The Ledger, every show

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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, …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are factories worldwide now, now turning, churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down. If anything, production is increasing to 30 to 40% per year, which is just Bananas.”

“We will obviously have a lot of solar in space, but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space. I don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the earth anytime, anytime soon.”

“They invented employer-sponsored healthcare, which became Kaiser Permanente.”

“And it would not surprise me if when we're like crusty old men sitting here, like, you know, At, let's say in our late eighties, that pretty much all the cars and all the trucks were electric, all the ground-based transport was electric.”

“It's like forty-something percent per doubling of production, and currently production's doubling roughly every two years. So you could say 20% a year. That's the panel by itself.”

“They're going to close it down, so enjoy it.”

“We need about 14 or fifteen million more acre feet to saturate demand. That's about double what we currently have.”

“The Bureau of Reclamation hasn't built a major dam in 50 years, so they've pretty much forgotten how at this point, I think.”

“We spend less than .1% of our national health budget on anti-aging research.”

“Actually, I think they just announced that they're using coastal desalination in the Mediterranean to refill the Sea of Galilee, which is in essence the reservoir that they use to feed downstream irrigation on the Jordan Valley.”

“Converting sunlight into energy about a hundred times more efficiently than plants do, and electricity is quite a bit more useful than corn.”

“One percent of the federal budget is spent on dialysis”

“I'm behind a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year.”