YouSaid · the spoken record

Austin Vernon

lines on the record: 158
first: 2022-09-08
most recent: 2022-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think if we tie it back into what we were talking about earlier, automation promotes local optimization in premature optimization. So a lot of times it's better to figure out like Instead of like automating a process to make a really hard to make part, you know, you should just figure out how to make that part easy to make. And then after you do that, then it may not even make sense to automate it anymore or get rid of it altogether. Then you just delete all those robots.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enterprise value is basically like what is the value of the actual company before you have any claims on it? It's the market cap plus your debt, the most simple. But basically, if you're the equity holder in the company get sold, you have to pay the debt first. So you only get the value of what's left over after the debt. So that's why market cap is when Tesla has very little debt and a lot of market cap, and then these other guys have a lot of debt with less market cap that skews the comparison.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that in that measure, I don't like market cap. You need to use enterprise value. And when you start these old car companies have so much debt that if you look at enterprise value, it's not so jarring. Like literally, you know, like. I can't remember what GM's worth like $40 billion or something. And then they have $120 billion in debt. It's like, so their enterprise value is like five times more than their market hat.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of zillions over thousands of robots run their process If you already have an existing stamping line and all that, where you're just changing the dies based on your model, then it doesn't make sense to switch to the casting. But if you're building new factories like Tesla is, well, then it makes sense to do the casting and you can build new factories very cheaply comparatively and much easier. So there's a little bit of like, you know, they have lots of, they just have lots of technical data, I guess you could say, in a software sense.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just too incremental. It's like it's so hard to get these processes working. So the faster you change things, it becomes very, very difficult to change the whole system. So one of the advantages Tesla has is, well, if you're making electric cars, like you have just a lot less parts. So that makes it easier. And then also once you start doing the really hard work of basically like digitizing. You start just removing parts from the thing and you can actually then start increasing your rate of change even faster. And it makes it hard to get behind if you have these like old dinosaur processes. But I think there's someone, there's like a YouTube channel called The Limiting Factor. And he actually went into the detailed numbers on what it cost for Tesla to do their giga casting which saves like tons of parts and deletes like.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stock reports and stuff. I'm like, well, I at least need to buy some stock so that I have a justification for spending all this time reading their 10Ks and stuff.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Production technology and stuff, they're very conservative. And like, you know, that's why they have. Hydrogen cars and not battery cars, even though came out with the Prius, which was like the first large sales hybrid. So, yeah, I think this whole what Tesla was doing with really just making Deming's ideas our own and really just like Americanizing it with like, you know, like, oh, well, we want to cast this because that would be easier. Well, we can't because we don't have an alloy. We'll invent the alloy. I love it. It's great. Mostly I just like Tesla because they do such. I'd agree with their engineering principles and stuff like that. And so I didn't know that the company would come to be so valuable. It's just like I was just always reading their.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this guy dimming. Yeah, W. Edward's dimming. And he had a lot of, found a lot of the same ideas that Toyota ended up implementing and Toyota respected his ideas a lot. And America never really, except for the software industry recently, never really got fully on board with this in manufacturing. And so this new, and of course it's like software people that are, you know, coming and implementing this and manufacturing and it's like the real American way of doing things because when you look at like these manufacturing processes like Best place to save money and optimize is like before you ever build the process or the plant. It's very early on. And so I think if there's like a criticism of Toyota is that they're optimizing too late and they're not creative enough in their”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, just like what's goofed around and made that up. Someone actually emailed me and they're like, hey, what does this metal manufacturing? I want to learn more about this. It's like, well, sorry, I just kind of like made that up. I thought it sounded funny. But yeah, I think it's really the idea that...”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how the industry goes, but I would guess there's like, you know, I know Accenture has like 600,000 employees or something like, or maybe I don't know that many, but it's just a large number in a lot are doing. Basic tasks, and then you know there are some people that are doing like the high, more high level stuff. There's probably a lot less.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's like this applies to consultants or young engineers. A lot of times you put young engineers just right in the thick of it. Working in production or process, like ride on the line where you're talking to the workers the most. And there's really two advantages. There's several advantages of that. One, the engineer learns faster because they're actually seeing the real process. And the other is there's easy opportunities for them to still have a positive. Impact on the business because there's just like $100 bills laying on the ground just from going up and talking to your workers and learning about stuff and figuring out problems they might be having and things like that that could help you lower costs. I think there's a lot of consultants”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So sometimes like small to reward new ideas, stuff like that works. But because the whole system has to row together, like if you just improve one part of the process, it may not help you. You have to be like improving all the right process and stuff. So normally it's much more collaborative. Like there's some engineer that's looking at it and like, oh, right, this is where we're struggling or we have our defects here. Then you go get together with like that supervisor and the workers in that area, then you all figure out what improvements could be together. Because usually the people already know like this is like, you know, you see a problem at the top and you're just now realizing it and then you go talk to the people doing the work and they're like, oh yeah, I tried to tell you about that like two weeks ago, man. And then you figure out, you know, a better process from there.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just going to say, like, you know, if you're a worker at a plant, then. Usually they have small a lot of times for that level employee, like actually small rewards work pretty well. Of people used to like on drilling rigs, used to like if you met certain targets, like give the guys $100 Walmart gift cards.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process really requires complete buy-in because a lot of your ideas for how you're going to standardize work content come from your line workers because that's what they're doing every day. So you can't If you don't have their buy-in, then it's going to fail. So that's why it's really necessary to have those kind of clauses.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you're going to increase productivity, that's why everyone's like, oh gosh, I'm going to get laid off. So instead, you just have to increase output and take more market share of what you do.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think there's a diminishing returns to how long your tenure is going to be. Maybe one year is too short, but there's a certain extent to where If you grow faster than your role at the company, then it's time to switch. And maybe that's like, it's going to depend on the person, but maybe like five years is a good number. And so if you're not getting promoted within the firm, then your human capital is being wasted because you could go somewhere else and have more responsibility and perform better for them Another interesting thing about that story is almost all lean turnarounds, you know, are like where we're going to implement something like Toyota Production System, they come with no layoff.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think all these kind of like Process like systems. They do have a lot of similarities and mostly you want to. Even out your production so you're producing very consistently and you want to Break it into small steps if you want to limit the amount of inventory you have in your system so that there's And when you do this, it makes it easy to See how the process is running and limit defects and the ultimate is you're really trying to reduce defects because they're very expensive. It's a little bit hard to summarize. I think that's my best shot at it there quickly off the top of my head.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it could be. I mean, I think it will be lots of very large companies unless, you know, there's some kind of change in our firm transaction costs. And again, I could possibly come from blockchain-like technology, but you probably also need better regulation to make that cheaper than you would have smaller firms. Again, in the end, it doesn't really matter. Like, you'd be working in your little unit of the big bank accorp or whatever. So it may not. Know what that would look like, you know, like as a personal level, but.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, definitely. Because they can basically decrease the transaction cost faster within. And then even at the limit, if you have large transaction costs outside the firm between other firms that are artificially imposed, then it will make firms bigger.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like for these big firms to survive, they have to be somewhat decentralized within them. So I think you have. You're going to the same place as just like what does it, how are we viewing it? What's our perception? So even if it's like a giant corporation, it's going to have very independent business units. As opposed to something like a 1950s corporation.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if internal transactions can be cheaper because they're avoiding the government reporting and taxes and all that kind of stuff. So I think you'd have to think about how these technologies can reduce transaction costs overall and decentralize that. But also, what are the costs in between firms?”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is like a post I've got on my list, so I want to write the blockchain application I'm actually which excites me personally the most is reimagining enterprise software. Because, like, the things you're talking about, like hard typing and like APIs, it's just basically built in to some of these protocols. So I think it just really A lot of exciting implications for how much you can decentralize software development. But you know, the thing is, you can still do that within the firm. So I think I mentioned this as like, you know, if the government's going to place like. All these rules on the edge of the firm makes transactions with other firms expensive.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's especially true when you're talking about you're combining bits and atoms. Maybe less true for pure software The physical world is just so much more complex, and so the constraints it creates are pretty extreme, you know, compared to like you could maybe get away with more of like everyone, their mom having an API and like a pure software world.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the same thing, you end up in like just constant vendor meetings where you're like trying to decide what the specs are or something instead of. Giving someone the authority or giving a team the authority to just go start building stuff. And then if you look at these companies, like they have to implement these decentralized, somewhat decentralized processes when they get too complex, but at least they have control over how they're interfacing with each other, you know, like Walmart. As the vendors control their own stock, you know, they don't tell the vendor, we need X parts. It's just like, it's on you to make sure your shelf is stocked.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think it's just like you know it actually gets to what we're talking about here where it allows you to avoid like the local optimization because. A lot of times, right, you're trying to build like a software MVP and you're like tying together a few services. They don't do quite what you need. So if you try to scale that, it would just break. But if you're going to take a really complex process like car manufacturing or distribution, retail distribution or the home buying process or something. Really have to vertically integrate it to be able to create a decent end-to-end experience and avoid that local optimization. You know, it's just very hard otherwise because there's no, you just can't coordinate effectively if you have like 10 different vendors trying to”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“File and start writing a new function. And not only that, but you still have to actually coordinate how this equipment is going to operate. So if you just let the grid flow as it does, everyone knows what's going to happen because they could just calculate the physics. So if you start adding in all these checkpoints where humans are doing stuff, then you have to actually interface with the humans. And the amount of things that can happen really starts going up. And so it's actually... A really bad idea Try to All this stuff off just because the reality of the physical laws and the equipment you need and everything like that.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you have like the same overall, you know, you still have to fight local optimization, but the level you have to is probably different with physical goods. I was thinking about the smart grid situation from a software perspective and like there's this problem where like, okay, I'm pitting my solar farm here and it's impacting somewhere far away and that's been like creating these like really high upgrade costs, you know, that cost two or three times more than my solar farm Well, you know, the obvious thing would be if you're doing software is like you're like going to break all these up into smaller sections and then you wouldn't be impacting each other and all that and you could you could work and focus on your own little thing. But the problem with that is if you're gonna like disconnect these areas of the grid is that the equipment to do that is extremely expensive you know like it's not like I'm just like gonna hit a new tab and open a new”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not necessarily. I mean, you do have to. Make sure you're not optimizing locally. But I think it's the same. You have that same constraint in software, but I think a lot of times people are just like running over it because processing has been getting so much cheaper. Expensive, so like if you could save development time, you know. It just ends up the trade offs are different when you're talking about the tyranny of like physical items and stuff like that. You get the constraints get a little more severe.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like if your assembly is too long, like it's longer than what your time allotment is to stay in touch with the rest of the process, then you just keep breaking it down into smaller pieces. And so Each person only has to know like a very small part of it. And even the overall engineering team has all sorts of strategies like this to they have all sorts of tools to help them break up all these processes into very small part and to make it all hold together. Still very, very hard. But it's kind of like a lot of the same ideas is you're taking away the complexity of making a $30,000 car or $30,000 part car where everyone's just focusing on their one little part and they don't care how what someone else is doing.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really actually very similar in car manufacturing and Toyota production system if you really get into it. It's very much the same conceptual framework. Also there's like this whole idea in Toyota projection system, everyone works at the same pace, which you kind of talked about. But also your work content is the same. There's no room for not standardizing a way you're going to do things. So everyone gets together and they're like, all right, we're going to this certain part, we're going to put it together this certain way at this little micro station. And it's going to be the same way every time that's part of like how they're reducing the defect rates. And then if you”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Concepts around like idiot proofing and everything like that that are very similar to like what you'll see you at Uncle Bob on there so Uncle Bob you know says like only put one input into a function and stuff like that because you'll mix them up otherwise so it's kind of like this the Japanese call it like pokey okay it's like you you make it where you you can't mess it up That's another way to reduce communication. And then software, of course, you have APIs. So I'm really interested in this. Overall concept of reducing communication and reducing how much cooperation and like Everything we need to run the economy.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like so extreme that there's this, I think it's a famous paper, but it's by Liszt, Siverson, and Levitt. And they went to the car factory and like, you know, studied how the defects propagated in cars and stuff. And once a car factory gets up and running, it doesn't matter what workers you put in there. Like if workers are sick or you get new workers, like the defect rate is the same. So like everything is just like all the knowledge is built into the manufacturing line and there's like”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have Toyota has these cards that go between workstations and they tell you what to do. So people would normally think of them as limiting inventory, but it also tells the worker exactly what they're supposed to be doing at what pace, at what time. And the simply line is like that. You just like know what to do because you're standing there and there's a part here and it needs to go on there. And it comes by at the pace you're supposed to work at.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creating the way the modern corporation is run, then you have Toyota production system. But arguably now creating software is actually the most complex thing we do. So there's all these kind of squishy concepts that underlie Torota production system that softwares had to learn and reimagine and adopt. And you see that with Agile where, oh, we can't have long release times. We need to be releasing every day, which is like, you know, we're limiting inventory there. There's like a whole thing, especially that's showing up in software that existed in car manufacturing where you're talking about reducing communication. So like Jeff Bezos kind of like now famously said, I want to reduce communication, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people. This is like age old and car manufacturing where”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's kind of like an interesting thing when you start praying it with management theory and like how it kind of Start sighing into some of my other posts is that for a long time when you add up like all the factors, the most complex thing when you're doing is high volume car manufacturing. So we got a lot of innovations and organization from car manufacturers like the assembly line. Then you had Sloan at GM basically.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if there's one post I kind of felt like I caught lightning in a bottle on is that one. It really like everything I wanted to put in it just like fit together perfectly which is usually not the case. Yeah, I think the idea is the world's so complex and Really underestimate that complexity. And if you're going to digitize processes and automate them and stuff, you have to capture all that complexity basically at the bit level. And that's extremely difficult. And then you also have diminishing returns where the easily automatable stuff goes first. And then it's increasing corner cases. Get to the end. So you just have to write more and more code basically. And so that's why we don't see runaway productivity growth from software is because Fighting, you know, all this increasing complexity.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't really know how much about it. And then, you know, I started looking at Wikipedia and stuff and like all this stuff they're doing. Taiwan just has a lot of modern platforms like F16s with our anti-ship missiles. They actually have a lot of their own, they have indigenous fighter bombers, indigenous anti-ship missiles because they're worried we might not always sell them to them. They've even recently gotten these long-range cruise missiles that could possibly target leadership in Beijing. So I think that makes it uncomfortable for the Chinese leadership if you attack them you're gonna have to go live in a bunker So there's lots of, you know, but again, I've not like the full time military analyst or something. So there's a lot of uncertainty around what I'm saying. It's not a given that China's just going to roll over them.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most recent ones were all the Americans in World War II and Korea. So the challenge there is just it's kind of on China to execute perfectly and do that. And so if they had perfect execution, then possibly. If, like, maybe their air defenses on their ships aren't quite as good as we think they could possibly be, then they could also end up with half their fleet underwater within 10 hours.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it might be, but I think it's a guess of the uncertainty thing, but Taiwan has actually one of the largest defense budgets in the world. And they've recently been upping it, I think they spend like, I don't know, $25 billion a year and they added like an extra $5 billion. They've been buying a lot of anti-ship missiles, a lot of air defense missiles, stuff that like. Ukraine could only dream of. I think Ukraine's military budget was like 2 billion. They have professional army. And then the other thing is they're an island, so you know, like Russia could just roll over the land border into Ukraine. But, you know, I mean, almost. Just very few successful amphibious landings in history.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, generally the consensus is that defensive technology has improved much more recently than offensive technology. And so this whole like strategy China has, as they call. Like area denial Anti access area denial A2ADN. So that's basically just like missiles have gotten better because the sensors on missiles have gotten better. So they can keep our ships from getting close to them. But, you know, they can't really challenge us like in Hawaii or something. And it really goes both ways. I think people forget that. So yeah, it's like hard for us to get close to China. But, you know, Taiwan has a lot of missiles with these new sensors as well. So I think it's probably tougher for China to get close to Taiwan than most people would say.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so much uncertainty when it comes to fighting, especially when you're talking about a naval engagement, whether we just don't have that many ships in general, you can have some bad luck. So I think you always want to be a little bit wary. Don't want to get overconfident.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I mean, we spend so much. We've got relatively. This kind of gets into like there's a lot of debate about how ready our military is and for certain situations it's more ready than others. I'd say in general most people talking about have the incentive to Downplay our capabilities because they want more defense spending or There's lots of reasons. So I think we're probably more capable than what you might see from some editorial in the hill or whatever. I think just like us just sending a few weapons over to Ukraine and how successful they've been. Using them, I think shows a little bit of that”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and that's because you know, the same thing, our physical technology hasn't changed that much. So it really has just made more sense to put better electronics in the same tanks we have than to build it. You're just not going to get, we haven't learned enough about tanks to build like a new physical tank that's way better. So we just keep upgrading our existing tanks with better electronics. So they're much more powerful. They're more accurate. A lot of times they have longer range weapons, they have better sensors. So the tank looks the same, but it may be as like several times more killing power, what have you. But, you know, the Ukraine war right now kind of. They're using a lot of Forty fifty year old weapons that especially looks like that.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Attack, you know, you need like a specialized package to do the aircraft, but you can see these aircraft on. Like, if you have enough synthetic aperture radar and stuff like that, you can see them with satellites and then guide it in the whole way. You could even say load heat-seeking missiles into a package that, you know, stop unfurls right next to them and launch conventional missiles too, probably. That'd be pretty hard to do some of this stuff, but it's just like kind of the things you might be able to do if you put some effort into it.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think for ships, I think it's pretty, you know, like I was watching videos of how fast a ship can turn and stuff because you'd want to like release your shrapnel if you were going to like do an initial target on a ship to like try to kill the radars and stuff. Want to do it above the ceiling of their missiles, so it's like how much are they going to move between your release where you stop steering and that? And it's really, you know, it's like maybe like a thousand feet. So that's pretty simple. You just like shrapnel the area. The aircraft you would be steering all the way in. So it's maybe actually. I'd say it's doable, but it'd be pretty hard. Yeah. And you'd actually maybe want to even go slower than you would with the ship.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like a super weapon. So that's what I think I said in the post, it really has, it's like advanced missiles where they're almost more defensive weapons. So I can keep you from pitting your ship somewhere and like, yeah, I could like try to bombard your cities, but I can't take ground with it. You know, I can't even like police ceilings with it, really. I'd still have to have regular ships, you know, if I had this air cover essentially to, you know, go like enforce the rules of the sea. board freighters and stuff like that.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so even the tungsten rod, sometimes people like, you know, they're not good at physics or something, so they don't do the math. They think it's going to be like a nuclear weapon, but it's really, I think even the tungsten rod, I might have put it in there. I think if I'm remembering correctly, like 10 tons of TNT or something, it's like a big bomb, but it's not.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tungsten's pretty expensive and like just the rod concept, it kind of limits to what you can do if you just do the rods. So a lot of these weapons will have like, that's what I was talking about with the shroud, like something that actually slows you down in the upper atmosphere. And then once you're to the velocity where you're not just going to melt, then you open it up and let it go. So if you actually had to fall from the sky, some may make it to the ground, but a lot would burn up. So a lot of stuff that makes it to the ground is actually pretty light. It's like stuff that can kind of like float and has a large surface area. Yeah, so that's like the whole thing with Starship, or not Starship, but Starlink. All those satellites are meant to completely fall apart on de-orbit.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, so the advantage of having on orbit is you can hit targets faster. So if you're launching the rocket from Florida, you're looking at maybe 30 minutes to get there. So target moves in that time. Whereas if you're on orbit, you can have them spaced out to where you're hitting, you know, within like a few minutes. So that's the advantage there. When you actually look at like the You really have to have like a two stage system, I think, for most because You have a really aerodynamic rod that's going to give you good performance in the low atmosphere or get going too fast and just like burn up before you get there. Tungsten's maybe the only thing You could have that could go all the way through. That's why I like the original concept use these big tungsten like rods the size of like a telephone pole.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the whole integration, it's not just like a specific chip, but like the board. It's like they're more like PLCs where you're like almost have like wired in programming and stuff like that. They come with to be able to do the guidance and all that stuff. It all kind of has to work together. I think that's the way I understand it. I don't know. Maybe I don't have a really good answer for that one. Hard to replicate is what matters.”
2022-09-08 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source