Casey Handmer, Terraform Industries: Hydrocarbons, startups, endurance sports, Mars exploration, and AI's future impact

like from a scientific perspective, why this lake uh what why so deep? Like usually lakes are not in mountains, what what explains the depthness of a lake is my question. >> That's a good question. Yeah, so most lakes are actually fairly ephemeral. They tend to silt up, right? They tend to fill up with with sediment and um and so there there are a handful of extremely deep lakes worldwide.

um um you know um that Lake Tahoe is is quite deep and and Lake Bol in in Russia is quite deep and those lakes are are deep because they're on rift valleys and that the the crust is actually spreading apart in those areas faster than the sediment is accumulating. Um and and and thus they're quite deep. Um the Sierras has 10 on the order of 10,000 lakes.

Um and um and they're all pretty cool. It's a beautiful place. Uh and and most of these lakes are glacial glacial lakes. So they're they're areas where the the ground has been gouged out by by glacias. Normally rivers and stuff run downhill, but glacias can run uphill to an extent. They can get kind of pushed up. So as they as they go, they can carve out these scolops in the ground and and then you know and the glacia retreats and melts and and the scolops fill up with water.

And um I I took my my inflatable raft and my uh my Suna buoy up to the 20 lakes basin in August with my son as part of a kind of shakedown temporary um test and uh and found a lake up there called Steel Head Lake. It's actually the site of the Hess Tungsten mine um that was 30 m 33 m deep at the deepest point which itself is staggeringly deep. like it's deep enough that you can fit, you know, a an absolute like Amsterdam Max um uh container ship in in that lake, right?

Um which is kind of mindboggling. Um and so I thought maybe maybe this lake up in in the Sierrasque would be, you know, 30 or 40 m deep even. Uh it's a similar size. Uh but it was far far deeper than that. And it was it was really mindboggling. Like I I just kind of jumped in the the kayak and started paddling around and and within like literally spitting distance of the shore, I was already in 20 m of water.

And I was like, "Okay, this is weird." I grew up in Sydney and Sydney is regarded as one of the finest natural harbors on Earth. It's uh it's it's about the same size as the San Francisco Bay, but it's far deeper. You can you can fit very very large ships into the Sydney harour. Um, and in the parts where I used to sail, uh, which are relatively close to the ocean, um, as opposed to up the river, uh, you know, was not unusual for the harbor to be 20, 25, 30 meters deep, which is of course, you know, incredibly deep by even modern standards.

And, and when Captain Cook first kind of sailed by and the the first fleet showed up, they they were like, "Oh, you know, fit the entire British Navy fleet in here with ease." Uh, several times over. Um and yet this lake which is at the top of this mountain like literally 13,000 ft up in the mountains is uh far far deeper even than that. Um it's really mind-boggling uh to think about.

I mean and part of the reason it's so deep is there's not much sedimentation happening up there. That's the lake is on top of a mountain. So there's no there's no catchment that really drives uh dirt into the lake over time. Um the lake is frozen for you know 10 months of the year. So, so, so there's even less, you know, water flow in that area. Um, there's a there's a small lake just upstream of it that that probably captures most of that sediment to the extent there's any sediment at all.

>> Um, but it's um >> but yeah, like how the hell it got out that deep, I don't know. >> There's like pondweed and stuff. Um, there were fish fish were stocked in there in the 30s, but but I don't know if any are still in there. I didn't see any fish in that lake. It's uh you know it's brutally cold most of the year. So you'd have to wonder how the how the fish would survive without sunlight for for 10 months.

>> And how do you decide if those expeditions you have like a a formula is just a hunch? And can you explain that hunch if there's one? >> I don't know. I've always liked doing weird stuff. So um you know >> it has a point, right? because you're full like you're all like this Mars exploration type of guy and you're you're like hyper curious about the planet itself, right?

So obviously >> well it looked like a it looked like a good good shape problem that like I could maybe go up there and solve and and I like the physical aspect and I like the camping and I like going in the Sierras and so all those different things kind of came together and then after a few years of kind of tossing the idea back and forth I was able to figure out how to how to make it happen and uh blocked out the time of my calendar and went up there and um yeah it was extremely physically strenuous uh to do it.

Um I I don't know if I'd be rushing back to do it anytime soon. Uh so me and my partner we started at um we started Tuesday evening because we went up Shepherd Pass which is um it's one of the harder passes in the Sierras and um and uh we spent two nights on the on the pass. One night about halfway up and one night near the top and then uh and then on the third the third day we uh we we popped over the top and down the other side and and made it almost all the way up to the Tania Basin on the on that on that day.

So on the on the third night we we camped once again just below the just below the lake. Um, generally speaking, when you're up in the mountains and you're acclimating, it's it's good to kind of get as close as you can without getting too high. Uh, and then you sleep sleep for a night, let your let your body adjust a bit, and then and then go up again the next morning.

Um, then then after you've done your hard climb, you have breakfast and and continue on with your day. >> And friend, is he as weird as you are, or is >> Oh, he's he's much weirder than I. This is this is Edward Jacobs. Uh, he's a he's a where he's ride or die buddy now. He he he came on one of my camping trips and lived to tell the tale. Um, I'm actually somewhat notorious in my family for for like draoning, you know, sisters and brothers and siblings and cousins and and and so on into like wildly improbable adventures that involve walking far too far and um and then them kind of like limping but telling the tale after the fact.

I remember at a uh at a family event probably 20 years ago now um maybe not quite that long 15 years ago with my uh with my cousin um we were staying in at a place called Dura which is uh in New South Wales in Australia and it's on a beach that's called 11 mile beach um I think it's called 7mi beach but it's actually 11 miles long now because the the um the Shaw Haven outflow was moved four miles to the south but my dad dropped us off at the at the old outflow and we decided to walk four miles south until we reached the modern outflow and then turn around and walk back again.

It's kind of weird like beginning a hike on a beach at 10 p.m. and and your the city you're walking to is not even visible over the horizon. But after 3 hours of walking, it is visible over the horizon and then after three more hours you kind of you get closer and I think we arrived just around dawn. We were pretty sore the next day. That was that was a good good time.

Um yeah, just just kind of things I kind of things I like doing, I guess. Um >> how to what you're doing at Terraform obviously requires immense grit. you have a hunch that this can scale, right? But how does it compare? >> Yeah, it's actually kind of similar in that in that um you need you need a kind of fairly specialized set of skills to make progress at all for it even to be possible and then you need to show up and show up and show up and show up and just day after day after day keep on keep on grinding away until until it's done.

>> How do you select your teammates? I saw some members of your team like how do you select for grit? Let's start with that. Um well I think to an extent they select in right so they can kind of see from the outside that it's a it's an environment that rewards people who are willing to put in a lot of work. Um and and and people who are willing to do that obviously want to go and work in that kind of environment because then they can have a competitive advantage.

Um you know their their natural characteristics can be rewarded. Um, and then the work itself, you know, it's it's its own test, right? Every day you show up and and you you kind of get shaped by your environment and tested by it and and it's the same thing as if you're a professional, you know, mountain porter or something carrying loads up and down mountains like you get stronger and stronger over time, [snorts] >> right?

Sherpas, right? Um, >> exactly. >> Okay. How far are you like with uh the last station that we talked about that I shared my screen last time we spoke? Um, you're literally producing gas with uh solar energy, right? Which is quite original. I like the idea. Makes all kinds of sense. You've shown proof of concept, right? [snorts] Um, how far are you uh what what are you chugging here?

>> Liquid death. >> Yeah. Death water. [laughter] >> H2O. >> You feel badass like chugging this? It's like, >> do I feel badass jugging it? Yeah, that's a good question. How many How many moles of That's like 20 moles. Um um [laughter] uh it's just I just had another podcast just before you and I needed to get to get some uh some liquid in >> some metal hard hard metal energy in you.

>> Exactly. Um sorry I forgot your original question. >> Yeah. How far are you with the the team? Maybe if I ask that like let's say I'm a teammate of yours, right? I'm in charge of like one specific system but am I talking to the rest of the team? How does how do I make sure that this specific component integrates with the rest of the work? How do you separate roles?

>> Yeah, I mean we have three core subsystems and the interfaces between them are pretty lightweight um quite deliberately decoupled, right? So so you know they but they sit right next to each other and they say well you know we ran the math and or we ran a test and it looks like we can hit you know 99% instead of 98.5% purity. Does that help you? And they say actually it does help us.

Thank you very much. Well we we'll we'll take 99. or they'll say uh it doesn't make any difference in which case you know maybe you put in a bit too much effort. Um and uh yeah and then it's just a matter of of making sure everyone stays on the same page. >> [snorts] >> And how much is enough hardness for a team member? Like because there's such a thing as burnout.

Arguably I experienced it in my last ultra race. Did 94 kilometer out of 125 was my first DNF, right? What's [snorts] someone? And also like what's uh what's not enough, right? Like have you ever outsourced something to a teammate and it was like too easy and just they they went at SpaceX because it was like hard. Yeah, a few of our teammates have offered SpaceX over the years.

I feel like it's it's not a not a critique. It's a it's maybe a a vote of confidence in our ability to to to create and develop talent that that people are able to move on to to other jobs where they can contribute in the in the wider environment. SpaceX is a huge organization and it does things at enormous scale and and uh it's an incredible environment, I think, to to try and push and succeed.

Um if that's your thing and you're excited about rockets and I totally get that. Um if you want to work in a small organization where you have a a big impact on the out outcome and so on then obviously SpaceX is is grown beyond that point. Now um I think you just kind of take it as it comes. I mean like lots of people get different projects and over time those projects change and evolve and someone solves one problem and you give another problem.

You say was that too easy too hard? I give you another one. You know you're ready for another level of of responsibility. And um she one of the the greatest pleasures as a as a father and as a as a manager is um is is taking people in as as relatively green and inexperienced you know early career people and and saying well this is how it's done and and today you're responsible for this but tomorrow you're responsible for delivery and the day after you're responsible for for like the

the part working correctly and the part the day after that you're responsible for the person who receives the part being happy about it. And that's each of those things are um a kind of a a big big stair step step, you know, level up in terms of, you know, internalizing responsibility for extrinsic factors over time. Um and and you you really want to climb up the earlier steps in that in that thing as as um as fast as you can.

This whole like, oh, not my job, not my problem kind of attitude doesn't get you very far. Uh if you want to have an interesting career, you've got to be able to take responsibility for successful successful operation of of your system in the wider world. Um, and by success I mean people are desperate to have it. >> And how do you see that with someone to know that they have it?

I I was green. I was full of potential. You were green as well. I I [snorts] don't think they obviously took you to your full potential, right? Like at um Caltech. Um I >> don't think they were even trying to Yeah. So, um, what happened there, I guess, like what's what's, uh, well, first, how do you spot these these people, right? Is this like, uh, they they've done like crazy ultra marathons and worked on ultra hard project.

And then how do you fully exploit their potential? Exploit might not be the right word, but just like fuse with them and just 1 plus one equal 10. [snorts] >> You develop potential. I mean actually like elite sports or or um endurance sports are a pretty good filter actually. Um because it's impossible to succeed at those without having a high degree of intrinsic motivation.

Um and fundamentally maybe it's just something you're born with, but it's extremely difficult to succeed without having the ability to drive yourself really hard. Um and so it's just it's an unfable signal, right? It's an honest signal if someone's able to do that. Um but yeah, that's it. There's plenty of people who are successful here who who've never really distinguished themselves um you know in terms of athletics.

That's fine. Um, [sighs] I mean, generally speaking, in in an interview, you're just looking for evidence of of a track record in that direction, right? And but for early career people, often there isn't much of a much evidence yet. So, you got to develop it. In terms of exploiting potential, I think it's more like developing potential. It's more like um helping people reach the reach their limits and and you know, if you've worked in um extreme sports, you would understand that like having a having a coach can often be extremely helpful.

They can help you kind of get past internal barriers and see things in a new way and and push you to limits of your ability in a way that maybe you can't necessarily do as well by yourself. Uh, and I see my my own job as as basically in that. It's it's it's helping people get the most out of their career and out of their lives. >> How did you manage your stress?

You know, like while getting up there, what goes on uh up there like sleeping couple of nights and just like walking for [ __ ] long distance with 60 lbs on your back and in business when it goes bad, you know, like how do you manage that up there? >> Well, it's an interesting thing. Um I I did a a fairly heinous uh trip in the mountains in in um Germany and Austria a couple of years ago and uh and in the process realized that something about running a startup had changed the way I approached fear and risk and so on.

Um uh yeah, basically like starting a company is a hell of a drug. It really changes the way your brain works. Um yeah, so last week I was up in the mountains having a great time. Like almost every minute I was just like, you know, on at the at the peak of my game and having I was just like in Rapture. It was it was incredible. Um my the worse the situation got and the less comfortable my my climbing companion got, just the better time I was having.

We're like scrambling across a couple of miles of boulders uh to to cut a corner on a trail and and um and it starts raining halfway through and I'm like, "Oh, put on the rain jacket and keep on going." And I'm just thrilled cuz for the first time in my life, I actually have a rain jacket that will keep the rain off cuz I actually went out and bought a nice rain jacket at the age of 39.

Um and and meanwhile, he's like, "Oh, these boulders might get slippery or something." I'm like, "I'll probably be fine. They're they're um they're granite. You granite doesn't really get slippery in the same way that say limestone does." So, I was having a great time. Um, you know, at one one point my sleeping mat stopped working and I I got a bit cold and but you know, I was like, I don't know, it's like you feel cold, but you weren't cold, if that makes sense.

Um, >> I've been I've been in situations on mountains and stuff that much worse. In terms of startup, >> every now and then you have moments of terror, right? It's a bit like it's a bit like um Vagna, right? You have like just, you know, long periods of just grinding away and then moments of sheer terror. Um, but again, after you've done it, after you've been through that process three or four times, it doesn't doesn't frighten you in the same way anymore.

Um, because you you've kind of learned the coping skills and the and the ways of compartmentalizing and approaching these problems. I I don't think it's for everyone. I'll put it that way. I think I think um for a lot of people it would be uh a pretty permanently negative effect on their on their mentality. Um almost traumatizing in some ways. But um for me at least it uh maybe thus far at least it's been fine.

But for me it's um it's kind of neither here nor there and and um yeah having a good time physics problem like cortisone your blood and need to downregulate with something else or >> uh I guess there are ways of mentalizing it like that. Um yeah people say like oh stress is a terrible thing. Uh but actually stress stress is the only thing that creates growth.

Um, you know, if you if you work out, like you have to stress out your muscles to make them grow. And and if you want to get smart, you've got to try hard problems to make your brain get better. And and if and yeah, it's basically stress stress is a neutropic. Anxiety and stress help you think better. They can also make you crazy. So, you know, there's a there's kind of a a balance to be struck there.

>> Yeah. Are you biohacker? Do you What's your stack? Do you have something or just like raw dog it? >> I'm I'm pretty pretty natty in that in that regard. Um uh I mean I I'm happy to share with your your audience the things I find tend to improve my mentality when I'm getting stuck in a stuck in a in a in a grind is like you're on the checklist. Have you slept recently?

Have you eaten enough food? Uh eaten a balanced diet? Uh have you had good interactions with your friends and family? Um have you exercised? Um and uh and have you interacted with nature? And so one of the nice things about about going up in the mountains actually is that you get many of these things for free, right? So so it's cold in the mountains.

So when it when the sun goes down, you have to lie down in your sleeping bag and and stay warm. So it's like basically mandatory 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night, which is probably twice as much as I normally get. Uh you're you're off the internet because there's no service up there. So So that alone like saves you hours a day. Uh you're doing a shitload of exercise.

Uh which is, you know, provided you don't get horrendous horrendously injured is is really good. Generally speaking, um maybe not eating the healthiest food, but but you're eating decently healthy food and um and and the exercise you're doing more than makes up for the to the extent that it's not healthy. You're often up there with friends, although sometimes I go by myself.

Um and uh and you're in nature and having a great time. So, it's uh it's certainly the most helpful thing for my well-being is is to go up in the mountains and have a horrible life experience. >> What's your relationship with the internet and where's it going? Well, that's an interesting one. Um, I'm an elder millennial. I'm 39. So, I I remember um you know, the first time I I had I think we called it ADSL um internet connection and and I discovered Wikipedia at about the age of 17.

And and back then, Wikipedia was small enough that you could actually read the whole thing if you if you were curious enough, which I was. Um so, like over the course of about a year, I I I I read pretty much all of Wikipedia. This is long before it became a kind of lightning rod in the cult culture war. Um, and uh, it's just fascinating. Uh, absolutely fascinating because I'd always been a very curious person and and if the things I was interested in didn't have an accessible book in a library that I could reach on foot, then it just wasn't part of my world.

You know, I didn't I didn't get access to um, advanced um, organic chemistry textbooks until I was in college. Um, but I was interested in it since I was 6 years old. So, it's kind of interesting, right? like spent eight 12 12 years or 12 or 13 years just kind of theorizing about about um [snorts] about your biochemistry and organic chemistry um before I had had the ability to actually get access to people who knew what they were talking about in this area.

Of course that's completely insane like nowadays you can ask your AI you can go on the internet you can download a textbook and these things are possible. So it was was super interesting. Um and then you obviously internet was also a way to provide communities for uh for people with with you know strange interests and predelections and um initially for me that was Facebook and it was how I kind of stayed in touch with people >> MSN >> my college >> well MSN Messenger and stuff but just for me personally and then um but then in recent years I

found my my tribe on X and my tribe by and large >> Facebook [ __ ] up the internet right I guess the last renaissance was LLM taking info on the internet and making it very valuable. But didn't social media like made internet less fun. >> Um, for most humans, >> I would say like the revealed preference of most humans is they like social media, including me.

Um, but you you kind of have to know what you're getting, right? Like you you go on you go on X to to get uh sanity damage and and enjoy it. It's it's like drinking, right? It's like I know it's killing brain cells, but it's fun. Um and the other thing is that X is X is a place that attracts lunatics like me who who enjoy um building companies and so you know my my my contemporaries uh kind of peg group mostly um entrepreneurs one flavor or another.

>> Wikipedia I'm a fan still am like I still read lots of [ __ ] on Wikipedia and go into very deep rabbit holes. They're always looking for funding right like they're sort of struggling and OpenAI like scrape their [ __ ] right. Well, no, not really. I mean, we could the cost of the cost of operating Wikipedia is basically nothing, right? Like it's a it's a it's a you can serve the entire thing on on a cloud uh a cloudflare bucket for >> not really also just like text, right?

Like >> it's text. Yeah, you can I downloaded the whole thing 10 years ago onto a USB drive just just for shits and giggles, right? You can do it. Um but the Wikipedia uh foundation spends a shitload of money on on um on social causes and activism and that's what they're raising money for. >> Interesting. Um, [snorts] were the big LLM boys um in the right to just like [ __ ] get everything on the internet?

I think from a one standpoint, they added gigantic value to humanity because they repacked that value, right? But on the other end, there's a lot of people [ __ ] pretty angry about like them doing that. What's >> I mean, it doesn't matter what they would have done. It doesn't matter who they would have done it. Someone would have found a reason, you know, like you're probably old enough to remember like 10 years ago in the in the early days of woke, right?

like uh there was this fun game that the that the kind of the kids used [snorts] to play on the internet which is like I'll tell me anything and I'll tell you what's wrong with it, right? I'll tell you how it's problematic or how it's concerning, right? And it's just it's just a dumb game, right? Because it doesn't actually make the world better. Um and so yeah, you can say, "Oh, well, you know, here's this amazing miraculous new technology where every single person on Earth can have a personalized hyper intelligent robotic assistant, you know, cognitive prosthesis that can help them solve any problem in their entire life." and uh democratized them essentially for free and um without permission, without interdiction from from hostile foreign governments, you name it.

Basically, anyone anyone can get a can get a personalized expert consult on almost any subject. Um well, let me tell you what's wrong with it. They they went on Wikipedia and they downloaded data that that that a bunch of like millions of contributors had given given to Wikipedia for free and they took it for free. How dare they? Well, give me a [ __ ] break because I read Wikipedia when I was 17 and if I was able to, I would read it today.

It's just too big for me to read in my lifetime. But um and it was it's it's free for a human intelligence to read it if you're free for a robot intelligence to read. Um and and and the the thing is more to the point I'm going to I'm going to kind of get on my soap box about this. Um [clears throat and cough] I'm old enough to remember when Google uh whose original mission was to organize uh the world's information and make it accessible uh had a extremely ambitious project to scan uh all the world's books and then make those books accessible to people.

So for example, the vast majority of books ever ever published ever printed are no longer in print and cannot be obtained for any amount of money from any dealer whatsoever. There might only be a handful of copies left in a library in the entire world. So if you don't happen to have access to that library, which necessary means living in that city and having the appropriate credentials, the information in that book is not accessible to you.

The original rights holders of that book are often long dead. The publisher might not even exist anymore. But because of the way legal principles are set up, uh obviously someone still owns uh in many cases the copyright uh to that information and that's fine. And Google being Google having almost infinite resources went about this the right way. They they went to all these different publishers and they sought to obtain a permission from them to scan and then distribute the information from these ancient uh intellectual property kind of properties um that were not not even no longer economically productive.

They they were forgotten. They were they were then I mean like which publishers make money? The publishers that make money are publishing like [ __ ] Harry Potter and stuff like that, right? Like the or Bloomberg Bloomberg terminal or something like that. Like no publisher on earth is making money selling selling a book that was first published 100 years ago.

Um [clears throat] and so it's not even a kind of economic thing. But what happened was uh enough of the world's publishers got together in a big class action lawsuit and and basically forced Google's hand that Google was then forced on on on pain of you know basically extreme violence and coercion uh to delete uh their priceless um records uh priceless uh scanned copies of of many of these books that they had sought to obtain and then distribute legally

uh via you know paying paying the rights holders and so on paying paying out paying out the rights holders. So all of humanity was deprived of the benefit of that project and of course Google didn't try again. >> So you believe >> so that shows what happens if you try to go in the front door. So why the [ __ ] would you go in the front door? Because if you try and do the right thing by people and by customers and so on, the incumbents who are rent seekers who just happen to have been the people who are privileged by legislation written back when information was distributed by printing press will still try to [ __ ] you.

So why bother? [snorts] >> Do you believe in patents and uh trademarks and all that [ __ ] uh there's obviously a [sighs] there has to be a way to extract uh value from intellectual property and monetize it in order to um incentivize the creation of intellectual property. On the other hand, it's pretty clear that um that uh you know extending IP for 75 years the pest of the Disney corporation or something is not in anyone's interests and um and it's obviously you know everyone involved has derived the necessary amount of value from those properties at this point.

Um, and that uh like like with many things about these different principles and values need to be balanced in a society and a society that's able to take say the property of Mickey Mouse and then recycle it after 75 years is a is a society that's that's much more dynamic and and creative than one that is like oh no like some guy thought of this 100 years ago and now you can't touch it forever.

Um uh and yeah, so generally speaking, when when it comes to things that I I create and I generate, um I I I give I go to go go out of my way to give them away for free. >> If you make it to Mars, would you like to run your own civilization? That seems like a a very difficult problem. Very hard thing to do. >> The civilization or getting to Mars? >> No, the the running it part.

Um >> they're running the you said would I like to run my own civilization. So I'd like to >> get to Mars. Yeah. >> Potentially go to Mars and potentially contribute to uh you know industrial kind of development there but um but actually um having line responsibility for the successful execution of an entire civilization is uh it's probably beyond my pay grade.

It's uh it's a very difficult task. Someone has to do it but it's a very difficult task. >> So humans but humans is a physic problem. No managing humans it's a science right? don't you think could install systems the way you would with cracking the current first principles problem you're cracking right now? >> Um I mean I'll be really blunt. The um the management of organization of large numbers of humans at scale is a problem that has beset and befuddled humanity since we first started throwing up pyramids.

Um well we have corporations they work why not select >> they work but like >> they work better than the alternative but thousands and thousands of books have been written on on managing people and it's still an unsolved problem right still a problem that people don't really um >> the fact that corporations fire their employees all the time you couldn't really fire your civilians I mean governments

fire their civilians all the time right they put them in prisons and who's them a small small fraction of people. Yeah. Um yeah, I mean I certainly think that like of of all the different economic and political systems that have been tried throughout history, the ones that we are using right now seem to be um um surprisingly effective. Um and certainly it is the case that um a kind of giant secret syncratic um political sorry e economic system composed of of of millions of independently coordinating um voluntarily associating uh individuals and and and corporations all cooperating in a nonviolent way beneath the um beneath the umbrella of some democratically elected um lawmaking and law enforcing apparatus.

seems to be relatively effective um because because it means that you can you can kind of fuzz the problem. You can you can generate thousands of different styles of of corporations and management structures to solve different kinds of problems at different times and different kinds of people and and just kind of experimentally determine what works best.

Um yeah, fine, great, wonderful. Do I want to be the guy at the top driving it? I mean, like look what happened to Obama, you know, over over his eight years of his presidency. He went from being a young man to being an old man in eight years. Yeah, Adele. Yeah, it's like redistributed power and pro possibly Yeah. AI with I don't know 50% 51% of voting rights because I believe more in [snorts] AIs generally than humans for judgment or at this stage in like 30 40 years I'm pretty sure we'll get AGI.

What are your thesis on that? >> Oh, probably much sooner than that. Um yeah, it's an interesting idea to say well like in what ways can can the LLMs or or their descendants um assist with human government governance problems? And I think that um it's actually not not a kind of uh a completely like su generous thing. I think that um bureaucratic the bureaucratic state which kind of came about in the 1800s at large scale um in in Europe and and and since then and other places too is an early instantiation of of an artificial intelligence.

you got is this kind of large you know kind of state state bureaucracy corporate bureaucracy um where the individuals within it don't actually have very much autonomy and they execute uh from a fairly finite set of instructions um a whole set of operations that that kind of more or less autonomously and and uh constantly discharge the the duties of the state um but there's as I said

there's very little kind of um leeway for uh individual expression within that within that organization um and essentially like cobalt the original uh business operated language, right? Um uh businessoriented language um uh was was designed to to substitute for the parts of both uh government and uh and private enterprise that would have been executed by people who were called computers or people who were called calculators um back in the day.

um and and then you could automate that part of the business uh within within these mainframes that would do these these batch mode um operations um and still do actually for for much of a banking system for example. Um and so you just basically take the additional parts of that bureaucratic apparatus and you and you you hand them over to the LLMs for um for uh the execution of of that kind of stuff.

And that's already happening. I mean like you see that you see that happening um in in private enterprise. You see that happening in in in in businesses at scale and it's already the case that the preferred um a front door if you like for a lot of the services that we use at Terraform is a is an LM uh that belongs to or is is trained upon or or or post-trained for I don't know banking apparatus or something that that our internal LM then goes

and integrates with or or interfaces with um which is far more efficient than the alternative. Yeah. So, so, so in some in some sense like the corporation is a is a prototypical AI um because it has it has lielike properties and and and and information processing properties and learning properties and so on, but it's not a human. It's composed of humans uh and and machines, but it's not a human.

So, we'll see. Um but I don't know if that necessarily solves the part of governance that is hard >> for sure. >> The part of governance that that obviously ages ages uh people with high degree of executive authority >> I think [snorts] we'll be neural linked by this time right so I I think that should solve it much better. AGI uh even neural link and getting to Mars is that dependent on cracking limitless energy which is what you're doing now?

No, no, we could do it without limitless energy. Um although more energy helps and I I certainly think that um right now our um our civilization is is largely preoccupied with kind of these insane questions of of structural decline which are brought about by um mostly energy scarcity amongst other other forms of rent seeeking. Um and that and that lifting that.

So the if the energy was limitless it would be free. It doesn't have to be free. It just has to be cheaper. So we didn't increase supply but we don't have to increase supply without bound >> is and and that can and what is your ultimate dream like what's the ultimate version of uh terraform in like I don't know 20 30 years from now >> um 20 30 years on from now I think I think there's a good chance Terraform will have um push push drilling decisively out of the market.

So you'll have um humanity consuming something like five times as much oil and gas as it currently does. um most of that uh oil and gas will be produced um locally to where it's consumed. Um and uh so so relatively little will be will be shipped around the world in in tankers and so on. Um and it'll be cheap by today's standards. So in in 20 um 202$26 we're talking like you know 30 bucks a barrel or something like that kind of 1968 level prices.

Um and uh and it will no longer be the kind of primary source of of the kind of ongoing industrial impoverishment of the developed world. Um yeah, I think that's a a nice future to look forward to. I think you know you expand the the privilege of aviation in particular. So you say like for for a lot of people like having enough enough oil to like you know light a kerosene lamp at night is a big deal or to run a car or motorcycle big deal.

that actually um if you say well for for the developed world at least what does it look like to increase your per capita energy consumption by a factor of 10 if you've already got an air conditioned house in an air conditioned car uh and it looks like using consuming just a shitload more aviation mostly and then obviously um uh on a on a per human capita basis

much more AI >> isn't h isn't like global population falling down and isn't the world merging towards more like solar and doesn't give a [ __ ] about gas. >> Um yeah, so the um human population is not yet falling. Um at least generally worldwide. Um but it is certainly the case that it is on track to fall. Um uh and it is also the case that the economy as a whole as it grows will continue to electrify where it can.

Um and some parts of the economy are easier to electrify than others. Um but the parts that are actually particularly energy intensive are actually really difficult to electrify. Um so if you need extremely high temperatures um for certain industrial processes or you need your energy to be mobile say in the form of rockets or or um longdistance shipping or high performance aviation then it needs to be a liquid uh typically a liquid or a gaseous um chemical fuel which is where we come in.

And you I ask you your yeah your dream your vision 20 30 years uh weren't you like a guy that wanted to to go to Mars? It seems like this vision is mostly like capitalism. How's uh yeah what's your what's your number one dream? Is it just helping the [snorts] world also? Like what what are your goals here? Your incentives? >> Well people I think some people say well we'll go to Mars and and all the problems that I face in my world in my life here will fall away.

Um, and it's always been a place that I think has attracted dreamers for that reason. Um, but uh, but if you think that that the Mars uh, civilization is going to um, somehow allow humanity to set beyond capitalism, I think that you're um, vastly mistaken um, given that uh, Mars will demand of humanity far higher levels of productivity and innovation um, and um, and performance than than than anywhere here on Earth.

will necessitate uh even more extreme forms of of capitalism, hyper capitalism if you will. Um uh and what Terraform is doing here is what sorry, what Terraform is doing here is is definitely like a piece of the of the space puzzle because when humans go to space, they will need um hydrocarbons as well for making plastics and things. So that's kind of the piece of the puzzle we're working at here.

But as of today, you know, 8 billion potential customers here on Earth and and zero on Mars. So it's pretty clear to us where where our business is uh is to be built. Why why hyper hyper capitalism on Mars, right? Uh also what will happen to human productivity once AGI is here statistically? >> Well, those are two separate two separate questions. Um I think as far as Mars goes, uh one of the most compelling and and beautiful accounts, at least contemporary accounts of of uh civilization on Mars is the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson.

And um and Stan, as he is known to his friends, is a uh a compelling author within a literary science fiction tradition that kind of anchors itself in the American left. Um and I've written a technical commentary on on Red Mars. Um which is was quite fun to write. Um, but yeah, the the great weakness of of the non- capitalist economic means of organization is that while they sometimes sound good in a story, they don't actually work in reality.

Um, and so it's important to realize that you the economic dynamism that you would need in space is is not the sort of thing that's delivered by a kind of top down command economy or something like that. Um, that was the first part of the question. Um >> it's just sheer survival out there and it's super hard to create new things on a very >> and then productivity and so on.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Um >> and then it's super wealthy people also that we would ship there first. No. or [snorts] >> Well, I think by definition, if you're >> if you're educated enough and skilled enough and connected enough to kind of even be in the in the running to be hired as an astronaut, you'll uh you'll be, you know, statistically one of the wealthier humans in the history of humanity.

Uh does not necessarily mean you'll be some hyperbillionaire. Um okay. Um, in terms of human productivity on Mars, well, the whole point of going to Mars is to build a kind of a second branch of humanity which is, uh, industrially self-sustaining, um, Mars' environment is is actually fairly hostile to human life. Um, for comparison, it is somewhat more hostile than like the summit of Mount Everest, for example, uh, which is famously fairly hostile to human life.

Um, and so it's impossible to survive on Mars without advanced technology. Um, which means that your industrial civilization there cannot just be like, you know, Hawaii 2.0, right? Where in in Hawaii you can basically survive in a pair of underwear indefinitely. Um, because the environment is is so benign. Uh, it's it's it's much more like a a nuclear submarine or something.

Um, so so you need to have the ability to manufacture and maintain uh all this machinery to keep you alive there. And um, and all that machinery today on Earth, you know, is produced by maybe five or six countries on Earth. Um you say Germany, Japan, uh China, South Korea, United States is basically it. Um uh and so you say well the smallest of those is probably South Korea and and South Korea is on the order of 50 million people.

So so in order to you know have the have the ability to potentially have a a complex enough diversified enough economy to be able to produce microchips and robots and you know rockets and and pressurized systems and spac suits and all the rest all the other stuff you need to survive there. um you would have to have an economy that's at least as developed as South Koreas with a population in the tens of millions of people.

That seems like a very tough thing to do. So you kind of look at that number and you say, well maybe maybe if we get really really good at automation and factories and and humanoid robots and so on who can get by with only a million people, right? But even then you're saying, okay, well there's million people have a productivity equivalent to South Korea, then their per capita productivity is going to be, you know, in the millions of dollars per person per year.

Um which is, you know, comparable to an employee in Netflix or something like that. Um yeah so so basically another way of looking at it is to say well you know the amount of output on a per capita basis has to be so much higher than than it is even in today's world that the per capita allocation of of like robotics or automated production or something has to be extremely high.

Um and and and thus the human has to sit kind of at the top of this growing pyramid of um of abstraction from actual like material labor or contact with the parts themselves. uh which is easier to envision in the case in the case of a of a compiler for a computer or something than than in the case of like building up a robotic capacity. Another way of thinking about it, you say, well, the the first time humans land on Mars, a team of 50 people land and they set up the factory that does steel, right?

They make make steel and then after two years another, you know, the population doubles and after two years, the population doubles again. After another two years, population doubles again. So every two years this team of 50 people has to basically double the output of their factory. Um, and maybe you can double it once or twice without too much difficulty.

But to double it 20 times in a row, um, requires obviously like extreme reliance on automation and and and the people in the factory are no longer like, you know, pouring ingots hand one one by one by hand anymore. They they they would necessarily have to be essentially supervising the automatic imp placement of extremely large conveyor belts and things like that.

Um I I wrote a book about this about about 10 years ago um that uh that I think kind of covers the details quite nicely. >> Yeah. I think I read it or the Google Docs at least version of it, right? Like >> Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a Google Docs version. Yeah. >> Yeah. Um >> I should probably revise it at some point. It's um I've had a few ideas since then.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. That'd be great. Um AGI and human productivity in the next 10 years. >> Okay, that was the other question you asked. Um so opinions vary on this front. Um and and it is certainly the case that while the US economy is growing right now, uh essentially all that growth is is um is in the AI space. Uh the physical construction of data centers and so on.

And so some people think that um that kind of scarcity of human intelligence uh amongst other things is one of the fundamental bottlenecks on on economic growth today. Um, and that or or maybe some other aspect of of AI development such as the liberalization of the construction of new power plants in the United States will lift that constraint from humanity and enable a higher rate of economic growth.

Um, and kind of finger to the wind, I think that with optimal uh industrial policy with current technology, United States could grow perhaps 4% per year. Um, maybe 5%. Um, and you say, well, maybe with the advent of AI doing a lot of the work, you could double that to 10%. and 10% growth per year would be pretty extraordinary. That would be roughly equivalent to you know the five fastest years of Chinese growth in the last you know 35 years.

Um and and and also like you know 10% growth per year is extremely exciting from a social perspective because it it means that you know the opportunities once again available for young people in a way they haven't been for generations. Um, other people think that, you know, bamos cost disease blah blah blah means that, you know, growth will will, if anything, slow down and and increasing dependency ratios and and, you know, aging the boomers and so on will mean that that essentially all the all the value generated by AI and then some will be captured by, you know, stringent overregulation and a few other things.

That's also possible. And then some people think that we'll get recursive self-improvement and and the AIs themselves will build their own economy that that then essentially grows at the at the speed limit of the construction of new AI factories which may be significantly faster than um than what humans can do. Maybe 100% per year, something like that.

So it could be anywhere in between. I guess we'll find out. >> Chop most jobs like 99% of jobs. >> Um I think that's a very reductionist point of view. I think that it's it's natural when new technology comes along to assume that there's this this is going to result in massive economic upheavalss and everyone's going to lose their jobs and staff. But actually, if you if you look at the scoreboard, um the reality is that the post post-industrialization, the introduction of new technology has has basically resulted in in improved quality of life and and life outcomes across the board uh for pretty much everyone.

So it's certainly the case that you know in today's world there are very few people who are you know the lifelong driver of horses down at the local manor and uh and they they they drive the rich people around in their horses like in Pride and Prejudice or something right that that job has disappeared. Um do you or me or anyone else lament that like our children won't have the opportunity to be like the keeper of the horses for the for the um for the darcies of this world?

I don't think so. Um, and so my my my instinct is that higher higher levels of of wealth creation, economic growth will actually drive increased demand for higher quality and higher volumes of consumer goods and that those in turn will um will will drive increased demand for labor and and increase the the value of human labor and and basically continue the story of of um of massive increase in per per capita GDP.

Or maybe there would be two economies. One one that is AGI produced, one that is human produced. AI invention as well. It's like rec. >> Well, that's still the case. >> I mean like right now I'm I'm speaking to you with the help of a of a mass-produced webcam, mass-produced computer, massproduced cables, mass produced microphone, mass-produced headphones, wearing a mass-produced shirt, right?

And that means that even even though I'm relatively prosperous, can afford all this stuff, you know, stuff that my parents frankly couldn't even dream of when they were my age. Um, but if I want to and do have the financial resources, I could go and contract with a a friendly engineer and have them build me a custom pair of headphones. Unlike any other set of headphones ever on Earth, they be made by hand.

And if they did a really good job, they'd be maybe nearly as good as these mass-produced ones at 100 times the price. So, if you want to, you can already go into the the handmade, you know, Etsy economy where everything is everything is kind of a little bit crap and a little bit weird. Um but it's uh and quite a bit expensive but if you want that human touch you can you can pay for it right now.

>> Yeah but almost no one buys that. We buy value we buy utility right so my thesis is like one >> well enough people do more people are making money through Etsy doing handcraft stuff than ever before. [snorts] >> You'll have to convince me on that. I haven't spoken to anyone rich off Etsy and talking to 5,000 founders and CEOs. Um, >> no, you're not going to get rich like handcrafting tacuzzies on on Etsy.

That's not the point, right? The point is if you really want to handcraft Tuzies, it can pay for itself. >> Sure. But okay, coming back to a question of AGI, right? Like do would do you believe in UBI? I think right now is as far as my brain can think it's a system that would pay these people that wouldn't have a job because as a CEO I wouldn't hire someone because oh it's it's a human.

nor would you, by the way. Like, I don't think you give much [ __ ] about that. You You want to take care of your family first. You want to take care of your community after hiring a random someone rather than outsourcing to an AGI to have it done. Um, I don't think guys like you and I will like be out of jobs because we're so competitive and we're wired differently.

We we're wired for competition competition and like just not resting on our laurels. That's 1%. [snorts] >> But I also think that AI would create so much value. And then there's probably the neural link aspect in that. We could have neural link inside us. I think with human magic it could create even something [snorts] higher. Uh I think there will be laws as well preventing AGI from doing X and I think humans will be at the bottleneck of various decisions still right.

What what do you think about that? Um well I mean hiring hiring is really difficult and so um these AI tools give me the ability to let my existing employees level up way faster than they otherwise would which is good for them right they get more responsibility and more experience and and they learn faster and and um and and earn more money than they otherwise would.

Um, and they they get to be part of a a small and tight-knit and extremely effective team that's able to increase its output far faster than it would be able to if it just had to do everything by hand, you know, including calculations and spreadsheets, right? So, it's just kind of the nature of >> you're you're recruiting like the the >> Yeah, but I mean the at the at the cutting edge of your economy, you're going to necessarily be employing 1 percententers.

I mean like Yeah. [laughter] Like it's it's not the case that that you can go out and develop new technology just by like, you know, throwing darts at a crowd, right? like let's let's let's not [ __ ] ourselves here. Okay. As far as UBI goes, um I think it's an idea that a lot of people have reached for over time and I think in the past I was I was much more amendable to the idea, but but uh currently I I'm deeply concerned that um it it creates an incentive structure that that actually doesn't help bring out the best in humanity.

Um and and it's it's just too easy to pay annoying people to go away. Um, and so I don't I don't think that UBI is the is the answer to the problem. I think I think um well I mean aside from like in the current world UBI is just physically not possible, right? It's just not possible. But but even if it was possible, I think I think the um the better the better future to look forward to is is one where um but basically humans can can find self-actualization doing a wide variety of things that are interesting to them.

While the drudgery, boring, [ __ ] timewasting, life-wasting jobs are abstracted away by AIs that that do them to the extent they need to be done at all, that the e economy is productive enough that uh that that the imbalance between income and the cost of goods and services is such that that with essentially a wide range of incomes, you can you can purchase the the things

that you and I take for granted at relatively low prices. Um and and so the effect is that you that pretty much everyone is universal high income. Um but not not universal high income in the form of like Donald Trump writing us all checks to feel good about ourselves. Uh universal high income in the sense that um that you can you can draw income or salary doing doing wide variety of interesting things that's adequate to to more than meet your more than meet your needs.

And that's actually much much more productive vision of the future, >> right? >> Or some kind of value coin, right? like in which you would be reward. we could calculate the value that you add to the greater group like utilitar utilitarian style and then you could be paid off that even if it's not an economical activity we could calculate all of that biologically with sensors right I think that would make sense that would >> um I mean that's the Soviets tried that in the 60s right the Soviets attempted to use early computers and

linear programming to um to generalize labor theory value to um to basically calculate the the true production cost of um and therefore price of everything in their economy. Um and it didn't work for a couple of basic reasons. Um but it turns out that that markets are actually the mechanism you need to to balance supply and demand uh in a distributed dynamic sense within an economy.

And so yeah, I think I think we already have a mechanism for uh for for like economically deciding what the value of particular activity is. And it's just it's called a market. Do market need supervision every now and then? What's your >> market? Markets have failures. Of course, markets have failures and markets need regulations in order to maintain a fair fair and open% free market 20% intervention.

[snorts] >> If if we did 8020 for the rest of humanity, I think that'd be just fine. Uh unfortunately, in in the in the anglophone uh west in particular, um it's trending more towards 50/50 and and that's obviously unsustainable. Casey, thanks for being on again for a round two. I'll let you go to your other activities. Where can people find out more about you?

[snorts] >> Uh, you can find me posting on X. I'm at CJ Hanmer there. So, uh, we've had to fun to chat. Thanks for coming. The