← The Peter McCormack Show
The Peter McCormack Show
#156 - Tim Gregory - Becoming a Type 1 Civilisation: From Nuclear Power to Harnessing the Sun
02:02:36
Loading summary
Transcript575 lines
- [00:00]
A
Is this vision physically possible or are we just being completely stupid?
- [00:06]
B
I don't think it's possible we could reach net zero by just dismantling all of our energy infrastructure and going back to what it was like in Neolithic times. The amount of battery power that we have in the UK at the moment on the grid scale would last us just over an hour.
- [00:19]
A
So, hold on, is biomass a scam?
- [00:22]
B
Yes, it is, yeah. The single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the UK is Drax Power Station, and that burns wood. You cannot have net zero without nuclear power. Nearly 7 million people a year die from air pollution. That's about the same number of people that die every half an hour as died in Chernobyl in its entirety.
- [00:42]
A
Hold on. So every half an hour we're killing as many people that died at Chernobyl from the fossil fuels we use?
- [00:50]
B
Correct.
- [00:53]
A
This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Iron the AI Cloud for the Next Big Thing. IRON builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out ayron.com to learn more, which is iren.com. tim, how you doing?
- [01:19]
B
Good, thanks for having me.
- [01:21]
A
No, no problem at all. I'm very interested in this subject. So, for the last 20 years, we have been told a version of the future of humanity which is based on renewable energy, wind, solar and using batteries. You're a nuclear chemist, you work with physics all day long. Is this vision physically possible or are we just being completely stupid?
- [01:48]
B
I don't think it's possible. I think, you know, we haven't really been thinking about how we get rid of fossil fuels for that long. On the grand scheme of things, fossil fuels really became a thing in a big way in the mid-1700s. And really, I mean, it's 80% of world energy. We're talking about getting rid of that and replacing it with something that doesn't emit carbon dioxide is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. I think there was this kind of naive view that it was just a case of building wind turbines and solar panels. And if we kind of want it enough and we do it in good faith and with good intentions, it would be enough. But the penny is starting to drop now. You know, it was 2019 that the UK put net zero into law. The penny is starting to drop now amongst politicians, energy leaders and I think the public as well. That it's going to take more than building wind turbines and solar panels to replace humanity's biggest source of energy and fundamentally the fuels on which the modern world is based. So, no, I don't think it's possible,
- [02:44]
A
impossible or very hard.
- [02:46]
B
I mean, we could reach Net zero by just dismantling all of our energy infrastructure and going back to what it was like in Neolithic times. That's one way of reaching Net zero. I don't think many people are seriously arguing that. Maybe some people are, but no one's seriously arguing that in good faith. And so, yeah, I think it is impossible because not only do we need massive amounts of energy to keep society running, but we also need that energy to be reliable. I mean, the lights in this room are working now. The lights in my house always work to the point where when they don't, it's kind of a big deal. You know, you're going around to the neighbors saying, like, your lights working, what's going on? And there's texts coming through from the energy providers saying, oh, we've got a power cut. Like our energy infrastructure is so reliable that it's a big deal when it doesn't work. We've grown so used to having energy on demand like that. I don't think we've kind of. We haven't fully internalized what a future would look like if we sacrificed that, for example, for Internet and renewables.
- [03:41]
A
So we. Well, we had Catherine Porter in here a couple of weeks ago and she predicts that we will. There's a high chance we'll have rolling blackouts by 2030.
- [03:51]
B
I think she's probably right, but I hope that she's wrong. I've followed her work for quite a while now, and it kind of seems inevitable as you erode that baseload, that reliable power that we've got. I mean, we phased out coal now in the uk. We phased it out two years ago. Our nuclear capacity is decreasing over time because we're not replacing the nuclear power stations that are retiring from old age. And we're going to be retiring part of our gas fleet as well. The question is, where does that reliable power come from? Wind turbines and solar panels cannot do that. And people talk about grid scale, storage and batteries. The amount of battery power that we have in the UK at the moment on the grid scale would last us just over an hour. Okay. That's nowhere near enough to get us through these periods of low wind like the one that we're in today, for example. Wind is just, is at 3 gigawatts at the moment. And just for context for listeners, we have 30 gigawatts of capacity of wind at the moment in the UK and it's running at 3 at the moment. There's 90% of our wind capacity is not running today because the wind isn't blowing very strongly. How are we going to make up that shortfall when we phase out gas, which is where the UK gets most of its reliable on demand power from? That's kind of the, that's the big question. And so, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if there are blackouts in the next five to 10 years. But I seriously hope that I'm wrong. We haven't experienced blackouts on a massive scale frequently for many, many decades in this country. It would be rather the rude awakening call to people if that does happen. And the sad thing is it was completely avoidable as well because we could have just built nuclear power stations to phase out that, that, that kind of fossil fuel base load.
- [05:29]
A
Well, I've been out to both Venezuela and Lebanon, countries which do experience significant periods of blackouts. I mean in Lebanon, sometimes they only have power for a couple of hours a day for a variety of different reasons. But if you do not care for a, your energy infrastructure and if you do not plan strategically for the long term, these are the risks you face. Right?
- [05:52]
B
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely. And like I said, this idea of Net Zero is still kind of new. I know that it seems like it's kind of all the rage, although the consensus as far as it ever did exist is crumbling. But it's kind of like this thing that everyone talks about all the time and especially for the last few years. But Net Zero is actually really, really, really new. And I really mean it when I say it's one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is how do we get rid of fossil fuels without eroding the economic growth on which we need energy abundance for that and our living standards that are fundamentally predicated on having massive amounts of power exactly when we need it. It's an absolutely enormous challenge and I think our politicians and energy leaders have kind of underestimated it. It's often touted as this really nice wholesome thing like, oh, it's great, we're on our Net Zero journey. We're phasing out these polluting, climate changing fossil fuels, wind turbines and solar panels. Actually, the reality is kind of, once you get to the nuts and bolts of it, energy is one of our most important pieces of infrastructure. I would argue it's maybe the most important piece of infrastructure in the country because it's what economic growth relies on. And our everyday lives, public services, business, everything relies on energy. And so it's far from wholesome. It's the biggest challenge of the 21st century.
- [07:12]
A
And so you, as somebody who understands this deeply, when you watch I won't name names in a band, but when you watch certain politicians talking about Net zero and you look at what's happening with our grid and our infrastructure, are you pulling your hair out?
- [07:29]
B
Yeah, I am. I'm conflicted. I'm pulling my hair out some days, but other days I kind of think like, oh, we've got this, we're so close. So I pull my hair out. Because nuclear power, right, it's been on the down turn since about the, the 90s. It's been decreasing as a share of our total electricity since then because our electricity demand has been increasing and we've been retiring old power stations as they've gone online. Thankfully, in the uk, nuclear power isn't a partisan issue like it is in other parts of the world. Best examples perhaps are Germany and Australia, where it's like a real hot topic. It's like talking about immigration in the uk. It's really polarizing. People get really passionate about it. That's not the case in the uk. Labour support nuclear power. So did. And do the Conservatives and so do reform uk. And between them, I mean, they've got like two thirds of the projected votes at the next general election. And so there is a political consensus there, kind of.
- [08:28]
A
What about the Green Party, though? Because they are growing, their support is growing quick. They've just won the seat up in Denton and Gorton, or Gorton and Denton. Hannah Spencer, I believe. And what I've noticed is there's a big shift in young people who are moving towards supporting the Green Party. What have they said regarding nuclear?
- [08:49]
B
So I actually got in touch with the Green Party to ask what are Zach Polanski's views on nuclear power? And it was interesting because they actually emailed back and they had quite a good back and forth with them. And the way that the Green Party decided their policies is by membership vote. And so they kind of, I mean, it's a political party, so I shouldn't have been surprised. They gave a politician's answer and said, well, it doesn't matter what the leader think because it's the members that decide on the policies. And I thought, okay, fair enough. But it's very, very clear that the Green Party by and large is Anti nuclear. And that's true when you kind of take the political party out of it and look at the environmental movement in general. It's quite interesting that the polling and surveys show consistently that the more you care about the environment and climate change, the less likely you are to support nuclear power. Which is very odd given that, for example, it's Europe's biggest source of clean power and has been for decades. And my view, and lots of other people's view, and I think this is an increasing view, is that you cannot have net zero without nuclear power. So it seems very, very self defeating to me. I think it's largely ideological. And so the kind of arguments that I advance in favor of nuclear power, which I hope are kind of rational and kind of, you know, you can kind of follow the chain of reasoning and even if you don't agree with it, you can kind of see where I'm coming from. I think that there's a large section of the environmental movement who are ideologically opposed to nuclear power. And by definition you can't make, you can't argue with ideologies with what I like to think is a rational argument. And so, yeah, it's kind of peculiar.
- [10:19]
A
So what is the argument for nuclear power being fundamental to achieving net zero? Because we have people who are skeptical of net zero, we have people who are out and out against net zero and they say it's pointless. Us, I think our emissions are what, about half a percent of them?
- [10:38]
B
It's between half and 1%. I think it's 0.7% of global emissions.
- [10:41]
A
So we're not really that relevant unless everybody else is going to net zero. So what's the argument for making nuclear fundamental to our net zero strategy?
- [10:53]
B
So on net zero, doing a bad job of net zero, I think is worse than not doing net zero at all. Because you make the point that you just make. You say the UK emits 0.7% of the world's CO2, it's barely anything. But then people often come back and say, well, we're kind of an example to follow for the rest of the world. And okay, well it's debatable whether the Chinese government or the American government are looking at the UK's energy policy and taking inspiration from it. But where was that chain of thought going? Sorry, so we're 0.7%, 0.7%. And so by really like kind of botching net zero and doing a bad job of it, we're probably actually deterring the rest of the world from pursuing those sorts of Policies which ultimately will lead to higher emissions. So it's really, really not a good idea, taking net zero aside. Cause I know that there's a kind of, there's a. I don't think there ever was a consensus about net zero. It was just impolite saying it in kind of the mainstream media that you were against it. But that consensus is definitely broken now and it's become a bit of a political football taking net zero out of it. There are still reasons to go nuclear, one of which is energy independence. Okay, so we buy lots of our fossil fuels from abroad and like we're seeing at the moment with the conflict that's going on in the Middle east like we saw a couple of years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine, it sends the global hydrocarbon market crazy. And that has a massive knock on effect with us here at home with our energy prices. Nuclear insulates you from that because it's largely detached from those kind of fossil. Well, it is largely detached from those fossil fuel supply chains for the oil and the gas. There's also the air pollution argument as well. It astounds me that we don't talk more about air pollution because it's one of the, I think it's one of the biggest public health crises in the world at the moment. Nearly 7 million people a year die from air pollution. And almost all of that air pollution comes from energy sources. Burning wood, which people euphemistically called biomass to try and greenwash it, and burning fossil fuels. And to put that into perspective, that's about the same number of people that die every half an hour as died in Chernobyl in its entirety.
- [13:01]
A
Hold on. So every half an hour we're killing as many people that died at Chernobyl from the fossil fuels we use?
- [13:09]
B
Correct. And the wood as well.
- [13:11]
A
How many people in total have died across the various accidents relating to nuclear.
- [13:17]
B
It depends how you count them.
- [13:18]
A
So give the most, give it the most extreme version. Let's give them, let's like give them a chance.
- [13:24]
B
A couple of thousand.
- [13:25]
A
Couple of thousand.
- [13:25]
B
And most of those were from the evacuation from Fukushima, which largely were actually needless because the amount of radiation that the affected population would have been exposed to was, was kind of comparable. And in the noise of what you would expect for background radiation on the earth. However, nearly two and a half thousand people died from the evacuation from the stress, mostly old people from the trauma of having to leave their hospital wards, their care homes. Their homes, things like that. People died of the stress and only one person to date has died from the radiation from Fukushima. And so this knee jerk overreaction to Fukushima in 2011 killed thousands of times more people than the actual accident themselves. Right.
- [14:06]
A
How many died at CHERNOBYL?
- [14:08]
B
So about 30 people died in the immediate aftermath. There were a couple of people that died from the explosion on the night, and about 30ish people died afterwards from acute radiation poisoning. Famously, the firefighters that were first on scene. Yeah.
- [14:22]
A
Who were taking their tops off to keep cool. I don't know how accurate is that series, the five Parter, because it was excellently made.
- [14:29]
B
It was brilliant. I've seen it three times now. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. It was pretty good, actually. I mean, I'm a scientist, I always pick a few qualms with these things, but by and large, it was pretty good. It did a really good job at getting the mood at the time, the corruption right at the end of the Soviet Union, just before it dissolved a couple of years later. But the big question is how many people died from the latent effects of that radiation? Because, you know, like, if you were born after 1986, you have strontium 90 in your teeth from Chernobyl, strontium 90 being a radioactive isotope that you find inside nuclear reactors. So I was born in 1993, so I've actually got bits of Chernobyl inside my body. It touched the whole of the northern hemisphere. Okay. And it even set the alarms off where I work in Cumbria, in Sellafield, right. On the west coast of the uk. So it traveled everywhere. The question is, how many people did that kill? And as you can imagine, this has been studied forensically over the last couple of decades in a kind of morbid way. It's like a natural experiment, but not the kind of experiment that you would want to do intentionally. But nonetheless, it's a useful test case. And of all of the cancers for which there was an increase following Chernobyl, the only one that had a statistical excess was the thyroid cancers. Okay. Thyroid cancers are interesting. And they were caused specifically by a radioactive isotope that you find in nuclear fallout called iodine131. Now, in just the same way that your bones take in calcium and your hair takes in zinc, when you eat it in your food, the thyroid takes in iodine. Okay? It's very, very iodine rich part of your body. It's this kind of little organ just kind of there in your neck. And the radioactive iodine rained down over Ukraine, Belarus and parts of Russia. And because the Soviets tried to cover Chernobyl up The response was very slow, it was very delayed. And that first few days is really crucial because it's when the iodine is its most active, it actually decays away pretty quickly in just a matter of weeks or months. But those first few days, we would say it's bouncing in our lab because it's really kicking out a lot of radiation. And so this iodine, along with the rest of the fallout, fell on the pasture land. It was eaten by cows. Milk is very iodine rich. And so it sequestered into the milk and then the locals drank the milk, made its way into the thyroid and gave it a good blasting with radiation. And so that led to the excess in thyroid cancers. But it was only detectable in people who were children or adolescents at the time. There's no statistical excess amongst the adult population. And when you look at the number of thyroid cancers and combine that with the fatality rate of thyroid cancers, which thankfully, it's very curable, it's upwards of 95% of people survive thyroid cancer. It's something like a couple of hundred deaths, something 200 to 500 deaths somewhere in that ballpark. And so it's very, very difficult to say exactly how many people died from Chernobyl. It's impossible to say, actually. So you have to do these large scale kind of statistical studies looking at the excesses in cancer, but. But in all with the people who died immediately because of the accident and then the acute radiation syndrome in the weeks that followed, and then taking into account all of the thyroid deaths in the years and decades that followed, the best estimates for the death toll of Chernobyl is somewhere in the region of 200 to 500 people, which is a surprisingly small number considering the mythic reputation of the night in question and considering that it effectively ended nuclear power expansion in Europe.
- [17:52]
A
Yeah. Because I wonder if you'd ask somebody who doesn't know any of this information, just a random person on the street, how many people do you think died at Chernobyl or after Chernobyl?
- [18:01]
B
Yeah.
- [18:01]
A
I mean, without knowing, people may say thousands, tens of thousands.
- [18:05]
B
Well, you do see those estimates. You do, yeah. And so when I was researching going nuclear, there's a whole chapter on Chernobyl. And when I was researching going nuclear, I kept reading these, these completely conflicting accounts of how many people died. Some people estimate many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people dying of cancer. Those really large estimates are based on, and I'm going to get a little jargony here, it's based on the linear. No Threshold model, which is a model of radiation that says your risk of getting cancer is directly proportional to the amount of radiation that you receive. Okay? That's the linear part of the name. Linear no threshold. It's a straight line relationship. The no threshold means that there is no safe amount of radiation that you can get. Okay? So that straight line goes through the origin of the graph, okay? Linear no threshold. It's a junk hypothesis in my view. Okay? It's a very, very contentious part of the scientific literature. You would be surprised at how passionate fully grown men get at conferences and in the scientific literature about these kind of nitty gritty details. But the linear null threshold model is very, very contentious, and the data just do not support it at low doses. There does seem to be a linear relationship at high doses. Okay? So, for example, the victims of the Hiroshima bomb and the Nagasaki bomb, they were exposed to massive amounts of radiation, especially the people who were very close to the blast. Okay? So lots of them got cancer. Their risk of cancer was increased substantially. But down at the low doses, which is kind of what we're talking about when we think about Chernobyl and Fukushima and indeed the background radiation that we all spend all of our lives living in, all of the time, that statistical relationship is just not there. Okay? There's some evidence to suggest that it is. There's some evidence to suggest that actually a little bit of radiation is good for you. It actually decreases your chances of getting cancer. That's a hypothesis called radiation hormesis. But the truth is that when you look at the last 70 years or so over which these data have been collected, nobody knows. Okay? So even if there is a statistical relationship between low doses of radiation and increased risk of cancer, it's so small that we still haven't seen it after 70 or 80 years of this kind of study.
- [20:18]
A
So nuclear energy has a branding of reputation problem.
- [20:21]
B
It's terrible. Yeah, yeah. 100% that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's what I've been. Yeah, I've been saying it for the last year like it's a PR problem. Well, that's one of the problems on the public front. There's the whole building nuclear power station thing as well.
- [20:32]
A
We'll come back to that.
- [20:33]
B
Yeah, we'll come back to that. But, yeah, absolutely. The. The truth couldn't be further from reality. And so it frustrates me that the environmental movement who, you know, the intentions are good. Okay? I try and kind of be. I kind of try and be charitable. Right. Whether you're really preoccupied with Economic growth and an increasing GDP 100%, I agree with that. And whether you're really preoccupied with the environment and reducing our carbon footprint and air pollution and reducing the amount of land that we use for our power sources, I'm 100% in favor of that. And often these two things are kind of framed as if they're in conflict with each other. And I guess that they are to some extent because a lot of the kind of the people who are preoccupied with the economy and with increasing our GDP are often very anti net zero. And I understand why, because the way that we're doing it at the moment, it's terrible. Okay? It's just terrible. But then on the other hand, the people who are kind of really preoccupied with the environment and reducing our footprint on the natural world, they're very anti economic growth often. And so there's kind of this conflict between the two. Actually in my experience, especially over the last nine months, coming out and speaking to people like you and giving lectures up and down the country on this kind of thing, most people want them both, okay? There's a huge number of people in the middle who want the economy to grow, want living standards to increase for them and their kids, but also save the natural world. And that's where nuclear comes in. I mean, it's got the same CO2 footprint as wind. It uses the least amount of land of any power source. It uses the least amount of raw material per terawatt hour generated. It requires the least amount of mining, which has very obvious environmental benefits, but also human benefits as well because of the terrible conditions in which lots of these minerals are mined from which we make renewable power sources. It's just, it's kind of a no brainer. I can't believe that we're still having this conversation in 2026 when we've had nuclear power for 70 years now. The solution was there all along, but we just haven't quite implemented it with enough spirit and vigor. Although a few countries have. France did a pretty good job.
- [22:32]
A
Yeah, they had about 50 odd power stations, nuclear power.
- [22:35]
B
They built 56 nuclear reactors between 1973 and 1999. And funnily enough, they were motivated by the oil crisis in the early and mid-70s. They thought, to hell with this, we're kind of going to try and decouple ourselves from this volatility as much as possible. And the saying in France at the time, when in France we don't have oil, but we do have ideas. And their idea was to massively expand their nuclear power capacity. And they built 56 reactors in like 25 years. And at its apex, those reactors, they generated 80% of France's power. That was in the mid noughties. So like 2004-2006, it was 80% of their power. They almost reached net zero by accident, or at least net zero on their grid by accident, long before anyone really cared or was talking about climate change. And so there is precedent for this.
- [23:28]
A
This episode is brought to you by Ledger, the most trusted Bitcoin hardware wallet. Now, if you're serious about protecting your Bitcoin, Ledger has the solution you need. Their hardware wallet gives you complete control over your private keys, ensuring that your Bitcoin stays safe from hacks, phishing and malware. And I've been a customer of that since 2017. Love the product, use it for my Bitcoin. I use it with my Castle multisig for protecting the football club bitcoin too. Now, with Ledger's sleek, easy to use devices and the Ledger Live app, managing your Bitcoin has never been more secure or convenient. And whether you're a longtime holder or new to the world of bitcoin, Ledger makes it simple to keep your assets protected. So if you want to find out more, please do head over to Ledger.com and secure your Bitcoin today. That is Ledger.com, which is L E D G-E R.com, that is Ledger.com but we have heard about days in Europe where we've hit net zero from wind.
- [24:27]
B
It occasionally happens. Yeah, it occasionally happens. And this is what's really frustrating about the kind of like the people who are so evangelical about wind turbines. Okay. They love the wind turbines and I'm not completely anti wind turbine. Okay. I think that they've got their place. But to ignore the fact that wind does that, it just swings massively. No one has proposed or demonstrated a serious solution to that problem.
- [24:58]
A
We're just going to put batteries everywhere.
- [24:59]
B
Yeah. I mean, you just do the back of the envelope calculations and look at how much lithium you would need to build a fleet of batteries big enough just to back the British grid up for 24 hours. It's absolutely astronomical. Let alone the cost of it and the other environmental consequences. It's far better to build these, really. And even the big nuclear power stations. Right. So Hinkley Point C, for example, when it comes online, okay, it was supposed to be online last year, but it's probably not going to be until the early 30s. Now we can get onto that for the various reasons Hinkley Point C, when it's finished, will cover about a quarter of a square mile of land, which is not very much.
- [25:37]
A
Quarter of a square mile.
- [25:38]
B
A quarter of a square mile.
- [25:39]
A
It's smaller than some people's gardens.
- [25:40]
B
Yeah, it's tiny. I mean it's a bit bigger than my garden, but yeah, it's tiny. And that power station will supply about 8 or 9% of the country's electricity.
- [25:51]
A
So 10 of those and we're at net zero, right?
- [25:53]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. You do the back of the envelope calculation, you need about 14 because you have to account for a bit of downtime. So it's about 14 Hinkley Point Cs and we could completely decarbonise the grid. Now in reality you would need more because our electricity demand will rise, they say, as we start to electrify transport and heating and all these areas of society. But you know, we're talking about on the order of a dozen, two, maybe three dozen nuclear power stations to reach net zero. And France built 56 between the 70s and the 90s. So a couple of dozen power stations you would think would be achievable.
- [26:26]
A
Well, the French only tend to want work a limited amount of hours as well.
- [26:30]
B
Right, exactly. Think what we could do. Yeah.
- [26:34]
A
Where, where did this anti nuclear agenda come from? Because if you look at the kind of, if you look at the. How we've kind of built energy sources up through the history of humanity from burning wood to them burning coal to discovering oil to then discovering nuclear. Nuclear is like was the natural next step in human civilization. We found essentially magic.
- [26:58]
B
Yeah, magic rocks.
- [26:59]
A
Magic rocks, yeah. You know, we found a magical source of energy and hopefully we're going to get to that next stage where we will have fission or we're in fission now. Is it fusion? I always get the two mixes.
- [27:09]
B
We're in fission now.
- [27:10]
A
We work on fusion. But like we seem to have got to this magical point of. Yeah, a serious amount of energy with very little used fuel left afterwards. How have we destroyed this?
- [27:25]
B
Yeah, you're completely right. Like one of the ways to view human history is through energy consumption. Right. And a million years ago we only had these to do things and our legs, we're really good runners it turns out. But it's not how you can power a civilization. So we started setting things on fire. Okay. It's million year old technology, burning things, wood. We did that for a very, very long time. But it was really in the 1750s that we tapped fossil fuels. Very potent, very energy dense, you get about four times more energy from a kilogram of coal than you do from a kilogram of wood. You also get less carbon dioxide from coal than wood, interestingly. And that's even despite the fact that in the uk, biomass, which is just burning wood, is classed as a renewable energy source.
- [28:09]
A
So hold on, is biomass a scam?
- [28:11]
B
Yes, it is, yeah. The single biggest source of CO2 emissions in the UK is Drax Power Station, not far from where I grew up in Yorkshire. And that burns wood. And so we fell forests in North America, we chip them and we dry them, we ship those chips across the Atlantic on diesel powered boats and then train them to Drax and set fire to them and that's still classed as renewable in the uk. You tell. I mean, every time I see those, I spend a lot of time on the train and I see Drax trains all the time. It makes me so angry.
- [28:42]
A
We're so dumb.
- [28:42]
B
It makes me so angry. It's million year old technology, we should be past that now. Nonetheless, the coal, the oil and the gas, it's 80% of humanity's, of humanity's energy consumption. Right? They are what the modern world is built upon. We couldn't have all of this. We couldn't have had the massive amount of economic development and the flourishing living conditions that have come along with that over the last two centuries without fossil fuels. And we've progressed in this nice order in increasing energy density of our fuel. Okay. And so the next logical step is uranium. Okay. You get about a million times more energy from a kilogram of uranium than you do from fossil fuels. Okay. It's so incredibly energy dense, such that if you got all of your power over your entire lifetime from nuclear, which is a lot, Right? Because we live in the uk, we consume a lot. We consume a lot of energy in the uk, but if you got all of that power over your entire lifetime from nuclear, it would be about the size of a Coke can. It's not very much at all. Okay. And then onto nuclear fusion eventually. The joke is it's always 40 years away. Yes.
- [29:48]
A
It's the same with quantum computing.
- [29:51]
B
Yeah, yeah, all of that. I mean, yeah.
- [29:53]
A
But I am starting to see they've been running some tests. As my limited understanding, as far as I see it, it's about the goal is they can generate more electricity than energy than it costs to Ozeon.
- [30:07]
B
That's the dream.
- [30:08]
A
And they get in that stable plasma, you'll know more.
- [30:11]
B
Yeah, it's incredibly hot. It's like hundreds of millions of degrees and Just for context, the visible surface of the sun is about 6,000 degrees, okay? So we're talking thousands of times hotter than the surface of the sun. It's toasty. There isn't a material in the world that can withstand that. It just vaporizes, just destroys it. And so it's very, very difficult to contain that plasma once it's up at temperature. And we're actually nowhere near. So I see headlines as well, and I was very excited over the last few years before I kind of dug into this, that we reach break even occasionally with nuclear fusion. And the implication is, well, we get as much energy out as we put in. That's pretty good milestone, right? Because from then on, it's kind of where we're at. Net positive energy from fusion. We're only at energy break even if you ignore all of the energy that we use to charge up the lasers and all of the kit that ignites these fusion reactors. And when you put that into account, we actually, actually lose more than 99% of the energy.
- [31:07]
A
So we're way off.
- [31:08]
B
We're way off and achievable. I really, really hope so. You know, how long ago, now time flies. Twelve years ago, when I was having my interview for my PhD, the last question that they asked me in the interview was, if you could solve one scientific or engineering problem in the world, what would it be? And I said, nuclear fusion. And it would probably be the answer that I give today. It would be absolutely amazing because nuclear fission takes big atoms, namely uranium, and breaks them into smaller pieces to get the energy out that produces nuclear waste. Although maybe we can talk about that. Nuclear waste isn't that much of a problem. Used fuel, Used fuel, partially used fuel. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, takes small atoms, hydrogen, and sticks them together to make helium. And, you know, helium is so harmless that we use it to fill balloons at children's birthday parties. It's kind of the holy grail of physics, getting nuclear fusion working. And so I think it is probably possible, I would love to see a kind of Apollo scale effort, whether it's international or it's the Americans or whoever, to get nuclear fusion working. Because that really, really, really would be amazing. Right?
- [32:15]
A
Okay, well, we'll say with fission, so you say it's a Coke can for me, for my lifetime.
- [32:19]
B
Yeah, it's nothing.
- [32:21]
A
Eight billion people on the planet. How much uranium do we have?
- [32:24]
B
So it depends how you do it. So the way that we do nuclear power at the moment is called an open fuel cycle. Okay, so we dig the uranium out of the ground, we turn it into fuel, we put it in a reactor just once and then we get rid of it. Okay. There are technologies where you can circularize that fuel cycle so. Well, it's exactly the recycling philosophy. You remember the adverts that were on TV when we all used to watch tv and you put a can in the bin and then it could become an aeroplane or a truck or a train or something like that. It's exactly the same with nuclear fuel. We can recycle it, and when we do that, we increase its energetic value by more than a factor of 100.
- [33:02]
A
So why are they not recycling at the moment?
- [33:05]
B
So this, this was looking like the future back in the 1950s and the 1960s when all this was revving up. This technology has been demonstrated, by the way, lots. So it's not like nuclear fusion, which, which hasn't really been demonstrated in a meaningful way. Sense of the word for it, for energy consumption. These types of reactors that recycle nuclear fuel have. Is actually pretty easy. And it's really interesting going back and reading accounts of the physicists and the engineers who were building these reactors back in the 50s and 60s. They were, they were writing, they were writing newspaper columns and giving interviews, saying, like, this is, this is the future. Like, we can, we can circularise the fuel cycle and we've, we've essentially got an infinite amount of power to grow the world and elevate everybody's living standards. Two things happened. We discovered lots of uranium in the ground, and so the supply of uranium increased massively. And this was just about the time that the kind of. The global expansion of nuclear power faltered and kind of petered out. And so just as the supply of uranium went up massively, our demand for it leveled out and it's kind of dropped off since. And so the, the motivation to circularise the fuel cycle evaporated. And so we haven't done it. We still waste most of the energy from the uranium that we dig from the ground. But if we did employ that technology, using all of the nuclear waste that we currently have in the world at the moment, which we could put back in reactors and burn and use to generate more electricity and all of the uranium and thorium that we know about in the world, we'd have enough for about 1,000 years. Okay, it's something like that.
- [34:40]
A
So we've got enough time to solve fusion?
- [34:43]
B
I would like to think so, yeah.
- [34:44]
A
And. And, well, the aliens might kill us before maybe. Yeah, but we've got a thousand years.
- [34:50]
B
Yeah. A thousand years, which at that point is essentially renewable. And it's very interesting. There was a report from the, from the 80s, from the UN and it defined sustainability kind of in the way that we all think about it today. Okay, so this. This kind of getting your maximum bang for your buck and using our resources in a way that we can hand not a ruined planet down to the next generation. And it actually listed this technology as part of its renewable energy sources. And so people have been thinking about this for a really, really long time. We just never quite pursued it.
- [35:19]
A
So this is perfect for the environmentalists. It's unlimited green energy, which can be recycled.
- [35:26]
B
And there are some environmentalists that are very pro nuclear. And I do think that the tide is starting to turn slightly. So you've got a lot of. Maybe not a lot, but there are a couple of vocal young Green Party supporters who are pro nuclear. The tide is slightly turning, but I mean, it's a hell of an object to move and give momentum. And I think one of the kind of mindsets that a lot of people have who are into environmentalism and the environmental movement is this appeal to nature fallacy, where it's this idea that when things are natural, they're good and when things are unnatural, they're bad. It's kind of this. I don't want to parody it too much because I love being out in nature. I live up in the Lake District in the northwest of England. I'm always out. I'm always out in the fells, in the lakes. I absolutely love it. And so I do get it. But there's this. It risks becoming a bit, you know, you know, a bit kumbaya and a bit like, a bit like huggy, huggy, like, isn't this nice nature a bit hippie, dippy kind of thing? And, and. And I think because wind and solar seem more natural than splitting atoms of uranium apart in a nuclear reactor, that kind of puts a lot of, kind of environmentally people off nuclear power because somehow it just seems like the most unnatural thing in the world to mess with the fundamental building blocks of matter.
- [36:43]
A
Well, how many birds die flying into nuclear power plants?
- [36:46]
B
Not many. Not many.
- [36:47]
A
How many die flying into wind turbines?
- [36:49]
B
A lot. A lot. And especially the big ones as well, the big migratory birds. They don't lay many eggs every year, so their populations take quite a while to decline. Everyone scapegoats cats for killing birds, actually, which I actually take a little bit personal offense because I have two cats.
- [37:03]
A
Yeah, but like, that's. Cats are mini tigers. They Got to eat.
- [37:06]
B
Yeah, they're pretty good.
- [37:07]
A
They've got to eat. But a turbine is just a big lump of Chinese imported technology, right? Yes, it's green.
- [37:16]
B
Exactly. And this kind of idea that wind and solar is somehow more natural than uranium is completely wrong because there's nothing natural about a wind turbine and there's certainly nothing natural about solar panels. They're like something from Blade Drummer, but
- [37:30]
A
they're not thinking of the turbine, they're thinking of the wind.
- [37:32]
B
Exactly. Yeah. And everyone loves the wind and everyone loves the sunshine and we all love the air. And I would love to live in a world where we could do that. I would love to live in a world where we just didn't have to set things on fire. And even if it was just so easy as building wind turbines and solar panels and we don't need that many and they're kind of reliable enough, it would be great, but we just don't live. We just don't live in that world. And so it's a massive missed opportunity for the environmental movement to gain some credibility.
- [37:58]
A
Has the Simpsons been massively damaging nuclear movement?
- [38:02]
B
So many people ask me about that. Yeah, probably, yeah. Yeah, probably, yeah. A lot of people. A lot. A lot of people think of Homer when they think about what I do
- [38:09]
A
for a job and you see green, like slime oozing out.
- [38:13]
B
Yeah. I can assure you it's not green.
- [38:15]
A
And Mr. Burns is like, yeah, it's
- [38:17]
B
all a bit weird, isn't it? Yeah. The truth is far less glamorous.
- [38:21]
A
So I think there's like a multilevel educational job that needs to be done here for certainly young green voters. I've come across a few. They also tend to be kind of socialist. And so I think we have a
- [38:35]
B
job done all young people.
- [38:37]
A
Some not my kids.
- [38:38]
B
No, no. That's some surprising.
- [38:40]
A
They've been bullied into being rampant free market capitalists.
- [38:43]
B
Good job to hate the government.
- [38:45]
A
But I think there's a job to explain why socialism destroys capital and it destroys the economy and makes everyone miserable, sad and depressed. I think that's a really important job, is to educate them on the economics, explain to them that growth is a good thing, it drives prosperity, it drives living standards. And then I think if you have people understand that, they could then understand nuclear. But whilst they're young and they believe that capitalism is evil and that growth is evil, they're going to believe that nuclear energy is evil.
- [39:19]
B
I really hope not. So, as we were saying earlier in Westminster, amongst the kind of politicians, this isn't so much of a divisive issue. I'm not sure what the Lib Dems think of it, actually. I've read their manifesto and I don't even think that they mention nuclear power.
- [39:33]
A
Whatever's on the fence.
- [39:34]
B
Right, okay, yeah. Ok, so they're not sure. The Green Party are definitely against it and so are the snp, but the main three laboratory and reform, they're all in favour of nuclear power amongst the public as well. More than 50% of people in the UK either somewhat support or strongly support nuclear power. Strong opposition is quite a minority view in the uk. And so in a way, it kind of feels like the job that I'm trying to do, which is kind of, you know, make an argument for nuclear power and kind of promote this technology for the betterment of all of us in society. It does kind of feel a little bit like we've got the wind on our backs. We're not where we are in Germany. I mean, how you would turn that around, I don't know. They're probably 30 years behind the point where we are in the UK when it comes to consensus around nuclear. And I've spent a lot of time giving public lectures over the last nine months since my book came out. And I've met a lot of young people and you know what, they seem pretty pro nuclear to me. And a lot of the events I've been to, they haven't been like nuclear industry propaganda or anything like that. A lot of them have been literary festivals, science festivals, that kind of thing. And so many of them are kind of interested in it. And I think a reason for that is that they've looked at the way that we're currently doing net zero and what we're doing to the environment. If they thought, you know what? I think it's time to give something else a go. How about nuclear power? They don't have that kind of trauma left over from the memory of Chernobyl and the Cold War. And so it kind of feels like now there's this new generation arising and kind of like kind of taking a bit of ownership over the issues that we face and thinking like, let's kind of give this a go. And so it's actually been overwhelmingly positive. And I feel more optimistic now about nuclear power in the UK than I did 12 months ago before I kind of had all of those experiences, which admittedly are anecdotal.
- [41:17]
A
Do you have a TikTok account?
- [41:18]
B
No, I don't.
- [41:19]
A
I think you have to have a TikTok account. You've got the perfect personality. You can. You can make it fun and entertaining. You can deal with all the arguments like an old boring person like me could do it.
- [41:32]
B
But you could.
- [41:32]
A
I think you could entertain it.
- [41:33]
B
Lots of people have said that.
- [41:34]
A
I really think you could.
- [41:35]
B
Have you read the Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haiss?
- [41:37]
A
Do you know what, it's funny you should say that because I wonder if it's exactly where I am. I tend to read about five books at the same time. Yeah, look, the book. I do audiobooks.
- [41:48]
B
Oh, yeah, can confirm.
- [41:49]
A
Yeah, I'm on chapter six. What do you think as a parent? It's terrifying and it's. We've already made. So we had little changes in our family in that when we go out for dinner, everyone has to put their phone on the table in the middle. That's it.
- [42:05]
B
That's.
- [42:05]
A
That's the rule.
- [42:05]
B
That's a good idea.
- [42:06]
A
And I was chatting to my son last night. I was showing him a Prodigy concert from like 2009 and they were playing Smack My Bitch up and I said, look at the crowd. What do you notice? He said, no phones. And me and my. Me and my son and my daughter, we go to concerts together. Yeah, my daughter's a. Yeah, she always on her phone. And I said, you know what we should do? Next concert we go to. We went to see Ray the other week. She was fantastic. We wanted our phones and we did take photos. I said, let's all leave our phones in the car next time. And it's made. I've made some changes at home specifically for my daughter as well. But essentially what we've done is we've raised kids with the new crack Cocaine.
- [42:41]
B
Yeah. 100. 100% agree.
- [42:43]
A
Have you ever watched Alien?
- [42:44]
B
Yes.
- [42:44]
A
Okay. You know the parasite that grabs the face? Yeah, yeah, that was explained to me. That's. That's what we've done. And look, it's very difficult to get a 16 year old off their phone now, but if I was to go again, I would do everything I could to keep them away from them because I think. I think it's pretty evil.
- [43:01]
B
It's terrible. I've noticed the music thing as well. 100%. I went to see Arctic Monkeys, I think it was 2024, with my wife. Where? Hillsborough. Yeah. Homecoming gig. It was. It was awesome. Amazing. They were so good. But all the youngins in the crowd, they were so self conscious and like really like kind of like, like, I don't know, like just like really uptight. And a lot of them were like taking pictures and filming and not really, like dancing. And I mean, we were like, we were 30 at the time. We were just going absolutely mental. And then you go to a. So we love Stone Roses as well. And so we went to a Stone Roses.
- [43:34]
A
Could have guessed from your haircut.
- [43:35]
B
Not Stone Roses, a Clone Roses gig. Sorry, not the real thing. They were pretty good, though. And that was a much older crowd and they were going mental as well. It was so good. And it's kind of what I imagine gigs used to be like before. Well, I can remember what it was like before phones, and no one had a phone. And, you know, I was on a night out last year with my sister and her chapter and we were in a bar, good music coming on and we were kind of all like, we'd had a couple by that point. We were starting to loosen up a bit and start dancing. And she got a phone out to film. And I immediately felt myself, like, kind of tense up and completely like, flicked a switch in my head of like, oh, God. Like someone could see this. Like, someone's gonna show me this tomorrow morning. I'm gonna be like, really embarrassed. And what that does to an entire generation that's being raised in that environment, well, we're just starting to see the consequences of that now. And it's not good.
- [44:18]
A
It's not good at all.
- [44:19]
B
No, no, it's absolutely terrible. I think that we'll look back on social media for kids. Like we. I'm like, cigarettes for kids. Something like that. It's terrible.
- [44:27]
A
It's an experimental phase we've gone through with this generation and I think we. Well, we know all the stats. I mean, Jonathan Haidt talks about. I can't remember the year, but like 2012, there was a massive spike in self harming. And, you know, you related it back to social media, mobile phones. The whole thing honestly disgusts me. And I think. I think AI is going to compound this problem as well in terms of, like critical thinking and, you know, and developing their kind of brains. And I think it's terrible. But when you talk about the concerts I did, we went to Oasis at Wembley.
- [45:01]
B
Nice.
- [45:01]
A
And it was all people kind of my age going mental.
- [45:05]
B
Yeah.
- [45:05]
A
And it was entirely different because I took my daughter to the Arctic Monkeys at the Emirates Stadium.
- [45:09]
B
Oh, cool.
- [45:10]
A
And everyone's phones were up. Yeah, I mean, there were phones, obviously Oasis, but everyone was going mental and dancing and drinking and I just. It's one of those things. It's a bit like I used to. Have you ever been a Smoker?
- [45:20]
B
No, I haven't.
- [45:21]
A
I've been a smoker. I don't smoke now, but I do have, like, little tobacco pouches. But I don't smoke anymore. I haven't smoked for seven, eight years. But I remember when I smoked, and I hate the government, but I always thought if they came out, just banned smoking, made it illegal, got them rid of everywhere, you know, threat of death if you're caught with cigarettes. I kind of like it because I
- [45:40]
B
agree with the smoking ban.
- [45:43]
A
It conflicts with my libertarian kind of principles as like off government. But at the same time, you know, secondhand smoke kind of. Does that, does that break the non aggression principle? Look, it's just, there's no upside to cigarettes.
- [45:59]
B
They can look cool sometimes, not. Not all the time. I'm gonna get flame for saying that. But I do think they can look cool sometimes.
- [46:05]
A
Yeah. In an old film.
- [46:07]
B
Yeah.
- [46:07]
A
Like with a James Dean, like a rock star.
- [46:09]
B
Yeah.
- [46:09]
A
Like, like slash, like playing the guitar.
- [46:13]
B
Yeah.
- [46:14]
A
But really, even that's gone because I, I. You see someone a cigarette, now you think, what are you doing, you douche man?
- [46:19]
B
I actually find myself, so I'm not a smoker, but I find myself feeling nostalgic for the smell of cigarette smoke because of all the vapes that are everywhere.
- [46:28]
A
I mean, I just hate them. That the problem with cigarettes is never. I don't think anything in the world has generated so much money by delivering so little benefit to society.
- [46:39]
B
Maybe that's until social media came along. Maybe that competed to the top spot, which is why I don't have TikTok, actually. So I've thought so long, you have a duty. There's part of me that thinks like, yeah, you know, kids are on this platform anyway. You might as well put some educational stuff out there. But it would kind of feel like smuggling vitamin pills in with the crack cocaine.
- [46:58]
A
No, I think it's okay. But if, I mean, I get less and less on social media. I use Twitter like a crackhead. But Facebook I'm kind of done with. And I've got. But if I do sometimes think, if I could have somebody just get rid of my phone, would I be happier? Like, I'm reading that. I'm reading books.
- [47:14]
B
Yeah.
- [47:15]
A
And the reason I'm read, like, I left it here because I thought we might talk about stuff like this is that I'm an audiobook guy. But I'm like, no, I need to read. I need to read the words on a page and, like, consume it and think. Because the thing is, the difference between audiobook and reading, which I realize it's like you passively consume an audiobook. You're driving along, we don't stop. But sometimes, like, I read a paragraph and I'm like, okay, what did Bastiat really mean by that? And then I'll go and research it, and then I keep some notes. And that version of learning I've gone back to because I was actually buying books. I was going on ChatGPT and saying, Explain this book to me. And I was debating the arguments. But I've read that report that came out that said basically we're getting dumber because of AI. So I've gone back to books.
- [47:56]
B
Cool.
- [47:57]
A
And I think we need this whole return.
- [47:59]
B
I endorse that. It's kind of going analog.
- [48:01]
A
Right.
- [48:01]
B
I think that's gonna be the next big thing. So I don't know.
- [48:04]
A
Cause the next big thing?
- [48:05]
B
Yeah. Like, we're always going out walking up in the Fells in the layer district, and we. We. So I was out just at the weekend and I left my phone in the glove compartment in the. In the car. Cause I thought, just don't need that. It's so nice. Like just five hours, my wife and I just out in the Fells. Like, proper old school. It's kind of like what I would imagine it would have been like 15 years ago. Going out for a walk. You're not kind of glued to that. And we started using paper maps as well instead of the Ordnance Survey app on the phone.
- [48:28]
A
Amazing.
- [48:29]
B
The Ordnance Survey app is really good. And we do use it for planning, but we. We're kind of trying to rely not so much on that. And we take fewer photographs actually, as a consequence. Which kind of felt like a bit of a sacrifice at first. Cause I've always been into, like, photography and stuff. But you know what? Actually, like, having those organic memories kind of somehow feels a little.
- [48:46]
A
Kidding.
- [48:46]
B
A little like a little warmer. You're the Penguin. Yes, the Penguin. I learned about that from you. The Penguin. On this podcast. The Penguin. We were talking about the Penguin the whole episode. And I thought you were talking about Batman or something. Then you played it at the end, and I went on YouTube and found it. The Penguin.
- [49:00]
A
Have you watched the actual documentary? No, it's a Werner Herzog one, obviously his commentary.
- [49:03]
B
Do I need to watch it?
- [49:04]
A
Oh, you've got to watch it.
- [49:05]
B
All right. Okay.
- [49:06]
A
But you know what happens to the Penguin, right? Yeah, yeah. But, like, I get it.
- [49:10]
B
Yeah, yeah, I do as well. So I think we all need to be a little more Penguin. Not. Not entirely, but kind of a little more penguin and just like, leave or leave all that aside. So I used to have Twitter. I used to have Twitter. I had about 15,000 followers on Twitter, which is not. It's not a lot, but I just thought, I can't be arsed just commodifying my life to this extent. And I'd find myself doing things for enjoyment. Reading a book or out walking or just doing something with my mates. And there'd be this subroutine running in the back of my head all the time, thinking, like, would this make a good tweet? Is this funny enough to put on? Like, should I put this on? And it just. It kind of. If you think about the amount of life and soul that that robs from you.
- [49:49]
A
I've got rid of alerts, so my Twitter alerts are awesome.
- [49:52]
B
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [49:52]
A
Still got Twitter. I've got rid of my Twitter alerts. But we've been doing all these other fundamental changes at home. Like, I can't cook for shit. Okay. So once a week, I'll make a steak. Maybe twice a week or maybe once a week, my daughter and I'll make a pasta together. And then we maybe have a takeaway a couple of times. Or we'll go out for dinner. Yeah, stopped all that. We might have dinner once a week out, but I cook five or six times a week.
- [50:15]
B
Nice.
- [50:15]
A
And the family come round four, phone's away. We hang out, we spend time together, we eat at the dinner table. On the weekend, we get up, we have breakfast together.
- [50:24]
B
Yeah.
- [50:25]
A
And all those moments suddenly real. Like there's been a chain reaction for that. So now when I drop my daughter off at school and I go straight back home, I don't work in the morning anymore. I've stopped work before the school run, I used to get up at 6 and work. I don't do that anymore.
- [50:38]
B
Right.
- [50:38]
A
School run to the gym, do an hour and a half in the gym. I start work at 10 now. Okay. And every now and again, I go and play tennis in the day with my son and I. It's almost like this cat counterculture, but digital counterculture.
- [50:52]
B
Yeah, totally.
- [50:52]
A
Back to real life.
- [50:53]
B
Yeah, I agree. Yeah. Yeah. It's so much better. It's so much better. So, like, having Twitter would have been useful for me in the last year promoting my book. Yeah, really would. But I'm not sure I would have even been able to write the book had I had Twitter. Because of what it does to your attention span. Certainly my attention span. I noticed like when I was like deep into Twitter and always on it and I was addicted to it, kind of chopping up your attention span and not being able to concentrate on something for more than a minute, a minute and a half, something like that. That's terrible.
- [51:25]
A
I was a shower thought this morning. I was thinking I had this thesis in my head I needed to research. That was what is it the algorithms tap into that draws us to negativity. We notice it with the podcasts.
- [51:39]
B
Yeah.
- [51:40]
A
We make shows about everything that's broken and doesn't work because everything is broken. Doesn't work. But it taps into something in our brain. Like when we release this show. If I title the show Nuclear is the Future or Nuclear is the Cleanest Energy, It's Going to bomb.
- [51:56]
B
Right.
- [51:57]
A
But if I have some title about the Energy Source that will Save Humanity or Net Zero is a Scam, it will really perform well.
- [52:06]
B
Interesting. Right?
- [52:07]
A
And so I thought about that. I thought about Twitter, I thought about TikTok. I thought about what is it about the algorithms that are tapping into us and algorithms, the ultimate downfall of humanity, probably.
- [52:18]
B
Well, it's interesting. You had the shower thorn and that's a very common thing for people to experience. You don't have your phone in the shower. You just stood there for like five or 10 minutes. So you have all these great ideas. Imagine what life would be like if more people did that. More often. Just in general. You don't have to wait for a shower to not have your phone.
- [52:34]
A
See, now I'm going to. Now I need to set up a little communist commune where we go and reject society, Become the thing I hate.
- [52:41]
B
You don't have to go that far.
- [52:43]
A
Okay, so back to this. Look, explain to me, Hinckley Point C, why is it going to be five years late?
- [52:48]
B
Right? There are lots of reasons. Hinkley Point C is complicated. It's one of the biggest nuclear. It's actually two nuclear reactors in one. Okay. And it's the first one that we've built here in the UK since 1995. I was 18 months old when the last nuclear reactor went live in the uk. That was Sizewell B. Okay, so Hinckley Point C is, is the first in a generation or two. It's been a really, really long time. And so as with all of these, it's essentially a one off project. I hope it's not a one off, but it's the first of a kind project because we haven't done it for so long, we have to like rev that supply chain back up and rev that skills base back up. So there's that. The second thing is everything is expensive in the UK at the moment. We just cannot seem to do big infrastructure or even small infrastructure like filling potholes like we used to do. And so whether we're talking about HS2, whether we're talking about the third Runway at Heathrow, whether we're talking about the road, tunnel down the road under the Thames, these things just become a complete farce. And nuclear kind of gets caught in that whirlpool. And so this is an infrastructure problem in general.
- [53:51]
A
Can't we just get the Koreans to build?
- [53:53]
B
Well, yeah, it's an interesting idea. I suspect that even if we copy and pasted the Korean reactors into the uk, we would still kind of put them through the meat grinder of our own weird and esoteric ways of doing things. And you would probably get another Hinkley point, See. And so when Going Nuclear came out nine months ago, I had it in my head that, like, the fundamental problem here in the UK is energy. Because I'm sure you made that graph of energy per head versus GDP per head. It's a straight line relationship. Okay, so it's okay. We need massive amounts of energy to at least keep the economy as big as it is now. Why don't we grow it? How nice would that be? So I went into this whole thing thinking like, the fundamental problem is energy, because so much sits on top of the energy problem. It's like economic growth, living standards, protecting the environment, protecting people's health. All of that comes from energy. I've changed my mind, actually, from talking to lots of interesting people and lots of people getting in touch with me and meeting interesting people. I think one beneath the energy problem is the infrastructure problem. We just cannot build things anymore in the uk is the regulatory environment. That's part of it, yeah. That's a big part of it, actually. So just before Christmas, there was a paper published called the Nuclear Regulatory Task Force Review. Yeah, it's a right mouthful and it sounds so dry, but you know what? For a government commissioned report from like an independent task force of experts, it's a riveting read. It's absolutely amazing and it's so brutal and it's written in such plain English, like even I can understand it because I'm not a politician, I'm not a lawyer. It's very, very accessible. And so this group of people led by John Finkelton, which is where the name for the report gets its name, the Fingleton Review is what a Lot of people call it. You should get him on. He's very, very, He's a real interesting guy. He, him, him and his colleagues went and basically tried to ask the question of what's wrong with the regulation in the UK for nuclear. Why is Hinkley Point C seven years delayed? Probably by the time it's built. By the way, it used to take us less than seven years to build a reactor. And this is seven years delayed on top of what we already did.
- [56:04]
A
How long does it take the South
- [56:05]
B
Koreans, their median build time, it's somewhere between seven and eight years, something like that.
- [56:11]
A
Who's the fastest in the world at doing this?
- [56:13]
B
China. At the moment their median build time is about six years, which is where Europe was in the 80s actually. So the median build time, and I say median because the mean is skewed by the one that took like 50 years to build. Okay. So median is the correct number to use.
- [56:27]
A
Are there people who make money off it taking a long time?
- [56:30]
B
I suppose the finances make money off it. A lot of the money. So most of the cost of nuclear power is in building the power station. Okay. And a lot of that cost is actually financing the damn thing. Because these things cost billions of pounds to make. Even when you do them well, Hinkley will probably cost more than 50 billion by the time it's finished, which will make it the most expensive nuclear reactor ever built. It shouldn't have cost that much money. A large part of the reason why is because of the regulatory framework. It's completely broken. And the Finkelton report outlines that really articulately and very generously as well and very honestly.
- [57:03]
A
What should it cost?
- [57:05]
B
So at the moment in. So for example, the uae, they just brought four of the Korean reactors online a couple of years ago. They went from no nuclear power in 2020 and now they get 25% of their power from nuclear. Which is just, it's just astonishing. Those reactors, they built them in parallel. So it took eight years to build, but they did them in parallel and they cost about $20 billion for all of them.
- [57:27]
A
They've built four. Yeah, in eight years. 20 billion, yes. And what does one of those comparatively produce compared to Hinckley?
- [57:36]
B
So it's about half of hinckley. So it's two Hinckley's worth. So 10 billion. 10 billion, yeah.
- [57:42]
A
We're fucking stupid in this country.
- [57:45]
B
It's very disheartening and I'm equally frustrated because a lot of the kind of anti nuclear people will point at Hinckley and say well, look at that. And I agree and I share those frustrations and perhaps not being as cynical as them. My argument for Hinckley is that that's not an anti nuclear argument, it's a pro building things argument. We need to iron out this crazy regulatory framework that we're in. We tie ourselves in knots. And one of the kind of the key take homes from the Fingleton review was that all of these kind of regulations, they kind of work at odds with each other and they're not kind of aligned with the public interest. These incentives are not aligned with the public interest. And so Hinckley, for example, has got the most elaborate fish protection measures of any nuclear power station.
- [58:32]
A
I've heard about this.
- [58:33]
B
You've heard of the fish disco, right? Okay, so does it work out like
- [58:37]
A
hundreds of thousands of pounds per fish?
- [58:38]
B
Depends how you do the maths. But it's £700 million in total for this fish deterrent system and the number of fish that it will save. So it was designed to save protected fish.
- [58:48]
A
Hold on, where are the fish at risk?
- [58:51]
B
So, so nuclear power stations need cooling.
- [58:53]
A
Yeah.
- [58:53]
B
Okay. And Hinkley Point C will get its cooling water from the River Severn because it's on the Severn estuary. So it'll suck in the water. It will, it will use it to cool the reactor and then put it back out into the estuary. The fish that get sucked into that won't make it okay. They'll get turned into like tuna, something like that. They won't make it out alive.
- [59:09]
A
We won't get the three eyed Simpsons.
- [59:11]
B
No, no, none of that. They're all up at Sellafield. And so, and so, so because of the nature and the wildlife regulations in the uk, Hinckley Point C had to put in this fish protection system. The fish disco is just one of them. Okay. There are, there are three separate parts of this infrastructure, but in all they cost £700 million.
- [59:30]
A
How does it protect the fish?
- [59:31]
B
To protect these fish? So the intake for the water is low velocity. So it just, it just doesn't quite suck as much of the fish that kind of get into the vicinity into the reactor. But the one that everyone kind of points to and laughs at and is kind of funny because it's ridiculous is the fish disco. And this is a series of underwater speakers that blast sound to scare the fish away from the intake pumps. And so all of that infrastructure together. £700 million and it will save about 125 fish a year. 125 fish. Although there will be people watching this kind of nitpicking at that and saying that the actual number of fish is much higher, which is true. But this system was put in place to protect a very small number of fish that are protected by law. And of the fish that are protected by law, it's 125. And so you can do the maths.
- [60:20]
A
Which fish do we protect?
- [60:21]
B
So, for example, sea trout and salmon.
- [60:24]
A
But we eat them.
- [60:25]
B
Yeah, we do. So we eat far more of them than will ever get sucked into Hinkley
- [60:30]
A
Point C. Could we just not breed more to cover it?
- [60:33]
B
This is kind of an example of what I mean when I say that it's not aligned with the public interest because on one hand we're completely tying ourselves in knots with the fish. And I'm only picking on this because it's such a great example. There are millions of other examples which.
- [60:46]
A
This is like the bat tunnel.
- [60:47]
B
Yeah, it's another bat tunnel situation. It's just, it's ridiculous. It's okay. We, we want to harm nature as little as possible. Everybody agrees on that. We don't want to do any more damage than we have to. Okay, but you've got to remember that Hinkley Point C is a 3.2 gigawatt nuclear power station. And just to put that in context, that all of the wind turbines in the UK I was just about to
- [61:09]
A
look up for birds.
- [61:10]
B
Right, Right. So all of those wind turbines in the UK right now are generating 3 gigawatts of power. Okay. And that's from one power station. And once it's built, it will last probably at least 60 years. But if it's anything like the fleet, the aging fleet in the United States, it will probably last about 80 years. And it's got the same carbon footprint as wind. It's an absolute no brainer. But we're completely tying ourselves in knots because of these excessive regulations.
- [61:35]
A
Well, I've just asked how many protected birds are killed by wind turbines in the UK. Total birds killed by wind turbines in the UK is why? 10,000 to 100,000 birds killed per year. The range is large because monitoring is inconsistent. 71 raptor deaths, bears of prey, 2008 ohmots, 814 kittiwakes. I've never even heard of these. 260 gannets, 154 razor bills, 65 puffin. That's more than 125 fish. But why doesn't it have the same regulations as nuclear?
- [62:09]
B
So it's funny, a couple of weeks ago I was driving to work and I was listening to Radio 4 for my sins. And there was this big wind farm that had just been approved offshore in Scotland on the east coast. And they had someone on. I'm pretty sure it was the rspb. I might be wrong, but it was someone from a wildlife charity coming on and making the exact point that you just made.
- [62:30]
A
It's bullshit.
- [62:30]
B
Yeah. And they're trying to stop the wind farm because of the effect it has on wildlife. And the problem is like, zooming out. We're in this mindset now and this has probably always been the case, but it feels like the rubber's meeting the road now. We're in this mindset where we want perfect solutions, we want all of the electricity that we need without any of the environmental cost and we want it to be reliable. There's no such thing as a power source that is perfectly environmentally friendly. There's no such thing as a power source that's perfectly safe. There's no such thing as a power source that's free. Everything has a cost. And so I think we need to kind of like accept that there's no such thing as a perfect solution and accept it. What is it? Is it Thomas Sowell quote that Constantine Kissens always loves? Yeah. Yeah. There are no solutions, only trade offs. It's so true. It's so true. And so to my mind, we should be basing our energy policy, in fact all of our policies, on getting the maximum amount of benefit for the things that we want to do as a society whilst minimizing the unavoidable and inevitable harms. And nuclear power fulfills that. That's why, I guess that's why I'm here today and why everyone's going nuclear.
- [63:42]
A
So birds versus a few fish.
- [63:44]
B
Yeah.
- [63:45]
A
And I kind of prefer birds to fish.
- [63:47]
B
Yeah. Especially. You should go. Pembrokeshire has got lots of guillemots and kittiwakes and things like that. And gannets.
- [63:53]
A
Few less.
- [63:53]
B
No, they're very. Well, a few less. Yeah, probably.
- [63:56]
A
So if you were the nuclear dictator for the uk, heaven forbid.
- [64:00]
B
Yeah.
- [64:00]
A
But like, I don't know. I look at politics at the moment, honestly, I do. I look at. With utter despair at the unimpressive people who are winning personality competitions.
- [64:11]
B
Yeah.
- [64:12]
A
And deciding the policies for this country, which is sending it to absolute shit. And I. Somebody said it to me. They said on your show, you interview some of the best people. These are the people who should be working in or for government and advising government. And I, Catherine Porter, for me, she should be doing what Ed Miliband is doing. She's a genius.
- [64:32]
B
Yeah, she's great. Yeah. I followed her for a while now.
- [64:35]
A
She's. She's utterly brilliant. And I watch Ed Miliband. I mean I watched him. Was it Laura Kuenssberg? He was. No. Sophie Rigby? I think it was Beth Rigby. I'm confused them all. Anyway, doesn't matter. He's a moron. But if you were the energy dictator for the UK and you had to create a plan for the next 15 years, what would it be?
- [64:55]
B
I would do what France did starting in the 1970s and have a massive expansion of nuclear power. And I would also encourage small modular reactors to power these AI data centers. Like what is already happening in the usa, I think. So historically these big gigawatt scale nuclear power stations have really only been a game playable by the state. Okay. I'm a little bit like you, I think as little kind of involvement from the state as possible. But I do accept that, you know, there are some things that the state should be running. I'm not a complete libertarian. I don't have a problem with the state supplying these giant kind of gigawatt scale reactors.
- [65:34]
A
Sorry, interesting. Sorry to interrupt you, but interesting. Today is the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith releasing the wealth of Nations. It's a brilliant book, but he said the state should provide the things that the free market can't provide as well.
- [65:50]
B
Right.
- [65:50]
A
And so the state shouldn't provide education because the free market provides it better, shouldn't provide health, sorry, NHS people, but the free market can provide it better. The state would be a lot smaller, we'd have a lot lower taxation, would have a more prosperous economy. But he did say like roads and bridges, certain infrastructure, the state should provide it. And I'm as a libertarian happy to make that compromise, like if we can get towards that. But it's interesting you say that because I'm okay with the state doing nuclear
- [66:17]
B
and I think, I think a lot of people are. There's an acceptance the state is good at some things and it kind of has to do some things. These gigawatt nuclear power stations is one of them. One of the most exciting things about trying nuclear this time round in the mid-2020s as opposed to the 1980s is that we've got these small modular reactors that have kind of. They've kind of like bewitched everybody actually. They're all the rage and they're all the hype. Definitely in my industry, nuclear. And the idea is, well, instead of building gigawatt nuclear Power stations. Why don't we build megawatt, ten hundred megawatt nuclear power stations? So that's a thousand or ten or one hundred times smaller than these traditional power stations. And they really, really are small. Okay, so some of these small modular reactors, and these reactors have been demonstrated, they're not just PowerPoint slides and kind of sketches on pen and paper. They would fit under this desk. A nuclear reactor. They're really, really small. In fact, some of the prototype reactors from the 50s were about the size of a shoebox. Really, really small. And this is not so this is not new technology. And indeed they've been powering the nuclear submarines in the UK for decades now. So the small bit isn't new. What is new is the modular bit. And that's because these small reactors have never been deployed in a civil setting to turn washing machines and keep lights on and cameras rolling and things like that. And so the idea is instead of building these massive pieces of billion pound infrastructures where you kind of have to do it in situ, why don't we build these things on a production line?
- [67:48]
A
How long do they take?
- [67:49]
B
Well, so no one has done it yet. No one has done it yet. No one has modularized and mass produced these reactors. But the kind of timescales that these manufacturers, and they're all in the private sector, which is really cool. So there are like I last looked and there were nearly 100, at least nearly 100 different designs from private companies around the world of how they might do a small modular reactor. And it's anything from a couple of months to a couple of years to click these things together and assemble them on the site. And so you're going from something like the Baraka nuclear power station in the UAE where it takes eight years to build a gigawatt sized nuclear power station, down to where you could build one in 12 to 18 months next to a data center. It would probably take you as long to build the data center as it would for the reactor that would power it. And so these small modular reactors as well as kind of reaching places that these gigawatt reactors can't reach because you need them close to the infrastructure that they're powering. I think the most exciting thing about them, and it doesn't get enough airtime and not enough people talk about it, is that it's an in for the private sector. It's like, let's see what they can do. Let's see what these genius engineers and these entrepreneurs and you know what they're like. You see them online, they're kind of like hip young guys. They wear like hoodies and they're kind of like the Silicon Valley types. And it's like, great. Like this is exactly what we needed. A little bit of like a bit of dynamic thinking, a bit of spirit, a bit of vigor. Let's introduce some competition into this. And so we're still in the very, very early days. And so I think it's very, very important that we, the grand we as in the nuclear industry and the kind of the energy policy machine, doesn't get complacent about these small modular reactors and think that it's just like something on delivery that's going to arrive in half an hour. No matter what we do, there's still a long way to go before we achieve the ultimate goal of mass production and deployment. But I'm actually very optimistic and excited to see what will happen with that. Because of the private sector involvement.
- [69:38]
A
Yeah. And the Navy have been used to sleeping next to them on submarines.
- [69:41]
B
Exactly. Yeah.
- [69:42]
A
They're not wearing third arms.
- [69:44]
B
These things are amazing. These things are amazing. And it's interesting, just last year and the year before, this is actually happening already in the usa where you've got Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, all buying and investing in small modular reactor technology specifically for AI data centers. Because all of the projections for the increase in electricity that have been made in the last couple of years, they were factoring in things like electric cars. So as we phase oil out and start to charge batteries, electric heat pumps, if that ever happens, we're phasing out gas, central heating and we're replacing it with electricity induction hobs, things like that. That's going to send our electricity demand skyrocketing, let alone the ever elusive economic growth that will hopefully make our demand grow even further. But none of those projections took into account the massive amount of power that will be needed for these data centers for AI because no one saw it coming. I don't know about you, but people were talking about AI on the kind of geeky podcasts that I listened to all the kind of tech bro y stuff like five years ago, but it was always like, yeah, maybe one day it was very speculative and then all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, like chatg. Even the free version is just orders of magnitude better than anything like it that existed before. It's scarily good. And the amount of power that these data centers will need. There was an amazing report published by. You can tell what I'm into reading.
- [71:12]
A
This is what you do TikTok you're so engaging, Like I'm entertained listening to you.
- [71:17]
B
It was the International Energy Agency. They published a report that projected the power demands from AI data centers. And by the mid-2030s, the annual consumption of electricity by data centers in their middle of the road estimate was about the same amount of electricity consumed every year by Japan. And it's more than the entire continent of Africa consumes every year. And that's just from data centers. And so all of those projections were massive underestimates. And who the hell knows what's coming next? That's the thing about technology. No one saw AI coming five years ago. Who knows what's coming next? And so these small modular reactors, it's funny, it might actually be AI that makes the nuclear renaissance happen. Yeah, I mean it would be amazing. And a lot of people say like, oh well, you know, what if the AI bubble bursts? What if it just becomes like super regulated and then it just kind of all peters out and it doesn't kind of reach the scales that we all think it will? Who cares? We'll use the power for something else. We don't know what's coming in the next five to 10 years. We'll use the power for something. At the very least we could export it to our European neighbours because right now we're one of the biggest importers of electricity on the continent. So it just seems like a no brainer. And so I'm really excited actually to see these small modular reactors being rolled out far and wide. I'd much rather live next door to one of those than a coal fire power station or Drax.
- [72:36]
A
We haven't mentioned solar too much. Elon Musk has been talking about solar a lot. He's been talking about putting solar farms in space. He's talked about the amount of land that's required to power the entire planet or the entirety of solar. The USA on solar. He's very pro solar. He is, is he right?
- [72:54]
B
No, I don't, I, no, I don't think he is right. When you do those calculations of how much land you would need to power the world often and they show a map sometimes, right, with a little dinky square, often that's close to the equator, which is a bit of a give that they've kind of fudged the numbers a bit because of course the further north you go, the worse your solar panels become. And in fact the UK is the second worst country in the world for solar capacity. I mean look at the weather's just awful.
- [73:23]
A
It's been so shit.
- [73:24]
B
The weather's just awful. The thing that solar does have going for it is that at least it's reliably unreliable. Right. You know that there is going to be zero solar panels, zero solar power after sunset or before sunrise and then during the day, depending on exactly how sunny it is, how cloudy it is, what time of year it is. It depends how high that peak goes. But at least it's reliably unreliable, unlike wind, which who the hell knows what that's going to be doing in two weeks. And so, you know, it kind of has its place. But again, it faces the same fundamental problem as wind. What do you do when the sun isn't shining and what do you do during winter, like these. These cold snaps that we get where our power demands increase massively and it's just very cloudy and gray, which. Which, living in the uk, happens all the time. So. No, I disagree. I don't think so.
- [74:09]
A
All right, I'll let you have that fight with you. Okay. Let's talk about the long future of humanity.
- [74:15]
B
Right? This is what we like.
- [74:17]
A
I was very excited to see. I only noticed it this morning because I obviously know your new book, but that you wrote a book about. We are just rocks from space, basically. What's the actual title?
- [74:29]
B
It's called Meteorite the stones from outer space that made our world. And I wrote that as a PhD student, actually.
- [74:34]
A
Really?
- [74:35]
B
Yeah, I did. Yeah. I spent a lot of hours and nights in the lab as a PhD student on my own, running mass spectrometers and various types of instruments. And I wrote most of that book whilst waiting for measurements to come back. So it's all about the formation of the solar system and how this and everything in the solar system came from a giant interstellar cloud of gas and dust called a nebula and how eventually it became alive and became us. And we're sat here now. There's a direct lineage between this table and the two of us and these microphones. 2. The Interstellar Nebula that existed four and a half billion years ago. Which is. Which is what?
- [75:09]
A
That unless we're in a simulation.
- [75:11]
B
Unless we're in a simulation, which I suppose is possible. Could be.
- [75:14]
A
And this simulation might have started this morning when we woke up.
- [75:18]
B
That's one of the interesting resolutions to the Fermi paradox. You know, when you kind of look at the number of stars that are out there and the number of planets and you think there must be life out there. How come we haven't heard from anybody or even seen anybody? One of the Resolutions is that, well, they all just plug themselves into the matrix and just can't be arsed going out exploring the galaxy and that's why I haven't heard from anybody or it's not required.
- [75:39]
A
We're just running this one experiment here and everything has to like exist out there in our minds to believe there is this universe.
- [75:47]
B
Yeah, maybe. I mean it's beyond my pay grade speculating about that kind of thing, but once I've had a pint I kind of get up to speed with it.
- [75:54]
A
So I don't actually think we are in a situation.
- [75:56]
B
No, I don't either.
- [75:57]
A
So I was having a conversation last night. I had my son, his girlfriend and my ex wife there and we were having a conversation about this because I've. I don't know if you watched my interview with Faraz.
- [76:07]
B
No, the other day.
- [76:08]
A
It's worth watching. Every time I interview for us it's been four times now. The, the second half we always get into Christianity as a devout Christian and it's a really interesting conversation. And I've said to him I always feel drawn to Christianity and even more so recently in that I find
- [76:26]
B
the.
- [76:26]
A
When I'd like go into sections of the Bible like I was, I watched Noah again the other day.
- [76:32]
B
Right.
- [76:32]
A
And the interesting part started. Noah was talks about when Cain kills Abel. Cain then goes out and creates industry and, and creates all these cities.
- [76:41]
B
Yeah.
- [76:41]
A
And then Noah has to flood the planet because of all the kind of bullshit that's come with it. And it's kind of what we're living through right now. And I just feel drawn to how, how right these stories are, you know, within the Bible and foreseeing the stupidity of humanity. So I feel very drawn to it. And so last night I said, my ex wife asked me, she's like, do you believe in God? I was like, I think I either believe in God or we're in a simulation. It's one of the two, right?
- [77:05]
B
Oh, so you said you don't believe in the simulation.
- [77:08]
A
No, no, one of the two.
- [77:09]
B
So you must believe in God then.
- [77:11]
A
Well, if you have to ask me to pick, I think, I don't think we're in a simulation, I just don't. But we could be, but I don't think we are. So I therefore believe in that.
- [77:23]
B
Yeah, that's what I mean.
- [77:23]
A
Yeah. No, I'm really drawn to Christianity at the moment, but I'm drawn to it more of intrigue.
- [77:32]
B
Have you listened to Jordan Peterson's biblical lectures?
- [77:34]
A
No.
- [77:35]
B
They are the most. I'VE listened to them three times now. So I kind of grew up in the New Atheist kind of times on the Internet, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, all of that. And I love Richard Dawkins, I think he's great and I've read his books many times. He's brilliant. He's like a big inspiration of mine as a writer. But I kind of grew up with this kind of idea that like religion is stupid and it's the delusion, it's the God delusion. Right. It's just, it's stupid and you kind of make these arguments as a 14 year old and get to feel kind of puffed up and clever about it. When I came across Jordan Peterson's Biblical lectures, I kind of thought, I'll give this a go. It's a bit left field, bit different for me and it completely changed my view actually of Christianity in the Bible. He goes through Genesis lecture by lecture and he tries to do it in the most scientific, rational. We don't need supernatural explanations for any of this kind of way. It's very kind of methodical. It's the psychological significance of the biblical stories. It's absolutely brilliant. It gave me a much kind of deeper appreciation of Christianity and the Bible and I kind of feel a bit embarrassed now about that.
- [78:41]
A
So where are you at now then
- [78:43]
B
with God and religion? Being perfectly honest, people ask me this, you know, I want to be able to believe in it. I went to church over Christmas for the first time in over a decade.
- [78:59]
A
Why?
- [79:03]
B
I used to go there in primary school for the harvest festival and the Nativity and the Christingle. It felt like a bit of a. It's a bit of a focal point of my childhood. Maybe it's just getting a little older now and kind of looking back and feeling a bit more nostalgic. Nostalgic undersells. It's like that kind of deep, like yearning for your roots kind of, you know, you feel more or less. So I Left home at 18, I went to university, I went to Manchester, then I went down to Bristol for four years to do my PhD. I moved to Nottingham for almost two years post Dockingham. I kind of left. I kind of left my home behind and as I've got older that kind of like yearning for it has grown and increased and I think that's what took me back there. And you know what? It was absolutely fantastic. I loved it. We were singing the old hymns that we used to sing and my sister were there and her boyfriend, who I've known my whole life like people that I love. And my mum was there and it was really, really good. And in the days that followed, it was like the thing that stood out for me on Christmas Day was like going to church again. It was the first. It was the first time I've been in so long. I can't remember last time I was in a church. It might have even been when I was at primary school. And I wish that I could believe in it, but I feel like it's maybe a bit too late for me. I just can't. But that doesn't mean that I kind of have to dispense with the whole thing and be like a real clinical atheist. No, it's stupid kind of thing. I like to think I can at least appreciate some of the ritual of it, even if it's only Christmas for now.
- [80:34]
A
Yeah. So it's interesting you say that because, like, as I said, my ex wife asked me last night if I believe in God. And it's almost like I don't feel like I need to or not believe in God right now.
- [80:44]
B
Yeah.
- [80:45]
A
But I'm intrigued by Christianity. I was brought up a Catholic and we went to a very Catholic church. Very ritual.
- [80:52]
B
Yeah.
- [80:52]
A
He did it. I was an altar boy, had to follow the priest with a cross. And then my friends found out and made fun of me and I just rejected that religion because of that. But I feel very drawn to it now and I keep thinking it's like, because there's so many problems in the world right now, everyone's at war and everything's terrible. I wonder if this is the compound interest of drifting away from the morality that's contained within religion. Like, is there a compound? Like, is there a compounded. Would it be a deficit? Yeah, probably a deficit than an interest. But like, I think about that a lot and I'm. I'm feeling really drawn to it.
- [81:30]
B
And this.
- [81:30]
A
When I was watching Noah and I. I love Darren Aronofsky, I think he's a great director. And there's this bit at the start where Noah's son is plucking a flower and he says, don't we only take what we need? And it really hit me, I was like, how much am I taking in this world that I don't need? And so I'm feeling really drawn to. I want to go to church, but not because I feel I need to be a believer in God. I just wonder if there is so much knowledge and wisdom within Christianity that can just make things better.
- [82:01]
B
I think there is. And you like the biblical Lectures. And it's funny. It's not just Jordan Peterson that talks about these things and these kind of biblical metaphors. Jonathan Haidt does as well, which is why his substack is After Babel, the Tower of Babel that just got so big that it collapsed. And if I'm right, I listened to him on a podcast last year and he said that he set out not writing the Anxious Generation. His whole metaphor is we are living in the days now after Babel. The Tower has collapsed, the top has got too far from the roots, we've forgotten, and so the whole thing is coming crashing down. The Anxious Generation was supposed to be a chapter in that book, but he thought, oh, there's so much here in this, it's too important. This is the next book. And I believe and hope that he's still working on After Babel because it's about that exact thing.
- [82:45]
A
It's funny you should say that. So this was. Does it not give you the date? This was a few days ago. And I asked ChatGPT, I said, what's the story of the Tower of Babel and how does it relate to what's going on in the world right now? So it gave me just like the Tower of Babel is a biblical look up. If we relate that to today, you might think of how global ambitions, whether technological, economic or political, can bring people together but also create fragmentation. If communications break down, think about how global platforms connect us, yet divisions, whether through differing ideologies, misinformation or cultural clashes, can emerge. This is where it got me. The modern world's towers might be AI, financial systems or globalization. The key parallel, if we don't find common ground or understand each other's language, we risk the same fragmentation. And we're not scaling wisdom as fast as we're scaling technology basically is the issue. And I said, is AI the Tower of Babel? And he said, I wouldn't say that AI is a terrible itself, but it could be one of the most ambitious world shaping projects that tests how unified we are. If we build it with hubris, without considering ethics, societal impacts, or ensuring everyone has a voice, we risk a Babel moment where misunderstanding and division follow. But if we're thoughtful, AI could be more a cooperative tool than a tower of confusion.
- [84:02]
B
It would say that though.
- [84:03]
A
Yeah, of course it would. Yeah. Like, yeah, yeah. But I'm thinking in those terms now.
- [84:09]
B
Well, the financial nod there has already happened. That was the 2008 crash. Everybody thought the banks were too big to fail, but really the truth is they were so big that they would fail. It's guaranteed. They got too big. The whole thing came crashing down.
- [84:22]
A
But we carried on building on the rubble then.
- [84:26]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I mean, like you say, our technological. The pace of technological advancement in many ways is outpacing our wisdom. You have to be really careful with these tools, whether it be AI or nuclear or anything else. You have to be really, really careful about it.
- [84:44]
A
Well, this is why I'm going back to reading a lot at the moment. So as you see, I've got Frederick Bastiatz, the Law here. I'm on my second read of it.
- [84:52]
B
Cool.
- [84:52]
A
Because I've read it before and I was just like, I want to read it again. And I'm keeping notes. And I reordered because I gave away my wealth of Nations. I reordered that today. And. But these are. I mean, these are books that were written hundreds of years ago and everything they predict and talk about there is. Right. And it's happening now. By the way, did you see that list of books that got released? If you're right wing.
- [85:18]
B
Did you see it? Yeah, I did.
- [85:19]
A
I. So I didn't have nine of the 12 books. I ordered them all to me.
- [85:25]
B
You're on a list somewhere. Check this out.
- [85:28]
A
I'll show you. This is quite funny.
- [85:30]
B
Wasn't George Orwell on that as well?
- [85:32]
A
Yeah, 1984. Well, that's to make it even more funny.
- [85:34]
B
I mean, the irony. The irony is staggering.
- [85:38]
A
Well, this is where I was so proud of my son. Right. So there's the tweet of the list of books, people. I'm just showing this to Tim. There's mine. So it's just slightly different front covers because I had to get. My son was like, no, you need to pick up 1984 and start reading it. So I sat there reading 1984 with
- [85:56]
B
them in front of it.
- [85:57]
A
But that was my son.
- [85:58]
B
Brilliant.
- [85:58]
A
As a 21 year old, I was so proud.
- [86:00]
B
What did you think of 1985?
- [86:02]
A
So I picked that for a photo. I've never read 1984, but I've watched the film.
- [86:08]
B
Okay.
- [86:09]
A
Which. Which weirdly, when I watched it, Rabsey Nesbitt's in there. I don't know if you know who he is. A famous old, like, Scottish comedian. He's actually in the film. So I know it from the film. The film could be a lot better. I think it needs remaking now, but I don't know. Darren Aronofsky.
- [86:24]
B
There was. There was a kind of dystopian 1984 Brave New World film with Christian Bale in it called Equilibrium. That. That's quite good. That's quite good. That's more kind of Brave New World, but It's got the 1984 vibe in it.
- [86:37]
A
Yeah. I think there's a world for people to start making these. Have you watched Mother?
- [86:41]
B
No, that's.
- [86:43]
A
Ah. Do you know what? Watch Mother. I'm not going to tell you a thing about it.
- [86:47]
B
That's my homework. Yeah.
- [86:48]
A
Watch Mother.
- [86:49]
B
Okay.
- [86:50]
A
Again, I think it's Darren Arofsky as well. Don't read anything about it beforehand.
- [86:54]
B
Okay. I'll go in cold, watch it, like
- [86:59]
A
live with your thoughts afterwards and then go and find a, like an explanation of what the film's about. Because most people watch it and go, what the fuck just happened?
- [87:08]
B
Right.
- [87:09]
A
Like, what happened? And then watch it again. And when you watch it, knowing it, it's a mind blowing film.
- [87:16]
B
Right? Okay.
- [87:16]
A
Very. Yeah, it's a mind blowing film. God, we've deviated here.
- [87:20]
B
You need to read Animal Farm, by the way, if you haven't. Well, I read that score. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's right up your street. So good. I love that book so much.
- [87:29]
A
Well, that's where my son did me proud again. Because he read that school, remember when it came out with Angela Rayner, you know, avoided tax on her second home.
- [87:35]
B
Yeah.
- [87:35]
A
My dad went, she's the pig in Animal Farm, isn't she? I was like, she fucking is the pig in Animal Farm. Like all like. I mean, it's crazy because there is so much wisdom in these books.
- [87:48]
B
There is. Yeah.
- [87:49]
A
And we're not teaching this.
- [87:51]
B
Yeah.
- [87:52]
A
Like, if I was to homeschool my kids and start again, this is what I'd be teaching them. I'd be giving them these books and said, let's discuss it. What have you learned?
- [88:00]
B
Yeah, I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time before Christmas.
- [88:03]
A
To Kill a Mockingbird.
- [88:05]
B
Brilliant.
- [88:05]
A
I mean, To Kill a Mockingbird. Is that the guy who's in. He's tried for.
- [88:13]
B
Yeah, he gets put on trial for rape.
- [88:15]
A
Yeah.
- [88:16]
B
And the story is really about Scout, the kid who's the daughter of the lawyer that's defending this guy in court. It's really, really good. A lot of people shudder at the memory of To Kill a Mockingbird because it's on the GCSE English curriculum. I didn't do it. I did Of Mice and Men.
- [88:32]
A
Yeah. I think I did Mice and Lenny.
- [88:33]
B
Yes. And the mouse. Well, I reread that again a couple of months ago. And you know, it hits, it hits harder when you're an adult. It's a brilliant, brilliant book that's got that nugget of truth in it. With that you can have the best of intent. Well, this is apt for this conversation. You can have the best of intentions, the best laid plans and all that and sometimes it just goes tits up no matter what you do.
- [88:56]
A
But I look at the state of our country and the state of our politics with utter despair. And I look at all the wisdom that's contained within these pages of these books and I'm like, do these people read or do they read? But they lack a backbone. It's absolute despair. I mean, I think every politician should read Hayek and Adam Smith.
- [89:19]
B
Yeah. Douglas Murray's big on that. Going back and reading the old classic texts. Yeah, society would be much better off. I've started reading a lot more since I really, really turned down the phone a couple of years ago. And since I stopped writing, going nuclear as well because that took all of my spare time. But yeah, I read a lot and I. I still find myself flicking onto BBC news and news websites on my phone. It's just that well worn groove in your mind. But I really, really try not to. And I leave little books kind of lying about the house and like, if I've got five minutes when my wife's getting ready before going out somewhere, I've got George Orwell's essay collection.
- [89:59]
A
Oh, amazing.
- [89:59]
B
It's really, really good. Just opening it on a random page and seeing what you thought about this topic. Really, really good. Like you say a lot of wisdom.
- [90:07]
A
Well, that's why I brought this today because the amount of times I'm on the tube and I see people reading books and I'm sat there listening to Slayer and I'm thinking, I could be read. I've listened to Rain and Blood a million times. I could be reading. Yeah, I did. So I got. I had. I was listening to music on the way to the tube. Got on the tube, music is off.
- [90:23]
B
And I was reading good stuff. Yeah.
- [90:24]
A
And yeah, no, I appreciate. Anyway, we were going to talk about the long future of humanity.
- [90:29]
B
Yeah, yeah. How do we get onto this? Well, we have to get there first.
- [90:31]
A
Yes.
- [90:32]
B
And zooming out from all of this, the long future of humanity is obviously in space. It has to be. It's not a good idea. And this is an argument from Elon Musk that I wholeheartedly agree with. It's not a good idea having all of the humans on one planet in exactly the Same way that you back up your iPhone, because if you drop it, you lose all your pictures. You have an off site backup somewhere. We need to have that with humanity just in case the worst happens down here. Whether it be something that we do to ourselves, which would be, which would be so stupid and catastrophic it doesn't bear thinking about, or whether it's something like an asteroid or a comet hitting the planet and we just don't see it in time, which is entirely possible. Actually, that would be super, super bad. And so we need to back up humanity by going to live at first on Mars and then, who knows, eventually elsewhere. And I think we're just, you know, I lived way before the Apollo era. It feels like it happened out of sequence, that. It feels like a dream. How did that happen in the 60s? I just can't believe it. That we sent humanity to the moon and brought them back. And we haven't been back since 1972. We haven't even left low Earth orbit since 1972. With Apollo 17, it kind of feels like it happened in the wrong order, but kind of on a, on a big time scale. On a thousand year human timescale, we're just at the beginning of our kind of our journey ultimately to the planets and maybe eventually even the stars. It's all within grasp.
- [92:04]
A
But you know why? It's the same argument why we don't have supersonic planes anymore. But we had Concorde. Yeah, it is, we know this. It is fiat money and bureaucracy.
- [92:15]
B
Yeah.
- [92:16]
A
People found a way of creating money out of thin air.
- [92:18]
B
And there was also, there's also the Cold War as well. That was a big motivator for the space race and Concorde. You know, the space race really was just America flexing its muscles and using science and technology as a way to show how superior it was to the Soviet Union, which it was. We've kind of lost that motivation. But I like to think that we've still got within us that kind of spirit of adventure of going to new places. And it's something that we've always done right. Ever since we left Africa 200,000 years ago. There have always been some crazy people in the tribe who thought, what's over there? The penguin, the penguin, the penguin. We go to the mountain, right? We go to the mountain and we see what's there. That's what we do. That's what we've done. And the natural conclusion of that is eventually we go up there. And we're just starting now to see people, governments kind of get interested Again, in going to the moon and learning how to live on the moon, nuclear is a key technology for that, interestingly, because the lunar night time is two weeks long. Two weeks, right. And it's freezing cold. And so, you know, you try and use batteries to get you through a cold night here on the Earth. That's not possible right now, let alone getting through two weeks of lunar nighttime on the surface of the moon. It's just, it's just not, it's just not feasible. We need that reliable power. And in the absence of any oxygen, in the absence of any atmosphere, you can't burn things, so you have to fission them instead. And so nuclear power will be a key technology to go into the moon. And again, these small modular reactors, these miniature reactors, there are companies now, Rolls Royce is one of them, who are designing nuclear reactors specifically for deployment on the lunar surface.
- [94:00]
A
What is the risk of a Challenger style disaster taking a small nuclear reactor to the moon?
- [94:06]
B
Yeah, that's something to consider. Thankfully, rocket technology is actually really reliable now. Okay. We're getting better and better and better at it. And even, even enriched uranium is not that radioactive. Okay. It's a slight misconception that uranium is super radioactive. It just happens to be the most famous radioactive element. But, but even, even highly enriched uranium is not that radioactive. It's once it's been in a reactor that it's really, really reactive. It's the fission products, it's the new elements that you get when you split the atoms. But the starting fuel isn't that radioactive. And so I wouldn't like one to go pop above my house raining down highly enriched uranium onto where I live. But these things are possible. And if we want to go and live on the moon, which I think that we should, we have, we have an absolute imperative to do that. We must do that. We don't have a choice. We have to learn how to do that. And so it's possible now.
- [94:59]
A
So energy is civilization and the long arc of civilization and what we want to do as humans is entirely baked in how we create and consume energy.
- [95:09]
B
Yes. Have you heard of the Kardashev scale?
- [95:11]
A
Yes.
- [95:12]
B
Okay, so, so this is, this is the scale of how you judge the kind of, the technological prowess, how advanced a civilization is. And people, people think about this kind of when they think about life up there across the galaxy. How do you classify civilizations? One of the ways to do it is the Kardashev scale. And in its original kind of form, it was a three tier step. Okay. And type one civilizations, they Consume all of the power, they harness all of the power of their home planet. Type 2 civilizations, they harness all of the power of their local star. And so to do that, you might use something like a Dyson Sphere or a Dyson Swarm, which is where you completely encase the sun in solar panels, essentially. So you harvest all of the solar energy from the sun, of which there is a lot, by the way. Okay. Not much of it falls on the Earth because we're a tiny speck that intercepts a really small fraction of it. But in principle, you could put lots and lots and lots of solar panels, giant solar panels in orbit and make a shell around the sun and harness all of the power of the sun to power civilization. That would be a type 2 civilization. A type 3 civilization takes it to the next step and consumes and harnesses all of the power of the galaxy. So that's hundreds of billions of stars. We don't even know what that would look like at this stage. Okay. And there's a way to quantify where you are on the Kardashev scale. It was ironed out by Carl Sagan, another one of my favorite authors. He's absolutely brilliant, I think, in the early 70s. And using this equation, you put in the power consumption of humanity, it's logged to the base 10 of the power consumption -6 divided by 10. For those who want to go make an Excel spreadsheet, which I have done. It's very, very interesting tracking humanity's rise through the Kardashev scale. And Interestingly, a type 0 civilization is about. It's a megawatt of power, which is about 100 campfires. Okay. That's not far from where we were the dawn of man, 200,000 years ago. If you look at where we are now with global energy consumption, we're about type 0.7. Okay. And so we've still got a little way to go. But when you plot this on a graph against time, it kind of is rising in roughly a straight line. Okay. Our energy consumption has gone up exponentially over the last couple of centuries, but that log to the base 10 in the equation straightens the line out somewhat, and we will hit type one civilization, all of the power of our home planet, within the next century or two. Wow. Yeah. And so that's not long. Considering that humans have been around for 200,000 years, it's kind of the blink of an eye. And so who knows what that will look like? That seems like the natural next step, if not only to preserve humanity, because despite everything Goodness knows we've messed up in many, many ways. And there are so many more problems that we will cause in the future that we haven't even thought of yet. But we've done so much good along the way. I mean, look at what we've managed to chisel out of the hand to mouth living that we were in for. Basically the entirety of human history. Up until around the mid-1700s, every other child died before the age of five. Mean life expectancy was 32 years. That's how old I am now. So I would have been an old person in the year 1600. People were poor, people had nothing, people were starving. You would die from tooth decay and infection. Look what we've managed to do in such a brief period of time.
- [98:44]
A
We could sit in a flying chair and FaceTime someone in another flying chair.
- [98:48]
B
Exactly. Isn't it, isn't it amazing? It's amazing, yeah. And it costs like 40 quid to get to Vienna on an airplane from Manchester Airport. It was like three times that to get the train here today from Carlisle. That's a whole other problem. But I guess that's one of the things that I love about science and technology, is that it shows what's possible when we get our acts together. Using science and technology to understand the world and turning that knowledge into inventions that we can deploy in society. Smart people tinkering with things, inventing things and going out there and deploying that technology. That's what makes the modern world. And that for me is a huge source of hope. When I look at what we've managed to do, it's kind of like we've got this. And for us to go extinct, whether it be through fault or folly, would be, I think, a catastrophic loss for the universe. Because we are, as far as we know, the only life forms in the whole universe that can look out there and kind of understand something about itself and look inward and understand a bit about where we came from, like with the nebula, like that I wrote about in my first book and I did my PhD on. We've decoded the genetic code of life. We've understood all of this stuff. We can kind of appreciate being alive. But the only things that can do that and for us to lose that in the universe would be. Would be a colossal loss. Which is why I think we have to go to space. And energy is absolutely fundamental to that.
- [100:08]
A
Right. A couple of closing questions. I read something recently about there being a funding problem in the world of physics. Is this something you're aware of?
- [100:17]
B
No, I'M not.
- [100:18]
A
Okay, we'll skip that one. Okay, Cut that on the edit.
- [100:20]
B
Okay.
- [100:20]
A
Okay. Before we finish, you're obviously a nerd. I don't think I'm insulting you, telling you this. I think it's brilliant. What things are you most excited about? We talked about fusion, so we can skip that off. What are you excited about?
- [100:40]
B
I'm excited about going to live in space. Honestly? Yeah, just what we were just talking about. I love visiting new places and it's why I love hiking in the Lake District. You can go up a mountain on the other side of the valley and you get a completely different view. It's like discovering a whole new world, even just a couple of miles apart. Imagine what it's like going millions of miles into space. When you think about all of the beautiful landscapes and the beautiful natural scenery that we've got here on the Earth. I know that it's lifeless compared to the Earth, but imagine how much beauty there is on Mars that we've yet to uncover. The geological history of Mars. Where did the rivers used to flow? What are these rocks made of? What happens if you dig a mile down into Mars? What are the rocks like? All of these questions, this exploration of the solar system, it's like the world, the Earth is so beautiful, but there are other worlds out there for us to go and visit. And in a way, I kind of feel like I was born a little bit too early. Although I did grow up without social media, so I'm not complaining about that. But I was born just a little bit too early to kind of get to kind of go there myself and really, really, really experience us discovering these worlds.
- [101:43]
A
I mean, if you, if you think of the long arm of humanity, the long arc of humanity, you're most likely to live through the singularity. You're most likely to live through AI superintelligence, fusion, potentially.
- [102:01]
B
Yeah, that would be cool.
- [102:02]
A
Quantum computing being maybe.
- [102:06]
B
And
- [102:09]
A
reversing aging.
- [102:11]
B
I mean, that would be. That's another thing actually. Like, we spend so much time with all of these problems on the Earth, a lot of them self inflicted. And especially the energy, especially the energy problem takes up so much human capital with our attention and our time and our smart people. Imagine if we solve that right. Imagine you made me the nuclear dictator and I just rolled out big nuclear in the uk and we can forget that we solved the problem. I wonder how far back we could roll aging, like actually roll it back.
- [102:40]
A
Listen to the podcast the other day. They're now going into tests, so they've been Testing. I can't remember what it was, but they've been testing reversing cell aging in mice and there's been successes.
- [102:52]
B
Right.
- [102:52]
A
And so one of the tests they're going to be doing with these, I can't remember what they're called. They're going to be tested on eyes. That's the first place you want to test it on eyes. People whose eyesight's been gone.
- [103:01]
B
Interesting.
- [103:01]
A
If they can reverse the agent and eyes, then your eyesight will come back. My eyesight's gone. I didn't used to wear glasses three years ago and then started reading, wearing them for reading. I wear them most of the day now.
- [103:11]
B
Right.
- [103:11]
A
And these ones need an upgrade because my eyesight's going. But imagine you can just drop, have a drop in your eye and it restores your eyesight.
- [103:17]
B
It makes you wonder what's possible because our life expectancy now is more than double what it was 200 years ago. And I bet if you went back 200 years ago and said, you know, people in the most developed countries in the world will be living into their mid-80s frequently without that much loss of quality of life. I know we have a problem in the UK with very elderly people and all that, but, you know, it's 70 isn't old anymore in the UK in your late 70s, you're kind of not that old. You're still able. You're like a spring chicken. Comparatively. They wouldn't have believed you 200 years ago that that was even possible. So, yeah, it makes you wonder what the next 200 years or even the next 50 years for that matter, are going to look like. I do sometimes wonder if there is anyone alive today who will never die.
- [104:00]
A
Oh, I certainly believe that.
- [104:01]
B
Really?
- [104:02]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [104:02]
B
Oh, right.
- [104:03]
A
You're saying. So you're saying, I mean, of a. A baby was born today and give them, give them 80 years. Will we solve age in an eight?
- [104:12]
B
Yeah.
- [104:12]
A
Yes, I think we'll solve it. I think solving Asian may be solved in the next decade.
- [104:16]
B
Wow.
- [104:17]
A
I, you know, just from following the tests that being done and I mean, maybe I'm an idiot. Maybe it's 20 years. Maybe it's always 40 years away, like fusion. But I do. But then we do have a problem. If we, if we solve aging, how many people can this planet actually take?
- [104:33]
B
Yeah.
- [104:33]
A
I mean, we will need Mars.
- [104:35]
B
Yeah. In a way, it's kind of one of those nice problems to have. You know, we talk in the UK about all of the collateral damage of having an aging population. I'm Not. I'm not downplaying that it's huge. But in a way, it's a nice problem to have because it means that people are living longer.
- [104:51]
A
Yeah, right.
- [104:52]
B
People aren't dying when they're 40 anymore or when they're 50 anymore. How nice is it that we kind of get to spend more time with people that we love and that people get more life, more years out of the one life that they're given? It's a nice problem to have in some ways.
- [105:04]
A
I think I was thinking about if they solved agent. Yeah. You can essentially never die from age.
- [105:13]
B
Would you. Would you take it?
- [105:14]
A
Fuck yeah. I like living and I don't want to. You know, I really like living forever. Well, at the point I don't want to, I can just kill myself.
- [105:24]
B
Yeah, I suppose.
- [105:25]
A
Yeah. You know, like 300. 300 years. Yeah. I've had enough.
- [105:30]
B
Yeah.
- [105:30]
A
But at the moment, I'm. I like living. I. I wake up every. I wake up quite early and I'm excited. I enjoy the day. I love living. I love spending time with my kids and my family. I love. I love life. I genuinely love life.
- [105:44]
B
Yeah.
- [105:44]
A
I sound miserable with this podcast, but I actually love.
- [105:46]
B
You actually do. You're an optimist at heart.
- [105:48]
A
I am an optimist.
- [105:49]
B
You are.
- [105:49]
A
I do. I love life and I love living and I love simple things now, like, like, say, cooking, reading a book, playing tennis. I love it.
- [105:56]
B
Yep.
- [105:57]
A
Why do I want it to stop?
- [105:58]
B
Yeah.
- [105:58]
A
Like, at the point I want to stop, I can just kill myself.
- [106:01]
B
I'd take. I'd love a couple of hundred years. Yeah, that would be really nice.
- [106:05]
A
It was. Who was that comedian? His name. Yeah, the one who got.
- [106:18]
B
I don't want to say it.
- [106:19]
A
Anyway, there's a comedian and he was talking about this and he was saying, the thing about life is, is that you. If you don't like it, you can just stop.
- [106:27]
B
Like.
- [106:28]
A
Like, you can have the shittiest life possible that people are living the. Out of the shittiest lives possible and carrying on. And so, like, none of us really, very few of us actually want to die, so why would I want. Yeah, the better question is to somebody, like, say if you said, well, no, I don't want to live forever, I was like, okay, well, when do you want to stop?
- [106:47]
B
Yeah, I guess that's what.
- [106:49]
A
You can't give a number.
- [106:50]
B
No, no.
- [106:51]
A
You might go, I don't want to live forever. But like, okay, when do you want to stop? What are you done? You carry on until you've Done. But. But think about in the world where you don't. Where you can essentially not die from old age, a death would be even more tragic.
- [107:07]
B
Yeah. Have you read the Silmarillion by Tolkien? It's kind of like the prequel to Lord of the Rings. Ish.
- [107:12]
A
What's it called?
- [107:13]
B
The Silmarillion.
- [107:14]
A
The Silmarillion, yeah.
- [107:15]
B
It's amazing. It's like, it's all the stuff that happened before Lord of the Rings.
- [107:19]
A
Okay.
- [107:19]
B
And that's a big theme in the Silmarillion, because the elves, they don't die. They're immortal, unless you kill them with a sword or something like that. But the men are mortal. And so the kind of. The conflict between the men and the elves, the immortal elves and the mortal men, is kind of one of the major themes in the Silmarillion.
- [107:35]
A
I wonder if we would treat risk differently. So if you know only you can't die from old age.
- [107:42]
B
Yeah.
- [107:43]
A
Maybe you would get on less planes, because a plane is a higher risk.
- [107:47]
B
That's an interesting idea.
- [107:48]
A
You wonder if you start to assess risk differently.
- [107:50]
B
Yeah, maybe. But in another way, you. You might take more risks. So, for example, if I quit my job now and went and did another degree in something that I'm interested in, which is probably what I would do if I won the lottery, actually, I'd go back to university and just study. Like, I just do undergraduate degree after undergraduate degree and everything that interests me. If I did that now, I would never recover the loss of earnings by the time I retire, probably. But if I had. If I had another 200 years left of life, it'd be like, that's fine. It's like dropping out after one semester and starting again.
- [108:22]
A
Yeah. I talked about this on the podcast recently. I was at this really profound day where I was. I accepted, going in, doing. I don't like being interviewed. I. I don't have anything much of interest to say. I just like, talk to smart people like you and saying, explain this to me because I'm a dumbass. And I was going to do one. I accepted. And on the way, I was listening to Mike Sanovich with Tucker Carlson, and Cenovich was talking about, like, death in a really profound way. And it made me realize is that, like, if. If you find out you've been. Say you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, you've got cancer, and you're given two years to live, you fundamentally change everything you're going to do. Probably at that point, you go, well, why go to work? I Want to be around my family because you've been given that time, that. That point in time where, like, life's over, but any of us could die tomorrow. I mean, we're all slowly dying anyway. But you could die tomorrow. You could die in two weeks, die in two years. It's like, well, why. What we. What we putting off. Why are we putting off living the life we want to live? For what possible reason? Is it money? Because who actually ever says, oh, I've got enough money, I'm done now. So what are we all putting off?
- [109:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, I take your point. I don't often think about. I don't often think about my own death, but I do sometimes sit and think about the death of my loved ones. Actually, I kind of make a habit of doing that. What would it be like if my mum died tomorrow? And it changes my relationship with her, actually for the better. It's not just. I think about it for lots of people in my life that I love. Yeah. It does make you appreciate people more knowing that you do have that finite time. It's not, hopefully not the two years. Like it might be with a terminal illness, but it's not that long. It's not that long. It's decades.
- [110:11]
A
I mean, I lost. Lost my mother. She went to cancer about nine years ago now and. But my father's still around and at the time when my mum got sick, I used to live in an island. I used to go across the sea here all the time and. And there's a, you know, the. Wait, but why Guy, you must know him.
- [110:29]
B
Oh, Tim Urban. Yeah. He's amazing. Yeah, I've read his blog forever. Yeah, he's great.
- [110:33]
A
Have you ever seen that chart he does where it's like. It's like dot for every year you live.
- [110:38]
B
Yes.
- [110:39]
A
And you calculate the amount of times you're going to see your parents.
- [110:41]
B
Oh, my. Yeah, So I did that in Covid with my mum. I calculate if 20. 20 is a represent.
- [110:48]
A
Yeah.
- [110:48]
B
How many more times am I gonna see her? And it was.
- [110:50]
A
It's like 12 or 20. It's a low number.
- [110:53]
B
Yeah.
- [110:53]
A
I had the same with my. My father. So my dad now comes and stays with me six months a year.
- [110:57]
B
Cool.
- [110:58]
A
And he's there in our house.
- [110:59]
B
That's the dream.
- [111:00]
A
And.
- [111:00]
B
Yeah.
- [111:00]
A
And we have him there all the time.
- [111:01]
B
Yeah, brilliant. Yeah.
- [111:02]
A
You know, once or twice a week, me and him go across the road and have two pints and we go to football together. And honestly, I'm like, I don't want him to Ever go back?
- [111:10]
B
Yep.
- [111:11]
A
Like, why go back to Ireland? We're all here. You're here with your grandkids.
- [111:14]
B
I wonder if that's a big part of a lot of the social problems that we're seeing in the UK at the moment is people being. People being unmoored from their families, because very few people live in the same postcode now that they grew up in. In fact, there's quite a snobbery about it, about being parochial and local and never kind of leaving home and growing up around the corner from. From where your family live. But that's how it was forever.
- [111:37]
A
Yeah.
- [111:38]
B
Until yesterday. And we're kind of like. With the social media thing, we're running this experiment of what happens if you. What was that game? Is it like Scrobble or something, where you have the dice in the little box and you give them all a shake? Something like that. Whatever. It's like you shuffle everybody around periodically. Boggle. Boggle. That's it. Yeah. Well remembered. Wow. Like, Boggle. Like you give everyone a shake and then they fall where they may. And that's. What does that look like? Maybe you can get away with it a little bit. There have always been people that move around and move to another country or a different part of the country. But what happens when that's the norm? What does that look like when you accrue a generation or two generations or three generations of people that are completely unmoored from the place that they grew up in and from the people that they grew up around? I suspect it's not good. And I kind of even feel it in myself. I like where I live. It's beautiful and I've got friends there, but there's no place like home. Right. And definitely, as I've got older, I've kind of felt that as the crow flies, I live.
- [112:38]
A
Live less than two miles from where I grew up.
- [112:40]
B
Yeah.
- [112:41]
A
And I love it. And I've thought of leaving the UK because of all the problems. I don't want to go.
- [112:45]
B
No, I don't either.
- [112:45]
A
I like where I am. I like the people.
- [112:47]
B
Yeah, me too.
- [112:48]
A
I love it. So. So if you were. If. Let's not go with, like, the fact that you might get a terminal. Let's just go with the Highlander version. You could live forever and you knew this. What do you wake up and do tomorrow? What change do you make? You said undergraduate degree after undergraduate degree.
- [113:06]
B
Yeah, probably. I'd. Probably so. I'm a scientist. I did, like, all the sciencey stuff at university. And what have You. I feel embarrassingly ill informed about culture. Kind of what we talked about with reading all these old books. I'd probably go and do like a classics degree or something like that. Or maybe. Maybe ppe, if they would let me in at Oxford or some sort of like philosophy degree, something like that. Just to kind of give me like a 101, this is who said what when, and kind of like a springboard then for me to go off and do my own reading.
- [113:41]
A
Have you never read, like, the Odyssey or the Iliad?
- [113:43]
B
No, I haven't. No. Have you?
- [113:46]
A
I did classics at a level.
- [113:47]
B
Oh, right. Okay.
- [113:48]
A
But I only did it because it was a Dosser subject. But so I ended up. So I didn't appreciate it at the time, so I read the Odyssey, the Iliad and the Aeneid. I can barely. I remember the Odyssey. That was the one I liked, by the way. That's coming out as a film soon. Matt Damon in it, directed by
- [114:05]
B
the
- [114:05]
A
guy did Interstellar and Batman.
- [114:08]
B
Oh, Christopher Nolan.
- [114:10]
A
Yes, Christopher Nolan.
- [114:11]
B
Christopher Nolan, Yeah.
- [114:11]
A
So the Odyssey's coming out as a film.
- [114:13]
B
All right, cool.
- [114:13]
A
It's worth reading as a book.
- [114:14]
B
Didn't they just bring out a new translation of that, like last year? I think. I think there was just. There was some new translation that.
- [114:20]
A
So I've got all three at home. But they all look new because I bought them to reread them.
- [114:25]
B
Yeah.
- [114:25]
A
The problem is I buy 10 to 15 books a week.
- [114:29]
B
Wow.
- [114:30]
A
And read one about one a month.
- [114:32]
B
Right. I mean, it could be worse. You could be buying worse things.
- [114:34]
A
No. Well, I've got this thing where it's like, if I'm going to research a book, like if I'm doing a podcast.
- [114:39]
B
Yeah.
- [114:41]
A
Even if I'm not going to read it, I buy it because the author deserves to be paid me using their research.
- [114:47]
B
But.
- [114:47]
A
Okay, so you do a classics degree.
- [114:49]
B
Yeah, probably something like that. Just as a 101. Like, this is kind of like the core bit of knowledge that you need, then go and do your own thing. But isn't it interesting that you just said classics was the Dosser subject? Isn't that sad that. Because that's. That's the conception of it.
- [115:03]
A
Well, it was known as the easiest subject to pass.
- [115:05]
B
Right. Was it?
- [115:06]
A
Yeah. So I did economics because I was. I'm so interested or so interested in money, in the economy. I did geography because I enjoy geography. And I needed one more. And I knew I could get a C with little work.
- [115:16]
B
Right.
- [115:17]
A
But we had the conversation the other day. We sat there as a group of friends and said, if you were to go back and repick your A levels, what would change?
- [115:24]
B
Oh, interesting.
- [115:25]
A
And I went. I would still have Economics, but I would now do history and I would do classics still because I actually care about it now.
- [115:33]
B
Yeah. You think it's kind of wasted on young people a little bit. Yeah. I think I always looked down on humanities when I was an A level student and definitely like into my early twenties as well. But as you've got older, you realize that.
- [115:46]
A
But then maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe as a kid you're trying to figure out the things you want to do for the job you want to do. Then you get a bit older and you get a bit wiser. You're like, now I need the wisdom.
- [115:55]
B
Yeah, I think that's it. It's like the STEM subjects. That's the knowledge. Okay. That's like the practical knowledge of like kind of going out, building things, understanding things. But the humanities and the classics is where the wisdom is. And the two together, I mean, they're much greater than the sum of their parts. Right. And we're perhaps missing a little bit of the wisdom at the moment.
- [116:15]
A
So what stops you? What is actually stopping you tomorrow or transitioning and going to do this classics undergraduate.
- [116:22]
B
My job. Like I need a job. That's honestly it. That's honestly it.
- [116:26]
A
You're an author.
- [116:27]
B
Yeah.
- [116:28]
A
You get invited on major TV channels.
- [116:30]
B
You.
- [116:31]
A
I think you have to find a way to monetize the way you collect and distribute knowledge to people.
- [116:36]
B
Maybe I could start a TikTok of doing a classics degree somewhere and. Yeah, maybe that's how I fund it, become a TikTok, a tick tocker to fund my undergraduate degree. I mean, people do worse things. Right.
- [116:48]
A
But you're an amplifier. Like you. You go and research it. You collect the knowledge and you amplify it to other people.
- [116:53]
B
Yeah.
- [116:54]
A
Then there needs to be a way to monetize that. Have you got a substack?
- [116:59]
B
No, I kind of started. I started last summer, but it was. It was too much work, honestly, because I still have. I still have like a day job. It's an enormous amount of time.
- [117:07]
A
There's a really good presentation by the guy who. What's that platform he did? The platform where you. It's not. Is it substack? No, it's not substack. It's the other one. But anyway, he said it's called A Thousand True Fans.
- [117:22]
B
Okay.
- [117:22]
A
So all anyone needs in the world is A Thousand True Fans. You could be A musician. You don't have to sell, you know, millions of T shirts or you don't have to have millions, billions of downloads. You need a thousand true fans.
- [117:35]
B
Yeah.
- [117:35]
A
Connected through a platform. Because if you're a musician, they will buy every record that you can.
- [117:41]
B
Oh, I like that. Yeah.
- [117:42]
A
They will buy every hoodie that you make. And if you put on a special concert in London, they'll come to it. And that thousand true fans can finance you being creatively the person you need to be. I. There will be a thousand people in this country who will pay a hundred pound a year. If you start a substack, I would buy it tomorrow. 100 pound a year. There'll be a thousand people will do that. That's a hundred thousand pound a year. Wow. And that can.
- [118:03]
B
That number only grows when you put it like that.
- [118:05]
A
You just need a thousand people who go, Tim's fucking brilliant. I want to support him. I want. I did a substack.
- [118:12]
B
I'm.
- [118:13]
A
I'm a halfway and I've got eight people and I don't even charge and I've had eight people choose to give me money. Cool.
- [118:20]
B
Right?
- [118:20]
A
And I'm not even charging. Like, I'm just like. They've just donated money to me and I'm literally a halfway. You feel like one of the smartest people I've interviewed. You can find a thousand true fans who could fund you to collect and amplify knowledge.
- [118:32]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You give me something to think about there, maybe. Yeah. That'd be fun. Right?
- [118:37]
A
Is there anything I've not asked you? You wish I had?
- [118:39]
B
I don't think so. We've covered a lot there. We went all the way from the dawn of man to the long term future of harnessing the power of the galaxy. We did a lot in two hours. We did tell people about the book, so. It's called Going Nuclear how the Atom Will Save the World. And it's really my case for a nuclear powered future. There's a whole thing about net zero in there. I kind of dismantle renewables, their limitations and their environmental footprint that we don't talk enough about. But aside from nuclear power, there are lots of other applications of nuclear science in there as well. For example, nuclear medicine, which is just absolutely amazing. That's using nuclear materials to cure and diagnose cancer, which.
- [119:16]
A
What?
- [119:17]
B
Yeah, it doesn't sound like it should be possible. So this works by inbrief making radioactive drugs that you inject into people's bodies, which sounds like the last thing you would want to do. But if you tweak these drugs and their chemistry just right, they actually latch onto cancers, okay? And so you turn cancers radioactive, and then when that drug gives up its nuclear energy by radioactively decaying, it fries the cancer on the smallest scale possible. What, one atom at a time. And this, this is already. You can already get this in for some isotopes on the nhs, this has been done for decades now. But there's this whole treasure trove of radioactive substances that we're in the early stages now of turning into new cures for cancer. And I am privileged enough in my day job, to use a word that's horribly overused. I'm privileged enough in my day job to actually work with some of the people that are doing this. They go to work every day and they're figuring out how to recycle nuclear waste to extract these rare, weird, unusual isotopes with the ultimate aim of turning them into cures for cancer. And the cool thing about that is it's not like chemotherapy, which is like carpet bombing the whole body. And you hope that you kill the cancer before you kill the patient. This nuclear medicine, if you tweak the molecule just right, it will target the cancer and then it's targeted, right? There's very little collateral damage to the rest of the body. And we're only just scratching the surface of what's possible here. And it gets tumours that you don't even know are there because it goes around the whole body and when it finds a tumor, it. It clicks in there and then boom. Radioactively decays and fries it. So there's a whole chapter on that. There's a whole chapter on nuclear forensics, solving crimes using nuclear science. There's a whole thing about atomic gardening. People are quite taken with that, actually. This is using radiation to genetically mutate crops, which is something that happens naturally because we're all living in radiation all the time. It's how evolution works. It's just naturally, natural selection because of genetic mutations. We can speed that process up using nuclear materials. And there are thousands of crops that are out there now and flowers and all sorts of weird plants that were bred using that method. And so there's a whole thing on atomic gardening. And at the end, there's a chapter on nuclear science in space exploration because, you know, the Curiosity rover on Mars, that's nuclear powered. The Cassini probe that was in orbit around Saturn, that's nuclear powered. The Voyager twins, which are the most distant objects humanity has ever made, okay, they're nearly it's like, it's like it'd take you almost a day to catch up with Voyager 1 if you were traveling at the speed of light. And it's still working. And it was launched 49 years ago and it's still working because it's powered by a lump of plutonium. And so there's all of that in there. It's like of all of the branches of science, nuclear science, and I guess I would say this, but it's why I'm a nuclear scientist. It's one of the coolest and one of the furthest reaching. So that's, that's, that's kind of why I wrote Going Nuclear.
- [122:08]
A
Tim, you're brilliant. I think people are going to love you. Will you come back on a few months?
- [122:11]
B
Can we do this? I would love that. Yeah. Anytime.
- [122:13]
A
This has been amazing. Go and get his book. And I think we need to find you a thousand true fans. I, I, yeah, I think I know we can do it. Anyway, thank you. Thank you so much.
- [122:24]
B
My pleasure. Thanks so much for the invitation and
- [122:26]
A
thank you, everyone, for listening. We will see you.