00:36:34 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
[00:36:34] S1: Of course. Yeah. As friends do. Like, I'm dragging you from time to time. Actually, Charlie had this amazing book called Paul... Poor Charlie's Almanac. It's really good. Highly recommended. So it's definitely true that when you set out on your entrepreneurial journey... And a year ago, I said, you're a smart guy, access to rich people. Why don't you give up this chitchat nonsense and actually start making things that are useful for people? And here we are. Maybe maybe you just can't. Oh my god. Apparently, there's a competition to see who's the meanest Australian hardware startup founder in LA, and you're adjudicating this competition now. Earlier, Ty told me that no one thinks that Australians can be mean. [00:37:18] S0: I think that they can try to be mean. I just don't think that anyone serious would listen to their voice and think, you know, feel bad. Like [00:37:28] S1: We're not testing that proposition. [00:37:29] S0: Alright. Go for it. [00:37:31] S1: As if we just did. [00:37:32] S0: I I great.
00:37:32 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:37:32] S0: I I great. [00:37:33] S1: When you start a company, if hypothetically one were, you wanna find an area where you have ideally persistent differential advantage. And so, for example, when I was thinking of starting a company, was also thinking of working on drones. But it's very clear that, like, Soren and Co, like, they're just gonna do a better job than I am. Right? There are some areas where I would have insights because of my background and knowledge that would help me, but it would not help me enough to clear the hurdle, which is that this is already an obvious thing for capitalism to work on, and capitalism is already reasonably effectively allocating capital, human capital and money capital towards solving this problem. And that was before the Ukraine war, like, popped off. And now it's, like... This is six years ago, seven years ago. So now it is extremely obvious that, like, if you don't have AI and drones, you don't have national sovereignty, and a handful of countries have even got the memo on that. So for me, I wanted to find something that I was interested in enough to actually work on for a long time, where my particular interests and skills would give me any kind of advantage, and where capitalism was not currently doing a very good job of allocating resources towards solving the problem. So it has to be, like, kinda on the frontier. And synthetic fuel actually works quite well for that. [00:38:56] S0: If you had to, you know, plot or put synthetic fuel on that one foot to 10 foot bar, where is
00:38:56 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:38:56] S0: If you had to, you know, plot or put synthetic fuel on that one foot to 10 foot bar, where is [00:39:03] S1: it? In terms of, like, raw difficulty? Sure. I'm not even sure yet. It's it's higher than I've seen. It's really ridiculously difficult. It... It's not as hard as orbital rockets, I think. But actually doing doing this as a successful business that makes money no one's ever done. Yeah. [00:39:21] S0: Is it currently in the science projects phase?
00:39:25 · Casey Handmer
[00:39:25] S1: I think we're mostly past the science project phase at this point. Like, the technology... Like, the science has been around for a hundred years or or longer, but, like, basically, the scientific processes legible to a manufacturing process that has more in common with kitchen appliances, for example, or consumer consumer electronics appliances is just ridiculously impossibly difficult. And we were just talking over lunch. Like, I I made a list the other day of of, like, hardware companies that have taken a crack in this direction, not just synthetic fuel, but but a few other things in the same area, carbon capture, hydrogen, a bunch of others. The field is littered. Evolution, like capitalism in general, is a system that actually does a pretty good job of recycling talent after ventures fail and you can discharge debts and all the rest. It's a good system. But I I feel like this particular field is littered more than most with the carcasses of, like, very respectable attempts to to, like, experimentally discover if a particular business model would be capable of generating net value in this space and finding out 10 or 100 or 1,000 million dollars later that, no. No. It can't. But to kind of misquote Timothy Chalamet in in in the next Dune film, There is a way. I can see a way. It's rather narrow, but we're on the right track here. We figured it out. But it's it's... Like, at the time, was like, this is incredibly obvious. And then I went and explained it to a 100 people, smart people who know what they're talking about, and I realized this is not obvious at all. It's one of those things where it seems extremely obvious to me, but it is not in fact obvious at all. And even now, if I try and put it down on paper in like a thousand words or so, why it is obvious, it is extremely difficult. In in much the same way that I think probably SpaceX had difficulty motivating reasonable rockets when they first started doing that in 2014 or 2015. And you had highly compensated professional CEOs of rival rocket companies with technical backgrounds themselves, like that Arianespace guy, stand up and say, that's bullshit. It's never gonna work. And even if it did, it wouldn't be a good idea. Why is anyone even thinking about this? And, of course, turns out, as Elon says, he's he's right more often than you would... Than chance would would would allow for.
00:41:38 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
His intuition is correct. Actually, I think I'm I'm reasonably confident now actually that that a lot of Elon's advantage here is that actually he is very intuitive and his intuition is is correct rather than him, like, sitting down in some, like, secret chamber full of spreadsheets and, like, deriving some weird thing that no one else saw. [00:41:57] S0: Why do you think he's so abrasive publicly? If most... Like, if he's got a good intuition in predicting human behavior and... [00:42:06] S1: Not human behavior, technical stuff. [00:42:08] S0: Really? [00:42:09] S1: I mean... Because he kind [00:42:10] S0: of does predict human behavior with his companies. Like, he's saying, like, people [00:42:14] S1: Maybe like a Harry Selden kind of way. [00:42:16] S0: A car. [00:42:17] S1: Harry Selden kind of way. I think he's got a good feeling for product. [00:42:20] S0: Okay. [00:42:20] S1: Yeah. But, like, he's obviously not the sort of person who would go out and win an election. Put it that way. [00:42:27] S0: Is he not? [00:42:27] S1: I don't think so. [00:42:28] S0: He's kind of doing that as companies. [00:42:30] S1: He's too unguarded. No. I mean, he he owns owns a business and he's... Controls the board. It's not a popularity contest. He'd never win a popularity contest. Just wouldn't. I mean, we saw that in in in Doge. Like, he was... He's too easy to hate. He's too easy to make fun of. He's too easy to misunderstand. He's he's too easy to take out of context. He's too unfiltered, which are all good things for us overall because he'd be wasted as a politician.
00:42:30 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
[00:42:30] S1: He's too unguarded. No. I mean, he he owns owns a business and he's... Controls the board. It's not a popularity contest. He'd never win a popularity contest. Just wouldn't. I mean, we saw that in in in Doge. Like, he was... He's too easy to hate. He's too easy to make fun of. He's too easy to misunderstand. He's he's too easy to take out of context. He's too unfiltered, which are all good things for us overall because he'd be wasted as a politician. [00:42:52] S0: This is something that's happened since last we talked is he left Doge. And the way that I think about Doge is it is one of the only things that Elon... You know, organizations or situations that Elon's ever come in contact with and been like, this is too hard from what I can tell. Or it's like the reward for trying is just not great enough.