Roadside Recharging, a.k.a. Why Didn't We Talk More About Bucky's???

Show Notes

This one started the way every late-summer episode does — Dan and I trading Labor Day notes, brisket at the neighbor's, pools closing mid-September, and me talking myself into and out of an accidental Ironman the following Saturday with a sore Achilles I was trying very hard to respect. I'd already done the hard rehab once, six to eight weeks flat on my back after surgery, and I was not eager to repeat it just to feed my ego. So I told Dan I'd decide Thursday based on how I felt, walk the half-marathon if I had to, and cross the line either way. That's the whole philosophy of this show, really: do the thing, don't break yourself doing it.

Then we got into the meat, which was the Gavin Baker episode of Invest Like the Best — Patrick O'Shaughnessy's show, and yes, Patrick's father Jim is the one who wrote What Works on Wall Street. Dan latched onto Baker's optimism that climate change might just not be the lifetime-defining problem we've all been bracing for, because the economics of solar keep marching toward energy that's effectively abundant and close to free. I love that idea too — and I told Dan I was suspicious of how badly I wanted to believe it. My pushback was the part Baker skated past: the materials. All this abundant clean future still has to be ripped out of the ground somewhere, and my fear is it gets ripped out wherever the Western world conveniently isn't looking. We riffed on whether we'd ever knock a few pegs off Everest if it turned out to be full of unobtainium. My honest answer was: not today — but if the world fractures hard enough over energy, eventually somebody will.

The middle of the episode is me trying to explain a chart I'd fed a transcript into GPT to build, and Dan gently bailing me out. The short version: it all comes down to power per compute, and a lot of that comes down to how much time the hardware spends waiting. Dan ran the gaming-PC analogy beautifully — CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, and the motherboard as the thoroughfare — and pointed out that in a data center, networking is the motherboard. Baker's number that stuck with us was something like 18% efficiency, all those millions of dollars of silicon idling while bits queue up to cross the network. Unclog the slowest link and you might double your utilization. I had to look up that FLOPS just means floating-point operations per second, which Dan absolutely roasted me for, but hey, now we both know.

The other Baker takeaway was self-driving, and this is the one I'd flag for the skeptics: he argued Tesla's edge isn't where FSD is today versus Waymo, it's the rate of change — that going from version 12.2 to 12.3 to 12.5 felt like GPT-2 to GPT-3 to GPT-4, because they're training on years of fleet video of humans intervening on the brake, the steering, and what Dan insists on calling the juice pedal. The pace comparison is Baker's read, not gospel, but the underlying mechanism — end-to-end neural nets trained on human driving — is exactly right. Waymo's beautiful in Phoenix with its wide, well-painted roads; come drive an 80-mile-an-hour Colorado curve where the dotted line just vanishes and we'll see.

Which, somehow, is how we got to the actual title of the episode. I floated a "mid-America business idea": an amusement zone built to entertain a screaming family for the hour-and-a-half it takes to charge an EV on a road trip. Dan said, "Isn't that called Buc-ee's?" — and then we immediately doubted whether Buc-ee's even has chargers. (They do, and lots of them, which we'd have known if we'd talked about Buc-ee's for more than nine seconds.) We never came back to it. We drifted instead into kiosk ordering at the ballpark, dynamic pricing, whether the future is just dueling haggling LLMs, and a burger company that makes one sale a year for a hundred billion dollars and calls itself a concept. Then we talked Philippines vaccines, factory trips, and expat life in Mérida until it was time to say adios.

So consider this the formal apology to the Buc-ee's faithful: we had the perfect setup and we whiffed it. Next time we charge up, I promise we'll stay parked long enough to do it justice.

— Sean