a thousand megawatts and it's also like a 50 plus year old design right there like I like the the this became an area where you don't go to school to do to do this because we haven't built one of these things in like 60 plus years. Yeah. So there's like a supply chain knowledge vacuum in being good at this. Is that is that fair to say? Yes, that is supply chain, labor, you know, um uh uranium, fuel, supply chain, a lot of factors, parts, knowhow, all of these things are of a piece um in bringing the nuclear sector back in the US. So the US nuclear sector didn't wither over a year or two, it withered over decades. So it's going to take decades to bring it back. But let's talk about how it could come back and let's talk about recent history. So we live in Texas. There are four power reactors made commercial power reactors in Texas. They're all about a thousand megawws each. So there are two at Comanche Peak and two at South Texas project. And we live in Austin. The city of Austin owns 16% of South Texas project. Those nuclear reactors now for te for the city of Austin are producing some of the cheapest power that Austin Energy sells. Like 2 cents a kilowatt hour, 3 cents maybe. So incredibly cheap. Now that they're up and running, the most recent nuclear plants that have been built in the US were Vogal 3 and four in Georgia. Those were a similar size about 1,000 or,00 megawatts AP-1000 uh designs, but they were staggeringly overbudget and overtime. They cost was roughly twice as much as expected. Ended up about $35 billion. Um, and they took twice as long to build as expected.

But this is one of the crit criticisms of nuclear is that it's it's not really cheap when you Right. Yeah. take into account the cost of building. So the the the idea around small modular reactors and my daughter Mary and I just recently made a a mini documentary called Shrinking Fision in which with the the and the race to build small modular reactors. We visited a company here in Austin called Alo Atomics. They're on the way out to the airport from here. Um their plan is to build a reactor that's 10 megawatts and then if you need 300 megawatts we'll build we'll build you know we'll build 30 of them for you, right? and they're going to build them in a factory, right, and then churn them out, right, and manufacture nuclear reactors. So that's been the design idea around SMRs is that instead of building a massive thousand megawatt project, we'll build ones that are SMRs generally are from like 1 to 300 megawatts. 300 megawatts is kind of considered the the the cutoff. But that's the idea is that instead of building, you know, one big project that's cost, you know, enormous amounts of capital, has to be built on site and might be a bespoke design, we'll build a slew of them, we'll we'll do a lot of the the production in a factory where we can stamp not stamp them out, but produce them quickly and then deploy them. So what is encouraging in the SMR market in addition to this enormous amount of of startup activity and capital going into it um into the market is that you've got big companies and the big tech companies hyperscalers, you know, Amazon, Meta, uh Google, Microsoft all looking at this and saying well we want part of that and so they're putting money into SMRs. Amazon just recently announced a deal with Xenergy uh company that's developing a uh gas cooled reactor. In fact, X Energy has a deal here in Texas at Sedrift with DAO to build gas cooled reactors at their chemical plant on the coast. So there is an enormous amount of capital, enormous amount of interest flowing toward this sector. And the challenge now is okay, we got to build the damn things and let's get on with it. And some of that's regulation, some of that's fuel. Uh I think the capital is there but I the Trump administration is heading the right direction. Uh but now the challenge is who's going out of that 33 companies in the US and another 30 globally. Who's going to win? You know, we don't need 30 companies. We need three four maybe five.

There are submarines, US submarines powered by nuclear power and aircraft carriers and um and so we have already deployed in our military all around the world small nuclear nuclearpowered things. Sure. Um what prevented that technology from being deployed already? Like if if we could build a nuclear a nuclear engine for a aircraft carrier and do that. I don't even I don't even know when those first came online. It's probably 30 plus years that we've had those things. What um what's stopped that from being something like Oh, no. Our town has one of those. It has, you know, like it has a nuclear sub thing that we've got at a power plant right nearby. There it is. Yeah. It's powering the entire town. My energy bills are $10. like how how did that not happen? Why why do we It's really It really is a a a great point. The US Navy is the arguably the best nuclear power operator in the world by far. And I think the first nuclear submarine was am I testing my history now? It's the Nautilus launched in the 50s right by by Rickover. I mean with the US Navy has been very effective at at building, deploying and utilizing nuclear reactors and nobody's had it done it better. Um, and in fact, one of the companies now that's vying in the SMR space is BWX Technologies. Well, they that's the old Babcock and Wilcox. They've been building reactors for the US Navy for decades. So, this idea of using SMRs is not new. Um, and it's been used, as you point out, on uh for shipborne power uh power plants and and propulsion. Um, the Russians are one of the points that I've been making in my writing and I presented at the Texas Nuclear Summit here with my friend Ray Rothrock a few weeks ago. China and Russia are way ahead of the US when it comes to this deployment of SMRs. The Russians are using uh reactors that they're using on their ice breakers in in in nuclear and floating nuclear power plants. So they're deploying, they already have one deployed in uh PC in Chakotka in Siberia uh a nuclear barge that's se producing 70 megawatts of nuclear power for the town and they're building four more floating nuclear power plants that are using the same reactor as they use on their ice breakers. So, um, as I said, you know, the the technical challenges are known, but we have a a techn a technology, uh, race with R, Russia and China, and right now they're kicking our butts.

What do you do with the waste? Chuck it in Yucka Mountain. What am I What about your backyard? I mean, but this is one of the things you got. You got like a radioactive waste byproduct that lasts. It remains unhealthy to be near for thousands of years or something, right? Not a problem, John. It's not a problem. Why not? You know, this is something that the left has been using as and it's a canard. The the French have are produced. They they get 70 to 80% of their electricity from nuclear power. If the French can handle their waste, we can too. The French are not that much smarter than we are, right? And their food might be a little better, but if they can do it, we can do it. But the problem is this fear-mongering around the idea of nuclear waste. Well, it's depleted fuel rods. I don't I don't even really like to think of it as waste, but we went I I mentioned Indian I think I mentioned Indian Point, the nuclear power plant in New York um earlier. It's 40 miles north of Time Square uh 45 miles by by by the crow flies. Is Indian Point now shut down? It is now shut down. When did it shut down? Uh last reactor closed I think in 2021 and it was a criminal act. what NRDC did and what Andrew Cuomo did with the a willing assistance of Riverkeeper and and unfortunately Robert Kennedy Jr. demonizing that plant, they shut it down. CO2 emissions in New York went up. Duh. Prices went up. Duh. Yeah, of course.

But well, the left is really the leftist leftwing ideology is really exceptional at this. They're great critics and they're great critics of the disasters caused by their prior actions. It's like we got an affordability crisis. Let's have a communist be mayor. Yeah. Why is it unaffordable? Uh, super progressive regulations on top of literally everything. Yeah. So, at Indian Point, I've seen this myself. They have the the old fuel rods from the reactors are put in these metal uh these big concrete casks. It's called dry cask storage. And I don't know, I'm looking at this room. You know, they'd be maybe uh 15 feet in diameter and 25 ft high and weigh 100 tons. They're not going anywhere. Osama bin Laden's not going to put that in the back of his Prius. I mean, you know, they're I mean, they're they're they're they're releasing heat. They're decaying over time. So, this idea that the waste is a problem is a manufactured problem. Now, is can it be solved? Yes, it could be solved immediately by Congress, but Congress doesn't want to deal with it because it's a it's a you know, oh, we don't want it here. How did Barack Obama get elected? Well, several reasons. One was he did a deal with Harry Reid from Nevada. The senator from Nevada said, "I'll back you if you kill Yuckah Mountain." What did he do? Reed backed him. One of the first things Obama did when he got into office, he killed Yucka Mountain.

So Yucka Mountain was the waste repository in Nevada. And Nevada, Nevada said, "Well, we don't want it." Well, okay, we could move that waste to Yucka Mountain. We could move it to Oakidge. We could move it to Hanford. We could move it to other sites that are federally controlled in the US if we had the political will to do it. But I think the the waste issue is not a polit it's not a technical problem. It's not a scientific problem. was a political problem. Doesn't that put And I don't even think it's a problem. I think it's just something that's been a manufactured issue that really doesn't doesn't ultimately make that much difference. Now, we have a lot of SMRs built. We're going to have to have more coordination. The federal government's going to have to be involved and that is, you know, one of the issues that the nuclear industry is going to have to deal with. If you're going to make it happen, we have to have strong federal backing.

Yeah. Let's dig into that for a little bit. So, let's imagine that we start having factories that can use the power of um reproducibility and the assembly line and all the stuff that Henry Ford unlocked for us. Yeah. The assembly line, build it in a factory, have tools that make things cheaper, faster, better, do more with less. So, now we can build these small reactors, popping them out, putting them in towns. They have these expended um fuel cells, right? What happens with them then in that world where it's more decentralized and there's a lot of them and you say we need to have the federal government involved. What does that mean? Why? Like what what is the what does that world look like to be effective and safe? Yeah. And deliver on its promise? Sure. Well, let me back up. I've already talked about China and Russia. Why have they been so effective at developing and deploying uh not just nuclear reactors but small modular reactors? It's well Ross Adam that is the state champion of the Russian government. They're they the government you know is involved in every part of Ross Adam right in China National Nuclear Corporation. These are state controlled or state funded or or or both entities because the state government the federal government in those those countries sees nuclear energy as a culture as a strategic imperative and so they are fully behind it. I don't think we have to have that similar kind of backing in the United States but we have to have deep bipartisan backing from Congress and the White House that's decadal in in its support. And we only have the Democrats finally finally finally after roughly 50 years of opposition coming around on nuclear because they realize they can't be anti-nuclear and you know making beating the drum on climate change. So but that's a hard road to hoe. I mean, let's be clear, but that, you know, coming back to your question about the fuel, we're going to have to have some federal entity, some coordinating body that will deal with the civilian nuclear waste stream. And that is going to have to be reckoned with and that will take time. It will take money and it's going to take political support. And we are in a government where there's a lot of polit political cowardice. But I'm I'm hopeful on this front, John, because I I see that the the the tenor of the arguments and the and the political support for for nuclear is on the upswing in a big way.

The um I I want to push on this just a little bit more. Sure. Which is I want to understand like when you say like that seemed a little vague in that it's like we need political support. Okay. But to do what? like what's the issue? So, all right, Austin Energy in a more libertarian society be fully private. Texas is kind of weird hybrid. Let's imagine some other town that's that's actually got like the more open markets here in Texas. So, a private energy company buys one of these new small modular reactors, installs it, and is now kicking butt. Everybody's buying their buying their electricity from this company. um where does the government and political issue come in other than getting out of the way and preventing it that like I want to understand the roadblocks because there's like all these roadblocks to deploying a technology that we already know works and is in our submarines right so is it that well this fuel is indeed dangerous unless it's handled in a very careful way and we need to have a lot of layers of of checks and balances to make sure there's no ch that there's like this chain of title of the fuel like I want to understand like what's at the heart of the precautionary principle being cranked to 11 yeah well and that's a good point and I think as you're just as you're talking about it there I was thinking okay well what would that entity be I think it naturally would be something within the department of energy right I don't think we need to craft some new entity it would be the DOE that would manage this because the department of energy is already giving some fuel to some of these nuclear startups. So for instance at Abene Christian University here in Texas, Nura Resources is building a a reactor that will be a test reactor for their uh salt sodiumbased reactor. Um and they're going to be getting some of the fuel they need from the Department of Energy. So, but let's just stick with Nurus saying and say they build it. Then they go and build commercial reactors and they, you know, they build 15 of them. Well, the fuel doesn't last forever. It gets spent. It it is used up and then they end up with, you know, a pile of stuff, we'll call it, that somebody has to manage. Well, you're not just going to tell, you know, Hallebertton to say, "Oh, we trust you. You go deal with this." No, I think it's going to have to be the DOE either overseeing I'll just stick with Hallebertton or the DOE with a with its own entity of people saying we're going to go out and collect this and then we're going to store it at Hanford or we'll still store it at uh what's the place in New Mexico? Uh waste isolation pilot project near Carlsbad um or Pantex here in Texas. you know, there are places they can move it and keep it and but I don't think given the the scale of these reactors that they're going to want to just leave it on site. Um, so that's that and and this is interesting to talk about because I haven't really given a lot of thought to that other part of the we're just trying to build them right now. So, you know, it's going to be, you know, a good 10 years before we're facing the problem of significant quantities of waste.

What about the sources of the fuel of the uranium? Yeah. how because one of the things when I think about um oil, natural gas, coal, like those have always been industries that private companies have been the have done. Like, you know, if you were an Italian immigrant in the 1910s, you came here, they're like, "Go to the coal. Go to the like, you know, the coal mine in Pennsylvania and you went and you dug coal and it was kind of a horrible job, but it was better than being in Sicily and starving to death." And there's a company that's taking the coal, putting it in a train, moving it, burning it. Yeah. Producing energy. Same thing with oil. Oil companies, they drill, they build rigs off the in the water. Yeah. Like you you you I kind of And again, I'm not some expert in all of that, but I I do know like all of that has been able to be done by private enterprises in a way that on the whole has been safe. Yeah. You know, there's oil spills, there's nothing's perfectly safe. Life's not perfectly safe. we're all going to die at some point. But on the whole, that's all true. There is this thing though with, oh well, where do we get the uranium and how do we make sure it's not getting used for bombs? And you know, I want to give give the devil its due that there is some broader some of the some of the anxiety around this is connected to things that Sure take a heightened level of security and checks and balances and fail safes. relative to oil pipelines and coal power plants and natural gas lines. Sure.

So, let's zoom out and talk about Miss Placky, my chemistry teacher at Mish Kelly High School in Tulsa, 1976, would be laughing right now for me to say, let's look at the periodic table, John. But let's look at the periodic table and look at uranium, which in this case is a not they call them critical minerals. I call them strategic elements, but it's a strategic element. We need more uranium. Right now, the US is importing effectively about 25% of the nuclear fuel it needs from Russia. Russia is not our friend, right? We're getting the balance of it from Canada, uh, Australia, and maybe from, oh, whereas in Africa, I think, but nevertheless, that's uranium, but it's not the only strategic element in the periodic table. And I I've published this before. China has a strangle hold on roughly 33 strategic elements in the periodic table including all of the rare earth elements dproium lantham neodymium misamarium uh lithium uh lithium is not a a rare earth but it's but it's another strategic element so to get back to your question so the US now going back to the government issue yes we're going to have to get in gear on the mining of uranium we're going to have and it's interesting how quickly some of this has happened just recently where uh Trump has gone to Australia and met with Albanessi and said we're going to work together on critical on critical minerals on strategic elements. He should be doing the same with Mark Carney in Canada. Although I don't know, you know, he's this week he's pissed off at the Canadians. Next week he won't. How dare you make an ad with Reagan against me. I know my feelings are hurt. I'm going to take my toys and go home. But what did he do in Japan with the new with the new prime minister there? I can't remember her name, but um the Margaret Thatcher of Japan. Let's hope the iron lady. um but doing a you know saying we're going to coordinate on rare earths. So the same is going to have to happen with uranium, right? The strategic elements as a whole, I think of uranium as only one of them. Antimony, um, tungsten, um, copper, um, all of these things where China now has a and andor Russia has nickel, uh, has a very clear market advantage. the US is going to have to with federal backing whether it's for loans with subsidies with guarantees with floor prices um uh going to have to be actively involved to counter the effect of the mercantalism that we are being subjected to by the Chinese. So uranium but just to jump back to the uranium specifically yeah we can rely on the Australians and potentially the Canadians for the the uranium itself. It has to be refined and it has to be fabricated. So, uh, you have companies like Centrus here in the US. They are, uh, doing uranium enrichment. We're going to have to, uh, ramp that up. That's going to take backing by the government, whether it's in subsidies, loan guarantees, floor prices, etc. But again, you know, this is a strategic industry for the US as a whole. And I like you, I'm I'm believer in capitalism and free markets, but there's some things where we cannot rely on the free market to solve the problems that we're facing. And China has very clearly demonstrated, particularly when it comes to rare earth elements, oh yeah, free market. Yeah, that's funny. We're going to get the government behind these. And now they have effectively a monopoly on the rare earth elements.

I um one of the things that There's a long answer. It's a good point with Miss Placky, the periodic table to uranium to You covered the whole gamut. Well, well, actually what it what it made me think about as we kind of come start to wind to the end of uh our time is this is touching on something that it's it's like broad and deep and hard to grapple with at the intersection of like the basic needs of life and then all the way up to politics and philosophy and and competitiveness of the US over the long term. our ability to think long term which the Chinese are doing and we haven't been and that I think that that's the key is that we have to pivot from this kind of lawyer you know capitalist mindset of the next quarter to the more long-term thinking of the next 5 years next 10 years next 20 years and that's what I hope in you know in talking about this been invigorating for me to think about the grid and where we are today and where we need to be and how we think about our long-term interests in as the us. We can't, you know, I think we have to move past this idea that the market is going to solve all of this, which I know sounds hard, but it's but I think that that's simply the case. We're dealing with mercantalist countries that now don't care about us and how do we counter that? Well, we're going to have to be very focused and very clear with a long-term vision about how we maintain our energy security because that's the base of all of our our our our entire society. And it's not just about the electric grid, but the electric grid is in the central part of that. I mean, this has been one of the things that it's easy to um and I'm grappling with this. I don't have some grand insight on this, but I've been looking at and and and sort of digging into the the issues that surround speech and censorship and tech and the past this past period of the censorship industrial complex. And one of the things that it's forced me to think about more is all of this tech we've talked about, we started this conversation with AI. These industries were fundamentally kicked off by the military, right? It's like Texas Instruments here. There's a Texas Technology Corridor component. Um, uh, Silicon Valley. These were places that like they they are where they are historically because of military installations, because of World War II. And I'm not saying like we have the government to thank for everything that we have. That that's not that's not true. But it's not entirely false. And we have this intertwining here. And you're talking about this now that we have an intertwining of of the military and intelligence with with AI with with satellites with because how do we have all this how do we have all this global communications? Well, we have satellites. How do we have GPS? Well, we have satellites. How do we have satellites? Well, because we have a military-industrial complex that builds rockets and pays SpaceX to put satellites in the air, right? So, we can't, and I say this as someone who's a fairly radically libertarian when it comes to economics and what should the government's role be? And I I'm inclined towards zero as an ethic. I don't like coercion. I don't like using guns to force people to do things. I like persuasion. I like human respect. Like, I'm Oh, if I respect you, I don't point a gun at you. I don't tax you. I try to convince you to do the thing I want. So that's my default. I also think it's moral. It's free because you can't make a moral choice with by force. But at the scale of history and countries and anth and like the anthropology of of humans, these things are all intertwined. You're talking about energy and our grid being essential and nuclear being a really important part of how we move forward. And that's deeply intertwined with like global supply chains and deals with governments to try to make sure that we have what we need. And then there's other countries that also want it. So how has grappling with this essential tool, this essential input into modern life in America and around the world, how has it shaped the way you think about politics and society? Like how has it shaped your sense of what's right and what's good? Because we have a lot of conflict around energy sources. Sure. Like the Middle East and oil. It's so literally elemental what you're describing and I just want to hear your take. It's interesting when you you know when you were talking there about the systems that we depend on, right, and take for granted. And I mentioned earlier we have it's actually more than 3,000 different electric providers in the US. So you we live in Austin, Austin Energy's and municipally owned utility. There are about 2,000 of them electric utilities in the US. There are handful like Huntsville, Alabama that their municipal utility does electricity, gas, and power. Uh electricity, gas, and water. Right. It's remarkable the system that we live in here in the US. And so I mentioned municipally owned utilities. There also about 850 electric cooperatives and I talked to a lot of electric co-ops in my speaking business and I travel a lot and very fortunate to do so. And then you have a couple hundred investor own utilities. You have TVA and and Bonavville and the the federal government entities. So why do I why do I bring that up? Because as you were talking, I'm thinking, oh, the government systems we depend on, they include these little electric cooperatives, some of them that only have like 2 or 3,000 meters, but they're self-governing entities in small towns in Nebraska, in Kansas, in Oklahoma, and they work and they're funded and by their owner members. They depend on, you know, local um, you know, uh, people to sit on their boards and be their governance entities and make power as cheap and affordable, as affordable, reliable, and resilient as they can for their town, right? Which is amazing, right? And then they deal with other co-ops and they form cooperatives with gen, you know, generation and tech and transmission cooperatives and then they're part of this broad group of co-ops that cooperate and then they interface with the investor own utilities and they all somehow work together and I only bring that up because your broader question about was how does this all work and where are we all going? I I think while I acknowledge your points about the market being, you know, the solution for a lot of things, Lyndon Johnson was a great proponent of co-ops. And when he was promoting co-ops in the 30s in here in Texas, he was called a communist, right? But cooperative to me is one of the prime examples of democracy at work in America. I mean, at a very fundamental level. So to get to your, you know, kind of I think where you were going with that is so how do we twin this? How do we make it all work together? And how does it change my ideas? I love seeing the co-ops. I love the people. I love farmers. Love ranchers. These guys that work on these co-op boards because they're just I've spent a fair amount of time with farmers and ranchers over the years and they're they've got it as a city kid. It's like it's it it opens your eyes. It widens your horizons. They're they're they're real people. But it's we have we have to continue what we're doing and the great success story that is the American government and the American system. But we're going to have to adapt this disfused system of governance and politics to this new global reality. And that's going to require more robust federal um federal leadership. And I'm think we can thread the needle, John. I'm I'm very hopeful for the US despite all these problems that we face. And I think that, you know, we're going to bum we're going to bungle our way through it. But I think there are things that are obvious now that are imperative. And it's something that I I give Trump credit for it. I think that his team sees the security needs, sees the imperatives ahead. And you know, I just I they have a lot to do and a lot to get done. And um what I'm hoping is that they can continue on that momentum because I think that the US particularly on the energy front we have a lot of advantages and we have to maintain those advantages because if we don't um then we're going to become also ran in the global global scheme. Do you think the future is more centralized or more decentralized? Because when I hear the way you're describing nuclear, there's an element of it that sounds more centralized and has to be. And then but then when I think about I mean this may maybe and this this might be a benefit of things like solar even though they're all made in China of being potentially more decentralized even if it's expensive but it's expensive but decentralized. Yeah. So that's got to factor in too I how do you think about the balance between because you're describing an ecosystem that sounds quite decentralized and there's a lot of resiliency in that. Yeah. But I think it's both. I mean I think eventually I mean this is one of the the genius things about the American system is that you know we focus too much on Washington. We just do you know and it sucks up a lot of attention for but my trash still gets picked up. The library is still open. you know that things that you know the federal government doesn't really affect me that much. So one of the genius things about the US system is that we have both this decentralized system that is part of our federal democracy, right? And we have a concentration of power in Washington. So I I think that it doesn't concern me that we're going to have to concentrate some energy and power and economic influence in Washington around entities that are going to make nuclear power work. I think that's just inevitable, right? Because it's going to take the oomph of the federal government to get that market going and allow it to to continue to flourish on the upstream side on fuel, mining, uh, strategic elements and and the downstream after, you know, for the waste, etc. and and regulation. But I I just think that it's, you know, if you combine that ability and that history of the decentralized system in America with a robust government at the federal level that knows its place, then you know I think that's golden and but you know I don't Dr. Pangloss here we face a lot of challenges. We got to deal with the debt. We got to deal with you know an underclass. We've got to deal with you know infrastructure all of these things at once. But you know what else is new? We always have challenges here. this uh this show. Am I am I sound am I too optimistic? I you know what I like I think it's good to be hopeful. I certainly am. I wouldn't we wouldn't call this show Dad Saves America if there was no point. I'm a dad. I got three great kids, Mary, Michael, and Jacob. Hi, Mary. Um so, you know, I ask this of every guest. Yeah. You know, the show the show's called Dad Saves America because I try to bring that lens to things. I think it's very easy to be in the abstract and to forget that we have to live our lives and take responsibility for our own actions and that's where we're going to find our happiness. And as a man and as a father being a dad is that role that is especially uh fulfilling and high impact like we helping to raise the next generation. They're going to go out and be the next leaders of the world or the next like degenerates if we don't do our jobs. How do you think more broadly, not just about being a dad, but how do you think about your role in the American story? Just doing my best. You know, I'm I'm incredibly lucky to do what I do. I'm, you know, um I turned 65 this year and I what I do is my purpose and my passion talking about energy and power and the importance of electricity and I'm incredibly lucky to do what I do to travel around. I give a lot of public do a lot of public speaking meet a lot of people and talk about these issues and try and inform them or trying to increase their level of knowledge you know and that's key I think so you know if I had any you know closing messaging or you know ideas about the the future it's that encouraging people to know more about how their energy and power systems work understand energy and power read you know yeah I'm proud of my books read my books read you know follow people who know what they're talking about because the enemy is ignorance And the more we can have an informed electorate around the centrality, the essentiality of electricity to modernity, the the essentiality of these systems to our well-being, I I think the better off uh we're going to be. Robert Bryce, thanks for being on Dad Saves America. It's been it's taken too long to get you here, but I'm glad we got this time together. It's been my pleasure. Thank you.