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…fully internalize the barriers to having kids. So car seats is, again, it sounds like almost an oddly trivial one but it does have a measurable impact. And that's before you get to housing, education— I think you could certainly say, well, what if we took all these things that have some marginal effect and we just turned them all up to 11 and saw what happened. And I think you'd make a plausible argument that you'd see a bump in fertility, especially if you had a pro-natalism law package that did all these things at once. And so you start a national conversation around how kids are great when you have more kids and we specifically focused on existing families and got them to go to N plus one or N plus two. Make a big difference. And that's what Australia actually did when I was in, I guess my teens, so let's say around 2000, was like, “Have a third child for the treasurer.” But the same problems kind of stick there. But this is obviously a very complicated problem because there are many countries on earth where these counterfactuals exist, at least in part, and it hasn't miraculously turned around the birth rate. And actually the number of developed Western liberal democracies where the birth rate is not either already catastrophically low or falling fast is very, very small and probably will be zero before long. But it did occur to me today, having spoken to a friend of mine about children, whether or not to have children and so on, that our evolution did not depend upon us in the past having a deep obsession with the need to have children. Because we didn't have contraception and we had sex drive. So children would just happen then. But once you have kids, then you're all about kids. As soon as you hold the baby in your hands, you're like, “Kids are fucking great! This is great. I might have six more of these.” But until you have that first one, you don't realize. You don't know. It hasn't come in yet. There's no evolved necessity to go out and have kids. Whereas with food, it's obvious. People get excited about food. So it sucks to be evolution in that case, I guess. But actually if you run the math on our demographics right now and kind of how dire it is, even if as a result of listening to this podcast, every single person in the West just immediately started having babies, it still wouldn't really for many decades… This hole we've dug for ourselves, there's basically no way out of that. There's no way to avoid it. I think the news that came out yesterday was the triple lock in the UK is going to go up by 4.7% against a backdrop of inflation of two-point-something percent and economic growth of like 0%. What's the triple lock? s that came out yesterday was the triple lock in the UK is going to go up by 4.7% against a backdrop of inflation of two-point-something percent and economic growth of like 0%. What's the triple lock? The triple lock is the process by which the pension in the United Kingdom is increased by the biggest of three separate factors. One being the employment rate, one being—I don’t remember exactly what they are but I think one is inflation, one's GDP. So it's like this insane ratchet. And the dependency ratio is of course increasing because people are getting older and older, because we're able to keep people alive for longer. And these are actually all good things, but we need to have some way of thinking rationally about paying for these things or making sure we're able to provide for people adequately because otherwise we'll burn the seed corn. And I saw this insane stat in France recently that the average pension is now higher than the average income for working age adults in France. This could be a problem. And I just don't think there's any way out other than Arc Institute gets its act together, invents a pill that keeps me young and everyone else young and lifts this burden of non-negotiable disease from every single person who's lucky enough to live through their youth. Don’t we also maybe get bailed out by AI productivity growth? Maybe. But do you really think that 10% year-over-year productivity growth is going to localize itself in the UK? No. But just if you— Is the United States going to be like, “Oh, here's a big transfer payment for all your old people.” I don't think so. So it's certainly the case that AI seems likely to produce enormous additional wealth. Where that wealth will find its way to alleviating the tax burden on the working class in the 200 countries on earth that don't have their own AI industry seems somewhat unlikely to me. Whereas a pill that—actually Ozempic probably does this—slows down your aging by some factor would be enormously important. No one could have seen this coming. No one could have possibly anticipated that Social Security and other stuff would result in ever increasing dependency ratios. And we're just fortunate that we got rich so fast that it took this long to bite. It's a big problem. I realize I'm asking you for ideas for hardware companies. You're always banging on about desalination, presumably that's a good hardware company. I'm working on it. I already have a hardware company doing it. Oh, you do. Tell me about your desalination company. So desalination is not strictly ripping oxygen off stuff to make fuel or metals, but it does involve ripping water off salt. So the oxygen and water is what makes it polar. Yeah, so Terraform Desalination is the project. It's very early stages now, but it's kind of insane to me that we live in this state in California. And can you also just do it with electricity and much else? Yeah. What's the reaction? The reaction is that the salt which is dissolved in water, gets separated somehow, either thermally or with filters. I mean there's probably 30 different ways of doing desalination. Okay. But what’s the Terraform approach? he salt which is dissolved in water, gets separated somehow, either thermally or with filters. I mean there's probably 30 different ways of doing desalination. Okay. But what’s the Terraform approach? The Terraform approach is thermal. Yeah. So basically distillation on steroids. I see. So you're just boiling off the water and recapturing it? Yeah, essentially. Okay. Yeah. Do you have to boil it? There has to be a phase change. Okay. Yeah. When people think boiling, they think hot, but you can actually boil at low temperatures if you reduce pressure. So we're getting into trade secrets here and there's nothing new under the sun. The challenge is to Terraform-ize this technology and make it cheap enough that you can run it intermittently off solar arrays, or solar power in general and still make money. That's quite challenging. But it is insane to me that we live in this state in California where they're talking about doing this project under the delta in the Sacramento River Delta. You spend $20 billion on it and it's going to potentially recover on the order of a hundred thousand acre feet of water a year. If you spent $20 billion on desalination, you could literally double the flow of the Colorado—5 million acre feet. So why is California ignoring desalination? Again, I think it's anchoring to the past where the way you got water was you went and built a big dam in the mountains and then built canals and stuff. Henry Kaiser, eat your heart out. And desalination. I mean there's the odd desal plant here and there, but they're very small. They're mostly set up to help cities out. Oh, there is desal in California already? Yeah, there's a plant in Santa Barbara. There's a plant I think in San Diego, maybe. And they supply water for the city just— Normally they don't actually. It's only if the city runs short on water than they do because they run off the grid and the reverse osmosis plants, they're quite expensive to operate. They also have wear parts, so as you run them, it costs money, But yours will not have significant wear parts? Hopefully not. I mean, it's mostly spreadsheets and some doodling in the kitchen at this point, which is how Terraform started really. And then the garage and then in the castle. But California has more coastline on the West coast than any other state. Maybe Alaska has a bit more, I don’t know. So why are we short on water? It's right there. Are there private entities you can contract with? Just because government procurement cycles are very long and politically involved in everything like that. Can you sell to the city of Irvine? Are there ways? Yeah, I mean that would be the way to do it or to sell directly to a consortium of farmers or something like that. The challenge in California is the California Coastal Commission, which I believe you've probably encountered. No sense of humor.…

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