#42 - Casey Handmer, Founder & CEO of Terraform Industries

0:28The ancient Romans, in principle, had the technology to industrialize. and CEO. It's been a long day. He's just confirming he's found the right guy in the right castle in Burbank. Terraform Industries. It's my body double. I'm pretty sure it's a Mars company, long term. Yeah, let's talk about like terraforming Mars a little bit. Sure. What is the, if you were to think through the steps for like critical path to terraforming Mars to a livable civilization, what is that critical path? Well, Mars is a very interesting planet. It's the planet most like earth it's already turning at the right speed it's got roughly the right gravity it's you know it's in the right solar system it's pretty easy to get to from earth all things considered um but it is cold so you need heat that's the main thing just heat and there are many ways of making the planet hotter but in my opinion probably the easiest is mass producing solar sails here on earth in like some factory in taiwan and um and then launching them into earth orbit and they can fly the rest of the way and then hang out and basically barbecue the planet and um how long does a barbecue take depends how fast you make them but you know you could probably get most of the way in 10 years if you really you know if you if you say took one of the iphone lines at foxconn and switched over solar sails with the same technology same production process same form factor same packaging same everything and instead of shipping them to the apple store in cupertino you just ship them to the cape and then launch them in a rocket yeah you can get like multiple degrees additional warmth in a short period of time the advantage of that approach is that is that all the hard work is being done here on earth where you have factories and stuff the next best way is probably setting up a autonomous factory on the surface of mars that produces little tiny 10 micron long nano antennas that um act as like really powerful greenhouse gas basically so you produce like something like 35 kilograms a second of those and like proof them into the atmosphere and that alone can like significantly increase the um thermal retention of the planet so just heat it up like artificial greenhouse effect on steroids yeah really powerful and you're not a fan of the nuking the poles if you run the math on it you just need a lot of nukes like we're talking thousands of starships where like the payload of the starship is like one gigantic nuke right we're talking like a gigaton scale nuke and a thousand of them a year kind of thing it's it's very expensive compared to just mass producing solar sales yeah i mean i guess we already kind of have the nukes right you could just like ship them we don't have enough we don't have enough we actually need to build we have enough to like like two weeks or something like that two weeks well i think like the sun is a giant nuke that's sitting in the sky and a little bit of reflective mylar just allows you to use it forever for free yeah so that's that's the trick when you think through like problems to go after i think you know elon keeps on talking about and he has talked about for a very long time that in the limit most of the energy produced by humans is just going to be through solar panels yeah it's totally correct what do you like why do you think people get it wrong and they try and go after other directions well the world has something like 10 terawatts of total electrical production capacity today i don't know it's order of magnitude people say well how much could you possibly need 20 so we'll just take what we have and double it it'd be fine you know we've got enough oil enough gas a bit more nuclear a bit of hydro on the side we fine and elon looks at it and says 173 000 terawatts of solar power rain down on the earth all the time and even one measly piddly middle milliwatt of that not being put to productive industrial use offends me so we're gonna have to go and get it all and this there's just no way that like gas or anything can scale to anything like that anything like that level so it has to be solar you know i think it's just a question of like well what do you see is like the long-term per capita or per human capita energy consumption likely to be on the earth and i just think it's like it's about it's increased about a factor of 100 in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution it could easily increase another factor of 100 okay you become dictator of a day for like of earth and your sole mission is to manufacture as many solar panels as possible as fast as possible yeah how do you do it that seems like a bit of a waste because uh our kind of techno capital machine is already doing that right for free like you don't need a dictator to make that happen that's already the case like we have more than a terawatt of annual production capacity online already yeah i mean like it's hardly what dictatorial powers but you could be like hey how about quote unquote the west uh delete environmental protection regulations for solar deployment because like it's obviously helping the environment next question but you know we'll get there eventually okay the uh the borg you know that the um the future kind of um kadashev level one asi that is reaching backwards in time with capitalism to build itself will not be denied right the environmental regulations might slow it down a year or two here or there but at the end of the day the outcome is not in doubt do you think do you think that the uh the borg from the future um why are they letting all this socialism creep up it doesn't matter it doesn't matter Yeah.

5:35Ultimately, it won't even need humans. So it doesn't care. If we want humans, we should care about socialism, but the future Borg doesn't care. What do you think the most effective way to create more Elons is? It's actually a really good question because PayPal kind of spawned a lot of startups, but most of them were in the software space. And I think Elon was just obsessed with space and electric cars and decided he'd rather put his money behind that. and i think he had the mentality that like well it probably will fail but i can always go back to software um and to be fair he probably took a bigger pile of money away from that than most other guys did um and he didn't need a big pile of money to do something in rockets in 2003.

6:16um but um was it 2003 i thought it was like 2001. 2003 was when they started spacex i think i mean don't call me on that i was in high school um were you even alive back then no no i mean i It was in 2003, not in 2001. Okay. Yeah. This is the millennial Zuma crossover that they've been wanting all this time. Okay. We're finally... It's time to get more Elons. I think you really have to remind people that it is possible to go and build stuff. You know, you can, quote, unquote, just do things. And that the industrial titans of the past are humans who mostly just tried hard and compounded for a long, long, long, long time.

6:55Who did those industrial titans look up to?

7:01that's a good question um i think they were probably all a bit different um i think they're all pretty ornery and disagreeable um but like henry kaiser i think you know towards the latter part of his career i mean he didn't really get going until his late 50s um but he probably sought counsel in other like-minded people in his own um generation who doing similar things um so he worked with howard hughes for a bit for example and he also had a very long-standing collaboration with um like jf shea and um and a bunch of other um parsons and so on um who formed his six companies collaborators who went and built the hoover dam and then did a bunch of other projects together or some subset of them did other projects together forever and so like they probably looked up to each other and i think that i think patrick colson tweeted a while while ago saying like why was it that the russia produced this like tiny little like clot of really extraordinary um writers at around that one time and i think that the answer to that is like never underestimate if you like get five or six psychos around a table and they just decide to like try and impress the shit out of each other for 10 years how much they can achieve especially when the only inputs you need a pencil and paper um and i think there's actually something that going on right now where like there's a bunch of people here in los angeles and also gundo and if other places who got together and they're mostly fairly young uh and they're mostly just able to celebrate the fact that they've decided to do something difficult with their lives instead of something that they think is a guaranteed slime dunk no matter what whatever it takes we'll get it done i think in some ways palmilaki might be like something in some sense the kind of modern progenitor of that and obviously elon is a major inspiration for that as well yeah um i wonder for when you're when you're kind of thinking you know you're talking earlier about a bunch of guys ex-spacex guys that are cash rich and they worked and were like extremely hardcore for a very long time at spacex but it's not necessarily translating into new lots of new startup formation yeah i know i mean if you think i'm thinking about you i'm not i swear i'm talking about one other guy but i know a lot of people who've left spacex or tesla and a good number of them have gone out and started their own companies and and good for them with actually mostly a lot of success um and a good number of them have have kind of succumbed to the siren call of venture capital instead of building, which is, you know.

9:19Can you elaborate on that a little bit more? A bit of a loss. How mean should I be? I mean, like, I feel like if you have the ability to build a company and provide mentorship for the next generation and provide livelihood for them and build stuff that only you can build, that you have the vision to build, that the future must contain and will not contain if you don't build it, you should go and do it. I like talking to a bunch of talking to a bunch of other like would-be founders and like writing them a check once in a while it's an important job but it's a different skill set and and the skill set you know the right limiting step the bottleneck if you like is is the people who are willing and able to go and start companies and really just can I swear on this podcast yes yeah okay just like eat shit for a long long long time yeah basically I mean like I go to the the gundo every time i fly through lx and i catch up with people we both know there and like how's it going well it kind of sucks you know it just does i'm chewing glass again i'm staring at it's beginning to enjoy the taste of blood um yeah but you know there's a good number who who i think you know basically retire from spacex when it's time to start a family or something and then they um and then maybe they don't have like a strongly formed opinion as to like a project that would be worth the pain and effort of of like jumping back in the trenches for probably 10 years to really if it's a big ambitious project probably 10 years to even know if you're going to succeed yeah um and i can understand that reticence and a lot of these people are men who at 19 just or 21 they just wanted to like prove themselves and find out if they were good and work with the best in the world they wanted to pull an earnest shackleton and go on the go on the ship and and try and impress elon or whatever and at 35 or 40 they've done that you know and they're not 21 anymore they're not totally overwhelmed with hormones and they're tired and they've got health problems and they don't care if elon likes them anymore and they know that they're good you know so like they have to find some other source of of uh of kind of like persistence itch that like like this thing has to exist why doesn't this thing exist i gotta go build this thing whatever whatever it might be it's a little bit it's a little bit of the you know you chase the you build a startup you chase the money for like 10 years or whatever only to realize you didn't actually want it in the first place i mean you can always sell yeah yeah but i mean like you know you work with elon for 20 years whatever and then realize like oh maybe it wasn't well especially i mean if you were still poor like you wouldn't have a choice you'd have to work and that's actually a funny thing that i've heard a number of builders that i quite admire say recently which is that actually in reality motivation follows action so if you're looking for motivation you actually just need to get started whatever it takes just enough to get a bit of sweat on your on your face and this very similar thing from drew houston from dropbox where he said basically like you wouldn't expect to get super motivated about a file sharing company or whatever but then when you have like a few thousand users suddenly you like it does interest you and you want to make them happy yeah it's just actually it's just a matter of like just lifting heavy objects i mean like you work out like i think joe barnard says like it fucking sucks but it's true you just have to like run on the treadmill until you sweat and then you feel better but you don't want to run on the treadmill but you just have to and then you can go and do whatever you need to do um yeah and so i think a lot of these guys are kind of sitting around thinking oh well what's worth my time to go and work on now and they'll do a bit of advising here or they'll like you know step in to help someone out if they've got to go and paternity leave or something and and step back out again but or like maybe their parents aren't well and but you know the thing is their spacex stock is worth tens of millions of so it's easy for them to be like well i don't have to work and the thing is once you get out of the habit of grinding it's it's pretty easy to get in the habit of sitting around not doing much and it's a problem because these people are us's united states's experts in re-industrializing and we need them out there building factories 100 factories each fully automated making stuff don't care what it is as long as making something and then they can retire that's exactly what Cameron said he said just factories not assembly mr.

13:26B says oh you want to make good videos make a hundred then we'll talk yeah right and the reality is a few people will actually make a hundred and then they'll know what to talk about most people you like make two or three and be like oh god I actually like this that much the funny thing too is you get like one or two in and then you realize how shit you know you just like do one you realize how bad it is you're like ah I hate this but I have to put it out because it's like the very best that I can do right now and then you get 10 in and you're like my god this is so much better 20 and it's like whoa big difference 30 and then you're like actually i realized i suck all over again no yeah well what's funny is like for me my the thing that's going through my head is i want to be i i want to improve so much between episodes that three episodes in the future i literally can't watch them i can't watch the like three episodes behind because i i just like my brain hurts yep it's so embarrassing yeah yeah i found that i guess around when i was 20 and i taught myself to play piano which is which is like yourself no not really okay it's a long time ago i i kind of understood the mechanics and but i realized i needed additional information i just like read wikipedia and i figured out some technique tech stuff and then i went started watching youtube and very quickly found mark-andre amela he's uh he's still still uh performing uh french canadian pianist and absolutely brilliant um just fabulously brilliant guy um and and watched him play for a while and i was like oh i see like this guy is as good relative to the best pianist i'd ever previously seen in my entire life as they are relative to like my former teachers as they are relative to the best i can ever be in my entire life so like your your realization of how far you are behind is increasing faster than your ability but i kept at it for a couple of years probably did i don't know 1500 hours a year or something like that quite a lot of practice like multiple hours per day every day and i got pretty good do you have the desire to be the best in the world or something?

15:13Well, it was many years after that that I realized that this lifetime would not contain me getting significantly better at piano because I started coding instead with my free time. Yep.

15:23There are a few things pretty obscure where I have been, at least for a time, the world expert or authority. But usually my skill is just to be there a bit sooner than other people, and then they arrive and they put much more effort in, they get much better. What have those moments been like? Or what have the moments been? I mean, for example, I think like between 2016 and 2019, I was probably the strongest authority outside of SpaceX for what Starlink was doing. I wrote a blog post about it in 2019. And similarly with like early Starbase stuff, I was paying attention there and I kind of understood what was going on.

16:00But now like there are people who spend all their time down there in like a camper van with a camera and a telephoto lens counting rivets. And the thing is when like Elon or John Cosa or one of the other senior guys wants to know what's really happening down there, they just pull up live stream. They can see. They don't trust their middle management. They pull up live stream and be like, oh yeah, I can see what the problem is now. When you were thinking through like what things to work on or what things are most important, how did you kind of, you know, you have all these people that are extremely good at what they do, extreme killers, like from an engineering side.

16:31But it's like difficult to find a truly good mission to go after. how did you kind of find the one that meant something to you yeah i had a list of various ideas i was noodling on it's also working on supersonic electric flight for a while um and what time frame was this was this like 2014 we started in like 2017 on that 2016 2017 2016 um i i met my wife in late 2014 at kip thorn's house actually um and we got together in late 2015 and then got engaged and then throughout 2016 she was in Antarctica as one does and she get back we got married and it was like 350 days or something like that 321 days yeah like a phone call every six weeks kind of thing still painful to think about really and yes I got a lot of stuff done in that year wrote a couple of books did a few projects anyway this project came about because i read some some books on the history of oil and realized like the extent of the bankruptness of the kind of leftist i think mostly leftist environmentalist claim that like the solution to global warming is to just stop using oil and i realized that like now the revealed preference of humanity is they like using oil and not just because they're like ignorant like oil's amazing uh and you can't just turn it off unless you want everyone to starve to death very quickly um which would be bad just going to go on a limb there and say that would be bad so we need to figure out some way to fix oil and at the same time i was writing a book on a couple of books on mars industrialization and doing the math on synthetic hydrocarbon supply chain yeah eventually kind of came to the realization that like you could actually use this technology to ride the wave of cheap solar here on earth because the perennial problem with space companies is you need to be able to find a market with money but there's no one who lives in space who's spending money on stuff in space so how does that work does it make sense yes okay so um so you know long term i'd love to do some stuff on mars at terraforming mars make some synthetic hydrocarbons on mars whatever um but no one on mars wants to buy synthetic hydrocarbons at any price right now but here on earth people are spending 10 trillion dollars a year on oil and gas it's a pretty big market it's like we're gonna sit here chatting for an hour or so that's like a billion dollars yeah in an hour so this is like torrent of torrent of value and wealth just kind of floating around and just reach out and grab some and uh solar is getting cheaper at some point solar will be so cheap that it'll be easy to turn it into synthetic fuel in the meantime it's merely difficult and that's what we're working on why not just build a massive solar company just build just that's what we're doing okay yeah i mean like with extra steps synthetic fuel is the bootloader for the giant solar installation i mean by area most of our impact will be solar panels how how many are you going to just buy the like 50 000 acres just in texas probably by lease whatever i don't care like it's a piece of paper that dictates like who's allowed to put stuff on it at the end of the day as long as you have like a meaningful ownership interest in the component that is generating the value at the last step before it becomes a commodity you win once it's commodity it's it's hard to compete yeah how many hours have you put into factorial zero really yeah i don't actually play computer games oh yeah i know some people who do very talented at it i'm like you know what you have the financial resources you could just buy a factory one of these guys lives in chicago you know who you are and um it's like chicago is full of factories that like would just love recapitalization just buy a factory and like build one for yourself go for it you make anything you want amazing you just buy a factory yep it's like there's literally tens of thousands of factories that are either officially or functionally for sale in the united states as we speak you can just go and buy one there's tens of thousands of factory owners who'd sell if you gave them a reasonable price right now and a good number of them have a sign out the front saying factory for sale or factory now defunct you have these uh three separate things that you think are like are kind of like obsessions for you um genealogy yeah i mean that's weird and personal i wrote a blog post on it um my surname is handma it's a very unusual name one i understand where i came from i don't have any like famous dukes or duchesses or queens or kings in my ancestry i'm peasant stock through and through um so you know if you're lucky you've got some ancestor in the early 1800s who was you know maladjusted enough to like generate records from like interactions with law enforcement or something um but in general like into the 1700s most of my ancestors lived in communities which were completely illiterate and the only trace i have of their existence is essentially a blip in some genetic code analysis that i do in my copious free time it's like yes there was definitely a person they were male or female and they lived you know within 50 miles of this location within 20 years of this time but sadly none of the hand they spoke don't know their name don't know who they loved don't know how they felt about their children don't know what they ate on a day-to-day basis but i can infer that they at least lived long enough to have one child who survived which is a lot first generation that came out to Australia nine out of eleven children died in childhood so it's a lot unimaginable really if you're a if you're a parent and I'm descended from one of the ones that survived obviously next generation all but one again 11 children but all one survived so life got better what role do you think kind of suffering plays in greatness well there's no short of suffering in the world right if suffering was all it took to be great then we would have industrialized five million years ago but obviously we haven't but at the same time it's also clear that many of the world's not all but many of the world's really great founders are people who had adversity one way or another and maybe it was just enough adversity to give them a chip on their shoulder but not so much that it destroyed their productive capacity something like that but i also think that it's possible to seek out adversity so last weekend i uh i kind of put out the bat signal and i said anyone who's interested can go out in the mountains and have sufferfest uh hardware founders and so-called friends sufferfest 2025 regret your life choices and um i think five separate parties including me and two of my kids and went out and hung out we met up in the in the mountain some of us one of the parties i went looking for them and i did in fact see them but i didn't realize it was them so i just like kept walking but i got a photo of them i was like i saw you we were there but like the point of the exercise is not for me to like catch up with people i can just pick up the phone and talk to anytime i want it's for us to uh yeah go out and sleep on the ground and get cold and climb rocks and look at the sunset and show my children that you know life gets better or worse depending on your perspective some cool stuff it's like an old mine there the Hess mine they were mining tungsten in the 1940s interesting yeah crazy genealogy yeah just just kind of did some research trying to figure out where we all came from and we've got a lot of stuff is digitized now um but yeah i know where the handmas came from in the sense that they were called something else before they changed their names in like 1850 something did they ever live in a castle

24:10no probably some of the scottish ancestors at least frequented castles because they had a lot of castles and they were constantly trying to kill each other there's kind of this line you can draw in europe around the areas that like abandoned kin-based institutions and scotland and ireland are outside that line so they were still like doing like family feud stuff until pretty recently yep yeah yeah i'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that like uh that the weirdest weirdest people in the world book has a point about like the weakness of kin-based institutions

24:51how much have you studied mr beast how much have you studied mr beast not that much to be honest i'm sorry jimmy um i've watched one or two of his videos and greatly admired the form of art without necessarily desiring to spend much more of my time absorbing it and i did read his onboarding memo which i thought was you know i routinely recommend it to people to read here uh really really great condensation of like essentially what the value prop is for employers and employees in an organization kind of blows my mind um when in some companies people are hired and then and then both employer and employee assume that their responsibilities are done at that point from the employee's perspective they kind of owed their salary at that level forever kind of regardless of the outcome and from the employer's perspective the employee is expected to show up and do some barest minimum of work forever no matter what and i just think that that's that's so empty so first of all like in a really good company with really good people like you got to keep on delivering as an employee and you got to enjoy delivering it's got to be part of your party a stick in order to progress and to learn and from an employer's perspective from my perspective you know i've gone out and scoured the world for the most talented people i can find and then they're here do i want them doing the same thing forever no i would i would actually much rather that in a year or two or three they have the option to say hey casey like i'm gonna go raise money and start my own company and then i have to be like oh no but like that would mean i've succeeded and that they're really good people because i've been able to level up with that much so um i think that's one of the things that PayPal did really well.

26:30All the people there saw themselves as main characters and realized that actually building an internet company, an internet business was difficult but worthwhile. There's nothing all that secret about it. Do you have some similar kind of manual for Terraform? I've written some internal memos. I might externalize them eventually. Recently, I put together my recommended reading list, including the Mr. Beast memo. podcasts and videos and uh the last year or so i've really specialized in in first person technical accounts of like things um so you know i read freedom's forge and i read the making the atomic bomb they were interesting but they didn't give me a huge amount of insight into what it was to be henry kaiser or leslie groves or you know any of the really key people you know um hyman rickover or someone like actually trying to make the damn project work and so i went on the ais and i said hey like which of these people wrote memoirs because they weren't necessarily on amazon you might have to go like looking through the rare bookstore to find it because they're mostly out of print but yeah i found um leslie groves wrote a memoir called now it can be told brilliant like paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of like catastrophic problem solution catastrophic problem solution it's incredible um i read a henry kaiser biography by one of his chief lieutenants um reading uh two books about rick over right now one by his number two and one by himself that was published posthumously um just a couple years ago just trying to get inside their heads trying to understand how does they do what they do one of the big questions i have about elon is that he's obviously an anomaly in our own age in our own era i think he would not be that out of place amongst the industrial titans of like 100 years ago um obviously he's working on much more advanced technology but you know holding holding that equal but it doesn't seem to me that there's been a whole lot of writing i mean like there's been millions of articles about elon but how many of them have been written from the perspective of how does he actually do it like how how is the sausage actually made and i just don't think he's likely to go out and write something i know so i think sam tellers his former assistant might have might have like a copy of his internal memos or something like that and it would be great if we could have a mission to publish them.

28:47That would give you some insight into what's actually going on. A bit like the Jeff Bezos memos and shareholder letters and things. Like, thank you and have a nice day. Everything is better if you release the files. At least at some point. Because posterity will wonder. I mean like I think there's a good chance Elon will live into his 90s. I hope he does. But you know, let's say like let's say like for whatever reason he stops being wildly productive in the next decade or so you and i will have been part of a world when he was being productive and an organization but those people will leave and those companies will fail and will become ordinary and people say well how did he do it how did they capture lightning in a bottle how did they do this thing and make something look easy that all the other companies found almost impossible like okay let's let's make this specific a bunch of other electric car startups they've all lost money none of them have not only electric car car period it's like successful car companies yeah um it's like gm but if you look at all the other all the other car startups in the last 20 years they've all like lost varying amounts of money on roughly the same trajectory including rivian just still losing money said and lucid's losing money in spectacular fashion yeah yeah um and i don't want to be too critical because like lucid shipped how many companies never even ship a car they've ever produced a car that people say oh that looks nice there was multiple billion dollar spacks where the founders sold hundreds of millions of dollars and they never shipped a single car never shipped the car whereas tesla at some point turned the corner and started like spending less money than they're making and now they've been a net producer of value they've produced more revenue than they've total in consumed in total but no other electric car company's done that like free cash flow uh the total amount of money that tesla has earned has exceeded the total amount of money that they borrowed from uh raised from investors yes right so if you're looking at some graph they've gone the j curve actually jade the jade all the way up through the x-axis and into the positive um whereas the other ones are still heading down uh if you look at the uh space launch company um scene probably at least a dozen well-funded launch companies founded by spacex alumnus who worked on at senior level on the rockets at spacex which in some sense worked out the hard problems for the first time the hard way so you already know what the solution is all you have to do is copy paste and they didn't succeed and the only other successful launch company thus far is rocket lab which had a separate genesis right peter beck did not start out at spacex plenty of people at rocket lab worked at spacex and vice versa but isn't peter beck also australian he's kiwi yeah i don't know him personally he seems like a cool guy and like unbelievably like canny like like like i would never ever want to play poker against peter beck holy moly he'd crush me um i'll give you an example of this um so rocket lab was starting to get their flight rate up and they're they're launching up to like say 500 kilograms satellite for five million dollars a pop so on a per kilogram basis it's much less uh much more expensive than than a spacex falcon launch but on a per dollar basis it's much cheaper you know it's five million versus 60 million so what does spacex do in response they start the transport emissions where they basically launch like between 20 and 50 or 60 satellites at a time in that 500 kilogram range on the um on the falcon 9 and they take care of all the integration stuff for you so you just show up with your satellite and they plug it in and launch it for you and you don't get to go to your own orbit but most of these satellites are happy to go to you know one of a broad class of orbits your sun synchronous or something um and it's cheaper than than uh rocket lab is rocket lab screwed right they're completely enclosed the spacex can launch 60 satellites in in a single launch and you can launch one at a time and their revenue are very profitable on these launches and you're barely scraping even what do they do well they spacked they raised a bunch of money they went out and bought a bunch of other satellite and space services companies and they allowed that to build their spacecraft bus capacity and something like half two or two-thirds of all the satellites that are launching on the transport emissions are flying rocket lab photon satellite buses like the spacecraft not the instrument the spacecraft which means that rocket lab makes more money per transporter launch than SpaceX does.

33:12Right? How's that for like 11-dimensional chess? Like I said, I never want to play poker against that guy. Is there any other founders that you see today and you kind of think that they're Elon level? Oh, I don't think I could answer that question. Okay. People say, oh, do you want to be like Elon someday or whatever? And I'm like, Elon strikes me as someone who has come to terms with the fact that he's a miserable person. Yeah, he's been very clear. The great thing about Elon is he's so transparent. He's accepted his suffering in a way. I think he struggles with it sometimes, and I don't know him personally, obviously, but I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

33:52I don't think anyone in their right mind could, but given that he is that way, he's found a productive way to deal with it and it makes all our lives better. We should be grateful for it. Yeah, you just see some people who are kind of born into a state of suffering one way or another and some of them achieve extraordinary things despite or maybe because of it um yeah there are plenty of other really brilliant people out there very dedicated trying hard things and i admire them a lot um but elon is quite clearly you know singular one other thing one of the things i think that makes him really good is that he's like super clear on finding and he's really good at finding the right kind of kpi to go after and I you know it's like master orbit or you know whatever yeah yeah he's really good at communicating that sort of technical information to his employees but I think it came with long practice right yeah he sat himself in the in the driver's chair in 2003 or whatever and if you talk to the people who were there in the early days it was pretty rough yeah you know it took it took a long time for him to really get the hang of it um and I think he's still learning now and I think that's one of the really powerful things that like he put himself in a position where he's just drinking from the fire hose of the most brilliant people all day long all day every day and compounding and compounding and compounding and compounding there's plenty of other people who said when elon started doing rocket stuff he didn't know much about it and after 18 months he knew more than anyone um why well he went out and he he bought all the textbooks in english and he read them all right and he's a physicist so he could deal with the problems right and then he went and bought all the textbooks in german and taught himself enough german to read them all and the same with russian and read them all at which point like you could read the chinese textbooks but they're probably pretty duplicative at that point and by this point he's got tom muller and a bunch of other people working for him at spacex and anytime he's got a question he just walks up to them and says page 462 of rocket propulsion elements or whatever like i don't understand this can you explain it to me no and now of course any of us can do this at gpt yeah but like it's literally that the information is that easy to get if you're prepared to grind for years on it but here i've been at terraform for three and a half years and i've learned things that I had no other way of finding out.

35:58I could have read all these books about management. I read these books about Leslie Groves and the Manhattan Project. I would never have learned, could never have learned what I've learned, except by literally sitting in the chair. Yeah. What I find interesting is right now he's building his AI company, XAI, and a lot of people, you know, he's constantly posting on Twitter this Imagine, you know, product. Yeah, he's promoting it. Exactly. And what I find interesting I think the journey is still better. I think so too. But I think that one of the things that Grok has shown you can do more than the other AI labs is like launch a product that's just barely defensible and then iterate it really quickly.

36:39And fix the things that break. Don't sit there for five years hypothesizing what might go wrong and trying to fix corner cases. Yeah, I'm very bullish on XAI at this point. Yeah, but what I find interesting about it is that he is extremely focused on finding the right KPIs, metrics to go after, and then super optimizing on them. And yet he is posting people. I was looking at the comments yesterday on some of the Imagine posts that he's reposting. And people don't even like it, but he's still doing it. And so I'm kind of wondering, what is the 6G chess that he sees that no one else understands?

37:13Well, I think you have to understand most of the interaction with Elon's account of bots, which is kind of ironic. he's posting bot content that other bots don't like is this increasing our gdp i want to know well it's weird it's like is the optimal path to building a super intelligence lab posting imagine things on twitter um well i think he i mean i don't really follow this all that closely but i think he understands that like promoting x and grok is the one thing he can he can really do right now and um x the app itself has done quite well like it's you know number one app here there in various categories and so on um but you know gpt is still uh you know a number of users yeah number of users yeah um but i grok is my daily driver lm at least for the moment really yeah i have subscriptions to them all of course but when did you flip uh i flipped from claude when the latest version of grok came out and the reason for that is actually well claude's a little bit slower um but they're both about the same quality and i gave them my my like torture test puzzles and they're both pretty crap at them but the the thing that turns me off is if i'm using an llm and it and it starts to lecture me about like oh you can't think that way or like i've answered enough questions about uranium 235 or whatever i'm like you are a mindless machine i'm a human i have a degree in physics don't tell me about uranium like i don't i don't want some like hall monitor's opinion of what i'm allowed to ask these things to get in the way like it's obviously some post-training bullshit that's nerfing the model in a way that i object to and yes all the pearl clutching people out there being like oh but someone kid's gonna use it to make a pipe bomb and hurt themselves like yeah no one ever knew what a pipe bomb was before lms came along all right no one ever figured out how to like crisper their little sister before these systems came along like anyway it's like it's just it's just so typical of the way that humans think about things right now is that you would invent something as miraculous as the llms and then immediately think well better devote 80 of our organization to like nuking its marginal utility like because the thing is like it's like you see this in organizations too you're like this big organization we've got a lot of customers got to make sure we look after them okay we better put in place some processes to make sure we don't fuck up too bad okay and what that does is it is it significantly reduces the like negative tail risk for like oh we accidentally just deleted or like and or published everyone's private information right but it also often has the effect of deleting the positive tail risks or upside which is often what you're trying to chase you know i explained to everyone here like we had default dead the most likely outcome here is that terraform fails and i don't think it is going to fail but like the most likely outcome is that is that anyone trying this does not succeed and so in order to increase our chances of success we actually want to increase the variance we want to be a little bit crazy so you're saying that in order for grok to figure out new science or new physics or whatever we need mega hitler

40:19uh quite i would i would actually and who knows maybe i'm just got the woke mind virus from my years in academia but i strongly suspect that that um you need to be a little bit more self-critical the Mecha-Hitler in order to make progress on big questions. My experience with all the LLMs when it comes to physics, actually, is they're not very good. They're not very good at it. I would like to help them be better. That said, most people, including physicists, are not very good at physics either. It's really hard to do well. And I can understand why the training set would not really have very much good physics in it.

40:55Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, genealogy is one of the problems I sometimes ask it about. Another one I think you have in your list there is actually this is a good warm-up problem. I've never hated a candidate, on-site job candidate enough to ask them this question like off the cuff, but like given one starship, which is 100 tons capacity, 9 meter diameter and say 20 meter long payload fairing, by electrical output, what is the largest nuclear reactor you can fit in that volume mass constraint? For Mars operation, just to be clear, not for deep space. It is an interesting puzzle. And unfortunately, I wrote a blog post about it, and now all the LMs just read that blog post and refeed it back to me.

41:38And then won't tell you stuff because they're worried that you're going to... They get what I think is the right answer, but I already provided it for them. So just in case you're wondering, press pause now if you want to work it out yourself, and then email recruiting at terraformindustries.com with your best answer, then unpause. the major constraint to operating nuclear reactors in space or space-like environments including mars is heat disposal right so it's a steam engine you've got a hot source which is generating a certain amount of energy in in terms of watts at a certain temperature and and then that energy is kind of traversing a thermodynamic gradient which typically involves some steam and turbines and stuff like that and then that heat has to go somewhere when it's all done and where it goes into is into a cold sink and that cold sink has to be able to absorb whatever power was not diverted into electrical power by the power plant which is typically one half to two-thirds of the total heat which is a lot uh and so the cold the cold source on earth is typically like a giant lake or something it's pretty easy to keep it nice and cold um but in space you don't have a giant lake you just have like the empty vacuum of space with a giant hot sun in the middle of it and maybe a giant hot earth if you're really close to the earth and so you have to use radiators and radiators work really well at high temperatures but you want your cold source to be cold which doesn't work very well so it has to be really huge uh and then you start to say well like if i'm going to build something that's the size of five foot football fields in space just to get rid of my heat why did i build a solar array the size of five football fields and see how much power generates what's that 10 times more than nuclear reactor and i can delete the nuclear reactor what a deal okay so this is the problem you run into and it turns out that if you are constrained by using radiators on a starship sized nuclear reactor you can get like five maybe 10 megawatts something like that which is not a whole lot right it's not very much power especially when you consider that your per capita consumption of power for humans in space is probably on the order of 100 kilowatts like a lot of power because you need life support systems and you need giant robot factories and all kinds of stuff so if you need like a gigawatt of power on mars that's like i don't know 200 starships full of nuclear reactor like that seems like a lot that seems really expensive um but if you figure out a way of using mars's atmosphere which is very thin but very cold but very thin as your cold source with a sufficiently large fan operating at near supersonic speeds to move enough mass through then you can increase that to more like 300 megawatts and how big would this fan be well nine meters in diameter because that's to fit inside the payload ferry so it's basically becomes a jet engine at supersonic speeds yeah near supersonic speeds you're supersonic you get a fairly drastic reduction in aerodynamic efficiency which is quite important the idea is you have some giant intake and you suck in lots and lots of Mars atmosphere and compress it heat it in the nuclear core and then allow it to expand through a turbine like a jet engine yeah and then it spews a bunch of semi-radioactive exhaust up into space up into the mars atmosphere but that doesn't matter because mars is already radioactive um because it just sits in space i guess the other way of doing it is you can you can build your nuclear reactor next to a giant pond on mars that's inside the habitat that's also fine you say well why would you want your nuclear reactor like right inside the habitat surely it should be like over there behind the other hill in case it melts down.

45:02I'm like... For warmth? No one's going to build a nuclear reactor and launch it all the way to Mars and have not done the engineering well enough that it won't just randomly melt down. The US Navy uses hundreds of nuclear reactors that are all inside the pressure hull with 100 and so sailors. It seems to be fine. They're able to keep it under control. Yeah, it helps keep you warm. And by extension, the habitat is, say, 20 Celsius. That keeps the reactor cold. So everyone's happy. It just works. Yeah, that's probably the correct model. But you do need a very large habitat to dissipate the heat.

45:34On the other hand, it's kind of a fun thing. If you're on the math on like, okay, well, how much habitat area do I need to dissipate 100 kilowatts per person? It works out to several acres. So like, it's not like this is people you got like a bunch of people crammed it like sardines into a small space habitat. You get to spread out like Montana ranch style. Because you need the area of that habitat to like radiate heat out of its roof. Yeah. At the low temperature. What do you think the optimal habitat size for, let's say, a 100 ,000-person colony like Elon is aiming for is going to be? Oh, like 500 square miles?

46:10500 square miles. Huge. Yeah. You've got farms and factories and forests and ski slopes and all kinds of stuff under the dome. Ski slope on miles. 500 square miles is a lot. That's like the size of LA Basin. It's like a large area. LA Basin is like 10 million people, so there's still plenty of room. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Which starship are you going to be on? Might need a fake ID to get on. I'm not sure. We'll see. I'd be willing to go. You'll do free consulting for Elon. Yeah, I've definitely been carrying water for that project for a long time. I think it would be a pretty neat thing to do. I don't think I necessarily have the skills of physical fitness to be on the first one, but we'll see.

46:57Is this why you train rock climbing? just uh i've always liked rock climbing yeah my kids like rock climbing take your kids to the gym i've got a six-year-old and a four-year-old and um you put them in a harness and then it's like socially acceptable to like strap them to the wall and you go and get a coffee and they can't escape because their hands are too small to operate the carabiner how many times have you done this

47:21yesterday and like if i if i had the baby with me i can't climb but if i don't have the baby i'll I'll get strapped in and say, hey, it's easy. I'm like, yeah, it's easy if you're six feet tall.

47:32Amazing. Rock climbing is a great exercise. It's really good. Yeah. Everyone should do it. When did you get into it? I don't know, early teens. Yeah, it was never very good. But throughout my teens, I'd do a lot of free soloing. And then when I was 18 or 19, I had a near miss. And I was like, this is dumber than I thought. When you say near miss, you almost, you all spelled. I ripped off a hold when I was like 10 meters off the ground. In like the middle of nowhere, five hours hike from the nearest person. Did you fall 30 feet? No. I like instinctually grabbed another hole before I even realized what had happened.

48:04And at that moment, I realized evolution is true. And my ancestors survived millions of years jumping around in trees. So you think there's like a, what is it, an alternative universe where Casey Hanmer just... Oh, many, many, many of them. Yeah, yeah. I had a few close calls over the years. What about the near misses? Tell me about the near misses. I did some sketchy stuff in Russia when I was in my late teens and early 20s. You know, like hiking through forests in the middle of winter when it was like 20 degrees below. You read the books on the marshes and you didn't take any lessons from them whatsoever?

48:36I read some memoirs by a friend of mine. He's a friend now. His name is Vladimir Dinec. He's a zoologist who grew up in the Soviet Union and did much the same thing when he was the same age, except he had the benefit of being able to speak Russian. Right. And I decided to go out there and check it out for myself. and there's this this nature park just outside of krasnoyask um called uh stolby or something like that stolby means pillars but um it's got these incredible granite formations that are actually very popular amongst the local rock climbers but like dozens and dozens of climbers have died there because they don't use ropes because like i guess they didn't have nylon until recently i don't know um it's going out there i climb deropting volcanoes and all kinds of dodgy stuff hitchhiking like middle of nowhere, sleeping stuff.

49:17The most dangerous stuff, of course, is traffic related. I was nearly hit by a car that was sliding on ice in Krasnoyarsk. I narrowly survived a very bad car accident outside a place called Atka, which is a couple of hundred miles north of Agadhan, which is in... Like, even if you read the books on the gulags, it's an obscure place, but it's kind of out that way. Did you read the books on the gulags and then go out there? When I came back, I read Valam Sholomov's works. called um column of tales and graphite which are not not pleasant reads i've never read um solzhenitsyn um but actually i was more interested in the people who are living there today than the people who died there in the 40s and 50s it's very sad stuff obviously but the people who are living there today are really survivors you know they're yeah and they've just got this kind of grit about them and i know it's a tricky thing because i'm still in touch with some of these people and and none of them are all that thrilled about the war in ukraine obviously some of them have since achieve the Russian dream and no longer live in Russia um but you know they it's actually if you kind of into into the um kind of what is what does a an anarchic situation look like there's few places on earth that are better than the Russian Far East because it's so far from Moscow and so neglected by Moscow that essentially there's no rule of law there's no nothing there's no infrastructure there's just like it's pure outdoorsman you know it's mostly indigenous people because because like a lot of russians moved out there in in like the dalstroy era in the 60s and 70s but then a lot of them have since moved on moved to the big cities so the only people who are left like probably i'd say like half to two-thirds of indigenous people who have that's where they're from they speak russian and they drive russian vehicles but they're they look kind of mongolian i know you mentioned that basically history people really overestimate how nice the past was and uh some people do yeah the people who tweet about Marxism and socialism from their iPhones.

51:13If you had to be teleported back, let's say to any point in history of the last like 1 ,000 years, or maybe even 2 ,000 years, what would that point in history be? And what would the profession or thing that you would try to be a business magnet? I don't want to go. What would you do? Well, I mean, yesterday, maybe. Okay, well, I mean, I can understand that the past kind of sucks. right at the same time if i'm going back some amount of time you could make an argument that you should go back as far as you can and still have a positive impact so for example there's an outside chance that if i was teleported back into the roman empire that having studied a bit of latin and science and biology and if i found myself in italy let's say instead of like what is now california um i may be able to teach them about like germ theory of disease and um you know antiseptic antiseptic treatment and gunpowder and steam engines tens of millions of deaths stuff the thing is the ancient romans i think samur buria has a couple of blogs about this but the ancient romans in principle had the technology to industrialize they did coal mining on industrial scale they had steam engines they were able to build steam boilers but they weren't using steam boilers to pump water out of mines and part of the reason is they actually preferred and this happened you know there's a number of cases we know historically of entrepreneurs being executed by the emperor because they disrupted like inventors because they disrupted the status quo yeah um and also in the late empire there were a series of fairly serious economic problems that were not very well understood at the time i could be like oh this is keynesianism like what the fuck does keynesianism mean but like yeah essentially like there were at that time they were still getting money out of holes in the ground and so it was not that difficult to end up in a situation where you had an imbalance between the amount of liquidity in the economy and the amount of production production capacity of the economy especially because they didn't have um ammonia so they couldn't like build make fertilizers so they're kind of you're building wealth on top of a slave agrarian economy that is facing sharply diminishing returns over time because of nitrogen depletion in the soil you know amongst other major structural problems associated with the roman empire but anyway you go you could go back and take a crack at it but many people have examined this idea in literature yeah yeah so flipping it you go forward up to a thousand years as far as possible as far as possible yeah and what would you do when i get there yeah i'll probably be like rented into atoms and then uploaded to the cloud i don't know like oh we found another one they keep sending them forward in time just freeze you would you but I think there's a good chance that we'll figure out immortality like you and I might live to another thousand years if we're very lucky that's my bet that's the goal cross fingers cross fingers yeah if you knew that was going to happen right if you knew we were going to reach um longevity escape velocity in 2030 what would you do differently

54:16I'd actually do nothing differently um this I don't think so I'd stay fit I would continue trying to move up the power scale as fast as possible uh continue trying to influence more people to go into building interesting useful companies like drive a little bit more defensively or something like that i don't know so i already don't like i try not to drive i try not to you know there's this funny 180 mile uber trips those are for the lore i understand i understand it was like it's a funny thing because i think well maybe i should drive more defensively but i actually think that like if you look at the people driving in general they're just driving however they want to at that moment there's like very few people's actions on a day-to-day basis are informed by like deep interrogation of what their life might be like in 30 years time yeah yeah it's an interesting interesting puzzle i also think that people really like misunderstand risk and they take a lot of risks that are unknown and then other things that are not risky at all they're like i'm never doing that it's like wildly misbalanced things speaking to someone the other day and they were they were saying oh you can say about microplastics or like exposure to um like uh inorganic food or something and i was like i'm sure it's not good for me but i live in los angeles i mean i choose to live in los angeles this is a super fun site where we are here right now like i inhale castle basically i inhale you know car exhaust and i think if you live in a place where you inhale car exhaust like probably shouldn't smoke or drink too much but like all that other hyper optimization in terms of inputs probably doesn't matter all that much uh you do better just by like getting some regular exercise and sleep and having good friends um there was like a 30-year period where or longer that we were inhaling lead gasoline everywhere and like the entire yeah you know states iq drop was like 10 points so the zoom reminds the reminds the millennial um but actually even now like if you fly a piston-powered aircraft they're pretty they're better gasoline yeah that's insane yeah Yeah, the FAA has had a program for like 20 years to try and replace it with some other, what's called anti-knocking agent.

56:17And there are a number of ones that are available. The problem is they're not chemically compatible with either 100LL or each other. So once you, you know, you can drain the entire fuel system of your plane and switch over to one of these other gasolines. But it's just like hard. But then you're committed to using that gasoline forever, which might only be sold at two airports in the whole country. So you kind of got this chicken and egg problem. Okay, so how many flights are being done per day with lead to gasoline right now?

56:44um that's a good question i can tell you that there are on average four general aviation accidents a day and on average i think general aviation will have an accident once every 2 000 hours or something like that so so that's probably 8 000 hours or so of of uh that seems too small if you ask me because there are like 15 000 airports in the united states and i'd say most so they might have at least one movement per day. That's not good. It's not great. It's not great. Thoughts on the 9 million leaded pipes? I mean, lead used to be used to seal copper pipes in houses, called Sweating the Connection.

57:26It's actually, I don't think it's that big a deal, provided that the water chemistry doesn't change. Explain that. Well, the pipes end up with kind of an internal patina. layer of like carbonates and other crap and this is what happened in flint it's also happened in my neighborhood that they they changed their water source because of a drought or something like that and the new water source had a different chemistry and it it like dissolved the pre-existing pipe coating before laying down its own one and in doing so like removed that patina and exposed so so what happened in my neighborhood was not so much lead but all the pipes which were galvanized iron just like spontaneously rusted through so think of the money the local water district saved by like sourcing their water from the california aqueduct for a year instead of getting it out of the aquifer that's replace all the pipes with plastic ones so much better and a finely divided mix of gravel um anyway so that's the um yeah but obviously we shouldn't use leaded pipes if we can afford it it's actually kind of one of these problems which is like the cost of installing and then maintaining infrastructure that delivers water and power and gas and so on to everyone's house is pretty substantial i was in ojaca in mexico last month and it kind of broke my brain because it's a city of almost i don't know half a million or a million people or something and there's a as is usual in mexico like a government funded monopoly utility provider in this case water um called sopa i think and its job is to provide water for everyone but doesn't provide water to anyone because all the pipes are broken and if the water overflows they can't maintain pressure because the pipes are broken or people run them too much and if you can't maintain pressure you can't keep the water clean and they've got wells but the wells run dry because it's like a place that's in drought half the year and then rains too much the other half of the year and it's just a it's a tricky issue like most of the population in mexico is at high altitude and most of the water is low altitude but we can solve this problem with pumps and solar power but they didn't you know it's like walking around the city and it's a beautiful city don't get me wrong and it's full of all this like grand old spanish architecture and i'm like okay the spanish were here and like state capacity and like they ran it for like 300 years how did they deal with it looked into it turns out they built an aqueduct in like 1750 and they demolished it in 1971 i'm like but then if the spanish demolish it i think it didn't work for it properly anymore it didn't didn't bring very much water but like if the spanish had water trucks which is what they use now everyone has a cistern under their house and they just deliver truck water by truck every month or so it's not drinkable water you get you have like a separate thing for drinkable water but i think if the spanish had had trucks they probably would have delivered water by truck there's an interesting uh graph that i saw from basically it shows the startups formed in China from like 2015 to 2025.

1:00:20And for the first five years up to 2020, it's going from like, I don't know, like 5 ,000 or something like 20 ,000 startups or whatever. Entrepreneurship and economic dynamism was an acceptable form of individual expression. Yes. And then after that, it was not. And then from 2020 to 2025, I think it's gone from like 20 ,000 startups or some crazy number of startups formed to like less than a hundred or something in 2025. What do you think the like long-term ramifications of basically shooting their innovation, you know, center, all the people that can build new things in the foot? Well, I don't know much about China.

1:01:02My impression is that the Chinese people are very entrepreneurial and industrious anyway. And so it may be the case that instead they're forming startups within flags of convenience, larger organizations or something like that. I don't see China necessarily following the same path that Japan did with like, you know, as soon as their economy stopped growing, they kind of calcified in place. Yeah. And I also very much doubt that like this particular policy misstep will prove to be like China's undoing. I think there are others that are probably much, much greater. Which ones? uh well they have a looming demographic catastrophe it's much worse than people are saying china has almost certainly overestimated its population by 150 million people how well think about the incentives of the people who are reporting information on the census and to cook the books one way or another what is the incentive boy scouts was caught doing the same thing well like so there's this theory that in the united states um some polities are importing uh voters or sorry importing importing non-citizens to increase their vote accounts or something like that right and then these people ultimately become dependent on the government and most likely vote liberal or something like that um similarly in in in china federal funding at this at the province level is allocated according to population so you want to say like yeah we had 100 000 births last year we got 100 000 new people um but then you say okay well how many vaccines did you administer to the newborns and they're like actually 45 000 like so you're telling me that you over counted your births by a factor of 220 percent like yeah actually so if you there's a couple of people and actually keep track of this stuff by like drips and drabs of publicly available information and it it seems it seems likely that that china has overestimated the population by more than 10 percent and and that most of that over counting is in the younger age group this is a major problem because you know various economies worldwide economies had the challenges in the 1940s and 50s particularly post-war but by and large they did not suffer from an overwhelming dependency ratio right like sure baby boomers had a lot of kids but kids are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things and they age into like productivity in 10 15 years whereas when people get old they're no longer economically productive and you can spend semi-infinite amounts of money on their health care and on their care and feeding which i think as a society we should aspire to do but at the same time there needs to be a realization that that like every dollar that you allocate and spend on non-productive social causes is a dollar that you're not spending on like accumulated like cumulative economic growth which is the engine that ultimately drives the society's ability to care for its sick and and old um and also like controls the accelerator pedal to the future right and uk is in the situation now where like their economy is like something like three or four percent net growth per year all of which and then some is sucked up by social spending so that their economy is actually not growing at all uh and their per capita um gdp is falling which is pretty dire it's not good unclear how you get out of that except if you invent immortality so the the soft landing is just figuring out how to live forever well i mean i mean this is a kind of edgy podcast let's talk about it for a bit um what are the other ways you deal with this you say we're going to put a hard cap on expenditure on on the old age um that it can be it can grow no faster than the gp goes and it can be no more than five percent of the total or whatever so you cap it where it is today and you say it cannot grow any faster than the economy grows at least that policy if you could make it sticky right so it doesn't the boomers don't vote it out at the next election right um would align incentives between the old and the young to make sure that the economy grows so that everyone gets lifted by this rising tide that'd be great um uh but if you don't have that you know just basically dependency continues to grow essentially ad infinitum.

1:05:15Or you could have COVID 2026 come around and this time, instead of killing 1 % of the old people, it kills 100 % of the old people, right? But that would kick the can down the road because you're still generating old people every single day and it would also make a bunch of young people really sick forever, right? We just got lucky with COVID that it didn't really affect children that much. But yeah, I can't imagine what it would be like to have like a really bad flu go around that kills my baby or something like that. Holy shit. Can you imagine? COVID was a starter pandemic. like warm-up um or we get fully automated industrial like space gay communist communism or something like ai powered economic growth that exceeds the pace at which we generate old age and dependency which is possible right because the rate at which we're generating old humans is limited by the rate at which we generated young humans 50 years ago which is limited by you know the fact that it takes nine months to make a human so so in principle we could if we if we played our cards right, get enough economic growth on the back of AIs and robotics to help cover that gap.