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
01:07:59 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[01:07:59] S0: You really don't think so? No. There's there's kind of these interesting [01:08:03] S1: Well, we can run the math right now. I mean, like, let's say let's say, like, the next generation Starship, which is produced in the next two years, can do 10 landings. Right? Like, the first Falcon nine first stage, they did the 10 landings. The factory in Starbase is set up, I think, to max out about 250 Starships a year. That's 2,500. Right? And it may be the case that they they build them there and then launch them, and then they land them in Louisiana and then relaunch them there. Don't know. Like, they become like airports. Right? You can you can fly them from... You don't have to land at the same place you take off from. [01:08:36] S0: It seems that a lot of people both say they believe in AI and, like, can kinda see the exponential, but then also kinda, like, extrapolate out the current trend versus, like, pulling in. You know? If there's, like, some ex... Intelligence explosion, who the hell knows what the future looks like?
01:08:36 · Ty Morse, Casey Handmer
[01:08:36] S0: It seems that a lot of people both say they believe in AI and, like, can kinda see the exponential, but then also kinda, like, extrapolate out the current trend versus, like, pulling in. You know? If there's, like, some ex... Intelligence explosion, who the hell knows what the future looks like? [01:08:51] S1: Well, that's a singularity. You can't really predict what comes next. But, yeah, I know I know a number of relatively well informed people who think that, for example, the real world economic impacts of AI will be diluted by Baumol's cost disease. That seems to me to be not entirely unlikely. Like you say, well, right now The United States economy grows at 3% a year, which is quite respectable. How much more will it grow as a result of AI? You can make an argument that most of the growth right now is AI. But is that going to go to 5% or 10%? Is it gonna go to 10000%? You know, ultimately, what becomes the limiting factor? Time to power? [01:09:31] S0: Would be fascinating to fabrication? To live in this world that Elon has talked about where he's, like, GDP just growing a 100% a year, and he's like, we're gonna be there in, [01:09:40] S1: like, twenty [01:09:41] S0: five years. [01:09:41] S1: He says, like, you'll have not universal basic income. You'll have universal high income. Yeah. Because you'll be able to essentially produce anything that you want on demand.