You like Starthink? Well, it rhymes with Starlink.

It's got that joke potential, right? All right.

It's an interesting one.

So when I first heard of like, oh, we're going to do data centers in space, I was pretty skeptical.

There's a couple of good reasons to be skeptical.

The first is that the juice is never worth the squeeze when it comes to like, oh, but there's infinite free power in space.

It's not infinite and it's not free.

You think that this, outside of a major war, is there any ability for us to down-regulate?

Mm

...

Australia, like New Zealand and California and a lot of the rest of the world, has really neglected the necessity of having onshore refining c- capability.

Uh, so you're able to, to take in a wide variety of different crude products from a wide variety of different exporters, and, uh, and then process that into usable fuels to keep your economy working.

Um, and it's been very hard to justify maintaining those capabilities with the environmental problems they cause and, and, and o- overwhelming cost in some cases, um, when, when, you know, you can just buy it from Singapore or somewhere and, and just hope that, you know, your term in office is not the term in office when the, when the wheels come off.

Right

... and then the cash li- lands in your account, and you go and spend it and feel good about yourself.

Um, but then, then the, the, the money you stick up by your computer, and, uh, it reminds you that, you know, even though we're kind of in this interminable grind, uh, to try and make this technology work, and, and, you know, sometimes you have weeks and even months of, like, really banging your head against the wall, uh, in the past you were able to succeed d- kind of doing almost impossible things on impossible timelines and budgets, and, and you can do it again, and you will do it again.

But what would you do if you wanted a clean sheet program?

Yeah, I mean, that's a fair question.

And also, I think...

You know, one of the things that I admire about your reporting is, and I've always tried to embody in my writing as well, is it's not, you know, it's one thing to complain, but you actually have to come up with a concrete suggestion as to what to do.

What can you do now? And my view on this has been the same.

It's been consistent.

It's been the case since before the Senate administrator became the national administrator back in the day, which is, Every day we continue to pour $20 million on this gigantic dumpster fire.

And it's like, yeah, what's the G meter reading on your meeting with Jared when you're up on the plane? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And of course, over time, uh, oil drillers are very, very studious and hardworking people, and they, they figure out better ways of getting oil out, and we've seen the fracking revolution, and I think that's just a, a wonderful thing.

I, I, I genuinely do think it's a wonderful thing.

Yes, it has certain climate, you know, implications, but at the end of the day, the, the human, like, human welfare benefits to cheap oil are, you know, 100 times better than the, than the climate problems caused by it.

Um, it's just a matter of fact that, like, we will run out sooner or later.

Um, and so oil is unlikely to get radically cheaper in the future.

On the other hand, uh, solar is getting something like 40% cheaper per doubling of cumulative production, and that takes about two years.

Um, that's a great sign.

No, I think you could

certainly say, well, what if we took all these things that have some like marginal effect and we just turn them all up to 11 and saw what happened.

And I think you'd make a plausible argument that you'd see a bump in fertility, especially if you had like a, pro-natalism law package that did all these things at once.

And so you start a national conversation around how like kids are great, we need to have more kids.

And we specifically focused on existing families and got them to go to like N plus one or N plus two, make a big difference.

And that's what Australia actually did when I was in, I guess my teens, so let's say around 2000 was like, you know, have a third child for the treasurer.

But the same problems kind of stick there.

And is it about also finding constructive forms of it that lead to better performance?

(laughs)

Um, now, you know, I think that on this show, people will understand what I mean when I say the lightcone wants to be free.

Uh, the lightcone is a place where, where humanity needs to, needs to expand and, and experience freedom, and, um, and the reality is that, uh, laws of physics don't guarantee that freedom will succeed.

It, it helps us.

Uh, freedom helps us perhaps, but, um, the challenge we face, I think, is that, is that NASA is the organization whose job it is to make sure that, uh, that we don't get a 1958 Sputnik-like surprise ever again.

And, uh, and there are many, many smart people at NASA working hard on this.

But their efforts are, you know, somewhat circumscribed and, and challenged by kind of decades of accumulated cruft and, and, and problems that, um, they're kind of causing major, major, major problems within the, within the organization and then for the US space program as a whole.

(clears throat)