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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“That would just allow you a much higher level of accuracy that you can easily get using manual methods. And then B, just reduce all that time. It takes manually measure things. So I can imagine it being much, much, much faster as well. So I'm quite bullish on that at a high level, at a slightly lower level. It's not obvious to me if the actual sort of get that level or just projects it with perfect accuracy right in front of you. It may be the case that like. A person moving their head around and constantly changing and changing their point of view, they're never going to be like project these things with millimeter precision or whatever. It's always going to be a little bit jumpy or you're going to end up with some sort of hard limit in terms of like how precise you can project it. I would bet on that. Just my sense is that”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right now, the way that pieces are building this put together on site is that somebody is looking at a set of plans, paper plans, or like an iPad or something that tells them where everything needs to go. And then so they figure that out and they take a tape measure or something like that. Or some other method and go figure out where that is and mark it on the ground and then try to sort of get it all put in there for site. So there's all this like setup time that takes and manual location that is really quite time consuming and error prone. Again, there's only so accurate that a guy dragging a tape 40 feet across site being held by another guy, there's only so accurate that that process can be, right? And so, yeah, you can imagine it's very easy for me to imagine just AR or stuff like that just project exactly where the components of your building need to go.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, that actually makes things more difficult because then it force instead of, if one part is really precise, that a lot of times means that you can't make adjustments to it easily. And so if you have this one really precise thing, it usually means you have to go make compensation for something else that is not built quite as precise. So it actually makes construction quite of advancing precision quite a bit more complicated. ARVR, I think, is I'm very bullish on that. Assuming with a big caveat of that assuming they can sort of just get the basic technology working, the basic intuition there is that”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mention of lumber glued together, and you end up with a lot of the properties of NGO material where three dimensionally stable, it can be produced very, very accurately. It's actually funny is that a lot of times the CLT is the most accurate part of the building. And so if you're building a building with it, you tend to run into problems where the rest of the building is not accurate enough for it. So even something like steel, right? If you're building like a steel building, the steel is not going to be quite, it's not going to be like dead on. There's going to be like an inch or so off in just terms of where any given component is. And so the CLT, which is built much more accurately, it actually tends to show all these where these errors are that have to be corrected. So in some sense, accuracy is like a little bit of a precision is a little bit of like a tricky thing because you can't just make one part of the process more precise. All that does is”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, glue it back together, which does a couple things. It basically spreads all the knots and the defects out so they aren't concentrated. And then lets you get a lot. Everything tends to be a lot more uniform when it's made like that. So that's a very obvious one. I mean, that's already widespread use. I don't really see that making a substantial change. I guess the one exception to that would be that there's this engineered lumber product called or like mass timber elements, CLT is a big one, which is like a super plywood where plywood is made from like tiny little sheet thin strips of wood, right? And then CLT is made from like 2x4 as a dimensional lumber gloomed and like cross laminated layers or whatever. So it's like instead of a 4x8 sheet of flywood you have like a 12 by 40 sheet of like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“grow and shrink because of the heat. So there's just a lot of variation that goes into putting a building up. To some extent, it probably constrains what you are able to build and how effectively you're able to build it. I kind of gave an example before of really energy efficient buildings and they're really hard to build on site using sort of conventional methods because just the air sealing is quite difficult to do. You have to build it in a much more precise way than is typically done and is really easily achieved on site. So I guess in terms of examples of things that would make that easier, I mean he gives some good ones like engineered lumber which is like you take lumber and then grind it up into like strands or chips or whatever.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is a very interesting question. So basically, because build-ins are built manually on site by hand, there's just a lot of variation in what NZEP built, right? Things, there's only so accurately that a person can put something in place if they don't have any sort of age or stuff like that. So just the placement of material tends to be have a lot of variation in it. And then the materials themselves kind of have a lot of variation in them, you know, the obvious example is like wood, right? One two by four is not going to be exactly the same as the two button, adjacent two by four. It may be warped. It may have knots in it. It may be split or something like that. And then also because these materials are sitting just outside in the elements, they sort of end up getting a lot of distortion. They either absorb moisture and sort of expand and contract or they...”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, if you were trying to lower your cost of construction. But again, if you have the setup to do that, you wouldn't necessarily need to raise it, right? Like these other big developments were built by developers that essentially saw an opportunity, right? It didn't require public funding necessarily to do it. I mean, it did in the form of like... Loan guarantees for veterans and things like that, but they didn't have the government to go and buy the land.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To and all. And so I think, you know, to go back to the question, trying to sort of plan your city from the top down, I don't think that doesn't have like a super, super great track record, right? In general, you want your sort of city to sort of develop a little bit more organically. I guess I would think just really good sort of land use rules that are really thought through well and encourage the things that you want to encourage and not discourage the things that you don't want to discourage don't have Euclidean zoning or whatever allow a lot of mixed use construction and stuff like that. So yeah, I guess that's a somewhat boring answer, but probably something like that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It the way that don't just do the construction the way that normal construction is done. I mean, but that's hard, right? Because a lot of the sort of centrally planned city never seemed or like the plant the top-down planned city never seems to do particularly well, right? Like what's the city Brasilia or whatever, the one that they've built and it was supposed to be a planned city in like the age of like, again, with the, you know, goes back to like the unfettered technocrat who can sort of build whatever he wants, right? A lot of times what you want is something that sort of responds at a low level and organically to sort of the factories as they develop and you don't want something that's planned totally top down that's disconnected from all the sort of chases on the ground. Ended up being that in a certain form, right? Like he's bulldozing through these cities that hear these buildings and neighborhoods that he's not paying attention.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fabricate all these things. And then you have almost like a reverse assembly line where a crew go to one house and install the walls or whatever and then go to the next house and do the same thing. Following right behind then would be the guys doing the electrical plumbing and stuff like that. So like this reverse assembly line system that allowed you to sort of get these things up like really, really fast like in 30 days or something like that, a house, just thousands and thousands of houses at once. So I think you could, you know, you would want to be able to do something similar. You could, you know, don't just.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. I mean, I think I would just off the top of my head, I would be. Interested in if you could really figure out a way to build that would use in a method that have really high upfront costs hire them could otherwise be justified, but if you're going to build 10,000 buildings or whatever all at once, you could really take advantage of that. One kind of thing that you see is that a lot of in the sort of post-World War II era is that we were building such just huge masses of housing. And a lot of times building them all in one place, right? Like the Lovetown builders were building like thousands and thousands of houses in one big development all at once. Like in California was the same thing. Just building like five or ten or fifteen thousand houses in one just big massive development. And there you end up seeing something like that where they basically build like this like little factory on their construction site and then use that to like”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't have any special deep knowledge of Georgism. It's one on my list of topics to read more deeply. I mean, yeah, I do think in general, yeah, taxing encourages to produce less of something for something that you can't produce less of it's a good avenue for something to tax more heavily. And then, yeah, obviously, if you sort of had a really high land value tax in these places that have like a lot of single family homes, it like dense urban areas like Seattle or San Francisco or something like that. That would probably encourage the land to be used a lot more efficiently. So it does make sense to me, but I don't have any special knowledge about it.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Housing cost is essentially a supply demand problem if you built as much as people wanted, the cost would drop. Like I have no reason to not think that's true. There is a little bit of evidence that sort of suggests that the cost of housing will kind of, it's just impossible to build housing enough to overcome this sort of mechanic where the cost of it tend to match to whatever people's income level are like the peak or the sort of flattening of housing costs in Japan also parallel when people basically stopped getting raises and income stopped rising in Japan. So I don't have a good sense of if again if it ends up being just more driven by some sort of other factors but in general I expect the very basic answer of if you build a lot more houses The housing will become cheaper.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a good question. Japan is an interesting example. We're basically people point to it as a sort of example of, you know, here's a country that builds like huge amounts of housing and they don't have housing cost increases. And in general, we should expect that dynamic to be true, right? There's no reason to not think that”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh, yeah, I have no idea. Like you, I've definitely heard talk of it and I've seen the little YouTube clips of them knocking down all these towers, that it turns out they didn't need or like the developer could't finish or whatever. I don't know a huge amount about that. In general, I wish I knew a lot more about how things are built in China, but the general so opaque and I generally kind of assume that any sort of particular piece of data that comes out of China has like giant error bars on it as to whether it's true or not or like what the context surrounding it is. So in general, I do not have an informed opinion about that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Materials that are just gone together in a pretty sort of minimal way, which ends up being not that different than the actual construction method that single family homes use, but just even further economizes and tightens the use of materials where a single family home might use a half inch plywood or whatever. They might try to use 316s or even or an eighth inch plywood or something like that. So probably a pretty similar way to the way most single family homes in multi-family homes are built currently just like with even tighter use of materials, which is which perhaps is something not super nice about the way they do as bills their homes.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, I'm not an expert on Japanese construction, but I think like a lot of their interior walls are basically just paper and stuff like that. I actually think it's kind of surprising they use a somewhat further a lot of their homes last time I looked. They used like a sort of surprising post and beam construction method, which is actually somewhat labor intensive to do the US in the early 1800s used a pretty similar method and then once we started mass producing dimensional lumber we kind of stopped doing that because it was much cheaper to build out a 2x4s than it was like big heavy post and beat mortis and mortise intended connections and stuff like that I mean I think the boring answer to that question is that you would just build like we build mobile homes essentially which is just using pretty you know pretty thin walls pretty low ends”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“interlocking set of institutions is just become so risk averse that they would end up just being blocked by in a way that they wouldn't if they you know when they were operating in the 1950s and 60s or whatever”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of unbound technocrat or like these technical experts in like these high positions of power in government could essentially do kind of whatever they wanted to some extent, right? And if they thought something should be built somewhere, they basically had the power to do it. You know, it's just kind of a facet of this problem of just how it's really, really hard to get stuff to built in the US currently. And I'm sure part of it is just that you don't see these really talented technocrats or whatever occupying these high positions of government where they can get stuff done. But it's not super obvious to me whether that's the limiting factor, right? I kind of get the sense that they would end up being bottlenecked by some other part of the process. And just like the whole sort of”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's an interesting question. Yeah, I remember reading this article a while ago that was complaining about how horrible Penn Station is in New York. And they're basically saying, yeah, we basically... It would be nice to return to the era of the”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of technology to really sort of raise the standard of development just for a super, super long period of time. Yeah, so those are kind of my three answers.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“from these sort of industrial companies in a way that you don't see in a lot of other places. The U.S. basically just from 1850 to maybe 1970s. So for like a hundred years or something, just building like just huge, massive amounts of stuff. And in a way that lifted up huge parts of the economy, right? Like, you know, we spent all this, you know, I don't know how many thousands of miles of railroad track that the US built between like 1850 and 1900, but it was many, many, many thousands of thousands and miles of it. And of course, needing to lay all this track and build all these locomotives really sort of forced the development of the machine tool industry, which then led to the development of better manufacturing methods and interchangeable parts, which of course then led to the development of the auto industry. And of course, that explosion just led to even more big giant construction projects. So you really see that just sort of being able to build just big, massive amounts of stuff really in this virtuous cycle with the US really advanced.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“built in their stuff quite quickly. They spent a lot of time and effort trying to use their robotics expertise to try to figure out how to build buildings a lot more quickly. So they had these like really interesting factories that were designed to basically extrude a tire skyscraper just going up vertically. And all these like big giant companies developed people. So they had like these many, many different factors that were kind of trying to do this with all these robotics. Really interesting system that did not end up ever making economic sense, but it is very cool. I think there are sort of big industrial policy organs of the government basically encouraged a lot of these industrial companies and stuff to basically develop prefabricated housing systems. And so you see a lot of really interesting systems.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a good question. I'm going to, again, sort of cheat a little bit and do it in space and in time, because I think a lot of most countries that are most interested in doing a good job at building vast amounts of stuff are not ones that are basically doing it currently. I mean, the current answer is like China, right? Where they're just building more concrete use in the last 20 years or whatever than the entire world use in need time before that, right? Just like big, massive amounts of urbanization, a lot of really interesting buildings and construction. I mean, just in terms of like raw output, right? You've got to get to that. I would also put like Japan in the late 20th century on there. Basically at the peak of concern, like wonder, like, is Japan going to take over the world? And they were really interested in...”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tend to scale based on how much you can move from point A to point B through them. And I do wonder if you change the way that they went together, you could unlock massively different cities, or even if didn't unlock massively different ones, but changed big operation effects that you see in cities. If people could move from point A to point B much quicker than they can.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So your flows would just be massively, massively improved. Yeah, so that just seems like a very obvious one that if you were building your cities, that's slightly off topic of the question, but if you were building your cities from scratch and had your druthers, you would clearly want to build them and knew how big it was going to get, right? You could plan very long term in a way that, again, almost no cities did, but be able to plan so these transportation systems don't intersect with each other and you have the space to scale or run as much throughput through them as you need without like bringing the whole system to a halt. There's a lot of evidence that basically says that cities”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, interesting, unique thing. Yeah, unique is an interesting qualifier. I mean, there's a lot of things that just like should get built, right? Just like huge amounts of additional housing or just creating more land where in these sort of really dense urban environments where we need it. Like, you know, places like San Francisco just fill in a big chunk of that bay. It's basically just mud flat and put more housing on it. I saw a prozal like that earlier. Unique thing is more tricky. One idea that I really like, I read this in the book, where is my flying car, but that it's basically crazy that our cities are designed with roads all intersect with each other. There's just a crazy way to structure a material flow problem, basically. And like any sane city would be built with multiple layers of transportation where each one went in a different direction.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, leather seeds and this type of stereo and this type of engine, if you add it off, there's just like just a huge, massive number of different combinations. And yeah, and just you can obviously customize a house just a huge amount just by like the appliances that you have and the finishes that are in there and the paint colors that you choose and the fixtures and stuff like that that would not really change theoretically the underlying way the building goes together. So I do think that that idea that the sort of fundamental demand for variety is a major obstruction. I feel I do not think there's a whole lot of evidence for that in the construction industry.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're not seeing like huge amounts of uniqueness in these things. People are clearly willing to just live in these basically copy-pasted apartments. And it's also quite possible to get a pretty high amount of product variety using a relatively small number of factors that you vary. I mean, the car industry is like this, right? Where you can, there's enough customization options where I was reading this book a while ago that was basically pushing back against the idea that a car industry didn't, you know, the in the 50s and 60s was just offering a very uniform product. And they did basically the math and the numbers customization options on their car were like more than the atoms in the universe, basically just there's so many different options. So like all the different computations.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And eventually they kind of had to change their business model to be able to deliver more customized options because the market shipped it. I do think that the effect of that is basically pretty overstated. Just empirically, you see that in practice home builders and developers will deliver fairly repetitive housing. They don't seem to have a really hard time doing that. As an example, I'm living in a new housing development that is just like three or four different houses copy-pasted over and over again in group of 50. The developer is building a whole bunch of other developments that are very similar in this area. My in-laws live in a very similar development in a whole different state. And if you just look like multi-family or apartment housing, right? It's like identical apartments, you know, copy-paste it over and over again in the same building or a bunch of different buildings in the same development, right?”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely think that, sir, I basically I would maybe phrase this as the construction industry makes it relatively comparatively cheap to deliver a highly customized option compared to a really repetitive option, right? And so people, yeah, it's the ratio between a highly customized one and just a commodity one is relatively small. And so you see kind of the industry built around delivering somewhat more customized options. I do think that the This is a pretty broad intuition that people just desire too much customization from their homes and that really prevents you having to mass produced offering. I do think that that is true to some extent. I mean to one I think one example is this like the Levitown houses which were originally built just you know in huge numbers of like exactly the same model over and over again.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Happy methods and build a successful construction business right now, like many people do. But in terms of dramatically lowering your costs, you don't really see that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“can you still basically have to pay the same amount for materials. If you were doing it like Theoretically, that wouldn't be true if you're doing truly huge volume where you could get material volume discounts, but even then it's probably not looking at asset saving. So you can cut out like a big chunk of your labor. And you do see that in factory built construction, right? Like these prefab companies are like mobile home companies. They have like a really small fraction of labor as their cost, which is pretty typical from a factory in general. But then they take out all that labor cost. They still have their high material costs. And then they have this overhead cost of like whatever the factory is cost for them, right? And then you have your additional overhead cost of just transporting it to site, which is pretty limited and just the math does not really work out in favor of the prefab in terms of being able to build dramatically cheaper. You can obviously build a build is a prefab us.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a combination of effects. I haven't worked through all this. This is going to be the next blog post, basically. Oh, excellent. Figured it out more by then. But the very basic at a high level is that, yeah, basically your savings are not that you get from using less labor or whatever are not quite enough to offset your increased transportation costs. One thing about construction, especially like single family home construction, is that a huge percentage of your costs are just the materials that you're using, right? Like a single family home is roughly 50% labor, 50% materials for the construction cost. And then you have development costs and stuff like that, land costs, things like that. And so a big chunk of that, you just can't move to the factory at all, right? Like the foundation, you can't, you can't really do that in a factor. You could prefab the foundation, but it doesn't gain you anything. Your excavation still has to be done on site, obviously. So a big chunk of that can't move to the factory at all. And for ones that...”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The obvious one is that if you're targeting the higher ed, you maybe have higher margins. If you're building to a higher level of quality, that's easier to do in a factory environment. And so you end up being cheaper than or at least a lot, the delta is a lot different, less enormous than it would be. You can build it. Building a high-level quality is easier to do in a factory than it is in the field. So a lot of buildings that are like or houses that are built to a really high level of energy performance, for instance, like need a really, really high level of air ceiling to minimize how much energy this house uses, you tend to see a lot more houses like that built out of pre-fab construction and other factory-built methods because it's just physically more difficult to achieve that on site.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or to this business, we'll be able to recoup it. And the math just does not work out. You can't build, in general, you can't build cheap enough to kind of recoup those giant upfront costs. A lot of businesses have kind of been burned that way. And the most success you see in prefab type stuff is on the higher end of things where you can get higher margins. And so a lot of these companies, these like prefab companies and stuff like that, they tend to target the higher end of the market where there is, and you kind of see a few different premiums for that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, part of the answer is that for software obviously if you have a construction software company you can scale it just like any other software business right I think for like physical things it is a lot more difficult and yeah this like lack of like zero marginal cost is tended to fight a lot of startups right not just construction ones but yeah it's definitely a thing construction is I think particularly brutal because the just margins are so low and then just the empirical fact that trying what seems like it would be a more efficient method of building doesn't actually let you do it cheaper and like get better margins like the startup that I used to work at Katerra their whole business model was basically predicated on that you know oh we'll just build all our buildings in these big factories and get huge economies of scale and reduce our costs and then make the billions of dollars that we're pumping into this”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“don't get completed at all or you know which is shocking but because of how many people it can then be deployed to after it's done the economics of it are slightly different”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those things can often scale in a way that you can't with a building. Once you're done with the software project, you can deploy it to 1,000 or 100,000 or a million people, right? Once you finish making a movie, again, you can 100 million people can do it or whatever. It doesn't quite look the same with a building. You don't really have the ability to like spend a lot of time upfront figuring out how this thing needs to go. You kind of need to figure out a way to get this thing to go together without spending a huge amount of time that maybe would be justified by the size of it. And yeah, he's absolutely right. I mean, I was able to dig up a few references for software projects and how often they just have these big long tails of sometimes they just go massively, massively over budget. A lot of times they just, you know.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of runs through it, right? You tweak your process to make it more efficient. But at some point, and there's always an element of like tweaking it to make it better. But to some extent, the process of like figuring out what you're doing is largely separate from the actual doing of it yourself. For a project-based industry, it's not quite like that. You're kind of having to build your process on the fly while you do it. And of course, there's best practices that shape it, right? Like for somebody writing a new software project or anything other project-based, right? Like making a movie or something like that, they know roughly how it's going to go together. But, you know, there's going to be a lot of unforeseen things that kind of come up like that. I think the biggest difference is that”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How I kind of think about that is that you kind of see a similar structure in anything that's kind of like project based or anything where you're kind of having to like there's an element of figuring out what you're doing while you're doing it compared to like a large scale manufacturing option right you spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly it is that you're building and then you spend a lot of time designing it to be built and then you know your first”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really more just the way of building is right. Like you can't, you know, for the, for example, for the electrical system of your house, you can't have like a separate box that is your electrical system that you adjust install. And if you needed to replace the electrical system, You could take the whole box out and put the new box in. The electrical system runs through the entire house. Same with plumbing, same with the insulation, same with the interior finishes and stuff like that. There's not a lot of modularity in a physical sense.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“surfaces that are creating that controlled interior so everything is like kind of touching each other and again that's not unique you know a plane or anything really highly engineered an iPhone kind of shares that to some extent but in terms of like the size of it and the relative small amount that you're paying in terms of like unit size or unit mass or something it's quite low”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then again, this is not unique either, but a building is really highly coupled in a way that the systems of a building are really highly coupled in a way that a lot of other things are. If you're manufacturing a computer or something like that, the hard drive is somewhat independent from the display, somewhat independent from the power supply. I mean, these things have coupled, but they can be built by independent people who don't really necessarily even talk to each other and assembled into one structured thing. A building that's not really like that at all. Every single part affects every single other part for the most. In some ways, it's like biology. And so it's very hard to change something that doesn't end up disrupting something else. And part of that is because the job that a building does, which is to create a controlled interior environment, you know, basically every single system has to run through and around this sort of...”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting question. I mean, that's kind of one thing that you think of there's a lot of like individual factors that are not unique at all, right? There's like, you know, construction is highly regulated, but it's not necessarily more regulated than medical devices or jet travel or even probably cars to some extent, which are very, you know, have a whole battery of performance criteria that they need to hit. So, and like, you know, similar with coupled to like land use or something like that, people say like, oh, the land requirements and I could build it on site make it difficult. But there's a lot of things that fall into that category that again don't really share the same structure of how the industry works than construction does. So kind of it's the, I think it's just kind of the interaction of all those effects. One thing that I think is perhaps underappreciated is that of building is like really”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it made maybe a few hundred dollars a month for a few years. I only ever ran it as a side hobby business, basically. So in terms of effort, you know, I'm sure it was very low, you know, pennies an hour or something like that.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To like maintain it and update it and stuff like that. So kind of as I moved away from the hobby, I eventually stopped putting time effort into maintaining website. I'm curious as to how you even fed that up.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Put in titles and stuff like that. And so I was in the process of doing this. Like, ah, this is really annoying. I should figure out a way to sort of automate this process. And so I made a very simple web app that basically you would search for like, you know, shoes or something and it would automatically search like the very nice brands of shoes, all the typos in the brand name, stuff like that. And it would just filter out all the junk and let you search through like the good stuff. You know, I set up an affiliate system basically. So anybody else that used it, I would get like a kick of the sales. And yeah, yeah. So while I was interested in that hobby, I ran this website for a few years. And it was like reasonably successful. It was one of the first things I did that got any real traction on the internet. But it was never successful in proportion to how much effort that it took.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically that hobby centers around for the enthusiast of it, it kind of centers around like finding stuff for a cheat because buying it new can just be like overwhelmingly expensive. But a lot of times you can get it for very cheap if you're even a little bit motivated, either to chose a hive or chose up in thrift stores and if you know what to look for, especially because a lot of these clothes and things like that, they can last because they're well made. They can last like a super, super, super long time. And so even if somebody who has worn it for 10 years or something, it might be fine. So a lot of this hobby center is on finding like ways to get this really nice stuff for cheap. A lot of it is based around eBay, but it was really tedious to find really nice stuff on eBay. You kind of had to like manually search a bunch of different brands and then filter out obvious bad ones and search for typos in brands that were like pretty reliably.”
2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source