Welcome to Faster, Please! — The Podcast. Several times a month, host Jim Pethokoukis will feature a lively conversation with a fascinating and provocative guest about how to make the world a better place by accelerating scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic growth. fasterplease.substack.com
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April 28, 202628 min
✨💪 The future of work in an age of AI: My chat with economist Daniel Rock
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly poised to change the workplace—the question is, by how much? Key voices in Silicon Valley warn that white-collar jobs will soon be a thing of the past, while others predict more modest economic gains as firms struggle to reorganize workflows. When it comes to the future of work and American business, contradictory forecasts can be difficult to interpret and reconcile.Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, Daniel Rock and I attempt to sift through the often-confusing current AI conversation. We cover the distinction between “AI-exposed” fields and those destined for automation, explore the bottlenecks that could slow adoption among businesses, and offer a more realistic outlook for growth.Rock is an assistant professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. There, his research dives into the economics of AI and digital technologies, as well as the future of work. His paper,The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies, is worth a read.In This Episode* The trouble with forecasting (1:40)* The economist’s evaluation (8:09)* The productivity J-curve (11:49)* Exposure vs. automation (18:53)* Growth projection (23:04)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
April 10, 202619 min
🏗️ A hub for hard-tech startups: My chat with 'American Shenzhen' builder Joshua Farahzad
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:As a college sophomore, Josh Farahzad assembled a group of students from around the country in an attempt to launch a homemade rocket into space. From there, he ditched the traditional route and scoured the country for the perfect place to build a uniquely American mega-project.Disillusioned with the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the Bay Area, he has since broken ground in central Texas. Caldwell County is now home to Proto-Town—a place Farahzad hopes businesses will have the space to engineer and build world-changing hardware.Today on Faster, Please—The Podcast, I chat with Farahzad about his quest to build America’s premier manufacturing town from scratch.In This Episode* Welcome to Proto-Town (1:20)* The Limits of California (5:18)* From the Ground Up (10:46)* The Vision (17:35)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
March 24, 202642 min
✨ The Age of AI, an update: My chat with policy analyst Dean Ball
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Anxiety is running rampant about the future of artificial intelligence and its place in society. When technology CEOs warn of an impending white-collar jobpocalypse (or jobageddon, if you prefer), it’s no wonder public pessimism is so widespread. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I chat with tech policy analyst Dean Ball to help us sift through some of the uncertainty.We talk about recursive self-improvement, the role of AI in everything from medicine to defense, and what to think about the possible growing risk of AI company nationalization.(FYI: Our chat occurred just before the White House released new guidelines for AI federal legislation, about which Ball opined on X/Twitter: “The White House’s proposal for a nationwide AI law is a thoughtful document that will serve as an excellent foundation for the legislative work ahead. I would be happy to see these principles, if translated well into statute, become law.”) Ball is a senior fellow at FAI, the Foundation for American Innovation. He recently served as senior policy advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as strategic advisor for AI at the National Science Foundation. He was previously a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a policy fellow at Fathom. He’s also the author of the excellent Hyperdimensional Substack newsletter.In This Episode* Public pessimism (1:37)* Differing narratives (4:21)* The nationalization risk (16:15)* Accountability via audit (25:55)* Productivity projection (34:18)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
February 19, 202634 min
🌎 Storm watch: My chat with climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr.
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Headlines portend rising seas, raging storms, and a planet in crisis. It’s easy to feel like the future is something to fear; however, the key to cooling things down isn’t scaling civilization back. If the world wants to cut back on carbon emissions without sacrificing growth, the answer lies in bold innovation. A sustainable tomorrow requires smart energy investment and long-term thinking today.On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Roger Pielke Jr. about the ever-evolving discussion around climate change. We talk about the benefits of embracing new energy technology and identifying some easy wins.Pielke is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where his research focuses on science and technology policy. He is also a professor emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder, a distinguished fellow at Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics, a research associate with Risk Frontiers in Australia, and an honorary professor at University College London. Pielke has authored and edited several books, including The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming. He also writes The Honest Broker Substack.In This Episode* The Shale Story (1:42)* Unknown Unknowns (7:42)* The Weather Forecast (14:19)* Alternate History (25:23)* The Path Forward (28:25)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
February 4, 202626 min
☄️Awaiting apocalypse: My chat with journalist and author Dorian Lynskey
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Since humanity’s beginning, we’ve been pondering about our end. From war, to disease, to divine reckoning, the means of our destruction seem endless. The advent of the atomic bomb, concerns around climate change, and now AI have prompted many to wonder whether our demise will be random, or if it will come as the result of our own actions.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Dorian Lynskey about the way we talk about the end times. We discuss whether catastrophizing leads to action or paralysis and the role of hope in our narratives.Lynskey is a prolific journalist and the author of three books. His most recent: Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, which was released last month in the US. He also co-hosts two podcasts, Origin Story and Oh God, What Now?.In This Episode* Scare Tactics (1:32)* Effects of Hopefulness (10:25)* AI Doomsayers (17:01)* Countdown to Catastrophe (21:15)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
January 30, 202631 min
⤴️ Beyond Abundance: My chat with Brink Lindsey about his new book, 'The Permanent Problem'
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:The human pursuit of progress stems from our desire for security and a higher quality of life. Yet, even as today’s advanced economies are the richest and most comfortable they’ve ever been, something is amiss. What explains the decline in R&D growth, mental health, and birth rates, just to name a few challenges?In his new book, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, author Brink Lindsey identifies the critical gap between material abundance and abundant human flourishing.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Brink and I chat about what constitutes a truly healthy society, beyond surface-level affluence. We identify the conditions for continual progress after our basic needs have been met and far exceeded.Linsey is a senior vice president at the Niskanen Center. He previously served as vice president for research at the Cato Institute and as a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation. He has authored and co-authored six books on economics and culture, and is the author of his own Substack, also titled The Permanent Problem.In This Episode* More of everything . . . !? (1:54)* Falling fertility (7:31)* What we’ve lost (10:20)* Evaluating flourishing (13:13)* A culture of growth (20:24)* Future-world problems (28:04)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
January 20, 202626 min
⚛️ A final (and lasting?) nuclear revival: My chat with nuclear energy advocate Jessica Lovering
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:Headlines abound with news of the coming nuclear renaissance — a long-awaited era of clean, abundant energy to power our future. But this is hardly the first time the media has heralded the dawn of the atomic age. Still, this round of nuclear optimism is seeing unprecedented corporate investment, more cost-effective modular reactors, and a greater sense of political consensus.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Jessica Lovering about past obstacles to growth, and what we might expect from the US going forward.Lovering is an advocate for nuclear power currently based in Sweden. She is the co-founder and former executive director of the Good Energy Collective, as well as a senior fellow with the Nuclear Innovation Alliance and the Energy for Growth Hub. She also authors her own Substack, Nuclear Power to the People.In This Episode* The lost Atomic Age (1:30)* To regulate or not to regulate (8:26)* Reactor capacity past and future (10:44)* The economics of nuclear (14:51)* Power projection (18:32)* The new nuclear status quo (24:04)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
December 4, 202528 min
🪐 NASA and beyond: My chat with space policy analyst Casey Dreier
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:NASA is attempting the difficult task of juggling highly ambitious goals, but also possibly intense budget cuts. Despite personnel losses and unclear leadership, the administration is racing to put humans on the Moon — ideally ahead of China — and then Mars.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I’m chatting with Casey Dreier about this complicated new era in NASA’s history. We’ll discuss whether or not we’re really in a space race, what to make of the differing visions of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and the rise of planetary defense.Dreier is chief of space policy at The Planetary Society where he advocates for planetary exploration, defense, and the search for extraterrestrial life. He has been featured in major publications from The New York Times to the Washington Post, and hosts his own podcast, Planetary Radio: Space Policy Edition.In This Episode* The return of Isaacman (1:32)* Ditch the Space Race (7:42)* Visions of space (14:48)* Planetary defense (21:23)* Proceed with optimism (24:51)(A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.)On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
November 20, 202525 min
✨🔬 Acceleration though AI-automated R&D: My chat (+transcript) with researcher Tom Davidson
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:What really gets AI optimists excited isn’t the prospect of automating customer service departments or human resources. Imagine, rather, what might happen to the pace of scientific progress if AI becomes a super research assistant. Tom Davidson’s new paper, How Quick and Big Would a Software Intelligence Explosion Be?, explores that very scenario.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Davidson about what it would mean for automated AI researchers to rapidly improve their own algorithms, thus creating a self-reinforcing loop of innovation. We talk about the economic effects of self-improving AI research and how close we are to that reality.Davidson is a senior research fellow at Forethought, where he explores AI and explosive growth. He was previously a senior research fellow at Open Philanthropy and a research scientist at the UK government’s AI Security Institute.In This Episode* Making human minds (1:43)* Theory to reality (6:45)* The world with automated research (10:59)* Considering constraints (16:30)* Worries and what-ifs (19:07)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Making human minds (1:43). . . you don’t have to build any more computer chips, you don’t have to build any more fabs . . . In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in the physical world.Pethokoukis: A few years ago, you wrote a paper called “Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?,” which argued that growth could accelerate dramatically if AI would start generating ideas the way human researchers once did. In your view, population growth historically powered kind of an ideas feedback loop. More people meant more researchers meant more ideas, rising incomes, but that loop broke after the demographic transition in the late-19th century but you suggest that AI could restart it: more ideas, more output, more AI, more ideas. Does this new paper in a way build upon that paper? “How quick and big would a software intelligence explosion be?”The first paper you referred to is about the biggest-picture dynamic of economic growth. As you said, throughout the long run history, when we produced more food, the population increased. That additional output transferred itself into more people, more workers. These days that doesn’t happen. When GDP goes up, that doesn’t mean people have more kids. In fact, the demographic transition, the richer people get, the fewer kids they have. So now we’ve got more output, we’re getting even fewer people as a result, so that’s been blocked.This first paper is basically saying, look, if we can manufacture human minds or human-equivalent minds in any way, be it by building more computer chips, or making better computer chips, or any way at all, then that feedback loop gets going again. Because if we can manufacture more human minds, then we can spend output again to create more workers. That’s the first paper.The second paper double clicks on one specific way that we can use output to create more human minds. It’s actually, in a way, the scariest way because it’s the way of creating human minds which can happen the quickest. So this is the way where you don’t have to build any more computer chips, you don’t have to build any more fabs, as they’re called, these big factories that make computer chips. In fact, you don’t have to do anything at all in the physical world.It seems like most of the conversation has been about how much investment is going to go into building how many new data centers, and that seems like that is almost the entire conversation, in a way, at the moment. But you’re not looking at compute, you’re looking at software.Exactly, software. So the idea is you don’t have to build anything. You’ve already got loads of computer chips and you just make the algorithms that run the AIs on those computer chips more efficient. This is already happening, but it isn’t yet a big deal because AI isn’t that capable. But already, one year out, Epoch, this AI forecasting organization, estimates that just in one year, it becomes 10 times to 1000 times cheaper to run the same AI system. Just wait 12 months, and suddenly, for the same budget, you are able to run 10 times as many AI systems, or maybe even 1000 times as many for their most aggressive estimate. As I said, not a big deal today, but if we then develop an AI system which is better than any human at doing research, then now, in 10 months, you haven’t built anything, but you’ve got 10 times as many researchers that you can set to work or even more than that. So then we get this feedback loop where you make some research progress, you improve your algorithms, now you’ve got loads more researchers, you set them all to work again, finding even more algorithmic improvements. So today we’ve got maybe a few hundred people that are advancing state-of-the-art AI algorithms.I think they’re all getting paid a billion dollars a person, too.Exactly. But maybe we can 10x that initially by having them replaced by AI researchers that do the same thing. But then those AI researchers improve their own algorithms. Now you have 10x as many again, you have them building more computer chips, you’re just running them more efficiently, and then the cycle continues. You’re throwing more and more of these AI researchers at AI progress itself, and the algorithms are improving in what might be a very powerful feedback loop.In this case, it seems me that you’re not necessarily talking about artificial general intelligence. This is certainly a powerful intelligence, but it’s narrow. It doesn’t have to do everything, it doesn’t have to play chess, it just has to be able to do research.It’s certainly not fully general. You don’t need it to be able to control a robot body. You don’t need it to be able to solve the Riemann hypothesis. You don’t need it to be able to even be very persuasive or charismatic to a human. It’s not narrow, I wouldn’t say, it has to be able to do literally anything that AI researchers do, and that’s a wide range of tasks: They’re coding, they’re communicating with each other, they’re managing people, they are planning out what to work on, they are thinking about reviewing the literature. There’s a fairly wide range of stuff. It’s extremely challenging. It’s some of the hardest work in the world to do, so I wouldn’t say it’s now, but it’s not everything. It’s some kind of intermediate level of generality in between a mere chess algorithm that just does chess and the kind of AGI that can literally do anything.Theory to reality (6:45)I think it’s a much smaller gap for AI research than it is for many other parts of the economy.I think people who are cautiously optimistic about AI will say something like, “Yeah, I could see the kind of intelligence you’re referring to coming about within a decade, but it’s going to take a couple of big breakthroughs to get there.” Is that true, or are we actually getting pretty close?Famously, predicting the future of technology is very, very difficult. Just a few years before people invented the nuclear bomb, famous, very well-respected physicists were saying, “It’s impossible, this will never happen.” So my best guess is that we do need a couple of fairly non-trivial breakthroughs. So we had the start of RL training a couple of years ago, became a big deal within the language model paradigm. I think we’ll probably need another couple of breakthroughs of that kind of size.We’re not talking a completely new approach, throw everything out, but we’re talking like, okay, we need to extend the current approach in a meaningfully different way. It’s going to take some inventiveness, it’s going to take some creativity, we’re going to have to try out a few things. I think, probably, we’ll need that to get to the researcher that can fully automate OpenAI, is a nice way of putting it — OpenAI doesn’t employ any humans anymore, they’ve just got AIs there.There’s a difference between what a model can do on some benchmark versus becoming actually productive in the real world. That’s why, while all the benchmark stuff is interesting, the thing I pay attention to is: How are businesses beginning to use this technology? Because that’s the leap. What is that gap like, in your scenario, versus an AI model that can do a theoretical version of the lab to actually be incorporated in a real laboratory?It’s definitely a gap. I think it’s a pretty big gap. I think it’s a much smaller gap for AI research than it is for many other parts of the economy. Let’s say we are talking about car manufacturing and you’re trying to get an AI to do everything that happens there. Man, it’s such a messy process. There’s a million different parts of the supply chain. There’s all this tacit knowledge and all the human workers’ minds. It’s going to be really tough. There’s going to be a very big gap going from those benchmarks to actually fully automating the supply chain for cars.For automating what OpenAI does, there’s still a gap, but it’s much smaller, because firstly, all of the work is virtual. Everyone at OpenAI could, in principle, work remotely. Their top research scientists, they’re just on a computer all day. They’re not picking up bricks and doing stuff like that. So also that already means it’s a lot less messy. You get a lot less of that kind of messy world reality stuff slowing down adoption. And also, a lot of it is coding, and coding is almost uniquely clean in that, for many coding tasks, you can define clearly defined metrics for success, and so that makes AI much better. You can just have a go. Did AI succeed in the test? If not, try something else or do a gradient set update.That said, there’s still a lot of messiness here, as any coder will know, when you’re writing good code, it’s not just about whether it does the function that you’ve asked it to do, it needs to be well-designed, it needs to be modular, it needs to be maintainable. These things are much harder to evaluate, and so AIs often pass our benchmarks because they can do the function that you asked it to do, the code runs, but they kind of write really spaghetti code — code that no one wants to look at, that no one can understand, and so no company would want to use that.So there’s still going to be a pretty big benchmark-to-reality gap, even for OpenAI, and I think that’s one of the big uncertainties in terms of, will this happen in three years versus will this happen in 10 years, or even 15 years?Since you brought up the timeline, what’s your guess? I didn’t know whether to open with that question or conclude with that question — we’ll stick it right in the middle of our chat.Great. Honestly, my best guess about this does change more often than I would like it to, which I think tells us, look, there’s still a state of flux. This is just really something that’s very hard to know about. Predicting the future is hard. My current best guess is it’s about even odds that we’re able to fully automate OpenAI within the next 10 years. So maybe that’s a 50-50.The world with AI research automation (10:59). . . I’m talking about 30 percent growth every year. I think it gets faster than that. If you want to know how fast it eventually gets, you can think about the question of how fast can a kind of self-replicating system double itself?So then what really would be the impact of that kind of AI research automation? How would you go about quantifying that kind of acceleration? What does the world look like?Yeah, so many possibilities, but I think what strikes me is that there is a plausible world where it is just way, way faster than almost everyone is expecting it to be. So that’s the world where you fully automate OpenAI, and then we get that feedback loop that I was talking about earlier where AIs make their algorithms way more efficient, now you’ve got way more of them, then they make their algorithms way more efficient again, now they’re way smarter. Now they’re thinking a hundred times faster. The feedback loop continues and maybe within six months you now have a billion superintelligent AIs running on this OpenAI data center. The combined cognitive abilities of all these AIs outstrips the whole of the United States, outstrips anything we’ve seen from any kind of company or entity before, and they can all potentially be put towards any goal that OpenAI wants to. And then there’s, of course, the risk that OpenAI’s lost control of these systems, often discussed, in which case these systems could all be working together to pursue a particular goal. And so what we’re talking about here is really a huge amount of power. It’s a threat to national security for any government in which this happens, potentially. It is a threat to everyone if we lose control of these systems, or if the company that develops them uses them for some kind of malicious end. And, in terms of economic impacts, I personally think that that again could happen much more quickly than people think, and we can get into that.In the first paper we mentioned, it was kind of a thought experiment, but you were really talking about moving the decimal point in GDP growth, instead of talking about two and three percent, 20 and 30 percent. Is that the kind of world we’re talking about?I speak to economists a lot, and —They hate those kinds of predictions, by the way.Obviously, they think I’m crazy. Not all of them. There are economists that take it very seriously. I think it’s taken more seriously than everyone else realizes. It’s like it’s a bit embarrassing, at the moment, to admit that you take it seriously, but there are a few really senior economists who absolutely know their stuff. They’re like, “Yep, this checks out. I think that’s what’s going to happen.” And I’ve had conversation with them where they’re like, “Yeah, I think this is going to happen.” But the really loud, dominant view where I think people are a little bit scared to speak out against is they’re like, “Obviously this is sci-fi.”One analogy I like to give to people who are very, very confident that this is all sci-fi and it’s rubbish is to imagine that we were sitting there in the year 1400, imagine we had an economics professor who’d been studying the rate of economic growth, and they’ve been like, “Yeah, we’ve always had 0.1 percent growth every single year throughout history. We’ve never seen anything higher.” And then there was some kind of futurist economist rogue that said, “Actually, I think that if I extrapolate the curves in this way and we get this kind of technology, maybe we could have one percent growth.” And then all the other economists laugh at them, tell them they’re insane – that’s what happened. In 1400, we’d never had growth that was at all fast, and then a few hundred years later, we developed industrial technology, we started that feedback loop, we were investing more and more resources in scientific progress and in physical capital, and we did see much faster growth.So I think it can be useful to try and challenge economists and say, “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but history was crazy. This crazy thing happened where growth just got way, way faster. No one would’ve predicted it. You would not have predicted it.” And I think being in that mindset can encourage people to be like, “Yeah, okay. You know what? Maybe if we do get AI that’s really that powerful, it can really do everything, and maybe it is possible.”But to answer your question, yeah, I’m talking about 30 percent growth every year. I think it gets faster than that. If you want to know how fast it eventually gets, you can think about the question of how fast can a kind of self-replicating system double itself? So ultimately, what the economy is going to be like is it’s going to have robots and factories that are able to fully create new versions of themselves. Everything you need: the roads, the electricity, the robots, the buildings, all of that will be replicated. And so you can look at actually biology and say, do we have any examples of systems which fully replicate themselves? How long does it take? And if you look at rats, for example, they’re able to double the number of rats by grabbing resources from the environment, and giving birth, and whatnot. The doubling time is about six weeks for some types of rats. So that’s an example of here’s a physical system — ultimately, everything’s made of physics — a physical system that has some intelligence that’s able to go out into the world, gather resources, replicate itself. The doubling time is six weeks.Now, who knows how long it’ll take us to get to AI that’s that good? But when we do, you could see the whole physical economy, maybe a part that humans aren’t involved with, a whole automated city without any humans just doubling itself every few weeks. If that happens, and the amount of stuff we’re able to reduce as a civilization is doubling again on the order of weeks. And, in fact, there are some animals that double faster still, in days, but that’s the kind of level of craziness. Now we’re talking about 1000 percent growth, at that point. We don’t know how crazy it could get, but I think we should take even the really crazy possibilities, we shouldn’t fully rule them out.Considering constraints (16:30)I really hope people work less. If we get this good future, and the benefits are shared between all . . . no one should work. But that doesn’t stop growth . . .There’s this great AI forecast chart put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and I think its main forecast — the one most economists would probably agree with — has a line showing AI improving GDP by maybe two tenths of a percent. And then there are two other lines: one is more or less straight up, and the other one is straight down, because in the first, AI created a utopia, and in the second, AI gets out of control and starts killing us, and whatever. So those are your three possibilities.If we stick with the optimistic case for a moment, what constraints do you see as most plausible — reduced labor supply from rising incomes, social pushback against disruption, energy limits, or something else?Briefly, the ones you’ve mentioned, people not working, 100 percent. I really hope people work less. If we get this good future, and the benefits are shared between all — which isn’t guaranteed — if we get that, then yeah, no one should work. But that doesn’t stop growth, because when AI and robots can do everything that humans do, you don’t need humans in the loop anymore. That whole thing is just going and kind of self-replicating itself and making as many goods as services as we want. Sure, if you want your clothes to be knitted by a human, you’re in trouble, then your consumption is stuck. Bad luck. If you’re happy to consume goods and services produced by AI systems or robots, fine if no one wants to work.Pushback: I think, for me, this is the biggest one. Obviously, the economy doubling every year is very scary as a thought. Tech progress will be going much faster. Imagine if you woke up and, over the course of the year, you go from not having any telephones at all in the world, to everyone’s on their smartphones and social media and all the apps. That’s a transition that took decades. If that happened in a year, that would be very disconcerting.Another example is the development of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons were developed over a number of years. If that happened in a month, or two months, that could be very dangerous. There’d be much less time for different countries, different actors to figure out how they’re going to handle it. So I think pushback is the strongest one that we might as a society choose, “Actually, this is insane. We’re going to go slower than we could.” That requires, potentially, coordination, but I think there would be broad support for some degree of coordination there.Worries and what-ifs (19:07)If suddenly no one has any jobs, what will we want to do with ourselves? That’s a very, very consequential transition for the nature of human society.I imagine you certainly talk with people who are extremely gung-ho about this prospect. What is the common response you get from people who are less enthusiastic? Do they worry about a future with no jobs? Maybe they do worry about the existential kinds of issues. What’s your response to those people? And how much do you worry about those things?I think there are loads of very worrying things that we’re going to be facing. One class of pushback, which I think is very common, is worries about employment. It’s a source of income for all of us, employment, but also, it’s a source of pride, it’s a source of meaning. If suddenly no one has any jobs, what will we want to do with ourselves? That’s a very, very consequential transition for the nature of human society. I think people aren’t just going to be down to just do it. I think people are scared about three AI companies literally now taking all the revenues that all of humanity used to be earning. It is naturally a very scary prospect. So that’s one kind of pushback, and I’m sympathetic with it.I think that there are solutions, if we find a way to tax AI systems, which isn’t necessarily easy, because it’s very easy to move physical assets between countries. It’s a lot easier to tax labor than capital already when rich people can move their assets around. We’re going to have the same problem with AI, but if we can find a way to tax it, and we maintain a good democratic country, and we can just redistribute the wealth broadly, it can be solved. So I think it’s a big problem, but it is doable.Then there’s the problem of some people want to stop this now because they’re worried about AI killing everyone. Their literally worry is that everyone will be dead because superintelligent AI will want that to happen. I think there’s a real risk there. It’s definitely above one percent, in my opinion. I wouldn’t go above 10 percent, myself, but I think it’s very scary, and that’s a great reason to slow things down. I personally don’t want to stop quite yet. I think you want to stop when the AI is a bit more powerful and a bit more useful than it is today so it can kind of help us figure out what to do about all of this crazy stuff that’s coming.On what side of that line is AI as an AI researcher?That’s a really great question. Should we stop? I think it’s very hard to stop just after you’ve got the AI researcher AI, because that’s when it’s suddenly really easy to go very, very fast. So my out-of-the-box proposal here, which is probably very flawed, would be: When we’re within a few spits distance — not spitting distance, but if you did that three times, and we can see we’re almost at that AI automating OpenAI — then you pause, because you’re not going to accidentally then go all the way. It is actually still a little bit a fair distance away, but it’s actually still, at that point, probably a very powerful AI that can really help.Then you pause and do what?Great question. So then you pause, and you use your AI systems to help you firstly solve the problem of AI alignment, make extra, double sure that every time we increase the notch of AI capabilities, the AI is still loyal to humanity, not to its own kind of secret goals.Secondly, you solve the problem of, how are we going to make sure that no one person in government or no one CEO of an AI company ensures that this whole AI army is loyal to them, personally? How are we going to ensure that everyone, the whole world gets influenced over what this AI is ultimately programmed to do? That’s the second problem.And then there’s just a whole host of other things: unemployment that we’ve talked about, competition between different countries, US and China, there’s a whole host of other things that I think you want to research on, figure out, get consensus on, and then slowly ratchet up the capabilities in what is now a very safe and controlled way.What else should we be working on? What are you working on next?One problem I’m excited about is people have historically worried about AI having its own goals. We need to make it loyal to humanity. But as we’ve got closer, it’s become increasingly obvious, “loyalty to humanity” is very vague. What specifically do you want the AI to be programmed to do? I mean, it’s not programmed, it’s grown, but if it were programmed, if you’re writing a rule book for AI, some organizations have employee handbooks: Here’s the philosophy of the organization, here’s how you should behave. Imagine you’re doing that for the AI, but you’re going super detailed, exactly how you want your AI assistant to behave in all kinds of situations. What should that be? Essentially, what should we align the AI to? Not any individual person, probably following the law, probably loads of other things. I think basically designing what is the character of this AI system is a really exciting question, and if we get that right, maybe the AI can then help us solve all these other problems.Maybe you have no interest in science fiction, but is there any film, TV, book that you think is useful for someone in your position to be aware of, or that you find useful in any way? Just wondering.I think there’s this great post called “AI 2027,” which lays out a concrete scenario for how AI could go wrong or how maybe it could go right. I would recommend that. I think that’s the only thing that’s coming top of mind. I often read a lot of the stuff I read is I read a lot of LessWrong, to be honest. There’s a lot of stuff from there that I don’t love, but a lot of new ideas, interesting content there.Any fiction?I mean, I read fiction, but honestly, I don’t really love the AI fiction that I’ve read because often it’s quite unrealistic, and so I kind of get a bit overly nitpicky about it. But I mean, yeah, there’s this book called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I read maybe 10 years ago, which I thought was pretty fun.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
November 4, 202530 min
🚀 The trillion-dollar space race: My chat (+transcript) with journalist Christian Davenport
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,China’s spacefaring ambitions pose tough competition for America. With a focused, centralized program, Beijing seems likely to land taikonauts on the moon before another American flag is planted. Meanwhile, NASA faces budget cuts, leadership gaps, and technical setbacks. In his new book, journalist Christian Davenport chronicles the fierce rivalry between American firms, mainly SpaceX and Blue Origin. It’s a contest that, despite the challenges, promises to propel humanity to the moon, Mars, and maybe beyond.Davenport is an author and a reporter for the Washington Post, where he covers NASA and the space industry. His new book, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race, is out now.In This Episode* Check-in on NASA (1:28)* Losing the Space Race (5:49)* A fatal flaw (9:31)* State of play (13:33)* The long-term vision (18:37)* The pace of progress (22:50)* Friendly competition (24:53)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Check-in on NASA (1:28)The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon . . . It’s really hard.Pethokoukis: As someone — and I’m speaking about myself — who wants to get America back to the moon as soon as possible, get cooking on getting humans to Mars for the first time, what should I make of what’s happening at NASA right now?They don’t have a lander. I’m not sure the rocket itself is ready to go all the way, we’ll find out some more fairly soon with Artemis II. We have flux with leadership, maybe it’s going to not be an independent-like agency anymore, it’s going to join the Department of Transportation.It all seems a little chaotic. I’m a little worried. Should I be?Davenport: Yes, I think you should be. And I think a lot of the American public isn’t paying attention and they’re going to see the Artemis II mission, which you mentioned, and that’s that mission to send a crew of astronauts around the moon. It won’t land on the moon, but it’ll go around, and I think if that goes well, NASA’s going to take a victory leap. But as you correctly point out, that is a far cry from getting astronauts back on the lunar surface.The lander isn’t ready. SpaceX, as acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy just said, is far behind, reversing himself from like a month earlier when he said no, they appear to be on track, but everybody knew that they were well behind because they’ve had 11 test flights, and they still haven’t made it to orbit with their Starship rocket.The rocket itself that’s going to launch them into the vicinity of the moon, the SLS, launches about once every two years. It’s incredibly expensive, it’s not reusable, and there are problems within the agency itself. There are deep cuts to it. A lot of expertise is taking early retirements. It doesn’t have a full-time leader. It hasn’t had a full-time leader since Trump won the election. At the same time, they’re sort of beating the drum saying we’re going to beat the Chinese back to the lunar surface, but I think a lot of people are increasingly looking at that with some serious concern and doubt.For what it’s worth, when I looked at the betting markets, it gave the Chinese a two-to-one edge. It said that it was about a 65 percent chance they were going to get there first. Does that sound about right to you?I’m not much of a betting man, but I do think there’s a very good chance. The Chinese tend to do what they say they’re going to do on the timeline that they say they’re going to do it. That said, they haven’t gone to the moon, they haven’t done this. It’s really hard. They’re much more secretive, if they have setbacks and delays, we don’t necessarily know about them. But they’ve shown over the last 10, 20 years how capable they are. They have a space station in low earth orbit. They’ve operated a rover on Mars. They’ve gone to the far side of the moon twice, which nobody has done, and brought back a sample return. They’ve shown the ability to keep people alive in space for extended periods of times on the space station.The moon seems within their capabilities and they’re saying they’re going to do it by 2030, and they don’t have the nettlesome problem of democracy where you’ve got one party come in and changing the budget, changing the direction for NASA, changing leadership. They’ve just set the moon — and, by the way, the south pole of the moon, which is where we want to go as well — as the destination and have been beating a path toward that for several years now.Is there anyone for merging NASA into the Department of Transportation? Is there a hidden reservoir? Is that an idea people have been talking about now that’s suddenly emerged to the surface?It’s not something that I particularly heard. The FAA is going to regulate the launches, and they coordinate with the airspace and make sure that the air traffic goes around it, but I think NASA has a particular expertise. Rocket science is rocket science — it’s really difficult. This isn’t for the faint of heart.I think a lot of people look at human space flight and it’s romanticized. It’s romanticized in books and movies and in popular culture, but the fact of the matter is it’s really, really hard, it’s really dangerous, every time a human being gets on one of those rockets, there’s a chance of an explosion, of something really, really bad happening, because a million things have to go right in order for them to have a successful flight. The FAA does a wonderful job managing — or, depending on your point of view, some people don’t think they do such a great job, but I think space is a whole different realm, for sure.Losing the Space Race (5:49). . . the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. . . There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moonHave you thought about what it will look like the day after, in this country, if China gets to the moon first and we have not returned there yet?Actually, that’s a scenario I kind of paint out. I’ve got this new book called Rocket Dreams and we talk about the geopolitical tensions in there. Not to give too much of a spoiler, but NASA has said that the first person to return to the moon, for the US, is going to be a woman. And there’s a lot of people thinking, who could that be? It could be Jessica Meir, who is a mother and posted a picture of herself pregnant and saying, “This is what an astronaut looks like.” But it could very well be someone like Wang Yaping, who’s also a mother, and she came back from one of her stays on the International Space Station and had a message for her daughter that said, “I come back bringing all the stars for you.” So I think that I could see China doing it and sending a woman, and that moment where that would be a huge coup for them, and that would obviously be symbolic.But when you’re talking about space as a tool of soft power and diplomacy, I think it would attract a lot of other nations to their side who are sort of waiting on the sidelines or who frankly aren’t on the sidelines, who have signed on to go to the United States, but are going to say, “Well, they’re there and you’re not, so that’s who we’re going to go with.”I think about the wonderful alt-history show For All Mankind, which begins with the Soviets beating the US to the moon, and instead of Neil Armstrong giving the “one small step for man,” basically the Russian cosmonaut gives, “Its one small step for Marxism-Leninism,” and it was a bummer. And I really imagine that day, if China beats us, it is going to be not just, “Oh, I guess now we have to share the moon with someone else,” but it’s going to cause some national soul searching.And there are clues to this, and actually I detail these two anecdotes in the book, that all of the flags, the American flags that the Apollo astronauts planted, they’re basically no longer there anymore. We know from Buzz Aldrin‘s memoir that the flag that he and Neil Armstrong planted in the lunar soil in 1969, Buzz said that he saw it get knocked over by the thrust in the exhaust of the module lifting off from the lunar surface. Even if that hadn’t happened, just the radiation environment would’ve bleached the flag white, as scientists believe it has to all the other flags that are on there. So there are essentially really no trace of the Apollo flags.There are, however, two Chinese flags on the moon, and the first one, which was planted a couple of years ago, or unveiled a couple of years ago, was made not of cloth, but their scientists and engineers spent a year building a composite material flag designed specifically to withstand the harsh environment of the moon. When they went back last summer for their farside sample return mission, they built a flag, — and this is pretty amazing — out of basalt, like volcanic rock, which you find on Earth. And they use basalt from earth, but of course basalt is common on the moon. They were able to take the rock, turn it into lava, extract threads from the lava and weave this flag, which is now near the south pole of the moon. The significance of that is they are showing that they can use the resources of the moon, the basalt, to build flags. It’s called ISR: in situ resource utilization. So to me, nothing symbolizes their intentions more than that.A fatal flaw (9:31). . . I tend to think if it’s a NASA launch . . . and there’s an explosion . . . I still think there are going to be investigations, congressional reports, I do think things would slow down dramatically.In the book, you really suggest a new sort of golden age of space. We have multiple countries launching. We seem to have reusable rockets here in the United States. A lot of plans to go to the moon. How sustainable is this economically? And I also wonder what happens if we have another fatal accident in this country? Is there so much to be gained — whether it’s economically, or national security, or national pride in space — that this return to space by humanity will just go forward almost no matter what?I think so. I think you’ve seen a dramatic reduction in the cost of launch. SpaceX and the Falcon 9, the reusable rocket, has dropped launches down. It used to be if you got 10, 12 orbital rocket launches in a year, that was a good year. SpaceX is launching about every 48 hours now. It’s unprecedented what they’ve done. You’re seeing a lot of new players — Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, others — driving down the cost of launch.That said, the main anchor tenant customer, the force driving all of this is still the government, it’s still NASA, it’s still the Pentagon. There is not a self-sustaining space economy that exists in addition or above and beyond the government. You’re starting to see bits of that, but really it’s the government that’s driving it.When you talk about the movie For All Mankind, you sort of wonder if at one point, what happened in that movie is there was a huge investment into NASA by the government, and you’re seeing that to some extent today, not so much with NASA, but actually on the national security side and the creation of the Space Force and the increases, just recently, in the Space Force’s budget. I mean, my gosh, if you have $25 billion for this year alone for Golden Dome, the Missile Defense Shield, that’s the equivalent of NASA’s entire budget. That’s the sort of funding that helps build those capabilities going forward.And if we should, God forbid, have a fatal accident, you think we’ll just say that’s the cost of human exploration and forward we go?I think a lot about this, and the answer is, I don’t know. When we had Challenger and we had Columbia, the world stopped, and the Space Shuttle was grounded for months if not a year at a time, and the world just came to an end. And you wonder now if it’s becoming more routine and what happens? Do we just sort of carry on in that way?It’s not a perfect analogy, but when you talk about commercial astronauts, these rich people are paying a lot of money to go, and if there’s an accident there, what would happen? I think about that, and you think about Mount Everest. The people climbing Mount Everest today, those mountain tourists are literally stepping over dead bodies as they’re going up to the summit, and nobody’s shutting down Mount Everest, they’re just saying, well, if you want to climb Mount Everest, that’s the risk you take. I do wonder if we’re going to get that to that point in space flight, but I tend to think if it’s a NASA launch, and it’s NASA astronauts, and there’s an explosion, and there’s a very bad day, I still think there are going to be investigations, congressional reports, I do think things would slow down dramatically.The thing is, if it’s SpaceX, they have had accidents. They’ve had multiple accidents — not with people, thank goodness — and they have been grounded.It is part of the model.It’s part of the model, and they have shown how they can find out what went wrong, fix it, and return to flight, and they know their rocket so well because they fly it so frequently. They know it that well, and NASA, despite what you think about Elon, NASA really, really trusts SpaceX and they get along really well.State of play (13:33)[Blue Origin is] way behind for myriad reasons. They sat out while SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 every couple of days . . . Blue Origin, meanwhile, has flown its New Glenn rocket one time.I was under the impression that Blue Origin was way behind SpaceX. Are they catching up?This is one of the themes of the book. They are way behind for myriad reasons. They sat out while SpaceX is launching the Falcon 9 every couple of days, they’re pushing ahead with Starship, their next generation rocket would be fully reusable, twice the thrust and power of the Saturn V rocket that flew the Apollo astronauts to the Moon. Blue Origin, meanwhile, has flown its New Glenn rocket one time. They might be launching again soon within the coming weeks or months, hopefully by the end of the year, but that’s two. They are so far behind, but you do hear Jeff Bezos being much more tuned into the company. He has a new CEO — a newish CEO — plucked from the ranks of Amazon, Dave Limp, and you do sort of see them charging, and now that the acting NASA administrator has sort of opened up the competition to go to the moon, I don’t know that Blue Origin beats SpaceX to do it, but it gives them some incentive to move fast, which I think they really need.I know it’s only a guess and it’s only speculation, but when we return to the moon, which company will have built that lander?At this point, you have to put your money on SpaceX just because they’re further along in their development. They’ve flown humans before. They know how to keep people alive in space. In their Dragon capsule, they have the rendezvous and proximity operations, they know how to dock. That’s it.Blue Origin has their uncrewed lander, the Mark 1 version that they hope to land on the moon next year, so it’s entirely possible that Blue Origin actually lands a spacecraft on the lunar surface before SpaceX, and that would be a big deal. I don’t know that they’re able to return humans there, however, before SpaceX.Do you think there’s any regrets by Jeff Bezos about how Blue Origin has gone about its business here? Because obviously it really seems like it’s a very different approach, and maybe the Blue Origin approach, if we look back 10 years, will seem to have been the better approach, but given where we are now and what you just described, would you guess that he’s deeply disappointed with the kind of progress they made via SpaceX?Yeah, and he’s been frustrated. Actually, the opening scene of the book is Jeff being upset that SpaceX is so far ahead and having pursued a partnership with NASA to fly cargo and supply to the International Space Station and then to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, and Blue Origin essentially sat out those competitions. And he turns to his team — this was early on in 2016 — and said, “From here on out, we go after everything that SpaceX goes after, we’re going to compete with them. We’re going to try to keep up.” And that’s where they went, and sort of went all in early in the first Trump administration when it was clear that they wanted to go back to the moon, to position Blue Origin to say, “We can help you go back to the moon.”But yes, I think there’s enormous frustration there. And I know, if not regret on Jeff’s part, but certainly among some of his senior leadership, because I’ve talked to them about it.What is the war for talent between those two companies? Because if you’re a hotshot engineer out of MIT, I’d guess you’d probably want to go to SpaceX. What is that talent war like, if you have any idea?It’s fascinating. Just think a generation ago, you’re a hot MIT engineer coming out of grad school, chances are you’re going to go to NASA or one of the primes, right? Lockheed, or Boeing, or Air Jet, something like that. Now you’ve got SpaceX and Blue Origin, but you’ve got all kinds of other options too: Stoke Space, Rocket Lab, you’ve got Axiom, you’ve got companies building commercial space stations, commercial companies building space suits, commercial companies building rovers for the moon, a company called Astro Lab.I think what you hear is people want to go to SpaceX because they’re doing things: they’re flying rockets, they’re flying people, you’re actually accomplishing something. That said, the culture’s rough, and you’re working all the time, and the burnout rate is high. Blue Origin more has a tradition of people getting frustrated that yeah, the work-life balance is better — although I hear that’s changing, actually, that it’s driving much, much harder — but it’s like, when are we launching? What are we doing here?And so the fascinating thing is actually, I call it SpaceX and Blue Origin University, where so many of the engineers go out and either do their own things or go to work for other companies doing things because they’ve had that experience in the commercial sector.The long-term vision (18:37)That’s the interesting thing, that while they compete . . . at a base level, Elon and Jeff and SpaceX and Blue Origin want to accomplish the same things and have a lot in common . . .At a talk recently, Bezos was talking about space stations in orbit and there being like a million people in space in 20 years doing economically valuable things of some sort. How seriously should I take that kind of prediction?Well, I think a million people in 20 years is not feasible, but I think that’s ultimately what is his goal. His goal is, as he says, he founded Amazon, the infrastructure was there: the phone companies had laid down the cables for the internet, the post office was there to deliver the books, there was an invention called the credit card, he could take people’s money. That infrastructure for space isn’t there, and he wants to sort of help with Elon and SpaceX. That’s their goal.That’s the interesting thing, that while they compete, while they poke each other on Twitter and kind of have this rivalry, at a base level, Elon and Jeff and SpaceX and Blue Origin want to accomplish the same things and have a lot in common, and that’s lower the cost of access to space and make it more accessible so that you can build this economy on top of it and have more people living in space. That’s Elon’s dream, and the reason he founded SpaceX is to build a city on Mars, right? Something’s going to happen to Earth at some point we should have a backup plan.Jeff’s goal from the beginning was to say, you don’t really want to inhabit another planet or celestial body. You’re better off in these giant space stations envisioned by a Princeton physics professor named Gerard O’Neill, who Jeff Bezos read his book The High Frontier and became an acolyte of Gerard O’Neill from when he was a kid, and that’s sort of his vision, that you don’t have to go to a planet, you can just be on a Star Trekkian sort of spacecraft in orbit around the earth, and then earth is preserved as this national park. If you want to return to Earth, you can, but you get all the resources from space. In 500 years is that feasible? Yeah, probably, but that’s not going to be in our lives, or our kids’ lives, or our grandkids’ lives.For that vision — anything like that vision — to happen, it seems to me that the economics needs to be there, and the economics just can’t be national security and national prestige. We need to be doing things in space, in orbit, on the moon that have economic value on their own. Do we know what that would look like, or is it like you’ve got to build the infrastructure first and then let the entrepreneurs do their thing and see what happens?I would say the answer is “yes,” meaning it’s both. And Jeff even says it, that some of the things that will be built, we do not know. When you had the creation of the internet, no one was envisioning Snapchat or TikTok. Those applications come later. But we do know that there are resources in space. We know there’s a plentiful helium three, for example, on the surface of the moon, which it could be vital for, say, quantum computing, and there’s not a lot of it on earth, and that could be incredibly valuable. We know that asteroids have precious metals in large quantities. So if you can reduce the cost of accessing them and getting there, then I think you could open up some of those economies. If you just talk about solar rays in space, you don’t have day and night, you don’t have cloud cover, you don’t have an atmosphere, you’re just pure sunlight. If you could harness that energy and bring it back to earth, that could be valuable.The problem is the cost of entry is so high and it’s so difficult to get there, but if you have a vehicle like Starship that does what Elon envisions and it launches multiple times a day like an airline, all you’re really doing is paying for the fuel to launch it, and it goes up and comes right back down, it can carry enormous amounts of mass, you can begin to get a glimmer of how this potentially could work years from now.The pace of progress (22:50)People talk about US-China, but clearly Russia has been a long-time player. India, now, has made extraordinary advancements. Of course, Europe, Japan, and all those countries are going to want to have a foothold in space . . .How would you characterize the progress now than when you wrote your first book?So much has happened that the first book, The Space Barons was published in 2018, and I thought, yeah, there’ll be enough material here for another one in maybe 10 years or so, and here we are, what, seven years later, and the book is already out because commercial companies are now flying people. You’ve got a growth of the space ecosystem beyond just the Space Barons, beyond just the billionaires.You’ve got multiple players in the rocket launch market, and really, I think a lot of what’s driving it isn’t just the rivalries between the commercial companies in the United States, but the geopolitical space race between the United States and China, too that’s really driving a lot of this, and the technological change that we’ve seen has moved very fast. Again, how fast SpaceX is launching, Blue Origin coming online, new launch vehicles, potentially new commercial space stations, and a broadening of the space ecosystem, it’s moving fast. Does that mean it’s perfect? No, companies start, they fail, they have setbacks, they go out of business, but hey, that’s capitalism.Ten years from now, how many space stations are going to be in orbit around the earth?I think we’ll have at least one or two commercial space stations for the United States, I think China. Is it possible you’ve got the US space stations, does that satisfy the demand? People talk about US-China, but clearly Russia has been a long-time player. India, now, has made extraordinary advancements. Of course, Europe, Japan, and all those countries are going to want to have a foothold in space for their scientists, for their engineers, for their pharmaceutical companies that want to do research in a zero-G environment. I think it’s possible that there are, within 10 years, three, maybe even four space stations. Yeah, I think that’s possible.Friendly competition (24:53)I honestly believe [Elon] . . . wants Blue to be better than they are.Do you think Musk thinks a lot about Blue Origin, or do you think he thinks, “I’m so far ahead, we’re just competing against our own goals”?I’ve talked to him about this. He wishes they were better. He wishes they were further along. He said to me years ago, “Jeff needs to focus on Blue Origin.” This is back when Jeff was still CEO of Amazon, saying he should focus more on Blue Origin. And he said that one of the reasons why he was goading him and needling him as he has over the years was an attempt to kind of shame him and to get him to focus on Blue, because as he said, for Blue to be successful, he really needs to be dialed in on it.So earlier this year, when New Glenn, Blue Origin’s big rocket, made it to orbit, that was a moment where Elon came forward and was like, respect. That is hard to do, to build a rocket to go to orbit, have a successful flight, and there was sort of a public high five in the moment, and now I think he thinks, keep going. I honestly believe he wants Blue to be better than they are.There’s a lot of Elon Musk skeptics out there. They view him either as the guy who makes too big a prediction about Tesla and self-driving cars, or he’s a troll on Twitter, but when it comes to space and wanting humanity to have a self-sustaining place somewhere else — on Mars — is he for real?Yeah, I do believe that’s the goal. That’s why he founded SpaceX in the first place, to do that. But the bottom line is, that’s really expensive. When you talk about how do you do that, what are the economic ways to do it, I think the way he’s funding that is obviously through Starlink and the Starlink system. But I do believe he wants humanity to get to Mars.The problem with this now is that there hasn’t been enough competition. Blue Origin hasn’t given SpaceX competition. We saw all the problems that Boeing has had with their program, and so much of the national space enterprise is now in his hands. And if you remember when he had that fight and the breakup with Donald Trump, Elon, in a moment of peak, threatened to take away the Dragon spacecraft, which is the only way NASA can fly its astronauts anywhere to space, to the International Space Station. I think that was reckless and dangerous and that he regretted it, but yes, the goal to get to Mars is real, and whatever you think about Elon — and he certainly courts a controversy — SpaceX is really, really good at what they do, and what they’ve done is really unprecedented from an American industrial perspective.My earliest and clearest memory of America and space was the landing on Mars. I remember seeing the first pictures probably on CBS news, I think it was Dan Rather saying, “Here are the first pictures of the Martian landscape,” 1976, and if you would’ve asked me as a child then, I would’ve been like, “Yeah, so we’re going to be walking on Mars,” but I was definitely hooked and I’ve been interested in space, but are you a space guy? How’d you end up on this beat, which I think is a fantastic beat? You’ve written two books about it. How did this happen?I did not grow up a space nerd, so I was born in 1973 —Christian, I said “space guy.” I didn’t say “space nerd,” but yeah, that is exactly right.My first memory of space is actually the Challenger shuttle exploding. That was my memory. As a journalist, I was covering the military. I’d been embedded in Iraq, and my first book was an Iraq War book about the national guard’s role in Iraq, and was covering the military. And then this guy, this was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, at this point, Elon holds a press conference at the National Press Club where SpaceX was suing the Pentagon for the right to compete for national security launch contracts, and he starts off the press conference not talking about the lawsuit, but talking about the attempts. This was early days of trying to land the Falcon 9 rocket and reuse it, and I didn’t know what he was talking about. And I was like, what? And then I did some research and I was like, “He’s trying to land and reuse the rockets? What?” Nobody was really covering it, so I started spending more time, and then it’s the old adage, right? Follow the money. And if the richest guys in the world — Bezos Blue Origin, at the time, Richard Branson, Paul Allen had a space company — if they’re investing large amounts of their own personal fortune into that, maybe we should be paying attention, and look at where we are now.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe
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