YouSaid · the spoken record

Casey Handmer

lines on the record: 104
first: 2025-08-15
most recent: 2025-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“In South Texas, you actually need less than this, but let's just say 24 hours worth of battery storage because that means it'll get you through two of two bad nights in a row, basically. And actually, it turns out that you can significantly decrease power consumption with a very small reduction in overall compute. So if you've got three really bad days in a row or something, you can actually just dial back your power usage quite a lot without compromising your inference or training. Okay, so you've got, say, a Tesla powerwall, something like four megawatt hours. one megawatt rack and then six tesla mega packs, each of which is roughly one truckload worth of stuff. So you're like one truckload worth of rack and then like six truckloads worth of batteries. And then in order to operate this at an average power of one megawatt, your solar arrays in Texas would be something like 25% utilization. So on average,”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So let's get concrete here for a second. Let's say you got one rack and it's one megawatt, and I'll leave the cooling to someone who specializes in air conditioners, but it's basically throw air conditioners at the problem. And then you have batteries. So in order to get four nines of uptime on this, you need...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, of computation that occurs off grid. Like 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.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An optical fiber cable, which you can string up on poles, you can run it underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to. You could use Starlink if you really wanted to. I don't know what the Starlink could be fast enough. I'm not sure if it's like capacity is high enough. You could use Laserlinks if you really needed to. And that's it. It's like this completely self-contained world of big”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember this. Yeah, so your batteries and you've got your data centers. So, in terms of ground floor area, it's roughly, let's say, 10% racks, 10% access to the racks, maybe like 50% batteries stacked up on top of each other, and the rest is cooling. Something like that, in terms of what sits in the centralized node, right? And that could be 100 megawatts, or it could be 10 gigawatts, depending on how you want to scale this. But then all you need to connect that to the outside world is an optical fiber.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, fields just solar rays, as far as I can see. And then within the solar rays, roughly in the middle of them, you have your batteries and your...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't need to be contiguous. Well, I mean, it helps if it's contiguous, it doesn't need to be convex. So this is, you know, you can have a bit over here and a bit over there, and you can wire them together relatively easily. In fact, in the limit In the limit, you have fields upon fields of solar rays with”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But also the market will be made at the place, the new marginal consumption and production, right? All the people who are working in the space right now. Are like, oh, I'm in the business of delivering power or storing power. I'm going to serve the AI market because that's where all the growth is occurring. That's where all of US GDP growth is occurring right now.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a very subtle point. I can go into vast detail on it later on, maybe, but let's just say you need four nines uptime. In order to achieve four nines uptime in the middle of winter, you need to have a lot of solar overbuilt. Is solar overbuilt a bad thing? No. It's the fact that we produce 40% more food than we need a bad thing? No Much better than producing 40% less than we need. And it just means that effectively you have a giant captive power plant attached to a data center that 99.9% of the time produces more power than it needs, and 99% of the time produces much more power than it needs, and that can now actually be the source of power that the low utility, instead of being like... Off your spare power at like essentially zero marginal cost plus. Whatever residential batteries that we need in addition to local power supply.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in practice, what happens is let's say you're hypothetically awakens from its slumber and decides it wants to participate in AI. Okay, I hope it does. They say, well, we're going to have to put 100 gigawatts down of solar at some point to build these data centers. It will most likely be in Southern Europe, Spain is not particularly heavily populated. That's a great place to start. So we put in 100 gigawatts of solar data center in Spain. And then in order to achieve basically if you're spending AI hyperscaling money on your GPUs, you want to have four nines of uptime in order to Maximize your tokens per dollar spent. Tokens per dollar spent on the entire project, not just on that.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can do it anywhere. You can do it anywhere you can find the land, right? People say, well, you can't do this in Europe because Europe doesn't have solar power. Europe has solar power. I've been to Europe in summer. It's like sunny for like 20 hours the day. It's a bit seasonal, right? But that's not a big deal.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't matter Like, do trees grow on mountain slopes? So it doesn't matter. And the total amount of land, so just for reference, Nevada is something like 80 million acres or something like that. So just Nevada, which is like 90% federal land, is 80 million acres. I would never say that we should sacrifice Nevada to the AI and pave the entirety of Nevada from one wall to the other. But I just saw a bunch of things in my feed the last couple of days that Vegas is falling apart.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically in Texas. I mean, like This very popular misconception that there's not enough land to do solar This is scubbage. If you've ever flown in an aircraft in the United States and you've ever looked out the window, you'd be like, oh wow, look, there's a lot of land you could put solar on, especially west of like 110. Yeah.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's no two ways about it. It's a farming operation. You need a huge amount of land. The total amount of land that you're using, less than 1% is under batteries, under roads, under data center structures, etc. It's mostly solar.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they max out at about 80% capacity factor because you've got to bring them down for maintenance pretty often, right? Especially if they're old. And so they're saying, well, we could pay you just to operate this old coal plant or something at higher capacity. It'll go down this power line to this place where the smelter used to be. We'll set up there. And then we promise to curtail when you need the power. Which basically means they just have a massive captive battery plant as well, which is fine. You just buy that and arrives on a truck. The major advantage to doing that over the pure solar play is that the power is already there, so there's no risk there. And then you don't need a massive amount of land. The problem with the solar approach.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But really, I don't have deep visibility because I'm not in the same room with the meta people as to when we're going to hit the wall on transformers and when we're going to hit the wall on just how much municipal peak load can we shave off, which is the latest thing it's been doing around, which it turns out there's a handful of places in the United States. And by a handful, I mean, like literally a handful, where there might have used to be an aluminum smelters, there's a bunch of latent capacity in the grid. And there's also a bunch of generators on the grid that are notionally turned down and they're like operate at, say, 40-50% capacity factor.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“90 plus percent solar for just those. So I think within a few years, we'll probably see that the majority of new DCs that are going in will be mostly solar.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's, yeah, I mean, that sounds roughly right. You're not the first person to give me a call and ask me about this, I'll put it that way. I'm not going to name names, but pretty much all the names you've heard of have given me a call and said, like, we know that you're a minority voice on the paper that came out recently with Scale Microgrids talking about how you could do 90% solar, 10% gas. And I said, you can go all the way 100% solar. I wrote a blog post about it. And so they always call me up and say, what about this? And they're all talking like five gigawatts in the next few years. And that's just like...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question to ask is the major constraint on that ramp up? And then everything else dropped in behind. And I suspect that the hardest thing to make will always be the silicon, the GPUs. So, the question is really how quickly does TSMC ramp up its production of GPUs? And that's a question for you, not for me.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like 2040. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, legacy production coal and stuff's going to retire over time. Right. And 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's just cheaper to.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and they did, and now Samsung's coming on board in the States to build T6 with XAI, I think. So, like, they all got there in the end.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so when someone says we can't do it, we won't do it nowhere, no how. I mean, not in the US. What they're saying is write me a check.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't know if Siemens or Phillips or someone will have outcompeted you don't know if GE's like major looming structural problems will cause it to be unable to compete as it has in the past you also don't know like in order to make that money back you have to then operate that plant at that capacity for 20 years right and 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 solar is already at its current price right and batteries at a price where they're already like you cannot win”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's say you're a bank and you're trying to decide whether to lend, I don't know, like G, a bunch of money to expand production of their guest termins. You can write them the check today, and then they'll start scaling up their factories, and then they'll start to see the benefits that in three or four or five years, right? You don't know if the AI bubble will have burst by then. You don't know if China will have invaded Taiwan by then.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the sense that it's fitness for the markets that it is being produced for is increasing over time. So it is still extremely early. We're still at the Apple II computer era of Solar.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Demand skyrockets by probably six times more than that additional marginal capacity, like production capacity increase. And this is one point where I'll say actually the pros, so-called pros are definitely wrong. Conventional wisdom is like, oh, solar demand is going to saturate this week. It's going to saturate. We've got a graph here somewhere that's like this year is it. It's never going to grow anymore. And instead of just like blasting out the top of the graph. This conventional wisdom is wrong. It is not only the case that solar adoption production price decreases are continuing. They're accelerating and the rate that they're accelerating is still accelerating.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in order to sustain this over a long period of time, you obviously need to have demand elasticity that exceeds your learning rate. So otherwise, you would, after a couple of booms, you would saturate your market at the current price and you'd have no additional growth. But in this case, roughly every two years, we're doubling production to two and a half years, doubling production. The price is coming down by a factor of 40 or percent. So like roughly 20, 15, 20% per year. And then just as a result of that price reduction.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I do. The learning rate for natural gas is nowhere near as deep for solar, which just tells you that it's easy to make solar panels, much easier to make solar panels. There are actually very few manufactured products which are easier to make. The learning, the right solar coefficient is 43%. So every time we double communal production, we get a 43% reduction in cost.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, their cost of serving it is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that. And the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value, right? So it's very obvious that Anthropic could be like, oh, electricity cost basis has increased by a factor of 100. And now instead of paying 10 cents on your $100 bill for power, you're paying 10 bucks. So we're putting your subscription up to $110 for an electricity capacity charge. And then they could go out and buy turbines for prices that would make your eyes water.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be clear, they don't care about cost for cost of power. This seems extremely counterintuitive. So, for like grandma kettle in Pennsylvania, she's very sensitive to electricity cost, and we don't really want her to suffer in her retirement from unaffordable electricity costs and like having to sit there shivering. Like, that's not the image that we want. At the same time, like... What is the economic value to you of using, I don't know, Claude or Grock or whatever you use on a monthly basis? But it's obviously much more than the subscription. But is it 10 times more than the subscription, maybe? Yeah. Okay, let's say. So let's say the subscription is on the order of 10 bucks. The value is on the order of 100 bucks. No, actually probably like 100 and 1,000. How much does it cost?”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“35 bucks a megawatt hour just for the Brayton cycle, right? So we're not talking about the fuel, we're not talking about the heat exchangers, we're not talking about the cooling ponds or anything like that, just the amortized cost of the high speed High temperature spinning components is 35 bucks a megawatt”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess, yeah. I don't actually know what the retail price is. I would suspect that if their prices are flexible, it would have gone up a lot. But if I recall correctly, it's like $35 a megawatt hour is just the flag for cost for.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And you boil water and the water goes through some kind of mechanical contrivance that creates motion and then that motion twists a magnet and generates electrical. Just going to cost you a bunch of money.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everything before about 2030 is spoken for at this point. Yeah, you could make more turbans. The funny thing is, like, it's actually relatively expensive, I think, to like spool up additional production of these turbans, for example. So actually, here's one thing you have to grapple with sooner or later. Conventional power generation is a steam engine. So you have some kind of chemical that you find inside the Earth that is out of chemical equilibrium with the atmosphere. And you burn it and Could be coal, could be gas, oil,”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me pentagground vision for you It would seem inefficient, but actually, like, if you are sensitive to the cost of power expressed maybe in supplier elasticity or something like that, you just have to do it. There's no two ways about it. Is it inefficient for the XAIA Colossus data center to have its own captive power plant, which it does, on the backs of a bunch of trucks? In their parking lot. No, it's not inefficient. Right.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's fairly clear to me that for really like large captive loads, like our data centers or aluminum refineries or whatever, you're going to have to build your own power plant for them, which is how it used to work. If you had an aluminum plant back in the day, you would be building your own power plant for it as well.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like the post-a child for bombostasis. So one of the reasons that we're going to see large-scale pruning of these grids is that we just can't afford under our current regulatory regime to maintain.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy, is that even though the cost of additional solar panel or additional wind turbine or additional gas turbine or whatever is relatively cheap? Getting that power to your house is actually really expensive. Why? Because you've got Generally, unionized labor that has to build and maintain power lines in areas that already have built up infrastructure. So you have like multiple collisions where there's like a power pole on your own street or like building new transmission line, which requires you to eminent domain land. So you're in court for years and years and years spending public money litigating against other people who are also spending public money to litigate against you on behalf of other interest groups and so on and so forth. And then you've got wildfires.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“PJM has all kinds of different sources of power, right? They have nuclear as well. They have gas, they have coal, all kinds of stuff. And actually, this price here is probably driven. More by the delivery cost growth than by the generation cost growth, if that makes sense. So when you pay your utility bill, the cost is sometimes broken down by like a delivery cost and a generation cost, sometimes importation costs and things. And so the delivery cost is the cost of basically what it costs the utility to build and maintain all the power lines that connect. All the houses to all the power plants in some gigantic area divided by your marginal usage with all kinds of other complicated rules designed to make it fairer. And the problem that we see, and the reason that PG&E here in California, for example,”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was bottlenecked on his supply of steel because steel was rare enough in the war because everyone was using it for different things. That Kaiser Industries went off and built not only a steel mill, but also a steel mine. They went and started digging rocks out of the ground to turn into ships. And there's the same sort of situation you have here where these massive industrial verticals, and here I'm quite bullish on XA in particular because the Elon Cinematic Universe has just done so much industrial stuff compared to the Googles or metas of this world. Can kind of reach all the way through down into primary material supply if they need to.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you kind of look far enough in the future, you say, well, you can just turn up the dial arbitrarily high. Like you can say, well, we're going to put in a gigawatt a year. Well, we can meet that constraint with gas turbines. We're not going to run out of natural gas at one gigawatt per year, indefinitely. Okay, what if we're doing five gigawatts per year? What if we're doing 50 gigawatts per year? What if we're doing 100 gigawatts per year? You can just break the situation. Does that make sense? Not to reach prematurely for analogies, but like Henry Kaiser set up the shipyard in Richmond just down the road here in San Francisco, over New Berkeley, and initially making ships for the British. And then by the end of the war, four separate shipyards operating in parallel to the point where...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once, maybe twice, right? But at a certain point, you realize, well, as you grow, you start to touch all these additional constraints. And some of those constraints include gas availability. So there's a lot of chat about doing this in Pennsylvania, for example, where there's quite a lot of stranded gas in parts of Texas. But at the same time, United States is gearing up in its ability to export natural gas overseas. So the price will not be infinitely low forever. You start to run into constraints around turbine manufacturing rate, around transformer production rate around grid capacity, and also kind of running into problems where the AIs and the humans who depend on legacy electricity production and delivery utilities kind of competing with each other. We just saw this recent Ford auction in PJM result in very high, like unsustainably high prices for consumers who depend on cheap electricity to heat and cool their houses and have general prosperity.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's their job. They probably know more about it than I do. But no, in all seriousness, if you're like XAI right now trying to build Colossus one data center in downtown Memphis, right, you want to get it done super fast. So you're like, what are all the different things we need? What are the factors of production to build this? We need a building. Well, we don't have time to build a building. We'll buy a building. Okay, more adapt it. We need power. We need thermal cooling, that stuff you can deliver on a truck, so that's what they did. You need access to gas. They had access to gas there. They could tap into local gas line. And actually, if you can tap into a gas line, generally speaking, you can get enough power. energy transmission capacity of your regular gas delivery pipelines is way way higher than electricity overheadlines and it's easy to upgrade or whatever and so if you're in this situation right now you say well you know are we constrained by our ability to go and rent gas turbines and no they're not because there was enough available”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you look at XAI, which Elon is involved in, obviously, What are they actually focusing on right now? They're focused on the chips, right? Because they understand the key bottleneck is the chips, not the solar power, right? Because even if Trump puts in a 200% tariff on Chinese solar and we're not able to bypass it via Vietnam or something, it's still a bargain. It doesn't matter. Like if you need solar to run your data center, it doesn't hurt in terms of the overall cost picture. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is having the chips at competitive capabilities per chip and enough of them.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturers here in Germany and so on are saying we need you to 10 exercise your factory starting today blank check go.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a good question. When Russia invaded Ukraine, I thought, ah, finally, the Europeans will see sense and they'll like pull the trigger on like, we need to localize production of solar panels from dirt to the finished module, which is like a roughly a four-stage process. They didn't. So they're still paying Russia like a billion dollars a day for the privilege of being invaded. But at the time, I thought they could probably do that in about two years. And I think the United States could probably do that in two years or less if you started today. It's currently 11 o'clock. So, like, we're going to start cutting checks by noon. And yeah, I think you could ramp up pretty quickly. A lot of technology already exists here. It's not like he has to be reinvented from scratch. It's mostly a case of putting in phone call to all the different...”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My views on this are somewhat different from the mainstream, which is great because this is a podcast. So the mainstream view would say, well, China has cheaper labor, which is no longer true because they're compared to Mexico. And it's got lower environmental regulations, which is true, and that it is more business friendly, which is absolutely crazy. I've never heard like there's no way you could justify that your company having to have an inspector from the CCP on its board who harasses you about Xi Jinping every day, like helps you do your business, and also the rule of law is not great. So you're constantly having to pay bribes to people in order to stay in business. The idea that the United States cannot compete against that with mostly your fully automated solar panel manufacturing in the United States, which has cheaper natural gas, by far abundant oil, abundant human resources, great financial capacity, world-leading automation, et cetera, et cetera. It's crazy. We could literally copy paste solar manufacturing factories.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, China obviously depends upon the US export market for its economic dynamism. And the United States But it's going to hurt both parties. To sever that link. But if you sever the link completely, China's ability to make advanced chips right now is basically not there, whereas the United States can make them. And the United States' ability to make solar rays is embryonic, but it's actually not that far behind China's, right? It's maybe five years behind.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I'm saying don't underestimate it, but at the same time, we want to find the truth here, right? And the truth is we should not count the United States out of the battle and just give up. We're very much still in the race now, provided we don't take extra effort to shoot ourselves in the foot.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This technology levels the playing field. It levels the playing field a lot. But at the end of the day, China still contains the poorest Chinese people anywhere on Earth. Never underestimate the capacity for an autocratic dictatorship to shoot itself in the foot.”
2025-08-15 · Dwarkesh Podcast · China is killing the US on energy. Does that mean they’ll win AGI? — Casey Handmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source