Brian Potter - Future of Construction, Ugly Modernism, & Environmental Review

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Okay, today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Brian Potter, who is an engineer and the author of the excellent Construction Physics blog, where he writes about how the construction industry works and why it has been slow to industrialize and innovate. And it's one of my favorite blogs on the internet. I highly, highly recommend that people check it out.
Brian, my first question is about the Line project in Saudi Arabia. What are your opinions?

**Brian Potter** (0:28)
Okay, yeah, this will be in no particular order.
One, it's just interesting that this country, Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East just kind of in general, is just so willing to just do these big, crazy, ambitious building projects and just pour huge amounts of money in constructing this infrastructure in a way that you don't see a huge amount in like the modern world, you know. They do it, China obviously does it huge amounts.
Some other minor places, but in general, you don't see a whole lot of countries doing just these big, massive, incredibly ambitious projects. So like, on that level, it's like interesting. It's like, yes, glad to see that you're doing this. But like the actual project is clearly insane and makes no sense. I mean, just from the physical arrangement layout, right? There's a reason that cities grow in two dimensions, right? Like a one-dimensional city is the worst possible arrangement for just transportation, right? It's like your maximum on a distance between any two points. And so just from that perspective, it's clearly crazy. And there's no real benefit to it other than, you know, perhaps in some like weird hypothetical transportation situation where you had like really fast point-to-point transportation, some sort of weird bullet train setup, maybe it would make sense. But there's no reason to build, in general, there's no reason to build like a city like that, right? Even if you wanted to build like an entirely enclosed thing, which again, doesn't make a huge amount of sense, you would save so much material and effort if you just, you know, just make it a cube. I would be more interested in the cube than the line.
But yeah, those are sort of my initial thoughts on it. I will always be surprised if it ever gets built.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:28)
But the cube, like from the meme about like, you fill all the humans in a cube the size of Manhattan.

**Brian Potter** (2:34)
Yeah, something like that. Or I mean, yeah, if you're just gonna build this big giant megastructure, at least take advantage of what that gets you, which is like, you know, minimum surface area to volume ratio, stuff like that.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:47)
And why is that important? Is that for temperature and stuff?

**Brian Potter** (2:51)
It actually, this is actually interesting because I'm actually not how sure it would work with a giant single city. In general, a lot of economies of scale come from like geometric effects, whereas something gets bigger, your volume increases a lot faster than your surface area does. So for like an enclosed thing, like a tank or a pipe or something like that, the cost goes down per thing of unit you're transporting because you can carry a larger amount or less for a smaller amount of material. It applies to some extent with like buildings and construction because the exterior wall assembly is like a really burdensome and complicated and expensive assembly. So for like a really, a building with like a really big floor plate, for instance, they can get like more area per unit, per amount of like exterior wall, like all else being equal, be more efficient. I'm not sure how actually that works with like a single giant enclosed structure because theoretically on the small level, it would apply the same way. Like because your climate control is kind of a function of your exterior surface, like at some level you get more efficient climate control if you have a larger volume, larger volume and less area that can escape from. But for a giant city, I actually don't know if that works. And it may be worse because you're generating so much heat that it's now harder to pump out. Like the urban heat island effect and stuff like that, where these cities generate like this massive amounts of like just waste heat.
I actually don't know if that would work, if it didn't apply the same way.
I'm trying to reach back to like my physics classes in college. And so I'm not sure the actual mechanics of that. But in general, that's why you would want to perhaps build something of this size and shape.