01:01:55 · Casey Handmer
So if you think like what we want here is the net economic surplus to make it from the Collison's hyper productivity into actual physical things that my employees need to survive, what fraction of that value gets siphoned off by the government, it's like 70%. It is unbelievable how much just disappears. And you say, well, why is it that this neighborhood here is no longer full of like vibrant businesses building state of the art aircraft that allow... Enable people to fly around the world? Could it be that two thirds of the net value between the source of capital and the goods and services that the the people actually doing the actual work need in order to survive is just yoinked out of the system along the way. It's it's nutty. It's absolutely crazy. I'm I'm... I'll give one more example. I'm I'm blessed to be married to a very talented woman, Christine, and and she has always and continues to earn more than I do, which is my own damn fault. I set my own salary, but, like, it's not even close. And and so I I I asked Croc the other day, like, in our net family income, does just my income, like, cover the tax or something? And Croc was like, your income covers less than half of the tax. And I was like, I should just retire. My wife should just retire. We're we're, like, comfortably middle class. We effectively buy the company a luxury car every couple of months. Like, it's kinda nutty. And and the thing is maybe for some people maybe some people it's different, but to me, I feel like The US people are no longer getting out of the government what they were putting in.
01:03:25 · Ty Morse
[01:03:25] S0: Do you think that civilizations just have to do a hard reset every couple hundred years to start situation fresh?
01:03:32 · Casey Handmer
[01:03:32] S1: Like, this year, we're in the AI takeoff. We're in the the singularity. And, like, this is thing that, like, you can you can kind of argue this way or that way about demographics, this birth rate, that tax rate, this, you know, offensive drone warfare that all this stuff is swamped by hyper intelligent AIs. And so the the correct question to ask really is what is... It's it's kind of like... You know, New York City was in a crisis over a century ago due to their inability to dispose of a horse manure from people using horses to try... Tow things around the place. And even in the Second World War, the German army depended on horses to drag artillery pieces from place to place. Right? It was not fully mechanized. And the answer was not like, oh, taxation on horses or something. Right? The answer was we invented new technology, a motor car that has its own problems but its own benefits, and here we are. So we're literally in the process right now of not so much changing this legacy tax and spend economic system, but, like, just superseding it entirely. Yeah. So if you think, like, let's run the block ten years forward in a in a good outcome scenario, 90% of the net benefit that accrues to humans will be downstream of AI, and AIs will be, you know, incorporating their economic system in a way that's very different from the way that FDR's team and, you know, the presidents or the congresses around that time decided that they were going to essentially fund the operations of the government by appropriating a fraction of everyone's labor through income tax. Right? Tax makes sense if if most of the people in your economy are working for businesses that run payroll where they're, turning screws in a factory or something, which was, you know, reasonably descriptive of the of the of the twentieth century. But most of the economic activity in our economy today is not that. You know, The United States still does a lot of manufacturing, but it's not the nexus of economic productivity here. And in the future, won't be either. Most of the economic productivity will be machines emitting streams of ones and zeros in low Earth orbit.
01:05:30 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[01:05:30] S0: Wanna talk about Starship? [01:05:31] S1: Starship. [01:05:32] S0: Okay. Let's do Starship. Let's let's talk about Starship. [01:05:33] S1: So cool. [01:05:35] S0: It's extraordinarily cool. On the Louisiana build out, I think it's at, like, 12 towers [01:05:41] S1: for that. Is that a 12? I mean, who really knows? [01:05:43] S0: It's some... Somewhere around there. [01:05:44] S1: But [01:05:45] S0: I think that there's, like, some constraint for Starbase where they can only launch so many Starships a day.
01:05:45 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[01:05:45] S0: I think that there's, like, some constraint for Starbase where they can only launch so many Starships a day. [01:05:53] S1: Well, Elon's in the process of undergoing regulatory arbitrage. So the impression that I get is that the Rio Grande Valley authorities having jurisdiction were perhaps getting a little bit cozy or comfortable with their little monopoly on on Starship development and the enormous revenue and so on that that's brought to that area and perhaps becoming a little too extractive or potentially having the ability to become too extractive. And so how do you make sure that you keep that relationship healthy? You create a a... An escape hatch that is nonzero cost and non infinite cost. And then you can now run the regular garbage charge. And the Louisiana governor... It was an... Actually, an announcement video was kind of interesting. Louisiana governor had the name tag because no one knew who he was, but Elon brought the bodyguards. That that, you know, if push comes to shove, he will do to Texas what he did to California and say, I'm taking my business elsewhere because, like, you can shear the sheep, but you can't skin them. Right? If you shear the sheep, it makes more wool. If you skin it, it dies. So you don't wanna cut too deep. [01:07:01] S0: I guess he wants to get to something like 10,000 flights a year in a very short time.
01:07:01 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[01:07:01] S0: I guess he wants to get to something like 10,000 flights a year in a very short time. [01:07:05] S1: A number. Yeah. Like a power of 10. Right? But, like, that... That's a good number because it it helps his team orient around, like, we're not just doing 10 a year. And, like, 10,000,000 a year is too far off. So 10,000 is good number. Actually, that's [01:07:17] S0: a good question. How do you think Elon sets basically objectives? Like, are these these arbitrary? Are they five years out objectives? [01:07:27] S1: He's pretty well calibrated on that, actually. I think his goal is a lot [01:07:30] S0: more calibrated than he was on timelines and also objectives. [01:07:34] S1: He's always had a good sense of what the the unifying goal, like the north star for an organization needs to be to keep everyone motivated and aligned. It's certainly something that has been not super obvious here because, you know, when you're in science project phase, it's never quite sure, like, when you're when you're when you're good enough when you're done. So 10,000, I think, is a good number to fixate on. Will he hit it in the next five years? Probably not. But [01:07:59] S0: You really don't think so? No. There's there's kind of these interesting