"Today I'm interviewing Casey Handmer.  Casey has worked on a bunch of cool things.  Caltech PhD on some gravitational wave black  hole gimmick stuff, then Hyperloop, then the   Jet Propulsion Laborato..."

"Do you think that China is better at  capital allocation than the United States?  Do you think the Chinese business environment is  better for business than in the United States?  I feel you can make ..."

"Synthetic fuels have been around for 100 years. There are projects in China right   now working on synthetic fuels. It would not surprise me if they were   thinking pretty seriously about this. Just t..."

"Like the Indian middle class is  larger than the US middle class.  But also it's nowhere near as wealthy. Whereas there are parts of China which   are humongous, which are actually  as wealthy as the ..."

"If we decided we want to produce 100  gigawatts of solar capacity every single year…  We’re already on track to do that. Is it going to be as cheap as it   is to do in China? My views on this are   so..."

"do that in two years or less if you started  today. It's currently 11 o'clock. So we're   going to start cutting checks by noon. You could ramp up pretty quickly.  A lot of technology already exists h..."

"That's actually something that Elon  and his companies are great at.  It's figuring out this mass production,  semi-automated mass production.  They've got this facility in Texas which is making  the ..."

"our ability to go and rent gas turbines?" No, they're not, because there was enough   available once, maybe twice. But at a certain point,   you realize as you grow, you start to  touch all these addi..."

"Not to reach prematurely for analogies, but  Henry Kaiser set up the shipyard in Richmond,   just down the road here in  San Francisco near Berkeley.  He was initially making ships for the British  an..."

"The problem that we see—and the reason  that PG&E here in California, for example,   is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy—is that  even though the cost of an additional solar panel   or additiona..."

"Okay, AI might be a special case. But big  picture question. Across different kinds of ISOs,   from Texas to Pennsylvania to whatever,  people are building data centers which   will not be online for ..."

"of these turbines. Here's one thing   you have to grapple with sooner or later. Conventional power generation is a steam engine.  You have some kind of chemical  that you find inside the earth   that ..."

"Okay. What is the cost of… GE makes  these 100 megawatt gas turbines, right?  I don't actually know what the retail price is. I would suspect that if their price is flexible,   it would have gone up a..."

"At the same time, what is the economic value to  you of using Claude or Grok or whatever you use   on a monthly basis? A lot.  It's obviously much more than the  subscription, but is it 10 times more ..."

"In 2032, we're going to have hundreds  of gigawatts of extra demand for data   centers and at that point, most of  it is coming from solar? Why is that?  There aren't enough turbines being manufacture..."

"So it’s roughly 15-20% per year. Then just as a result of that price   reduction, demand skyrockets by probably  six times more than that additional marginal   production capacity increase. This is on..."

"We’re still in the Apple II computer era of solar. Backing up, if the story is that the reason solar   is getting cheaper is because there's a lot of  demand for more solar, and that demand can sustai..."

"If I was looking at the same charts as  they're looking at right now, I'd say,   "What are the odds that in 25 years'  time we can produce gas turbines at   a price that is relevant in a world where  ..."

"If a gas plant is still making  money, people will keep operating it.  But at a certain point… It is the case right  now that operating a coal plant costs more   than building a new solar plant. So it..."

"10x more H100 equivalents in the world. About a kilowatt each, something like that.  Okay, so that's like 100 gigawatts. That sounds  roughly right. You're not the first person to   give me a call and..."

"And you don't need a massive amount of land. The problem with the solar approach is that   there's no two ways about it. It's a farming  operation. You need a huge amount of land.  The total amount of..."

"No. Doesn't matter. Do trees grow on mountain  slopes? So it doesn't matter. For reference,   Nevada is something like 80 million acres. Just Nevada, which is like 90% federal land,   is 80 million ac..."

"you need to have a lot of solar overbuilt. Is solar overbuilt a bad thing? No. Is the   fact that we produce 40% more food than we  need a bad thing? No. It's much better than   producing 40% less tha..."

"That's where all of US GDP  growth is occurring right now.  I guess you didn’t answer the question of , yes,  theoretically we could do this, but is it going   to be possible to get the permitting to ..."

"on private land somewhere in the backwoods of  Texas where no one lives and no one will ever live   because it's completely inhospitable to humans. In terms of the ratios, one trend that was   impress..."

"So you've got about 10 acres of solar. So 10 acres of solar, six truckloads of   batteries, one truckload of data  center, and some cooling stuff.  For how big of a data center? One megawatt. That's j..."

"For people who do optimization problems  for fun, this is how you do it.  You start off with a bunch of NREL data  on what your solar abundance is in this   particular part of the world, and then you ..."

"How much does a megawatt of solar cost? If you go and ask the usual suspects,   they'll tell you a million dollars. But this is one of the things that breaks   my brain at Terraform, which is my day j..."

"firehosing energy at a given problem  because it rains down from the sky.  Between the fact that maybe solar prices will go  down and the fact that demand is going to go up. "

"we'll get poor the same way the UK did,  because they ran out of coal, basically.  The second thing is we'll get poor  because we'll flood our coastal cities   than Florida underneath climate change. ..."

"That's a really great question. You and  I had a conversation along these lines   almost two years ago when we first met. It caused me to go and write a blog post.  This is a good way of thinking abou..."

"one side. We know why the grid is expensive. It's a lot of wires strung up in hard to reach   places that are hard to maintain, especially as  the workforce ages, with regulations and all the   rest a..."

"had of meaningfully storing energy, storing  electricity on the grid, was pumped hydro.  That only works in a handful of  places and with limited capacity.  It doesn't work all that well either.  The ..."

"That trend is only going to continue. We've got batteries that are   performing this temporal arbitrage. The sun comes up every day, right?  So the power swings from midday—you're  otherwise curtailin..."

"costs are increasing year after year. So it's just very clear that the average   distance the electron is going to travel between  generation and consumption is going to decrease   in the future prett..."

"In that asymptote, I want to  get to the crazy nerd sci-fi….  What does our civilization  look like? What is happening?  Kardashev Level 1. Let's wait to get to   turning the entire earth into an AI f..."

"Human labor generates on the order  of $60 trillion of economic value.  That's how much is paid out in  wages to labor around the world.  So that's what AGI can do. Even if you curtail it to   just wh..."

"through the gas tanks of our cars and through our  aircraft and in our grids and stuff like that.  Right now, the AI revolution is about  routing around cognitive constraints,   that in some ways writ..."

"But if you don't have oil, then you have these oil  shocks, which cause double digit decreases in GDP.  So the elasticity of demand often matters more  than its raw fraction contribution to GDP.  Anyw..."

"Again, GDP will see this huge deflation because  the variable cost of running AI will just be   pretty cheap as compared to paying humans wages. At the point where you've got a mixed economy with   an..."

"Exactly, if we think that the value of cognition  is going to be unbounded, and the way to derive   cognition—to the extent you think solar will  eventually win—you can derive it from how much   land ..."

"You can actually make do with a buck  converter or with relays or whatever to   match the current output of your solar array  with the charge state of your batteries and   the power consumption of you..."

"don't need to because they're immortal. Is this what the Dyson sphere will be made   of, Casey? Is it just going   to be computronium at the center of a solar cell? They can fly closer to the sun to g..."

"So then the constraint is, well, how  quickly can you convert the crust into   enough silicon to support silicon thought? What does the silicon ecosystem look like?  Any thoughts? Well, it's pretty qu..."

"We have fusion in stars and the inky blackness of  space and that provides our temperature gradient.  Then the most efficient way to convert  that into usable cognition is silicon.  Literally electron..."