Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - The Science Fiction Universe of "Venemous Lumpsucker" by Ned Beauman

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

Daniel and Kelly chat with Ned Beauman, author of "Venemous Lumpsucker" a cautionary tale about applying free market strategies to preventing extinction.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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because your life is going to be full of them. Listen to these women and more on She Pippets, now on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, quick announcement, everyone. We have just joined TikTok, so head over there and follow us to see videos of Daniel asking and answering science questions. All right, enjoy the pod. Well, you maybe don't realize the can of worms you've opened up. If you go to a parasitology meeting, this is something that we actually fight about. But I'll just cut to the chase because I'm sure what you wanted was a short answer. And I would say that they are micro predators.

What predators? You're saying that these bloodsuckers don't just make me itch. They've turned me into their prey. They do. And unlike parasites, they don't have like durable, long lasting interactions with your body, they just kind of take a meal and then they run off. Does that mean that I don't have to feel bad when I swap one of them? I don't think they feel bad when they're drinking your blood. All right, well, what if I was like going to kill all of the mosquitoes? Then should I feel bad? Oh, I feel like now we're getting into like philosophy.

This is like a twisted version of the trolley problem. Well, you know, if I could pull a lever to have that train kill every single mosquito, I would do it even if it saved nobody. these lives, even if it just saved us from some itches. You don't need philosophy. You know the answers. You go with your gut. Hi, I'm Daniel.

I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine and a deep, deep hater of mosquitoes. I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I'm an adjunct professor at Rice University. And, you know, I'm also a deep, deep hater of mosquitoes. I thought that as a parasitologist, you were like the biggest advocate for the most hated species on the planet. I'm an advocate for some parasites, but, you know, mosquitoes kill a lot of humans. And I don't think that we really know what would happen if you took them out of the ecosystems. Maybe they play a role that we don't know about. But I feel like if you eradicated all of them and then no one got malaria anymore, we could probably find some way to fill in the ecologic

niches that they were leaving empty. I think it would be worth it to kill them all. Oh, I think I know what purpose mosquitoes serve. They serve to limit people's happiness. You feel like there's some mechanism on this earth where that's like a thing that needs to happen? I thought that's what Twitter was for. They call it X now, Kelly. They call it X. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so behind. Let's eliminate both of them. The mosquito of the internet. Well, welcome to the podcast, Daniel and Jorge explain the universe in which we dive deep into the joys of philosophy and physics and cosmology and think about everything that's out there in the universe. We want to understand how it all works. We want to make sense of the universe. We want to boil down all of those frothing quantum particles

into a story that fits into your mind that clicks together and goes, ah, I understand how it works. If only all questions were that straightforward. Well, all of physics at least has a goal to tell you a story that makes a story that makes sense to you to incorporate into your mind a mental model of the whole universe. We don't dare to do that with chemistry and definitely not with biology, but sometimes we can take a tiny little sliver of physics and download it into your brain. My normal friend and co-host Jorge can't be here today, but I'm very excited to be here with you, Kelly. I am super excited to be here with you. And while I'm always super excited to be here with you, I'm particularly excited that we're a little bit more in my

niche today talking about, you know, ecology and species conservation. And it's going to be a good time. That's right. Because we usually talk about real science on the podcast, how the universe actually works. No, no, no. This is not a biology slam. I'm going to go in the way of the mosquitoes, Daniel. No, no, no, you totally know. I'm taking you out too. No, no. Let me finish. I was going to say that usually we talk about real science, but today we're talking about science fiction. Not that biology is not of real science. I think you're a little too defensive. Maybe I'm a little sensitive. I feel like physicists often look down on biology. I saw a talk by Freeman Dyson where he was certainly doing that. Anyway, I'll stop being so sensitive. No fair point. Physicists have been guilty of that in the

past. I think it was Rutherford who said all science is physics or stamp collecting. And I definitely do not agree with that. There is glory in chemistry and wondrous questions in biology. But today we are stepping beyond the bounds of all kinds of science into the worlds of science fiction because one of the roles of science fiction is to think about the boundaries of science. What's beyond it? What other universes could we live in? What are the consequences of the technology that we develop? If science keeps barreling forward, does it change the way we live and what it's like to be a human being and the choices that we have to make? And I think that there's a very close

connection between the work of scientists and the imagination of science fiction. So we have a series of episodes on this podcast where we read a science fiction novel, talk about the science in it, and then interview the author about how they wrote it and why they decided to build their science fiction universe the way they did. And most of the episodes that you and I have done together with sci-fi writers has been about being moved into a world that's totally unlike our own. And so it's sort of they build this brand new universe and you get to enjoy living in it for a while. What was so exciting about today's is that it's more near term and you're left thinking, oh gosh, is this going to be us in a few

decades. And so it's it's a little bit different than what we usually do, which I, and I really enjoyed it. This is a wonderful book we'd be talking about today. It's called the venomous lump sucker, a novel by Ned Bowman, and asks a really intriguing question about the nature of extinction, what price we should have to pay to drive a species extinct, whether we should care about species going extinct. For example, does the mosquito deserve to live? I don't think that's something that he talked about in particular, but I did appreciate that there was a whole sort of speech about how we should be thinking about parasites in conservation. And that was very refreshing to me. Yeah, it was fascinating. I thought about you as I was reading this book. Today on the

podcast, we'll be covering the science fiction universe of the venomous lump sucker. What a great name. Everybody I tell about this book invariably says, the what? Are you serious? Who would name their book that. But I also like totally bought it. Like when I first read the title, I thought, oh, I thought I knew about a lot of the weird fish, but venomous lump sucker. I can totally buy there's a fish called venomous lump sucker. But I was wrong. But anyway, he came up with a really glorious creature. He really did. So let's tell people the setting of the book and then we'll dig into what the story is. The book is set somewhere in the near future on earth. And it's very much set in our universe. This is not the kind of book where they invent all sorts of new physics and the

universe is very different and we have fast and light travel. This basically takes place on earth in Europe in about 15 years. And it's facing the question of how do we cope with this massive extinction event? So many species, so many little beetles are going extinct every day. What should we do about it? What can we do about it? And this book paints a specific picture about how society might handle it. And I thought he did a really nice job of creating a world that you could imagine like if we take all the wrong turns between now and like 15 to 20, maybe 30 years from now, we could be there. And so, you know, right now we use carbon credits and companies can buy carbon credits, you know, to essentially pay for the right to release more carbon into the

atmosphere. Here he's created extinction credits where if you're going to start some big new project that's going to result in the extinction of some species, you can sort of pay for that with extinction credits. And, you know, there's like a sliding scale for how many extinction credits you need depending on some characteristics of the animal that you're going to have go extinct. But like, I bought that this is a path we could go down in a couple decades. What about you, Daniel? I thought it was both inspired, creative, and also very realistic. We often have trouble figuring out, like, how do we solve a problem? And when we can't figure out what direction to go in, we basically just turn it over to capitalism. We're like, can we financialize this? Can we incentivize

people to do the right thing by making it expensive to do the wrong thing? And, And I feel like that's sort of clever, like turn it over to the free market, but it also feels like sort of an abdication of our responsibility. But then again, we can never really decide on how to do anything. So it's better to do something than nothing, I suppose. But this was really uncomfortable to read about this like financialization of extinction. It really reminds me of like putting a price on a human life. You know, when the government has to make decisions about like how much to spend on things or should a company have to install seatbelts, they do so if the price. The rise of the seatbells is less than the expected loss of human life.

You know, you have to calculate like, oh, human life is $10 million. It makes me wonder, like, well, if I had $10 million, could I buy a murder credit to, like, kill somebody and then give that money to the family? Be like, I bought the right to kill your husband, right? That seems terrible. This is just sort of the same thing on a larger scale. Yeah. I mean, I do think humans, for better or worse, feel more comfortable doing that with non-human animals. And, like, we get more uncomfortable, you know, if you're talking about, like, well, this,

Chimpanzee really made me angry. Like, people would, you know, maybe make you pay more to take the chimpanzee out than the, like, a stink bug that lives on your curtain or something. But yeah, no, I agree. These things are complicated and uncomfortable. And I thought he also did a really nice job of sort of, like, weaving in the way that even our best intentions

can get corrupted by things like, you know, the market doesn't always do what we think it's going to do. Even though we, like, maybe should have been able to anticipate the 2008, you know, financial crisis because what were we doing with the banking system and housing back then? But we didn't. And so, you know, things don't go exactly the way the characters thought they were going to go with these extinction credits and how they're going to pay out monetarily. And, you know, this stuff doesn't always work the way we think it will. And so this is sort of a story about things going kind of horribly awry. Yeah, it is sort of a cautionary tale.

And I thought it was super thoughtful and creative. There are so many things that happened in the book that surprised me. And then as soon as I thought about it, I thought, you know what that's totally realistic like that's exactly what could happen and to me that's the best kind of science fiction somebody who's like creatively thought about the consequences of some new technology and you know the way in the book a lobbyist and special interest add like loopholes and exceptions and they end up like driving down the cost of extinction credits to make it like horribly cheap to send some caterpillar off to its final demise I thought that was was very realistic another aspect of the book which is super fascinating is the role of technology he thinks

about what it really means for a species to become extinct when you can record it, when you can record its genome and its behavior and get samples of it. And if it's possible to bring a species back, is it still extinct? And this is a topic that's like near and dear to my heart, you know, the positive implications that we think will happen when we create a technology. So, you know, right now people are working on de-extinction. Like, can you bring back the mammoth and put it back in its, and, you know, the permafrost habitats in Russia to try to make the habitat what it once was, which would be better for all of the other species that were there. But, you know, a lot of these technologies, even if they were envisioned with only positive implications,

the way they get rolled out can often have some pretty negative implications. So here you see they're working on, you know, figuring out ways to store biological information so that you can not only bring back sort of members of a species, but you could even bring back specific individuals. And I think, you know, I don't know what the original plan was in the book for the people who made these technologies, but I can certainly imagine on earth people having really good intentions creating that technology. And then it makes extinction blurry. Like is, you know, the beetle that you study really extinct if everything that you need to bring it back is in a computer and you could recreate it in a lab at some point. So, you know, these technologies that are

meant to help but like can get used in the wrong way and really mess up incentives is a to me a fascinating topic that I felt like he handled really well in the book. Yeah and lots of really interesting questions that seem initially like they have obvious answers like when is a species extinct you might say well when there are no more living bits right when there are no more living individuals but then he walks you through these arguments in a really thoughtful way like well if there's a few more living individuals but they can't reproduce because it's too small a group or they can only live in zoos, then is that really somehow less extinct than another species where there are no living individuals, but we have the capacity to make more because of our

technology and we could bring them back, which species really is more extinct in that case? So it's very persuasive. It really changed my mind a lot of these tricky questions. Yeah, the book tackles a lot of difficult questions. So what is the story about, Daniel? Yeah, so it's not just like, here's a future earth where everything is going wrong. It tells the story. And it's from the point of view of a biologist who's being asked to assess whether a particular species is intelligent.

Because as you said, it costs more extinction credits in this book to kill something if it's intelligent, which I guess makes sense, but also feels really icky. And her job is to assess whether the venomous lump sucker is an intelligent species or not. And it turns out she has her own stake in this game. She wants it to be intelligent for her own reasons. And in the book, some corporation comes along and accidentally kills off. all of the venomous lump suckers, or do they? And in these places where people store these species, these bio banks then get hacked. And the whole question of whether species are extinct becomes much more fuzzy and questionable.

It's a really exciting sort of thriller that takes you through this world. Yeah, it's a totally fascinating world. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the science that was sort of created or forwarded for this story in particular? Yeah, I wanted to ask you about it, actually, because a lot of this stuff is biological. I mean, the core technological innovations that exist in this world are the ability to preserve a species, to in principle de-extinctify it. And they do, for example, genome sequencing, of course, you've got to store the DNA, but they also do deep scans of the animals, and they watch their behaviors, et cetera, et cetera. And as you said, this is something people are actually working on now.

So it made me wonder, like, is it possible today or in the near future to actually do this, to bring a species back from extinction? or what would you need in order to make that possible? So there are people who are way smarter than me who would say that the answer is definitely yes. We can bring species back from extinction. But to be honest, I'm skeptical that we're going to bring back the exact same thing. And maybe that doesn't matter.

So, for example, they're working on, as I mentioned, bringing back the woolly mammoth. And different groups are doing this in different ways. So, for example, one group has, was I think it's the genome from some elephant species, and then they're taking what they've been able to get from mammoths that have been like frozen in permafrost, what they've been able to extract out of their genome. They're tinkering with an elephant genome to try to make it look like a mammoth genome. But then there's all sorts of like, you know,

maternal effects that are missing. So that mammoth would have to be gestated, given the science that we have now, gestated in the body of an elephant. And how does that like hormonal environment, you know, differ. And then I think, you know, some elephants and maybe some mammoths, like, eat feces after they're born to get the right microbiome. And so now you're not getting like a mammoth microbiome. You're getting like an elephant microbiome. And is that enough. Did you say eat feces? Sure did. Yeah. This is biology, man. We get to feces in about five minutes. You're saying it's not a mammoth. If it hasn't eaten mammoth poop when it was a baby. You know, I wouldn't say that that's the line, yes or no. But I would say that like, you know, to some extent, these differences build up and, Like, so yes, you have a mammoth, but the mammoth is now, you know, placed into an ecosystem that varies dramatically from what it was in before. Its social interactions might be different because will they act the same in a different environment? And is there something about their development that's missing that's going to change the way they interact with each other?

And so, like, yes, you have a mammoth, but you don't have the mammoth you used to have. And the extent to which that matters, I don't know, maybe it's enough to just have a mammoth back in the environment and that does some good. But I think these things are complicated. And as far as MRI scans and like connectomes so that you can bring back a human who is exactly the same as the person you love to just passed away, I think we are way more than decades away from that. But I'm sure there are a lot of people who disagree with me. But it seems like when we first got the human genome, we were like, there's so much we're going to be able to deal with it. And then we were like, oh, well, not really because actually it's much more complicated.

And that always seems to be the answer. A friend of mine just completed the connectome of like the fruit fly, which has a tiny note. of neurons compared to the humans and it took forever and it seems like we're never going to get to the connectome of the human brain but you raise a lot of really interesting questions that I think touch on the deeper issue of like what does it really mean for a species to be extinct it's not really just about the individuals it's about their entire environment and can they survive and propagate and that requires much more than just the actual bodies right it requires the parents and the poop and everything around them and and all of this kind of stuff and I think

that's one reason why all the efforts so far in the real world to de-extinctify have focused on things that are near relatives to existing species like you could have a mammoth baby maybe born an elephant and that's giving you something that's close to a mammoth or you could have like an extinct rat be born from existing rats these kinds of things i don't think it be possible for example to de-extinctify a species that was very distant from anything that was currently alive you know, like a dinosaur, although maybe I guess you could grow one in a big alligator. I don't know. Yeah, like, I don't know how you de-extinctify a trilobite or something, for example.

And maybe the question is like, you know, if you could de-extinct it, but it could only live in a zoo because you've, like, destroyed all of its habitat and it just can't, the things that it needed don't exist anymore. What kind of a life is that? And I'm sure people would dramatically differ in their answer to that question. And so there you go. Well, one of the fascinating things about the book, Venomist Lump Sucker is he talks about the influence of this technology on decision-making. And if it's possible to bring species back from

the dead, then does it make it less bad to make them extinct? And it sort of makes the question like fuzzier now, because what does extinct really mean? You know, it's sort of like saying, oh, I can upload you to the cloud. So what does it matter if I murder you? Like, well, I still don't really want to get murdered, even if I'm backed up. Well, I mean, I guess there's also like nobody wants the physical pain of being murdered and many layers of complication in all of these questions. Many reasons to not be murdered by Kelly Wienn-Smith. Speaking of commercialization, let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace.

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Brought to you by the American Lung Association and the Ad Council. And we're back. All right. Well, we thoroughly enjoy this book. We thought it was very thoughtful, very interesting, very creative, but also very, very funny. I laughed out loud many times while reading this book. Okay. So without further ado, let's bring Ned Bowman onto the show. Well, then it's my pleasure to welcome to the program today. Ned Bowman. Ned, thank you very much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into science fiction writing? Well, this is my fifth novel, but it's my first real science fiction novel. I think it was inevitable that I would write

one eventually because I read pretty much nothing but science fiction when I was growing up and then kind of moved over into more mainstream literary fiction but continued to read science fiction and to be honest I always felt like you know it was a genre that I appreciated but wasn't necessarily up to myself because I think it requires quite a specific set of skills but eventually you know I tried my hand at various other things and I had done it I'd published a couple of science fiction short stories. And then with this one, I thought, okay, I'll give it a shot, put everything into it. Yes. And that was how I ended up with venomous lumpsecker. So you noted that you need to have a certain set of skills to write

science fiction. How did you get those skills yourself? So like you got a lot of the, you know, the biology in this book is fantastic as a biologist. Did you like pull out biology textbooks? What was the process of trying to blend science fiction with all of the appropriate science facts? Well, all of my books have been quite research heavy. You know, for instance, my second book had a lot about the avant-garde theater in the Weimar era. You know, I don't think researching science is inherently any harder than researching that kind of thing, at least until you get into the really confusing stuff. When I say a specific set of skills, I mean more trying to kind of paint a,

plausible and internally consistent future world without leaving huge gaps and blind spots. And I have always so admired the science fiction novelists who were good at that. And with this book, I was very conscious. It's set 15 to 20 years in the future. And A, I don't specify the exact date, which makes it easier. And also B, I think 15 to 20 years is kind of the easy. place to put it, because it's not so soon that you can get refuted in all your predictions really quickly, but it's also not so far away that you really have to make some big

calls about, like, what's going to change and where things are going to go. So I think I was, you know, doing it sort of on easy modes in that respect, but that was the challenge. Whereas the science stuff. Yeah, you know, at this point, I'm just kind of used to being a dilettante and with each book I stroll through some new era of research and I didn't really find it any harder than any of the stuff I've researched in the past. Well, before we dive into the details of your book, we'd like to ask the same questions to every author to sort of put them on the spectrum of science fiction. So here's some generic science fiction questions, not specifically about your book. So the first one is, do you think,

that Star Trek-style transporters kill you and clone you, or do you think they actually transport your atoms somewhere else? Well, I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and then later read this book called Reasons in Persons by Derek Parfit, which one reviewer actually noticed

as an influence on this book, by coincidence, which I hadn't really consciously thought about, but in hindsight, yeah, I think a lot of those ideas had implanted themselves in my head. And I think Parfit's answer would be that you need to start thinking about personhood in a way which doesn't have such strict boundaries. You have to think about a person as being a kind of soft entity which doesn't begin or end in a specific place.

And if you look at things that way, then it's legitimate to say, is the person who beams down to the planet me? Sort of. That person is semi-continuous with me, not continuous to the extent that we normally think of ourselves as being continuous. And yeah, I think Parfit would say, that's okay.

There doesn't have to be a strict binary answer to that. So I think that's probably what I would go with because I really respect. half-fits concept of the world. So it is you, as long as you redefine you to be whatever you ends up on the other side of the transporter. Yeah, I think it's fair enough to say, it's sort of you. In many ways, pretty much you.

That's a great answer. So another tech question. What tech in science fiction would you most like to see become a reality? I think the science fiction story that has had the most influence on me in terms of my sort of personality and outlook is this story called Reasons to Be Cheerful by Greg. Egan. And that is a story about a guy who gets a brain tumour which affects his ability to take pleasure in things, which kind of flattened his ability to take pleasure in things. And, well, I have no choice to spoil the ending, but I don't think it really spoils it.

They eventually develop a device which allows him to adjust how much pleasure he takes in different things. So he's able to say, not do I like this or do I find that beautiful, but do I want to like this? Do I want to find this beautiful? What is it that it would be most convenient

or positive for me to take pleasure in? And he's able to adjust it on that basis. And I've always felt that would be so good. That would make it so much easier for us to adjust to the world. What would you change about your response to the world first if you had this device? Well, again, this kind of comes up in the novel, and I'm sure, again, the novel was kind of influenced an unconscious way by this story, but basically one of the two main characters

of venomous lump sucker is this guy who's a real foodie, but because of the effects of climate change in 15 or 20 years, most foods don't really taste of anything anymore. So he has to take this pill, which means he doesn't care whether a meal is good or not, which is sort of the more destructive version of what I'm talking about. The better alternative would be, you know, for him to go, well, what is still available to me? I'm going to decide that I will love that. And then I'll be perfectly adjusted to the world that I actually have, as opposed to the world that I would like to be in.

I mean, there's probably a lot of more profound ways that you could use something like that, but that's probably what I would do at least to start off with. Because, you know, I am quite a snob about, like, food and fabrics and all that kind of thing. Like, you know, imagine if you could just take just as much pleasure in cheap polyester as in Kashmir, or you could take just as much pleasure in a protein bar

as in, you know, a delicious meal. Oh, I mean, that's another one. Like, I'm trying to be vegan, not very successfully. I would love, you know, I would just adjust it so that I didn't even want meat anymore and enjoy chickpeas way more than I ever used to enjoy prosciutto, if I could. That's going to be tough. Chickpeas are delicious. I'm definitely pro-chick-pee in this question.

I'm pro-chick-pee, but as soon as you start eating vegan, you find yourself eating chickpeas like seven times a day and it's too much. No, there's so many. kinds of beans out there. You should get into indigenous kinds of beans. We're members of the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. So we get this shipment of heirloom beans every month. It's wonderful. Anyway, a big fan of Greg Egan over here, love his stories. So thoughtful and creative. Last generic question before we dive into the book is, what's your personal answer to the Fermi paradox? Why haven't aliens visited us or have they? Oh, yeah. I don't have a great answer to that.

I mean, I don't see strong reason to believe that they have. I'm not particularly convinced by any of those hypotheses about how they know we're here and they're watching and they've chosen not to visit us or interfere. The answer to it that kind of grips me with the most, like, a cold, implacable grip, as soon as I heard it, is just the idea that all advanced civilizations eventually destroy themselves one way or another, you know, before they leave their solar systems, if not before they leave their planets. So it could be there, but then you'd think somebody would have got as far as, you know, self-replicating probes or annoying machines or whatever.

So I really don't know why we haven't had any of those. I can't explain that. All right. So let's start jumping into Venomous Lump Sucker. I love this book. So the novel, like, so I'm an ecologist and so top like climate change in the massive extinction event that we're living through right now are topics that are near and dear to my heart.

What fascinates you about these themes? Why did you decide that you wanted to write a book around the topic of extinction? Well, it's a combination of, you know, on the one hand, I am very, very. concerned about the climate and I love animals and a lot of the sentiments in the book about how thinking about animals being driven extinct is so painful you can't even bear it. Like some of that is an exaggeration of how I feel. But then on the other hand, like I Selle studied philosophy and I'm often frustrated by the way, we have so many surface level debates about things which

go round and round in circles, and you never get anywhere around. I always just think this needs some real philosophy applied to it. And the question of extinction is really one of those, you know, because most people basically seem to agree that it's bad if a species goes extinct, but obviously there's no consensus on what we are willing to pay or sacrifice to, prevent that happening. That's not one of those questions you can answer just by people sort of vaguely, you know, talking past each other about how they feel about it. I really think if we're going to talk about how much do we really care about preventing extinction, you have

to look at it rigorously and ask, well, why is it bad if a species goes extinct? How much do we or should we care? Why is a species valuable? Why should we prevent it? And you have to look at those philosophically instead of just relying on intuition and assumptions and so on. So I thought that would be an interesting basis for a novel to start not offering answers, but at least asking some questions that I felt like needed to be asked that weren't being asked, in a more serious philosophical way about this issue. I totally agree. And I note that in your answer, you gave sort of two questions.

One was, what price are we willing to pay? And the other was, how much should we care? For me, one of the most interesting things about the book was that it seemed to sort of sound a warning about attempts to legislate and financialize decision making. I've often heard economists say things like, it's good to put a price on things, even if it's the wrong price.

Do you think that there's a danger to try to assign a monetary, value to moral choices, like a human life or the existence of a species. Is that the right way for us as a society to balance these things? I mean, I don't think it's intrinsically immoral to do that. You know, if you work in the government, you have to operate, at least in this country, on the basis of, they're called QA-L-Y's quality-adjusted life years, and you have to decide, is it worth buying this treatment for a rare cancer? And, you know, they're called QA-L-L-Y's quality-adjusted life years, and you have to decide, is it worth buying this treatment for a rare cancer

and then you have to think well how many people will live how many extra years longer and you have to put a number on that stuff so you know I find it very frustrating when people are like we can't have bureaucrats putting a price

on human life or whatever when I think you have to that's the only way you can make tradeoffs in a you know time of relative scarcity But on the other hand, when the reason you're trying to put a price on something is because you're saying, well, a price signal is the only signal that the free market really understands. So the reason we're putting a price on it is so that we can plug it into the free market and then pull a few levers and then allow the free market to work its magic and solve this problem. for us. Again, I don't think that's inherently immoral is just one of the things I'm saying in the

book is it's not going to work because the thing that the free market is good at is rooting around any impediments to profit. And the free market, the reason it works is it's, you know, a collaboration of millions of very intelligent people all working together to solve this problem where the problem is someone is stopping us from making enough money and if opposed to them you only have a handful of kind of well-meaning people in government then the free market is always going to outsmart the people in government so that's why it's a danger so that's why i think it's dubious to put a price on it because if that price is is meant to be a kind of, you know, essentially translating it into free market language.

You don't necessarily want it in that language because once you give it to them, you never get it back. And what is the role of the individual in how these things all play out? You know, like I recently purchased something like a new purse the other day made out of billboards. And I felt so great because I'm reusing something. But like maybe I didn't need that new purse. And to what extent do these like, you know, credits and these, you know, telling people that your company is greener than another, like, to what extent is it still the individual's responsibility when we have all these ways of making ourselves feel better that may not actually be doing anything? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I really see both sides of this, because on the one

hand, you often hear people saying the emphasis on individual responsibility for climate change is just a way of distracting from the fact that we need enormous structural changes at the level of governments and mega corporations to make any real difference. And, you know, I think it is literally the case that, you know, polluters via their think tanks and lobbyists and AstroTurf operations have tried to move the climate change conversation towards people recycling their bottles or whatever because it kind of changes the terms of it, which makes it easier for them to avoid these demands. But on the other hand, I am always very conscious that my carbon footprint as like an affluent Northern European is many times that of the, you know, median global person.

And that also does put me in a difficult moral position. But then also I feel relatively smug about the whole thing because, like, I don't drive, I don't have children. I've basically given up flying. and like I said, I'm trying to be vegan and I live in 500 square feet. So like, it's pretty easy for me to look down on other people. I also think looking down at other people for climate reasons is bad and not helpful. But it does make it easy for me to say that individual responsibility is important

because if you look at my individual responsibilities, I come out looking pretty good, I think. Although I do buy quite a lot of clothes. Of course, the answer is we have to do both. Like, we have to have governments making huge changes. Then also realistically, in the future, all of us individually are going to have to make changes in our lives as well. Because if all six or seven billion people on Earth live like Afloan Northern Europeans, that won't work. But we also can't ask the majority of the global population to maintain a lower standard of living than we have.

because there's no reason for that. So we are going to have to smooth things out in some way. So I don't know. But yeah, I think, you know, we have to do both, of course. I think it's really fascinating the moral implications of turning things into costs, though. If I'm willing to pay more for a banana that's very environmentally expensive, does that like make it okay that I'm eating this banana because I've paid for it? Or like in the world, do you constructed if I want a specific view from my condo

and I know that building a condo there meant some caterpillar had to go extinct? But hey, I'm willing to pay another. 10K for that condo, does that like absolve me of responsibility? Or am I just like seeding the responsibility for this choice to the algorithm of free market capitalism? So there is this attitude that offsets are dangerous because they simply, you know, shunt the damage to someone else and they relieve the pressure to actually make real changes. And we need that. And we need that. that pressure. I don't really agree with that. You know, obviously the premise of offsets is that the free market is good at finding the most efficient methods and time and place to accomplish

something. And if the thing we want to accomplish is, you know, not emit 100 tons of carbon, then we might as well do that in the most efficient time and place and buy the most efficient method. You know, I don't think there's any reason why we can't smooth that out. But, you know, as I write about in the book, the whole offset idea since its inception and in every implementation of it has been extremely bedeviled by loopholes and corruption and fraud and lies and so on. So in practice, it hasn't really worked. But in principle, I don't see anything wrong with it. You know, if the fact that, is it cold play,

who were like, our tours are going to be carbon neutral and some of the ways we're going to do that with offsets, if the offsets are real, then I think that's good. I think offsetting is good if the offsets are real. But the problem is, again, because the free market is so nimble and devious, a fake offset is always going to be more profitable. than a real one. So most of the offsets have turned out to be fake. But if we could make them more real, great. But the free market is cleverer than us. So I don't think that will ever

happen. Yeah. These things are complicated and it all depends on their implementation, which sort of leads to the next question. So technology is an important feature of the book. And in the book, they're working through the technology to maybe to be able to bring individual people back after they've died and then a whole species back after they've gone extinct. And so, you know, this sort of ties in with the extinction credits. You don't have to feel quite as bad if you think you can bring an animal back eventually also. So to you, what is the thing that makes extinction so terrible? Like if we still have it as a backup on one of our computers and we can maybe bring it back one day, does that make it less bad? Because maybe it's not completely gone. So what do you

think about the role of technology and extinction? And when is the species really extinct? Yeah, as I write about it in the book, in principle, we could get to a point where we have all of these threatened species in biobanks and then in the future we could bring them back. But will we ever bring them back? I just don't think we will. I can see us bringing back woolly mammoth and stuff, but the vast majority of the species going extinct every year are kind of very obscure rainforest beetles or whatever. and I just don't think we ever will bring those back

because who is going to pay for that and who is going to keep them alive once they're brought back and, you know, where is that going to happen and so on? So I think the fact that we could doesn't mean that we will, we probably won't, which means we shouldn't put ourselves in that position of being like, well, we've still got them so we could still bring them back so they're not really extinct. But then when you start asking whether this kind of potential resurrected beetle is a kind of

ursat's version of the real thing, that's when you do start to like wander into this fuzzier territory. You know, is there something inherently valuable about a beetle that has continuously lived in the habitat in which it evolved and as it were the kind of community and the ecosystem role of that species within the you know broader web of species has continually existed from the first moment it evolved is that more valuable than hypothetically the species being brought back in a zoo in the future. Well, it seems to me that it is,

but it is harder than to say, well, why? It doesn't really seem to affect anyone. It doesn't make anyone's life better. Even if we're very invested in this beetle existing somewhere in the world, whose life is better because this, you know, beetle has continuously existed.

It's like caring deeply about, your table being a real antique instead of a fake antique. If you're very into antiques, then of course you care about that, but why should anyone else care about that in particular? Why should anyone else pay costs or give things up because you care about that? That's a niche interest. It does seem to me that it would be nice not to eradicate this beetle

and simply have it in a biobank and clone it later, but that's not how politics works. You can't say to people, well, we all have to agree to do this because I think that would be nice. So I think that's where philosophy comes in. That's where you have to start thinking, well, I have reasons for thinking it would be nice. And once we dig into the reasons, maybe you would start to agree with me too. But then, of course, the danger is once you start dig into the reasons, the reverse could happen. It could be that I start thinking, well, actually, I don't even care anymore. Now that I've looked at it, you know, really harshly. I don't care. I think there are actually more important things. The other thing I talk about

in the book is that knowing that this technology is there sort of takes the pressure off, it's going to make us more lackadaisical because we have a plan B. I think there is something to that, but I don't think that's a reason not to build biobanks or whatever. Better to have them in case we need them than not to have them out of a fear that they would make us lazy or whatever. I think it's fascinating the way having biobanks or the ability to recess today species makes extinction itself less terrible because it's the irreversibility of extinction that really gives it its moral drama. Sort of reminds me of your answer to the question about teleporters. Like if I murdered somebody, it's actually less terrible to murder them

if I knew I could just recreate them somewhere else. And then I'd say like, look, according to novelist Ned Bowman, you still exist and you is you, even if I murdered you and recreated you. Yeah, I think that's a great analogy, actually, because again, I talk about this in the book. Yeah, the question of whether something is extinct or not extinct, it's simplistic to make that a binary. You know, extinction is arguably not a clear-cut enough concept that you can use it in that way. It might be more helpful to start talking about species being sort of extinct-ish. Although again, in the book, yeah, I asked, is that going to sort of expand our sense of how worried we might need to be about a species

or on the contrary, is it going to let us relax when we shouldn't be relaxing about it? Well, then let me make the philosophical game of making it more personal. Say we could scan you and resuscitate to. you or recreate you later on. Would you want that to happen? And would that make it less bad for somebody to murder you? Well, again, reading loads of Greg Egan when I was younger has been a huge influence on my thinking about this because he writes more interestingly than anyone else I've ever read about what it would be like to be an uploaded consciousness. And, you know, of course, if you end up living on a computer, then you might live for, well, A, you might live for another

million or billion years, and B, at that point, you have complete freedom to alter yourself. So is the person at the end of the billion years who's been radically kind of expanded and altered and perhaps merged or split into two or whatever, is that the same person as the person who was uploaded, once again, I think it's preposterous to give a straight yes or no answer. You have to say, well, there's some degree of continuity in it being the same-ish person, but I don't know. So, you know, that's why I always think it's a bit kind of vapid to say, or would you want to be immortal or not?

Because clearly the person who's there at the end of eternity is only in certain ways continuous with the person who was there at the beginning of it, like, is that person any more similar to you than your father is similar to you or whatever? So when I think, would I want to live forever, would that be terrifying? I was thinking, well, I don't think living forever is possible, because the person at the end of forever is only partly you. All of that said, my answer basically is no. I think 70 to 90 years is ample. I really don't feel any need or desire to live several hundred or several thousand more. And also, you know, one of the things Greg Egan writes about,

and again, this is sort of reference in a different way in the book, it's like, that's a lot of time to go nuts, basically. That's a lot of time to become obsessed with the wrong thing or to start valuing the wrong things. And obviously, if you're in this position where you can sort of, sort of edit yourself, then that can really turn into a spiral. Like, if you spend a week thinking, there's nothing more important than this thing that I've just got into, then maybe you think, well, I'm going to edit myself, so I'm more committed

to this thing that I've just got into. And then the person that you've become who's more committed to it thinks, well, I've got to become even more committed to it. So you start editing your own consciousness so that you become more and more into this specific thing and then you can never get out of it and then you're just there for eternity kind of shriveling up into this monomaniacal computer consciousness and you know I'm already way too into monster hunter world for my Xbox like I dread to think how much I could get into it if I had complete control over my own consciousness and we'd kind of live a billion years so no basically I think

safer to die of old age but I wish the best to anyone who's getting uploaded, and I completely think that's possible, and they will be the same person, at least in the short term. So I encourage people to try it out, but not for me. So speaking of long-term planning, what are your thoughts on are we going to eventually avert this extinction disaster at some point? Like, what do you think our prospects are for humanity in the next 100 or 1,000 years? Well, again, this is why I didn't set the book any further in the future. I know people become furious when this is said. I do think there is at least a possibility that when we build an AI that's like a million

times more intelligent than any human being, the AI will come up with something that we didn't come up with. Like, I do think that could happen. I don't think we should rely on that happening. And if that doesn't happen, I don't think it is looking very good. I actually listened to a different podcast recently with Peter Watts, the Canadian science fiction novelist. He's really brilliant and also famous for his pessimism. And his take on it is that even with a lot of geoengineering, so much climate change is already locked into the oceans and so forth

that we can avert the very worst maybe, but it's already too late to avert the almost as bad and the almost as bad, definitely involves a lot of ecosystems being absolutely devastated and a huge chunk of the biodiversity of the earth just going away probably before we have the opportunity to scan and preserve it all. But then, you know, you've got to have a certain amount of intellectual humility about this stuff. Like every 10 years you look at the graphs and it's like the graph is not where it's supposed to be. Like sometimes it's worse or sometimes it's better. Like the whole thing about renewable energy having gone down in price by 97% or whatever it is over the past decade. So I really can't say it would be nice if AI saved us, but I do want to emphasize.

I don't think we should like sit back and wait for that to happen. It would be it if that was only the emergency plan and we came out with something better in the meantime. All right. We have lots more hard philosophical questions for Ned. But first we have to take a quick break. overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick.

I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month. So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One tribe saved my life twice.

There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't want to have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

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Okay, we're back and we are chatting with Ned Bowman, the author of Venomous Lump Sucker. Well, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your writing process. You said you did a lot of research. Why did you decide to invent a fictional species for your book, whereas the rest of it seems to follow the rules of our universe? Well, the book had to be premised on a highly intelligent species and most of the highly intelligent species that we know about are fairly well publicised. So the fact of whether they are endangered or extinct

is a fact in the world that people know, which would have made it very hard to fictionalize it. so I had to come up with a fictional intelligent species that could plausibly have remained obscure and I didn't really feel like it could be a mammal because if you look at the club of mammals, there aren't actually that many. Like, there really aren't that many mammals,

especially in Europe. And if there was an intelligent mammal, we would have heard about it. I mean, apart from the ones that we obviously already know about. I really don't think there are any very intelligent mammals that just nobody has noticed yet. That didn't feel realistic to me. So I made it a fish because there are so many fish and fish intelligence is still pretty understudied. So it was just about credible to me and hopefully to the reader that there could be this fish that was really

special but just we hadn't really been paying any attention and it had maybe gone extinct without anyone really noticing. And the other advantage of a fish is that fish are hard to find. Like if it's a bird, you can just set up cameras or whatever. I mean, if you care enough about it, you can just set up loads of cameras. But if something is obviously in the ocean, then, you know, it's very dark down there. So it's easier to believe that you could have a quest for this species that didn't just entail, well, we, you know, send up 100 drones with cameras to look for it. So when I was reading the book, it sort of reminded me of some George Saunders short stories that I've read. Like, it's sort of like wild and out there and oh my gosh, what are these

people thinking? But at the end, you're left positing all these big questions about society and humanity. And clearly, I've no literary critic. So I've done a horrible job of describing all of this. But who, outside of like your science fiction influences, who are your like straight fiction influences other than Egan. I mean, I love George Saunders. Although I wouldn't really say he's an influence on me, partly because, like, Sonders, I think, he talks about this.

Ultimately, he's, like, very concerned with human feeling and human kindness and stuff like that. And, like, I'm not interested in that kind of thing at all. Like, that's not what I write novels about. So there's a limit to how much I can take from him. So influences from our own. outside science fiction. Well, yeah, it's funny.

Any of the names I would mention, I don't know how much you would see of them in this book. Well, actually, Graham Green is one. You know, Green's novels are all about putting kind of tortured people into terrible moral situations. And I think that was definitely an influence and what happens to a saint in this book. And actually when, now they think about it, when she talks about Catholics and, you know, how thorny their theology is, I think I almost put kind of Catholics in a Graham Green novel or Catholic grand green readers or whatever.

So that's definitely in there. I don't know. Other than that, you know, I'm not going to say I've transcended my influences here, I think. But I would say that my earlier novels were very much a. patchwork of influences and pastiches and even direct quotes. And I would happily go, well, this bit is from this person and this bit is from this person. But I don't know. By the point of this novel, I'm still like totally in the shadow of all my influences.

But I think I at least found my own style and preoccupations to the point that I wouldn't say about this novel. Well, this novel is simply this writer and this writer and this writes mashed together in the way that it would have with the other ones. So the book is really thoughtful, but I also want our listeners to appreciate like how funny it is on the page. And part of that just comes from, you know, your particular turns of phrase. And as I was reading it, I was struck by this one word, which I had to look up and I'm going to ask you to give us like a useful definition of it because I need to know it in context.

what exactly is an RG bar G? Well, the thing is, as with any word like that, if there was an easier way of saying it than meant the same thing, that I would have used that. Like, I think I'm pretty sure I remember having to think, like, what is a one word or one phrase expression for what I am trying to talk about here? And I think it took me a while to get to RGBarrie.

argy-bargy, because argy-bagi is not a word that I would normally use in conversation. It's probably a word that I had never written out in my life before. It's not a word that you hear come up that much. But it is one of those English phrases with a specific meaning that is some combination of sort of fuss, commotion, disputation, hassle, argument, you know, all those kinds of things, but none of them quite capture it. And then if I remember rightly, it comes up when, you know, most of the book is about like Australians and Europeans in Europe.

That bit is a English character talking about something that happened in England. And it's in an England which has kind of gone backwards. So it felt appropriate there to use a quite old-fashioned, quaint, very English words. So, but for example, is this something a married couple might do when they're, you know, disagreeing about whose turn it is to have to do the dishes? Or is this something, is this a description of kids arguments on the playground or I'm just, I'm lacking a concrete, like, understanding of what it means? If you said like, oh, I had a bit of argy-boggy with the wife or whatever,

that would sound condescending, or at least kind of inappropriately jovial because it slightly implies a sort of annoying, somewhat inconsequential obstacle or friction that you just have to. to get past. You would never say, like, during last night, argy-bargy, my wife expressed some very real concerns, which I listened to and took on board. It's like, that simply wouldn't be compatible. Well, what about your kid for the 1,000th time didn't put their underwear in the hamper, and you had a bit of an argy-bargy with them about it? Would that be appropriate? Like,

it is sort of inconsequential. No. Again, it's so hard to articulate why, but it doesn't have that sort of kind of intimate, interpersonal context. I think it implies more something that happens at work or I'm kind of imagining, I don't know, this is a random example, like if a policeman tells someone to move their bike or something, you know, our policemen don't carry guns. So I'm imagining like a slightly more benign version of that than might happen elsewhere in the world. I mean, I do think it implies two people who don't really know each other,

kind of snapping at each other, not really succeeding in communicating, but ultimately it doesn't matter and it may as well never have happened. Oh, so like everything on the internet. Yeah, but no, not. Not really that either. I really am, I know it makes it sound like

Argy Vodgy is as hard a word to define as personhood or extinction. And when I'm thinking about personhood or extinction, I am thinking about like, you know, Wittgenstein famously says, no one can define a game. A game is just a kind of tangle of associated things. So that's why it's slightly absurd whenever we try and define any word, because any word basically is a tangle of associated.

semi-continuous things. And I think personhood is definitely like that. And I think, unfortunately, Argy Barge is like that. Like, that's why I'm so struggling to define it. It's so, it's so English, so contextual, and so hard to pin down exactly. It does have some implication of, like, bureaucracy,

misunderstanding, someone trying to exert authority, maybe a vague sense of impending physical, scuffle, but the scuffle doesn't quite happen. This sounds like a faculty meeting. Yeah, but a faculty meeting would be unlikely to erupt in Argy-Vargy in that way. I don't know. But this is also maybe why I never use this word, because it's so hard to grasp.

Well, I think it's delicious how difficult it is to understand what the meanings of words are. Maybe we'll find somewhere a philosophy thesis on the topic of the Argy-Bargy. But thanks very much for joining us today and digging into these tricky questions. We really enjoyed the book and we really enjoyed our conversation. with you. Thank you. Yeah, I enjoyed it. See, thanks a lot for having me. And before we let you go, can you tell us anything about your upcoming projects or your next book? I have started another novel, which is about how the most evil institution in world

history that has existed for hundreds of years is still in operation and thriving just west of London, but it is too early to reveal what that institution is. But people are welcome to guess. Wonderful. Sounds delicious. We look forward to seeing it. All right. Thanks very much for coming on the program. All right. So that was a super fun conversation with Ned. I'm glad that he wouldn't consider that conversation an RG Bargy. I cannot wait to use that word on Zach because he like loves old English stuff. And I can't wait to see if he knows what that word means. And I am going to use that word like five or six times a day until I personally feel like I know where it belongs in my life. Well, I hope it doesn't cause any RG Bargeys. I'm going to use it on my brother

who moved to the UK and might have heard it and actually have like a native understanding of it while remembering his American roots. So perhaps he can translate it for me. Oh, yeah. Here's hoping. Here's hoping. All right. Well, we had a lot of fun. this book and talking to the author and talking to you about it. So I highly recommend the book Venomous Lump Sucker by Ned Bowman. Go out and get it. Read it. Enjoy it. Thanks very much, Kelly, for reading this with me and talking about it. Thanks for having me. You were right. When you said you read that passage and it made you think of me, this was the perfect book for me. I enjoyed it so much. Thanks for the invite. All right. Thanks for everybody for listening and tune in next time.

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