The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Chris Keefer: "Empowering the Future: from Nuclear to Podcasting"

Starting point is 00:00:01 You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. I'd like to welcome my friend Chris Kiefer to the program. Chris is a Canadian ER.com. somewhere near Toronto, I believe. He's also the president of Canadians for nuclear energy, as well as the host of the very popular decouple podcasts, which examines how science, technology, and politics can hopefully allow us to decouple the benefits that humans receive from modern industrial societies from our ecological impacts. This was a no-holds-barred, wide-ranging discussion, starting with Chris's experience as a wilderness trapper, talking about nuclear energy to podcasting, to health care, and many other things. Chris has a podcast of his own, and he and I share kind of a similar philosophy of educating and inspiring people to

Starting point is 00:01:29 understand how our global system is interconnected. And I'm also going to be on his show in the near future. Please welcome Dr. Chris Kiefer. Dr. Chris Kiefer, welcome. Nate, it's good to finally be here. It's been wonderful corresponding with you over the, it feels like years now. It feels like it.

Starting point is 00:01:55 I think it's probably one year. But sometimes weeks happen and, or what's the word? Decades happen within weeks. You're quoting our friend Vladimir Iliic Lenin there. Absolutely. Yeah. I am. Oh, shit.

Starting point is 00:02:10 I didn't know that. Inadvertent, but you are. Let's restart. Restart. I'm sorry that we've had to reschedule so many times, but, um, but here we are. Um, I respect your work. Um, you host the decouple podcast. You are the president, uh, um, correct me if I'm wrong.

Starting point is 00:02:31 You're the president of an organization called Canadian. for nuclear energy. You are an emergency room physician. And offline, you've kind of told me about some of your things that you've done in the past. You were a trapper. You had an intentional community to tie this all together and bring me to the current moment. What is your path and how did you arrive here? And contrary to most of my guests, you also are up.

Starting point is 00:03:03 podcast hosts. So I think there's a fraternal handshake here of sorts because we both deal with similar challenges in communicating to the public. So you have the mic, my friend. Bring us, bring us up to date on the life and history of Chris Kiefer. I will aim for brevity, but as you mentioned, there's a lot of stopping points along the way. And you know, it's interesting when you like apply to something like medical school, you have to kind of create this narrative arc and make sense of it all in a compelling way to claw your way into into medical school. So I've, I've done this before, but I'll try for the great simplification here. I'll try to simplify it. Yeah, I mean, without being self-indulgent, like going way back into my youth,

Starting point is 00:03:47 awkward kids spent a lot of time in the woods sort of just to deal with not being terribly socially gifted. I think we probably share some commonalities there, just a deep love of nature. The sharing of the woods or the not socially gifted? Well, probably the woods more than anything. I won't make any deep commentaries there. Nate, don't know you well. No, no, no. I spent a lot of time in the woods as a young person. And, uh, you know, I was really a, uh, a neoledite.

Starting point is 00:04:10 I, I saw technology as kind of the root of, of, of all evil of social stratification, really romanticized, you know, our hunter gatherer passed a time of greater equality, a time in which we could basically all manufacture that tool kit that we needed. Um, and I took that so far. A time, a time of greater equality except for the animals, maybe. Yeah, in a time of, you know, maternal mortality and early child mortality of, you know, at least in the child side, a good 50% up until kind of the hockey stick of the Industrial Revolution. But we'll get into that later.

Starting point is 00:04:44 At the time, you know, really romanticized that. It was actually not a survivalist in terms of a prepper, but, you know, I learned how to make a bow drill fire, making fire with friction. I was a survival instructor, you know, for a summer camp. What? But that wasn't enough, Nate. That wasn't enough. You know, those canoe trips and things like that. I wanted to take it further. It's quite a romantic and a bit of a privileged kid so I could afford to start university late or even think I wasn't going to go to university. Ended up in the Yukon Territory. I spent some time. My high school English teacher's uncle was a trapper in northern Ontario. And I found his knowledge of the land to be just extraordinary. You know, there's conservation biologists that go out for a field trip. you know, maybe a month a year and they cordon off a small piece of prairie grass and they know every species in there. And that's very admirable. But seeing the way this guy understood sort of

Starting point is 00:05:38 sustainably harvesting his trap line, the behavior of animals, and almost kind of like a spiritual connection to the land, that really touched something deep in me in terms of. And again, these are, these are partially kind of romantic aspirations, but a pretty incredible history we have as a species scraping in existence and out of pretty meager resources. Anyway, so that took me to the Yukon territory where I decided I was going to go and meet a trapper. I'd learned how to make fire with sticks. I'd learned how to gather wild edibles, but I didn't come from a hunting family.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And I figured that was part of learning how to kind of survive in the wilderness. So, yeah, managed to pull that off. Ran a trap line for a winter and then ended up getting a job, never having ridden a horse before as a horse wrangler and hunting guide in a remote concession in the Yukon territory. And, you know, basically we did everything off of horseback, not the hunting part, but, you know, pack animals, things like that. It was a pretty primitive life, but, you know, still complemented by airplanes that would, you know, bring in supplies. And, you know, this was an outpost of a fossil field civilization where you got a bit of a taste for pre-modern life.

Starting point is 00:06:52 So I'll just add an interjection there. I've been to Whitehorse and I talk on, as you know, about the disparity between humans and our farm animals relative to wild mammals that we outweigh them 50 to one in the world. Yeah. Not in the Yukon. The Yukon is the opposite. Yukon is one of the few places that megafauna far outweighs humans. Right, right. No, I've seen, well, I've killed and eaten my fair share of that megafauna as our ancestors did.

Starting point is 00:07:25 Not to the point of extinction though, Nate. It was pretty sustainable. Moose, caribou, mountain sheep. Anyway, I promised I would try and be brief in this. But I think that question of sort of, how do you go from being a romantic neolete to an advocate for one of the most complex technologies that we have is probably an interesting one.

Starting point is 00:07:42 I ended up, you know, deciding I wanted to get myself an education after a while or a non, you know, kind of mountain man education. And, yeah, was very inspired by an amazing doctor named Paul Farmer. I've always had a sort of humanist trend, a humanitarian trend, and figured I'd like to get some tangible skills to be able to serve my fellow humans, as you want to call them. And so, yeah, got inspired and got into medical school. That definitely was an education in, I guess, kind of the beauty of complexity. You know, this healthcare system, you know, we'll probably talk about this later, but there was a time

Starting point is 00:08:25 when almost every human being was involved in energy, as you know. I mean, in terms of agriculture, in terms of growing food, harnessing photosynthesis, something like 90% of us were farmers remotely. And now, you know, 50 and 16% of us are health workers. It's incredible what our wealthy societies are able to devote to human well-being. Often there's a bit of inefficiency there. And we could talk about the U.S. and Canadian healthcare systems. But yeah, it was interesting. And I think I started to shift my perception of technology and really appreciate the benefits. And that's obviously been strengthened by my own son surviving a very premature birth and, you know, an incubator saving his life. We talked earlier about, you know, childhood mortality sitting at 50%. I've learned

Starting point is 00:09:12 not to romanticize that and have some appreciation of the modern world. After finishing my emergency medicine fellowship, I took out a big loan, bought a farm on the border of Canada's largest indigenous reservation, with the attempt of kind of setting up a bit of a embassy between progressive Canadians and indigenous people and a sort of permaculture community trying to solve some local problems with water supply, you know, food sovereignty, healthy food, that kind of stuff. So most intentional communities disintegrate within about two years and we definitely fit the mold there.

Starting point is 00:09:49 It was a very interesting romantic project. learned a lot from it. So you're seeing me sort of go through the hunter-gatherer period, the agricultural revolution. And when my son was born five years ago, I started to think a lot about climate change and get pretty worried about it, got very doomy. It wasn't any fun at parties. My ex-wife at the time said, you know, can you just stop talking about this shut up and do something? And she probably meant, you know, sort the recycling better, take out the compost. And I think, you know, thank God I'd gone back to even high school to get my my core sciences in order to get into med school.

Starting point is 00:10:28 And I had that sort of empiric training to start looking around and say, hey, what are the solutions to climate change? And discovered I lived in nuclear powered Ontario, where we're 50, 60 percent nuclear power, one of the lowest emitting electricity grids in the world, despite not being blessed with tons of hydroelectricity. And so that really intrigued me. And I discovered this technology that's much maligned, I've sort of always fought for the underdog. And, you know, my 16-year-old Neo-Luddite self, again, might have put out a contract on the life of my, you know, 37-year-old self as I got into this.

Starting point is 00:11:05 But for whatever weird dopamine reward system I have, I've been, you know, pretty obsessively interested in this space. Definitely matured in it from seeing nuclear energy as a kind of absolute sort of panacea. being educated by 232 guests now. And being involved in advocacy within Ontario for more nuclear has taught me a lot of lessons about the kind of pace and scalability possible. But I'll wrap it up there, Nate. Hopefully that wasn't too self-indulgent. No, no, no.

Starting point is 00:11:35 We're going to drill down into each of those things. You have a picture, I recall, on your Twitter feed, you and Justin Trudeau. So you've actually brought up this to the political. level in Canada, yes? Yeah, yeah, I've had the opportunity to speak. And this is truly bizarre. Again, my previous sort of advocacy and activism was in the health space. I founded one of Canada's first seasonal agricultural worker clinics serving Mexican

Starting point is 00:12:01 and Jamaican workers. I worked at the Canadian Center for Victims of Torture. You know, in that advocacy, you develop a social network. It's interesting. But yeah, the nuclear thing has been absolutely mind-blowing. As you said, meeting the prime minister, leaders of the opposition, the people. Premier of Ontario, the heads of, you know, all the big labor unions here, you know, the CEOs and the executive suite of the big nuclear companies and supply chain companies. So it's, it's been,

Starting point is 00:12:26 you know, and as you know, the social capital of a podcast, it's, it's been absolutely a wild ride. So I have covered, um, the basics on nuclear just once or twice on this channel. And again, you're an ER doctor. That is your. profession, but you have a podcast that's called decouple. By the way, what's the origin of that word? Because I can think of about 20 ways of decoupling in our world. What was the origin of your choice of that word? Well, I started the podcast very shortly after my divorce, and so a lot of people assumed it was a relationship advice podcast. I am in no position to offer relationship advice, although I have a wonderful fiancé now. So maybe that rests in the future. A lot of

Starting point is 00:13:15 People think about. We'll see if you rename it recouple. There we go. There we go. Well, I'm in that process. Again, wonderful fiancé. But yeah, no, it definitely, I was inspired by the ecomodernist tendency, which again, wrestling with that question of, okay, it's fine to kind of romanticize the past.

Starting point is 00:13:36 But, you know, there's a reason that the human population was stable, really, up until the industrial revolution. And that's because the average woman had five to six children. and 2.2 of them would reach reproductive age. A lot of kids died, right? And so appreciating, starting to appreciate. Was this just in the last, you know, a thousand common era to 200 years ago or is this go way back? This goes way back.

Starting point is 00:14:03 I mean, at least according to paleo demographers, you know, who look at Peru 400 BCE, for instance, or I think Malorca, Spain even further back. You know, I'm not in a position to assess these paleo demographers. demographers methodology, but I'd assume this is pretty solid. And again, I think it's born out, you know, you can look at skeletal remains, but you can all just look at if you have a stable population in your birth rate is five or six kids, uh, that infers that, again, only two of them are reaching reproductive age, um, you know, maybe three and then some die off in their 30s or something. But, you know, uh, that's dark. And so, you know, kind of coming from a romantic, lefty, progressive, maybe kind of degrowth or mindset,

Starting point is 00:14:44 certainly came to appreciate the nuance and especially being in healthcare of the wonderful world we live in in which very few parents have to mourn the death of their children. It's 0.3% now in modern industrialized countries. So how do we keep the gains, the good things that have come from development, from industrialization,

Starting point is 00:15:08 while minimizing the ecological impact? So essentially that was the question. sort of decoupling human well-being. A lot of it, you know, maybe a lot of the environmentalists out there don't want to admit maybe the basis for this. But I think the trends are quite clear. It has to do with increasing energy consumption, increasing wealth. And again, yeah, so how do you navigate that contradiction? And I think some of your work, quite frankly, has put me in a little bit of crisis about the actual potentials for decoupling,

Starting point is 00:15:33 that tight linkage between energy use and GDP or material use and GDP. There's not a sort of dematerialization of our economy as much as we'd like to imagine it. But a few technologies really stand out. Nuclear are obviously capable of decoupling, at least electricity production from carbon emissions. And, you know, the environmental case being that because it is such an energy dense form of energy, that means we can, you know, use less mining. It's less land intensive, et cetera. So the podcast has been pretty nuclear focus, but we've also, you know, looked at biotechnology, you know, ways of producing more food on less land.

Starting point is 00:16:11 so you can rewild. These are some of the sort of tenets of ecomodernism, which is an ideology, which I'm not completely on board with. I think there's some interesting ideas from it. But anyway, this was the perhaps kind of romantic origins of the podcast. What ideology are you completely on board with? None. None. I have a friend who talks about sort of his political allegiances and he says, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a Republican. I'm a card-carrying member of the disgusted party. I don't really, I don't really find a home anywhere, I think, because I'm just really restless, but I do really, really genuinely appreciate good arguments that I disagree with. And so, you know, nuclear has been a big part of that because, again, we have a set of

Starting point is 00:16:59 sort of unexamined beliefs, the kind of package deal of the politics, perhaps that we grow up with. Right. So being on the progressive left, that was anti-nuclear. I hadn't, done my research. But that's part of the package deal. I used to kind of hold my breath when I drove past one of our nuclear plants, which is really hilarious because it was built instead of, you know, a four gigawatt coal station where I really needed to hold my breath. But realizing that my tribe had really gotten it wrong and needing to listen to other voices, often on the political right, which tends to have a little bit more engineering discipline, a little bit more, you know, literacy in math and on the understanding of the built world. It didn't mean. It didn't mean.

Starting point is 00:17:38 that I accepted all the kind of positions that come along, maybe the unexamined beliefs of the political right, but I did appreciate certain analyses that were there. And so it's really helped me to have a much broader, you know, appreciation for the need for robust debate and, you know, a whole number of opinions. And that's obviously we're really suffering in this social media dominated hyper-polarized landscape to navigate the human predicament, as you call it, and partially it's because of that. So I kind of owe that to nuclear, strangely enough. I want to take a deep dive in your insights on nuclear. But before we get to that, maybe you could just start by laying out since you don't claim to be a nuclear expert,

Starting point is 00:18:22 but you've had 200 guests on your podcast, many of which are nuclear experts. So you're a very, very qualified layperson, ER doctor on nuclear issues. Please lay out for us the breadth of opinion. on the nuclear issue from both extremes and kind of what's in the middle and, and we'll go from there. Well, Nate, as you probably notice, most of it is the extremes, which is a little bit frustrating. People either love nuclear or hate nuclear or I guess they're indifferent.

Starting point is 00:18:58 And, you know, perhaps, you know, we'll just acknowledge that they, they're not sure they don't know. So why on the extremes, let's deal man, man, the two extremes. why people love nuclear and why people hate nuclear. Sure. Well, let's start with the hate. I think this is fundamentally a dual-use technology. This is swords and plowshares, and this goes back to the beginning of time.

Starting point is 00:19:21 Every technology has a sort of beneficial application, a productive application and a destructive application. And the famous metaphor would be swords and plowshares. And the problem is that the sword of nuclear is apocalyptic. certain, I don't know about life on earth, but certainly in terms of any kind of life that human beings would want to live. There are several men in the world that can, you know, put in some codes and essentially initiate the destruction of human civilization. That's a potent reason to be scared shitless, frankly, about all uses of nuclear energy and sort of lump them all into one basket. And so a lot of those apocalyptic fears are, in my opinion, misplaced onto the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. And that's not just energy production.

Starting point is 00:20:05 That's the production of medical isotopes, which absolutely enable modern health care. Our Kandah reactors here in Canada have a quirk of being incredible mass production machines for medical isotopes. 40% of the world's single use medical devices are sterilized with medical isotopes we produce here. So there's a lot of positive applications. But the sort of edge case fears that people have about nuclear are really a transference. of those fears about nuclear annihilation. So that's, I think, what drives it. You know, my dad did duck and cover drills during the Cuban missile crisis.

Starting point is 00:20:40 I'm deeply empathetic to people that are, again, scared shitless about nuclear energy. The environmental movement really kind of latched on to it. And again, maybe just going back to the weapons thing, the fear of radiation was a vital tool in stopping, say, atmospheric weapons testing, for instance, the insanity of sort of where we were heading with nuclear weapons. Like if you look at the actual data in terms of the atomic blast at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the vast majority of the deaths and injuries were blast injuries and burns and good old fashion, you know, explosive trauma injuries. But the radiation induced injuries, you know, were a potent motivator of kind of shock and horror

Starting point is 00:21:21 around the use of these weapons. And so there's a kind of long history of how our fear of radiation has been exaggerated. Certainly high-dose radiation is absolutely deadly, but our, kind of fear about low doses, I think is greatly exaggerated. And again, these physicians primarily actually, who are really involved in getting atmospheric weapons testing prohibited, partially by looking for, you know, a few atoms of decay products that you only get from weapons testing in the milk teeth of babies, right, finding some stronti of 99, for instance.

Starting point is 00:21:58 That was, you know, a potent motivator to politicians say, okay, we're going to just do the test underground now basically. But there's a temptation to try and put the nuclear genie back in the bottle and stuff it in. And I think I understand the motivations there. That's the anti side. On the pro side, hold on just a second. Sure. What about Fukushima and the fact that they're storing all this stuff and some of it leaches into the ocean? And is that too diffuse to worry about? Is that overblown or do you have any comments on that? Well, Fukushima is really interesting because it's kind of pretty close to the worst case scenario. Three gigawatt scale nuclear reactors melting down essentially simultaneously.

Starting point is 00:22:39 And the health impacts from that are really, I don't want to sound blasé, but they're negligible. People hear that 20,000 people died as a result of the Fukushima accident. Those 20,000 people that died as a result of the Tohoku earthquake and the tsunami that followed it. in terms of deaths from radiation from Fukushima, there have been none. There was a single worker who got a still fairly low dose who was compensated, a 50-year-old guy who was also a smoker who got lung cancer several years after the accident. Most serious epidemiologists don't think it was caused by it, but hey, it's good that he got compensation and maybe had a more dignified end of his life because he had some extra money

Starting point is 00:23:19 and his family had some money. But really, we have not seen any radiologic injury from his worst-case. And I think what you're probably discussing there is the Fukushima water. So a lot of water got onto the site, got contaminated with radio nucleides, has been filtered. The only significant radioisotope left is something called tritium. It's a very weakly, uh, radioactive, uh, element that, that ends up binding to water and creates essentially a water molecule with a heavy form of hydrogen. That's the only one left, the half life of all the others has already dissipated.

Starting point is 00:23:52 No, no, they've been filtered out with resins and things like that. So in terms of the water, they're talking about releasing into the Pacific. They're diluting it down to, and again, this is the issue with radiation. You have to go down a huge rabbit hole to understand dose. And even the way it's measured, the units involved are hugely confusing. But I like to sort of put it into just money values like dollars and cents. But essentially the safe drinking water limits, say in Canada or 7,000, we'll say,

Starting point is 00:24:21 Becurels per liter, atomic decays per liter for tritium, they're getting it down to 1500. So you could drink the stuff that's that in terms of the way that it's being diluted to and be well, well underneath the, the safe drinking water limits that we have established around the world. So, so 16 year old Chris Keeper would not have drank that water, but 37 year old Dr. Chris would have. Well, you know, we, some of the nuclear advocates have jokingly, uh, suggested we have a Fukushima drinking team. Um, there, there was a Japanese politician who, uh, who did drink some of the water. He did look like he was a bit hesitant in the moment. So there was a, you know, some reports on that. And again, I don't mean to be blasé about this. The

Starting point is 00:25:01 Fukushima accident caused an evacuation. People died because of the evacuation. It's, it's not to be taken lightly. But I think in terms of people's apocalyptic fears, we have there the example of, as I said, a triple meltdown with absolutely negligible health impacts, particularly from radiation. So, so you're at least confident in saying that drinking that filtered water from Fukushima is healthier than drinking round up. Yes, sir. And alcohol and, you know, we could come up with a whole number of sugar. We drinks, glucose fructose.

Starting point is 00:25:33 You're an EAR doctor. Do you drink alcohol? Occasionally, occasionally. Yeah, occasionally. I used to drink quite often. I, well, I was at a Pioneers conference last week and I had wine for four nights in a row. But other than that, I haven't had a single thing to drink in many, many months. and I actually feel quite better.

Starting point is 00:25:53 It's just, it's a culture, especially the United States, especially Wisconsin, where I live. Right. I digress. And by the way, my dad is also a doctor and he was the chief of surgery for a while and has had lots of ER stories. I'm sure you've seen quite a lot of things being in a big city emergency room. I have. I won't bore you with all of the objects. I've taken out of people's bums.

Starting point is 00:26:20 throughout my car. I wasn't going to bring that up, but seriously, you've done that? That's a, it's a part of the job in the emergency medicine world. People do weird things. Oh, my God. Yeah, I heard those stories from my dad too. So it's Canadians too. So, okay, on to the, the pro nuclear.

Starting point is 00:26:43 Right, right. So I think people get pretty religious. They find religion. people that, again, have the unique set of cognitive biases that lead them to this advocacy camp. There's a really compelling narrative with nuclear energy. Again, in terms of that incredible energy density, the promise of a very minuscule land footprint, environmental impact. And frankly, this wasn't as present before the extreme situation that we find ourselves looking down the barrel of climate change.

Starting point is 00:27:18 And so, you know, we have in the best case or in the hopes of this class of advocates a solution to climate change, a solution to an existential problem. It's a fascinating technology. And there's certainly some sort of techno fetishism that goes on. But I'd say really it stands from people probably who are a little bit contrarian and who look at the available options on the table in terms of replacing fossil fuels. and are probably a little overly generous in terms of the potential of nuclear energy to shift things or replace fossil fuels. There's certainly some fossil fuel services.

Starting point is 00:27:57 Nuclear energy is great at replacing stationary power generation, low-grade process heat for some district heating, desalination. There's some applications that are important, but yeah, it's not a panacea, but I would say that folks on the extreme pro-nuclear side are probably guilty of thinking that this is,

Starting point is 00:28:17 you know, essentially energy too cheap to meter if done right. But of course, it's never really happened. And that was just one statement by a guy that's been quoted far too often. So we have the two extremes, the people who love nuclear power and don't miss a chance to advocate it as the answer to society's problems and the people who hate nuclear power and think it's the devil in disguise because of its long, term potential to destabilize and pollute the environment. And those people account for the majority of commentary that we see in social media and a lot of people, including the people who are energy blind, who just look at the cost of energy at the pump or on their utility bill.

Starting point is 00:29:08 And that's the extent of energy's influence on our economy rather than looking how everything, the entire scaffolding is built on the complexity powered by machines that are fueled by fossil and renewable energy. So the vast majority people are kind of, as you said earlier, indifferent to nuclear because they don't know that it's needed or that it's relevant and they just haven't been educated, would you say? Well, I mean, let me give you like a case study of Ontario, right. If you live in a jurisdiction with a lot of nuclear plants, it tends to pull very well, particularly in the communities around the plant.

Starting point is 00:29:52 They have the best equipped sports teams around. They got the best swimming pools. You know, they usually kick the ass of the surrounding communities because they got better coaches, etc. I'm being a bit facetious, but the benefits are there. And you don't have the smoke, you know, coming out of the stack, frankly poisoning people that you do with coal plants or to a lesser degree natural gas plants. You know, over the lifetime of a nuclear plant, the power is very, very cheap and really underpins a lot of, you know, economic well-being.

Starting point is 00:30:23 In the case of Ontario, so, and this is a little bit similar to France, which is another famous case study of a jurisdiction with a lot of nuclear. You know, the saying in France was, you know, we do not have gas. We do not have oil, but we have ideas. And very similar situation in Ontario. no gas, no coal. We had water, which my great, great, great grandfather referred to as white coal, which might tell you something. But we were dependent on importing a lot of coal from Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the U.S. across great lakes that sometimes froze mined by miners that often went on strike.

Starting point is 00:30:59 It was an energy insecure situation and it was costly energy. We accidentally sort of found ourselves as a real center, probably the second greatest center of nuclear research outside of the Manhattan Project in Canada because a lot of European scientists and the heavy water that they kind of snuck out of Europe as the Nazis chased them and tried to get it came to Canada and we ended up developing our own indigenous power reactor design. But basically we tapped out our hydroelectric. We built a lot of coal stations, including the largest in North America and Anticoke. And in 1973, when the OPEC crisis hit, the price of coal doubled. And we had a power reactor that was ready to go in the form of the can do. And we just started stamping those things out. We never built another large.

Starting point is 00:31:40 coal plant. After that, we just built big nuclear plants. We have the largest operating nuclear plant in the world. And ultimately, in the early 2000s, we're able to completely phase out coal, which had been 25% of our electricity grid. It would have been probably 75% had we not gone nuclear. And thinking the implications of that in terms of, you know, energy security, economic well-being, human well-being, in terms of, you know, the enormous amount of pollution that's estimated around 1,000 people died prematurely per year because of our coal fleet. There's a really compelling story there. See, that might be a window into sort of not my fanaticism, hopefully my nuanced appreciation for this power source.

Starting point is 00:32:17 Other than personally liking you and us having similar hobbies or vocations with our podcasts, I do really value your balanced view and you're not a fanatic. And nuclear is not a topic I know well, which is why I'm really. glad that you're here because I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions that will be easy for you, but that I don't know the answers to. So let's go in no particular order.

Starting point is 00:32:51 Here are some questions. So to my knowledge, Ontario is like 15 million people, which is the population of Michigan and Wisconsin combined. Most of the people live in and around Toronto, I would imagine. How many nuclear plants are there in the province of Ontario, give or take, do you know? Yeah, so there's three nuclear stations. They're all multi-unit stations. So two of these, two of these sites have eight large candor reactors and one has four large candy reactors. And so what about the transmission of nuclear power? Can those reactors you just mentioned get electric power all the way to the west of Ontario? Yeah, yeah. So we have, you know, an efficient grid. And that's another thing about, nuclear is, we call it an expensive way to make cheap electricity and renewables in contrast,

Starting point is 00:33:46 a cheap way to make expensive electricity in terms of all of the supporting infrastructure, nuclear is very efficient in terms of transmission. Okay, so spend a few moments unpacking that statement that you just made. Yeah, I mean, so your listeners probably heard of the levelized cost of electricity. It's a way to compare, really, it should be used to compare like with like in terms of this coal station versus that coal station or this natural gas. versus that. It gets really skewed by renewables, which have sort of a zero marginal cost in terms of their operations. But the problem with renewables is that they're intermittent and they

Starting point is 00:34:22 require backup and often they're located far from population centers. And transmission is a major cost. I don't want to get too sort of sidetracked off these kind of nuclear fast questions. I have like 14 of them. So do your best. To try and answer. distinctly and then I'm quite a tangential speaker. We, we, uh, our nuclear plants,

Starting point is 00:34:45 I'd say, you know, in terms of the far north of the province, we do have a biomass generating station up there. Um, but, uh, suffice to say,

Starting point is 00:34:53 yes, these, these three nuclear stations, um, are near population centers and do a good job. But getting back to the levelized cost of, of electricity, how would nuclear compare with solar and wind?

Starting point is 00:35:05 And what was your critique of the levelized costs of electricity? that it's a narrow boundary metric, that it doesn't include the actual full cost of getting the energy services to the household. So, you know, there's nothing cheaper than, you know, jiggly electrons coming out of a solar farm, for instance, when it's producing, when conditions are perfect. But electricity is a service, not a commodity. You don't go to a solar farm and bring your little bag and say, I need to get 300 jiggly electrons and I'm going to put some, like, coins into my toaster sort of when I need them. It's a lot like healthcare, which is, again, I would argue a service, not a commodity. It's something that needs to be reliable, something that needs to be there for you 24-7, something that needs to be able to adapt to surges and demand.

Starting point is 00:35:49 And, you know, the kind of narrative that I'd use or the comparison I'd use is, you know, if we were to have wind and solar doctors and nurses, kind of fair weather friends. They're a little bit prone to packing it in when the weather changes. And they can do so sort of on very short notice, I would say, you know, a solar doctor. Some clouds will go over. He might just drop the scalpel and, you know, go off for a prolonged break or call it quits for the day. Which would be a real problem if you're operating on someone's bum. Right, right.

Starting point is 00:36:17 So suffice it to say that requires a really costly backup network of reliable doctors and nurses. You might have to pay a premium to that have to come into the hospital to keep your reliable services going nonstop, right? And so LCOE level as cost of electricity ignores those system costs and therefore is not a good tool to compare unlike with unlike in terms of, you know, know, an intermittent renewable source to a dispatchable source of energy. I ask you because there is the Lazard graphs that always get touted around that so many people truly believe that solar is the cheapest energy source on the planet. And it's only a matter of time before it scales and completely replaces fossil fuels, which is so completely misleading for many reasons.

Starting point is 00:37:04 But a main one is what you just said. It's only the marginal cost of generation that they're talking about, not the 24-7 access to the service. I will say in order not to sound like a fanatic here, I think there is a role for solar, probably at pretty modest penetrations in terms of carving off load, say in terms of the air conditioning peak in the middle of the day. Too much solar, you get into this duck curve

Starting point is 00:37:31 where it cannibalizes its own value and you need a crazy ramp in the evening to keep your grid stable. But a moderate amount can shave that. And the other application a friend of mine recently convinced me of is solar as a power source for desalination because you're producing something that is very storable, which is fresh water. What would you say in reply people like Mark Jacobson frequently tweet. He tweeted the other day that in California earlier this month, wind water and solar together combined for 106% of the electricity. demand over some of the days earlier this month. I believe that the quote was 0.25 to 6 hours per day.

Starting point is 00:38:15 So what that means is with a 100% windwater and solar system in California, they would have had absolute black start style blackouts every day for the last 38 days. So it's Jacobson, people are afraid to kind of criticism because criticize him because he's litiginous. He recently, about 10 years ago, the case finally wrapped up. And he's a really nice guy. I've met him. I mean, he's just very polite.

Starting point is 00:38:40 He's not a nice guy. He's not a nice guy if you disagree with him. And the academic literature is, as fellow scientist, Christopher Clack did. Jacobson launched a $10 million slap loss here against Christopher Clack. He lost. He's been ordered to pay damages. I think he's an absolute embarrassment, frankly. And I think his influence is really diminishing.

Starting point is 00:38:58 Not to comment on his personal relationship with you. I'm sure he's a nice guy, you know, if I met him in person. I've only just met him once. So, okay, thank you for that. Are people pro-nuclear in Ontario? I would imagine they know a little bit more about it than the average American. Yeah, recent polling, and we're on the verge of a major nuclear expansion. We're going to increase our nuclear fleet by about 50%.

Starting point is 00:39:27 And when polled on that, as much as you can trust polling, 70% of people are in favor of not just keeping our existing assets, but expanding the nuclear fleet, about 18% are against and 12% undecided. So it's pretty favorable. So you've had 200 episodes on your podcast, and I feel like I'm getting long in the tooth here, and I'm at like 120. So good on you. How many of those have been directly or indirectly related to nuclear power?

Starting point is 00:39:58 I'm probably embarrassed to say, but I would say probably about 180, 190 of those. Okay. So I have questions and, you know, unfortunately one of my skills and that of my network of systems, ecologists, people is I'm good at saying what won't work and less good at saying what might work or what will. So I have some ideas that I want to ask you of things on nuclear that I am skeptical about. But let me preface that. And I don't want to spend this entire time talking about nuclear because you're kind of a Renaissance man.

Starting point is 00:40:38 And I do want to talk to you about the podcast and medicine and other things. And I think we should just agree that this is a first conversation and that you could come back and take a deep dive on something else. But what would you say in your considered expertise? peace and in discussing and focusing on the issue of nuclear, what are the best three attributes of nuclear power that people should be aware of? And what are the three constraints or limitations that people should be aware of? Okay, so top of mind in terms of being a climate hawk is the low life cycle emissions,

Starting point is 00:41:23 actually the lowest of any power generation source, as confirmed by recent work by the UN economic committee of Europe. So 4.8 grams of CO2 per per kilowatt hour for reference. I mean, that's pretty close to wind and solar. And almost all that 4.8 grams is in the construction of the plan. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:41:46 And so the longer you run the plant, the better that number gets. And we're really seeing, you know, economists and engineers sort of put an arbitrary lifespan of 40 years on, really for economic planning reasons. But a lot of plants are getting licensed out now to 50, 60 years. And, you know, our can do plants, we can do kind of engine swap out. So they're going to 60, 70 and maybe 100 years. So nuclear is a lot like hydroelectric dam. But I'll try not to get tangential here. So the life cycle emissions. And again, this includes the mining, the milling

Starting point is 00:42:17 of the uranium, the construction of the plant, the maintenance of the plant, the storage of the waste, incredibly low emissions. And by the way, Chris, I'm not in your podcast. You're on mine. So you are allowed to go tangential, if you like. Fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. So number two, number two, I'd say it's, it's really a question of, you know, minimizing that ecological impact. And again, why it's such a theme in the decouple podcast. Certainly because of that incredible energy density of harnessing the strong nuclear force of the atom, which again is so destructive in the sword application of nuclear, but I would argue so constructive in the, in the, the productive side

Starting point is 00:42:58 of nuclear power, is again that we have a nuclear sector, which the mines, the factories, the power plants occupies about 30 square kilometers of land in Canada. To give you a sense of that, that's a little larger than the Toronto Pearson Airport. So a very small impact on nature. And when you compare that to more dilute forms of energy, particularly wind and solar, they consume vast amounts of lands and really industrialized landscapes. and we may be sort of conditioned by compelling narratives and aesthetics to sort of see wind turbines is almost like trees naturally growing into the landscape.

Starting point is 00:43:36 They do have ecological impacts. And one of the biggest problems of the biodiversity crisis is trying desperately not to transform land from wilderness into agricultural land or otherwise industrialized. So I guess that would be sort of number two compelling reason. Number three, and this kind of, I guess, goes back to my lefty politics. I'm wearing my union proud t-shirt here, Union Strong T-shirt. Nuclear, it's very efficient in terms of the number of jobs created because it's so energy-dense. You don't have sort of sprawling numbers of workers needed.

Starting point is 00:44:14 But the workers that are employed are high-skilled, craft labor, really high levels of education. To me, one of my sort of Myers-Briggs personality type features is I love, seeing people kind of lean into and achieve their full potential and be unleashed to do that. And nuclear is something where, you know, you can you can start working with a high school degree. I was going to call it a diploma. And sort of on the job training that's available can get people up to incredibly high levels of education, not to mention the sort of the PhD reactor physicist. The, again, the skill trades people. There's a lot of really amazing employment opportunities and traveling to a nuclear community. I was kind of joking about that.

Starting point is 00:44:57 earlier, but you really see a vibrant, healthy community. So, and again, sort of contrasting that with wind and solar in particular, the other sort of main sort of climate solution in terms of electricity generation. We see really questionable labor practices, particularly within the solar supply chain, with forced to weep your labor and pretty credible allegations coming out of China. You have workerless facilities with very low wage, low skilled construction jobs available, basically just in the installation in Canada anyway. But we need a lot more people in solar and wind per kilowatt hour generated than

Starting point is 00:45:34 than a nuclear, right? I mean, there's no parking lots outside of wind farm or solar farm. So there's no long-term employment. You need a lot of people in the construction phase. And I'll give it to solar. I mean, we've gotten really good at building solar firms very fast, very cheaply. But no, there's not a lot of long-term jobs in it. But at the end of the day, this is kind of what we talk about, which is net energy and energy surplus.

Starting point is 00:45:59 The fact that we have fossil gas and coal and oil and nuclear plants means that there's less of us that need to work in the energy field. The rest of us can be librarians or doctors or inventors or whatever. 15% of us can be basically in allied health care, whether it's doctors, nurses, you know, personal support workers, occupational therapists. I mean, you can have lots of critiques of modern industrial societies and the kind of wasteful spending that occurs. But I think that's a really powerful statement. I was just in preparation for this podcast looking at U.S. government spending, military

Starting point is 00:46:39 spending by the U.S. is $800 billion. Medicaid and Medicare. It's more than that. $1.6 billion. You know, and again, there's a lot of inefficiencies. And I'd argue particularly within the U.S. system, that's not talking about the insurance money spent as well. But just that commentary of again, 15% of people in a modern society have jobs looking after other people.

Starting point is 00:46:59 That's incredible to me. In our ancestral time, it was 100% of people had jobs looking after other people. I don't know that I would put it that way. I think you'd probably have some few shamans and healers. But I think most people were pretty occupied and trying to scrape together the calories necessary to kind of maintain. For their for their clan. But that's what I meant. That's what I meant.

Starting point is 00:47:23 Yeah. Okay. So those are the three positives. What about the three negatives or the three constraints or the things that would give you pause when in a debate with the people who love nuclear as a fix all solution? So I would say nuclear is probably the most challenging, the most difficult form of power generation. A lot of category errors occur. there's this great quote recently it was attributed to me by Euripides. I don't think it was him.

Starting point is 00:47:54 I've been trying to Google the source of it. But man is blind until he finds a metaphor that allows him to see. And with nuclear, I would make the comparison. The best category error you could you could commit would be to say it's a lot like hydroelectricity. This massively capital intensive high risk construction project, right? It's an expensive way to make cheap electricity. It's an asset that lasts for decades, maybe even up to a century. Once it's amortized, it produces very, very cheap, low carbon power, provides good jobs,

Starting point is 00:48:29 underpins a lot of economic well-being. But it's expensive up front. There's no getting around that. I think there's a lot of folks, particularly in the sort of venture capitalist arena, that commit a category of thinking that nuclear is a lot like tech, that there's a lot of opportunities for incredible disruption, that these dumb nuclear engineers just haven't thought about using molten salts or sodium fast reactors or burning waste. Nuclear is difficult.

Starting point is 00:48:56 It's hard. You don't do it unless you have to. And Ontario is a place that had to. We didn't have coal. We didn't have gas. France is a place that had to. They were burning oil from Algeria in the Middle East. And then the OPEC crisis came along.

Starting point is 00:49:08 And they needed to move fast in order to not bottom out their economy. Japan, right? Burned through its fossil fuels for the major. restoration and incredible breakneck industrialization there, but it was going to come to a screaming halt if they didn't find a ways to import fossil fuels and a way to sort of become more energy secure was a big nuclear fleet. South Korea, you know, the list goes on. It's generally an energy security play. I'd say like the one exception would be maybe Russia where you don't get high in your own supply. You free up natural gas for export by using nuclear. There's some sort

Starting point is 00:49:42 of soft power diplomatic reasons. But basically the underlying driver is energy and security. You don't do it unless you have to because it's technologically complex. It requires the best of the best people. And that's a limit. That's complexity. Great simplification. I don't know. We were building good nuclear plants in the 70s.

Starting point is 00:49:58 When people talk about a great simplification, you know, or when you do, I'm not sure what you imagine. If it's kind of Votslav Smil saying, hey, things weren't so bad on the 50s and 60s, maybe we can sort of shrink back to that level of GDP and things would be more sustainable. We could do nuclear sort of 60s and 70s. That was one that kind of great buildouts were. But yeah, open question. No, I mean, a simplification is something between a collapse and a mortar economy of continued growth.

Starting point is 00:50:25 And it's after we run out of the ability to paper over our financial claims and the decoupling between how much people think they own and what our material substrate is to do that. It doesn't mean that we go back to the dark ages necessarily, but there's going to be a transition. And we're still going to need a lot of energy, not as much as we need today, probably, because there's this financial disconnect. So it's, you know this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:05 Most of our technology has created complexity, which is required more energy. Artificial intelligence is now a huge, demand and about to get a huger a lot of people that follow this show think that AI is overhyped I'm talking to a lot of people very close to it that give me the impression that it's actually underhyped and a lot of the really pro nuclear people I talked to in the US investors are really high on nuclear right now because of AI that we're gonna need so much more power demand that they're looking to

Starting point is 00:51:42 clear as an answer. Certainly if they want to meet their 24-7 clean energy targets, baseloads back, baby. I mean, AI data centers require that baseload 24-7 power, and the U.S. grid is becoming increasingly unstable for a variety of reasons, what my friend Meredith England calls the fatal trifect of reliance on intermittent renewables, just-in-time natural gas, and just trying to import electricity from elsewhere. You know, with the glut in natural gas prices and that surplus for the foreseeable future, they could power those data centers and they may end up powering those data centers with combined cycle gas turbines.

Starting point is 00:52:17 But certainly if you're trying to be low carbon, nuclear would be the way to do it. I am not a nuclear for nuclear sake kind of guy. It's a means, not an end. So yes, there's a lot of pro-nuclear advocates that are sort of celebrating this new surge in demand. And maybe it's a way to kickstart the nuclear industry so it can meet other needs and, you know, decarbonize. But right now, AI is a carbon problem.

Starting point is 00:52:40 It's not a, you know, it's not a, not a, not a solution yeah yeah and i'm and i'm going to have more on that in the very new future okay i interrupted uh you and you were going to tell me your third constraint um that's a good question and this part it sort of betrays probably um my if you run out i have like 10 that i can offer why don't you start just because i'm i'm drawing a blank and that that reflects poorly on me actually but go ahead so there's only two constraints to nuclear no no complex okay fuel is fuel is a concern right now I mean, nuclear, it's real selling point should be fuel security because in terms of storage, you have two years of fuel inside the reactor.

Starting point is 00:53:23 It's such a dense form of energy. You can stockpile nuclear fuel on site or, you know, on the national level. But due to an underinvestment in uranium enrichment, and most of that uranium enrichment actually happening in Russia, 46% of the world's uranium enrichment occurs there. there's questions right now of a fuel and security. A lot of the advanced so-called advanced reactor designs actually require a higher level of enriched fuel. And a lot of the aspirations of that sector are going to be limited by that not being present until we potentially have the sort of policy solutions to upscale enrichment, say in the U.S. for instance.

Starting point is 00:54:01 So that's another constraint. That's one of my constraints is the peak uranium. I mean, the fact that the mineable concentrated ores, if the world were to dramatically scale nuclear power, and there's issues with that, which I'll offer in a few minutes, that we maybe have 50 or 60 years left, I think probably because we've not tried. And if we tried, we could extend that quite a bit. But what are your thoughts on the amount of uranium needed and available for, tripling to 10x-ish nuclear in the world?

Starting point is 00:54:46 I mean, first off, I'd say, you know, it does sound a lot like you said peak uranium. I mean, there was concerns about peak oil going back, I believe, to the 1920s, Haberbosch, who invented the Haberbosch process to fix ammonia also were involved in the Fisher Trot process. And I remember before, I think the Texas oil field started gushing. There was concern amongst the automotive industry in the U.S. There wasn't enough oil. And so these guys were actually trying to start a business model of, I think, coal conversion. So I think, you know, part one is there's a lot more uranium than we know about in terms of reserves versus resources.

Starting point is 00:55:19 But fundamentally, you're right. And the early, early history of nuclear was we really didn't think there was a lot of uranium around. And so there's a lot of interest in a reactor technology called a breeder reactor, which actually produces more fuel. You know, you put a fuel load in, you create more fuel in the process through the alchemy of nuclear power. Breeder reactors have not really gone far, partially because there hasn't been the need, because uranium is dirt cheap. Right now in terms of if you're an investor in uranium, you're pretty happy because the price has gone up a lot. But I mean, relative to the energy it puts out, I'd say it's the most undervalued commodity in the world. So with breeder reactors, you can extend.

Starting point is 00:55:58 I have a friend Nick Turan, who is not a fanatic. I'd say he's very reasonable middle of the rotor type guy, but he's done calculations. where you start getting out to millions of years. There's uranium present in seawater. I haven't looked at the efficiencies of extracting it, but for all intents and purposes with breeder technology, I wouldn't say that's a limitation, except that breeder technology is a bit harder.

Starting point is 00:56:23 Give me a one to two minute overview of the mechanics of what a nuclear breeder reactor, how that would work and what it would accomplish. And are there any? I don't think there are. There are, so it's, I'm stepping out of my wheelhouse definitely, right? But we're getting into slow neutrons versus fast neutrons. So the current kind of thermal reactors that we have in order to split more uranium atoms, we moderate the neutrons that are being released as part of the chain reaction, slow them down. And that is a bit of a limitation in terms of using what are called fertile elements, where if you maybe add a neutron to them, they become fissile and you can split them again. So a breeder reactor, in my understanding, again, as a medical doctor, but with lots of expert advice, is able to use that fast neutron spectrum, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and make these fertile elements that are present into fissile elements,

Starting point is 00:57:18 thus generating more fuel. Are their breeders active right now? Certainly a lot of countries have poked around in it with this interest of closing the fuel cycle. I'd say the Russians are probably the furthest along. They have a sodium fast reactor program that's 50 or 60 years old. they've scaled that up to, I believe, 800 megawatts recently. Have they felt a need to expand that? It's not as economic as their light water fleet, frankly.

Starting point is 00:57:45 It's more of a sort of, I think, research and development arm with the goal of maybe closing the fuel cycle at some point using waste within those reactors, but also extending the uranium reserves that they have. So I'll cut it there because I'm going to acknowledge the limits of my expertise. Well, also, I have so many questions, and there's a lot of other topics, too, that I want to cover. What about the cost and complexity? One of my beliefs is we're kind of out of time. We have a decade before this geopolitical financial system kind of unravels. And so I think there's so many times that a nuclear plant is over budget and over-deadline. And even if you agree with all the positive attributes you said to do a crash course nuclear thing only would make sense if AI and productivity or some some genie for our culture is able to extend our timeline.

Starting point is 00:58:47 So what do you think about that constraint? I'd say the timeline constraint is pretty much universal in terms of looking at really any technological solution to our predicament. I agree things are moving quite quickly. That's not a dodge, by the way. in terms of the ways that nuclear can improve. Really, it has to do, again, it's like a hydroelectric dam. We've got to get better at project management and construction. You know, the fastest built nuclear plant was done in just over three years in Japan

Starting point is 00:59:15 by a highly competent supply chain workforce and, you know, excellent project managers. They built a nuclear plant from scratch in three years? Yeah, from what they call the kind of concrete basematts of the reactor itself to grid connection. right we've got candor reactors that in china went from shovel to breaker in just over four years so it's possible to build these things quite quickly the innovation again the venture capitalists are going you know again probably coming with that Silicon Valley tech um uh bias of listen I've made billions you know creating a social media platform where you had to click less and then everyone went to it and you know like I'm not not trying to minimize some of the disruptions that have

Starting point is 00:59:56 happened in tech that's a bit pejorative but there's been some pretty big things. Nuclear is far more slow moving. And the innovations, if you look at the cost of building a nuclear plant, only about 20% of it is in the actual reactor. 80% of it is in the civil works and the balance of plants. And so the place for innovation is really in project management being more like what does that mean civil works? So nuclear plants are the most robust structures that human beings have created. Maybe you could say the pyramids are a little more robust. But, you know, because of A, the dangers, which I think are a little bit overhyped, again, you know, the kind of culture of excellence in nuclear engineering that was called the

Starting point is 01:00:37 defensive depth is wild, right? Every potential thing that could go wrong is considered. And obviously earthquakes are part of that story. So in terms of, you know, preparing a nuclear power plant, you're digging 100 feet down. You're putting in certain types of fill that can absorb seismic shocks. You've got a kind of a base mat of concrete. Again, I'm not a civil or structural engineer, but those civil works are a lot. You know, the water intake channels. It's a lot of concrete and steel. And again, that contributes, as we were saying earlier, to the lifecycle carbon.

Starting point is 01:01:10 That's really the main source of lifecycle carbon emissions for nuclear. But that's what I refer to there. All right. So one of the biggest concerns that I personally have had with regards to nuclear power is, the assumption that civilization will always continue and that there won't be a hiatus due to an an EMP pulse or a solar flare or a war or some massive reduction in complexity that causes the 500-odd nuclear plants to then have their environmental cost. all be backloaded and Chernobyl on steroids.

Starting point is 01:02:00 I watched the TV show Chernobyl. It was like a four-part series. I thought it was excellent. Of course, you see the other TV shows that show the wolves and the wildlife are thriving now where Chernobyl used to be. But you also hear stories of cows with five legs and other things like that. So given the followers of this podcast are at least emotionally and cognitively aware of the systemic possibility of diesel fuel that is used in the backup generators at a nuclear plant suddenly being unavailable even after two weeks of backup diesel supplies and that people then don't go to the nuclear plant because they can't get there or they're. there, ATM cards don't work because of some loss in complexity. And so what are, what are those risks that in such a scenario, and we can debate whether that's 1% or 20% possible in the next

Starting point is 01:03:05 century, but under that scenario, what are the nuclear waste, radiation, et cetera, risks to the areas around nuclear plants? What can you say about that? Right, right. So first off, that electromagnetic pulse scenario has been factored in since the 80s into this defense at depth mentality that nuclear engineers have. And so nuclear plants are designed and hardened with that in mind. Narrow boundary though. You're looking at the EMP to the plant. I'm talking about the EMP to society. No, no, they're looking to the whole system. They're looking at. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, the way that that's magnified through electric plants. Trust me, these are some of the smartest people on the planet and they're thinking through every eventuality. And, and, you know, one way to generate an EMP is,

Starting point is 01:03:48 a stratospheric nuclear detonation in terms of a nuclear weapon. So that has been very carefully looked at. The experts I've talked to is that it would lead to a scram in terms of just a reactor shutdown, all the control rods going in and then the emergency coolant systems running. So not to say it's a nothing burger. But, you know, and this is a familiar territory in terms of, you know, because of people's apocalyptic fear of nuclear weapons and that transference to nuclear energy, these kind of edge case scenarios are often brought up to imagine, you know, well, how can this turn into a nuclear apocalypse, you know, as we would see with weapons. As we saw with Fukushima, again, the simultaneous meltdown of three large boiling water reactors,

Starting point is 01:04:30 you know, and you can look at this because you're going to hear, but I heard a study, you know, that this many people died from radiation from Fukushima. That's more of the case with Chernobyl studies that you'll hear, say, Greenpeace, say, a million people are, you know, going to die from Chernobyl or the Green Party of Europe commissioned to that said 50,000 people will end up dead because of Chernobyl prematurely dead. The quality of that literature, you know, you get to the, the unskier reports. This is, you know, eight UN agencies, three countries participating, consensus, there's making hundreds of scientists, and they're going down to, you know, 50 confirmed deaths

Starting point is 01:05:04 and a possible three to four thousand from thyroid cancer. So you get these huge kind of disparities, but Chernobyl is even like far, far worse than Fukushima. I mean, this is a reactor without containment that blew its lid that caught on fire and burned for 12 or 13 days with a, you know, radioactive plume that went across, you know, Eastern Europe and into Europe. And again, if you, if you, you know, this is something that's a big part of medical education right now, critical appraisal skills, right? As we saw with COVID, you find all kinds of studies, preprints. And, you know, in terms of the way that social media amplifies things, if you, find something that fits your cognitive bias, you don't read the paper, you don't look at

Starting point is 01:05:47 the methodologies any good, you share it. And that is a big, you know, I would leave it to people to critically appraise the studies in terms of the health impacts of nuclear accidents, even Chernobyl, which is far worse than Fukushima. And, you know, we don't build nuclear plants like that anymore. The safety culture is totally different. The health impacts, very minimal and less than running a coal fleet, certainly, where you're just constantly putting out, you know, PM2.5 particles that even in what we consider to be good air quality conditions, you know, have a 4 to 8 percent, you know, increased mortality rate from things like lung cancer and cardiovascular disease. So, so in terms of imagining these kind of worst case scenarios, it would be really bad if, you know, the world's 430 nuclear

Starting point is 01:06:30 plants all simultaneously, you know, lost the ability to cool themselves. You know, as you mentioned in a war zone. This is not great, right, but the Zaporasian nuclear plants, I believe it's four large gigawatt scale reactors. They've been, you know, they're in cold shutdown now, but they manage those despite a, you know, war zone type event. Um, not a Chernobyl style plant. Um, and so, you know, the ability to keep the reactor core cool for, you know, as long as possible, the reactivity comes down exponentially, but I'm not saying it's a nothingberg, it's not a problem. But in terms of these apocalyptic fears, both for humanity and for the biosphere, I can't think of anything that's, you know, more grossly exaggerated.

Starting point is 01:07:07 So let me ask a follow up to that, Chris. So let's say that there's two different scenarios. There are one scenario where something happens that none of us can anticipate and these 430 plants don't have any warning and then they react. The second would be that we have a month notice of something happening. There's a big war or whatever it is. And the operators of these plants have time to shut them down properly. Is there a big difference then in the radioactive externality pollution risk between those two scenarios?

Starting point is 01:07:52 I mean, definitely the longer you can keep the core. And Fukushima, to be clear, they were able to keep the cores cooler. I think it was on the scale of hours. But even hours, you're dropping the level of radioactivity massively. in the amount of heat and energy that that core is producing. But again, in terms of that Chernobyl-esque far worst-case scenario, the health impacts we see are very small. So I don't want to minimize and say there's no difference.

Starting point is 01:08:14 Obviously, you can get the plant, I think, pretty close to cold shutdown after a month in which it's really, you know, not much active energy required to kind of maintain that core as it finally cools down into a state of cold shutdown. But, you know, in that worst-case scenario, I don't want to minimize that. but in terms of, again, our apocalyptic fears of, you know, what did you say, five-footed moose or something, you know, there was, because this is a big, this is a big story, right? I mean, there's a whole Chernobyl's children charity, which brings children from Chernobyl,

Starting point is 01:08:45 often with congenital heart defects and other problems to Ireland, to Canada, and gives them sort of a radiation retreat and respite. And it's a beautiful organization in terms of these disabled children getting to live in a wealthy country for a few weeks and be cared for and maybe get specialist care. they couldn't back home. There is absolutely zero evidence that Chernobyl caused these congenital heart defects and other things. Indeed, there was a whole genome sequencing study that came out a couple years ago, which looked at folks that got some of the highest doses at Chernobyl and looking for germline mutations between parents and kids in a large sample of people with high radiation

Starting point is 01:09:23 exposures in the general public, no increased germline mutations were found whatsoever in this study. they did find germline mutations and if the father smoked, for instance, right? So this gives you a sense of sort of, I don't want to say that radiation is a nothing burger. Like, for instance, nuclear waste, that irradiated fuel fresh out of the reactor, if it's not shielded,

Starting point is 01:09:43 you'd get a lethal dose in seconds and die, a horrible death, right? And yet in the history of civilian nuclear energy in terms of storing and handling spent fuel, not reprocessing it, but storing it, there's not been a single incident in terms of someone dying as a result of exposure to radiation. And that's because radiation is very easy to measure and it's very easy to shield.

Starting point is 01:10:04 So there is a danger there. But we're able to manage those risks very, very well as, you know, that 70-year track record of, for instance, handling spent nuclear fuel is demonstrative of. So here's my last question on this. And you could use this as a segue to a follow-up question or my last kind of constraint is I got a lot of critical. criticism when I had my great simplification video, the animated video that we put out last year, people are like, ah, he didn't mention nuclear. That means he doesn't know what's going on. So there's energy properties and different energy qualities. And if we are worried about oil peaking and declining, which is inevitable, I think AI may prove to extend the peak. We don't know yet. But,

Starting point is 01:10:59 But we're at or close to the peak. Many countries have peaked already. And most of what we plan on consuming in the future is in countries like Iran and Iraq, which we may be at war with in the near future. Who knows? But one of the things that I'm curious about is nuclear is generator of electricity like solar and wind are when only around 19% of global energy use right now is electricity. So there's a mismatch with the end services of what humans currently are using.

Starting point is 01:11:37 And there's a lot of decentralized transportation in cars and trucks and things like that. So that's something that I call attention to. But I'll let you comment on that. But then you can follow by answering this. Assuming that there are different. energy facilities in the future that use nuclear power, what would be the three or four or five best use cases for if we're able to scale nuclear plants, what should that base load power in those plants be best used for in our current society? I'll let you answer any way you

Starting point is 01:12:21 would like there. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm, you know, very aware partially through your work and others. this question of like energy fungibility or energy quality. Just because we have units like kilowatt hours, that disguises the kind of utility of each form of energy that we use. And, you know, for instance, liquid hydrocarbons, I think you're very right to be concerned about peachy oil. You've mapped out supply chains in your book, which I have here on my table.

Starting point is 01:12:47 It's incredibly complex. And we have complexified the hell out of our, we have six continent supply chains. I mean, I was just reviewing, you know, there's a famous essay on, on how to make a pencil, right? And it's like graphite, mind in Brazil, India, China, right? Need like aluminum and copper alloys for the little eraser stub.

Starting point is 01:13:07 You need petroleum products for the eraser. This is a major concern. A nuclear does not solve that issue, that service that liquid hydrocarbons provide, whether it's, you know, agriculture, running tractors, whether it's, you know, the vast majority of marine propulsion. That's not aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. whether it's diesel trucks, which we're so dependent on, you know, diesel power, diesel electric trains. So that is a major limitation.

Starting point is 01:13:33 I think the problem with a lot of the energy transition debate is that we have this existential problem. And we're trying desperately to make, I always forget if it's round pegs fit in square holes or square pegs and round holes. I imagine they don't go well into either. But there's this there's this forcing of we've got to make it work. And you see that, I think, in some of the really, you know, frankly, bullshit models from the IPCC in terms of bending that emission curve down. And often it relies on, you know, insane amounts of bioenergy capture, carbon capture and storage, for instance, to kind of force the model to work.

Starting point is 01:14:05 But similarly, you know, amongst the nuclear is the panacea folks, they'll say, listen, this is, you know, essentially limitless, abundant, clean energy. We can use it to run a number of processes to make synthetic hydrocarbons. So don't worry about it. I'm not of that mindset. I think that similarly to yourself, we are running a red line. Energy is the economy. I'm not going to repeat all your talking points here.

Starting point is 01:14:27 But if the price of oil goes to $150 or $200 a barrel, that risks really tanking our economy. I'm not going to get people who are listeners of this podcast are familiar. So no, I don't think nuclear can do that. What it's useful for. I mean, so stationary electricity generation. And you could argue, you mentioned about 19% of the world's energy uses electricity. You could argue that we have a global electricity shortage. If we were serious about decarbonization, for instance, you know, high temperature process,

Starting point is 01:14:54 That's provided very well by electric arc furnaces, but we don't have enough electricity to dedicate to that, for instance, right? That's kind of hard path, you know, big hydrodams and nuclear plants that kind of would allow that use of energy to get around some of those fossil fuel services. We either have an electricity shortage or a complexity longage. Or like a, you know, a surplus use of fossil fuels. And I know you'd probably say, listen, you know, every time we discover a new form of energy, it's just additive, right?

Starting point is 01:15:23 And yeah, that's probably true, right? So far it has been. There's no, there's no biological organism that will go, wow, there's a sweet, you know, concentration of nutrients. Which is why I'm not so sanguine on AI's possible optimism on developing nuclear fusion as an answer to all our problems. Do you have any thoughts on that? I'm incredibly bearish on fusion.

Starting point is 01:15:46 I mean, from the first splitting of heavy elements, nuclear fission, 1932, to, you commercial nuclear power, 1956, that's a really short timeline. Our first sort of induction of fusion, basically in bombs until now, we are still nowhere close to getting a positive Q value in terms of the energy out versus energy in. And the engineering, these machines, I've talked to, you know, ITER or Eter physicist running the Topamax in Europe. And they say this machine is eating itself, you know, the kind of neutron bombardment of the materials, the complexity there. If we're struggling to build a very complex nuclear plant,

Starting point is 01:16:25 like the AP 1000s we just built in Vogel, you know, multiply that complexity by tenfold and tell me that you're going to deliver that project more easily. And a lot of the hyperon fusion is it solves the so-called problems of nuclear, these intractable problems of say waste and proliferation and accidents. And it really doesn't. I mean, do you think that fusion research is not critical to thermonuclear weapon development. Like I've got friends who work in big laser laboratories like Lawrence Livermore. And most of that research is for making sure the bombs will go off, right? There's a total link there.

Starting point is 01:17:00 There's kind of more intermediate level waste that's created, not so much high level with fusion. But the biggest issue is these are engineering problems to, engineering solutions to communications problems. Nuclear waste is not that big of a deal. We don't need to develop a technology. I mean, that I just frankly don't think we're going to harness any time soon. If we are able to get that positive Q value out, are we going to be able to build the goddamn thing? The project management, the construction skills that are evasive to us in a much simpler, easier to force.

Starting point is 01:17:28 You know, harnessing of atomic energy, I don't think so. But there's my position. And that doesn't even get to my point, which is let's assume we have too cheap to meter or even free electricity. given our current cultural value system aspirations and scoring metrics of GDP, we would fry the planet by bringing in lots of other non-carbon or carbon resources with that energy underpinning it. Yeah, yeah, I don't disagree with you, Nate. So nuclear fusion, if it ever arrives, would have to also arrive with a better form

Starting point is 01:18:04 of coordination, governance, and cultural values in my mind. opinion and and to take it to extremes as you as your as your uh guess Thomas Murphy has has shown uh I guess eventually with this limitless clean energy would have to find a way to get all the waste heat off the planet before we boil that's right that's right if it with a few more doublings we I forget how many we would boil the oceans just from the waste heat 400 years of two to three so um I have a lot more to ask you one more thing on nuclear what about the small modular reactors and SMRs and molten salt and some of the things like that versus the tried

Starting point is 01:18:45 and true conventional large conventional plants that we know work today. What is your sense on that landscape? So the nuclear industry is like as an anthropologist of it having met lots of people that work within it. It's it's absolutely fascinating. It's mostly these really, really nerdy smart engineer types and they're brilliant engineers. And the way they think is engineering. And so they come up with engineering solutions to social license problems and communications problems, as is mentioning with waste. What's a social license problem? Well, if nuclear is unpopular, right? Then you rebrand it as a small modular reactor. You don't even use the N word in there. And maybe you can convince people, this is friendlier. It's different. It's better. It's shinier. Or, you know, another issue, another

Starting point is 01:19:26 reason that SMRs were in vogue, and I'll really argue they're falling out of Vogue, was this idea that government will never finance nuclear anymore. So you need to get a plant down in terms of the financing to about a billion dollars if you want the private sector to finance it. So there was a whole sort of paradigm that's a little more than a decade old that went against everything

Starting point is 01:19:46 and the entire track record of nuclear. The big cost reductions that we see in the first 10, 20 years of nuclear, absolutely from scaling, from these 20 to 100 megawatt reactors up towards the gigawatt scale. Where the grid size permits it, we have always scaled to a gigawatt because economies of scale are real.

Starting point is 01:20:03 The SMR advocates are big fans of rights law, which is basically an economies of multiples. If you double the amount of units, then you should get a sort of positive learning rate and it should reduce by whatever percentage it is. We often don't see that in nuclear. That's really evaded us in terms of those positive learning rates that are remarkable with things like wind and solar.

Starting point is 01:20:24 And again, even the use of the term SMR, it is like renewables, an incredibly imprecise term. It's this massive grab bag. Probably what your listeners in terms of those who kind of imagine, you know, the best case for SMRs, they're like, oh, yeah, these are, you know, plants you can deliver on the back of a truck. And there's minimal civil works and they just snap together like Lego, connect them to the grid. And that's certainly, I think the industry and the trade associations are guilty of, you know, selling that story. And they've really overpromised and they're about to under deliver. So scale is very real with a nuclear.

Starting point is 01:20:57 and the imprecision of SMR. So again, we're lumping together so-called advanced technologies, things like molten salt reactors, sodium fast reactors, anything that's not sort of water-moderated and water-cooled is now kind of considered an advanced reactor, despite the fact that these reactor concepts were attempted in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and for economic reasons, they didn't make it. It's not to say that we shouldn't research them more

Starting point is 01:21:22 and maybe develop them, but they really need to be a side project of proven nuclear, which is already struggling. right um but but again there's this there's this narrative that's really exciting because hey you can breed more fuel than you use maybe these things can consume nuclear waste i mean these aren't real priorities to us in the here and now at the moment and so you know i've consistently in my podcast and i've been a bit of a contrarian in this been an advocate for again focusing on the project management focusing on the construction skills the boring stuff of nuclear right and embracing

Starting point is 01:21:52 the high value you know long term asset that is a nuclear plant just like a a big hydrodham is a long-term kind of low-carbon asset. It's a bit more of a boring narrative is less inspiring, but it's certainly what's proven and what we know works. And in places that have sort of followed those rules of a building a standardized gigawatt scale reactor over and over again, at least we don't see a ton of negative learning curves. We see, you know, in France, for instance, 56 reactors commissioned in about 20 years. And now, you know, essentially decarbonizing their electricity accidentally in the 70s and 80s, a similar story in Ontario. I mean, there's really kind of cool and inspiring stories here with doing what we know. And, you know, in terms of

Starting point is 01:22:33 what has risen to the top, what has actually advanced in terms of nuclear technologies, it's done it for a reason. These things are easier to operate, easier to maintain. You know, we've been handling high pressure steam as a working fluid and pressure vessels, you know, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Adding fission into that wasn't a huge leap. Moulton salt reactors, you know, having a fuel that's melted, all the alchemy of a nuclear reaction happening, you know, as a, as a kind of liquid that's all throughout the reactor versus contained in a fuel pellet and a fuel element. You know, I'm getting into specifics here. But I'm not, I'm not particularly bullish on on advanced or small modular reactors as you can hear from this brief diet trip. There's not an easy fix, Nate.

Starting point is 01:23:18 There's not an easy fix to this. There's a lot more I want to ask you on nuclear, but we might have to save that for a. round two because I want to give a whole view of Chris Kiefer Renaissance man podcaster in this first interview. One final nuclear question, though, how does the political attitude towards nuclear differ between your country, Canada and mine, the United States? And is there a heavy political divide left versus right on this issue? So I will say looking from Canada south of the border, I can identify one and only one issue that seems to have bipartisan support right now, and that is nuclear energy. So the Biden administration is all in on nuclear. The loan programs

Starting point is 01:24:04 office, Jigger Shaw, the Department of Energy, they're all in. They're frustrated with the nuclear industry. They're trying to push it along. There's massive incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act for nuclear, I think production tax credits that approach 50 percent if you build on a brownfield site, use union labor, which basically is sort of goes without saying. use a local supply chain, which nuclear tends to local as a supply chain. So the social license is big. What's different between Canada and US is the nonprofit industrial complex. So there's a beautiful tax avoidance mechanism in the U.S., which is if you're very wealthy individual, lots of generational wealth, you start a foundation, and you can decide how you want to essentially spend that tax burden.

Starting point is 01:24:44 You can move it into your pet causes. And so, you know, if you look at the value of the nonprofit sector in the U.S. It's a larger economy than some pretty respectable economies around the world. And particularly, you know, the combined revenues of Sierra Club, of Greenpeace, of Friends of the Earth is approaching, you know, not into the double digit billions, but I think at last I checked five or six billion dollars. They've been resolutely anti-nuclear. They've been very influential.

Starting point is 01:25:12 A lot of staffers that are sort of cultivated with the environmental movement become political staffers and have been very influential. And so in Canada, we don't have that same strength of a nonprofit sector. The anti-nuclear activists have been less influential and have really waned in terms of influence. Partially is they've just grayed out because there's not a lot of young people that are enticed by an anti-nuclear narrative anymore. But again, partially just because not the same kind of money as at play in terms of influencing politics. And I will say the NGOs that have been pouring a lot of money into anti-nuclear. Even the Rocky Mountain Institute has really softened.

Starting point is 01:25:47 its views on nuclear and I think the Sierra Club recently defunded their main sort of legal branch that was fighting, you know, for the closure of nuclear plants, for instance. It's a remarkable transformation in the last five years. Thank you. That was a pretty good whirlwind overview. So, Chris, please, please now shift hats, put on your podcast hat. Is your podcast audio only or you have on video on YouTube as well? The first 40 episodes, audio only biggest mistake of my podcast and career. Yeah, I know YouTube is a, it's a great place for a lot of the conversations happen in the comment sections on YouTube for whatever reason. That's where a lot of interaction happens. And yeah, it's both. So knowing what you know about our societal, our spectrum of

Starting point is 01:26:32 societal narratives, what do you anticipate will be the comment section on this podcast so far on what you've said on my channel? I think it's going to, to be interesting because I think you have a pretty varied audience. Certainly I think, you know, you attract for better or worth, worse, you know, kind of certain degrowth audience, probably sort of progressive environmental audience is a sort of core listenership. And I know it's much more diverse than that. And I think they'll probably take issue with, you know, the blazé way that I've probably talked about nuclear risks as they would perceive them. So I imagine there'll be some of that. I think as well, you know, in terms of, again, you've, I think, elucidated very well,

Starting point is 01:27:16 a nuanced perspective on what you imagine a great simplification to look like, but this isn't us going back to the Stone Age, perhaps. But I'm not sure about your listeners in terms of, and there's a lot of romanticization, you know, and I even, I won't accuse you of it, but in terms of your question about child mortality, like, was that just the last kind of, was that just since the agricultural revolution that it got bad? Or, you know, was there some kind of illustrious hunter-gatherer past when we lived in harmony with nature? One of my favorite physicians, Hans Rosling, has a great quote.

Starting point is 01:27:46 He says, you know, humanity never lived in harmony with nature. We died in harmony with nature. And it was mostly women in childbirth and children under five. So I think that's a fundamental tension to wrestle with. You know, and these gains in terms of, you know, early childhood survival are recent. This is the last like 50 hundred years. I mean, Somalia, it's still 14% of kids. Used to be 50%.

Starting point is 01:28:06 And that's kind of throughout human history. So I think that's the thing to wrestle with. I think some people, I mean, we might get into this later, but Cuba provides a really interesting example of an economic shock when they were cut off from their Soviet sponsors and their GDP shrunk by 35 percent, you know, over a couple months. And I used to be a sort of Cuba solidarity activist. It's a very, you have to be very careful of discourse around Cuba because ideologues are drawn to it on either side of the political spectrum, like moths to a flame. But I imagine the comment section of this podcast might wrestle a little bit with these questions

Starting point is 01:28:39 of like, how bad is it going to be? The Dumers will probably be all over that. But I think, you know, romanticization. This idea, you know, even in terms, I know that you touch on agricultural topics from time to time. Van Daneeshiva has been a guest several times. I think there's an idea based upon, if we imagine this simplification future, we may think of like a camping trip and we're like camping trips were great.

Starting point is 01:29:00 I love cooking over a fire and you forget that you drove there and you had a great tent made in Pakistan with really waterproof fibers. Or you think about like a transition village you visited or a. permaculture farm you went to. And these again are islands in a sea of a fossil field civilization and often have enormous fossil fuel inputs into them. So I think we have a really hard time imagining and there's a lot of sort of idealism of sort of, oh, this industrial society is really terrible. Why don't we simplify to something that's nicer? And I don't think you share that delusion, but I think that that might be a theme. So I do want to ask you about healthcare and medicine

Starting point is 01:29:35 approaching during and after a great simplification. But let's stay in the podcast theme. Since 180 of your 200 odd episodes have been on the topic of nuclear, presumably you have attracted an audience that is very interested in the nuclear question. Whereas I'm covering anthropology, neuroscience, climate, biodiversity, debt, energy properties, geopolitics, everything. And invariably, and it's getting worse, whatever episode I cover, the ideologues will show up and criticize. I mean,

Starting point is 01:30:13 it's not everyone. There's more positive comments than negative. But my question to you as a podcast host is in this polarized social media, ideological, tribal identity-laden world, how do we have a conversation and integrate the broader societal narratives and suppress our identities at least temporarily in order to have a discourse on the things that matter. What have you learned and what are your core insights on this?

Starting point is 01:30:45 I mean, I've really learned to sort of depersonalize and not take anything personally and also delight in ideas that, well-expressed ideas that trigger all of my cognitive dissonance. And maybe it's a good training process. but I love hearing well articulated arguments that are that I absolutely disagree with. And I think like as a society, explain that. I do explain that. I do. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:31:12 It hasn't always been that way. Like again, coming from like even the hard left, the romantic left, the Marxist-Leninist left, I wouldn't say I was ever like a, you know, again, I'm a member of the disgusted party. I've never really felt at home in any ideology. But on the on the extreme or hard left, as on the extreme or hard right, I think there's an idea that like, you know, People that don't agree with us are just kind of stupid. If they only knew, if we could just explain to them, they'd be converts. And then those that don't agree, I mean, in sort of Stalinist Russia, they should go to the gulag or, you know, get lined up against the wall.

Starting point is 01:31:40 There's a total intolerance on both sides of the political spectrum for free speech, for diversity of opinions. And it cripples societies. One of the reasons that I think, you know, there's many reasons that the, you know, liberal capitalist system won out in the Cold War. I don't want to simplify this too much. But the free exchange of ideas is just so vital. Like we're in a whole number of different predicaments. And if we don't have a breadth of opinion, and maybe I hate to kind of weigh into COVID because it's so politicized, right? But this is potentially an illustration.

Starting point is 01:32:13 And I'm sort of drawing from Jonathan Hayes' work in the righteous mind. You know, we are a species that's evolved as a social species in terms of a sort of selection pressure. We always see within, you know, basically every human society, people on the left, people on the left, people on the right, conservatives, liberals, authoritarian, communitarians, libertarians, right? And that might frustrate us in our various political polls. But when we recognize that all those voices are really necessary, that's a good thing. So let's take COVID, for instance. You know, when I'm working in the emergency department in Toronto and we're seeing these tsunamis,

Starting point is 01:32:48 right, in Iran, for instance, in Italy, in New York, right? Doctors, you know, freezer trucks outside in terms of, you know, for dead COVID patients. doctors intubating in scarves. Like we were terrified in Toronto. I was a huge advocate. I was messaging my MP and saying the military should be out in the streets and forcing lockdowns, right? And that kind of authoritarian impulse in the face of a threat that,

Starting point is 01:33:12 you know, we thought there was a case fatality rate of 5% with COVID. You know, that 10% of people would end up in the ICU, that 20% of people would be hospitalized. And I ran the numbers in my emergency department. And I was like, you know, we're going to lose 15, 20 people in this department. Right. There's going to be 40 of us that will end up on ventilators. And in that context, with the limited information we have, an authoritarian impulse, I think

Starting point is 01:33:33 absolutely appropriate, right? As both, you know, natural immunity, vaccine-induced immunity and an attenuation of the virus occurred, there was a kind of hangover of that authoritarianism that went on too long. And so libertarian voices came in. You know, they didn't necessarily, they weren't sort of savory voices per se, maybe like, you don't have a different opinion or there's a diversity of opinions on, say, the truckers protests in Ottawa. but I would argue that that authoritarian impulse was stale.

Starting point is 01:33:58 It had gone on too long. It was no longer appropriate. It was causing damage. You only have so much sort of public health social capital until you burn through it. And, you know, there was a hangover there. It needed a course correction. And so the libertarians came in. And that was, this is just one example where it's, I think, important.

Starting point is 01:34:14 We're faced with novel challenges and a sort of diversity of opinion is super important in terms of both understanding the new predicaments and how to engage and deal with it. So more important than being able to suppress your identity and be a good listener, what I'm hearing from you is the ability to change your mind. Absolutely. And again, just to reference Jonathan Hayd for a second, he had this great example, right? If a farmer is trying to get the most eggs out of a chicken, if you select an individual, you find that hen that just lays like crazy and you try and breed her, you end up with less eggs. Because alongside that trait for laying more eggs is aggressiveness. and they peck each other to death and the overall production goes down.

Starting point is 01:34:54 So what you do is you grab groups, you segregate chickens into groups of 12. And whichever group lays the most eggs, that's your breeding stock. And it's, I think, a lot like humans, which evolve, and I'm just quoting hate here. This isn't, you know, my original thoughts. But we evolved collectively in small groups of hunter-gatherers, you know, 25, 50, 100. And there's a reason genetically, I think, why there's this political spectrum. Like in every society around the world, there's liberals and conservatives. conservatives. Like, why isn't there some country or some village where everybody is super liberal?

Starting point is 01:35:26 I think there's a reason for that. And I think there's a evolutionary advantage to a diversity of opinions. And again, this contradicts my sort of hard left past, but I'm really glad for that nuance. And again, a big journey of myself, not into the political right, but for appreciation of certain arguments and elements and viewpoints from the political right is, is that, is that understanding that we do need a diversity of viewpoints to identify and understand. and the problems that we have and to generate solutions. And for our solutions to change over time as the facts on the ground change in the sort of COVID example I gave. So given your experience as a podcast host, in addition to your emergency room role and as the president of the

Starting point is 01:36:11 Canadian nuclear society, how do you think we can change that? How do you think we can change the discourse in the direction that you would aspire to? Are there, is there anything you've learned that gives you some hints or clues or or avenues that give you hope? Well, you have this magic wand question that I know you asked your desk. Right. Well, I'm going to ask you that. Maybe if you had, well, maybe I'll intercept it early on.

Starting point is 01:36:40 But if you had a magic wand, maybe you could, you know, make Twitter disappear or make TikTok disappear. So you think social media is the cause of our polarization? It's not the cause, right? But Nate, I think, you know, like, we all have like a window into reality. We all have cognitive biases. I think you've elucid it very well in your work. We all have blinkers. You know, again, we can't see the world until we have a metaphor that explains it.

Starting point is 01:37:03 And the metaphors that we have are all constrained by our individual experiences of the world. So everything is very narrow. And now the way in which we perceive the world is largely, and the information we gather is largely through our smartphones and the screens we have. And then the platforms that present us the information. And, you know, and the platforms that are. are trying to keep us on them as long as possible by presenting us with information that suits our cognitive biases and makes a little dopamine receptors fire. Right. So that's incredibly damaging to, you know, again, a diverse, robust, tolerant, you know, environment that's,

Starting point is 01:37:33 that's prioritizes free speech. So I'm, I think that's a major barrier. It's not that the root cause, right? The root cause is just our basic kind of paleo-psychology that persists today. but your question of how to overcome that. I think the podcasting medium is really interesting. Like everything has become short attention span, right? TikTok is down to a minute or whatever, right? And people probably, if you look at the metrics, you know, people probably when they watch the first 20 seconds

Starting point is 01:38:01 before they're distracted and move on, the emergence of long-form podcasts that are popular, it speaks to something. It satiate something, I think, in people that crave nuance and want to go deeper. So I'm actually shocked by that myself. Like I don't listen to podcasts unless I have to for prep reasons or they're really, really exceptional.

Starting point is 01:38:23 Like I watched Tristan and Daniel Schmachtenberger on Joe Rogan, for instance. But I'm shocked that so many people have the appetite to listen to a 90 minute conversation between two people. I really, it actually is heartening to me because I think most people, like you say, have a two minute or less time span. So maybe that is an emergent phenomenon of nuance and complexity and context that our society needs. Well, you don't have the patience maybe to listen to many podcasts, but you engage in hour, hour and a half, two hour long conversations on a regular basis.

Starting point is 01:39:01 And that's also, and again, in terms of like the social capital of podcasting, I mean, how, like, maybe like I love going to parties where there's really cool people and I generally pick one or two of them. and we just go deep for an hour. These are weird parties, right? This is not your average party go, right? So maybe we do that in our natural life, but it's very rare to sort of like, we're kind of looking each other in the eyes across this platform

Starting point is 01:39:22 and having a deep conversation, exploring each other's work and thoughts. So even though you're not a listener, like you're engaging in this, the same thing. You have a thirst for it as well. And that's why we, you know, do this insane thing in putting an episode out every week.

Starting point is 01:39:35 I think you do, you do more than that. Well, maybe if I was far less busy, I would listen to a lot more podcasts. I just don't have the time. So that was a good answer. I like that. And I need to think about that more. Okay, switching hats again because I don't want this to go three hours.

Starting point is 01:39:56 I mean, to be honest, Chris, I have so many questions I'd like to ask you. Let's just do what we can on this and have you back for that one to two hour party deep dive on something. So wearing your emergency. physician hat. I've been very concerned about this. I've had a former governor of Oregon, John Kitsaburon, I've had Robert Lustig on talking about the health care system. The United States health care system is 20% of our GDP. Americans have 50% of the world's, the entire world's medical prescriptions, which implies we're either sicker. Our doctors are prescribing them more for some kickback thing or, we're, you know,

Starting point is 01:40:41 were babies or some combination of the three. But I do not believe that our current growth-based system and by implication our medical complicated just in time throw this plastic tube that used once out system is sustainable. So it's my belief that in the not too distant future, and I can't put a date on it. We're going to have to gradually or suddenly go to getting 80% of our health care and medical needs with 20% of the resources that we do today. And I'm sure you've thought about it, especially from your trapper, intentional community, Cuban solidarity past. What insights can you merge with your decouple hat? And, you. your medical knowledge knowing about a potential great simplification in the future.

Starting point is 01:41:42 What are your thoughts? Well, I mean, first off, I think we'd be unlikely to see sort of this 80-20 rule playing out. I think 10% of the population would continue to get outstanding, you know, healthcare and 90% whatnot. So there would be a, that's what we see, right? And if we want to talk about like more sort of simplified societies, I mean, there's an upper crust elite, usually with the private health care system that gets, you know, US style or similar sort of levels of care

Starting point is 01:42:08 and there's MRI machines and everything else. Okay, so if society has 20 or 30% less resources, right? Your view is the accordion just stretches. So got it.

Starting point is 01:42:19 Absolutely. But, you know, but I do think it's a really interesting question. You know, I was looking at some Medicaid data recently and I don't have a photographic memory for numbers, but there's this idea of super utilizers,

Starting point is 01:42:32 right? So something like three or four percent of people on Medicaid, to use 25% of the resources, right? And these are people with a lot of comorbidities, diabetes, heart disease, etc. That predispose them to be sicker and who need a higher level of care. So how do we manage that while still, you know, I hope maintaining an idea of sort of universality, universal respect for human rights and human health.

Starting point is 01:42:59 And this is where I do not want to romanticize Cuba or the Cuban system. I've done that in the past as a, as a kind of, you know, 20-year-old Cuban solidarity activist. I think there's really, really interesting things about the system. A lot of nuance there, right? But in Cuba, for instance, which, you know, the health spending would be a fraction of what they have in the U.S., they have pretty similar life expectancy stats, you know, child mortality stats as the U.S. on a much smaller dime. How do they accomplish that?

Starting point is 01:43:27 There is a huge element in terms of preventative care. You know, things are stretched now because they send a lot of doctors on humanitarian. missions to earn foreign exchange to prop up the economy. It's actually most of Cuban foreign exchange is earned through export of pharmaceuticals that they've got a biotech sector, but also human resources, doctors, right? They're kind of like the Philippines in that way, I guess, in terms of not remittances. This comes back through the government. But they have a very interesting healthcare system that was constructed after the 1959 revolution. And what it consists of is about 12,000 family doctor offices. It's a family doctor and a nurse. They live embedded in the

Starting point is 01:44:03 community and they make house visits. Every Cuban is labeled with a number one to five. And one means you're healthy. You got no issues. And you might get a doctor's visit a couple times a year. Five on the other extreme is, you know, again, you're diabetic that's had one of their legs cut off. Their glycemic controls terrible. They've had a heart attack. You're getting a visit a couple times a week or every week. Are you taking your medications? These are the superutilizers, right? And so there is a very aggressive preventative medicine side of things and chronic disease management side of things, which occurs because of a highly structured and centralized and organized healthcare system, which does value universality. And I'm not romanticizing it again because Cuban resources have been stretched in. It has the highest doctor to patient ratio in the world, something like one doctor for every 200 people.

Starting point is 01:44:55 but about 50,000 of those doctors are off on medical missions earning the government foreign exchange. So talk to the average Cuban, just like any person in the world, they're going to bitch about their health care. But one doctor for every 200 people and that's the highest amount of doctors in the world? Yes, sir, per capita. How much is it in Canada or the U.S.? We're talking one per, I don't know the data in front of me, but high hundreds, one per 700. Okay. There's countries where it's in the thousands, obviously, right?

Starting point is 01:45:24 So anyway, so you have this primary care network, doctors and nurses, embedded in the community. Like, again, how do you achieve really low neonatal mortality? Well, you're on top of your prenatal care, right? And their schedule for prenatal care puts us to shame. You know, maybe it's even excessive, but like you're getting blood pressure checks frequently to detect something called preeclampsia, pregnancy-induced hypertension. You're getting a lot of health surveillance throughout your pregnancy. People don't fall through the cracks partially because, hey, this is kind of a police state that has

Starting point is 01:45:52 information on everybody. But there is a kind of nanny state element where people are are looked after and, you know, and preventative medicine is, is really essential. You know, so the health system is organized, again, with these primary care clinics dispersed, you know, right throughout the country, right? There's not areas where there's, you know, rural areas in particular really prioritized. And then you have, you know, this next section of polyclinicos, probably about 500 throughout the country.

Starting point is 01:46:20 And they have, you know, basic specialties, internal medicine, pediatric. obstetrics, obstetrics, gynecology. And they're kind of referral centers for those primary care doctors. And those are also really dispersed out of the country. And then you have 13 specialist hospitals, so, you know, neurology hospitals, trauma hospitals, transplant hospitals. So they have, you know, very specialized care available in terms of doing, you know, complex congenital cardiac malformation surgeries.

Starting point is 01:46:46 But the focus is really in terms of getting the bang for the buck on that preventative care, that chronic disease management. And I will also say if you go to Cuba, everybody plays an instrument or plays sports. Like it is insane, the sports culture. The number of Olympians that Cuba produced is absolutely nuts. And again, I'm starting to sound like a blathering Cuba solidarity activist. And I really want to acknowledge complex society, a lot of nuance, a lot of stressors internally imposed and externally imposed. But the health system is fascinating.

Starting point is 01:47:15 I've been to Cuba seven times. I did a research project with American scholarship students, studying medicine. in Cuba. Fidel gave, as a bit of a FU to George Bush, he gave 500 scholarships to mostly black, Chicano, and indigenous Americans who couldn't afford to study medicine in the U.S. And they went to what's, I think, the world's largest medical school, which is a scholarship school for the global South, apparently, to come study medicine in Cuba for free. And they were really interesting windows through which to see Cuban society, because they're Americans, they shared, you know, my cultural formation and background and questions and curiosities.

Starting point is 01:47:50 and they were embedded very deep into Cuban society, providing health care. Like, nothing puts you in touch with human beings like providing health care to them. Like as an Emerge Doc, I see kids, I see elderly, I see women, I see men, I see the whole spectrum. And it's an amazing window into life. So anyway, so they've been really useful at giving me sort of a nuanced sense of a Cuban reality. And some of them had kids down there and could comment on that obstetric care. So anyway, just to just sort of, I guess, give you context.

Starting point is 01:48:20 for these these opinions. So, so as an ER doc, although you just said something different than ER or emergency, you said you're an emerged doc, which is kind of an interesting. That's the Canadianism, yeah. Is it?

Starting point is 01:48:34 Okay. Yeah. Well, I would think that there are emergent things that happen in, in those facilities. So, like how much of our medical system is just treating the symptoms and not the disease? And how much of our effort as a society, as a culture, as individual responsibilities should be towards prevention and sports and music and all those other things. Because once you get to the hospital, it's almost too late.

Starting point is 01:49:05 You're in the system and all that. Do you have any words of wisdom on that front? I mean, we're really, like one thing you didn't mention is infrastructure, right? We talk about social determinants of health, things that make people sick. And, you know, there's biologic determinants, like maybe just have really bad genes, right? Philadelphia chromosome and you're going to get leukemia as a child or something like that. But there's social determinants. And some of those, again, are sports or diet, nutrition, you know, mental health is a product of living in an alienating environment.

Starting point is 01:49:37 But some of them are just infrastructural. And maybe that's, you know, to the environmental crowd, less sexy. There was a really interesting study done in Mexico as a health intervention. And it was giving families a few bags of cement. And this had a huge impact on local health. So if you have a dirt floor, you have worms and parasites on that, you have kids crawling around on it. You have kids infested with worms. They're anemic.

Starting point is 01:50:03 They're having diarrhea all the time. They can't go to school. The moms are looking after them. The moms are depressed. Being able to pour a cement floor, you know, I don't have the stats right in front of me, but dramatically reduced diarrhea illnesses like by 70%. Reduced anemia. I also read that those people that spend a lot of time in the soil and the dirt when their kids don't have allergies when they're adults and that we should take our shoes off and walk in the bare soil and get hookworms.

Starting point is 01:50:31 Yeah. No, I mean, there is something called the hygiene hypothesis. The IgE immunoglobulin branch of our immune system is targeted at parasites at things like worms. And so if it's got nothing to do because we live in such a hygienic environment, then yes. I mean, allergies are the price to pay for, you know, kids not having anemia and like almost all kids, right? Like, and again, this is where the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, you know, there would be different sort of health challenges, right? But humans living close together with animals presents, you know, all kinds of zoonotic diseases, like where does, where does the flu come from? Where does smallpox come from?

Starting point is 01:51:06 All of these infectious challenges, not all, but a lot of them are from concentrated humans with living with animals. And so, no, crawling around on a dirt floor where there's animals and everything. else. Like roundworms are, let me tell you about the roundworm life cycle. It's horrific, right? So they come in usually through your foot. They bury themselves, embed themselves in your skin and you'll see this long little, you know, it looks like a little bit of rope or something under the skin surface. They get into a vein. They ride the vein up into your lungs, right? It causes a bad cough, etc. Then they crawl up your trachea and then they get swallowed down your esophagus, right? And then they lay their eggs in your intestine. They hatch some worms, etc., which, you know, leach off your blood.

Starting point is 01:51:45 supply, you poop out eggs, they get back in the soil and the beautiful cycle continues. I mean, it's like a, it's a disgusting sort of tour to France through your body. And so, like, again, there's romantic ideas that it's nice to play in the dirt. And to a degree, yes. And particularly for kids in nice, industrialized countries where the dirt's not, you know, where I would keep our animals in factory farms. I don't want to, I'm not going to go that far, but, you know, where we're not living piled on top of our animals and the soil's not full of parasites. Yeah, it's, it's great. Let your kids crawl around in the dirt. So clearly you have. a lot of wisdom on this topic and and we can't do justice in this conversation. But do you have

Starting point is 01:52:21 any advice or at least directional thinking on medicine and the great simplification? Yeah. And I mean, I think, um, the Cuban example is insightful. Is it replicable? Not really, right? Like, that's the product of a unique moment in time of a series of political ideologies and, and sort of social values that became encoded in the system that I think did really well on education and health care and screwed up a lot of other things. You know, we're not about to have a sort of centralized government in the U.S. that rationally distributes health care according to the needs of the population on, you know, the values of sort of universal equality, etc. But I do think, again, that question of if we would want to reduce health care costs,

Starting point is 01:53:04 a big thing is we have something called an acceptable misrate, right? So in a merge, we order an insane amount of diagnostic tests because our tolerance to miss a heart attack is something like 1%. If you have kind of, this isn't how lawsuits happen, right? But like, we want to get people down using some Bayesian reasoning to a risk level of around 1 or 2% with something as serious as a heart attack. And so basically every single person with chest pain gets a troponin, which is a blood test that looks for an enzyme that should only be inside heart muscle. If we see it in blood, then some heart muscles of, you know, cells have broken open and spilled tropon. You know, so that is an enormous burden. We also have medical interventions that, you know, frankly don't have a big payback.

Starting point is 01:53:48 A lot of actually cancer screening has very poor evidentiary base in terms of on a population level actually saving lives. That's not a popular thing to say, but it's objectively true. There's, you know, a lot of therapies. I mean, there's cancer drugs that extend life by a month or two, right, that come at great cost. I mean, I just lost my dad to cancer. He wasn't on one of those really expensive drugs, but like, I get it. I absolutely get it. You know, very interestingly, just as a sort of side note back to nuclear, my dad got a medical isotope that's produced in a candor reactor. You know, it's tagged to a molecule that specifically finds, you know, a receptor on prostate cells binds to them. And it's kind of like a radio pharmaceutical.

Starting point is 01:54:36 that like radiates just the cancer cells in that way. Anyway, you know, like I don't know if your loved one had a really complex medical condition and even expensive treatment, I think it's hard to say no to that. So I'm not sure what it looks like, but certainly there's a lot of,

Starting point is 01:54:53 you know, excessive testing that goes on. And borderline treatments. Like, like, again, like things like, and I'm not about to give medical advice on your podcast here,

Starting point is 01:55:02 but like a lot of people have this concept that, you know, one intervention, one cure, right? It's called the number, needed to treat. So if you have appendicitis and I either, we can manage it sometimes just with antibiotics, but if I do surgery on you and I take out your appendix, I've done one intervention.

Starting point is 01:55:16 I've saved you, you know, saved one life, right? There's things like trying to manage cholesterol to prevent heart attacks, right? And then the number needed treat goes from maybe one for appendicitis up to sort of three, four hundred. You know, to prevent a single heart attack, you might need to be on that anticholesterol medication or you might need hundreds of people to be on an anticholesterol medication for, you know, five years diligently to prevent one heart attack. On a population level, is that worthwhile? Maybe. And with anti-hypertensis, we certainly think so, right? So there's, there's a lot of nuance here. But, you know, if you were, if, if you were kind of ruthlessly develop a cheaper healthcare system, you'd probably look at the numbers needed to treat,

Starting point is 01:55:53 the numbers needed to investigate to prevent bad outcomes. There's a way that the math whizzes could do that. I'm just not sure that we, just as we won't willingly sign up to degrowth, I don't think we're going to willingly sign up to sort of de-row therapeutic options. No, we're not. But I think as much as our society is unsustainable, our current Western healthcare model is unsustainable. So maybe we'd come back and do a deeper dive on that sometime. So in lieu of asking you medical recommendations for my viewers, what about just general

Starting point is 01:56:26 lifestyle behavior, polycrisis, human predicament, prepers? recommendations for my viewers. Do you have any? It's going to be, very generic, right? I mean, like, eat well, get good exercise, stay fit.

Starting point is 01:56:41 I mean, I think, stay positive. And I'm kind of, because I listen to your podcast so much, Nate, I do know some of the questions that are coming. And a big part,

Starting point is 01:56:51 I think a biggest part of, like, if you're wrestling with this question of a great simplification, and, you know, I wrestle with it. Sometimes I discount it altogether. I look at it as a kooky idea. I come back to it.

Starting point is 01:57:00 I read your book. I read your work, et cetera. But, you know, certainly it's doomy. It can provoke a doom reaction, right? I know, and I know that's not your intention. But certainly, I think a lot of people come across it and they go, we're fucked. We're in big trouble.

Starting point is 01:57:14 And what's the psychological reaction to that? And the sort of mental health reaction, I think very important that this message is coupled with an idea of agency. Like the kind of climate concern amongst Western youth, for instance, is crippling. Like, people commit suicide over this stuff. People fall into it. They see therapists about it for years. the antidote to anxiety is empowerment, right?

Starting point is 01:57:38 And, you know, I would, like, me and a couple friends have thought about this, but never taken it on. So I'll spill the idea out here. And if someone wants to run with that, I'd be very happy if they did. But, you know, this is kind of 50 careers for climate book we were thinking about. Like for myself, when I was thinking about getting into medicine or as a youth, if you're looking into like, you know, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up, you know, teacher, okay, but there's so many uninspiring teachers, when you find that one teacher,

Starting point is 01:58:02 that one role model that just blows your socks off, that makes you want to be a teacher. You want to be like them. You want to identify someone who's done something heroic and otherwise. Medicine can be a really boring profession. There's a lot of mediocre doctors or uninspiring doctors or unfriendly doctors. You know, you need to find someone who inspires you. But I think like really having a culture of try of excellence. Like, yes, we have a brutal crisis ahead of us. equip yourself, empower yourself so you can help your fellow humans, right? Like I think that's a vital part, you know, in terms of trying to answer your question there about, you know, how to stay healthy in this, in this kind of coming metacrisis, if your predictions are true name.

Starting point is 01:58:43 I totally agree with you. What I don't want to see is the sort of like, and what I do see all the time is the tune in and drop out, right? Is that like Timothy O'Leary? I can't remember my drug, this 1960s drug culture lore well enough. But like, you know, in terms of like the kids out at the climate protests, it's sort of like, yeah, okay, we get to quit school for a day. Awesome.

Starting point is 01:59:01 And we don't make up for it. studying more on Saturday so that we can become whatever it might be. Like one of these careers for climate, maybe you become a biotechnologist and you're able to genetically engineer a crop that's heat tolerant or saline tolerant or instance, right? I mean, you can do everything. Maybe you become an artist or musician and you raise people's spirits in a difficult time. But don't tune in drop out. Try. And like, let's organize our society. I mean, like in response to the Cold War and the space race, you know, there was a massive effort in the States to have rocketry clubs and a big investment in education because we didn't want to fall behind on the missile gap. I mean, the motivations

Starting point is 01:59:36 might have been terrible. But like when you face a crisis, empower your youth, right? Invest in them. Provide them with it with a compelling narratives because I'm just worried that with, you know, some of the reactions people might have to your message, they get depressed. They get deactivated. They, they, they get disempowered. And so I think that's like that that challenge of how to communicate realistically as you see it, a bit of a, well, frankly, pretty pessimistic future, how to couple that with like humanity's been through brutal dark times like fuck we've been through the holocaust we've been through world war two like the last 40 years have been pretty amazing some of us have been through the holocaust um but i but i get your point uh i totally agree with you

Starting point is 02:00:18 um a few follow on comments and and clarifications i'm not so much predicting the future as i'm laying out the different scenarios that I see and neither one is good. Business as usual headed to a mortar economy fueled by new productivity increases continue to widen the size of the straw that draws down our finite natural capital and the ecosystem sink capacity of the earth will eventually itself lead to a simplification. Or if that doesn't manifest, we have the musical chair situation of our financial claims not being supported by the underlying resource access. So it's more of painting the scenarios. But I will say if the result of this podcast is generally tune in and check out, I will have failed.

Starting point is 02:01:14 No, and I'm certainly not suggesting that. But that is a common reaction. It's not in my control. It's in control of the viewer's response. And I guess I have a response. as do you as a hosting of public conversations to steer towards the empowering of people, but I'm just a guy. You're just a guy. We're just trying to unpack with the nuance, complexity and context of very, very complicated, emergent, evolving situation. And it's,

Starting point is 02:01:52 it's not easy. So I really recognize the potential for getting mental stress from hearing these topics. And so far, I still fall on the decision that that is much better than the alternative, which is some sort of toxic positivity. Oh, no, no, no, that's dumerous stuff. ignore that. We've always solved problems before and we will again. In order to solve our problems, we have to understand the system that we're a part of, which is your work and mine. Well, and Nate, that's exactly where this question of like having diverse viewpoints is so important. One person

Starting point is 02:02:35 can't take on the burden of like, hey, my message is a bit worrisome. I'm going to make a few people anxious. And you know, your one voice in a wilderness of different voices and your voice is, you know, it's been very influential and powerful for me and I think many others that follow the podcast. But you don't need to take on all that responsibility. There's a number of other voices. And like, thank God, there is a diversity opinion. Like the super abundance people drive me totally crazy. This is, an example of, you know, sometimes when well articulated, I'm like, well, it's interesting. That makes me think about it a bit differently. But I mean, just to kind of summarize the thesis, it's like, listen, you know, Julian Simons was right. Paul Erlich was wrong. They bet on a bunch of

Starting point is 02:03:14 commodities. They got cheaper, not more expensive, despite resource quality going down. It's all about human ingenuity. The more humans, the better. as long as there's a free market and kind of liberal democracy or whatever, right? And humans are the master resource. And it's like, it's interesting and it does point to the importance of technology. But like as I've come to see it, you know, there are three sort of fundamental variables to how long we can ride this, you know, this roller coaster we've been on. And there's kind of materials and we know that we access the best first. Or grades are declining, you know, we're in a bit of trouble there in terms of materials.

Starting point is 02:03:47 We're papering over that with, you know, still very abundant. and relatively cheap energy and technological innovation. So the supermenous people are right. Like the technology, the human ingenuity part is really, really important. They're delusional because they're ignoring those other two factors. They're saying they can just be papered over.

Starting point is 02:04:04 But like I and the ecosystem thing, which is a big part that's missing. Yes. Yes. I tend to like Nate, like I'm definitely in camp human. I'm definitely like on the human aside. Like if I'm in the zoo with Harambe and the kit falls into the enclosure,

Starting point is 02:04:18 I'm sorry. I'm going to shoot the gorilla. right and part of that comes out of being a father like again i'm just anticipating your questions what's most important to you i guess like my son right my fiance is right right up there too i don't know if she's listening um mom etc but like we are social creatures in the social web um i think there's a temptation amongst um you know people that probably don't like being called malthusians um of ah man we're a virus there's too many of us and of course that is always sort of begins at the end of your moral community, of your social network, of your family, friends,

Starting point is 02:04:51 you know, when you get to sort of being able to dehumanize people because you just don't have any social relations with them. But that's a really, for me, this is like the most difficult thing to disentangle because, yes, I love the natural world, right? And we need to also just for the benefit of humanity, maintain biodiversity and pollinators and insect populations and stuff like that. But I'm not sure what I'm willing to sacrifice in order to do that. And I don't pretend to have an answer. But I think, again, it's, it's part of me is like, Why should I'm confused? I haven't reached a conclusion.

Starting point is 02:05:19 Why should I be talking about this? But like, this is the discourse that we need. And we need those delusional superabundance people. We need people that are saying, hey, there's firm limits. You know, we need people who say, yeah, but we've overcome them before. Many people will say, yeah, but that that ends somewhere. And maybe that ends because of material constraints or energy constraints, right? Because technology ain't going to keep soaring if we don't have these other two.

Starting point is 02:05:38 And I'm leaving with the middle finger here. But you get what I'm saying. I'm going to take your previous answer on removing Twitter. as your magic wand answer, which leads me to the, I'm such a Twitter addict. The final question. If you were to come back to this show, and I expect you, you will, what is one topic that maybe we touched on or didn't even cover today that you would be interested in taking a deep dive

Starting point is 02:06:07 on that you think is relevant to human and planetary futures? You know, again, like I'm someone who's not siloed. I don't have, like medicine might be kind of an area where I've got a bit of deep depth and, you know, of knowledge because of all the years put into studying it. Like, I find it incredible sometimes. My influence, specifically kind of politically, like we've had really enormous success. And in terms of the long shot campaigns we've run in Canada to save a nuclear plant called Pickering, for instance.

Starting point is 02:06:38 And I'm like, you know, why are people listening to me? I'm a doctor, hobbyist, podcaster. and it's because I'm able, I think, to kind of weave compelling narratives and tap into a incredible network of experts while not being an expert myself. So sometimes I'm a little insecure. If I'm coming on your podcast,

Starting point is 02:06:54 if we're going to deep dive something, I got to confess to you. I'm not an expert on really any one thing. It's more sort of pulling together the information that I have into narratives. I do think this question of trying to, like for you and for your project, you know, there's a lot of time spent

Starting point is 02:07:10 in, well, you know, imagining a future of what a great, simplification looks like. I think that needs more voices. Again, I haven't listened to every episode, right? But I think the people that you generally have on to kind of imagine that with, you know, if I'm frank in terms of my judgmental opinions, which are under-researched, I'll be fair, but tend to be folks from the kind of progressive environmental left, you know, permaculture sort of crew. And I would like to see and maybe could contribute as someone offering a bit of a different perspective that doesn't, you know, it's not that I don't appreciate those voices. And I think

Starting point is 02:07:41 it's important that there's people that study some of those concepts. But anyway, so I don't if that answers to your question, but I don't know that I'd be able to come on and talk, you know, deep dive a topic. But like everything we've touched on today has been, you know, interesting and we've scratched the surface. So there's more depth. Okay. So we'll have to think of a title for this episode. Oh man. But the title for the episode that you come back will be something like a non-progressive lefty permaculture view of the great simplification. Yeah, I don't, I'm not in the permaculture. camp um unfortunately so you can't you see a disgusted party you can't you can't okay the disgusted party dude this has been great i really appreciate your authenticity and the fact that you're not siloed

Starting point is 02:08:24 and the fact that you're non-political and the fact that you deeply care about all these things do you have any closing words uh for the viewers and listeners uh no i mean need i i i again your work sent me on a bit of a roller coaster of my own in terms of you know i was like should i keep calling my podcast decouple is decoupling even possible. You know, for brand recognition, I've definitely kept the name. But yeah, I've really enjoyed, and I'm not just trying to fluff your ego here. I've really enjoyed your contributions to this question of the human predicament. It's shaped me quite deeply.

Starting point is 02:09:00 So I don't know, I just, I want to express some gratitude. I would love it if people from, you know, in terms of some shameless self-promotion, I'd love it if people who were interested in this conversation wanted to jump over. and check out the decouple podcast. Actually, the very first episode, the audio is not the best, but it really sort of, it's a time capsule. It kind of elucidates my thinking from 2020, this idea of decoupling, which I think has holes in it now. But yeah, I mean, let's just keep learning together. Let's be tolerant.

Starting point is 02:09:29 Let's really pursue free speech as a core, core value. And let's, you know, fuddle through this and make the best of it that we can. Thank you, Dr. Kiefer, to be continued, my friend. Absolutely. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases.

Starting point is 02:09:58 This show is hosted by Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and curated by Leslie Batlutz and Lizzie Siriani. Thank you.

The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Chris Keefer: "Empowering the Future: from Nuclear to Podcasting"

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.