Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 64 | Ramez Naam on Renewable Energy and an Optimistic Future

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

The Earth is heating up, and it's our fault. But human beings are not always complete idiots (occasional contrary evidence notwithstanding), and sometimes we can even be downright clever. Dare we imagine that we can bring our self-inflicted climate catastrophe under control, through a combination of technological advances and political willpower? Ramez Naam is optimistic, at least about the technological advances. He is a technologist, entrepreneur, and science-fiction author, who has been following advances in renewable energy. We talk about the present state of solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources, and what our current rate of progress bodes for the near and farther future. And maybe we sneak in a little discussion of brain-computer interfaces, a theme of the Nexus trilogy. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Ramez Naam worked for 13 years at Microsoft, helping to develop early versions of Outlook, Explorer, and Bing. He founded Apex Technologies, which develops software for use in molecular design. He holds 19 patents. His science-fiction trilogy Nexus was awarded several prizes. He is chair of Energy and Environmental Systems at Singularity University. Web site Singularity University page Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Talk on Exponential Energy Twitter

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this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Minescape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We've all heard that the Earth is getting warmer, that we're in the middle of global climate change. And that climate change is being caused by human beings and their effects on the globe, whether it's farming or fossil fuel burning, transportation, etc. So it's a depressing prospect because it is very real and it's going to hurt us in very important ways.

But nevertheless, there's still room for bits of optimism. Maybe we can do something about it. Maybe there is reason for hope that the human race will actually figure itself out and get this right before we completely destroy the planet. Today's guest is Ramesnam, who is a professional technologist, investor, also a science fiction writer. He's the author of the Nexus Trilogy, which is a wonderful set of books. I encourage you to read.

And it's about a future where we have brain-inism. implants that let us communicate with the internet wirelessly, something I'm very, very interested in myself. But in his professional capacity, he's thinking mostly these days about our energy future, and especially the future of renewable energy. So in today's podcast, we sort of take the optimistic view on climate change and energy generally. We say, is it conceivable that we will be able to free ourselves from a dependence on fossil fuels and get to a point where we can still enjoy the high energy consumption that drives our society right now without destroying the atmosphere or leading to global climate change.

So Rames is optimistic by nature, and he's pretty convincing. He knows this stuff, he lays out a case that at least it's possible to be optimistic. We might do terrible things to the planet, but it's not absolutely necessary. And of course, at the end of the podcast, I do take a little bit of time to ask about brain implants and other crazy science fictiony things. So it's a very fun conversation, a little bit of reason for hope in the midst of this doom and gloom. This June, the world comes to Los Angeles. Kick off FIFA World Cup 2026 at the FIFA Fan Festival at the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

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preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast. And on the website, you can find information about going to the Patreon page, supporting on Patreon if you want ad-free versions of the show, and if you want a monthly Ask Me Anything episode. And with that, let's go. Rahman is Nam, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Sean, it's an honor. So I asked you on because I'm,

fascinated by what things you've said and done about clean energy and the future. But in looking over the various things you've written and spoken about, this overwhelming sense of optimism comes through about technological progress and the future and so forth. I've met more optimistic people even than you, but I would definitely say that you're 90th percentile optimist about the future of human kind. So why don't we help the audience a little bit place you in some kind of context because You have this fun trajectory where you came up as a computer scientist and you wrote fiction and now you're proselytizing for clean energy. I'm a Mazinam, and I don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up.

I spent 13 years at Microsoft, did stuff with cloud services, email, search, big data, machine learning. I have written three science fiction novels about neuroscience, sort of cyberpunk-e novels that people seem to like. the Nexus trilogy. And now I'm a clean energy wonk. I wrote a book about how to save the planet, basically, and that led me to becoming the co-chair for energy and environment at Singularity University. So I project the future of clean energy, how fast the prices are dropping, and I do a lot of speaking about how that gives us some hope for climate change. And since your message does seem to be mostly there is reason for optimism, I did want to say, I'm sure that this optimism is driven mostly by facts, right, by research, by data, by things you can back up. But in my experience with

humankind, it has also been a strong intrinsic personality component to whether people want to look on the sunny side or the dark side of things. So would you say that you are in addition to being driven by the facts and reality-based that you're an intrinsically optimistic person? I am intrinsically optimistic, and I think it's probably genetic. I think also optimistic just because of the numbers about human history. I'm in the Max, Rosa, Steven Pinker camp of look at the numbers, all the bad things, hunger, child mortality, disease, warfare, going down and good things, life expectancy, education, et cetera, going up. So that also sort of gives me context for my optimism. Yeah, I do think that I'm basically on that side in the sense that in many very quantifiable ways things are getting better.

if I want to channel the devil's advocate point of view here, I would say, yes, but our capacity for doing great harm is also increasing. So maybe the trend line is upward, but fluctuations around the trend line are broadening rather than shrinking. So it's very possible that everything gets better and better and better until we destroy ourselves, right, whether through climate or nuclear war or whatever. So how strong is your concern about those kinds of existential worries? I'm a concerned optimist, and not just about existential worries. Inequality worries me. And I believe that being an optimist doesn't mean you should be complacent, and I think we should be doing more faster. In climate change, for instance, I think we're not on pace for two degrees Celsius, for staying below that. Now, it used to be that this as usual was six degrees.

We've bent that curve, and now I think we're tracking for two and a half to three degrees, but we should do more. Two degrees, I mean, to people who are completely not following the discourse on climate change, maybe two degrees doesn't sound like a lot, but it kind of is really a lot, right? It kind of is a lot, yeah. It would be warmer than the planet has ever been since humanity existed as a species. And if you think the middle of the last ice age was only about four degrees Celsius colder than it is now. So two degrees is a lot.

At the same time, it's not. a threshold where the world ends. Like, it's not the case that 1.9 degrees is just hunky-dory. And it's not the case that at 2.1 degrees you get Armageddon. So I think in addition to people underestimating how fast we're going to replace fossil fuels with clean energy, I think people also underestimate our adaptability as a species, and the many ways we'll have to adapt to a warmer planet. You know, usually I take as part of my, I invite people who I think have interesting and important and true things to say.

And then I try to mildly disagree with them because, you know, this is my job as the podcast host. But maybe we should just let the optimism flow for this podcast. I will have other people on to talk about the doom and gloom scenarios for climate change one way or the other or for AI or for whatever. So that, yeah, we can be optimistic a little bit with, you know, a footnote that everyone should decide for themselves. So why should we be so optimistic? What is it about energy production that makes you happy right now? Well, the case that we're going to switch over more rapidly is an economic case, which is that the cost of clean energy, solar, wind, batteries, electric cars, has just been in free fall.

You know, if you look at solar panels themselves, look at the price you pay for a watt of solar panel. in 1977 it was 77 bucks and today it's you know in the 20s of cents 25 cents maybe let's say like a 350 times cost reduction that's insane in just in just the last decade the cost of electricity from solar counting everything the land you need to buy the labor to deploy the panels the other hardware that you need and operating it keeping them clean has dropped by a factor of 10 and so now we have places where not only is solar and wind, not only are solar and wind cheaper to build new solar and wind than to build new coal or gas, but it's cheaper to build new solar and wind and storage in some places than it is to keep existing coal power plants and in some cases existing natural gas

power plants running. I'm old enough to remember when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the top of the White House. And as soon as Ronald Reagan got into office, he took them down, like just out of spite, as far as I can tell. There's certainly a component of people who resist. I mean, maybe it's falling now because the obviousness of climate change is much more clear now than it was in the 70s and 80s. But there are definitely people who don't want us to go in that direction. I mean, how much of your optimism is based on the reading of what human beings want to see happen? So it's actually really interesting. It surveys in America, America's the only country that's even like this show that climate change is hugely divisive,

and that hasn't really changed. I mean, younger generations are way more bought in to the science, but it's still highly, highly polarizing. So that's not why we're making progress. We are making progress because clean energy is universally loved, almost, not quite universally, but supermajorities everywhere say that solar is their first choice for energy source for their community, wind is their next natural gas is like 20 points down from that and coal is down to the bottom. So that I think informs out of the politics. Obviously a lot more gets done in blue states than red states and a lot more gets done when Democrats are in charge at a federal level than Republicans.

But some actually got done in 2015 when the Republicans had both houses of Congress. And even in 2017, you know, they could have torn down a lot of stuff federally. and they really left the clean energy incentives and policies in place better way. Do you personally have solar power? I do. I'm in Seattle, which is one of the least sunny pieces parts of America. But I have, I got a solar installation on my home last year. What was that like?

What was the process like? Has it been rewarding? It's really easy. I mean, basically my bills have just gone down. I have a separate bill for the solar. The utility bill has gone down by more than, the bill for the solar, even in Seattle, certainly in summer months. I'm in L.A. We definitely want to do it. The only thing holding us up is that I'm in a townhouse

with the homeowners association that plans to completely redo the roof in two or three years. So I presume that solar panels would get in the way of that, so we're probably going to wait for that. But just bought my first electric car, and I can imagine the new future, finally. Yeah, it is coming. It's coming fast. I mean, solar is just. growing like gangbusters, and it'll fluctuate a bit, but really it's economics. For the most part, people will buy the cheapest energy possible. And so now that solar and wind are usually the cheapest, they have an increasing ability to win in power market auctions that we have. And now, really, it's just introducing market mechanisms to lots of places so that they actually do have

the chance to go head to head against coal and gas. So I think it is, you know, unimpeachable that the cost has fallen. So why has it fallen? Let's pretend that we actually think about the technology a little bit. Is it it, it's not just that we think harder about it and everything becomes cheaper, right? I mean, there must be specific technological improvements that have come into play. There is a magical, not magical, but there's a philosophical question, really, about why it's because if you look at the decline in the cost of solar or wind or batteries, they all follow

what's called the learning curve or they have a learning rate or what's sometimes called Wright's law. Wright was a World War II economist who studied the production of airplanes and found that every doubling of manufacturing of the same model airplane brought down the price by a fixed percentage by 16%. 16%. Yeah. In solar, every doubling of scale has brought down the price by, on average, 30%. And so why is that? It's mostly not that the panels are better, though that's part of it. It is mostly that the manufacturing process gets better. And people criticize the solar industry because the solar industry only reinvest 1% of revenue in R&D. But it's not the stuff on the R&D budget that's bringing the price down. It's actually factory efficiencies. So, they learn how to have a higher labor productivity, how to get more work done with the same number of people. They install bigger machines that cost more money but have a lot more output.

They automate things that humans used to do. They slice the silicon wafers that turn into solar panels more thinly. There's less silver per watt of solar. I could go on and on. The temperatures they have to reach in the ovens to turn silica into silicon wafers are lower than they used to be. They've gotten more efficient. So that's what's really going on that's driving this. And the same at the whole project level. The labor it takes to deploy solar across, you know, a big deployment of many acres has gone down. People have gotten more efficient.

The inverters they use that turn DC electricity into AC have gotten cheaper and more efficient. Across the board, people are finding economies that are leading to lower cost. My grandmother slept on a futon her whole life. Lived a 96, walked every day. I thought that wisdom was lost. Then, I found Air Weave. The Japanese Futan reimagined. Extra firm support that honors tradition, but answers to science.

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The technology is getting better, too, but more slowly than the cost is dropping. Yeah. And so how far can we extrapolate that? You know, I always, I do have part of me that shivers whenever people mention exponentials, because it's a scientist, I know nothing's really exponential other than the expansion of the universe. It's more like a sigmoid kind of curve. where we'll look exponential for a while before leveling off, and the question is always when will it level off? Do we see endpoint, steady state, new normal for solar costs? So I think in the growth of solar and how much solar we deploy, it is going to be sign-word because we entered a phase where solar, phase one was all of history until about 2014, 2015, solar had to be subsidized.

Suddenly around 2015, you had places in the world, where a new solar was in sunny places just cheaper than new coal or new gas, which is amazing. And same with wind and windy places. And then we're at the very edge, maybe a year or two away really, from the point where building new solar or new gas, or so new solar or new wind is cheaper than running existing coal, existing gas. And then I think the growth rate accelerates. But then you do hit headwinds and you hit that top of the sigmoid as, more and more of your electricity of solar and wind that are intermittent, it gets harder and

hardest by deploying more of them. You need to deploy other stuff instead to shift the load around and so on. But that's different than cost. It's not clear to me if cost really has an endpoint or not. But, you know, every, it's every doubling brings on the cost by six percent, and every doubling is physically more stuff. So if you look out about four doubling, solar is only two percent of world electricity. So it's still tiny, still in its infancy. Plenty room. Yeah, four doubling, it gets to 32%. At that point, we're talking about sunny parts of the world, really sunny parts of the world, having one cent per kilowatt hour solar. And that compares to like five cents from natural gas, you know, five to ten cents from coal,

depending on where you are in the world. And that's just like a really, really amazing price. That gives you the freedom to do things like overbuild your solar by a factor of two. so that even in the winter months, when it's not very sunny, you have enough electricity. I love the fact you've already mentioned that at some point it becomes cheaper to build new solar production than to just run your existing coal plant. I don't think many people appreciate that. That's the disruptive phase. That's what I think of as the third phase of clean energy. Phase one had to be subsidized.

Phase two, competitive for new electricity. Phase three, cheaper to build new solar, wind, or storage than to keep existing. coal or gas running. And that's what we're on the cusp of right now. Yeah, so we saw it. Last year, the CEO of Nextera said that would happen in the early 2020s. A think tank called Carbon Tracker said it happened in early 2020s. And then in October of last year, this utility in Northern Indiana called Nipsco announced their five-year roadmap, their IRP, their resource plan. And they are currently 65% coal-powered. They're in a red state, went for Donald Trump by 19 points, and they said it would save their customers $4 billion, then to shut down all that coal and replace it with solar, wind, batteries, and flexible demand. So they're saying it's here now, at least when they look at their five-year window, their window out to 2023 or so.

Yeah, that's pretty good. I mean, when we say solar production, we were just talking about solar panels on our roof, but there's also giant solar farms, right? Is there a proper mixture or is one obviously dominant over the other? Most of it is anywhere in the world, almost. Most of it is giant solar farms. In the U.S., it's about 70% of our solar. And that probably does really have the highest value to the grid, though as we get more distributed storage,

putting a batter in your town home as well as solar, the value of solar on the edge of the grid at your home goes up, actually. So it's hard to say exactly. Generally, you know, most models find that centralized solar is just higher value. You can deploy it more cheaply and big economies of scale than putting it on lots of individual roofs. But this stuff on the roofs adds value to. When we drive to Vegas, we go past these solar farms, right? I forget the names of them, but right on the border of California and Nevada,

there are these huge fields of mirrors shining brightly onto a tower. and I'm not sure what actually happens inside those towers. Do they boil water? Yeah. How do they turn that? That's an older form of solar called solar thermal or concentrating solar. And yeah, they concentrate the sun's heat on a small area and heat up, usually water, which turns a turbine. Right.

Or more recently, people are building projects like that with molten salt instead of water as the working fluid. Okay. And then you get 12 hours of energy storage along with the solar because the salt just has so much momentum. It just stays hot for so long that you can keep turning a turbine overnight. Can we convert the existing farms to molten salt? No, so there's actually not that many concentrating solar farms in the world. What's really overtaken it is solar PV, solar photovoltaics, you know, materials. mostly silicon-based that convert a photon to an electron effectively.

And that's similar to what we'd have on the roof, right? The same tech is on your roof. That's what is dominant in large utility scale, solar deployments also. And you should just put it wherever it's sunniest. You put it wherever it's sunniest, and you know, you pick sites that have the best sun, which your house may or may not, and they use trackers, which people don't on your house. so they can track the sun, keep the solar PV focused on the sun to maximize its energy production. And of course, the big puzzle is where you store the energy, right?

When you have fossil fuels, you can burn them on demand when you want them. The sun is going to shine when it wants to shine. And so batteries or something like that are crucial. I presume we've had similar technological and cost advantages, improvements with the battery situation. Yeah, between 2010 and now, batteries, lithium ion batteries, the kind of your cell phone, your electric car, and that we use on the grid, have dropped in costs by like a factor of nine. So that's really surprising.

Actually, it's really shocking to a lot of people when you say that. Energy storage is still actually really expensive. But there's other battery chemistry. Lithium ions going to drop in price another factor of three to five, and that'll actually probably be enough to get it to where we have really good, cheap grid storage. But there's other battery chemistries like flow batteries that are more suitable for the grid. And I think this is the year, or maybe next year, we're really start to see commercialization of those. And that's a step function down in cost over their lifetime.

Could you explain what a flow battery is? Yeah. So a lithium ion battery moves a lithium ion through an electrolyte from, you know, a positive electrode to a negative electrode and back again. A flow battery moves electrolyte through a membrane. And so that either one direction of flow is producing electricity, the direction of flow is sucking in electricity. And the thing that's really nice about that is you can separate, in a true flow battery, you can separate the size of the tank that contains electrolyte from the membrane and the power stack that controls how much power you can output. So if you want to add more hours, these tanks are just like injection-molded plastic, and the electrolytes, at least in some battery chemistries, are super cheap.

Like, the one that I'm involved with, it's really just iron and salt, basically. And so you just build a bigger plastic tank and put in more of this iron salt solution so you can increase the hours that you store really, really cheaply. And is the future, once again, I know I'm just asking to extrapolate into the future, but is it that the power companies have jihumanous batteries or that we all have batteries in our garage? So right now in the U.S., the battery segment that's growing the most rapidly is behind the meter, but in commercial buildings, not in people's homes.

Okay. So I think this will be different than solar. is, we'll have maybe half and half. We'll have a lot of solar, or a lot of batteries at the solar plant, at the wind farm, in a centralized location for the grid. We're also having a lot at the edge. And the reason is that at the edge, you know, in your home, in the office building, in the mall, it has other benefits. And those benefits are things like if there's a power outage, it keeps the power up. And maybe it does for the neighborhood. We'd also have it at the substation, right? And keep the whole neighborhood up. It has other benefits like the electricity lines that run to your home

and your neighborhood, they're probably pretty close to full at 4 p.m. to 8 p.m., but they're empty at midnight. So we can fill up the battery in your region at midnight with wind power, ideally, or maybe hydro, and then drain it down at the peak of the day. So you get additional flexibility by having, It's a lot like in software, we talk about caching at the edge of the network. It's a lot like that, actually. Okay, good. And does this improvement in battery technology extend to cars as well? I know that's a big issue with electric cars right now is the range.

Well, I think it's more a psychological issue than anything else. If you look at a Tesla Model 3, it's a 325 mile range version, right? So I think we're getting to the point that range anxiety is more about, psychology than about the vehicles themselves. That said, what we're going to see in electric cars is the batteries get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And that means that in a couple of years, maybe two years from now to be three, a new electric car will be the same price or cheaper than, a new electric car with a 200-mile range or more, will be the same price or cheaper than an internal combustion car that's very similar. And it'll cost a quarter as much to keep running. The maintenance

costs is a quarter, the energy cost per mile is a quarter. So it's just going to make it more and more of a non-brainer, no-brainer for people to deploy. Now, increasing range is harder. Historically, you know, price has come down really fast and capacity, you know, energy density, how much energy you have for unit of weight, so the capacity is what you'd call it, has gone up more slowly. So since 2010, the price has come down by a factor of nine. The energy density by weight has gone up by maybe 60, 70%. That's consistent with what you said earlier about the price improvements coming from economies of scale. You're kind of building a version of the same thing, but you're building it better, but the thing you're building is still limited.

It is learning by doing a little different than economies of scale. But yeah, the manufacturing process gets better a lot faster. Elon Musk says this thing of, look, one engineer working to improve the battery factory is worth 10 engineers working on improving the battery technology. All right. But at least I think you're making a pretty persuasive case for an optimistic electric future in the sense that we can make it using solar, we can store it in batteries locally and elsewhere. What about the wind component here?

I mean, it always seemed weird to me that wind and solar, which are too utterly different technologies should be in any way comparable. Why are they relatively the same kind of cost? Well, the night, solar is going to be just cheaper than wind. But the nice thing about wind is it's countercyclical to solar, roughly. So the sun only shines during the day. And if you see sun at night, check with your doctor. Wind statistically is faster at night than it is during the day times. The solar peak, almost every continent on Earth, is summer, and that's the wind trough. That's when wind is low. And conversely, wind maximum is really at spring, but it's quite high in winter as well, and that's when solar is at its bottom. So across a continent size, which is the

right size for grids, you get a real complementarity. And you can actually get maybe 70%, maybe even 80% of electricity from solar and wind and some smart software controls of consumption without any storage if you build really a continent-sized grid and put the solar and wind at ideal complementary locations. Do you see any future for more wild speculative ideas like solar collectors in space that would beam the power down, or is that just something that's not even really necessary? It's not necessary. It does have advantages. There's island nations and places like Taiwan or South Korea that would benefit from something like that.

But the launch costs have to drop a couple more orders of magnitude for that to really pencil out. Yeah, I didn't think it would be a near-term thing. But I just wondered, you know, we're talking only about electricity. There are other things we need power for also, right? Once we have solar and wind taking over most of our electricity, are we still burning fossil fuels at a tremendous rate? So David Roberts is an amazing reporter on the climate. change beat at Vox. He says, look, the plan is this. Electrify everything and make the electricity all clean. So that's basically what we're trying to do is a first order approximation. And what you have

is, you know, transportation is electricity itself is a quarter of emissions. Another quarter, roughly, a little less than a quarter, is transport. The cars and trucks we know how to do. Ships and planes are hard. They're both small. They're each like 2% of global emissions right now. So we've got some time. We'll figure it out. Then you have industry, which is, we have building heat is like 6%. And we have heat pumps starting to become viable. They're still more expensive than just burning gas. But there's a future for them and they are getting cheaper and more efficient. And then you have industry, making steel, making the cement that goes into buildings. And so there people are trying a whole lot of things. There's a whole lot of science and a lot of startups and investments

by people like Bill Gates in startups that have ways to make steel and cement and plastics without producing carbon emissions. Maybe it's worth just going into, why does producing steel result in carbon emissions? So that industry part, and so steelmaking, it's really, there's two separate things in industry. One is in most of these processes, you need a heat source, and just burning natural gas or burning coal is a cheap way to get heat. And renewables, clean electricity has to get down to like a cent and a half a kilowatt hour to compete with that.

Now, there are advantages, like you look at electric arc furnaces, which is how we recycle scrap steel and turn it into steel for reuse. And they electrified a long time ago because let them build the mills much smaller, get rid of a lot of equipment that they no longer needed to use. So there are advantages of electrifying anyway. That's one half. the other half is what we call process emissions. So in steel, iron ore contains a whole lot of oxygen.

And you can't have oxygen in your steel. So you have to have a reducing agent that takes the oxygen out. And right now you burn coal and it supplies both the heat and the carbon atoms that combine with the oxygen and they turn into CO2. Good for your steel, bad for the atmosphere, yes. Yeah. So people are playing with using hydrogen. as the reducing agent, Thysen Krupp, that's one of the world's biggest steel makers, is a project doing that at big scale.

And then the hydrogen reacts with the oxygen and turns into water, which is not so harmful to emit. It's still a lot more expensive, but people are going to try to get the costs down. Well, but also, when we think about saving the planet, there are people who focus on individual virtue, right? you know, conservation and just using up less fossil fuels. There are others who focus on policy. For the solar and electricity part, you know, you paint a picture which sort of renders both of those irrelevant.

It will happen just because of economics, just because it's cheaper, right? Just as cheaper to use solar. But for the steel, it sounds like even if we can make it more cleanly, it will always cost more money. So what we need to do in steel and cement and, planes and ships is do what started us off in solar and wind, which was policy, actually. So you imagine that these learning curves exist. Every doubling of scale brings down the cost. Why did anyone deploy solar when it had to be subsidized? Well, because they put subsidies in place, because they thought if they did that, the industry would get on its own two feet and bring down the cost, and it did,

better than anyone expected. So Germany, you know, one of the least sunny countries on Earth, actually, like less sunny than most of Canada for Americans, Germany really started this solar revolution by deploying huge amounts of solar and wind in the 2000s when it cost more than 10 times as much in a country of the sunlight resources of Canada, but that started the industry scaling. And we went through many doublings.

Before we even got to half a percent of electricity being from solar, it went through many, many doublings, and each of those brought the price down. So what we need to do is do that with the sectors that we don't yet have price competition for is we have to, you know, say we're going to have a mandate. X percent of the cement, maybe in California, X percent of the cement using new buildings has to be carbon neutral. X percent of the steel that comes into California in the form of cars or beams for buildings has to be carbon neutral. And that will create a market. That will allow the startups that have

technology that can do that to raise funding and do more R&D. That'll get them bought up by big industrial companies that, or they'll scale themselves, that can scale them, and that scaling will start to bring down the cost as well. And then hopefully at one point, at some point, that cost is below the cost of the old way we did it. And are these policies being pursued? No, I've got a to do-lisd-list item to make a proposal for what California should do, actually. It's been busy lately. So, you know, Gavin Newsom, if you're listening to this podcast, I just told you what you should do. And Facebook and Google, if you're building big buildings. right now, you should build them with carbon neutral cement.

There are actually efforts in Europe. They're not being driven by policy quite yet, but there's big investor groups that are pushing these companies, like Thysen Krupe, to say, it's time to deal with steel. You guys need to start working on this. The problem is that Thysen Kroop doesn't have customers, because their customers are like, we'll take the cheaper stuff. So there's got to be some policy to,

bootstrap the market for this stuff in the early days and drive it down and cost. Yeah, I mean, I think awareness that coal and oil burning is bad for the atmosphere is pretty high, but maybe awareness that steel and cement are also big drivers is lower. It seems like a low-hanging fruit for policymakers to really make an improvement. Yeah, and I think it's also just the case that what looks like very incremental policy can do a lot. You know, California, I don't know what the first renewable portfolio standard was in California, I think it was 25% or 20% by a certain year, and now it's 100%. But getting up to 20%, that doesn't sound crazy. Like if we said 20% of cement and steel coming into California or Washington

or New York has to be clean, that doesn't sound unachievable. But that would be a giganticly larger market for carbon-free steel or carbon-neutral steel and carbon-neutral cement than exists today, and it would help those industries scale a lot. And then we have a lot. And then we have have the cows belching and creating methane, right? I mean, that's a whole other So the last quarter is what the IPCC calls agriculture, forestry, and land use, and that's, you know, also a quarter of emissions, probably. It's hard to get really accurate numbers in deforestation. And it really comes down to livestock, mammal livestock, and deforestation primarily. And there's some other stuff like nitrogen fertilizer decomposing on fields, manure

from those cows decontosing on fields. Cow burps, that far it's cow burps and methane are about 4% of global emissions. So they're as big as planes and ships put together. Yeah, I mean 4% sounds small, but it's big, but it's the fraction of all global emissions. Yeah, bigger than all aviation and all shipping.

But really, it's cattle emit the most methane and they're what we have the most of. Pigs are a part of it, but it's overwhelmingly cattle. And cattle are historically the number one drivers of deforestation, though I think palm oil also has a big role to play right now, Malaysian Indonesia. I mean, deforestation used to be the big hotspot was the Amazon,

and there it came down a lot, though it's rising now under Bolsonaro in Brazil, still nowhere near where it was, but we want to get it down to zero or negative. We want to be planting trees in the Amazon, growing the Amazon. not shrinking it even a bit. But now deforestation is shifted to Indonesia and Malaysia, where a lot of it is planting palm plantations to produce palm oil that goes to Asia. Nigeria, Sudan, like Darfur was partially caused by deforestation, you'd say.

Countries like that in Africa, and their cattle is actually a fair bit of it. Agriculture overall is a fair bit of that deforestation and probably cattle most thing. And the deforestation sounds bad because forests are good, but is it also just taking away these sinks of CO2 in all the plants? Is that a major part of the problem? And more than that, the carbon that's already in that forest that's in the trees and plants gets emitted into the air. Right. And so you produce an immediate emission that's quite large. Like there were times, there have been times in the past few years, days anyway, where the fires in Indonesia or Malaysia,

because there are people labor like using a saw to chop down a tree is a lot harder than using fire so in Indonesia Malaysia also in particular people poor like poor farmers that have small lots typically light fires to try to clear land and the fires got out of control yeah and there were times in the past years where those fires were putting more carbon into the atmosphere on a given day than all of the economy of Japan right and and and and and and And then you have less of a sink as well. So what are we going to do about this exactly? This is a really hard one. This is what keeps me up the most at night. Cows scare me more than cars. And just to put in perspective, because I'm sure you know, but maybe most people don't. Like the number of cows alive on Earth today is preposterous compared to what it ever used to be, right?

Like human beings. Yeah. No, actually, last I looked at it was just over one billion head of cattle, which is, still a lot. We like our cows. I mean, there was never that many cows. They outmass us. Yeah, more pounds of cow. Don't aggravate them. But cow revolution will not be pretty. So, I mean, we can fantasize about Impossible Burgers taking over and synthetic meat, but is that really the best medium-term solution? I think things like the Impossible Burger and things like stem cell meat have a chance. I'm not that bullish on them, but I think when you look at, um,

processed meat where you don't have the original texture. I think they have a chance to go into that. So we'll get impossible pepperoni before we get impossible T-bone steaks. That's right. Yeah. Or, you know, stem cell pepperoni before we get stem cell T-bone steaks. And so I think there is a real chance there. And really, it's primarily beef that matters, right? Although there's a case for like there's a company, finless foods doing impossible tuna, basically, or stem cell tuna.

And there the case is conservation of tuna that we're overfishing. Yeah, okay. But for a climate perspective, it's not enough. So we have to figure out, A, we have to protect forests, just done. Like the America has a lot of cattle in it too, but guess what? In America and Europe, forests are growing, not shrinking. Why? Because we've protected land and because the land that's privately owned,

for logging, the loggers all have commitments to replant faster than they chop down. That's not the healthiest forest. It's not the most biodiverse forest, but it's still a forest. And as it gets older, you know, it's been 50 years, like there's some serious biodiversity in those. I did a podcast interview with Joe Walston, who's a conservationist, and he makes the case that we are at an inflection point in the sigmoid curve of human population, and it's mostly because of urbanization. And we can imagine a new normal where most people live in cities and there's still plenty of room, even if there's 12 to 20 billion people on Earth for a lot of nature out there to flourish. That's right. Agriculture is the dominant form of our land use. It uses a third of the

land area of the planet is agriculture. A third is sort of unusable, mountains, desert, so on, and a third is forests more or less. I mean, cities are like, human habitations are like two or three percent. It's not very big. So densification, shifting people out of agriculture economy into an urban economy that's around, you know, industrial stuff or services and taking away, giving them alternate ways to produce revenue instead of chopping down forest. And then intensification of agriculture.

The yields of agriculture, how much food you grow per acre in the U.S. are twice the global average and four times what they are in a place like Bangladesh. So as farmers in Bangladesh get tractors, fertilizer, pesticides, or GMOs, which are they're also prohibited from getting, more or less, their productivity goes up. And that means that you can then pass laws to spare the forest, to protect what's left, while still, you know, pooling these people up out of poverty and producing enough food to feed yourself.

So we've got to do that. And we've probably got to improve the cows somehow so they don't work as much methane. Or will we feed them, one or the other. I bet synthetic biology can do that, right? So right now, the rage is additives. There's multiple potential additives. Very famously, there's a red seaweed

that, in very small experiments, when cows ate it massively cut their methane production. Really? And when a cow is emitting methane, when it's burping it, that's energy leaving it. So the people that have these additives, which are very limited so far, there's one startup I know that has one that's different. What they claim is that if you feed a cow this stuff, not only does it produce less methane, but that energy, methane is a very high energy molecule, that energy gets turned into more productivity. Either the cow puts on more mass or produces more milk. So that's what I'm hoping is true.

I'm not convinced yet. There's not, has not been enough skeptical science done on it. But if that's true, it gives us a path to maybe help farmers in a way that also helps the planet. And if that doesn't work, then I think you're talking about synthetic biology. It's really the cow's microbiome that does the work that makes the methane. So maybe we can just engineer the microbiome and not call it a GMO cow. Who knows? Let's pause for a second to talk about the Great Courses Plus.

This is one of my favorite things to talk about because it gives you access to all sorts of college-level courses taught by professors from the best universities in the world, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so forth, or experts from National Geographic, the Smithsonian and elsewhere, who are vetted to be really good at explaining their material. The Great Courses Plus App makes it possible to learn whichever way works best for you, without the pressure of homework or grades or anything like that. I taught several courses for the Great Courses, one of which is Dark Matter, dark energy, the dark side of the universe, which will tell you all about the 95% of the energy

in the universe, which is not the particles we've ever seen anywhere in a laboratory, about the different candidates for dark matter, for dark energy, how they affect the universe and how we know they're there. Right now, they're giving our listeners here at Minescape a special limited time offer, a free month of unlimited access to the entire library. To get there, go to the great courses plus.com slash mindscape. That's the great courses plus. Don't forget the or the plus slash mindscape. Start learning today. It's always a race, right, between technology, making messes and technology trying to clean them up. And I don't think there's a rule of thumb for who wins in these. I think that it does, there are reasons to be optimistic, but I look at them not as reasons that

everything will be okay, but that there are things we can do to make things. better. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I think, like I said, we're not currently on path for 2 degrees Celsius, and there are tail risks. You know, there are positive feedback loops that most models say are unlikely to kick in at 3 degrees C, but they could. Are we talking about things like melting in permafrost and so forth? Yeah, I mean, the permafrost melt gets a lot of press today, relatively speaking. It's still a tiny contribution to atmospheric methane. But, you know, there's reason to expect some non-linearity there. And most models, again,

show that it's still going to be that even at the much faster and expected pace that it's happening, it's still a very small contributor to atmospheric methane. But, you know, you don't like to see nonlinear things headed in the direction you don't like. Especially if they're unpredictable a little bit. I mean, there's a reason to be cautious. But your example of the Bangladeshi farmers is a reminder of how interconnected all these different concerns are, not just the environment, but the conditions of people around the world. And it reminds me, before I forget, I want to just mention the weird fact that some,

not huge, but still too large fraction of our global energy consumption is Chinese Bitcoin farms, right? But if you're right, that solar power will eventually be cheaper than coal, then even if they're crazily mining bitcoins, they won't be destroying the environment. In fact, they'll be driving down the cost of solar, right? scaling it and putting it through the learning curve. So I actually think that cryptocurrency, any, like I think that an increase in electricity demand, if you can put your electricity demand application anywhere on Earth,

is just good for the planet because it allows us to scale solar and wind faster because they're at least cost, and that drives them down and costs faster. Now, the reason people mine Bitcoin in China is because they're trying to escape Chinese money controls. So it's not necessarily the case that they're going to, They can't put their project in Chile.

We have the best son in the world. But even in China, in the far west, solar is hitting unsubsidized prices. The first unsubsidized solar plants in China were really built this year, and the whole industry is expected to be unsubsidized in two years. Right. But all these interconnections, again, so I go back to the Bangladeshi farmer, or kids in Somalia or something like that are being rapidly technologized. I don't know if that's the word.

But maybe you can talk a little bit about this, because I think this is an underappreciated thing. I mean, there are places in the world that are still desperately high levels of poverty, but things are changing there pretty rapidly. This is part of your optimism portfolio, right? Yeah. I don't believe in the singularity, but I do believe in the singularity when everyone is connected. And I think the singularity is here right now, more or less, or it's happening as we speak. And that's amazing. And the reason it's happening is really simple. A cell phone is cheaper than a toilet. And a cell phone and a cell tower is cheaper than a toilet and plumbing and a waste processing system. So you have this leapfrogging happening where people, you know, particularly in India and sub-Saharan Africa, are, you know, getting smartphones, getting access to the internet, getting cameras and apps and music and advice and whatever it is they do. They might not even be very literate, right? They're getting that.

even though they don't have an improved water source or a plumbing system that we would recognize as modern. And that's fascinating. And then what the hope is this. The hope is that device. In the U.S., we say the phone is the third screen, right? Screen one is a TV. Screen two is a laptop. Screen three is the phone. It's the first phone for most of the planet. It's the first screen, most of the planet. So that becomes the platform for education. That becomes the platform for transparency. and taking a picture of a corrupt official in your area, that becomes the platform for knowing market prices, instead of having to walk to market and see what's the price for your crop today, you can check on the internet and see, should you sell or not. It's the platform for, you know, financial inclusion, all of it. Weather forecasting, you know,

weather forecasting. I was just talking to somebody, like somebody that's a software guy, wants to do something to improve climate and agriculture. I said, make an app that tells farmers in Africa when to plant their stuff. Like, that doesn't sound that hard. I'm sure it's really hard. Nevertheless, you're a software guy. Here's what you can do. So that changes a lot.

And it's happening. Like, we're in the five-year window now. Like, across Africa, I think, smartphone penetration is maybe, like, I mean, cell phone penetration is in the high A's to 90s among adults. smartphone penetration is like somewhere in 15 to 20% except South Africa where it's like 35% let's say

and it's going to like race in the next three, four or five years it's going to get to smartphones being ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa and then what happens? I don't know, then everybody has mobile money that solves a lot of the problems for how can you pay for solar on your roof

everybody has an educational platform and then does that produce more economic gains as well as people start to be able to earn a living in different ways, I hope so. And I think that might ultimately be one of the greatest poverty-reducing things on planet Earth. Well, I was going to ask if you have smartphones but not toilets, do we have any data on how much that can really help you get ahead? But maybe the answer is no, because it's just happening too quickly,

and we haven't seen it yet. It's hard to get the data. I mean, we have case studies of how it affects, you know, farmers' incomes go up when they have smartphones because they have access to the market. We do know that, so having mobile money of some sort allows you is the key to getting solar on the roof of your home in Africa. And because it's too expensive to send somebody around every place or clip cash.

But if you have mobile money, the solar panels are literally like software controlled. If you haven't paid, they're paid as you go. If you haven't paid, they shut down. So you're motivated to pay. And the mobile money in some places, the telcos or banks are holding it back, but once every every has a smartphone, they can't hold it back, clicking an app. So that facilitates people getting solar on their roofs much more easily, and that creates lighting. And lighting, there are conflicting studies, but there's at least a good chunk that show that it leads to better educational outcomes

because the kids can study at home, and it leads to more family income because they can have a little small business at home where the wife is doing some clothes mending, the dad is doing some woodworking, something that allows them to be industrious at hours so they can't be industrious. And it saves them money. Like in almost all of these countries, if you have mobile money, solar on your roof is actually cheaper than kerosene and cleaner and safer. So that starts to look like, you know, a domino effect that leads to some income growth and economic growth. Yeah, no, it definitely sounds very exciting. And Africa, of course, has struggled for generations now. But it sounds from the picture you're painting that the next few years are going to be a whirlwind of transformation there.

Is this something where the governments in Africa are encouraging it or at least not trying to stop it? It varies from country to country. I'd say, I mean, Kenya did some very smart things. And you see Kenya are really thriving. Nigeria is also, I mean, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and like the fifth most populous country in the world, maybe fourth even fifth, I think. But Nigeria's economy is really based on a resource extraction. And so that's probably less long-term sustainable. So you just see different things happening, but places like Rwanda, Ethiopia, East Africa, Uganda, East Africa in general, I think you see a lot of economic growth based on agricultural photoivity based on light industrial work, that sort of thing.

And is it something that suggests strategies for well-meaning Western governments or individuals' charities to help things along? Yeah, I mean, you don't want to just give people stuff. You want to bootstrap industries. And, you know, the aid literature is beyond me. There's deep debates in the aid literature, the foreign aid literature of what works. But we know that just handing out money or just handing out food, handing out money is better.

Handing out food in an emergency, for instance, is terrible because it suppresses the local prices of food. The farmers can't make any money. It drives the farmers out of business, right? So you don't want to replace what's there. You want to provide seed capital and advice for people to be able to build businesses on the ground that can keep operating. I mean, you can imagine that in the aftermath of a hurricane,

or an earthquake, breaking food is good, but it's not the long-term thing just because a region is in poverty. You want to build some infrastructure there. Give them better seeds instead of giving them food. You know, teach the farmers better agricultural techniques, build them a fertilizer factory, maybe, that it's within their means to maintain. Yeah, but also corruption is a big inhibitor of growth and the lack of markets is a big inhibitor of growth. So you want a government that says we're going to have a relatively free market. I mean, those things are totally free. We have competition. We have access to capital. We don't nationalize companies all the time because that makes investors very scared to put money in. We pay our debts. We don't overspend too much. We can spend,

you know, debt spend some. And we're not corrupt. We don't have, we pay our civil servants enough money and that they can live on it. And we hold them to accountability that they don't get in the way of people doing stuff. The optimist would say that if everyone can talk to each other on their smartphones, that might help ferret out corruption and other, you know, various ways in which governments don't perform as efficiently as they could. I don't know if that's an empirically testable thing either. I mean, I think you'd say that in the U.S., it has not been as big an effect as we would

like, but cell phone videos of police brutality have exposed a form of corruption in the U.S., US and have probably started some small, but some steps towards reforming that system. And so I do think if somebody has the power to take a picture of a corrupt official getting a bribe or to walk in and search or should record, if somebody says, no, you can't have this permanent unless you pay me a bribe, I think that's only good. How much good it is, I don't know. And if cell phones are this transformative in lesser developed regions of the world, what's the analogous technology that will be disruptive and transformative in the developed regions.

I know that you've thought about human augmentation and brain computer interfaces quite a bit. I think it's also cell phones. Still cell phones, okay. Smart phones, yeah. Well, you know, my novels imagine tech that's in your brain that can transmit it wirelessly, and people are really working on that. Elon Musk with NeurLink, Brian Johnson with Colonel Mary Jepson with Open Water. people are really working on next generation brain-puter interfaces, but it will be slow.

I think the layer between or the step between smartphones and directly in your brain is probably some combination of augmented reality and speech and natural language. So at some point, it's not really that soon, but at some point, maybe it is 10, 15, 20 years away walking around with a pair of glasses that show you relevant data, don't spam you, and being able to speak and have your system, basically having Alexa with you at all times, but way better, and being able to say, like, hey, you know,

what's that over there? Or check this out. Or, hey, oh, shoot, I didn't pick my seat for my flight tomorrow. Can you make sure I get an aisle? Or remind me, what time is my daughter's recital? Like, I think that's the human augmentation. It's when wherever you are, then you can talk to and can talk back to you,

a la her, but also show you some. visual stuff. And who knows, maybe it's just your cell phone and speech and it doesn't involve augmented reality. But it's pretty cool if the thing can also see what's around you and show you visual information. Yeah, I mean, my computer does a pretty good job of reminding me of upcoming things, podcast recordings and so forth. But it's also, you know, my computer in particular, like some people's, is a little bit too open to the world. It's too easy for the rest of the world to butt in some time. So I think that we haven't yet figure. all of that out. And if it were directly into my brain, obviously, that would be even more

avenues for abuse would open up. And I get to have some fun with that in the novel. Yeah, exactly. Anything that you're going to hack you, anything connected can be hacked fundamentally. Well, so Google Glass got a lot of abuse, but it always, I always thought the abuse was a little bit misplaced. I mean, the Apple Newton got a lot of abuse when it came out, right? And that was a proto-blackberry smartphone kind of thing, which has now changed the world. We need some stumbling first steps to get where we want to go. And the idea of a wearable somehow that helps you interface with the world in a smarter way, I get why people are afraid of it or skeptical, but the potential seems pretty big to me.

I think it's going to happen. Yeah, I think it's really quite interesting, actually, and it seems to me that's going to happen as well. Have you, did you try ever Google Glass or anything like that? I think I put one on at a conference or something. It did, you know, what I want is when it can actually, you know, wearing glasses right now, when the text or the animations, whatever can actually appear on my glasses for me to see or be projected onto my retina, I don't want to have to look up in the corner.

I want it to like, you know, highlight the thing. I want to look at a thing and do eye tracking and know what object I'm focused on and say, what's that over there? You know, that sort of thing. I want to look at somebody's face and know that it knows where I'm looking and have it present the information right over their head of here's their name. Last time you talked, their kids. I'm just really bad at that.

I'm very bad at names. I'm terrible at names. I had a dream last night of sitting next to someone who I know very well, and I didn't know their name. But obviously, privacy and things like that worries, right? How worried are you about such? things? If you're wearing glasses that can literally face-recognize anyone, whether you've met them before or not, it's not an unalloyed good. It's not an unalloyed good. And, you know, I'm not all the

way to David Brin, who says, look, privacy is dead. We're going to have a surveillance society, no matter what. It's just who controls it, the people or, you know, powerful shadowy figures. I'm not all the way there. I don't think privacy is dead. I think we'll negotiate. a new social contract and I think it'll be messy. I think you'll have places where devices like that can't operate or, you know, can't record at any rate. And wearing a device that is hacked to be able to ignore those signals will be considered very socially faux paugh at a minimum and maybe worse than that. I mean, it'll still be possible. But there's a lot of things, that are possible that don't happen often due to social convention. It's possible for me to take my car,

which is a 2,000-pound missile and drive it into opposing traffic or into a crowd. And we're so shocked when that happens because it doesn't happen very often. And so there's a very strong social convention around that in a sense that you're going to suffer if you do that sort of thing. So I think we'll eventually get there on these privacy issues too. But what the path has from here to there, I don't know. Well, the obvious worry about that analogy is that people don't make a lot of money off of you driving into opposing traffic, whereas people could make a lot of money out of all sorts of privacy violations. You know, I tend to be on Bryn's side here. I haven't actually read his opinions about this, but looking at, you know, young people and how willing they are to share

things online, I wonder if the idea of privacy won't just become antiquated, you know, kind of I don't think young people have gotten under the idea of privacy. Like, young people very much understand privacy, and they're maybe more into it than adults. Like, you know, ask a young person about anything about their relationship to sex, and you'll find out how they feel about privacy. They want to choose who they communicate things to. Yeah. Right? And they might be willing to share more with the world on some topics or with their friends on some topics, but they very much understand that there's things that they don't want to communicate.

or they learn over time. As a no longer young person, I'm probably being unfair to the young people because I do see people oversharing on the internet, but it's probably just an unrepresentative slice of people, right? Yeah, the kids these days. Yeah, the kids these days. They're on my lawn. I wish they would get off it.

But is there anything, okay, what about the optimistic side of things? I can kind of see in my everyday life where facial recognition would be useful. Is there something big? It's always hard to predict what the killer apps are going to be. when we get better at communicating directly with our computers, is there something that becomes much easier right away? I mean, I think in a way it amplifies our collective intelligence. And I make the case for that. In history, we have inventions made by individual famous people.

That's probably an exaggeration. That's not really how it happened. But now it's less than less how it really happens. I mean, you know this very well, right? in your field, like it's giant teams of people working with giant instruments that were designed by giant teams of people that do the work. And so that's collective intelligence. We have to collaborate to do that. So if we have more intuitive ways to share ideas, knowledge, questions, designs, whatever, with each other, I think that reduces the friction and

increases the bandwidth between us and probably allows groups like that to work more effectively. You know, I think, like, look at Slack. I mean, this is a bit of a tangent, but why do people love Slack? Well, hey, it reduces their email. Slack sometimes drives me crazy notifications. Tell people, some people out there don't actually even know what Slack is, so maybe you should tell them. Slack is like internet relay chat of the 80s reimagined on the web as a team collaboration tool. But it's a team collaboration tool where you have your company or your startup or your group has a channel. And inside of it there's multiple rooms or multiple channels inside of your space or whatever. And so the team that's interested in marketing can go in the marketing team area.

And anybody who joins the marketing team can go there. And unlike email, all of the history of the marketing team conversations is right there. And there are documents and whatnot. And I might be a dev or I might be on sales. But I might pop over to marketing just to see what they're talking about. They can lock me out if they want to, but they probably don't. So it's a new way to collaborate that has, it's not perfect, but there's a lot of advantages over email. And the idea is it reduces friction and makes people more productive together, right?

Yeah, over and above, you know, the ability to calculate the tip instantly, right, because you have a direct connection to some little calculator. I personally wonder, and maybe this is optimistic, I'm not sure. I think that once you have, people are underestimating the video capture element here. If I have glasses that are looking at the world or something built into my brain that is accessing my visual cortex, and let's just say it records an image once every five seconds of what I see. I think that totally changes the world, not just in sort of surveillance state ways, but just in memory ways. Like, you know, what did I see at that thing that happened five years ago? I can instantly pull it up.

I think that courts for it changes human cognition in an interesting way. Yeah, I'll run with that. There's something else that happens, I think. These videos tap into human empathy. If you read a stat about police brutality is one thing. If you watch some of the videos, you're really there, right? And a second thing that will increase empathy is automatic real-time speech translation. So if you watch, you know, some Iran, we're on.

have tensions with today. If you watch, you know, the statements from Iran or a news briefing, and you're like those weird people looking weird, talking funny, you know, just to be honest. Yeah, right. If you hear it in real time, translate it into English with the speaker's voice, it, like, those news conferences might still seem threatening. But you can find other Iranian content. Like, what if you, like, watched Iranian movies because they weren't subtitled, they weren't even dubbed, They were just, like, translated in the guy's voice to you. What if you could have an Iranian pen pal that you, like, just talk to and it just works instantly?

I think that might increase our sense of empathy. Yeah, I'm very much in favor that I did have a podcast with Paul Bloom, the psychologist who was anti-empathy. He thinks that empathy gets in the way of our rationality. I think the opposite. I think that we trick ourselves into being rational by thinking of things a certain way and not recognizing other other ways to think or other facts that matter or other experiences of the world

that have completely shaped our everyday lives. And so I'm going to optimistically agree with you that our ability to experience things as other people in a more visceral way might help the world come together a little bit. I'm sure there will be people who are going to disagree about that, but we're being optimistic today.

And rational is not the default state of a human. Tribal is. And empathy dissolves tribal. or at least expands your sense of who the end group is. And that's what we have to do with global problems, I think. Speaking as a techno hippie here. Yeah, techno hippie. But so, and I do want to wrap up,

you did write this science fiction novel trilogy. So first, tell us, tell the audience who has not read the Nexus trilogy, which I've read the first book, sorry, I didn't get to the next two yet. Tell us what it's about. It's idea-heavy work, but also a rollicking yarn, as they say. Thanks. So Nexus is a fast-paced, techno thriller set in 2040, so not that far in the future, 21 years, where we've invented a brain

tech. You can swallow it. You swallow a vial of a metallic fluid, sold as a party drug. It gets into your brain, and it's little nanomachines that cross the blood brain barrier, attach to your neurons, and transmit what your brain is doing via Wi-Fi. And so if you and I both have it, we've both taken it, and we're in close proximity, it creates a corei doctor who called it a weak telepathy. We can see each other's eyes, feel as a person is feeling, and so on. And it's a story about freedom versus control. My protagonist is like a young scientist who, and he and his buddies and friends think this stuff is awesome, and they want to make it a platform and make it permanent in the brain and build apps on top of it and, like, give it to the world. So it's sort

of cyberpunk, but unlike William Gibson's view or only the elite had it, the question is, we could give this to everybody who gets to make that choice. And there's a Cold War with China and clone soldiers and maybe an uploaded AI and lots of explosions. And a lot of it takes place in Thailand at a neuroscience conference with Buddhist monks talking about the connection between Buddhism, science, and technology. And they also like Nexus. Yeah, I mean, slightly parenthetically, but I read it very close to when I read The Wind Up Girl. And apparently all the great science fiction is set in Southeast Asia these days. That's just where things are going to happen.

Paulo Bocachigliupe. I love the guy. He's a friend of mine. We talk, at least on Slack, actually, pretty often. I love the wind-up girl. Also another amazing novel set in Thailand. And yeah, by authors with Egyptian and Italian last names. So I was wondering whether there's a connection there or not.

But it is, there's things going on. But why did you write science fiction novels? I mean, I'm very tempted to write fiction myself, but I never quite screwed up the courage slash time to do it, but you made a conscious decision. Is it because this is the best way to work out these ideas? Is it the best way to reach an audience? Or is it just, it sounded like fun? I read science fiction as the dominant thing that I read growing up. And I thought it, I think science fiction is the literature of ideas. It's the literature that really has ideas about the big picture. And then frankly, I was writing, I wanted to write my book on how to save the planet

called The Infinite Resource. And my agent didn't like it. And so I was just like frustrating. If you're listening to this, you're the reason I have a science fiction career. Thank you. And so I like, I was like, okay, well, I had, I'd written a nonfiction book before about human augmentation. I'd written a chapter about brain computer interfaces. I'm going to take that and make it a novel. And I just did it.

And along the way, then we found a formulation of the book on energy and climate and resources that my agent did like, and we sold that book too. So then I had two books to write. That was a busy year. Did you find it challenging to write fiction? Do you know, I mean, there's people. there's relationships, the whole bit is a very different genre. I think I got a lot better by doing it.

I got a lot of advice. Most novelists really keep it close to the heart and don't share a lot of what they're writing. They just give it to their editor, maybe help people. I had 55 people read different drafts of Nexus, friends of mine, and give me copious feedback. They're just friends that I said, will you read it? And I took some advice from David Brin actually.

First, I asked them, where do you put the book down? Where were you bored? You have to put the book down. Please tell me that page number. I'll tighten it. But I ask them a whole bunch of other questions, and then I invite them over for, like,

a discussion of, like, what they like and didn't like. And I would say my first draft was a hot mess, and not very good and probably offensive in some ways. And my, by the fourth or fifth draft, which is what you read, it had gotten a lot better. Thanks, not just to me, but collective intelligence. There you go. Old-fashioned collective intelligence, yeah.

And so aside from the personal reward of doing it, do you think it's been effective? Are you happy with how people responded? Yeah. People love the book. I mean, the people who read it, like, it found a certain audience, right? Among people that are in tech and science and neuroscientists like it, which is the best compliment to me. So it's awesome. It's been a, A, nobody ever emails me and says, man, your nonfiction or that blog post about solar economics kept me up to 3 a.m.

Oof, yeah. But occasionally somebody. will be like, man, I was up till 3 a reading your novel. And that's a treat. And so I do think fiction, narrative is a superpower, actually, because human brains did not evolve to be rational or, you know,

data weighing or whatnot. Paul Bloom is wrong, right? We evolved to... Well, sorry, to be fair to Paul, he's not saying that we are rational. He's saying that we should work to maximize our rationality and empathy gets in the way. I retract him being wrong, but we're not

rational. And it's not even empathy, it's just narrative, right? And so if you can tell a narrative, be very responsible with it, because it slides past rationality and penetrates a deeper level of the reader or listener, and they can start to believe things. And so I do think that fiction is a very powerful tool to change opinions. Alex Rosenberg, who was another previous guest, he's a philosopher who rails against how stories can be used to make people believe things rather than, you know, deliberative argument.

And he was failing in getting this message across, so he began to write novels to illustrate his point, and they've been wildly successful. So there you go. Do you have future plans for more fiction? You know, as soon as we have finished the energy transition, it's not going to be that long. That's going to be a while. Yes, but I don't know when. I definitely have more novels in me to write, but the clean energy thing is, is sort of all-encompassing right now. It's a pretty big thing, yeah. But I mean, when you write a novel, or when you anticipate writing a novel,

do you, is it the idea that is there first and you want to illustrate it, or do you get a plot in your head or characters and want to put them in an interesting situation? I get vignettes and themes. There's things I look around and I'm interested. I'm interested in tech unemployment. I'm interested in AI.

I'm interested in the belief, which I think is totally mistaken that AIs will be killer AIs will want to take over the world. I'm interested in uploading. I'm interested in all the stuff happening with fake news. I'm interested in the future of empathy. I'm interested in AR and VR. And so there's things that sort of bubble up in my head. And then I think about what could the world look like?

What's an interesting world? And what's the conflict going on? What's the mystery or the conflict that pulls you through? Yeah. Lots of novels to be written. Well, good. So I think we've done a pretty good job of being optimistic, mostly, or at least. giving people fuel for optimism.

Is there any parting message you want to leave that may be action items? Like, what can we do to even improve the chances that the optimistic timeline comes to pass? That's a good question. Well, I would just say this. Like, when you read the news, like, go look for a stat. Go look for a number. When you hear about any bad thing that happened, go look for the context of, like, the larger number that it's in it. Because the news exists to get your clicks.

And that's the business one. I don't know that outrage works. And so I love great news media, but the real news is science and numbers. And so keep hope because the story that gets the most revenue for news media is the most negative story. And so, you know, go find the ways the world is getting better and tell people about it because it'll lift them out of their malaise and it'll motivate them, not make them complacent. Yeah, my version of that is that I think that news stories should be much more filled with rates and frequencies and fractions of things rather than just things happening. Even in Vox, which I really do like in many ways, there was a story about buffet restaurants

and how there was a salmonella outbreak. So I'm like, okay, well, what is the rate of that compared to salmonella outbreaks elsewhere? I think that's a little cognitive improvement that people could adopt very widely. Totally. All right, Robes-Nam, thanks so much for being on the podcast. This is a very uplifting, fun message. Sean, thank you so much. It's been a blast.