Joe Lonsdale

And if you look at the standard of living the last couple hundred years for the poor middle class, it's tracked almost one to one in a lot of cases with the cost of energy. It's a really big deal to innovate on that. It's just been this very predictive thing for how well people are doing. What's the holdback with nuclear energy? Well, there's two different holdbacks.

The holdback on the fission side, which is what we should be scaling up now, is that we have an insane regulatory apparatus. And so we had this like It was like this atomic energy group in the U.S. that was very innovative. We used to do things very quickly in the 50s, 60s, and we built a ton of plants.

And then in the mid-70s, they shifted it, and it became what's called the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as far as I could tell and all of my friends could tell, had a mandate of just stopping anything new. So if you graph new nuclear stuff, it was like this, and then it flatlines. And these people... It's just crazy.

So basically, my father, for his job actually, was at something called Raychem and he was selling heat tracing. And he would sell heat tracing to different types of industrial plants. And sometimes he would try to sell it to a nuclear plant. And when he had to sell it to a nuclear plant, he had to bring like 60 binders that they had to work on and all this stuff of just nonsense information.

It made it 10 times as expensive for him to sell to nuclear plants. So what these bureaucrats did is they created so many rules and so many laws that made no sense whatsoever. And by the way, all of us want nuclear to be safe, but this was just like way aggressive beyond that. And so it made it unprofitable to do new nuclear plants.

And so what happened is starting from the mid 70s, you no longer could innovate on this technology and you only have what you had. And so it really crushed the industry for really almost a couple of generations now. And finally, Finally, thanks to great work by a lot of people I know, one of my friends who started Airbnb, his wife is a model who's a big nuclear energy promoter. It's really cool.

They're just really into this. And a bunch of other friends who are pushing nuclear energy. It's finally coming back as a bipartisan thing that it's cleaner for the environment. It's good for everyone, including the working class. It's good for American business. we should be innovating again in nuclear energy and building it.

So it looks like we're going to start fixing the regulations and allowing us to do more things there. I think this new administration, Chris Wright's coming in, Secretary of Energy, he's a very big fan of it. So I'm seeing really good things. So that's going to come back there. That's what's been blocking that.

On the fusion side, we just haven't had the technology, but this big investment might get us there the next decade.

It's very possible that part of the reason, there's probably like, if you look at Germany, the Green Party in Germany, which is a left party, was basically founded around an anti-nuclear energy policy.

There is a crazy part of the left that's against nuclear energy, but I bet you on the right, there's some interest from oil and gas that I can't go back in time and see those conversations in the smoke-filled rooms, but I bet you some of those guys, I love Texas, but I bet you some of those guys in Texas, they might have had a thing to say about that. Now, today, are they blocking it?

No, they're not really anymore. I think we're going to break through and fix it. Most of the guys I know, Chris Wright comes from, he created a giant fracking company, Liberty Energy. I think a lot of these guys nowadays are, they have a lot of money, they love the country, they just want the best solutions to win is what I've seen.

I'm sure there's some of them that don't want it, but I think overall the vibe shift we're in is just like, let's do what's best for America. So I think we're going to break through and fix the regulation.

It's going to become a bigger problem. I agree. Especially as you go to more electric vehicles where it's distributed and everyone wants to charge. That's going to weigh on these grids. They need to be modernized. The way we've built them right now, Sean, is the regulation again is a problem here. The incentives are all screwed up.

You're only allowed to charge certain amounts or spend certain amounts. And it's very much like one of the areas of our society that's like one of the commie areas of our society. I mean, it's like controlled by top-down by government and told what to do. And I have two concerns. One is it's not ready to work with what we're going to need in terms of future demand in the next five or ten years.

Two, it's not protected very well at all. So if I was an adversary who wanted to go to war against America or wanted to harass America, probably lots of ways to break in, hack in, take down these utilities. And it's kind of crazy. We spend all this money on defense. We haven't defended any of that stuff at all. I think we just leave it to the local towns.

But I'm sorry, these small towns aren't going to know how the heck to defend against the top hackers in China. So there's definitely a lot we could be doing to fix that.

Oh yeah. I'm concerned in general that we don't have an advanced manufacturing base that's nearly as big as it needs to be. I think from a geopolitical perspective, it's extremely dangerous.

And if we want to be ready, so in World War II, it wasn't that we had a bunch of big defense contractors, it's that we had a bunch of big industrial manufacturers and powers that were able to be shifted to do things for the war. And we've basically gotten rid of a lot of that base. And I think we need it back if we want to defend ourselves. So I think Trump is very good on this. He shifted it back.

I think even his first term actually kind of turned the whole conversation in our country where a lot of people on both sides now agree, we need to fix this. This is where the tariffs against China, if they're done correctly, are not totally insane at all.