The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Kris De Decker: "Low Tech: What, Why and How"

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

On this episode, we meet with inventor, researcher and author Kris De Decker to understand the concept of "low tech" and its relevance in a high tech society and growth-driven economy.  How does low tech differ from high tech and what does it feel like to live a low tech lifestyle? Why do we assume high tech will always be the solution, and could low tech be a feasible path for a sustainable and fulfilling future? De Decker shares his personal experiences as a low tech advocate and researcher in a high tech urban environment and how freedom from technology provides both challenges and unexpected benefits.   About Kris De Decker: Kris De Decker shifted from a journalism career covering high tech to exploring low tech through formal and personal research and projects, including the Human Power Plant and the Solar Powered Website.   De Decker is creator and author of Low Tech Magazine and No Tech Magazine, publications which explore low tech solutions to questions society assumes must be solved through high tech.   De Decker has contributed articles about science, technology, energy and the environment to Mother Earth News, Techniques et Culture, Design Magazine, The Oil Drum, Resilience, EOS, Molenecho's, "Knack", "De Tijd" and "De Standaard".  De Decker's books "Energie in 2030" advised the Dutch government on challenges related to science and technology and his book "Stralingswarmte: gezonde warmte met minder energie" provided a guide for how heat works.    De Decker was born in Antwerp, Belgium and lives in Barcelona, Spain. De Decker describes himself as "rather inactive" on Twitter and LinkedIn. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episodes

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's-eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. Modern culture has a love affair with technology, but generally we underappreciate how our tech has co-evolved with ever-increasing energy scale. Today's guest is Chris De Decker, the creator and author of Low Tech Magazine, the creator of No Tech Magazine, and the co-developer of the Human Energy Project.

Chris is from Belgium currently living in Spain, and in today's conversation, we do discuss the difference between high tech and low tech and what a lower energy and material future implies for technology use for most of humanity. How to best use innovation and technology in a post-growth economy is a major topic. So consider this an introduction to this important issue, which I hope you enjoy. Please welcome Chris Decker. Hello, Chris. Hello, Nate.

Nice to meet. Yeah, nice to meet you. I've known of your work for a long time. You submitted some articles on low tech to the oil drum 10, 15 years ago when I oversaw that. So let's just get right into it, Chris. Unfortunately, I think 99% of people don't know what low tech is. What is the difference between high tech and low tech? Let's just start there. Yeah, that's already a difficult question. You can actually look it up in the dictionary. And then it says that low tech is defined as not using the latest technologies. And high tech is the opposite. It's making use of the newest technologies available. And I actually think it's quite a good definition in the sense that it's a relative, it's an adjective.

So you cannot really treat it as a concept as the French do these days. They're talking about low techs and then they have all kinds of devices in mind according to them are low tech. But what is more interesting, I think, is that it's something what is high tech today will be low tech tomorrow. And so it constantly shifts. Like I often use the example of the mobile phone. I have a dumb phone, as they call them. So I don't have any data.

I cannot go on it. And is that high tech or low tech? Well, today it is low tech. I'm considered a kind of Luddite for using a dumb phone. But 15 years ago, it was the most high-tech thing you could have. And so it's constantly shifting. What is low-tech, what is high-tech? Bicycle is another example.

Is that low-tech or high-tech, well, depends in what period you are looking at it. Now it's called low-tech, but 150 years ago, it was quite an innovation to be able to multiply your own human power and travel like four or five times faster with the same effort. So low tech by that definition is really a relative comparison, not an absolute statement. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So you run something called Low Tech Magazine.

I happen to have all of your books here that you've assembled in our library. What inspired you to research and educate others on low tech and a lower energy lifestyle? Well, I have been a high-tech journalist when I started my career. So for 10 years, I was reporting on all the cutting-edge technologies, all the new innovations. The newspaper sent me to, well, whatever researcher, professor had invented something new. And I had to go and report on it. And after a while, I started realizing that many of these so-called solutions that they proposed were not really solutions. or they solved a problem in the short term, but then they create more problems in the long term.

And it became like one day my editor says, like, we really like your articles and they're really good. You come with new topics the whole time, but you always conclude that it's not going to work. And I thought, well, it's not really my fault. Because if you ask the right questions to these engineers, to these researchers, then say, it themselves. Like, I remember one interview about Alja fuel, like running planes on the fuel of Alja. And it turns out if you ask how much animals actually in it, that yeah, it's actually more than comes out of it. And yeah, then it's not going to work, of course. And indeed, nobody's talking about that technology anymore. So there's a lot of ideas that if you kind of

critically look at them and you ask the right questions, then it becomes pretty clear, pretty fast that they're not going to work. So that's for me an important reason. I think why I switched to low-tech magazine. There's other factors like I was also just getting tired of the freelance world where you get paid pretty bad. So I kind of decided then to let's focus on these problems with high tech and start by myself. It was these two things together. So have you made any big changes in your personal?

life to use more low-tech other than your dumb phone? Yeah, quite a lot. So it's an ongoing process. I'm not there yet, but quite quickly when I started Lotech magazine, I stopped flying. Not that I was flying a lot, but still I was like really write that kind of articles and then fly between Spain and Belgium the all time. Also, I really stopped driving or even being a passenger in cars. I mean, sometimes you cannot really avoid it, but I really hate cars. I started hating them because as a kid, I was a kind of a car, actually, but that turned around pretty radical. So I'm just traveling by train. I'm taking the bike. I also don't have a heating system, air conditioning. I kind of try to consume as little as possible. And the interesting thing is that the more low-tech I start living, say, the

happier I get. That's really rewarding in that sense. You save a lot of money. Why do you think that is? Yeah. First, like not having all these expenses. Like now with this energy crisis and energy prices, I don't have a car. I don't have a heating system. My apartment runs largely on solar power. For me, it's not really an issue. And that's really... really because I can live with little money that gives a lot of freedom. It actually gives me the freedom to keep continuing this low tech magazine because I have very little expenses, actually, and very little to worry about also. And at the same time, I think also when you withdraw from these modern technologies, you get a lot of time also to do things that are really

valuable, like reading books. It's something that these days less and less people have the tension for it. But yeah, I really more and more I read books and I'm less and less online, actually. And it feels really great to be offline. It seems like with high tech, what ends up happening is we invent all these time saving technologies and then we use the extra time to spend on high tech things like Facebook and social media and Instagram. It's this accelerating treadmill. Yeah, it's a very ironic thing that people constantly are hurrying and adopting technologies that save them time, but tend to do what. And you can live in a totally different way.

Like everything, like the more you do yourself, yeah, it takes more time, but at the same time, it's a rewarding experience. Like instead of consuming, you build things yourself, you build your own furniture, for example. Yeah, it takes time and it's probably, it's cheaper to buy cheap furniture. And then you can look at the furniture or look at the, look at the, television that's standing on top of it. But I think using that time to build your own furniture, for example, is we're much more happy than watching that television with all the time you saved.

Well, our economic system optimizes for profits and social media grabs the attention seconds of our brain. And so what you're doing is kind of trying to leapfrog the cultural signals. I think the low-tech versus high-tech is an active versus passive engagement with our economic system. And if you're actively choosing low-tech so that you have more time, extra resources to read books, that's an active decision. And it's hard for people to do that. It's an addiction and a social pressure that we look around us and everyone has all these gadgets. I think I read a paper recently that the average house in America had 60 items. plugged in that are a constant drain on on baseload like even when we're sleeping we lose 12%

of our energy because these items are plugged in even if we're not using them like our computers and things like that yeah okay so I really want to get into what does a potential low-tech future look like and get your insights on that but let's first start at some of your critiques of the cultural assumption that a high-tech tech future will continue. By the way, somewhere on Earth last week, George Jetson was born. George Jetson, the cartoon character was born on like July 29th, 2022. So somewhere there is a human baby that will turn into George Jetson with the flying cars and spaceships. I'm kidding, but that is a cartoon trivia. So you've done a lot of writing, Chris, on living with no baseload, intermittent generation

and low-tech solutions. So give us your few-minute overview on renewable energy. Will that be the saving grace society predicts and hopes they will be? And what role will renewable energy, as we know it today, have in the society, the future, in your opinion? Yeah, that's a good question. And it's a very important topic in my work. Short answer is that no, renewable energy will not save us. And actually, what you see, if you look at it.

the debate about energy sources is that everybody seems to have their favorite energy source. You have the fans of nuclear energy, you have the fans of solar and wind, then you have the fans of fossil fuels, of course. But it's of secondary importance what type of energy source we use, because in the end, all these renewable energy sources, the way we use them at least, like solar panels to produce electricity, wind turbines to use electricity, it's all dependent on fossil fuel. So renewable energy, solar panels, wind turbines are almost always presented as alternatives to fossil fuels. And they are not, because without fossil fuels, you cannot make them. You cannot mine the materials.

You cannot run the factories. You cannot transport the components. So it's a kind of more efficient way to use fossil fuels if you do it good, because you can also do it that in the end you create more emissions and use more. fossil fuels. But so for me, what is important and what should be focused is to reduce the use of energy and say you have to reduce by, I don't know, say 80% and then how you generate the 20% remains. For me, that's not so important. So in that sense, I'm also not against nuclear energy or even fossil fuels. It's just like reduce it. And if 20% is left, then, okay, if you want to run it by nuclear plants, I would prefer not. But that's a compromise I'm willing to make.

But at the same time, it's also the only thing that nobody's talking about. It takes a war and energy crisis to finally get some politicians advocating for lowering energy demand. And that has until now been the big, that's what was missing in the conversation in the discussion. And it remains very controversial, of course. Well, because there are two conflicting conversations. A lot of people want us to use less energy and they recognize that renewables are not a good fit for our current cultural expectations. But the real driver is the financial system. Finance is driving the car and energy is powering the car. But our economic system requires growth and we need energy for growth. So it's very difficult to optimize for either

carbon or energy and also optimize for profits in the economic system. So my logic, I don't know if you've watched my movie or read my superorganism paper, is that we will continue to change rules and print money and do whatever we can to continue growing until we can't. And then there will be a recalibration of our financial claims with our underlying resources. And almost by definition, which is one of many reasons I wanted you on this show, we're going to have to return to more hybrid technology, maybe some high tech with some low tech, we won't be able to continue to afford to scale, you know, the high tech that our cultural stories and our movies are advertising. Yeah, the financial system or the economic system is, of course,

the big problem. And the whole thing behind Lotech magazine is, in essence, a critique on the economic system. I use technology as a, I focus on technology because it's something that people that you can grasp, that you can see, that people can imagine another world if you show them technologies that you would use in that world. But on the other hand, economy is a very abstract thing. And it's very hard to engage people with some abstract economic system that is different from the one we have now. But if you show them like, hey, you're going to drive a Velo mobile and you're going to use energy when you're going to your washing machine only when the sun shines and then people see what that there are other possibilities.

But in essence, the whole low tech magazine is a critique on the economic system. And you cannot, I'm often asked, I get emails from people asking me, how can you commercial low technologies? You can't, you cannot really, because from the moment you, you commercialize them and you want them to grow and you create again like, you create unnecessary stuff. So, I mean, it doesn't mean that you cannot make money with a low-tech device, but it not keep a society growing forever and an economy growing forever. It doesn't match.

So two comments there. I had someone out to the office a few months ago to get an estimate to change everything over here to solar. And they were coming up with 5KW system is what I wanted. And they're like, no, no, no, no. you have to get a much larger system in case you're going to add employees or you're going to add things. And that's in contrast to what you're doing. You have a fan right now because it's hot there.

You're powered by solar, but you're not trying to grow your energy services as a human being to live at 100 times exosomatic energy versus what your body needs. You're using solar technology to highlight the important things. that you need to power your electronics and your fan, et cetera. So I personally think solar panels are amazing, given where they were 20, 30 years ago, to use them for important societal activities like powering my phone or creating a social media network and to power that to connect with others. And maybe some other basic services like refrigeration is great. But we're using them to continue this metabolic scaling of all of our access to energy. So there's that. And do you have a

comment? Yeah, we don't even replace fossil power plants with wind turbines and solar panels. We just add them to the mix and the total energy keeps growing. So there is no decarbonization going on. And what I'm trying to communicate also with many articles is that, yes, we should switch to renewable energy solar panels, wind turbines, but if you want to have energy always available, and so you're going to add a lot of energy storage and a lot of extra generation capacity to fill this energy storage, yeah, then in the end, it's going to use as much fossil fuels as you did before, because the unsustainable component of any solar system is the energy storage.

The batteries last just a few years. You replace them. It's very energy intensive to produce. So it would help so much if we would switch to renewables and at the same time adjust our energy use to the weather and the seasons, like we did for hundreds of years. Okay. So I was just in Europe. I got back yesterday. I was there for 12 days.

And unlike you, I took six flights to do that. and as a political comment on the side, when I came back to America from Europe, it felt the same way as when I fly from somewhere in America to Las Vegas. It was this cultural shock. And I really liked, I was in Berlin, in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Helsinki. And it struck me how the culture there is kind of we before I, at least more than in the United States. But the last day I was there, I was in Finland. And it's one of the first times that we had a government presentation and discussion on how to increase the amount of renewables in a smaller economy. How do we have an energy descent scenario where we use production, predominantly renewable energy in Finland's one of the few countries that could do it.

Low population density, they have nuclear and biomass and hydro. But I think just recently we're starting to ask the question, how might we be able to use renewable energy in tandem with depleting and environmentally costly fossil fuels towards a smaller footprint? But here to four, that's been a verboten topic to bring up in the news. So do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. Obviously, what you said earlier, there will come a moment that we're going to have to

read energy use. And it's much better idea to do it in a kind of planned way or intentional than if you're forced to do it. But can it be planned? I don't think it can be planned. So we have to have some sort of scout team and things going on on the side. ahead of time that's not in the public? Because I don't think our economic and political system can plan for this.

I'm afraid you're right. So it's a very hard question. It often happens when we talk and I explain all these things. And then people are asking me, but how do we get there? How do we get to this future you are sketching? I honestly don't know because theoretically we should get there through politicians. And politicians should make decisions in the public interest. But that is not really what politicians are doing anymore.

They are making decisions in the interest of a financial corporate system. And then what options do we have? I don't know. I'm afraid to you can violently overthrow the system, but then even that's how are you going to do that? Well, how are you going to do that? and what would be the unexpected negative consequences of that? Also.

Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. But could it be possible that lots of people could kind of gradually and then suddenly do what you're doing, which is living a rewarding life, working on meaningful things using a fraction of energy that the average person does on your same block there in Brussels? What do you think about that? Yeah, I think there is hope. It will, of course, logically come from the younger generation. And for example, what you saw with last elections in France, that Melanchon, the Communist Party, got a lot of votes, that's quite remarkable result.

I cannot remember anything similar. And also the interesting people for Lotech magazine, I mean, I think that the biggest fans are, there's a lot of young people entering this thinking and this philosophy, let's say, or ideology. I don't know how I should say it. But I think a big problem in our society is that there is a lot of power and financial power and political power in the very old generation. Like who is ruling the world is basically the old people.

And if you see how people vote, for example, or what people think about. the environment or how important it is to reduce energy use, then there is a big difference between generations. And that is, of course, a hopeful sign. It may just change by itself because older people die and younger people get born. But in the default, whether you're young or old or rich or poor, you are downstream from the economic market system that is currently calling all the shots. But I agree with you.

People are starting to understand and see the bigger picture. So, Chris, you're involved in a big variety of projects beyond the low-tech magazine, such as your solar-powered website and the human power plant project. Can you tell us about some of those? Yeah, so the solar power website we made in 2018. And it's kind of a summary of a lot of thinking about how to use renewable technologies. renewable energy sources. So first of all, I think the internet is great technology to show that you can use renewable energy in a very different way, even with a modern technology like the internet.

So the sword website is powered by a solar panel here on my balcony. And it has a very small battery. And that means that it's mostly online summer, but then in winter, like December, January, it goes down a lot. And it's a price I pay for, say, relatively sustainable solar system. There goes quite some little fossil fuels go in the production of the components. And we are offline for like 20 days a year or something. So are we doing this interview right now on a solar powered system?

No, this computer is not solar powered. It's a long story. But I have some solar panels in repair now. And to be clear, my apartment is not totally off the grid because it's simply impossible for the simple reason that we have an electric cookstove, which you cannot power with solar panazonia balcony. And you have an electric water boiler. And these things are not that I cannot control them.

It's an apartment that I rent. And that's, yeah, it's the limits that I discovered, like try to get off the grid in an urban context and that's how far you can get. I can charge my gadgets. I can all the lights. I can run the website, but I cannot run the fridge because I cannot have no access to the roof to put more solar panels. I think it's an important point also. I try to live low tech, not because I feel more or something, but for me, mostly it's a research position. It's like, what is possible? Like, for example, they tell us you should not fly, take the train. And then, okay, let's take the train. Always when I travel, I take the train. But then you discover how difficult it is and how difficult, more difficult it becomes every day because they're basically taking apart the railway network that we had many decades. So it's very difficult to live low tech because the whole system is geared towards pushing you in another direction and not just the kind of system, but even your friends and your family are trying to push you in that.

direction. Well, it actually might not be that difficult to live low tech. What you're describing is living partially low tech embedded in an highly energy consumptive system around you. And that makes it a little difficult. Yes? Totally. Yeah. The fact that I don't have a smartphone is now making my life very difficult because people have completely changed their ways of making appointments of meeting. So it happens to me, I have telegram on my laptop. And then I'm trying, I make an appointment with someone. And then I take my bike and I leave. But from that moment, I'm offline.

And they let me know like, yeah, no, better tomorrow or let's meet in another place. Well, I don't get that message. So just meeting people has become for me a real challenge. And every time I, someone asks my mobile phone number, I have to tell them like no WhatsApp, no data. I can just receive SMS and calls. It becomes pretty cumbersome to live like that. Well, this is the first time I've actually spoken with you. We emailed long ago and first just say how I respect you for taking the high road on this because I know you could have taken the easier choice on many of these things.

And you're trying to make a statement and ethically live aligned with your principles. And I just wanted to give a shout out to you for that. I know it must be very difficult at times. Yes, but it's also challenging. I mean, I learned that if you set yourself limits, life becomes really rewarding and interesting. And you also see that in art. I mean, if you limit that artist, like, you can just have these tools and this medium and great things come out.

And if you give them all the tools that they could possibly imagine, they don't even start. They get, like, blocked. So I think limits make life interesting. And for me, it became like an endless video game. of how, okay, I have to go to Helsinki, for example. That's quite a challenge if you don't fly because it takes me four days to get there and a boarding a boat full of drunken truck truck drivers. It's really, I experience things that most people never experience

just because I make life hard for myself. And all these travels I did, well, there's a lot of stories there that you would miss if you take the plane. Yeah, wow. So getting back to the low-tech, internet. I talked to a friend of mine a couple weeks ago and he does work in Africa and he was telling me that I think it was Ghana. They have some slums and the number one cause of death is dysentery due to diarrhea because the water is impure. So they have to plug in these purification systems that are

electrical. But what ends up happening is people want their social connections. so much that they unplug the water purifier and they plug in their social media, Facebook and Instagram and stuff. So in a future where we have less energy gain, less energy scale as a society, could we have either a centralized or decentralized internet using primarily renewables? And what are the possibilities of a distributed internet and communications infrastructure using low-tech. Yeah, I think that is very well possible. So some people I've read people saying like, okay, the internet will not survive if we have to use less energy, but the internet can in fact be

as high tech or low-tech as you want it to be. And so also high-energy or low-energy use. I think the solar power website is a very good example. It runs on a server that uses two watts of power. And it serves like a lot of traffic. So it's really, you could run large newspaper website, you can run on a server like that because we still have a lot of hard disk space left. So, of course, it means you have to build another type of internet in the sense that you have to downsize everything. You have to lower the resolution of images and videos. It would not be as dynamic as it is now in the sense that you social media is all about changes. And every time you go to your Facebook page, the content has changed. That's not the case with low tech magazine.

The content is what it is. And every month or so, there is a new article. But the internet could be perfectly a technology that nobody talks about energy use anymore. It's almost nothing. But it would be a totally different internet. And it would not be the internet that is now so engaging in the sense that all these social media that you talk about. It's all designed to be addictive. It's like a gambling machine, basically.

And nobody can escape that. And I'm not different because I don't have a smartphone, but I have access to all the same content on my laptop, of course. And I also know how it feels to get addicted to a news feed. And I have to fight against that. But so I think if we want a low-tech internet that is not a problem, we also have to get rid of all these addictive features that it has. And that would be a good thing in my opinion.

Of course, it's difficult to sell because you're going to have to tell the addicts that are going to take away their addiction and that they're going to feel better afterwards. I mean, whether it's the internet or alcohol or nicotine, I mean, it's never easy to pull people away from an addiction because that's what it is. It's really an addiction. I think there's two separate questions, as there always is in these discussions, is what would be technically possible? Like, could we design an internet with low-tech energy and materials in Brussels, in Ghana, in Minnesota?

And then the second question is, what would be the pathway from here to there? I agree with you. We're not going to en masse voluntarily vote to jettison our addiction. But I'm just wondering if there's some chaos in society in the coming decade. And there's various versions of what's happening in Sri Lanka. happen more widely if the tech and the plans and the blueprints for using internet could be created using solar panels and other more simple technology. Yeah, this kind of community networks, they already exist in several content and regions

in Western Europe, in North America. So they're based on long-distance Wi-Fi technology. So it's basically the same technology that we use. to distribute wireless internet in our homes and in bars and so, so on. And if you change the antennas, you can send data to another node if they can see each other. And in that way, you can simply build bottom up. You can build a whole network. And these nodes can be solar powered or wind powered or human powered, whatever, how you want it.

And the sun is not there. There's no energy available. you can store the data instead of storing the energy. And then it travels. It continues to travel when the energy source comes back. So you would still be able, for example, to send emails, but when they would arrive would depend on the weather, for example. So it would definitely slow down.

One of the points that my writing partner, DJ White and I make in our materials for students, is that humans don't need base load. We are baseload. And that intermittent experience of neurotransmitters and things in your life is actually how we evolved. And so when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, we do work and we do things. And when it's not, we read a book or we take a nap or we go for a hike. And so I wonder, getting back to your addiction comment, right now in the developed world, we take it for granted that we have 24-7 access. to the energy services provided by electricity into every house and everyone has an internet and

all that. I look at the future as a probability distribution. I don't know what's going to happen. But a big chunk of the probability to me is that high tech will continue but for an increasingly smaller percentage of the population because we're going to get poorer. The pie is not going to get bigger. the power dynamics will likely still exist. So that means a lot more people will be living lower on an energetic material basis.

So the middle of my distribution, Chris, is that high tech and low tech will coexist in coming decades. But can you paint a picture on what would living a low tech lifestyle really look like? How is it different from the energy use patterns we have now with far fewer or even zero airplanes, 5G, base load, air conditioning. Basically, what could the future look like? And then an additional question, more importantly, do you have any ideas and how we could increase the chances of preparing for such that building a bridge from here to there?

Yeah, I think what's... That was a mouthful. Yeah, no problem. But often people have this kind of idea in mind that you either have the high-tech growth society that either you follow that or you go back to the Stone Age or to the Middle Ages. But there are many possibilities in between. And that's what I'm trying to show with Lotech magazine that there's a lot of possibilities between these two extremes.

And one way to kind of visualize this is like how far should we go back in time to find compromise between, say, modern convenience, knowledge, technologies and the Stone Age? and would it be like living in the 1980s or in the 1950s, that's already a very different thing. Or would you have something more than the 1900s or the 1500s? And at the same time, it's not possible to go back in. We can only go forward. So it's not about going back. It's about taking another direction.

And any kind of combination is possible because, of course, what you say is evident. I mean, the future will be a mix of high tech and low tech. It's already what it is. I mean, in fact, we live in a low tech world because the majority of the global population is not enjoying the technologies that we are enjoying. So it is already a low tech world. And I agree that it will only grow possibly. At the same time, also, like my solar website, you can call it low tech, but it is based on some very high tech components. So I'm not against high tech.

The problem is that high tech is now mainly serving financial motive. Why do we constantly are bombarded by new technologies is because companies are looking for new ways to keep growing. But if you use these high technologies in a different way, like, okay, we use a high tech components, but at the same time, we're going to reduce energy use and we're going to adapt our lifestyle. then you create actually a possibility like, okay, we can actually, thanks to technological progress

and increasing energy efficiency, we could live an increasingly comfortable life with less and less energy. So it's like one example that you have on the website is about the old French car, the de cheval, that I discussed. It was one of the first articles on Lotech magazine that this car from the 1950s or something

has the same fuel use as the one, the smallest car of the same brand today. And that's really weird. So all this progress in energy efficient, better engines has not been used to reduce energy use, but to kind of add performance to the vehicle, make it more convenient, more luxurious. But if you would take the engine from the newest Citroen car and you put it in this old, slow, lightweight car that has no dashboard even. Yeah, then you have a technology that is still a car. You may be used half a liter of gasoline per 100 kilometers.

So there's a lot of possibilities there to reduce energy use drastically, but still keep the modern technology because why it's extremely wasteful. And the car is a great example. The cars of today are like, I don't know, I think they're three times a zest. heavy as the cars of of the 1970s. But they're both cars. They're both ways to move from one place to another. And now the latest trend is to add like big video screens in cars, which adds a lot of energy use again and it kind of creates a distraction and you're going to kill many more cyclists and pedestrians. But I mean, take that away and you still have a car. Here's a thought,

which I've never thought about until just this moment. So I think you would agree that high-tech lifestyles, both for individuals and for societies, are a greater risk. They're at greater risk of something going wrong because they continue to need high levels of energy input and complexity and everything else. So in the field of finance, there's something called the risk-adjusted return, which people care very much about, which is how much financial return. they get for each unit of risk.

And I wonder if we can think about as individuals, as communities, as nations, the risk-adjusted portfolio of high-tech versus low-tech. Because low-tech, in theory, would have simpler components, fewer components, maybe shorter and less complex supply chains. And so if we apply Joseph Tainter, who was a recent guest on this podcast, that we're going to experience decreasing returns to complexity as we can no longer grow energy. The risk then isn't that we don't have enough energy. The risk is an unwind in complexity due to the inability to add more energy.

So I'm just wondering if as individuals to apply a portfolio strategy where you start to to integrate more low-tech into your routine, into your behavior, into your expectations, actually gives you as a human being a higher risk-adjusted return going forward. That might have been an esoteric example, but do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, a few days ago in the news that hospitals in London, because of the heat, their data centers crashed. And they said it in patient safety was compromised. So people died basically because the data center of the hospital didn't work.

And then you think, well, just 20 years ago, hotels didn't need data centers to operate. So this is a very important thing. We create an extremely vulnerable society. And it just keeps going. We add more and more infrastructures that are necessary to even do the most basic, like, paying the fact that we now have digital cash more and more instead of physical cash. I mean, digital money instead of cash. Well, I mean, cash keeps working no matter what happens to the energy infrastructure,

but digital payments will stop if something is not working anymore. And we are constantly like more and more technologies are now dependent on more than one infrastructure because everything is now being connected to the internet. It's very weird. Also, the fact that I got, at a certain point, got really fascinated by automatic doors. And I started kind of spotting them everywhere. But you don't see automatic doors in the African countryside, for example. If there is electricity, it's not always available.

And then a door that is electric and automatic is very unpractical because it won't open or it won't close. And a few years ago, I was in Lancaster University. and the power went out for quite some time. And one of the problems... Blackout, brownout. A blackout, indeed. One of the problems they had was that all the automatic doors opened and everybody could get in any building.

So another thing that they learned was like, okay, the cars which are still running on gasoline, so they still work when the power goes out. But the garage doors don't open anymore because they're all electric by now. So people could not leave their because there were electric doors. So because we are so used to having always energy available and electricity is always there and the internet is always there, you also build a lifestyle that depends. And of course, then when you take this infrastructure away, nothing works anymore.

And people don't know how to do. They also lost the skills to do things without these infrastructures. They have a total disaster. So that's another argument for living kind of the way you do. It's not only to save money and be flexible, but you're also more prepared for a future with potentially intermittent energy services, behaviorally prepared. Yeah, well, of course, that is a relative thing, because I might, if here where I live in the town inside Barcelona, if the power goes down, I'm probably the only one that still

has electricity. I also depend on a wider community to get my food, to go to the, hospital. I don't know. If you're the only one left with electricity, then it's not much. You're not going to save your life by that because in the end, the guy with the guns will take it all. So you brought up earlier what's happening in Ukraine and Russia as a wake-up call to our energy blindness, that people are starting to connect the dots and see that there's more risk here, that we're more dependent not only on Russian energy, but on energy full-stop. So let's just hypothetically say that there is an uncertain and shortening time over which

we have access to the production of the global six-continent supply chain system like we have now. So we should prioritize the most important material and technological inputs we might need before they slowly disappear from readily being available. What guidance would you suggest on that? What should we prioritize if you're an administrator in a public transportation or a systems risk standpoint? How should we think about this? What are the things that are going to be most critical that we don't think about?

Yeah, critically is food production. I think if that's the only thing we really need, in the end, how much energy does a human need? And it's, I don't know, 2,000 calories a day. and all the rest is could be described as luxury. So even a transportation system, I mean, you don't really, if I want to go from Barcelona to Brussels and there is no train infrastructure, I can still walk there. I mean, it's what we did for thousands of years. And it's not that people didn't travel before the Industrial Revolution. So I think even, of course, I have to see a great railway network be able to keep that option open to be able to travel.

But I think what we should really focus on is food production. And that is, especially in Europe here, it's pretty problematic because we produce less and less food here. And I even see it here in my town. Like when I came to live here 15 years ago, there were like food gardens everywhere. I have a friend here who has a big organic farm. He's now threatened by the fact that municipality wants to build houses there. And then you think, well, it's actually. actually a great asset to have a big farm in a town and to have these food gardens because you

kind of, you may not produce enough food to survive as a village, but well, you have something. And more and more like if I look at a country like Belgium that has quite some people in a small area, there's no food production left anymore almost. And agriculture is a lot under pressure. In the Netherlands, it's also a big debate at the moment. That is something that, you know, should be a priority. And of course not industrial agriculture, but more sustainable agriculture, that would require more people again working in agriculture. Because I often read that people say it's impossible to feed the world without high-tech agriculture, but that's not true. Of course it can be done. You need more people working in agriculture. You need more human power. And something that I hope

politicians will make work of that. More than anything else, the internet, the transportation, no, it's food that we need. Now that I know you live in Barcelona, let me ask you this question. In addition to food, in a low-tech future, how do you envision heating and cooling? Because in areas like Barcelona and Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, I think increasing research on the wet bulb temperature, which is the combination of heat. and humidity that allows our sweat to not be absorbed into the air becomes fatal for people. So in a lower energy future, what sort of technologies are feasible for heating and cooling?

Yeah, heating is pretty easy. Heating is not strictly necessary unless you're like a baby or an older person who cannot really move much anymore. But, I mean, physical activity is the best heating system. we are heating systems ourselves. And when you get physically active, and it doesn't need to be a big effort, but even just having an animated conversation already lowers the need for a high temperature.

Like you can turn down the thermostat for like four or five degrees if you're doing something in contrast to sitting in your couch and surfing social media. Well, I live in northern Wisconsin, and animated conversation would not quite do it in January here. No, of course. But actually, I interviewed a guy on this in Finland, which is also, it may not be Wisconsin, but it's still, it's quite cold there. And I was there for a reportage about wooden buildings.

So they have a lot of wooden buildings in Finland. And in the 70s, they started insulating them that created all kinds of problems of humidity and bad indoor climates. And so I asked this guy what is a solution? And he said, well, you just don't insulate buildings. You let the wind blow through. And you go outside and you chop wood and you be active. And when you come back here, just coming inside from the cold is already enough to feel comfortable. And you go to bed.

And it's hard to argue against such a logic. Because the reason why we need heating, why we are so dependent on heating systems, is that in comparison to our forebears, we are much less physically active. And I mean, I know there's some data in some article about the thermal insulation of bodies that even at minus 40, if a person walks or runs, it's very surprising how little clothes they need to be comfortable. So even in a very cold climate, you can actually survive just by insulating your body. you could go one step further, you could say like electrically heated clothes,

like heat your clothes, heat your body instead of your building. So if you look at old ways of thermal comfort, of achieving thermal comfort, you see that it was much more focused on humans and not so much on spaces. And that is something we could easily get back, like with hot water bottles, with thermal underwear. I know it's easy for me to speak being in Barcelona. It doesn't get that cold here. But when I go to Finland or to Belgium, I also not even support air heating systems anymore.

It makes me extremely uncomfortable. And so that's kind of easy. The hard part is the cooling. That is where it gets complicated because you can also say you cool people instead of spaces and the fan does that. That's a very old technology that uses very little energy. I mean, I have it here now under my desk. But as you said, it stops working above a certain temperature. Like 32 Celsius, it kind of makes no sense anymore.

Didn't the government of Spain last week announced some rule that they could not have air conditioning below 27C, which is 80 degrees Fahrenheit? So all over the country, it's illegal to have your air conditioning turned lower than 27? Yes. And in fact, I went to the library yesterday. They are doing it. It's one option. I mean, you could use airco in a very smart way also. And for example, you could say, let's put the temperature at 27 and then add some fans.

Because you could still improve the thermal comfort if you combine both. And you don't have to load the thermostat that much to create a comfortable conditions. And I assume that to make the same temperature change at that point that using a fan instead of, Airco uses a fraction of the energy, yes? Yeah, like a fan is like 10 times less energy. But some months ago, I was two months in the city of Barcelona in a roof apartment. And there, as much as I hate airco, I could not, I had to use it because I actually got a heat stroke, which is not something to laugh with. It kind of, it can kill you.

And but then, okay, you go like, let's use it when it's really necessary. and don't put a 21 degree Celsius, like put it at 27 and let the fan go. And three days later, temperature went down and you turn it off. But I think it should, because now we are really looking at it in a kind of level of individual households. But the problem with cities, of course, is that it's one big mass of stone and concrete and asphalt and all these things that absorb so much heat. That is the problem. So you have to reduce these stone.

surfaces and you have to add more trees, trees and water. Because even if it's like 40 degrees, but you're seeing in a park next to a lake under the trees, it's quite a difference than being in a city with these temperatures. So that is something that you could do. It's quite a low-tech solution to add more water, open up the canals again in cities and plant a lot more trees or start by not cutting them down because at the moment we are not even there. In Belgium, a lot of trees are getting killed. I mean, Antwerp, my hometown, there's a great example there. So ago, they redesigned a large square.

And the result is like a desert. It's like a stone desert. There's not one tree standing. It's all stone. And they do that, I guess, because they want to organize events there and stuff. But now with these temperatures that we have this summer, you can simply not cross that square anymore. You have to go underground to kind of get to the other side. So I don't understand that these things are still being built.

You should build a park there. You should have trees. You should have water. And that would cool down the surrounding buildings much more than any technological solution. Yeah. That's actually something that worries me a lot in coming 10 or 20 years, how people living in hot countries in a declining economy in all likelihood are really going to, that's going to be a struggle. Yeah, they're going to come our way. And that's right. I mean, there's going to be

migration towards the cooler areas and places that have technology and access to energy. So as I warned you offline before we started speaking, I expect I could talk to you for five hours or so. And any one of these questions, I'm sure we could dive deep because you have a lot of knowledge. So let me ask you this before we get to the closing questions. If we have a lower tech future, we're also going to need different types of human skills. What would you suggest are the skills that we might think about prioritizing? Yeah, I think that anything, any skill that is useful in a pre-modern society is something that could be handy to have. Like more and more I get emails from young people who are kind of desperate.

Like, what should I do? I need to work. I need to live. But at the same time, I don't want to contribute to destroying the planet. What should I do? And so I kind of concluded that maybe the best. If I would be 20 now, I would learn all kinds of skills that are at the moment, completely useless. I don't know, basket weaving, growing your own food, all these things that are

not really necessary anymore, or we think they're not necessary anymore, probably going to be very useful in the future. And meanwhile, if you become a craftsman in whatever you can do, you can also kind of make money in this society, selling things that are you. And that people, I mean, if you make nice objects, if you make nice furniture, for example, people will still buy it. I mean, look at the success of Etsy website, for example. People are willing to pay for quality. But I think don't do anything with, I don't know, if your job is designing apps for our phones, well, you run the risk of having a skill that's completely useless in 20 years' time.

So anything that has been used over thousands of years will probably be useful in the future. That's a kind of law in technology that the longer something exists, the more probably existing and keep being relevant in the future. But in the hybrid period in the coming 10 or 20 years, I could make an argument for young people emulating you and being kind of a low-tech MacGyver in certain ways, like having skills on how to use solar panels not to have a giant house powered with all the gadgets, but to apply the electrons towards things that people are really going to need and know how to plug and play and match all that and be energy efficient. Do you think that would be a useful skill? Yeah, definitely. And also,

when I say this, I mean, the fact that, for example, if you know how to build devices out of these other discarded devices to reuse electronics to build your own circuits from scrap, those are also very valuable skills. You should not do anything that's related to computers. I don't think the computer will ever disappear, but it's more than get to the bottom of it, whether it's software or hardware, and there's a lot of work to do also.

But if you want to really make sure you can live through the future, then you should learn how to grow your own food. everything related with that. And I'm not actually. I'm not doing that because I'm too busy writing about these things. I should show you, I'll send you a picture yesterday I took of my potatoes. I was just in Europe for two weeks and I grow a lot of my own food. But I've been so busy. I'm working 60, 70 hour weeks. And I think I'm talking and thinking about the future so much that I've neglected the present because my potato crop is decimated by potato beetles and weeds. And so it's hard to engage doing the work that we're doing and also do the right things for ourselves in the

present. So I hear you on that one, Chris. So personal question, Chris, what do you care most about in the world, given what you know and your life choices and everything you've shared today? What do you care most about? I think I care most about the world itself, like nature, wildlife, even though I'm not really so much in contact with it. I'm not going on a safari in Africa, for example. But the idea that this exists, I think nature is such a, we are a part of nature. And that is what happens in modern societies, that nature basically disappears. And we are conquering it.

And I think that that is a big problem. I mean, we need nature to be happy. We are part of it. And if you take us out of that environment, we get mentally disturbed. So what saddens me most is how we destroy nature and how we, including destroying other cultures, like people who still live. There's not many of them anymore, but this human diversity, like in the Amazon. on the forest, there's still people living like they did thousand years ago. And for me, it's a very comforting to know that. And I would feel very, be very depressed if they're all gone.

And the same for like ecosystems that that are collapsing, disappearing. I think for everyone, it's what it's about. That's what we need to save. Yeah, I agree. We've never spoken before. And we're in a hundred percent agreement on that point. And thank you for that. So out of all the things that we imagine and read and infer, what are you most concerned about in the coming decade or so in our world? I'm afraid it's violence, war and violence. Because as we talked earlier, it's like this climate is having very concrete consequences for people who live in countries where it's already hot. You cannot live there anymore in another decade or so. So they're going to have to move, seeing how people deal with immigrants already now, that's not going to end well.

And I also think that people kind of keep going with the system now because it gives them a lot of material rewards. But from the moment that kind of starts to disintegrate, how much support is there still going to be for politicians, for governments, how is that going to influence how we vote, you know how right-wing parties. I mean, they're very good at taking advantage of these things. But, yeah, I'm afraid of violence and war. I kind of feel that is what we are facing.

Rather than trying to reform society, I'm afraid we're going to destroy it. And of course, not something to look forward to. I share your concern. And in contrast, what are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so? Well, let's say that the things I write are very, have a lot of hope in them. And people do ask me that and I think, well, I don't think so. But then at the same time, I realize I'm getting old, probably cynical, because I see that things are not changing as fast as I would have liked.

But then I think that people who are younger are looking to add it very differently. And they are our hope. I mean, it's a super cliche, I know. I'm sorry for that, but I do have some hope there. And another thing is that crisis, re-crisis, like what we are having at the moment, actually, they can also bring about change. So if Russia decides to really cut the total gas supply, then you will see things change. So since we can thank Putin for doing that.

Well, it's getting back to what you said at the beginning. It's like giving a painter only a few tools instead of all the tools. it's going to force creativity that we can't yet imagine what might result. Yes. Yeah. So if you were benevolent dictator, King de Decker, and there was no personal recourse to your decisions, what is one thing you would do to improve the human and planetary futures? Yeah.

I would abolish the car. And that's it. I would do nothing else. I'm afraid that this whole environmental crisis, if politicians start to kind of take it serious, they are going to react to it in a very authoritarian way. And I'm not really looking forward to that either. I thought about this question for a long time. And it's like, if you take one thing out, what is the most important?

How would life change? And if you take away the car, everything changes. because the whole our modern society is built around cars. And if you take that away, you're going to have to organize everything differently. And for the rest, you don't have to do much, I think. So, of course, a lot of people cannot imagine living without cars. But then it depends on where you live. Because for instance, here in Barcelona, if you don't have a car, well, you can get anywhere you 24 hours a day.

If you don't have a car in Belgium, you have a problem because public transport is really bad. after 12, after midnight, there's nothing anymore. You need a car. But if you organize your society, if your transportation system in a decent way, people would not mind to get rid of their car. I mean, but still, I think better than regulating everything individually, try to take something out that is really fundamental to how society operates. And I really hate cars.

I cannot help it. Yeah. And then so what we're trying to do on mass is instead of internal combustion cars, we're just trying to add 100 million new electric cars, which is the same car, just powered by lower carbon, you know. Yeah, but there's still cars destroyed public space and make, I mean, if you look, investigate what the car changed and like the fact that kids are not being able to play outside. It's also because of cars.

The fact that people don't gather on the streets anymore is also because of cars. Like public space used to be a very lively space that's also connected to a democratic society. You don't need security cameras because there's social control on the street. I mean, take away these cars and so much changes. Because we have given them basically 90% of public space is taken by these super inefficient vehicles. It's the transportation equivalent of a smartphone. Yes, because if you would have given me the option to do two things, then I would say the second thing is get rid of the smart. And then we're there.

Like take away the car and the smartphone and we're in low tech paradise. People will start talking to each other again without the need for technology and they will organize themselves more locally. Well, it's soft. We don't need to do more. And of course, we also need to abolish the thing that we don't have yet because the smartphone is just, what, 15 years old. I really enjoyed this conversation, Chris, and I wish you good luck in all your projects and efforts. Do you have any other closing thoughts or advice for our listeners? Well, get offline as fast as you can.

Thanks, Chris. To be continued, my friend. Thank you. Welcome. You're welcome. Thanks a lot to you too. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform. and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.