Steve Levitt

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962 appearances 8 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 31 Jul

Steve Levitt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Freakonomics Radio · 682. Should A.I. Move to Space? · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

After the break, the details and the prototypes.

I'm Steve Levitt.

This is Freakonomics Radio, and we'll be right back.

Project Suncatcher is Google's effort to put solar-powered data centers in Earth's orbit.

Beals runs the project from his home on an island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada, near where he grew up.

How did you come to be part of the Paradigms of Intelligence team?

Did you volunteer or were you drafted?

Now, I'm wondering, somebody at the top of Google must have said yes to this at some point.

How did that conversation go?

This is high stakes now, suddenly.

I can't help whenever I think about Project Suncatcher, the Manhattan Project always pops into my mind.

And obviously they have very different objectives, but they have this feeling of trying to apply physics in a way that seems unreal, but making it real.

Do you feel like Robert Oppenheimer sometimes?

Could you talk about moving data through space?

Because the linchpin of this whole thing is the fact that everything is hard to send through space, except data.

We're really awesome at sending data through space.

The idea behind Project Suncatcher is that the AI computing happens in space, powered by the sun, and then that data is beamed back down to Earth.

But why bother to send all those computers up there?

Why not bring the power back here?

Now, by my rough calculations to generate 5% of US electricity demand via solar energy on Earth, I

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