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AI is going to sort of make dramatically new types of automation possible.
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It's tasks you used to be having to had to do manually, uh you can now do automatically by some machine.
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Sort of reduce the the labor burden.
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People are trying to use this basically AI technology to sort of drive robots around.
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If you could, you know, automate a big frac- fraction of like, you know, construction work, you would be able to sort of drive down the cost of of building a building and find a sort of, you know, addresses construction productivity problem that we've had for decades.
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>> [music] >> My guest today is Brian Potter, a structural engineer by training and a long-time practitioner of the same.
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He writes on the hidden logic of how things actually get made and the author of The Origins of Efficiency.
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Please enjoy my conversation with Brian.
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So, Brian, the book, The Origins of Efficiency, which did you write that before or after your experience at Katerra? Uh that was after.
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That was uh several years after I left there.
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>> but to me this was all new to me.
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I I haven't really thought in terms of the practicalities of trying to make actual construction more efficient.
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The the experience at Katerra, I know I followed it somewhat when things were happening, uh but talk to me about like what happened?
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You were there and I know you you wrote a a long piece on it, which I read, but I'd rather have you explain the whole concept to our listeners and viewers.
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Uh yeah, so Katerra, for for those who don't know, is this really well-funded uh construction startup that formed in in the 2010s. I joined uh there 2018.
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And their goal, or what their goal had evolved into by the time I was there, was just, you know, revolutionize essentially the construction industry by way of um you know, prefabricated factory-built methods, which is an idea that is perennially popular.
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You every, you know, 10 to 20 years someone comes along and says, "Oh, I have a brilliant idea.
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I will revolutionize the industry with this uh with this, you know, factory-built methods that nobody has ever ever thought of before."
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And then they in- inevitably does not work out the way that they imagined uh that it will.
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And so, I joined them in 2018 after had I had spent, you know, 10 or or 2018 after I had spent, you know, 10 years of my career in the construction industry.
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I had thought the industry was like, you know, incredibly backward, incredibly inefficient.
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And I had thought that these Katerra guys were basically on the right track to to try and and and fix it.
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And so, I joined them uh sort of building and managing a team of structural engineers while I was there.
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Uh and you know, for a while it was like very exciting.
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We were like growing super fast and hiring all these people and the company was like getting bigger and bigger and, you know, signing all these deals.
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And then it just sort of started to kind of go sideways.
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Uh you know, the costs kept kind of up coming uh just back super high.
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We were trying to sort of dial in our manufacturing processes and there was all these difficulties, you know, in the factories and stuff just kept being too expensive.
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You had to, you know, design and redesign and re-redesign these these products that we're offering over again and they just kind of weren't coming together the way that we hoped.
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And, you know, COVID hit and sort of threw a wrench into everything and started being, you know, series of of layoffs.
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Uh they started before COVID, but but COVID certainly didn't help.
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You know, many rounds of layoffs just sort of winnowed winnowed the the group down.
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My entire team team was laid off.
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Uh um and they were just, you know, trying to sort of pivot into some sort of model that would work and they sort of struggled and and staggered along for a few years.
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I eventually left after about um uh 2 and 1/2 years there.
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And and went went to another engineering job and sometime after they eventually sort of uh gave up the ghost and uh and declared bankruptcy.
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It seems like there were multiple causes, right, for the failure.
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Uh because when I was reviewing it and reading your Another Day in Katerra Dies, I instantly thought of Sears Roebuck and the success that they had kind of mid-century, 1908 through beginning of the century, 20th century, through 1940.
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They sold, I think, close to 100,000 mail-order houses uh that became quite popular.
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And, you know, it was kind of the birth of of that.
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Some of them are actually considered like really beautiful houses today.
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So, I I thought maybe that that's where they got the idea, but no, I'm I'm wrong about that?
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No, so that's like sort of there's like a whole history of like prefabricated construction that's been tried, you know, and some- sometimes unsuccessfully, but attempted multiple times in in multiple ways, you know, in many different periods and places.
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So, the Sears mail-order home was one sort of subset of that.
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There was actually a whole constellation of these um mail-order home builders.
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Uh they were it was actually based on this idea of uh people would sell like what were called knockdown boats, which is basically they would assemble a boat out of wood and then just disassemble it into the pieces and like mail you the pieces and you could like assemble it and stitch it together yourself.
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And basically somebody said, "Hey, I should do the same idea, but with houses."
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And they would send you essentially all the parts to a house and you would have to sort of stitch it together yourself.
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Uh and I and you know, that yeah, they were in that business for yeah, the the early 20th century up through the 1930s.
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And then I think they ended up going that going out of business essentially because they ended up losing huge amounts of money on the mortgages.
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And I think they ended up losing so much that like erased any the entire history of profits from the uh from the from the business.
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Um but there's like lots of different, you know, people have tried like the prefabrication thing over and over uh um again.
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It really became popular in the US after um Ford [snorts] had such major success with like mass production and, you know, dropping the cost of the Model T by such huge amounts.
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And some of and, you know, they had had like large continuous process factories before that, but like with Ford and mass production this was like the first time that you had like this really large, this really complex good being produced in large quantities and like sort of these sort of continuous methods.
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And that had really really dropped the price of it.
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And so, people said, "Hey, this, you know, method these methods have made like this complex big thing, a car, way cheaper.
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We should be able to say apply the same ideas to, you know, complex big houses, which are essentially just, you know, stitching parts together in the same way that a car gets stitched together.
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The same idea should work."
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So, it's in the 1930s where you really see this idea of like prefabrication as a way to like reduce cost start to take off.
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And so, it's really it starts to get more popular in the '30s.
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Um it gets, you know, the people try it again in like the '50s and the '60s and the '70s and it just keep reiterating like the same basic thesis where it's like if I move my process into the factory, it will become much more efficient and I'll be able to like lower my costs and and prices dramatically.
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And Katerra was just like the latest of like a long history of this same basic thesis.
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Yeah, and as I was uh of a parallel.
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Uh the external event that wiped out Sears was, as you said, the mortgages.
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And the mortgages didn't get paid because oh, Great Depression.
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And with Katerra, I know that we're going to talk about other factors for why they went down, but, you know, the pandemic hit.
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And that couldn't have been friendly to the project at hand, right?
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Yeah, that certainly hurt things and disrupted things.
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I've heard folks there who claim that like if the pandemic hadn't didn't hit, they would have been able to muddle through and and maybe not have, you know, had the transformation effect on the industry that they had hoped, but would have been able to emerge as a success- successful business.
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Uh it may even be true, but um uh I I don't know for sure.
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What are the lessons that are the, you know, are applicable beyond engineering and beyond construction?
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For, you know, is it just, you know, when you get 2 billion in funding and you spend like a drunken sailor, uh that leads to really bad things.
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That's a pretty obvious one that I've seen in a lot of startups, you know, WeWork being a classic example.
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Um or are are there I in reading your stuff, I think you have very good reasons from the engineering point of view why this didn't work, but you're the expert.
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Yeah, I mean, a big one is just that, you know, in startups you're always trying to hit what's called like product market fit, right?
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Where you have like a basically you have created some sort of product, some sort of good or service that like people are like clamoring to to to buy.
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And then once, you know, you're you're you don't want to it's it's very risky to like scale up your operations um before you've hit that because if you, you know, you don't know before that you don't really know what it is you're you're to be building.
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If you big build this big organization that's devoted to producing X and it turns out we need to produce Y, it's very expensive to sort of make that change.
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It's expensive it's especially expensive if you're like building physical things in the physical world, you know, building hundred million dollar factories that you then decide, oh, we don't actually don't need this.
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Oh, well, you know, shoot, I spent all this money on this factory.
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That happened that at Katerra at the very early on they were very big into this material called cross-laminated timber, CLT, which is like these big heavy timber panels.
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Um Um sort of like a super plywood, basically.
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So, instead of you know, plywood is 3/4 of an inch thick, these would be 9 inches thick or something like that.
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Uh used for like the structural floors and and walls of a building.
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Uh they'd bet, you know, very heavily on this.
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They had built what I think was like the largest CLT plant in the world, but by then by the time the CLT plant came up came online, they realized, "Hey, this product's very expensive.
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It's very hard to sort of achieve the the goals that we want using this thing."
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And almost as soon as they got it online, they were sort of trying to get rid of it, as I understand it.
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Um because they it it no longer fit with with what they were trying to do.
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And there was just like, you know, tons of examples of this.
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They had brought all this stuff, you know, all these trades in house and then they sort of sort of later thought, "Well, maybe we should be outsourcing more of this work and, you know, blah blah blah blah blah."
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Um you know, trying all these different products, but they were trying to sort of, you know, constantly trying to find traction and find their foot in, um which is very expensive to do when you have like, you know, a 10,000 person company and you have, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in capital equipment that maybe now you're not sure you actually need to uh use.
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So, um you know, many of the they never really truly found product market fit in the sense of here's the thing that we're selling and this is what people want to buy and we're going to scale up our operations to produce this or deliver this service.
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They were constantly constantly trying to sort of figure out what that needed to be.
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And another thing that I thought about was maybe there was also a failure in investor-company fit.
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And by that I mean did was were the people running the company getting a ton of pressure from Silicon Valley, you know, the hypergrowth strategy that might work with digits, but doesn't work so well with atoms? Uh possibly.
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They got a lot of their money from SoftBank, which is famously, you know, for like, "I just want you to grow as big and and crazy as possible."
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and writing just like truly outrageously enormous checks.
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I was certainly wasn't privy to those conversations, so I don't really know, but it certainly fits the pattern.
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So, did did you as an employee feel from the management and from or from your boss or whatever, was was that a constant pressure, we got to go faster, we got to build bigger, or or were you relatively immune from that kind of pressure?
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The pressure at the early on was just for like growth at all costs, basically.
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Or just or like scaling up our operations in anticipation of growth.
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So, I was, you know, trying to hire as many find as many good engineers and, you know, good CAD operators and and and stuff uh as we could and like setting up the department in preparation for, you know, handling like the huge influx of work, you know, setting up standards and getting our software in place and and all sorts of stuff like that.
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And uh you know, it never really quite all materialized.
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Uh you know, we were doing in anticipation of like this huge work and like the volumes of work were just like never really not that high and people were like, "Are we ever going to like really actually build any buildings?"
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Uh and we did, you know, it wasn't like we were doing nothing.
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We were certainly putting uh lots of of buildings up.
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Um but uh it was never like the huge amounts that sort of we were had been prepping for.
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And then so then there was then like sort of they like, I don't know, figure out exactly as the company grew, figuring out exactly what the role of our department was in it, which kind of like changed over time as they started to like tweaking, you know, how they foresaw the the business model uh evolving.
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Well, the the other thing that I'm taking away by going through all your stuff is like obviously we we we have some obstacles to the idea of American abundance, for example, is particularly in this industry.
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And is it, you know, bad policy, fragmented institutions, can we lay it all at the feet of Robert Moses, who famously profiled in the as the villain in The Power Broker?
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You know, I I actually read a lot about that. I've read the book. I read a long time ago.
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But I actually read a lot about it in anticipation of talking to you.
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And and I'd kind of forgotten that he and and the reaction to him, more specifically the reaction to the book about him, uh The Power Broker, you know, how he ruined New York, caused a lot of the NIMBY attitudes and the procedures and and everything else.
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But like was that there before?
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Is this always been a problem in terms of building and in America? Yeah, it's interesting.
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So, there's two things I guess that have shaped my view on this.
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One is this very good book um a by guy Mark Dunkelman called Why Nothing Works.
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I'm I'm not sure if you read it, but it's a lot about like, you know, Robert Moses and like the aftermath of him and sort of the reaction to sort of the book and like how he suddenly started to be perceived so negatively.
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And he sort of Dunkelman kind of sees this like huge transition in like US politics um overall, where there's these sort of two competing tendencies.
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One is this sort of uh what he calls the Hamiltonian tennis tendency after Alexander Hamilton to sort of have like a robust muscular government that is capable of like doing a lot of things successfully.
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Uh and then there's also this sort of Jeffersonian impulse that's like fundamentally suspicious of government power and wants to like uh check it and restrict it and constrain it and prevent it from like inflicting harm intentionally or accidentally on like the US citizens.
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It like views like the government as like a big basically a big danger to its citizenry.
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And over like the course of history like these the relative like strengths of these tendencies have sort of waxed and waned.
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And like, you know, from maybe the '50s through the '70s through up the early '70s, it's like really a sort of Hamiltonian was sort of in ascendancy and like you wanted like have these like government agencies that could handle that could, you know, successfully deliver sort of a lot of things.
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US had just won World War II off the back of like government intervention and people saw like, you know, oh, the government can come along and like successfully do all these big uh major things.
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But then starting in like the you know, around like the 1960s, uh late 1960s, early 1970s, that sort of gave way and people started becoming much more suspicious of and much more worried about like the government's, you know, [snorts] power and authority and started to putting all these restrictions and laws and and rules in place that basically made it like much harder for the government to sort of, you know, do anything at all.
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And this comes in like a huge number of of of you know, ways and you know, forms.
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know, ways and you know, forms. Uh so, a lot of like the environmental rules that sort of started popping up uh in like the late '60s and early '70s, uh National Environmental Policy Act and, you know, Clean Air Act and and all
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these things, which are good uh rules in in many, you know, at least in the way that they were originally envisioned, but they also serve to like, you know, really restrict, especially things like the National Environmental Policy Act, you know, what the government is able to do. They give citizens a lot of ability
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They give citizens a lot of ability to like intrude not intrude, but like, you know, halt government uh efforts by through things like litigation and and and stuff like that.
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And so that he sort of sees this as like a, you know, we've we've been we're sort of on the end of several decades of like this Jeffersonian impulse uh reigning supreme.
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And so it's left us in this uh world of like where it's very very hard for like government agencies to actually accomplish anything cuz we've bound their hands in in so many different ways based on just sort of these suspicions and and reluctance to let the government have um the authority.
18:38
Yeah, I I had a guest on who wrote a book contrasting and comparing America and China.
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And his thesis was America is now a lawyerly society, whereas China is an engineering society.
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Um and then obviously the conversation took the the normal uh course that you would expect, very similar to the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian divide.
19:06
If if America was suddenly faced with a World War II type mobilization for housing or for energy, for whatever reason, could we do it?
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Do we have the capabilities?
19:18
What capabilities would we discover in your opinion that we still have?
19:22
And what capabilities do we think we have that are mostly a myth from your point of view?
19:28
Uh yeah, it's a good question.
19:30
I have I guess a sort of constellation of thoughts on this.
19:35
Um one is that, you know, in the very to go back to COVID, in the very early stages of COVID, people thought that we would see that sort of like emergency mobilization type of like marshaling our resources to respond to to COVID or something like that.
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People thought, you could "Oh, we're going to you know, suddenly going to sort of get our manufacturing in gear to manufacture like, you know, PPE and and and stuff like that."
20:02
Or like, you know, really sort of rise to sort of meet this challenge of of of this, you know, virus.
20:06
And in some ways we did, you know, Operation Warp Speed was able to produce vaccines extreme extremely quickly and and start manufacturing them quite quickly far far faster than anybody thought was possible.
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But in many ways we didn't, like, right?
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We never really like, "Oh, we're going to bring, you know, we're going to scale up our manufacturing operations and start producing all these like PPE stuff that is in like really short supply."
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We never we never, you know, there was never like a huge upswell of like American like mask manufacturing or anything like that.
20:36
And for so for a lot of like COVID stuff, you know, even though there's like this big emergency, it didn't really inspire like this sort of, you know, transformation in capabilities.
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We really just kind of muddled through in a lot of ways.
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We didn't end up with like a CDC that was like massively competent at, you know, dealing with this dealing with this pandemic.
20:57
You know, if anything the the pandemic showed how like rotted our institution was and how incapable we were of of fixing it.
21:08
So, you know, that's one perspective is that we can't, you know, we've really atrophied our ability to sort of respond to these major threats or like, you know, changes in the world.
21:20
But then I also I look at the sort of AI buildout.
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We're we're in the middle of like one of the great infrastructure construction efforts in history, basically.
21:32
Just the amount of like capital that's being deployed to just build all these data centers and and, you know, install all these chips and get all these capabilities online is like really truly astounding.
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You know, you I there's you can see these like graphs going around.
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It's like comparable with like any major like US project, basically.
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You know, Manhattan Project or Apollo or something like that in terms of like the money and the resources that are being deployed and like the physical infrastructure that is being built.
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Only something like, you know, only a few things, stuff like the railroads are like really exceeding it.
22:06
So, it you know, it also shows that like in the right circumstances we can like still deploy you know, infrastructure and resources to like build capabilities like really really astoundingly quickly if there's motivation to and if stuff is not blocking the way.
22:20
You know, one big part of it is just I I think for that buildout is that for a long time, a very very long time, local jurisdictions really really liked having data centers around because they paid a lot in property taxes, but they didn't demand all that much in the way of like new government services because, you know, it's basically just a big building with computers in it.
22:40
It wasn't like dramatically raising the population and so it didn't like change like, you know, how many schools we need to provide, how much traffic is on the roads and, you know, fire services, police services and stuff like that.
22:51
It didn't really like stress all that stuff very much.
22:52
So, you just had this like big business coming in and paying you a big check for for property taxes and not really demanding very much of you.
23:02
That's really starting to change partly because the new data centers are so big that they are placing stress on the infrastructure, right?
23:08
Power and and water and all this stuff that has become popular to talk about.
23:13
But also just because the construction is so vast and also I think, you know, the cap AI capabilities are so like they're making so many people nervous that people are really starting to oppose data centers in a way that they haven't before.
23:28
And so, you know, the sort of local restrictions on like sort of the building these things even in places that used to be like really really popular like Virginia is just becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.
23:41
And so, yeah, it kind of the AI sort of shows like, "Oh, we still have these capabilities when they are not restricted and when there's the incentive is is is correct, but also shows like how quickly the forces that can like shut these things sort of down can move.
23:57
Yeah, and I I've done kind of a deep dive on on the history of innovation and what I found was really interesting. It happens all the time.
24:06
Like literally the industrial the most obvious is the Luddites during the the weaving explosion of innovation, but it goes on and on and on and I think a lot of it has to do with just kind of a basic fear of the new and good storytelling.
24:25
I mean, back to the power broker, he he he wrote a good book and he he he crafted a villain and people responded to that particular villain.
24:40
And there's a villain being crafted right now about AI and, you know, you get people emotionally reacting to it.
24:47
But on the subject of AI, do you think that with the AI we have right now available to us, what benefits do you think it can bring to your field?
25:00
What do you mean by my my field? My field is engineering?
25:03
>> building, the the the whole real world construction, etc. , etc.
25:11
Yeah, so I you know, I guess there's a a few things.
25:13
I mean, one is just this, you know, at a high level you can, you know, AI is just some is a new tool for automation that's, you know, we've been automating work for for for for centuries.
25:25
AI is going to sort of make dramatically new types of automation possible, but it's, you know, going to still be the sort of automation that we've seen before.
25:33
It's like, you know, tasks that used to be having to had to do manually, you can now do automatically by some machine.
25:41
Sort of reduce the the labor burden.
25:42
You know, it used to take 60, 70, 80% of people working to sort of work in agriculture to produce enough, you know, food just to feed society.
25:54
We've sort of, you know, thanks to automation and other technological improvements, that's dropped to like, you know, 1 to 2% or or something like that.
26:02
So, you know, frees people up to do sort of new other things or maybe have to do less, you know, lead more fulfilling lives or having to do just less, you know, back-breaking unpleasant labor or whatever.
26:13
And yeah, you know, so a big part of it is just going to be like tasks that used to be having to do manually are going to be sort of automated.
26:19
So, you know, a lot of design and engineering tasks I foresee getting sort of automated.
26:28
What that, you know, automated away, you know, people find new perhaps find new higher leverage tasks that they can do now that these sort of, you know, other specific things are can now be done by machine.
26:41
In terms of like the physical side, you know, people are trying to use this basically AI technology to sort of drive robots around.
26:52
You know, there's all this investment going into like humanoid robots, which are a lot of these things or like, you know, not necessarily humanoids.
27:00
Other companies are working on just but the same basic idea of like using these sort of big huge neural networks essentially to to drive these sort of like robot arms or humanoid robots or whatever.
27:12
That's a lot, you know, the progress is not we're not at the same level of just like, you know, the chatbot AI models or whatever, where it's like increasingly capable of like doing any information processing task.
27:23
These things are not These things are not as good as driving a robot around yet as they are, you know, answering a question about, you know, the history of nuclear power or, you know, how a government agency works or, you know, where you should shop to find a good pair of shoes, you know, any sort of information processing task where these things are already like extremely extremely capable.
27:46
Those capabilities aren't nearly the same place as they are in robots.
27:48
same place as they are in robots. But they're getting better and there's lots of investment and lots of enthusiasm and people many people think that like, you know, it's going to be on like a similar sort of evolution where eventually these things are going to be able to move around
28:03
quite capably in the real world and be capable of like automating a lot of physical um physical, you know, actions and operations the same way that we're, you know, with current AI models we can now, you know, see the possibility of of automating automating, you know, a huge swath of intellectual work if not if not all intellectual work. So. So.
28:27
And do you think that AI will have the ability to assist the human designers to, for example, could you think working with an AI, do you think that they could solve that pre-manufactured problem that, you know, Sears ran into, you guys ran into? Like or or no?
28:48
Maybe I you know, it it I I think I don't think the problem with like, you know, these these prefabrication was around like insufficiently clever design of the building, basically.
29:01
I think it has to do more about So, you know, I've written quite a bit about this, but it has to do more with like the fundamental constraints of how you put a building up.
29:10
Like difficulties achieving economies of scale and kind of, you know, huge, you know, different different like jurisdictions with sort of different requirements and sort of the fundamental nature of like building a, putting a building on site which has to meet like your site requirements.
29:24
All these sorts of things like that.
29:26
It has very little to do with just like not being smart enough to design a, you know, a prefabricated building properly or or something like that.
29:36
So, I don't think it would have it'll have effect like on that side of it.
29:39
I do think that if you could, you know, automate a big frac fraction of like, you know, construction work, you would be able to sort of drive down the cost of of building a building just by using, you know, these automated labor, you know, robots or whatever, instead of sort of manual uh workers.
29:55
Um and finally sort of, you know, address this construction productivity problem that we've had for decades, um which is just construction productivity, labor productivity never really seems to improve.
30:07
If you have, you know, sufficiently good AI, sufficiently good robot control, you can find a kind of finally uh address that problem.
30:15
And and another question I had for you when I was reading your stuff was, is it simply a matter of like the new rules and regulations, etc.?
30:28
I mean I think of how fast we built the Empire State Building.
30:30
I think about how fast we built like monumental projects in the past.
30:36
Is it is it just regulatory environment, social environment that we we can't build them like that anymore?
30:47
I mean, you can we can still build stuff fast if we choose to.
30:49
A lot of these data centers are going up quite fast.
30:53
You know, you can build certain things, uh you know, power plants, certain industrial facilities, they can go up uh quite quickly.
30:59
So, we can build quickly if we need to, um or, you know, again, in certain cases where we haven't made it outrageously difficult.
31:04
Uh regulation is certainly a big part of it.
31:08
I kind of view of it is like, you know, we have these like steadily encroaching regulations, steadily like more difficult bureaucracy that needs to be navigated, you know, the rise of this Jeffersonian impulse that like makes it just harder to do anything that has to sort of go through uh uh a government process.
31:25
Um but it's, you know, a big part of it is just on sort of like on the technical side, just like the fundamental nature of a building buildings, uh and it's just difficult to improve for kind of various reasons.
31:37
Or it has historically been, anyway.
31:40
And um you know, what what efficiency uh that you that you know of, which I might call a forbidden efficiency in the field, uh one that would actually work, but that would instantly trigger cultural or political rejection? Oh, uh I don't know.
32:00
I you know, I don't know of any sort of instant things like that.
32:05
I would say the big theme of my work generally, uh especially around like construction stuff, is that there are not like super easy solutions, and that any sort of thing like, "Oh, if we only we could just do this."
32:16
Uh you can find examples of someone trying that and it not working.
32:21
Um or like, "Oh, here's, you know, you can try this and, you know, it's it's not going to do what you intended to do because of these various complicating factors."
32:29
Or you may think the binding constraint is this, but if, you know, cases where this constraint has been relaxed, "Oh, it turns out, you know, you still don't get the improvements that you hoped to see."
32:37
So, I, you know, fundamentally a lot of my work is, I would say, pushing back on that idea and just, you know, a lot of these difficulties are due to sort of the inherent nature of the process and not due to sort of like one difficult roadblock that we've erected that if we just change this one thing, all of a sudden our problems would be fixed.
32:57
Most of our problems are not like that, I don't think.
33:01
So, [snorts] what innovations and or procedures have you seen over the last, let's call it, 10 or 15 years that either surprised you because they worked or surprised you cuz they didn't work?
33:16
In sort of construction or more generally?
33:22
Uh let's go generally, but then also touch on construction. Sure.
33:26
Um I am quite surprised at how quickly you can you know, to get take it back to AI, I have been quite surprised at how quickly we've managed to sort of scale up uh this um uh you know, the build out of these, you know, these computing power and data centers uh generally.
33:44
I thought, you know, basically our sort of you know, NIMBY sensibilities were so so strong that like any major infrastructure project was going to be just inevitably like strangled by these sort of things that just made it hard to build like anything really large uh in in really large volumes to deploy very quickly.
34:08
And we do a lot of things quicker than I have um uh anticipated.
34:15
Um uh you know, when and now we're starting to see sort of backlash to that, so maybe that will like slow down.
34:23
Um but up until now, I've been impressed about how sort of quickly stuff is is is come online.
34:29
Um in terms of like stuff that I'm, you know, was surprised that doesn't work, like my whole history like, you know, researching construction, uh I I you know, I've over and over again again, you know, run into an idea of like something that's like, "Oh, surely if they did this, this would definitely uh like I said, this would definitely work."
34:47
And then learning of some case where it didn't work.
34:48
One example is like, you know, we've talked a little bit about prefabrication, and you know, if only you could like get like prefabrication done at scale or something like that, then you would be able to sort of achieve these like cost savings that people are constantly hoping that prefabrication will do.
35:02
It's like, "Only if we were uh we'll like use this really widely."
35:08
Um but then I learned about you know, countries that have basically deployed prefabricated home building really really widely, and they still don't see cost savings the way that you would sort of hope or expect them to.
35:20
So, like Sweden is like the typical example here, where they build some huge fraction of like their single-family homes and apartment buildings are built like in using factory-built construction, basically.
35:32
Um uh you know, something like 80, 90% of single-family homes and like 40% of apartment buildings or something like that prefabricated construction.
35:40
Um but their costs are not like low.
35:43
It's not like it's, you know, it's not like they're not producing the Model T of of homes over there like in in the sense that like, "Oh, these homes are just so massively cheaper than anything you could build by hand."
35:53
Their homes are like more expensive than the homes that we build in the US from what I can see.
35:59
So, yeah, just and just, you know, over and over again running into things like that.
36:03
It's like, "Oh, maybe this idea would work." It didn't really.
36:04
"Oh, maybe if we relax this regulation, it would have this big transformative effect." Not really.
36:09
Yeah, it's uh it's it's very very tough.
36:13
And and if you had to explain America's building problems with a non-construction analogy, would it be like health care, medieval guilds, enterprise software, you know, political >> Yeah, I I I Yeah, I would I would, you know, again, kind of two things.
36:29
We talked about this once once before a little bit before it and I went into half of them.
36:32
But one half is like this Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian impulse and sort of the rise of sort of Jeffersonianism.
36:39
And then the other is just we've we've talked about this a little bit ago, but once something becomes like, you know, I'm almost not sure kind of how to characterize it.
36:49
But once people like the reach some like certain level of like affluence or success, or like once something becomes, you know, gets reached to some level of like disruption, uh people are willing to tolerate it up to some certain point, and then once it goes beyond this like point, then people start to get really uh upset about it.
37:07
Um So, like in the 1960s, I I've written this essay about like growth in in in California, and how for a long time California was like a very very like fast-growing state.
37:18
And up through like the '50s, California like took pride in the way like a fast-growing fast-growing state they were.
37:25
For a long time, they had like a um this big sign that was on one of their bridges, I think maybe the Bay Bridge, um in in in the Bay Area, I but I I don't remember.
37:36
But anyway, it had like the population and like of California next to like the population of New York, and it was tracking when California would like surpass New York as being the most populous state.
37:46
So, for a long time, you know, California was like, "Oh, we're like a big growing state, and that's like good basically for our society.
37:54
Growth means like, you know, more people, more jobs, you know, greater division of labor, we're getting wealthier. That's what we want."
37:58
But then at some level, at, you know, eventually that kind of like tipped, and um you know, the consequences there there'd been enough growth that people were like uh wealthy and successful enough that they started to be like very unhappy by like the consequences of all this growth.
38:17
So, you know, as this growth was taking place, you had all this like environmental ruination and like, you know, just huge swaths of like, you know, forest Uh all these sort of, you know, we we're rushing grow go go go go, and we've has made ourselves rich and successful, but now we're sort of ruining the environment that like drew us here uh in the first place.
38:42
And so, in the '60s, you see like this very wide-scale, very like grassroots like switch to like being opposed to to growth.
38:48
And, you know, jurisdictions started electing like, you know, political leaders that would like enact anti-growth policies and all these things.
38:58
And sort of California still grew after that point, but its growth was like much more checked, and it became much more fraught um after that.
39:08
And I sort of, you know, I So, yeah, I there you know, people like when, you know, if if if if there's like a rising tide that's lifting all boats, people are very happy to to sort of be a part of that.
39:20
But eventually, if they start seeing the consequences of that, uh they're uh or get to a point like, "Oh, I've, you know, I'm, you know, this is starting to sort of affect me uh or or the place I live in in negative ways, they're going to start eventually turning against that."
39:34
turning against that." Um I'm thinking of like uh you know, China, which I'm I'm I'm an expert on on China, but I understand it's like a lot of what the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from is that they've been able to like successfully deliver really robust
39:50
economic growth and you know, these people remember like what it's like to be like wretchedly poor and they're very happy to like be in a society that's growing like much much richer and more successful and we have all these things that we didn't have before and we're much more powerful country than it used to be. And so they're you know, they
40:02
And so they're you know, they really rely on be able to like be able to sort of continuously deliver uh these improvements and they think that if like those sort of growth maybe runs out, maybe things are going to be start to people are going to start to sort of reconsider what they think is important.
40:23
Yeah, of course the irony about China's rapid growth is it was probably mostly driven by Deng's opening up China to limited capitalism, right?
40:32
For those 20 years when he took over and that was basically the the engine that drove much of China's growth.
40:44
Um If if if we return to a more Hamiltonian aspect here in the United States and and you got named like head of housing.
40:57
And and you could flex your flex your muscles a little bit a little bit more than you could under a Jeffersonian administration.
41:08
Like what what what would you do?
41:08
What would be your your platform?
41:13
It's it's tough because you need a lot of this sort of restrictions on like you know, building things are at like the state or like regional or like local level.
41:24
A lot of it is local like city supervisors or whatever or like design review boards that like are listening to like local residents unhappy about um about like you know, some new apartment project or or or whatever.
41:38
So a lot of this you know, has to be done at like And it's you know, it's in such a way that's like it's it's it's hard for like you know, federal tools or federal policies to change that in like huge ways.
41:53
There's sort of carrots and sticks that they can do but they're hard for them to sort of like mandate things.
41:56
So a bit but a big one is just like encouraging sort of state level um state level you know, setting of like or like reducing sort of a lot of these like growth restrictions that maybe like local jurisdictions have in stuff like that.
42:14
And what federal has a lot more ability to influence is stuff that goes you know, like large scale certain large scale infrastructure construction projects sort of like a lot of like energy energy building transmission lines pipelines you know, you know, big solar installations.
42:35
Federal government you know, has a lot of like leverage there that it can do and so like big wide scale reform in how you know, permitting by of you know, stuff that goes through like this federal permitting process um you know, reducing like the burden of
42:50
environmental review and things like that could like really have a huge build out or huge impact in terms of like how much energy infrastructure that we can build and things like that which is really going to become a very very important. And you know, the federal government
43:04
And you know, the federal government owns a lot of disused land that uh you know, nobody there's nothing on it.
43:13
Why haven't they pivoted to some of these like you brought up solar.
43:17
Um why why not use some of that federally owned land?
43:21
Again, you're the czar of the of this building uh thing.
43:26
Would that be something that could be generative?
43:29
They do use that land for a lot of energy stuff.
43:33
A lot of oil and gas drilling is done on federal land.
43:38
Part of it is like you know, again we have this like you know, all this like burdensome process for like doing all these things and like the oil and gas industry is like very large and successful and they've had like a long time to kind of like work the process in a way that some of these like newer more nascent industries haven't had time to quite work it as well.
43:56
So there's a lot of like favorable environmental law and rules around permitting for like oil and gas stuff that maybe doesn't exist for like other stuff yet.
44:09
But some of that that's changing I think.
44:11
think. They've they've I think recently changed some of these rules that makes it easier for sort of like geothermal energy drilling which like uses which there's like these novel geothermal energy technologies which basically use like sort of this
44:25
oil and gas drilling methods to sort of drill into the earth and like manually create these like fracture networks to and then inject hot water hot liquid underground and and basically extract thermal energy from from underground and use that to drive a turbine or or whatever. And there's some like you know,
44:41
And there's some like you know, promising companies that are using this technology and I think they've recently changed the some of the rules or they're in the process of changing them.
44:48
I I have to look up the specifics but to sort of give some of the benefit you know, the the permitting benefits that maybe oil and gas have been able to take advantage of to um to apply to sort of these these geothermal methods.
45:04
So you know, it's you know, some of it's it's it's changing and all in but all these you know, this stuff in a invariably moves quite slowly never quite as quick as you'd like it to.
45:15
And again listening it seems to me that the mismatch here is a lot of what is throttling our ability to you know, build more houses etc.
45:26
Is all happening at the local level, right?
45:30
Where they have endless review endless ability to challenge to sue variety of reasons.
45:36
So basically what I'm hearing you say is even if you had that Hamiltonian power at the federal level you you would be bound in some way or face a lot of bottlenecks from what's going on locally.
45:55
I mean is is that just a permanent problem?
45:58
Is is there a fix for that?
46:03
Uh you know, that's a that's a good question.
46:06
Um >> [laughter] >> I wish I knew like easy answer to that but you know, hearts you know, I other than like you know, long-term change of like hearts hearts and minds.
46:17
You know, I I'm work for the Institute for progress and there's this sort of broader interest interest in sort of progress studies more generally of which the the group I work with is a part and I think you've you've talked with many people sort of in that in that vein.
46:32
in that vein. And I think a big part of like what those people are interested in is like cultivating the sense of like oh, progress is good and expanding our capabilities is good and economic growth is is good is part of like you know, changing these like attitudes in sort of a broad way because a lot of it just stems from like
46:54
this these you know, sort of ideas that have been inculcated into people's heads and you can sort of change how people like think about these things or like recognize like what actually is responsible for like this world of of incredible plenty that we've created and how like if we sort of you know, make we could continue to sort of improve that if only we were allowed to. You know, there's like a big emphasis on
47:18
You know, there's like a big emphasis on sort of like that sort of work.
47:23
And and I'm just speculating and would love your opinion like aren't there pockets where you could do a project?
47:31
You mentioned earlier that people were in California particularly really pro-growth because it was seen as the rising tide lifting all the boats etc.
47:42
You know, are there pilot projects that could be done somewhere where there was a significantly disadvantaged population where you could do some form of building some form of different way of building a village or what I mean like I'm not the expert here.
47:59
I'm just thinking out loud.
48:02
Where where you could say see, look this this was a very disadvantaged area and now because we've done this look at it thriving.
48:13
Yeah, this is like a perennially popular popular idea and you see you know, variations of this concept show up in a bunch of ways.
48:21
There's this whole there's a big uh interest nowadays in like finding news founding new cities, right?
48:27
And like finding these new cities that would like designed to be like you know, growth or prosperity engines.
48:37
There's a lot of like existing cities and in places where in the US where like maybe they would like they would be fine with like a little more growth that offer like have offered like bonuses to like tech workers like remote tech workers like hey, if you're a tech worker that can work remotely, we will pay you you know, $50,000 or something to relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma or Delaware.
48:58
I forget exactly where they were but there's a variety of these um of these places that they're trying to sort of you know, encourage people to come and and uh into into into the city.
49:11
You know, for a long time people were like so fed up with like the difficulties of changing things in San Francisco that were like you know, the a lot of like the venture capitalist and and tech population there is like you know, we're just going to like relocate all of this to Austin or to Miami or something like that.
49:27
For a long time people were like you know, really trying to like make like Miami like the new tech hub.
49:34
And I think it proved like really difficult.
49:36
Like Austin has been like a major success story, but I think Miami basically didn't really work out.
49:43
Um and basically it proved pretty hard to sort of dislodge, you know, the ecosystem that had grown up around San Francisco and move it anywhere else.
49:50
All these things, you know, there's like network effects and like built-in advantages, right?
49:54
It's like once something is like successful, uh and there's all these like people and places that are located in this place that you want to be, uh there's a very hard marketing problem of like getting everybody to just, you know, no individual person has like an incentive to leave, right?
50:09
Because everything here is already like where I want it unless everybody else goes all at once.
50:14
Um but if everybody else sees that everybody else is staying here, then they're going to stay here here, too.
50:17
Um these, you know, these sort of, you know, things have proved to be quite durable and and difficult to change.
50:24
I'm not, you know, same with like the cities thing.
50:28
I think it's hard to sort of spin up like a new city from scratch because if nobody else is there, there's no reason to go there.
50:34
And if there is no reason to go there, there's no reason for anybody like start, you know, it's it's that it's these like sort of difficult chicken and egg or, you know, problems uh that are kind of hard to, uh you know, break out of.
50:49
Yeah, and of course the example of the famous ghost cities in China would be another example of, yeah, we'll build the city and then no one goes.
51:00
Yeah, although I think they actually I think actually it's China's somewhat of a counter example.
51:04
I think they were having like such big urban migration um that a lot they sort of a lot of these were like cities were like built in anticipation of population growth.
51:12
And people said, "Oh, you're building this stupid city in the in the middle of nowhere.
51:16
What's wrong with wrong with you?"
51:18
Um but there was such huge migration that they did a lot of them did end up basically filling up as they anticipated.
51:24
But that's in like, you know, sort of a different situation because they were having this like they were like in this big transition from like rural population to urban population.
51:34
They're having all these people move from the countryside and move into the cities.
51:37
When they're in the middle of a situation like that, you can like build these new cities in a way uh that you can't if everybody if you're already in like a highly urbanized population with all these sort of like existing uh industries and sort of networks in in place that are like you're going to be resistant to being dislodged.
51:55
I I like uh you uh leaning into the network effect because I think you're absolutely right.
51:59
Um do you think that there's any mitigating thing you could do if you were trying?
52:04
You mentioned Austin succeeded where Miami failed. I'm curious.
52:08
I'm certainly not an expert in this at all, but what why did Aus- was it simply that Austin was so much closer to the place they were drawing population from?
52:19
I don't have a super deep knowledge of like the what's on, you know, the situation on the ground in in these two cities.
52:25
And I don't and, you know, I don't know how much Austin has been they've been, you know, it's grown quite a lot.
52:30
I don't know how much success it's had in like relocating, you know, uh the venture capital ecosystem.
52:38
As far as I know, the San Francisco Bay Area is still like by far the biggest and and largest and and nothing else in the US is really close.
52:47
Um but I do think that Austin has been very successful in growing just because they've made it very easy to sort of build housing there.
52:54
I think Miami for all the for all the people that were trying to like, you know, turn it into the next San Francisco or whatever, I think they actually are like somewhat NIMBY and it's not actually amazingly easy to sort of build new uh housing there.
53:09
So, I think, you know, a lot of it can probably at least in terms of like, you know, major growth stories or whatever can be traced back to that.
53:17
It also seems to me as we're chatting and as I was reading your stuff that a lot of this comes down to social outlooks, social views, etc.
53:29
And if you look historically, I guess, you can also see a waxing and a waning of uh trends.
53:38
Like, for example, uh for a long time immigration was desired in the United States. You'd let everybody in.
53:47
And then you had this backlash in the beginning of the 20th century with or even the late 19th century with the Know Nothing Party and all the people who like didn't want anyone to come.
53:56
Is this kind of sinusoidal thing affecting what, you know, uh the the building and and whatnot in the country today?
54:09
Uh yeah, that's a good question.
54:09
I don't I actually, you know, I should know more about this because uh IFP has a very robust uh and strong immigration team that tries to work on like encouraging uh policies that would um uh you know, make a maximum use of like high-skilled uh immigration because the US has been like that's been such a huge story around the US successes, right?
54:32
Is that we've been able to attract the uh attract like the best and brightest talent from around the world and bring them into environment where they can really like make a maximum use of those talents.
54:39
So, it's like, you know, it's great for the US.
54:43
It's great for the people that uh that that uh come here, too.
54:45
Um and I really don't have a great sense of like how those um perceptions have uh evolved over time and um and how it's like changed on like the level I, you know, how it's been reflected in like the level of policy and how uh versus like what the sort of typical citizen um thinks uh about it.
55:12
I'm just not in informed eno- enough to uh to to know about it.
55:14
But yeah, I and um, you know, I know like the late 19th and and early 20th century, it wasn't necessarily amazingly popular even as we're like getting like a really large number of immigrants.
55:26
So, I don't, you know, I just don't know enough about it to speak, unfortunately. Yeah.
55:28
[snorts] Um I know maybe a little bit more about it because uh I'm Irish and and one of uh one of one of the central aims of a lot of these movements was to keep the Irish people out.
55:42
[laughter] Um and I just sometimes see a parallel there to like not my backyard, uh that type of attitude um it being prevalent in in the discussions today about the fact that we need more houses.
56:01
The houses that we have are very uh costly right now. What's the solution?
56:07
Why can't we come up with one?
56:10
Yeah, a lot of a lot of this, you know, comes down to sort of ideas of like concentrated harms and like diffuse benefits.
56:17
So, like a city a city overall or a state overall will like benefit from like population growth or like a bigger, stronger economy, more division of labor.
56:27
It's like nicer to live in like a bigger city.
56:28
live in like a bigger city. But like if you're building like a big apartment building next to next to a um you know, a a housing development or whatever, the people, you know, even though that build big new apartment building might like have like a small
56:43
impact on like the overall rents in the city and overall contribute making the you know, overall the city slightly more affordable, the cost of that thing, like the disruption and like the increased traffic are all going to be concentrated right next to that like one spot. So,
56:55
So, the people there are going to like rationally oppose it because they're going to like, you know, you're talking like a small diffuse benefit over the entire city versus the concentrated harm that one, you know, one group of people really does not uh does not like.
57:07
So, they rationally oppose it.
57:10
The the benefits are like diffuse enough that like it's hard to marshal like a lot of support uh in favor of it.
57:15
And so, you know, you have this sort of fundamental uh asymmetry.
57:22
I ran into this like in my neighborhood not too long ago where some developer wanted to build like a, you know, retirement community sort of kind of near our neighborhood and it was going to be like a multi-story building or whatever.
57:35
And you know, that's, you know, people people need places to live including uh older people.
57:38
The if you don't build those things, like the cost and the difficulty of like finding of being living in a retirement community uh goes up.
57:47
And so, you know, the more you build, the more like affordable these things become.
57:50
But that benefit is like, you know, spread very broadly.
57:52
Um and then the harms are all concentrated, you know, the uh of, you know, right in this like one spot.
57:58
And so, all a bunch of the local neighbors were like very opposed to like this new building um uh that was like going to uh get put up.
58:07
So, you know, again, there's like these these fundamental, you know, comes back to sort of like these uh incentives or like the perception of uh of what the incentives are.
58:18
I I think that framework is an excellent one to look at a lot of problems.
58:20
The the diffuse benefits versus the upfront costs and and what we notice is it's hard, right, to think about the diffuse benefits that uh a particular project.
58:36
And it's really easy to look at the harm, right?
58:38
Like the it it reminds me of uh the the idea of learning via negativia.
58:46
And by that, I mean, it's really easy, let's take a drug, right?
58:51
Like if there's a drug available in Europe and not here, uh you tend to look at it from a there's no it isn't available here.
58:59
So, you're not thinking about it, you're not worried about it.
59:02
But you're also not thinking about all the lives that drug that uh is available in Europe could have saved in the country, right?
59:10
So, we it just seems our human OS has a really hard time dealing with that kind of construction, right?
59:18
Like uh how am I supposed to have an opinion on something that isn't available here?
59:23
You want me to think about what all the benefits of what it would be, all the positive benefits of if it was available here.
59:33
Yeah, I you know, and we kind of go on fritz.
59:35
So, I I definitely like that framework of sort of the obvious and immediate costs that present themselves verse the diffused benefits that might also temporally happen at a different rate and a different amount of progress.
59:57
Do you think was was your time at Katerra one that basically like no more moonshots?
1:00:06
Or do you think do you have an idea for some moonshots that might actually work? Oh, good question.
1:00:11
No, I don't think it um it soured me on the idea of moonshots.
1:00:20
You know, I wish it had been like what what the you know, what Katerra inspired me was like wow, it's really shocking how like little people understand about like what actually is like required to like make this process work better, you know, people have been trying this simply the same idea over and over again.
1:00:42
And it you know, oh move our process to the factory.
1:00:45
And every single time they tried it it like didn't work in the way that they thought that it would in the sense of like oh, I'm going to be the Henry Ford of 5000. That never happened.
1:00:53
But people somehow people the lesson never like stuck and people just kept trying it kind of over and over again.
1:00:58
But it actually you know, at a high level it makes me feel like you know, this is one of the major strengths of like US society, right?
1:01:04
Is is that we're an environment where people are willing to invest like enormous amounts of money on this like speculative idea because they think it will you know, be a success when they you know, it will be sort of transformational in the ways that they hope for.
1:01:20
I'm glad that we live in a society that's able to like willing to take those like really big swings.
1:01:26
You know, for any individual one you can argue that and of course Katerra you would argue you know, correctly like you know, this one is not very well thought through if you you know, you should sort of maybe retarget what you're doing.
1:01:36
Um but you know, I really like at the at the high level that it's a you know, a place where those things occur and I would like sort of you know, many many more moonshots and more investment uh in sort of like these like speculative like you know, transformative ideas that maybe aren't like you know, you know, the popular like the hip thing.
1:02:02
You tend to see like a lot of clustering around like common ideas or or whatever at the same time.
1:02:08
Right now all the money is going to do like you know, robots and AI and a few years ago all the money was like going to like cryptocurrency or whatever.
1:02:14
Um I would like to see sort of a robot a more robust uh ecosystem of of um funding that can like fund projects that which like don't like aren't necessarily like attractive to like venture capitalist for whatever reason but still have the potential to sort of be quite transformative.
1:02:33
And you're starting to see like more of these things spring up.
1:02:40
So, I would like to see like many more many more moonshot type projects of all sorts.
1:02:48
Give me an example of one that you would like that you've seen and you're like wow, that would make a great moonshot.
1:02:56
Um one that I've heard about and it's you know, it's not even one that I like I've like strongly advocate for because I think it will probably happen eventually.
1:03:07
But I've read about it from some robotics experts who say we don't necessarily have yet have like the robot equivalent of like a GPT-3 moment where like this new model comes out and all of a sudden it it is like massively capable because it's trained on like such a huge like corpus of data or whatever.
1:03:26
But then there's speculation like actually doing this maybe wouldn't be that much work.
1:03:33
You know, you get some like you know, you train it you get you pay enough humans to like you know, do teleoperation of of like you know, various tasks and you feed it enough video data or whatever and maybe you could actually get like a robot GPT-3 and have this like general purpose highly capable robot model and it would take you know, many millions of dollars um to do but maybe like less than you might expect.
1:04:02
And that seems like a really um you know, valuable thing at least in terms of like potentially advancing robot capabilities.
1:04:09
But there's so much money that's getting put into these like robot companies that I have to imagine that somebody if not multiple somebodies are like working that on that right now.
1:04:19
It's not amazingly easy to find yeah, you know, these these moonshot ideas it's not amazingly ideas easy to find ones that are like promising enough that you know, you think somewhat you know, someone should fund but not so obviously promising that people have like missed it already.
1:04:38
You tend to have to at least in my experience you have to have like some sort of like discipline specific knowledge or whatever and I'm a little bit too I'm a little bit too much of a generalist and you know, I you know, just stay a little bit too close to the surface level of things to have like a really deep understanding of like a lot of what these needs are.
1:04:58
A lot of these so a lot of these like operations um that are like finding these like missed sources of you know, valuable potential things are um they're doing so by like finding a lot of like domains that were experts and like asking them hey, what do you need in like this specific area?
1:05:15
What would be like really transformative?
1:05:16
But it's not amazingly easy for someone without that like um you know, domain specific knowledge to like articulate what they are.
1:05:27
And and what's a what's a normal day look like in in your day job as senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress?
1:05:34
What what what >> Yeah, almost all of what I do is you know, researching and and and reading and writing things.
1:05:42
So, yeah, typically on on a normal day I will get up and the morning will be spent working on whatever the current writing project is is on my docket.
1:05:50
So, usually that's like whatever newsletter project that I'm working out and so mornings are almost always dedicated to writing.
1:05:57
I find that like I can really only write for about three or four hours effectively in a day.
1:06:03
So, I try to block out my time in the morning to basically do that.
1:06:09
Um and then in the afternoon I'm basically just doing research on whatever upcoming project I'm working on.
1:06:17
So, you know, this is like reading a book or like looking up sources or doing some sort of data analysis or increasingly it's you know, asking AI to like dig up sources for me or do some analysis for me or or write some script for me on that.
1:06:28
But usually at a high level it's you know, writing in the morning and like reading and research in the afternoon basically pretty much every day.
1:06:37
Do you have an example where working with colleague at the Institute come from a completely different section you know, what they're working on where you guys having lunch together chatting about things where the cognitive diversity between the two of you and you were like ah, that's a great idea.
1:07:01
I never thought about that. Or no?
1:07:04
Um so, I would I work from home so, I don't actually work in work in their office.
1:07:09
I'm working out of my home office basically every day.
1:07:10
Institute for Progress is in Washington DC and and I am located outside of Atlanta.
1:07:15
So, you know, a little bit of a commute.
1:07:20
But often I will like other people will like suggest you know, topics of essays I should write or topics that I should research and I'm always like open to those and some of those suggestions have been some of my like best and most popular and most uh interesting you know, essays that I've written.
1:07:41
So, yeah, some of those suggestions for like topics that I should like look into have have been very valuable.
1:07:49
So, you got to give us at least one that we can put in the show notes.
1:07:53
What which one along those lines that got very popular?
1:07:56
I so I think my most popular essay that I've ever written is about the history of airplane manufacturing by the US in during World War II and basically how we built like the huge number of airplanes that we needed to produce.
1:08:13
Which is not like you know, necessarily my normal beat.
1:08:18
I write a lot about like manufacturing stuff in general.
1:08:19
So, it's not like totally outside of it but it's not about like buildings and infrastructure.
1:08:24
But I think somebody I don't actually remember the specifics of it but I think somebody basically suggested that that would be a good topic to write about.
1:08:29
I said ooh, that is something good.
1:08:31
You know, I have a sense of like what a topic would be good to write about if there's like this combination of like again, it's kind of the same it's kind of the same thing with like you know, investments.
1:08:40
You want it to be like promising enough in the sense that there's like a lot of like sources and research that I can dig up about it to to read and learn and learn about it.
1:08:52
But not like so promising that somebody has already written something really really good about it.
1:08:55
So, I'm trying to you know, I'm trying to sort of hit that like relatively narrow target of like investable writing and research topics.
1:09:03
Um and so again, I often draw I can you know, it's it's often useful for me to draw on like what other people can can see cuz I can't just necessarily see everything myself.
1:09:12
And so that was like I I think a particular good one.
1:09:14
I'm working on one that'll I'm I'm going to start working on one in a couple weeks that was suggested by somebody else that I will think be similarly good for kind of similar reasons.
1:09:22
It's like that right combination of like you know, neglected but still enough to like really do a good and thorough interesting uh research about it and and and it'll be quite interesting, but I can't reveal that one yet.
1:09:36
Come come back for more when uh we'll have we'll have the one on the airplanes on the show notes.
1:09:41
Uh Brian, this has been absolutely fascinating for me.
1:09:44
Uh we are coming to the end of our conversation and we have a tradition here at Infinite Loops where we make you, just for a day, the emperor of the world.
1:09:57
You You can't kill anyone.
1:09:59
You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world
1:10:13
whenever their next morning is, they're going to wake up and they're going to say "I've just had two of the greatest ideas and unlike all the other times when I wake up with these great ideas and then I ignore them, I'm going to start acting on these two today." What What are you
1:10:27
What What are you going to incept in the world's population? Oh, gosh.
1:10:33
Uh I mean, one easy one is just, you know, build housing.
1:10:36
That's like a really easy one because that stems from like this like grassroots local opposition to like building uh new things or if even, you know, like, you know, build more stuff, build more housing, build more infrastructure.
1:10:51
Uh if I could find some way to like communicate that basic idea uh that would be like really powerful and all of a sudden we can build all the housing we need, build all the transmission lines, and all the solar panels, and everything.
1:11:01
Uh that would be like uh truly transformative.
1:11:04
And uh I don't know, maybe something about like make AI safe.
1:11:09
You know, we're uh we're in this world where like AI capabilities are like advancing like monstrously.
1:11:16
Uh and I think many of the concerns that people have about like, "Oh, what happens if you like you build this thing that is like massively smarter than uh everybody else uh in the world is not necessarily going to have your your best interests uh in mind just like when humans became massively smarter than other animals.
1:11:32
They did not necessarily have the best interest of other animals in mind and it did not necessarily work out for the and other animals all that well, even the ones that like humans weren't necessarily like interested in in hunting uh or whatever.
1:11:46
Uh and so if you could like ensure that everybody took that problem like really seriously, I think that would be uh a major win as well.
1:11:54
Two great ones to think about.
1:11:54
I love in particular uh if you get the if you incept the build more houses, maybe that all that would have to change would be the attitude, right?
1:12:05
So, that that they physically wouldn't have to go out and build the houses, but uh they could drop their uh their opposition to many many projects.
1:12:16
Uh Brian, where can where can people find your work?
1:12:19
Uh yeah, I write a newsletter called Construction Physics that you can just search Brian Potter Construction Physics and it will come up.
1:12:26
Uh I'm the author of a book that's called The Origins of Efficiency.
1:12:30
Uh it's found on Amazon if you search Origins of Efficiency, uh it will come up there.
1:12:34
Those are the two main places where uh yeah, my two two main major outputs, so. Perfect.
1:12:41
Brian, thank you so much for being on Infinite Loops. Thank you very much.