Oliver Stone on Nuclear Energy, Putin and the Path to Conspiracies
59:42 Share

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Join Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app today and earn your spot at the festival. Learn more at globalcitizen.org slash bots. It's on!

Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Gordon Gekko. And I'm here to tell you greed is good. Just kidding. It's not really that good, but it's not bad sometimes for some people. This is on with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher.

And I'm Naeema Reza, and Gordon Gekko, of course, is Michael Douglas' character from the film Wall Street, the hit 1987 film and 2010 sequel by our guest today, Oliver Stone. 2010 was not so good. Not so bueno. The original was fantastic.

It's just an amazing movie. It was sort of so reflective of the times. And Gordon Gekko had a phone that I had, too. Oh, you had the Gordon Gekko phone. Yeah, the big giant one. Stone, of course, meant Wall Street to be a critique of capitalism. Yeah. But you know what happened instead? People loved Gordon Gekko.

They wanted to be him. More bros were inspired to become stockbrokers. And it's apparently very much a dismayed stone. Yeah, it probably did. I mean, they tried to make Charlie Sheen the hero. You know, he was sort of taken in by Gordon Gekko. But you're right. Gordon Gekko was so compelling and so fascinating that he, you know, he's a billionaire today, like a zillionaire today. He did just fine. Gordon Gekko isn't working.

Yeah, isn't working. Anyway, he probably is because he liked it all. But there was a lot of things he said, which actually, if you go back and watch it, it has a lot of resonance to changes in the economy that he was completely correct about many things. Well, in a minute, we're about to get to Stone, who has directed more than 30 films, including Born on the Fourth of July. Great film.

JFK, Snowden. He also wrote Scarface. But before we get there, it is finally after Fourth of July starts hot movie summer. Supposedly. Which is like hot girl summer, but darker and less making out. Yeah. Look, the movie season has not started off well. Flash has been a disaster for Warner Brothers.

The new multiverse Spider-Man has done well, but a lot of them are not performing. You have to be a big opener like Mission Impossible, which is opening, which I will be there in the front row seat for the first day. And maybe the Barbie movie. I'll be interested to see how that does widely. But it's really hard to open a movie. I think Tom Cruise is the only one who's really delivered for Hollywood in terms of theatrical experiences. And then Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer is the one that I'm very excited about. Yes, it is a hard time. Actually, I had friends who just are about to premiere a new film called Joyride, which is a raunchy rated R comedy. Are you excited for it? Oh, very much. I'll see that on a plane. I'll be honest with you. No, don't. You've got to see it in a theater. So my friends wrote it, Cherry Chiva Prabhuduramrung and Teresa Hsiao. And it was directed by our friend Adele Lim, who co-wrote Crazy Rich Asians. Great cast. Amazing cast. Stephanie Hsu, Ashley Park. Ashley Park. I love Ashley Park. I know. I was out with all of them.

Did you have a joyride? No, but great cast, great film. There's some really fun movies. I'll see it in the theater, even though I'm probably going to see it on a plane, but okay. You see it twice, Kara. Also, you like to watch films on planes about the plane going down because you're intense like that. Yeah, I do. I do. I put them on my thing and there they are. I always get looked askance at by...

you know, the neighbors and the stewards and stuff. And I'm always like, what? I'm excited for these movies, especially Mission Impossible. Let's be clear. That's my number one. Yes. Mission Impossible, Joyride, Oppenheimer, and Barbie. These are all four of those CN theaters. Yeah. I'll be interested to see how Oppenheimer does because it's a complex and difficult movie about nuclear energy, which is nuclear bombs, excuse me. And what we're talking about today is nuclear energy.

Yes, it's the Chris Nolan film about the theoretical physicist who helped develop the world's first nuclear weapons. And our guest today, Oliver Stone, has also made a film about nuclear. It is a documentary, not quite the Chris Nolan's scripted feature. But the film starts by asking actually a very good question, which is, why don't we have more nuclear energy?

in a world where renewable sources of energy like solar and wind are not reliable, they're variable, and more reliable sources like oil and coal are so dirty. And damaging. And damaging. Why don't we build more nuclear plants? Yeah, a lot of people are now rethinking it, including Bill Gates and many others.

have changed their minds because the actual facts are it's not as dangerous as people think it is. There haven't been as many deaths. And the impact of climate change because of fossil fuels, including methane, including natural gas, all of them is really devastating. So we have to be rethinking the use of safe nuclear energy. And some of the innovations in it are really interesting. I've talked to a lot of companies that are working on fusion and nuclear energy in ways that are really compelling. Bill Gates being...

first and foremost, in terms of investing in it. Of course, those small and modular reactors, which we'll talk about with Oliver Stone. But it is so important because people think, oh, well, you know, I'll get an electric vehicle. But it's only as good as what you plug the thing into to charge it. And so there are parts of China, for example, where driving an electric car is actually reportedly worse for the environment because you're using so much coal to power that car and charge it up. You might as well drive a gas-powered car at some point. And at times this film, which we've both watched,

It's a polemic. It's a polemic. It's a polemic. It's a polemic. He's taken a stand. And it's an interesting argument, and he makes a good one, but it's a polemic. And a lot of people who are against nuclear energy probably haven't done as much research as they should, I have to say. Yes.

Because I have been convinced by many, many, many people that a lot of the scare tactics, which are based on nuclear bombs, which are, of course, a nuclear bomb can ruin your day. You're saying the conflation between nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry. Yeah. There are cultural and cost barriers to kind of pushing through nuclear, which I think he's hoping that this will make a dent the way Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth made a dent, right, in climate change.

And it certainly toggles between kind of constructing a case being a polemic and then just a flat out ad for nuclear at times. You know, most of his movies are polemics. Let's be clear. You know, every one of them. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Because he said most of his films are designed to expose a lie, which they often are controversial. Yeah.

They sometimes veer towards conspiratorial. Fear. They run right into it. They rush. They drive their electric vehicle powered by nuclear right into it.

And the key one for that is the 1991 film JFK, which starred Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Bacon. Did you see that film? Oh, yeah, I enjoyed it. Kevin Costner just ate up the screen. It was so enjoyable to watch. You know, I think it's absolutely important to raise what happened to John F. Kennedy. I'm not a grassy knoll kind of person, but it certainly was, the investigation was not done in the way that it should have been. And there are links between, you know, the mob, Cuba, Mexico.

There's just, it's enough to, should have been investigated in a better way. For people who have not seen this film, it dramatizes a conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the assassination of JFK. And Walter Conkite, who actually broke the news of JFK

JFK's assassination, he said the film was a, quote, mismatch of fabrications and paranoid fantasies. Yeah, that's the problem. He went way too far down that avenue. It got nominated for eight Oscars and won two, though. Yeah, I know. It was a great film. Watching his films, they're so thick. They're so full of stuff. Whether, you know, Born on the Fourth of July is one of the

I think, speaking of Tom Cruise, too, one of the finest movies. So gripping. By the way, you know that, like Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone dabbled in Scientology? Oh, I didn't know that. For a month. It's in Going Clear. It's in Larry Wright's book. Interesting.

I actually read a biography of him, but it ended in Platoon. Platoon, yeah. He's really made some amazing movies. He made that four-hour documentary with Putin, which was based on 20-plus hours of Putin. You know, I had a real problem with Natural Born Killers, but it stuck with me for when I saw it, I don't know, 20 years ago. What was your problem with Natural Born Killers? It was so upsetting. It was so upsetting to watch just...

It was really disturbing. It was like a Bonnie and Clyde on steroids. So his mind is a little bent, I would say. He's very polarizing. And one of the things, he attracts a certain crowd. He's not Alex Jones, but he attracts a certain crowd that probably likes. There's probably some diagram overlap of fans. And Christian, Christian Castor-Rissel, one of our producers on the team,

Actually went out to cover one of the first ever or the first ever Flat Earth International Conference in 2017. And he found a lot of stone stands there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's a really interesting talent he has, but he definitely the Putin thing, that nice guy like that was. Yeah. Some have called him a Putin apologist. That documentary is a love letter. Yes, it is. And it is.

This is something that obviously we're going to ask Stone about. You didn't want to start there. You wanted to build up to it. Yes, I did. Because I do think this documentary deserves attention. And I think he is obviously a very gifted filmmaker. You know, he's got a dose of crazy, you know. He's a very talented filmmaker. And as someone who I produce and write and direct documentary, I'm very much in awe of his talents.

for film. 100%. And we should note going into this that Stone is not a nuclear expert. He co-wrote the film with a scientist, Joshua Goldstein, and based on a book that Goldstein had written with another scientist. But he is a filmmaker who has studied this subject and has a particular point of view. So, you know, a lot of what he's putting forward is his opinion. And we'll see. The timing of the film couldn't be better. The U.S. is now rethinking nuclear, as you were saying, a lot of innovation coming into it. Yeah.

What's ironic is that the person most beleaguered by conspiracy theories these days is Bill Gates, who is, of course, someone who has been pushing what Stone wants to push. Which is nuclear. Nuclear, yeah. Among other things. But that's one of his big things. So it's kind of funny. And of course, Bill Gates did not put a chip in your vaccine. Anybody. He didn't. No, he didn't. Yeah. They'll probably be buddies. We'll see. I don't know. We'll see. Okay.

Anyways, let's see if this is Oliver Stone's Al Gore moment. Yes. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with Stone.

All right, welcome. We're going to talk about the arc of your work a little later, but I want to start that you've made over 30 films. You've told stories about Vietnam War, Greed on Wall Street, figures like JFK, Nixon, Bush, Edward Snowden, Vladimir Putin, and now nuclear energy and climate change. What's the through line of your career and what you're trying to build here with this body of work across complicated, often controversial topics?

Well, one doesn't think about it in terms of when you're a young person, you don't say, I'm going to be this at the end of my life. You just do it as you go. And the issues that concern you often concern the rest of the world. I mean, I have been very conscious of the news when I was raised that way in New York City by my father, who was conscious of the news. And I've always been interested in who's president and economic policy. My father was an economist. And

Try to follow the trends. Nuclear energy, I mean, the concept of clean energy has been haunting for the last few years. Everyone's talking about it since they've acknowledged climate change since, let's say, the 2000 period. And certainly Al Gore's film brought attention to it in 2006. So it's scary. Even if you don't accept climate change, and some people don't,

What is the best way to utilize energy in our country? That could be conservation conscious. And in that regard, when you do the research and you go around and you talk to the scientists, people who know, who don't just have opinions, but who know, it comes out that nuclear energy is a must.

is a must. What made you do that? You said most of your films unpack a lie. You say undiscovered lies that people won't admit, I think, in an interview. Explain the lie that got you motivated to do an entire documentary, almost two-hour documentary. Well, I didn't see it as a lie when I started. It was simply to deal with this issue of where are we going? I mean, everyone was talking about

taking pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear positions. It's tedious to listen to these arguments because it's a what if, what if, what if kind of question mark. We want to move beyond that and try to solve the problem. So when I read this book called A Bright Future written by Josh Goldstein, who is a professor of international relations and a nuclear engineer scientist from Sweden called Stefan Svester,

They laid out in a very simple book, it was very clear, it's very dry and hard to read, but it's clear that we're going to need a lot of nuclear energy in the next 30 years to meet the standards of what the IPCC calls 2050 is going to be kind of a breakpoint when the Earth is going to no longer going to be able to recover from warming.

and it will just keep warming itself. Let's say that's true, but even if it were not true, I would still be saying, and this book would still be saying we need nuclear energy, and we had it. It works. Sure. I guess what I want to get to is why this? There's crises all over the world, including misinformation, political partisanship. What prompted you to come to this?

to this? You read a book. You read a book that you liked, right? There's lots of books. Because I'm scared. I'm scared for the world. I have children. Hopefully I'll have grandchildren. What's my daughter and son going to face? The

The prospect of the Earth getting worse is what scares me. The Earth should be getting better because we know more and more and more, and we have more tools to help us. And it's not getting better. The carbon dioxide poisoning in the air, along with the methane gas poisoning in the air, is growing. So this compelled you to make an argument that the answer is—

The solution is nuclear energy. So I want you to explain why you think nuclear is the answer and compare it to solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy that we've been sold on.

Because you can get more out of it, more bang for your buck. Well, because nuclear operates 24-7. I mean, it's basically a capacity of about 90% plus. It's always going night and day. Once it's built, it's expensive. Once it's built, the maintenance is very smooth. And it runs and it runs, and we take it for granted. And we took it for granted in our country. And we never really kind of realized it. We looked to one accident, which was the Chernobyl accident.

which terrified the world. And Three Mile Island. I understand why, but that one accident became the basis for closing up nuclear plants, not only in Germany, but even in the United States, closing them early. And the others, the other solar wind are not, renewables are not good enough. They're too small, is the argument. They're too small on the scale that we need. We need continent size. Plus, it takes up a lot of land. You know, in Germany, for example, they put up

solar panels in a huge solar park, almost 500,000 panels reflecting the sun. Those panels produced about one-tenth the electricity that nuclear produced on five times the size of the land. And the same is kind of true about turbines, too, because they take a lot of space. But if we can do it, we should do everything we can. Everything we can. Yeah.

I want to talk about why we're not using it. You make a case at the beginning of the documentary about this quite clear, and it's largely around safety and fear of accidents, essentially. You yourself said you used to be afraid of nuclear energy. What convinced you that it was safe? Because a lot of our fears come from the nuclear bomb, right? Presumably. Exactly. So we equate the two. Yeah.

Nuclear bomb and nuclear energy have been conflated into one monster. And the truth is the nuclear bomb is enriched with plutonium. And it makes it highly radioactive and it's dangerous. It happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which we set off. And people died of poisoning, radioactive poisoning. But nuclear energy was made in a much lower level environment.

The enrichment process is monitored highly by the IAEA, International Atomic Energy Commission. These plants are very, very safe. They're built along these lines very strictly. In the United States, too strictly. You might argue that there should have been more accidents because as in any new industry, chemicals, gas, oil, pipelines, there's a process of learning.

I think they did a pretty damn good job. They had one accident in the United States. It was at Three Mile Island. Right. And nobody died. The containment structure worked at Three Mile Island, and yet the panic was in... So you're saying it became demonized in this, you know, a nuclear bomb. It was demonized, yeah, by that...

by that film by Jane Fonda and I admire Jane very much for Vietnam Stan as you know but it made hysterical the concept grew that if this thing blows up it's going to be a nuclear explosion. I'm curious have you heard from Jane Fonda on this? No.

No, I haven't. But I wish she would look at it. It's very hard to go back on your thinking and change your mind. But you have to listen to facts. So what changed your mind? You said you were in that camp. You were in that camp. Yeah, but I wasn't. I assumed that people knew what they were talking about. But the truth is that the nuclear industry never really had a lobbying. They never had...

you know, what Wyoming has with coal or Texas has with oil, they didn't have a constituency. And no scientist was, there was no Einstein around, or I guess, or Marie Curie who found radium.

to explain it to the people so that they would understand it. And the media got involved. And let's be honest, they love hysteria. They love sensationalism. When you can talk about an explosion in your backyard of the size of a nuclear bomb, it's going to make the news. But that's not the case. All right, let's get to the media in a second. But let's play a clip from the documentary to start. This is President Eisenhower sharing his vision for nuclear energy in a speech to the UN in 1953, followed by your voiceover. Let's play that.

This greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boom for the benefit of all mankind. Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world. The United States pledges before you to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way

by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death but consecrated to his life. The entire assembly of delegates from around the world, including the Soviet Union, responded with warm and sustained applause.

Okay, we're not exactly living in this nuclear powered utopia, he promised. You argue a few things are to blame. Let's do a lightning round of some of these things you say have gotten in the way. Let's start with big oil and economic interests here. How did they change things?

Well, as we explained in the film, they knew that this was a threat to their livelihood and their profits. And the Rockefeller Foundation put out a study in 1956, which put its thumb on the scale. And their scientists that were paid for by the Rockefeller came out with this conclusion that any amount of radiation is harmful to the human body.

This is a study that went right to the New York Times front page. The publisher of the Times was incidentally on the board of the Rockefeller Foundation. What happened is that that report is fraudulent and it has been denied by science. It's been discredited. Low-level radiation exists all over the world. It's with us. It's cosmic rays bombard the Earth, the Sun. We are exposed to radiation, low-level radiation, all day long.

And people at high levels of altitude or in airliners are more exposed to it and so forth and so on. But when you have that kind of news, it sticks around. So that perception was there from almost the beginning, from 1956. So they created this lie. They created a lie. Bad PR. They put bad PR against it by saying you could die. Well, there's low-level radiation and there's high-level radiation. High-level radiation is dangerous. Mm-hmm.

The bomb stuff is high-level radiation because it's enriched. The nuclear plant radiation is low-level. So big oil tried to scare people into thinking you could be mutated. They did. And also they went on in time, and now they have declared themselves the perfect partner for renewables.

You see why? Because we know that renewables, sun and wind, do not work all the time. So what's the backup? It's immediately gas. Okay, so you talk about the co-opting of environmental groups, of Big Oil's anti-nuclear agenda, that they shifted. Initially, the Sierra Club was pro-nuclear energy and then became anti, including the Friends of the Earth, who was funded by...

Big oil. Talk about that. It's very hard to follow the money because it's always anonymously given. But definitely, Rod Adams in the film tells the story of the ARCO investment in Friends of the Earth. Friends of the Earth was one of the first anti-nuclear environmental groups

around 1970, but the chief of Arco Oil Gas broke the first check for $200,000 to Friends of the Earth. They got into the business of

protesting nuclear energy. Not all the environmental groups did at first, but certainly a lot of them did. Greenpeace followed in 1970. Greenpeace. And so, because why? Because oil was controlling them? I think that's hard to believe. But they may have gotten their initial funding from that, but what happened to these groups to become so anti-nuclear? Well, who knows what funding continued. We don't know where the funds come from. But the point is, even if it's not a conspiracy, it's business as usual, which is the oil companies don't want to have competition from...

From nuclear. Okay. So you talk about the, we've talked about the conflation of nuclear energy and nuclear war. And you point a finger at Hollywood for fear mongering. How do the films and TVs stoke the fear? Obviously you've got Godzilla that came out after the bomb, you know, duck and cover. And then the China syndrome, you know,

All kinds of movies. There's one movie after the next. Yeah. You don't forget Silkwood, which is a wonderful film with Meryl Streep. These people are... Film business has been horrible to the nuclear industry. We had all the horror films of the 50s when I was growing up. You know, everything was radioactive. There was always the reason for two heads. Monsters existed. Fish came out of the sea.

Everything that was horrible came from radiation. On top of that, you had this HBO series about Chernobyl, which was extremely successful around the world. So why is Hollywood doing this? Because they don't know. Because they don't know. And it makes, you know, it makes for easy, it's an easy, what do you call it? It's a low-hanging fruit. Can you imagine there being a movie, Nuclear Energy is Great? Yeah, I could. Well, you just made it. I had to make it as a documentary because it's very difficult to make.

At one point, Josh and I played with the idea of doing a scenario about a female scientist, because that was popular, a female scientist saving the world by her courage and so forth. But that becomes kind of melodramatic. It's not really a one-person issue. It's really a global issue. It can't be solved by the United States or one scientist. It's going to be solved by...

by a consensus in the world. But the popular idea is that nuclear energy is dangerous, is that no matter what, it's more dangerous than anything else. It was bad, yeah. It was bad. So there are justified fears. We've had, as you said, Chernobyl was the worst one. The UN estimates 4,000 deaths related to radiation exposure. But you and Mr. Goldstein fear it's

that it's been blown out of proportion. Totally. Compared to Bhopal, the deaths at Bhopal. Which is chemical. Right, 1980, was it? And then in 1975, we had the hydropower dime in China. 250,000 people died. So, I mean, there are accidents in any industry.

The airplane industry had accidents, and they were very dramatic. Nothing compared to what the car industry was turning out, as Ralph Nader pointed out. In other words, what's scary...

And what's dangerous are two different things. Nuclear energy is scary, but compared to the more mundane oil, gas, coal, nothing compared to it. So Fukushima was another one, an earthquake and a tsunami hit Japan, caused a nuclear disaster and an active power plant. As you point out, natural disasters are going to get more powerful and plentiful. So should we be more or not less concerned about future Fukushimas? Or you think every...

Every energy source is at risk. It's funny that you call, everyone says, Spugashima is a nuclear disaster. It isn't. It was a tsunami disaster as we had in the South Pacific. That plant was badly, had a low seawall and it was flooded. The generators were flooded. The seawall was penetrated, but the containment structure held. There was a radiation leak, but again, realize it's low-level radiation. People were checked out.

Nobody died from radiation poisoning. People died from mismanagement, hospitalization. Hospitals were emptied and they rushed it. But the Japanese government panicked and closed it down for quite a few years. It's a contagion of fear. So it would be like closing down planes if there was one plane crash. Yeah, closing down planes or banning knives. I mean, what's a knife for? A knife is a wonderful instrument. We use it for hundreds of things, but it can also kill people.

All right. But you just said something which I think a lot of people would get their back up. And Goldstein said in an interview, and you just said it, you think that it's better for nuclear if there were more accidents. Well, that's a form of saying, yes, we'd get more used to it because people get spoiled. They want zero tolerance. Zero tolerance in any industry is almost impossible.

So you're saying accidents normalize the tech, in other words. Accidents normalize. Yes, they do. And I mean, think about the waste from nuclear compared to ammonia, from agriculture, compared to arsenic, compared to lead, compared to mercury, which is...

just thrown into our landscape. So that radioactive waste is safer than all the other things that come out of oil, gas, solar panels. They talk about 100,000 years from now. Okay, right? But even so, it decays. It decays to almost nothing. Radioactive waste doesn't move. It's

It's been over glamorized and over sensationalized. And people can always say, what if, what if? But at a certain point, you've got to say, look, we got to we got to take the what if zero tolerance. It's not going to happen. We got to build. All right. Let's talk about that. The cost plants are getting built across the U.S. are costing twice as much as their budgets promise, while other countries have been able to do it cheaper. South Korea has actually lowered its costs.

Talk about how we get costs down, specifically the rule of SMRs, which are small modular reactors, which move around. That is the American way. We're building innovative companies, private companies, with the support of the DOE, the Department of Energy.

exploring the small modular reactors. Bill Gates has invested a lot of money. It looks very promising on what they call a Natrium. Natrium is a saltwater reactor. Don't ask me to explain all the details. I'm not a scientist, but it looks good. Would you have one in your home?

when they get small enough? Absolutely, in a second. Powered by nuclear energy. Interestingly, I had a discussion with Bill Gates about this, who is a big investor in nuclear technology, which of course will add to the conspiracy theories around Bill Gates and the chips and the vaccines and everything else. But so it requires startups to be doing this, presumably, if that's the case, innovation in nuclear energy.

When we make the point that startups are an alternative to General Electric, because General Electric builds on a big scale, and as it was explained in the film, their nuclear division is a small part of their overall business. They make turbines. They make drilling equipment. It's a huge company. So their motivation to...

to do nuclear is limited. But the other... But there's the small companies that do this full-time, that this is their motive to begin with. That's the companies that...

hopefully will make a breakthrough in America. Yeah, also Sam Altman, who is the head of CHATGCT, also has a big fusion. He's working on that. Yeah, fusion is also for the future, but not now. That's his great interest. You do explore France as a kind of nuclear energy gold standard. 70% of the country gets its energy from nuclear, but there's serious costs and climate issues. Last year, half of France's plants were offline for repairs.

Unusually high temperatures put more pressure on the plant's cooling systems. The state-funded nuclear power operator EDF is billions of dollars in debt. So is France really the shining example? Yes, it is. It's a wonderful example, actually, because it's been working for 50 years. They built 57 reactors, and they've been delivering. And France had very low electricity costs, and they had very little CO2. But, you know, the French system has to be repaired because it's been at...

in business for 50 years at a low price. But there are pipes and corrosion and so forth and so on, but that's part of the business. So what they did should be the map, what they did for today. Absolutely. And Russia, too. Russia, too, has 20% of its electricity coming from nuclear, and they have built some of the finest reactors ever seen. They have this new fast breeder, which we saw at Belyarsk in the Ural Mountains in the center of Russia. That fast breeder...

its own waste. Right. I got that. Of course, it's paid for by their gas and gas and oil revenues. No, it's paid for by the state. That part of it. But gas is no good. Russia is definitely, it's sad that they do it. But China is the one that's building the most nuclear right now. They are investing, according to what I read, $440 billion into building 125 or so new reactors. They already have 50 some reactors.

They've promised to get to zero emissions. Well, that's one thing. 2038, they will have all these reactors in place and they'll be building more. They have promised, President Xi has promised to go to a zero emission by 2060.

Right. So we're not in China. We're not in Russia. We're not in France. In the U.S., how do you get politicians behind the nuclear vision in a bipartisan way? Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently went to visit the site of the Fukushima power plant and said she was there to neither fearmonger nor sugarcoat.

So how do you get people in this country to be bipartisan about nuclear, especially when there's oil and gas interests and coal interests? Joe Manchin just got it dropped into the debt ceiling bill, a coal plant. Listen, I acknowledge it's a huge problem to get people to change their ways, but the worst necessity is a mother of invention. The worst it gets, people will see. They know in their hearts that oil and gas are not the solution. But

As the planet chokes, there has to be change. And people will realize maybe too late and they'll be building nuclear as fast as they can by 2040 or even 2035. But as I said to you earlier, the nuclear business does not have a constituency. They're not very good at promoting themselves. I talked to these people at Idaho Lab. They all want to make the next solution, but they don't have a clue as to how to advertise it.

like the oil people do or the coal people do. Right, right. Movies, movies can help. Let me ask you this. I think it's a natural question. No nuclear company paid or invested in this movie. No, no, this was done privately. It was Participant. This was done by Participant. Participant helped us a lot. Jeff Skola produced The Inconvenient Truth, and he was anti-nuclear.

We talked, and two, three years ago, he changed. He read everything he could on nuclear. He's a very bright man, much more scientific than I am. And he's very happy with this film and wants it to penetrate, doing everything he can to help us. Okay, so you end the documentary on an optimistic note about the pace of technological innovation you've witnessed in our lifetime. Why so optimistic? You know, you're very leaning into entrepreneurship, innovation.

It's a bit of a love letter to the nuclear energy. Well, you could say that. The ending, you know, all I've seen in the last few years is dystopian stuff. The film's...

reading materials. It's depressing. I don't understand why the movie business is just always about death and destruction. I guess that makes money. But I really would like to see a change and hope given to the future. In this book, I found Bright Future is about hope and about changing the way we're

doing our energy now. It's doable. That's what's frustrating about it. It's fascinating because a lot of your movies are dystopian, whether it's Wall Street. Or dystopian. You know, Natural Born Killers really left me, was a bummer, was a fucking bummer, Oliver, I have to tell you. But I'm saying, what shifted you to Utopian and its nuclear that does this? Because a lot of your films are darker, I would say, historically.

I don't think they're like dances in the park. I don't feel... No, I'm not known for a Disney approach to Frozen here. Believe me, I've always been an optimist because...

Sometimes you go to the darker places because you can handle it. You can take it. You don't get depressed, but you can come out the other end and you're better for it. And that's the truth about human existence. Suffering sometimes makes us wiser and better people. So the same thing applies in making, creating films like this.

Somehow I have an innate optimism. Perhaps it comes from my mother. My father was a pessimist, actually, more than my mother, but my mother was really a believer in humanity. And I repeat that at the end of the movie because scientist Marie Curie, one of the greatest, brought us the discovery of uranium and what it could do. And Einstein and people and...

And even Eisenhower, as dark as it could get during the Cold War, he was still hoping that we could nuclearize our society. And we were close to doing that. I wish we had built more. But I'm an optimist. You're an optimist.

So one of the things you do talk about is something that is never going to happen at this moment in time, which is you said there's no reason for the United States and Russia not to be partners on nuclear. But realistically, any partnership seems far-fetched.

Is nuclear still possible in the scale you envision without the U.S., Russia and China working together? Do you see it seems like, well, sure. But right now, given the world, the state of world affairs. Well, let's say it's not realistic now because of the politics. But there's no reason why we were the enemies of Russia. When I was a boy, there was constant anti-Russian propaganda and they changed everything.

suddenly when Ronald Reagan actually talked to the enemy and had this relationship with Mr. Gorbachev and it resulted in a tremendous period of cooperation. Even before that there was cooperation in the space. Kennedy, John Kennedy, who was proponent of nuclear power, spoke of that partnership in his great peace speech in 1963. We should recognize the sacrifice of the Soviet Union in World War II and

We have to we have to what they call coexistence, which you don't hear about these days. But the concept of coexistence was very important to the planet. And he spoke about that. And that's unfortunately been forgotten. Well, it's another time there is there's obviously incredible tension with China right now, but more so with Russia. And you were making the Edward Snowden film. I know you spent a lot of time in Russia and met Vladimir Putin there.

Then you made a four-hour TV series called The Putin Interviews, which you released in 2017 on Showtime. You spent 22 hours interviewing Putin. Talk a little bit about this because I think he's not the world's most popular person right now. Yeah, the four-hour documentary, The Putin Interview, speaks for itself and I really...

There's nothing to defend and it's just a series of questions. I got to know him through the Snowden because I was curious about how Snowden got into Russia and he tells the whole story. How did you meet Putin? That way. I met him as a result. I was in Moscow shooting the end of the film and we shot some stuff with him at the end of the film. If you saw Snowden, you'd know what I'm talking about. Sure, yeah, I did. So who introduced you? It was somebody...

There are people around him, I mean, they knew I was in Russia because I got permission. So I met him at a theater actually, it was in the backstage, and he explained to me very rationally the story, as he saw it, of the Snowden affair, which is fascinating to hear on film. It's in the Putin interviews.

Although Snowden wasn't a fan of his. He told me he was not a fan of Putin at the time when I interviewed him. Snowden was trying to get back into the United States, too, because Snowden didn't consider himself, and he's not a traitor. But unfortunately, there's been a perception of him as such. So there's a lot of misconceptions here.

Anyway, yes, despite all the criticism, I went ahead and I did. We ended up doing a 20 some hours. I spent 30 hours with a man over two and a half years. Right. And he gave me he enlightened me a lot. I mean, he told me the whole Ukraine story from his point of view, which is crucial to know for Americans.

And he told me about many other things, about dealing with the George Bush administration. He's been in office 20 years. He's seen a lot. Certainly. He's a world statesman. Okay. A lot of people, I would say a lot of people think not so. But how did you get the access to him? Did you have to promise anything? No, I didn't promise a thing and he didn't touch a thing. We had complete freedom in editing. I think the first meeting led to the second meeting. In other words, he saw that I was serious about these questions and I wanted to know.

And I was coming from at it from call it more of a Western viewpoint because I didn't understand some of the Russian thinking. So I learned a lot in those two years to

Two and a half years. And I saw the world situation getting worse and worse and worse. So it's a strange thing. You know, obviously a lot of tension. I took a lot of heat for the interviews, but I maintain that they're objective. So there were some tough moments in that Putin interview, including pushing back and forth on elections. He was denying hacking U.S. elections. That is indeed a lie. The Russians have.

Well, we don't know that. Well, we do. This area I do know about. But in any case, when you aired these, were you worried about the pushback that you got? Was that a worry for you? And have you changed your opinion since? Changed my opinion of him? Of him. Mm-hmm.

No, no, I've read all the criticisms. I've been reading them off and on since 2002. I mean, he's been criticized heavily in the United States for being accused of many crimes. And the 2007 meeting in Munich certainly is...

is a key point to look at again, and you can see the United States reaction to his same proposals that he was making proposals for peace and an understanding of the Russian red lines. And you see John McCain smirking as he speaks, so you get a lack of respect, and I think you feel that throughout that conference, and it goes on and on and on.

And it's a shame because I think that's part of the problem. We just don't have respect for the Russian special for Russian interests in this time. We don't understand them. We're operating blindly, blindly. And I think it's very dangerous. Has your perspective changed since the invasion of Ukraine? I understand Ukraine in another way because I understand the origins of the war and I see them as a civil war between Russian ethnics and Ukrainians.

And Ukrainians. Okay. And do you get a great deal of flack for that, given the support for Ukraine in this country? I don't. Listen, I haven't talked much about it. I'm doing nuclear energy. I'm trying to push this through. It's distracting as a side issue. Okay. So when you, let me ask you about Hollywood then. You told my colleague Olivia Nutzi at Vulture that moviemaking these days is money wasted. Why is that?

I don't know the context of that, but I would say they spent an enormous amount of money on marketing and advertising and not on making. And actually, the making is very inflated now. I mean, the budgets are...

The budgets that I knew, I made films realistically, and the budgets were much tighter than they are now. So it seems to me it's more of an event. It's like Westinghouse building a nuclear reactor or General Electric. It becomes extremely expensive. By the time you finish, it goes over budget. It goes delayed. So in that context, when you look at it, you've had decades of being a prominent writer and director. We're in the middle of a strike now.

One of the things you talked about is there's no original ideas anymore. How do you look at Hollywood overall? Listen, I made 20 feature films and 10 documentaries. I've achieved, you know, I'm happy with what I've achieved. But in any case, I'm...

I'm making another documentary. It's almost done now. It's on Lula of Brazil. We interviewed him. I've known him off and on since early 2000.

in my earlier documentary, South of the Border. So I'm staying active and interested in the world. But when you look at Hollywood overall as someone who's been there, you know, you have AI coming around, you've got all this things happening. How do you look at the industry now? Where is it from your perspective? I'm a bit old-fashioned in that way. I regard story as the essence, and I think we need a soul to tell a story.

And I think artificial intelligence, despite all its advantages, does not have a soul. And Hollywood, the industry in general, are you worried for it? That's a good question. Sometimes people say there's no soul in Hollywood because it's a pretty ruthless place. But if you believe in a soul, you keep doing it. You don't change your way. If someone wants to believe in me, I'm...

Glad to make a film that I believe in. Okay, my last question. You've been interested in conspiracy theories your whole career. Some might even say your films. Some of them are around conspiratorial thinking. How do you feel about the mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking that's happened in this country? There's been a surge. It's inevitable. I don't have to go any further than Hillary Clinton.

I mean, they talk about the nefariousness of my JFK and how it hurts the country, but it doesn't hurt the country. It's a search for truth, and it's important that we get there. We have to get past the Warren Commission because it's so juvenile.

Hillary was, with all her people, was saying that Donald Trump was an agent, essentially, of the Russian government. And that went around very quickly after he won the election. I thought she was a sore loser. And I think it hurt his presidency. No matter what you think about Trump and what he did, and I'm not making that judgment,

He still did not get a chance to really be the president because he was so reviled off the top from a phony investigation that was proven, the Mueller report, the Durham report. There was nothing to it, and yet it went around this country for three years. So that is a conspiracy, and it's conspiratorial thinking, very dangerous, very dangerous.

Very dangerous and without foundation. Well, he's got some with the election fraud and everything else. Yes, that's later. But I'm starting where it became very obvious that conspiratorial thinking is taking over in this country in that 2016 election. But who is to blame for that in the overtaking of conspiracy theories in our national psyche?

Well, you know, I've lived from 1946 to now, and I know, I'll tell you this, I grew up in a conspiracy about, it was Russia was behind everything. If you remember McCarthy, they were all over the White House, they were all over the State Department, especially the State Department. They were in our system. They were teachers in schools. They were part of the military. There was all kinds of accusations that the communists were inside the United States. And that was a big fear.

And where did that go? It was all nonsense. So there is, from my very beginning in my life, we were buying this stuff. There's been obviously conspiratorial thinking in this country and it's part of the American way. I'm sure it goes further back than that. As late as the 2000 election, I mean, I felt that night was a heartbreaking night for me. I felt it was a fraudulent election in the sense that they stopped counting the votes.

And it was very much an inside power move by Antonin Scalia, the justice of the Supreme Court, who put that final decision through, and James Baker and these people. I think that they, I don't believe Bush won that election. So I think from that point on, that was a severe, severe break in traditional respect for the vote. And we've had problems ever since then. And so, you know, you're someone who definitely, you know,

dabbles in that area, but it becomes, it curdles, conspiratorial thinking curdles. I mean, you're talking about someone here in nuclear power, Bill Gates, who's subject of conspiracy theories about the vaccine, that he's putting chips in people's heads, et cetera, et cetera. It moves somewhere very ugly rather quickly. How do you keep writing about the truth and

but not go right deeply into a conspiracy theory. How do they stop shifting into something that is crazy, just crazy, just untrue and damaging? Well, I've never ascribed to anything that I think is crazy. I'm not saying that Martians are here, although...

There's a lot of evidence of some stranger things are happening in the world. You have to stay open in the world to change. It's a part of the science is always teaching us new ways of doing things. Nobody before Marie Curie or Albert Einstein was thinking that energy is matter and how to get matter, how to get energy out of matter and how to build a horrible bomb or how to use it for good reasons. I mean, this is all developing.

So you can't curdle. If you curdle, then you become a cynic. But part of our job as human beings is to find good things in life. I believe nuclear energy is a good thing. And if I can promote it to my fellow Americans, I would be very proud, you know, as doing a good thing. So I'm not sure that I'm curdled, but certainly, I mean, I do believe Kennedy was killed. And I think he was killed for reasons. And I think he was the last president

good president we really had. And I think he was talking about coexistence, as I said earlier. And unfortunately, we're not there. We stayed in a militaristic state and

and built up this military-industrial complex into megatons, far bigger than Mr. Eisenhower ever had an inkling of. Do you imagine that you'll do another movie looking at this idea? I'd love to do one more film. I can't talk about it, but I'd love to do one more film because I have it in me. About what? I can't talk to you about that because I never talk about what I'm going to do. But I really...

love to do one more film and maybe I'll be given the opportunity to do so. And if I made another movie, believe me, it would not be frivolous. Not a musical? No.

Maybe you would. JFK, the musical? I tried to do Evita for a long, long time. Yeah, yeah. I regret not being able to make a musical. A musical about nuclear power, perhaps? No, that's pushing it. That's pushing it. Let me ask you the last question. Is there any movie you have made that you would make differently now, given your...

Well, there's sections that I'll probably do better. But I'm proud of the choices. All of the choices. All the movies. All of them. I defend them all. All right. Mr. Stone, thank you so much. Thank you. What do we think his next film after Lula will be? That'll probably be a polemic, too. The Love Letter to Trump. Just kidding. He's not. He's not going to do that. He's misunderstood.

He didn't get a chance. I think he got a chance, Oliver. I'm sorry on that one. He took every bit of my control to not to say, what the fuck are you talking about? Nice to meet you, insurrection. He doesn't like Trump, but I think it'll be Hillary. Hillary, he really doesn't like. Come on, come on.

The musical, Hillary, but the email. Yes, she's a housewife from Chappaqua. That is what she is now with zero power. And all of you, she is a housewife, including my mother. She's a housewife from Chappaqua. People are obsessed. But anyways, Hillary, the musical by Oliver Stone, funding thanks to Citizens United, coming soon to a theater near you. He made a number of controversial statements there. I think

that it was on Putin, maybe world statesman, okay. But then when he said it was a civil, a quote, civil war between Russian ethnics and Ukrainians. Yeah. You know, he's very anti-war and anyone who's anti-war, no matter what it is, he doesn't believe there's a just war. And some people do. But the misinformation stuff, he really just doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm sorry. I mean, he had his own very personal experience. I thought that was very telling. It was one of those conversations that actually gets more

the deeper you kind of go into the conversation and his upbringing, his, his believing that he grew up in a time of a lie has obviously shaped so much of what he does. I get it. I mean, he's older than me, but the Nixon thing was indelible. Um,

Even at my young age, the death of JFK, and I was just born then, I think, that would be indelible to him. And the Vietnam War would be just impossible to remove from your psyche, just like today's kids, pandemic, right? Well, also Iraq War for my generation, right? Going into college around the time of the Iraq War and seeing Colin Powell up there.

That creates a certain questioning. Scrutiny. Scrutiny is healthy. Conspiracizing is obviously not. That's correct. I very much appreciate his point that there are points of views outside the West. I don't agree with his characterization as a civil war, but I think there's a rush to kind of

oversimplify the external world order. Yeah, the black and white-ization. And you see it with the Saudi-Liv case, right, where a bunch of people who have not spent any time in the Middle East would like to make all kinds of attributions, allegations. But, you know, the PGA was running a near monopoly. So there's also that and other views out there. Yeah, I get it. They also were not dismembering members of the press. Yeah, but that's not all Saudis. And the characterization of the government as all of them is problematic. Okay. All right. Yes, they're a monopoly. I just

I think that he cannot not black and white everything, and that's how his movies are. And subtlety is not Oliver Stone's greatest asset, I would say. He called that line of questioning on Russia and Putin a distraction. And we wanted you to push him more, but you kind of backed off at that point. Why? I just think it's pointless to argue with these people about Putin. There's a whole raft of people who've decided to throw it in with Putin, and I just...

You know, the facts are what they are. This guy, you can see right now, including in this latest situation, this is a rotten government. It's a government that's rotten from the inside and full of corruption and worse. And what they're doing to Ukraine is just so obviously an invasion. And I don't know.

I don't know what to say. If you can't, at times when things happen, change your mind on things and go, oh, okay, look, this is bad. I just don't know what to say to you. Yeah, I would have loved to have a few minutes to really push him on that because one of the interesting points he made was actually about changing minds, specifically Jeff Skoll, who funded the film, and the fact that Skoll had changed his mind about nuclear. I have, too, over the years. I absolutely have. I know a lot more, and it's very easy to get drawn into...

One or the other, when in fact, when you think about the damage fossil fuel has done, it's very clear we have to make safe nuclear energy fusion, all the renewables, even though they don't keep up, and Stone is right in this, but we still have to lean into innovation and renewables, which are the best choice. Would you keep a small modular reactor in your home? I would. I would. Live next to a giant nuclear power plant with young children? I think they're not going to be giant. I think they're not going to be... That's the way of saying no. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. I don't feel unsafe around nuclear reactors. There were times at that interview where he started toward this kind of giant oil wing conspiracy. Yeah. I think there's some merit to it. I think if... Everything's not Chinatown, right? That was a movie about oil barons, etc. And so...

It makes a better film if it's very obvious villains and everything else. But I do think the oil industry has pushed away nuclear. I think they pushed away electric cars. I think there's no question. They are powerful people who like to keep their power, just like the tech industry does. Insidious. Anyone with money and power wants to hold on to that power and then buy Congress, etc., etc., etc.

It's interesting that someone this old, Oliver Stone, is like, I can't believe it. I'm like, oh, really? I found that about him sweet. Not a lot. He's a bit curmudgeonly, that Oliver Stone. But I thought he was earnest in this one moment. And the most earnest line he said was when he said, movies can help. Movies can help. They can. I thought that was really sweet and true. And in a negative thing, I think the movies that they did around nuclear energy really did make people...

pause about it in a way that was propaganda too. And movies can also hurt, which is to say that JFK was probably an interesting film, but the fact that it

It is a gateway into conspiracies. It's also probably not very much a good thing. Anyways, for whatever he thinks, he is a talented creative. 100%. It's a really interesting interview and a great... You should watch the movie. Yeah, you should watch the movie. Watch all his movies except Natural Born Killers, which apparently bums you out. It's a bummer. Carrie, you want to read us out? Yes. Today's show was produced by Naima Raza, Blake Nishik, Kristen Castro-Rossell, Megan Cunane, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Mary Mathis.

Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a small modular reactor next to your home, actually in your home. If not, you get to be an understudy in Evita the Musical, which will be filmed on an oil field. So go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.