The Limitless Podcast

David:
[0:02] We're here with Isabel Boemeke. She is trying to make nuclear cool. Isabel, welcome to the show.

Isabelle:
[0:09] Thank you. So excited to be here. I would argue that I am making nuclear cool.

David:
[0:13] You are me. I think we think nuclear is pretty cool here on the podcast.

David:
[0:18] Maybe you could talk about, I'll classify it, I'll characterize it as a crusade. You're on a crusade to make nuclear cool. Why are you doing this?

Isabelle:
[0:26] Well, first of all, nuclear is actually really cool. So I don't need to make it cool. Because when I explain to people how a nuclear reactor works, you know, I say a lot of our energy producing facilities, they all rely on a turbine to create electricity. And nuclear is the same way. But instead of burning fossil fuels like coal or methane gas to heat water to make steam that spins a turbine, nuclear reactors are tapping into the energy that's trapped inside of the atom. That alone is pretty cool. Like, I don't have to do anything. But nuclear has had a pretty bad reputation for a few decades at this point, at least since the 60s and 70s. It was very tied up with the environmental movement in the 70s. There was a strong anti-nuclear movement in the United States. And I tell people that I think it's hard to grasp. But one example I like to give is there was an anti-nuclear series of concerts and protests in New York City in 79 called No Nukes. And hundreds of thousands of people showed up to these protests. It's hard to comprehend. I don't even think we have anything of that scale nowadays on a social level. So nuclear wasn't cool for three decades or so. Needs to be cool because it's an incredible technology that helps solve climate change. It also helps solve energy dependence problems, energy unreliability, and enables an incredible energy-rich future.

David:
[1:52] Okay, so there's been this history of like a bad rapport that nuclear has gotten.

David:
[1:57] Probably downstream of things like the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. I'll kind of like chalk those up as we understood nuclear energy as like a valid, pretty cool way to get energy. but we didn't really know how best to do that, like with safety mechanisms and the like. And then also at the same time, there's like the subjects of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war, which is like related to nuclear energy as a concept. But in terms of nuclear energy production and energy sustainability, I think what you're saying is the nuclear energy production side of this conversation kind of got the bad rap of the whole nuclear war arms race thing. And nuclear is pretty cool, independent of that.

Isabelle:
[2:33] Well, also another thing that's very hard for us to grasp is that nuclear fission, which is what happens in a nuclear reactor, also what happens in a nuclear bomb, was discovered in 1938 in Germany. So, yeah. You know, to paint the picture, we are, Hitler is taking over Europe. We are a year away from entering World War II. And this goddamn discovery happens in Germany. So of course, you know, the first instinct was Hitler is probably going to try to build a nuclear weapon based on this, on this, you know, the underlying science. So Einstein and another scientist wrote a letter to President Roosevelt at the time saying, get your shit together. Hitler is probably going to try to build a bomb. We have to do it first. And that kickstarts the Manhattan Project. And so the real introduction to the world of the word nuclear, maybe, but even of nuclear technologies in general, was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Isabelle:
[3:33] So I like to give the example of imagine if we were introduced to AI through murderers, murdering raging robots instead of chat UPT or friendly chatbots for that matter, we would have a completely different idea and image of the technology in our mind. So because of the timing of the discovery and the fact that we dropped the bombs in Japan and people saw those images of mushroom clouds and kids crying, running away from buildings, that really was seared in the public's mind. So it was very, very hard to disentangle nuclear electricity, which is what I'm advocating for, from nuclear weapons. And also for the first 15 years after the discovery of nuclear fission, only the military could build and operate reactors. This was for like research, submarines, or weapons productions as well. So again, it's just really tied with military, government, bad juju.

Isabelle:
[4:31] So then when you have, you know, the 70s and the environmental movement and all this, this emotions around, around government and the anti-establishment movement, this is also tied up with anti-Vietnam protests. So you have this, this feeling of just anti-government in general. And because nuclear was so tied with government at the time, it kind of got bundled up with, you know, nuclear weapons and the bad side of it all. So, you know, this was already in the early 70s. And then as you mentioned, then you have Through My Island, which was a small incident that happened in 79.

Isabelle:
[5:11] And people freaked out. The other really crazy thing about Through My Island is it happened 12 days after a thriller starring Jane Fonda as a journalist who was visiting a nuclear power plant and witnesses a nuclear accident at the power plant. And the power plant tries to do everything they can to cover it up.

Isabelle:
[5:31] So this thriller about a nuclear reactor accident comes out 12 days before Thremau Island. Yes, the timing of it all is just honestly quite fascinating. We can do a whole deep dive on even, you know, that side of it alone. So it's really interesting to look back and now having more context and having the vantage point of being, you know, on the other side of it all, it becomes very, very clear why nuclear was so demonized.

David:
[6:00] I think just to equip our listeners with the history of nuclear is a useful thing to do. Our listeners are pretty like future oriented. So I don't think it's going to take them much convincing that this was kind of just an unfortunate PR circumstance as a result to nuclear. I think it's going to be pretty easy to get our listeners to buy into nuclear. But of course, like tracing over the history to get them to explain to their friends and family that, no, this is also just an unfortunate PR situation for nuclear. I think that's going to be pretty easy.

Isabelle:
[6:31] Yeah, it's just like, it's interesting to look back and understand why that became the case.

David:
[6:37] Yeah. One thing I do want to do is really double down on something that you said, talking about just the mechanisms of energy production and why nuclear is unique. You talked about there's energy trapped in a molecule where, you know, other forms of energy comes from, you know, burning fossil fuels or, you know, capturing wind or spinning a termine through a dam. Why is the mechanism of nuclear energy just unique? Why is it uniquely cool?

Isabelle:
[7:03] It's uniquely cool because, first of all, we can't really see it, right? If you're burning fire, you can light up a log of wood on fire and you can see that very clearly. Same with coal and methane gas. With wind, you can actually see the turbine spinning. And nuclear, you're just you're just trusting that there are these atoms that are easy to split and that you can tap into that energy. And by the way, it's such dense energy as well. So everything about nuclear is just really counterintuitive in a way. You know, you would never expect to get that much energy from things that are as small as atoms, but it is the densest energy source. And I also think when you look in the history of energy consumption, right? You go all the way back to when we started, we tapped into fire. Humans have gone through everything. Fire, coal, methane gas. We also have, I mean, we've been using solar for a long time, even though not solar panels. Though I have to say, people are surprised to learn that the first solar panels

Isabelle:
[8:07] were invented in the late 1800s. I think a lot of people don't know that. Nuclear just seems like the obvious next evolution of energy. And I say that because it has the profile of fossil fuels, which is it provides loads of reliable energy.

Isabelle:
[8:24] However, it does so in a way that also reduces the impact on human health and the environment because nuclear obviously doesn't have carbon emissions that are associated with it or particulate matter as well, which is something else that fossil fuels generate. Whenever you burn fossil fuels, they release particulate matter into the air that go into your lungs and can cause a bunch of health problems. And like at least 4 million people die every single year from diseases that are caused by this type of air pollution. So better impact on human health. And because of the energy density that I just mentioned, it also has less of an impact in the environment because you need to mine way less. You need to build power plants way less often because they last for such a long time. So it's just like the obvious next step in energy where we're able to get all the positive benefits while reducing our impact.

Josh:
[9:14] It's funny, as I hear you mention energy density, visualizing something, and it's a gummy bear actually from one of your videos. And it was one of the first videos that I stumbled upon. And it started as something like this is a day in the life of what I eat. And I was like, this is kind of different for my feed. I normally don't see this stuff. And then it came to like, oh, yeah, here's some gummy bears. And this one gummy bear could actually power your house for a couple of months. And I was like, oh, wait, that's kind of cool. That's interesting. And that's a stark contrast to, I guess, what you're describing earlier, the way people were introduced to it, right? Like they saw these nuclear bombs destroying people's lives.

Josh:
[9:45] And now you're introducing it kind of in a way of like a Trojan horse. Can you explain that approach to us and how you wound up getting there?

Isabelle:
[9:51] I started making content about five years ago and I knew that I wanted to do something very different because I needed people to pay attention, right? If I'm trying to convince them of this technology, I couldn't just be wearing a t-shirt and explaining how nuclear works. I needed to do something that was completely different and unusual and that really caught people's attention. So I looked at the most successful type formats of content. So what I eat in a day, my workouts, routine, outfit of the day, and those kinds of things. And then I found ways to somehow talk about nuclear. So the one video you're talking about, I start with, I start saying it's about what I eat in a day. So I say I wake up, I drink coffee, work out, and then I eat something a little bit unusual. Gummy bears, roughly the size of uranium pellets, which are the fuel using nuclear power plants, which are the size of gummy bears. They're tiny. and I just said the nuclear is so counterintuitive so imagine that one single

Isabelle:
[10:50] Uranium pellet, roughly the size of a gummy bear, has as much energy as 2,000 pounds of coal or 149 gallons of oil. We can't understand that. It's just beyond our brain's capacity to even wrap our minds around it. But it is so energy dense. And, you know, that's how I've been successful at spreading my content to audiences that would otherwise never engage with that type of content. To your point, you were surprised that you came across that video, but it's, you know, because I was talking about technology, but there were a lot of people on the other side that never talk about technology, that are only interested in fashion or self-care or those kinds of things that came across the content and left it something at least.

Josh:
[11:38] Yeah, you had me in the first half, and I was surprised, but like pleasantly surprised. And it's interesting to hear the behind the scenes of how you kind of reverse engineer the algorithm to feed information to people to get it on their feeds? Because I mean, at Limitless, as people who are trying to grow a show, we frequently think about how to package the content in ways that make it interesting, make people want to engage with it. And it sounds like you took a very different approach than the traditional, which is, I mean, normally when we talk to people who are involved with nuclear, they are very stern, they're by the book, they're generally older, they have less enthusiasm, but you're kind of reverse engineering that you're like, I'm going to go where the people are, I'm going to create interesting content for them. And then once I have them hooked, well, I'm just going to kind of feed them these small little nuggets of information. And it seems to really effective. What have the effects been of that? Have you seen a noticeable change in, I guess, particularly the younger generation

Josh:
[12:22] getting interested in nuclear and getting excited about this in a way they haven't been?

Isabelle:
[12:25] It's so surprising because if you told me five years ago when I had this crazy idea of becoming a nuclear energy influencer, if you told me we would be here where we are today, where 61% of Americans support nuclear, I wouldn't have believed you. I had those ambitions, but I had no idea if it was going to work. I mean, And I was literally just putting out TikTok videos on social media, okay? And for a long time, I didn't have the data to back it up that I had seen a change. But I had anecdotal. So I would hear from people who, you know, changed their mind about nuclear because of my videos. And I've heard from a lot of people like that. Not thousands, but, you know, maybe hundreds. So I had all the stories of people who told me that, but now it's totally reflected on the data. So I...

Isabelle:
[13:12] In 2020, 49% of Americans supported nuclear, and now it's 61%, which is a huge shift for only five years. And it's almost the highest ever level of support for nuclear. But I don't only see it in polls, I see it as well in the people who are coming into the industry. I would say that five years ago, there were very, very few people trying to build nuclear reactors or even just trying to work generally in nuclear. And if they're lawyers, entrepreneurs, or so on. And now there's just this huge excitement. There are people starting nuclear companies every week, it seems like. And so I think that also tells you how cool it has become and how much excitement there is.

Josh:
[13:56] Okay, so we have model turned influencer telling everyone nuclear is cool, proving it to them, showing them why. Now nuclear is cool, 61% of the country loves it. We think it's great.

Josh:
[14:04] And David and myself are included. Now, the question I have to you is, why are things not powered by nuclear energy now? Because it seems like a lot more people are on board. Everyone's excited. And yet, I mean, just today, living in New York City, I got a message from my electricity provider saying, hey, can you please keep your air conditioner above 72 degrees because we're having energy problems. So where is this disconnect happening between the majority that want nuclear energy and then the actual result of reality, which is very absent of nuclear energy?

Isabelle:
[14:32] The majority that wants nuclear energy wants nuclear energy as of very recently. There was a period of about 30 years where the United States didn't build a single nuclear reactor. And this happened after Three Mile Island. You know, the accident happened, the incident happened, which, by the way, just to remind people, the safety systems worked perfectly well in the plant. And there was a partial meltdown of the fuel, but the radiation exposure to people around was tiny. So nobody got sick. Nobody died from it. So it was not an accident at the same level as Chernobyl, you know, but it created this fear. It created a lot of regulatory changes at the time, which did increase costs at the time. And just to give you a number, before TMI is what we call it, before TMI, there were 120 reactors ordered in the United States. After TMI, slowly, all of those orders were canceled. and we didn't build anything for 30 years, which is, I mean, it's basically the end of an industry, right?

Isabelle:
[15:36] So we lost, we lost all how we lost people who had expertise on how to build reactors. We lost people. Brilliant people who might have gone into the field fields. But I actually was talking to somebody recently in a podcast and he told me he wanted to study nuclear engineering, but he went to the nuclear engineering department and it was like cobwebs and it was like two guys really bored. There was no excitement. There was nobody there. And so just imagine the amount of brilliant people that went into different areas because there was no excitement. There was no perspective. If you were going to be a nuclear engineer, you were going to do some calculations or become a professor. And that was basically it. So, you know, that's not something that is easy to reverse those decades of brain drain and loss of expertise. So there will be a lag between now that we're seeing all this public excitement. And when we start building reactors, there is a leg. And then there's an even bigger leg until we actually can bring the cost down and make it competitive with other sources of energy. So people have to be patient on this one. And we can't, we can't lose the enthusiasm and excitement about it just because it might take a little while.

David:
[16:52] I think as a first step, getting society to think that nuclear is cool and, you know, give the nuclear thumbs up is of course a huge step. But then there are next steps after that, right? We need, as you alluded to, to elevate nuclear in our education

David:
[17:05] systems. We need to probably pass some regulations in government. Do you have a sort of like set of steps or guidance to give society in order to get us to this like nuclear enabled future that we so desperately need to get to?

Isabelle:
[17:19] Well, if society, if we're talking broadly, globally, you know, like China is doing a great job. I mean, China is building large reactors in about four years and they cost about $3-4 billion each, which is when you get to the megawatt hour...

David:
[17:34] That's a small number of money. It's a very small number.

Isabelle:
[17:37] They're building nuclear at a cost that's totally comparable to methane gas. So... Nuclear is crushing it there. China is crushing it. They're building fast. They're building cheaply. They're going to keep, they're actually keeping, they keep increasing the size of their reactors because the bigger you make them, the cheaper it gets to the electricity. So China is crushing it.

David:
[17:59] Now the West. Good for China. Like I'm happy for them. What should we do? Because I feel like America should not be the laggard here in nuclear energy production.

Isabelle:
[18:08] So that's, you know, that's my concern as well. I'm pointing to China just to say it's possible because there are people who will say it's impossible to build nuclear cheaply. That's one of the main arguments that people make because it's such a complicated technology. So it's never going to be cheap.

Isabelle:
[18:26] It's never going to be as cheap as fossil fuels. It's literally possible. It's happening right now. Now, what can the United States do? Quite frankly, the Trump administration is very pro-nuclear. They kept a lot of the incentives that were in the Inflation Reduction Act for nuclear. They kept those incentives. I think that the biggest thing right now is enabling nuclear projects to access very low interest rate capital. That's the most important thing. And that's what China does very, very well. The second most important thing is to pick a reactor design and stick to it and build it over and over and over again. That's historically, when you look at all the countries that have been successful at deploying nuclear, that's what they've done. They pick a reactor design and they built it over and over again.

David:
[19:17] Refined it, optimized it, perfected it. Probably how you get higher safety standards.

Isabelle:
[19:22] It's how you get everything. But mostly it's how you bring the time to build down because you just have so much expertise, right? You know, you asked earlier, why didn't we, why don't we have a bunch of nuclear plants? And in the United States, one of the reasons was every single utility picked a different reactor design. And they built maybe a couple, but they didn't build enough to transfer that knowledge and information to truly scale it and bring the cost down and the time to build down. A few companies are trying to solve that problem by becoming, you know, developer shops. But that was that was one of the main reasons why the United States wasn't so successful in deploying nuclear, even in even as early as the 70s, like mid 70s and so on.

David:
[20:08] So we have regulation. We have the government leaning into nuclear. That's the Trump administration. We have some companies that are spinning up nuclear nuclear production vehicles. We talked to Isaiah Taylor earlier on this podcast. You're advocating for just like making sure these companies have access to capital so we can really foster the economy around nuclear inside the United States. It seems like we have most of the things, maybe we could give more capital, but it really feels like just time is what's left here. Is that correct? Well, yeah.

Isabelle:
[20:37] So I would like to make a distinction. When I'm generally talking about why we failed with nuclear in the 70s and the United States in general, I'm talking about large reactors. And these are reactor designs that we've operated for decades. And like the name says, they're very big. They make a lot of electricity. So one of these reactors can make enough electricity for like a million people, sometimes even more. So those reactors, they already have licensed designs. They don't have to go through the process of the NRC to get necessarily a design license. They have to get licensed to build and operate, which is a different thing. Now, there's an entire wave of new companies that are trying to build to get brand new reactor designs. And Isaiah Taylor is one of these companies, but there are about 70 plus around the world right now that are trying to make nuclear cheaper. And their philosophy is you make it cheaper by making it smaller. And listen, I'm all for trying to solve the problem in any ways possible. What I caution people about is the following. In the 1950s, when we were doing cowboy nuclear in the United States, which meant they were just experimenting with a bunch of shit, they didn't have a ton of regulations.

Isabelle:
[21:51] The U.S. government built a ton of these, the same reactors that people were trying to bring back from the 50s. The U.S. government built a bunch of them. Gas-cooled reactors, molten salt reactors.

Isabelle:
[22:05] The army had a micro-portable reactor, okay, that they carried around with them. That was the whole goal. What happened in every single case was nuclear is a very technically challenging sector. It's very, very hard to maintain a chain reaction under certain conditions. And when you start adding very exotic fuels and coolants and all of that stuff, you start getting into like a chemical nightmare of having to add things to prevent leakage and explosions and this and that. And so what happened was every single one of these designs, they just proved to be too technically complicated, which made them less reliable, which also made them more expensive. So they were never able to compete with fossil fuels on costs. And the reason why we ended up having large reactors is because slowly, very, very slowly, the reactor providers would say, but if we make it bigger, we can make it cheaper. And so they slowly increased the size until we got to a size where they became cost competitive with fossil fuels. Because there are certain things about nuclear that are just intrinsic, right? Like containment domes, so you prevent the radiation from going into the environment. Security, and there are a ton of different things.

Isabelle:
[23:22] So I'm really excited and we can like nerd out about different types of reactors. And I'm so excited people are trying all of these. But I don't want us to think that that is the only path, because right now, not a single one of these companies has a functioning nuclear prototype. You know, Isaiah has a great prototype. It's not nuclear. It doesn't have the nuclear components, which is what makes it hard. You know, the challenging part is to make, is to get the radiation in there and see what the corrosion is going to be like and what your neutron leakage is going to be like and all these things. And so what do we do? I think in one of the executive orders, Trump talks about how we should allow all of these new advanced nuclear companies to go to federal land and build a prototype. And I think that's exactly right. They should be able to go to like Idaho National Labs or somewhere else where there's federal land and they should be able to build their prototype and test it out and see what works. And you know what? Probably 98% of these are going to fail. The reality is maybe one or two reactor designs are going to work. Just from a technical perspective, like, is it even going to work? You know, some of these reactors in the 50s, they had a 20% capacity factor, which is shittier than solar. So imagine if you're a data center company, you're buying one of these small reactors, and then turns out your capacity factor is 20%. They're going to say, like, why did I spend all this money? Should have bought solar panels.

Isabelle:
[24:50] And so let's go to the middle of nowhere. Let's test these reactors out, see whatever works from a technical perspective, and see what works just from like a financial perspective. And then we can focus on scaling them. But in the meantime, what we really need to do is to start building large reactors because they're licensed.

Isabelle:
[25:13] We know exactly how they work. They have like 94% capacity factor in the United States. And we have the expertise because we built two reactors in Georgia that ended up being extremely expensive and so on. But we have all of that workforce that now knows how to build that exact reactor design.

Josh:
[25:32] So can you describe the dynamic of these reactors? Because I'm hearing you talk about large reactors that we have and China's rolling them out and they're doing well. And then I'm hearing you talk about the nuclear projects that are here in the United States. And it sounds like we're very much still in the prototyping phase and we haven't quite figured out the correct form factor. But there is a large reactor. So is a large reactor different than, say, I mean, I'm sure it's different than a modular reactor. But is it safe to say we've figured out one type of reactor, but it's not optimal, so we're not going for it? And therefore, we're experimenting with new ones? or what is kind of like the balance there?

Isabelle:
[26:04] In the 50s and 60s, we figured out that light water reactors, and these are just reactors that use water as a coolant, meaning the thing that cools the reactor down, and also as a moderator, which is the thing that makes a chain reaction happen. So we use water for both of those things. Those are called light water reactors. Turns out that they just performed better than all the other reactor designs we experimented with.

Isabelle:
[26:32] Then we started making them bigger, slowly, slowly. And the bigger they got, the cheaper they became because you could produce more electricity in one facility. Obviously, that, you know, will bring your cost down or it will make you have more electricity to sell. Let's put it that way. And so it made more sense economically. The problem is that somewhere around the late 70s, because of a combination of changing regulations after the Three Mile Island accident, which, you know, just changed all the safety regulations. So imagine you are building a nuclear reactor at that point, and all of a sudden you have to do a hundred different things and you have to take stuff down and replace and redesign and so on. Obviously that added cost at the time. You also have, you know, very bad public perception. So you have no public support. So whenever there is one example of a nuclear power plant that was being built, I believe in the 80s, mid-80s in Long Island. And the plant ended up being totally built, but they never started operating because the anti-nuclear movement sued them so many times.

Josh:
[27:41] That's so rough.

Isabelle:
[27:42] Yeah, that they basically gave up on it. And so we have a technology that works, works really well, but for a variety of reasons, we became really bad at building it and it became super expensive. And so the way this small company that the upcoming companies are trying to solve the fact that it became too expensive is by saying, okay, the way to solve this is to make the reactors smaller because obviously smaller reactors cost less. But what we don't know is if the cost of electricity is going to be less, if the cost per unit of electricity. And if you're selling, you know, they're selling a product. Like if you're selling, if your product is electricity, the person who's buying electricity doesn't care if it's a small or big reactor. They just want to buy cheap electricity, right? And if your electricity is not going to be able to compete with solar, wind, fossil fuels, forget about it. You don't have a product. So that, you know, that's where my, I don't want to sound like a skeptic because I'm not, but I'm just trying to warn people to not put all of our eggs on the small reactor basket because we truly don't know. And people ask me this all the time, obviously, but they say, what's the company? What's the company that's going to succeed?

Josh:
[28:58] Of course.

Isabelle:
[28:59] Of course. And I'm going to tell you here, first time ever. No, I'm kidding. Oh, breaking news. Breaking news. No, but my honest response is there is no way of knowing. There is no way of knowing because they don't have, again, none of them have a prototype. We don't know if they're going to work.

David:
[29:16] Why don't they have a prototype? Is it just too early? They all kind of got started semi-recently. Why do they all not have a prototype?

Isabelle:
[29:22] Some of them started very recently. Others, you know, they start the design process. And then what I mentioned earlier, they start realizing, oh, if we add this thing, then this thing comes undone. And then we have to add this chemical here to, to, to. So it's just, I know a lot of people who have worked in the advanced nuclear space. And they all tell me the same thing. It was not because of regulations. it was because the technology is extremely complex and people really underestimate how complex it is. But of course, if you get rid of regulations, then you can build anything But do we want people to build any nuclear reactor with no regulations? I don't want that. And I'm like arguably the biggest pro-nuclear person in America.

David:
[30:07] As I understand nuclear, I kind of see this line that I think we've kind of danced around here on the podcast. There's the big nuclear reactors where we centralize everything. We centralize the economies of scale. We know how to do it. It's mostly a known science. And, you know, there's like a plant somewhere that's 30 miles away from me. And there's a wire between me and that plant and it hooks up to my home. That's like the big nuclear reactor. And then there's like the small nuclear form factor, which I think like maybe it goes to be as small as I have one in my house in some suburb somewhere and I buy one and that powers my house. And that's the nut that we haven't cracked yet as a technology, but it would be pretty cool if we did. And as you allude to, there's like 70 different startups all trying to crack

David:
[30:52] that nut of the small form factor in nuclear. Do you need to correct something? Am I on target here?

Isabelle:
[30:58] Well, because nuclear is so dense, the small is still huge. Small is still huge. So a small reactor, you're still talking about it powering a thousand homes. Okay, okay.

David:
[31:08] So rather than a city, we are powering towns.

Isabelle:
[31:11] And that's small. Or just like a neighborhood or something. And this is the microreactor. Okay, so the microreactor.

David:
[31:18] That's a microreactor is smelling like a small town.

Isabelle:
[31:21] Yes, totally. A microreactor is powering a thousand people. And then the small module reactors that were like a hundred megawatt or something like that, if you see this number being thrown around, then you're talking about like a hundred thousand people. Like you're talking about, it gets, it powers a lot of people. But again, it's one of the advantages of nuclear, right?

David:
[31:40] Yeah. One gummy bear powers a whole, you know, 10,000 people. Yeah.

Isabelle:
[31:44] Not that much, but yeah. And so we use nuclear batteries for space exploration. So like Voyager 1 or 2, I don't know if you are both familiar with that, but there are this like space probes that were sent off in the 70s and they're powered by nuclear batteries. They don't work in the same way as a nuclear reactor. It's just like the decay heat from plutonium in this case. But, you know, these things have been exploring the solar system. They're now in interstellar space, meaning they left the solar system and they're still sending data back to Earth. And this is powered by one like nuclear battery. So maybe something like that for homes. I don't know how that would work. But none of the companies that right now are trying to make nuclear smaller slash cheaper

Isabelle:
[32:27] Are trying to make it as small so you have it in your house. So you'd still need some sort of like grid infrastructure. Now, I think those, you know, there are cases for those technologies. Like one of them is remote locations, like, like Alaska, you know, some remote town in Alaska, where it doesn't make sense for them to have a huge reactor because they don't have a big population, but they still want to have energy and they don't want to deal with diesel generators anymore. That makes sense. Another case is industry. So like even the, you know, fossil fuel industry could buy small reactors that have very high temperature because that's the other thing. Some of these new reactor designs, they can operate at much higher temperatures. So they can do industrial processes like fertilizers and stuff like that, that our existing nuclear reactors can't really do because they don't get as hot. They don't get as high temperatures. So there are definitely cases for it. Now, are we going to see small nuclear reactors powering the grid? I don't think so. I think we're going to see the big nuclear reactors providing electricity for the grid. And I was just at the DIR podcast. Do you guys know what DIR is?

David:
[33:41] I don't think I know that one.

Isabelle:
[33:43] It's like distributed energy something. I forgot about the ER. But it's basically the whole idea of you can have your own power plant in your house, right? So you have solar panels and you have batteries and you're kind of off-grid, you're self-reliant and all of that stuff. So in a future where more people have solar panels in their homes and batteries, and that's basically it, you can't really have a turbine, though I guess you could, but unlikely. There's still room for grid because you have hospitals, you have commercial buildings, you have industrial facilities. So you still have this city infrastructure that needs a lot of, you have data centers, right? You need, you have things that are not going to come from the electricity from your house, from your solar panel. I think that would be like my ideal, if you told me like, what is your ideal grid look like? A lot of nuclear, basically like. A strong base, baseload, people hate this word, but baseload of nuclear. And then depending on the place, let's just say like a Texas, lots of solar in everybody's homes and they have batteries as well. And so that's kind of how the grid works. You know, you have nuclear, solar and batteries in other places, maybe nuclear, wind and batteries. We're always going to need batteries. So this is this is definitely a technology that will become more and more common

Isabelle:
[35:00] and needed in the future.

David:
[35:01] Isabel, your book is called Rad Future, which I believe is a double entendre. Rad being cool. Rad also being radiation. Yeah. Great name. Thanks. Can you say we fast forward 30 years and we are living in Isabel's rad future? We just teleport there. What's the most obvious thing that's different about that world to us, a world that's nuclear powered? And we've cracked the small form factor nuclear tech nut, and we've figured out how to deploy all these big reactors. Everything's nuclear. How is life different? How is the world different in that world?

Isabelle:
[35:38] Well, first of all, no air pollution, no smog. If we electrified transportation so there are no cars that are running around burning gas and industry and so on, but better air quality. We are also not adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. So at least slowing down climate change. We're probably going to have to build some direct air capture machines to capture the carbon from the atmosphere. So that as well, you would see some direct air capture machines spinning and sucking the carbon from the air. Hopefully no power lines. I think they're so ugly. I would love to live in a world with no power lines. But truly, it's just a world where people are healthier because, you know, we're not dealing with the effects of burning fossil fuels just to make electricity and where electricity also makes its way everywhere. And so you have different cities all over the world, you know, at least having the option of living a high energy life. There are 600 million people in the world right now that don't have access to electricity. How crazy is that? You know, how do they cook their food? How do they wash their clothes? They have to like go somewhere and hand wash their clothes.

David:
[36:52] Right. They're the energy.

Isabelle:
[36:54] The energy is coming from their muscles, right? That's like literally the history of energy is like human muscles and then animal muscles, maybe like horses and stuff. So they are the ones that are burning. And like, I don't know, I grew up hand washing clothes and it was a lot of work and very boring. I don't wish that for anybody. But it's also a future of freedom where, you know, I can totally see this future where people just get fed up with technology and they don't want to be a part of this like ultra virtual AI world and they just go be homesteaders somewhere. And like the only technology interaction they have is with a little drone that helps them grow their food and stuff. I would love to see technology more integrated into human lives in a way that feels like it's giving humans the power to choose what they do with their lives. And no power lines again, because I really want those to go.

Josh:
[37:52] We need the aesthetic too. That's just as important, right?

Isabelle:
[37:56] It's, yes.

Josh:
[37:56] It matters.

Isabelle:
[37:57] It counts. I'm about to drop the aesthetic on August 12th.

Josh:
[38:00] Oh, okay. Coming soon. One of the things I want to talk to you about actually

Josh:
[38:04] is the dynamic between nuclear and solar. And one thing that you mentioned that I like a lot, because a lot of nuclear people are like, no, nuclear can power everything. But the reality is solar is pretty good at a lot of things too. And creating these modular kind of ecosystems of power throughout the country matters. The question to you is, are we going to have enough energy to supply everything we need for the next couple of years? Because you were mentioning earlier about China. China is building nuclear energy. I think they're projected to have eight terawatts of energy by the end of the decade, some outrageously high number. I know we're producing about one terawatt. I learned recently we're not even using nearly half of it because it gets lost throughout the grid. We don't have batteries to store it properly. We're not really using it efficiently. So is nuclear a possible solution to solving our growing energy needs? And when I'm asking you this, it's kind of through the lens of, we spend a lot of time on the show talking about AI data centers and how we're going to power them, how much energy they use. In addition to just our exceeding energy requests from electric cars and industry and whatever it may be, is nuclear enough to support this growth? And can we move fast enough?

Isabelle:
[39:07] So first of all, let's go back to the idea that you said that some people say everything should be powered by nuclear. That's such an arbitrary goal in the same way that we have to have everything, everything powered by renewables only is an arbitrary goal. Like why, why are we limiting ourselves to only nuclear, right? It doesn't make sense to me. I think nuclear is great for a lot of different places, but I would like to bring energy, like the way we think about energy in the way we think about like locally grown food in that in Texas, it makes a lot of sense to have solar panels. So why not? Every time I fly to LA and I see all of those giant warehouses and they're like naked roofs, I'm thinking to myself, why is this not covered in solar panels? It's so stupid. The sun is literally hitting there. You could be generating electricity. And these are warehouses that probably, you know, have people working during the day.

Isabelle:
[39:59] Same in places where you have lots of empty, cheap land with great solar potential. Let's go, you know, let's go solar really big on those places. Wind makes sense in a lot of other places in Texas as well. Texas like surprisingly makes sense for both wind and solar. And by the way, a lot of people are shocked to learn that Texas has a much, much higher percentage of renewables than California. Because obviously California talks this big game when it comes to clean energy, but Texas has a lot more renewable energy. I think it's really dumb to limit ourselves to one energy source only or one, you know, category of energy only.

Isabelle:
[40:38] Now, in the same way that I think it's dumb to like to be Germany and try to go all solar when you don't have a lot of sun there just for just because you're anti-nuclear. And your other question is, can we even power all of this energy demand? And by the way, when we look at projections of energy demand for the next 10, 15 years, I don't believe any of them. Mainly because think about 15 years ago, we wouldn't have predicted the AI era right now and the amount of energy that it would need. Even five years ago. Even five years ago, right. We could not have predicted that. And before then, it was like we couldn't have predicted cryptocurrency mining. You know, didn't know how much that was going to use. Before that, even like iPhones, we didn't know how much we were going to rely on these computers. And so, and now with AI, because it can also unlock all of these amazing technologies that we can't like, our brains can't even think of yet.

Isabelle:
[41:39] I have no idea what our energy demand is going to look like in five years, in 10 years. So the only thing we can do is try to prepare for that future and say, OK, we're definitely not going to use less. We're only going to use more. So how can we grow this in a way that's not destroying, you know, lives and the environment? And nuclear is definitely a part of it. But, you know, if we're being very honest, we're not there yet. We cannot build nuclear reactors in the next five years. It's going to take a little while. Even methane gas turbines are delayed now. I mean, you can't really buy one until the 2030s or maybe like 28, 29, right? So even that is hard. So I think it's really been a mistake by the Trump administration to take all the subsidies and credits for solar and wind and to go so hard against it. Because realistically, those are the energy sources that we can deploy right now. The other really cool thing that we can do is we can go to our existing nuclear reactors. So like we have 92 reactors. We can go to a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them. And we can do something called operating, which is we can get 20% more electricity

Isabelle:
[42:56] from our existing nuclear reactors. And so we can get 5 to 10 gigawatts in the next five years, which is, you know, that for sure we can do. We have the technology. We have done it before.

Isabelle:
[43:08] That to me is the most obvious next step in nuclear. It's just making the stuff we have more efficient so we can get more electricity into the grid in the next five to 10 years. And then we're probably going to have some of the large reactors that hopefully we're going to start building in the next two years or so. But who knows, they might take like seven to 10 years. And in the meantime, we're going to have all of these small companies that are trying to prove that their reactor works and that they'll have a viable product. Because you must have seen this. There are a lot of data center companies that have placed PPAs, power purchase agreements. And some people mistake that. They think, oh, it means that they're like building the plant. No, what that means is that they're telling the nuclear company, if you build a reactor and you are able to sell me electricity, I will buy that electricity at this price. And they're paying a little bit above but they're not going to pay you know an exorbitant amount and so I feel like the next three to seven years is going to be very interesting. We're going to see a lot of companies just going under, giving up. Some of them might cut through. And truly, it's just it's really exciting, again, because we also don't know what's going to happen. Like, we truly don't know.

David:
[44:25] You talked about the demand curve for energy and how we can't really predict what the future energy demand might be because we have new technologies coming online that seem to require more energy. And that makes a specific order of operations when it comes to talking about energy production and consumption. It's there's this amount of energy that needs to be consumed by society. Therefore, we better be producing at least that much energy or else we're going to have supply shortages. There's an order of operations there where like we have a demand and then let's create the supply. But I also want to flip that around as well, because say we double, triple down on nuclear and all of a sudden the energy supply that we have is actually the thing in the lead. The lead, the cart is leading the horse here. And all of a sudden we are unconstrained, unbridled in our ability to consume electricity. Josh and I, we both live in New York and whenever I go down to the L train, there's plastered on the wall in these little tiles. It's built into like the

David:
[45:27] stairwell going down into the L train. It says, do your part, conserve.

David:
[45:33] And it's like this very like socialist vibe of like, hey, everyone, like you, we all have to chip in and conserve energy a little bit. And like Josh alluded to, like we have like Con Ed, which is like, oh, there's a heat wave coming in. Everyone turn off your AC. And my opinion is like, no, no, you go make more energy, go make more. And so we can all use it and cool our homes. And so I want to kind of just like to give you the opportunity to kind of flip that around on us about like, maybe, what if, what does that world look like when the supply of electricity, the supply of energy is unbounded? What does that create? What are the second and third order consequences of that? Why is that good?

Isabelle:
[46:14] Some people, they argue that we don't have, you know, we don't have to produce that much more electricity, that things are going to be more efficient and so on. One thing that we know from history is that the more access we have to electricity and the cheaper electricity is, the more ways we find to use that electricity. That's just, you know, historically correct. And so to your point, if we produce abundant, cheap electricity, people, humans are going to find ways to use it. And just to touch back on the whole like conserve energy vibe that you're telling me about, this is very consistent in the environmental movement. This is what's called degrowth. And the whole idea behind there is that it's unsustainable. Our planet, we're using too many resources. And the only way to fix the climate crisis and all these other environmental crisis is to drastically reduce the amount of energy that we use, which I think is completely the wrong way to think about human civilization, first of all.

Isabelle:
[47:17] I was talking to Michael Shermer. I don't know if you guys know who that is. He has this magazine called Skeptic. And he interviewed the guy who wrote the Population Bomb book back in the 70s. And this guy's prediction was that like billions of people were going to die from starvation in the 80s or 90s. And of course, all of those predictions turned out to be wrong. He recently wrote another book saying how he was wrong. And now he predicts that the population is going to peak in 2050 at about 10 billion, and then it's going to rapidly start declining. And so all of these ideas around conserving and using less, they all come from this idea that we have too many people using too many resources.

Isabelle:
[48:02] And, you know, we're going to destroy the world and ourselves. Now, I don't want to be like casual about it because I do. It does bother me that if you drink tap water in New York City, you're basically drinking antidepressants and and birth control and like microplastics and lead, maybe like I don't, you know, I care about the environment. I care about having clean water. I care about having clean air. I care about nature being pristine. So I don't want to turn the world into like a dumpster fire. But, you know, we have better ways of making electricity. We don't have to burn freaking dinosaur bones anymore. We can build a ton of nuclear reactors and solar panels and wind turbines and geothermal wells and, you know...

Isabelle:
[48:49] We have a couple more hydropower dams and we can create, this is a whole thesis of my book, right? We can create this future of radical abundance that will just make people's lives better in a way that reduces the impact on the environment. And like we shouldn't be having to put our air conditioning to 73 in New York City in the summer. This is a first world country for God's sake. And by the way, you know, everyone in the world should have access to air conditioning. I grew up without air conditioning. It sucks. It sucks.

Josh:
[49:20] We need more energy. And it's clear now. We have the direction. We know what we need. We need more energy. We know how to do it. It's just a matter of, I guess, applying more resources, putting more time, putting more knowledge and effort into getting it. So let's say that we do get here. We have an abundance of nuclear reactors. We have a ton of energy. Everything is good. We have this rad future. I'm curious if there's any more utility from this fission technology, from harnessing it outside of just the grid. What other cool things happen downstream of this technology? Is there anything or is it just a downstream effect of more electricity equals more abundance everywhere?

Isabelle:
[49:52] Well, there's also the heat. So because nuclear reactors, the primary output is heat. And then that heat is converted into steam.

Isabelle:
[50:02] That heat creates steam, which then is converted into electricity. But you can also have heat, like I said, for like making paper and fertilizers, a bunch of industrial processes that just need very, very high temperatures. So you can have both sides, but that's only like in the nuclear energy, electricity part. Nuclear in general as a technology has been used for, you know, medicine. So like radiation therapy, radiation diagnostics. I don't know, like most people have done those exams or you take the contrast and they do a scan on your body. That's radiation diagnostics. So there's a lot of cool stuff as well in agriculture, where they radiate certain foods to keep some invasive species from eating them. So there's lots of interesting applications of nuclear technologies in general. But I do think that the, oh, also nuclear in space, you know, the nuclear batteries that we talked about. Again, nuclear reactors can be used on the moon and Mars. In Mars, it actually doesn't make a lot of sense to have solar panels. Very dusty. There's actually this really tragic story where NASA sent a rover to Mars and it was powered by solar panels. And a couple of months or maybe a year later,

Isabelle:
[51:20] There was a dust storm and the solar panels got covered and the rover just died because the solar panels...

Josh:
[51:27] That's a tough way to go out.

Isabelle:
[51:28] I know, but it's also like you couldn't have predicted that. If there's one thing we know about Mars is that there are dust storms, you know?

Isabelle:
[51:37] So solar panels for Mars don't make a lot of sense, but like a nuclear reactor on Mars would be really cool. Have you watched For All Mankind? Oh, no.

Josh:
[51:47] Yeah, that sci-fi TV show.

Isabelle:
[51:49] Yes, it's so good.

David:
[51:50] Yeah.

Josh:
[51:51] Does this need to be on the watch list?

Isabelle:
[51:53] Well, it's one of my favorite shows. I don't know.

David:
[51:55] David doesn't seem to agree. I think I watched seasons one and two like a number of years ago.

Isabelle:
[51:59] Okay. You should definitely watch it. It's very cool. They have a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Josh:
[52:03] Oh, okay. Is that why you bring this up? So we're seeing what a use case would look like if it was actually on the moon.

Isabelle:
[52:07] Yeah, exactly. You'd see it in that TV show. It's very cool.

David:
[52:10] So if we are going to become an interplanetary species, what you're saying is we're going to need to take nuclear reactors to future planets?

Isabelle:
[52:19] Well, at least to the moon and Mars. Probably future planets because there's also a payload question, right? Nuclear reactors are so small, so you can bring one reactor to power the entire moon bays versus having to bring a shit ton of solar panels and batteries. So it's a lot smaller. You need less resources. So it definitely makes a lot of sense. And also, this is totally unscientific, and it's purely based on vibes. But let's just quick, let's do this quick experiment. Let's say you're in New York City tonight, hanging out on your balcony, and an alien spacecraft comes and takes you with them. You know that they're using nuclear, right?

David:
[53:01] Do we?

Isabelle:
[53:02] Yeah, for sure. Like, you wouldn't be like, oh, you're using wind turbines? Yeah. They're definitely not burning coal. Yeah, I'm following. They're definitely not burning coal. I just feel like nuclear is such a futuristic technology.

David:
[53:16] There's no other possible form of energy production that they could be using?

Isabelle:
[53:22] They could. It could be like nuclear fusion. What is the thing that UFO people love to talk about, like antimatter or something like that? Oh, yeah, the warp drives. Those things? No, it's like antimatter. Antimatter? Yeah.

David:
[53:33] I don't know anything about antimatter.

Isabelle:
[53:35] I don't know anything either, but I always hear about that, and I'm like, that sounds cool.

David:
[53:39] I feel like that's on the edge of just like most of society doesn't know what antimatter is. Therefore, the script writers can just say that it produces infinite energy. You can use the word a lot, yeah. It's like, oh, antimatter engines. Yeah.

Isabelle:
[53:51] Yeah, exactly.

David:
[53:52] But a nuclear engine does sound very real.

Isabelle:
[53:56] Right. You know that aliens are using nuclear thermal propulsion, right? Like, that's obvious. But that's not a reason why we shouldn't.

David:
[54:03] Yeah, the scientific rigor on this section of the podcast isn't at its height. Yeah, but it's fun to fantasize.

Josh:
[54:09] Right? Like I frequently think about my, I love technology devices and mobile devices and my phone being the number one. And the two constraints that drive me crazy with every phone I've ever had is the connectivity and the battery life. And we've actually solved one of those problems where SpaceX has Starlink, Starlink has direct to cell communication, they use cool lasers. I now have service everywhere I go. So now one of my two problems is actually solved. And the last one is battery life. I want a device that will last forever. And when I think about even my car, which has a battery in it, I want a battery that can just take me forever. And being able to consolidate energy into a gummy bear, to put a gummy bear in the back of my phone and to have a phone that never dies, that seems cool. That's like a future I can get excited about. So I'm sure there's tons more opportunities for really cool nuclear tech.

Isabelle:
[54:54] And like, again, we can't even dream of them yet, right? Like we couldn't dream of Starlink three years ago. I was just, I just took a flight and this bothers me so much because the airline is like, we have Wi-Fi on board. And then, of course, the Wi-Fi is horrific. It only works like one minute at a time and then it drops. And I was thinking, why don't they have Starlink? Then it would work, you know, beautifully. I wouldn't have to be dealing with this. And it's so crazy how quickly we get used to these luxuries, right? And like, I don't even know where, to your point, I don't even know what the world could look like in 50 years. But I will tell you what I don't want. Have you watched The Wally?

Josh:
[55:38] That one I watched.

David:
[55:39] Yeah.

Isabelle:
[55:40] So, you know, when the humans are like in the spaceship and they're all just consuming all day long, they're like in little electric scooters and just like. Yeah. That I don't want. Yeah, but that's

David:
[55:51] Mostly an adjacent conversation, right? That was a commentary on like hyper capitalism and.

Isabelle:
[55:56] Hyper consumerism.

David:
[55:57] Hyper consumerism. Yeah.

Isabelle:
[55:59] Which, you know, is one of the one of the possible outcomes.

David:
[56:04] Right. If we have free energy, we can consume it more. Yeah.

Isabelle:
[56:07] And it's just like pure consumerism without any like it's not actually improving anybody's lives. As a matter of fact, it's making people's lives worse.

David:
[56:15] I think you could probably argue across all economic philosophy here,

David:
[56:20] where if you have free energy, that's very communist, too. Everything is free. And so like technology unlocks something that is a can be truly a public good for everyone in the earth across the earth to access free for free. And so I think, like, if you're a communist or a capitalist or a socialist, whatever, free energy just works for you across all economic philosophies.

Isabelle:
[56:42] Oh, yeah. Well, free energy, I don't even think there is such a thing, right? We're talking about maybe cheap energy.

David:
[56:48] Right, very cheap energy.

Isabelle:
[56:50] Yeah, very cheap energy. Then, yes, I think another concern that people do have, and I don't know if you hear this because your circles are slightly different than mine. Like, I walk so much in the environmental circuits where people are more concerned with the environment. But one thing that kept coming up a bunch was people being concerned that we're building nuclear to power data centers instead of powering the grid. And there is this fear that we're just, you know, we're using all this new energy supply to, That is good, but we're using it all for technology only instead of, again, like humans.

David:
[57:28] I think our listeners are probably like, hell yeah, we are.

Isabelle:
[57:31] Yeah, your listeners are like,

David:
[57:34] Quick. Sick, yeah. Give us the data center power. I think our listeners understand that free energy goes into Sam Altman's data center, which powers our queries into ChatGPT, which is democratizing intelligence. And so again, going back into the conversation of like economic philosophy, like, okay, sick, in the future, not only do we have free energy, but we also have free access to intelligence. ChatGPT 5, the most recent model is free.

Isabelle:
[57:57] And so- I haven't even used it yet. Is it sick?

David:
[58:00] Yeah, I mean, I think it's a modest upgrade from ChatGPT 4, just like the last Apple M4 MacBook. Oh, it's becoming the iPhone.

Josh:
[58:08] Yeah, it is. Marginal increase.

Isabelle:
[58:10] It's like 2% better.

David:
[58:11] Yeah. And like, it's probably out of scope of this particular podcast, but the trend that we're seeing, again, with Isabelle's rad future, we have very cheap energy. With Sam Altman's AI future, we have very cheap intelligence. And so I think our listeners were like, oh yeah, like everything's just going to power the data centers later. And we, hell yeah, it is. Let's go. Nice. Yeah.

Isabelle:
[58:33] So like you guys are very like, yes, AI future.

David:
[58:36] Let's go. We're definitely firmly on the accelerationism side of things.

Isabelle:
[58:40] Yeah. I hope we don't become WALL-E people. I just don't want people to become like super consumerists in that sense. But I do think, by the way, there is like a huge sect of even accelerationists, because I'm kind of in between. Like, obviously, I'm super pro-nuclear and I see the benefits and I want to live in an energy abundant society. But I also, especially as I studied the history of nuclear, I really appreciate what the anti-nuclear movement did, especially when it came to weapons proliferation. And I think we don't have context for that because we didn't live through it. But like we would be in a very shitty world if every country on earth had access to nuclear weapons.

Isabelle:
[59:20] So I'm kind of in between, you know, I'm like, guardrails are good, you guys. Like, let's go. But also let's think about the worst case scenario here for a second. And what I think is fascinating, and I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, is I think the most interesting future for all of us is a future where I can grow my garden with a little robot that reads the health of my soil. And I have a little monitor that like tracks the vitamins in my body and tells me what I need and I can buy the stuff that's going to be delivered to my house. But, you know, I'm having a different experience than maybe somebody who is a full WALL-E type of person just like playing VR video games and just like not even living in their body, right? Like maybe that's a rad future that we want is like this full spectrum of humanity being able to experience the world in that way.

David:
[1:00:15] Yeah.

Isabelle:
[1:00:16] While not drinking hormonal birth control through their water.

David:
[1:00:20] I definitely think that there is a going to be, this is something I've tumbled around in my head a lot recently, actually. There's going to be a societal trend shift away from technology, not going full Luddite, still allowing technology to improve their lives, you know, using an iPhone, like all these kinds of sorts of things. But also at the same time, kind of becoming like gold, gold, gilded age, like minimalist. And so they go to work, they're on their laptop, their laptop jockey. Me and Josh might be these types of people. But then also when 6 p.m. Shuts down, we put our phones on airplane mode. We go to the bar with some friends and, you know, we don't check the Internet for Friday until Sunday. And then we open up all the technology on Monday once again. And I'm seeing a lot of Zoomers start to tap into this where they understand that technology is right in your brain. And I think as technology does get better and better and better, it can enable you to kind of choose your own adventure. So there will be people who will step into the Ready Player One and they will be hooked into the metaverse. And then there will be others who are like, you know what, I'm going to go to the cabin in the woods for the weekend and shut everything down. I'm definitely seeing a trend towards the people who are kind of like technology. I don't know what to call it, but like they lean in, they use technology, but they also shut it down as like a recurring habit that they make.

Isabelle:
[1:01:43] Yeah, it's almost a, you know, it's this idea of technology enabling human life instead of just being a thing that you need at all times and all, you know. I mean, social media is bad. Like being on social media all day long, your brain does turn into mush, you know, we know that already. Even, I mean, here's the crazy thing about AI. I was speaking in a room, you know, with a lot of environmentalists as well. And all of them are going to tell you, AI uses too much energy and the water to cool it down and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I asked a question. I said, how many of you here use AI? And literally every single one of them raised their hand. And so it's like, forget about it. We are way past the, like, are we going to adopt AI? It's already adopted.

Isabelle:
[1:02:28] And like we but we might have to go through a process as we did with social media where we're like okay how much is too much AI like but I have to say like it's been I feel so lucky that I got to like do the final push of my book and like all the promo and everything in the age of AI because I was able to be so much more productive and as a creative person having access to AI tools, it's completely game-changing. And I can't even imagine like entrepreneurial people. You know, when I started my first business, it was a cosmetics company and I didn't know anything. I was like, okay, you go on Google and maybe you search how to make cosmetics, but then you have to go through a bunch of different pages and like skip through the trash. And I just feel like nowadays, if you have an entrepreneurial mind, literally go on an LLM and ask, how do I start a business? And it gives you a full like business plan and what to do next. So I think it's truly going to enable very creative. What is it? High agency people.

David:
[1:03:31] Yes. Yeah. Yes. And when we have free electricity, we can support those high

David:
[1:03:36] agency people with even more agency. Isabel, your book is called Rad Future. Tell us about your book. Where can people get it? And anything else you want to tell our listeners about you and your career and what you do?

Isabelle:
[1:03:48] Well, that's a big question, but I will do a short answer.

David:
[1:03:51] Take your time if you want, yeah.

Isabelle:
[1:03:52] No, I think it's good. I spent the last three years writing Rad Future. I have to say it was pretty crazy because the last year alone, everything changed in nuclear. So I had to keep coming back and doing edits and, you know, just adding all the new information that came out because the public perception has shifted so dramatically. But the book is honestly the book I hoped I had when I started learning about nuclear because textbooks are pretty boring and I wanted something that was accessible, easy, but substantial, had the good data in it. And that's what Rad Future is. I also have to say the cover looks pretty sick. The illustrations in it are very cool because they obviously have all the facts, but they don't feel like super intimidating. So it's just the most accessible book about nuclear for anyone who's interested in how it works, why we need it, why we came to hate it, and or how to solve climate change. And it's out on August 12th. And you can buy it pretty much anywhere. Bookstores, Amazon.

David:
[1:04:52] We will get a link to your book in the show notes. Isabel, thank you so much for coming on Limitless.

Isabelle:
[1:04:56] Thank you.