TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #408: The Truth About Renewable Energy with Brian Gitt

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Brian Gitt to discuss the flawed ideological approach behind ESG mandates and renewable energies. Brian Gitt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BrianGitt Brian's website: https://briangitt.com/ 5:23 - California emissions and electric cars 14:08 - Material supply for EVs 16:21 - California's oil hypocrisy 21:15 - EGS mandates don't preserve environment or help human life 27:06 - Nuclear safety 32:48 - Small modular reactors 48:52 - Wind and solar subsidies 52:52 - Ranting on batteries 55:08 - Unreliable and inefficient renewables 1:04:05 - Top down ideological policy 1:09:27 - Regulations are the root of the problem 1:14:11 - Questioning beliefs and educating 1:19:25 - Money and energy are the backbone 1:25:23 - Speaking out 1:29:56 - Plugs, wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠Unchained Capital⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Podcast

so freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc sat back down with brian get but this time we sat down in person he's here in austin hell of a conversation not going to rehash it because you're about to listen to it it's going to read boostograms but uh don't have any from the matthew mazingtious episode yet i don't know fountains i think fountains broken nobody likes us is that what it is Logan it's all over

it's all over Bitcoin's dead I'm washed up it's been a fun ride freaks this ride was brought to you by good friends at River

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that can bring you what you need. Go to Bitcoin Talent Co. Tell them that TFTC sent you and enjoy this rip with Brian Gitt. the fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be probably should be so california's got some crazy epa regulations or yeah i was just talking with the california fuels and convenience alliance the other day giving them a little talk because they're they're getting together folks to go advocate in sacramento because there's been so many so

much regulation so much restriction on anyone in the oil and gas supply chain basically and the many of these small gas stations are just small family-owned businesses mostly most of them are immigrants minority-owned small businesses and they're paying the highest labor rates in the country because la for example has minimum wage requirements of 1678 cents an hour they're paying massively more for electricity 36 percent more than most of the other country for for that type of business and then their land costs are soaring as you can imagine over time so all of these things are just pressuring and crunching crushing these small businesses and then california has put forward a little while ago this ban on any kind of internal combustion via cars and light

trucks by 2035 they say no more sales of new cars now this will be phased in so it's not that you're waiting until 2035 actually starting in 2026 33 percent of the new vehicles sold in california which i believe there's about a million vehicles sold in california a year so it's not an insignificant amount of vehicles will have to be quote zero emission which ultimately means electric because there aren't a lot of other alternatives there's very few hydrogen cars right now i mean in the bay area i think there's one hydrogen station i looked at least there was when i looked at it up maybe a year or two ago i don't think that's changed much not a lot of hydrogen vehicles on the road so in essence what we're talking about is is electric vehicles and

at the same time that these bans are going in and we're going to ratchet up the amount of electric vehicles on them. Our grid in California is so fragile and so unreliable. Last September, I'm getting alerts on my phone saying, hey, don't charge your electric vehicle if you have one because the state might go into rolling blockouts. And we only have a really small percentage of the vehicles right now that are electric. So I'm not necessarily anti-electric vehicle. I'm pro technology in general if the technology is better and people want to buy it and it's convenient they should buy it but we have to be strategic and thoughtful and you can't cram down policies these centrally planned policies from the top crushing small businesses in the process

crushing consumers in terms of the cost of electricity and gasoline and expect everything to work out because we don't even have the infrastructure the the distribution grid the as well as high um capacity transmission network to support all of this electrification we just don't have it yet no and it's there's many things to touch on there and number one like going back to like the gas station owners that was probably one of the most despicable things to come out of the biden administration over the last year was blaming these small business owners for price gouging and you just laid out particularly in california all the overhead costs that they have on an ongoing basis electricity land cost uh the initial fuel costs like these businesses typically

make money by people coming in and buying like like chips and stuff correct like that's where most of them yeah they have razor thin margins anyone that says that the oil and gas industry is price gouging doesn't even understand basic supply and demand in economics it's pure political power play right it has it's not how the market works if that were true when oil was negative 37 down some barrel why were they pricing it everything feels so low i mean if they could just fix the price wherever they wanted why would they have it why would it go negative i mean it just makes no sense no not at all and then we get into the complete logical contradiction which is if you're getting alerts in september of 2022 not to plug your electric vehicle in because of the

potential for rolling blackouts how in the world does governor newsom and the other supporters of this type of initiative to transition to a full ev fleet by 2033 think that's going to be possible like how much more grid infrastructure would need to be built out and most importantly reliable grid infrastructure yeah and a lot of the gas station owners that we're talking about they say oh well why don't they just switch to install electric charging stations well to install a new electric charging station in california costs up to 150 000 per charger when you take the equipment the permits the fees the installation costs when you add it all up around 150 000 per charger now imagine you're a small family-owned business scraping by making tiny margin on selling

reese's pieces and then all of a sudden they're saying these kind of cars your customers cars are banned from going here they have to charge electric and by the way oh you might have to spend 150 000 a charger to install these things in your station if you're going to transition to your revenue model around charging electric vehicles oh and by the way many of these gas stations don't have the room i mean so it's not even even if they wanted to do it they don't have the space many of them i mean some do obviously but many don't no and then you can't factor in like the time value of money like maybe you can let's just run with the hypothetical that some of these gas stations could scrape up the money to invest in these charging stations maybe get

five or six like a typical amount of gas pumps that exist like it takes much longer to charge a car than it does to fill it up with gas so then your total addressable like revenue stream gets shrunk as well because you're waiting for people to charge their cars where when you're filling your gas tank maybe takes five minutes park to cap the tank and go on your way yeah in five minutes you're in and out of a normal gas station in for electric vehicle charging obviously it depends on how much charge you have and how much you want to charge up but you're talking 40 minutes you know between 30 and 60 minutes let's say 40 minutes somewhere in there on average if you're gonna If you're somewhat low charge and really want to bring it back up to 80%

and somewhere in there, it's obviously going to make a difference on the type of charger and the model of the car. And there's a variety of factors, but that's a good range. So first of all, people are going to sit at a gas station for 40 minutes to charge their car? I mean, that just doesn't seem very realistic. No. And even if it's a supercharger, they can do 15 minutes now.

It's still 3x the time it takes to fill your car with gas. And it's like, well, most people will probably charge their cars at home. And it's like, okay, what's wrong with that? Like, what does that do for their... Well, think about the person that says this, though. Oh, people can just charge in home, and they have their own garage, and they'll just spend the money, first of all, on the electrical upgrades in their home, which could be several thousand dollars, putting in a home charger.

Well, that assumes you're a homeowner, that you have a garage, right? A lot of people rent, and not everyone lives in a single-family home with a nice garage and in space so what are we talking about here you're basically this is a regressive tax on lower income and middle income families that's what it is because those are the people that don't have the ability to charge the car in their garage overnight and they certainly don't have the money to pay sixty five thousand dollars which in the united states the average electric car is 65 000 that's more than double a typical sedan for a conventional vehicle who is buying that those are we know who they've done the market research they've done the surveys

most of the people that are driving electric vehicles make over six figures are of the upper income upper middle income class so it is it is truly an unfair policy that's putting the burden on lower and middle income people yeah and then on top of that if we were to say all right maybe the price of the cars comes down and can become accessible to lower income individuals you still have the problem of charging in a space that they don't own or simply don't have enough space to charge or the electrical infrastructure but then is it possible from like a raw material raw input perspective to to actually make this a possibility like how many how much cobalt how much lithium how much rare earth metals would need to be taken out of the ground to actually produce a fleet

of this size for california and we're only talking about california alone and we know that there are some people throughout the federal government who would like to make this a national policy right the amount we have plenty of minerals in the earth so it's not that there's scarcity in terms of the actual supply of the minerals they exist the problem is getting them digging them out of the ground in the timetables that the policymakers have set we don't have enough existing mines or planned mines to come anywhere close to hitting the various clean energy goals of transitioning to solar wind and electric vehicles when you look at what that would require and there's various goals by 2030 2050 these various milestones and

you just look at the amount of minerals that would be required to meet those goals the mining infrastructure doesn't exist and according to the international energy agency on average it takes 17 years to bring a new mine online it's one of the most over-regulated ridiculous processes you can imagine that takes decades i mean they they think in decades not not a few years now let's just say you know some of these minds maybe because of political expediency they can fast track and they can make it happen even in the best case scenario it would be 10 years in the best case scenario and that's not going to happen very it's certainly not going to happen in most western countries but maybe in other developing countries they can fast track it and get something up and

running in 10 years in the united states forget it i mean you're talking 20 years 15 20 25 years uh at least yeah what is there a large cobalt deposit up in maine but they refuse to to dig it because they don't want to they don't want to perturb the uh the natural landscape up in maine they'd rather allocate those um that process to somewhere like the congo i'd say others that's the most frustrating thing about this is just the hypocrisy of the individuals pushing this particularly like western environmentalist who have this not my backyard mentality when you actually dig in under the surface it's like i want this to happen but i don't want to happen in my backyard i don't want you to dig up the mountains of maine to get us the rare earth

metals we need to actually build out this infrastructure in pushing all of this mining or all the oil and gas development overseas to countries typically that have much weaker environmental requirements much weaker labor requirements let's just since we're talking about california it's a great example because they've pushed the envelope more than anyone and are are so hypocritical that it's it's crazy so california is sitting on 1.5 billion barrels of oil mostly in kern county in southern california tons of oil here we could produce it here and most of it's under the desert i was down visiting an oil lease not too long ago and it's just desert i couldn't see a single plant a single tree there's nothing when i came to the site there

was a team of surveyors that were walking around flagging off where they were going to be drilling looking for lizards endangered lizards in marking the area so they would fence it off to make sure they weren't disturbing any area with this lizard now contrast that so we're not that that's what we do here that's the level of regular which is admirable it's noble we do want to protect our environment we don't want to cause pollution unnecessarily and if you're going to drill you should drill there right in the middle of the desert with no plants where it's highly regulated and we have full control instead what california prefers to do instead of using this resource that comes in an environmentally friendly way with good labor requirements.

We, California, imports over 70% of its oil from foreign countries. Three countries represent 50% of that. Ecuador, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. Now, who do you think has stricter environmental concerns, Iraq or California? I mean, Iraq will just set whole oil fields on fire. I mean, they don't have near the kinds of constraints or rules or care at all in terms of these kinds of things. And in Ecuador, you're basically slashing and burning the rainforest. They don't have any kinds of controls that we have here in terms of the production.

There's all kinds of contamination and spillage and destruction of a very sensitive ecosystem versus the barren desert in California. then all those environmental impacts are happening down there so we're destroying wildlife we're contaminating water we're unnecessarily flaring gas down there that we don't we're not allowed to flare gas here for example in terms of production so all that's happening then you got to put it on a big oil tanker and you got to burn a bunch of fuel oil which is the dirtiest type of of fuel it's much more emitting than traditional gasoline that we use in cars and like trucks so you're burning all of this polluting fuel oil to transport all of this these hydrocarbons across the ocean from iraq from saudi arabia from ecuador then you come to

the long beach in la ports and then all of these ships idle sitting out there and all the trucks that are coming in to transport this are spewing tons of pollution into the neighboring communities that happen to be low-income, mostly minority communities that live near the Long Beach and LA ports. And so the people who claim that we're protecting the environment, we're protecting low-income people by getting rid of fossil fuels in California are doing exactly the opposite. They're harming the low-income people the most, the people that live near the ports and have to deal with all this extra smog and pollution the amount of smog and pollution associated just with all of this oil transport is equivalent to six million cars on the road across the region it's

a massive amount of smog and air pollution then you're also nailing these same low-income people throughout the state in terms of the cost because all of this costs money to you know all of the additional fees and taxes and things that california adds on for all the climate programs and all the cap and trade there's a dollar and 18 cents a gallon on every gallon of gasoline in california that just represents taxes and fees and costs for climate programs so all of this is getting burdened on lower income people so when you start adding all this up and really what is the goal that we're trying to achieve with this we were trying to protect and improve the quality of human life improve improve human welfare we're trying to protect and improve the quality of

your environment and we're doing the exact opposite through these insane policies yeah and then on top of that because i imagine you i think i saw a tweet you met with mike umbro down in current count yeah that's usually lisa was that and he sat in that chair about a year ago almost exactly i think and he was explaining that the demand for oil has remained constant if not grown over the same time period so it's not like yes you are reallocating that production elsewhere but you're not consuming less oil and that's something you actually tweeted out earlier today from robert price is despite all this renewable sustainable energy infrastructure there's no been no material dent in the amount of emissions and it's been a double whammy because the price of

electricity has risen alongside that as well yeah the price of electricity in california is the highest of any other state except hawaii we we've just increased at this rapid rate and when you look at the data and you look well when do all these prices start escalating it's when the state put these mandates in for renewable energy and set these really really aggressive goals now i don't have inherently a problem with any technology that's generating energy more energy in the world the better however when you start misapplying those technologies and requiring them and cramming them down from the top from the government and mandate making it happen you're perverting the entire marketplace you're sending false price signals into the market they become parasitic

on thermal power thermal power plants because you can't operate to operate a power plant you obviously have to sell a certain amount of power if you're competing against someone that doesn't even have to sell power because they make most of their money on the subsidies the various tax credits and subsidies then you're at a serious disadvantage to them so you just shut down you don't build them who's going to invest in it and then all the incentives are flowing in flooding into renewables so of course investors are going to keep pumping money into that because they get great tax benefits from it um and they don't have to deal with the unreliable unreliability of the electric grid that's not their problem no it's like it is very uh i mean it's fascinating because

this is a bitcoin podcast and i truly think this is stems the core of this problem stems from the fact that the government could just print money and throw money at these subsidies where you just have these negative externalities that arise because we can print money at will and throw it where we deem most productive which is turning out to be not very productive at all and actually counterproductive to the end goal like you mentioned making quality of life better for lower income individuals and providing more reliable energy infrastructure it's doing the exact opposite yeah i mean we there's basically three paths that we have we can surrender the environmental goal meaning we can go and you know do whatever we want pollute all the water pollute

the air do all that we can surrender the human goal and you know have people live in poverty and not lift them up and able to live in prosperity and flourish or we can figure out ways to make better energy and we know how to do this we don't have to surrender any of these goals those it those are kind of a false equivalency we don't necessarily have to go all in on humans or all and the environment we can have both yeah and this what what do you think is the best solution for both is it nuclear nuclear natural gas i think in the united now energy is very localized right it really there's a bunch of criterion factors that i think are important to weigh and the availability of the resource where you're trying to deliver it is important also the level

of economic development of a country, I'll give you an example. If you're in India right now, India has tons of coal. They have a huge economy that's reliant on coal. They need to burn coal. They don't really have another choice. They can't afford just to shift overnight to nuclear power. The cost of that kind of infrastructure shift, although that should be the long-term goal, and they should aim eventually to go into a cleaner burning fuel source such as nuclear power, it's not realistic for them to do that even in in the next couple decades it's going to take many decades just like it did for europe and the united states so we have to think of these things over time and what's appropriate for different regions so i think you got to map out all the

evaluation criteria and what is going to be affordable what is going to enhance energy security what's going to provide reliability all of these things need to be weighed and balanced and there's no perfect solution there's not one thing that's ideal and perfect in every situation yeah i mean you can even add geography into it don't build a nuclear power plant on a coast or on a fault line like there's you're probably going to have natural gas facilities closer to the source so close to natural gas pipelines and wells where it's being extracted from and yeah And it's the nuance that you just described never enters the question. It's broad brush.

No, we need to do this. We need to do it in haste as soon as possible. And stay on nuclear, too, because that's like the most disencouraging theme in the energy sector right now is this inability. It seems like over the last year, actually, people have begun to shift their mentality as it pertains to nuclear because we've recognized the problems that's caused countries like Germany and states like California. What is the path forward to make it so more nuclear power plants are spun up and we actually begin reinvesting in this technology and actually building it out? because it seems like it's been pretty stagnant for for many decades now the world is shifting on nuclear energy right now we're watching it happen in real time you have countries like japan that obviously suffered the the terrible accident in fukushima who turned off over 50 nuclear power

plants that was the dominant electricity source well they're now turning those back on they're turning them back on as fast as they can it's a phased process because it's not so easy just just flip a switch and turn a nuclear power plant back on but they're they're rapidly moving towards turning on as many of those units as possible korea had started to divest and we're going in a different direction just towards a renewable destination and they've corrected course now they're going all in on nuclear power france the same thing even though france 70 of electricity in france comes from nuclear energy however in 2015 they enacted legislation called their energy transition law that was in essence going to deprioritize nuclear and go more towards renewables

well now they've doubled down on nuclear power again and they're going to be building uk yeah well going back to language go like that whole this is what's so odd it's like they were going to deprioritize nuclear to go prioritize renewables but wouldn't shouldn't nuclear be considered like the most renewable it's the most energy dense if you run your power plant correctly it is extremely clean the gas coming out of these reactors is not is not toxic it's water vapor um like that's the other thing is like how has nuclear been siphoned off into this dirty energy when it is arguably the cleanest that we may have on the planet it is a concerted effort over many decades of environmental groups and politicians as well as some folks originally in the fossil

fuel industry because they saw it as a competitor to basically attack it and to spread tons of misinformation. When you look at the data, nuclear power is, well, first of all, it's the only 24-7 truly clean energy source that has zero emissions, you know, in terms of emissions coming out of the power plant. Of course, there's some emissions associated with mining, et cetera, in the whole life cycle. But in terms of actual emissions from the plant, it's zero air pollution, zero CO2 emissions. So when you look actually at the data across the last 70 years of commercial operation, there's the i think solar is the only one that has slightly less deaths per kilowatt hour so it's this it's safer than wind power right it's certainly safer than natural gas and

other types of fossil fuels and yet we have put it in this category to where it's this unknown dangerous thing when it's not dangerous of course you need certain level of regulation you have to be safe and thoughtful just like any industry but for some reason we don't i mean we have chemical accidents all the time we just had a plane a train derail we these things happen it's it's part of running a modern society there's some degree of risk involved but that doesn't mean we shut down the entire chemicals industry because there's an accident every once in a while no no i think people point to chernobyl particularly and say this was a terrible event we don't want to replicate this but if you dig into the history of chernobyl obviously hbo had that that show it was really a

managerial crisis and not really a crisis of the actual nuclear power itself it was human error at the end of the day yeah and when we take that accident which is a horrendous accident and in there's there's no uh sugar coating it whatsoever still when you even look at that which is the the worst accident that's ever happened, about 200 people total, including all of the first responders, including factoring in any kinds of health-related impacts post-disaster died associated with that event, which is a tragedy. You never want people to die, of course. But I mean, we have millions of people that die every year due to coal power plants, right? And we don't shut down coal power plants because the benefits outweigh the side effects. We have a

rational weighting and view that, yes, we know that coal does create air pollution, which does create adverse health effects in some communities, but it's worth it because of all the benefits that it brings. Yeah. And so what do you think the future of nuclear is? Are you bullish on small modular reactors i think it depends on where we're talking about right and so in europe and in the middle east and in asia they're going to build large reactors as well as small reactors which i think is great i'm a fan of both i think we need it's almost thinking about this problem is similar to our view trains cars and airplanes that you need them all they serve different functions within the transportation network so we we need the large light water reactors of large

plants and we also need small modular reactors we need micro reactors we need all of it because they serve different purposes for different applications so in the uae for example they've shown that we can do this quickly so just about 2008 2009 they they started a nuclear power program and in the last three years they've turned on a new reactor each year um and the fourth reactor is built it's just not turned on yet and they will have 25 of their electricity will come from nuclear power in the near future and they had nothing they had no nuclear power program they had nothing now they partnered with north uh south korea to help them develop that program north korea could use some nuclear power yeah that might be a little slightly different uh situation but

no south korea has the knowledge and expertise and they partner with them but it shows you can go from zero to one very quickly in in basically a decade they went from zero to now in essence having about 25 of their electricity coming from a hundred percent clean energy source and that's that gives me hope that gives me that shows me it can be done when there's a political will and joined with the right engineering expertise yeah it's replicable it seems like here in the united states political will isn't there yet there's a lot of red tape that any company trying to build reactors has to get through there's there's a lot of headwinds for sure and i think we will be building a lot of small reactors in the united states unfortunately i

don't see us building large reactors in the near future and here's why so right now we have two units going in in Georgia at the Vogel plant unfortunately because we hadn't built any large plants in so long we there was many confounding reasons why I can converging reasons why this project ended up taking way too long and for way too much money it's six years behind behind schedule in 16 billion dollars over budget and there's no excuse for that I mean yes we had covid yes the company was going through a bankruptcy at the time yes there was some significant technical errors there's all kinds of reasons why that happened regardless there's

no excuse it's just it's it's set the whole industry back a very long ways because but that kind of investment that's necessary utilities don't have the balance sheet to be able to even finance something like that and why would they can't take on that kind of risk there's no way it would be irresponsible for a utility to take on that level of risk given these recent events in the near term when their balance sheet can't really accommodate it and so i don't see it happening in the united states for a while i think we will eventually build large plants again but i think what will happen is over the next one to two decades we're going to build a lot of small plants and people are going to understand it get educated and see the benefits and then we're going

to take a lot of that knowledge and a lot of that political will and then we'll build large plants again eventually but i think it's not going to happen for a while and what will the dynamic between small communities and these SMRs look like? What does the application look like? There's lots of applications. I mean, I work on this in my day job. And what I see happening right now is there's industrial customers that are very interested in lowering their emissions

and finding reliable power. So this could be petrochemical facilities, refineries, energy intensive factories that are making all you know that are really going to become more automated use more energy the amount of energy required in a lot of these factories is just off the charts and especially as they're trying to get permitted they have to show that they're not going to increase emissions a lot because all the states and the government doesn't want to they won't be able to hit their various goals etc so there's a lot of pressure on companies that are building out these kinds of industrial facilities.

So those are some of the kind of industrial facilities. Mining sites can access it. They have huge power requirements for mining operations, for processing the minerals, et cetera. And then data centers is a huge opportunity, as well as in Bitcoin mining, obviously. Data centers right now, the highest concentration of data centers in the world is in Northern Virginia.

I think something like 70% of all internet traffic goes through Northern Virginia. It's an incredible concentration of capacity. And right now, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera, they can't build more data centers because there's transmission bottlenecks. There's not enough electricity that can get through the wires to where they want to build them. and so these companies are considering and looking at small modular reactors micro reactors as a solution to solve power availability because now if you can plunk down a data center or a bitcoin mine anywhere right you're not constrained by grid congestion you're not constrained by lack of generation capacity in the region it really opens up the whole field of your opportunities

And what does connection to these data centers or plants look like if it's like off-grid, not connected to, is there an interconnect or? well you're you're connected the the reactor has a power conversion system so there's different components so you have the reactor itself that if you're zooming out and just thinking what is in the simplest form what is this thing you have basically a big stainless steel tank that you have some kind of liquid in it different reactors use different types of coolants in the bottom of tank you have hot rocks which is uranium right those hot rocks are are creating heat that is then getting transferred to a liquid of some kind of coolant then that is going through a heat exchanger and at the end of the day all you're doing is boiling water and creating steam the

whole power conversion system off of most of these systems is the exact same whether it's a natural gas plant a coal planet it's just you're boiling water to create steam to turn a turbine right so So it's just how do you boil water? That's really what we're talking about here. So they connect in a similar way than any power plant would connect. I mean, there's obviously wires that are connecting the power conversion system to whatever the facility is. But instead of sending those wires miles and miles or hundreds of miles away, you're just setting it down right next to it and connecting. There's also additional benefits about resilience and reliability, because now if your generation source is right next to the data center, right next to the Bitcoin mine, you don't have to worry about the grid going down.

You know, trees, storms coming and knocking down the grid or knocking down the distribution wires. So there's an inherent enhanced resilience to having this on-site generation. And nuclear reactors run 24-7, 365. the only time you take them offline is when you have to refuel them and depending on the reactor design uh some of the designs go all the way out to every 10 years you basically don't have to refuel them for 10 years so they're all these benefits really lend themselves enhanced reliability enhanced resilience and they can be very cost effective as well yeah that's what that's the next question i was gonna ask like what is the uh what's it do from the cost side like how

how cheap can you get your electricity down well i think we're going to in see this roll out in phases right you're going to have the initial units and as we get more economies of scale the price is going to drop lower and lower there's also different business models within the smr community some of the business models are centered around the traditional model where you you design the reactor you license that technology to utility that utility builds it and operates it and then maybe that company has a service contract or something to support in some way if some some issues arise so that model is very different than offering a power purchase agreement where some some of the companies are basically owning and operating the reactors themselves and then just

selling heat or power to the customer on a long-term contract basis so maybe 20 years 25 years they're signing some agreement maybe there's some escalators in there but basically the customer's locking in a long-term power contract for a fixed amount or a known amount of energy each year yeah bitcoin miners would love that that's yeah but to answer your question directly i think what we're seeing in the near term is six to nine cents a kilowatt hour in the lower 48 us so alaska's its own beast obviously hawaii is separate but in in the lower 48 i think you're going to see six to nine cents depending on the location depending on variety of factors um for the cost per kilowatt hour and i think in probably once we get a dozen or so of these out in in getting going and start

standing up some of the economies of scale i think it's possible to get five cents or less in some cases um for for larger sites and obviously the m and smr is modular like how how small of a scale are we talking in terms of megawatts produced from from some of these reactors yeah there's a whole spectrum and it's great to see this whole ecosystem of companies starting to emerge there's about 50 different designs out there for for reactors and there's i would say there's 12 companies that are well capitalized that are engaged with the regulator are going through the regulatory process and have some level of traction so with those you're going to see the majority of them are focused in ranges i would say in 300 to 500 megawatt range is is what you're

looking at like for example terra power has natrium it's 345 megawatts um then you have what are classified as micro reactors and with those they can go down as small as one megawatt but generally i think what you're going to see in the micro reactor range is 10 to 100 megawatts is going to be a nice sweet spot because there's a lot of customers you know data centers are a good example where not a lot of data centers want 400 megawatts i mean that's a huge i mean it's a huge campus or something like that but there's quite a lot that if you don't come in at 25 50 75 megawatts that's would would serve a lot of potential customers yeah yeah just again using bitcoin mining as an analog that's i run a company or co-founded a company tom my uh partner matt

they really run it at the end of the day but uh that's what we're targeting that like 10 to 25 megawatt um size site up in appalachia and tennessee and kentucky and and like this module reactor um design and the idea behind it has always intuitively made sense i mean you have to imagine if these companies are able to get through the red tape hopefully the red tape gets less um less stringent as we move forward like how much of the cost on the front end is purely compliance regulatory like well it's not cheap that's for sure because the the nuclear regulatory commission bills out on an hourly basis and i'm trying to remember the exact number i don't want to give a wrong number but i think it's something like just shy of 300 an hour or something like

that it's like 290 dollars an hour something and you're talking about massive amount of time investment of reviewing all of the design document all the design documentation etc through these projects but i think what the advantage of the small reactors and what a lot of these companies are doing in creating these modules is that they can be replicated they're not going to change mostly right i mean each company has slightly different strategy but generally they're trying to create something so once you get the first one through and approved most of the applications for future licenses will be referencing 80 to 90 percent of the application and then only 10 to 20 percent will be for local environmental changes of that site you know if you're in arizona or if

you're in minnesota or wherever you are and you're dealing with those local environmental conditions but 80 plus percent of the of the application will already have been reviewed for the safety case for the major features within the reactor so i think what we're going to see is this has been incredibly painful incredibly slow we haven't seen a lot of progress for many years until it changes and i think we are on the cusp of seeing a big shift in the amount of reactors that get out there i think we're going to see in the late 2020s we're going to have dozens in the u.s implemented in the 2030s we're going to have hundreds and then hopefully moving up from there so i think we are going to see a radical shift in the deployment of micro reactors and small modular reactors

what do you think is the main driver behind the shift in sentiment right now is it people waking up to oh crap energy is pretty important it seems like um we've left ourselves in a bit of a vulnerable situation from an energy grid perspective is it looking at examples like the uae and others that are doing it successfully and saying, hey, we need to participate in that combination of everything? I think from a political standpoint, it's clearly greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. I was just, a few days ago, I was in a conference in Houston.

It's a petrochemical conference. You might as well have been at the Green Festival. Every single session, every session, whether it was in finance, whether it was in technology, whether it was in legal, the entire conference was infused with all about electrification, CO2 reduction, decarbonization, sustainability. Every session was talking about it. And this is not a green conference. This was the petrochemical conference. So I think what we're seeing is the policy level, both at the

state and federal level, has pushed this to a point where whether companies like it or not, they realize if they want to operate and they want to grow they're going to have to do something and so they're all looking for solutions and obviously the solutions need to be affordable cost effective etc so that's a huge driver yeah government man just forcing all these these regulations on people perturbing the market just let people go let them run i mean and bringing this back to like wind and solar in california too like again i think the piece that you shared from robert today leaning into the prices like the proof is not in the pudding like going back to the subsidies we may have discussed this the first time you were on but even if we did i think

it's important to rehash it like many people will point at the subsidies given to wind and solar projects and say hey this is pretty insane how many subsidies these industries are getting and then people from the wind and solar industry will turn around and say like well oil and gas is getting the same amount of subsidies is that true like what no no what is the magnitude of it yeah i'm trying to remember the exact number but it's many many times more subsidies on wind and solar versus the oil and gas industry i mean i've tweeted about this in the past i'm trying to remember the exact stat but it's not even remotely close in terms of order of magnitude wind and solar have been subsidized in every possible way from tax credits rebates incentives

preferential treatment on the grid access all of these things they get huge huge advantages on and in terms of money spent to influence policy robert bryce had a recent substack article on this where he showcased there was $4.5 billion a year being spent on campaigns basically to mislead people about the dangers of fossil fuels and nuclear power and focus on renewable energy. I mean, there's just so much money in all of these environmental NGOs that is going towards just hammering and bombarding the public and policymakers about the dangers of nuclear power, about fossil fuels are destroying the planet. We must do this transition. And when you look at that compared to, I think the spending was four to one. And when you look at the oil and gas industry and what they're spending to try to influence policymakers and the public. so the spending is way different in terms of both the money that's flooding in to influence policy

and politics as well as just that's why i think what we're seeing on downstream of that which is where all the subsidies are actually flowing yeah yeah no i mean we see it in the bitcoin mining industry particularly here in texas where a lot of mining operations are going after these wind and solar projects because they're just like heavily subsidized on the front end and throughout the life so they're able to get really cheap power but it's because these credits come into play these renewable credits and it's not really that cheap without the subsidies which is a blind spot i think a lot of miners have in the long run because of those subsidies i mean just look at the state of the country right now we have a banking crisis going on looks like we're

about to hit um the budget limit and whether or not the political will is there to keep raising the uh the ceiling on that limit is yet to be seen and i would not rule out the possibility that one day you wake up at the end of the 2020s and those credits aren't there and then you're actually sitting there mining at the true cost of power which would be significantly above what what you thought it was with the credits in place oh when you when you add up the true cost this is just partial cost accounting it's just it's silliness to say that wind and solar are cheaper there's it's just it's just not when you add up the real cost that's why in every single place you have a high percentage of of renewable penetration in a market they have

higher electricity bills i mean it's it's true in germany it's true in california it's true in the 28 other states that in the us that have renewable energy mandates it's just more expensive because renewable energy is an expensive wasteful add-on to the existing grid you don't get rid of the need to have a power plant right and don't even get me started on the batteries okay batteries batteries today i sort of want to get you started batteries are meant for shaving off peak they're they're used for these four hour windows when there's peak in demand and to basically offset that right they're not meant for long duration storage we don't really have that technology yet people are working on it and maybe we'll get there i'm sure we will get there we're very innovative humans

then people really smart people are working on it however we don't have long duration battery storage especially not long enough to go for weeks or months which is what we need and when people are talking oh all we need is a day or 12 hours or a few hours no look at the data they did this analysis in germany they went back for 34 or 35 years of actual data and looked at heating degree days cooling degree days looked at the amount of wind resource that was available and they were trying to calculate well if we actually did shift the whole grid to renewable energy could we do it how much storage would we need to overcome when the wind wasn't blowing and we had clouds especially in a country like germany it's northern latitude they had their solar power

systems only have a 10 capacity factor that means solar is only generating power 10 of the time to generating maximum power um of of of the day of the year so when you're in that environment you need a massive amount of storage and for seasonal storage right because what they found was there was 64 days during a period of time where there was just scarce wind and sun and when they went and calculated that how much battery storage they would need given that lack of resource what they found was i think it was 24 days of storage 24 days 24 7 for each day obviously i mean it's just a massive the the price tag for something like that is so expensive and so ridiculous you you wouldn't even bother with the calculation because you don't need to you just know that it's

unaffordable there's not it's not even a possibility no and it's again it's just indicative of the clown world because uh after covid we moved out of new york city we moved to a small island barrier island town uh near the southern tip of new jersey and in the causeway when you're off island you go shopping off island you go to the the store and then you go back on island on the causeway you have a speed barometer um it's solar powered uh and in the middle of winter when the sun was laying low for for most of the day or most of the winter months and then it got cloudy because it was cold and it started snowing like there are days where that barometer just simply wasn't on because it was solar powered and you just use that as a small example like that's one

speed limit barometer that doesn't take a lot of electricity but you use that as an example of like this thing doesn't work how do you think like a whole grid run on solar is going to work well it's not just the amount of battery storage you also have to overbuild tremendously because so what they're what the proponents of renewable energy say they want to do is they're going to overbuild the amount of solar and wind you need they're going to build out massive amount of new transmission lines so that they can interconnect large geographic areas so that if one place supposedly is is cloudy or lack of wind then you can basically import the electricity from another place and then you'll use some type of storage whether it's hydrogen or whether it's battery

storage to accommodate the rest and all of those things make no sense first of all the building out the transmission capacity is just completely unreasonable for example in california they're saying they need to triple the size of the transmission capacity triple the grid well you can't even build anything in california and now you're going to triple the grid you can imagine the amount of land use conflicts and fights and legal battles over that that's not gonna that's nowhere near going to happen and when you consider the alternatives like hydrogen well hydrogen is a wonderful chemical i mean we use it to make ammonia which is used to make fertilizer which is feeds you know half the world so it's it's great and hydrogen is also used in industrial applications

to remove sulfur from petroleum products wonderful you know it's a great product we make it today the the oil and gas industry has made hydrogen for decades right however when you're starting to use it as a fuel which it's not it's a carrier it's not it's not you don't it's not a fuel into itself you have to make it you have to make the energy or generate it from somewhere and it just makes no sense beyond a certain amount of niche applications when you start transport it so for example if you want to start sending hydrogen around well you need to compress it because it's very light molecule it wants to slip out of everything and it leaks everywhere right and it needs a high amount of compression so you spend three times the amount of energy to compress the

gas to put it in a pipeline then you do natural gas three times um and then even back up a second And just to make it, so you've got to make it somehow. So today it's made from natural gas. They basically strip it out of natural gas. The proponents of this renewable energy fantasy say that they're going to use electrolysis. They're going to split water, and they're going to pull off the hydrogen. Well, there's so many flaws in that thinking that it would take us an hour to walk through everything. But let's just take a few of them, which is, number one,

the electrolyzer is the most expensive part of that whole setup when you have an expensive piece of equipment you have to run it all the time it has to run like 24 7 that's why all of these industrial facilities they run 24 7 they never shut down because if they shut down the economics don't work to even build it in the first place well people say well we'll just store the excess wind and solar um we'll put it through an electrolyzer when we have excess and we'll make hydrogen well no because then the whole thing will the economics completely fall apart you need that electrolyzer working 24 hours a day all the time seven days a week and then maybe it makes sense for some applications but that goes against the whole idea of the intermittent power

source because we know that it's not going to the sun is not going to generate power 24 hours a day so therefore just on the face of it the whole economics are destroyed it makes no sense that's before you get into needing to transport it spending three times the amount of energy to compress it then the fact that tons of it is going to leak out of the pipeline which by the way is a greenhouse gas um more so than even methane i mean in a lot of ways it's it's a bigger problem if if we were doing this now it's not a problem today because we don't have a lot of it and but all of a sudden if we were trying to scale this up at the scale of natural gas um we would have a problem with emissions of leaking hydrogen because it would be coming out of everywhere

it it gets it is so small and slippery it it comes out of everything out of welds out of cracks everywhere didn't we learn our lesson from the hindenburg too wasn't that hydrogen based yeah it's it's i mean we know how to control things safely but that's a dangerous gas you wouldn't want it going everywhere all of certainly would never want it pumping into people's houses are businesses yeah for for certain niche industrial applications hydrogen might make sense beyond its use as a chemical but when people start talking about that it is going to be the replacement for natural gas and we're going to ship it all around the world we're going to compress and ship it and move it put it on boats that is absolutely insanity it makes no the

thermodynamics of that make no sense whatsoever and as soon as my my litmus test with with hydrogen is are they going to generate it and use it in the same place if if so maybe it's worth a further look and maybe it makes sense as soon as someone starts talking about transporting it i know they have not done any work on this topic and they haven't researched it because there are so many issues and we haven't even gotten to the embrittlement issues it actually doesn't work in a lot of pipelines because it eats away and embrittles the pipeline so it depending on the type of steel so there are so it is just a terrible fuel source it's a great chemical a terrible fuel source are people seriously talking about replacing home natural gas with it

oh yeah oh but lots of people are proposing this yeah they hydrogen there's so much hydrogen hype out there right now that this is the panacea of the solution the only thing that's hyped more than hydrogen is maybe fusion but but it's it's a close second um because there they are viewing it is the solution to this intermittency of wind and solar so i think the achilles heel of renewables is everyone it's so obvious that you have to have a long-term storage solution in a way to deal with that so people point to batteries and hydrogen are the solutions we know i mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that we don't have long duration battery storage yet i mean we just don't we have great batteries for certain applications limited like we said to like

four hours after six months my phone won't make it through the night like how do we think we're going to create like batteries for and what about in cold weather which obviously many parts of the world have i mean this going back to batteries and its role even in electric vehicles when you're driving in cold climates your range can be cut in half up to depending on the temperature obviously but if you get down to single digits um in let's say the u.s fahrenheit then you could be cutting your range between 40 and 50 percent and it can take three times longer to charge that car so imagine you're trying to i mean fine if you're just doing short commutes to work and you happen to have a garage and you happen to have cheap electricity then great get an electric car

knock yourself out but that's not the reality for the majority of people that drive majority of the country lives in cold climates they drive longer distances and they don't want to have the inconvenience of waiting to charge their vehicle right i mean it's just it's not a practical solution for many people no and then again think of the economic costs remove the need for battery infrastructure and charging station infrastructure but going back to the time needed to charge like the collective man hours spread out against uh over the life cycle of one of these cars like how much time is wasted like how much potential economic value productivity could have been produced uh if you did not have to wait to charge your car it's like like are these factored into

these infrastructure bills these economic analysis probably not no i mean this is all being driven again back to your point this these technologies are mostly being driven by this top down policy regime that is pumping massive subsidies to prop them up based upon an ideology that's why that is why this is happening if there were no subsidies for wind and solar we would not be building them except in maybe some niche applications where someone lives in a rural area and it costs too much to bring power lines to them. Or maybe there are some cases in sunny Arizona or sunny California for certain types of homes where it makes sense.

Great, do it. But that's not what they're proposing. They're proposing to have it be the dominant supply of energy to run civilization. That's what they're proposing. California says we're going to be 100% renewable by 2045. People say this to me all the time on Twitter. no one's advocating for 100 renewable energy like what are you talking about we have law there's laws of states that actually say this and yes no they they are saying this right that that

is the stated goal it's in enacted in legislation yeah and how many like rolling blackouts or brown outs is california need to go through before more pain required you think so oh much more pain i I mean, I live in San Francisco. You see the politicians, all the problems are right in front of you, and yet they're doubling down on all the policies that created the problems in the first place. And we see this at the state level as well. And it's just a shame because there's going to be, unfortunately,

a lot of unnecessary suffering. Again, back to the people that will suffer the most will be lower and middle-income families. They're going to suffer the most because of these bad policy decisions. yeah yes i mean san francisco is one of the extreme cases not only from like energy but just local city politics and the da's office there and how they i mean i'll let you speak for the city since you live there but i'm not from philadelphia we're going through similar things up in philly but it just seems like there's this political unwillingness to actually fix the problems and i

know you're good friends with michael schellenberger who wrote san francisco and is really focused on this problem as well as the energy problem like what what do you think yes things need to get worse but like what is the the rock bottom point where san franciscans and others wake up i would have thought we've been there by now i mean i i've had i've had the privilege to travel quite a bit around the world and unfortunately i've gone to some certain places where i've seen some incredible levels of poverty in parts of india for example in parts of peru that i visited And I can tell you, when I go to the gym in the morning in downtown, it is worse than some of those areas in Peru and India. It is just incredible, the level of just self-destruction and just suffering that we're witnessing.

And the fact that we just allow this to happen, that we walk by. i i'm myself i mean i've become somewhat immune to it because it's everywhere you you just are immersed in it so it's really really sad to see and how we how easily we have to adapt to it yeah there's this weird juxtaposition where you have all that suffering and the like open drug trade and like just the unwillingness to actually change it like with silicon valley tech companies i think that have built modernity in the digital age that were afforded today it's just so odd that you have like all this immense wealth in the form of these tech companies and then in this city that seems to be getting into a more desperate

place every day every day you see it in the news yeah well these these policies are being driven by ideology and ideology is coming from a place of people are wanting to do good i think most of most not all but most of these actors are wanting to contribute to something bigger than themselves they're seeking a sense of purpose they're seeking meaning in their life and they've embraced a set of ideas and ideology that fulfills that and although that ideology is not grounded in reality It is serving a function and a purpose for them. And unfortunately, it has catastrophic consequences when it goes awry. Yeah.

The urge to help leads to mass suffering many times. Yeah, that's why we have human action here. It's like just pull yourself up from your bootstraps, try to be productive and take care of yourself first. and then naturally a bunch of individuals doing that together should should help each other and provide a quality of life that that everybody's happy with um which gets like to another question i wanted to ask you like if you had a magic wand you brian get redeemed energies are of the united states what would you do well first i'd fire myself that would be my first action um because

say i don't think anyone should have that position that's the problem it's the central planning cramming down certain ideas on everyone i think the most important thing that i could do in that position is actually to fire myself and remove as many barriers as possible um because that's really the that's the genesis that's the root of the problem is we've layered on although many of these are well-intentioned we've layered on so many rules and regulations and requirements that it is just piled and piled and piled higher and higher and it's gotten to a point where it's been obviously perverted by the political process and money that's influencing that process etc so there's there's many confounding factors to this but right now the incentives are so

misaligned that that's why we're investing in the wrong technologies and that's why we're building energy system that is going to be more polluting and more harmful and more expensive versus achieving the aims that we're setting out to do so i think price signals are incredibly important just the idea of a price is so powerful right because it allows a large group of people to react to incentives and act very rationally and engage in free commerce with each other so you want is the least amount of distortion is possible on that price signal and we've done just the opposite because we've loaded up certain technologies with tons of subsidies rebates and tax credits we're penalizing others we're we're basically doing everything we can to obscure

what the real price is and the real value is and that's the root of the problem if we could get out of the way and yes there's certain we need a minimum number of regulations and rules i'm not saying to go back to the free-for-all wild west but it's got to be the minimum bar right that that we should always look for the minimum threshold we always now are looking for the maximum threshold it's the inverse yeah i completely agree it's uh it was a trick question i was hoping you were going to fire yourself because uh because that is the problem central planning and price distortion it's again going back to the money like what the fed's doing what they have been doing like we have this banking crisis because the fed manipulated the pricing mechanism of the world via interest

rate policy and we have all these distortions throughout the financial system that are have made it extremely fragile over the last five decades and we find ourselves in a situation where Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen look very worried right now because I think deep down they understand the gravity of the situation and the ill effects of messing with the pricing mechanism of the world. It's astounding to me that someone would have the hubris to think that they could control and manage a system that is so compliant, our financial system, our energy system.

These are two of the most complicated, nuanced networks and systems of trade and interaction that exist on the planet, how could any small group of humans think that they could somehow put their thumb on the scale and control it and figure out what the desired outcome and actually achieve it? I think it's impossible. And that's what the whole idea of a price signal is, is the fact that you can get millions or even billions of people

to coordinate effectively with the right incentive structure. so i think it's it all comes down to what you're saying it's this kind of centralized control and centralized decision making um that that hubris to believe that you can even do that is a huge part of the problem yeah complacency complacency and hubris are why we find ourselves in this terrible situation that we do in the financial sector and the energy sector the like american populace at large probably got a bit complacent not understanding the the systems they're operating within and then the hubris of the government to give the the populace the um the courage to believe that the government has uh their best interests in mind and can make the

best decisions for them and this is it's a really hard problem because i i've been very guilty of this myself i mean i spent 20 years of my career pursuing a lot of the ideas that are opposite of what i'm saying right now and so it's it's really hard how do you question your beliefs how do you how do you know when you're being overly biased and overly influenced because we're all biased obviously in some way shape or form and it's really hard to change your beliefs because your beliefs are rooted in your identity and your identity is tied to all of your social relationships and how you see yourself and how other people see you so if it's really challenging to think about how do you shift a belief because then this can change my identity that might change my friends

that might change my professional network all of those things so it's easier and all of us myself included we like we like the path of least resistance we don't want you don't want to wake up every day and have that kind of cognitive load to figure out like everything right so we have all these heuristics and these these ways of kind of fast tracking things but how do you know when you're too much on autopilot and not really questioning some of those core beliefs and assumptions and you know i've i've been wrong so many times and unfortunately that led me to waste decades of my life working on the wrong problem so i get this i mean i'm not actually that's why I'm not blaming people generally.

I mean, of course, there's some bad actors. But I think for the most part, people are well-intentioned. They're stuck in their biases and their programming. And I don't disparage them. But we need to shake them. And we need to educate them. Just like I needed to be shaken and educated. And part of it, the reason that I had the opportunity to question my police was

i suffered some serious pain you know i made some serious bad investments i lost millions of dollars of my own money and other people's money based upon a belief system that was wrong right and so when you go through that kind of pain i guess you i guess you could continue to to blindly follow but it's it most people i think in this situation would say they'd step back and go man i never want to do that again yeah what did i what decisions did i make what beliefs do i have that allowed me to think this was the right way to go yeah and so you would define that part of your life as a waste of time well it's hard to x you know it's hard to extract all this i mean i did i wrote this article on how i wasted 20 years of my life uh because i was basically working on energy efficiency

renewable energy for for two decades it's hard to to know what's truly a waste because we all learn from our experiences and we grow and we couldn't be where we're at now without those experiences but objectively if i really sat back and and thought about it and in terms of trying to achieve the goal of the problem i was working on which is how do you create clean energy how do you create environmental protection in the world. And yeah, I failed. Absolutely, it was a waste. Because if I would have been spending that time

pursuing working in the nuclear power industry or working in the natural gas industry and working on other technologies, I could have been contributing in a much more meaningful, productive way. But instead, I was part of the problem. Yeah. It does take a lot to admit that.

to look internally to say you're wrong right that's and that's part of what uh led me to bitcoin i got studied economics i studied finance in college i got a job trading you know worked at a fund that traded currencies and i was like i wanted to be an economist of some sorts like i looked up to uh the federal reserve uh chair chairperson at any given point bernanke yellen for a period of time for a short period of time but um i wanted to be that like macro expert that really understood why currencies were trading the way they were because i thought there was um validity in the idea that economists were necessary to make sure that the global economy could actually function and it wasn't until it was a few years into the industry and i started

realizing how markets were trading off of what these fed chairs were saying i was like wait this doesn't make any sense and luckily i found bitcoin and was able to be like oh this makes a lot more sense than this and started uh dedicating my life to that but yeah i mean that happened in my early 20s luckily for me but no it was it was a bit of a shock being like oh i just spent all this money on this degree for something that is complete bullshit well it sounds like you you you didn't do too badly though if you found out in your early 20s what you know kind of a better path yeah yeah it's um that's the thing i think that's true that's why we have it outside fix the money fix the world because i do think going back to like creating accurate pricing

signals throughout the economy you can only do that with a good money that allows you to actually create like a metric stick of value that which you can then go put prices on things yeah money energy are the foundations of modern civilization right i mean that those are the that's the backbone uh the rails that everything rests upon and i think the the worst part about on the energy so well on the money side too but is that we're pulling up the ladder behind us and subjecting the developing world to energy poverty in the name of environmentalism and climate right it makes no sense i mean we still have 40 of the population on the planet all three and a half four billion people that live in energy poverty of some type now there's obviously a

spectrum of extremes we have about 700 million that have no electricity that cook and heat their homes with wood or animal dung in terms of generating heat they're breathing uh most of The women that are doing the cooking with their kids are breathing the equivalent of two packs of wood smoke to cook with and just to heat their homes. They're breathing the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes a day. They're going and spending an hour a day to gather wood for cooking and an hour a day to gather water for drinking and cooking. This is the reality for billions of people, right? And telling those people, oh, you can't burn fossil fuels. We're not going to pay for that.

we're not going to finance that power plant we're not going to build that pipeline we're not going to let you burn coal that's the height of hypocrisy when over 80 percent of our world runs on fossil fuels and all of our wealth was built on fossil fuels and we are going to subject them to living that life in in the name of us being somehow idealistic and thinking that we're do-gooders i mean that's the height of hypocrisy yeah i really hope it changes and i do agree i do think the sentiment is beginning to change i think there is a bunch of people obviously not all there are people who are pot committed to fighting for the cause but i do think the quote-unquote silent majority of people who have that intuition in their stomachs they have that

gut feeling like something's not right like something needs to change i think they're beginning to do more research and really shake themselves out of being complacent and begin to focus on this because i think whether it's the financial system the energy systems um the overall health of the country i think people are beginning to notice like hey something's something's gone wrong here i need to dig into this yeah when you go to the bank and your money's not there or when you your electricity gets shut off because there's not a stable source of electricity people wake up quick and it's very fast that's why i am it is inevitable that we are going to get rid of this ridiculous idea of powering the world with wind solar and hydrogen or whatever that's never

going to happen it's just how much suffering is going to have to unnecessarily take place to get there because once the pain comes and it's going to come the natural human response is going to be to throw out the politicians that got us there and put in some new ones and that is inevitable it's going to happen we're already seeing it starting to happen in certain parts of the world so it's just it's just a shame that people will have to suffer along the way yeah do you do you think it happens in california in the next few years uh we're not there yet but i think i think if we continue and it's an if there's always the i'm i'm always an optimist and hopeful that we can course correct i mean the definition of intelligence is error correction and we do have

the possibility to change and to shift but right now we're doubling down on all the bad policies that are creating the problems and it's going to exacerbate it and make it worse so if we if we truly continue down this path to try to get to this 100 renewable energy goals if we're banning all traditional conventional cars by 2035 in oh the thing we started this whole conversation on was it's not just cars now they're going to medium and heavy duty trucks like diesel trucks you know 18 wheelers right they're trying to that basically the epa has granted california this exemption to to basically pursue this it looks like and so none of this stuff makes sense in the world of thermodynamics and economics and reality we don't have any of that charging

infrastructure for those trucks we're expecting the small business owners that run these trucks to go spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on new trucks when they don't even have the infrastructure to charge them and they're not even certain that we'll have the energy available that they need when they need it and it doesn't even make sense given the routes and their time duration that they're going to have they're not going to sit and charge the truck for hours i mean the weight that they're carrying yeah i mean it's it so these are the kind of things that aren't going to work we know they're not going to work because it's obvious just from a physics and economics thermodynamic standpoint so will we course correct yes eventually will it happen in

the next few years i wouldn't bet on it unfortunately uh because it seems like we haven't until we have more pain people aren't going to change their minds and wake up that's annoying because we know these problems i mean you've been you've dedicated your career to it we've discussed it um at least over the last year probably more um both together and then separately via our newsletters and social media presence i guess that's the one question i want to ask as well which is like how like the people listening out there all over the world that agree with us maybe they're a bit silent what would you tell them in terms of like giving them the ability to affect change by speaking up like how do we

like how do we tell people listening to this how do we teach them to go shake others to get them to wake up so that we can course correct before people die i mean because i mean if we get rock bottom and this goes unperturbed into a future where they're trying to power every california uh truck with as an electric vehicle people are going to die especially if you're depending on great infrastructure for this because power is essential for life particularly in the western world like you mentioned the billions of people live without power every day they're used to it but if you have a situation in america where people their whole lives have been accustomed to reliable energy they go into a room and flip the light on it

has worked their whole lives if that archetype of a person and the privileged westerner if you will gets put in a situation where they go to turn the lights on and it doesn't go on like they don't have the experience to actually survive without reliable electricity yeah i mean a lot of people rely upon health equipment and various things for to live right i mean even in the the texas blackouts a couple years ago there's a couple hundred people or more that died in that in those few days just because of lack of power so it's not it's not a minor topic this is a really deep important topic when the lights go out people die that that's what happens and so we should be taking this really seriously and i think to answer your question directly more of us need

to start speaking up about this and not just kind of putting our head down so okay i'm just well i you know i'm busy doing xyz unless more of us are vocal and speak out about it and push back a little bit against this and we can do it in a very respectful and engaging way i'm not saying to get fights with people about it or anything but we have to speak up about this these topics are nothing's going to change because most it's the the green emperor has no clothes really doesn't i mean it's that's what i feel like we're doing right now we're saying look the emperor has no clothes and yet it's obvious and people as soon as a few more people and enough people look and agree then everyone's going to agree because i think everyone is has common

alignment and common incentives to agree ultimately in this um it's just people are fearful and they've been told a certain narrative that is just untrue and they haven't you know most people are busy they're trying to run their lives they don't have a chance to research all this stuff and dig deep into it but once they start realizing the stakes of their health their family their their livelihood are at stake then it becomes serious so hopefully more people can speak out and be a be a little more courageous on these topics in the near term so we don't have to get to that emergency point completely agree go speak out freaks it's important and thank you for speaking out i think what you're doing is incredible both on the content side of things what you do on

twitter what you do with your newsletters and what you're doing at oklahoma i mean i think the smr movement is very important um it makes sense right like it it makes a lot of logical sense that we would go towards this extremely dense energy source that that has been neglected here in the united states for for way far too long so again on both fronts the education front and actual like trying to get nuclear across the line i think it's going to be a massive positive ev for society and maybe you're 20 years in and then the renewables wasn't a waste because it drove the fire under you that you have now to to make sure that we course correct well i like your little tagline in your email we will win yeah i like that we're gonna we're

gonna win uh so thank you for having me on i really appreciate it it's always a pleasure talking with you yeah i'm glad we were able to do it in person this time so much better than than over a Zoom call. Yeah, I agree. Before we wrap up, where can people find you? They can find me, the best two places are on Twitter. I try to share what I'm learning every day or almost every day at Brian Gitt.

And then my website, briangitt.com. I haven't been writing as many articles recently, but I've been working on this little mini book project that I'm going to be launching soon, going through an independent publisher. And so you can subscribe to my website, I get articles about energy investing, decision making, and then you'll things like this book project. Obviously you'll hear about that in other videos. So those are the two places.

Oh yeah. Well, it's a hell of a way to end a Friday. Hell of a way to end a week. Great conversation. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. That's all we got today. Freaks. Peace and love. Thank you.