AI transcript
0:00:07 PUSHKIN
0:00:11 Hey, it’s Jacob.
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0:01:24 There are three statements that are all true.
0:01:27 Statement number one, the world is awful.
0:01:32 This one is pretty self-explanatory, no need to dwell.
0:01:37 Statement number two, the world is better than it used to be.
0:01:43 This one, in my experience, tends to generate pushback that ranges from mild skepticism to
0:01:45 outright hostility.
0:01:49 And yet, along many dimensions, it is clearly true.
0:01:53 You know, just in the past few decades, the infant mortality rate around the world has
0:01:59 fallen by a lot, as has the share of people living in extreme poverty, literacy rates
0:02:04 are going up around the world, lots of things are getting better.
0:02:06 So that is statement number two.
0:02:11 And then finally, statement number three, the world can be better.
0:02:14 The world can be better than it is now.
0:02:21 This one, I find, when I say it, people will sort of go along with it, but without conviction,
0:02:22 right?
0:02:26 Like, maybe theoretically, the world can be better, but they don’t really believe it.
0:02:32 And yet, as list item number two reminds us, the world is better than it used to be in
0:02:33 many ways.
0:02:34 It’s true.
0:02:44 The world really can get better.
0:02:46 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:02:49 My guest today is Hannah Richie.
0:02:55 Hannah is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data, which is an amazing
0:03:01 online publication, home of many great graphs about the world.
0:03:06 And Hannah is also the author of the relatively new book, Not the End of the World, How We
0:03:11 Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.
0:03:15 The book uses that three-part framework I just talked about.
0:03:19 Things are bad, things are better than they used to be, things can be better than they
0:03:20 are now.
0:03:26 And it presents a fact-based, non-moralistic set of approaches to solving some of the world’s
0:03:28 big problems.
0:03:34 In our conversation, Hannah and I wound up focusing on food, focusing on the way we eat.
0:03:39 Because the way we eat is really tied up with a lot of the big problems that Hannah focuses
0:03:45 on in the book, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and of course climate change.
0:03:49 But to start, I asked her about part two of her framework, that idea that the world is
0:03:51 better than it used to be.
0:03:57 In particular, I was curious why she thinks that idea generates so much pushback.
0:04:03 It’s interesting because when you say, when I say in my experience, the world is much
0:04:09 better than it used to be, people don’t believe me or they get mad.
0:04:12 Which is interesting.
0:04:14 Has that been your experience at all?
0:04:20 Yeah, I think the key thing about this framework is that you really need to be able to hold
0:04:23 all three things in your head at the same time.
0:04:25 And I think naturally this is very difficult for us to do.
0:04:31 I think as soon as anyone says anything positive, our mind automatically goes to the negative.
0:04:32 Right?
0:04:38 So if I say we’ve made amazing progress on reducing global hunger, your automatic reaction
0:04:41 is to go to, well, yeah, but there’s still 800 million people that are hungry.
0:04:43 Which is also absolutely true, right?
0:04:48 But there is this pool in us and it has definitely had that reaction from the book, that there
0:04:54 is this gut reaction of wanting to counter it with the kind of almost cynical or protective
0:04:58 kind of blanket of, well, we shouldn’t be complacent about this because we still got
0:04:59 a massive problem.
0:05:01 Sometimes it goes even farther than that.
0:05:03 I mean, that is certainly true.
0:05:06 And that is more easy to understand, right?
0:05:10 Because as you say, one shouldn’t be complacent, one shouldn’t just live here comfortably in
0:05:13 the developed world and say, oh, everything’s great.
0:05:19 But people don’t even want to believe that things are good here relative to 100 years
0:05:20 ago.
0:05:24 And that one is a little bit harder to understand.
0:05:29 Like why do you think people don’t believe that things are better than they were 100
0:05:30 years ago?
0:05:31 Say.
0:05:33 I mean, I think one thing is that we just don’t look at data, right?
0:05:35 You can only see this through data, right?
0:05:39 You’re never going to get this in the news because the news covers what’s happened in
0:05:40 the last hour in the world.
0:05:41 So it’s an event, right?
0:05:43 It’s an event that can make a headline.
0:05:44 It’s a natural disaster.
0:05:45 It’s a war.
0:05:46 It’s a murder.
0:05:51 It’s a really, really bad event, which is why the, one of the reasons why the news skews
0:05:57 negative, whereas a lot of the progress we’ve made, you know, there’s no headline really
0:06:01 you can run because it happens gradually day after day after day after day.
0:06:07 It’s not a headline story that globally infant mortality has fallen a huge amount in the
0:06:11 last 30 years, even though in terms of human welfare, it’s one of the most important things
0:06:13 that happened this century so far, right?
0:06:14 Yeah.
0:06:18 And I think that’s true for like most of our progress stories.
0:06:22 They happen incrementally over time, but when you add that up over decades, you just
0:06:26 have this like profound change that’s happened in the world.
0:06:30 And I think because it’s just out of, out of pace with the news cycle, we just don’t
0:06:31 get it, right?
0:06:35 We just don’t see it, especially in rich countries in the world.
0:06:41 We often have this patronising perception that the rest of the world has stagnated or
0:06:43 hasn’t moved forward, right?
0:06:49 So we think, okay, things might be okay where I am, but you know, countries in Africa or
0:06:54 countries in Asia, they’re just as poor and bad off as they were 50 years ago.
0:06:57 But actually they are, child mortality rates have fallen.
0:07:01 Poor kids are getting vaccinated, hunger is down, poverty is down.
0:07:05 So I think we have this perception that many countries in the world are stuck where they
0:07:06 were 50 years ago.
0:07:07 And that’s just not true.
0:07:11 And it’s because we often, again, don’t see these stories in the news.
0:07:17 They’re either, our news in the US or Europe is very US or Europe orientated and the stuff
0:07:22 we hear from other parts of the world, again, tend to be these negative stories.
0:07:30 So the book, the book does talk about a lot of stuff that’s wrong, right?
0:07:38 The book is certainly not Pollyanna-ish, I would say.
0:07:46 But it approaches it with a sort of practical like let’s figure out how to solve this framework.
0:07:52 And you step through most of the big things that seem terribly wrong or many of the big
0:07:59 things that seem terribly wrong, climate change, overfishing, deforestation, etc.
0:08:05 I want to talk at some length about one chapter in particular, because as you say in the book,
0:08:08 it’s sort of a nexus.
0:08:14 It’s a subject that touches on all of these other subjects, really, and that is food.
0:08:18 In part, obviously climate change is the other one that is sort of this grand thing, but
0:08:26 food is very important and very under discussed in the context of climate change, right?
0:08:28 So let’s talk about food at some length.
0:08:36 And let’s use that framework that you use more generally with the world is much better
0:08:41 than it used to be in many ways, the world is still bad in many ways, and the world can
0:08:42 be better.
0:08:43 Let’s apply that to food.
0:08:49 So how is food much better than it used to be?
0:08:56 So when you look at it through a human hunger lens, so today around just under 10% of the
0:09:00 world are still go hungry, which means they just don’t get enough calories to eat.
0:09:02 So that’s around 800 million people.
0:09:04 That’s the still very bad piece.
0:09:05 That’s the still very bad piece.
0:09:06 Yeah.
0:09:11 But if you were to go back a century, you know, the share of the world that go hungry was
0:09:13 way, way higher than it was.
0:09:17 Is there, are there credible estimates for what it was 100 years ago?
0:09:23 The long term data on this is more shaky, I’d say, but you’re, you’re definitely talking
0:09:28 about in most regions, well over a third, if not more people were not getting enough calories
0:09:30 to eat.
0:09:32 Well over a third as opposed to 10%.
0:09:33 So that is improvement.
0:09:39 I mean, what if you go back, if you go back 200 years, what is the rough estimate of what
0:09:42 percentage of people on Earth were not getting enough to eat?
0:09:46 I mean, I’d say probably even higher still.
0:09:52 And I’d say most of the improvements in food and agricultural productivity have came really
0:09:56 in the last century, but in particular in the last 50 years.
0:10:01 So if you were to look at hunger rates a century ago or two centuries ago, they’d all be very,
0:10:02 very high.
0:10:06 And again, I’d say estimates are fuzzy, but you’d say at least well over a third, if not
0:10:09 over half of people weren’t getting enough food to eat.
0:10:14 So as compared to today where it’s something like 90% of people are getting enough food
0:10:17 to eat.
0:10:22 So, so I mean, obviously there are a few key breakthroughs in like getting more food per
0:10:26 acre of land, per unit of land, right?
0:10:30 Nitrogen fertilizer and then the Haber-Bosch process, which weirdly we just talked about
0:10:35 on the show, for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer.
0:10:40 And then there’s this other moment, a later moment that you talk about in the book, which
0:10:45 is basically one guy, one of these amazing one guy changes the world stories, and it’s
0:10:46 Norman Borlaug.
0:10:48 So tell me about Norman Borlaug.
0:10:57 So Norman Borlaug was a kind of agricultural scientist and he was basically recruited initially
0:11:02 to go to Mexico to work out how Mexicans could grow more food per unit of land.
0:11:07 So how to increase agricultural productivity or crop yields in Mexico.
0:11:12 And he came at this for a genetic reading lens or trying to work out what combination
0:11:18 of crop strains might be able to produce this.
0:11:20 And it was a very long process, there’s a lot of trial and error, right?
0:11:24 Just to be clear at what this is like the 60s, this is not like GMO.
0:11:25 This is pre-GMO, right?
0:11:31 This is just like old school Mendelian crosses, farmer hybrid like that, like the old school
0:11:32 style.
0:11:33 Yeah.
0:11:34 Old school.
0:11:39 So lots of trial and error, lots of trying a crop, not performing well, trying another
0:11:41 crop, not performing well.
0:11:44 And kind of we got to the stage where he was kind of sent out on this mission and kind
0:11:48 of left there as like, oh, well, he’ll be over there trying to do this.
0:11:52 We’re kind of skeptical that it’ll work, but you know, he’s got a job over there.
0:11:53 Good luck.
0:11:54 Yeah.
0:11:55 And he finally cracks it.
0:11:59 And it makes a massive difference to crop yields in Mexico.
0:12:01 You’re talking about a large, large increase.
0:12:07 Mexico moved from being a net importer of food to a net exporter of food.
0:12:12 And from there, this really kickstarted what we frame as a kind of agricultural revolution.
0:12:16 And he went to South Asia and in Pakistan and India and did the same, right?
0:12:21 So again, their crop yields were extremely low during that period.
0:12:27 There was lots of concerns about especially food shortage in that region, but more broadly
0:12:34 there was lots of concerns at the time about a global food shortage, huge famines, huge
0:12:35 levels of hunger.
0:12:36 Right.
0:12:43 Well, and you talk about Paul Ehrlich, the famous biologist who in retrospect looks quite
0:12:44 bad, right?
0:12:48 Who wrote this bestselling book essentially saying, we are screwed already.
0:12:51 It’s baked in, a billion people are going to starve.
0:12:55 We just got to figure out who, because there’s no way we can grow enough food to feed all
0:12:57 the people who have just been born.
0:12:58 Right.
0:13:03 So 1968, he comes out with this book, The Population Bomb, and yes, that was his thesis.
0:13:05 There’s just far too many people on the planet.
0:13:10 We’ve got this major global food crisis coming and many, many people are going to die from
0:13:11 this.
0:13:12 That didn’t happen.
0:13:16 And one of the reasons it didn’t happen was because of Norman Blerog and the Green Revolution.
0:13:23 So we vastly underestimated how much we could increase crop yields across the world.
0:13:28 So staying for a moment on the theme of the world is much better than it used to be.
0:13:32 One thing that I didn’t know before I read your book that I learned from the book is
0:13:42 that the world has passed peak fertilizer use and has passed or almost passed peak land
0:13:48 use for agriculture, which was surprising to me and encouraging.
0:13:51 Tell me about those facts.
0:13:56 So peak fertilizer use, I wouldn’t say definitively that we’re past the peak.
0:13:59 I think we’re kind of being on this kind of plateau.
0:14:04 We saw really, really steep rise in global fertilizer use in the 1990s and especially
0:14:05 the early 2000s.
0:14:11 But if you look over the last decade or so, it’s kind of been leveling off, which I
0:14:12 think goes against people’s intuitions.
0:14:15 I think they’d think we’re just still going through the roof.
0:14:20 We’re using far more fertilizer than ever before.
0:14:25 No, we look like we’re kind of stabilizing and part of that is due to some countries
0:14:26 are still in the increase.
0:14:29 And I actually think it’s good that they’re still in the increase, as you said, like one
0:14:35 of the key innovations that have helped to feed the world has been the use of fertilizer
0:14:38 and some countries still don’t have enough.
0:14:42 But some countries definitely overuse it and overuse it to the point where it’s just not
0:14:45 even cost effective for farmers to be using that much.
0:14:50 But over the last few decades, some countries have dramatically reduced fertilizer use without
0:14:52 sacrificing yields.
0:14:58 So fertilizer use in Europe in particular has gone down and yields have either stayed
0:15:01 the same or have continued to increase.
0:15:06 Even in China, so China, again, looks like it’s now past peak fertilizer use.
0:15:11 Fertilizer use and pesticide use in China has now been falling and I actually think that
0:15:13 that could fall quite quickly.
0:15:19 And part of the way that China’s done that has actually been through large scale education
0:15:23 programs for farmers on how to use this stuff more effectively.
0:15:28 And again, it’s cost effective for a farmer to learn that.
0:15:32 We’re about to get to why the world is still bad in terms of food.
0:15:39 But before we do, is there anything else we should do on why the world is much better?
0:15:44 I think what people underestimate, and I actually think this is a good and a bad thing.
0:15:49 I think people just underestimate how good we’ve got at producing food.
0:15:53 I think they don’t have a sense of scale in their heads about how much food we can actually
0:15:55 produce.
0:16:02 So if you say that the average person in the world needs around 2000 to 2500 calories per
0:16:11 person per day, depending on their size and gender, etc., because we know that some people
0:16:15 don’t get enough calories and some people probably over-consume a bit, right?
0:16:19 We might assume that that just about levels off, right, balances each other out.
0:16:22 So we maybe produce just enough calories for everyone in the world.
0:16:25 So maybe two and a half thousand per person per day.
0:16:31 The reality is that we probably produce around twice as much as that, right?
0:16:36 So you’re probably talking about four and a half to 5000 calories per person per day
0:16:39 if you were to split it all equally.
0:16:43 So we just are capable of producing huge amounts of food.
0:16:49 So we produce enough food if we didn’t waste any to feed twice as many people as are on
0:16:54 Earth today, which is probably more people than we’ll ever live on Earth at once, right?
0:16:56 We’re probably not going to get to 2X current population.
0:16:57 Right.
0:17:01 So if you were to get to zero waste food systems, and again, this is not just about, I think
0:17:07 what people think about as food waste, but if you were to have a really, really efficient
0:17:14 distribution system, we could definitely feed 10 billion, which is what people are looking
0:17:16 at in the future.
0:17:22 So right, so that’s happy from the point of view of there’s definitely enough food.
0:17:27 We have the technology to know how the land to grow as much food as we will need to feed
0:17:29 people when we hit peak population.
0:17:34 Okay, let’s talk about what’s bad.
0:17:37 What’s bad with food today?
0:17:43 And I think the place to start there is how much of the Earth we use for food, and in
0:17:47 particular, how much of the habitable land mass of the Earth we use for food.
0:17:48 It’s a lot.
0:17:53 So if you were to take the world’s habitable land, which is basically land that’s not desert
0:17:59 or not ice, then we use around half of that for farming.
0:18:03 Yeah, half the Earth’s land mass we use for growing food.
0:18:08 What share of that is for cows, either for growing cows, you know, rangeland or for growing
0:18:10 food to feed cows?
0:18:15 So for cows specifically, it’s probably around 60%.
0:18:22 60% of all agricultural land, so more than a quarter of the habitable land mass of the
0:18:27 Earth goes to growing cows and growing food for cows.
0:18:29 Yeah, exactly.
0:18:32 But that, I think, is the central wild fact of your book to me, right?
0:18:37 I think as I read this chapter of your book and the book more broadly, because this seems
0:18:42 like the central chapter, cows come out as the villain.
0:18:44 Is that a fair read?
0:18:46 I think that’s a fair read.
0:18:47 Yeah.
0:18:48 I mean, villain is a moral word, right?
0:18:54 And I would like to use a non-moral as my fault, but I appreciate that you are not moralistic
0:18:55 in your telling.
0:18:57 It’s one of the things I particularly like about this book.
0:19:01 It’s not like, here are the evil people and I’m the good person exposing them.
0:19:07 It’s a much more sort of clinical, what feels to me more rational approach of just like,
0:19:09 look, let’s just lay out the facts.
0:19:16 But when you lay out the facts, I’m like, cows, man, cows, like, if we just, if it wasn’t
0:19:20 for cows, I don’t want to say we’d be fine, like we’d still have the energy transition
0:19:24 fossil fuel, but it seems like if we could solve beef, we could solve a lot.
0:19:25 Yeah.
0:19:31 If we were to significantly reduce global beef consumption, it would have a massive
0:19:35 environmental impact and a positive environmental impact.
0:19:41 So when you look at the range of environmental problems we face, beef and cattle come out
0:19:42 really strongly.
0:19:45 So it’s like a really large driver of climate change.
0:19:49 It’s the leading driver of deforestation.
0:19:56 As a result of deforestation, it’s then one of the leading drivers of biodiversity loss.
0:20:01 So yes, cattle and beef consumption specifically straddle a large number of our problems.
0:20:06 And then for many of these problems are really like the leading cause.
0:20:12 And can you just articulate the link between beef and climate change a little more?
0:20:13 Yeah.
0:20:18 So there’s two key ways that beef contributes to climate change.
0:20:19 One is about land use, right?
0:20:26 So when we have deforestation or other land use changes, that’s a driver of CO2 emissions,
0:20:31 so that contributes to CO2 through land use changes.
0:20:34 And then the second one is really about cow’s burping, right?
0:20:41 So cows burp and they burp methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
0:20:44 So that’s the second way that they mostly contribute.
0:20:49 There’s a third way, which is that their manure also releases greenhouse gases.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:55 I want to get to the world can be better section of the food conversation.
0:21:02 But before we do, like, so cows are clearly the biggest food problem, it seems.
0:21:09 Are there other, what else is on the very short list of big food related problems we
0:21:10 need to solve?
0:21:16 I mean, I think one final framing of the world as bad as it is now is that we still have
0:21:21 800 million people in the world don’t get enough food to eat.
0:21:26 And actually when you look at it beyond calories, so not just getting enough energy, but getting
0:21:31 enough of all of the micronutrients that we need, you’re actually talking about billions
0:21:35 of people in the world are defined as being malnourished.
0:21:41 So even if you can get enough calories and you can usually do that through staple crops
0:21:46 like cereals or cassava, et cetera, you might be able to get enough calories, but you’re
0:21:54 not getting the full spectrum of nutrients that we need.
0:21:58 After the break, we get to the the world can be better part of the conversation.
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0:23:06 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:23:11 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:23:12 future.
0:23:16 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:23:21 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:23:26 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co-founder
0:23:32 Steve Wozniak, or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:23:37 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from, from the very first CTO of
0:23:43 the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
0:23:49 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:23:53 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:23:55 They just broke this down.
0:24:00 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of 3 billion records?
0:24:02 They covered that too.
0:24:06 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:24:08 Listen to find out.
0:24:14 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:24:22 Okay, so let’s solve these problems.
0:24:28 Let’s start with people going hungry and not getting enough nutrition.
0:24:31 How do we solve that?
0:24:38 One key way is that, especially for many of the poorest countries in the world, we just
0:24:42 need to work again on the agricultural productivity problem.
0:24:46 And here I’m really specifically talking about Sub-Saharan Africa.
0:24:51 Most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa get very low crop yields, much lower than the global
0:24:55 average and much, much, much lower than, say, you’d get in the US or Europe.
0:25:02 Are there examples of places, if you set aside this kind of one-off green revolution, are
0:25:07 there examples of places where crop yields go up independent of economic growth or is
0:25:13 the typical story that economic growth sort of causes crop yields to go up when countries
0:25:15 are not at the economic frontier?
0:25:20 It is very strongly correlated.
0:25:23 So as countries get richer, yes, you tend to get increased productivity.
0:25:27 But I think there are still differences there.
0:25:33 I think government policies play a role, land reforms play a role, access to markets play
0:25:34 a role.
0:25:37 This is purely just about stimulate economic growth, and this happens.
0:25:43 There are things that governments can do to stimulate that and make that go faster.
0:25:49 Providing subsidies for farmers to be able to afford the crucial inputs like better seeds
0:25:53 or more fertilizer or irrigation really helps a lot.
0:25:57 That’s one key way to do it.
0:26:05 Okay, what are we going to do about meat and beef in particular?
0:26:12 So I think if we are to solve these big environmental problems, globally, we need to reduce meat
0:26:13 consumption.
0:26:19 I say globally because I think when I say reducing meat consumption, people say, “Oh,
0:26:24 should the person that’s eating a few kilograms a year and that’s crucial to their nutrition?
0:26:25 Should they be cutting back?”
0:26:26 And they always ask, “No.”
0:26:27 Right?
0:26:32 So we’re mostly talking about people in middle income to rich countries where meat consumption
0:26:33 is very high.
0:26:39 If we’re to solve these problems, we would need to reduce global meat consumption.
0:26:40 Yes.
0:26:46 I mean, that’s the, again, almost tautological answer of the way to solve the problem of
0:26:49 too much meat is to have people eat less meat.
0:26:50 But how do you do that?
0:26:56 You’re talking in the book about individual behavior change doesn’t matter basically in
0:26:57 the aggregate.
0:27:00 It may be useful for moral reasons or in the abstract.
0:27:05 But on the level of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, the things we’re talking
0:27:11 about here, it seems like individual behavior change is not going to do it.
0:27:19 So what are the macro moves that might drive things in the right direction?
0:27:23 So individual behavior change on its own is not going to change anything.
0:27:28 I still advocate for that, and I’m vegan myself, so I try to take that on.
0:27:32 I think people too often set up- You kind of have to be, right?
0:27:36 After writing that chapter, you kind of have to be.
0:27:37 Sure.
0:27:43 But I think people too often set up this false dichotomy of individual behavior change and
0:27:44 wider systemic change.
0:27:45 Fair.
0:27:47 Like, as an individual, you’re part of the system.
0:27:48 No, that’s fair.
0:27:49 I’m on the hook.
0:27:52 You’re putting me on the hook, and that’s totally reasonable.
0:27:58 So yes, even if you were to go vegan tomorrow, the world’s global meat consumption is not
0:28:00 going to notice.
0:28:08 I would say that what you choose to eat actually is one behavior change that actually can have
0:28:14 a small direct impact in some way, especially when you look at it in terms of animal welfare.
0:28:19 So you eat in less meat does actually potentially reduce the number of animals that are probably
0:28:23 raised in pretty poor conditions and killed for meat consumption.
0:28:25 Yes, that is plainly directly true.
0:28:32 I mean, the moral dimension of eating meat is real and significant, and we have not been
0:28:37 discussing that piece of it to this point, but clearly the individual choice about eating
0:28:43 meat, that moral dimension is obviously significant.
0:28:47 But it is notable in your book, and let’s just talk about this for a second.
0:28:49 It’s a little digressive, but let’s just do it here.
0:28:57 Like, you talk about which behavior changes people make are meaningful at what magnitude,
0:29:04 and clearly eating meat and even more so eating beef relative to other individual choices
0:29:06 is quite significant.
0:29:10 And I think it kind of punches above its weight in terms of what people think about.
0:29:14 So just for a minute, talk about that.
0:29:18 In terms of individual choices, what are things that are kind of underrated that people don’t
0:29:22 think about enough that make a big difference, and then what are things that are overrated
0:29:26 that people talk about or care about, but actually don’t really matter that much?
0:29:27 Right.
0:29:32 So the things that people overrate, and this is basically when you ask people what are
0:29:35 you doing for the environment, this is what they say.
0:29:42 They say they recycle, they get energy-efficient light bulbs, and they try to avoid single
0:29:43 use plastics.
0:29:47 Like, those are the key things that people say when you ask what they’re doing for the
0:29:48 environment.
0:29:51 The reality is that the impact that they have is tiny, right?
0:29:54 It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of your footprint.
0:29:55 Yeah.
0:29:56 Recycling wildly overrated, right?
0:29:57 Yeah.
0:30:02 It’s good for cans, but for everything else, it doesn’t matter really.
0:30:03 Right.
0:30:04 So, okay.
0:30:06 So what does matter?
0:30:07 Eating meat, what else?
0:30:12 What are other actual meaningful changes at least relative to the scale of one person?
0:30:17 So if you were to look at what makes up probably 80% of your footprint, it’s what you eat, and
0:30:20 the biggest thing you can do there is eat less meat and dairy.
0:30:25 In your house, it’s heating or cooling, so like, heating or air-con.
0:30:30 So if you have a gas boiler, switching to an electric heat pump would make a massive
0:30:32 difference to your footprint.
0:30:34 And then the other two big things are travel.
0:30:39 So like, if you have a car, your car is a massive part of your footprint.
0:30:43 So either, obviously, walking and cycling is best.
0:30:46 Going to an electric car is way better than a petrol car.
0:30:49 And then the final thing, if you fly, is flying.
0:30:55 And if you add up those things, you’re getting to the majority of your environmental footprint.
0:30:56 Good.
0:30:57 Okay.
0:30:59 Back to meat.
0:31:05 What do we do about meat on a non-individual level, right?
0:31:10 What are the macro ways we can reduce meat consumption?
0:31:16 So I’ll go to the macro, and then I’ll see why I think individuals play a role in that.
0:31:22 So when you look at the macro trends in meat consumption, globally they’re going up.
0:31:27 And even when you look at a country level, there are very, very few examples where meat
0:31:28 consumption is going down, right?
0:31:32 So we’re just really not making much progress on this problem.
0:31:33 We’re making regress.
0:31:35 And what about beef in particular?
0:31:39 I mean, presumably a shift from beef to chicken, obviously it’s not as good for the world as
0:31:44 a shift from beef to soy, but it’s pretty good, right?
0:31:49 And I feel like anecdotally, in the U.S., chicken has risen and beef has fallen, not
0:31:53 for environmental reasons, but for health reasons, basically, right?
0:31:54 People grew more wary of red meat.
0:31:57 Is that true empirically?
0:32:01 What has happened with beef consumption in America in the last, whatever, 50 years or
0:32:02 something?
0:32:03 Yeah, that’s true.
0:32:08 If you look at America or you look at Europe, red meat consumption, specifically beef consumption
0:32:12 has gone down a bit, and in its place, chicken consumption has gone up.
0:32:19 As you say, that switch is probably very underrated as a climate solution, right?
0:32:23 It actually makes a big difference to your footprint, switching from beef to chicken.
0:32:27 So environmentally, that’s a very, very good swap.
0:32:31 I’d argue that the animal welfare costs of that are the opposite, right?
0:32:36 If you value the life of a chicken at the same as you value the life of a cow, it’s clearly
0:32:38 much worse for animal welfare.
0:32:45 But yeah, I think this meat switching has been a key transition in many countries and
0:32:47 environmentally positive.
0:32:52 But globally, beef consumption is rising, presumably because as very poor people get
0:32:54 richer, they eat more meat, understandably.
0:32:55 Yeah.
0:32:56 Okay.
0:32:57 So still bad.
0:32:59 We’re not yet to how do we make it better?
0:33:00 Let’s get there.
0:33:01 What do we got to do?
0:33:03 Or how do we go in the right direction even?
0:33:08 So we’ve made little progress, and one of the reasons we’ve made little progress is because
0:33:14 people are not willing to switch to the previous alternatives we had as a protein source, right?
0:33:22 People were not switching from a beef burger to lentils or tofu or beans, right?
0:33:23 People just didn’t want to make that switch.
0:33:26 That seemed like a step backwards, right?
0:33:32 The way we solve this, and the only way I see that we solve this is to make a like for
0:33:38 like switch so that people can still have the beef burger or something really close to
0:33:41 a beef burger without the cow, right?
0:33:46 That’s the only way I see a route out of this or a way to reduce global meat consumption
0:33:52 is to basically produce meat substitutes that provide the same texture, the same nutrition,
0:33:57 the same experience, just without the cow or the chicken and much lower environmental
0:33:58 footprint.
0:34:01 It’s basically lab-grown meat.
0:34:06 Some of the plant-based meat substitutes I think are getting pretty good, although I’m
0:34:07 probably biased.
0:34:17 No, I mean, I eat a lot of impossible beef, certainly way more than beef-beef, but it’s
0:34:22 clearly not good enough, right?
0:34:26 I mean, you know, people are trying sort of sell culture.
0:34:31 Like sort of meat as a biotech problem is fundamentally what you’re talking about on
0:34:32 some level, right?
0:34:39 And it does seem like fundamentally that’s appealing because it doesn’t require people
0:34:43 to change their behavior ultimately, right?
0:34:48 Ultimately we want a solution based on people just acting indifferently or in their own
0:34:49 self-interest.
0:34:53 Like that’s the kind of solution I can believe in, right?
0:35:00 And you know, I’ve heard counterarguments that like, oh, people won’t trust it or people
0:35:03 are attached to, you know, beef that comes from an animal.
0:35:06 But I feel like that’s going to be the minority of people, right?
0:35:11 I feel like most people don’t care about any particular thing in the world and they just
0:35:13 want something like with energy.
0:35:15 They just want something that’s reliable and cheap.
0:35:23 And so if somebody could make lab-grown meat that was the same as beef and one penny cheaper,
0:35:26 you would win.
0:35:31 I think initially people might be hesitant and skeptical, but I think that’s the case
0:35:33 with most new technologies.
0:35:38 Like if you look at electric cars, for example, I think initially many, many people were skeptical
0:35:43 because they didn’t know anyone that had an electric car, right?
0:35:48 They didn’t know how it ran, whether you broke down on the highway, like was it easy
0:35:49 to charge?
0:35:50 Was it expensive to charge?
0:35:53 No one really knew that apart from a really small minority.
0:35:57 I think with electric vehicles, we’re now getting to the stage where most of us know
0:36:02 someone that has one and they get by fine and actually really like it.
0:36:06 And it feels like with new technologies like lab-grown meat, for example, it might be the
0:36:07 same.
0:36:13 Like uptake rates at the very start might be slow, but I think it would very slowly start
0:36:15 to become normalized.
0:36:18 And as you say, I think people at some point would just switch and they’d be very happy
0:36:22 to just have something that tastes like a burger, has a texture of a burger, as nutritious
0:36:23 as a burger.
0:36:24 I think cost will be key.
0:36:27 They will not pay more for it than they would for a beef burger.
0:36:32 So that’s really, really key is that we need to scale these technologies, but we also need
0:36:36 to make sure that they are undercutting the current cost of meat.
0:36:43 Well, you know, I talked to the guy who started Impossible Foods and he makes the point that
0:36:51 from first principles, meat made without animals should be cheaper, right?
0:36:54 For the same reason that animals are such a problem for the world, which is they’re
0:36:56 wildly inefficient.
0:37:01 Like yes, industrial agriculture has become very efficient at growing cows and at growing
0:37:02 the corn to feed cows.
0:37:04 But from first principles, it’s still crazy, right?
0:37:11 Like the fact that you only get one calorie of beef for every whatever, 95 calories of
0:37:16 corn you put in and you have to raise a whole cow, like theoretically, there should be a
0:37:22 much more efficient way to get beef than going through all that work of making a cow, right?
0:37:27 And so that makes me optimistic in an abstract way, if not in a practical way.
0:37:28 Yeah, I think so.
0:37:30 I think this is also a time thing.
0:37:32 Like I think we’ll get there.
0:37:34 I think it’s really about how long it takes us.
0:37:40 I think what’s key about agriculture is we’ve been refining and optimizing these processes
0:37:45 over a really, really long period of time, whereas these new technologies are very much
0:37:46 in their infancy.
0:37:47 Yeah.
0:37:50 Well, that makes me less hopeful when you put it that way.
0:37:55 I mean, I guess I am somewhat less hopeful about meat, right?
0:38:01 Like the energy transition seems to be going better than almost anyone would have expected
0:38:05 10 years ago, right?
0:38:07 We’re not having a meat transition.
0:38:09 It’s just not happening yet.
0:38:14 Can you help me feel better about it?
0:38:20 I’m not sure because I mean, I think the theme that also comes from my book again is that
0:38:26 I think, again, I’m optimistic on the energy story and I think we’re making pretty rapid
0:38:29 progress there and more progress in people imagine.
0:38:35 I think the way people discuss the food chapter in my book is kind of like the pessimistic
0:38:37 side of the story is hard.
0:38:43 So if we manage to solve the food problem, if we fundamentally manage to come up with
0:38:49 like good, cheap, fake meat, right, that’s actually the answer.
0:38:51 How will the world change?
0:38:54 What is the happy outcome there?
0:39:00 So I think if we were to somehow magically end beef production tomorrow, one is that
0:39:05 we would dramatically reduce the amount of land that we’re using for agriculture, which
0:39:12 means that we could really start to restore old ecosystems and our habitats that we basically
0:39:14 took over with agriculture land, right?
0:39:17 So that has biodiversity benefits.
0:39:22 And it also has benefits for climate change because you can start to restore and sequester
0:39:28 carbon that we previously lost by deforestation that land or taking away the wild grasslands.
0:39:31 So that’s a huge, huge positive.
0:39:36 Because beef is also the leading cause of deforestation, globally, you would also see
0:39:39 a significant drop in rates of deforestation.
0:39:44 It wouldn’t go to zero because there are other causes, but it would at least significantly
0:39:45 reduce those rates.
0:39:50 And then the final one is I think it would have a significant impact on our greenhouse
0:39:51 gas emissions and climate change.
0:39:58 So if we were to get rid of that methane, so for context, livestock, and most of this
0:40:04 is cattle, contributes around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
0:40:05 Wow.
0:40:06 That’s basically cow burps.
0:40:10 It’s cow burps and some of this land just changed, but again, a lot of that would go
0:40:11 away.
0:40:12 Yeah.
0:40:20 So I think you would at least cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 5% to 10%.
0:40:28 So if we zoom out even more, at the end of your book, you sort of tell the happy story
0:40:29 right?
0:40:37 Like, if things go well, if we make good on the things can be better piece of your framework.
0:40:43 If things go well, not just with food, but more generally with the big global problems
0:40:48 you talk about in the book, what will the world look like?
0:40:51 Well, you say in 50 years in the book, right?
0:40:52 I think there’s two sides to this.
0:40:57 And I think it’s really important that we consider both sides as an environmentalist.
0:41:01 I mean, again, we always focus on just the environmental metrics.
0:41:05 So it’d be very easy for me to sit here and say, you know, just the best outcome would
0:41:09 be that there’s no deforestation and we stopped climate change, right?
0:41:13 And again, I think those would be huge victories, but at the same time, we also need to make
0:41:19 sure that we’re providing a good life for the nine or 10 billion people that will be
0:41:20 on the planet.
0:41:28 So, when I’m an old lady, what success would look like is that we have nine or 10 billion
0:41:35 people that don’t live in extreme poverty, that are not hungry, have access to energy
0:41:43 for a good life, they have access to healthcare and we’ve eradicated diseases and they have
0:41:45 clean water and sanitation.
0:41:51 And we’ve done that, so we’ve driven that huge amount of global human development while
0:41:53 also reducing our environmental impacts.
0:41:57 So we’ve managed to stop climate change and there will still be climate damages there
0:41:58 to be clear.
0:42:02 We’re not going to just solve this and there’ll be no impacts whatsoever, but we can manage
0:42:09 to deal with those negative impacts and we’ve really just freed up a huge amount of the
0:42:12 planet to be restored for biodiversity and nature.
0:42:17 So we’ve stopped cutting down forests and forests are re-growing and we’ve taken out
0:42:23 a lot of the farmland that we currently use and that’s now being restored for wild ecosystems.
0:42:30 So we have nine or 10 billion people living really, really good high welfare lives and
0:42:38 we’re using a much smaller amount of the planet in order to do that.
0:42:48 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:42:49 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:42:54 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:42:55 future.
0:42:59 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:43:04 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:43:09 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co-founder
0:43:15 Steve Wozniak or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:43:20 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from, from the very first CTO of
0:43:27 the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
0:43:32 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:43:37 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:43:38 They just broke this down.
0:43:43 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of 3 billion records?
0:43:45 They covered that too.
0:43:50 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:43:51 Listen to find out.
0:43:58 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:44:04 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:44:10 What’s your favorite dataset?
0:44:12 At the moment, the renewable energy data is at.
0:44:19 I think the biggest transition that’s making me most optimistic about the future is the
0:44:24 rapid growth in renewables and the plummeting costs of those energy sources.
0:44:29 It’s amazing because even, I don’t know, I did a story seven years ago or something
0:44:33 about, oh my God, solar got so cheap and people are getting solar power who don’t even care
0:44:35 about the environment just because it’s cheaper.
0:44:38 And then since then, it’s gotten so much cheaper.
0:44:39 It’s just not stopping.
0:44:40 It’s not stopping.
0:44:45 But I think combined with that, I think the next stage which is making me equally optimistic
0:44:50 is now the falling cost of batteries.
0:44:56 What’s a dataset that you wish existed that doesn’t exist?
0:45:03 Just a really, really good global dataset on biodiversity.
0:45:07 And by that, I mean for every species in the world, but just really far away from that
0:45:10 because there’s so many species.
0:45:14 And that was one of the struggles for the biodiversity chapter is that I tried to base
0:45:20 all of my thinking on data and when the data scarce, it’s hard to get a really clear picture
0:45:21 of what’s going on.
0:45:25 So I think that’s one dataset I would love is just what on earth’s going on with global
0:45:26 biodiversity.
0:45:31 What’s one thing I should do if I go to Falkirk?
0:45:35 We’re famous for this massive wheel.
0:45:36 So we have a wheel.
0:45:37 Like a wheel.
0:45:38 It’s called the Falkirk wheel.
0:45:39 Right.
0:45:40 When you say famous.
0:45:45 I mean, that’s the only thing we have and the queen opened it.
0:45:47 So she was there, the opening of it.
0:45:54 So in Falkirk, we have these canal systems with boats and we have this magical wheel
0:46:01 where basically it takes the boat from like ground level up to like a massive, massive
0:46:03 height so you can get on the new canal.
0:46:04 Wow.
0:46:05 Like a ferris wheel.
0:46:08 Oh, should I picture like a ferris wheel for a boat?
0:46:09 Exactly.
0:46:15 But the exciting thing is that turning this massive wheel with this boat on it takes less
0:46:18 energy than boiling a kettle.
0:46:19 Wow.
0:46:20 So it utilizes.
0:46:21 That is very on brand for you.
0:46:22 Yeah.
0:46:24 So it utilizes potential energy and converts it into kinetic.
0:46:27 So it’s this really energy efficient wheel.
0:46:28 Wow.
0:46:29 Okay.
0:46:34 Do you have any graph related pet peeves?
0:46:37 Oh, a lot.
0:46:42 One key one is that people just make them far too complicated.
0:46:48 I think people try to cram as much information in as they can or they think that it makes
0:46:55 them look smarter to make a more complicated graph and that a line chart is just too simple
0:47:00 and actually the simple line chart or the simple bar chart that people can understand
0:47:02 is just way more effective.
0:47:03 Yeah.
0:47:07 So with time on the x-axis and the variable you care about on the y-axis.
0:47:08 Yeah.
0:47:09 That’s all you need.
0:47:10 Yeah.
0:47:11 I look for those all the time.
0:47:14 I’m always Googling like time series, whatever.
0:47:19 And it’s weird how hard it is to find a time series.
0:47:24 Your book is full of facts, one of the things I appreciate about the book.
0:47:30 What’s just like one fact, if you want to take one fact from the book and tell everybody,
0:47:35 what is it?
0:47:41 The price of solar power has fallen by around 90% in the last decade.
0:47:43 That is an amazing fact.
0:47:44 Yeah.
0:47:45 And very–
0:47:46 That’s a life-changing fact.
0:47:51 I mean, I think this is just going to define the energy transition that we just so crucially
0:47:53 need to solve climate change.
0:47:57 Without this change, I’d be super super pessimistic about this.
0:47:58 And with this change?
0:48:03 I’m cautiously optimistic.
0:48:07 London versus Edinburgh.
0:48:12 Edinburgh because people can understand what I’m saying.
0:48:13 Because you speak the language.
0:48:22 Because I speak the language, yeah.
0:48:26 Hannah Ritchie is the author of Not the End of the World and the deputy editor of Our
0:48:28 World in Data.
0:48:31 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:48:35 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sara Brugier.
0:48:39 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:48:54 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:48:56 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:49:00 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:49:02 future.
0:49:06 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:49:10 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:49:16 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co-founder
0:49:22 Steve Wozniak or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:49:25 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from.
0:49:32 From the very first CTO of the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic,
0:49:33 and DeepMind.
0:49:39 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:49:43 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:49:45 They just broke this down.
0:49:50 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of 3 billion records?
0:49:52 They covered that too.
0:49:56 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:49:58 Listen to find out.
0:50:02 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:00:11 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:00:16 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:00:17 future.
0:00:20 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:00:25 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:00:31 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and ripe, like Apple co-founder
0:00:37 Steve Wozniak or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:00:41 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from, from the very first CTO of
0:00:48 the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
0:00:54 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:00:58 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:01:00 They just broke this down.
0:01:05 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of three billion records?
0:01:07 They covered that, too.
0:01:11 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:01:13 Listen to find out.
0:01:20 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:01:24 There are three statements that are all true.
0:01:27 Statement number one, the world is awful.
0:01:32 This one is pretty self-explanatory, no need to dwell.
0:01:37 Statement number two, the world is better than it used to be.
0:01:43 This one, in my experience, tends to generate pushback that ranges from mild skepticism to
0:01:45 outright hostility.
0:01:49 And yet, along many dimensions, it is clearly true.
0:01:53 You know, just in the past few decades, the infant mortality rate around the world has
0:01:59 fallen by a lot, as has the share of people living in extreme poverty, literacy rates
0:02:04 are going up around the world, lots of things are getting better.
0:02:06 So that is statement number two.
0:02:11 And then finally, statement number three, the world can be better.
0:02:14 The world can be better than it is now.
0:02:21 This one, I find, when I say it, people will sort of go along with it, but without conviction,
0:02:22 right?
0:02:26 Like, maybe theoretically, the world can be better, but they don’t really believe it.
0:02:32 And yet, as list item number two reminds us, the world is better than it used to be in
0:02:33 many ways.
0:02:34 It’s true.
0:02:44 The world really can get better.
0:02:46 I’m Jacob Goldstein, and this is What’s Your Problem.
0:02:49 My guest today is Hannah Richie.
0:02:55 Hannah is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data, which is an amazing
0:03:01 online publication, home of many great graphs about the world.
0:03:06 And Hannah is also the author of the relatively new book, Not the End of the World, How We
0:03:11 Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.
0:03:15 The book uses that three-part framework I just talked about.
0:03:19 Things are bad, things are better than they used to be, things can be better than they
0:03:20 are now.
0:03:26 And it presents a fact-based, non-moralistic set of approaches to solving some of the world’s
0:03:28 big problems.
0:03:34 In our conversation, Hannah and I wound up focusing on food, focusing on the way we eat.
0:03:39 Because the way we eat is really tied up with a lot of the big problems that Hannah focuses
0:03:45 on in the book, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and of course climate change.
0:03:49 But to start, I asked her about part two of her framework, that idea that the world is
0:03:51 better than it used to be.
0:03:57 In particular, I was curious why she thinks that idea generates so much pushback.
0:04:03 It’s interesting because when you say, when I say in my experience, the world is much
0:04:09 better than it used to be, people don’t believe me or they get mad.
0:04:12 Which is interesting.
0:04:14 Has that been your experience at all?
0:04:20 Yeah, I think the key thing about this framework is that you really need to be able to hold
0:04:23 all three things in your head at the same time.
0:04:25 And I think naturally this is very difficult for us to do.
0:04:31 I think as soon as anyone says anything positive, our mind automatically goes to the negative.
0:04:32 Right?
0:04:38 So if I say we’ve made amazing progress on reducing global hunger, your automatic reaction
0:04:41 is to go to, well, yeah, but there’s still 800 million people that are hungry.
0:04:43 Which is also absolutely true, right?
0:04:48 But there is this pool in us and it has definitely had that reaction from the book, that there
0:04:54 is this gut reaction of wanting to counter it with the kind of almost cynical or protective
0:04:58 kind of blanket of, well, we shouldn’t be complacent about this because we still got
0:04:59 a massive problem.
0:05:01 Sometimes it goes even farther than that.
0:05:03 I mean, that is certainly true.
0:05:06 And that is more easy to understand, right?
0:05:10 Because as you say, one shouldn’t be complacent, one shouldn’t just live here comfortably in
0:05:13 the developed world and say, oh, everything’s great.
0:05:19 But people don’t even want to believe that things are good here relative to 100 years
0:05:20 ago.
0:05:24 And that one is a little bit harder to understand.
0:05:29 Like why do you think people don’t believe that things are better than they were 100
0:05:30 years ago?
0:05:31 Say.
0:05:33 I mean, I think one thing is that we just don’t look at data, right?
0:05:35 You can only see this through data, right?
0:05:39 You’re never going to get this in the news because the news covers what’s happened in
0:05:40 the last hour in the world.
0:05:41 So it’s an event, right?
0:05:43 It’s an event that can make a headline.
0:05:44 It’s a natural disaster.
0:05:45 It’s a war.
0:05:46 It’s a murder.
0:05:51 It’s a really, really bad event, which is why the, one of the reasons why the news skews
0:05:57 negative, whereas a lot of the progress we’ve made, you know, there’s no headline really
0:06:01 you can run because it happens gradually day after day after day after day.
0:06:07 It’s not a headline story that globally infant mortality has fallen a huge amount in the
0:06:11 last 30 years, even though in terms of human welfare, it’s one of the most important things
0:06:13 that happened this century so far, right?
0:06:14 Yeah.
0:06:18 And I think that’s true for like most of our progress stories.
0:06:22 They happen incrementally over time, but when you add that up over decades, you just
0:06:26 have this like profound change that’s happened in the world.
0:06:30 And I think because it’s just out of, out of pace with the news cycle, we just don’t
0:06:31 get it, right?
0:06:35 We just don’t see it, especially in rich countries in the world.
0:06:41 We often have this patronising perception that the rest of the world has stagnated or
0:06:43 hasn’t moved forward, right?
0:06:49 So we think, okay, things might be okay where I am, but you know, countries in Africa or
0:06:54 countries in Asia, they’re just as poor and bad off as they were 50 years ago.
0:06:57 But actually they are, child mortality rates have fallen.
0:07:01 Poor kids are getting vaccinated, hunger is down, poverty is down.
0:07:05 So I think we have this perception that many countries in the world are stuck where they
0:07:06 were 50 years ago.
0:07:07 And that’s just not true.
0:07:11 And it’s because we often, again, don’t see these stories in the news.
0:07:17 They’re either, our news in the US or Europe is very US or Europe orientated and the stuff
0:07:22 we hear from other parts of the world, again, tend to be these negative stories.
0:07:30 So the book, the book does talk about a lot of stuff that’s wrong, right?
0:07:38 The book is certainly not Pollyanna-ish, I would say.
0:07:46 But it approaches it with a sort of practical like let’s figure out how to solve this framework.
0:07:52 And you step through most of the big things that seem terribly wrong or many of the big
0:07:59 things that seem terribly wrong, climate change, overfishing, deforestation, etc.
0:08:05 I want to talk at some length about one chapter in particular, because as you say in the book,
0:08:08 it’s sort of a nexus.
0:08:14 It’s a subject that touches on all of these other subjects, really, and that is food.
0:08:18 In part, obviously climate change is the other one that is sort of this grand thing, but
0:08:26 food is very important and very under discussed in the context of climate change, right?
0:08:28 So let’s talk about food at some length.
0:08:36 And let’s use that framework that you use more generally with the world is much better
0:08:41 than it used to be in many ways, the world is still bad in many ways, and the world can
0:08:42 be better.
0:08:43 Let’s apply that to food.
0:08:49 So how is food much better than it used to be?
0:08:56 So when you look at it through a human hunger lens, so today around just under 10% of the
0:09:00 world are still go hungry, which means they just don’t get enough calories to eat.
0:09:02 So that’s around 800 million people.
0:09:04 That’s the still very bad piece.
0:09:05 That’s the still very bad piece.
0:09:06 Yeah.
0:09:11 But if you were to go back a century, you know, the share of the world that go hungry was
0:09:13 way, way higher than it was.
0:09:17 Is there, are there credible estimates for what it was 100 years ago?
0:09:23 The long term data on this is more shaky, I’d say, but you’re, you’re definitely talking
0:09:28 about in most regions, well over a third, if not more people were not getting enough calories
0:09:30 to eat.
0:09:32 Well over a third as opposed to 10%.
0:09:33 So that is improvement.
0:09:39 I mean, what if you go back, if you go back 200 years, what is the rough estimate of what
0:09:42 percentage of people on Earth were not getting enough to eat?
0:09:46 I mean, I’d say probably even higher still.
0:09:52 And I’d say most of the improvements in food and agricultural productivity have came really
0:09:56 in the last century, but in particular in the last 50 years.
0:10:01 So if you were to look at hunger rates a century ago or two centuries ago, they’d all be very,
0:10:02 very high.
0:10:06 And again, I’d say estimates are fuzzy, but you’d say at least well over a third, if not
0:10:09 over half of people weren’t getting enough food to eat.
0:10:14 So as compared to today where it’s something like 90% of people are getting enough food
0:10:17 to eat.
0:10:22 So, so I mean, obviously there are a few key breakthroughs in like getting more food per
0:10:26 acre of land, per unit of land, right?
0:10:30 Nitrogen fertilizer and then the Haber-Bosch process, which weirdly we just talked about
0:10:35 on the show, for synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer.
0:10:40 And then there’s this other moment, a later moment that you talk about in the book, which
0:10:45 is basically one guy, one of these amazing one guy changes the world stories, and it’s
0:10:46 Norman Borlaug.
0:10:48 So tell me about Norman Borlaug.
0:10:57 So Norman Borlaug was a kind of agricultural scientist and he was basically recruited initially
0:11:02 to go to Mexico to work out how Mexicans could grow more food per unit of land.
0:11:07 So how to increase agricultural productivity or crop yields in Mexico.
0:11:12 And he came at this for a genetic reading lens or trying to work out what combination
0:11:18 of crop strains might be able to produce this.
0:11:20 And it was a very long process, there’s a lot of trial and error, right?
0:11:24 Just to be clear at what this is like the 60s, this is not like GMO.
0:11:25 This is pre-GMO, right?
0:11:31 This is just like old school Mendelian crosses, farmer hybrid like that, like the old school
0:11:32 style.
0:11:33 Yeah.
0:11:34 Old school.
0:11:39 So lots of trial and error, lots of trying a crop, not performing well, trying another
0:11:41 crop, not performing well.
0:11:44 And kind of we got to the stage where he was kind of sent out on this mission and kind
0:11:48 of left there as like, oh, well, he’ll be over there trying to do this.
0:11:52 We’re kind of skeptical that it’ll work, but you know, he’s got a job over there.
0:11:53 Good luck.
0:11:54 Yeah.
0:11:55 And he finally cracks it.
0:11:59 And it makes a massive difference to crop yields in Mexico.
0:12:01 You’re talking about a large, large increase.
0:12:07 Mexico moved from being a net importer of food to a net exporter of food.
0:12:12 And from there, this really kickstarted what we frame as a kind of agricultural revolution.
0:12:16 And he went to South Asia and in Pakistan and India and did the same, right?
0:12:21 So again, their crop yields were extremely low during that period.
0:12:27 There was lots of concerns about especially food shortage in that region, but more broadly
0:12:34 there was lots of concerns at the time about a global food shortage, huge famines, huge
0:12:35 levels of hunger.
0:12:36 Right.
0:12:43 Well, and you talk about Paul Ehrlich, the famous biologist who in retrospect looks quite
0:12:44 bad, right?
0:12:48 Who wrote this bestselling book essentially saying, we are screwed already.
0:12:51 It’s baked in, a billion people are going to starve.
0:12:55 We just got to figure out who, because there’s no way we can grow enough food to feed all
0:12:57 the people who have just been born.
0:12:58 Right.
0:13:03 So 1968, he comes out with this book, The Population Bomb, and yes, that was his thesis.
0:13:05 There’s just far too many people on the planet.
0:13:10 We’ve got this major global food crisis coming and many, many people are going to die from
0:13:11 this.
0:13:12 That didn’t happen.
0:13:16 And one of the reasons it didn’t happen was because of Norman Blerog and the Green Revolution.
0:13:23 So we vastly underestimated how much we could increase crop yields across the world.
0:13:28 So staying for a moment on the theme of the world is much better than it used to be.
0:13:32 One thing that I didn’t know before I read your book that I learned from the book is
0:13:42 that the world has passed peak fertilizer use and has passed or almost passed peak land
0:13:48 use for agriculture, which was surprising to me and encouraging.
0:13:51 Tell me about those facts.
0:13:56 So peak fertilizer use, I wouldn’t say definitively that we’re past the peak.
0:13:59 I think we’re kind of being on this kind of plateau.
0:14:04 We saw really, really steep rise in global fertilizer use in the 1990s and especially
0:14:05 the early 2000s.
0:14:11 But if you look over the last decade or so, it’s kind of been leveling off, which I
0:14:12 think goes against people’s intuitions.
0:14:15 I think they’d think we’re just still going through the roof.
0:14:20 We’re using far more fertilizer than ever before.
0:14:25 No, we look like we’re kind of stabilizing and part of that is due to some countries
0:14:26 are still in the increase.
0:14:29 And I actually think it’s good that they’re still in the increase, as you said, like one
0:14:35 of the key innovations that have helped to feed the world has been the use of fertilizer
0:14:38 and some countries still don’t have enough.
0:14:42 But some countries definitely overuse it and overuse it to the point where it’s just not
0:14:45 even cost effective for farmers to be using that much.
0:14:50 But over the last few decades, some countries have dramatically reduced fertilizer use without
0:14:52 sacrificing yields.
0:14:58 So fertilizer use in Europe in particular has gone down and yields have either stayed
0:15:01 the same or have continued to increase.
0:15:06 Even in China, so China, again, looks like it’s now past peak fertilizer use.
0:15:11 Fertilizer use and pesticide use in China has now been falling and I actually think that
0:15:13 that could fall quite quickly.
0:15:19 And part of the way that China’s done that has actually been through large scale education
0:15:23 programs for farmers on how to use this stuff more effectively.
0:15:28 And again, it’s cost effective for a farmer to learn that.
0:15:32 We’re about to get to why the world is still bad in terms of food.
0:15:39 But before we do, is there anything else we should do on why the world is much better?
0:15:44 I think what people underestimate, and I actually think this is a good and a bad thing.
0:15:49 I think people just underestimate how good we’ve got at producing food.
0:15:53 I think they don’t have a sense of scale in their heads about how much food we can actually
0:15:55 produce.
0:16:02 So if you say that the average person in the world needs around 2000 to 2500 calories per
0:16:11 person per day, depending on their size and gender, etc., because we know that some people
0:16:15 don’t get enough calories and some people probably over-consume a bit, right?
0:16:19 We might assume that that just about levels off, right, balances each other out.
0:16:22 So we maybe produce just enough calories for everyone in the world.
0:16:25 So maybe two and a half thousand per person per day.
0:16:31 The reality is that we probably produce around twice as much as that, right?
0:16:36 So you’re probably talking about four and a half to 5000 calories per person per day
0:16:39 if you were to split it all equally.
0:16:43 So we just are capable of producing huge amounts of food.
0:16:49 So we produce enough food if we didn’t waste any to feed twice as many people as are on
0:16:54 Earth today, which is probably more people than we’ll ever live on Earth at once, right?
0:16:56 We’re probably not going to get to 2X current population.
0:16:57 Right.
0:17:01 So if you were to get to zero waste food systems, and again, this is not just about, I think
0:17:07 what people think about as food waste, but if you were to have a really, really efficient
0:17:14 distribution system, we could definitely feed 10 billion, which is what people are looking
0:17:16 at in the future.
0:17:22 So right, so that’s happy from the point of view of there’s definitely enough food.
0:17:27 We have the technology to know how the land to grow as much food as we will need to feed
0:17:29 people when we hit peak population.
0:17:34 Okay, let’s talk about what’s bad.
0:17:37 What’s bad with food today?
0:17:43 And I think the place to start there is how much of the Earth we use for food, and in
0:17:47 particular, how much of the habitable land mass of the Earth we use for food.
0:17:48 It’s a lot.
0:17:53 So if you were to take the world’s habitable land, which is basically land that’s not desert
0:17:59 or not ice, then we use around half of that for farming.
0:18:03 Yeah, half the Earth’s land mass we use for growing food.
0:18:08 What share of that is for cows, either for growing cows, you know, rangeland or for growing
0:18:10 food to feed cows?
0:18:15 So for cows specifically, it’s probably around 60%.
0:18:22 60% of all agricultural land, so more than a quarter of the habitable land mass of the
0:18:27 Earth goes to growing cows and growing food for cows.
0:18:29 Yeah, exactly.
0:18:32 But that, I think, is the central wild fact of your book to me, right?
0:18:37 I think as I read this chapter of your book and the book more broadly, because this seems
0:18:42 like the central chapter, cows come out as the villain.
0:18:44 Is that a fair read?
0:18:46 I think that’s a fair read.
0:18:47 Yeah.
0:18:48 I mean, villain is a moral word, right?
0:18:54 And I would like to use a non-moral as my fault, but I appreciate that you are not moralistic
0:18:55 in your telling.
0:18:57 It’s one of the things I particularly like about this book.
0:19:01 It’s not like, here are the evil people and I’m the good person exposing them.
0:19:07 It’s a much more sort of clinical, what feels to me more rational approach of just like,
0:19:09 look, let’s just lay out the facts.
0:19:16 But when you lay out the facts, I’m like, cows, man, cows, like, if we just, if it wasn’t
0:19:20 for cows, I don’t want to say we’d be fine, like we’d still have the energy transition
0:19:24 fossil fuel, but it seems like if we could solve beef, we could solve a lot.
0:19:25 Yeah.
0:19:31 If we were to significantly reduce global beef consumption, it would have a massive
0:19:35 environmental impact and a positive environmental impact.
0:19:41 So when you look at the range of environmental problems we face, beef and cattle come out
0:19:42 really strongly.
0:19:45 So it’s like a really large driver of climate change.
0:19:49 It’s the leading driver of deforestation.
0:19:56 As a result of deforestation, it’s then one of the leading drivers of biodiversity loss.
0:20:01 So yes, cattle and beef consumption specifically straddle a large number of our problems.
0:20:06 And then for many of these problems are really like the leading cause.
0:20:12 And can you just articulate the link between beef and climate change a little more?
0:20:13 Yeah.
0:20:18 So there’s two key ways that beef contributes to climate change.
0:20:19 One is about land use, right?
0:20:26 So when we have deforestation or other land use changes, that’s a driver of CO2 emissions,
0:20:31 so that contributes to CO2 through land use changes.
0:20:34 And then the second one is really about cow’s burping, right?
0:20:41 So cows burp and they burp methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas.
0:20:44 So that’s the second way that they mostly contribute.
0:20:49 There’s a third way, which is that their manure also releases greenhouse gases.
0:20:50 Yeah.
0:20:55 I want to get to the world can be better section of the food conversation.
0:21:02 But before we do, like, so cows are clearly the biggest food problem, it seems.
0:21:09 Are there other, what else is on the very short list of big food related problems we
0:21:10 need to solve?
0:21:16 I mean, I think one final framing of the world as bad as it is now is that we still have
0:21:21 800 million people in the world don’t get enough food to eat.
0:21:26 And actually when you look at it beyond calories, so not just getting enough energy, but getting
0:21:31 enough of all of the micronutrients that we need, you’re actually talking about billions
0:21:35 of people in the world are defined as being malnourished.
0:21:41 So even if you can get enough calories and you can usually do that through staple crops
0:21:46 like cereals or cassava, et cetera, you might be able to get enough calories, but you’re
0:21:54 not getting the full spectrum of nutrients that we need.
0:21:58 After the break, we get to the the world can be better part of the conversation.
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0:24:22 Okay, so let’s solve these problems.
0:24:28 Let’s start with people going hungry and not getting enough nutrition.
0:24:31 How do we solve that?
0:24:38 One key way is that, especially for many of the poorest countries in the world, we just
0:24:42 need to work again on the agricultural productivity problem.
0:24:46 And here I’m really specifically talking about Sub-Saharan Africa.
0:24:51 Most farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa get very low crop yields, much lower than the global
0:24:55 average and much, much, much lower than, say, you’d get in the US or Europe.
0:25:02 Are there examples of places, if you set aside this kind of one-off green revolution, are
0:25:07 there examples of places where crop yields go up independent of economic growth or is
0:25:13 the typical story that economic growth sort of causes crop yields to go up when countries
0:25:15 are not at the economic frontier?
0:25:20 It is very strongly correlated.
0:25:23 So as countries get richer, yes, you tend to get increased productivity.
0:25:27 But I think there are still differences there.
0:25:33 I think government policies play a role, land reforms play a role, access to markets play
0:25:34 a role.
0:25:37 This is purely just about stimulate economic growth, and this happens.
0:25:43 There are things that governments can do to stimulate that and make that go faster.
0:25:49 Providing subsidies for farmers to be able to afford the crucial inputs like better seeds
0:25:53 or more fertilizer or irrigation really helps a lot.
0:25:57 That’s one key way to do it.
0:26:05 Okay, what are we going to do about meat and beef in particular?
0:26:12 So I think if we are to solve these big environmental problems, globally, we need to reduce meat
0:26:13 consumption.
0:26:19 I say globally because I think when I say reducing meat consumption, people say, “Oh,
0:26:24 should the person that’s eating a few kilograms a year and that’s crucial to their nutrition?
0:26:25 Should they be cutting back?”
0:26:26 And they always ask, “No.”
0:26:27 Right?
0:26:32 So we’re mostly talking about people in middle income to rich countries where meat consumption
0:26:33 is very high.
0:26:39 If we’re to solve these problems, we would need to reduce global meat consumption.
0:26:40 Yes.
0:26:46 I mean, that’s the, again, almost tautological answer of the way to solve the problem of
0:26:49 too much meat is to have people eat less meat.
0:26:50 But how do you do that?
0:26:56 You’re talking in the book about individual behavior change doesn’t matter basically in
0:26:57 the aggregate.
0:27:00 It may be useful for moral reasons or in the abstract.
0:27:05 But on the level of climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, the things we’re talking
0:27:11 about here, it seems like individual behavior change is not going to do it.
0:27:19 So what are the macro moves that might drive things in the right direction?
0:27:23 So individual behavior change on its own is not going to change anything.
0:27:28 I still advocate for that, and I’m vegan myself, so I try to take that on.
0:27:32 I think people too often set up- You kind of have to be, right?
0:27:36 After writing that chapter, you kind of have to be.
0:27:37 Sure.
0:27:43 But I think people too often set up this false dichotomy of individual behavior change and
0:27:44 wider systemic change.
0:27:45 Fair.
0:27:47 Like, as an individual, you’re part of the system.
0:27:48 No, that’s fair.
0:27:49 I’m on the hook.
0:27:52 You’re putting me on the hook, and that’s totally reasonable.
0:27:58 So yes, even if you were to go vegan tomorrow, the world’s global meat consumption is not
0:28:00 going to notice.
0:28:08 I would say that what you choose to eat actually is one behavior change that actually can have
0:28:14 a small direct impact in some way, especially when you look at it in terms of animal welfare.
0:28:19 So you eat in less meat does actually potentially reduce the number of animals that are probably
0:28:23 raised in pretty poor conditions and killed for meat consumption.
0:28:25 Yes, that is plainly directly true.
0:28:32 I mean, the moral dimension of eating meat is real and significant, and we have not been
0:28:37 discussing that piece of it to this point, but clearly the individual choice about eating
0:28:43 meat, that moral dimension is obviously significant.
0:28:47 But it is notable in your book, and let’s just talk about this for a second.
0:28:49 It’s a little digressive, but let’s just do it here.
0:28:57 Like, you talk about which behavior changes people make are meaningful at what magnitude,
0:29:04 and clearly eating meat and even more so eating beef relative to other individual choices
0:29:06 is quite significant.
0:29:10 And I think it kind of punches above its weight in terms of what people think about.
0:29:14 So just for a minute, talk about that.
0:29:18 In terms of individual choices, what are things that are kind of underrated that people don’t
0:29:22 think about enough that make a big difference, and then what are things that are overrated
0:29:26 that people talk about or care about, but actually don’t really matter that much?
0:29:27 Right.
0:29:32 So the things that people overrate, and this is basically when you ask people what are
0:29:35 you doing for the environment, this is what they say.
0:29:42 They say they recycle, they get energy-efficient light bulbs, and they try to avoid single
0:29:43 use plastics.
0:29:47 Like, those are the key things that people say when you ask what they’re doing for the
0:29:48 environment.
0:29:51 The reality is that the impact that they have is tiny, right?
0:29:54 It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of your footprint.
0:29:55 Yeah.
0:29:56 Recycling wildly overrated, right?
0:29:57 Yeah.
0:30:02 It’s good for cans, but for everything else, it doesn’t matter really.
0:30:03 Right.
0:30:04 So, okay.
0:30:06 So what does matter?
0:30:07 Eating meat, what else?
0:30:12 What are other actual meaningful changes at least relative to the scale of one person?
0:30:17 So if you were to look at what makes up probably 80% of your footprint, it’s what you eat, and
0:30:20 the biggest thing you can do there is eat less meat and dairy.
0:30:25 In your house, it’s heating or cooling, so like, heating or air-con.
0:30:30 So if you have a gas boiler, switching to an electric heat pump would make a massive
0:30:32 difference to your footprint.
0:30:34 And then the other two big things are travel.
0:30:39 So like, if you have a car, your car is a massive part of your footprint.
0:30:43 So either, obviously, walking and cycling is best.
0:30:46 Going to an electric car is way better than a petrol car.
0:30:49 And then the final thing, if you fly, is flying.
0:30:55 And if you add up those things, you’re getting to the majority of your environmental footprint.
0:30:56 Good.
0:30:57 Okay.
0:30:59 Back to meat.
0:31:05 What do we do about meat on a non-individual level, right?
0:31:10 What are the macro ways we can reduce meat consumption?
0:31:16 So I’ll go to the macro, and then I’ll see why I think individuals play a role in that.
0:31:22 So when you look at the macro trends in meat consumption, globally they’re going up.
0:31:27 And even when you look at a country level, there are very, very few examples where meat
0:31:28 consumption is going down, right?
0:31:32 So we’re just really not making much progress on this problem.
0:31:33 We’re making regress.
0:31:35 And what about beef in particular?
0:31:39 I mean, presumably a shift from beef to chicken, obviously it’s not as good for the world as
0:31:44 a shift from beef to soy, but it’s pretty good, right?
0:31:49 And I feel like anecdotally, in the U.S., chicken has risen and beef has fallen, not
0:31:53 for environmental reasons, but for health reasons, basically, right?
0:31:54 People grew more wary of red meat.
0:31:57 Is that true empirically?
0:32:01 What has happened with beef consumption in America in the last, whatever, 50 years or
0:32:02 something?
0:32:03 Yeah, that’s true.
0:32:08 If you look at America or you look at Europe, red meat consumption, specifically beef consumption
0:32:12 has gone down a bit, and in its place, chicken consumption has gone up.
0:32:19 As you say, that switch is probably very underrated as a climate solution, right?
0:32:23 It actually makes a big difference to your footprint, switching from beef to chicken.
0:32:27 So environmentally, that’s a very, very good swap.
0:32:31 I’d argue that the animal welfare costs of that are the opposite, right?
0:32:36 If you value the life of a chicken at the same as you value the life of a cow, it’s clearly
0:32:38 much worse for animal welfare.
0:32:45 But yeah, I think this meat switching has been a key transition in many countries and
0:32:47 environmentally positive.
0:32:52 But globally, beef consumption is rising, presumably because as very poor people get
0:32:54 richer, they eat more meat, understandably.
0:32:55 Yeah.
0:32:56 Okay.
0:32:57 So still bad.
0:32:59 We’re not yet to how do we make it better?
0:33:00 Let’s get there.
0:33:01 What do we got to do?
0:33:03 Or how do we go in the right direction even?
0:33:08 So we’ve made little progress, and one of the reasons we’ve made little progress is because
0:33:14 people are not willing to switch to the previous alternatives we had as a protein source, right?
0:33:22 People were not switching from a beef burger to lentils or tofu or beans, right?
0:33:23 People just didn’t want to make that switch.
0:33:26 That seemed like a step backwards, right?
0:33:32 The way we solve this, and the only way I see that we solve this is to make a like for
0:33:38 like switch so that people can still have the beef burger or something really close to
0:33:41 a beef burger without the cow, right?
0:33:46 That’s the only way I see a route out of this or a way to reduce global meat consumption
0:33:52 is to basically produce meat substitutes that provide the same texture, the same nutrition,
0:33:57 the same experience, just without the cow or the chicken and much lower environmental
0:33:58 footprint.
0:34:01 It’s basically lab-grown meat.
0:34:06 Some of the plant-based meat substitutes I think are getting pretty good, although I’m
0:34:07 probably biased.
0:34:17 No, I mean, I eat a lot of impossible beef, certainly way more than beef-beef, but it’s
0:34:22 clearly not good enough, right?
0:34:26 I mean, you know, people are trying sort of sell culture.
0:34:31 Like sort of meat as a biotech problem is fundamentally what you’re talking about on
0:34:32 some level, right?
0:34:39 And it does seem like fundamentally that’s appealing because it doesn’t require people
0:34:43 to change their behavior ultimately, right?
0:34:48 Ultimately we want a solution based on people just acting indifferently or in their own
0:34:49 self-interest.
0:34:53 Like that’s the kind of solution I can believe in, right?
0:35:00 And you know, I’ve heard counterarguments that like, oh, people won’t trust it or people
0:35:03 are attached to, you know, beef that comes from an animal.
0:35:06 But I feel like that’s going to be the minority of people, right?
0:35:11 I feel like most people don’t care about any particular thing in the world and they just
0:35:13 want something like with energy.
0:35:15 They just want something that’s reliable and cheap.
0:35:23 And so if somebody could make lab-grown meat that was the same as beef and one penny cheaper,
0:35:26 you would win.
0:35:31 I think initially people might be hesitant and skeptical, but I think that’s the case
0:35:33 with most new technologies.
0:35:38 Like if you look at electric cars, for example, I think initially many, many people were skeptical
0:35:43 because they didn’t know anyone that had an electric car, right?
0:35:48 They didn’t know how it ran, whether you broke down on the highway, like was it easy
0:35:49 to charge?
0:35:50 Was it expensive to charge?
0:35:53 No one really knew that apart from a really small minority.
0:35:57 I think with electric vehicles, we’re now getting to the stage where most of us know
0:36:02 someone that has one and they get by fine and actually really like it.
0:36:06 And it feels like with new technologies like lab-grown meat, for example, it might be the
0:36:07 same.
0:36:13 Like uptake rates at the very start might be slow, but I think it would very slowly start
0:36:15 to become normalized.
0:36:18 And as you say, I think people at some point would just switch and they’d be very happy
0:36:22 to just have something that tastes like a burger, has a texture of a burger, as nutritious
0:36:23 as a burger.
0:36:24 I think cost will be key.
0:36:27 They will not pay more for it than they would for a beef burger.
0:36:32 So that’s really, really key is that we need to scale these technologies, but we also need
0:36:36 to make sure that they are undercutting the current cost of meat.
0:36:43 Well, you know, I talked to the guy who started Impossible Foods and he makes the point that
0:36:51 from first principles, meat made without animals should be cheaper, right?
0:36:54 For the same reason that animals are such a problem for the world, which is they’re
0:36:56 wildly inefficient.
0:37:01 Like yes, industrial agriculture has become very efficient at growing cows and at growing
0:37:02 the corn to feed cows.
0:37:04 But from first principles, it’s still crazy, right?
0:37:11 Like the fact that you only get one calorie of beef for every whatever, 95 calories of
0:37:16 corn you put in and you have to raise a whole cow, like theoretically, there should be a
0:37:22 much more efficient way to get beef than going through all that work of making a cow, right?
0:37:27 And so that makes me optimistic in an abstract way, if not in a practical way.
0:37:28 Yeah, I think so.
0:37:30 I think this is also a time thing.
0:37:32 Like I think we’ll get there.
0:37:34 I think it’s really about how long it takes us.
0:37:40 I think what’s key about agriculture is we’ve been refining and optimizing these processes
0:37:45 over a really, really long period of time, whereas these new technologies are very much
0:37:46 in their infancy.
0:37:47 Yeah.
0:37:50 Well, that makes me less hopeful when you put it that way.
0:37:55 I mean, I guess I am somewhat less hopeful about meat, right?
0:38:01 Like the energy transition seems to be going better than almost anyone would have expected
0:38:05 10 years ago, right?
0:38:07 We’re not having a meat transition.
0:38:09 It’s just not happening yet.
0:38:14 Can you help me feel better about it?
0:38:20 I’m not sure because I mean, I think the theme that also comes from my book again is that
0:38:26 I think, again, I’m optimistic on the energy story and I think we’re making pretty rapid
0:38:29 progress there and more progress in people imagine.
0:38:35 I think the way people discuss the food chapter in my book is kind of like the pessimistic
0:38:37 side of the story is hard.
0:38:43 So if we manage to solve the food problem, if we fundamentally manage to come up with
0:38:49 like good, cheap, fake meat, right, that’s actually the answer.
0:38:51 How will the world change?
0:38:54 What is the happy outcome there?
0:39:00 So I think if we were to somehow magically end beef production tomorrow, one is that
0:39:05 we would dramatically reduce the amount of land that we’re using for agriculture, which
0:39:12 means that we could really start to restore old ecosystems and our habitats that we basically
0:39:14 took over with agriculture land, right?
0:39:17 So that has biodiversity benefits.
0:39:22 And it also has benefits for climate change because you can start to restore and sequester
0:39:28 carbon that we previously lost by deforestation that land or taking away the wild grasslands.
0:39:31 So that’s a huge, huge positive.
0:39:36 Because beef is also the leading cause of deforestation, globally, you would also see
0:39:39 a significant drop in rates of deforestation.
0:39:44 It wouldn’t go to zero because there are other causes, but it would at least significantly
0:39:45 reduce those rates.
0:39:50 And then the final one is I think it would have a significant impact on our greenhouse
0:39:51 gas emissions and climate change.
0:39:58 So if we were to get rid of that methane, so for context, livestock, and most of this
0:40:04 is cattle, contributes around 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
0:40:05 Wow.
0:40:06 That’s basically cow burps.
0:40:10 It’s cow burps and some of this land just changed, but again, a lot of that would go
0:40:11 away.
0:40:12 Yeah.
0:40:20 So I think you would at least cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 5% to 10%.
0:40:28 So if we zoom out even more, at the end of your book, you sort of tell the happy story
0:40:29 right?
0:40:37 Like, if things go well, if we make good on the things can be better piece of your framework.
0:40:43 If things go well, not just with food, but more generally with the big global problems
0:40:48 you talk about in the book, what will the world look like?
0:40:51 Well, you say in 50 years in the book, right?
0:40:52 I think there’s two sides to this.
0:40:57 And I think it’s really important that we consider both sides as an environmentalist.
0:41:01 I mean, again, we always focus on just the environmental metrics.
0:41:05 So it’d be very easy for me to sit here and say, you know, just the best outcome would
0:41:09 be that there’s no deforestation and we stopped climate change, right?
0:41:13 And again, I think those would be huge victories, but at the same time, we also need to make
0:41:19 sure that we’re providing a good life for the nine or 10 billion people that will be
0:41:20 on the planet.
0:41:28 So, when I’m an old lady, what success would look like is that we have nine or 10 billion
0:41:35 people that don’t live in extreme poverty, that are not hungry, have access to energy
0:41:43 for a good life, they have access to healthcare and we’ve eradicated diseases and they have
0:41:45 clean water and sanitation.
0:41:51 And we’ve done that, so we’ve driven that huge amount of global human development while
0:41:53 also reducing our environmental impacts.
0:41:57 So we’ve managed to stop climate change and there will still be climate damages there
0:41:58 to be clear.
0:42:02 We’re not going to just solve this and there’ll be no impacts whatsoever, but we can manage
0:42:09 to deal with those negative impacts and we’ve really just freed up a huge amount of the
0:42:12 planet to be restored for biodiversity and nature.
0:42:17 So we’ve stopped cutting down forests and forests are re-growing and we’ve taken out
0:42:23 a lot of the farmland that we currently use and that’s now being restored for wild ecosystems.
0:42:30 So we have nine or 10 billion people living really, really good high welfare lives and
0:42:38 we’re using a much smaller amount of the planet in order to do that.
0:42:48 We’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
0:42:49 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:42:54 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:42:55 future.
0:42:59 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:43:04 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:43:09 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co-founder
0:43:15 Steve Wozniak or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:43:20 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from, from the very first CTO of
0:43:27 the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind.
0:43:32 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:43:37 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:43:38 They just broke this down.
0:43:43 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of 3 billion records?
0:43:45 They covered that too.
0:43:50 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:43:51 Listen to find out.
0:43:58 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
0:44:04 Let’s finish with the lightning round.
0:44:10 What’s your favorite dataset?
0:44:12 At the moment, the renewable energy data is at.
0:44:19 I think the biggest transition that’s making me most optimistic about the future is the
0:44:24 rapid growth in renewables and the plummeting costs of those energy sources.
0:44:29 It’s amazing because even, I don’t know, I did a story seven years ago or something
0:44:33 about, oh my God, solar got so cheap and people are getting solar power who don’t even care
0:44:35 about the environment just because it’s cheaper.
0:44:38 And then since then, it’s gotten so much cheaper.
0:44:39 It’s just not stopping.
0:44:40 It’s not stopping.
0:44:45 But I think combined with that, I think the next stage which is making me equally optimistic
0:44:50 is now the falling cost of batteries.
0:44:56 What’s a dataset that you wish existed that doesn’t exist?
0:45:03 Just a really, really good global dataset on biodiversity.
0:45:07 And by that, I mean for every species in the world, but just really far away from that
0:45:10 because there’s so many species.
0:45:14 And that was one of the struggles for the biodiversity chapter is that I tried to base
0:45:20 all of my thinking on data and when the data scarce, it’s hard to get a really clear picture
0:45:21 of what’s going on.
0:45:25 So I think that’s one dataset I would love is just what on earth’s going on with global
0:45:26 biodiversity.
0:45:31 What’s one thing I should do if I go to Falkirk?
0:45:35 We’re famous for this massive wheel.
0:45:36 So we have a wheel.
0:45:37 Like a wheel.
0:45:38 It’s called the Falkirk wheel.
0:45:39 Right.
0:45:40 When you say famous.
0:45:45 I mean, that’s the only thing we have and the queen opened it.
0:45:47 So she was there, the opening of it.
0:45:54 So in Falkirk, we have these canal systems with boats and we have this magical wheel
0:46:01 where basically it takes the boat from like ground level up to like a massive, massive
0:46:03 height so you can get on the new canal.
0:46:04 Wow.
0:46:05 Like a ferris wheel.
0:46:08 Oh, should I picture like a ferris wheel for a boat?
0:46:09 Exactly.
0:46:15 But the exciting thing is that turning this massive wheel with this boat on it takes less
0:46:18 energy than boiling a kettle.
0:46:19 Wow.
0:46:20 So it utilizes.
0:46:21 That is very on brand for you.
0:46:22 Yeah.
0:46:24 So it utilizes potential energy and converts it into kinetic.
0:46:27 So it’s this really energy efficient wheel.
0:46:28 Wow.
0:46:29 Okay.
0:46:34 Do you have any graph related pet peeves?
0:46:37 Oh, a lot.
0:46:42 One key one is that people just make them far too complicated.
0:46:48 I think people try to cram as much information in as they can or they think that it makes
0:46:55 them look smarter to make a more complicated graph and that a line chart is just too simple
0:47:00 and actually the simple line chart or the simple bar chart that people can understand
0:47:02 is just way more effective.
0:47:03 Yeah.
0:47:07 So with time on the x-axis and the variable you care about on the y-axis.
0:47:08 Yeah.
0:47:09 That’s all you need.
0:47:10 Yeah.
0:47:11 I look for those all the time.
0:47:14 I’m always Googling like time series, whatever.
0:47:19 And it’s weird how hard it is to find a time series.
0:47:24 Your book is full of facts, one of the things I appreciate about the book.
0:47:30 What’s just like one fact, if you want to take one fact from the book and tell everybody,
0:47:35 what is it?
0:47:41 The price of solar power has fallen by around 90% in the last decade.
0:47:43 That is an amazing fact.
0:47:44 Yeah.
0:47:45 And very–
0:47:46 That’s a life-changing fact.
0:47:51 I mean, I think this is just going to define the energy transition that we just so crucially
0:47:53 need to solve climate change.
0:47:57 Without this change, I’d be super super pessimistic about this.
0:47:58 And with this change?
0:48:03 I’m cautiously optimistic.
0:48:07 London versus Edinburgh.
0:48:12 Edinburgh because people can understand what I’m saying.
0:48:13 Because you speak the language.
0:48:22 Because I speak the language, yeah.
0:48:26 Hannah Ritchie is the author of Not the End of the World and the deputy editor of Our
0:48:28 World in Data.
0:48:31 Today’s show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang.
0:48:35 It was edited by Lydia Jean Cotte and engineered by Sara Brugier.
0:48:39 You can email us at problem@pushkin.fm.
0:48:54 I’m Jacob Goldstein and we’ll be back next week with another episode of What’s Your Problem?
0:48:56 Hey, it’s Jacob.
0:49:00 There is no shortage of tech podcasts, but few of them actually give you a dose of the
0:49:02 future.
0:49:06 The A16Z podcast is the exception.
0:49:10 The chart-topping show from Andreessen Horowitz brings you to the world’s most influential
0:49:16 people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right, like Apple co-founder
0:49:22 Steve Wozniak or Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
0:49:25 Not to mention folks you don’t typically get to hear from.
0:49:32 From the very first CTO of the CIA to the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic,
0:49:33 and DeepMind.
0:49:39 These guests tackle the most important trends in technology, from space to supply chains.
0:49:43 Want to understand the technology, policy, and economy of deepfakes?
0:49:45 They just broke this down.
0:49:50 Curious what really happened with the recent data breach of 3 billion records?
0:49:52 They covered that too.
0:49:56 Are autonomous cars, boats, and drones still miles away?
0:49:58 Listen to find out.
0:50:02 So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future with the A16Z podcast.
Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet. Hannah’s problem is this: How do you use data to get past the doomsday headlines and solve big problems to achieve sustainability?
Check out Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.