Austin Vernon - Energy Superabundance, Starship Missiles, & Finding Alpha

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay, today, I have the pleasure of interviewing Austin Vernon, who writes about engineering, software, economics, investing on the internet, but not that much else is known about him. So, Austin, do you want to give us a bit about your background? I know that the only thing the internet knows about you is this one little JPEG that you had to upload with your recent paper, but what about an identity reveal, or I guess a little bit of a background reveal, to the extent that you're willing to, comfortable sharing?

**Austin Vernon** (0:28)
My degree is in chemical engineering and I'm kind of like a lifelong love of engineering and also things like Toyota production system and stuff like that. And I've worked as a chemical engineer, like in a large processing facility.
I've done a lot of petroleum engineering. Let's see. And then now, you know, I taught myself how to write software, and now I'm working on kind of like more research, early commercialization of CO2 electrolysis.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:59)
Okay, yeah. So I'm really interested in talking about all those things.
But so I guess the first question I have is Alex Berger, who is the co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. He asked this question when I asked on Twitter what I should ask you and he suggested I should ask you why so shady? So you have, I mean, famously, you have kind of like an anonymous personality, pseudonymous thing you have on the Internet. What's up with that?

**Austin Vernon** (1:22)
Yeah, yeah. When, you know, he I think he posted a tweet that said, you know, like, I don't I don't know who this guy is, or like, if he's credible at all, but you know, his stuff sure is interesting. That really made me laugh. It's hilarious. It just doesn't doesn't seem necessary. I think I'm fine with my, my ideas being well known and, and communicating, but I have less desire to be like, personally famous.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:51)
I gotcha, I gotcha.
I wanted to start off with a sexy topic. So let's talk about using starship as a kinetic weapon. I thought that was like one of the one of the more amusing posts you wrote. Do you want to talk more about how this will be possible?

**Austin Vernon** (2:08)
Well, I think the main thing with starship is like it's, you know, you're taking a technology and you're making it about a hundred times cheaper for cargo and a thousand times cheaper for people.
So when things like that happen that drastically, you're just like looking at huge changes. And it's really hard to anticipate what some of those can be when the change is that drastic. So I think there's like a lot of moon-based, Mars-based stuff that, you know, doesn't really catch the regular public's eye.
And I think they also have trouble imagining some of the like point-to-point travel that could be possible. But as far as like, you know, you start talking about it like as a weapon. And I think that's, you know, it lets people know they should be paying attention to this technology that we certainly do not want to be second or third getting it. And we should make sure that we're going to be first.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:05)
Yeah, I think you mentioned this in the post, but so as recently as the 90s, the cost of sending one kilogram to space was around 20,000. More recently, SpaceX has brought it to 2000 And then there's like a lot of interesting questions you can ask when you ask what will be possible once we get it down to $200 per kilogram to send into orbit.
So one of them might be to manufacture these weapons that are not conventional ballistics. Do you want to talk about why this might be an advancement over conventional ballistic weapons?

**Austin Vernon** (3:37)
Well, regular conventional ballistic weapons are extremely expensive.
This is more like a bomb truck, but usually we think of B-52 as the bomb truck, and this could be even cheaper than the B-52, delivering just like mass on target. When you think about how expensive it is to fly B-52 from Barksdale and Louisiana all the way across the world, you can do it from South Texas or Florida with the Starship and get more missions per day, and the fuel ends up being... When you go orbital, it takes a lot to get to orbit, but then once you're in orbit, your fuel consumption is pretty good. So over long distances, it has a lot of advantage. That's why the point-to-point works for the longer distances.
There's really a sweet spot with these weapons where you want it to be pretty accurate, but you also want it to be cheap. You're seeing that problem with Russia right now, is they have some fancy parade-style weapons that are really expensive, like multi-billion-dollar cruise missiles, but they're missing that $5,000 guided artillery shell or that $20,000 JDM that you can just put massive... Or the multiple-launch rocket system, guided rockets, they're really short on all those because I think they just had a limited amount of chips they could get from the US into Russia to make these advanced weapons. So the Starship gives you just a platform to deliver. You could pit JDMs in a shroud, or you could just have the iron, unguided, kinetic projectiles, and it just becomes impossible for a ship to launch missiles to intercept yours if your cost is so low. You can just overwhelm them.