YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Potter

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160
first
2022-10-27
most recent
2022-10-27
sittings or episodes
1
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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

  1. “Man, you really did type deep. Yeah, so this was a business, a small business that I ran for a few years. Seven or eight years ago at this point. Basically a hobby of mine was just high in men's fashion for a while, which is a very strange hobby for an engineer to have. But there you go.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Are not the result of any particular recent process? They are the result of whenever a problem comes up, they reach into the garbage can of like penguinal solutions. And then whatever they pull out of the garbage can, that's what the decision that they end up going with, regardless of how much sense that it makes. It was a theory that was noted by academics to describe decision making in academia. But I think about that, especially with big bureaucracies governments, I think about that a lot. You can just imagine the horror storage rating process and how these decisions just evolved. You can just imagine that any random decision, especially when there's such a disconnect between decision makers and technical knowledge and stuff like that.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The thought I get the sense that a lot of Mideast, they're just, they're really, I've had some amount of success in building like big, impressive. Physical construction projects that are just like an attraction just by virtue of like their size and impressiveness, like a huge amount of stuff like in Dubai, right, is something in this category. And they have that giant clock tower in Jeddah that is like similar, like, oh, biggest giant clock, you know, building, one of the biggest buildings in the world or whatever like that. So I think on sub-level they're expecting they can just see a return just from building something that's like really impressive and the biggest thing on some particular axis or whatever. So it could be, you know, there's some extent where I think they're just optimizing for like big and impressive and maybe not diving into it more than that. There's this theory that I think about every so often. It's called like the garbage can theory of organizational decision making, which is that basically the choices that organizations make”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Not sure the actual mechanics of that, but in general, that's why you would want to perhaps build something of this size and shape.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Her amount of exterior wall will all else be an equal be more efficient. I'm not sure how actually that works with like a single giant enclosed structure because theoretically on the small level it would apply the same way like because your climate control is kind of a function of your exterior surface like at some level you get more efficient climate control if you have larger volume and less area that can escape from but for a giant city I actually don't know if that works and it may be worse because you're jettering so much heat that is now harder to pump out like you know the urban heat island effect and stuff like that where these cities generate this massive amounts of like just waste heat I actually don't know if that would work if it didn't apply the same way I'm trying to reach back to my physics classes in college. And so I die.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “This is actually interesting because I'm actually not how sure it would work with a giant single city. In general, a lot of economies of scale come from like geometric effects, whereas something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for like an enclosed thing, like a tank or a pipe or something like that, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount for a smaller amount of material. It applies to some extent with buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is a really burdensome and complicated and expensive assembly. So for like a really a building with like a really big floor plate for instance that can get like more area per unit.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Or something like that. Or, I mean, yeah, if you're just going to build a big giant mega structure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is like, you know, a minimum surface area to volume ratio, stuff like that.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Right? It's like your maximum amount of distance between any two points. And so, you know, so just from that perspective, it's like clearly crazy. And there's no real benefit to it other than perhaps in some like weird hypothetical transportation situation where you had like really fast point-to-point transportation, some sort of weird bullet train set of. Maybe it would make sense. But there's no reason to build. In general, there's no reason to build a city like that, right? Even if you wanted to build an entirely enclosed thing, which again doesn't make a huge amount of sense, you would save so much material and effort if you just make it a cube. I would be more interested in the cube than the line. Yeah, those are sort of my initial thoughts on it. I'll be surprised if it ever gets built.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I mean, just from the physical arrangement layout, right? Like there's a reason that cities grow in two dimensions, right? Like one dimensional city. Like the worst possible arrangement for just like transportation.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Okay, yeah, just this will be just in no particular order. One, that it's just interesting that this country, Saudi Arabia, is, and the Middle East just kind of in general, is just so willing to just These big crazy, ambitious building projects and just poured huge amounts of money in constructing this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in the modern world. They do it. China obviously does it huge amounts, some other minor places, but in general you don't see a whole lot of countries doing just these big, massive, incredibly ambitious projects. So like on that level, it's like interesting. It's like, yes, glad to see that you're doing this. But like the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense.”

    2022-10-27 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source