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“Economically speaking we should have deleted trackers in 2016, right? Like the trackers are the systems that move the panels around. Obviously we're still in 2025 installing trackers.”

“So I believe that it should be possible to produce water, desalinated water, for 99 bucks an acre foot, which would be transformational, right?”

“Relax the outer space treaty in 2017 with the outer space, so the Artemis Accords, so we can go and kind of make a land grab on the moon, and then it turns out China's going to get there first.”

“I think ultimately, I think history will show this is going to be a massive net positive for United States. You know, obviously there's going to be some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way.”

“China's program managers in their space program, they fear the consequences of failure and NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference.”

“Nuclear reactors are steam engines and steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton cycle. And there are certain irreducible costs associated with, you know, steam turbines and so on that, that just drive the cost up. And that's, even if NRC didn't exist…”

“I think if China, our geopolitical adversary is attempting to harm us by giving us solar panels subsidized at their taxpayer's expense we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you…”

“Is Hyperloop ever gonna happen? [79] Casey Handmer: No. [80] Casey Handmer: I think I can safely say that now.”

“The solar has gotten so cheap that you can actually kind of do the reverse process, and it makes financial sense, increasingly so over time.”

“Plants are great. Even this plastic one here but their net throughput efficiency is about a hundred times lower than a synthetic process like the one we're using in terms of like, Area of land into reduced carbon fuel.”

“Fast aircraft, big aircraft, long, long range aircraft, hydrocarbons. Probably long range shipping would stay that way. Like LNG, it's just so cheap. It's gonna stay that way for a long time. Paints are gonna stay hydrocarbon based. Chemicals, pesticides, herb…”

“It seems pretty clear to me, I think two years ago, I've got a blog post on this saying that, like, we're going to have to go to solar and batteries for AI data centers at scale and back then everyone was still talking about, like, oh, we're going to build SMR…”

“They could probably see line of sight to, like, another two extra action in cost. So we go from eight cents a watt down to four cents a watt.”

“The limit of physics on how cheap a solar panel can be is, like, at least 10 times cheaper than it currently is.”

“Do you think by 2035 China is still going to be as dependent on oil through the Strait of Malacca? I don't. At the rate that they're deploying right now, they could cut off that supply if they needed to.”

“The single biggest intervention you could allow is by right development of solar panels on private land and ideally even like BLM land would be great.”

“This whole idea, like, comparative advantage, that the United States should just be intrinsically bad, or, like, uncompetitive at certain kinds of things, is crap. Like, this has every advantage it could possibly want.”

“If I see someone who is pretty successful do a series of crazy things over and over again, and yet they work out every single time, either they have root access, To the simulation. Or their model of reality is better than mine in some key way that I don't unde…”

“In the space sector, at least, it's quite astounding the extent to which SpaceX is dominant. Right. This is not the case that, like, Apple has, what, 2030, 40% market share in smartphones, and Pixel has 10%, and Huawei and so on has a, this is like, SpaceX has…”

“Something like 58 children's lives are saved in the United States every year by statistically by car seats, and something like 10,000 births are averted by families who cannot afford to upgrade their cars”

“So it is certainly the case that AI seems likely to produce enormous additional wealth. Whether that wealth will find its way to alleviating the tax burden on the working class in, you know, the 200 countries on earth that don't have their own AI industry, see…”

“If you spent twenty billion dollars on desalination, you could literally double the flow of the Colorado. So why? Five million acre feet.”

“California. I live there. I love it. It's great. It's a great state, but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now. And that's a real problem for the future of the progressive movement.”

“And in almost all cases, it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing, you know, capital relationships and projects and in particular, a large team of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about …”

“My experience in NASA was that the organization is you know, it's still stuffed to the gills with brilliant people, but most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work, like actively being blocked and hindered an…”

“So I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve the energy problem, you know, this decade.”

“In terms of energy we can give every man, woman, and child on Earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States, which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year with something like six percent of Earth's surface under solar, which is, It's a, …”

“I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans, it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 19 thirties.”

“How many seven three sevens could you build and operate for 30 years for that much money? And it turns out you could move more people more quickly that way than with the Hyperloop.”

“Terraform is building a machine that connects to Standard quantitized solar array and produces natural gas.”

“Everywhere pretty much that people live has enough sun that you can make, you know, can grow enough food to survive. And if you can grow enough food to survive, you can synthesize enough fuel to run your modern industrial economy.”

“That's actually super, like, regressive because people like you and I will still be able to afford to fly. We're not super price sensitive when it comes to, you know, flying, flying United, but actually it's the people on the margin who could, you know, it mak…”

“Well, I mean, people in general, maybe you shouldn't start hardware companies. It's kind of cursed in a way, but if you have the right skill set and the right mindset and you're determined to just do the most ambitious thing you could possibly achieve, you sho…”

“Now, I think that as our export capacity to Europe increases and our fields continue to deplete and so on, we're going to see that price rise quite a bit, but probably not next year.”

“In the kind of fact, Germany didn't do it, right? Well, Spain still did it a little bit, and Australia did it a little bit. You know, maybe it would have delayed things by a year or two. Yeah. But like, as soon as, say, China started to do it at scale, they wo…”

“China has deployed more solar in, like, the last three months than the United States has ever deployed ever.”

“We're already in a situation right now where China is outproducing the United States on all the metals, like steel, aluminum, magnesium, and so on and so forth, by, like, a factor of between 10 and a hundred, because they're, Energy is cheap”

“Right now to permit a solar array, even on private land for the sort of applications we want to use, it's often Just as tiresome and expensive and difficult as permitting a new chemical plant or, you know, something that's much dirtier.”

“If you want to have the ability to, like, rapidly prototype electronic systems, you've got to have that here, servicing, servicing the US market, which is the strongest consumer market on earth. There's no reason you can't do it. No, you don't want to have, li…”

“The psychic damage is the same, but the pay is better at SpaceX which is hard to believe, but true.”

“If you've recently graduated or you're about to graduate, it's more important that you get a job and you kill it, do really, really well straight out of school. Than that you sit on the job market per year, and then compete against the next brand. Like, if you…”

“The number of developed, you know, western liberal democracies where their birth rate is not, like, Either already catastrophically low or falling fast is very, very small and probably will be zero before long.”

“Even if Like, as a result of listening to this podcast, every single person in the West just, like, immediately started coming out babies. It still wouldn't really For many decades halt this hole we've dug up, dug for ourselves. There's basically no way out of…”

“I was insane stat in France recently that the average pension is now higher than, the pension is now higher than the average income for working age adults in France.”

“One of the mistakes I've seen a lot of first-time founders make is, is they assume that an hour of coaching is as good as an hour of firing.”

“Which is a real problem because it is, it's really the jewel of space science in the United States and much of our technology besides but it has been allowed to wither.”

“I think a better model, I don't know how to get there from here, but a better model might be that every time like a lab or an agency or something is set up, it's automatically set up with its destructor, right? And after some fixed period, it sunsets.”

“One of the anomalous things about Elon's companies is that they're now quite old and quite large, and they haven't, they've got other organizational pathologies, but they haven't had that problem.”