okay today I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter who is an engineer and the author of The excellent construction physics blog where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been similar to industrialize and innovate and it's one of my favorite blogs on the
internet I highly highly recommend that people check it out Brian my first question is about the line project in Saudi Arabia what are your opinions okay yeah just this will be a us just in no particular order um one that it's just you know interesting that this country Saudi
Arabia is and the Middle East just kind of in general is just so willing to just do these big crazy ambitious building projects I just poured huge amounts of money and constructing this this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in like the modern world you know they
do it China obviously does it huge amounts um some other minor places but in general you don't see a whole lot of countries doing just these big massive incredibly ambitious projects so like on that level it's like interesting it's like yes glad to see that you're doing
this but like the actual project is clearly insane it makes no sense I mean just from like a just the physical arrangement layout right like there's a reason that cities like grow in like two Dimensions right like a one-dimensional city is like the worst possible arrangement for just like Transportation
right it's like your maximum maximum amount of distance between any two points and so you know so just from that perspective it's like clearly crazy uh and there's there's no real benefit to it other than you know perhaps in some like weird hypothetical Transportation
situation where you had like really fast point-to-point transportation uh some sort of weird bullet train setup maybe it would make sense but there's no reason to build in general there's no reason to build like a city like that right like even if you wanted to build
like an entirely enclosed thing which again doesn't make huge amount of sense you would save so much material and effort if you just you know just make it a cube make it I would be more interesting than the line but uh yeah those are sort of my initial thoughts on it I will I'll be surprised
if it ever gets built but the cube like from the meme about like you can fit all the humans in the cube the size of Manhattan yeah yeah or something like that or I mean yeah you're just gonna build a big giant mega structure at least take advantage of what that gets
you which is like you know minimum surface area to volume uh ratio stuff like that and why is that important is that for um it actually I'm actually this is actually interesting because I'm actually not how sure how sure it would work with a giant single City in general and a lot of
economies of scale come from like geometric effects whereas something gets bigger your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area so first like an enclosed thing like a tank or a pipe or something like that the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a
larger amount for less for a smaller amount of material it applies to some extent with like buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is like a really burdensome and complicated and expensive assembly so for like a really a building with like a
really big floor plate for instance uh that can get like more area per unit per amount of like exterior wall like all those being equal be more efficient I'm not sure how actually that works with like a single giant enclosed structure because theoretically on a
small level it would apply the same way like because you're um climate control is kind of a function of your exterior surface like in at some level you get more efficient climate control uh if you have a larger you know larger volume and less area that can escape from but for a giant City I actually
don't know if that works and it may be worse because you're generating so much heat that is now harder to pump out like you know the urban heat island effect and stuff like that where these cities generated like this massive amounts of piping uh just waste heat I actually don't know if that would work
if it applies I might you know I'm just like I'm trying to reach back to like my like my physics classes I'm not sure the actual mechanics of that but in general that's why you know why you would want to perhaps build something of of this size what was the thought process behind
designing this thing because like Scott Alexander had a good blog post about the line and where he said you know I presumably the line is designed to take up less space and to use less fuel because you can just use the same transportation across the line but like the only thing that Saudi Arabia has is
space and fuel so like what what is the thought process behind this construction project so I get the sense that a lot of committees they're just they're really they've had some amount of success in building like big impressive physical construction projects that are
just like an attraction just by virtue of like their size and oppressiveness like a huge amount of stuff like in Dubai right is is something in in this category and they have that giant Clock Tower and Jetta that is like similar like oh biggest giant clock you know building one of the biggest buildings in
the world or whatever like that so like I think on some level they've been there expecting that you can just see a return just from building something that's like really impressive on in biggest thing on some particular Axis or whatever so it could be you know there's some extent
where I think they're just optimizing for like big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that there's this there's this theory that I think about every so often it's called like the garbage can theory of organizational decision making which is that basically the the choices that
organizations make are not the result of any particular reasoning process they are the result of whenever a problem comes up they reach into the garbage can of like pencil Solutions and then whatever they pull out of the garbage can that's what uh the decision that
they end up going with regardless of how much sense that it makes uh it was eventually it was a theory that was mentioned by academics to describe decision-making in Academia but I think about that especially with like big bureaucracies to governments I think about that a lot we can just imagine the
horse trading process and like how these decisions just evolve you can just imagine that any random decision especially when there's such a disconnect between like decision makers and like the technical knowledge and stuff like that yeah um tell me about your eBay Arbitrage
with uh designer clothes yeah yeah it was a business a small business that I ran for a few years uh seven or eight years ago um basically a hobby of mine was just iron men's fashion for a while which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have with it but there you go and
basically that hobby centers around uh for the enthusiasts of it it kind of centers around like finding stuff for a cheat because buying a new can just be like overwhelmingly expensive but a lot of times you can get it for very cheap if you're even a little bit motivated
you've ever chose about eBay or shows up in thrift stores if you know what to look for um especially because a lot of these clothes and things like that they can last because they're well made they can last because they're super super long time and so even if somebody who has
worn it for 10 years or something it might be fine so a lot of this hobby center is on finding like ways to get this like really nice stuff for cheap and a lot of it is based around eBay but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay uh you kind of had to like manually search like a bunch of
different brands and then filter out obvious bad ones and search for like typos and brands that were like pretty reliably put in titles and stuff like that and um so I was I was in the process of doing this like ah this is really annoying I should figure a way to sort of automate this process and so I
made a very simple web app that basically you would search for like you know shoes or something and it would automatically search like the very nice brands of shoes all the typos in the brand name stuff like that and it would just filter out all the junk and let you
search through like the the good stuff and then I put a you know I set up a affiliate system basically so anybody else that used it they would I would get like a kick of the sales um and yeah yeah so while I was interested in that hobby uh I uh I ran this website for a few years and it was
it was like reasonably successful it was one of the first things I did that like got any real traction on the internet but like it was never successful in proportion to how much effort that it took to like maintain it and uh update it stuff like that so kind of as I moved
away from the hobby I eventually stopped putting some effort into maintaining website I'm curious as to how you even set that up I have a friend who was with you at the um at the Oxford uh oh gotcha the refugees conference I don't remember nice [Music] nice um no uh finding other information about
you on the internet actually was quite difficult managed to maintain your anonymity so and then what if you're willing to reveal what was like the p l of this project oh it made uh uh maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a few years I only ever ran it like
because a side hobby business basically right so in terms of like top efforts you know for my ever whatever I'm sure it was like very low you know yeah or something like that so a bra theme that I've gotten from your post is that the construction industry is plagued with these lossy
feedback loops um you know a lack of um strong economies of scale uh regulation and then you know cost uh mistakes being very costly do you think that this is a general characteristic of many Industries in our world today or is there something unique about construction interesting question I mean
that's kind of one thing that you think of is there's a lot of like individual factors that are not unique at all right there's like you know construction is highly regulated but it's not necessarily more regulated than like medical devices or like jet travel or even probably cars to some
extent uh which are very you know have a whole battery of of performance criteria that they need to hit so and like you know similar with like a couple to like land use or something like that people say like oh it's you know the land requirements and have to build it on
site uh make it difficult but there's a lot of things that fall into that category that again don't really share the same you know structure of how the industry works then construction does so kind of it's the um I think it's just kind of the interaction of all those effects one
thing that I think is perhaps under appreciated is that a building is like really and then again this is not unique either but a building is really highly coupled in a way that um the systems of the building are really highly coupled in a way that a lot of other things are
um if you you know if you're manufacturing like a computer or something like that right the hard drive is somewhat independent from the display it's someone independent from the power supply I mean these things have coupled but they can be built by independent
people who don't really necessarily even talk to each other and assembled into one structured thing a building is not really like that at all um every single part affects every single other part for the most in some ways it's you know it's uh it's like biology and so it's very hard to change
something that doesn't end up disrupting something else and part of that is because the job that a building does which is to create uh controlled interior environment you know basically every single system has to run through and around this the sort of surfaces that are creating that controlled
interior so everything is like kind of touching each other and again that's not unique of you know a plane or anything really highly engineered an iPhone kind of shares that to some extent but the in terms of like the size of it and the relative small amount that you're paying
in terms of like unit size or unit or something it's quite low it's a fundamental reason you can't like have as much specialization and modularity is that basically a trend uh Transportation cost yeah I think it's really more just the way of building is right like you
can't you know for the for example for the electrical system of your house you can't have like a separate box that is your electrical system that you would just install and if you needed to replace the electrical system you could take the whole box out and put the new box in the electrical system runs
through the entire house same with the plumbing same with like the insulation same with you know the interior finishes and stuff like that there's not like there's not a lot of like modularity and like a physical sense gotcha okay now uh Ben had this interesting comment on your article
about um why it's hard to Innovative construction where he pointed out that many of the reasons you give for why it's hard to innovating construction um like the sequential dependencies and the highly variable like delivery timelines that that's also common in software where uh Ben works so
um why do you think that the same sort of uh stagnation has not hit other industries that have a superficially similar characteristics like software you know what I I kind of think about that is that you set you kind of see a similar structure and anything that's
kind of like Project based or anything where you're kind of having to like there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it now compared to like a large scale manufacturing option right you spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly it is that you're building and then you
spend a lot of time designing it to be built and then you know your first number of runs through it right you tweak your process to make it more efficient but at some point you and there's always an element of like tweaking it to make it better but to some extent the process of like figuring
out what you're doing is largely separate from like the actual doing of it yourself for a lark for a project-based industry it's not quite like that you're kind of having to build your process on the Fly while you do it and of course there's best practices that shape it right like for somebody
writing a new software project or anything other Project based right like making a movie or something like that they know roughly how it's going to go together but you know there's going to be a lot of interesting things that kind of come up like that I think the biggest
difference is that either the pr those things can often scale in a way that you can't with a building like once if you once you're done with the software project you can deploy it to a thousand or 100 or a million people right once you're once you um once you finish making a movie again you
can 100 million people can can do it doesn't quite look the the same with uh with a building you don't really have the ability to like spend a lot of time up front figuring out how this thing needs to go you kind of need to figure out a way to get this thing to go together without spending
the huge amounts of time that maybe would be justified by the size of it and yeah he's definitely right I mean I I I was able to dig up a few references for yeah software projects and how often they just have these big long tails or sometimes they just go massively
massively over budget a lot of times they just you know don't get completed at all or you know whatever which is shocking but yeah because of how how many people could it can then be deployed to after it's done the economics of it are slightly different I see yeah there's a famous law and
software I forget the name of it which is that a project will take longer than you expect even after you account for the fact that it will take longer than you expect yeah hofstetter's law or something like that I think it is yeah but so I'm curious what's the what the
lack of skill in construction implies for startups like famously in software the fact that there's zero marginal cost to scaling to the next customer that's like a huge Boon to a startup right but the entire point of which is just scaling with like a hockey exponentially
does that like fundamentally uh constrain like the size and quantity of startups you can have in construction if that this game scaling is not available uh yeah that's a really good question I mean I and the obvious first part of the answer is that for software obviously if you have a
construction software company you can scale just like any other software this right um I think for like physical things it is a lot more difficult and yeah it's like lack of like zero marginal costs it's tended to fight a lot of startups right not just construction ones but
yeah it's definitely a thing construction is I think particularly brutal because the just margins are so low and then just the empirical fact that trying of what seems like it would be a more efficient method of building doesn't actually let you uh do it cheaper and like get better margins like
the startup that I used to work at katera their whole business model was basically predicated on that you know oh we'll just build all our buildings in these big factories and get huge economies of scale and reduce our costs and then make the billions of dollars that we're pumping into this industry uh
to this business we'll be able to recoup it and it you know the math just does not work out you can't build in general you can't build cheap enough to kind of recoup those giant upfront costs a lot of a lot of businesses have kind of been been burned that way and the most
success you see in like prefab type stuff is like on the higher end of things where you can get higher margins and so a lot of these these companies these like prefab companies and stuff like that they tend to Target the the market where there is and you kind of see a few different premiums for that
um you know the obvious one is that if you're targeting the higher end you maybe have higher margins and if you're building to a higher level of quality that's easier to do in a factory environment and so you're you end up being like cheaper than or at least com
a lot the Delta is a lot different less enormous than it would be you know you can build it a little bit uh building a high level quality is easier to do in a factory it's a lot of buildings that are like our houses that are like built to a really high level of like uh energy
performance directions like need a really really high level of air ceiling to minimize like how much energy the title fuses you tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of prefab Construction because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that uh on site can you say more about why you can't use
prefabrication in a factory to get economies of scale is it just the transportation cost will eat away any gains you get or is there like what is what is going on yeah high at a high level is that yeah basically your savings are not that you get from like using less labor or
whatever like that or not quite enough to offset your your increased Transportation costs one thing about construction especially like like simple family home construction is that a huge percentage of your costs are just the materials that you're using right like a single family home is roughly 50 labor
or 50 materials for the construction cost and then you have development costs and stuff like that land costs things like and so um a big chunk of that you just can't move to the factory at all right like the foundation you can't it's you can't really do that in a factory
you you could prefab the foundation but it doesn't gain you anything your excavation still has to be done on site obviously so a big chunk of that can't move to the factory at all and for ones that can you still basically have to pay the same amount for uh materials if you
were doing it like theoretically that wouldn't be true if you're doing like huge truly huge volume where you can get material value discounts but even then it's probably not looking at like a massive savings so you can cut out like a big chunk of your labor and you do see that in these in
like Factory Built construction right uh like these prefab companies are like mobile home companies they have like a really small fraction of uh of Labor as their costs which is pretty typical from a factory in general but then they take out all that labor costs they still have
their High material costs and then they have this overhead cost of like whatever the factory is cost for them right and then you have your additional overhead cost of just yeah transporting into site which is pretty limited and just the math does not really work out in favor
of the um in favor of a prefab in terms of like being able to build like dramatically cheaper right you can obviously you can obviously build a a building it is a prefab using pre-happy methods and build a successful construction business right that like many people do but in terms of like
dramatically lowering your costs you don't really see that yeah yeah Austin Vernon has an interesting blog post about this why there's not more prefabricated homes and then the two things he points out were like trans Transportation costs and the other one was that people prefer to have
homes that have like Unique Designs or unique features when I was reading it it actually occurred to me that maybe they're actually both the result of the same phenomenon So like um have you have you heard of like um I I don't know if I'm pronouncing correctly but the alkian Allen theorem
in economics uh maybe I don't think so basically it's the idea that if you increase uh the cost of uh some like category of goods in a fixed way like let's say you tax oranges right um like added one dollar tax to all oranges or I don't know transportation for one just gets one dollar ex more
expensive for all oranges then people will shift consumption towards the higher grade variety because now the ratio of the cost between like the higher the more expensive orange and the less expensive orange that ratio has decreased because of the increase in
fixed costs and um it seems like you could use that uh that argument to also explain why people have like strong preferences for uniqueness and all kinds of design stuff in manufactured houses which is that since Transportation costs are so high that's like basically a
fixed cost and the death fixed cost has the effect of making people shift consumption towards like higher grade options I definitely think that sir I basically I would maybe phrase this as the construction industry makes it relative relatively comparatively cheap to like deliver a highly customized
option compared to like a really repetitive option right and so people yeah it's the ratio between a highly customized one and just uh you know a commodity one is relatively small and so you see kind of the industry built around delivering somewhat more customized options I do think that the
this is you know this is a pretty broad intuition that the um that people just desire too much customization customization from their homes and that really prevents you having a mass produced offering I do think that that is true to some extent I mean to one I
think one example is this like the Levittown houses which were originally built just you know huge numbers of like exactly the same over and over again and eventually they kind of had to change their business model to be able to deliver more customized options because
the market shifted I do think that the effect of that is basically pretty overstated just empirically you see that in practice home builders and developers will deliver fairly repetitive housing uh they don't seem to have a really hard time doing that as an example I'm living
in a new developed housing development that is just like three or four different houses copy pasted over and over again a group of 50. the developer is building a whole bunch of other developments that are very similar in this area my in-laws live in a very similar development in a whole different
state and if you just look like multi-family or apartment housing right it's like identical Apartments you know copy paste it over and over again in the same building there are a bunch of different buildings in the same development right it's not you're not seeing like huge amounts of
you uniqueness in these things people are clearly willing to uh to just live in these like basically copy pasted apartments and it's it's also quite possible to get up pretty high amount of variety using a relatively small and All actors that you that you vary right
I mean the car industry is like this right where you can there's enough customization options I was I was reading this book a while ago that was basically pushing back against the idea that a car industry uh didn't you know the the pre you know the in the 50s and 60s was just offering a
very uniform product and it did basically the map and the numbers customization options on their car were like more than the atoms in the universe basically just there's so many different options so like all the different permutations you know leather seats and you know this type of stereo and this
type of engine if you add it up there was just like just a huge massive number of different combinations and yeah and just you can obviously customize a house just a huge amount just by like the appliances that you have and the finishes that are in there and the paint
colors that you choose and the fixtures uh and stuff like that that would not really change theoretically the underlying way the building goes together so I do think that that idea that the sort of fundamental demand for a variety is a major obstruction I feel I I do not
think there's a whole lot of Evan in the construction industry interesting now so I asked on Twitter what I should ask you and usually I don't get uh interesting responses uh from this but the the quality of the uh of the people and the audience that knows who you are was so high that
actually all the questions I got were really interesting so I'm just gonna ask you some questions from Twitter okay okay so Connor tavrock asks what is the most unique thing that would or should get built in the absence of construction regulation yeah interesting unique thing
yeah unique is an interesting qualifier I mean there's a lot of things that just like should get built right just like huge more house huge amounts of more uh additional housing or just like creating more land where in these sort of really dense Urban environments where we need it like you know places like San
Francisco just fill in a big chunk of that bay put more house unique things is is um or tricky one idea that I that I really like I read this in um the book where is where is my flying car but that it's basically crazy that our cities are designed with roads like all intersect
with each other it just you know that's just a crazy um way to like structure a material flow problem basically and like any insane City would at would be built with like multiple layers of like Transportation where each one went in like a different flows would just be massively
that just seems like a very uh they're building your cities that's slightly off topic of the question but if you're building your cities from from scratch right and had your druthers you would clearly want to build them and like and and knew how big it was going
to get right so you could plan a lot very long term in a way that you know again almost no cities did but be able to plan through these these Transportation Systems don't don't intersect with each other and you have the space to scale them or run as much throughput through them as you need
without like bringing the whole system to to a halt um there's a lot of evidence that basically says that cities you know tend to Scale based on how much you can move from point A to point B through them and I do wonder if you like you've changed the way that they went
together you could allow unlock like massively different cities or or even if didn't unlock mess if they want to change like big collaboration effects that you see in cities if people if people move from point A to Bo yeah I uh I did an episode about the book uh where's my fine car with um with
uh rohith uh Krishnan and I don't know if we discussed this but yeah that was an interesting part of the book where he talks about like a transistor design like if you design transistors this way like can you imagine how slow they would be okay so uh Simon Grimm asks what
countries are the best at building things uh yeah this is uh a good question I'm gonna again sort of cheat a little bit and do it in space and in and in time because I think a lot of the most countries that are most interested in doing a good job at building massive amounts of stuff are not ones that are
basically doing it currently I mean the current answer is is like China right right it's building you know you know more more concrete used in the last 20 years or whatever than the entire views in in the time before that right just like big massive amounts of urbanization
a lot of like really interesting buildings and into construction I mean just in terms of like raw output right you've got to get to that I would also put like Japan in like the late 20th century on on there um basically at the peak of like concern like Wonder like is Japan gonna gonna
take over the world and they you know they were really interested in building their their s quite quickly they spent a lot of time and effort trying to use their like robotics expertise to try to figure out how to build buildings uh a lot more quickly um so they had these like really
interesting factories that were designed to basically extrude a tired skyscraper just going up vertically and all these like big giant companies available they had like these many many different factors that were kind of trying to do this robotics really interesting system that
did not end up ever making economic sense but uh it is it is very cool um the uh I think they're sort of big Industrial uh policy um organs of the government basically encouraged a lot of these industrial companies and stuff to like basically develop prefabricated housing
systems and so you see a lot of really interesting systems uh developed from these uh from these um sort of industrial companies in a way that you don't see in a lot of the other places the US basically just from 1850 to maybe 1970 so for like 100 years or something um just building like just huge massive
amounts of stuff and in a way that like lifted up like huge parts of the economy right like you know they we spent all this you know I don't know how many thousands of miles of railroad track that the US built between like 1850 and 1900 but it was many many thousands of
thousands of miles of it and of course needing to lay all this track until all these locomotives really sort of force the development of the Machine Tool industry which then led to the development of like better manufacturing methods and interchangeable parts which of course then led to the development of
the Auto industry and of course that explosion just led to even more big giant construction projects um so you really see that these just sort of being able to build just big massive amounts of stuff really in this virtuous cycle with the US really Advanced a lot of technology to really
sort of raise the standard development just for a super super long period of time um yeah so those are kind of my my three answers yeah those three bring up three additional questions for one for each of them um that's really interesting um have you read the power broker the
the book about Robert Moses I think I got like a scent like a tenth of the way through it that's basically a whole book in itself no but I'm like uh half of the way through and so far it's like basically the story about this one guy built a startup within the New York state
government that was just so much more effective uh at building things didn't have the same corruption and clientalism and incompetence of the Tammany Hall political machine at the time and you know I mean maybe maybe it like turns into a tragedy in the second half but so far it's like we need this guy like
where do we get a second rubber Moses do you think that if you had more people like that in government or in the Construction Industries uh Public Works would be um more effectively built or is that just um is the stagnation there just a result of like uh other bigger factors
yeah that's it's an interesting question yeah I I remember reading this this article in a while ago that was complaining about like how horrible Penn Station is in New York and they're basically saying yeah we basically it would be nice to return to the era of like the
sort of Unbound technocrat where like these people these technical experts in like these high positions of power in government could essentially do kind of whatever they wanted to some extent right and if they thought something should be built somewhere they basically
had the power to do it uh you know it's just kind of a facet of this problem of just how it's really really hard hard to get stuff the built in the in the US currently and I'm sure part of it is just that you don't see like these really you know talented technocrats or whatever occupying these these five
positions of government where they can where they can get stuff done uh but it's it's not super obvious to me whether that's like the limiting factor right I kind of get the sense that you they would end up being bottlenecked by some other part of the process just like the whole sort of
interlocking set of Institutions has just become so risk-averse that they would end up just being blocked by it's you know in a way that they wouldn't if you know when they were operating in the in the 60s 60s yeah yeah that's interesting all right so speaking of Japan uh I I just
recently learned that they have uh like a lot of the construction there is that they just keep tearing stuff down every every 30 to 40 years and rebuilding it so you have this interesting series of posts on how you would go about building a house or a building that lasts for a
thousand years but I'm curious how would you build a house or building that only uh lasts for 30 or 40 years if you're building in Japan and you know they're going to tear it down soon what changes about the construction process uh yeah yeah I mean as I'm not an expert on
Japanese construction but I think like a lot of their interior walls or are basically just you know paper and stuff like that um I actually think it's it's kind of surprising to use a somewhat further a lot of their homes last time I looked they used like a sort of surprising Post
in beam construction method which is actually somewhat labor intensive to do the U.S in like the early 1800s used a pretty similar method and then once we started mass producing dimensional Lumber we kind of stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out of two by fours than it was like big
heavy posts and eight-partisan artists attendant connections stuff like that I mean I think the boring answer to that question is that you would just build like we build mobile homes essentially which is just using pretty you know pretty thin walls pretty low end uh uh materials that are just
pretty sort of sort of you know minimal way which ends up being not that different than the actual construction method that single family homes use but just even further economizes and tightens the use of materials you know where a single family home might use a half inch
plywood or whatever they might try to use you know 3 16 or even or an eighth inch plywood or something like that so probably a pretty similar way to uh to the way most single family homes in multiple family are built currently just like with even tighter use of of uh of materials yeah
which is part which perhaps is something not super nice about the way the US builds their house um uh okay so China is a third uh the third one here there's been a lot of talk about a potential real estate bubble in China that they're building housing in places that people don't
really need it and of course the maybe the demographics aren't there to support the demand what do you think of all this talk I I don't know if you're like familiar with it but is there a real estate bubble that's created by all this competence in building oh gosh yeah I have
I have yeah no idea like you I've I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen like you know the little YouTube clips of like the knocking down all these towers that it turns out they didn't need or like the developer couldn't can't finish or or whatever I yeah I don't know a a huge amount about
that in general I wish I knew a lot more about how things are built in China but the information it's it's in general so opaque and I generally kind of assume that any sort of particular piece of data that comes out of China has like giant error bars on it as to whether
it's whether it's true or not or like what the context surrounding it is so in general I do not have a informed opinion about that and then this is the second part of Simon's question does greater competence in uh being able to build stuff does that translate into other good outcomes
for these countries like higher GDP or lower rents or other other kinds of important outcomes that's a good question Japan is an interesting example where basically people point to it as a sort of example of you know here's a country that builds like huge amounts of
Housing and they don't have housing cost increases and in general we should expect that dynamic to be true right we should there's no reason to not think that that housing cost is essentially a supplied demand problem if you built as much as people wanted the the no reason to die that's true there is a
little bit of of evidence that sort of suggests that the cost of housing will kind of it's just impossible to build housing enough that to overcome this sort of mechanic where the cost of it tend to match to tend to rise to um to whatever people's income level are like
the like the the the peak and the sort of flattening of uh uh housing costs in Japan also parallel when people basically stopped getting uh raises in incomes authorizing in uh in Japan so I don't have a good sense of um if again if it ends up being just a good just just uh impact you know more
driven by some sort of other factors uh but in general I expect of the very fan serve if you build a lot more houses they will the housing will become cheaper right speaking of how the land keeps uh gaining value as people's income go up what is your opinion of
georgism like does that kind of try and make you think that housing is a special asset that needs to be more heavily taxed because it's not a you're not inherently like doing something productive just by owning land that the way you would be if you like built a company or something yeah I don't have
any special uh deep knowledge of georgiaism that's one I might want to on my list of topics to uh read more deeply I mean yeah I do think in general yeah you know taxing encourages to produce less and stuff for something that you can't produce less of it's a it's a good
Avenue for for something to to tax more heavily and then yeah obviously if you sort of had a really high land value tax in these places that have like a lot of single-family homes that like urban areas like Seattle or San Francisco or something like that yeah that would probably encourage the land to be used
um a lot more efficiently so it does make sense uh yeah makes sense to me but I don't have any a ton of special knowledge about it all right Ben ask on Twitter what uh construction related advice would you give to somebody building a new Charter city that is interesting I mean I think I
think I would just off stuff in the head I would be interested in if you could really figure out a way to build that would like using a method that have like really high upfront costs cost higher than could otherwise be justified but if you're going to build you know 10 000 buildings
or whatever all at once you could really take advantage of that one one kind of thing that you you see is that a lot of in the sort of post-world War II era is that we're building such as huge masses massive amounts of Housing and um a lot of times building them all all
in one place right like a lot of town Builders were building like thousands and thousands of houses like in one big development all at one second California it was the same thing just building like five or ten or fifteen thousand houses in one just big massive development and
there you end up seeing something like that where they basically build like this like little Factory on their construction site and then use that to like fabricate all these things and then you have like you have almost like a reverse assembly line or work through like go to one house and install like
the walls or whatever and then go to the next house and do the same thing following right behind them would be the guys doing the electrical you know the plumbing and stuff like that so if it's reverse assembly line system that all allowed you to sort of get these things
up like really really fast like in 30 days or something like that um my house just thousands and thousands of thousands of at once so I think you could you know you would want to be able to do something similar purpose that you could you know don't just do it the way that don't just do the
construction the way that the normal construction uh is done um I mean but that's hard right because a lot of the the sort of centrally planned city does never seem more like the plant the top down Plant City never seems to do particularly well right like what's the
city Brasilia or whatever the one that they've built in it was supposed to be a planned city in like the age of like again with the you know goes back to like the unfettered technocrat who can sort of build whatever he wants right A lot of times what you want is something
that sort of responds at a low level and organically to sort of the factors as they develop and you don't want something that's planned totally top down that's disconnected from all the sort of cases on the ground and a lot of you know what the acquisition to Robert Moses and something like that ended up
being that in a certain form right like he's bulldozing through these cities that hear these buildings and neighborhoods that he doesn't is not paying attention to at all and so I think you know just to go back to the question trying to sort of plan your City from from the top down
I don't think that doesn't have like a super super great track record right in general you want your sort of city to sort of develop a little bit more organically I guess I would think just really you know really good sort of land use rules that are really thought
through well and encourage the things that you want to encourage and not discourage the things that you don't want to discourage you know don't have equity and Zoning or whatever allow a lot of mixed-use construction and stuff like that um so yeah I guess that's that's a
summer forward answer but probably uh something like that interesting interesting I I guess that implies that there would be like high upfront costs to building a city because if you need to like build 10 000 Homes at once to achieve these economies of scale then you would need to raise like tens of
billions of dollars before you could uh build a charter City yeah if you were trying to yeah lower your cost of construction but again you know that if if you have the setup to do that you wouldn't necessarily need to raise it right like these these other big developments were built by a developers
that essentially saw an opportunity right that didn't require it didn't require Public Funding necessarily to do it I mean it did in the form of like uh you know loan guarantees for veterans and things like that but they didn't have to the government to go and buy the
land right uh okay so the next question is From Austin Vernon and to be honest I don't understand the question but um you you two are too smart for me but hopefully you'll be able to explain the question and then also answer it hey guys I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far
if you are I would really really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it this is still a pretty small podcast so it's basically impossible for me to exaggerate how much it helps out when one of you shares the podcast you know put the episode and the
group chat you have with your friends post it on Twitter send it to somebody who think might like it all of those things helps out a ton anyways back to the conversation what are your power rankings for technologies that can tighten construction tolerances and he gives examples like AR VR CNC cutting and
synthetic wood products yeah so this is a this is a very interesting question so basically because build-ins are built you know manually on site by hand there's just a lot of variation in what nsapking built right there's that you know things aren't there's there's only so accurate
so accurately that a person can put something in place if they don't have any sort of age or something or something um so just the placement of material seems to be have a lot of variation in it and then the materials themselves kind of have a lot and you know the obvious example is like
wood right where a one two by four is not going to be exactly the same with the two button adjacent 2x4 it it worked it may have what's in it it may it may split or something like that and then also because these materials are sitting just outside in the elements
they sort of end up getting a lot of distortion they either absorb moisture and sort of expand and or they grow and shrink because of the heat um so there's yeah there's just a lot of variation that goes into uh uh putting up putting a building up into some you know it's to some extent it probably
constrains what your uh what you are able to build and how effectively you're able to build it I kind of gave an example before of um you know really energy efficient buildings and they're really hard to build in um on site using sort of conventional methods because
just the air ceiling is quite difficult to do you have to build it in a much more precise way than like is typically done and is really easily uh achieved on site so I guess in terms of examples of things that I that would make that I mean he gives some he gives some good
ones like you know engineered Lumber which is like you take Lumber and then grind it up into like strands or chips or whatever and you basically glue it back together uh which does a couple things it basically spreads all the knots and the defects out so they aren't
concentrated uh and then it lets you get like a lot everything tends to be a lot more uniform um what it's made like that so like that's a that's a very obvious one I mean that's already widespread use I don't really see that um making um [Music] I guess the one exception to that would
be that there's this uh engineered Lumber product called or like Mass Timber element CLT is a big one which is like a super plywood where plywood is made from like tiny little cheap thin strips of um of wood right and then CLT is made from like two by fours dimensional Lumber
glued like cross laminated layers or whatever so it's like instead of a four by eight sheet of plywood you have like a 12 by 40 sheet of light dimensional longer glue together and you end up with a lot of the properties of you know NG material where it's really dimensionally stable it can produce be
produced very very accurately it's actually funny is that a lot of times the CLT is the most accurate part of the building and so if you're building a building with it you tend to run into problems where the rest of the building is not accurate enough for it so even something like
steel right if you're building like a steel building the steel is not going to be quite if that can be like dead on there's going to be like an inch or so off in just terms of where any given component is and so the CLT which is built much more accurately it actually
tends to like show all these where these errors are that have to be corrected so in some sense accuracy is like a is a little bit of a Precision is a little bit of like a of a tricky thing because you can't just make one part of the process or precise all that does is you know in some ways it actually makes
things more difficult because then it Force instead of if one part is really precise that a lot of times means that you can't make adjustments to it easily and so if you have this one really precisely it usually means you have to go make you know make compensation for
something else that is not built quite this precise um so it actually makes construction quite you know of advancing like Precision quite a bit more complicated AR VR I think is I I'm very bullish on that assuming you know with a big caveat of that assuming they can sort of just
get the basic technology perfect um the basic intuition there is that you know right now the way that um pieces are a building is put together on site is that somebody is looking at a set of plans paper plans or like an iPad or something that tells them where
everything needs to go and then so they they figure that out and they take a tape measure or something like that or like um you know uh some other some other method and go figure out where that is and mark it on the ground and then try to sort of get it all put in there for a site so
there's all this like setup time that takes and and manual location but it's really quite time consuming and and error-prone again there's only so accurate that a guy dragging a tape um 40 feet across site being held by another guy he's only so accurate that that process can be right and so yeah
you can it's very easy for me to imagine just um AR and stuff like that which just projects exactly where the components of your building need to go that would just a allow you a much higher level of accuracy that you can easily get using using manual methods and then B just
reduce all that time it takes like manually measure things so I can imagine if you like much much faster as well so I'm quite bullish on that at a high level and a slightly lower level um it's not obvious to me if the actual the only what they sort of get that level or
just like projects it with perfect accuracy right in front of you it may be the case that like a person moving their head around uh and constantly changing and changing their point of view they're never going to be like locate these they're never going to like project these things with like
millimeter Precision or whatever it's always going to be like a little bit jumpy or it's you're going to end up with some sort of hard limit in terms of like how precise you can project it I would bet on that I just my sense is that locator technology will get good enough
but I don't have any principles I don't have any principles believe in that and then and then the other thing is that being able to sort of take advantage of that technology would um would require you to have like a really really accurate model of your building that like locates where every single element
is precisely an exact ly right now buildings are designed like that um they are built using a sort of comparatively sparse uh set of drawings that leaves a lot to sort of be interpreted by the people on site doing the work um and efforts that have tried to make these models like a really really really
precise a lot of times have not really paid off you can get you can get Returns on it if you're building something like really really complex where there's a lot of where there's a much higher premium to uh being able to make sure you don't make any errors or whatever
but for like a simple building like a house the different yeah it returns to it just just aren't there and so you see really comparatively sparse drawings um and so you know whether that whether it's going to be able to work worth this upfront costs of developing this like a
really really complex very precise uh model where exactly every component is is kind of to be determined there's some interesting companies that are like trying to I think move in in this direction where they're basically making it a lot easier to like draw these things really really precisely that
would just be uh you know have every single component of exactly where it is um so I'm optimistic about that as well but it's a little bit TBD okay this raises a question that I actually wanted to ask you which is in your post about why there aren't um automatic bricklayers
um it was a really interesting post and somebody left in um an interesting comment which was that bricks were designed to be handled and assembled by humans and uh and then I think you let me just pull this up you you left a response to that which I thought was really interesting you said
the example I always reach for is with steam power and electricity where replacing a steam engine with an electric motor in your factory didn't do much for productivity improving Factory output required totally redesigning the factory around the capability capabilities of electric motors and so I
was kind of curious if you apply that analogy to construction then what does that look like for construction like what is a what is a house building process or building building process that it takes like Automation and these other kinds of tools into account how
would that change how buildings are built and like how they end up looking in the end I think that's a good question and yeah I think that's one big part of you know one big component of like the lack of construction productivity is everything is designed and is evolved over you know
100 years and 200 years or whatever to be easy for a guy or you know person on the site to manipulate by hand um so like bricks or roughly the yeah size and shape and weight that a person can move it easily around uh dimensional Lumber is the same if the size and shape
and weight that a person can can move around easily kind of all protection materials are like this and the way that they attach together and stuff is the same it's all designed so that a person on site can sort of put it all together with as comparatively little effort as
possible and then you but yeah what is um what is easy for a person to do is usually not what is easy for a machine or a robot to do right you typically need to sort of redesign what you know think about what your end goal is and then redesign the mechanism for accomplishing that in terms of like what
is easy for it to get to make a machine to to do I mean the obvious example here is like it's way easier to build a like wagon a card that like rolls than it is to build like a mechanical set of legs that mimics a humans movement right um that's just way way easier so yeah I
do think a big part of advancing construction productivity is to basically figure out how to redesign these building elements in a way that is really easy for a machine to produce and a machine to put together and and one I think reason that we haven't yeah haven't seen it is that a lot of a lot
of the mechanism mechanization that you see is people trying to mechanize exactly what a person does so if a person moves like these two high floors you know into place they're trying to make a machine that will move them before and then nail them together and to do that it's like really really
expensive you need a lot of like really expensive industrial robots that can move exactly the way that a human moves more or less um yeah and so I think yeah a lot of like uh what what that kind of might look like is basically something that can be like really easily extruded by
machine in something like a continuous process that wouldn't require a lot of like finicky mechanical movements and uh yeah something like a good example of I think the technology is a technology that's called like insulated metal panels which is perhaps one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build an
exterior wall and what it is it's just like a um it's just like a thin layer of Steel uh and then on top of that is a layer of insulation and on top of that is another layer of Steel and then at the end there's sort of the Steels like extrude in such a way that it can like these
inner panels can like lock together as they go and it's basically the simplest possible method of constructing a lot all that you can imagine almost but then that has like the structural system and the water barrier and the air barrier and the insulation all the students like
assembly and then it could when it go when you put it together on site it just lost together and of course it doesn't you know there are a lot of limitations to this like you want to do anything on top cave like add windows or something like that all of a sudden it starts to
look quite a bit less good but yeah I think things like that that I think are like really easy for a machine to do can be put together with like a lot of like really you know don't need a lot of like Precision measurement or stuff like that in the field they can
just kind of like Snap it so you want to put together I think that's kind of what it looks like and then what would the houses or the buildings that are built like using this what would they physically look like I mean maybe in like 50 to 100 years we'll look back on the houses we have today
and we'll be like oh look at that artisanal creation made by humans but then what what is a machine that is like designed for Hume uh for uh robots first or for automation first like in what interesting ways would it differ from today's buildings yeah that's a good question I'm not especially bullish on
like 3D building printing in general but this is another example of like a built you know building a built you know a building using like an extrusion process that is relatively easy to mechanize right and sort of what's interesting there is that when you start doing that
a lot of these other like bottlenecks become locked a little bit like it's very difficult to um build a building using like a lot of like curved exterior surfaces like we're using conventional methods right like you can do it but it's quite expensive to do um but it's there's relatively
straightforward for uh like a 3D printed building for that to do right like it's they can build that just as easily like as a straight wall um and so you see a lot of interesting curved architecture on these things and you're kind of seeing that in a few other areas there's companies a company
that can like build like this cool undulating facade or whatever that people kind of who like um and yeah so it kind of unlocks a lot of options so kind of machines you know they have they're more constrained in in some things that they can can do but they don't have a lot of the other
constraints would otherwise see so I think you'll kind of see a larger variety a sort of aesthetic things like that um that said at the end of the day I think a lot of the ways that like a house goes together or whatever is pretty well shaped to just the way that
it you know a person living inside it would like to use I think Stuart brand makes this point and um oh how building is learned there we go to find that a lot a lot of um good because again going back to surface area volume they enclose the space using the least amount of material
possible so like in some theoretical sense are quite efficient but it's actually quite inconvenient to live inside a building with like really curved walls right because like Furniture doesn't fit up against it nicely and and stuff like that like pictures are hard to hang on a really
curved wall um and so I think you would see less variation than you might expect interesting and why are you pessimistic about 3D printers or for construction I mean yeah for construction oh gosh so many reasons um I'm not pessimistic but just there's a lot of other answer questions I mean
so the big obvious one is like right now a 3D printer can basically print the walls of a building that is a pretty small amount of like the value in a building right it's maybe the um eight percent seven or eight percent something like that probably not more than ten
percent of like the value building because you're not you're not putting the foundation you're not putting like the overhead vertical you know overhead spanning structure of the building you're basically just printing the wealth and you're not even really putting the Second Story walls the
average multiple sorry I don't think they quite figured that out yeah so it's a pretty small amount of value add to the building and it's like it's frankly a task that is relatively easy to do by like manual flavor right it's really pretty easy for um a a crew to um
basically put up the structure of a house uh this is kind of a recurring theme in like mechanization where it goes back to what I was talking about previously where it takes like a lot of mechanization and a lot of expensive equipment to replace what basically like two or three guys can can do on in you
know a day or something like that it's the the economics of it are pretty brutal but anyway so right now produce is a pretty small value of that so I think that the value of 3D printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like
deliver more components out of the building using their system and there's companies that are trying to do this there's um there's one that got funded not too long ago called Black Diamond where they have they have this crazy system which is like a series of 3D
printers that would act simultaneously like each one building a separate house and then as you progress you like switch out the print head for like a robot arm because 3D printer is basically like a robot arm with just a particular manipulator at the end right and so they switch out
their printhead for like a robot arm and the robot arm goes and then installs like different other systems like the windows or the mechanical systems or something like that so you can figure out how to do that reliably where your print head or your printing system is like installing a large fraction of the
value of the building it it's not it's not clear to me that it's gonna be economic or right but that's that's it obviously needs to reach that point and it's not obvious to me that they have like that they have they've gotten there yet it's really quite hard to sort of get a
robot to do a lot of these these tasks it'll kind of kind of depend on how successful they are at doing that a lot of for a lot of these players it seems like they're actually moving away from that like I think in the recent um icon is the biggest uh construction 3D printer company in the US uh as far
as I know um and as far as I know they've moved away from like trying to like install lots of systems uh in their walls as they get printed and they've kind of moved on to like having that installed separately uh which I think has made it their job a little bit easier but it's
again not quite it's hard to see how the 3D printer can fulfill fulfill its promises if it can't do anything just beyond the vertical elements which again are really for most construction are really quite cheap and simple to build now if you take a step back and talk
about like overall how expensive construction is how much of it can just be explained by the Obama cost effect that like labor costs are increasing because labor is more productive in other Industries and therefore construction is getting more expensive yeah I mean I think that's like a huge
huge checklist yeah labor has not you know the labor fraction of it has has uh I think not changed appreciably enough I'm gonna answer with that because I haven't actually verified that and I need to and and I remember in somebody that said actually they used to be much
different um you sent me some literature related to it so flight asterisk on that but in general yeah the labor cost is just has remained just a huge fraction of of uh of the overall cost of a building uh things that were like labor is a huge cost of it right and like reliably seen their costs yeah continue
to to rise I think there's there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it now I know this sounds like a question with an obvious answer but in your post comparing the prices of construction in different uh countries you you mentioned how the the cost of
Labor and the cost of materials is not as big um a determiner of like how expensive this is constructed in different places but what doesn't matter is the like the amount of government involvement and administrative overhead I'm curious why those things like government involvement
in an administrative overhead have such a high consequence on the cost of construction yeah that's a good question I don't actually know if I have Theory I mean basically with any regulation thing it's just you know any heavily regulated thing just any particular task
that you're doing takes longer and uh is less reliable than it would be if it was not done right you can't just do it as fast as on your own schedule right you end up being bottlenecked by by government processes processes it reduces kind of that it Narrows your your options uh so yeah in general I
would expect that that to to kind of kind of be the case but I actually don't know if I had like a unified theory of how that works Beyond just it's a bunch of additional steps any given part of the process Each of which it's cost yeah now uh what an interesting Trend we
have in the United States with uh construction is that a lot of it is done by Latino workers and especially by undocumented Latino workers what is the effect of this on the price and the quality of construction so if you have like a like a bunch of hard-working undocumented workers who are working for
below Market rates in the US will this have like dampened the cost of construction over time or what do you think is going to happen so I suspect that's proof that's probably one of the reasons why the US has comparatively low construction costs compared to other
parts of the world like well well like residential construction right which those are all built in the U.S and have like light framed wood and quick immigrant workers and then yeah because of that it's ice it would not surprise me if like those wages are a lot lower than you know the equivalent
wage for like a carpenter in Germany or something like that and that results in our our the cost of our original construction which is very very low by by World standards I I suspect that is um that is a big that's a factor in why our costs of President construction are quite low
um now like overall it seems from a blog posts that you're kind of pessimistic or you don't think that um like different improvements in industrialization have like transferred over to construction yet but what do you think is a prospect of like future advances in AI having a
big impact on uh construction so like oh you know with computer vision and then with like advances of Robotics do you think we'll finally see some carryover into a construction productivity or uh or or is it going to be more of the same yeah it would I I think there's
definitely going to be progress on that axis yeah if you if you can wire up your computer vision systems to like your your uh robotic systems and your AI in such a way that like your your capabilities for uh for uh a robot system yeah are are more expanded uh yeah I kind of foresee the you know
robotics being able to take like a larger and larger fraction of of the tasks done on a typical typical construction site I kind of see it being kind of done in in um in like narrow avenues that gradually expands upward like you're starting to see a lot of companies that um they have some robotic
system that can do like one particular task but it can actually do that task um quite well there's there's a couple company different robot companies that um that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on like concrete slabs or whatever so you know
exactly where to like build your walls which is you would think it would not be like a difficult problem in construction but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or uh uh and just basically deal with it and
so yeah they have it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the the um the wallet stack rates lab and all the other systems as well like where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that so yeah I kind of respect if you're just gonna start to see
robotics and systems like that just take a larger and larger share of uh of the tasks on the construction site over time uh what do you think of flow that's uh Adam Neumann's newest startup that is backed with 350 million dollars from Anderson forwards I do not have any uh
strong opinions about that other than wow they're really giving him another dream right yeah I I do not have any particular strong opinions about that I will say that um was it a16z they mean a lot they make a lot of Investments that like don't make sense to me but I'm another venture capitalist
so there's no you know there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation so I'm just presuming they they know something uh I do not yeah I'm going to be interviewing um Andrews in later this month and I'm hoping I can ask him about that I mean you know
you know you see it's all about like really high variance bets there's nobody higher variance yeah terms that make sense you had an interesting post about like how a bunch of a lot of the knowledge in the construction industry is like informal and contained within uh continued within like best practices or
between between relationships and um like expectations that are not articulated all the time it seems to me that this is also true of software in many cases but software seems much more legible and open source if that makes sense then um like these other sort of like
physical disciplines like construction despite again having a lot of the knowledge contained within you know people's minds and within like the culture rather than like explicitly codified somewhere so um like why why do you think that uh construction is seems more closed Source
than software it's interesting I mean to go back slightly to our you know products versus projects industry right a slightly different way of thinking about that is it just like graft-based Industries via versus like again like an industrial process where a craft-based industry basically you have and this
isn't like a background icon but in general like craft based stuff there's like an expertise and judgment aspect of it that is sort of pretty well embedded in the process that you can't really well remove it you know any sort of decisions any given point requires an expert or an artisan or
somebody who understands like the relevant context and knows how to proceed based on the specific variables in uh this specific situation where like industrial process is more like this has been sort of figured out and this is how it works um every single time um and just construction is just very
very much on the craft and of the production Spectrum where uh you know the decision of like how to put these things together and how to wire you know this building or whatever it's all left up to the sort of the expertise and the sort of judgments of the people doing
sort of the installation and what that gets you is that again you can it lets you put things together without having to do a very large amount of specifying fix exactly what you need right like the drawing specify a house going together even something quite complicated
um are way fewer than the drives needed to produce a Toyota Corolla I'm I'm sure for instance uh you know so and the cost required like you know uh to do it like the design cost required to do it is on in terms in proportion to uh to how expensive the thing is is also is also much lower as well
software is perhaps and again I'm not an expert on software um development but it's somewhat more legible by response and that the end product is like it's big you know it's very clear you can clearly see every single part of it and how every single part of it um touches every single other part
perhaps I'm overstating that you know I'm sure a software could say well it's actually really not super obvious how these things work and why they're done this way or or whatever but you can see you can clearly inspect every single part of it and see exactly how it does
uh who you know what it does and how it connects the other part of it I can't really I mean you can't really do that with a building I guess I would also maybe say that there's this is maybe an interesting question with with a building it's not necessarily obvious how it got to the
point that it did when it was when it was put together um and a lot of times with like physical things it ends up even if you have the object it is unclear how what the process was to create it and so a lot of times what you see is that even with like this comes up with like industrial
Espionage right or somebody who's trying to like steal some particular thing or whatever A lot of times that doesn't help them as much as they would think to try to like recreate it a lot of times they have to basically go through the entire process of figuring out how to
make it and it takes them just as long to do it as it did the original people doing the development you saw this with like the development of the atomic bomb for instance we're like the people who like stole this stole the plans for how to make it or who had information on
like exactly how their system if the bottom worked or whatever basically took as long to figure out how to make it as the US did so just a physical object just the processed you'd be used to make it is not necessarily just super super legible tends to be a little bit hidden I and I was gonna say that I for perhaps
that is not as true for for software but I actually real I don't actually know and it's it's very plausible to me that you could have some piece of software that was written I guess I would maybe ask you this question is it possible you can have some piece of software that was
written and then just it be utterly inscrutable as to how it it came together uh and how you could like be you know duplicate a similar you know a similar piece of software or is that like a category error yeah that's an interesting question I think there are a
lot of examples where if you don't like have the context on how well like why there was built a certain way you wouldn't understand like what's going on like um if you've heard of like Fast inverse square root that's uh yeah for people who are interested there's like a great YouTube video on this that
like goes through it but basically just like a whole bunch of like I mean the guy who created John Carmack is like a a super genius and like but if you just look at the algorithm it's a few lines but you would never understand like why this gives you um an inverse square root unless you uh
so that kind of stuff where it's like we just saw the code it's like well you you would need to go through the mind of John Carmack when he's like goes through like Newton's method and all these other things and like why this particular float operation um anyways but I guess the advantage
software has is the ability to fork and so you can you can't like just take a building and then just make an exact replica of it and then just change the part you want to better understand to see what the effect is whereas with like um a software project you can just Fork
it or you can just make an API call or something and then um like try to um I guess this goes back to the modularity then you were explaining right like try to understand like the specific uh sub component um it's easier with software yeah that's that's interesting you can
like you can run experiments on your piece of software to like understand how it works a lot more easily at lower cost than you can with any physical object right but especially like a giant building right where um who knows right yeah okay so let's say some Mega
Corporation the CES of microcorporation is like uh Brian we want to build some really interesting skyscraper or building and you know I've talked to the mayor and the governor and they're willing to get rid of all the building codes so there's no building codes there's no regulation
um you J we just want you to build that's like a really cool skyscraper what is it that you would do that would be like some idea you have for like some I don't know some Innovation or some change that would like like what would you do if you were given this latitude to just build like a really cool
building oh interesting I would like to see uh us fulfill the dream of like the early to mid 20th century and build a mile-high skyscraper like this was the this you know this was this was the when everybody was was you know not everybody but this was what people saw the
development of skyscrapers going in sort of uh 30s and 40s and and perhaps 50s Frank Lloyd Wright designed this uh this uh mile skyscraper called the Illinois presumably backward s Susan Chicago was like you know how much of a Metro Horizon importance yeah and there's you
know the technology for it uh exists I I I'm aware of other rooms who have like designed conceptual buildings this style and you haven't really seen anyone do it even these people who are willing to clearly build these uh Giants you know white elephant projects basically nobody's uh tried to go the distance and
build like the ice price paper I would like to see us do it interesting um but I I I you have a really interesting uh uh essay in Works in progress about like Skyscraper height and then you know one of the things you talk about is like uh how like the super linear increase in like lateral forces
and other kinds of um uh other kinds of impediments to building tall how would you get over that kind of stuff I mean you would not a giant amount that is like the physical constraints do not allow you to build pro you know a mile in height it's sort of the economic
and legal constraints uh that to sort of stop this extreme abstraction and yeah even the the economic constraints are significant enough that even in places where there's not legal constraints like China or Dubai or something like that they still do not build the site because
the economics of it are just so brutal but um yeah in this fantasy scenario uh yeah a giant stack of money would get uh would get devoted to doing this a sack of money A Mile High um uh so uh speaking of which in that post you um you brought up that uh argument like that paper from um The
Economist uh Glazer that like says that we're leaving billions of dollars basically on the table by having this uh you know Building height codes because we're just giving up all this vertical space I'm curious uh why you think it's a case that these developers don't have
any sort of lobbying or political influence to be able to like collect the billions of dollars of deadway uh loss that are created by these codes like why aren't able to like organize politically and a way that like gets rid of these uh regulations that are helping no one [Music]
Association of home builders which exerts quite a bit of influence to try to keep um the cost of building single-family homes uh low I'm not aware of any anything um that uh that exists for you know large commercial buildings or something like that maybe the association of general contractors or something I guess
my my initial guess would be something to the effect of you know the the the natural constituencies for like opposing a big project like this are always going to be quite a bit grit you know at least as big if not bigger than sort of the constituencies that would able would be
able to um act for it right so like any big giant construction project even if it had like a lot of developers mobilized to try to support that kind of thing kind of thing also um also uh would have a have a large constituency that would exist to um oppose basically basically anyone who uh
uh lives in the area and these you know uh doesn't want this giant shadow of a building or is worried about the congestion that it would cause or or whatever like that and a sort of paradox with this situation is that the places that need it the most because their
rents are so high the people that are living there already are going to be financially well equipped to oppose it right like and that in a certain sense they're losing the most out of it right um like if you if you're making fifty thousand dollars a year you might value
The View out of your apartment and like 500 but if you're making five million dollars a year you might value that you you know proportionately more and be willing to expend a lot more to prevent it from from being obstructed so I feel like this sort of mechanism by where places get wealthier and need more
housing kind of also creates its own opposition to some extent which is why I think like a cosine solution to this kind of thing would be optimal where it's like if the view is worth more to you then like a apartment is worth to somebody else then you can just pay them to like not build there
the view is not worth more than like an apartment has probably worked to somebody right so uh you're just like an inoptimal allocation of resources um just based on who has political influence yeah and and yeah it's an interesting question I don't actually I
don't I'm not super confident of that answer I should I should look it I should look into it why don't developers have better audience it does seem like a unanswered question um now speaking of um being able to put put projects into a tailspin and Admiral sclerosis you just recently published a
very interesting and thorough examination of how Napa Works do you want to explain what this law is and what its consequences are and then I could ask you some more specific questions about it yeah for sure so NEPA is the is a National Environmental Policy Act
um this is the law that basically requires um any major federal government action that might have um significant environmental impacts to do a very long and thorough and expensive environmental impact study before anything is done on a project right um it gets a lot gets a large amount of
attention because of how long these environmental impacts stay continues to prepare the average time currently is something like four and a half years and in some cases you know since the average half of them are longer um the Highway Administration for instance Jake's not having something
like eight and a half years to do an environmental impact statement but and that's before they can build a highway or something like that so people are perpetually trying to figure out a way to reform this law basically such that we would not have to wait years and years and years before building big
important infrastructure projects um basically so that's that's the gist of what Neva is and how it works yeah you had a really interesting point in the article where you said that by adding this cost you can basically think of it as like a tax on all major government action and the effect of
attacks is to reduce what you're taxing and then I I thought at the end you had a really interesting argument how like uh NEPA is an anti-law um can you can you explain this argument uh for podcast lessons yeah um yeah it's my spicy take at the end that I always hit the throwing right at
the end um but so yeah kind of the basic argument is that the purpose of a uh a law is is roughly twofold his a is to encourage something that you would want more of or discourage something that you would you would want less of so you know we have laws against drunk driving
because we think direct driving is harmful and we want less drunk driving in our society and then the the second purpose of a law is to basically reduce coordination youth problems and enable exchanges that might not otherwise be able to take place that's you know the
obvious example of this is the government enforces which side of the road you're allowed to drive by not because one side is inherently better than the other but because it's good if everybody agrees on which side of the road to to drive on contract law is is in some ways like
this like it's good if um you know people will be punished for breaking contracts because that allows people to go enter into them which allows exchanges that might not otherwise um Place uh there's a I forget I forget exactly what the example of this but there's there's a there's a argument
that's made like the uh the ability of the English government in like the 1600 to 1700s like basically um have to pay back its debts was a really important development because it allowed it to raise money that it otherwise wouldn't be able to because people could trust that they would be
able to to uh to get paid back but anyway so those are the two rough purposes of a lot Anita does not do either of those things um in the first if because Deepa is basically a procedural statement or a requirement it does not require the government to like way environmental concerns especially
heavily like it doesn't prevent a big oil and gas drilling project can take place um essentially it uh what it does require is that for any major environmental effects you just have to document them very thoroughly and so all it is it's a documentation requirement
and notifying and and notifying the public of of of what you're doing but but it's um it doesn't prevent a major environmental like negative effect as long as you've documented it quite thoroughly you can kind of do uh whatever you want so it doesn't actually and you know the
evidence is like very unclear as to whether it is it has had like on that beneficial environmental um uh effects and to the extent that it has I think there's a good argument that it has done so just by making it harder to do anything at all um and then so yeah the other side of
this is to create you know certainty solve coordination problems stuff like that NEPA actually is very very bad at this it creates a lot of uncertainty because of because of the um the requirements for like meeting doing the analysis are so unclear or constantly shifting and like the
definition of like what is a major environmental effect has basically changed over time you know this example is um in the 1970s it was maybe not obvious that uh greenhouse gas emissions were in major environmental effect but now in the 20 you know 2020s that obviously is
and so what you've had to do for Anita analysis changes over time which is of course fine on its uh in in that sense right but it does mean that it's very unclear when you have to when you have to go through the process it is unclear how long it's going to take and what is
going to be involved and whether anybody is going to sort of litigate your decision this is the other sort of big part of NEPA is that uh people are able basically able to sue people for groups for like not completing the analysis thoroughly enough they can't use they can't usually um they can't permanently
stop a project because all you need to do is basically show that you've documented your things thoroughly enough and so once you have documented it thoroughly enough they don't have grounds for for stopping it anymore but um they can slow it down if they slow it down enough sometimes the project
becomes unattractive and it gets canceled that's kind of what a lot of these groups uh hope for um and so it basically instead of creating certainty and solvent coordination problems it creates all this new uncertainty where people will like very deliberately try to avoid the
process because they do not know how long it will take and how much it will cost to get their project approved and in some cases these yeah again going through the process will take like a very very very very very long time and so making like a business decision as to
whether like do a new like offshore wind development or you know develop a new Forest resource or something like that it's very hard to do any sort of economic analysis right if you don't know when your project is going to start because you know it's not a lot of the simple process will take yeah yeah
that's so fascinating all right so I've got um a lot more questions about this because yeah you're uh your breakdown is really interesting so one thing is uh I I don't know if you're familiar with the long-termest movement if you come across this vaguely yeah okay so one thing that
they've like proposed is that this is not like a Doctrine or anything but like uh on the periphery some idea I saw was that dresses you have environmental review we should have um a posterity review so that you're like analyzing the impacts of your actions on gender you know Generations way down the
line um like what are the future impacts for actions just as we analyze what are the environmental impacts of reactions what do you think of an idea like that given the various dysfunctions of the environmental review process yeah a couple a couple of thoughts so one is just
I feel it my gut responses at any additional review is just gonna you know add additional time and complexity to your process right like everything is like a you know it's a process that takes some amount of time and has some particular chance of success right so just adding another
thing that like is adding basically another filter this process it's only going to make the process slower and and uh less likely to succeed rather than more and then the other thing is just you know how do you uh and I I know I've seen a take like this before so this is
not original at all but how do you how accurately you're going to be able to sort of predict what your what your long term um uh impacts are like it's not obvious to me that anybody making predictions in like even over the past 20 years would have been able to sort of uh do so with any
degree of precision even I'm not it's not obviously would even be able to get like the sign right on that you know whether it be net positive or or negative I could be I you know that's off top of my head I could definitely be persuaded uh otherwise from somebody who
is who has thought a lot more about it so I don't wanna that is not a strongly held opinion but that's fine yeah that is not my immediate impression that would be my critic critique as well like if you think of um like in the 70s correct me if I'm wrong but like the technical consensus
at the time was that we would hit peak oil by the 90s and of course that's because they couldn't predict like our ability to like find new reservoirs and like develop new technologies right so um that made more oil available to us so like it's just like very hard to predict
like future Trends so um I I don't know how much that kind of law would help uh so let me ask about uh I vaguely hear that in like the political operation they're discussing reform to Napa what would your ideal reform of Napa look like how would you reform the implementation yeah I mean I think
various simple level I would like to this even the playing field so like a lot of these newer Energy Technologies and have a lot of the same benefits that like the oil and gas has been able to accrue so like for instance oil you know oil and gas with a lot of categorical exclusions for
like certain drilling operations and for like you know Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico they actually have a lot of a lot of niba exclusions which was perhaps one of the reasons that um that's one of the reasons but I can obviously connect that to like the giant dewater Horizon accent
and yeah so basically just giving this given the Technologies like wind and solar and like hot you know large-scale transmission projects giving those the same benefits that like oil and gas drilling and like your like natural gas pipelines have would I think be like a
massive massive um boom so just off the back of my head that's one thing that I would like to see yeah yeah I wonder what you think about this but like one one uh one idea had like reading the post was it like it doesn't make sense to me why this is enforced through the courts where
anybody can just like bring a lawsuit like shouldn't there be like a single coherent um like bureaucracy who's whose goal is to figure out like who's messing up and what not like I don't know it seems like a mistake to have this like done through the courts yeah I mean there I was
reading a paper earlier about it and basically that from Michael alarm it's like yeah NEPA is like a horribly drafted law because it contained no Provisions for like yeah funding it or with a bureaucracy for like enforcement or anything like this and it's essentially through random chance at the
courts to you know when it was passed it was like a very activist period in the court and they decided to win a force that's like this provision for the impact statement which was kind of added just like not randomly but added late in the process without a lot of fanfare or
consideration and then that like one little part of it ended up became in that becoming the most important part because that's what the courts has added to enforce like really really strongly um but yeah people are like yeah this is not this is not how you would draft uh Environmental Protection Law if you were
if you were doing it from scratch it was this sort of weird thing that we've ended up with due to uh path dependency um but yeah you would want something yeah a government agency responsible a a sort of an idea that I've seen or heard floated a few times that you would want
something that looked more like the OMB which basically is charged with like figuring out how much a good addition a given law is going to cost or something like that like and and you would want something like a bureaucracy attached to it that was just designed to like you
know figure out the environmental effects of this that was like decoupled from like the specific agency or whatever um the downside of that is this for something like the um you know especially for like a really environmental Environmental Protection statute uh as to whether it would be
captured by like political interests or not and either just not enforced at all if it was like a very conservative um Staffing for it or just unforced like extremely extremely vigorously if it was um you know on the other end of the spectrum so that's kind of the risk of
that but yes it's it's it's clearly not ideal that the court system is responsible for basically determining this even if there was like a bias in how the law was enforced if there's a bureaucracy the benefit is that you can just like fire the guy who's running it if you think he's not enforcing it
correctly and replace him with somebody who's like who you think will enforce it uh more appropriately whereas with like the Judiciary if it just like dozens of different judges like uh just having like independent like I guess opinions of like how this should be enforced
there's nobody who's like responsible that you can uh you can say like enforce it differently you know what I mean yeah and it actually it actually makes it because it's the court that actually makes it like a little bit hard to to change it because any given change in
the provision you don't actually know what the effect of it is until somebody files a lawsuit referring to it and it works its way through the courts so there's like you know some people think that um during the Trump Administration there was some changes to how people work because that's one thing about it
is that a lot of these laws are just our federal level laws that are comparatively simpler to change um but they changed some of these the these laws regarding it and someone was like yeah this is the you know designed to accelerate it but because it's Unsure
how the courts are going to interpret them it's actually going to kind of increase the risk for these projects in the short term until some of these lawsuits make their way through the courts and we know exactly what is required or not because the court tells us so yeah it's a it's a it's a very
inefficient system of uh you know implementing environmental requirements and I don't think I'm not an expert on this I don't think it's really how other countries do it um I'm not I this again I'm not strongly will in this opinion extended extra that but you know a lot of other
friendships almost every other country I think has something like requiring environmental impact statements but I don't think it doesn't necessarily mean that they um that there's like a legend they can you know the courts enforcement via citizen lawsuits is how it's important I think a
lot of times yeah they're just it's done via like another a normal government bureaucracy or something like that okay I was actually just about to ask that like countries that have different or no um systems of environmental review do they have speedier and more cost
effective public works or do we do have data on this or uh yeah I don't actually uh no it would be very hard to separate that setting up yeah I don't know that's all right and then um you had a you had a comment in that post that I found interesting you said this uncertainty also makes
changing Napa somewhat risky experts have noted for instance that rules to accelerate Napa processes or impose maximum timelines might result in more of them being challenged in court by failing to take the proper uh quote-unquote hard look um do you want to explain this because
this is counter-intuitive to me yeah so the requirements uh for um meeting the deeper requirement and this is this is a more General requirement um across other things but you have to take what is what the courts call like a hard look where you have to consider these impacts and uh quite thoroughly
and so the sort of risk is that if you put a um put like a cat you know a timeline cap on some of these presses like it has to be done in a year and if it's not done in a year it's automatically approved it's just an idea you see floated from from time to time the risk is that people just say okay
well we will go and litigate this project immediately and then when we do we will say they did not look hard enough at these impacts and if there was a you know if they can't Marshal the resources or something else like you know we needed to study some particular
flowering species and it only has a flowering period of two weeks in the spring and we didn't have time to you know the time period was up before that happens then the quality school which is a which is a thing that happens in in Nipa apparently um which which is one of the reasons why
they take multiple years because if you're observing some species or whatever you maybe need an entire year or to actually to actually observe it um but if you you know if you fail to look at this plant when it was during the flowering season you don't know if it's actually there until you haven't
considered the impacts on on the uh potentially endangered species or whatever and the court would say yeah you did not look hard enough at this so go back and do it again so it's you see that mentioned quite a few times uh timeline gaps could either easily backfire by just increasing the amount
of increasing susceptible to litigation which would just make these things take longer than they already do already you see a lot of like extra analysis due to risk aversion from the from these federal agencies the the laws around me to actually say that your environment
impact statement should really not be longer than 150 pages except in extreme circumstances but the average environmental impact statement is now like 660 Pages or something like that so people are already like going more than what the losses they should do just out of risk aversion so if you
don't like fix what's what fix whatever fix the incentives that are causing this risk aversion your your solution will not work I'm curious if you think that there's been a sort of talented drain from the physical engineering tasks like construction into software has that
happened and has that had an impact on uh the world of atoms or like is that just a thing people like discuss on the internet but it's not it's not real oh yeah I I do think that's almost definitely happening I mean this was it was my constant opinion when I was yeah working as an engineer
especially when I was like managing younger Engineers right who were getting paid like comparatively little and I would always thinking I was always like on the verge of telling them it was like why don't you just go learn how to code and go like three or three or four times
as much at you know a fan company instead of doing this like fairly thankless work um uh frankly um yeah so I think it's it's very likely to to be um an issue you know in some sense it's it's theoretically like self-correcting right to the extent that where if you're if the labor moves out
of the field and it then gets more expensive um the uh the incentives around it changed a little bit and you're forced to find ways of building things with with uh less uh labor requirements or where you can spread your your labor development over a larger volume outfits
and arguably you know if the engineers are leaving and Engineers are getting more expensive or or whatever you're gonna basically find a way like all right we need to get more that's going to push you towards like figuring out how to like spread your engineering effort over like a larger construction
volume which would be like you know using more prefab or using you know Kitty Parts assemblies and and things like that so theoretically to some extent it is um self-corrected I guess the risk for that is like if you you know if you scream uh you know screen off the top 20 of most
talented people or whatever is that just like fundamentally handicap what your industry is is kind of capable of of doing or does it just you know do your incentives kind of push the other way and you try to like even lower your your quality the um uh even more I feel like
I've heard something people make uh complaints of this effect of like semiconductor research how like semiconductor engineering is actually not especially well paid and it is relatively easy for like semi-connected Engineers to go get jobs working in software and development and so you see
sort of a brain Dane from from that um yeah if you can see I think I it I think it actually may be correcting to some extent with um Engineers last last time I looked I'm a little bit of out of the engineering game but it um uh the salaries for engineers that actually kind of risen
quite a bit a similar risk is and people are in construction are complaining about this constantly is just the end of it unavailability of of uh skilled labor where um you know like we talked about like being able to like do a lot of these tasks requires like skilled
expertise and able to do and um you saw a lot of these people leave the labor force during the uh the Great Recession and then not really come back and uh people aren't just entering it at the rates that that they need to I think the average age of like a construction
worker is like somewhere in the 40s or perhaps 50s it's like very very high um and so people are and people like constantly complain's like I can't get enough flavor there's not enough workers or whatever like that but of course this also is just gonna push you know incentivize finding uh ways to um
basically get these buildings built using less labor I'm a little bit less worried about like potential negative effects from that I mean there's a lot of historical examples of like labor constraints developing into um you know labor-saving inventions and things like that like the you know the
history of the US is like that right where we had like a real not nearly enough labor as they as sort of they need so we developed a lot of um uh uh labor-saving Machinery the American system manufacturing and things like that um yeah I'm a little bit less worried
about that like the skilled paper side but I could see it definitely taking having sort of effects like that and the sort of um other sides of the uh the industry yeah yeah and even um uh who's the author of that global economic history book but they made a point that the
Industrial Revolution happened in Britain because the cost of labor was highest in Britain because there was a plague that killed off a bunch of people so labor was really expensive yeah I've heard that as well and I guess you know one the other factor is just that now as sort of
venture capital expands its tentacles include other Industries you're seeing a lot more effort on developing sort of solutions for the built environment so to some you know you're seeing or convention Capital money flow into the space so perhaps that will counteract at some extent uh I don't know yeah all
right final question like many years ago um Tyler Cowan was like interviewed by Patrick Collison uh and then like one of the things Tyler Cohen said was that there should be more blogs that are just like focused on one particular area or issue and then just kind of Raise This
aliens of it and help like Drive insight and understanding of it and I feel like you've done that really well with um uh construction and construction productivity and I'm curious what other areas would you like to see the blogs that uh that do for their area what you have done for construction
productivity which is just like take a broader view of what's happening what the trends are like try to add more insight into um like professional problems and things like that oh good question um yeah I feel like there's so much about this I was complaining this study
the other day that like you know just this I think a very underrated problem is just this giant civilizational machine that like takes in raw materials and spits out finished goods and services and high quality of life nobody really knows how it works and mostly how it works is like completely
undocumented it's not does not exist in written information anywhere and the information that is written down is like maybe at one particular company's you know in shared drive or something like that like there's no the the instructions for building like a Toyota
or something don't exist in any way shape or form um and it might be very hard to kind of recreate that you know if you needed to but yeah just in general I would like to see somebody do something similar for like manufacturing just in general especially now because so much of that
um so much of manufacturing us knowledge has been lost because it's moved over to uh to China and other places where labor is cheaper um there's just so much technology has been gone and just how things that get built uh and manufactured that just isn't written down anywhere or isn't written down
anywhere accessible and you know you see kind of people share like the same small enough resources for how these things work uh over and over again I asked a few a few people who I thought would know about it like is there any like book written that um actually explains
like what it is like to build something get something built in China or like what like building things in China are actually like and they're all like no I don't know any I don't know any source that exists there's a few blocks like describe like their particular experiences which again it ended up
being like overly valuable resources but there's no like General source of available information for how any of that works um so yeah I just think like documentation of others how uh the civilization machine functions is just wildly under investigated invested in which I guess
is is true for documentation in general right like nobody wants to do that because if the payoffs are far in the future and uncertain um and the costs are uh upfront so um it's not surprising to me that it doesn't exist but um I do think that you know in general teams people are really very interested
in understanding how things work and if you can explain how something uh works even if it seems like a fairly Niche topic you can get quite a bit of attention for doing stuff so for anybody who works in you know manufacturing like that you would see uh you would find quite a
bit of success if you started writing things about how it functions interesting okay excellent listeners who know about manufacturing do do spin up your uh do spin up your sub stacks okay so this is part two of my conversation with Brian Potter um the first conversation was really
interesting and then afterwards I realized that I had forgotten to ask Brian about this really interesting theory that uh Scott Alexander and others have written about uh and Brian is a perfect person to talk to about this so uh I had to inconvenience them and ask him to come on again but the
idea is basically or the question is why does modern architecture just look so much more ugly than things that were built 100 years ago or 200 years ago you would have thought that due to increases into technology and the build up in new ideas and designs that things would
become prettier but if you look at like a building that was built in the last hundred years it just looks like a cylinder or a rectangle of glass and concrete and if you look at things that were built before you see like things like uh you know this grata Familia or
like these intricate Cathedrals or even these skyscrapers that have all these uh flourishes and ornaments and all these decorations and so Brian what is going on why are things so much uglier now sure I have a few thoughts on this I don't know if I have an answer to the actual question but I can sort of
add some other context I think hey I'm not necessarily the best person to ask on this a better person to ask on it would a be an architect who can talk about like how you know the design and taste has like evolved over the course of you know the 20th and 19th century
and stuff like that but also in general I don't have like a huge amount of opinion on Aesthetics and to the extent that I do I do tend to favor the more like you know simple minimalist clean lines like one of my favorite you know pieces of construction is this bridge called salga matoval which is
built in I think Switzerland it's the banner that's on my Twitter account and it's exactly this it's like this really simple mindless minimalist just really tiny curve of concrete that's like just an exactly in the shape that it needs to be to resist the forces on it and so to
some extent it's to me it's like you're asking you know why did Aesthetics change from like worst Aesthetics to better Aesthetics uh you know because they're better um that's obviously not what I actually think but you know just again to a little bit where I'm I'm coming from you want to like
separate out the question a little bit I don't I think it's more a question of why do built modern buildings have like less ornamentation not necessarily that they're like ugly per se I think there's like a really lot a lot of like a really you know beautiful modern architecture and
kind of what it a lot of what it sort of seems to focus on and again an architect would be a better person to ask about this but I will sort of muddle my way through using like light and space and form to like create like these big interesting open big impressive Open
Spaces that like create a lot of uh just interesting shapes and like this big expansive space is what they're kind of really going for a good example of this like a building thing is interesting is if you look at like the new terminal for the Portland airport which has this big
giant mass Timber roof which is not you know a way of building these big large fan structures but it's really neat and kind of interesting and that's like a lot of what kind of you see these these these um uh a lot of architectures is kind of focused on and that's like that's been
like pretty common throughout history right like Cathedrals it's like they're trying to create these like big impressive spaces using you know with with like using like light and stuff to create you know this this impressive space with like the pantheon it's like
the same thing it's like creating this big open impressive space and and so I think it's really you know you kind of want to separate out to some extent the question of why is it ugly which I'm not necessarily a group agree with and why does it not have so much why does that have so much less
ornamentation which I think is like a little bit more defensible okay actually let me ask you about the second one because I I'm not sure I uh totally followed so the ornamentation has been replaced by the openness well yes yeah so I yes my my point is that all you know traditional a lot of
like impre you know interesting impressive spaces were just focused on creating this big indoor and you know impressive large span space and using the you know playing with the light and stuff to do that and that's like a that's a uh that's been like common in like like people buildings that are people
think are oppressive and you still see that today all right Architects still do that a lot right the using like big open areas with a lot of glass everywhere is kind of a tool in their tool belt to uh to kind of do that to some extent gotcha so okay so they're replacing like the
Old Stone working and stone masonry stuff with uh and the Gargoyles with uh with these kinds of things okay I see okay so yeah let's talk about one because the idea that the older designs were less efficient in some way to Steel Man the opposite position someone might say that there
are a lot of the value of construction and then building is just the aesthetic presence that it has in a city or a neighborhood and to the extent that we've lost that you know maybe maybe we got to use less material on a bridge or a skyscraper but then it kind of just
acts as like this it's just like this ugly thing in the middle of the city um or if not ugly at least not as aesthetically pleasant as it could have otherwise been uh and that that's something we should care about when we're doing construction how would you react to something like that yeah so I
guess to clarify what I was talking about I don't think new buildings necessarily use less material in in a sense I just think it's they have an aesthetic that's more minimalist and streamlined and without a lot of extra decoration uh I mean you know the complaint is like oh all billing is a
big like Circle you know cylinder of glass or a rectangle of of glass or whatever like that um I think one reason that that is true is because it may not be super interesting from the outside if you're on like the inside of a building it actually is you actually kind of want
like a whole lot of glass like he's really nice to have a whole you know a large open space to to walk through and to have like a lot of like natural light that didn't really that wasn't really that was very hard to do prior to like you know the mid 20th century and
because for a couple reasons one is because buildings weren't really air conditioned before that yeah um and another one is like it was like really very very ex you know to have like big expanses of class it's still expensive but it was like even more expensive uh as you go as you go go
farther back there was a glass making process invented in like the 1950s 1960s called the float glass process which made it a lot you could basically make really high quality glass for like way way way cheaper than it was possible to do previously um and so that you know air conditioning
and stuff like that it basically and then you know advances in like structural design increased use of like steel stuff like that um it basically became a lot more possible just have like your building as like a big big giant slab of of glass and have like a lot of natural light and
a lot of openness on the inside and that creates kind of a nice experience if you're actually in the the building I see um and I think that to some extent applies a little bit more more generally if you look at like you know if you look at and uh if you look at like you know an HGTV
remodel or something like that everybody wants to create like a big giant open concept floor plan or whatever with all the walls blown out and lots of natural light coming in everywhere so I mean to some extent it's just like the technology it seems like it's maybe a
case of the technology evolved so you can create this nicer interior space to some extent that Shane perhaps came at the expense of like having a lot of really ornate decoration on the top on the outside on the top but the outside um and you know if you're building a
building it makes sense to you know optimize the Insight at the extent of the outside because that's where what is you're actually using okay yeah that's interesting to put it one uh one comment that I've heard is if the the progress of yimbyism has been hurt by the fact that new buildings
because of this rational software interest are ugly on the outside and very pleasant on the inside but the result is that the people who are like I don't know the community organizers or whatever the other people in the community will oppose these new buildings because what they get to see
is the outside and you know these all these historical preservation boards they will notice that these older buildings that are not as pleasant on the inside and have obviously less occupancy and everything um they look more pleasant in their neighborhood than the new buildings that
people want to tear these down and build and then so if we want to convince the nimbies to go along with new construction you kind of make it look beautiful what do you think about that yeah I bet that's I sounds it seems like it's true probably to to some extent I mean there is that's
like the fundamental tension in like real estate right is that any property you have has a lot you know has like a lot of externalities and influence with the value everything around it so like it's this big game of negotiate any given thing you build it's like a big
negotiation between you and everything in the immediate area and that's why things like zoning and stuff like that exists in the first place even if it's not you know necessarily implemented and especially the way that people think is good I think it's probably a little bit
easy to over index on that um I would it would not surprise me if like you know it's like okay well Bill this is like a really beautiful old building it's like no it's still gonna it's still gonna be a giant building it's still gonna mess up my traffic it's still gonna have a bunch of renters that are
gonna come in and reduce my property values you know you see a lot of these like historical preservation things want to preserve things like old gas stations and laundromats and things that are like not beautiful at all sure or like parking lots and stuff like that
um so I you know I think that's probably true on some margin I would be surprised if it's like you know this is the one thing we need to fix to to un to untangle this problem gotcha I wanted to ask by the way you mentioned um how indoor air conditioning and heating has changed this Dynamics is
it just because you have enough installation that even if you lose heat through the glass that's fine or no I mean basically if you're if you're um if you have like a glass you know a big glass wall um on your as your exterior building right that like is if you don't have air
conditioning that thing is just going to like cook and whenever it gets hot out that it's gonna actually be like a greenhouse so you basically need air conditioning to sort of make that habitable you see this with like single family homes too where um where when air conditioning started to become like
popular and like installed by default all of a sudden they started building these houses with like these big giant picture windows which they didn't have before which people like right again this makes like a nice inside space and if you're gonna be inside you want that's the part you want to focus on but
again it basically is predicated on having air conditioner to control the climate gotcha okay so that explains why the outsides of buildings aren't as pretty as they used to be but uh there's still the question of why insides are so minimalistic like they're I don't know
if you saw this by the way so about a year or two ago Microsoft announced that they were building this new office for developers in India and the interior the outside it looks like a modern you know glass building but the inside that all these like really interesting Mughal
architectural details and craftsmanship that made it look you know for everything from the furniture to the floor layout to the arches of the entrances uh was supposed to like look like a Mughal Palace and it actually looks really cool um and so why don't more developers do
something like that on the Interiors of these uh buildings uh yeah I mean again good question I think for the most part a developer is very broadly speaking and again I'm not an enveloper so this is I'm going to model my way through as best I can um they're basically building this space
to rent out right or to sell to somebody else so they're gonna like they're gonna they're creating like a a lot of times they they they um it's it's development is called like shell and core which they which I think I'm using that correctly but um where they basically don't even like finish
the inside it's all just like rod and open studs and everything like that and something the tenant comes in and does whatever they want to this space but they're basically in the business of creating like usable space for some given class of Market that they're
trying to attack right they're not in the business of of making fancy architecture same if you're buying a single family home right you come in with blank walls and you put up all your different pictures that you want different uh you know decorations and paint it however you want and add your
funky wallpaper or whatever and then when you move you can take all that stuff out the next person can come in and put everything if they want so it's just I think to some extent you see like a decoupling of the aesthetic design from the building itself okay so then this is really a revealed
preference about the people who are actually renting or buying these properties that like people so actually people who are living there actually don't want this kind of interior design maybe yeah I think again it comes back to a little bit about like a question of like
aesthetic style and just like do people like want a lot of ornamentation and uh you know fundamental attractiveness because again people do focus a lot and like making these spaces like attractive and a lot of times they do that by like having like a big and nice and open a
lot of natural light and like a cool you know glass staircase or whatever that goes from here to there people like the new you know somebody pointed to the uh the new um Google headquarters not I don't know how new it is but on the on the newer side basically it's like yeah this big big giant like you know Dome
type thing with a lot of like structural detail visible and a lot of like yeah just lots of light coming in this big giant open space a lot of like interesting dark cases and kind of kind of stuff like that so in some extent it's just like a style with like less
whole ornamentation necessarily than like bad Aesthetics per se okay gotcha the other theories that are out there about this I emphasize more the cultural and aesthetic changes rather than the actual practical necessities of these kinds of changes that you've talked about so one theory
is that if you look at the change in men's clothing over the last two centuries it's become also a much more minimalistic and much less colorful and ornamental right so if you look at you know a king Louis or something he's like wearing a suit with all these studded colors and dies and even gems and stuff
and if you look at like a picture of Joe Biden you know he's just wearing a suit not even a tie anymore right it's just a black suit and a white shirt so that this is this is a continuation of this sort of aesthetic Trend towards being very minimalistic what's your reaction
to that sake yeah I mean I think that's true to like some extent this is one of the difficulties having a conversation like that is that there's so many like degrees of freedom it's hard to pin down ex you know what specifically you're talking about what class of things
you're specifically talking about like if you're talking about you know if you look at like an example from Fashions if you look at like streetwear or something like that if you just Google streetwear or something like that you'll find a ton of pictures of like really sort of quite
ornate interesting clothing it's not that you know there will be some stuff that's minimalist but there will be a lot that's like not necessarily minimalist at all so uh yeah I I you know it's I don't I guess I guess in some way I disagree with the um the premise I mean if you're talking about like some like
Elite counter signaling signaling thing like you know it's so easy and cheap to uh make like ornate color for clothing that it's not like a signal of status anymore so you have to counter signal by like a very simple clothing you know maybe there's something you know to that
but that's like a different thing than like why are things ugly in general right one thing that people also talk about uh is the increasing cost of Labor that now you can't hire people to spend the higher Talent of stone masons to spend hours on every square foot of the
outside of a building so I was in India like six months ago and we went to New Delhi uh to visit this new Temple that was built the swaminar and akshardham I'm sure I mispronounced it but but anyway so it's this really intricate and cool design on the outside it just covered in these hand carved stones with
like these intricate idols and different images and you know it's really cool but I I think it took like tens of thousands of hours probably way more and like thousands of workers and stone masons who actually construct that and which is obviously not going to be very feasible
economically in a western country so one theory is just that we don't you know just too expensive to do that kind of stuff anymore you need to do something that does doesn't require as much Manpower yeah I mean I I think just there's there's that's definitely got to be part
of the story right I mean you know construction as we know is not really gotten any cheaper but it also hasn't gotten more expensive right like a lot of this other basically things that are pure labor like other services right like Medical Care education stuff like that which has
gotten more expensive and part of the part of that is probably because we've found ways to like pull labor out of the process so so construction only Rises at the rate of inflation instead of faster than the rate of inflation um and yeah so like super labor and things of things like masonry that just
you know gets done anymore and there's probably like a vicious cycle there where P you know if you hire less of it and so there's fewer Masons available and so they get more expensive and it could you know the skill gets more scarce and now it's to hire someone to do like really ornate masonry work in
the U.S is probably really difficult to like even find them I'm sure they exist but it's probably not trivial and if you're like you know have your schedule you're trying to meet it's not super straightforward an interesting example of this is uh I can't remember we talked
about this in part one or not but the ISA jinu temple in Japan which is this Temple complex that they've been like uh it gets like torn down and rebuilt every 20 years and they've been doing that and they've been doing this for uh like 1300 years or something like that
um so it's using like 1300 year olds uh construction techniques like you know fast roofs and like particular woodworking methods or whatever uh and it's now like quite difficult for them to find a lot of these skills right there's just not that many roof thatchers around anymore
um it's so you know again I can imagine that like you know it's uh it was some sort of a a similar cycle with like with like masonry um I don't think that's like the whole story because a lot of these like a lot of these like things do like are kind of built in a way that like make buildings
um a lot of this like minimalist style it's actually quite expensive to do you know a glass curtain wall is actually really expensive to to build on a building because it lets in so much because glass is just expensive by itself and because it lets in so much light and it gets so hot you need so
much more uh you know so many so much a more extensive mechanical system to keep it cool and but you've talked I've talked to Architects like why do the owners love these you know glass curtain walls it seems like especially for like now where like everyone is like really
concerned about like climate change and uh you know Greenhouse emissions of your uh whatever it is you're You're Building people like yeah they you know they just really owners just really love this all glass look and they're willing to sort of pay extra to get it and if you look
like the ER the very early this is the sort of style of construction where you just have a big glass facade it's called for like a skyscraper it's called the international Style uh and you see like early International style skyscrapers they're actually quite expensive
um more expensive than the traditional way of building but again you know the the people who were like building it really liked the aesthetic and again it gave you some other options in terms of like light on the inside or whatever so it was they decided that it was that it was worth it so I think
yeah that's that's definitely probably part of the story but again it's I think definitely doesn't seem like it can be it could be all of it gotcha okay yeah to the extent that it is part of the story somebody who left an interesting comment on one of Scott Alexander's posts on this uh thing about
you know how modern construction looks different than older construction uh so this is a comment from fluffy Buffalo he writes or he or she writes I think new technology should help a lot with 3D painters CNC machines robots Cad and AI it shouldn't be too hard to come up with
a way to produce eye pleasing ornaments murals and building shapes at a reasonable price and then as they go on but no one is doing it because the current crop of Architects can apparently only think and steal concrete and glass so how plausible do you think this is yeah so I mean
like what kind of that makes me think of and I think I read some of the comments on this on that post and I think one of the people mentioned that but like yeah the the Victorian style of house basically came about because of uh mass production methods which made like
really ornate wood decorations to you know you could make those like really really cheaply just like they were just cranked out in some milling machine in a factory somewhere and then you could just buy them disabled them to your house or whatever and so that that style
is basically a function of Technology making that cheaper and then of course you don't you know that was in style for a while that's not anymore uh for I'm you know Shifting the shifting fans of ascetics but also I think part of it is that and this is I think more broadly applicable
it's actually kind of a hassle to have all this like ornamentation all over your house or whatever um on the inside there's just lots and lots of stuff to like dust and keep clean or whatever which again comes back to cost disease if you have servants to do that for you it's fine but if you
don't have servants it's you it creates a lot of extra work for you um same on the exterior but then also there is the issue that in general you want your building to like shed water and you know direct it away from the house as possible if you have a lot of like little nooks and
crannies and ornamentation stuff for water to collect that's pretty bad from a durability perspective um I don't think I would be careful not to index over index on that because obviously you can build like extra and people you can and people did build like extremely durable beautiful masonry
brick buildings are right it's not like that makes it impossible but it is something to like consider uh that it does on the margin probably make your maintenance costs um go up okay uh are you optimistic overall maybe not with these specific Technologies but
just and maybe not with you know having ornamentation or something but do you think that in 100 years the technology would enable like construction of buildings that look prettier than uh modern buildings but uh and also are more maintainable um or at least as maintainable or is it
basically going to be steel and glass towers for the time for you know the upcoming future yeah that's a that's a good question um there's a lot of enthusiasm some of it is like architecture and so we'll see how it will it actually gets adapted but for like more um Timber you know large top you know
tall buildings uh made out of heavy Timber elements I don't know if that will get you know partially it's like an aesthetic thing partially it's uh you know the carbon if you from a carbon perspective right it's uh using a lot of Timber versus steel or concrete is like way way better on on
that calculus um and it does kind of look nice a lot of the like you know a lot of these like um tech companies are building like these ornate Timber offices uh and stuff like that so that's like one Trend and then kind of um yeah I I kind of I there's not like an obvious
technology that could like usurp like the sort of standard palette we have you know unless it's unless it's like a a dramatic development it's like Material Science or whatever where somebody finds some way of building something that's uh you know is way cheaper and gives you like a
way more options than you add before like that's you know what like steel and then like congregate you right all of a sudden you could build things in ways that you couldn't do it before steal because you could use so much less structure to build time and uh concrete because it was like liquids
you could make it you could all of a sudden make any shape that you want and that's when you get all these like really cool interesting shells and uh you know really ornate concrete Dome stuff like that which of course we also don't build anymore so I don't I don't see like an obvious like technology to
kind of replace that and then I guess you know the other thing is like did the uh you know did the when all of a sudden you had technology that could like easily duplicate or make any sort of art possible Right did that all did that Usher in a new era of like way better
art or like 2D Aesthetics I don't necessarily think I don't necessarily think that it did right um so I think if you could all of a sudden build any sort of shape that you want cheaply and easily it's you know it's it's not it's not obvious to me that that would often okay now we can
get right like really cool things I'm sure you would see like a lot of interesting experiments on the on the margin or whatever but it's not obvious to me that like the standard way of building in some ways it might become even like less interesting right so there is the question of why we
haven't seen in these other fields better Aesthetics so given how much you can do with artistic like the traditional art today why do these like paintings that are selling for millions of dollars look like you know there's a obviously the the common perception and stereotype about them is that they're
very like simple and ugly and that to so to apply that to architecture and engineering there's this idea that Scott Alexander kind of talked about this a lot in his post that there's this like cabal of modernist architects in these guilds who are just like very obsessed
with building these buildings that the public doesn't like to look at given your exposure to the industry do you think that's true that like The Architects or just have a completely different sense of Aesthetics than the average public I think there's probably
something to that in like uh where like you go to architecture school and architecture school is like adjacent to Art School right um and you learn like you know how does that buildings or whatever you also learn like a specific way of looking and thinking at them about them and that
like filters down into like how you design you're building something like that but I think Architects are you know again they are competing in a Marketplace and the vast majority of them who are not starchitects uh are basically trapped to having to deliver the buildings that owners like ought and
like and are happy with and if they don't do that they're gonna go out of business I think I think most Architects you will talk to will basically say yeah I don't give the owner like a building that he's happy with I am not doing my job correctly uh and they're definitely
you know they're being hired for like there's among many other things they're like sense of taste right and but perhaps there's that's you know part of the story it's like a fragment or whatever but I think it's would be very easy to over index and I think there's a lot of ways that's not true
okay okay uh okay so I'm really glad we got a chance to cover this topic and um I appreciate all those explanations but uh actually this one question that I didn't get it I didn't forgot to ask you last time that I'm curious about your opinion on uh is let's say somebody
listens to the conversation and or they've been a follower of your blog and this has got them interested in engineering um somebody may be in like high school or maybe early in college or something for them to be able to do cool things in these fields in the future what kind of
training and career advice would you give them that they should pursue to be like get involved and innovate in these fields um yeah that's a good question uh I I don't have a super good answer that I fell into it very much uh very much on accident I was you know I spent the very
large chunk of my career just doing you know pretty standard work a day engineering type stuff and then I sort of fell ass backwards into a job at a construction startup and then that is sort of lend me led me to to to other places um I guess yeah if you're an engineer like go to a good
I I feel it's sort of gross giving this answer um because in general you know go to a good engineering school I was like ah your you know perpetuating the college industrial complex but um you know people do really care about that especially like in in sort of the fields
of you know building engineering that I'm working with they do care about that uh quite a bit I went to a reasonably good engineering school and that probably opened doors for me that it would not have um otherwise um so yeah go to uh you know go to a good engineering school go to like a lot
of like the status indicators uh that are like very obvious like go to a good engineering school and go to like a you know a top tier firm or whatever that does kind of matter uh people do pay attention to those things I don't matter quote unquote uh and it matters in the
sense that people pay attention to those things in like a Building Development world and then if you you know if you went to MIT or you know Caltech and then you had a you know an internship that's you know Skidmore owed Merrell or whatever that's gonna open quite a few doors for you
um and that amazingly happy that with that answer I do think that it is uh that it is true yeah you know another way would just be to try to uh come in from you know a more oblique angle angle focus on like you know software and stuff like that and then work at one of the you
know because there's so many more startups and stuff that are now tackling the construction space they're increasingly need of like software developers and stuff like that that would be a uh a prop probably a a lower risk way to do it because it's probably you know you don't need to necessarily
go to a fancy school to become a software developer and then if it doesn't work out you can just go get a job at a fan company and make 600 600 000 a year yeah see it look at look and see how like the startups um in the in the space are changing and growing I think by the time some folks
got out the build in space might look uh pretty different in technology and software stuff is like kind of slowly forcing its way in there a lot more okay um but then so if they want to transition from just like being an engineer to working on the Forefront
stuff that you write and talk about is working at a startup the ideal way to do that oh that's a good question um there's a lot of there's a lot of yeah I think this the there's a lot of startups that are doing yeah really interesting stuff not just in software but like a lot of yeah interesting
Building Technology stuff uh a lot of you know there's a lot of like green building stuff that has worked there's a workout that is being developed uh folks working on like low carbon concrete there's like low carbon Steels yeah there's a lot of stuff doing like construction robotics a lot of like
prefab stuff startup world is really kind of trying to start to eat the um uh the construction world and there's like a lot of opportunities there I do you know very broadly I would say I see a lot of innovation happening so I think that's a good place to sort of look and
see what's uh what's going on awesome okay well Brian thank you so much for coming back a second time uh I really appreciate it and I'm glad we got a chance to talk about these uh by this question here it is very interesting and it's good to get an actual engineer's
perspective on it so that we're not just doing like cultural Theory and we actually understand the practicalities of what's involved in um all those kinds of things okay Brian this is super fascinating I highly recommend people check out your blog which you can find at constructionphysics.substack.com and
they can also follow you on Twitter we'll leave the handle in the description anything else you would like to plug or uh say at the end uh yeah I do uh I'm doing some work for the institute for Progress which is a I think tank designed to advance industrial progress and Progressive
studies ideas more generally so we should check that check them out okay excellent uh thanks Ron uh I appreciate it thanks hey thanks for listening if you enjoyed that episode I would really really really appreciate it if you could share it this is still a pretty small podcast so it is a huge
help when any one of you shares an episode that you like post it on Twitter send it to friends who you think might like it put it in your group chats just let the word go for it it helps out a ton many thanks to my amazing editor Graham besselu for producing this podcast and
to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode uh which have helpful links and you can find them at the link in the description below remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms cheers see you next time [Music] foreign