Why has America become so bad at building housing and infrastructure?
Brian Potter, author of The Origins of Efficiency and writer of Construction Physics, explains why prefab housing keeps failing and why there are no easy fixes to America’s building problem. We discuss Katerra, California’s anti-growth turn, and the deeper logic behind local opposition to growth: concentrated harms and diffuse benefits.
I’ve shared some highlights of our conversation below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Highlights
Concentrated Harm Vs Diffuse Benefits
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The houses that we have are very costly right now. What’s the solution? Why can’t we come up with one?
Brian Potter: Yeah, a lot of this comes down to sort of ideas of concentrated harms and diffuse benefits. So a city overall or a state overall will benefit from population growth or a bigger, stronger economy, more division of labor. It’s nicer to live in a bigger city. But if you’re building a big apartment building next to a housing development or whatever, the people, even though that big new apartment building might have a small impact on the overall rents in the city and overall contribute to making the city slightly more affordable. The cost of that thing, the disruption and the increased traffic are all going to be concentrated right next to that one spot. So the people there are going to rationally oppose it because they’re getting, you’re talking a small diffuse benefit over the entire city versus the concentrated harm that one group of people really does not like. So they rationally oppose it. The benefits are diffuse enough that it’s hard to marshal a lot of support in favor of it. And so you have this sort of fundamental asymmetry.
Hamilton vs Jefferson
Brian Potter: One is this very good book by a guy, Marc Dunkelman, called Why Nothing Works. I’m not sure if you read it, but it’s a lot about Robert Moses and the aftermath of him and sort of the reaction to the book and how he suddenly started to be perceived so negatively. And Dunkelman kind of sees this huge transition in US politics overall where there’s these two competing tendencies. One is this sort of what he calls the Hamiltonian tendency, after Alexander Hamilton, to sort of have a robust, muscular government that is capable of doing a lot of things successfully. And then there’s also this sort of Jeffersonian impulse that’s fundamentally suspicious of government power and wants to check it and restrict it and constrain it and prevent it from inflicting harm intentionally or accidentally on US citizens. It views the government as basically a big danger to its citizenry.
And over the course of history, the relative strengths of these tendencies have sort of waxed and waned. And from maybe the 50s through the early 70s, it’s really a sort of Hamiltonian that was sort of in ascendancy. And you wanted to have these government agencies that could successfully deliver a lot of things. The US just won World War II off the back of government intervention. And people saw, “Oh, the government can come along and successfully do all these big major things.”
But then starting in around the late 1960s, early 1970s, that sort of gave way and people started becoming much more suspicious of and much more worried about the government’s power and authority and started to put in all these restrictions and laws and rules in place that basically made it much harder for the government to sort of do anything at all. And this comes from a huge number of ways and forms. So a lot of the environmental rules that sort of started popping up in the late 60s and early 70s, National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Air Act and all these things, which are good rules in many ways, at least in the way that they were originally envisioned. But they also serve to really restrict, especially things like the National Environmental Policy Act, what the government is able to do. They give citizens a lot of ability to intrude and – not intrude, but halt government efforts through things like litigation and stuff like that. And so he sort of sees this as we’re sort of on the end of several decades of this Jeffersonian impulse reigning supreme. And so it’s left us in this world where it’s very hard for government agencies to actually accomplish anything because we’ve bound their hands in so many different ways based on just sort of these suspicions and reluctance to let the government have the authority.
The Changing Politics of California
Brian Potter: So in the 1960s, I’ve written this essay about growth in California and how for a long time California was a very fast-growing state. And up through the 50s, California took pride in being a fast-growing state. They were, for a long time they had this big sign that was on one of their bridges, I think maybe the Bay Bridge in the Bay Area, but I don’t remember. But anyway, it had the population of California next to the population of New York. And it was tracking when California would surpass New York as being the most populous state. So for a long time, California was like, “Oh, we’re a big growing state and that’s good basically for our society. Growth means more people, more jobs, greater division of labor. We’re getting wealthier. That’s what we want.”
But then at some level, eventually that kind of tipped and the consequences, there had been enough growth that people were wealthy and successful enough that they started to be very unhappy by the consequences of all this growth. So as this growth was taking place, you had all this environmental ruination and just huge swaths of forest being cut down and water being polluted and all this stuff that people were like, “Oh, what hath we wrought? All these sort of, we’re rushing, go, go, go. And we’ve made ourselves rich and successful, but now we’re sort of ruining the environment that drew us here in the first place.” And so in the 60s you see this very wide scale, very grassroots switch to being opposed to growth. And jurisdictions started electing political leaders that would enact anti-growth policies and all these things. And sort of California still grew after that point, but its growth was much more checked and it became much more fraught after that.
And I sort of, people, when there’s a rising tide that’s lifting all boats, people are very happy to sort of be a part of that. But eventually, if they start seeing the consequences of that or get to a point like, “Oh, I’m, this is starting to sort of affect me or the place I live in negative ways,” they’re going to start eventually turning against that. I’m thinking of China, which I’m not an expert on China, but I understand a lot of what the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from is that they’ve been able to successfully deliver really robust economic growth. And these people remember what it’s like to be wretchedly poor and they’re very happy to be in a society that’s growing much richer and more successful. And we have all these things that we didn’t have before and we’re a much more powerful country than it used to be. And so they really rely on being able to sort of continuously deliver these improvements. And they think that if those sort of growth maybe runs out, maybe things are going to start to, the people are going to start to sort of reconsider what they think is important.
🤖 Machine-Generated Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So Brian, the book The Origins of Efficiency, did you write that before or after your experience at Katerra?
Brian Potter
That was after. That was several years after.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I know that, but to me this was all new to me. I haven’t really thought in terms of the practicalities of trying to make actual construction more efficient. The experience at Katerra, I know I followed it somewhat when things were happening, but talk to me about what happened. You were there and I know you wrote a long piece on it, which I read, but I’d rather have you explain the whole concept to our listeners and viewers.
Brian Potter
So Katerra, for those who don’t know, is this really well-funded construction startup that formed in the 2010s. I joined there in 2018 and their goal, or what their goal had evolved into by the time I was there, was to revolutionize essentially the construction industry by way of prefabricated factory-built methods. Which is an idea that is perennially popular. Every 10 to 20 years someone comes along and says, “Oh, I have a brilliant idea. I will revolutionize the industry with these factory-built methods that nobody has ever thought of before.” And then they inevitably just don’t work out the way that they imagine that it will. And so I joined them in 2018 after I had spent 10 years of my career in the construction industry. I had thought the industry was incredibly backward, incredibly inefficient. And I had thought that these Katerra guys were basically on the right track to try and fix it. And so I joined them, building and managing a team of structural engineers while I was there. And for a while it was very exciting. We were growing super fast and hiring all these people and the company was getting bigger and signing all these deals. And then it just sort of started to kind of go sideways. The costs kept ending up coming back super high. We were trying to dial in our manufacturing processes and there were all these difficulties in the factories and stuff. It just kept being too expensive. You had to design and redesign and redesign these products that we were offering over and over again. And they just kind of weren’t coming together the way that we hoped. And Covid hit and sort of threw a wrench into everything and there started being a series of layoffs. They started before Covid but Covid certainly didn’t help. Many rounds of layoffs winnowed the group down. My entire team was laid off and they were just trying to sort of pivot into some sort of model that would work. And they sort of struggled and staggered along for a few years. I eventually left after about two and a half years there and went to another engineering job. And sometime after, they eventually sort of gave up the ghost and declared bankruptcy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It seems like there were multiple causes, right, for the failure. Because when I was reviewing it and reading your “Another Day in Katerra Dies,” I instantly thought of Sears Roebuck and the success that they had kind of mid-century. 1908 through the beginning of the 20th century through 1940, they sold, I think, close to 100,000 mail order houses that became quite popular. And some of them are actually considered really beautiful houses today. So I thought maybe that’s where they got the idea. But no, I’m wrong about that.
Brian Potter
No. So that’s sort of, there’s a whole history of prefabricated construction that has been tried and sometimes done successfully, but attempted multiple times and in multiple ways in many different periods and places. So the Sears mail order home was one subset of that. There was actually a whole constellation of these mail order home builders. It was actually based on this idea of people would sell what were called knockdown boats, which is basically they would assemble a boat out of wood and then just disassemble it into the pieces and mail you the pieces and you could assemble it and stitch it together yourself. And basically somebody said, “Hey, I should do the same idea, but with houses.” And they would send you essentially all the parts to a house and you would have to sort of stitch it together yourself. And they were in that business from the early 20th century up through the 1930s. And then I think they ended up going out of business essentially because they ended up losing huge amounts of money on the mortgages. And I think they ended up losing so much that it erased the entire history of profits from the business. But there’s lots of different, people have tried the prefabrication thing over and over again. It really became popular in the US after Ford had such major success with mass production and dropping the cost of the Model T by such huge amounts. And they had large continuous process factories before that. But with Ford and mass production, this was the first time that you had this really complex good being produced in large quantities in these sort of continuous methods. And that had really dropped the price of it. And so people said, “Hey, these methods have made this complex big thing, a car, way cheaper. We should be able to apply the same ideas to complex big houses, which are essentially just stitching parts together in the same way that a car gets stitched together. The same idea should work.” So it’s in the 1930s where you really see this idea of prefabrication as a way to reduce cost start to take off. And so it starts to get more popular in the 30s. People try it again in the 50s and the 60s and the 70s, and it just keeps reiterating the same basic thesis where it’s like, “If I move my process into the factory, it will become much more efficient and I’ll be able to lower my costs and prices dramatically.” And Katerra was just the latest of a long history of the same basic thesis.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And as I was reflecting on that, I thought that there was kind of a parallel. The external event that wiped out Sears was, as you said, the mortgages. And the mortgages didn’t get paid because, oh, Great Depression. And with Katerra, I know that we’re going to talk about other factors for why they went down, but the pandemic hit and that couldn’t have been friendly to the project at hand, right?
Brian Potter
Yeah. That certainly hurt things and disrupted things. And I’ve heard folks there who claim that if the pandemic didn’t hit, they would have been able to muddle through and maybe not have the transformation effect on the industry that they had hoped but would have been able to emerge as a successful business. It may even be true, but I don’t know for sure.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
What are the lessons that are applicable beyond engineering and beyond construction? Is it just when you get $2 billion in funding and you spend like a drunken sailor, that leads to really bad things? That’s a pretty obvious one that I’ve seen in a lot of startups. WeWork being a classic example. Or are there, in reading your stuff, I think you have very good reasons from the engineering point of view why this didn’t work. But you’re the expert.
Brian Potter
Yeah. I mean, a big one is just that in startups you’re always trying to hit what’s called product market fit, right, where you have basically created some sort of product, some sort of good or service that people are clamoring to buy. And you don’t want to, it’s very risky to scale up your operations before you’ve hit that because you don’t really know what it is you’re supposed to be building. And if you build this big organization that’s devoted to producing X and it turns out we need to produce Y, it’s very expensive to sort of make that change. It’s especially expensive if you’re building physical things in the physical world, building $100 million factories that you then decide, “Oh, we actually don’t need this. Oh well, shoot, I spent all this money on this factory.” That happened at Katerra very early on. They were very big into this material called cross-laminated timber, CLT, which is like these big heavy timber panels, sort of like a super plywood basically. So instead of plywood being three-quarters of an inch thick, these would be 9 inches thick or something like that, used for the structural floors and walls of a building. They bet very heavily on this. They had built what I think was the largest CLT plant in the world. But by the time the CLT plant came online, they realized, “Hey, this product’s very expensive. It’s very hard to sort of achieve the goals that we want using this thing.” And almost as soon as they got it online, they were sort of trying to get rid of it, as I understand it, because it no longer fit with what they were trying to do. And there were just tons of examples of this. They had brought all these trades in-house and then they sort of later thought, “Well, maybe we should be outsourcing more of this work,” trying all these different products. But they were constantly trying to find traction and find their footing, which is very expensive to do when you have a 10,000-person company and you have hundreds of millions of dollars in capital equipment that maybe now you’re not sure you actually need to use. So they never really truly found product market fit in the sense of, “Here’s the thing that we’re selling and this is what people want to buy, and we’re going to scale up our operations to produce this or deliver this service.” They were constantly trying to sort of figure out what that needed to be.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And another thing that I thought about was maybe there was also a failure of investor-company fit. And by that I mean were the people running the company getting a ton of pressure from Silicon Valley, the hyper-growth strategy that might work with digits, but doesn’t work so well with atoms?
Brian Potter
Possibly. They got a lot of their money from SoftBank, which is famously for, “I just want you to grow as big and crazy as possible” and writing just truly outrageously enormous checks. I certainly wasn’t privy to those conversations, so I don’t really know, but it certainly fits the pattern.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So did you as an employee feel from the management and from your boss or whatever, was that a constant pressure? “We got to go faster, we got to build bigger”? Or were you relatively immune from that kind of pressure?
Brian Potter
The pressure early on was just for growth at all costs, basically, scaling up our operations in anticipation of growth. So I was trying to hire as many, find as many good engineers and good CAD operators and stuff as we could and setting up the department in preparation for handling the huge influx of work, setting up standards and getting our software in place and all sorts of stuff like that. And it never really quite all materialized. We were doing it in anticipation of this huge work. And the volumes of work were just never really that high. And people were like, “Are we ever going to really actually build any buildings?” And we did. It wasn’t like we were doing nothing. We were certainly putting lots of buildings up, but it was never the huge amount that we had been prepping for. And then there was sort of a, as the company grew, figuring out exactly what the role of our department was in it, which kind of changed over time as they started tweaking how they foresaw the business model evolving.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, the other thing that I’m taking away by going through all your stuff is obviously we have some obstacles to the idea of American abundance, for example, particularly in this industry. And is it bad policy, fragmented institutions? Can we lay it all at the feet of Robert Moses, who famously was profiled as the villain in The Power Broker? I actually read a lot about that. I’ve read the book. I read it a long time ago, but I actually read a lot about it in anticipation of talking to you. And I’d kind of forgotten that he, and the reaction to him, more specifically, the reaction to the book about him, The Power Broker, how he ruined New York, caused a lot of the NIMBY attitudes and the procedures and everything else. But was that there before? Has this always been a problem in terms of building in America?
Brian Potter
Yeah, it’s interesting. So there’s two things, I guess, that have shaped my view on this. One is this very good book by a guy, Marc Dunkelman, called Why Nothing Works. I’m not sure if you read it, but it’s a lot about Robert Moses and the aftermath of him and sort of the reaction to the book and how he suddenly started to be perceived so negatively. And Dunkelman kind of sees this huge transition in US politics overall where there’s these two competing tendencies. One is this sort of what he calls the Hamiltonian tendency, after Alexander Hamilton, to sort of have a robust, muscular government that is capable of doing a lot of things successfully. And then there’s also this sort of Jeffersonian impulse that’s fundamentally suspicious of government power and wants to check it and restrict it and constrain it and prevent it from inflicting harm intentionally or accidentally on US citizens. It views the government as basically a big danger to its citizenry. And over the course of history, the relative strengths of these tendencies have sort of waxed and waned. And from maybe the 50s through the early 70s, it’s really a sort of Hamiltonian that was sort of in ascendancy. And you wanted to have these government agencies that could successfully deliver a lot of things. The US just won World War II off the back of government intervention. And people saw, “Oh, the government can come along and successfully do all these big major things.” But then starting in around the late 1960s, early 1970s, that sort of gave way and people started becoming much more suspicious of and much more worried about the government’s power and authority and started to put in all these restrictions and laws and rules in place that basically made it much harder for the government to sort of do anything at all. And this comes from a huge number of ways and forms. So a lot of the environmental rules that sort of started popping up in the late 60s and early 70s, National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Air Act and all these things, which are good rules in many ways, at least in the way that they were originally envisioned. But they also serve to really restrict, especially things like the National Environmental Policy Act, what the government is able to do. They give citizens a lot of ability to intrude and – not intrude, but halt government efforts through things like litigation and stuff like that. And so he sort of sees this as we’re sort of on the end of several decades of this Jeffersonian impulse reigning supreme. And so it’s left us in this world where it’s very hard for government agencies to actually accomplish anything because we’ve bound their hands in so many different ways based on just sort of these suspicions and reluctance to let the government have the authority.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I had a guest on who wrote a book contrasting and comparing America and China and his thesis was America is now a lawyerly society, whereas China is an engineering society. And then obviously the conversation took the normal course that you would expect. Very similar to the Hamiltonian-Jeffersonian divide. If America was suddenly faced with a World War II type mobilization for housing or for energy, for whatever reason, could we do it? Do we have the capabilities? What capabilities would we discover, in your opinion, that we still have? And what capabilities do we think we have that are mostly a myth from your point of view?
Brian Potter
Yeah, it’s a good question. I have, I guess, a sort of constellation of thoughts on this. One is that, to go back to Covid, in the very early stages of Covid people thought that we would see that sort of emergency mobilization type of marshaling our resources to respond to Covid or something like that. People thought, “Oh, we’re suddenly going to sort of get our manufacturing in gear to manufacture PPE and stuff like that, or really sort of rise to sort of meet this challenge of this virus.” And in some ways we did. Operation Warp Speed was able to produce vaccines extremely quickly and start manufacturing them quite quickly, far faster than anybody thought was possible. But in many ways we didn’t. We never really, “Oh, we’re going to bring, we’re going to scale up our manufacturing operations and start producing all this PPE stuff that is in really short supply.” We never, there was never a huge upswell of American mask manufacturing or anything like that. And for a lot of Covid stuff, even though there’s this big emergency, it didn’t really inspire this sort of transformation in capabilities. We really just kind of muddled through in a lot of ways. We didn’t end up with a CDC that was massively competent at dealing with this pandemic. If anything, the pandemic showed how rotted our institutions were and how incapable we were of fixing it. So that’s one perspective, that we can’t, we’ve really atrophied our ability to sort of respond to these major threats or changes in the world. But then I also look at the sort of AI buildout where we’re in the middle of one of the great infrastructure construction efforts in history. Basically just the amount of capital that’s being deployed to just build all these data centers and install all these chips and get all these capabilities online is really truly astounding. You can see these graphs going around. It’s comparable to any major US project basically, Manhattan Project or Apollo or something like that in terms of the money and the resources that are being deployed and the physical infrastructure that is being built. Only a few things, stuff like the railroads are really exceeding it. So it also shows that in the right circumstances we can still deploy infrastructure and resources to build capabilities really astoundingly quickly if there’s motivation to and if stuff is not blocking the way. One big part of it is just, I think for that buildout, for a long time, a very long time, local jurisdictions really liked having data centers around because they paid a lot in property taxes, but they didn’t demand all that much in the way of new government services because it’s basically just a big building with computers in it. It wasn’t dramatically raising the population. And so it didn’t change how many schools we need to provide, how much traffic is on the roads, fire services, police services and stuff like that. It didn’t really stress all that stuff very much. So you just had this big business coming and paying you a big check for property taxes and not really demanding very much of you. That’s really starting to change partly because the new data centers are so big that they are placing stress on the infrastructure, power and water and all this stuff that has become popular to talk about, but also just because the construction is so vast. And also I think the AI capabilities are so, they’re making so many people nervous that people are really starting to oppose data centers in a way that they haven’t before. And so the sort of local restrictions on building these things, even in places that used to be really popular, like Virginia, it’s just becoming stronger and stronger. And so, yeah, the AI sort of shows, “Oh, we still have these capabilities when they are not restricted and when the incentive is correct.” But also shows how quickly the forces that can shut these things down can move.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I’ve done kind of a deep dive on the history of innovation and what I found was really interesting. It happens all the time, literally the most obvious is the Luddites during the weaving explosion of innovation. But it goes on and on. And I think a lot of it has to do with just kind of a basic fear of the new and good storytelling. I mean, back to The Power Broker, he wrote a good book and he crafted a villain and people responded to that particular villain. And there’s a villain being crafted right now about AI and you get people emotionally reacting to it. But on the subject of AI, do you think that with the AI we have right now available to us, what benefits do you think it can bring to your field?
Brian Potter
What do you mean by my field?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Well, engineering, building, the whole real world, construction, etc.
Brian Potter
Yeah. So I guess there’s a few things. I mean, one is, at a high level you can, AI is just a new tool for automation. We’ve been automating work for centuries. AI is going to sort of make dramatically new types of automation possible, but it’s still going to be the sort of automation that we’ve seen before. It’s tasks that used to have to be done manually you can now do automatically by some machine, sort of reduce the labor burden. It used to take 60, 70, 80% of people working to work in agriculture to produce enough food just to feed society. We’ve sort of, thanks to automation and other technological improvements, that’s dropped to 1 to 2% or something like that. So it frees people up to do sort of new other things or maybe have to do less, lead more fulfilling lives or have to do less back-breaking unpleasant labor or whatever. And yeah, so a big part of it is just going to be tasks that used to have to be done manually are going to be sort of automated. So a lot of design and engineering tasks, I foresee getting sort of automated away. People find new, perhaps find new higher leverage tasks that they can do now that these other specific things can now be done by machine. In terms of the physical side, people are trying to use basically AI technology to sort of drive robots around. There’s all this investment going into humanoid robots, which are, a lot of these things, or not necessarily humanoids, other companies are working on, but the same basic idea of using these sort of big, huge neural networks essentially to drive these sort of robot arms or humanoid robots or whatever. The progress is not, we’re not at the same level of just the chatbot AI models or whatever where it’s increasingly capable of doing any information processing task. These things are not as good at driving a robot around yet as they are answering a question about the history of nuclear power or how a government agency works or where you should shop to find a good pair of shoes, any sort of information processing task where these things are already extremely capable. Those capabilities aren’t nearly the same place as they are in robots, but they’re getting better and there’s lots of investment and lots of enthusiasm. And many people think that it’s going to be on a similar sort of evolution where eventually these things are going to be able to move around quite capably in the real world and be capable of automating a lot of physical actions and operations. The same way that we’re, with current AI models, we can now see the possibility of automating a huge swath of intellectual work, if not all intellectual work.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And do you think that AI will have the ability to assist the human designers to, for example, could you think, working with an AI, do you think that they could solve that pre-manufactured problem that Sears ran into, you guys ran into? Or no, maybe?
Brian Potter
I don’t think the problem with these prefabrication efforts was around insufficiently clever design of the building basically. I think it has to do more about, I’ve written quite a bit about this, but it has more to dowith the fundamental constraints of how you put a building up, difficulties achieving economies of scale and kind of, you have different jurisdictions with sort of different requirements, the sort of fundamental nature of building a, putting a building on site which has to meet your site requirements, all these sorts of things like that. It has very little to do with just not being smart enough to design a pre job created building properly or something like that. So I don’t think it’ll have effect on that side of it. I do think that if you could automate a big fraction of construction work, you would be able to sort of drive down the cost of building a building just by using these automated labor, robots or whatever instead of sort of manual workers. And finally sort of address this construction productivity problem that we’ve had for decades, which is just construction productivity, labor productivity never really seems to improve. If you have sufficiently good AI, sufficiently good robot control, you can finally address that problem.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And another question I had for you when I was reading your stuff was is it simply a matter of the new rules and regulations, etc.? I mean, I think of how fast we built the Empire State Building. I think about how fast we built monumental projects in the past. Is it just regulatory environment, social environment that we can’t build them like that anymore?
Brian Potter
I mean, we can still build stuff fast if we choose to. A lot of these data centers are going up quite fast. You can build certain things, power plants, certain industrial facilities, they can go up quite quickly. So we can build quickly if we need to. Or again in certain cases where we haven’t made it outrageously difficult. Regulation is certainly a big part of it. I kind of view it as you have these steadily encroaching regulations, steadily more difficult bureaucracy that needs to be navigated. The rise of this Jeffersonian impulse that makes it just harder to do anything that has to sort of go through a government process. But it’s, a big part of it is just on sort of the technical side, just the fundamental nature of buildings and it’s just difficult to improve for kind of various reasons or has historically been anyway.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what efficiency that you know of, which I might call a forbidden efficiency in the field, one that would actually work, but that would instantly trigger cultural or political rejection?
Brian Potter
Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know of any sort of instant things like that. I would say the big theme of my work generally, especially around construction stuff, is that there are not super easy solutions and that any sort of thing, “Oh, if only we could just do this,” you can find examples of someone trying that and it not working. Or, “Oh, here, you can try this and it’s not going to do what you intended to do because of these various complicating factors.” Or you may think the binding constraint is this. But in cases where this constraint has been relaxed, “Oh, it turns out you still don’t get the improvements that you hope to see.” So I, fundamentally, a lot of my work is, I would say, pushing back on that idea and just, a lot of these difficulties are due to sort of the inherent nature of the process and not due to sort of one difficult roadblock that we’ve erected that if we just change this one thing, all of a sudden our problems would be fixed. Most of our problems are not like that, I don’t think.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So what innovations and/or procedures have you seen over the last, let’s call it 10 or 15 years that either surprised you because they worked or surprised you because they didn’t work?
Brian Potter
In construction or more generally?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Let’s go generally, but then also touch on construction.
Brian Potter
Sure. I am quite surprised at how quickly we’ve managed to sort of scale up this, the buildout of these computing power and data centers generally. I thought, basically our sort of NIMBY sensibilities were so strong that any major infrastructure project was going to be just inevitably strangled by these sort of things that just made it hard to build anything really large in really large volumes to deploy very quickly. And we built things quicker than I have anticipated. And now we’re starting to see sort of backlash to that, so maybe that will slow down. But up until now I’ve been impressed about how quickly stuff has come online. In terms of stuff that I was surprised that doesn’t work, my whole history researching construction, I’ve over and over again run into an idea of something that’s like, “Oh, surely if they did this it would definitely work.” And then learning of some case where it didn’t work. One example is that we’ve talked a little bit about prefabrication and, “If only you could get prefabrication done at scale or something like that, then you would be able to sort of achieve these cost savings that people are constantly hoping that prefabrication will do. If only it were able to be used really widely.” But then I learned about countries that have basically deployed prefabricated home building really widely and they still don’t see cost savings the way that you would sort of hope or expect them to. So Sweden is the typical example here where they built some huge fraction of their single-family homes and apartment buildings are built using factory-built building construction basically, something like 80, 90% of single-family homes and 40% of apartment buildings or something like that, prefabricated construction. But their costs are not low. It’s not like they’re producing the Model T of homes over there in the sense that, “Oh, these homes are just so massively cheaper than anything you could build by hand.” Their homes are more expensive than the homes that we build in the US from what I can see. So yeah, and just over and over again running into things like that. It’s like, “Oh, maybe this idea would work.” No, it didn’t really. “Oh, if we relax this regulation it would have this big transformative effect.” Not really. Yeah, it’s very tough.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And if you had to explain America’s building problems with a non-construction analogy, would it be like healthcare, medieval guilds, enterprise software, political?
Brian Potter
Yeah, I would, again, kind of two things. We talked about this once a little bit before, and I went into half of them. But one half is this Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian impulse and sort of the rise of sort of Jeffersonianism. And then the other is just, we’ve talked about this a little bit ago, but once something becomes, I’m almost not sure kind of how to characterize it. But once people reach some certain level of affluence or success or once something becomes, gets reached to some level of disruption, people are willing to tolerate it up to some certain point. And then once it goes beyond this point, people start to get really upset about it. So in the 1960s, I’ve written this essay about growth in California and how for a long time California was a very fast-growing state. And up through the 50s, California took pride in being a fast-growing state. They were, for a long time they had this big sign that was on one of their bridges, I think maybe the Bay Bridge in the Bay Area, but I don’t remember. But anyway, it had the population of California next to the population of New York. And it was tracking when California would surpass New York as being the most populous state. So for a long time, California was like, “Oh, we’re a big growing state and that’s good basically for our society. Growth means more people, more jobs, greater division of labor. We’re getting wealthier. That’s what we want.” But then at some level, eventually that kind of tipped and the consequences, there had been enough growth that people were wealthy and successful enough that they started to be very unhappy by the consequences of all this growth. So as this growth was taking place, you had all this environmental ruination and just huge swaths of forest being cut down and water being polluted and all this stuff that people were like, “Oh, what hath we wrought? All these sort of, we’re rushing, go, go, go. And we’ve made ourselves rich and successful, but now we’re sort of ruining the environment that drew us here in the first place.” And so in the 60s you see this very wide scale, very grassroots switch to being opposed to growth. And jurisdictions started electing political leaders that would enact anti-growth policies and all these things. And sort of California still grew after that point, but its growth was much more checked and it became much more fraught after that. And I sort of, people, when there’s a rising tide that’s lifting all boats, people are very happy to sort of be a part of that. But eventually, if they start seeing the consequences of that or get to a point like, “Oh, I’m, this is starting to sort of affect me or the place I live in negative ways,” they’re going to start eventually turning against that. I’m thinking of China, which I’m not an expert on China, but I understand a lot of what the Communist Party derives its legitimacy from is that they’ve been able to successfully deliver really robust economic growth. And these people remember what it’s like to be wretchedly poor and they’re very happy to be in a society that’s growing much richer and more successful. And we have all these things that we didn’t have before and we’re a much more powerful country than it used to be. And so they really rely on being able to sort of continuously deliver these improvements. And they think that if those sort of growth maybe runs out, maybe things are going to start to, the people are going to start to sort of reconsider what they think is important.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Of course, the irony about China’s rapid growth is it was probably mostly driven by Deng’s opening up China to limited capitalism, right, for those 20 years when he took over. And that was basically the engine that drove much of China’s growth. If we return to a more Hamiltonian aspect here in the United States and you got named head of housing and you could flex your muscles a little bit more than you could under a Jeffersonian administration, what would you do? What would be your platform?
Brian Potter
It’s tough because a lot of these sort of restrictions on building things are at the state or regional or local level. A lot of it is local city supervisors or whatever or design review boards that are listening to local residents unhappy about some new apartment project or whatever. So a lot of this has to be done at, and it’s in such a way that it’s hard for federal tools or federal policies to change that in huge ways. There’s sort of carrots and sticks that they can do, but it’s hard for them to sort of mandate things. But a big one is just encouraging sort of state-level setting of or reducing sort of a lot of these growth restrictions that maybe local jurisdictions have and stuff like that. And what federal has a lot more ability to influence is stuff that goes, like large-scale, certain large-scale infrastructure construction projects. Sort of a lot of energy building, transmission lines, pipelines, big solar installations. Federal government has a lot of leverage there that it can do and so wide-scale reform in how permitting of stuff that goes through this federal permitting process, reducing the burden of environmental review and things like that could really have a huge buildout or huge impact in terms of how much energy infrastructure that we can build and things like that which is really going to become very important.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And the federal government owns a lot of disused land that, there’s nothing on it. Why haven’t they pivoted to some of these, you brought up solar. Why not use some of that federally owned land? Again, you’re the czar of this building thing. Would that be something that could be generative?
Brian Potter
They do use that land for a lot of energy stuff. A lot of oil and gas drilling is done on federal land. Part of it is, again we have this all this burdensome process for doing all these things. And the oil and gas industry is very large and successful and they’ve had a long time to kind of work the process in a way that some of these newer, more nascent industries haven’t had time to quite work it as well. So there’s a lot of favorable environmental law and rules around permitting for oil and gas stuff that maybe doesn’t exist for other stuff yet. But some of that’s changing. I think they’ve, I think recently changed some of these rules that makes it easier for sort of geothermal energy drilling which uses, which there’s these novel geothermal energy technologies which basically use sort of this oil and gas drilling methods to sort of drill into the earth and manually create these fracture networks and then inject hot water, hot liquid underground and basically extract thermal energy from underground and use that to drive a turbine or whatever. And there’s some promising companies that are using this technology and I think they’ve recently changed some of the rules or they’re in the process of changing them. I have to look up the specifics, but to sort of give some of the benefit, the permitting benefits that maybe oil and gas have been able to take advantage of to apply to sort of these geothermal methods. So it’s, some of it’s changing and evolving, but all this stuff invariably moves quite slowly and never quite as quick as you’d like it to.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And again, listening, it seems to me that the mismatch here is a lot of what is throttling our ability to build more houses, etc., is all happening at the local level, right, where they have endless review, endless ability to challenge, to sue for a variety of reasons. So basically what I’m hearing you say is even if you had that Hamiltonian power at the federal level, you would be bound in some way or face a lot of bottlenecks from what’s going on locally. I mean, is that just a permanent problem? Is there a fix for that?
Brian Potter
That’s a good question. I wish I knew of an easy answer to that. But other than long-term change of hearts and minds, I work for the Institute for Progress and there’s sort of broader interest in sort of progress studies more generally of which the group I work with is a part. And I think you’ve talked with many people sort of in that vein. And I think a big part of what those people are interested in is cultivating this sense of, “Oh, progress is good and expanding our capabilities is good and economic growth is good” as part of changing these attitudes in sort of a broad way. Because a lot of it just stems from these ideas that have been inculcated into people’s heads. And if you can sort of change how people think about these things or recognize what actually is responsible for this world of incredible plenty that we’ve created and how if we sort of, we could continue to sort of improve that if only we were allowed to. There’s a big emphasis on sort of that sort of work.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I’m just speculating and would love your opinion. Aren’t there pockets where you could do a project? You mentioned earlier that people were in California particularly really pro-growth because it was seen as the rising tide, lifting all the boats, etc. Are there pilot projects that could be done somewhere where there was a significantly disadvantaged population, where you could do some form of building, some form of different way of building a village or what? I mean, I’m not the expert here, I’m just thinking out loud where you could say, “See, look, this was a very disadvantaged area and now because we’ve done this, look at it thriving.”
Brian Potter
Yeah, this is a perennially popular idea. And you see variations of this concept show up in a bunch of ways. There’s this, there’s a big interest nowadays in finding, founding new cities, right, and finding these new cities that would be designed to be growth or prosperity engines. There’s a lot of existing cities in places where in the US where maybe they would be fine with a little more growth that have offered bonuses to tech workers, remote tech workers, like, “Hey, if you’re a tech worker that can work remotely, we will pay you $50,000 or something to relocate to Tulsa, Oklahoma or Delaware.” I forget exactly where they were, but there’s a variety of these places that are trying to sort of encourage people to come into this city. For a long time people were so fed up with the difficulties of changing things in San Francisco that a lot of the venture capitalists and tech population there were like, “We’re just going to relocate all of this to Austin or to Miami or something like that.” For a long time people were really trying to make Miami the new tech hub. And I think it proved really difficult. Austin has been a major success story. But I think Miami basically didn’t really work out. And basically it proved pretty hard to sort of dislodge the ecosystem that had grown up around San Francisco and move it anywhere else. All these things, there’s network effects and built-in advantages, right. It’s like once something’s successful and there’s all these people and places that are located in this place that you want to be, there’s a very hard marketing problem of getting everybody to just, no individual person has an incentive to leave, right, because everything here is already where I want it unless everybody else goes all at once. But if everybody else sees that everybody else is staying here, then they’re going to stay here too. These sort of things have proved to be quite durable and difficult to change. I’m not, same with the cities thing. I think it’s hard to sort of spin up a new city from scratch, because if nobody else is there, there’s no reason to go there. And if there’s no reason to go there, there’s no reason for anybody to start. It’s these sort of difficult chicken and egg problems that are kind of hard to break out of.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And of course, the example of the famous ghost cities in China would be another example of, “Yeah, we’ll build the city,” and then no one goes.
Brian Potter
Yeah. Although I think they actually, I think actually China’s somewhat of a counter-example. I think they were having such big urban migration that they sort of, a lot of these were cities were built in anticipation of population growth. And people said, “Oh, you’re building this stupid city in the middle of nowhere. That’s wrong. What’s wrong with you?” But there was such huge migrations, a lot of them did end up basically filling up as they anticipated, but that’s in a different situation because they were in this big transition from rural population to urban population. They were having all these people move from the countryside and move into the cities when they’re in the middle of a situation like that. You can build these new cities in a way that you can’t if you’re already in a highly urbanized population with all these sort of existing industries and sort of networks in place that are going to be resistant to being dislodged.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I like you leaning into the network effect because I think you’re absolutely right. Do you think that there’s any mitigating thing you could do if you were trying? You mentioned Austin succeeded where Miami failed. I’m curious. I’m certainly not an expert in this at all, but why did Austin, was it simply that Austin was so much closer to the place they were drawing population from?
Brian Potter
I don’t have a super deep knowledge of the situation on the ground in these two cities. And I don’t know how much Austin has been, it’s grown quite a lot. I don’t know how much success it’s had in relocating the venture capital ecosystem. As far as I know, the San Francisco Bay Area is still by far the biggest and largest and nothing else in the US is really close. But I do think that Austin has been very successful in growing just because they’ve made it very easy to sort of build housing there. I think Miami, for all the people that were trying to turn it into the next San Francisco or whatever, I think they actually are somewhat NIMBY and it’s not actually amazingly easy to sort of build new housing there. So I think a lot of it can probably, at least in terms of major growth stories or whatever, can be traced back to that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It also seems to me as we’re chatting and as I was reading your stuff that a lot of this comes down to social outlook, social views, etc. And if you look historically, I guess you can also see a waxing and a waning of trends. Like for example, for a long time immigration was desired in the United States. You’d let everybody in and then you had this backlash in the beginning of the 20th century or even the late 19th century with the Know Nothing Party and all the people who didn’t want anyone to come. Is this kind of sinusoidal thing affecting what, the building and whatnot in the country today?
Brian Potter
Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t, I actually, I should know more about this because IFP has a very robust and strong immigration team that tries to work on encouraging policies that would make maximum use of high-skilled immigration. Because the US has been, that’s been such a huge story around the US’s successes, right, is that we’ve been able to attract the best and brightest talent from around the world and bring them into an environment where they can really make maximum use of those talents. So it’s great for the US, it’s great for the people that come here too. And I really don’t have a great sense of how those perceptions have evolved over time and how it’s changed on, how that’s been reflected in the level of policy and how versus what the sort of typical citizen thinks about it. I’m just not informed enough to know about it. But yeah, the late 19th and early 20th century, it wasn’t necessarily amazingly popular even as we’re getting a really large number of immigrants. So I don’t, I just don’t know enough about it to speak unfortunately.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I know maybe a little bit more about it because I’m Irish and one of the central aims of a lot of these movements was to keep the Irish people out. And I just sometimes see a parallel there to not in my backyard. That type of attitude, it being prevalent in the discussions today about the fact that we need more houses. The houses that we have are very costly right now. What’s the solution? Why can’t we come up with one?
Brian Potter
Yeah, a lot of this comes down to sort of ideas of concentrated harms and diffuse benefits. So a city overall or a state overall will benefit from population growth or a bigger, stronger economy, more division of labor. It’s nicer to live in a bigger city. But if you’re building a big apartment building next to a housing development or whatever, the people, even though that big new apartment building might have a small impact on the overall rents in the city and overall contribute to making the city slightly more affordable. The cost of that thing, the disruption and the increased traffic are all going to be concentrated right next to that one spot. So the people there are going to rationally oppose it because they’re getting, you’re talking a small diffuse benefit over the entire city versus the concentrated harm that one group of people really does not like. So they rationally oppose it. The benefits are diffuse enough that it’s hard to marshal a lot of support in favor of it. And so you have this sort of fundamental asymmetry. I ran into this in my neighborhood not too long ago where some developer wanted to build a retirement community sort of kind of near our neighborhood. And it was going to be a multi-story building or whatever. And people need places to live, including older people that, if you don’t build those things, the cost and the difficulty of finding, of living in a retirement community goes up. And so the more you build, the more affordable these things become. But that benefit is spread very broadly and then the harms are all concentrated right in this one spot. And so all a bunch of the local neighbors were very opposed to this new building that was going to get put up. So again, there’s these fundamental, it comes back to sort of these incentives or the perception of what the incentives are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I think that framework is an excellent one to look at a lot of problems. The diffuse benefits versus the upfront costs. And what we notice is it’s hard, right, to think about the diffuse benefits that a particular project. And it’s really easy to look at the harm, right. It reminds me of the idea of learning via negativa. And by that I mean it’s really easy. Let’s take a drug, right. If there’s a drug available in Europe and not here, you tend to look at it from, it isn’t available here. So you’re not thinking about it, you’re not worried about it, but you’re also not thinking about all the lives that drug that is available in Europe could have saved in the country, right. So it just seems our human OS has a really hard time dealing with that kind of construction, right. Like, how am I supposed to have an opinion on something that isn’t available here? You want me to think about what all the benefits of, what it would be, all the positive benefits if it was available here? Yeah. And we kind of go on the fritz. So I definitely like that framework of sort of the obvious and immediate costs that present themselves versus the diffused benefits that might also temporally happen at a different rate and a different amount of progress. Do you think your time at Katerra was one that basically, no more moonshots, or do you think, do you have an idea for some moonshots that might actually work?
Brian Potter
Oh, good question. No, I don’t think it soured me on the idea of moonshots. What Katerra inspired me was, “Wow, it’s really shocking how little people understand about what actually is required to make this process work better.” People have been trying essentially the same idea over and over again. And, “Oh, move our process to a factory.” And every single time they tried it, it didn’t work in the way that they thought that it would in the sense of, “Oh, I’m going to be the Henry Ford of housing.” That never happened. But somehow people, the lesson never stuck and people just kept trying it kind of over and over again. But it actually, at a high level it makes me feel like, this is one of the major strengths of US society, right, is that we’re in an environment where people are willing to invest enormous amounts of money on this speculative idea because they think it will be a success and that it’ll be sort of transformative in the ways that they hope for. I’m glad that we live in a society that’s willing to take those really big swings. For any individual one, you can argue that, and of course, Katerra, you would argue correctly, this one is not very well thought through, you should sort of maybe retarget what you’re doing. But I really like at the high level that it’s a place where those things occur. And I would like sort of many more moonshots and more investment in sort of these speculative, transformative ideas that maybe aren’t the popular, the hip thing. You tend to see a lot of clustering around common ideas at the same time. Right now all the money is going to robots and AI. And a few years ago all the money was, “I need cryptocurrency or whatever.” I would like to see a more robust ecosystem of funding that can fund projects which don’t, aren’t necessarily attractive to venture capitalists for whatever reason, but still have the potential to sort of be quite transformative. And you’re starting to see more of these things spring up. So I would like to see many more moonshot type projects of all sorts.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Give me an example of one that you would like, that you’ve seen and you’re like, “Wow, that would make a great moonshot.”
Brian Potter
One that I’ve heard about, and it’s not even one that I’ve strongly advocated for because I think it will probably happen eventually. But I’ve read about it from some robotics experts is that we don’t necessarily yet have the robot equivalent of a GPT-3 moment where this new model comes out and all of a sudden it is massively capable because it’s trained on such a huge corpus of data or whatever. But then there’s speculation, actually doing this maybe wouldn’t be that much work. You train, you get, you pay enough humans to do teleoperation of various tasks and you feed it enough video data or whatever and maybe you could actually get a robot GPT-3 and have this general-purpose, highly capable robot model. And it would take many millions of dollars to do, but maybe less than you might expect. And that seems like a really valuable thing at least in terms of potentially advancing robot capabilities. But there’s so much money that’s getting put into these robot companies that I have to imagine that somebody, if not multiple somebodies are working on that right now. It’s not amazingly easy to find these moonshot ideas. It’s not amazingly easy to find ones that are promising enough that you think someone should fund but not so obviously promising that people have missed it already. You tend to have to, at least in my experience, you have to have some sort of discipline-specific knowledge or whatever. And I’m a little bit too much of a generalist and I just stay a little bit too close to the surface level of things to have a really deep understanding of a lot of what these needs are. So a lot of these operations that are finding these missed sources of valuable potential things are, they’re doing so by finding a lot of domain experts and asking them, “Hey, what do you need in this specific area? What would be really transformative?” But it’s not amazingly easy for someone without that domain-specific knowledge to articulate what they are.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And what’s a normal day look like in your day job as Senior Infrastructure Fellow at the Institute for Progress?
Brian Potter
Yeah, almost all of what I do is researching and reading and writing things. So yeah, typically on a normal day I will get up and the morning will be spent working on whatever the current writing project is on my docket. So usually that’s whatever newsletter project that I’m working on. And so mornings are almost always dedicated to writing. I find that I can really only write for about three or four hours effectively in a day. So I try to block out my time in the morning to basically do that. And then in the afternoon I’m basically just doing research on whatever upcoming project I’m working on. So this is reading a book or looking up sources or doing some sort of data analysis or increasingly it’s asking AI to dig up sources for me or do some analysis for me or write some script for me. But usually at a high level, it’s writing in the morning and reading and research in the afternoon basically pretty much every day.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Do you have an example where working with a colleague at the Institute from a completely different section of what they’re working on, where you guys having lunch together, chatting about things where the cognitive diversity between the two of you and you were like, “That’s a great idea. I never thought about that”?
Brian Potter
So I work from home, so I don’t actually work in their office. I’m working out of my home office basically every day. Institute for Progress is in Washington, D.C. and I am located outside of Atlanta, so a little bit of a commute. But often I will, other people suggest topics of essays I should write or topics that I should research. And I’m always open to those. And some of those suggestions have been some of my best and most popular and most interesting essays that I’ve written. So yeah, some of those suggestions for topics that I should look into have been very valuable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So you got to give us at least one that we can put in the show notes. Which one along those lines that got very popular?
Brian Potter
I think my most popular essay that I’ve ever written is about the history of airplane manufacturing by the US during World War II. And basically how we built the huge number of airplanes that we needed to produce, which is not necessarily my normal beat. I write a lot about manufacturing stuff in general, so it’s not totally outside of it, but it’s not about buildings and infrastructure. But I think somebody, I don’t actually remember the specifics, but I think somebody basically suggested that would be a good topic to write about. I said, “Ooh, that is something good.” I have a sense of what a topic would be good to write about if there’s this combination of, again, it’s kind of the same thing with investments. You want it to be promising enough in the sense that there’s a lot of sources and research that I can dig up about it, to read and learn about it, but not so promising that somebody has already written something really good about it. So I’m trying to sort of hit that relatively narrow target of investable writing and research topics. And so again, I often draw, it’s often useful for me to draw on what other people can see because I can’t just necessarily see everything myself. And so that was a particularly good one. I’m working on one that I’ll, or I’m going to start working on one in a couple weeks that was suggested by somebody else that I think will be similarly good for kind of similar reasons. It’s that right combination of neglected, but still enough to really do a good and thorough, interesting research about it and it’ll be quite interesting. But I can’t reveal that one yet.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Come back for more. We’ll have the one on the airplanes in the show notes. Brian, this has been absolutely fascinating for me. We are coming to the end of our conversation and we have a tradition here at Infinite Loops where we make you, just for a day, the emperor of the world. You can’t kill anyone. You can’t put anyone in a re-education camp. But what you can do is we’re going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it that is going to incept the entire population of the world. Whenever their next morning is, they’re going to wake up and they’re going to say, “I’ve just had two of the greatest ideas.” And unlike all the other times when I wake up with these great ideas and then ignore them, I’m going to start acting on these two today. What are you going to incept in the world’s population?
Brian Potter
Oh, gosh. I mean, one easy one is just build housing. That’s a really easy one because that stems from this grassroots local opposition to building new things or even, build more stuff, build more housing, build more infrastructure. If I could find some way to communicate that basic idea that would be really powerful. And all of a sudden we can build all the housing we need and build all the transmission lines and all the solar panels and everything. That would be truly transformative. And I don’t know, maybe something about make AI safe. We’re in this world where AI capabilities are advancing monstrously. And I think many of the concerns that people have about, “Oh, what happens if you build this thing that is massively smarter than everybody else in the world? It’s not necessarily going to have your best interests in mind.” Just like when humans became massively smarter than other animals, they did not necessarily have the best interest of other animals in mind and it did not necessarily work out for the other animals all that well. Even the ones that humans weren’t necessarily interested in hunting or whatever. And so if you could ensure that everybody took that problem really seriously, I think that would be a major win as well.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Two great ones to think about. I love in particular, if you incept the “build more houses,” maybe all that would have to change would be the attitude, right, so that they physically wouldn’t have to go out and build the houses, but they could drop their opposition to many projects. Brian, where can people find your work?
Brian Potter
Yeah, I write a newsletter called Construction Physics that you can just search Brian Potter, Construction Physics and it will come up. I’m the author of a book that’s called The Origins of Efficiency. It’s found on Amazon. If you search The Origins of Efficiency, it will come up there. And those are the two main places where, yeah, my two main major outputs.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Perfect. Brian, thank you so much for being on Infinite Loops.
Brian Potter
Thank you for having me.
