Palmer Luckey

If someone can figure out how to do that cheaply enough, first of all, it's an incredible carbon capture mechanism.

Two, if you can do it cheaply enough, let's say a dollar per gallon, then all of these trillions of dollars in investment into battery electric vehicles and hydrogen electric vehicles become really a waste of money and a waste of time.

There are, of course, some advantages to battery electric vehicles and hydrogen electric vehicles that wouldn't apply.

But for the most part, especially on the aviation side,

the ability to make fuels that just plug into existing, fully known, fully optimized, fully understood, and even fully certified systems that are better than the ones that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to develop that also aren't as good.

Electric planes spend most of their energy hauling around their energy storage, not people or payload, which of course means you need to put more energy into them in the first place than even synthetic fuels with a pretty low conversion efficiency.

The reason it's so interesting to me is that Tibet seems so misapportioned.

You have so much money going into battery electric vehicles and electrification of electrical infrastructure that's not moving.

And almost nobody betting that you can build systems that make dollar per gallon hydrocarbon fuels using either biological processes like algae farms or mechanical processes, however you're making the synthetic fuels.

And of course, if someone figures it out, they're gonna really knock a whole bunch of stuff sideways.

And we talked about this before, but it's especially interesting because lots of companies make poor technical decisions and they decide to go down a product path that doesn't make sense.

I personally feel like this is a case where you have dozens of governments around the world have decided to commit to a particular product path

that isn't optimal.

It's not the optimal end state or the optimal near term.

And they're dumping hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars into that bet.

It's something that I'm worried about.

Well, in this case, it's 1950s era Department of Energy documents regarding potential energy futures for the United States accounting for what they assumed would be a nuclear future.

I always find it interesting when I go into an area that I don't understand to try and understand it better.

Even I want to understand what's going on in the modern day.

You want to go back to the future and say, what were people saying back then?