How we're going to power the AI data center buildout | Energy Sec. Chris Wright & Scott Nolan

25:47And so we should take responsibility and make sure that can happen here in a way that we influence. I think that's the task. You then think through the next five years, and how is it all going to work? Great point on the deliveries. Yeah, it takes you a while if you want to order a turbine now, but people have been ordering turbines for the past few years, so they're on their way. Could we produce even more turbines? Could we ramp production even more aggressively? Yes, but that's up to the companies to do. You do see some new companies jumping into the space because they think they want to lean in and they think that this is actually going to be even bigger than the incumbents think.

26:23So I think that'll help solve it. I think with the right regulations, American industry, if there is money to be made in it, people will find a way to solve the problem. So I think we'll see a lot of things, like even the fuel cells being used to produce energy off of methane, off of natural gas. Very unexpected, but turned out to be a use case, and now people are deploying that aggressively. So I think we're going to see a ton of innovation of how to actually deliver this more energy period. And then whether it's on the grid, I think we're going to see people innovate there. I think we're also going to see a ton of it behind the meter, just production and consumption on almost isolated islands, whether it's nuclear or something else.

27:04and the data center and the power production being right there together, with no impact outside of some fence line. I think to stay ahead of China, it's going to be incredibly tough. What are the biggest things that you guys are maybe seeing today that people aren't paying attention to that are going to be issues? You can just see them from your vantage points. Going back to China, they've had very rapid growth in their electricity production, and good on them. But they've had the opposite story. They've had relatively modest growth in their oil production, relatively modest growth in their natural gas production, and relatively meaningful growth in their coal production, but in percentage terms, not that rapid growth.

27:47So, China replaced the United States of 20 years ago as by far the world's largest importer of oil, and by far the world's largest importer of natural gas. And they're also a net importer of coal. And so, nuclear, they're moving ahead, but their economy, even more than the U.S. and the world, which are sort of, think around 85 % hydrocarbons, China's closer to 90 % hydrocarbons, and they're a massive importer of those. So, they have an inherent energy dependence and an energy weakness that we don't have in the United States. Our weakness is easier to fix. It's bureaucratic and rules. But we have the people, we have the capital, we have the smarts to do things fast in America.

28:27We just got to get the system out of the way and let it go. I think one of the challenges coming up is going to be humans. As we pushed large industry out of the United States, energy-intensive industry, Scott was talking about that earlier, saying we moved to less energy-intensive industry. This all starts when we admitted China to the World Trade Organization, and unilaterally granted them most favored nation status. Our manufacturing in dollar terms continued to grow after that in dollar terms. But as a percent of our economy, it shrunk dramatically. The rest of our economy grew much faster.

29:02It didn't mean the world needed less manufacturing products. It just meant energy-intensive, large-scale manufacturing all went to Asia. We displaced so much of it out of our country. If you look at the European nations, they did it even more dramatically. They don't have flat electricity production from 20 years ago. They produced 20 % or more less electricity than they did 20 years ago. And almost all of their heavy industry left. All in the name of being green or fighting climate change, you just move emissions from one place to the other. There's nothing green about that. It's just impoverishing.

29:34Western Europe, in dollar terms, has had zero per capita economic growth since 2010, since they went crazy on energy policy. They shrunk their energy production and completely stopped their economic growth. I believe they will pivot. They're not going to be players in AI. They're not going to be players in advanced manufacturing without a pivot. Now, maybe this is a loud enough wake-up call. Some of them are saying all the right things now, and hopefully they're pivoting. We may not have been stars in the industrial world and electricity world the last 20 years, but we weren't the worst actors.

30:06But I think we are pivoting to be among the best actors. We're going to have speed here in the Department of Energy. We're thrilled to get the benefit of this AI revolution to help push scientific advancement to a much faster pace. There are still cancers and many other diseases that you get that news, it's a death sentence. You may have a year, you may have a few years. We can fix those problems. We can solve those problems by leveraging human mind and human creativity and supercharging it with AI. And I could not be more optimistic about the speed at which we're going to see improvement in science, improvement in engineering, improvement in human quality of life.

30:49It's been a tremendous story over the last two centuries. I think the next decade is going to be outstanding. I know there's anxiety associated with it, which is a real thing, but the improvements, I think, are going to be simply tremendous. Yeah, it's a great point. The electric grid only being a part of the story. You look at the growth. Yes, the grid's been pretty flat, but U.S. is a net exporter of fossil fuels and of energy. Completely different story. Now, the economy has been running on the grid for the most part, and so that is highly correlated with our economic growth. So we do need to grow it if we're looking at any ways that we've been running the economy to date.

31:26I do think as we really expand energy production, a lot of it will be consumed behind the meter. It won't have to go through those transmission lines. I think there's actually a huge opportunity to do something with that, though. You asked, what are the stoppers going to be? What are the breaks going to be? And I think there are huge benefits that everyone will experience from AI. There's going to be a bunch of changes, But there's examples on the cancer side. Like, I think a lot of people saw it. Someone used AI to cure their dog's cancer. They sequenced it. They looked up what things could actually target this.

32:02And, you know, they came up with a cure. And so, I think that was a few months ago we saw that. So, there's going to be a lot of specifics. I think as people really start using AI for benefit, there's going to be a bunch of stuff that gets solved. But there still is a lot of anxiety around it. And I think one of the biggest anxieties, you know, there's really been two. that you've heard about in one's water usage, which I think is becoming a thing of the past as people design and use and deploy closed-loop water data centers. You fill them up once, and you don't need to really consume water after that.

32:34But then the grid question, and are these data centers going to actually consume all my community's electricity and drive up the electricity price? And I think if that's allowed to happen, that will have been a failure of regulation. And so I think it's also a failure you're on the part of the companies deploying data centers. If you think, okay, company A versus company B, we're in an arms race. We need to really expand energy production. We really need to deploy these data centers. How do you actually win over a community? You actually give them some benefit. It shouldn't be neutral or a cost.

33:08It should be benefit. And so you look at some of these data centers, and it's$10,$20,$40 per watt. You could say maybe a third or half of that is the energy production that they might do behind the meter. Well, instead of doing 1x your production, why don't you do 110%, 1.1x? The cost of the project doesn't change that much. It changes 3 % to 5%. But now you can pitch a community and say, hey, we're not actually consuming your power. We're actually providing power onto the grid, driving down your rates. So that's an idea that I've had, I think is a good one. But you could do it through regulation, or you could let the companies sign up for it themselves.

33:44I think the free market way is you let the companies out-compete each other, and who's going to give the most back. So I think the whole, how do you get communities on board with this? How do you let them say yes to new power production and consumption at data centers? It's things like that, which to me seem very simple. And it's this one way that you can help people see a lot of benefit from it as we go through this transition. Is there any other things on kind of the matter of incentives? And if you design the incentives to be massively beneficial to communities, then they're probably going to be very excited about it.

34:17right now on social media, AI is fucking hated. People just hate it for some reason. How do we kind of flip that? Yeah. And it's not just on social media. It's reflected in the polls. I mean, the opposition to AI and data centers is pretty tremendous. And I think President Trump, right at the start of his administration, I think he knew AI was going to be a big deal. He knew we could not let it go to China, which was the trajectory we were on. We've got to lean in in the United States. And he immediately, and our whole administration engaged with the hyperscalers. Scott talked about it in a market way, not in a mandatory way, not in a law way, about what they can do to bring immediate benefits, first on energy costs, but on economic development to communities.

35:01And hence, Trump's ratepayer protection pledge. All of the large hyperscalers have signed onto this. Many others have said, hey, we'll follow those same rules. And it's back to the point Scott made, which is that the cost all in for a data center, like energy is a big consumption thing, but it's not a giant cost driver. And all of the developers have said, yes, we'll pay above market price for power. We'll bring money to the table before we even get any power to help build upgrades to transmission lines. If we're going to consume a gigawatt of power, we'll build or fund 1.2 gigawatts of power generation.

35:39So, we put additional capacity onto the local grid that will allow other businesses to grow and will keep prices down. Almost all the big deals that have been signed have had multi-year rate freezes. Rate freezes in nominal dollars, so in real terms, it means they're declining every year. In Indiana, we've already seen applications for rate reductions. We're going to see more of those. That fear that data centers drive up electricity prices, the reality is actually the opposite. If you look at the states with the fastest growing electricity prices, California, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, they all shine in the fast growing electricity prices.

36:17They all produce less electricity today than they did five or 10 years ago. The states with fast demand growth, Texas, for example, or Nebraska, or North Dakota, are the states that have had declining in real terms, and some of them even declining in nominal terms, price of electricity. Here we are sitting here in Utah, very low electricity rates in Utah. And as the grid has expanded for industrialization here, we'll likely see electricity prices go down even more. So new demand loads are actually your friend to fix rising electricity prices. Electricity prices were driven up because the Obama and Biden administrations wanted to shut down as much existing power plants as they could.

36:59and they wanted to subsidize the construction of intermittent sources, politically favored sources, that ended out distorting electricity markets. This production tax credit, if you pay people three or four cents to produce a kilowatt hour, whether it's needed or not, guess what? They'll produce a lot. And they drive these wholesale prices at low demand times negative. That killed the economics of nuclear, killed the economics of firm power. Just government subsidies distorting a marketplace. But the Trump administration came in with just a common sense, pro-business, pro-America, pro-innovation attitude.

37:35So, a lot of damage, a lot of things to be reversed. And the biggest one, which I'm dancing around, is this public opinion. You're absolutely right. For it to win in the long run, we have to win in that space. That is a very active dialogue with hyperscalers. We have to lean in. My last thing is, philosophically, it's very much like the campaign against fracking when it started. It's very much about the climate change campaign. It's COVID. We've got to lock down and stop everything. It's very easy to scare people. And we have a whole industry in the United States who collect money, and they scare people to make them oppose it.

38:16They oppose fracking. They oppose any industrial development for climate change reasons. They opposed businesses and kids going to school during climate change. And they were successful at selling this fear. Those same people, those same organizations are opposing data centers. It's not that they're fundamentally opposed to fracking or fundamentally opposed. We have a very large fear-mongering industry that fits a human psychology. Humans are, we have to be careful. And so fear is a strong reflex in humans, and it's very powerful politically. And our side, the data, we think is compellingly on the side that the advantages are going to be much bigger than the disadvantages.

38:58But that's a more in-depth, that's a harder argument to sell. We're going to have to sell it. We're going to have to lean in. We're going to have to be honest and credible. Are negative things going to come from AI and data centers? Absolutely. There will be. There will be negatives. People are going to abuse this power. It is going to displace people out of some jobs, but it's going to create other jobs. I think net-net, it'll create way more jobs, way more economic opportunities, but it will be disruptive. But we need to lean in honestly, candidly, and sincerely in contrast to fearmongers. Right now, the fearmongers are winning, hands down.

39:33As we go back to some of the numbers we were talking about earlier, I'm just thinking about the scale of the investment, trillions of dollars into these data centers at these 100-gigawatt-plus, at these scales. If those companies want to invest in the grid, if they want to push energy back, whether it's 1.1, 1.2, maybe 1.21 gigawatts back onto the grid for every gigawatt that they consume, how do they do that? Is that a utility thing? Is that a FERC issue? How do we set them up to be able to drive it back on? I'm wondering if there's any incentives that could be set up to make that easier because that's how you get the rapid benefit to the local community.

40:12And then the jobs benefit versus jobs lost, that's a much harder one to predict. But I think if you know that you're driving electricity prices down, that's good for people. Scott, here's a simple high-value idea. As I was saying, electricity at different times of the day has very different values. What really matters, why does California have crazy high electricity prices? Because at crunch times, they're short of electricity, and they have to ration demand, and prices skyrocket. Yep, so it goes back to baseload, basically. Yeah, or dispatchable, even more so. If you operate at a date, which is why I also believe, I don't think there'll be a lot of data centers or large generation that's isolated from the grid.

40:49There may be some, but I think the economics and logic are much stronger to have a connection. Even if most of your capacity goes to run your own facilities, if you're on the grid, and at times of these peak demand, these are hours a year, hours a year. You're running a training model, you turn it down a little bit, and you push a few hundred megawatts to relieve grid stress. That's very valuable. and driving down rates, having some capacity needed. We did a short-term version of that in Florida, where we had all the grocery stores in Florida turn on their backup generators. This generated an enormous amount, gigawatts of additional power, so we could keep the classrooms open in Florida on a Monday morning where there wasn't enough electricity to heat the homes and the schools.

41:36So, I think it's just using electricity when it's the highest value and diverting it into communities to keep down rates, building some infrastructure for those communities, and communicating the amount of tax dollars and training, high-paying jobs, not just during construction. Maybe you don't have massive staffs operating data centers, but when they're there, it builds sister industries around them that are going to bring a lot of jobs and opportunity. I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It is amazing, the economic stimulus that's coming from a data center that's about two-thirds done. It is amazing.

42:10Yeah, I was talking with someone earlier, and they were referencing some of the stats and job creation of one of the big projects coming, and it was tens of thousands of construction jobs, thousands of permanent jobs. So it's very real. And yeah, great point on interconnect. Even if you can produce behind the meter, if you're doing a nuclear power plant next to your data center, maybe you don't need to be connected. If you're doing turbines, if you want those five nines of reliability without a huge infrastructure build out, then being connected to the grid lets you call on that when necessary.

42:43And then in other times do curtailment and not just like not just help, but make a lot of money by doing curtailment with the utility. I think right now, like we've done a pretty good job of flipping the first domino to kind of make it so 2030 things are much better than they're at right now. But past that, like how do we basically structure things so that with the long term in mind, we can keep on scaling through 2040 and 2050 to get to hundreds of gigawatts of new generation? I think all of these things get cheaper at scale. Scott's innovating. He's going to find a new way to enrich uranium.

43:19It's going to be different than it's done before. And as he scales up his business, his cost to deliver his product is actually going to go down. And the whole idea of small modular reactors is everything in our lifetimes that is built in a factory has become cheaper and faster to build. When you stick build something on location, those things have become more expensive and slower. That's a long story behind that. But the more you can build in quantity in manufacturing facilities, we're very good at driving the cost of those down. So to build nuclear systems and nuclear supply chain at scale, I think that's the road to lower cost.

43:54Why were the last two plants we built in the U.S., the Vogel 3 and 4, expensive? Well, we hadn't built any plants in decades, and we tried to stand up a supply chain to build two reactors, and then all the jobs went away. So, as we look at it, a long-term, that scale you're talking about, decades ahead, that's the way to build nuclear power plants cheaper. That's the way to build natural gas and fuel cells cheaper. That's the way to build energy storage cheaper. I think it's going to be the pathway to lower cost. And certainly, as a percent of people's incomes, I think the cost of electricity and energy are going to decline meaningfully in the next 10 or 20 years.

44:31Again, not a trajectory of the Biden administration, but that has been a mindset of the Trump administration. And I am seeing it bipartisan. Democrats in the Senate, Democratic governors, I think common sense is catching on. And they're worshiping at energy subtraction and energy fear-mongering. That still exists, but it's more in small corners now. Most common sense is catching on. People realize Americans are mad at expensive electricity and they're mad at their jobs going overseas. They just want lower prices and higher wages. That's the Trump administration agenda, and it doesn't sound like it should be controversial.

45:08Yeah, I think the thing people are also realizing is it's just really hard to predict what it's going to be. People wouldn't have predicted that fuel cells are going to be used to harness energy from natural gas. They did predict that it would actually be much more about intermittent and renewables. And then it turns out that we need a lot more baseload. We need a lot of just energy growth. So, I think the mistake is often in trying to over-prescribe what the answer is without knowledge of what's coming next. It's just very, very hard to predict. And so, you have to let the market figure it out for itself and let the market actually do these things, like scale the production.

45:44The second Vogel plant was much, much cheaper than the first, and the third would have been cheaper than that. And so, how do we get to a world where we're producing much more of these things and actually hitting the scale effects of, you know, of factory built reactors, of factory built anything. This is the future that we're preparing for. So acknowledge it is very hard to predict what's going to, what's going to happen if you're not driving it personally. The thing we're driving is nuclear. So our bet to your question, like what, what are we looking at, you know, 10, 20 years out if we're talking about, you know, 10X power consumption, another 10X, another 10X.

46:23I'm forced to acknowledge that one approach to this is orbital data centers. I worked at SpaceX early in my career. That's one angle is you just say we're going to go to an entirely new paradigm and we're going orbital. We're going to go sun synchronous satellites. We're going to build them and we're going to do everything there and harness the sun's energy. That's a good approach if you can do it. And I think only SpaceX is set up to do that right now. I think for everybody else, the answer is going to be you do it on the ground. you find ways to get more baseload. And the thing we're trying to help with is nuclear.

46:56And so how do we scale nuclear? And so the thing we're focused on is fuel in our case. And I think just to get to the exponential numbers topic, because you could say, well, okay, can we get a second facility online? Right now there's one in the U.S. in New Mexico run by a European consortium. It makes about a quarter of what the U.S. needs. And so you say, okay, well, maybe we'll have a second one. But now we're still only at half what the U.S. needs. And then you look at U.S.'s allies. Our closest allies consume about as much nuclear fuel as the U.S. does. And so we're at a quarter today, but we're really only at an eighth of what us and our allies need if we wanted to provide them with it.

47:34So now we're talking 8x. And then the Biden administration wanted to triple nuclear. A lot of countries signed up to do that by 2050. The Trump administration has said we want to 4x by then. So now you're talking over 30x. And then you say, OK, just to kind of meet U.S. and its allies by 2050, if we're going to 4X, you have to 30X enrichment production in the country, which is the sort of thing we're trying to think through. And how do we plan for that and how do we do that? But maybe 4X isn't the real number. Maybe it's like maybe with with the energy consumption numbers we're looking at, maybe it's really like nuclear either works and the cost comes down and it's one of the cheapest sources of baseload or it's not.

48:13And if it is, is 4x the right number, or is 10x, or is 50x, or is 100x? So you start thinking in these orders of magnitude, and you realize, wow, there's so much opportunity to just produce much, much more, even in this niche piece of the nuclear supply chain that a lot of people don't think about. We have room for 10, 100x growth on what the U.S. soil by European countries is doing today. So, back to the exponential numbers, it's just dramatic what the opportunity looks like and how many areas there are going to be for people to build new businesses and just contribute to really getting that curve from flat the last few decades to just almost vertical.

48:55Scott, repeat that punchline again. A lot of people look at me and say, we can't even enrich uranium. How are we going to grow our nuclear power thing? And, well, if you can, you can produce enough for today, but you can't meet the future. You just said, and you're right, we don't know the future. If the demand is just awesome, very real possibility, it's 100x, you can do that, right? Right? It's America. Yeah. I mean, no reason you can't. It's an immense amount of hard work. So you look at like space launch. You could 100 times increase the capacity to enrich uranium in the United States. Yes.

49:26Fantastic. Yeah. I mean, you won't do it at one facility. You'll do it at a number of facilities. That's what we're planning out, thinking far ahead of where we're going and identifying those sites that we can build that sort of capacity. But just as an example, you had the U.S. back in early 2000s, something like 20 % of global launch capacity. We were launching probably tens of rockets per year maximum. Not even that, single digits many years. Then SpaceX came and said, well, the issue is it's not cheap enough. The U.S. is not competitive. Not just that. Okay, there's like a baseline goal of make the U.S.

50:04competitive again, bring it back. That's a good goal. That's very strategic for the U.S. But on top of that, the goal of SpaceX was let's make space actually something that we go do. Like, you look back to the 50s, 60s, it was supposed to be two things, nuclear and space. Those were the areas where you're going to get an immense amount of growth and these new possibilities that people couldn't even imagine. So on the space side, it was how do we do that? We make it much cheaper. And so SpaceX has gone from something like, I believe it was like 10 launches in their first 10 years, roughly one launch a year, to now over 100 Falcon 9 launches per year.

50:38And with Starship, the launch count will get to that level. It will eventually get to more than that level. But more importantly, the capacity is just dramatically, dramatically larger. And so the U.S. went from sub-20 % of launch capacity worldwide to now over 90 % of mass-to-orbit. I think we can do that in a bunch of industries. And the thing is, it's going to come down to private sector thinking through, how do we drop these costs down, how do we do this in a really commercial way, where we can out-compete every country, even if they may have subsidies. But it's going to require a ton of innovation, and for SpaceX, that's been almost a 25-year story.

51:15Especially with Space Launch and Elon, he's kind of thought out a few years about, where do we need to take this? And even if maybe there's not necessarily demand to ship thousands of satellites to orbit, we're just going to build the capacity and then just believe that the demand will materialize in effect. How do you kind of do things in parallel? You're turning on your first plant in 2030. Are you going to start building a second plant or start working on the second plant now so that you can basically turn on the second one in 2032? Yeah. I mean, for us, the sequence is you identify the sites, you prep the land, you build the building, You make sure your infrastructure is there, and then you fill the buildings with equipment for that capability to come online.

51:56You commission it. You bring it online. And so as we build facilities and then bring them fully online and scale production within the facility, by the time that core and shell is built, we'll be working on the next core and shell. So our approach is we want to take everything possible into our own hands. We don't want to just say, you know, we give up responsibility for a major portion of cost like buildings. We're not going to do every last task in-house. We'll be hiring thousands of welders, like construction workers, through subcontractors. But the project itself, we'll manage ourselves. We'll be our own GC.

52:31We'll be our own EPC, Engineering Procurement Construction Company. And this is something that Tesla really proved out in the Gigafactory Constructions, is own your project, design, build, and operate. And you can get efficiencies across all three. and you can avoid giving up responsibility for something that can really drive the project over budget, over schedule. And that's the whole extreme ownership, just take responsibility approach that we're trying to do. So we have an EPC in-house, and that EPC will first do Kentucky. It's working on it now. Kentucky comes on before end of decade. And then as that corn shell is built and Kentucky's ready for the next phase of construction, start building that second site.

53:14The executive orders last year really basically poured a bunch of gasoline on companies, like Valor is one of them, where Isaiah is just burning the 3 a.m. oil and his team is burning the 3 a.m. oil to make this happen. How do we kind of incentivize more founders to take on the charge of building ahead of demand? So right, because whether it's AI or nuclear enrichment or nuclear power, this is done by business and innovators. It's not done by government. I'm in the service business. But yeah, what the Trump administration is trying to do is just make America fertile ground for entrepreneurs and risk takers.

53:50They're afraid of getting permits. Is the NRC going to approve my thing? Am I going to be able to build it anywhere? Am I going to be able to get land? So we just, is the fuel going to be fabricated in the United States? So we're just trying to address all of those. You know, at the Department of Energy, we have 17 labs in millions of acres. We've told data center developers and nuclear developers, we got land. We'll permit you. If you're struggling somewhere else, come to us. We want you to build your thing. We'll permit you. As I mentioned, we've restructured and new people at the NRC that it's about safety.

54:22It used to be bureaucracy, safety, and bureaucracy. Now it's safety, safety, and safety. But the way to do safety is to focus on the things that matter and not the paperwork and minutiae. Of course, using AI itself is going to allow optimization of getting regulations and studies done quicker. The complexity of the electricity grid takes forever to get an interconnection thing study done. While with AI, we can do something that was years before in a few days. So, we need to move faster at what the government services we provide and greater surety that, you know, here's the principles in which we're operating under.

55:00And if you're going to achieve those principles, we're going to permit you and we're going to permit you quickly. We need a lot more Isaiahs out there. We need entrepreneurs in this country again. And we're feeling that right now. You know, countries from abroad have all said, we want to invest in the United States again. Business is here. We talked about the supply chain in gas turbines. The local gas turbine manufacturers, the biggest one in the world, They are well more than doubling their capacity, as are the other biggest turbine manufacturing capacities. The fuel cell makers, the reciprocating engine makers.

55:34We really want to see an industrial renaissance in the U.S., but you're only going to get an industrial renaissance if you're going to have fair treatment of capital in a secure and reasonable regulatory environment. I could go on, but NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, 1970s, reasonable idea. Hey, if you're going to build something in federal lands or with federal money or large scale, just check what environmental impacts it might have and submit a little form on that. We still do that. But it had been weaponized into stopping people from building things that someone didn't like. They could just take you to court and sue you for NEPA.

56:11Across the whole government, we reformed the implementation of NEPA to be back to the intention of 1970. midstream as we were doing this, the Supreme Court gave us a unanimous decision reaching the same conclusion. We've got other work to do with permitting reform in the Congress right now, but the Trump administration, and really prodded aggressively by President Trump, is look across the government at the barriers we put in place of people that want to take risks, that want to do new innovation in America. If we want people to put capital to work, we've got to be a friendly, low-risk, encouraging place to place capital risks.

56:49I'm excited with the direction we're going, but we want to make a lot more progress every day we got. Yeah, I think all that helps a ton. Just having huge uncertainty in your business that's outside your control, no one really likes that. Why should I start something if I just don't know if I'm just going to get stopped? That's extremely discouraging. I think when there's certainty, people are willing to do amazing things, at least certainty of what the playing field is. And so I think that's probably the most important thing. Even so, these are like 20-year projects. So when people ask me like, oh, should I start a company?

57:25I usually say no. Like, unless you have something really good that you really care about that's really important, all things equal, don't. Like work at a company that's really important. Work at one that you think you can learn a lot from or have a lot of positive impact at. But in terms of, yeah, how do we get people to, you know, I think you started the question with the example of SpaceX and Tesla really, really leaning in. I would still go, it is true, Elon is one of the best at seeing where things are going and understanding these exponential curves and investing in those curves. You know, he started talking about Kardashev 2 level civilization way before people were even thinking about level one.

58:04And I think it came out of left field, and now you kind of realize, OK, there's maybe some truth to that of, yeah, we do need to actually scale this orders of magnitude, not just like 2x, 3x. But even so, you look back to SpaceX in the early days, we weren't building like 10 Falcon 1s at once. It was one at a time, get it working, then as you start to get that momentum, as you know you can really scale things, then you get to the scaling stage. And I think it takes time. I think that's what, you know, today we're seeing the exponential curve of SpaceX, for example, 20-plus years in. First couple years, it was a much more...

58:43The early days of the exponential. Yeah, progressive curve that looked more linear at the time. So only in hindsight did these things look exponential. Any part you're on looks linear. And so you just have to get started and start investing, start growing the business, start figuring out what problems you're solving. And then you start doubling down, and it's that doubling that really starts catching on. Let's end on how would you tell founders or ask founders to operate differently than they have over the past many, many years with this changing environment? What risks should they take? How should they decide to build their businesses with the understanding that they need to grow and they kind of need to believe in the build first, demand will show up later sort of vibe?

59:25Yeah, I've been a lifelong entrepreneur myself. But most of the entrepreneurship in America during my time has been about software and designs. And if you're going to build big stuff, you built it overseas and imported it back. And obviously, Elon's a great exception to that, as is Scott. We want people to don't assume that's the model. If you have big ideas and you want to build large things in America and take big risks, but you're worried about it, please come to the government. Call me up and let's talk about it. We want to make as welcoming an environment as possible for risk takers. And things that have been hard to do in America for the last two or three decades, we're doing everything we can to make it so you can do them in America again.

1:00:08We love trade and across borders and all that. But one of the things that drives me is that I look at the three of us sitting here. The last 30 years have been pretty awesome for us. But if you grew up in a rural area or your family is recent immigrants or they're low income and you didn't get a great education, you live in a different neighborhood, the blue-collar jobs in this country for the last 30 years has not been a good run. And when we build big things in America again, you really change the economic prospects for a full half of the Americans that have not had great economic prospects.

1:00:47So, not only is it going to be good for your business to do things in America, but you're going to lift Americans up and bring that. And then that snowballs, right? We want to have the most talented, the most experienced workers that build these things. That thing snowballs. But, unfortunately, bringing China into the World Trade Organization and this kind of smothering environmental regulation and sort of naive beliefs that the world was dematerializing, that we were just moving the material part away from us, We got to get beyond that. President Trump's vision is re-industrialize America, have every American believe they have a tremendous job and opportunity in front of them, and take chance in America, bet on America, believe in America.

1:01:35And I got proof sitting across the microphone from me right here and Scott Nolan and so many others. But if you have concerns or problems, reach out to us. Let's talk to us. Let's figure out how we can fix them. to the question of, yeah, what should be the encouragement of people that want to do entrepreneurial things? The formula I always follow is, or have followed when evaluating companies, when thinking of where to work, of what to do, was always, it was three things. It was, what's a really important problem that's not going to get solved unless someone does it, someone new does it, and do your skills somehow overlap with that need?

1:02:13If all three boxes are checked, you almost have to do it. It's almost like a moral imperative that you have to go try and help solve this important problem that otherwise will not get solved that only you can solve. So I think that's the formula. And ideally, we get a few people working on these really, really important problems. And yeah, the last few decades have been all about digital, all about the software world more than anything else. And I think the next few are actually going to be about the physical world. So I think it's a really exciting place for people to be looking and just evaluating what can we do to accelerate that, to make all the progress that we were supposed to be making the last 50 years, then bring that back.

1:02:51I think the fundamental piece behind all of it's going to be energy and like scalable, lower cost energy in the U.S. will fuel manufacturing, will fuel construction, it will empower all these things and get the U.S. back in a stance of realizing the physical world is just as important as the digital world. and it's the one where there's such low-hanging fruit that we can go do new things that people always dreamed about in the 50s.