Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Basically if you have a big glass wall as your exterior building and you don't have air conditioning, then that thing is just going to cook whenever it gets hot out. It's going to basically be like a greenhouse So you basically need air conditioning to make that habitable and you see this with single-family homes too where when air conditioning started to become popular, all of a sudden they started building these houses with these big giant picturesque windows Which they didn't have before. Again, this makes a nice inside space, and if you're going to be inside, that's the part you want to focus on. But it basically is predicated on having air conditioning to control the climate. That's a nice little detail that I want to be able to talk about. That explains why the outsides of buildings aren't as pretty as it used to be, but there's still the question of why the insides are so minimalistic. I don't know if you saw this, by the way, but about a year or two ago, Microsoft announced that they were building this new office for developers in India and they were looking at this very interesting architectural details and craftsmanship that made it look like you know for everything from the furniture to the floor layout to the arches of the entrances. It was supposed to be like like Taj Mahal, and it actually looks really cool. So why don't more developers do something like that on the interiors of these buildings? I mean again, good question. I think, for the most part, broadly speaking, and again, I'm not a developer so I'm gonna model my group as best I can. They're basically building the space to rent out, right? Or to sell to somebody else. So they're creating what a lot of times is called the development's shell and core, which I think I'm using correctly. They basically don't even finish the inside, it's all just raw and open studs and everything like that. So then the tenant comes in and does whatever they want to the space. But they're basically in the business of creating usable space for some given class of market that they're trying to attack, right? They're not in the business of making fancy architecture. Same if you're buying a single-family home. You come in with blank walls and you put up all your different pictures and decorations and paint it however you want, then add your funky wallpaper or whatever. When you move, you can take all that stuff out, and the next person can come in and put in everything that they want. So I think to some extent, you see a decoupling of the aesthetic design from the building itself.…

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