# Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone | Casey Handmer, Terraform Industries Relentless · 2026-09-30 Terraform Industries founder and CEO Casey Handmer tells host Ti that Elon Musk outcompetes because his intuition is right more often than chance, walking through his lunar Mass Driver—Moon rock shot once a second down an electromagnetic track—and Starmind, the orbital AI constellation whose tokens are 1,000 times more valuable than Starlink bits. He says Earth data centers converge on solar plus batteries, that megaprojects have become effectively illegal—fixing the subsided California Aqueduct wastes 10,000 statistical lives—and that Terrafab needs national security cover. He credits Musk with firing teams like the Starlink staff, says ~70% of productive value is taxed away, doubts 10,000 Starship flights a year within five years, and defends income inequality as lifting the floor. ## Questions this episode answers ### How would a Mass Driver on the Moon work? Casey Handmer explains that with lower gravity and no atmosphere, you can launch mass from the Moon without a rocket. A shuttle sits in an electromagnetic track, accelerates back and forth like a machine gun, and releases payloads at speed. To launch 100 tons a day you'd use 86,400 bite-sized pieces of a few kilograms at a time. [0:19](https://ti-morse.podhood.com/c7c6e096-6f93-4c46-8a72-9a3504f9b5b2?t=19000) ### When does space compute become cheaper than building data centers on Earth? Casey Handmer says Starship will make launch cheaper and far more available, enabling gigawatt-scale deployment that Falcon couldn't. He notes Elon foresaw that Earth data centers face rising headwinds from local jurisdictions wanting their piece of the action. The asymptotic question is whether batteries to run at night are cheaper than launch. [4:44](https://ti-morse.podhood.com/c7c6e096-6f93-4c46-8a72-9a3504f9b5b2?t=284000) ### How would the Starmind orbital data center make money? Casey Handmer explains Starlink earns a billion times more revenue per watt of transmitted microwave power than space-based solar power by transmitting information instead of raw power. Starmind puts GPUs in sun-synchronous orbits, spreads them along solar arrays to solve the thermal problem, and sells AI tokens worth at least 1,000 times more per bit than a Starlink bit. [20:03](https://ti-morse.podhood.com/c7c6e096-6f93-4c46-8a72-9a3504f9b5b2?t=1203000) ### Can Starship realistically reach 10,000 flights a year? Casey Handmer says 10,000 is a good power-of-ten number to orient the team, but doesn't expect it within five years. He runs the math: if the next-generation Starship does 10 landings like the first Falcon 9 first stage, and the Starbase factory maxes out at about 250 Starships a year, that's 2,500 flights. [1:03:41](https://ti-morse.podhood.com/c7c6e096-6f93-4c46-8a72-9a3504f9b5b2?t=3821000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Mass Driver** - [0:19] Casey Handmer explains how a lunar Mass Driver could launch 100 tons of Moon rock a day in kilogram-sized shots, no rockets needed - [2:55] Casey Handmer says a lunar Mass Driver only beats Starship if Earth launches hit 10,000 Starships a day - **[4:26] Space compute** - [4:26] Q: When does space compute beat building data centers on Earth? Casey Handmer says Starship makes gigawatt orbital deployments feasible - [5:23] Casey Handmer: local jurisdictions blocking data centers are in price discovery for 'the appropriate-sized official bribe' - **[8:53] Illegal to build** - [8:53] Casey Handmer argues large-scale projects have become effectively illegal in America over the last 50 years through regulation, not statute - [10:53] Casey Handmer calculates California's unrepaired Aqueduct costs the equivalent of 10,000 statistical lives - [13:11] Henry Kaiser built his Lake Tahoe estate in 22 days, finishing before an injunction could be filed — Casey Handmer tells the story - [14:27] Q: How will Elon get Terafab, the biggest building in the world, approved? Casey Handmer says national security chip onshoring is the shortcut - [16:43] Casey Handmer: it's now illegal to do metal refining or even print circuit boards in California, leaving 100-year-old grandfathered shops - [19:19] Casey Handmer: Australia lost its manufacturing middle and its economy has been flat ever since - **[20:03] Starmind** - [21:04] Casey Handmer: Starlink earns a billion times more revenue per transmitted watt than space-based solar power ever could - [23:37] Casey Handmer: an AI token is at least 1,000 times more valuable per bit than a Starlink-relayed Netflix stream - [25:29] Casey Handmer's fix for space data center cooling: sprinkle GPUs along the solar array instead of stacking racks in a box - **[27:43] Elon's evolution** - [27:43] Casey Handmer vs Ti on the Louisiana Starbase: Casey says even Elon will wait years for Army Corps and wildlife-refuge approvals - [30:13] Ti and Casey Handmer on Elon's decade-long company baking period at Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and the Boring Company - [31:36] Casey Handmer: talent doesn't saturate — Elon fired a fully staffed Starlink team because three better engineers could actually ship it - [33:20] Casey Handmer on how Elon surfaces talent: find 10 one-in-100,000 project managers, give them harder problems, see who survives - [35:44] Casey Handmer pushes back on Warren Buffett's 1-foot bar: the strategy only works if you plan to live to 100 - [37:34] Casey Handmer's rule for starting a company: find a frontier problem capitalism is failing to allocate capital toward - **[37:35] Starting companies** - [41:38] Q: Why is Elon so abrasive publicly? Casey Handmer: he'd never win a popularity contest and would be wasted as a politician - **[41:57] Unfiltered & DOGE** - [42:52] Casey Handmer on why Elon left DOGE: Congress voted down the cuts and his time was worth millions of dollars per minute - [46:39] Casey Handmer: modern wars destroy wealth instead of clearing regulations — competitive pressure between countries is the real forcing function - [50:49] Casey Handmer: Japan rebuilds 98% of its city fabric every 50 years, keeping average building age at 25 years instead of 150 - [53:14] Casey Handmer: US federal law and regulation runs 12 million pages — he'd accept an AI-compressed 4,000-page version - **[55:18] Mini dictatorships** - [55:18] Casey Handmer: every company is a voluntary dictatorship and a laboratory for experimenting with governance systems - [56:42] Casey Handmer's fix for sclerotic agencies: auto-sunset every non-constitutional agency after 10 years, like DARPA's fixed terms - **[58:53] Taxes** - [59:44] Casey Handmer: roughly 70% of the value created by Stripe's founders is siphoned off by taxes before it reaches workers - [1:02:48] Casey Handmer asked Grok whether his salary covers his family's tax bill — it covers less than half - **[1:03:26] Hard resets** - [1:03:26] Casey Handmer: we're in the AI takeoff right now and the income-tax system will be superseded, not reformed - **[1:05:31] Starship scaling** - [1:05:31] Casey Handmer: the Louisiana Starbase is Elon's regulatory escape hatch — 'you can shear the sheep, but you can't skin them' - [1:07:17] Q: How does Elon set objectives? Casey Handmer says 10,000 Starship flights a year is a calibrated North Star, not hype - **[1:09:31] Universal high income** - [1:09:31] Ti argues universal high income will never satisfy anyone because of the hedonic treadmill - [1:10:03] Casey Handmer on champagne socialists: 'you have the same iPhone as Elon Musk' - [1:11:50] Casey Handmer: the optimum amount of income inequality is not zero — it lifts the floor by rewarding innovation ## Speakers - **Ti** (host) - **Casey Handmer** (guest) ## Topics Startups ## Mentioned Boring Company (company), Netflix (company), Neuralink (company), SpaceX (company), Stripe (company), Terraform Industries (company), Tesla (company), DOGE (product), Mass Driver (product), Starlink (product), Starmind (product), Starship (product), Terrafab (product) ## Transcript ### Mass Driver **Ti** [0:00] Today I'm sitting down with Casey Handmer, the Founder and CEO of Terraform Industries. This is going to be the third part in our series of "Why Elon Outcompetes Everyone," and I want to start off with Mass Driver on the Moon. So, can you go through your essay of making the Mass Driver on the Moon work? **Casey Handmer** [0:19] That's a good question. Mass Driver is an interesting one. I worked on hypolith profiles, so I actually worked with, like, magnetically accelerated levitated systems. The thing about the Moon is that the gravity is a bit lower than Earth's, and there's no atmosphere, so you can actually— in principle, you can launch mass from the surface of the Moon into space without a rocket. Which, in the '70s, seemed very attractive because back then rockets were seen as very, very difficult to do. And also, the Moon doesn't have, you know, fuel supply. So you could imagine, you know, some kind of factory on the surface of the Moon that is processing rocks, has a nuclear power plant, and, um, perhaps receives its power beamed up from Earth. It would probably be even cheaper. And then launches that mass into orbit, where you do something with it and then make money. So goes the theory. And if you're not constrained on the acceleration that you subject these things to, your Mass Driver could be, like, just less than 1,000 feet long. Like, really short. And it would, like, shuttle back and forth. So it'd be like a— like a machine gun,right? Like, so you think, oh, well, you know, a rocket launch you can, like, launch every couple of days if you're really good. No, no. With this Mass Driver, you'd have a shuttle that sits in a— in an electromagnetic track that shuttles back and forth. So shuttle actually is a component of a loom, like for making cloth. **Ti** [1:41] Mm-hm. **Casey Handmer** [1:42] And they shuttle back and forth as well. And once it starts to slow down, you know, roughly halfway down the track, whatever the payload is will separate, you know, from momentum and then fly the rest of the way, however far it's going into space. And then the shuttle will slow down, accelerate in the other direction, and then get reloaded with another, you know, wire bale of Moon rock or whatever, and shoot itself back into space. And at the speeds involved, it might be like 1 a second kind of thing. So, like. **Ti** [2:14] This shit will be happening fast. **Casey Handmer** [2:16] Well, yeah. I mean, you don't need some, like, colossal Mass Driver. Say, if you want to do, I don't know, 100 tons a day, you don't need to do, like, one Starship a day. You do it in 86,400 bite-sized pieces of a few kilograms at a time. So the thing is, you could actually build this Mass Driver on the Earth, test it on the Earth, launch it to the Moon, maybe do a minimum assembly or, like, deployment on the Moon, and then operate it. It would have to be anchored to the surface quite well because of, you know, Newton's laws. But it's way easier to do that than, for example, to try and build some, like, precision-aligned structure that's 20 miles long to, like, accelerate at a more stately pace. **Ti** [2:55] Do you have any idea on what the timeline— you know, we're in 2026right now— what the timeline is for having that fully built? **Casey Handmer** [3:05] Um, no idea. And it actually, to be really blunt, like, the reason you would do this is to provide some of the mass for Starmind, for the— for the Orbital AI constellation. But it's hard to imagine, like, what set of circumstances would make it, like, obviously economically preferable to do that as opposed to building more Starships, more launch pads, more factories on the Earth where everything's, like, thousands of times cheaper, and just launching more stuff from the Earth. And I think the constraint might be something like, if you're launching 10,000 Starships a day, people will say, "Hey, come on." But, like, if they don't, then just keep launching from the Earth. Because, like, Starship will ultimately get launch costs into that constellation down to a few hundred bucks a kilogram, which is not very much compared to the costs of a mass-produced high-performance GPU. So if you look at, like, the embodied cost of the— of the item in orbit, most will be the part that does the thinking, the GPU, and then a bunch of other mass associated with radiators and solar arrays and communication. But even that is not all that much. And almost all those systems are spiritually two-dimensional, so you can fold them up or make them really thin and not very heavy. So it'll be interesting to see. ### Space compute **Ti** [4:26] Elon on the Dwarkesh and John Collison podcast basically said that in 3 years from the date of that podcast, he believed it would be cheaper to launch, like, space compute. **Casey Handmer** [4:38] Yeah. **Ti** [4:38] Versus building it on the ground. How— **Casey Handmer** [4:41] Yeah, it's like one of those, like, monkey-poy twitches thing. Well— **Ti** [4:43] How does that equation work? **Casey Handmer** [4:44] Well, Starship is getting a little cheaper. Well, I mean, me and everyone else have made a little spreadsheet to try and figure this out. Starship will ultimately make launch cheaper, but also much more launch available. So if you're saying, "Well, we want to do a gigawatt of deployment," that's just not really feasible even with Falcon. But with Starship, that's possible. And then at the same time, I think Elon correctly foresaw that large-scale deployments of data centers on the surface of the Earth would run into headwinds that would increase their cost. And this didn't— didn't require, like, an exceptionally accurate crystal ball back in the day, because there's just so many marginal constraints that sooner or later one of them will come to bite. **Ti** [5:23] It kind of seems like the data center thing on Earth, it's like this unicorn where the companies that are building them will almost pay any amount to just have them built. And it seems like there's a whole bunch of other shit that's just getting, like, layered on on top of the data centers. **Casey Handmer** [5:37] Yeah, all the local jurisdictions. **Ti** [5:38] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [5:39] Saying, "Well, we'd like our piece of the action." And— **Ti** [5:41] Exactly. **Casey Handmer** [5:41] I think they're in what's called a price discovery phase, where they will, yeah, shortly find out what the market clearing rate is for the appropriate-sized official bribe to make these things happen. I mean, we're actually working on that at Terraform as well, so it's a neat thing. We currently have a 1.8 megawatt solar array that we built earlier this year. And it turns out you can— you can run your synthetic fuel plant on it during the day, and you can also hook up to batteries and then run a continuous, much smaller but continuous load, like an AI computing rack or data center rack or something, off that at the same time, without these two uses conflicting. So you can basically, like, more than double the economic output of your fixed solar infrastructure, which, in terms of land use, is the dominant contributor. At the end of the day, almost all AI compute over the next, say, 10 years will converge. We'll kind of— we'll be done with this silliness with natural gas and nuclear and so on, and it'll converge on, at massive scale, basically like a giant Starlink satellite in space, which needs, you know, a decent radio antenna and a couple other bits and pieces to work properly in space, and a GPU. Or basically the same thing on the ground, where you, in addition to— you can basically delete the giant radio transmitter and replace a battery. They put a battery there. So the kind of the— the real question mark there about, like, asymptotic cost is whether or not batteries are cheaper than launch. Right? Because one of them requires a launch and the other one requires a battery to last, to run at night. **Ti** [7:18] Interesting. And so it's basically, like, batteries plus bureaucracy. **Casey Handmer** [7:22] Yeah, plus land. Land is, like, ridiculously abundant, though. You know, like, Nevada is, like, what, 65 million acres or something. It's absurdly an enormous amount of land. And a lot of that land is still federal because back in the day they couldn't even give it away. Right? It was so economically marginal. And now this, like, absurd technological deus ex machina has kind of landed in all our laps, where it's a system that's essentially apparently unbounded economically— economic productivity. So it's, like, way better than farming was in, like, 1860. And the only thing it needs to operate is power, which you can get from the sun. That's it. Basically, like, in the United States, like, income taxation and so on basically only occurred in the last century. Prior to that point, the United States government was much, much smaller and was funded primarily by tariffs. And so we've had this, like, massive tax and spend thing that was largely put in place by Roosevelt in the 1930s. And it's grown and grown and grown. And you can see in other countries that, you know, they're starting to run out of places to find revenue to fund the government. Right? But if instead, like, the United States had managed to retain, like, its small government, like, fairly, like, light touch on the economy through to the present day, and they start saying, "Oh, we're the feds and we need a source of revenue to run our government," the feds would be getting into building data centers on, like, federal land in Nevada and then leasing it out to the highest bidder because the revenue available is just absurd. So it's kind of a funny thing that we're in this situation now. ### Illegal to build **Ti** [8:53] It kind of seems like over time, large-scale projects are almost becoming sort of illegal. **Casey Handmer** [8:59] Yes, very much so in the last 50 years. **Ti** [9:01] Do you want to go into that? **Casey Handmer** [9:02] Well, I did— I did tweet about this the other day. It's very frustrating to me. Now, it is the case that in general, if you— if you murder someone, you go away for a long time. But, you know, the newspaper writers and so on love the outrageous headline where they find, you know, some bizarre confluence of factors that results in a murderer being released early or not even getting convicted or whatever. That's fine. You know, everyone deserves a day in court. You know, I prefer to live in a world where justice is imperfect but, you know, innocent people stay free kind of thing. But on the other hand, the presumption behind, like, giant projects that are building or maintaining infrastructure for the public good is that it's going to result in an environmental impact with unbounded downside. I can imagine a process that could do that, but it'd be pretty hard work, actually. And just the de facto, like, way that this has kind of worked its way through the system over the last 50 years, mostly with regulations, it's not even in the statute, is that if you want to do anything at all at large scale in California, but also much of the rest of the country, you have to go through this, like, debilitating process that takes so long and costs so much money and has so many handouts to everyone involved that the— you don't— it's not just that, like, the project doesn't pencil on paper monetarily, but the sorts of people you need to run these sorts of projects are just not interested. Right? Like, who's going to sit around 15 years waiting for permission to fix some basic thing in their backyard? It's ridiculous. Yeah, so it's just like, I just kind of had Grok run the numbers for me on, like, you know, in terms of, like, the value of statistical life, what is the net loss to our society for, you know, California's inability to repair the California Aqueduct, which has been, I think, nominally it can transport, like, 4.5 million acre-feet a year of water to LA from the Sacramento River Delta. But its actual capacity is, like, maybe 50% of that because a couple of hundred miles in the southern section have subsided due to groundwater extraction over the last 30, 40 years. And obviously it's, like, you know, between pumping stations, it's meant to be pretty flat. And so if a section subsides, it will overflow if it's too full. Well, this is not rocket science. Bulldozer, concrete, done. Okay? And we know that, you know, when a bit of the freeway falls down or something, we can fix it in a week or two. Like, that capacity does exist. And so instead, we live in this insane situation where the farmers haven't got enough water and Southern California doesn't have enough water, and the infrastructure already exists in a corridor where it's already been built, where the environmental disturbance has already taken place. And just the process of getting permission to, like, send out, you know, a local road repair crew with a bulldozer and cement to, like, make this canal work at its designed capacity, thus solving everyone's problems, the, like, "fix everything easily" button is, like, 10 years and billions of dollars. Right? So coming back to the value of statistical life, the economic value that's lost as a result of this kind of clot, just with this one example, is roughly equivalent to 10,000 lives. Right? So if you're, like, I don't know, scrolling on TikTok and you run some kid over, that's vehicular manslaughter. And if you're unlucky and you have a bad lawyer, you'll probably go to prison for a while. But, like, you'll get out of prison and that project will still be in, like, yeah, the approval agency hasn't even looked at it yet. Purgatory. Right? And in that meantime, that one year, like, equivalent to 1,000 statistical lives have been lost completely just due to our inability to fix it. It drives me crazy. It drives me absolutely crazy. We know we can move extremely fast. And we also know that the key to delivering, like, really cost-effective, high-value infrastructure at scale for people that benefits everyone, it's super progressive because it benefits poor people way more than it benefits rich people. Rich people will be able to afford services no matter what. Rich people are not running out of water. It only harms poor people when these things fall apart, really, is to move really quickly because then your labor cost, you know, is less because, you know, you're getting more stuff done in a given unit of time. This is how we built ships really quickly in World War II. It's how we built aircraft, you know, the planned just across the road here in World War II. Just, like, reduce the number of labor hours per unit by a factor of 10 and actually increased output by, like, a factor of 50. So labor did well as well. Everyone got more, basically, just for moving quickly. But these days it's— it seems insane. Like, it's essentially impossible to get the green light to do it. I mean, this was starting to happen in the '50s, and Henry Kaiser was the entrepreneur who did the Hoover Dam and a few other things and the Liberty ships in Richmond. And he wanted to build an estate up in Lake Tahoe. And he was older by that point. He didn't want to screw around. So he just had his construction crew up there and built it 24 hours a day under lights, including 6 feet of fill and, like, multiple structures and a dock and a place for his speedboats and, you know, a couple of large houses and house for guests, for staff, and so on. And he managed to complete the project before an injunction was able to be filed. Right? Did the whole thing in 22 days. Right? That's insane. Like, Alta Dina burned down, what, almost 2 years ago? 20 months ago? And just now. **Ti** [14:07] There's a single house built. **Casey Handmer** [14:09] Yes, there are a few now. There are a few now. A year ago, nothing. Now there's been a few houses built. But, you know, they lost 10,000 structures. They'll be, at the current rate, still rebuilding by the time the next fire goes through in 20 years. So, man, that was a housing crisis. Anyway. **Ti** [14:27] At the same time that it's, like, effectively becoming illegal to build large megaprojects, you have Elon turn around and say, "Actually, we're going to build the biggest building in the world by, like, maybe double or something," in the form of Terrafab. **Casey Handmer** [14:40] Oh, Terrafab, yeah. **Ti** [14:41] In Texas. So how does— if you had to, like, think about how he's thinking about that project, he's both saying, like, "It's impossibly difficult to get this stuff through," and yet I'm going to do it anyway. **Casey Handmer** [14:51] I'm shocked if it breaks down in the next five years. It may be the case that he gets the green light to, like, begin part of it sooner because of, like, national security imperatives, in particular, like, onshoring of chip production. But, yeah, if he just went through the same lane as everyone else has to go through, like, even in Texas, you would get— you'd get stuck with a project of that scale. **Ti** [15:11] Why do you think that he thinks that he's able to pull this off? **Casey Handmer** [15:14] Well, he's done it many times at this point. But also, like, he knows the numbers to call to say, like, "Hey, do you want chips or do you want to lose the next war to China?" Right? And it actually helps to be on the critical path for national security at a certain scale. And, you know, in those cases, you can sometimes cut some corners. But, you know, the reality is that most of US economic growth is not happening by, like, one or two people. Right? It's tens of thousands of small businesses that are growing gradually like miners that are providing mentorship and opportunities for people to, like, build their skills and level up and good pay and local housing and tax revenue for the local cities and all the rest. And, I mean, I actually relistened to our interview this morning on my way to work, just so I'd be, you know, up to the moment. And a year ago I said, "We're in this castle and we're going to gradually expand through this entire neighborhood until we're up to the freeway," which would be— it's probably 500,000 square feet or something. Maybe a million square feet between here and the freeway. Like, plenty, basically, over the next 5, 10, 15 years. I like it. The city likes us. We get on well. We like the local fire brigade. It's convenient. All the people already live nearby. There's local residential areas. It's a great place to build. Okay? But, but it turns out that even here in, like, heavy industrially zoned Burbank, there are enough restrictions that basically make it impossible for us to expand here. And we're going to have to move into, like, down the road, like, miles and miles into another industrial area that's larger. I can give you some examples. All the buildings east of here, they're like a few blocks east of here, were redeveloped in the '90s. And even though it's heavy industrially zoned land, they were built as light industrial. And so even though the city will permit heavy industrial use, the building owner won't. So they're just going to have, like, you know, city block full of vacant studios because all the studio business has left Burbank, generating zero income or tax revenue for the city for, you know, as long as the landlord can afford to be patient, I guess, decades. That's just as an example. You know, and then meanwhile, just up the road here, we have some of the last anodizing plants in California because it's now illegal to do metal refining in California of any kind. You can't even build, like, PCB, like printed circuit board traces here. San D'Amico is very good on this. And so you've got these legacy shops that are, like, 100 years old and, like, ridiculously bad for the environment, for the people who work in them. And they're grandfathered in and they'll never shut them down. Because once they do, that's it. They'll have to go— they'll have to go to Texas or Louisiana to do this work. So this neighborhood and this whole city was once, like, a global center of aircraft manufacturing. Like, built maybe 100,000 aircraft here in World War II. And it's pretty much all gone. It's desolate. It's— I mean, there's still businesses occurring here. LA is still a vibrant and economically dynamic place, but it's not like it was. And it's no longer a center of manufacturing. And secondary manufacturing is massively underrated for its importance. I think it's, like, the single biggest, like, value increase. Right? So the purpose of a business is to, like, consume inputs where they're cheap and then produce outputs and sell them where they're expensive or market them where they're valuable and thus generate value. And secondary manufacturing takes in commodified input, you know, materials like aluminum or whatever, airplane manufacturing, and then does a series of operations on it with extremely sophisticated machine tools. Our neighbors across the road here do aircraft hinges. And they're the only, as far as I know, the only certified aircraft hinge manufacturer in all of NATO. So all of Airbus and all of Boeing and all of the military people and their maintainers and everyone else for the hinges that, like, allow flaps and stuff on the wings to work, they get them done here. Right? That's bizarre. Right? But these are just, like, you know, all these old places here, they're kind of— their original proprietors are aging out now. And they were part of the satellite kind of industrial complex that served the Lockheed plant, which is now an Amazon fulfillment center until the mid-'90s. You know, this is where Kelly Johnson built all those airplanes. And he was able to go out and get the landing gear made and so on, like the specialists who do just those things that weren't within the plant itself. They've got to rebuild it or we just won't have wealth. The Australian economy made this mistake. Right? The Australian economy lost its middle and now it's just tertiary services, which is extremely low leverage because it's just one-on-one stuff. Right? And primary production, which is just digging up dirt and shipping it to Asia. And none of those things, you know, basically, like, you get your first 1% and your last 1% of value generation and you miss the 98% in the middle. The Australian economy is flat. That's insane. Like, it's a peaceful, modern, you know, Western liberal democratic system with well-educated, relatively young, demographically vibrant workforce, good culture, no violence, no threats, really. Like, New Zealand's not going to invade. And unlimited natural resources. And their economy is flat. Load of numbers. **Ti** [20:03] Let's talk through the buildout of Starmind, the economics behind it, and what the timeline looks like for that. ### Starmind **Casey Handmer** [20:11] It's interesting. I'd say, like, I wish there was moon dirt here. **Ti** [20:15] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [20:16] Yeah. It'd be so cool. Starmind. I don't like the name very much. **Ti** [20:22] You should talk with Beth. **Casey Handmer** [20:23] Is it his fault? **Ti** [20:25] Yes. **Casey Handmer** [20:26] Okay. Like, Starlink wasright there. **Ti** [20:31] You like Starlink? **Casey Handmer** [20:32] Well, it runs a Starlink. It's got dad joke potential. Right? **Ti** [20:36] Allright. **Casey Handmer** [20:36] It's an interesting one. So when I first, you know, heard of, like, "Oh, we're going to do data centers in space," I was pretty skeptical. There's a couple of good reasons to be skeptical. The first is that, you know, the juice is never worth the squeeze when it comes to, like, "Oh, but there's infinite free power in space." It's not infinite and it's not free. And, you know, if you're in most orbits, you'll eventually be shadowed by the Earth, et cetera, et cetera. But there are a couple of ways to kind of get around that. And I think Starlink really shows the way. So people who've read some of my blogs will know that, like, space-based solar power is kind of dumb because you're taking a product where it's expensive and you're selling it somewhere where it's cheap, which is not what a business should do. So in space, power is really expensive. And then you're beaming that power as undifferentiated microwaves down to the Earth where you're collecting them. And now you're having to compete with solar and nuclear and coal and gas and everything else for, like, I don't know, like, what does your merchant power producer earn in California? $0.10 a kilowatt hour? Like, not very much. You pay more than that, but you're paying for distribution. However, Starlink works because instead of just beaming, like, a shitload of microwaves at the Earth for power, they modulate those microwaves with, like, something or other, like some quadrature amplitude modulation radio signal thing that allows them to transmit not power, but information. Right? And so if you run the math on, like, what is the revenue per watt of transmitted microwave power for Starlink, it's a billion times higher than space-based solar power. So while SpaceX is making money hand over fist with Starlink, and it's worth kind of putting a pin here in the fact that other people have tried and not succeeded, but SpaceX has, their margins might be, I don't know, 100% or something, optimistically. If you reduce their revenue by a factor of a billion, they are no longer in business. So basically, you take that model and you say, "Well, we can make money being the middleman transmitting data from your content delivery service or an edge node or whatever." You know, Netflix is just down the road here. Via our network, which initially was just this bent pipe system, and now they've got LaserLink set up so they can transmit a lot of, you know, a lot of data in the shell, you know, the shell of Starlink satellites and then land it again at some other place, either at a consumer place or, you know, like a consumer satellite dish or a fiber hotel or, you know, a gateway, what they call a gateway, which is like a gigantic dish, which is, you know, where all the data goes in. They can make money doing that, which is very cool. Then you say, "Well, what if we, like, mess up our latency a little bit and so we can put all these satellites in sun-synchronous orbits so they're always in the sun, except for during lunar eclipses?" And then we don't need anywhere near as many batteries. And we use LaserLinks to transmit data to and from those via the Starlink network. Although if you didn't have that, you could also transmit to the ground. And instead of charging people 100 bucks a month to relay, like, Netflix, where, like, the value of the marginal bit is not all that high. In fact, Netflix, like all these systems, uses error correction so you can delete 10% of the bits and it'll be fine. You won't notice. And instead of transmitting Netflix, you instead transmit tokens of some hyper-intelligent model that you can update with software. So once you've got the hardware flying, you have that software. And then you say, "Well, what is the comparative value between your average Starlink bit versus your average StarMind bit of data?" And it's probably at least 1,000 times more valuable, like a token. Like, what do you pay for tokens versus, like, your subscription to Netflix or something? Right? It's not even in the same category. I was doing a project on Saturday where I rediscovered that, like, nested loops consume resources when I basically had an AI go out and scrape the entire internet for all sources of data on 200 separate topics and then categorize that data across 200 separate principal components, which then resulted in, like, 40,000 times. Anyway, it's like 260 bucks of tokens. Like, unbelievable. Like, this is— it gave me better results than a team of expert professional analysts would do with a year's work. And this is just, like, just as an idea, just like me mumbling into my phone and then forgetting about it. Yeah. So that's real money. That's real moneyright there. It would be interesting to see if economic demand for intelligence in the form of, you know, AI tokens can saturate. **Ti** [25:07] Hmm. **Casey Handmer** [25:08] I suspect not. Yeah. So that's the idea. Giant solar array, GPUs. Now, and, like, data center in space, you have this, like, massive thermal problem, but you don't necessarily have that if you do itright. Like, instead of building, like, a giant box full of racks of hardware and cooling systems, you can actually just, like, sprinkle the GPUs out along a solar array. Right? Because, like, each solar module generates a kilowatt and each GPU consumes a kilowatt. And then just have, like, local Wi-Fi or optical fiber link or something to transmit data up and down the solar array, you know, train or chain or whatever. And then you've got, you know, a star tracker and a couple of radio antennas and stuff in the middle. Then if your GPU dies, who cares? And it's like, it's bolted onto a solar array and the GPU is the expensive part. Does that make sense? So it's like, well, how do you replace a GPU when it dies? In a data center, you've got all these fixed costs. And if your GPU dies, you've got to go find it and rip it out and put a new one in. In space, you're like, "Oh, no. Like, I've got 100 GPUs on this particular satellite and one of them just died and 99 of them are still going fine." And eventually, you know, maybe you're down to one or two or they're very old and you just deorbit, burn up, crash in Alaska. **Ti** [26:19] If you believe that Elon has the same view where token demand is effectively infinite and if you just make more tokens or, you know, put more GPUs up there, someone will buy them and either it'll be him or someone else. **Casey Handmer** [26:33] Yep. **Ti** [26:34] Then how do you think he's thinking through the problem of just maximum scale as fast as possible? **Casey Handmer** [26:40] Well, it's not exactly a secret. Oh, there's one other aspect of this, which is to say Starlink as a business model is possible if you have, like, a legal monopoly lock on, you know, a plurality of the world's most talented engineers and a highly mature launch system that is extremely affordable. And as we've seen with Chinese, Russian, European, and other American attempts to compete in this space, it is extremely difficult to do if your satellites are not best in class, like, very good value, and then you don't have access to, you know, preferred launch, basically. So how do you do this as quickly as possible? There's probably some optimization to be done in terms of, like, maximizing tokens per kilogram, but ultimately it's about maturing Starship design and then scaling up production. So. **Ti** [27:31] Starship B-4. **Casey Handmer** [27:32] Starbase, Louisiana. Right? You've got one launch pad in Texas, two actually now, a couple going up in the Cape, and now they're saying 10 or 12 in Louisiana and who knows where else. ### Elon's evolution **Ti** [27:43] This is another thing. He's building this massive launch facility in Louisiana. **Casey Handmer** [27:47] Well, I don't think any, like, dirt has been turned over yet. Again, like, it'll have to go through the federal agencies because it touches the coast and it touches the Intracoastal Waterway and it touches the Mississippi system. So the Army Corps of Engineers is going to get a say. And it's adjacent to wildlife refuges. So, like, national parks is going to get a say. And then the state's going to get a say. And, like, by the time even at Elon's speed, it may take a long time to get the thumbs up to really start moving on that. **Ti** [28:14] You think so? I kind of feel like he, you know, if I think about the infrastructure projects that Elon has said that he's going to start, I can't think of a single one that didn't. Maybe Hyperloop might be one where he kind of said, like. **Casey Handmer** [28:27] He didn't do that personally. **Ti** [28:28] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [28:29] If you think about, like. **Ti** [28:31] But with these. **Casey Handmer** [28:31] Well, they started work on Starbase in, what, 2012 or something. And, like, not much really took place there until 2018. And then once they started working in earnest, they were held up for months at a time. **Ti** [28:41] Do you not think that he's—he has, like, built teams that are much more effective and, like, ways that are much more effective at getting these large-scale projects done? **Casey Handmer** [28:49] I mean, yeah, definitely, like, the reps. You don't get worse at it for doing more of it. **Ti** [28:52] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [28:53] Yeah. And that's actually an interesting point. I think Anthony Calangelo makes this point on managing cut-off quite often, which is that people say, well, you know, SpaceX makes the best rockets and so on. But actually, like, SpaceX and Tesla are also probably, like, the preeminent real estate development firms in the entire countryright now, for example. **Ti** [29:13] For large-scale projects? **Casey Handmer** [29:14] Just in general. Like, if you look at total cash flow divided to those particular areas, there's, like, best-in-class across a range of areas at this point. **Ti** [29:24] If you had to think about the way that Elon operated 10 years ago versus today, what do you think the biggest changes are? **Casey Handmer** [29:31] That's a good question. I was wondering about this myself the other day because it certainly seems to me that, like, there's less filter and he goes faster now. Yeah, it'd be interesting to get him on record about how he feels about that. You know, whether he's become more or less hardcore or more or less consequentialist or, you know, how he approaches talent development now versus in the past. For me personally, it's certainly been a case of, like, unlearning a bunch of fairly, like, logically consistent but not actually useful assumptions or not correct assumptions that I had, you know, going in and then finding out the hard way that, like, no, actually, the world doesn't work that way. **Ti** [30:13] I've noticed with a lot of Elon's companies, there's, like, this decade-long baking period before things really unlock. **Casey Handmer** [30:19] Yeah, I'm surprised. Like, boring company didn't—I mean, like, they're drilling holes. That's great. Like, it seems like it incubated for a long time. **Ti** [30:27] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [30:27] Now, all complicated things take time. I should know that as well as anyone. We've been at this for over four years now. But maybe it's just, like, there's a minimum, like, six-year spend or something to do a new kind of thing from the ground up. I don't know. **Ti** [30:38] Elon 10 years ago or 20 years ago would start off with a relatively small team and the company would just take probably, like, six or eight years to bake before they had, like, a real, you know, good product that they wanted to ship. Like, I think it took that long for Tesla. I think that took roughly that long for a rocket to make it to orbit. I think it's the same thing. **Casey Handmer** [30:58] Oh, the very beginning. **Ti** [30:59] Yeah. I think it's the same thing for Neuralink and Boring Company where they're starting to, like, they're starting to ramp on the Neuralink implants and they're starting to ramp on the number of tunnels dug where, like, miles of. **Casey Handmer** [31:09] Well, I think for Neuralink, though, it's a fairly well-understood, like, set of steps that have to be gone through to get approvals to do, like, you know, stage three trials in humans and then scale up. It's hard to say. I suspect that for the projects that are not, like, obviously on the critical path, they probably don't get, like, priority access to talent. And it really matters having theright people on the job. Like, it's kind of the strange thing. People might assume from the bottom looking up—actually, I think Sean went on about this for a while—that, like, you know, two or three steps above my level, like, talent saturates. But it doesn't. And this is—if you watch sport, it's intuitively obvious that at the high levels of anything, it separates, you know, and it differentiates. And so, you know, the three best people at SpaceX to work on getting Starlink up and running made that project possible. And previously, they had fully staffed the project with talented, well-regarded engineers who were making progress, but they weren't going to ship. And Elon fired them all. So it makes a huge difference. There's essentially, like, I think particularly, like, a lot of talented people come through school and they're like, "Yeah, I got, like, you know, 98% plus in all my exams. Pretty much saturated the metrics." Like, nope. Like, in the real world, there's no upper bound. There's no—there's no, like, limit to the upside. You know, like, you're 10 times better than the next person. Good. Why aren't you 100 times better? What would 100,000 times better look like? What does it take to get there? You would see this in podcasting as well,right? It's parallel distributed. **Ti** [32:46] Exactly. **Casey Handmer** [32:46] And the best—the best are really good. **Ti** [32:49] Yes. **Casey Handmer** [32:50] Chris Bauer said you've gotten better. I don't know if I can see it. We'll have to wait and see. **Ti** [32:57] I was having a conversation with one of my founder buddies last night and we were kind of talking about the evolution of Elon over time. And he didn't believe that, you know, 20 years ago, Elon would go into a room and then just, like, fire an entire team and walk out. But he kind of does that today. He does some other things today. **Casey Handmer** [33:14] Your founder friend believes that now? **Ti** [33:16] I believe so. **Casey Handmer** [33:18] Yeah. I learned pretty early on that—and actually, it's the same with parenting as well—that there's no upside in being, like, highly finessed when it comes to solving problems. Right? If you want to motivate your team to solve the problem and not escalate it to you, they have to believe that, like, if they don't solve the problem and it escalates to you, it's going to be messy. And it will be, you know, and that's just part of it, I think. But I don't have a recruiting team here,right? Whereas Elon has very prestigious companies and there's always hordes of people who want to come in and work really hard. And he just takes in a lot of talented people and gives them steadily graded, increasing difficulty of problems. And it's up or out, you know? And that's how you surface talent. Like, it's not like you can do some exam at the end of high school and be like, "Oh, you're destined to be, like, one in a million project manager." The only way you find out is you find 10, 1 in 100,000 project managers and you give them the next level problem of difficulty and you see who succeeds. **Ti** [34:16] If you look at Elon over time, he becomes more and more raw, it seems, not only, like, publicly facing on social media and X, but also, like, privately. It feels like he just makes decisions faster. **Casey Handmer** [34:30] I'm not sure I think there's more exposure now, but I know a few people who worked with him in PayPal days. And I think he also shot from the hip then as well sometimes. **Ti** [34:37] I think he did. I just don't think he did it in the same way. And do you think that there's any advantages? **Casey Handmer** [34:42] Certainly not at scale. He didn't have 100,000 people to deal with his messes, so. **Ti** [34:46] Do you think there's any advantages to being, like, maybe a little bit more coarse, like sandpaper? **Casey Handmer** [34:51] Well, there is a kind of a question here, which is, I think a lot of managers or startup founders or whatever will reach a point where they can't really scale to the next size of the business. Right? But Elon has been able to work effectively at organizations of a range of sizes. And that's actually pretty unusual. The important thing is getting the message out. And it's crazy how easy it is to be misunderstood on even the stuff you think is the simplest. And I've been coaching my managers here to, like, boil it down, boil it down. Like, your message is getting lost. Like, one bit of information, like, a single bit of information is really all that needs to be transmitted. If you can transmit it well, that's enough. But, you know, you don't have enough time in the day to, like, sit over all your reports' shoulders all the time. They have to model what you're going to say in their head so you don't have to say it. So you definitely have to have a big personality or the appearance of a big personality to achieve that. **Ti** [35:44] Do you think that you suffer from basically. **Casey Handmer** [35:47] Probably. **Ti** [35:51] Warren Buffett has this idea of, you know, there's, like, investing hurdles where sometimes you have to, like, be a genius and jump over this 10-foot bar and other investments, it's like this 1-foot bar and. **Casey Handmer** [36:01] And he's taller than Jim Simons. **Ti** [36:03] He likes to just step over the bar. Whereas I think he mentioned that a lot of smart people get stuck in this trap of trying to jump over the 10-foot bar because they, like, it's intellectually challenging and interesting. **Casey Handmer** [36:14] Yes. **Ti** [36:14] Do you think that you suffer from that problem? **Casey Handmer** [36:17] With a caveat, maybe. Warren Buffett was probably dragging Jim Simon in that quote. And Warren Buffett's strategy works brilliantly if you plan to live to 100 years old, which worked for him, but not for everyone. **Ti** [36:27] I think he was dragging long-term capital management, actually. **Casey Handmer** [36:30] Probably them too. **Ti** [36:31] He actually, he and Charlie has a lot of respect for Jim Simons, my understanding. **Casey Handmer** [36:35] Oh, of course. As friends do. Like, I'm dragging you from time to time. Actually, Charlie had this amazing book called Poor Charlie's Almanac. It's really good. Highly recommended. So it's definitely true that when you set out on your entrepreneurial journey, and a year ago I said, "You're a smart guy, access to rich people. Why don't you give up this chit-chat nonsense and actually start making things that are useful for people?" And here we are. Maybe you just can't. **Ti** [37:04] Oh my God. **Casey Handmer** [37:06] Apparently, there's a competition to see who's the meanest Australian hardware startup founder in LA. And you're adjudicating this competition now. Earlier, Ty told me that no one thinks that Australians can be mean. **Ti** [37:18] I think that they can try to be mean. I just don't think that anyone serious would listen to their voice and think, you know, feel bad. Like. **Casey Handmer** [37:28] We're not testing that proposition. **Ti** [37:30] Allright, go for it. **Casey Handmer** [37:32] We just did. **Ti** [37:33] I feel great. **Casey Handmer** [37:34] When you start a company, if hypothetically one were, you want to find an area where you have ideally persistent differential advantage. ### Starting companies **Casey Handmer** [37:46] And so, for example, when I was thinking of starting a company, I was also thinking of working on drones. But it's very clear that, like, Sauron & Co., like, they're just going to do a better job than I am. Right? There are some areas where I would have insights because of my background and knowledge that would help me, but it would not help me enough to clear the hurdle, which is that this is already an obvious thing for capitalism to work on. And capitalism is already reasonably effectively allocating capital, human capital, and money capital towards solving this problem. And that was before the Ukraine war, like, popped off. And now it's like, this is six years ago, seven years ago. So now it is extremely obvious that, like, if you don't have AI and drones, you don't have national sovereignty. And a handful of countries have even got the memo on that. So for me, I wanted to find something that I was interested in enough to actually work on for a long time where my particular interests and skills would give me any kind of advantage and where capitalism was not currently doing a very good job of allocating resources towards solving the problem. So it has to be, like, kind of on the frontier. And synthetic fuel actually works quite well for that. **Ti** [38:57] If you had to, you know, plot or put synthetic fuel on that 1-foot to 10-foot bar, where is it? **Casey Handmer** [39:05] In terms of, like, raw difficulty? **Ti** [39:07] Sure. **Casey Handmer** [39:08] Oh. I'm not even sure yet. It's higher than I've seen. It's really ridiculously difficult. It's not as hard as orbital rockets, I think. But actually doing this as a successful business that makes money, no one's ever done. Yeah. **Ti** [39:22] Is it currently in the science projects phase? **Casey Handmer** [39:25] I think we're mostly past the science project phase at this point. Like, the technology, like, the science has been around for 100 years or longer. But, like, basically making the scientific processes legible to a manufacturing process that has more in common with kitchen appliances, for example, or consumer electronics appliances is just ridiculously impossibly difficult. And we were just talking over lunch. Like, I made a list the other day of, like, hardware companies that have taken a crack in this direction, not just synthetic fuel, but a few other things in the same area, carbon capture, hydrogen, a bunch of others. And just the field is littered. I mean, evolution, like capitalism in general, is a system that actually does a pretty good job of recycling talent after ventures fail and you can discharge debts and all the rest. It's a good system. But I feel like this particular field is littered more than most with the carcasses of, like, very respectable attempts to, like, experimentally discover if a particular business model would be capable of generating net value in this space and finding out 10 or 100 or 1,000 million dollars later that, no, no, it can't. But to kind of misquote Timothée Chalamet in the next Dune film, there is a way. I can see a way. It's rather narrow. But we're on theright track here. We figured it out. But it is, it's like, at the time, I was like, "This is incredibly obvious." And then I went and explained it to 100 people, smart people who know what they're talking about. And I realized this is not obvious at all. It's one of those things where it seems extremely obvious to me, but it is not, in fact, obvious at all. And even now, if I try and put it down on paper in, like, 1,000 words or so why it is obvious, it is extremely difficult. In much the same way that I think probably SpaceX had difficulty motivating reasonable rockets when they first started doing that in 2014 or 2015, and you had highly compensated professional CEOs of rival rocket companies with technical backgrounds themselves, like that Arianespace guy, stand up and say, "That's bullshit. It's never going to work." And even if it did, it wouldn't be a good idea. Why is anyone even thinking about this? And of course, it turns out, as Elon says, he'sright more often than chance would allow for. His intuition is correct. Actually, I think I'm reasonably confident now, actually, that a lot of Elon's advantage here is that actually he is very intuitive and his intuition is correct, rather than him, like, sitting down in some, like, secret chamber full of spreadsheets and, like, deriving some weird thing that no one else saw. ### Unfiltered & DOGE **Ti** [41:58] Why do you think he's so abrasive publicly? If most, like, if he's got a good intuition in predicting human behavior and. **Casey Handmer** [42:07] Not human behavior, technical stuff. **Ti** [42:09] Really? **Casey Handmer** [42:10] I mean. **Ti** [42:10] Because he kind of does predict human behavior with his companies. Like, he's saying, like, people want to. **Casey Handmer** [42:15] Maybe like Harry Seldon kind of way. **Ti** [42:17] Book a car. **Casey Handmer** [42:17] Harry Seldon kind of way. I think he's got a good feeling for product. **Ti** [42:20] Okay. **Casey Handmer** [42:21] Yeah, but, like, he's obviously not the sort of person who would go out and win an election, put it that way. **Ti** [42:27] Is he not? **Casey Handmer** [42:28] I don't think so. **Ti** [42:29] He's kind of doing that at his companies. **Casey Handmer** [42:31] He's too unguarded. No, I mean, he owns a business and he controls the board. It's not a popularity contest. He would never win a popularity contest. He just wouldn't. I mean, we saw that in DOGE. Like, he's too easy to hate. He's too easy to make fun of. He's too easy to misunderstand. He's too easy to take out of context. He's too unfiltered, which are all good things for us overall because he'd be wasted as a politician. **Ti** [42:52] This is something that's happened since last we talked, is he left DOGE. And the way that I think about DOGE is it is one of the only things that Elon, you know, organizations or situations that Elon's ever come into contact with and been like, "This is too hard from what I can tell." Or it's like the reward for trying is just not great enough. **Casey Handmer** [43:16] Well, DOGE did a bunch of different things. Okay. And I think it's not very well understood in general what they were doing. But one of the things they did was assemble a whole bunch of programs that should be cut. And Congress voted on it and they voted against it. You know, and at that point, he could continue working there day to day, doing the other things that DOGE was working on, particularly things within, you know, your executive control or things to do with modernization of government services and systems. But actually, a lot of that work has continued without him. And you also have to wonder, like, what's the opportunity cost of his time? It's probably, like, millions of dollars per minute. And he is an officer of multiple publicly traded companies. So you can't just, like, abandon those companies to go and fill around in the government, especially when I think, well, I think I said in the last podcast, like, it was weird to see for me, you know, a bunch of my, like, you know, I have friends on all sides of the political spectrum, but, like, you know, team left, you know, theultra-work kind of deep state types team up with theultra-right deep state types to kick this newcomer out, which is what they did, essentially. So anyway, we'll see. But yeah, I think, you know, as a society, we're better off with Elon on the outside trying to outgrow the spending state than on the inside trying to prune it. I do worry about it, though. And I think, as I said last time, it seems to me highly unlikely that our political system can survive its long-term structural challenges without solving the problem of old age dependency through, like, radical extensions in longevity and also, like, radically increasing growth. So you have to, like, either smash through these regulatory barriers we discussed earlier or build new kinds of economic growth that can exist in places that are not yet regulated to death so that you actually have, like, permission to grow the economy faster than dependency, which is a tough ask these days. You know, when FDR put in place the New Deal in the '30s, it looked like it could be sustained for, you know, 50-plus years, and that was long enough to solve the problem it solved at the time. But, you know, basically any country on Earth one day will get, they'll develop until they're rich enough that people are no longer dying young, which is a great thing. It's a great thing that, you know, people your age, my age aren't dying of preventable disease. But that just means sooner or later, it'll be like your description of New Zealand. And everyone around there is old and everyone has health problems and everyone has dependencies and everyone, like, children are, like, crazy dependent and relatively expensive for a few years at the very beginning. Then they're relatively independent, but they're not economically productive for another decade or so, and then they become economically productive. But for old people, you know, there's no, like, economic productivity ahead of them. There's just spending down whatever their society has managed to accumulate, which is not, like, it's a socially worthwhile thing to do, but at the same time, it is not compounding. Right? And sooner or later, everyone's old. You can walk around, you know, Germanyright now, the median age is 48. 48. Right? And the median voter age is older than that, obviously, because children don't vote. And you wonder why it is that these societies, why Europe is kind of in its own death rows. Well, why wouldn't they be? They don't, like, the median voter is past the point where they can vote for a future they want to be part of. **Ti** [46:39] Do you think that this outside of, like, a major war, is there any ability for us to downregulate? **Casey Handmer** [46:45] That's a good question. Some people say, well, you know, the regulations get cleared out in a major war, but it's pretty clear that a major war in 2026 would be extremely different from a major war in 1941. Basically, what happens in a war is you end up with this, like, we're seeing this in Iranright now. It's kind of an extremely kinetic exchange of explosives and weapons that the net effect of it is you're killing people who don't want to die and in many cases uninvolved civilians. The number of people involved in actually fighting these wars is collapsing. Right? Even in Ukraine, the number of people involved in active combat is minuscule compared to World War I and World War II. And so instead of what you're doing is blowing up infrastructure and you're just making money expensive and destroying wealth. Right? So it's just pushing us back in the Stone Age and you say, well, we need to rebuild this stuff maybe. It seems to me that the forcing function for improving regulations is more likely to be competitive pressure. So you end up in a situation, actually, we're already seeing this where the anglophone West is relatively economically non-dynamic compared to parts of Asia, for example, particularly South Asia, and has a lot of homologation in their regulatory setup. So, for example, if you're an entrepreneur in England and you don't like the fact that the English government has a certain policy, you could say, go to the EU and work there. But how different is the EU? They have all the same structural problems and much of the same laws, and despite Brexit, it's pretty much the same deal. You can go to the United States and you get a better deal because there's more capital here, it's a more permissive environment, and so on. But if you're Japanese,right, you're a young Japanese guy or woman, and you want to start a company and build a new business and build wealth and help the economy grow. Nope. You have to learn a new language, go to a new country. And so what I would like to see is it would only take one of these countries to defect from the current consensus that we just have to, like, increase spending, increase taxation, increase the size of the public sector by, like, three or four X the size of the overall economy on an ongoing basis. I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago pointing out that Australia for, like, 15 years now has been locked into a future where it becomes fully communist, essentially, like, full government control of the economy because the private economy, the economy that actually generates net wealth and taxes, is shrinking. But you only need one of these countries to, say, face an existential problem, realize it's facing an existential problem, and undergo massive reform. So actually, Patrick Collison and Mario Draghi recently announced the Rhein Group, which is a kind of a think tank whose efforts are around restoring European dynamism. I find it's an interesting or useful thought experiment to think of Europe as kind of a successor civilization to the civilization that built all the infrastructure that's kind of living in the ruins of that infrastructure but isn't capable of building it again. And we're talking, like, not 1700, we're talking, like, 1960 kind of thing, like, only a few generations ago. I think a lot of it was driven by energy scarcity. Right? So, like, big economic shock in the 1970s when basically the Saudis nationalized Saudi Aramco and then formed the OPEC oil cartel. And we were able to find, like, a modicum of economic growth in the intervening periods through capital deepening, improvement in public health, kind of a little bit of Cold War nonsense and kind of elevation of the developing world. And then more recently in software, consumer software, which is a really great way of improving productivity without increasing energetic inputs particularly, although now data centers have grown to the point where they're, like, pushing double digits of total energy consumption and, like, we're starting to run against those limits again. And so it's really important, I think, for us to grow to break these constraints on energy availability. So our friend Isaiah is working on this, for example, with nuclear energy, and obviously solar is a key way to go that direction. You know, and then, you know, bring back permission to do things. One thing is the Japanese do do nicely, and it has its own proclivities and weirdnesses, though, but they normalize construction. So they're actually constructing things all the time. And part of the reason they've got an extremely powerful steel cartel, basically, with, you know, very, very politically connected that wants to keep on building things. But they also understand that, like, you know, a city is really only a city if it's constantly in the process of regeneration and recreation. And it's completely acceptable to say, well, yeah, there's one or two nice buildings, we'll keep them nice, we'll restore them, but in general, we want to replace 98% of the fabric of the city every 50 years. Right? What a radical point of view that is. Right? But 98% of the fabric of the city every 50 years just means that, you know, on average, your buildings are 25 years old instead of 150 years old, which is a major problem we have facing in the West. And it means that you get lots of practice in construction, you get lots of practice in project financing and management. And if you build a real stinker, you're not stuck with it forever. You just rip it down and try again. Right? So I'd love to do something with the Salton Sea one day. It's this environmentally desolate wasteland in the southern end of California that could be like Phoenix, Arizona, but with this beautiful lake in the middle of it. It could be the most extraordinarily beautiful part of the world. And, like, there's no downside to trying. The worst that can happen is it remains an environmental catastrophe. It is already an environmental catastrophe. You could only improve it by changing it. You know, it's kind of like theright to try laws around using weird drugs if you're about dying of cancer anyway. Like, what difference does it make? **Ti** [52:08] On the same kind of thread of regulation. **Casey Handmer** [52:10] Yes. **Ti** [52:11] In America. **Casey Handmer** [52:12] America? **Ti** [52:13] I've never understood this idea that if Elon believes that the kind of, like, American system and all the regulation that surrounds this is basically like this unstoppable, you know, thousand strings, you can't do anything over time situation. Like, he's not going to import that bad system to another planet. **Casey Handmer** [52:34] One would hope not. And I think that's kind of the libertarian. You know, you need one state which tries things differently, does things differently to become competitive. Right? So, like, in some sense, the Arab states do this. Like, UAE has radically lower taxes. It's quite attractive to certain areas. And in the United States, the federation, different states are able to compete in terms of their, you know, regulatory approach to various things. So some states have decided they're going to be, like, business-friendly places. Other states are so wealthy through no fault of their own that they can afford to be extremely profligate in the way that they spend money. Cough, California, cough. Yeah, there's never been a really strong forcing function for great governance in any part of the United States. But yeah, we need one Western liberal, ideally anglophone democracy to defect and say, we're going to adopt an extremely, like, aggressive deregulatory agenda. Like, AI is a great way to do it. You say, like, hey, I had Claude 4.6 do this a year ago. Like, ingest the complete corpus of American law and regulation and compress it to 4,000 pages, which is a Mastercard catalog book. Right? I'm a fit guy. I should be able to fit the laws of the land in an overhead locker. Right? In an overhead bin. That should be your constraint. Like, you can't just keep on adding laws forever. How many laws do you really need? You know, anyone who's developed software knows that there's an optimum size. Right? And you should not have too much or too little. You should have the optimum size. But there's no forcing function. There's no process even for the destruction of laws that are, you know, obsolete or no longer needed. In the reconstruction period after the Civil War, I think under Jackson, there was an effort to, for the first time, actually get all of U.S. law in one place. So you had the Constitution, the founding documents, obviously, but then you had lots of laws in all the places. It wasn't particularly well kept. It came to 1,700 pages at that time. 1,700 pages. But, like, Lincoln himself was originally a trial circuit lawyer in Illinois, I believe, prior to his election. And so in those days, they're just, like, terrible lifestyle, just, like, going from town to town trying cases and getting to know people. And yeah, and they didn't have, like, a central source of truth for what the law was back then. Kind of wild. Obviously, the federal government was much smaller back then. But yeah, 1,700 pages seems like a good number. 4,000 pages, I could live with. You know, we've got airplanes and stuff now to deal with. 12 million pages is what the current. **Ti** [55:08] That's the current law? **Casey Handmer** [55:09] Yeah. Yeah. Federal code and regulations. It's 12 million pages, which is more than anyone could even read the index for in a lifetime. It's absurd. **Ti** [55:18] I've thought a lot about this whole idea of, like, dictatorships and, you know, companies. ### Mini dictatorships **Casey Handmer** [55:23] Companies are dictatorships. **Ti** [55:23] At some level are basically, like, especially in founder-led companies, they are a mini dictatorship where you live or die based on how good you are at making something that people want. **Casey Handmer** [55:32] They're all different, though. Like, the nice thing is, in our system, and this is 10 years ago, I would not have seen the value of this. Now I do. And I think maybe it was Pamela Hakie or someone who was talking about the value of the limited stock or joint stock company as an innovation. Every single company in the entire country is governed differently. Right? You have everything under the sun. And within very broad bounds, almost anything is legal. Right? You can have a company where you've got a constitution and all your employees have proportional votes and they vote on what gets done. Right? And the thing is, this works really well because no one's locked in. Anyone can resign and go to another company. Right? So it's not like a religion where if you're an apostate, you get killed. You can always leave. It's voluntary association, but it becomes this laboratory for experimentation of different governance systems that work better for particular types of businesses and particular types of founders for particular times in history. Different systems work better. **Ti** [56:29] The other great thing is it's kind of live by the sword, die by the sword. And if your system doesn't work, you rapidly get killed. **Casey Handmer** [56:35] Oh, yeah, for sure. **Ti** [56:36] And this is, like, the difference between, you know, the U.S. government where it can have, like, a non-functional system. **Casey Handmer** [56:42] Aside from USAID, but, like, agencies. Like, here's a radical idea. The executives should be allowed to spool up agencies to solve problems. That makes sense to me. Some of those agencies are chartered in the Constitution. Some of them are not. For the ones that are not, they get automatically sunsetted after 10 years. That solves all the problems. Right? Because you could then, you could then, you could always recharter it. DARPA does this automatically. Right? So whoever invented DARPA was a genius because they knew that the problem of all agencies is that you get a founding team, that team sits in place, and they hire people like them, and over time it gets captured and sclerotic and it can't do its job anymore. And we've just seen this over and over and over again. There's 400-something agencies in the United States, and their ability, like, if they were actually independently operated businesses, like, with paying customers, they'd be out of business tomorrow. Like, they just can't, they don't function in a functional way that we'd recognize in the private sector. Okay? They're funded by the private sector. They can never go out of business. Okay? In DARPA, if you're an employee of DARPA, you can only be an employee for a fixed term. Right? And then you're out. And it might even be for life. And so you don't have that problem of, you know, the kind of, I say boomer, but, like, there were boomers 50 years ago in these places as well. It's like the people who stay there forever. It's a real problem. And this is why in all these agencies, anyone who's got any degree of risk tolerance or labor market value over time will be attrition, like, a trader from the system because they'll get cross-recruited or they'll leave to do something different. And so if you solve for the equilibrium, the people who remain will be the people who either can't or don't want to leave ever. And they might have good reasons not to. But on average, the character of the organization will just trend more and more risk-averse and older and older and more and more conservative with respect to decision-making. And so their ability to actually dynamically execute against their purported and stated goals will diminish necessarily. And their ability to attract new talent to work on them will diminish. And so you have to have a natural mechanism for sunsetting this. And in the capitalist system, this happens naturally. Most businesses don't last that long. And the ones that do, sometimes you wish they hadn't. They kind of have a full life cycle. The resources get recycled. ### Taxes **Ti** [58:54] I do find the government kind of fascinating because you have this organization that over time just grows and grows and grows and grows. It's just a corporation in the limit. Its revenue source is taxes or, like, printing money. And then it's like merging. **Casey Handmer** [59:08] Which are taxes by disguise because if you're just diluting everyone else's money supply, you're just stealing wealth from them. **Ti** [59:12] Yes. And the, like, effective output is, like, rules and regulations from what I can tell, for the most part. **Casey Handmer** [59:18] Okay. Well, some agencies make things as well. I mean, like, to be clear, like, NIST outputs, you know, standards. Right? And NASA outputs rockets and space probes, and they build things. And actually, some of these agencies, you know, Department of Transportation, like, outputs roads that generate economic value, and you don't have to pay a toll when you drive to Vegas. So, like, I'm not trying to say here that, like, agencies just can, like, burn money up in a furnace. Right? **Ti** [59:41] But have we got 40 trillion of value, is the question. **Casey Handmer** [59:44] The question is, do these agencies operate with equivalent efficiency or productivity of the private sector? And the answer there is no. Absolutely not. Like, not even close. Not even within a factor of 2. In some cases, not even within a factor of 10. And given that, you know, I ran the math a couple of months ago. I took our financial data and plugged it into an LLM and said, you figure out what's going on here. So, I don't know. In the grand scheme of things, like, the Collison's have put a few million dollars into this business. Okay? That's public information. They wouldn't mind me saying that. I'm proud to be associated with them. Whether they're proud to be associated with me, one can never tell. But the Collison's have put some money into this business. And the Collison's are very wealthy. How do they get their money? They built an extremely valuable business themselves. Okay? That business is a huge benefit to this country in particular. Right? And all the other businesses, like, millions and millions of businesses depend on it. They're probably responsible. I think they tried to estimate this at some point for, like, measurable amounts of GDP increase are attributable to Stripe decreasing friction on transactions. Okay? We should throw these guys a parade. Okay? Pin a medal on them and make statues in Silicon Valley of them, you know, 100 feet tall. Okay? But like any business, they pay tax. They pay a shitload of tax. They pay all kinds of tax. They had to move to South San Francisco because San Francisco was like, we're going to charge you a transaction tax. Genius move. Okay. So they had to pay, they pay a shitload of tax. The Collison's, like, most rich founders are probably not paid much in the way of salary, but they have equity and they can borrow against the equity. They still pay tax on that. Then, in addition to payroll income tax on, some of that money gets invested in companies like ours. And then we pay tax. Okay? So I ran payroll on Monday and I'm paying on the order of $350,000, $400,000 a month in payroll. And of that payroll, almost half of that goes into either payroll tax or income tax. So the actual amount of, like, and then when my employees go out and, like, try and rent a building to live in around here or buy food or something, they're paying tax on that as well. So if you think, like, what we want here is the net economic surplus to make it from the Collison's hyperproductivity into actual, like, physical things that my employees need to survive. What fraction of that value gets siphoned off by the government? It's like 70%. It is unbelievable how much just disappears. And you say, well, why is it that this neighborhood here is no longer full of, like, vibrant businesses building state-of-the-art aircraft that enable people to fly around the world? Could it be that two-thirds of the net value between the source of capital and the goods and services that the people actually doing the actual work need in order to survive is just yoinked out of the system along the way? It's nutty. It's absolutely crazy. I'll give one more example. I'm blessed to be married to a very talented woman, Christine, and she has always and continues to earn more than I do, which is my own damn fault. I set my own salary, but, like, it's not even close. And so I asked Grok the other day, like, you know, net family income, does just my income, like, cover the tax or something? And Grok was like, your income covers less than half of the tax. And I was like, I should just retire. My wife should just retire. We're, like, comfortably middle class. We effectively buy the company a luxury car every couple of months. Like, it's kind of nutty. And the thing is, maybe for some people, maybe some people it's different, but to me, I feel like the U.S. people are no longer getting out of the government what they were putting in. ### Hard resets **Ti** [1:03:26] Do you think that civilizations just have to do a hard reset every couple hundred years? **Casey Handmer** [1:03:30] We're in the crisis we're inright now. **Ti** [1:03:31] Fresh? **Casey Handmer** [1:03:32] Like, this year, we're in the AI takeoff. We're in the singularity. And, like, this is the thing that, like, you can kind of argue this way or that way about demographics, this birth rate, that tax rate, this, you know, offensive drone warfare, that all this stuff is swamped by hyper-intelligent AIs. And so the correct question to ask really is, what is it's kind of like, you know, New York City was in a crisis over a century ago due to their inability to dispose of a horse manure from people using horses to tow things around the place. And even in the Second World War, the German army depended on horses to drag artillery pieces from place to place. Right? It was not fully mechanized. And the answer was not like, oh, taxation on horses or something. Right? The answer was, we invented new technology, a motor car that has its own problems, but its own benefits. And here we are. So we're literally in the processright now of not so much changing this legacy tax and spend economic system, but, like, just superseding it entirely. Yeah. So if you think, like, let's run the clock 10 years forward in a good outcome scenario, 90% of the net benefit that accrues to humans will be downstream of AI, and AIs will be, you know, incorporated in our economic system in a way that's very different from the way that FDR's team and, you know, the presidents around the congresses around that time decided that they were going to essentially fund the operations of the government by appropriating a fraction of everyone's labor through income tax. Right? Like, income tax makes sense if most of the people in your economy are working for businesses that run payroll where they're, like, turning screws in a factory or something, which was, you know, reasonably descriptive of the 20th century. But most of the economic activity in our economy today is not that. You know, the United States still does a lot of manufacturing, but it's not the nexus of economic productivity here. And in the future, it won't be either. Most of the economic productivity will be machines emitting streams of ones and zeros in low Earth orbit. **Ti** [1:05:31] Want to talk about Starship? ### Starship scaling **Casey Handmer** [1:05:32] Starship. **Ti** [1:05:32] Okay. **Casey Handmer** [1:05:33] Let's do Starship. **Ti** [1:05:33] Let's talk about Starship. **Casey Handmer** [1:05:34] So cool. **Ti** [1:05:35] It's extraordinarily cool. On the Louisiana build-out, I think is it like 12 towers for that? **Casey Handmer** [1:05:42] I don't know 12. I mean, who really knows? **Ti** [1:05:44] It's somewhere around there. **Casey Handmer** [1:05:45] Some number. **Ti** [1:05:46] But I think that there's, like, some constraint for Starbase where they can only launch so many Starships a day. **Casey Handmer** [1:05:54] Well, Elon's in the process of undergoing regulatory arbitrage. So the impression that I get is that the Rio Grande Valley authorities having jurisdiction were perhaps getting a little bit cozy or comfortable with their little monopoly on Starship development and the enormous revenue and so on that that's brought to that area and perhaps becoming a little too extractive or potentially having the ability to become too extractive. And so how do you make sure that you keep that relationship healthy? You create an escape hatch that is non-zero cost and non-infinite cost. And then you can now run the regulatory arbitrage. And the Louisiana governor was actually in that announcement video, it was kind of interesting. The Louisiana governor had the name tag because no one knew who he was, but Elon brought the bodyguards. That, you know, if push comes to shove, he will do to Texas what he did to California and say, I'm taking my business elsewhere because, like, you can shear the sheep, but you can't skin them. Right? If you shear the sheep, it makes more wool. If you skin it, it dies. So you don't want to cut too deep. **Ti** [1:07:01] I guess he wants to get to something like 10,000 flights a year in a very short period. **Casey Handmer** [1:07:06] I mean, that's a number. **Ti** [1:07:07] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [1:07:07] Like a power of 10. Right? But, like, that's a good number because it helps his team orient around, like, we're not just doing 10 a year. And, like, 10 million a year is too far off. So 10,000 is a good number. **Ti** [1:07:17] Actually, that's a good question. How do you think Elon sets basically objectives? Like, are these arbitrary? Are they five years out objectives? **Casey Handmer** [1:07:28] He's pretty well calibrated on that, actually. I think he's got a good sense. **Ti** [1:07:31] I think he's a lot more calibrated than he was on timelines and also objectives. **Casey Handmer** [1:07:35] He's always had a good sense of what the unifying goal, like the North Star for an organization, needs to be to keep everyone motivated and aligned. It's certainly something that has been not super obvious here because, you know, when you're in science project phase, it's never quite sure, like, when you're good enough, when you're done. So 10,000, I think, is a good number to fixate. I don't really hit it in the next five years. Probably not, but. **Ti** [1:07:59] You really don't think so? **Casey Handmer** [1:08:01] No. **Ti** [1:08:02] There's kind of these interesting. **Casey Handmer** [1:08:04] Well, we can run the mathright now. I mean, like, let's say, like, the next generation Starship, which is produced in the next two years, can do 10 landings. Right? Like the first Falcon 9 first stage, they do 10 landings. The factory in Starbase is set up, I think, to max out about 250 Starships a year. That's 2,500. Right? And it may be the case that they build them there and then launch them and then they land them in Louisiana and then relaunch them there. I don't know. Like, they become like airports. Right? You can fly them from, you don't have to land at the same place you take off from. **Ti** [1:08:37] It seems that a lot of people both say they believe in AI and, like, can kind of see the exponential, but then also kind of, like, extrapolate out the current trend versus, like, pulling in, you know, if there's, like, some intelligence explosion, who the hell knows what the future looks like? **Casey Handmer** [1:08:52] Well, that's the singularity. You can't really predict what comes next. But, you know, I know a number of relatively well-informed people who think that, for example, the real-world economic impacts of AI will be diluted by Balmoral's cost disease. That seems to me to be not entirely unlikely. Like, you say, well,right now the United States economy grows at, I don't know, 3% a year, which is quite respectable. How much more will it grow as a result of AI? You can make an argument that most of the growthright now is AI. But is that going to go to 5% or 10%? Is it going to go to 10,000%? You know, ultimately, what becomes the limiting factor? Time to power? ### Universal high income **Ti** [1:09:31] It would be fascinating to. **Casey Handmer** [1:09:33] Chief of Fabrication? **Ti** [1:09:34] To live in this world that Elon has talked about where he's, like, GDP just growing 100% a year and he's like, we're going to be there in, like, four or five years. **Casey Handmer** [1:09:41] That's what he says. He says, like, you'll have not universal basic income, you'll have universal high income. Yeah. Because you'll be able to essentially produce anything that you want on demand. **Ti** [1:09:49] Ironically, I don't think we'll ever have universal high income because I think the way that the hedonic treadmill works in human brains, whatever you have, it's like not good enough anymore and suddenly you want, you know, that plus two. **Casey Handmer** [1:10:01] Well, we already see that now. **Ti** [1:10:03] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [1:10:03] Where, like, not to pick on anyone too much, but, like, who are these people in New York in the DSA? Right? Like, when I was a kid, the leftist labor leaders, the union bosses and so on who were running, even in the 1990s, like, you know, wage labor, like hourly labor, labor trade disputes, strikes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? They were genuinely on the bottom end of the economic totem pole. They were often older gentlemen who had grown up in genuine poverty, in public housing, often like their dad had died in World War II or whatever, and they'd worked their way up from the ground floor. They were usually pretty tough. Right? Not like you and I, not like soft-handed, like, weirdos. You know, like, they actually, they genuinely worked with their body. They longshoveled, like, they loaded ships by hand, like, hard work, shit like that. Okay? Nowadays, the lefties that I know and that we see in public and so on, they're the most privileged people you've ever seen in your life. It's astonishing. **Ti** [1:11:12] It's like Elizabeth Warren in the back of a limousine being like, hate the rich. **Casey Handmer** [1:11:17] Yeah. Post it for my iPhone. **Ti** [1:11:18] Yeah. **Casey Handmer** [1:11:19] It's like, you know, we're not sharing the benefits of technology. Post it for my iPhone. I'm like, oh, you know, the benefits of wealth. I'm like, you have the same iPhone as Elon Musk. Like, it's basically like once you reach some relatively minimal tier, it's like horseshoe theory. If you're too privileged, you become a champagne socialist or something. **Ti** [1:11:38] Yeah. It's very interesting to me that, you know, 150 years ago, there might have been a major difference in between, like, the wealthiest people in the world and the poorest people in the world. But if you look across, like, the U.S. today. **Casey Handmer** [1:11:50] Yeah. **Ti** [1:11:51] The vast majority of activities that people partake, like, you roughly eat the same food. There's not, like, some billion-dollar mattress. There's not some, you know, maybe you have, like, a pool, but you watch the same Netflix or YouTube. You don't have access to a faster DoorDash. **Casey Handmer** [1:12:06] Yeah. The only real differences are around energy availability. So, like, can you afford to air condition a large house? Can you fly private? Whatever. Right? **Ti** [1:12:13] Yeah. But, like, honestly, I think people misunderstand private jets as well. Like, for Elon, really what you should compare it to is if, unless it's, like, purely legal. **Casey Handmer** [1:12:22] Elon is an anomaly in that class. Right? Because most people who are actually flying private are themselves private citizens and no one knows who they are. Right? So the thing that Elon doesn't have and that you will also one day lose if you become famous enough, and I will as well, is that you'll be unable to exist in public. The same thing to the movie stars who live in the hills here. Right? They can't exist in public because they can't go outside without being harassed or someone trying to kill them. And the same thing for, you know, sufficiently prominent politicians. But most people are not, they don't have enough face recognition that they could do that. Yeah. I totally agree with you. People bang on about income inequality and so on. Like, in the United States, there's the worst income inequality on Earth. I'm like, the United States has the richest poor people on Earth. **Ti** [1:13:04] Yeah. There's no, like, teleportation device for a billion dollars either. Like, you actually just have to get in the same, roughly same jet, and there might be some guy that spends a boatload of money on the flight, but you're going to get there in the same amount of time. **Casey Handmer** [1:13:16] I mean, I don't really envy the rich. I mean, I am rich, but I don't envy the super rich. And I'll tell you why. The people who are significantly wealthier than I am, their lives are more complicated. Okay? They have private security. They're usually much older and in much worse health. They don't have privacy, obviously. They have people actively trying to destroy their privacy. They're wealthy enough that they're surrounded by very few relationships and are not transactional one way or another. It's very hard for them to, you know, interact with other humans as humans. And the ones that are not ridiculously old or inherited wealth or whatever are, by and large, like, cracked founders who have, by their own choice, but nonetheless, extremely difficult professional lives. Right? So that usually, like, the family life is not quite there or whatever. Right? And you say, like, is that something you really want? I think that this obsessing over income inequality is actually a negative thing. I think the optimum amount of income inequality is not zero. And a certain amount actually incentivizes success. It rewards success. It rewards hard work. It rewards innovation. It rewards technological development. And as a result, it actually lifts the floor. So the thing you should worry about, I think, is not so much income inequality, like some Gini coefficient nonsense. It is, like, are the bottom decile in our economic system starving or do they have an opportunity to get on that ladder? Do they have opportunities to get educated, to try as hard as they can to build a better life for themselves, for their children, for their grandchildren, for their communities, and so on? And on that front, I think the United States has always done a really good job. It's done a better job now than in the past, perhaps. But the United States is accumulating wealth for people up and down the spectrum faster. People say, oh, the middle class has disappeared. As though, like, what was the middle class 70 years ago, which is like, you know, some guy working hourly at the Lockheed plant, putting his kids through some public school in a car with no safety standards is the middle class. The middle class has disappeared in the United States because people have left it through the ceiling. But these things are not well appreciated or educated or taught or understood. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.