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this week on the futurists rames Nam lots of gnarly things have happened lots of horrible events have happened many horrible events await us and yet somehow despite that overall we’ve made the world and the well-being of the average human on planet Earth better and better over time

welcome to the futurist I am your host Brett King we are coming to you from various places across the continental United States today I’m the host along with Rob tersek my co-host Rob welcome back thanks and we have a really amazing guest on today rames Nam um before we get to that um actually Rob do you have a couple of news items that you can shed some light on some progress in the future sure today’s today’s news from the future is really news about fighting the future or resistant in the future and that’s often a common theme uh we make a bit of progress and then there’s some resistance points that are encountered uh news broke in the last 10 days about internal confusion at meta uh famously about a year and a half ago Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook changed the name of his company changed the direction of the company decided to focus on the metaverse at the time it was criticized as a a poorly designed goal or poorly defined project and apparently that’s still the case internally so there’s a great deal of confusion reports are coming out from Facebook now known as meta that the employee Workforce is demoralized disoriented confused and there’s poor morale around the attempts to build the metaverse but at least Zuckerberg’s metaverse characters now have legs so it’s not a legless metaverse although there’s some controversy about that too right and there always will be uh the other news is uh there’s been some pushback against self-driving cars a topic we’ve covered a couple of times on this show and um you know there’s always been some uh cheerleading enthusiasm around the prospect of of uh self-driving cars but that always seems to be a future that’s just around the corner and never plainly in sight we’ve been hearing about self-driving cars now for 20 years since those first tests that were done for the defense department in the Nevada desert more than 100 billion dollars has been invested in robotic vehicles and now uh Anthony levandrowski who is a former Google employee who then switched uh went over to Uber where he was promptly sued for stealing Secrets One of the pioneers of of robotic vehicles and he recently came out in um in in Bloomberg and among other press Outlets to declare this uh a gigantic Tech demo and he said 100 billion dollars and no discernible progress pointing out for instance that robotic Vehicles still have trouble making a left turn and so until they can Master those basics of driving we’re not really any closer to that self-driving Auto future so a setback for that that’s probably not likely to deter development in that space however then finally one more item that popped up uh is um police in Edmonton Alberta used a controversial tool they had DNA from a suspect in a crime and they used DNA phenotyping to generate an image of what the suspect of that crime might look like and though they released this information with disclaimers saying that they weren’t 100 sure that the technology they were using is not entirely proven it immediately generated tremendous pushback and then part that’s that’s largely due to the fact that the the suspect’s image that they generated was a black man um and so immediately the police were accused of uh wasting money on racist astrology for cops that was a Twitter comment racist astrology and even professional geneticists decried the move because they said the technology is not ready and that you cannot actually derive a physical characteristics like skin color uh from a DNA sample but nevertheless the police proceeded kind of a weird blunder on their part uh kind of a self-goal anyway three three stories interesting that show us that the future doesn’t always come in an even path and sometimes they’re unexpected uh sideways YouTubers that occur yeah hey welcome back to the showrooms it’s such a pleasure to see you after such a long time Brett and Rob it’s a delight to be here it’s been way too long so let me just uh give give a quick intro about uh ramiz for those that don’t know him it actually uh born in Egypt came to the US the age of three did a lot of work with Microsoft um working on early versions of Microsoft Outlook in an Explorer and so forth he’s an author um he has written in the Sci-Fi space so you know we often have sci-fi guys on here as well as futurists uh MERS does both he straddles both of those areas um his uh Trilogy on Nexus um on the future of sort of brain machine interface um then also the infinite resource the power power of ideas on a finite planet and more than human embracing the promise of biological enhancement that was his first non-fiction book he uh also works with singularity in the energy space Singularity you in the energy space and has since got into his new bench Capital firm focused primarily on climate and clean energy Miz welcome to the futurists Brett it’s awesome to be here and if you’re um thanks mess you’re you know you’re the futurist futurist one of the things we like to say on this show is is the definition of a futurist isn’t somebody who just talks about it but there’s somebody who actually does something about it um and there can be many things right part of it is persuading lots of people to see the future or to embrace the version of the future that you’re promoting but you take it several steps beyond that we first met at Singularity University um almost about 10 years ago really one of the best things I’ve ever done was to go to that course that week-long executive course and you opened my eyes uh at the time about the coming rise of electric power of renewable energy um and at that time it was actually in a kind of a dark spot it was it had been slow rolled but you pointed out that there was an exponential growth curve can you catch us up on the state of things in the last 10 years because there’s been tremendous progress in renewable energy yeah the big thing that’s happened really is that Renewables have plunged in price uh solar wind energy storage for the grid batteries and electric vehicles in particular you know 10 years ago 11 years ago I wrote my book definite resource and I wrote an article for Scientific American saying that by that solar was dropping in cost like compute some a similar slope not exactly as fast but there was a Moore’s Law of solar now we’d call that rights law that by about 2015 solar and some parts of the world would be cost competitive with coal and about 2020 in Sunny parts of the world slowly half the cost of call at the time that looked ridiculous to most people in energy and most environmentalists uh and yet that’s basically what’s happened in fact I was a little bit too conservative forecasts have even my forecasters are wildly optimistic at the time have been a little bit slow once actually occurred so what’s happening now is you know we spend trillions of dollars a year on energy all up including Transportation heating electricity and so on uh doing now you look at it as much as six trillion dollars we are in the midst of what will be a multi-decade transition this is not absolutely I’ve been overnight it’s not going to happen as fast as deploying cell phones or social networks nevertheless now uh almost all new electricity build out is solar and wind that’s more than 70 of global build out is Renewables uh energy storage is booming it’s like doubled every year electric vehicles even through covid when we saw vehicle sales in general plunge electric vehicles have risen to be now 12 13 all Global vehicle sales you know that annual growth rate of 40 50 60 so we’re we’re at this point we’re still in the the early part of the s-curve if you will but what’s happening is that you know electricity Renewables have now become cost competitive in transport electric vehicles have gotten good enough they’re very exciting and they’re on the verge of being plain cheaper than fossil fuel powered vehicles and we’ll do the same thing to uh industrial processes that use a lot of energy we don’t really think about to make steel and cement to manufacture cars or build buildings and other sectors of energy that are going behind the scenes those will come in time but this is you know to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming on the planet we’ve probably missed that to be totally honest anyway two degrees Celsius we need to get to net zero emissions around the planet it’s completely decarbonizing Energy System by 2050 2060 2070 uh and I think that’s doable but it’s still going to be a stretch and it’s going to require continued Innovation and continued policy work wow okay that’s a bold forecast and that’s an impressive progress uh what are some of the biggest hurdles what are the biggest impediments uh the hardest things to change yeah I’d say there’s a couple of impediments one is there’s some cost so we have you know new power solar and wind are the bulk of it and new vehicles electric vehicles are still just 11 12 something like that uh they’ll they will be more than half by the end of this decade but power plants are built to operate 30 40 50 years the average Fleet turnover or the average age of a car on an American Road it’s been like 13 years so full Fleet turnovers like 26 and another parts of the world is slower so even once you reach the point where clean energy is all of the new energy you’re deploying you have this multi-decade tale of infrastructure you’ve already deployed and either you’ve got to get thin as you just so cheap that you you shut that down and it’s cheaper to buy an electric car that drives your gasoline powered car which is possible or you have policy levers that’s one impediment there’s others NIMBY is a huge impedimenting uh people don’t realize that you’ll solve climate change we have to build we can’t just oppose everything we have to actually allow solar Farms or wind farms or transmission lines you go by someone somewhere uh and then often non-market business models a lot of utilities have Monopoly business models where they don’t actually have to do the cheapest thing for their customers because there is no competition and they get paid on a capital plus basis so they don’t necessarily see the actual economic pressure to switch the cheapest thing because that might actually force them to regulate them and force them to lower the costs so they charge their customers so that’s a surprising one uh that’s a real one you can see that in China too where you know there’s heavy Reliance on coal-fired plants to this day they make solar panels and they could eat they could begin to do that switch well having said that Rob China’s deployed more solar in the last three years than than the US has historically throughout all history so I I think they are making that switch but two different things two different things this existing planet is but miss uh part of this is sort of grid design you know um you know we we have seen um Texas California where I’m from in Australia with South Australia New South Wales Victoria we are starting to see traditional grids being challenged by climate change because of temperature extremes and so forth um and this idea of centralized generation the way we’ve thought about it and and network distribution um this in itself really needs to be rethought doesn’t it for 21st century grid design so distributed design um you know a grid level battery storage incorporating you know you know residential home battery units and EVS into the storage capability you know rooftop solar all of these sorts of things this is a fundamental rethink of the way the grid um has resilience so um you know where would you you know who would you say economically um is sort of leading the charge and terms of this new design thinking around the way grid should evolve what’s I will partially with you there is a huge new opportunity in distributed energy resources in solar and buildings in batteries behind the meter and using electric vehicles as energy resources grid just to charge smartly and we have the most Windows unavailable automobile power back on the grip that is an enormous north of Duty at the same time what all the modeling shows is that Renewables are actually more dependent upon a larger scale grids than fossil fuel power plants because weather is less spoiler over distance so you look at Texas Texas has actually in some ways a good grid Market design it’s a it’s actually a place where energy resources compete on price unlike a lot of places in the world or in the US but Texas is also an energy Island Texas at most can import two percent of its peak electricity Management’s neighboring states so you look at the Texas outages that happened recently uh a the culprit was not when it wasn’t even a One National resource and natural gas plants and what failed the most with these ice storms because you have every energy resource we built whether it’s a thermal power plant like a gas plant or a coal plant a nuclear power plant depends on water for its cooling uh or wind farms or solar it’s actually somewhat dependent on weather uh but B when you had Texas struggling to provide a power of the lights on next door in Oklahoma you had a surplus of dirt cheap power right because weather events that they couldn’t access it right they couldn’t access it because Texas has made the decision to be its own energy Island uh ercot there’s three groups in America there’s the Western American act the Eastern interconnect and ercot which is Texas uh and even in the west and the East we don’t have as much transmission between states as we should so do we actually do simulations of weather and religious humans everything points to building continent-sized grids allows you to move power from the sunniest parts of the U.S you move power from us to New York with less than 10 losses pretty cheap you can move uh wind power from the Great Plains out to the coasts uh that’s what it actually worked the best and what gets in the way of that is not economics it’s not technology we’ve got the tech and it’s cost effective it is purely Regulatory and it is mostly NIMBY yeah so this is not in my backyard um element of this um you know how can we educate the general public that um you know not only that um energy needs are changing as a result of you know the changes in climate and demands from things like cloud computing and electric vehicles but what is the process to get people to understand the the significant longer term benefits of you know Renewables um just from an economic perspective because I think this is something we still struggle with in the United States and in Australia in particular where people don’t understand how much cheaper these energy sources are going to be in the future I think we see it somewhat on a local basis you know most people that installed solar energy rooftops do so because they want it but also they see that they actually save money in their bill uh a friend of mine uh it runs your own business where she had a a gasoline-powered pickup truck as her main work vehicle and she switched to an electric vehicle and the monthly payments on the vehicle are less than what she saves in fuel costs even after adding in her electric charging costs wow you have Amazon ordered a hundred thousand electric trucks from rivian these delivery Vans you know like the UPS and FedEx fans yeah yeah Vans and they did it because employees were really frustrated with pesos several thousand employees wrote him a letter on how Amazon do better on climate hundreds to sit in a walkout but they also did it because when they did the math they actually said oh my gosh this will actually save us money it’s an investment in these electric vans will pay back in two or three years with if you have electricity and the high efficiency of these vehicles and the low maintenance costs and they’re so simple was well actually save us money even if we have to switch over the whole Fleet so we’re starting to see that happen now and that narrative is starting to get more into the mainstream certainly in business it is and so I think that the the Ford’s decision to launch a electric version of the F-150 truck is so important because the customer for that truck has had their two been resistant right to energy initiatives um as you both have pointed out it’s a case it’s a matter of Case by case one person at a time has to have their own Epiphany uh so the idea that an electric truck can be more powerful faster less cost of ownership and operation uh that could be a really compelling use case on an individual basis I’m excited to see that let me just take a step back here uh you know I mean you you clearly have um evolved in your career you’ve you’ve now become one of the world’s expert in in in this field but you started in you know the technology space like you know yeah myself so what was that Journey like from you being a deep technologist to becoming more interested in the future and then you know getting into um you know like becoming the lead for for Singularity University on on the energy side yeah you know I have a degree in computer science that’s my only formal uh certification really uh but I was always a statute of the future I grew up reading science fiction reading uh popular science nonfiction books and I was always asking about what’s next and uh when I working in Tech gave me the luxury that I felt that I could try something new mostly because I felt that I get hired in Tech again and that’s actually a luxury that a lot of people don’t have I feel like they can just go off and do something so frankly I just hit a point in my career where I needed a break I needed to do something different when I had been doing I left found a startup startup failed as most do didn’t know what to do next decided to write a book didn’t know how hard it was to write a book didn’t know how low the odds were being published and reading if so this did it and that was my first book more than human I went back to Tech for their six seven years at Microsoft and along the way I just got really interested I had a very cliche environmental Awakening on a beach in Mexico fell in love with the water wondered why there was litter thought I should look into things I’ve been hearing about the environmental climate change and when I started looking into it I decided that both extremes that I was hearing one extreme being there is no problem it’s all a hoax or it’ll solve itself and the extreme being we’re doomed there’s no way out I thought both those were were kind of BS honestly like it was obvious that there are real problems and also obviously we have enormous Innovative capabilities when I put our minds to them yeah and it was just the luxury of today and this was a decade ago is that now you have access to all the world’s data or a huge fraction of it so I can just go read reports by the world’s leading experts and scientists papers and I could call people up and and not let you know their book and that then I started give them talks and wrote that book and uh people kept inviting me back and once you’ve written a book something you’re a quote expert yeah yeah dangerous and I got smarter along the way yeah and one of the things about public speaking is it forces you to master the material you become a great student when you’re standing when you’re forced to stand on stage um no one wants to embarrass themselves so one of the things that’s interesting uh is what I’m hearing you describe in your own Epiphany you’re on your own course of evolution is that your Storyteller um and and this is really kind of the key of our show uh the futurists um because everyone we talk to is either a science fiction writer which you are or they’re a scenario planner in some fashion sometimes in a specific discipline and sometimes more broadly there are futurists for hire and they’ll provide that as a service but scenario planning let’s get real it is storytelling right because you’re having to take some uh some facts you start with some facts some Trends do some extrapolation and then posit a scenario in the future and this is the point when the fiction starts because then at that point you have to sort of Flesh that uh story or that scenario out with some facts and so what we’re finding is that there’s a little parallel between what a futurist does and what a science fiction author does and you do both tell me about the importance of stories yeah so I I have never worked as a professional futurist I’ve never been hired through scenario for anything like that I instead what I’ve done is talked about where I saw the future headed and the key decisions I thought we had to make as a civilization um either in fiction or in on I will say you know both of them involve the importance thinking about the motivation of the actors and what do people want what are the different entities whether it’s people businesses governments what do they want so you don’t factor that in you have something very dry is it not realistic uh and then I think also public speaking you’ve got to have an emotional art through the talk to carry people along you know now I mean I I always think your ability to apply sci-fi into this as well as the uh the Practical elements is is really compelling from a storytelling perspective but uh hey man listen we’re going to have a quick break but before that we like to do this thing we call a quick fire round just some some uh really uh pithy questions that uh get get a little background for our listeners so here we go

what was the first science fiction you remember being exposed to on TV or through books I’m sure it wasn’t the first but the first book was El Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth a very cool interesting um not a really compelling movie but a really interesting book what technology do you think has most changed Humanity uh digital Tech Community Communications tech uh really but that combination of the internet cell phones yeah absolutely name a futurist or entrepreneur if you like that has influenced you and why Kevin Kelly uh his book out of control I read it I think I was in high school I’m proud to have Kevin with a friend these days and it really you know that was a period where chaos by James Glick came out complexity came out and out of control came out out of control really persuaded me that there was this Bottoms Up model of both Innovation and musicalized control that was really fascinating and I haven’t thought about before yeah really relevant again now with web3 yeah yeah yeah what’s the best prediction a futurist or sci-fi practitioner has ever made do you think without wow that’s a really bold one uh that tomorrow is likely better than yesterday and I don’t know who first made that but I think you know that the anti-appy jewels fan I don’t know yeah yeah that’s a good one um what science fiction story this is the last one what science fiction story is most representative of the future that you hope for oh my goodness gracious um I think it would have to be a slightly Utopia actually I would say this it’s um Ian M Banks’s culture world yeah yeah there are novels that are about a utopian future they’re very dark dark dark novels and everything on the edge of this Utopia and that makes them fun to read for me and very Thrillers but they are about a world where we’ve some species has surpassed the planetary boundaries we have and have really built a world of abundance yeah absolutely well that’s great let’s uh take a quick break you’re listening to the futurist with myself and Rob tersek Our Guest this week Ram is nam we’ll be right back after these words from our sponsors provoked media is proud to sponsor produce and support the futurist podcast provoke.fm is a global podcast Network and content creation company with the world’s leading fintech podcast and radio show Breaking Banks and of course it’s spin-off podcast breaking Banks Europe breaking Banks Asia Pacific and the fintech 5. but we also produce the official phenovate podcast Tech on reg emerge everywhere the podcast of the Financial Health Network and next-gen Banker for information about all our podcasts go to provoke.fm or check out breaking Banks the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show

welcome back to the futurists you’re listening to myself Rob tercik with my co-host Brett King and this week we’re talking to ramaz Nam ramas is a double futurist he’s the futurist futurist not only does he work in a field where he exercises significant influence on events that are going to unfold in the future but he also writes about the future as a science fiction author so he’s written non-fiction books and science fiction books and Mez what’s the intersection there between the visions that you put forth in the Nexus series and the work that you’re actually doing is there an intersection do the two inform each other it’s really about thinking about what’s going to happen to us at the future place that we’re all going and looking for a way to navigate to the challenges we have and I think while Nexus you know simple class classified as dystopian fiction some people classify as utopian fiction as a book where a lot of bad things happen but the world overall becomes a better place and that’s actually my view of the course of history lots of gnarly things have happened lots of horrible events have happened many horrible events await us and yet somehow despite that overall we’ve made the world and the well-being of the average human on planet Earth better and better over time and I guess what what lies largely lies ahead of us but it also doesn’t happen completely passively it happens yeah do Market forces do other things you know Stephen Pinker you can read but also happens to the the actions of individuals who yeah people with a vision who are charismatic can actually really make a gigantic shift yeah yeah and we’re seeing a little bit of that right now that we talked about the sort of bad things happening for instance right now this conflict in the Ukraine um it’s unfortunate because it’s distracting people from other things that frankly could be a bigger priority it’s going to consume a lot of resources on kind of a pointless exercise it’s forcing Europeans Western Europeans to revert to some coal-fired plants and stuff so progress on energy uh you know future energy is being suspended for this period of time uh so unfortunately the future comes and fits and starts and there are you know political events uh geopolitical events that occur that can set it back some uh so we live through that but it’s important to look past today’s headlines the negative headlines the Press stories about the conflicts and look toward that future that progress that we’re always making I’ve always admired about your work including the infinite resource which is kind of the core principle there is that we have one renewable resource which is human Ingenuity um it’s actually not renewable it’s an infinite resource to use the title of the book non-rivalrous yeah that’s right yeah that’s right we can share the ideas and actually compound them and make them more useful and I have a slightly different view on Ukraine um I think Ukraine is horrible no one should wish for war there’s you know hundreds of millions of people being affected one way or another and millions affected very very directly uh I think through Putin’s invasion of Ukraine most likely we don’t know the outcome but most likely it’s going to massively accelerate the energy transition agree um that we see that in Europe already there’s temporary increases in Coal burning whatnot but so you look at what Europe’s actually setting in place they’re going to massively turn away from natural gas than ever I think it is strengthened the alliance in the U.S and Europe I think it’s probably not been a positive for Global democracy the verdict’s still out there’s still some scary times ahead I think it’s uh strengthened Taiwan against China and I think it’s made the U.S and Europe uh you sort of wake up and get a little bit more cognizant and take some measures to be a little bit less dependent upon China and other totalitarian States maybe in Saudi Arabia for things that are critical and I while I’m a free tradeist I’m a globalist I think those are all actually pretty positive things that I would never wish this were to happen there’s still scary things that could could happen but I think uh the most likely outcomes I see are that the world gets better as a result of it I wanna I I want to change Tech a little bit here mayor’s talking about the Nexus Trilogy and uh the work you did there because you know if you uh if you wrote a story about the future of um you know energy production in a science fiction setting that would be sort of naturally aligned with your your career in respects but you did um you know Nano robots that that had you know sort of brain control interfaces and stuff like that and you know changing um human behavior and so forth but um you know your series was quite successful it was nominated you you you tied for best novel for the Prometheus Awards you were shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke award um and won the 2015 um the third the third in the trilogy Apex won the 2015 Philip K dick award phenomenal outcomes congratulations but um suddenly you were now thrust into this world um where you’re going to the science fiction award dinners and so forth was some of your childhood uh you know Heroes what was that like be suddenly becoming networked with um you know these amazing science fiction grades oh my God it’s such a privilege I mean I grew up reading David Brynn I’m a huge fan uh my friend Paul a bunch of loopy is with the wind up girl I think it’s just amazing there’s so many people uh you know Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank who wrote the expanse so we’ve seen the last on TV the last several years uh so getting to suddenly uh be peers and friends with these people is just you’re like a kid in a candy store honestly yeah now I I I can definitely uh see that in terms of um the the elements of future scenario planning regarding things like grid design and the things we we talked about earlier in in terms of developing stories for science fiction um how how do you think you can help people to think like a futurist to get in that mindset of understanding the rate of change how we can stimulate that how we can absorb that into society how would you help people to develop that mindset yeah about writing I’ve thought about I’ve never come up with a way that I could write a story about climate energy primarily because the the solution doesn’t happen over the course that I can fit into a store easier it would be a multi-generational story I think um what I find is this you know I I give a lot of talks and Rob when you came to singular University my talk started with sort of the global challenges and then I think there was sort of probably a an appeal to what we needed to do collectively towards the end with technology optimism intermixed uh maybe the year after that I was asked to give a talk at a hedge fund conference and I thought oh my gosh the people here might be climate deniers I can’t give them a talk about what they need to do to make the world a better place or address interesting so instead I just flipped the talk entirely and the talk was just about the economic Trends and clean energy and how cleanser was going to become cheaper than fossil fuels as you know cheaper to build nuclear energy than to operate existing fossil fuel infrastructure and that all of their Investments and fossil fuels were severely at risk and I didn’t mention climate change to the very last slide and then their influences and there’s this thing called climate change policy is going to get more ambitious over time too I can’t tell you the exact Pace it’s only two simple one step back the policy is going to keep going forward too and that was the narrative Arc that actually worked for that audience and that’s been the narrative Arc that I’ve I’ve largely kept in most talks about climate because what I find is the advanced majority of people who are in the audience you’re talking to sea level executive companies people with private Equity or solid wealth funds or Banks or militaries almost all of them believe that climate change is real and they need to do something about it what they lack is a bottom line argument to take to their organization that they can use to drive the right investment or change and one of the points of resistance there is that there’s a lot of disinformation there’s a lot of information that’s being published probably with the support of fossil fuel industry uh that that causes people to have a doubt or to resist or maybe to not take it so seriously uh you know a moment ago you mentioned that the Ukraine war has shaken Europe out of its complacency uh maybe given us a fresh Awakening as to the needs of you know the the the transatlantic Alliance and uh and the needed shift to new kinds of energy um but but we tend to work complacency if we’ve got a system that’s working we’re going to go focus on other problems and some some organizations are paid lavishly uh to to write lullabies right to tell us uh to tell us fairy tales that’ll cause us to kind of sleep fall back asleep or or not take this matter so urgently uh a few weeks ago I sent you a report from the Manhattan Institute that was um raising the issue of all the other costs associated with manufacturing electric vehicles how electric vehicles and uh renewable energy have a cost associated with manufacturing that we don’t often take into account and while that report was interesting it’s actually really well written report it’s very persuasive what I noticed in reading it is we’ll give me a comparison give me an Apples to Apples comparison on the cost the total cost of manufacturing and installation and deployment and then operation and end of life cycle and the artfully avoided that because I think when you do that analysis fossil fuels don’t look great and they don’t compare over time and Ice engines you know traditional internal combustion cars also don’t look favorable to electric vehicles so in isolation you can find you know reasons to resist or reasons to deny um but when you try to do an accurate uh point-by-point comparison which is harder to do than it sounds because that information is not always available but talk to me a little bit about disinformation and what you run into when you’re out there spreading this message of the cost benefit analysis yeah we’re going to do a lot and a lot of it actually is is mostly you can actually get people sort of just look at the facts about today uh but there’s a disbelief there has been this belief that the economic trends of clean Technologies even cheaper will persist and some of the leading think tanks I mean the International Energy agency is actually a prime culprit in this and not yeah so few organization they just have sort of a status quo bias right a lot of forecasters do but I’ve I no longer spend a lot of my time engaging with disinfo because what I found what the data shows is that most people make up their mind on issues like this emotionally and based on tribe then they go seek data to confirm what they believe so there will always be a Bjorn lombork out there or a Michael Schoenberg out there and it doesn’t there’s of spending my time on that is just not productive what is more interesting is spending my time with a bank that is was lending to Coal power plants and showing them these plants are going to go out of business they’re going to bust before they pay you back and getting them to shift you know billions of dollars of investment elsewhere which I’ve done right because those entities that are just bottom line oriented and that are willing to take sort of a cold hard look at things I think are amenable to these sorts of of economic arguments and now now that the tide has turned like not fast enough but we spent how you look at it in 2022 on clean energy deployment just capex we’re going to send between 1 and 1.4 trillion dollars Tran whose definition you use all fossil fuel capex will be about 650 maybe 700 billion dollars we are now spending more not just solar wind batteries and EVS basically we’re not having more on that then we’re spending on oil and gas as far as new capital investment per year and that’s never going to go back never that exactly doubling time on clean energy investment is like every four years right now so we would like things to go faster um but the fossil fuel companies are finding a revert action on this I mean I do think part of this is also um you know as as we look at things like energy production as we look at automation of society um you know resource allocation you know with with sort of systems design you know there needs to be sort of some green field thinking in terms of motivations here you know I mean if you look back in the 70s and 80s when we knew just um the the qual quality of our air and fossil fuel you know burning what that was doing to you know in terms of pollution and the 70s there was a very big environmental Awakening but you know we we were willing to absorb seven to ten million deaths a year from air quality uh you know degradation from fossil fuels but there seems to be sort of this broader Awakening in in that um you know if we’re going to deploy these long-term large systemic um things that they they need to have a more net positive outcome on society as well I think this is part of the sort of generational shift yeah what’s interesting about what Mez just taught us which I think is really worth underscoring for our audience is is really he said two things one is most people have a hard time envisioning exponential change right we we’ve heard that again and again from people like Ray Kurzweil so that’s a pretty familiar Trope but when you’re confronted with the facts of exponential change it’s extremely hard to Envision that and the proof of that is what Mez said in the beginning of this even his most Sunny optimistic forecasts in his first book turned out to be wildly below the actual trajectory that unfolded right so that happens quite often with exponential change most people can’t Envision it and then the tendency is to get skeptical about it right is the tenant the natural reaction is to say come on that can’t be right that can’t be true but the second thing that Mez just said which I think is really interesting and goes kind of Builds on the point you’re making Brett is you got to pick your audience uh what he doesn’t do is waste time as he doesn’t waste time with the climate deniers anymore he doesn’t waste time trying to engage with them or persuade them or get into you know uh scraps on Twitter on Twitter or other social media platforms instead find a high value audience a high leverage audience and devote your resources in time to persuading them because that’s where you’re really going to make a material difference no I think that I think that’s important yeah um uh Miz you know we’ve only we’ve got a few minutes left before we finish up here so I you know I’d like to get a little bit um bigger in scope you know and I’d like you to put your sci-fi hat on here and um you know um throw yourself into the world of culture the culture series Etc but you know looking out 30 to 50 years what do you think will be um the greatest changes that Humanity will see you know what are you most Optimist Mystic about well first and foremost I am an optimist I think some things will get worse and there’s some scary events in the future I mean some events that horrify us but I think 30 to 50 years from now the median person on planet Earth will live a better life than they do today longer better education Better Health Care more freedom is my best guess um I I think a lot of what’s going to change lives the most is still the digital technology we still have not reached 100 saturation of you know pocket devices with speech recognition translation between every language and access to all the world’s knowledge and a built-in educational assistant uh and so I think that’s a huge one I think the role of AI as cognitive prosthesis uh is massive I’m not too worried about AI as entities or uh you know AI takeover but I think uh one way to look at I was talking with uh Sam Alvin atop AI is that you know today we you have people writing term papers using gpt3 and I think uh down the road I mean this is a short story uh I’m coming out you’ll have people who say uh were there people use Dolly to make images you’ll be able to say design me a house uh 5 bedroom Rambler split level mid-century modern uh with sort of a Moroccan theme and it’ll do that where you’ll have beyond that at some point we’ll have uh physicists and chemists like we already have a little bit of work of AI helping us with uh drug design helping us with materials design we’re always going to validate these things in the real world but I think AI is going to improve our rate of innovation and intellectual production and I think that’s a huge huge benefit for Humanity and in addition to that we’ll solve issues at the bottom of the ladder I think the average person on planet Earth will be better fed have access to clean water more basic medicine more shelter and more of an energy that’s great mess it’s so nice what you just did there was no keep them to tie together two Trends or two themes that we heard so much in our in this show uh we’ve heard so much in previous episodes about uh dystopian Futures you know the idea that science fiction and particularly in science fiction movies it’s a lot easier to portray a dystopia than it is to portray a Utopia Utopias tend to be boring and they’re not great drama and so Hollywood doesn’t focus on those as much um you know dystopia is scary and it motivates people and it creates conflict and drama but we what you just shared is a vision of of constant incremental improvements and it’s probably worth putting that in the context of that’s also been the story of the past 100 years and frankly the past 1 000 years although we don’t tend to notice it because we tend to notice those big events the big conflicts the big setbacks uh the hardships and so on you know just in the last 20 years uh um about a billion people have been raised out of extreme poverty into a kind of middle class you know and and probably not the middle class that we’re we’re aware of here in the United States but that’s a significant achievement right that’s a huge achievement on the planet Earth it’s happening in places that are far from the United States so most Americans don’t notice that and they tend to focus on what’s near to them which might not be the same story um but I think it’s really great to keep that vision of ever growing incremental progress forward it’s great to keep that vision in mind but that’s cool as a science fiction author you’re not going for the easy points here you’re going for the toughest story of all the hardest narrative to tell well that’s why inside we actually have terrible things happen you gotta have the reader has to have a reason to trim the page there’s got to be tension yeah so I don’t I don’t criticize sci-fi authors for adding dark stuff that’s why Nexus is the way that it is it’s a Trilogy is like there’s constantly fear that horrible things can happen in the main characters of the world and bad things do have a lot of the protagonists uh while overall if you read the books the world gets better yeah I mean listen this is hard white into humans we want the story of redemption we want the story of Salvation we want the story of Resurrection you’re going to some really really core like beliefs that are hardwired into human beings I think maybe on an unconscious level um so yeah that that drama that conflict makes it a good read But ultimately things are getting better and that’s a super positive way to wrap the show I think that this has been a really fun it has been um it’s fun it’s great to finally get to talk to you again miss hey um what are you working on now that you want to share with uh with our audience that that’s interesting over the next couple of years so I’ve been investing in crime energy startups for the last eight years I’m watching my own uh Venture Fund in climate Tech it’s the best time ever despite Global recession and so on this is a booming area so just gonna keep getting hotter and to hear more from me about that uh soon I think there’s going to be like I mean the spend on climate mitigation and you know infrastructure resilience and adaptation as you say it’s got to be trillions of dollars over the next uh um you know uh decade or so so a huge opportunity indeed um and uh how can people find out more about what you’re doing and follow your uh your activity go to our website grammaznam.com or follow me on Twitter res fantastic well Miz thanks for joining us again on the futurists and you know please stay in touch and uh you know if you have some really interesting initiatives that you’re launching let us know we’ll make sure we weave it into our news and activity that we do on the show will do thanks Brad thanks Rob really fun man good to see you take care all right that’s it for the futurist this week um if you like the show please feel free to leave us a review uh preferably a five-star review we’re getting some really phenomenal traction now the futurist is now in the uh you know top two percent of uh um podcasts globally so fantastic attraction um and tell people about it share it on social media you know um uh and so forth that all helps but uh we’ll uh we’ll be back with you next week with another episode of the futurist until then we’ll see you in the future [Music] well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on Instagram and Twitter at futuristpodcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions you’d like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we’ll see you in the future [Music] foreign foreign