The Exchanges

Q If you could wave a magic wand to speed up U.S. solar deployment, not manufacturing, just deployment, what would you, what would you do?

A The, the single biggest intervention you could allow is, um, by right development of solar panels on private land, um, and ideally even like BLM land would be great. Right, BLM land has been set up for ranching, Um, and you can run your cows on it with very little friction. Um, and, and I think sections of that should be set aside for like, it's just electron wrenching. You can put your solar panels there and you have, you have something like California's fire, um, uh, insurance scheme, right? Uh, so that if, if, you know, one batch of solar panels goes bad or after 50 years we have fusion and we want to take them out, there's money there that we can take them out and put them, put them away. It goes back to being desert. Um, but right now to permit a solar array, even on private land for the sort of applications we want to use, it's often Just as tiresome and expensive and difficult as permitting a new chemical plant or, you know, something that's much dirtier. Much dirtier and much worse for the, actually, I think solar overalls a net benefit for the environment. We should be encouraging it. It should be like, you get credits for deploying more solar on government-owned land. Yes. 90% of Nevada is, is BLM, is like federal land. Yeah. And that's the best place. The reason it's federal land is because they couldn't give it away in the day, right? Um, because it's so inhospitabl…

AI assessment note: “The, the single biggest intervention you could allow is, um, by right development”

Q Yeah. So that's one thing. You have to be somewhat hard-edged. What else?

A I think he works really hard. Um, I think that he compounds his own knowledge. I think he's super smart. Um, I think he understands that, that, you know, physics is the law. Everything else is a recommendation. But yeah, I don't know. At all, really. So I can only kind of speculate from the outside. Um, actually I think that one of the things that frustrates me somewhat about Isaacson's book is like, Isaacson is quite clearly a very sharp guy, right? And he spent a year and a half with Elon, and yet if you read his book, particularly like the last third or a quarter of it, which is talking about all the recent stuff, the Twitter stuff and so on, it's just, it's very clear that he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand why Elon is doing these things that seem completely crazy, right? But yet, He keeps, like, rolling sixes. Like, why is that the case? And my point of view on this, and I wrote a blog post about this at one point, was if I see someone who is pretty successful do a series of crazy things over and over again, and yet they work out every single time, either they have root access, To the simulation. Or their model of reality is better than mine in some key way that I don't understand. But I might be able to understand if I assumed that they made a sensible decision given knowledge that they must have but I don't have. What can you infer about this?

AI assessment note: “I think he works really hard. Um, I think that he compounds his own knowledge.”

Q Don't we also maybe get bailed out by AI productivity growth?

A Maybe, but do you really think that, like, 10% year-over-year productivity growth is going to, like, localize itself in the UK? No, but, but just, um, if you say it occurs in the United States, the United States is going to be like, oh, here's a big transfer payment for all your old people. I don't think so. Right. So it is certainly the case that AI seems likely to produce enormous additional wealth. Whether that wealth will find its way to alleviating the tax burden on the working class in, you know, the 200 countries on earth that don't have their own AI industry, seems somewhat unlikely to me. Whereas a pill that, like, I mean, actually audio's MPEC probably does this, slows down your aging by some factor, um, would be enormously important. No one could have seen this coming. No one, no one could have possibly anticipated that social security and other stuff would result in ever increasing dependency ratios. Um, and we're just fortunate that we got rich so fast that it took this long to bite, uh, it's a big problem. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “Whether that wealth will find its way to alleviating the tax burden... seems somewhat unlikely”

Q I'm sorry, where do we use methanol in the economy?

A Methanol is, it's used for all kinds of things, um, but, uh, but it's a precursor. So, so again, like, this is somewhat subtle point, but, but Terraform's job is to take, you know, sunlight, which is intermittent, but it's free, um, and in the form of solar panels, make electricity that's intermittent, and then do a bunch of, like, very scary, uh, chemical engineering to it to turn it into a tangible, storable, Offloadable commodity, right? So we make hydrogen, but I would never dream of trying to sell that hydrogen as like our major product, because just there's no mechanisms for transporting that to market. No one wants it in bulk. It's a intermediate product. It's not the final product. I make carbon dioxide. Same story. Put them together. Now we have something that you can store in a tank, right? Methanol itself is chemically like in terms of boiling point and so on. It's very similar to water. So you literally store it in a tank. Then if you want to, you can pipe it across the road to a Standard old-school refinery, and they can turn it into gasoline or something. I could do that myself. I could build a refinery, but, but like, what is Terraform good at? Eh, we don't know much about making large-scale chemical plants, and we'd have to go and license the MTG process anyway. Yes. Methanol is a gasoline process. So why not just hand that off to someone who can do that already…

AI assessment note: “they can turn it into gasoline or something... MTG process anyway. Yes. Methanol to gasoline”

Q And is it about also kind of finding constructive forms of it that lead to better performance?

A Um, yes, it's a balance. Um, one of the mistakes I've seen a lot of first-time founders make is, is they assume that an hour of coaching is as good as an hour of firing. Because at the end of the day, you can't be some other founder. You can only be yourself. And so you want to build an organization that like essentially is like an extended mind for you and for your hands and arms and the ways you think about a problem, right? And I think Stripe is very much a reflection of you and Patrick. I'm not sure which one the most actually. Um, I have a question for you about that next up. Um, uh, and so to an extent, the parts of Terraform that weren't working with the parts that I was trying to build, not my way against my better judgment. And when I just gave up on that and said, screw it, I'll just do it my way. It suddenly started working because I could understand and intuit how it worked. Yeah, had to become pretty demanding there, and obviously, um, no one's perfect at recruiting, and so the success to that is you've got to give people extremely direct feedback and coaching and mentoring, and ultimately Invite them to build their career elsewhere. Um, it's been really tough. Some of the people I had to let go, people I really like, people I had friends with for many years in some cases. Um, and, uh, and obviously I wish them the best, but again, having read resume after resume a…

AI assessment note: “Um, yes, it's a balance. Um, one of the mistakes I've seen”