"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..."

"It's mostly a case of putting in a phone call to  all the different manufacturers here, in Germany,   and so on and saying, "We need you to 10x the size  of your factory, starting today, blank check, ..."

"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..."

"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 ..."

"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..."

"you also have to then operate that  plant at that capacity for 20 years.  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..."

"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..."

"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..."

"You're saying solar gets so cheap that  it's the way we'll treat hard drive space.  We get a bunch of excess. Also the market will be made   at the new marginal consumption and production. All the peo..."

"You could even use microwave  links if you really wanted to.  You could use Starlink if you really wanted to. I don't know if Starlink would be fast enough.  I'm not sure if it's capacity is high enou..."

"compromising your inference or training. Okay, so you've got, say, a Tesla Megapack,   something like four megawatt hours. So one megawatt rack, and then six   Tesla Megapacks, each of which is  rough..."

"he said that if you have diesel generators  or something which can take over 10% of   the generation during winter, then you  can have a 60% reduction in the amount   of solar panels you need to insta..."

"The thing that Meta has realized is that Zuck is  running out of time to spend his money to win.  The capex is not crazy high, just to be clear. The capex is still dominated by just the GPUs.  How muc..."

"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.  Do you think electricity ..."

"In terms of things that are causing us to  lose to China, tariffs are neither here   nor there because as we've discussed,  we're not sensitive to cost on power.  But the environmental regulations tha..."

"go through this whole process. If there's one thing that anyone   listening to this can do, it would be to have  a categorical exemption for solar deployment.  Or if I put money in an escrow account t..."

"We also need to do sulfur injection  and a couple of other things.  People will point out that transmission line  growth has been stuck in a rut for decades.  We have all these bottlenecks in terms  o..."

"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..."

"in the future pretty radically. It's already  decreasing. It's going to continue to decrease.  It's especially helpful for solar, but  solar is the one that's most intermittent.  You can predict the a..."

"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..."

"Right now, the AI revolution is about  routing around cognitive constraints,   that in some ways writing, the printing  press, computers, the Internet have   already allowed us to do to some extent. A..."

"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 ..."

"If you do that calculation, that's 50x1000,   so 50,000 AI souls off of one acre? It could easily be much more than that   because neurons are much slower  than transistors, obviously.  Probably 10 ye..."

"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..."

"Making solar arrays, making  chips is a multi-stage process.  Basically you start off with silicates,  which are rocks ideally in a relatively   pure form. You chemically reduce them. A  couple of dif..."

"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..."