YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Potter

lines on the record: 160
first: 2022-10-27
most recent: 2022-10-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, so the requirements for meeting the deeper requirement, and this is a more general requirement across other things, but you have to take what the courts call like a hard look, where you have to consider these impacts quite thoroughly. And so the sort of risk is that if you put a timeline cap on some of these processes, like it has to be done in a year, and if it's not done in a year, it's automatically approved. It's just an idea you see floated from time to time. The risk is that people will just say, okay, well, we will go and litigate this project immediately, and then when we do, we will say, they did not look hard enough at these impacts. And if there wasn't marshal the resources or something else like, you know, we needed to study some particular flowering species and it only has a flowering.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as the court tells us. So, yeah, it's a very inefficient system of implementing environmental requirements. And I don't think I'm not an expert on this. I don't think it's really how other countries do it. This, again, I'm not strongly willing in this opinion. But, you know, a lot of other, almost every other country, I think, has something like requiring environmental impact statements, but I don't think it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a courts enforcing it via citizen lawsuits is how it's enforced. I think a lot of times, yeah, it's done via like another a normal government bureaucracy or something like that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it actually makes it because it's the corpse that actually makes it like a little bit hard to change it because any given change in the provision, you don't actually know what the effect of it is until somebody files a lawsuit referring to it and it works its way through the courts. So there's like, you know, some people think that during the Trump administration there was some changes to how IPA work because that's one thing about it is that a lot of these laws are just our federal level laws that are comparatively simpler to change, but they change some of these laws regarding it. And someone is like, yeah, this is designed to accelerate it. It's actually going to kind of increase the risk for these projects in the short term until some of these lawsuits make their way through the courts and we know exactly what is required or not.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Especially for a really environmental protection statute, is to whether it would be captured by political interests or not, and either just not enforced at all if it was a very conservative staffing for it, or just enforced extremely, extremely vigorously if it was on the other end of the spectrum. So that's kind of the risk of that. But yes, it's clearly not ideal that the court system is responsible for basically determining this.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, you would want something, a government agency responsible, a sort of An idea that I've seen or heard floated a few times is that you would want something that looked more like the OMB, which basically is charged with figuring out how much a given law is going to cost or something like that. And you would want something like a bureaucracy attached to it that was just designed to figure out the environmental effects of this, that was decoupled from the specific agency or whatever. The downside of that is something like the”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I was reading a paper earlier about it, and basically from Michael, he's like, yeah, Nipa is like a horribly drafted law because it contains no provisions for like, yeah, funding it or with a bureaucracy for enforcing it or anything like this. And it's essentially through random chance that the courts, when it was passed, it was like a very activist period in the court and they decided to enforce this provision for the impact statement, which was kind of added just like not randomly, but added late in the process without a lot of fanfare or consideration. And then that one little part of it ended up became becoming the most important part because that's what the courts decided to enforce like really, really strongly. But yeah, people are like, yeah, this is not how you would draft an environmental protection law. If you were doing it from scratch, it was this sort of weird thing that we've ended up with due to path dependence.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think on a very simple level, I would like to even the playing field, so like a lot of these newer energy technologies and have a lot of the same benefits that like the oil and gas has been able to accrue. So like, for instance, oil and gas has a lot of categorical exclusions for certain drilling operations and for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They actually have a lot of NEFA exclusions, which was perhaps one of the reasons that one of the reasons. But you can obviously connect that to the giant tea water horizon accent. And yeah, so basically just giving the technologies like wind and solar and like large scale transmission projects, giving those the same benefits that like oil and gas drilling and like your like natural gas pipelines have would I think be like a massive mass”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even over the past twenty years would have been able to sort of do so with any degree of precision. It's not obvious we would even be able to get like the sign right on that, whether it be net positive or net negative. That's off the top of my head. I could definitely be persuaded. Otherwise from somebody who has thought a lot more about it, so I don't want to, that is not a strongly held opinion, but that's fine. That is not Nai's impression.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, a couple thoughts. So, one is just Philip Responses that any additional review is just going to add additional time and complexity to your process. Like everything is like a process that takes some amount of time and has some particular chance of success. So just adding another thing that is adding basically another filter to this process, it's only going to make the process slower and less likely to succeed rather than more. And then the other thing is just, you know, how do you, and I know I've seen a take like this before, so this is not original at all, but how accurately are you going to be able to sort of predict what your long-term impacts are? It's not obvious to me that anybody making predictions in like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic analysis, right? If you don't know when your project is going to start, because who knows how long this eco process will take.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They can't usually stop a project because all you need to do is basically show that you've documented your things thoroughly enough. And so once you have documented it thoroughly enough, they don't have grounds for stopping it anymore. But they can slow it down if they slow it down enough. Sometimes the project becomes unattractive and it gets canceled. That's kind of what a lot of these groups hope for. And so it basically, instead of creating certainty and solving coordination problems, it creates all this new uncertainty where people will very deliberately try to avoid the process because they do not know how long it will take and how much it will cost to get their project approved. And in some cases, yeah, again, going through the process will take like a very, very, very, very long time. And so making like a business decision as to whether like do a new offshore wind development or, you know, develop a new forest resource or something like that. It's very hard to do any sort of”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And stuff like that. NEPA actually is very, very bad at this. It creates a lot of uncertainty because of the requirements for Doing the analysis are so unclear or constantly shifting, and like the definition of what is a major environmental effect has basically changed over time, you know, Nadi's example is in the 1970s, it was maybe not obvious that greenhouse gas emissions were in major environmental effect. But now in the 2020s, that obviously is. And so what you've had to do for an EPA analysis changes over time, which is, of course, fine on its sense, right? But it does mean that it's very unclear when you have to go through the process. It is unclear how long it's going to take and what is going to be involved and whether anybody is going to sort of litigate your decision. This is the other sort of big part of NEPA, is that people are basically able to sue people for groups for not completing the analysis thoroughly enough. They can't use”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heavenly, like it doesn't prevent a big oil and gas drilling project from taking place, essentially. What it does require is that for any major environmental effects, you just have to document them very thoroughly. And so it's a documentation requirement and notifying the public of what you're doing. But it doesn't prevent a major environmental negative effect as long as you've documented it quite thoroughly. You can kind of do whatever you want. So it doesn't actually, and the evidence is like very unclear as to whether it has had on net beneficial environmental effects. And to the extent that it has, I think there's a good argument that it has done so just by making it harder to do anything at all. And then so, yeah, the other side of this is to create certainty, solve coordination problems.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This. Like, it's good if people will be punished for breaking contracts because that allows people to go enter into them, which allows exchanges that might not otherwise take place. I forget exactly what the example of this, but there's an argument that's made like the ability of the English government and like the 1600 to 1700s to basically have to pay back its debts was a really important development because it allowed it to raise money that it otherwise wouldn't be able to because people could trust that they would be able to get paid back. But anyway, so those are the two rough purposes of a law. And NIFA does not do either of those things. In the first, NIPA is basically a procedural statement or a requirement. It does not require the government to weigh environmental concerns, especially.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Podcast listeners, yeah. Yeah, it's my spicy take at the end that I always have to throw in right at the end. So yeah, kind of the basic argument is that the purpose of a law is roughly twofold. A is to encourage something that you would want more of or discourage something that you would want less of. So we have laws against drunk driving because we think drug driving is harmful and we want less drunk driving in our society. And then the second purpose of a law is to basically reduce coordination problems and enable exchanges that might not otherwise be able to take place. The obvious example of this is the government enforces which side of the road you're allowed to drive on, not because one side is inherently better than the other, but because it's good if everybody agrees on which side of the road to drive on. Contract law is in some ways like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This law basically such that we would not have to wait years and years and years before building big important infrastructure projects, basically. So that's the gist of what NEPA is and how it works.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. So NEPA is the national environmental policy act. This is the law that basically requires any major federal government action that might have significant environmental impacts to do a very long and thorough and expensive environmental impact study before anything is done on a project, right? The logits of a large amount of attention because of how long these environmental impacts prepare. The average time currently is something like four and a half years. And in some cases, since the average, half of them are longer than that, the highway administration, for instance, Dixon have reached something like eight and a half years to do an environmental impact statement. And that's before they can build a highway or something like that. So people are perpetually trying to figure out a way to reflect.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an interesting question. I'm not super confident of that answer. I should look into it more. Why don't developers have better lobbying efforts? It does seem like an unanswered question.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sort of mechanism by where places get wealthier and need more housing kind of also creates its own opposition to some extent.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, have a large constituency that would exist to oppose basically anyone who lives in the area and doesn't want this giant shadow of a building or is worried about the congestion that it would cause or whatever like that. That's a sort of paradox with this situation is that the places that need it the most because their rents are so high, the people that are living there already are going to be financially well equipped to oppose it, right? And a certain sense they're losing the most out of it, right? If you're making $50,000 a year, you might value the view out of your apartment at like $500. But if you're making $5 million a year, you might value that view proportionately more and be willing to expend a lot more to prevent it from being obstructed. So I feel like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really interesting question. In general, the strongest construction lobbying group I'm aware of is probably the National Association of Home Builders, which exerts quite a bit of influence to try to keep the cost of building single family homes low. I'm not aware of anything that exists for large commercial buildings or something like that, maybe Association of General Contractors or something. I guess my initial guess would be something to the effect of the natural constituencies for opposing a big project like this are always going to be quite a bit grit, you know, at least as big, if not bigger than sort of the constituencies that would be able to act for it, right? So like any big giant construction project, even if it had a lot of developers mobilized to try to support that quite a kind of thing also.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you would not, yeah, you basically by throwing a giant amount of money at the problem. So, yeah, the basic gist of that is like the physical constraints do not. Allow you to build a mile in height. It's sort of the economic and legal constraints that sort of stop this extreme construction. And yeah, the economic constraints are significant enough that even in places where there's not legal constraints like China or Dubai or something like that, they still do not build this site because the economics of it are just so brutal. But yeah, in this fantasy scenario, yeah, a giant stack of money would get devoted to doing this.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh Intersan, I would like to see us fulfill the dream of like the early to mid twentieth century and build a mile high skyscraper. Like this was what everybody was not everybody, but this was what people saw the development of skyscrapers going in sort of the 30s and 40s and perhaps 50s. Frank Lloyd Wright designed this mile-high skyscraper called the Illinois, presumably backward. Susan Chicago was like much of a metro of rising importance. Yeah, and there's the technology for it exists. I'm aware of other rooms who have like designed conceptual buildings this fall. And you haven't really seen anyone do it. Even these people who are willing to clearly build these giant white elephant projects, basically, nobody tries to go the distance and build the ice skyscraper. I would like to see us do it.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's interesting. You can run experiments on your piece of software to understand how it works a lot more easily at lower cost than you can with any physical object, right? But especially like a giant building where, yeah, who knows?”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“as the US did. So just a physical object, just the process to make it is not necessarily just super legible, tends to be a little bit hidden. And I was going to say that perhaps that is not as true for software, but I actually don't actually know. And it's very plausible to me that you could have some piece of software that was written. I guess I would maybe ask you this question. Is it possible that you could have some piece of software that was written and then just it be utterly inscrutable as to how it came together and how you could duplicate a similar thing? Or is that like a category error?”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is maybe an interesting question with a building, it's not necessarily obvious how it got to the point that it did when it was put together. And a lot of times with like physical things, it ends up, even if you have the object, it is unclear what the process was to create it. And so a lot of times what you see is that even with like, this comes up with industrial espionage, right? Where somebody who's trying to steal some particular thing or whatever. A lot of times that doesn't help them as much as they would think to try to like recreate it. A lot of times they have to basically go through the entire process of figuring out how to make it. And it takes them just as long to do it as it did the original people doing the development. You saw this with the atomic bomb, for instance, where like the people who stole the plans for how to make it or who had information on exactly how their system developed or whatever basically took as long to figure out how to make it.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is perhaps and again I'm not an expert on software development but it's somewhat more legible by response in that the end product is like it's you know you it's very clear you can clearly see every single part of it and how every single part of it touches every single other partners and I'm overstating that you know I'm sure a software could say well it's actually really not super obvious how these things work and why they're done this way or or whatever but you can see you can clearly inspect every single part of it and see exactly how it does you know what it does and how it connects the other part of it you can't really I mean you can't really do that with a building I guess I would also maybe say that there's”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just construction is just very, very much on the craft of the production spectrum where the decision of how to put these things together and how to wire this building or whatever, it's all left up to the sort of the expertise and the sort of judgments of the people doing sort of the installation. And what that gets you is that, again, it lets you put things together without having to do a very large amount of specifying exactly what you need, right? The drawings specify a house going together or even something quite complicated are way fewer than the drawings needed to produce a Toyota Corolla. I'm sure, for instance, you know. And the cost required to do it, like the design cost required to do it is in proportion to how expensive the thing is also much lower as well. Software.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. I mean, to go back slightly to our product versus project industry, right, a slightly different way of thinking about that is it just like graft-based industries versus like, again, like an industrial process where a craft-based industry, basically you have, and this isn't like a dichotomy, right? This is a spectrum. But in general, like craft-based stuff, there's an expertise and judgment aspect of it that is sort of pretty well embedded in the process that you can't really well remove. Any sort of decisions at any given point requires an expert or an artisan or somebody who understands the relevant context and knows how to proceed based on the specific variables in this specific situation or like industrial process is more like this has been sort of figured out and this is how it works every single time.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hoping I can ask him about that. I would love to hear about that thing. I mean, it's, you know, it's maybe just like, you know, PC is all about really high variance bets. There's nobody higher variance in the ancient. Then, uh, yeah, so Adam Newman. So yeah, maybe just on those terms, it makes sense.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do not have any strong opinions about that other than wow they're really giving him another three. Yeah, I do not have any particular strong opinions about that. I will say that was it A16Z where the one check? They make a lot of investments that don't make sense to me, but I'm not a venture capitalist, so there's no reason that my judgment would be any good in this situation. So I'm just presuming they know something I do not.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly where to build your walls, which is you would think it would not be like a difficult problem in construction, but it turns out that a lot of times people put the walls in the wrong spot and then you have to go back and move them later or just basically deal with it. And so, yeah, it's basically a little Roomba type device that just draws the wall layer onto the concrete slab and all the other systems as well, like where the lines need to run through the slab and things like that. So yeah, I kind of suspect that you're just going to start to see robotics and systems like that just take a larger and larger share of the tasks on the construction site over time.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there's definitely going to be progress on that axis. Yeah, if you can wire up your computer vision systems to your robotic systems and your AI in such a way that your capabilities for a robot system are more expanded. Yeah, I kind of foresee robotics being able to take a larger and larger fraction of the tasks done on a typical construction site. I kind of see it being kind of done in like narrow avenues that gradually expand outward. Like you're starting to see a lot of companies that they have some robotic system that can do like one particular task, but it can actually do that task quite well. There's a couple company, different robot companies that have these little robots for like drawing wall layouts on concrete slabs or whatever so you know.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why the US has comparatively low construction costs compared to other parts of the world. Like, well, I'll copy that for like residential construction, right? Which is single family homes and multi-family apartment buildings. Those are all built in the US out of like light framed wood and put together, like you said, by a lot of immigrant workers. And then, yeah, because of that, it would not surprise me if those wages are a lot lower than the equivalent wage for a carpenter in Germany or something like that. And that results in the cost of our residual construction, which is very, very low by world standards. I suspect that is a big, that's a factor in why our cost construction are quite low.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. I don't actually know if I have the unified theory of that. I mean, basically with any regulation thing, any heavily regulated thing, just any particular task that you're doing takes longer and is less reliable than it would be if it was not done, right? You can't just do it as fast as on your own schedule, right? You end up being bottlenecked by a government processes that reduces kind of it narrows your options. So yeah, in general, I would expect that to kind of be the case, but I actually don't know if I have like a unified theory of how that works beyond just it's a bunch of additional steps at any given part of the process, each of which kind of adds costs.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's like a huge, huge chunk of it. Yeah, labor has not, you know, the labor fraction of it has, I think, not changed appreciably enough. I'm an asteroid because I haven't actually verified that and I need to. And I remember in somebody that said, actually, they used to be much different. He said, I use some literature related to it. So slight asterisk on that. But in general, yeah, the labor cost has remained just a huge fraction of the overall cost of a building, things that were like labor is a huge cost of it, right? I've reliably seen their cost continue to rise. I think there's no reason to believe that that's not a big part of it.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is the biggest construction 3D printer company in the US as far as I know and as far as I know they've moved away from like trying to like install lots of systems in their walls as they get printed and they've kind of moved on to like having that installed separately which I think has made it their job a little bit easier but it's again not quite it's hard to see how the 3D printer can fulfill its promises if it can't do anything just beyond the vertical elements which again are really for most construction are really quite cheap and simple to build”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you progress you like switch out the print head for like a robot arm because the 3D printer is basically like a robot arm with just a particular manipulator at the end, right? And so they switch out their print head for like a robot arm and the robot arm goes and installs like different other systems like the Windows or the mechanical systems or something like that. So you can figure out how to do that reliably where your print head or your printing system is like installing a large fraction of the value of the building It's not it's not clear to me that it's going to be economic or right but that's that's it obviously needs to reach that point and it's not obvious to me that they have like that they have they've gotten there yet it's really quite hard to sort of get a robot to do a lot of these these tasks will kind of kind of depend on how successful they are at doing that a lot of for a lot of these players it seems like they're actually moving away from that like I think in the recent”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deliver more components of the building using their system. And there's companies that are trying to do this. There's one that got funding not too long ago called Black Diamond, where they have this crazy system, which is like a series of 3D printers that would act simultaneously, like each one building a separate house.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“basically put up as the structure of a house this this kind of a recurring theme in like mechanization where it goes back to what I was talking about previously where it takes like a lot of mechanization and a lot of expensive equipment to replace what basically like two or three guys can can do in you know a day or something like that it's the the economics of it are pretty brutal but anyway so right now produce is a pretty small value of that so i think that the the value of 3d printing is basically entirely predicated on how successful they are at figuring out how to like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for construction, so many reasons. Not pessimistic, but just there's a lot of unanswered questions. I mean, so the big obvious one is like right now a 3D printer can basically print the walls of a building. That is a pretty small amount of like the value in a building, right? It's maybe the eight percent, 7 or 8%, something like that, probably not more than 10% of like the value in a building because you're not printing the foundation, you're not printing the overhead vertical spanning structure of the building. You're basically just printing the walls and you're not even really printing the second story walls that you have in multiple stories. I don't think they quite figured that out yet. So it's a pretty small amount of value add to the building. And it's like it's frankly a task that is relatively easy to do by manual labor, right? It's really pretty easy for a crew to”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he basically makes the point that a lot of people try to use dome-shaped houses or octagon-shaped houses, which are good because, again, going back to surface area volume, they enclose the space using the least amount of material possible. So in some theoretical sense, aren't quite efficient. But it's actually quite inconvenient to live inside a building like really curved walls, right? Because furniture doesn't fit up against it nicely and stuff like that. Pictures are hard to hang on a really curved wall. And so I think you would see less variation than maybe you might expect.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or whatever, that people kind of like. And yeah, so it kind of unlocks a lot of options. So kind of machines, you know, they have, they're more constrained in some things that they can do, but they don't have a lot of the other constraints that you would otherwise see. So I think you'll kind of see a larger variety of sort of aesthetic things like that. That said, at the end of the day, I think a lot of the ways that a house goes together or whatever is pretty well shaped to just the way that a person living inside it would like to use. I think Stuart Brand makes this point in.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not especially bullish on 3D building printing in general, but this is another example of building a building using an extrusion process that is relatively easy to mechanize, right? And sort of what's interesting there is that when you start doing that, a lot of these other bottlenecks become unlocked a little bit. Like it's very difficult to build a building using a lot of curved exterior surfaces, like we're using conventional methods, right? Like you can do it, but it's quite expensive to do. But there's relatively straightforward for a 3D printed building for that to do, right? They can build that just as easily like as a straight wall. And so you see a lot of interesting curved architecture on these things. And you're kind of seeing that in a few other areas. There's a company that can build this cool, undulating facade.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on top of that is another layer of steel. And then at the end, there's sort of the steel is like extruded in such a way that it can light these inner panels, can like lock together as they go. And it's basically the simplest possible method of constructing a wall that you can imagine almost. But then that has like the structural system and the water barrier and the air barrier and the insulation all just in this one really simple assembly. And then when you put it together on site, it just locks together quick, quicker. And of course, it doesn't, you know, there are a lot of limitations to this. Like if you want to do anything on complicated, like add windows or like that, all of a sudden it starts to look quite a bit less good. But yeah, I think things like that that I think are like really easy for a machine to do can be put together with a lot of really, you know, don't need a lot of like persistent measurement or stuff like that in field. They can just kind of like snap together and actually want to fit together.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“exactly what a person does. So if a person moves like these two by fours, you know into place, they're trying to make a machine that will move them before and then nail them together. And to do that, it's like really, really expensive. You need a lot of like really expensive industrial robots that can move exactly the way that a human moves more or less. Yeah, and so I think, yeah, a lot of like what that kind of might look like is basically something that can be really easily extruded by machine in something like a continuous process that wouldn't require a lot of like finicky mechanical movements. And yeah, something like a good example of, I think, this technology is a technology that's called insulated metal panels, which is perhaps one of the cheapest and easiest ways to build an exterior wall. And what it is, it's just like a thin layer of steel. And then on top of that is a layer of insulation.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You typically need to sort of redesign whatever, you know, think about what your end goal is and then redesign the mechanism for accomplishing that in terms of like what is easy for it to get to make a machine to do. I mean, the obvious example here is like, it's way easier to build a wagon or a cart that holds than it is to build a mechanical set of legs that mimics a human's movement, right? That's just way, way, way easier. So yeah, I do think a big part of advancing construction productivity is to basically figure out how to redesign these building elements in a way that is really easy for a machine to produce and a machine to put together. And one I think reason that we haven't seen it is that a lot of the mechanization that you see is people trying to mechanize.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's a good question. And yeah, I think that's one big part of the lack of construction of productivity is everything is designed and has evolved over 100 years, 200 years or whatever, to be easy for a guy or person on the site to manipulate by hand. So like bricks are roughly size and shape and weight that a person can move it easily around. Dimensional lumber is the same. It's the size and shape and weight that a person can move around easily. And I'll construction materials are like this. And the way that they attach together and stuff is the same. It's all designed so that a person on site can sort of put it all together as comparatively little effort as possible. But yeah, what is easy for a person to do is usually what is easy for a machine or a robot to do.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Able to make sure you don't make any errors or whatever. But for like a simple building, like a house, the returns to it just aren't there. And so you see really comparatively sparse drawings. And so whether it's going to be able to work worth this upright cost of developing this like a really, really complex, very precise model where exactly every component is kind of to be determined. There's some interesting companies that are like trying to, I think, move in this direction where they're basically making it a lot easier to draw these things really, really precisely that would just be, you know, have every single component of exactly where it is. So I'm optimistic about that as well. But it's a little bit TBD.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology will get good enough, but I don't have any principled reason believing that. And then the other thing is that being able to sort of take advantage of that technology would require you to have like a really, really accurate model of your building that locates where every single element is precisely and exactly what its tolerance are. Right now, buildings aren't designed like that. They are built using a sort of comparatively sparse set of drawings that leaves a lot to sort of be interpreted by the people on site doing the work. And efforts that have tried to make these models like a really, really, really precise, a lot of times have not really paid off. You can get returns on it if you're building something like really, really complex where there's a lot of where there's a much higher premium to be.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source