Energy economics and rocket science with Casey Handmer
I'm joined this week by my buddy Casey Handmer of Terraform Industries. The conversation starts with catching up non-specialists to the exciting revolution in solar energy which happened over the last 15 years (and continues to make almost incredible progress), and then touches on space, organizational design, and the moral case for increasing energy consumption.
[Patrick notes: I add commentary to transcripts, set out from the rest of the text in this fashion.]
Sponsor: This podcast is sponsored by Check, the leading payroll infrastructure provider and pioneer of embedded payroll. Check makes it easy for any SaaS platform to build a payroll business, and already powers 60+ popular platforms. Head to checkhq.com/complex and tell them patio11 sent you.
Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(00:25) Casey’s startup: Terraform Industries
(00:48) The rise of solar power
(02:19) Solar power vs. traditional energy sources
(05:18) Economic and industrial impacts of solar
(09:02) Challenges in aviation and energy
(19:39) The role of policy in clean energy
(22:30) Sponsor: Check
(23:41) Casey’s experience at NASA and JPL
(34:17) SpaceX, Elon Musk and the US private space actors
(44:05) Solving problems and workplace politics
(45:10) Spreadsheets create their own reality, film at eleven
(48:35) Organizational challenges at NASA
(49:40) Challenges of innovation in bureaucracies
(51:07) The role of NASA and government in innovation
(55:25) The housing theory of everything
(58:36) Empowering employees for success
(01:02:41) Terraform Industries’ vision
(01:07:28) The future of energy and carbon neutrality
(01:10:52) The importance of hydrocarbons in aviation
(01:15:47) Challenges with hydrogen as a fuel
(01:18:21) Development of synthetic fertilizers
(01:21:54) Environmental considerations on industrial progress
(01:22:55) Wrap
(Many of the above section headers are available via Ctrl-F if you'd like to skip to that part in the transcript. Sadly, for technical reasons, I can't reliably hyperlink them everywhere this shows up.)
Transcript
Patrick: Hi everybody, I'm Patrick McKenzie, better known as Patio11 on the internets, and I'm here with my buddy Casey Handmer.
Casey: Hi. So great to be here.
Patrick: Thanks very much for coming. So, Casey, what are you doing these days?
Casey’s startup: Terraform Industries
Casey: These days I'm mostly preoccupied with running my startup Terraform Industries, where we're making cheap, green synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air.
The rise of solar power
Patrick: You've had a blog for a number of years and have written extensively on solar power, which is a topic that I know relatively little about. And so I brought you on the show to talk more and help more people “get solar pilled.”
Let's start with the obvious fact: we are installing an absolutely gobsmacking amount of solar power as a result of the cost versus benefit curve of it, bending in an extremely favorable way over the last couple of years. What just happened, and why?
Casey: If you look at the data, going back to the 1970s, solar has followed a pretty good learning rate, even since then. But obviously, exponentials are exponentials, and progress accumulates. I remember when I first tuned into this 10 or 12 years ago thinking, “wow, quite a lot of solar [has gotten] installed.”
For reference, last year I think we had about 460-something gigawatts globally, which is very close to a one megawatt array per minute being put down. That seems like a large number right now, but I can assure you all in 5 or 10 years time, it'd be like, “Wow, that's tiny. That's like less than a week's worth of installation to put down 500 gigawatts.”
At this level, we actually have to start thinking about deployment in terms of overall land use compared to things like forestry and agriculture and grazing of animals — just in terms of the quantities of land consumed and the scale of the industrial machine required to perform those operations. This is no longer, you know, a couple of people running around on a rooftop putting in some solar panels so you can feel good about yourself in summer. This is actually kind of a major project to drastically upgrade the energy capacity of our entire civilization, which I find super exciting. I find it super compelling.
[Patrick notes: Solar and AI were two technologies that were “just around the corner” for several decades, with that being a Lucy-takes-the-football-from-Charlie-Brown story frequently enough, that I was mildly surprised when they actually happened.
When I graduated university in 2004 prices were approximately $4.35 per watt. That was a 5X improvement over the course of my life, and forecasting another 5X improvement didn’t seem too compelling. They’ve fallen by a factor of twenty and are still dropping.]
Solar power vs. traditional energy sources
Patrick: The thing that's often missed about solar panels when you put them on the ground is that they are hundreds to thousands of times more energetically and economically productive than farming, which is typically how we dispose of large amounts of land in order to create energy that we can use.
And of course, 200 years ago, most of the energy we consumed was in the form of food. Today it's about 1 percent or less. We kind of have grown the non-digestive part of our energy economy quite substantially.
But in some ways, that growth is limited by the scarcity of reduced chemicals like hydrocarbons and coal and so on in the crust, so we're going to have to go back to something like plants. But the nice thing about silicon, solar photovoltaics, and similar technologies is that the productivity is hundreds to thousands of times higher. So you can actually support the next step of our major civilization development on much less land and with much less intense demands, you know — irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, etc. — than farming requires.
Patrick: It's sort of fortunate for humanity that we kind of co-grew up with a number of plants that have photosynthesis as one thing they do. Unfortunately, since plants only do photosynthesis as one thing they do, versus like reproducing and resisting pests and blight (and similar), they're actually not that good at photosynthesis relative to an engineered system, and we can simply choose to engineer photosynthesis better.
Casey: That’s right.
Patrick: We've had photovoltaic cells for a very long time now as a technology. In startup land, we deal with exponential growth curves with respect to things like user adoption of the internet or various companies on it, etc. But I very rarely hear about hard physical technologies where there is an exponential curve sustained over decades in terms of actual price/performance of the physical artifact. Why has that happened in photovoltaic cells and has not happened in — I don't know — steel smelting?
Casey: It kind of actually has, if we want to get super detailed here. The obvious comparison (or point of comparison) would be silicon chips, essentially Moore's law — similar technology. And actually solar itself turned a corner in about 2009 when the scale of the industry became so large that it became necessary to invest in solar photovoltaic specific silicon refineries rather than just consuming the seconds from the silicon chip industry.
At that point the learning rate almost doubled, which is in some ways why a lot of the policy papers written in about 2010 have got their timelines wrong by a factor of 10. We're already at prices now that are at the very tail end of curves that went out to 2150 or 2200 that were written down 10 or 15 years ago, which is super exciting.
Economic and industrial impacts of solar
Casey: But actually just more generally, if we think about the development of mass production, and the learning rates and cumulative learning rates and so on, we've seen this over and over again. We've seen the cost of producing ships and planes and tanks in World War II drop exponentially by multiple orders of magnitude. We've seen the cost of mass producing automobiles under Henry Ford drop from something like $12,000 down to about $200 (in those days’ money), over the course of roughly 20 years of development of manufacturing technology.
And actually just as far as metals go, I’m continually flabbergasted by how much bronze we find in burials in Europe from like 3,500 years ago, because in those days, the amount of bronze (which is mostly copper) required to make, say, a two- or three-pound sword would take the equivalent of, let's say, 20 to 100 human days of labor to create. Nowadays, the productivity of our economic system is such that you can generate that amount of copper with the equivalent of like three hours of labor, or something like that.
Patrick: Textiles are another great example of that. Traditional garments used to sometimes embed 3,000 hours of human labor and now can be bought for, like, less than the price of a cheeseburger. And the actual physical artifacts you get, people like to poo-poo a lot on — “oh, t-shirts fall apart almost immediately these days,” — as if we didn't have to repair things made under traditional systems. But we can just pump so much out of industrial processes. (Ah, sorry, digression.)
Casey: No, you're exactly correct. But of course, if we think of the extraordinary garments of the ancient past, actually, the fact that they consumed a lot of labor to produce was part of the point. It's kind of a way of honestly signaling that you have wealth and prestige, to create or commission works that require a lot of effort to produce.
There are still things today which require decades of labor by many, many, many extremely talented, special, unusual, rare people. And that's kind of where you see modern day vanity projects kind of going, because it's more in the direction of rocket launch companies or private jets or fancy cars or flying cars or whatever the case may be.
Patrick: Movie producing, I think probably falls into that, although with a compressed timeline, but effectively, you know, multiple hundreds of person-years of extremely specialized labor.
Casey: Yeah, but movie producing mostly self-supports itself, right? As opposed to like a vanity product. Like I say, “vanity is a byproduct rather than the main purpose of Hollywood.”
Patrick: True. Although I do think it's important to say, we've actually gotten much more effective at things like textile production. Even in the relatively recent past, the United States is young enough to still have a Navy that has relatively consistent records over the entire national run of history, which is not true of many older nations.
And it used to be the case that there was a particular salary — I think it was like 20 present-day dollars in the 1800s — for employing a sailor in the Navy. And then the Navy also budgeted three months of salary for the outfit they were going to put the sailor in; one of the two outfits that they would requisition for him.
[Patrick notes: I sometimes wonder at how things get stuck in my head, but “Oh yeah, enlisted sailors roughly halfway between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War got about $15 a month in wages.” is in the historical record. The industrial revolution brought the cost of a uniform from a month of wages to a week’s in only about 50 years. At the risk of stating the obvious, fabric is not a material component of the net worth of enlisted sailors in the modern era.]
Patrick: Nobody in the modern world only owns two outfits anymore, and they certainly don't require three months of salary to buy. And that was for people near “the lowest possible rung of the Navy, swabbing decks, etc.” We are not making a conspicuous consumption of labor. We are not simply diverting rent into the industrial complex — although probably a little of that went on because nothing ever changes. But it was just like, “Oh, you know. Wool coats are expensive to make when you do it by hand,” and they get vastly less expensive in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
Casey: You're absolutely correct. Yeah. Completely.
Challenges in aviation and energy
Patrick: To push back a little bit about something you said, though: I do understand that between Kitty Hawk and World War II, we were able to industrialize creating airplanes as a process, and the implicit cost per airplane fell by orders of magnitude, but it doesn't seem like we've continued that over the course of the last couple of decades.
The newest model, the Boeing-whatever, is a much better technical artifact than what came off the line in World War II, but costs many, many billions of dollars, where, if we had seen that curve continue, it would cost, like, car money and be about as effective as it is currently. What's the magic trick with solar that causes this exponential to just continue, and do we think we're approaching a plateau here in terms of price versus performance, or are there still multiple orders of magnitude to go?
[Patrick notes: Boeing makes approximately $34 billion of revenue a year (pg 24) in commercial aviation, which is somewhere on the order of 150 planes. Military aircraft can be substantially more expensive (stealth bomber: ~$4 billion apiece in current dollars) and, due to quirks in how procurement works, the number quoted upfront is very rarely the price the taxpayer ends up paying once the program is delivered a few decades later.]
Casey: Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, some of our friends are involved in speculating about the stagnation hypothesis. I think it's certainly true to say that in general aviation worldwide and also in the United States (which kind of led general aviation), a series of unfortunate policy choices essentially sucked the air out of the room, as far as continued innovation on general aviation aircraft — which I'm actually pretty upset about — but in many ways the key missing piece there is a mass producible turbine engine.
In the case of the automotive industry, we figured out how to produce precision machined four- or six-cylinder engines for $5,000 or $10,000, including gearbox and so on. And we kind of almost have that technology in some cases with piston powered aircraft. But if you want a turbine, like a Pratt and Whitney PD six (roughly one megawatt turbine), this typical thing that was on a Cessna Caravan or something, you're talking like 1 to 2 million dollars for one of those new. You kind of substitute the mechanical engineering problem for a material science engineering problem, to machine or to produce these turbine components that are extremely strong and extremely performant and extremely light and extremely heat tolerant.
If you ever have the opportunity, visit the Dodgers museum in Munich and have a look at the exhibition on aircraft engines from World War II, because it's just a perfect example of what it takes to make a piston engine produce 2000 horsepower, which is relatively straightforward with like two moving parts in a jet, but these things had thousands and thousands and thousands of components. As far as commercial aviation goes, I think that both Airbus and Boeing have made several previous mistakes, as did their various predecessors, as far as their business development went.
On the other hand, I can go out today and buy a brand new Boeing 737 for between $50 million and $100 million, depending on options (the jet engine is typically not included, but kind of in that ballpark), and if you look at the complexity and the sophistication of the engineering that goes into building those things, and then how long they're expected to last and in what conditions, it kind of blows my mind that it's possible at all, right? This is a private company doing something that is extremely, extremely difficult to do.
We typically think that the peak of industrial might might be something like the Falcon 9 reusable rocket or something like that, but really, those cores are still hand-built in a way and to a tolerance that is nowhere near what Boeing is able to achieve when they build their aircraft.
It would be nice though if aircraft were significantly cheaper and faster and better. I think the major obstacle to continued development of extremely high performance aircraft, kind of along the lines of Boeing or the other supersonic jetliners, was an increase in the price of fuel coinciding with, you know, what the hell happened in 1971. Generally speaking, the pricing in of fuel scarcity by global oil markets that occurred about then.
And of course, at Terraform, we want to do something about that long term, but it's extremely difficult to justify the sorts of investments required to build the next generation of aircraft if you're uncertain, or if your customer is uncertain that they can afford to operate them. Fuel prices went up by a factor of between five and 10, which is kind of really bad news if you're in the aircraft business, because aircraft just consume a lot of fuel. There's no way about it.
That said, solar arrays and jet aircraft are obviously quite different in some ways, and the way this is expressed in terms of learning rate — and just to be clear, learning rate is a phenomenological description. It's a curve fit, it's not deterministic or determinative. But typically aircraft learning rate is not quite as good as solar panels or something that's quite a bit simpler to build. You can kind of approximate this in terms of, you know, how many assembly steps are required to produce the final product.
The thing about solar arrays is that — it’s really not very controversial at this point — there is enormous demand to be unlocked if the price comes down, and that enormous demand will result in enormous revenue, which will fund the research and development required to bring the price down.
So there's kind of this virtual cycle going on and has been going on and has really taken off since the Chinese government, in its wisdom, decided to basically make available infinite amounts of money at zero interest for solar manufacturing.
Patrick: That was intensely criticized in the United States and other places as, “oh, China is dumping on the solar markets, etc.”
[Patrick notes: “Dumping” is a term of art in industrial policy. It means, essentially, that China was using government incentives to sell solar panels internationally at far below the true cost to make them, with the end goal of undermining competing nations at manufacturing them.]
Casey: Yeah, they should. I mean, what do you do when someone's dumping, right? You just buy as much of their stuff as you can. Because the more you buy, the more they lose. This is the approach to dealing with Uber subsidizing ride share with venture capital dollars. The more you consume, the worse they do, and then if necessary, sell it back to them.
I think there'd be no harm at all whatsoever to the United States saying, “OK, you want to sell the panels for 9 cents a watt. We will buy as many of them as you can put on ships and we will just stockpile them somewhere until we can get around to deploying them.” Right? These are machines that just have no moving parts, they require no special skills to install, and they just produce wealth — like they just shoot out wealth. Why wouldn't you buy as many of those as you possibly can? I think it's Austin who would say, “promoting supply side growth for manufacturing here in the United States as well.”
[Patrick notes: I think Casy was referring to a mutual buddy, Austin Vernon, who will be coming to a podcast near you in about two weeks. Austin works in petroleum engineering and writes about energy economics frequently.]
Casey: But you know, if the Chinese can do it for 9 cents a watt, there's no law of nature that says the United States can't do it for 9 cents a watt or better. I think an awful lot of people, particularly in the West, have really undersold their convictions when it comes to solving the latest generation of efficient manufacturing or capital efficient manufacturing.
The other part of your question was, “How cheap can solar get?” Obviously this is kind of a tea leaf reading phenomenon, and there's two ways to answer the question.
One is to look at, “What are the price reductions that are already baked in by people who are much smarter than me who are spending trillions of dollars on solar manufacturing investments?” A solar factory takes about three years, three and a half years, from essentially ink on the page to the factory working. And as I said, trillions of dollars have been invested. If you look at the curves involved there, it is easily another factor of two or three baked in, in terms of cost reduction.
Which is great, I'll take it. As far as my business is concerned, at current solar prices we can make money. Any further reductions just help our business [producing artificial hydrocarbons from the air using solar energy].
The other way to ask is you say, “well, from first principles, what is the platonic ideal of a solar cell or a solar panel and how cheap could you possibly make it?” And there, the answer is something like a one hundred micron thick layer of mostly plastic with a very, very thin layer on top of that (a supported layer of silicon that, physically speaking, doesn't need to be much thicker than about 20 microns). Then you start running the math on, you know, “okay, well, how much does it cost to refine a ton of silicon and how much does it cost to produce a ton of high density polyethylene, polypropylene, or UV-stabilized-whatever, and the various interconnects and bits and pieces?”
And it ends up being kind of agriculture money. Like I think I will live long enough to see solar cost far below one cent per watt. Does that sound about right? I think even cheaper than that. I think we’ll get down to like $10,000 per megawatt for the installed cost.
[Patrick notes: That is a penny per watt.]
People will listen to this and they'll think “that sounds crazy. That's insane.” The installed cost per megawatt is on the order of $200,000 or $300,000 in the United States.
Patrick: For people who don't necessarily think in terms of megawatts — play the SimCity game — like a large nuclear power plant is, what, 100 megawatts or so?
Casey: A large nuclear power plant is typically 1 gigawatt to 1.4 gigawatts per reactor, and then in most nuclear power plants, multiple reactors are installed next to each other. The largest on earth are about 10 gigawatts, so one megawatt is tiny compared to that.
In terms of land use, it's about five acres today, but we're actually seeing significant improvements in land density coming down the pipe. I'd say it's more like two to three acres per megawatt in the next few years, which is interesting. One megawatt of power can quite easily supply the power needs — with some batteries and stuff — of 10 to 20 homes.
But can you imagine trying to feed 10 to 20 homes worth of people on five acres of land?
Patrick: For people who aren't in real estate or farming, five acres of land is like a particularly large backyard. So, no, it is not possible to, to feed people on five acres of land.
[Patrick notes: 217,800 sq ft or 20,234 sq m. I’m aware that many people living in cities do not consider this a realistic back yard size. I spent more than a bit of my life not living in cities.]
Casey: Well it's not unprecedented, but you would have to be farming all the time. Like everyone involved would have to be farming all the time.
Patrick: And you'd have to accept your diet looking like a subsistence farmer's diet versus the many varied kinds of things that you get in the modern economy.
Casey: Yeah, rice, beans, corn, and some other stuff. No meat. Maybe a chicken or something. And yes, you would have hungry seasons for sure. Let's not do that.
Essentially, when we think of paving the world with solar, maybe we'll just be like rolling sheets of plastic out over the surface to create power. And this sounds like an ecological catastrophe in some ways, but it's actually much, much better for the ground than the other things we do with it, like pouring concrete on it.
And if after 30 years, we finally get fusion right, you can just roll the plastic up and, you know, put it in a hole, and it goes back to being the ecologically and economically unproductive desert that it was in the first place.
I think this is wildly underrated when it comes to solar installation: its ecological impact is like less than 1 percent of legacy power generation.
In the United States, thousands and thousands of people are dying every year as a result of lung damage from pollution from legacy coal plants that we could displace today if we got out of our own way and installed the solar panels, but we won't.
[Patrick notes: The rule of thumb historically was that coal in the United States killed a few tens of thousands of people per year, almost all through disease incident to air pollution rather than through direct industrial accidents. Good news: we cut that extremely substantially with air scrubbers and turning off coal plants. Bad news: this is the way one writes the good news: “For example, the Keystone facility in Pennsylvania was one of the deadliest power plants over the period studied. It was associated with more than 600 deaths per year on average before installing emissions scrubbers. After scrubber installation, that number dropped to 80 per year.”
Energy economics is, ultimately, a societal discussion about how many buildings your nation should have in it which kill 80 people a year. Phrased that way, you’d think the moral case for “Uhh how about we not do that” is extremely compelling, but you see, that would require pissing off a large, politically influential industry which sees energy transformation as an affront to their way of life, and also pissing off the coal industry.]
Casey: And so thousands of people will die every year, like a 9/11 every few months, because the environmental protection act put into law 50 years ago by Nixon is being weaponized against installation of solar and wind. This is like ‘shooting both feet off with a gun before breakfast’ level stupidity. It's unbelievable.
The role of policy in clean energy
Patrick: It is amazing how many times I talk to people who are in various forms of clean energy and say that “We think we have the political cover to get clean energy done in Texas. We know we don't have the political cover currently to get clean energy done in California” because environmentalists didn't wake up this morning and declare like, “I will die before I let you do a clean energy project in the neighborhood.”
[Patrick notes: For a public discussion that tracks some private discussions, see generally Public Citizen, which has necessary facts to draw the conclusion but presents them with opposite emotional valence. In their point of view, California is succeeding in solar generation and Texas is failing because California bet big on distributed generation (i.e. rooftops systems) and Texas bet big on utility-scale generation (i.e. fields of solar panels). This is downstream of the political economy of land use in California.
Californians will, not to mince words, experience a few rough decades during which their Texan cousins will painfully and accurately joke about how terrible their environmental record in energy production continues to be.]
Patrick: And yet, they very much do have, you know, fingers-on-levers of power, which have created a complex interworking system of regulations that effectively makes it impossible to do this project in California and very possible to do it in Texas. And this isn’t me attempting to make a partisan point or anything. This is literally people who have put their professional reputations and money on the line and want to bring clean energy to market [who] are like, “I have to go where the place that I'm actually legally allowed to operate is.”
[Patrick notes: If you are interested in that subject, some further reading material for you.]
Casey: Yeah. And the record is clear. I think Texas surpassed California last year in terms of solar installations, and the gradient of the lines is off by about a factor of 10. So at this point, California will probably never catch up.
It's kind of funny, I live on the West Coast and live in California and there are aspects of Texas’ economic and political sphere that I find quaint at best, but, credit where it's due; they understand that if you want energy, you have to make energy. There's a reason why Texans are more energy rich than almost anyone else on earth — and certainly any other area of that level of population on earth.
And it's just obvious, you know? You walk through a Texas city and you say, “well, this city has its challenges, no doubt. The climate is challenging in some ways compared to coastal California. But you could never fault Texas for being energy-poor. Much the opposite. And I think that people underestimate just how important energy wealth is for wealth overall.
Patrick: I strongly agree on that. I think that there is, in some sectors, sort of a notion that consumption of energy is intrinsically this sinful thing that we should minimize. But the history of human progress is getting more efficient energy delivered at lower cost that we can use to unlock various other things that we want, which would have been flatly impossible using prior production modes of energy.
When you describe solar panels as this essentially magical technological device that spits out wealth, the important thing is not merely to replace the current energy load in the United States with a greener form of that and shave off some carbon at the margin. The important thing is like, “If we hypothetically had, like, five times as many electrons as we currently have — or ten times as many electrons — what interesting things could we do with those electrons on the margin?”
And currently one of the examples is like, “Well, it turns out that we have a technological substrate that converts electrons into intelligence, maybe we can drive down the cost of intelligence in various applications.”
[Patrick notes: This clicked for many people before it clicked for me, for which I thank Leopold’s Situational Awareness publication. See the subsection on energy.]
Casey’s experience at NASA and JPL
Patrick: So, I'm definitely a software guy, and I'm from the part of systems engineering that I seize up whenever I look at hardware. Networks, cooling, electricity, etc. are kind of scary to me. You, importantly, are not that. And so when you were talking fairly confidently about the history of development of engines — you previously worked at an institution that has the word ‘propulsion’ in the name, if I remember right?
Casey: Yeah, my previous job was at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for about four years. NASA is obviously the U.S. space agency, amongst other things, and it operates about 12 to 15 different centers in different parts of the United States. The one in Southern California is JPL, and JPL — well, they all have their own specialties — and JPL’s specialty is deep space robotics.
Patrick: I have a cousin who does this as well, but I’m endlessly fascinated with [this]. So, as someone who is literally a rocket scientist, what do you actually do over a multi-year period of a career as a rocket scientist?
Casey: Well, I don't want to oversell myself here. JPL is a very large organization, there's several thousand people who work there. JPL's org chart is a matrix org. So basically, people are organized into divisions and directorates and sections and groups according to their subspecialty.
And then when projects come through — the money kind of comes through the project office, but the project office is typically just a few people — and they will go out and say, “well, we need these hundred different specialties to build this spacecraft,” and they'll go and talk to those section managers and group supervisors, find the people, put together the team, authorize the charge numbers, and get [it] going.
It's no secret that I find aspects of this process quite amusing and extremely inefficient. But at the same time, one must recognize that JPL routinely takes crazy, impossible ideas from napkin-sketch to launched in six years, and there was no other space agency on earth that could do anything like that, even in eight or nine years which is kind of more typical for other development cycles. That said, there's definitely room for improvement, but it's a very special place, I'll say that. There's no place like JPL, it's really quite remarkable.
Patrick: One thing that I sometimes say about the breakdown in terms of society's advantages with government and government-supported organizations versus private industry is, when you think it's almost impossible to do something at all that will largely end up being a government competence [thing] like, “can we shift a hundred tons of material to an arbitrary flat surface anywhere on the surface of the earth in the next 48 hours?” — the United States military can do that. And very few, no — no private actor can do that essentially.
And then when you want to scale it to absolutely stupid amounts, it starts becoming a private sector problem. A hundred tons is a very quaint number to Amazon, and Amazon can only operate within an existing logistical network, but within that existing logistical network, pick the number of zeros you want, Amazon can deliver it essentially.
Casey: Like take Coca Cola, for example. I run a company, I interview people all the time, and I've interviewed a couple of people who've worked at Coca Cola and it's this kind of “world unto itself.” They have their own logistics distribution network that operates in every country on earth. I've been in the backwoods of Mongolia and I've found Coca Cola. Not just like Coca Cola to drink, but a store with Coca Cola branding and stickers attached to it. And you're like, how did that happen?
Patrick: This is where our society chooses to deploy its competence and then gets the results from it. Someone once made the point, and it's kind of a desultory point, but needs to be said that, there are places, like poor regions in India, rationing systems with regards to distributing food, and without those systems people go hungry, and people say, “we can't seem to deliver the rations and yet there's a Coca Cola reliably available in every freaking village. What's the difference?” And that's a topic for another day, but it is a useful thing to notice about the world that it is very difficult to find a place that is so deprived that Coca Cola cannot successfully deliver Coca Cola there.
Casey: Yeah. It’s also infinitely shelf stable, which helps. [It] wouldn't surprise me if in 5,000, 4,000 years our descendants dig open whatever our equivalent of the pyramids are and find a perfectly drinkable can of Diet Coke sitting there.
Patrick: So you mentioned you had some friction with respect to how NASA operates. Any you want to dig into at the moment?
Casey: Yeah, of course. So, I'm being politely asked to dump on a former employer.
Patrick: Only if you want to.
Casey: I will comply. The thing about Patrick [is] it's impossible to refuse. As an important caveat, I should state that in retrospect it is obvious to me that I have had (and have had for a long time), a very peculiar condition, which made me rather difficult to work with and could only effectively be treated by becoming an entrepreneur.
Some people might call this a curse or, you know, the gift of being able to see things as they could be or whatever. And certainly when I started at JPL, I'd just come out the back of Hyperloop One, which was a kind of a crazy, hardware-focused startup based in LA doing impossible stuff, and just extremely crazy and disorganized in all kinds of weird and wonderful and also quite detrimental ways.
So you go to JPL and you're like, “oh, wow, they have systems and systems and systems, and they've got processes and layers and all kinds of stuff.” And now I understand why those are there because they are essentially organizational scar tissue. And if you are in the business of launching robots to other planets and those robots don't work, the scars run deep and they run hard for a very, very long time.
Patrick: One thing which is virtually cliché in those neck of the woods is that all the regulations are written in blood, which is extremely true with respect to the development of aircraft and etc.
Casey: Yes. Well in this case, few people died, but you know, maybe a lot of careers. So one of the challenges with some of these extremely ambitious projects, especially in 2024, when it seems impossible for these organizations to do things quickly is that you run into a kind of a similar problem that you get — I think you've spoken about in Japanese managerial circles — which is [that] you don't get your chance to run your mission until you're on the verge of death, and then the mission itself might take 10 or 12 years to actually run. So you're sure as hell not going to get a second chance.
Basically every mission that I'm aware of that JPL flew in the last few years, essentially the PI delayed retirement, just to basically see the mission finish. And then as soon as it was launched, they retired, which means: “finally someone knows how to do this — oh, they've retired.” It's crazy, it's crazy.
Patrick: It’s essentially a mode of industrial organization where you give someone 30 years of apprenticeship, starting essentially the moment they get out of school, to get to the point where they have a sufficient understanding of the complex system — less of orbital mechanics and more of how to work the organism that is the United States federal government to successfully put together a novel new engineering project, where creating that novel new engineering project is like plus or minus 5 to 10 years.
And then like the physical reality of “it needs to go from point A to point B.” Delta V is the harsh mistress that it is. So after we push ‘go’ it will be 10 years until we stop receiving useful data from this. And then you sum up those numbers and human lifespans are what they are. That is the entire length of a career. There is no do over.
Casey: So there's a lot of risk aversion. Now, one of my hobby horses is that JPL should run their programs in a more serial way. And actually, aspects of the Soviet Venus exploration program were done this way, for example.
So what you would do instead of every 10 years trying to get the band back together and build a copy of the old rover and put some new instruments on it, you just say, “for the same funding we will hire a few more technicians and we will continually produce Mars rovers. And every two years, every two and a half years, when the launch windows line up, we will launch one. And if your instrument's not ready, that's fine, you have a shot next time around. But the rover’s going, the train is leaving the station.”
And someone else's instrument can jump in. There's always kind of a limited budget there. And then the engineering organization gets to work continuously on this product and they can push out new revs and so on. And so you end up with this much more hardware-rich model, and people know they have a second shot, or they can be like, “oh, well, I want to fly this instrument, but it's not quite ready, so I'll fly a simpler version of that instrument that's less risky. And then we'll be able to iterate on that instrument three or four times over the course of my career.”
Patrick: This is effectively how the automotive industry works, where the automotive industry is priced in for a lot of reasons, if there's going to be a new model year every year for the next several decades. So if you are an engineering lead working on a particular component that's going to go on the dashboard or support the drivetrain or similar, and [you’re] like, “oh, shoot, engineering schedules are what they are. I'm going to slip schedule by six months.” You have a very unfortunate meeting, but the upshot to that unfortunate meeting is like, “okay, we slip it out of this model year, we make some amount of efforts to take it out of the plans.
You've just created an enormous amount of work for some of their engineers in the building, but we still intend to ship your thing next year and your career does not go down in disgrace just for missing one shipping milestone, where[as], if you get like one shot, one opportunity where physics actually allow you to shoot the thing off, and you don't hit shooting the thing off…
[Patrick notes: If one happens to be in the social situation of being a white man of a certain age who routinely goes to karaoke with Japanese people you have to get good at at least one Eminem song, and Lose Yourself is the most fit for purpose. It’s also probably the best startup song. “Nervous but on the surface he is calm and ready.”]
Casey: Yeah, we have this kind of insane situation where a lot of our operations on Mars depend on orbiters to relay information and those orbiters — some of them are very, very old. They could just die at any time and there's no money in the budget to put more orbiters there.
Although I think that U.S. private sector now has the capability to do data relay satellites, and I think if you ask the right person the right question with the right number of zeros attached, that problem could be solved extremely quickly. There is a bit of “not invented here” going on, of course.
SpaceX, Elon Musk and the US private space actors
Patrick: We're subtweeting a little bit on U.S. private sector. It's essentially SpaceX and the Elon Musk industrial complex. I think there's a lot positive and negative you could say about that gentleman, but, descriptively speaking, a stupid portion of all of humanity's access to the solar system was downstream of, like, one executive deciding to devote his life to that problem.
[Patrick notes: In art imitating life, if you play Terra Invicta, a strategy game about humanity’s response to alien invasion, and are insufficiently skilled at the game to build up “boost” capacity to move material to Earth’s orbit early enough for your “boost” to arrive sufficiently early to bootstrap your space economy and survive through the game’s middle and end stages, the game will cheat to help you out. The form of that cheat will be an unsolicited DM from an unnamed tech billionaire who happens to have a nation-state of “boost” lying around and thinks you should a) use it and b) start getting serious about your space program immediately. That event was the hardest I have ever laughed at a technical artifact telling me “skill issue, bro.”]
Patrick: And I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say, if you summed up the accomplishments of, make a ranking of all humans and sum up the next, I don't know, 10,000 people, he probably outpulls the next 10,000 in terms of objective metrics like, “How much payload has this person put in orbit in the last 12 months?”
Casey: Yeah, on that metric, certainly. I think there's actually a lot of strength beneath the surface. But I also believe — and you and I both know people that it doesn't matter how exclusive your leadership conference or something is — it seems to me that whenever you get in the room, it's always power law distributed. There's no apparent ceiling on leadership capacity.
Elon evidently decided he was going to devote the rest of his life to solving this problem and actually went and did it, and the results speak for themselves. Not everyone can do that, obviously.
And it is kind of a thing that whenever everyone starts talking about the U.S. space private sector, they'll be like, “It's private space actors like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin Orbit and Firefly and so on.”
And it's kind of an unfortunate truth that in many ways it's really SpaceX and then maybe a few footnotes or something after that. The capacity of that organization is difficult to comprehend. I do not understand, and I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about it; why it is so much more successful than any other organization approaching problems of similar magnitude.
[Patrick notes: SpaceX accounts for 45% of all global launches and 80% of ones from the U.S. That other 20% includes plucky startups and passion projects, such as NASA.]
Casey: For example, there are dozens of companies that have been set up to attempt to build rockets that are essentially copies of the Falcon 1 or possibly the Falcon 9. These companies are founded by people who worked at SpaceX for many years, who literally built the first generation of rockets. When they did the Falcon 1, they were figuring it out, in many ways, for the first time. Now they've learned a lot of the hard lessons. Take those with them, go do the next thing.
In many cases, these companies have raised significantly more money than SpaceX ever spent getting to orbit. They are staffed with all stars from SpaceX, and yet, few of them seem to have crossed the threshold into a real business. Some of them have achieved orbit once or twice, which is kind of remarkable in itself. Like that's very, very hard to do.
Patrick: It's one of the canonical, difficult-to-cheat problems in the world.
Casey: No, you cannot fake your way to orbit. Yeah.
Patrick: Physics doesn't let you cheat. Either you achieve orbital velocity and a long list of other requirements… or you don't. There is no partial credit. There is no ‘pass go.’ Partial credit is literally, your thing blows up on the landing pad but doesn't kill any people.
Casey: Yeah, it's a good example of something that's impossible to fake. I think North Korea tried to fake it once or twice, but Jonathan McDowell shot them down.
So, I guess the core of my opinionation on JPL and NASA is that their process-improvement process wasn't very good — or actually, more precisely, did not exist.
You would end up doing things that were objectively insane, because someone once thought that was a good idea and wrote it down. And now it's impossible to delete that process. Individually, these things would be annoyances or irrelevant, but cumulatively, there were tens of thousands of them and it's impossible for any one person to even have an initial familiarity with what they all are.
So generally speaking, what happens as you're developing a project is you say, “I want to do this, this, this, this, and this.”
And then all these people come out of the woodwork and say, “well, I'm familiar with 2 or 5 percent of this corpus, and you just violated every possible rule in the worst possible way, find some other way of doing it.”
And you're like, “ah, no!” So what I've sometimes alluded to on Twitter or on X or whatever, is that, I think in four years, I was formally reprimanded five times, which I actually, in retrospect, feel that it should have been a larger number.
One of my friends is Pete Worden, who was the former director of NASA Ames. He wrote the self-licking ice cream cone paper a long, long time ago, describing this exact problem. And his thing was, he said, “proceed until apprehended.” Which I think is the correct approach here. So anyway, I got in trouble five times.
[Patrick notes: A self-licking ice cream cone is a human system which has utterly lost the plot. In the corollary to Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy, the system’s goals have become self perpetuation to the active exclusion of the mission.]
Casey: I don't know if I can go into infinite detail on all of them, but I will give one example, which is: I did, like a lot of JPLers, a lot of work outside of my section or outside of my group, for other people. And I built up something of a reputation for someone who could solve certain kinds of problems extremely quickly, which is sometimes very advantageous.
The major problem is that at JPL, you need to have charge numbers and accounts to charge your time to. And there's quite a bit of administrative overhead to obtaining those numbers. So they tend to be available in allotments of at least three months, typically six or 12 months, FTE (full time equivalent) labor.
And what this means is that for someone like me, who specializes in taking problems that other people might take months or years to solve and finding ways to solve them in days, you cannot charge a fair market rate for solving that problem. You can only charge the time that you consume, which meant that I had to spend almost all my time doing business development, which is to say, finding new accounts to solve, which is fine. I got to work with a lot of really cool people and [on] a lot of very interesting projects.
But on one occasion, my group supervisor at the time, whose formal responsibility was to make sure that there was full employment under the JPL Politburo, basically found me some work helping out a colleague who I actually already knew.
I was familiar with this project already, a super cool project. It was like figuring out how radar pulses emanate from inside the moon as a result of impact from cosmic rays, and then get refracted through the surface of the moon (which is quite lumpy and bumpy), and then fly out into space and in some cases intersect an antenna, say in orbit around the moon or the earth.
Then you want to figure out, like, “Given that we detected this radio pulse, can we localize where the cosmic ray that came into the moon came from?” And there's some polarization stuff involved. And in a sense, solving this problem the obvious way would be like the final boss battle. You could almost build a PhD around it.
But I had a few tricks up my sleeve and I figured out how to solve it basically going in reverse. So you start with the field of view of your antenna, you propagate it backwards to the moon, and then you propagate that, basically doing the geometric transformations back into the sky, and then you end up with a very nice statistical spread of where this pulse could have possibly come from. And I didn't invent this, this is standard, like, ‘book of sneaky tricks.’
Patrick: There are so many scientific fields where it's like, actually solving the problem is almost intractably difficult. Cheating, on the other hand, we have a book of things that no one really wants to admit to that are extremely effective cheats. The entire history of AI development up until at least 2018 is this, and then etc.
Sorry, I'm digressing from your story. But what was the amazing sheet that you managed to cross apply to this novel situation?
Casey: Well, ordinarily if you're solving a refraction problem, you would apply Snell's law, which is n one sine theta one equals n two sine theta two, where n1 and n2 are the respective refractive indices of the two materials and theta one and theta two are the angles of the instant ray and refracted ray relative to the respective normal.
This is quite a complicated calculation to do on a surface that's lumpy and bumpy because that normal, you can express it in terms of two angles because it's with respect to a surface.
And you very quickly become extremely muddled up. Speaking from experience, having seen the prior attempts to solve this problem.
But what I knew was that you could actually solve this vectorially. You basically have a point cloud corresponding to a surface, you calculate the normal using a cross product, and then you can essentially start off with a matrix composed of vectors corresponding to propagation rays and polarizations, then perform a series of very elementary linear algebra transformations on these. And you solve the problem in full 3D generality in a vectorized format. So you don't have to go like ray by ray, you just do the entire thing as one big NumPy operation.
[Patrick notes: It is at times like these that I reflect that many people consider me reasonably intelligent, and yet I wonder whether I would have survived the professional career that one goes into if one a) gets a physics PhD and b) avoids the attractive state.]
Casey: I kind of regret, in some ways, that that code remains safely within JPL, because I would like to look at it, I'm quite proud of it. You basically solve the problem, and I seem to remember, like, the code runs in less than a second. And it was kind of neat to do it because, sine theta in small angles and so on has approximations, but the net result because of the respective refractive indices was that we were able to localize the origin of these particles by about a factor of two better than we had previously thought.
But the problem that I got in trouble with for was that I solved this problem too quickly. My boss had said, “Hey, Casey, we need you to solve this problem. And we have six months of funding for you to solve this problem.” But I did not catch the, “we have six months of funding (wink) for you to solve this problem.”
And I just assumed that like all the other problems I was working on, this was a problem that was on the critical path, it needed to be solved as quickly as possible. And in my prior jobs, sometimes at JPL and definitely at Hyperloop, if I'd been given an intractable problem on the critical path and we're already slipping a week per week and standing army cost is $10 million a day, you know, solve this problem quickly, please.
You solve the problem, you work day and night and you solve the problem. And then they say, “Hey, Casey solved the problem. Thank you very much.” And you get a nice squirt of dopamine and they might give you a cash bonus or something like that. You feel good about yourself.
[Patrick notes: It is the routine practice in some corners of the tech industry to have two flavors of cash bonus.
One is awarded substantially annually and considered a variable form of compensation. Its social purpose is, substantially, to smooth over the transition to the tech industry of many people in finance who get the lion’s share of their compensation annually as a bonus and build their professional lives around that. You might reasonably size this at 10 to 20% of annual cash compensation.
The other form of bonus is irregular and not something almost everyone will get in some quantity almost every year. In some places it is called a “spot” bonus. Spot bonuses are generally small relative to the total compensation of technologists; something of the social purpose of them is saying “We expect everyone here to do stellar work regularly, which is why we pay you all so well, and you did more than that, which is why you got this thing that relatively few get.”]
Solving problems and workplace politics
Casey: And the contrast to that was that my boss said, “oh, well now that you've solved the problem you need to find a new charge number; this is a big hassle. I have to keep a lot of people fed here.” — there'd been a reorg, he had a bunch of new people to deal with — “You have to understand that it's very difficult for us to plan if it takes you drastically longer or drastically shorter for you to solve a problem than we thought you should solve.” Which is about as political — he'd been around for a while, he knew how to say this.
But I was like, “wow, I've never been in a place where the skills that I'd spent decades developing would be so radically undervalued.” And at that point I knew: I need to find something better to do with my time.
And there were similar instances that occurred over the years, to this, where, you know, at one point I got in trouble for pointing out that being quoted $140,000 for 20 hours of flight testing was ridiculous because you could buy a whole plane and train a pilot for that much money. But of course that would not be compliant with the rules. Stuff like that.
Spreadsheets create their own reality, film at eleven
Patrick: Mind if I dig into the charge number thing for a moment? So actually I produced a much less impressive engineering artifact than the one that you produced, but had, almost verbatim, that discussion with a senior engineer at my company back when I was Japanese salaryman of like, “You need to understand that when you get work done egregiously ahead of schedule, you both make the rest of us look bad, and also you create additional work for your manager and senior engineers. They now need to retask you on something in a way that corresponds with the way that we do accounting for these things.”
“And so you need to understand as a junior engineer that people in this section work with due deliberation, and if you are blessed with an engineering miracle and the work is done in one week when you had six weeks to work on it, then you need to, like, write some documentation for the next five weeks, or otherwise do some low value task to avoid stepping on other people's toes.”
Casey: Yeah. Same idea.
Patrick: Anyhow, this is not simply because these organizations are hostile to productivity.
Casey: It’s an emergent phenomenon.
Patrick: There was at some point a rationale for this. It's like, “We need to avoid waste, so we're going to track these numbers religiously. We need to avoid misusing the public purse, so we will not allow you to” — well, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, certainly happens, but in principle, you are not allowed to do work on any random project, but charged against account X, because now you are essentially stealing from the American taxpayer to fund your random other project that is not properly authorized by democratic authority.
Casey: I’m having flashbacks.
Patrick: For better or worse, we have this sacred value in the U.S. political system of, you know, we care about a number of things: human lives, freedom, personal liberty, etc. But we really, really, really care about waste in government.
And so we will make trade offs at absurd margins to avoid waste in government while simultaneously understanding there is a tremendous amount of waste in government, but if you do it in a legible fashion, that's almost the worst thing you can possibly do.
It's enormously difficult to have even honest conversations about these tradeoffs, because currently one of the few retrospectives we're doing on the COVID period is, we spent billions of dollars on PPP loans and other sort of COVID stimulus. A lot of that was, misspent, maldirected, resulted in being fraudy, etc..
And very few people want to stand up and say, “Actually, if we spent $10 billion on fraud during the pandemic when effectively the entire United States economy was shut down, we did not spend enough on fraud. We should have been much more aggressive with regards to stimulus.”
[Patrick notes: There is an ongoing debate in the U.S. administrative state on whether it was defrauded for hundreds of billions of dollars. In some quarters, like the Office of the Inspector General, it is believed we are curiously reticent to get to the bottom of a fraud which shocks the imagination. I believe one of the things the state understands but cannot state is that this was an intentional policy choice. We are unwilling to look under the rocks because we know that, if we see at scale what we chose to do, we will be forced to prosecute people who were essentially the normative targets of this policy choice.]
Patrick: I would like to be the pro fraud guy for a moment, and say, “if we had spent a hundred billion dollars on fraud, could we have restarted the economy like two weeks earlier at the margin? Like that would be an obviously good use of $90 billion at the margin.” And, since that trade off is difficult to pursue openly, we largely don't pursue it and end up in these emergent situations that are almost beggar belief in how perverse they are.
[Patrick notes: U.S. GDP in 2019 was $21 trillion; $90 billion is 43 bps of that. You should be willing to spend 43 bps happily to recover ~3.8% of your productivity.]
Organizational challenges at NASA
Casey: It's kind of crazy. One of the important lessons that I learned at JPL — I kind of internalized there — was, there might be even a name for this. It might be like Zipf's law or something like that. But you can take a large group of extremely competent, extremely well qualified, extremely dedicated, extremely aligned people, right?
I’ll just pick a random example. Let's talk about the Columbia space shuttle. Thousands of people are involved in that organization. They all know each other. Their kids all go to the same schools. They're all smart. They're all experienced. They're all qualified. They all want to fly the shuttle safely.
And yet, if you look at the emergent property of the way their org chart fits together, it guarantees that they're going to kill astronauts sooner or later. And actually after the fact, we can say that after 135 or so shuttle flights, only two crews were lost is kind of a miracle. That's like ‘p less than 0.05 level,’ like, we got very lucky.
Challenges of innovation in bureaucracies
Casey: And it's very interesting to me that — you see this all the time, where a bunch of people get together and they decide they want a certain outcome. And just as a result of something to do with Dunbar's number and hairless apes and so on, you end up with — not just they fail, but they achieve the exact opposite outcome that they wanted. The exact opposite. Like across a hundred dimensions, they managed to go completely out the back door. It blows my mind.
So the reason that I bring this up and the way that I want to emphasize my point is that, at the end of the day, JPL and NASA exist as a strategic safeguard and to bolster national prestige. Is it really the end of the earth if they spend a bit too much money on the missions? It's not like they're getting free coffee or anything, but does it really matter?
[Patrick notes: One of my more cynical points of view is that NASA is also an optics-friendly friendly slush fund for defense contractors.]
Casey: The answer is no, I don't think it matters. I think the purpose of the government is to spend slightly wastefully solving really tough problems that private industry is unable or uninterested or unwilling to do.
And necessarily it'll solve those problems at enormous scale with a variety of people of a variety of skill levels. And nailing those all together and making them work is obviously going to be much more complicated and wasteful and difficult than having a startup of six incredibly cracked engineers sitting around a dining table inventing the next great web server technology or something like that. That's just the nature of the beast. Like if you've ever had any interactions with the social security organization or anything like that, that's just how it works.
The role of NASA and government in innovation
Casey: On the other hand, NASA has this idea that they're constantly on the edge of starvation. That despite the fact they have 20 something thousand public servants working for them, despite the fact that their budget is on a year-to-year basis higher than the Manhattan projects budget ever was — which incidentally invented an entire new field of physics and nuclear warfare and built Los Alamos from scratch, and found three different ways of doing uranium enrichment, etc.… Despite all those factors, they claim they have no money and they can't complete these missions, and Veritas gets canceled, Viper gets canceled, Hubble's on its last legs, Chandra is getting canceled, a couple of instruments were taken off Europa Clipper, which is now in final preparations for launch and they found that there's some fundamental problem with it, Boeing can't get their Starliner up, and SLS is this huge problem stalking across the face of NASA.
Patrick: I sometimes wonder whether there isn't a second iron law of bureaucracy where I don't know if in the entirety of recorded human history has a bureaucracy ever said, “We have our funding level established for the year. Actually, it's more than sufficient. We're going to accomplish the goals we set out to achieve, so, can you cut funding by 20 percent for next year?”
Casey: Or, “can we spend this money on something different?” And there are the kind of certain stupid laws restricting the extent to which NASA can lobby for its own purposes. It in some ways launders those ideas through third party groups like the planetary society or whatever to go and do that direct advocacy. Which is fine.
Patrick: And again, there's excellent reasons for that. We don't want the public servants to be self-dealing, and so we prevent them from directly spending tax dollars to advocate for their own pocketbooks, and yet the perverse outcome here is that, instead of getting the honest truth from them, we get a covert ecosystem designed to patch around the inability of them to legally tell us the truth about what they perceive about their area of expertise.
[Patrick notes: The United States strongly prefers that public sector employees attempt to achieve capture of the democratic process only in the blessed way: by having their labor unions successfully advocate for increasing deferred compensation.]
Casey: Yeah, so if you want to know the answer to the question: how is it possible that NASA building a rover to land on the South Pole to basically keep up with what the Chinese have already done of the moon — not the South Pole of the Earth, but the South Pole of the Moon, which has a reasonably basic instrument suite. It’s solar powered, it's due to be landed by a privately developed lander, called Griffin, launched I think on a Falcon 9. Initially budgeted $250 million has blown out to I think something over $600 million at last estimate and probably cost more than a billion by the time it's done — how is that possible?
How is it possible to spend that much money on a small electric car that drives around on the moon? Given that we already know how to do it, given that we've already built moon rovers in the past. We're not inventing space for the first time, right?
The answer to that question is: I do not know of a single instance ever in the history of NASA, certainly my own experience, certainly in the experience of anyone I've ever spoken to there, where innovations to save cost or schedule have ever been recognized, let alone rewarded.
That is the answer. There's practically zero recognition of exceptional performance when it comes to compensation. There's zero recognition of exceptional performance when it comes to promotion, prestige, etc, etc.
Patrick: What does achieve status in NASA? Like what is the thing that you could put in the postmortem of a project that would actually get your back slapped so hard you got bruises?
Casey: There are certainly people at NASA who are extremely well regarded for having done good technical things. And for many people, it's like academia. You kind of get the privilege of working and living with special people and having a kind of an interesting kind of life.
But if you're living in Los Angeles and you've been there for 10 years and you and your spouse both work full-time for JPL, working on all these projects, and mostly it consists of writing grants that get slapped down for no reason, and you can't afford a house, and you can't afford a car that doesn't break down, and you can't afford to have children, right?
At the same time as being told by your seniors who are mostly just people who've been alive for longer than you that, “I don't see what the problem is. When I moved to Lackanyatta in 1943, I bought a house for 12 bucks. And check out my antique car collection. And also I have so much money I could have retired five years ago, but I've chosen not to.” It's insane, right?
The housing theory of everything
Patrick: This is another data point in favor of the housing theory of everything, where so much dysfunction in American society at every level and every institution is downstream of our inability to keep up with the housing demand curve in desirable places.
Casey: I mean, particularly in parts of California, I think that's absolutely the case. But also it's not that JPL with its 2 point something billion dollar a year budget couldn't afford to compensate people, right? They just choose not to.
And they choose not to build an organization that — so here's one of the key problems with organizations I've seen across the board, which is, if you don't make it harder for good people to leave than bad people to leave, right, or if you don't make it easier to fire bad people than to lose good people, what do you think the average quality of your workforce is going to look like in 5 years?
Patrick: Solve for the equilibrium. Yeah, this is very predictable, it happens 10 years out.
You mentioned something offhandedly, but I think this is just a cultural tell. You said, “These people aren't getting free coffee.” If you were a rocket scientist at NASA do you pay for coffee?
Casey: Yes.
Patrick: Oh, my Japanese salaryman has such firm views on this topic because, when the company was going through some financial difficulty, rather than dealing with rank and mismanagement in many places or choosing to avoid the things that we're losing millions upon millions of dollars, we decided to make a prominent sort of bike shedding effort to save costs. And that cost was: we already paid for the coffee, but there were free paper cups in the coffee room.
And management one day, called an all hands meeting and said, “We are making sacrifices where they need to be made. There will be no more free paper cups. That is wasteful. So bring your own mug from home and you can wash it yourself because you're engineers and that is a great use of your time. Or in the alternative, we will take up a collection among the employees to pay for the paper cups now because the company is no longer subsidizing this inefficient use of company resources on disposable paper cups.”
And I think you can just tell a lot about how much an organization wants to win by asking very simple questions like: do your employees pay for coffee?
Casey: It's a legal stimulant. It's crazy. Now, again, there are legal limits. Because actually JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA as an FFIDC. It’s kind of a weird thing. It's a privately run national lab where the facilities are owned by NASA. And there are coffee stores on site where you can go and buy your coffee and it's affordable. They're not gouging.
But at the same time, when I came and set up my business here in Burbank, the first thing I did was I bought the best coffee machine money could buy and I stuck it in the room and I deputized someone who knows about coffee, because I don't drink it, to make sure it was always stocked with beans. And thus far we have had two hours of downtime in two and a half years on the coffee machine and thus it shall remain forever.
Empowering employees for success
Casey: We do other things here which are much more in keeping with a fast-charging hardware-based startup. We brought an intern in, I don't know, two months after we got this building — actually brought a class of five interns in — and, all of them, I said, “Welcome to Terraform Industries. Here's your credit card and your Gmail account, and a few other bits and pieces. Buy your desk, buy your computer, buy yourself an office chair; each of you has a project that we will discuss with you in the next day and you will be done in 12 weeks — so you better bloody well be done in eight weeks so you've got time to fix problems and debug and write the report.
“Your credit card has a limit of $10,000; let me know if that's not enough. Get cracking.”
People succeeded variously at this challenge, but a couple of them in particular really said, “Oh, I get it. I'm being asked to manage my own stuff, go as fast as I possibly can, and show what I'm made of — show what I'm capable of.”
I couldn't believe what they achieved. One of these guys, he built our first chemical reactor in six weeks. There were some mistakes along the way, but we were making methane in six weeks. And he’s, like, a rising junior at Berkeley or something. Very, very smart guy.
(Actually you might want to have him on your pod at some point.)
Patrick: It is downright insane how much of an unlock it is: relative to space exploration, or novel forms of physics being invented for Terraform Laboratories, $10,000 is just insane. Not a lot of money. It's not a lot of money in the tech industry either, but we zealously guard the paper cup budget — at some companies, there's a multi-stakeholder signoff required to buy a book with a retail price of $20.
That’s another great question to ask — if a company is rational or not, like, “Is there a process required to sign off on a professional buying a book?” If there is, (1) there was some terrible incident in the past, but (2) they're not making great decisions in the present.
[Patrick notes: I think it was Jason Fried who observed that all organizational processes are scar tissue, and scar tissue forms where you have been cut. Much like the safety regulations are written in blood, corporate governance along the mighty and meek alike is steeped in historical experience. It sometimes lets that blind itself to taking obviously incentive compatible improvements.]
Casey: The thing is like, since I've had 17 people here now, I've been at it for two and a half years — in all that time, I think there was one instance once of someone spending a bit too much on a dinner where they were wining and dining some customers — and even then it wasn’t, like, beyond the bounds of morals.
I was like, that’s one more zero than I was expecting — but you know, in the grand scheme of things, if anything, if I look back I'd say actually still there's too much friction for people to spend money to save time.
Patrick: What a lot of organizations choose is, “To avoid having one somewhat awkward conversation every 20 years, we'll instead paper cut every decision that touches money for the rest of eternity and pay this ongoing productivity tax.”
In the first days of VaccinateCA — like literally in the first hours when we were spinning up servers, etc. — one of the surprising rate limiters on progress there was a team with no legal entity and no money.
You need to at least put down a credit card to buy a service that costs $20 a month and people were, you know, negotiating between each other on like, “OK, I'll take this one. You take that one, because we're all putting these on personal credit cards.” I was watching minutes upon minutes of discussion between engineers going by when our launch window was like 12 hours away and said, “Guys, this is insane. Luckily I work in financial infrastructure; I can create debit cards at will and fund them with my own money.”
[Patrick notes: Stripe Issuing: for when it is shortly before midnight in California and your business owner in central Japan wants to spin up a “company” purchasing card in, oh, three minutes or so. I am a former employee and current advisor to Stripe, which does not feel pedantic about me needing to disclaim that this recitation of a historical fact is not a compensated advertisement, but the FTC might.]
Patrick: I posted in a public Discord server:
“Here is 16 digits for a brand new visa debit card. It has $10,000 in it. There is no approval process. Don't bother getting a receipt. I can paperwork anything later.
Use this anytime you are blocked and stop talking about, like, favor trading, or ‘Maybe I can use my rewards card on that one,’ etc. This does not accelerate the path to actually saving lives here.”
Organizations get choices about whether they make good decisions or bad decisions. Essentially micro-tactical things like reimbursement of expenses, how they do budgeting, how they do accounting — those don't end up being micro in terms of impacts.
Terraform Industries’ vision
Patrick: I've talked too much about VaccinateCA here recently. I would love to talk more about Terraform. So you said you are essentially turning functionally infinite free energy from the sun into various highly dense forms of energy that we can burn in, presumably, various places.
Can you walk us through? Like, I gave the technically inaccurate gloss — what is the more technically accurate gloss?
Casey: Well, that's the basic idea. Obviously there's all kinds of alien technology under the hood, but the key idea is you say, “Well, those Saudis sure seem rich. I would love to have a gas or an oil well in my backyard, but it turns out I lost the geological lottery.”
Well, you won the solar lottery — everywhere that humans live with any appreciable numbers has essentially infinite solar power. Very small numbers of people live at the South Pole.
It turns out if you put a solar array out, now you've got this essentially commoditized machine that produces wealth — well, electrical current itself is not so useful. Maybe you need to do something with it: either transport it to an end user, or use it to charge something, or, in our case, make chemicals with it.
Patrick: This is broadly underappreciated about electricity generation: electricity generation is, if not a hyperlocal market, a local market where one electron 100 miles from you is not fungible with an electron next door even though you would think, like, wires get you from point A to point B.
[Patrick notes: I’m not a crypto fan, to put it mildly, but one person to follow on the centrality of physical location in energy economics is Nic Carter, a crypto VC with a special interest in embarrassing crypto-skeptical criticisms of Bitcoin miner energy use. There are competing claims made about engineering reality, those claims are checkable, and Nic has a track record of being right.
He has a number of publications and podcast episodes about it. “Stranded” energy generation is a particularly interesting topic; see generally this episode.]
Casey: Actually, so if I'm going to drop some very sneaky, spicy things on this pod, one of my most controversial points of view is that all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that's going on about the necessity for permitting reform — so that we can do massive grid expansion in the United States in order to decarbonize the grid — is misplaced. One thing I will say for sure — and I will bet any amount of money to anyone right now — is that the average distance the electron will travel from the point it's generated to the point it's consumed in the future will drop radically.
We will relocalize electricity production, but the average time between the point it is produced and the time it is consumed will increase, because we will switch to using batteries to run a temporal arbitrage instead of using power lines to run a spatial arbitrage on essentially energy abundance and consumption.
In any case, that's kind of besides the point for us. We have to operate in the solar array in order to avoid electricity transport costs; then we make natural gas, and we're working on methanol too. So essentially with our machine, you can live the Saudi dream and have an oil well in your backyard, no matter where you are.
Actually, when I say backyard, I mean a very large backyard. In practice you probably want to deploy these at (at least) hundreds of megawatts, if not thousands of megawatts scale. The good news is there is plenty of latent demand for hydrocarbons, and I think that by the time we are done — in maybe the early 2040s, if we're smart — we will have something like 400 terawatts, which is 400 million units operating worldwide.
That would be enough to essentially bring the global average hydrocarbon consumption up to US levels, which for the developing world in particular would be equivalent to double-digit percentage points of economic growth year over year.
Patrick: Yeah, and it's important to say: contrary to what a lot of people believe about energy consumption, again, it's not merely a cost or a sin that is imposed upon the world; it cannot be the case that the rest of the world gets to current Western standards of living without radically increasing the amount of energy that they consume per year.
So energy abundance is a moral imperative, if you want children to live past the age of five, if you want people to have schools with air conditioning available. If you ever want to just allow people to have nice things — the rest of humanity should have nice things too. Let's get it to them as quickly as possible.
Sorry, got on my hobby horse for a moment.
But 4,000 terawatts, almost an unimaginably large number what's the —
Casey: 400 terawatts — 4,000 would be a stretch.
Patrick: We don’t completely make up numbers on this podcast, like orders of magnitude still matter, but…
Casey: Orders of magnitude, yeah. 400 million units sounds like a lot, but that's roughly comparable to the number of cars and light trucks that are manufactured every year on earth — and those machines in many ways are much more complicated than what we are doing, so I pat myself on the back or like reassure myself: what we're doing is, is crazy, stupid, ambitious, but at the same time, it's not completely unprecedented.
The future of energy and carbon neutrality
Patrick: And there's a bit of a carbon story as well, probably?
Casey: Yeah. So at the end of the day, like, if you're making natural gas or oil out of the air, then you have to get carbon from somewhere — and that carbon comes out of the air, same as it does for trees and plants.
Plants get the carbon out of the air.
You and I and trees and so on — are made of carbohydrates, which are kind of biopolymers made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, mostly — and the hydrogen, oxygen is easy enough to get that from water, which also comes out of the air; need a source of carbon.
Plants by and large don't grow exclusively on coal seams or volcanoes, right? They get the carbon out of the air. So we do that too. The neat thing about that is that it's essentially an unlimited supply — and also if you burn it, you're not putting more carbon in the air.
In fact, if you go and produce a bunch of synthetic natural gas, you are displacing future fracking, in a way, or ongoing extraction.
Patrick: There is some limited but very large amount of carbon, which has been essentially sequestered by amoeba and whatnot under the surface of the earth.
Strategy A for doing for doing energy development is, we take the sequestered carbon, burn it, it goes into the atmosphere and then it stays there — versus strategy B is, “We're going to use the atmosphere as essentially a carbon battery. We are prohibited by the laws of physics from introducing more carbon into the system because you can't simply create matter.”
So take the energy from the sun, put it into carbon as a density-efficient way to store it for a while, burn it at the point of use, suck it back down close to the photovoltaic cells. Keep doing this and, you know, one hopes that it's on net, basically carbon neutral?
Casey: It’d actually be slightly carbon negative because something like 12 to 15 percent of oil turns into petrochemicals and plastics.
Plastics get a bad environmental rap as well, but I think (provided you're using them responsibly and not throwing them in the ocean when you're done) they’re obviously significantly better than many other mechanisms that are being used for the same purposes. Plastics are fabulous.
Patrick: People say that they don’t break down over like huge timescales — and that's an excellent property for an engineered artifact to have, because, like you said, if we ever decide that there is an arbitrary large amount of plastics that are far past their utility to humanity, you dig a big hole and put them in the bottom of it and forget about them for forever. And that works fine.
Casey: Yeah. I work in Burbank here and it's a super fun site, because when Lockheed had a factory here producing aircraft, they did what they did back in the old days — actually, JPL is a super fun, super fun site too. You just disposed of unwanted chemicals by pouring them in a hole in the ground, like, “it's probably fine. Don't worry about it. Obviously we don't do that anymore.
Some plastics can leach certain chemicals, that’s certainly true, but in general disposing of plastics is significantly less troublesome than disposing of almost anything else — disposing of it in a safe and sustainable way. (You could easily recycle them, obviously.)
So yeah, it's carbon neutral. One way of thinking of our economy is that it has certain side effects like keeping humans alive, but mostly what it's doing is just pumping carbon out of the crust and putting it in the air, if that makes any sense.
Really what you want to do is to stop pumping the carbon out of the crust — but you probably can't stop using hydrocarbons because they're extremely useful for all kinds of things.
[Patrick notes: At a certain level of abstraction, POSIWID-style, a plant is a machine which exists to create future generations of machines that convert atmospheric CO2 and sunlight into more plant biomass. Humanity is a machine which, at one point, sourced carbon for human biomass mostly by outsourcing it to plants. Then, we got much more efficient and used hydrocarbons, using plants as a partial transport layer because we can’t digest oil distillates directly. We may soon discover that we have even more exciting, efficient options to turn carbon into human biomass. The factory must grow.]
The importance of hydrocarbons in aviation
Casey: In particular, I'm passionate about expanding consumption of hydrocarbons in aviation and space flight.
Say, “Well, 2 percent of our global oil and gas supply goes into aviation right now, but actually something like less than 1 percent of the world's population routinely flies aircraft” — and flying aircraft is pretty neat, if you to go places and meet people. So what are we going to do about that? Are we going to build a high speed rail network across the entire world? I don't think so.
So aircraft have been pretty much the dominant technological method for delivering stuff from place to place since about 1935 (unfortunately pushing Zeppelins out of business). But it seems to be this kind of broad-scale denial that, like, “aircraft are actually really cool, and pretty amazing!”
Patrick: Weird factors from my personal history result in half of my family, half of my life, half of my soul being on one side of the Pacific versus the other — there are a lot of people in that situation. Aircraft, like, (1) you can't end up in that situation without them, and (2), there's no way to usefully live my life without pricing in a lot of plane flights in the future.
So figuring out how to deliver as much of humanity as possible cheap plane flights with minimal consequences to other values that we care about is a bit of an imperative.
Challenges with hydrogen as a fuel
Patrick: We talked a little bit about accidents of physics and accidents of chemistry. What's the accident that makes hydrocarbons just like absurdly useful relative to, I don't know, hydrogen gas?
Casey: That is a good question.
I think you could probably make an argument that, if hydrocarbons didn't occur naturally on earth, humans may have settled on a different chemical stack for chemical fuel. I think that would be a weak argument though. Carbon as a hydrogen carrier is significantly superior to nitrogen or boron because it can form long chains.
It's also significantly less toxic than ammonia or hydrazine to humans. So I think there’s a reason why, even in the context of building a city on Mars, you would probably pick hydrocarbons there — like natural gas, and probably paraffin, actually — as your main stores of energy.
Patrick: Can paraffin even have a gaseous state? I know a little about chemistry, but it's been a while since AP Chem.
[Patrick notes: Some combination of not speaking English on a regular basis and forgetting this part of my education made me not realize, in the moment, that Casey was speaking about a substance I know better as kerosene.]
Casey: If you make it hot enough, it can, but actually the major advantage of paraffin on Mars is that it doesn't have a gaseous state. You can move fuel around, both inside the hab where it's warm and highly pressurized, and outside the hab where it could be warm or cold and barely pressurized, or almost a vacuum of space.
The set of chemicals which remain liquid with a suitably low vapor pressure and which are not also horrifically toxic to humans is basically nonexistent.
You have a situation where either you have a chemical that remains liquid on the surface of Mars, but inside the it freezes or it boils off and you will suffocate from petrol fumes or vice versa — or you pick paraffin and you basically run it through a 3d printed-style extruder to melt it and then burn it. But actually one of the challenges on Mars is you don't have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, whereas on earth you do.
On earth you can extract enormous energy by combusting reduced chemicals — methane or, or gasoline or whatever it is. Petrol is somewhere in the order of between, 35, and kerosene's a bit more, and natural gas which is 50 megajoules per kilogram, which is just a staggering quantity of energy. Recently I've been on a bit of an exercise kick and I've been carrying water uphill, up a mountain near my house and yeah, I can carry 10 kilos of water uphill or something. It’s not necessarily the most comfortable thing. But having trudged uphill for an hour, I've successfully transported about 35 kilojoules of gravitational potential energy.
The amount of gasoline required to burn to perform that operation is like a shot glass full or something like that. (Laughs)
If you say, “I want to fly an aircraft in the stratosphere for like 15 hours” or something like it, it has to be something with that sort of energy density.
Patrick: Can I dig into one fun little chemistry fact? It might be a fact. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I've learned in talking to aerospace engineers that “low vapor pressure” means one thing:
When you have a very energy-dense substance with high vapor pressure, and you are in an environment that supports human life (i.e. is oxygenated), an open container with high vapor pressure of an energy dense substance is a bomb.
The important thing about paraffin is, at room temperature and with an atmosphere that won't kill you for breathing it, paraffin is not a bomb, and gasoline is not a bomb.
[Patrick notes: This is not a complete set of instructions on how to safely transport gasoline.]
Casey: Yeah. Whereas hydrogen is… you mentioned hydrogen earlier, hydrogen is pernicious. I mean, don't get me wrong, we’re all made of hydrogen ultimately — about two thirds of the atoms in your body are hydrogen by number. But hydrogen as a gas is extremely difficult to work with.
It's almost impossible to liquefy. It's a hard cryogen to liquefy. It's difficult to pump. It's extremely flammable in air. The flammability limits are, like, almost the entire range — I think it's like 25 percent up to 96 percent or something purity in air will combust.
It undergoes a thing called DDT or deflagration detonation transition with almost trivial ease. So if you have a hydrogen fire, it can just decide to detonate — which is to say form a supersonic shockwave which is obviously extremely bad news.
On top of that its flame speed is about 10 times higher than natural gas — which is useful if you're trying to make some sort of air-breathing hypersonic aircraft, but otherwise it's just annoying and scary.
Also, by the way, the flame is invisible in sunlight. Hydrogen fire can be burning under natural light and you won't be able to see it — you can see it at night, but not during the day, because its emission is mostly not in wavelengths visible to the human eye.
Patrick: The good news is, if you can't see the hydrogen fire, it's probably already killed you and so it's a moot point; the bad news is it's probably already killed you. (Laughs)
Casey: Well, it can make a small mess, much, much worse. I didn't get to this point yet, but basically hydrogen always leaks. It leaks like you would not believe. It leaks through valves. It leaks through metals. It leaks constantly. You cannot stop it from leaking. So let's say you've got a small leak in a hydrogen apparatus outdoors.
Hypothetically, actually — this has never happened to us, fortunately, we've been extremely careful — but you have a small leak, that leak somehow achieves a combustion event. Say hydrogen is leaking through a plastic fitting. The result of the hydrogen passing past the plastic is that it causes the accumulation of static electricity, which eventually discharges, igniting the hydrogen.
Now you have a small hydrogen flame on a small leak in a plastic pipe or something like that. Outdoors, you cannot see it. It is beginning to melt a larger hole in that plastic pipe, and your small problem became a very large one, and you had no sign that this was occurring, no way of knowing.
In addition to its leakiness, it also has a tendency to cause embrittlement: say you have it in a pressurized steel container. It gradually seeps into the walls of that container, where it disrupts the crystalline structure of that container and causes it to become brittle.
Development of synthetic fertilizers
Casey: And if you are interested in reading a — by equal terms, horrifying, mesmerizing, and captivating — book about the history of the development of synthetic fertilizers which involves hydrogen and nitrogen, go no further than the Alchemy of Air by Thomas Hager which is a terrific, terrific read.
It even talks about the development of synthetic fuel based on coal liquefaction in Germany in the 1930s. I think it came up on Hardcore History with Dan Carlin: one of the reasons that the Allies ultimately stomped the Axis powers in the air war was that the Axis powers’ access to fuel — this story again, it's essential to have access to energy — was not good. The reliability of the engines was not good because their fuel was not good compared to, you know, US Crude — but you can read the story there.
At the time it looked like conversion of coal to gasoline was going to be the way that we would scale out the production of gasoline worldwide, because we hadn't discovered Pennsylvanian oil fields in 1930.
Patrick: There are multiple embedded stories there about how the development of synthetic fertilizers is essentially an engineering hack around the inability of plants to fertilize themselves because they don't have brains, etc., etc. That can engineer the environment for their maximum success.
Happily, we do. But synthetic fertilizers are, essentially, like a very energy dense supplement that we can create out of dead plants to give to live plants such that the agricultural yields go up to support more humans per acre of crops that we have under cultivation.
Casey: Well, nitrogen fertilizers are made out of air. The plants have nothing to do with it. I guess unless you're using coal to power the process.
Patrick: I was thinking, since creating the fertilizers is an — I’m forgetting exothermic or endothermic — the reaction takes a lot of energy to run.
We are essentially trading the best available cost/performance power source, which is naturally occurring hydrocarbons at the time — burn that to create fertilizer, which transfers the energy from the dead plants and the hydrocarbons to the live plants in Iowa.
Casey: I'm not sure if plants actually use the fertilizers as a form of energy fuel — I think it supplements some aspect of the metabolism.
Last year I had the opportunity — thanks to a reader of my blog and a good friend — to visit and get a tour of the plant outside of Leipzig in Germany, at a place called Leuna, which is still operating a chemical plant today. It's like 13,000 hectares, it’s absolutely insane.
This is where they did the first development of the Haber Bosch process and the Bergius and the Fischer-Tropsch process and so on.
It was intensively bombed in World War II to the point now that, like, do not disturb the soil, do not dig a hole.
But it’s, like much of Germany, quite a beautiful location. So I'm wandering around and I'm just seeing these hills and lakes everywhere, and I'm like, “wow, there’re a lot of lakes in this part of Germany.”
He's like, “Oh yeah. Check out the Google maps image.”
So I pull up Google maps and it's just lakes, everywhere. He's like, “Yeah, those are all coal mines, and the hills are the overburden.”
[Patrick notes: Overburden, in mining, means “Everything that naturally sits on top of the thing you actually want.”]
Casey: They dug all the dirt off the top and made a hill, and then, I don't know… it’s like very large, very deep, very cold bodies of water, which are now, you know, remediated.
Environmental considerations on industrial progress
Patrick: I think it's under-appreciated that, you know, we sometimes end up in inadequate equilibria for explicable reasons. One of the reasons why we have such onerous environmental regulations is we inflicted horrors on our environment and ourselves during various phases of the Industrial Revolution to achieve goals that were also important to humanity, you know — modern society, a kind of cool thing we wouldn't have gotten here but for digging the holes and creating the hills and disturbing the “pristine environment.”
But as we have increased in our capability of doing these things, getting to that next level of human potential will be much less disruptive, simply because we learned some lessons, we got better at engineering, and digging holes is like no longer the best use of our time if we want to turn brains into vast amounts of energy at the margin.
Wrap
Patrick: I think that is as good a point as any to wrap things up. If people want to turn their brains into vast amounts of energy, where can they find you on the internet? (Well, maybe don't directly turn your brain into energy, but…)
Casey: Well, sooner or later — actually, a shout out here to our friends working on, on longevity stuff. If we don't solve aging, then we're all going to die.
But yeah, I’m most active online on X (formerly known as Twitter) where I can be found at @CJHandmer, but it's not that hard to find me. I have websites and blogs and stuff as well.
Patrick: We will link them in the show notes.
Casey: Everyone should write a blog. I think it was Patrick's explicit enunciation of that, that first made something that was implicitly obvious to me very explicit, and something that I tell all my friends: “You should write a blog.”
Don't overthink it, just put words on a page.
Patrick: I think even if you can’t convince yourself to write a blog — because a blog is this, you know, chronologically sorted commitment for the entirety of your life, etc, etc. — everyone who's a professional, write three essays about anything that you would find yourself spending multiple weeks of your life on.
And if you only ever write three essays in your life, that's fine. The world is three essays richer for that expenditure of effort, and it will be directly incentive-compatible for you.
If you can convince yourself to write five million words, write five million words. The world will be better for that expenditure of effort.
But yeah, if participating on Twitter is the thing that gets you to write, do that; if writing a blog is the thing that gets you to write, do that. If taking one memo that you can write at work and filing the serial numbers off of it and putting it on the internet is the thing that gets you to write, do that.
And with that, thank you very much, Casey, for your time today, and we'll see the rest of you around the Internet.
Casey: My pleasure. Thanks.
