Relentless
00:53:33 · Chris Wright
[00:53:33] S1: So right because whether it's AI or nuclear enrichment or nuclear power, this is done by business and innovators. This is 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. They're afraid of getting permits. Is the NRC going to approve my thing? Am I going be able to build it anywhere? Am I going be able to get land? So we just think, is the fuel going to be fabricated in The United States? So we're just trying to address all of those. At the Department of Energy, we have 17 labs and 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. I mentioned we've restructured a new people at the NRC that it's about safety. It 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. Well, 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 a greater surety that here's the principles in which we're operating under and 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. 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. We really want to see an industrial renaissance in The U. 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.
00:55:47 · Chris Wright
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. Across 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 to be a friendly, low risk, encouraging place to place capital risks. I'm excited with the direction we're going, but we want to make a lot more progress every day we got.
00:56:55 · Scott Nolan
[00:56:55] S2: Yeah, I think all that helps a ton. Like just having huge uncertainty in your business that's outside your control, no one really likes that. Like, why should I start something if I just don't know if I'm just going to get stopped? That's like 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 twenty year projects. So when people ask me, Oh, should I start a company? I 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, like, SpaceX and Tesla and, like, really, really leaning in. I would still go... It it is true. Like, Elon is one of the best at at seeing where things are going and understanding these exponential curves and investing in those curves. You know, he started talking about Kardashev two level civilization way before people were even thinking about level one. And I think he came out of left field, now you kinda realize, okay. 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 you should start to get that momentum as you know you can really scale things. Then you get to the scaling stage. And I think that it takes time. I think that's what... You know, today, we're seeing the exponential curve of SpaceX, for example, twenty plus years in. First first couple years, it was it was a much more
00:58:43 · Ty Morse, Scott Nolan
[00:58:43] S0: It's the early days of the exponential. [00:58:44] S2: 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 and start investing, start growing the business, start figuring out what problems you're solving. And then then you start doubling down, and that... It's that doubling that that really starts catching on. [00:59:04] S0: 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?
00:59:25 · Chris Wright
[00:59:25] S1: Yeah. Like, 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, you know? 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. 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 that you can do them in America again. We 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 thirty 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 thirty 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. So 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've got to get beyond that. President Trump's vision is to 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. And I got proof sitting across 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.
01:01:46 · Scott Nolan
[01:01:46] S2: To the question of 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? If 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 fifty years, then bring that back. I think the fundamental piece behind all of it is going to be energy. Scalable, lower cost energy in The US will fuel manufacturing, will fuel construction, it will empower all these things and get The US 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 fifties.