Hi, I’m Chris Hawkins. I founded 1 technology company, and am working on another. Both companies had the same core purpose: to solve core problems. SignNow (my first company) was founded to make eSigning easy, and we were the first online notary service (back in 2012). TIDY (my current company) is designed to be the operating system for home services. In both cases, I tried to see how the world should be and try to bring that into the world.
This is rare, and I know it’s rare. Most people do not think about where the world should be and think about how to get there.
This blog is a small effort to try and improve that. There is a huge gap between what we can do, and what we should focus on. “The possible” is much better than commonly imagined. We need to upgrade our optimism. My pithy tagline for this is Let’s try to get a trillion, rich superhumans in space.
I expect to talk about anything that fits this theme of expanding our optimism. I’ll speak both of short-term policy changes and big ideas that are not given the attention they deserve.
Here is a shortlist of some big ideas that we can do as humans if we focus on it:
We can have trillions of humans. Actually much more than that, but a trillion is about the highest number people can think about.
We can populate space. Space does not have to be expensive, and commuting to and from locations around space can be fundamentally inexpensive.
We can become superhumans. Healthy, strong, exotic, and immortal.
We can be rich. Starting with energy, we can have a huge abundance of things. Not unlimited, but it’s “easy” to have a trillion people each with 10x the energy budget of today.
We can live quadrillions of years. The universe will be habitable for a very, very long time.
In the short term, I have some weird ideas that could dramatically improve the US, if it chose to use them. Note, I will avoid politics and stick to ideas far outside the political norm. The main ideas that don’t get as much attention as they should are:
Real Estate should be deliberately a "bad investment”. People should be able to live in fabulous homes at low cost.
Healthcare needs to focus on cost reduction, not the price people pay. These are two fundamentally different things.
Immigration. We should try to get a billion people in the US with immigration, targeting about 3%/year growth. This growth would make the US vibrant, richer, and more powerful.
Basic income is probably as a social safety net than our current programs.
There is a lot of nuance that needs to be discussed, and I’ll add to this list over time. But I will get into these in future posts.
