Pirate Wires - We Need Nuclear NOW & Grindr Union Goes Wild | PIRATE WIRES EP#14 🏴‍☠️

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

EPISODE FOURTEEN: This week, the Pirate Wires crew is joined by Grant Dever, who makes the White Pill case for Nuclear Energy. Grant makes the case for nuclear and how we are making progress in the United States and around the world. Also on this episode, the Grindr Union that caused half the staff to be laid off, Zoomers Demand Work From Home, Memory Hole-ing of the insane C*vid policies, and the obsessive nature of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd. Featuring Mike Solana, Grant Dever, River Page, Sanjana Friedman Subscribe to Pirate Wires: https://www.piratewires.com/ Topics Discussed: https://www.piratewires.com/p/ca-senate-appropriations-approves-ab316 Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Grant Twitter: https://twitter.com/grantadever River Twitter: https://twitter.com/river_is_nice Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:40 - Welcome Grant Dever To The Show! 2:18 - The Grindr Union - How Their Demands Caused Half The Staff To Be Laid Off 12:00 - Do Zoomers Believe In The Entitlement To Work From Home? 17:25 - C*vid Was Crazy - The Memory Holing Is Almost Crazier 28:30 - Nuclear Energy - The White Pill Case 38:10 - TDS - They Secretly LOVE Him 48:25 - More Nuclear White Pill 59:15 - Sanjana Gives Us The Report From Observing California State Legislative Session - A Form Of Torture?! 1:06:50 - Progress In Nuclear - What Lies Ahead 1:11:29 - Thanks For Watching! Follow Grant Online! Pirate Wires Pod Every Friday!!

Grant, give us the white pill on Newfoundland, America. I want to be celebrating. We're about to build like 100 gigawatts of these things. I think solar, a world of solar energy is a worse world. It shows you where the closest person is who can give you a b****. A company that delights in queer joys. I don't know. It's got to be written into the law.

All of these people need to be in jail. She funded, was $20 million to, I would say, I mean, I'm going to use the word terroristic. They love him. I think it's like a weird, sick, almost fetishistic relationship that they have with each other. Welcome back to the pod guys. Today, we've got Grant Dever with us uh grant is an energy research fellow at the i just learned this foundation for research on equal opportunity the reason i just learned it is because i know grant as just an all-around poster on twitter i think that's where we met years ago i feel these introductions are getting kind of repetitive and that literally

every person i bring on is like this is just a friend of mine from Twitter. But that's just true. And also all my friends on Twitter are awesome. P.S. That's how I've met River. And Sanjana actually, no, Twitter came later, but she's also great on Twitter. Follow all of these people. But not until you listen to today's episode. We've got a bunch of cool topics. One very exciting topic, which is why Grant is actually here. We are going to talk about church bell music, perhaps from editorial. A white pill is the nuclear energy white pill. We've got some good news that we want to kind of unpack and break down and explain a lay of the land when it comes to nuclear. We've got the grinder union, which has ended in calamity. We have unions more broadly in tech, and we have a really, I would say, unexpectedly beautiful moment of Sanjana's while watching the last California

state legislative session, waiting for news on AB, what was it? What's the number? 316. This is the self-driving car bill that was just passed that effectively bans them, but has to be signed into law by Gavin Newsom, who's expected to be into it. It's a whole crazy thing. We'll get into it. All right. So the Grindr union. The Grindr union is something that I've wanted to write about for a while because it's this interesting canary in the mineshaft, so to speak, of a broader trend in tech of these kind of ridiculous attempts at unionization for a variety of things that do not track at all to what you might expect from a union, let's say. So historically, you're used to unionization attempts for things like pay or workplace fairness or something like this.

Increasingly, what you're seeing in tech, where you're seeing unionization at all. And again, this is like, or not again, I guess I should say this is not a huge trend. It's a sort of trend that's been amplified by the media, which loves this trend and really kind of wants to see unionization attempts everywhere. What you see increasingly from these new, this sort of new generation of union is an attempt to actively control the product in such a way as to shape the broader public. You might say it's a form of activist control, I guess. Again, these are small groups of people, but they tend to have an outsized voice amplified by the press. And one of the best ones is the grinder union. I think probably the best, I'm not, I want, River, you have done extensive research on the Grindr Union.

Why don't you just take us from the top? Okay, so the Grindr Union, they organize with the CWAwa that's communication workers of america they're the ones who are heading up a lot of these tech unionization efforts as you were kind of alluding to they're not really going after like better pay or like benefits or anything like that but the things that normally a union would pursue i can actually just read through the things they want. Essentially they want every, they wanted everything. Um, when they formed in,

in July, they wanted everything that they already had essentially, which is an extensive like benefit package, excellent health and wellness benefits. So their words, remote work, flexible hours, unlimited PTO,

gender affirmation, affirmation funds. so the like funders exchange, 401k matching, parental leave, and a company that delights in queer joy, both ours and the users. I don't know. I mean- It ought to be the law. It's got to be written into the law. Right. Exactly. Let's just pause. I mean, I guess there is a world in which maybe some people don't realize what Grindr Grindr is a gay hookup.

It's like it's a straight up sex app. It is a you log on to Grindr and it shows you where the closest person is who can give you a. That's the company that we're talking about. Yeah. It's like tapping underneath a bathroom stall, but like from your phone. It's disgusting all right so so they come in hot and they're like here are our demands for the union union attempt wasn't there

i thought you told me there was some political thing with the ceo was he maybe against a trans thing or i mean what was the hysteria uh jacobin did an interview with them. And so they were like, well, it sounds like that even a Jack and then was like, so why are you doing this? Um, they, uh, apparently a spark, um,

for people joining the union and signing union cards was the revelation that their K Republican boss had donated money to Glenn Youngkin. And so this is just all an elaborate way to like irritate their gay Republican boss had donated money to Glenn Youngkin. And so this is just all an elaborate way to, like, irritate their gay Republican boss, which I'm like, there's easier ways to do that. Like, I just, like, defend the Russian military. You know, like, there's easier ways to cope out it.

But they cast this as, like, support for anti-LGBTQ politicians on Twitter, so they're mad about the tweets too. And via political donations. By the way, their CEO, George Harrison, is like a gay guy from Georgia, the country, not the state. Where they're like, I don't know if the birthplace is Stalin. They're like hanging gay people in the woods or whatever. It's probably like actually. So they organized probably like actually... On behalf of this...

So, I mean, this is like... The context is like, we're mad at you. You gave some money to Yunkin. We demand a place that celebrates queer joy and gives us exactly what we already have in terms of benefits and pay.

But then, I mean, the response... it's sort of unclear if it was or was not a response, right? The company decides, great, separate conversation. Now, you guys have to come to work. Now, this is, and it's interesting, this actually is this enormous, And it's interesting. This actually is this enormous, I would say hilarious line that has been drawn throughout tech where employees really somehow, I mean, it's like you give a mouse a cookie. They've really decided many sort of strong, very vocal minority within tech has decided they are now after COVID entitled to permanent work from home. This was very much the ideology at work. Ideology, I don't know if it's ideology. It's very much a kind of thing that these people wanted, I would say.

That's now taken away. Grindr's like, you have to come into the office two days a week. There's a revolt. Absolutely not. This is a violation of our human rights status. Is this or is this not... I'm not as familiar with the union labor law type stuff. Was this retaliatory? Is it being seen as retaliatory? Is the grinder union suing? What is going on? Because fast forward, the union didn't prevent this. Half the the company left because of this because they did not want to go into the office so it seems like a a pretty significant victory for grinder a loss

for both the union and probably like western civilization um what what is the labor what is the labor situation well i mean if you quit you can't claim claim that you're retaliated against. You have to be fired or they have to discipline you in some way. Just changing company policy is not retaliation. They might try to claim that rhetorically, but I don't even think they would try legally. With the number of people that are leaving, it's likely that they're going to lose their majority on card check, which is like the process that you go into before they do an election.

With the NLRB, it's a long, complicated thing. But yeah, the Greider Union is probably over or near over. The thing is, it's so important to stress that these people did not actually want anything like they literally just did this to be annoying they said like okay so here's one thing they said speaking as allies of communities that are systematically impressed they want to sorter the queer experience um and they want a company built for queer people not to extract wealth from clear queer people it's like wait what so you don't want it to be a company that it's not a company you're not allowed to charge

queer people on the gay dating app is that kind of roughly where we're at i love it yeah honestly i'm sad they left grinder to be like an ngo something, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. Take that out of your mouth and start talking about two spirit people. I don't know what they want. Does it make money? Is Grindr actually a business? Grindr premium is like $20 a lot.

Not that I would know, but maybe at a previous time. What do you get? I met my husband on Grindr actually, so there are some heavy endings, but like, but yeah, they make a lot of money.

I mean, they have to, I mean, it's a very simple app and I feel like every gay guy I know has used it. They aren't using it right now. I guess, I mean, there are a couple of ways to take this.

We could, we could talk about the union stuff. I think it's sort of still brewing to a certain extent. I'm a little more interested now in, because I've got, I mean, I'm pretty sure, are the three of you, are you guys all Zoomers? I'm kind of a fake Zoomer. I'm like an elder Zoomer. I paved the way for them.

I get to joke that zoomers only know app like they don't actually know how to work computers but i'm just as online as 1994 november 1994 i was born in 96 and that's either the old the last that's either like the cutoff for millennial or it's either 95 or 96 i see like different numbers so i really don't know if i'm considered like the oldest i would just say youngest millennial or like the oldest and i would just say culturally i'm i'm often more zoomer than some of the zoomers like not in all respects but in like certain ones like i would identify as a zoomer whenever it's convenient you know like sometimes millennials

are just down bad right and you're like i don't want to be associated with this but other times they're like zoomers can't talk to strangers and i'm listening i am being told in group chats that zoomers are to blame for this issue and i feel i don't know it's a giant question mark is this is the are Do Zoomers specifically believe in the entitlement to work from home, to not go into an office? Is this like a Zoomer thing? I would just caveat by saying quickly, first, obviously, when we say Zoomer, we're talking about a class of Zoomers that are even capable of working from home. We're talking about a very specific upper class, sort of white collar Zoomer, where this is even an option. Obviously, if you're working in construction or something, or law enforcement, nursing,

like you're not teaching, well, I guess they fought for a long time. But generally speaking, there's a whole part of the population that this will never be a question. They obviously have to work in person. But for that rare and privileged few, is this a Zoomer thing? Or is it something bigger in society? I mean, people once spoke early on in the COVID days of a massive psychological shift. We were all going to be living in the cloud and working there. Has it happened? Or is it just some young Zoomers who are like, I don't want to go to the office, man? I think I can speak as the resident unequivocal Zoomer here.

I'm a 99, 1999 baby. I mean, I think that honestly, a lot of us just got used to remote stuff during the pandemic. And people kind of configured their lives. Like a lot of the grinder workers, they were saying they didn't want to move to more expensive cities basically because I think what was proposed was either you move to one of their hubs, which is like, you know, Chicago, LA, San Francisco, New York, whatever,

or take a severance package, which doesn't sound that bad actually. But I guess if you get used to working in like a really cheap small town making like an LA salary or something maybe it makes sense that you want to work remotely I mean personally I think that I don't get why a lot of zoomers want to work remotely like I think they have this fantasy of being in Ibiza like on a beach while they're like you you know, doing their JP Morgan finance job. But in actuality, that would suck probably because- I was surprised at the tenor of sort of Zoomer blame because it seems to me

like this is much more beneficial to stable couples with kids who are young, like young families is kind of what that feels like the group of people who really want remote to happen to me. For young people, I mean, you have every... You want to be in a big city if you're single, especially. It's like that's where you go to big cities to meet partners and then you want to be in person at your workplace so you can ascend the ranks. So it just seems like if you were a Zoomer, all of the opportunity would be in... Not as a Zoomer. If you're a young person, all of the opportunity, it seems to be in person work where you're ascending the ranks at work and also just in person, like in those big cities,

highest opportunity of networking and meeting your partner potentially. So I never really understood it, but increasingly it does seem to be, I mean, perhaps somewhat generational thing as well. Or like Sanjana said, maybe it's just people got used to it. I tend to think that people just got used to it. I feel really bad for Zoomers who often had their college years taken from them for those who were in college. It was just very fake. It's not at all the experience that I got to have, regardless of how you feel about

college education. Mine was really fun. I got to network and meet a lot of people. Well, they got to experience both. Sanjana, you were there at Stanford when they famously... So what was it? It was the piece. I forget where the piece came out, but it sort of laid down the social scene at Stanford,

which was famously open and fun and people mixing and houses and parties. Shut it down. And so you saw that and then you saw the shutdown and then you returned. I mean, what was your take? What was my take? Well, it's funny. When the pandemic broke, I was living in this really sort of like dirty co-op where we were all half-heartedly cleaning bathrooms and putting our hands in food as we mixed salads and stuff. And the pandemic happened. And the university university i don't think this is stanford

specific i think a lot of universities did this kind of took covet as an opportunity to restructure a lot of their housing and you know traditions and things like that and stanford really did that i mean the article you're referring to i think it's called stanford's war on fun or something like that but basically they classified all the dorms in this bizarre neighborhood system that didn't make sense because the neighborhoods were not contiguous. So you had a bunch of dorms like in these neighborhoods that had names like Neighborhood S, Neighborhood T. And they sort of relied on the fact that a lot of the ways that crazy traditions got passed down, like there used to be this tradition called full moon on the quad where everyone would make out on the quad on the first full moon of February or something. And of course, that's not COVID safe or whatever. But they relied on COVID restrictions being in place. And then the incoming class of freshmen, of course, didn't know about the tradition. And now I don't think it exists anymore. And then the incoming class of freshmen, of course, didn't know about the tradition. And now I don't think it exists anymore.

How crazy was COVID? I'm sorry, just brief aside. The idea that there was a moment in time where it was like, stay in the house. Do not touch anybody. Kissing a stranger? Insane. Really crazy. Traumatic, some would say, if I were to adopt the language of the enemy.

Against queer joy. Certainly is in violation of the principles of queer joy um glad it's over uh sorry we'll wrap that up i didn't mean to cut you off oh yeah no it was just i mean it was a shit show honestly um i don't think stanford's the exception again but like the before and after of my experience there pre-covid and after after covid it was just this weird administrative state where we had these completely insane rules. Like at one point, you had to wear a mask to class, but you could take it off when you were talking. And then you had to put it back on.

I mean, it was just all this shit that we've all kind of forgotten about. Like all the COVID contradictions we've forgotten about, probably because we're traumatized or something or we're mad at ourselves. There's been a widespread memory holing of it. I think it's the only way to not hate your neighbor. It was such an extreme event. And you kind of can't, I mean, how do you sit with the fact that there was a massive group of people who were demanding something like vaccine mandates,

who were demanding something like vaccine mandates, like forcible, coercive vaccination, for example, that's a hard thing to grapple with as a country. You have half of the people who really just completely dehumanized the other half. Actually, I guess both halves dehumanized the other half. And that was an intensely vitriolic moment. And I think the memory holing is just a natural human reaction to trying to kind of get past something. A little concerning because it's like, you don't want to be repeating the past. And I am convinced that we're going to. I think that there's almost no way there's not another pandemic. And I just don't think we've learned any really important lessons.

But I guess even while I don't love the impulse to memorial, I kind of, yeah, just on a human level, I get it. Yeah, I think there's also a lot of, there will be a bigger backlash, I think, this time, though, because so many people were radicalized. There will be a bigger backlash, I think, this time, though, because so many people were radicalized, not just by the vaccine mandates, but I know people whose parents and grandparents died in nursing homes, and they weren't allowed to go see them. And that's something that you're going to think about for the rest of your life. But why don't you – you don't really see that message. Is there going to be a backlash? It's surprising to me that there hasn't been. I'm ready for the backlash. I would love a little backlash to this kind of stuff, but I don't see it. And it's not really come up in the election other than if the backlash was coming and there was something, a real nice vein that you could tap into, a populist vein, you'd think that someone would be channeling it by now.

And you don't really see that. Why not? Well, even in 2022, right? That was kind of the referendum. And there were these narratives from the right that they were going to have this red wave and that it doesn't occur. I would say the only thing that seemed kind of close to retribution was New York flipping a bunch of these Congress seats and like nominally, I don't know how close it actually was like having a Republican governor, although that guy,

I don't remember his name, but he's not very popular. Like maybe someone else could have done it. But the ex-governor of New York? No, no, sorry. So Cuomo gets ousted, right? And there's a question, like, why was Cuomo ousted? You know, like, we nominally know why, but why was he ousted? And maybe it's because some of the numbers on this were really bad. And they were like, okay, you're no longer useful. You're actually not going to be the president one day. You know, we're replacing you now.

I don't know. I'm not inside of these things. I can only speculate. As a former New Yorker. Both Cuomo brothers were witch burned, but by the left for sure. It was elder Cuomo on the political side, and then the younger Cuomo was taken down on behalf of the entire media establishment. He was one of the big scalps. I don't even know who else really suffered for the covet stuff i think nobody it was the cuomo brothers double whammy sad yeah so i just so i don't think that there

was even really like there was kind of narratives that there would be retribution 2022 and maybe it's an off election so maybe these energies will be channeled to the extent that they're there um i would say maybe the other caveat is like school choice stuff i think a lot of parents were like with this can never happen again like i don't know what the solution is but if you tell me how you know my child won't be forced to like zoom school ever again i'm i'm open to the they would need to feel that's i think sorry rivers one i think it's too far away from when that happened you know we're talking by the time the election is coming, we're talking three years, maybe, four years even, I think, from when most of the schools in the country experienced this.

There were some holdouts in California and whatnot, but I think people are not going to be thinking about it. I think that you'll have a better chance of getting people to care about the trans issue in schools than this. And I think, by the way, I think both are kind of losers in terms of powerful political issues to propel you to the White House. I don't think either are uniquely capable of driving that in the way that, for example, immigration drove Trump's last campaign. Sorry, River, you were about to say something.

Yeah, I was just going to say something yeah i i was just gonna say i when i was talking about people being radicalized and then like if this if they try to do like another covid like thing where it's they're like we're shutting everything down and all that but i mean i do think that like some people are radicalized in the sense that like covid will forever like change the way that they perceive things and think about things you know like i'm reminded of like my great-grandmom whenever she died um she just had like bags of change and like cash hidden all over the place because she wouldn't open a bank account because she like survived the depression or all the banks fell and like her family lost all the money so like it's

gonna be you're gonna have people like that who are either like COVID forever people who are like masking forever or people who are like, I'm never getting another vaccine again. I'm never getting my kid any vaccine. You know, that sort of thing. lessons right like there is this like overcorrection almost where it's like of course be extremely skeptical of all these things but it's not like like you know with um the ability with the ability to engineer these viruses and stuff like that like we could experience another pandemic that is truly bad and whatever like the idea that like oh it's all crap and like go out and like whatever and just be the first person to get it it's like there's still potentially justification to like personally lay low when there's an emergent, potentially lab-engineered virus. I think it's like you should almost always...

You don't want to be the early adopter when it comes to something like a fucking pandemic. Yes, you sit it out and you let the data present itself to you from the safety of your internet connection. I also worried a little bit about this, especially in terms of, I mean, I'm always kind of caught in the middle because I find myself defending anti-vaxxers all the time. But the reason is because I understand where they're coming from. Like, how could you not after what we saw happen?

The idea that there were people who lost their jobs because they didn't want to get an experimental medical procedure is to me unimaginable. However, the conceptual vaccine is not the problem. And I worry about a future world where, yeah, the left specifically has so completely overplayed its hand. And the right has, in its attempt to politically capitalize on that, amplified this fact that we now have a broad distrust of science. And this is not like a believe science moment. I'm talking about real science, which even that alone, to leave the pandemic, having science politicized, dirty word is really a tragedy in my opinion. Yeah. I mean, the fallacy also had a lot to do with the head though. I mean, like- mean like no no no it's deserved it's

a problem is like i get it it's deserved it's just there are consequences like there's no way that this is going to be a net positive for humanity that there's now broad complete suspicion of science the conceptual level including and then including in the medical world talking about things like vaccines generally, you know, like we have. Do you think that like lab leaks, like the idea that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab funded by the NIH and that like this was covered up or whatever? Do you think that becomes, I don't know if there's ever a world where like this is admitted, but do you think it becomes something that's like kind of universally kind of believed or at least looked at like kind of kind of like the JFK thing where like if you ask the average American, they're like they may not have like an exact theory about what happened. But they're kind of like, yeah, that was fishy. There was something going on there type thing.

Do you think it's like that or do you think it remains partisan and like politicized where like liberals? I don't think it's that partisan. I don't know a lot of Democrats who are like oh it definitely didn't come from a lab not anymore i mean do you guys i don't know many yeah i think john stewart said it was okay it's he was the first he was i think you could almost credit him with the the changing of of sentiment there because he got out there and he said almost verbatim things that, not to make this about me, but he said almost verbatim things that I have said that, and then much more people who were actually in the trenches on this issue said. And it was

shocking and people got really mad for a second, but the average person was like, I'm glad someone said it. The average Democrat, I should say. And I think that's really where they mostly are. Nobody really wants to own the zoonotic origins of COVID or whatever. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants to have to defend that because it just never made much sense that that happened blocks away from the fucking covid factory yeah and they keep going through like they've gone through a whole zoo of animals of like who what it came from they're like bat pangolin um tiger like they're like just any animal really like they're like nondescript animal it came from could have come from your dog we don't know um speaking of the science uh we gotta get to the white pill man um i don't want to kind of

insult the audience by making the case for nuclear this is something that we've written about at pyrowires forever it is uh actually my uh it's boss uh p, Peter, he loves to challenge environmentalists on this issue. It's like, if you really believe in the man-made global warming sort of argument, and I do personally, he loves to challenge you on like, how do you feel about nuclear? And if you are opposed to it, that is a signal that you are really not serious at all about global warming, that you yourself do not believe in the sort of man-made global warming thing. It is our best, most abundant source of carbon-free energy. A world of nuclear is a world of abundance. And it is really the way,

when you talk about powering a progressive, growing, healthy society, it's awesome. However, it's like massive backlash, specifically from what I like to call the Fern Gully left. In America, I think we've been a little bit better than abroad. You saw two pretty high profile closures of nuclear plants, one in New York, Indian Point, and then Diablo Canyon, more famously, massive power outages following blackouts following the closure of Indian Point. Meanwhile, California already a sea of blackouts and power outages as the sort of state capacity for running the basic essentials of infrastructure crumbles has been worsened by our lack of power, but Diablo Canyon saved. Newsom made an about face, decided to save it concurrently. And I think, honestly, I don't think that nuclear feels like a controversial issue anymore. I think it really was a few years ago. I think there's broad buy-in on both the left and the right. You got your crazies in both directions. But I think generally speaking, your average intelligent person looks at

the math and is like, we need carbon-free energy. Nuclear waste is not as big. It's a problem, but not as big of a problem as we once thought. It's also not as big of a problem as potential global cataclysm induced by man-made global warming. We got to do it. In bizarro world America, which you might refer to as Europe, you have Germany taking the opposite path and celebrating their closure of these plants and their burning of coal. Grant, give us the white pill on nuclear in America. Because California was the beginning for me. That was when I first thought, wait, maybe we're going to be good here. But there have been some recent developments in Georgia and more broadly, break that down for us.

Yeah. So I guess to your first point, I would say that kind of empirically, at least according to Pew Research, it's shifted like approval nuclear or support for nuclear has shifted 14 points since 2020. And that's kind of amongst like, it's just categorized by Republicans, independents, Democrats. Republicans are already kind of 50-50, whatever. I just don't think they really care. It's probably like, does it power things near you? And do you like power and the grid working? You're like in favor of it. You know, I don't think people had that many strong opinions,

but it's really, you know, jumped up as far as public support. And then I think we see that translating into movement and in these different things. There was actually almost a potential nuclear renaissance during kind of the Bush era. And like, you know, leading into the beginning of Obama, which is actually where some of the initial loan funding came for the plants that just are the reactors that just went online. And that kind of got shut down by Fukushima, and kind of the big scare after that. And now we're kind of like, okay, actually, we still need to do this. You know, even more so, I would say, you know, the desire for carbon free energy, as like a political goal has, you know, it's a huge thing, not only from people from just

like general climate, but also whether you like it or not, kind of ESG global finance being like, oh, we're doing this. This is 100% the future. And we know that we can't just do intermittent power. We need firm baseload power. Because the grids, as you said, in both California, Texas, the Midwest, New England, and New York all have very slim operating reserves during specific times. So in Texas, we had, I think, $5 billion worth of electricity costs last week or something like that because of the surge pricing and this kind of deregulated market grid. What was the surge for? Was there a heat wave or something? Yeah, yeah. It's been insane this summer

has been absolutely nuts in austin we had like i don't know 30 something days of above hot 100 peak temperatures um so once the air conditioner goes on this the grid is fucked it's yeah it's like essentially in all the places the like kind of deregulated independent system operator or regional transmission organizations, essentially anything that's not an integrated utility. For the most part, the you know, there's there's kind of caveats, they're all a little different. But there's nothing inherent about the way the market is structured. That means that there will inherently be power at 9pm. You know, it's like kind of every five minutes, more or less optimized around

energy being extremely or electricity being extremely cheap. So in Texas, our power is extremely cheap. But we just kind of keep inching closer and closer towards catastrophic failure. And that will not be cheap. That's actually extremely expensive. How you actually reform and get there. I think, again, a lot of it also comes from regulatory issues at the federal level. Of course, new nuclear designs not being approved, and that being a very slow process, but also just a lot of crazy stuff from the EPA, FERC, all these different bureaucracies that normal people shouldn't have to know exist. What about, walk me through the Georgia stuff. So you have, what was it, two reactors that were approved and this was widely celebrated as a, I mean, a huge victory.

You had some kind of, when we last talked about this, you seem to have some quibbles about how big of a deal it actually was. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, it's like everyone has to take a win when they get it. So when you're seeing, you know, like, I just think how exuberant people were, it's easy to be like, all right, like, you know, it was like, way over budget, way delayed. You know, it's, I want to be celebrating, you know, we're about to build like 100 gigawatts of these things, you know, Amazon decides it's time to go nuclear. And as like, SMR is powering all these data centers, like that's the news I want to be celebrating. It's not like, hey, you know, for the first time in 50 years,

we built two reactors. We have 2,500 megawatts of power. And, you know, it's great, but it's not like it's inching forward. And I think kind of to the white pill, you know, so Jigar Shah was, you know, we were talking about kind of the influence of the Department of Energy's loan program office, which essentially their role is not to fund R&D, but to help for commercialization of energy related technologies before basically banks and kind of like big financiers are willing to step up to the plate. So they had provided loans to like, you know, since like 2008, I think they have 12 billion total in loans to three different entities to build the Vogel 3 and Vogel 4 reactors in Georgia. While they were building those reactors, there were a bunch of issues. One, apparently they

hadn't like completed the full designs before they started building. And that caused all kinds of overruns and problems along the lines there. That's also when this Fukushima backlash happens. So the economics of Westinghouse, the company that was doing the actual building, just completely collapsed, you know, because I'm sure it's like, people say they're going to buy things and then you can get financing and all that just stops when no one wants to buy your reactors. So they went into bankruptcy in the middle of building the reactor, and then had to pass off management of the project to two other entities. But anyway, the kind of idea of, you know, the LPO and their their mission is to, you know, kind of de-risk these things for private markets,

these like large asset managers. And, you know, the thing that, you know, Jigar would point to as the massive success is no one wanted to finance solar or wind, you know, like before they were doing this like a decade ago. There have also been failures on the DOE, like people talk about Solyndra and all these things. mean Zoomers don't know about it but you know like everyone has heard this is like there was it was the first extinction event in energy where

all of these funded companies that just completely sucked died correctly and yeah we have this speaking of memory I mean we just completely memory hold that entire chapter of government investing. Yeah, there was a Pelosi connection. Yeah, yeah.

And I think. What was the Pelosi connection? Her brother-in-law or something was like on the board of Solyndra and like they got the Obama White House like pushed through approval of like some loan or something um and it was alleged that there was some sort of crap doing this is you know what all of these people need to be in jail and that's this is like this is my this is my problem with not to make this about trump but we're going to make this about trump for a second this is my problem with the Trump sort of go to prison thing. I don't even with my just rough sort of like glance at the stories. I'm like, I'm sure that he's done something fucked up and illegal. Like this is the, he's a politician. They are all doing fucked up illegal things all the time. My problem is not that Trump is maybe going to go to jail. My problem is that

only Trump is going to go to jail. And you cannot live in a country where only one of the criminal politicians goes to jail. It's like either all of them or none of them. And that is my brief Trump soapbox comment for the day. It's genuinely concerning to me because I remember being a 19, 20-year-old leftist in majoring international relations. And I remember professors being like, no, it's good that the corrupt politicians basically don't get arrested and charged. And the reason is because then that's how you create like dictatorships like there's countless examples all over the world because people people think they're going

to jail or they're going to be executed when they leave office they're not going to leave um like there's countless examples of this in america and everywhere that's the tough pill to swallow is that probably a little bit of corruption at that level is you have to allow it. But you have to, like, you actually have to allow all of it. And if you don't, then we are in a dictatorship or some kind of, let's say, authoritarian state where only one kind of person goes to jail for what everybody is doing. That is clearly a problem. Anyway, probably should get back to good yeah and i think that's rubbing people the wrong way you know i would i would say like the almost again i just like to play with the ideas and throw things out there is that like you know he just keeps becoming pop more

popular yes as he gets indicted um and i think there's there is this element to your point mike and kind of the like visceral reaction to this and being like, you know, can can we let them get away with this? Like, I would say that that's like kind of the opinion people have is like, you know, we can't let them throw a president in, you know, then then what country are we? You know, like we can't have a president going to jail for this, I think. And so then the conspiratorial angle is like they view him very weak. He's a weak candidate.

They would like to amplify Trump relative to other parties. I don't know that that's true, but I do think that the Democratic Party did that. Dude, I don't think it's true. I think everyone says this. I think there are two things happening. I think surface level, they actually can't help themselves. He activates something in the brain of a certain kind of person who has never been me. I was shocked in the beginning.

And then, I don't know, he didn't do to me what he did to other people, where he really just seemed to break them in a way. And they cannot help but react to what he is giving. And then I think the second thing that's happening sort of below the surface is they want him to be, they like him. The people who hate him the most get something out of him being in a position of power. He, by virtue of his existence in a seat of power, he seems to confirm their entire worldview, which is built upon the notion that America is this evil, monstrous country run by a dictator.

And that fantasy that these people, I think, seem to live on doesn't really work when your party controls every single fount of power in the country. Like they need at least, they need the puppet of, they need the enemy puppet to be waffling around to make them not feel bad about themselves. They love him. I think it's like a weird, sick, almost fetishistic relationship that they have with each other. I was going to say to like dynamic i i joke with this dynamic that it's like because people i mean people say all kinds of things which i think kind of miss the mark on this but there there is an element that's like people are acting out

because they want someone to tell them no yeah and it's like children yeah like children and i think and i think that that is like it is this weird thing where it's like that shouldn't be in public like that is where we need to stigmatize your like sexual fantasy like it's not about your like politics of this like go find daddy elsewhere like you don't need to like try to provoke the thing you know whatever and it's just kind of a bit like i'm joking but there is this element of it that is very like punish me punish me daddy trump it's like i'm not giving that 100 it's giving fulsome street fair to me that is what i'm getting river what do you think so what i will say is that growing up the way i did like my parents were like hardcore evangelicals so they actually um i think my dad liked trump

but my mom didn't like trump she still doesn't like trump very much she voted for both times but or yeah both times although she voted for like ted cruz in the primary so like there's like that evangelical wing but like other people in my family were not as religious for them trump like these people never give a fuck about politics and when trump came along they did um because for a lot of them i mean like the town i grew up in like as i was growing up was just like rapidly de-industrializing like people had like good like union jobs in manufacturing and in sawmills and like and all this other stuff and then it just all went away. Now it's like, okay, do you want to cook math

or work in a dairy queen? That's it. People felt demoralized and they felt like basically the country had been sold out underneath them and Trump basically came along and said, you're right. These people are crooks. They hate you. They don't respect you.

They think you're stupid. They were like, said, you're right. These people are crooks. They hate you. They don't respect you. They think you're stupid. And they were like, yeah, you're right. Like they don't want it. Like these people don't want to hear that. Like Biden is an institutionalist. Democratic Party has become like the institutionalist party and partially because Trump isn't. And like people see that as like not only like oppressive, but like also like these are these people don't care about you and they think that they're better than you. And like, when you see the way that Democrats and not necessarily elected politicians, but like in the media, in the popular discourse, talk about like, you know, rural working-class white people it is patronizing

and it does seem like they don't respect them they don't like them they think they're just racists who have never contributed anything and that's all i agree with your your analysis of the trump supporter that i think is all true but what about what do you make of the trump detractor like i mean do you acknowledge that there seems to be a unique republican trump detractor or the um no i'm talking about the republican trump detractor is less interesting to me because it's less i guess you have the lincoln people but they are democrats now so what i'm talking about your average like obsessed like trump deranged never trump democrat not my president yes yeah so i actually think that's mostly a class thing i think it's mostly like professional class people who did all the right things and went to college and like

they were like we believe in the system because the system worked for us he represents like a bucking of the system that has benefited these people i've never met like a poor person who was like rabidly anti-drug and personally yeah i think that's that's true but do they want to have sex with him or not is what i'm really asking do they want to have um maybe some of them i don't know they want to be they want to be punished uh Saja, you were able to say something. No, I mean, I was just going to say, I really think, I mean, I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, which is very blue and has a lot of people who are hysterical, hysterically anti-Trump.

And I do think, I mean, the opposition I saw was completely, I mean, it almost seemed like a mental illness. Like, I'm not saying that there aren't legitimate reasons to hate this guy. But I know people who you start talking to them about Trump and five this like hatred of this man who represents everything evil in the universe. And I think that serves an important psychological purpose. That's, I think, what's happening. It's good to have, I don't think it's good. I think it's it's good to have not only i think it's good i think it's capital g good i

think their feeling is it feels good to have someone who you can blame for all the things that are not working in your life and um and he's that dude for them and it's weird they also don't believe in god like they have to have like a secular devil and like trump is that so and then like i don't black women or like whatever, like. Well, cause they're evangelical. There are so many evangelical Christians you're saying. So you're saying that's an outlier contingent. No, no, no.

I'm like saying like the, the, I just remember libs in like 2018 or being like the black women are going to save us from Trump and like all of this. Oh, right. Like they basically basically turned politics into like a quasi-religious cosmology. Yeah. It's so crazy. What a fucking weird world

the internet has turned us into. I think it's the internet. Maybe it's just modernity. It's really hard to tell. I do want to talk about, Sanjana, your incredible experience in California, because so much of what we just heard about nuclear, which is exciting, is going to require support from legislators. And it's worth kind of looking into what that environment looks like. I think right before we actually get into that, Grant, we covered the nuclear, sort of the exciting nuclear trends on the table. What about the actual reactor? Aren't

there some sort of smaller module reactors now that are kind of, and that's where I really think regulatory stuff is going to start becoming important. Yeah, yeah. So that's where that matters. So I guess just to like kind of finish the georgia point so the the kind of optimistic piece there was that the uh so the reactor 3 and reactor 4 reactor 4 was much cheaper than reactor 3 so if you're asking like lpo you know who gave these loans like a lot of what they were doing is kind of like rebuilding the supply chain that it just completely collapsed like both like skilled labor plus these different things and you know know, essentially, you want the, you know, for any of these things to work, you need economies of scale. So just and then just kind of to make the point from like the first principle standpoint, there's no reason that nuclear should be more expensive than these than these other things, it should be able to compete.

And this isn't a model for scaling it. But the Koreans, through their like nationalized, like monopoly with a standardized reactor are able to produce a reactor for $4, but the Koreans through their nationalized monopoly with a standardized reactor are able to produce a reactor for $4,000 per kilowatt, which is like, I think I got it wrong in our prior conversation, but it's still like one fourth, if not more cheaper than this Vogel plant. But the hope would be that that scales. Currently, there's not demand for these large light water reactors from utilities or let alone private corporations. But the small modular reactors, much, you know, you know, maybe like between it depends on which one it is, but 110 to 120th, 110th to 120th of the amount of power that's generated by a large light water reactor, much smaller. The idea there is that since it's smaller, you'll be able to scale up these factories that will essentially print them out. Not only could you sell them to a utility, but in fact, perhaps some of these large tech companies

would be willing to buy them outright to just meet their own needs. My joke about this is if these were legal and you could buy them and we were scaling it, how many would Amazon have purchased or built, like functionally built? And there's a little bit of... This is kind of like the good news, bad news. So essentially, I think we're setting the stage for that production to scale and for that to all come about. But it's probably not going to be until, you know, the end of the 2020s going into the beginning of the 2030s, partially because or mostly because of the regulatory aspects of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, you know, the two reactors in Georgia are the only ones that have like since it was created in 1974, I think it started

operation 1975. They're the only ones that have been approved, built and begun operations under their, you know, their authority. And then essentially that process, you know, for a long time, it was just very hostile to nuclear, I think, culturally, leadership and stuff is really in favor of nuclear, the last four presidencies or so have been nominally pro-nuclear. It's really this kind of like bureaucratic issue. But there, the process for approving new reactors is still far too prescriptive. There's a couple other issues too. But essentially, there's not a clear... There's not a good process for approving new design. So one design of an SMR has been approved,

but all the others are like being supported by all these other government entities. And you know, people are excited about them. They're putting all this money into none of them are approved. You can't start ordering them yet. But you know, it's kind of like we're getting there. I still think there's a lot on the reform side that could be done. But that's kind of like the the generic overview of the white pill you said that um the last few presidents have been like pro-nuclear which i i did not know because i i feel like it's never really talked about and um i don't know maybe something say something on that because i i do remember and i could be wrong about this but i'm pretty sure i

remember whenever everybody was talking about the green new deal, like AOC's whole plan and Bernie's or whatever. And if I remember correctly, nuclear was left out of that. Is that right? So is that? Yeah, I mean, she's changed on like the left, like the Democratic Party left or. I actually, I think AOC in particular has said some like pro nuclear things. I think some people like kind of got to her. You know, it's very much like the large NGOs that are focused on these things, like the Natural Resource Defense Council, or the Sierra Club, or whatever, which is these giant entities, they have tons of money. Jeff Bezos, like Climate Fund gave NRDC, like $100 million or something like that. Like he's not even... I mean, maybe he's one of their biggest donors, but there's ages of boomers who have given them a ton of money, and they're all extremely hostile to nuclear, and they're not changing their minds on that. I didn't realize that Bezos had given to anti-nuclear stuff.

He gave to... He has a fund, so I don't know exactly his involvement, but still, it's like a misallocation of money. This is the problem with these people who have too much money to keep track of it. They put people in charge of their money to give it out and then they don't pay attention. Mackenzie Bezos just did this in San Francisco. She funded, was $20 million to like two of the worst, cluniest left-wing activists in the city,

like destructive. I would say, I mean, I'm going to use the word terroristic. They feel like a terrorist on the soul, on the human spirit, perhaps. They're bad people. And she is giving them an unlimited amount of money to be bad in perpetuity, like forever. Shut it down, man. I've never been an eat the billionaires person until like this week. I'm like, wait a minute. Maybe I was wrong. They are the problem. And yeah, and that was why I looked it up. I vaguely remembered this. And this was before I really had the context about these organizations. And then they were talking about the Mackenzie

Bezos thing. And I was like, well, I mean, like they were like, you know, this is the disastrous divorce, you know, allocation money. Sure. I take all that. I read into that one. Seems terrible. Misallocation of money. But then I was like, I mean, I'm pretty sure Jeff Bezos gave $100 million to the NRDC.

And I looked it up. And it's his fund. But either way, yeah, don't create the fund. Or if you do, like, you know, put people in charge of it who uh whatever share believe the same things you do i don't think jeff bezos believes you know that we should only use solar and wind and batteries should we need to shut down natural gas solar not that jeff bezos is like the last but like from the sierra club and like a lot of like uh like bernie who is i think he's anti-nuke because he was like i don't know like a leftist in

the 70s and it's just like part of the deal but like the obsession with um solar is strange to me if you're like taking from elected leftist perspective these is like the most like damaging imperialist like thing that you can do it's like kids binding like rare earth minerals in uganda and when and then when the solar panels age out, they just dump them in Kenya. And then kids have to take them apart. It's just horrific human rights disasters that are happening in Africa that nobody gives a fuck about, really. You hardly ever hear about it. When you talk about a shift to solar, you need to be talking about the human rights impact on something like

that and i but i think it's easy to explain actually i think solar fits in with the spiritual belief of the far left this is the fern gully spiritual component of it they want to photosynthesize like plants that is the in in their imagination that is the least impact you could possibly make is to photosynthesize they want to be they want to be fucking fairies like that is the least impact you could possibly make is to photosynthesize. They want to be fucking fairies. That is what they want. And that unfortunately is impossible in reality. In reality, like you said, you need to have slaves mining cobalt so you can live in your, drive around in your electric, your solar powered vehicle. That's kind of, that is the tension between their their faith and you know the material world yeah nuclear is interesting if you can look up videos of this it's like 10 year olds

like pouring lighter fluid just like on a solar panel so that they can burn it and then like getting the um like different like metals and stuff out of it and selling it to a scrap market. And these kids are breathing in all of these toxic fumes full of heavy metals and cobalt and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. I hate solar. I try not to say that. It's crazy.

We're supposed to play nice with the other renewable energy sources or certainly the other carbon, let's say the other carbon neutral energy sources or certainly the other carbon, let's say the other carbon neutral energy sources. I think a world of solar energy is a worse world. It is land intensive. It requires cheap labor. It requires rare metals that you need to process and mine, both of which are extremely damaging to the environment. There are no shortage of... I think that natural gas is much better than solar. And I think a world of complete solar, that sort of fantasy is really scary to me. That is not a good world.

That is an environmental catastrophe and a human rights disaster presently as we are sort of presently structured nuclear is the way yeah and the the all the kids dying like trying to get scrapped metal out of the solar panels like that's called recycling like that's so they can say that they recycled the solar panels and there's ways you can do that without killing like kids in africa but like it's more yeah you can do it well they will the next option when you pose these questions is well you can just use less energy you can just right it's like we can just have you can have less babies and you can use less air conditioning and consume less uh food that needs to be transported and refrigerated and things like this you can just do less you can be less you

can vanish you can no longer exist and i think for me it's i would like to exist i would like people to exist i would like us to have abundance and i would like there to not be literal slaves mining our shit so maybe nuclear is the option for us i think we're all pretty much on board so i don't want to belabor the point i do worry about uh i do worry about navigating these. It's crazy how much power we give this certain class of people who just loves power. And that's not even at the top. I'm talking about local politicians. Saja, tell us about your experience with the California state legislative session. California state legislative session? Yeah, I've been describing it as a form of torture, which I think has more to do... Well, it has more to do with the fact that I'm actually in what you called bizarro world America right now. I'm in London. So it was on an eight-hour time difference. So it meant I was watching the session at night. But basically, last Wednesday, I tuned in to the California state Senate floor session because we've been covering AB 316,

which is a bill that bans self-driving trucks in California, basically. I mean, it doesn't outright ban them, but it requires that there's a human safety operator in them at all times, which essentially bans them. And it also requires that the DMV and a bunch of other random state organizations submit a bunch of research reports on the trucks in five years, even that the California Highway Patrol is also included in it. And so we've been covering it. And our idea was to send out a tweet about the result of the vote as soon as it came out. the result of the vote as soon as it came out. And so that requires watching the hearing live because California only updates its legislative results at 6 a.m. the morning after. And so this hearing was at 10 a.m., which is 6 p.m. where I am. And I tuned in and I was like, all right, I'm just going to get through two hours of watching these people sort of talk about their

legislation and then eventually they'll vote on AB 316 uh it turned out to be a six hour long hearing um but it was actually really interesting because california is a good example of what we were talking about earlier it's a one-party dictatorship um which means that they did not to my knowledge like knock down any vote any bill they basically approved every single bill that came up for consideration uh and the bills that were up for consideration ranged from i would say completely banal like what should the state mushroom be this was an actual bill that was passed last week um what is the same mushroom again? It's, oh God, it's some really obscure, wait, let me find. The Chantel or something? Yeah, it's Chantel. It's the California golden Chanterelle. Chanterelle. Congrats, California. We love a sexy mushroom.

Yeah. And there was a bill about whether or not, it was about protecting artificial flavoring in children's medication. I don't know who wants to get rid of that but like the person introducing it saying mary poppins and shit like that um but in the midst of all this banal legislation there was also a bunch of like really really disturbing stuff that they just waved through um so among other things uh it looks like and all this is pending gavin newsom signing it i should say um. So Gavin Newsom can veto. And if he vetoes, then the bills don't pass, really. They can technically override them, the vetoes. But in practice, they never do because state politics operates like a mafia and they don't

want to piss off their mafia boss. But fair evasion, the fair evasion, decriminalizing fair evasion bill passed. Fair evasion, the fair evasion, decriminalizing fair evasion bill passed. So basically, in California, going forward, if Newsom signs it, if you don't want to pay for public transportation, essentially nothing will happen. I mean, in practice, if you do it like three times, they might fine you. But essentially, it's decriminalized. again, if Newsom signs it into law. They also passed a bill that adds affirming a child's gender identity into the criteria for determining custody. So basically, if you've got a custody battle between parents and one kid identifies as trans and wants to, for for example pursue hormone replacement therapy and get surgeries and one parent is like against this um another parent's for it the parent who's for it uh has priority all things equal for custody it's really shocking how much actually takes place that i mean none of this stuff was on our radar. We weren't covering any of this. We're still not covering any of this. Most people are not covering any of this.

This stuff just, it just comes up and passes. And that's because it's like, you have these long sessions. Like you said, it was like six hours before you departed. You woke up the next day, still wasn't up. And that is yeah i think that's a problem i think it's a problem not not even the legislators it's the problem is us man like we gotta start paying attention to this stuff yeah i think i mean they sort of do everything in their power to make you not want to pay attention to the i should say like all of the it's bizarre the the website even for the california California state legislature looks like it was designed in 2004 or something. There's this arcane way of figuring out where the legislation is and there's all this code language they use. the stuff is really consequential. I mean, they just passed last week, there's like basically Prop C for LA, where they're raising taxes and earmarking it all for housing first homelessness

policy. And again, what's shocking when you watch the sessions is that there's like no debate on any of it. Or if there is debate, it's a bunch of people getting up and like grandstanding incoherently for five minutes before everyone then votes in lockstep. Yeah, it's kind of a black pill on democracy, or at least one-party democracy. There's something insidious about the banality and orderliness of American legislative decorum, I guess. You see it in the US Congress too. If you compare that to British Parliament,

which sometimes is genuinely fun to watch. They're screaming at each other. They're jeering. People boo. It feels like an actual debate. It almost feels like they make it impossible to watch like even when i've tried to watch legislative hearings on subjects i'm interested in you can barely get through them because it's like everybody gets like five minutes to speak and like half of them are actually

wanting to talk about something else and like it's just like this awful, boring thing that I feel like it is meant to make people disengage totally. Yeah, I mean, it totally is. The California session begins with this insane prayer that's led by a nun. But it's this non-denominational prayer where she invites us to like enter into ourselves and, you know, recenter our connection to the future. And then it's just this barrage of like, you know, they vote, they say aye or nay on the bills. And, you know. Was there a land acknowledgement? There was not a land acknowledgement.

There was not a land acknowledgement, unfortunately. I'm sure there will be soon. Next time for sure we're going to get one. Or we'll suggest it. Write them a letter. I'm sure they'll take it up. Maybe they'll pass a bill about it. That would be great.

I think, Grant, I need you to give me the white pill on some of this stuff because I want to go out. I promised a white pill, and this week I want to go out with something positive. Take us out of – you have this nuclear thing. You want to push it through, you're facing, these are the legislators, this is what you need. These are the people that you need on your side. Yeah. So I think looking at, so Diablo Canyon, I think was a big shift. Different parties take credit for that changing or influencing Governor Newsom to basically be like, no. I think he just straight up didn't want blackouts. I think he knew that with more blackouts, he would be done. And he would have no chance at the presidency, which is what he wants.

Yeah. And I think that's ultimately true. I think there were a lot of parties kind of being like, hey, we don't... The DOE, I think, sent him a letter. There were these ground... Isabel Bomeka and these other activists were really lobbying as well. And, you know, so lots of people take credit for it. It was the right decision. I'm sure it was some staffer, to your point, in the Gavin or the Newsom administration being like, we're going to have rolling blackouts.

You're going to preside over them. You won't be president. I think with some of these other things, it'll be interesting to see whether he approves them or vetoes them, because I kind of looked that up when I saw some of these points of news you were talking about, being like, so is he just over? Some of the things you just talked about, if he signed those, I'm like, how could you ever be president? I mean, no one really knows, I guess, anymore. But anyway, so the good news is a lot of these state legislatures are pretty pro-nuclear. Some of it because of the current state of things. I mean, the Inflation Reduction Act is law. It was passed. There's an immense amount of subsidies going to

electric vehicles, solar, wind. There are subsidies for advanced nuclear, for existing nuclear. It's a crazy amount of money. The more I learn about it and dig into it, the more I'm like, I don't think maybe a $50 trillion dollar energy package was really good policy. So no Republicans voted for it. It was all Democrats. And then Kamala Harris broke the tie. And at the time, the Democrats held the House under Nancy Pelosi. So it got approved. But the white pill, at least from the nuclear angle, and like us actually building things is there was a lot of funding allocated to this loan program office. So and money for coal to nuclear plants, in particular that so there's additional subsidies for that. And that really matters,

you know, to some of the points that River brought up earlier, you know, making sure that, you know, we need this energy infrastructure. It shouldn't, you know, making sure that, you know, we need this energy infrastructure. It shouldn't, you know, we need productive economic things, it shouldn't all be located in a couple insane cities full of mad people, you know, like we should we should we should spread some of this investment around, especially if it's like everyone's tax dollars, or like, you know, about some unified idea of the United States of America. So anyway, a lot of states are moving to kind of pave the way for advanced nuclear, because essentially with the coal to nuclear, there's all this existing transmission, there's an existing site, people already live next to a

thing. I would much rather live next to a small modular reactor nuclear facility than a coal plant. It's like a huge victory in that response. So anyway, they want the money. There's a bunch of money there. They want it for their people. When you have, if you go look at these jurisdictions that have these nuclear plants, they tax the shit out of them. But the school districts are really great. People who live there have really good things. I'm doing some research on the costs of shutting down Indian Point in New York. The reliability stuff is crazy. But they also have this huge shortfall in their budgets for the school district and for the town and for all these things. The white pill is kind

of like a lot of people have been making really bad decisions. It's very obvious that they were bad decisions. Lots of different parties have seen what's happened and they're shifting course. Sweden is planning to build nuclear reactors. In the United States, I would say the consensus is moving that way. We're going to figure it out. We're going to hit economies of scale. Canada, I think, is doing surprisingly well on the nuclear stuff as well. And also France. Yeah. Yeah.

And so France shifted course at one point, they kind of like bought in with the whole like. Historically, they were very good on nuclear. And then recently they were Greta Thunberg, but it looks like they regained consciousness and are back on the righteous path. So I do think there is like a real path there. I think there, you know, any given company, I'm not totally sure

about. My position is really just the regulations don't make sense. We can make them better. We need to build the reactors. Let's let people compete. If there's a company that wants to eat everyone's lunch in gigascale reactors and bring us to abundance, I love them. And they should keep working hard because that's the future I want to live in. Let's go. Thanks for joining, Grant. River, Sanjana, it's always a pleasure. We'll catch you guys here next week.

Thank you. Later.