#1992 - Oliver Stone
2023-05-30 01:49:13
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Yeah, I have been fascinated by this subject for a long time, and I'm very, very happy that you made this documentary. And it's a very good documentary, by the way. Thank you for making it. And thank you for highlighting this very, very important issue. that seems to have been really confused.
And I'm really glad how you covered it in this documentary about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima. We have these ideas in our mind about the dangers of nuclear power. And I love the analogy that you made in the film about how driving a car is not scary, but it's dangerous. Flying in a plane feels scary, but it's far safer.
Yeah.
And this is a great analogy to nuclear power. When you went over the data, when you talked about the amount of deaths from coal every year, when you talk about the amount of deaths overall ever from nuclear, it's stunning. It is. It's stunning. And then, when you cut to, in the documentary, you showed the anti-nuclear movement that happened after Three Mile Island.
Yeah.
And how crazy it was. There's all these stars and celebrities, and they're doing concerts. We've got to stop nuclear power, and what a mess.
That happens when a fad becomes fashionable. Yeah. It was a very successful movement. You're talking about the negatives here. Mm-hmm.
And the accidents.
We cover all that in the film, which is called Nuclear Now. And the idea that was behind it was because I really was like you. I went along with those things in the 70s and the 80s because I didn't know better. I wasn't educated. I really wanted to know what is nuclear power.
I wanted to go back to the source. And you've got to go back to the beginning. And you've got to go back to Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and World War II and how it got developed. This nuclear energy is a beautiful, incredible, almost a miracle that was given to us. We have an Earth.
It's in the Earth, the uranium. It's everywhere, the planet, the Earth, the sun. And we, in a sense, we took it like Prometheus and we kind of misinterpreted it, misused it, which is kind of normal given what we do with natural things. World War II was happening, just as the nuclear fission was being understood. And that made the bomb.
They made the bomb with it because there was a war on. They rushed it and they did an amazing job in Los Alamos. And they got it and they were successful. But, as you know, it was misunderstood at that point that nuclear energy was not a nuclear bomb. On the contrary, a bomb is very difficult to build.
And it takes years. sometimes. It takes scientists and they have to enrich the plutonium and they have to work at it. There's all configurations in the bomb that don't exist in nuclear energy. So when people see a nuclear energy plant, they subconsciously cross it with both war and they cross it with horror films that they've seen in the 1950s, with radioactivity and monsters that come out of that.
You know, the spider bites the man and he becomes Spider-Man. Hulk. It's incredible the stuff that happens. And Hollywood has done no favors to it. It's continued for years and years and years.
And then, of course, you had Three Mile Island. The film was coming out at the same time, China Syndrome, with Jane Fonda. It was a good film. I enjoyed it. We all enjoyed it.
But it really was hysterical and alarmist. Nothing happened at Three Mile Island except the reactor did melt down. But nobody got hurt because the containment structure worked to keep it in. So there was no release of radiation.
And they continued on. Silkwood was another one. And then, if you remember, not too long ago, there was the HBO thing, Chernobyl.
Yeah.
Which was a complete fictionalization of what happened at Chernobyl. So we went to Russia and we talked to the scientists there. And we wanted to know what happened at Chernobyl. And we find out that it's in the film. And the same thing is true for Fukushima, which is unbelievable.
Because when you go to the bottom of it, I was astounded to find out that nobody died there from radiation. Not one Japanese. They checked the whole thing out. And it's been done to death. But you hear about 15,000, 20,000 people died from the tsunami.
And the earthquake, which was the biggest earthquake Japan ever had. I mean, really, we show the earthquake. We show the tsunami. The wave was 100 feet tall. There was a badly built wall.
The wall was not a seawall that could hold. And the generators were flooded beneath the water.
And these were also not state of the art. That's right. What they can do now in terms of these power plants.
No, everything gets better. But even those nuclear reactors built 60, 70 years ago are still functioning. They're legacy reactors. They do work. And we mustn't dismiss them.
Yeah, it gets better. Technology gets better. As in any business. There's another generation. It's better.
Hopefully better.
The point was that they could avoid what happened in Fukushima today.
Fukushima was, if you look at it closely, Japan had built 20, some reactors at that point. And this one is the only one. The others were exposed to the same earthquake and the same kind of tsunami. Several of them were on that same coastline. But this particular one, this plant, was the only one that was shaken up.
And even then, all the radiation that was released. There was a hydrogen explosion.
That radiation released in the air. You heard about it. It was supposed to be another terrible. Well, we have shots in the film showing they're taking tests on all the Japanese citizens. And nobody can.
It's low level, what they call low level radiation, which is we can sustain it. We have DNA in our body that fixes, repairs our body as each day goes by.
But it's also, you point out very well in the film, that there's a lot of radiation that you don't even take into consideration, that you encounter constantly. We have this idea of radiation as being a net negative. It's a terrible thing. But it's just a thing. You get it from being outside.
You get it from rocks. You get it from all sorts of things.
There's radiation in this room. You get radiation from eating a banana.
I think what you said is so, it's so true that films and comic books are fictions of radiation. That's part of the problem.
Yeah, it started early in the 50s.
It's a giant problem.
Comic books and all that.
It plays to the worst aspects of human nature, which is we just love to get terrified about headlines, so we don't read into the devil of the details.
Exactly. That's what was confusing to me. Really, we're miseducated. And there is still a bias against nuclear, if you mention it to anybody.
Yeah, it's scary instantly.
Yeah, but the point is we can live with it. And we have to because we're facing a very difficult situation, a cliff that we're going to go over. And it seems that no one's really getting it. So that's why I felt like the film, I wanted to know. I need to educate myself.
So in doing the film, I think I was able to bring out these things. You talk about what is wrong with nuclear energy. It can work. It is a miracle. We should use it.
And we should use it abundantly. The Chinese and the Russians are way ahead of us. They built it and they built it with government backing, not like the US, where we kind of back it, but we don't really back it. So, as a result, well, China is really cutting out now, because they have about 70 reactors, approximately 70 reactors. Yeah, about 74..
Anyway, they're building. And I've heard, I can't, I don't remember the source, but I did hear that they're putting another $140 billion into this thing, which means that they're going to build 150, some reactors over the next, by 2038.. That is a serious investment. Serious investment. Wow.
That's a serious investment that would take a long time for us to catch up to.
Oh, it's not about competing.
Right, but if we wanted to do what they're doing right now, even if it's not competing, just to be current.
Yeah.
So they're the leader right now.
Well, no, we're the biggest country in the world. We still have 90, some reactors online.
So China's climate goals hinge on a $440 billion nuclear buildout. That's interesting. So we still have more, even with all the negative stereotypes about nuclear reactors, planning at least 150 new reactors in the next 15 years. More than the rest of the world has built in the past 35..
That's correct. Wow. I'm surprised you remember.
No, it just says it right there in the article. Jamie just had it pulled up.
China has. Wow, you've got a system worked out.
Jamie's the wizard. Look at him over there.
He's the best. He doesn't know what this film is about.
This article that you just pulled up, Jamie, this is from Bloomberg.
Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, you see, you got the source right away.
Yeah, and this is from 2021.. This whole thing is exactly how you lay it out in the film. It's almost like we have to cure ourselves of these misconceptions, and if we don't, we're screwed.
China's building, man. They don't fuck around. Now, they have a lot of coal. They're still building coal plants because they have a huge demand, and they have to get off the coal. That is crucial because they are completely contaminating the atmosphere as well.
The more nuclear they build, the better it will be.
The contamination from coal is terrifying. We showed a documentary that had been done. Do you remember the documentary? No, but I remember it was in Indiana. It was a documentary.
It was all about. one of the things it was highlighting is all the people that live around these plants and the air quality they suffer. It's insane. Their cars are covered with a thin film of all the particulates in the atmosphere. That's correct.
It's horrible.
They estimate. from air pollution alone, I've read figures of 4 million deaths a year.
It's just so many cases of respiratory illnesses. It's horrible.
I want to say 4 million a year from air pollution, but 1 million at least from coal a year. That's what I've seen, but there could be more coal.
Who knows what the health negatives are on top of that? How many people are suffering with illnesses and ailments because of those particulates? Especially around those reactors or the plants? rather. It's horrible.
We still have coal in the U.S.
No, this was in the U.S. This was in Indiana, correct?
Oh, yeah. They have coal everywhere. President Trump said, Trump digs coal. I dig coal.
He said clean coal once.
What the fuck are you saying?
The fuck are you saying? Cleaner than what?
The other...
Lighting tires?
Now, the other truth that we miss is gas. We know how ugly the oil thing is. There's the waste and all the oil, and this fossil fuel itself is destroying the universe because we're putting carbon into the atmosphere, CO2.. But gas is considered... They're using gas everywhere.
It seems like a modern thing. They say, well, renewables, which is solar and wind. We're all for that. I want wind. We want solar.
But they don't work all the time. They run out in the winter, at night.
Is it also a problem with battery technology when it comes to those things?
Well, that's part of it, too. But the point is, when they run out, what they need is gas backup. It's backup. You see, nuclear doesn't need storage, and it doesn't need backup. What's the beauty of it?
It's a real clean energy.
And gas. does... I mean, renewables do need backup, and that backup is gas.
So it's not 100% like... One of the issues is about storage, the waste.
Yeah.
And when you talked about just the size of the amount of storage, it's not nearly as much as a lot of people think it is.
Oh, the amount of... All the waste that America has used up to now, and the last since 1958, whenever a shipping port was built, has amounts to about the size of Walmart, frankly. You could put it in a Walmart. In other words, people make a big deal about waste, but they don't realize that it's so intensive an energy, huge amount of energy, that it's, how do you say, compact as a result. So it fits into...
If waste itself is a positive about nuclear, because, first of all, there's been no harm done. So it's been buried in casks, and first of all, it goes into water for maybe two, three years, and that's a conductor that takes the radioactivity down, and then it gets put into casks that are 12 to 14 feet. They build these casks in the United States. They're concrete and steel. Concrete is a great...
It does not conduct radioactivity. Concrete stops it. So concrete and steel casks work. They can go for 100 years, and then you can go another 100 years, and then eventually, eventually, you realize that radioactivity drops each time. In four or five years, it's way down.
It drops to almost... I don't have all the figures, but you can see that it's a ridiculous fear compared to what, given that climate change is so dangerous.
And compared to the deaths that are already occurring every year just from using the methods we have now, in comparison to the amount of people that have died from nuclear, it's very, very small.
Well, the only people who have died from nuclear that we know of are returnable. There were 50 first responders who died in the actual... They were badly protected. They were sent in by a corrupt and decaying Soviet government, and then they were hiding the fact that there was a leak. The radioactivity went all over northern Europe.
And still, it was not what we think it is. It's not like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It wasn't that enriched kind of radiation. It was a low-level radiation that exists that went out there. And they went out.
The UN went in, and the WHO went in, and it was really exhaustive what they did. And they came up with a number of about 4,000 possible deaths from cancer after returnable. Now, since then, there's been another examination by another scientific organization that says that is even in a high number. We don't really know, because people die from cancer naturally. So we don't really know how bad returnable was, but nothing like what the environmentalists say is the end of the world.
Or the HBO series.
Oh, the HBO was a disaster.
I didn't see it, but I heard it was great.
Yeah, it was great, as tension and all that. I make movies, I know. You can make movies out of disasters, but it's not fair.
It's not fair.
Nuclear has never had one proponent. That's what bothered me. Nobody said it's a good thing, as opposed to it's this horrible beast.
It's crazy that it's something like that. that's right in front of our face. It's not like something that has to be invented. It's not theoretical.
No. It's like, again, myth over. You. use your reason. Go scientific.
Yeah.
Trust the science, which is very hard to do in a world where, imagine, tobacco was sold to us. as tobacco is good for you. Car seat belts were not necessary. We have automobile safety. All the good things that happen, they happen against the desire for profit.
Yeah. But even this desire for profit, we're talking about renewables.
It's really interesting that that gets connected to green. Everyone says that's green. This is green power, green energy. But there's very little that's more green than solar.
Yeah. It's never mentioned. We went to Davos with a film. Here they are, Davos, all the world's richest businessmen, biggest guys, movers and shakers. They don't even have it on the agenda.
They talk about clean, green, this, that. It's demanding. It's demanding. We had to struggle to get a screening of nuclear, and we got one. So, in other words, people know about it, but they—.
It has to become trendy, right? It's almost really what has to happen. It's almost like that has to become the trend of being one of the people, the early adopters, to recognize that nuclear is the way out of this.
It's a sad thing, because the truth is it worked for 70 years, and it still works. The old ones work. But, okay, we want new stuff. That's the American way. We always have to have a new thing because we get bored with the old thing.
Oh, nuclear. I heard about that. That's dangerous. That's the way. the reaction— So, now they're building in the U.S.
They have 50 companies working on—50 companies working privately with some Department of Energy help towards making SMRs, small modular reactors that are sleek, great-looking, and they all have different methods of working, including Natrium, including Bill Gates is there with a new company.
Does this lead to nuclear-powered cars? Because, if so, I mean—.
Yeah, sure. Well, no, that's another thing.
I want one of those.
No, cars, transportation, that can be dealt with. That's another—see, it's not just electricity that has to be improved. We have to nuclearize electricity, which is about a third of the problem, but we still have the problems after that of—.
Internal combustion engines.
Transportation, and, aside from that, heating buildings, heating offices.
Cooking.
Heating in general.
Yeah.
For apartments, for offices, and then there's the industry aspect of it, the concrete, steel. These are huge, highly intensive CO2— They consume a lot of carbon. to make these things. And don't forget agriculture. Yeah.
It sounds horrible, but ammonia is one of the worst byproducts of the—. Ammonia is in the air, and you remember the Oklahoma bombing. Yeah. But ammonia is terrible, and what we have to do is electrify everything, essentially. So, the demand for electricity, given the whole world's coming into—.
Look at all the people in Africa, Asia, who are coming to want what we have. They see television. They see what Americans have.
Have you gotten into regenerative farming at all and looked into that?
Not really, no.
It's something to consider, because when you were talking about ammonium, when you're talking about just the different fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides that get put into the ground, I don't know if it's scalable for the entire country. That's the real problem with it. But there's people like Joel Salatin and White Oak Pastures that's down in Georgia, and they figured out a way to have farms where it's regenerative, where the animals are eating the grass. They're fertilizing the grass. They use the fertilizer to grow food, and they bring in these animals to these ecosystems, and they have them exist in a way that it just basically contained nature.
Yeah.
It's just the way the natural cycle is, and they have a zero-carbon footprint. It's essentially—everything sort of works in balance, and that's how it's supposed to happen. And if you look at—especially from White Oak Pastures, he had video of the runoff from a rainstorm from his property into the river, which is nothing, to the next-door neighbor's property, who runs an industrialized farm. And it's a fucking disaster. It's horrific to look at, because you just see the topsoil's gone.
Look at the difference. There's a clear line between his property on the left and the neighbor's property on the right. I mean, how insane is it that this is normal for us?
This is the problem. The problem is they've gone into these monocrop agriculture situations, where they use the same land over and over again, and they have to apply fertilizer, and they have to apply herbicides and pesticides, and make it toxic for everything. But whatever the fuck it is, they're growing, a lot of the stuff they're growing is genetically modified in order to be more tolerant of these pesticides and herbicides. And that's not good. This is a major source of the problem.
Yeah, fertilizer. But I can't comment on that.
Yeah, it's really interesting stuff. It's obviously not my wheelhouse either, but these people that I've had to talk about it—.
But the point is that we're going to need, some people say, three, four, five times the amount of electricity that we have now by 2050, which is the—we used 2050 as a gold mark because that's the IPCC standard. They said that by 2050, all the countries of the world have to bring down the carbon emissions to zero. To zero.
How is that even possible?
It doesn't work. I mean, the green renewables are great. There's a great idea. It made great sense when you saw Al Gore's film. But the truth is that CO2 keeps going up, not down.
It's gone up since then. We've spent trillions of dollars since the 2000 period. This is 20-some years now. And it just hasn't worked, and nobody admits it. That's what's crazy.
So, the only way to get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is do it. Do it clean. Do it right now. You've got to get rid of gas, and you've got to get rid of oil, basically. And you've got to be severe about it.
That means you have to have an alternative, a clean, cheap, scalable alternative. And nuclear is the only one that's proven itself for so many years. And yet, it doesn't even get talked about. I mean, journalists will say, and there's nuclear, which is dangerous. But it's not dangerous if you do it right, if you build it right, and you keep it right.
It's been done time and time again. I wish there had been more accidents. It would have really taught the lesson. Every industry has had needed accidents. I mean, when they started the railroad, they thought that your brain would get pushed back in your head because of the speed of going forward.
Same thing was true with airplanes. You had more crashes before the airplane has been modified into this incredibly powerful machine. We're not going to get rid of the airplane. We're going to have to use fuel. We have to use aviation fuel.
And it will come from the marriage of hydrogen and carbon, actually. And it will need a lot of heat. And that heat is going to come from nuclear. It's not going to come from anything else, that amount of heat.
We also have to take into consideration that if the population continues to grow and we're doing things the same way, whatever our output is now, that's damaging, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. There's going to be more people.
The United States is in good shape compared to the rest of the world. But look at India. Look at Africa. People will burn wood if they have to, much less coal. They're not going to stop people from getting things.
And they're going to want energy. That's going to be the prime. India is crucial. We bring it up in the film. They are doing some great nuclear work.
They have 20-some reactors in India. But they are definitely on the path of coal, like China.
Their demand is enormous for coal. So what happens? There's no luck. We can't get out of that mess. We're going to have so much pollution, so much warming, that the only way we can do it is by building nuclear now and taking everything else we can throw in there, including renewables, alongside it.
Well, I think it has to become something that people are aware of and becomes trendy. And that's one of the great things in the film.
This Brazilian woman that lives in Austin.
Oh, yeah. She lives in Austin. Her name is Isabel Bumke.
She makes TikTok films. And these little TikTok videos, the great thing about those is they become viral. And maybe that is how the message gets out.
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think it needs to be addressed by leaders. The leadership of, let's say, President Xi of China has committed to the UN that by 2060 they will have zero carbon emissions. That's a vow.
It's going to take someone who's got some courage, because politically it's an issue, because people do have this false narrative in their head. Yeah. So it's going to take someone who's willing to step outside of what the polling would show. Because I would imagine that most people, if you just started talking about we have to switch the entire country over to nuclear power. if you're running for president.
People go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So many people just have the knee-jerk reaction that is brought about because of these films, because of the anti-nuclear power movement. There's still that propaganda exists in people's heads, or the false narrative.
Necessity is the mother of invention. As things get worse, it will be clear that we need nuclear more and more and more. And we'll come late to the game and we'll say, well, we've got to build more and more and more nuclear because it's not working with wind and solar.
Right, but I don't think you're going to see that from a politician. I don't think a politician is going to stick their neck out. It's going to have to be so prevalent in the public narrative. It's going to have to be so prevalent in the zeitgeist that they think politically. it's okay to be a proponent of it.
Well, I think the younger generation is changing the numbers and the demographics. I think 60 percent I'm reading are pro-nuclear now. That's great. In the U.S.
It's probably TikTok.
Well, maybe.
It might be.
But it's a new generation. They're more scared about climate change than they are about war. And a lot of the older generation, who confuse nuclear energy with nuclear bomb, are dying off. And I think there is going to be a change. It has to be.
There's no other way.
There has to be.
On top of it, it's a miracle. It's incredible. If it's handled correctly, built correctly, like Hyman Rickover did with the Navy. The Navy was one of the biggest developers of nuclear in America. Yeah.
From the 1950s, they built nuclear submarines and they kept going.
Talk about the power in a nuclear submarine, how long it lasts, too. Yeah.
One small reactor can run a submarine for 50, 60 years.
That's insane.
And also, if you put two of them into an aircraft carrier, you've seen the size of those. Yeah. It's a giant ship, 6,000 people on that thing. That can go for... Also, two reactors can make...
That's what they're doing, actually. Two reactors can make an aircraft carrier go for, I don't know how many years, 50 years, 40 years.
That's insane. It's incredible. I mean, it really is. There's nothing like it.
Nothing like it.
No. The fact that that is not... That's not something that people marvel at.
No.
That you have a ship at sea that's powered entirely by nuclear power and it can go for 50 years, or whatever it is.
We try to show that in the film. I mean, it's just a miracle.
It's insane. It's so much different than anything else. And if you just do it right, like they do with the submarines or like they do with...
You need discipline and you need to redo it and do it and do it. So you standardize it. The United States never standardized it. Japan did. Korea did.
They built one type of reactor and they built it consistently. Just recently, Korea built four heavy water reactors, big ones, in UAR, the United Arab Republic. Four of them. 1.4 gigawatts, each. A gigawatt's a billion watts.
And so it's 5.6 gigawatts. That's a huge amount for the United Arab Republic. That'll cover a huge area.
That's incredible.
That's the kind of building you need to do, but you have to do it consistently.
Didn't the phrase... Go ahead, please.
And, by the way, you can ship it too. If you assembly line it, like in Korean shipyards or something, you can build it in a way that you... Parts. You can put the parts in and ship them like a Lego set up and down the coastline of China or the coastline of America, any country. Russians did that.
in Pevek, which is an Arctic outpost. They sent a barge. The Greenpeace, of course, predicted it would be a nuclear titanic, and it wasn't. It arrived in Pevek and it's set up and it's working beautifully to this day. So SMRs are shippable, and they can be built in shipyards.
They can be assembled by the thousands. There's no reason not to.
Now, what about if one of those things sinks?
Yeah, well, water absorbs it. It absorbs radiation.
So what happens when... There have been nuclear submarines that have sunk, right?
Well, if they did, there's been no damage that I know of.
Isn't? the phrase, can neither confirm nor deny? Doesn't that come from... I think that comes from an operation. I believe I heard this on Radiolab.
I think that phrase comes from an operation where they were trying to recover a Russian downed submarine.
Right, I remember that.
And they had to answer the question. And so, when they were questioned, their answer was, we can neither confirm nor deny. Because they were put in a position where they were supposed to interact. So how do we say this? We can't lie.
We can't say, no, we're not going to tell you because we have to answer. So the answer they came up with is, we can neither confirm nor deny. Which is beautiful. It's very eloquent. If you really think about it, if you want to be a bullshit artist, that's an amazingly eloquent statement.
That was the one that Howard Hughes was involved in.
Globar?
Is that what it was? Yeah, Howard Hughes. Yeah, that sounds right.
Never heard more about it. Whatever happened, happened. The world didn't end. That's the thing about nuclear. People say, well, when something goes wrong, it really goes wrong.
There's no evidence for that, though.
That's an exaggeration, too.
But, in comparison to the things that we absolutely know, go wrong with just transportation, just driving. Deaths are inevitable when you have hundreds of millions of people. Obviously, you want to mitigate them as much as possible. You want to mitigate dangers as much as possible. But we're just victim of bad narrative.
Industrial accidents. You know how many people die a year? Two million.
It's incredible.
So 50 people died at Chernobyl. And here we are running away from nuclear.
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. But that's humans. We're so weird like that.
Germany is the craziest of all. They are smart people. I thought they were mathematical geniuses.
Explain what you're talking about, because a lot of people probably don't even know that they shut down.
They originally built 20-some reactors in the 70s. And they were doing very fine with it. And they had no problems. And now they've shut them all down because the Green Party, which is a political party, Green Party, which is also pro-war, pro-NATO. You know, it's a pretty strange Green Party.
It's a hybrid. Anyway, they came into power. And it's a democracy. And they don't want any nuclear. So they destroyed.
They shut down all their plants that were working. And we show that in the film.
It's insane.
And what did they go with? They replaced it with coal and gas. And as a result, and a lot of solar and a lot of turbines. In fact, if you look at the solar park that they built, they built a gigantic solar park in Germany. 495,000 panels.
Can you imagine that? 500 acres. 495,000 panels. That's enormous. And that park, if you took – they took down a nuclear reactor in the area.
That one was about 100 acres. But it was producing about 100 times more electricity than this 500 acres on one-fifth the land.
Not only that, at what point in time does that become pollution?
Pollution factor, yeah.
I mean, just whatever the panels are, like, whatever that area is, like. what have you done to that area? I know we don't think about – we just think about it as land. But that's part of earth. So you've covered part of earth with this – with these fucking panels.
It looks gross. The turbines look gross too. I went down to – I was going down to south Texas. And I drove past this turbine farm. And I'm like, how is that not bothering people?
That's – it's like eye pollution. You're looking at these things that are – these giant machines that are spinning instead of just the landscape. It looks like we're tricking ourselves into thinking that this is like 100% clean. It's not clean if all you're looking at is turbines. If you're driving down the highway and you see hundreds of turbines with lights on them, so planes don't fly into them.
That's not clean. Like that's a part of the problem. Like that's polluting the environment. It looks like shit.
Yeah, I understand. Each country is different. It depends what they want to do with their land. I mean Denmark has had some success with it. Germany has had greater success with wind than they have with solar.
That's for sure. But they're not dealing with it because we're still putting out shit in the air.
It's also – yeah, I mean it's certainly better than burning coal. It's certainly better than many alternatives, but still it's not perfect.
Well, we should talk about methane, because that is not better. It's more damaging in the short term.
Methane is.
Methane is horrible and it leaks all along the line, as we say in the film. That's gas.
Natural gas.
Natural gas and we talk about it like it's some kind of savior. It's a perfect partner for renewables. That's what they sell themselves as, and they advertise it.
When they show the footage of how much gas gets released from those pipes, it's crazy.
I showed it in the film. We showed the infrared camera and how much gas is leaked. You turn your gas stove on and that's a leak right there. And that goes a long way towards destroying the atmosphere.
A lot of people are upset that they're trying to ban gas stoves in future buildings in New York City. That's a big thing. But, you know, I was like, okay, are people overreacting? Who's overreacting? And then you think about it like it's just for the convenience of cooking that you enjoy cooking more with that?
Is it a price thing? Because nuclear would solve the issue of the availability of power.
Yeah.
But would it, you know, I think people just like to cook with gas, which is really weird. Like if it's really bad for you and really bad for the city and for the environment, just the fact that you don't like cooking with electric.
Well, I can't comment on that. I just know that methane has a short term, huge effect on the atmosphere. Long term, less.
But they did recently ban it in New York City, correct? I don't know. Didn't they, Jamie? I think they banned it for new home construction. Yeah, I think that's right.
And everybody went crazy. And I was like, wait a minute, I don't know about this. Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. You know, like. First statewide ban on use of natural gas in new buildings.
Yeah, because if that stuff really does lower IQs, isn't that one of the things that they've discussed? I don't know why. See, if you can find that. I've heard that, yeah. Yeah, see, if you can find.
Because I remember there was something about it having an effect on cognitive function.
Yeah.
Which, you know, we found out, we just talked about this the other day, but we found out from leaded gas that there's a giant dip in IQ points. Not a giant one, but like a measurable dip in IQ points amongst people that grew up in my generation with leaded gas everywhere.
Well, I wonder about my own brain. I guess, you know, we've been around long enough.
Well, we're getting old, Oliver, and that's part of the problem. Sometimes you think it has to do with childhood asthma. Childhood asthma. That's it? Didn't say anything about cognitive function?
I even typed in IQ here, and it didn't bring up anything.
So much heat comes off nuclear that it really is not being used, as the scientist says in the film. It could heat New York City.
Yeah, so even if it's causing kids asthma, it's not good for anybody. then. That's really what's going on with gas. But the amount of time that it would take to get the United States, like, what would that take to get rid of all of the things that are polluting the environment, all of the things that are putting out particulates, coal and all that stuff, replace it with nuclear?
We showed that graph. from here to 2050, thinking backwards and trying. You have to get this thing going. You have to get the nuclear part going. It's going to go slower at the beginning because they take longer to build.
But once they're up, maintenance is very, very easy to do on these things. So in 2030 to 2040, if you're built, this stuff is going to start to pay off. From 2040 to 2050, it's going to be a huge run, a huge race, and we can do it. We may not get all the way to zero, but it's certainly doable. If Rickover were in charge of a program, he would push it through.
But it's not just us. I mean, honestly, the Chinese are doing their part. They're trying. They're really trying because they see the problem. And for a president to say that, Xi, when he said he's going to go down to zero by 2060, that's 10 years later, that's pretty good.
That's amazing. if they can stick to it. Russia, too, plays a huge role. So does India.
Well, they obviously have much more control over how things run. They don't really rely on the public's opinion or people voting.
That's okay, because we're talking about the earth here. But let's talk about France. France has been nuclear since 1975.. They built 56 reactors in 15 years. That's pretty fast.
And they're all working. Some of them are getting very old now, and they have to be either renewed or replaced. But they still have those nuclear. A lot of their electricity. in France, 70%, is nuclear.
They have some hydropower and, I think, some gas, but not much.
I genuinely think that it takes someone like you making a documentary about this to get the word out there, to the point where people really start demanding this. I really do. I'm trying. You're countering all those movies that you discussed, all the fictional movies. You're countering all those.
You're countering all the stuff that we had growing up, Godzilla and Spider-Man, and all that. That's what it is. We associate radiation with negativity and nuclear power with radiation.
We show images in Brazil of Brazilians going to black sand beaches to absorb the radiation. It's good for the body. In cancer therapies, heavy radiation is used to kill off tumors in the body. We show in Iran, Ramsar, Iran, which has got huge radioactivity. It's very high and it's tremendously….
They're doing very well in Iran, with Ramsar. No one's dying. In other words, we can live with radiation much longer than we know, because DNA, as Crick and Watson found, reduplicates. It has a double.
The body repairs itself as it's damaged. That was a big argument in the old science because the Rockefeller Foundation, of course, put out the scare. They're oil people. They put out the scare to the public in 1957 where they said any amount of radiation to the body is dangerous. That really worked.
The New York Times publisher put it in the front page, in a column. It gets out, that fear.
Meanwhile, the counter comes later, but you don't hear about it. The counterclaim is we repair our body as we move through life. That's what DNA does. It's a wonderful system we have of DNA.
We just have scary stories about radiation. Rightly so, in some cases, like the radium girls. Do you know about this? No, I don't know. They used to use radioactive paint for indices on watches and things along those lines.
You know, loom? Do you know loom? You know what that is? Like? on a watch face, there's these little dots.
These little dots collect light. When it's light out and it's dark, they glow. People used to apply those things with paint. They didn't realize the consequences of the radioactivity. These girls would sometimes lick the tip of their brush to wet it, to shape it.
They develop horrible cancers. It's a very famous story. These poor women, they develop these holes in their faces. It's really scary stuff. It's from a very specific type of radiation.
It's also from direct contact through this paint, with no protection at all.
I can't comment on what I don't know.
I understand. There are some consequences that are negative, that are associated with radiation. rightly. Yes. This is one of them.
High levels of radiation will hurt and kill.
Exposure to radiation. There's a reason why they make you put a lead thing over your junk when you get into an x-ray machine.
That's correct. I went to a lot of that when I was visiting the plants in France, Russia, and here at Idaho National Laboratory. We talked to a lot of scientists. The people who handle it, those people who know, know. They don't freak out about it.
Was this subject, when you decided to make a documentary about this, was it simply just because you had the information and you felt compelled that this is just not a story that's being told correctly?
No. I read a book review in the New York Times, of all things, about Joshua Goldstein's book with Stephen Kvist, the Swedish nuclear scientist. It was called Bright Future. I bought the book, read it. It's very practical.
It's simple. It goes into the truth. There's been a lot of lies. Then I bought the book and made the movie with him. He gave me a lot.
I had to learn, a lot. I had to travel. It was difficult. It was not an easy film to make. I wanted to make it understandable to a ninth grade level.
Trying to make it simple. I think it works at that level.
It absolutely does. Definitely.
It's just very important to do, and I'm really glad you did it. I've talked to so many intelligent people that share your perspective on this, but it's just not being discussed publicly enough. It might have been our solution the whole time. It was. Yeah.
It was. I shouldn't have said might have.
Eisenhower was on the right path, and John Kennedy supported it completely. Remember, we quote him in the film. It got derailed, obviously, in the 70s. Ralph Nader was very influential. He's done great work, Nader, but of course, on car safety.
He was wrong about it. He exaggerated this to a degree that was not necessary.
Do you think people exaggerated it because they have their own heightened anxiety about it? It's not like they did it on purpose. They did it because they were genuinely misinformed. That's correct. Yeah.
I do believe that. Nader is a good man, and he still believes in it, that he's right, but it's a question of degree. He said all Cleveland's going to blow up from one nuclear reactor. That's not true. If it blew up, it's not going to blow up Cleveland, and it's not a bomb.
Unfortunately, that was original confusion.
But there wasn't also no one to counter him. Who would counter him back then? Scientists. William Buckley, scientists did, but somewhat publicly.
That one I can't answer you because I don't remember. Well, frankly, do you remember the guy who started Greenpeace, Dr. Moore? He was the co-founder of Greenpeace. He came out and said, you know, we were right about a lot of things at Greenpeace.
The whale, saving the whale. We were right about toxic waste. We were right about nuclear bombs, but we were wrong about nuclear energy. We got it wrong. He says that in the film.
It's a wonderful statement, but again, people, I guess when you hear the negative first, you don't listen to the positive.
Yeah, that's the problem. We're slaves to our initial impressions.
Well, that's the point of maturity.
Yes.
That's where you have to get smarter.
Yes. It's just very difficult for people to do. It's a lesson that doesn't get taught enough that you are not your ideas. And once you start talking about a subject, particularly something that is a world-changing subject like nuclear power or renewable energy, you have to be – it's not you. These arguments are not you.
You have to look at just the data. You have to look at the data. And just because you had an initial idea about something, don't – Exactly. Look at it correctly. Exactly.
Because it is – people associate themselves with ideas, and if they've espoused an idea, they somehow or another think they have to defend it to the end, and it's a terrible trap to get into. And I've seen brilliant people get into that trap. It's a terrible trap. You're not your ideas. They're just ideas.
Well said.
And you're certainly not something that is a very nuanced and complicated issue like nuclear power. You could be a person who was anti-nuclear power a few decades ago, or even a few months ago, and get new information and go, oh, okay, this is what I thought, and this is where I was wrong. And that's better for everybody. And if people learn how to do that, we can move past a lot of silly shit in this country.
I wish Jane Fonda would come out the other way.
What is she on now?
I admire her for her Vietnam stand.
Oh, yeah.
She could mean a lot if she understood this and came out against – but so is – a lot of the people know this. Matt Tybee and Russell Brand, they understand. They've done the reading. They're smart people. We've got to get it out, and it's going to happen.
They're smart people, and they're courageous enough to just start talking about it.
As I say in the film, you know, with Josh, I said nuclear has been around. It's been discredited constantly, but it won't die. It's like something that just sticks around because it's good. It's the truth. And that, I think, is going to be inevitable, because there's no other alternative.
I mean, we can talk about carbon capture. We can talk about all the things that they're doing. Fusion is a great solution. I love fusion. I was just up at MIT with Dr.
Dennis White. He's the head of the program. there. He's fusion plasma. It's beautiful, amazing amount of work, and maybe it'll work in the second part of the century.
But right now, we have – from 2020 to 2050, we've got to deal with this hump, and fusion is not there yet. It hasn't delivered. Fission has.
There's also some research that's being done on utilizing the spent fuel cells and utilizing the waste and converting it into batteries, correct?
I didn't know about batteries, but I know in Russia they had the breeder reactor that I saw at Beloyarsk, which we went out to the middle of Russia. I forgot exactly where it is. It was designed. It's a 600.. It was designed many years ago, and it does breed more than it – it eats up its own fuel, and it reuses the fuel over and over again.
That's why they call it a breeder reactor, because it breeds more. They're using it. It's expensive. That's the problem. Can they standardize it?
That's the other problem. You have to make it cheap, too. But the Russians have done it, and now they're building an 800, which is a bigger one. I have hopes for that. But on the U.S.
side, we have all these smaller – we have GE working with Hitachi, which is a Japanese company. They're building an SMR, a small modular reactor, with some capacity. It could make –.
A radioactive – a radioactive diamond – whoops. Hold on, a second. Pop-up bag got us.
On batteries –
Unveils battery made from nuclear waste that could last up to 28,000 years. The nanodiamond battery's power comes from radioactive isotopes used in nuclear reactors. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. So, as technology advances, and obviously technology, would, you know, whatever they're able to do now or even – have they actually done this, or is this just theoretical? This article is .20..
It unveiled a battery that uses nuclear waste.
I don't know.
This is – they're saying that they actually have a functional product?
Whoa. That's what I was trying to – the article I had that got the pop-up was a nuclear – Oh, I thought – Right. I thought it was theoretical. I didn't know they were already making batteries out of it. But if they can do that, I mean, bingo.
Now we have a problem with electric cars, right? That was the problem. Electric cars, the batteries. That's the giant issue is you're getting lithium out of the ground, and most of it is sourced through unethical ways. You're getting cobalt.
Most of that's sourced through unethical ways. But if they can make batteries out of fucking diamonds and make – I mean, how crazy is that? We're all running around on cars built on nuclear waste.
But you still have the problem of – it has to be continent – it has to be a country-size dimension, scalability. You know, if you can make an iPhone, you can make a car work on an individual basis here and there. But how do you make it so it works on a continent size? We're talking about – look at the world map.
Well, I think we have to look in terms of a long period of time. If you go back to just the invention of electricity, to the time where everybody's carrying around a battery-powered cell phone in your pocket, you're not talking about that long. We're talking about a couple of hundred years. We're looking at it like, oh, my God, we've got to get it done tomorrow. I don't think you do get this thing done tomorrow.
I think – but I think a big step is what you're describing in your documentary. That's a big step. A big step is, like, understanding that nuclear power is a fantastic way forward. And if they really can make batteries out of nuclear waste, well, now we have a – instead of a problem, now we've got a commodity. Now you've got something they can utilize.
Although I remember what Bill Gates says.
Uh-oh. Hold on a second. I googled it again. It said, like, 2017. they were saying this was still a hoax.
But –.
They always say that. It's a mixture, yeah. We have to keep optimistic about this.
So, are nuclear diamond batteries too good to be true? You're probably wondering what the catch is. There's a diamond battery out there that really uses nuclear waste, lasts thousands of years, and involves layers of only the most minuscule diamonds. It's slightly more complicated than that. Each battery cell will produce only a small amount of energy, for one thing.
So scientists must combine the cells in huge numbers in order to regularly power large devices, raising the cost a great deal, along with increasing the complexity. So I guess the battery would have to be big. It touts the tiny share of the nanobattery diamond cells as an advantage for scalability, though. Take the battery for a wristwatch, for instance. It consumes around 2 microwatts.
A much smaller NDB cell would be sufficient. Okay. So that's smaller than the battery that's on your watch? That's pretty small. So if we need to power a different application, the number of stacked cells could be increased to meet the demand.
That sounds like every battery.
Listen, Bill Gates in the film says he's put a billion dollars into the battery business. He's really done a lot of exploration. As well, he's doing great work on nuclear. But he says there's no battery. that's going to take a miracle.
It's just not going to happen. He says we're going to need nuclear. Even he said that. And he's not proud of that. But I don't know why he's running away from it.
I think we should be very proud of using nuclear, because it was a tremendous discovery by Marie Curie.
I think a lot of people are skittish about the conversation.
They just don't want to have the conversation. I've noticed that, yeah. Why doesn't Al Gore in the film, Inconvenient Truth, even mention nuclear energy?
Yeah. It's true. Good point.
You know, it's nuts. It's nuts. Can we take a break?
Yep. I can tell. You're ready to go. You've got to pee.
No worries.
We'll be right back.
So tritium is the stuff that they make. That also lights up the watch hands. They put that stuff inside watches. It lasts for like 25 years. Yeah.
I have one of those. I have a marathon watch. And even if it's pitch blackout, all of the hour indicators are all lit up permanently. It's really cool.
Yeah.
And that's radioactive, too. And it's totally safe. That's what it looks like.
That's what the Fukushima—.
That's what tritium looks like. Have you ever seen it on a watch hand? It's really beautiful. Click on that image again, Jamie. That's what it looks like.
So it lights up permanently. You have radiation on your wrist.
Well, that's been the big issue in the Fukushima cleanup, because they said that water is filled with tritium.
Josh, my co-author, was saying, you know, I could drink a gallon of tritium and it would be about the equivalent to one banana. So it's a lot of bullshit.
Really? You could drink a gallon of tritium? Yeah. And it's about what negative aspect of a banana?
He says the electrons in it just don't penetrate. They don't—you know, I'm not a scientist.
I understand. I'm not either. So I buy it. But I love the fact that my watch has these little indicators that are nuclear.
Everyone's screaming, you know, you can't dump it in the Pacific. That's what the environmentalists say. They're wrong. The water is safe because, by the way, the sea absorbs a lot of radiation.
Yeah. There's a company called Ball, and all of their watches use tritium. And they've been doing it forever. Like, they've been making these watches for a long time. And they're famous for the fact that all their indicators are little radioactive things.
I'm terrible for the watch market. I never had a watch.
I have years. You never had a watch?
No, I don't like to keep track of the time. I'm very—I know the time in my head. Yes. I kind of have a sense of it.
Good for you. Yeah, you don't want to be a slave to this thing. Exactly. Yeah.
I want something on my wrist telling me what to do.
Do you still rock a smartphone, though?
I use a smartphone as little as possible because it's essential. now. They've made it essential.
That's basically a clock, anyway. You're getting your time from your watch.
Yeah, it's a clock. I can set an alarm to it, but I wake up on my—basically, earlier. So, the phone is—I just—the only thing I don't like about the phone is I'm always worried about losing it. I lose a lot of time looking for phones. You know, why don't they make a double of this, a DNA copy?
Yeah, you can't have two, because then someone else would copy your phone.
Is that right?
Yeah, and they would start using your phone.
It's about copying.
Yeah, it's about getting access to your—you know, whatever you have, credit cards that are on it and all the data that they can sell. Yeah. I mean, they're selling data no matter what, anyway. It's the weirdest commodity that's ever existed, a thing that people didn't even know was worth anything.
Are you worried about losing your phone? I mean, do people know you?
Yeah, I worry about losing my phone. Yeah, I try not to.
Well, you probably have an automatic shutoff on your account, right? So, no one's going to rip you off for American Express or credit card.
Yeah, but it's still—it's very inconvenient, obviously. It's inconvenient. I use my phone to get in my car, too.
It's inconvenient, but it's not dangerous.
Right, it's not dangerous. My phone operates my Tesla. I don't even have to have my key. I just have to have my phone.
Your phone operates your Tesla, right?
Yeah.
How do you do that before you—.
Just—it knows that it's me. So, the app knows that it's me. So, if it's in my phone, and—rather, the phone is in my pocket, and I walk towards the Tesla, the door's open. It lets me in. It knows it's me.
I don't even have to have a key on me. It's like, hey, dude. I go, I don't have my key. Don't worry about it. We know it's you.
But, also, someone could take your phone, and without even unlocking it, they could just start driving your Tesla. That's true, too. Because, you know, when you walk towards the car, it just goes off, even if your phone's not even unlocked. And that's not good. Because then, if somebody gets your phone, then they get your car.
What made you so smart, Joe?
I'm not that smart.
Come on. Give me a break. I am not. Where'd you go to school? I'm curious.
Oh, dude. I barely made it through high school, and then I went to UMass Boston. I was in Newton. Newton South High School.
In Massachusetts. Massachusetts. Yeah.
Suburb outside of Boston.
Yeah.
I think the thing that's helped me more than anything is being on this show and having conversations with people. Yeah. It's like, you think of education as being something—I mean, obviously, when you sit in a classroom, you're absorbing a lot. You're getting a lot of education. And the kids today that are going through the workload that they have to go through to put in to get a bachelor's degree and then a master's or PhD, it's an insane amount of work.
Right.
But you're absorbing information. That's the key. The key is that you're learning about all these different subjects and absorbing all that information. And you prove it with your degree.
That's the beauty of also making films, because you get that opportunity to spend time to luxuriate in this.
You get to talk to people, too. You get to talk to—.
Yeah. This and that. I was so grateful for this. I've done 20 fiction films, feature films, 10 documentaries, and you want to get out in the field. You want to talk to real people who are doing things.
Yeah. Well, I think it's so important, especially to do the work that you're doing. How else could you relate? How else can you—you have to get out there.
Well, find the thing that's bothering you. Yeah. What really is bothering you? In this matter, it was, of course, what do they mean? This is confusing climate bullshit.
They go back and forth. Even if you don't believe in climate change, what I found out is that I would still go nuclear, because it is the cleanest of all, no battery, no storage.
Absolutely. I think there's two schools of thought when it comes to climate change. The first is the school of thought that it's not an issue. It's a natural cycle, and there's a school of thought that human beings are pushing the world to the brink of demise.
I think human beings are doing a lot. Whenever people try to come up with excuses for things, I was like, well, it's always been this way, but how much impact are we having? Instead of looking at it like the climate's always going to change, which it always does. That's the thing about the climate. If you look at the climate models, when they do ice core samples, when they try to figure out how warm it used to be and what the atmosphere was like, it's always changed.
I mean, it's changed radically. But how much are we fucking it up? Forget about it. It's never static. It's never like.
the climate is like this. If human beings never existed, internal combustion engines never existed, you still have volcanoes. You got chaos. You got asteroids. You got all kinds of shit.
There's no stable. There's no flat, safe, we get to this. We're on a life vest. We're on a life raft. We're going to make it out.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Even if I lived in Iowa, in a nice, small town, in a country town?
That's what we want. We want this idea. But the reality is, the reality is ice ages. The reality is super volcanoes. The reality is asteroid impact.
That's the reality. Those are the horrific things that radically change the temperature of Earth and the environment, and all kinds of things.
What about that lady in somewhere in Missouri? The tornado came out of nowhere and just blew the house away.
Yeah, Jesus Christ. That's crazy, too. Those are things that are-.
Tornado, I mean- I saw those in the Midwest when I was shooting, especially in Louisiana and Texas, Panhandle, that area. Yeah. They have a lot of whirlwinds, a lot of wind shifts.
Oh, it's incredible. There's an amazing video of this guy driving at night, and the tornado is in the distance, and you only see it when the lightning strikes.
Oh, God. And it's huge.
I mean, it's like city blocks, and it's in the sky. This is just a massive funnel, and these people are in a car, and they're just driving down the road watching this. It's fucking wild. Did you find it? Watch this.
Look at this. Look at that. Look at the size of that thing.
Yeah.
I mean, how terrifying is that? Terrifying. Terrifying.
Oh, that's scarier than King Kong, Godzilla, all the above. Real things.
Yeah.
Real things. Not nuclear power. The angry sky monster that comes down and destroys cities.
There is nuclear power in that electricity.
Oh, yeah.
Good point. This all came from the beginning, the supernova that exploded. Yeah. Supernovas exploding all the time. Where does it all start?
I mean, the beginning of the world. We don't really know. There's no beginning.
No, we don't really know. I think we have these biological limitations that we put on the universe.
Where does this explosion come from? And before that, was there another explosion?
Right. There was a great piece, there was a great documentary on hypernovas that I watched once. And when they first started discovering hypernovas, they thought that there was aliens having war in the sky. Right. Because there was explosions that were taking place in far distant portions of the universe.
And they were like, what is happening? These are happening on a regular basis. And then they realized that these are hypernovas. I never heard of that. Yeah.
They destroy solar systems. They destroy everything. It's an immense explosion of power that's beyond our comprehension. And it's happening all the time.
Do you believe in extraterrestrial life? Yes.
A hundred percent.
A hundred percent.
Yeah. I just don't know if it's here. I don't know if it's visited. But just the vastness of the universe itself, and if you believe in the concept of infinity, that means the possibilities of this happening exactly the way we are, are also infinite. It's not – infinity, it's really hard to put it in your head, because it doesn't make sense.
But the true infinity would mean that everything that you've ever done, and everything that I've ever done, and everything we've ever said, and every piece of paper you've ever put down, all that has happened an infinite number of times in the universe, in some other place. That's how – and every other variable in between. That's how crazy infinity is. So I think that if we imagine that we're the only ones, that seems silly. It doesn't even make sense.
It's just too – it's kind of like nuclear power. Because you talk about nuclear power to people, you go, wait, nuclear bombs, nuclear bad. Nuclear is dangerous. Nuclear is dangerous. I think we think that way about aliens, because I think there's been so many kooks that have had so many fake stories and so many doctored photos and everything's blurry and just weird, people that probably lied.
And then compelling stories that are really confusing, like really intelligent people, like Commander David Fravor, who was a fighter jet pilot in 2004 and encountered this thing that they tracked going from 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 in a second.
I think I saw – was there a clip?
There's video of this.
Yeah, I think I saw it.
Yeah, there's video of this thing. They tracked it. They think it was interacting with something that was submerged. And then this thing, when it jetted off at this insane rate of speed, first of all, it blocked their tracking. It blocked their – whatever their radar or whatever sensors that they were using.
And then it shot off at an insane rate of speed and stopped at their cat point, which is the point where they – the predetermined point where they were going to meet up in this exercise that they were doing. And this thing went to that spot, and it was 20 feet long. It looked like a Tic-Tac, and it was just hovering. A Tic-Tac, what's a Tic-Tac? A Tic-Tac, like a candy, like a little white Tic-Tac candy.
So they call it the Tic-Tac UFO. When I talk to guys like that, when I talk to guys like that, I go, well, if it's not a UFO, if that's not from another planet, that is maybe more scary than if the Chinese have something that's that advanced, that can move like that. Is this some new type of technology that might be available to the – probably just like the high-end military applications that they're using for drones and all these different propulsion methods? If they've figured something that crazy out, it's kind of game over. If they can go 50,000 feet above sea level to 50 in a second, like what is that?
Well, if they wanted to use it, they would have done it by now.
Perhaps. Or perhaps it's an alien. Or a probe from some alien planet, or something non-biological. Maybe they've gotten past the necessity of biological life.
If you're an alien, wouldn't you want to visit this place and share with the culture?
No, definitely not.
Why not?
The same reason why – did you watch Chimp Empire? Who? Chimp Empire. It's this amazing documentary series that's on Netflix right now. And it's about these embedded journalists who document chimpanzee life in this part of the – very deep in the jungle called – a place called Ngogo.
And it's incredible because the scientists that laid the groundwork for this documentary, they've been studying this particular group of chimpanzees for 30 years. So the chimpanzees have become completely fine with them being around. They have rules of interaction. They have to stay within, I think, 20 yards of the chimpanzees at all times. And as long as they do that, the chimpanzees behave as if they don't exist.
And they enact in war. They kill monkeys. They hunt. They defend their territory. They take over new territory.
They do all this stuff in front of people. But they don't interact with the chimpanzees and they don't interrupt their life. I think that's what the aliens do with us, because that's what we do with intelligent primates. Why would you do any different if you were an alien? I think if I was an alien life form, I would make sure that the chimps don't blow themselves up.
Like if chimpanzees and Ngogo, if, all of a sudden, they've developed TNT and they start soldering and they're building bombs and they're planting – Okay, hold on, fellas. You can't blow yourselves up. You can't just be blowing the jungle up and starting fires. Let's stop. If I was an alien life form, I would treat human beings the same way that I, as a human being, would treat chimpanzees if they started developing bombs.
I feel like we need to get the bombs away from the chimps.
If chimpanzees developed missiles and they started shooting missiles at each other through the jungle – Don't you think we'd be like, hey, hey, hey, cut the shit. You're not even people. Only people are allowed to kill people like that. I think. if alien life forms do exist, I think the most likely strategy is the one that we use on higher primates – on lower primates, rather.
We don't interfere. We observe, but the true scientists, they just sort of stand back and watch. And the chimpanzees don't seem to have any problem with these people being around. Occasionally. they get curious, and when they start walking towards the person, the person just keeps backing up.
And as long as they stay a certain distance, the chimp loses interest. It's really weird. You just can't eat in front of them, ever. And you just can't ever raise your voice. You can't behave in a threatening way.
And they just interact with the chimps.
And this documentary is coming up.
It's out right now. It's out on Netflix. It's called Chimp Empire. It's fantastic. It's really fantastic.
Learning too much, too fast.
The point is, I think that if there are aliens, I think they would do the same. I think they would just watch. Just make sure we don't blow ourselves up, watch, and maybe, maybe, you know, let us know occasionally that we're not alone. That's what I would do. I would like, just like the scientists had to slowly habituate themselves with the chimpanzees, they had to slowly do it.
First the chimpanzees ran, and then they had to figure out some sort of way that they can just be around them. enough that the chimpanzees relaxed. And as soon as they realized they were never a threat, and then generations of them realized they were never a threat, then they could do the work that they're doing. Pretty wild stuff. I think I would do that if I was an alien.
I would just sit around and watch.
Well, that's why people have dogs and cats. I love cats. Cats are great. They watch us, you know?
Yeah. Sure, I think...
It is an alien form, isn't it, a cat?
Oh, yeah, sure. So are dogs. Wolves, wolves are, I mean, what a bizarre alien life form.
It depends on the degree. A. goldfish, for that matter, is an alien form.
Oh, my God. Some of the most alien-looking stuff is in the ocean, for sure.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, octopuses, are the most bizarre.
They're smart, I hear.
They're so smart. They figure out jars. They know how to unscrew jars. Jesus. And they also, they can camouflage themselves to look exactly like the floor.
Have you ever seen octopuses do that? No. Oh, my God, you have to see this. My friend, Remy Warren, he used to have a show called Apex Predator, and what he would do is study all of the different methods that different apex predators used and see, like, is there anything you could emulate as a human being? But this shows some footage of octopuses camouflaging themselves to their environment.
It's insane. It's alien. And this is what Remy said. He goes, dude, they're aliens. He goes, you've never seen anything like it.
And he had no idea until he filmed this show, I don't think, of how complex their ability to blend in is. But that's an octopus. Which one? Right there. That thing you're looking at.
They make themselves look like plants. They make themselves look like coral. They make themselves look like rock. Watch when they get over it. Look.
Look how he changes color, depending on what he's on. Yes. That's an octopus. Look at that. Watch what he does.
He blends in with the plant.
That's pretty wild.
And he blends in with the texture of the soil underneath the plant.
Is that because there's a predator around?
No, because he's a predator. Oh, I see. So as these fish swim in looking to eat, this octopus is hiding. They have octopuses that kill sharks. There's a video of, they had this, see, Google.
octopus kills shark in aquarium.
Jesus Christ.
Yeah, they camouflage themselves to look like anything. Look at this. Watch how it does this.
Wow.
Just get some good footage of what they do when they get over things. But when they get over it, they've done it like cuttlefish, which are also similar. I think they're called cephalopods. They do it where they've done them, where they try to emulate a chessboard. Oh, Jesus.
Yeah. How bizarre is this?
Very.
But they change their texture. I don't want to be an innocent fish around here.
I mean, what a crazy little thing that's moving around at the bottom of the ocean, changing its texture, changing its colors to look exactly like its environment. Like, look at this thing. It's fucking bonkers. That's an alien. I mean, if we found that on another planet, we would be like, what the fuck is that thing?
I'm sure the DOD is studying it, trying to make octopus weapons.
Yeah, they probably definitely have studied these things, figure out. how are they doing this?
Yeah.
Instead, they're sushi. We turn them into sushi.
That's right.
We turn them into, we just grill them.
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