Mentions personal use of The Prize.

Transcript context

…Right. You look at developing data centers. They'll take all of the electricity generated by a nuclear power plant. If they do that, that means you've taken that baseload nuclear power off the grid. There's a scramble to understand this. Then there are the issues that we have in our country, which is that you can't get things permitted. It takes so long. You have supply chain problems. You have a workforce that has aged out. It's said that to be a fully-trained lineman, you need seven years. You can see that this area of electricity, pardon me for saying it, is hot. The thing I find wild when I'm reading The Prize is just how much economic development is ultimately contingent on the laws of physics. Suppose that fossilization happened in a different way and then oil didn't form. Let's say coal didn't form either. Then it's hard to imagine how society goes from like water wheels to solar power. That's right. What you really realize is that hydrocarbons have been the fuel, the engine really, of economic development. People would still be in sailboats. They would still spend six weeks crossing the Atlantic. It would take weeks to go from one place to another. That's a very interesting question, to imagine our world without them.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.