00:48:44 · Casey Handmer
I wrote a blog post a couple months ago pointing out that Australia, for, like, fifteen years now, has been locked into a future where it becomes fully communist, essentially, like full government control of the economy because the private economy, the economy that actually generates net wealth and takes taxes, is shrinking. But you only need one one of these countries to, say, face an existential problem, realize it's facing an existential problem and undergo massive reform. So, actually, Patrick Collison and Mario Draghi recently announced the Rine Group, which is of a think tank whose efforts are around restoring European dynamism. I find it's an interesting or useful thought experiment to think of Europe as a as kind of a a successor civilization to the civilization that built all the infrastructure that's kind of living in the ruins of that infrastructure, but isn't capable of building it again. And we're talking, like, not 1700. We're talking, like, 1960 kind of thing, like, only a few generations ago. I think a lot of it was driven by energy scarcity. Right? So, like, big big economic shock in the nineteen seventies when, basically the Saudis nationalized Saudi Aramco and and then formed the OPEC oil cartel. And we were able to find, like, a modicum of economic growth in the intervening periods through capital deepening, improvement in public health, kind of a little bit of cold war nonsense and and kind of elevation of of the developing world. And then more recently in software, consumer software, which is a really great way of improving productivity without increasing energetic inputs particularly. Although now data centers have grown to the point where they're, like, pushing double digits of total energy consumption and, like, we're starting to rub against those limits again. And so it's really important, I think, for us to grow to to break these constraints on energy availability. So our friend Isaiah is working on this, for example, on on nuclear energy, and and, obviously, solar is a key way to go that direction, you know, and then bring back permission to do things. One things the Japanese do do nicely, and and it has its own proclivities and weaknesses, but they they they normalize construction. So they're actually constructing things all the time. And part of the reason they've got an extremely powerful steel cartel, basically, with...
00:50:47 · Casey Handmer
Know, very, very politically connected that that wants to keep on building things. But they also understand that a city is really only a city if it's constantly in the process of regeneration and recreation, and it's completely acceptable to say, Well, yeah, there's one or two nice buildings, we'll keep them nice, we'll restore them, but in general we want to replace 98% of the fabric of the city every fifty years. What a radical point of view that is. But 98% of the fabric of the city every fifty years just means that on average your buildings are 25 years old instead of 150 years old, which is a major problem we have faced here in the West. It means that you get lots of practice in construction. You get lots of practice in project financing and and and management. And if you build a real stinker, you're not stuck with it forever. You just rip it down and try again. Right? So I'd I'd love to do something with the Salton Sea one day. It's this environmentally desolate wasteland in the Southern End Of California that could be like like Phoenix, Arizona, but with with with this beautiful lake in the middle of it. It could be the most extraordinarily beautiful part of the world. And, like, there's no downside to trying. The worst that can happen is it remains an environmental catastrophe. It is already an environmental catastrophe. You could only improve it by changing it. You know, it's kind of like the the right to try laws around using weird drugs if you're about dying of cancer anyway. Like, what difference does it make?
00:52:07 · Ty Morse
[00:52:07] S0: On the same kind of thread of regulation Yes. In America. America. I've never understood this idea that if Elon believes that the kind of, like, American system and all the regulation that surrounds this is basically like this unstoppable, you know, thousand strings, you can't do anything over time situation. Like, he's not gonna import that bad system to another planet.
00:52:33 · Casey Handmer
[00:52:33] S1: One would hope not, and I think that's kind of the libertarian... You know, you need you need one state which tries things differently, does things differently to become competitive. Right? So, like, in some sense, the the the Arab states do this. Like, UAE has radically lower taxes. It's quite attractive to certain areas. And in The United States, the federation, different states are able to compete in terms of their, you know, regulatory approach to various things. So some states have decided they're gonna be, like, business friendly places. Other states are so wealthy through no fault of their own that they can afford to be extremely profligate in the way that they spend money. Cough California. Cough. Yeah. There's never been a really strong forcing function for great governance in any part of The United States. But, yeah, we we need we need one Western liberal, ideally Anglophone democracy to defect and say we're going to adopt a extremely, like, aggressive deregulatory agenda. Like, AI is a great way to do it. You say, like, hey. I I I had Claude 4.6 do this a year ago. Like, ingest the complete corpus of American law and regulation and compress it to 4,000 pages, which is a Mastercard text catalog book. Right? I'm a fit guy. I should be able to fit the laws of land in an overhead locker. Right, in an overhead bin. That should be your constraint. Like, you can't just keep on adding laws forever. How many laws do you really need? You know, we... Anyone who's developed software knows that there's an optimum size. Right? And you should not have too much or too little. You should have an optimum size. But there's no forcing function. There's no process even for the destruction of laws that are, you know, obsolete or no longer needed. In the Reconstruction period after the civil war, I think under Jackson, there was a... An effort to, for the first time, actually get all of US law in one place. So you have the constitution, the founding documents, obviously, but then you had lots of laws in front of the place. It wasn't particularly well kept. It came to 1,700 pages at that time. 1,700 pages. But, like, Lincoln himself was originally a trial circuit lawyer in Illinois, I believe, prior to prior to his election.
00:54:40 · Casey Handmer, Ty Morse
And and so in those days, they're just just, like, terrible lifestyle, just like going from town to town and trying cases and getting to know people. And, yeah, they didn't have, like, a central source of truth for what the law was back then. Kinda wild. Obviously, the federal government was much smaller back then. But, yeah, 1,700 pages seems like a good number. 4,000 pages I could live with. You know, we've got airplanes and stuff now to deal with. 12,000,000 pages is what [00:55:07] S0: the current law? [00:55:08] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Federal federal code and regulations, it's 12,000,000 pages, which is more than than anyone could even read the index for in a lifetime. It's it's absurd. [00:55:17] S0: I I... I've thought a lot about this whole idea of, like, dictatorships. And, you know, companies [00:55:22] S1: How many dictatorships? [00:55:23] S0: Are... Basically, like, especially in founder led companies, they are a mini dictatorship where you live or die based on how good you are at making something that people want.
00:55:23 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[00:55:23] S0: Are... Basically, like, especially in founder led companies, they are a mini dictatorship where you live or die based on how good you are at making something that people want. [00:55:31] S1: A little different, though. Like, the nice thing is in our system, and this is... Ten years ago, I would not not have seen the value of this. Now I do. Is... And I think maybe it Pamela Lucky or someone who was talking about the value of the limited stock or joint stock company as an innovation. Every single company in the entire country is governed differently. Right? You have everything under the sun. And within very broad bounds, almost anything is legal. Right? You can have you can have a company where you've got a constitution and all your employees have proportional votes and they vote on what gets done. Right? And the thing is this works really well because no one's locked in. Anyone can resign and go to another company. Right? So it's not like a religion where if you're an apostate, you get killed. You can always leave. It's voluntary association, but it becomes this this laboratory for experimentation of different governance systems that work better for particular types of businesses and particular types of founders for particular times types... Times in history. Different systems work better. [00:56:28] S0: The other great thing is it's it's kind of live by the sword, die by the sword, and if your system doesn't work, you rapidly get killed. [00:56:34] S1: Oh, yeah. For