That talk is, to put it kindly, populist drivel.
The notion that simply vaporizing the polar caps will magically terraform Mars into someplace we could live is, to say the very least, wildly optimistic. He also seems to be under the impression that plants can live in a pure CO2 atmosphere. That alone pretty much blows any residual belief I might have had in him. Beyond that he cavalierly assumes low gravity is a pure win, which is totally unproven.
Notice that at no point does he mentions how this could be funded or self sustaining, much less economically viable. Any colony has to rapidly become at least economically self supporting. No nation on Earth will support a colony of any size for any length of time, particularly one so expensive to supply as one on Mars would be. What could Mars possibly trade with Earth that would fund any colony there?
It's also going to be pretty hard and expensive to build up the industrial infrastructure to make all the marvelous machines necessary to subsist there. Who's going to pay for that, and for that matter, how would we get it there? Don't say 3D printing either.
