0:00:05 Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I’m Sonal. This week we’re resurfacing one of our
0:00:10 favorite episodes of all time, all about emojis. It’s timely not just because a whole new set
0:00:15 of emojis are about to hit many people’s phones soon, but because the episode, which was actually
0:00:21 first recorded in 2015, is really an evergreen and broader conversation about how innovation comes
0:00:27 about. Because we cover the tension between open standards versus close and proprietary systems,
0:00:31 the economics of creativity, the governance and politics of design, and much more.
0:00:35 We begin with the brief tour of different emoji and how they came about,
0:00:39 where emoji fit in the taxonomy of visual and social communication,
0:00:43 and why that matters, especially when it comes to machines reading emotions.
0:00:48 And finally, we talk about the ambiguities and difficulties to translating emoji
0:00:53 when it’s not really meant to be a language. Our guests are Fred Benenson, who was a second
0:00:58 employee at Kickstarter and VP of their data. He also famously kickstarted a project to translate
0:01:04 Moby Dick entirely into emoji, and Jenny Aitley, former New York Times reporter who was a member
0:01:10 and is now vice chair of the Unicode Emoji subcommittee. She first led the effort to get
0:01:13 the dumpling emoji, which is where we briefly start this conversation.
0:01:20 I wasn’t a really big emoji user. In fact, the first time I ever heard of emoji was when
0:01:25 Fred started his Kickstarter called Emoji Dick, and I was like, “What the fuck are emoji?”
0:01:29 This is before they showed up on our iPhones, like perky little yellow faces.
0:01:31 I was like, “What? It sounds something very bizarre.”
0:01:35 I just started. I didn’t even actually just be blunt. I had a very hard time using emoji,
0:01:39 because I didn’t quite understand how to even, frankly, use that moment. I don’t understand
0:01:44 it when people send it to me, if it’s not the obvious heart, etc. But as I’ve been using it
0:01:48 more, I found myself sort of expressing myself now in kind of quirky ways, and I don’t know
0:01:50 if people really get it or not, but I’m getting a kick out of it.
0:01:52 That’s the fun of the ambiguity.
0:01:58 I have a friend who showed me an exchange between a friend of his who was dating a guy,
0:02:01 and he would only send her emoji, and she was like, “I just can’t handle this.”
0:02:05 And he showed me these screenshots of their exchange, and it was hilarious.
0:02:06 You’re helping translate.
0:02:07 But yeah, it’s so like, I was like, “Oh, this is-“
0:02:09 You looked a certain abridgerack in like emoji.
0:02:11 Yeah, I was like, “This is what this means.”
0:02:16 I can definitely see it being like sort of an irreconcilable difference between people and
0:02:21 relationships. I fast forward many, many years. Emoji have showed up on our iPhone,
0:02:25 and I’m texting with my friend Yiying Lu, who’s best known as the designer of the Twitter fail
0:02:29 whale. So we’re texting back and forth about like dumplings, and so I send her a picture of the
0:02:33 dumplings I’m making, and then she texts me back, knife and fork, knife and fork, yum, yum, yum, yum,
0:02:38 and she goes, “Wait, Apple doesn’t have a dumpling emoji.” I was like, “How could that be?”
0:02:43 I was like, because there’s so many obscure Japanese food emojis and emojis are from Japan,
0:02:50 like you have everything ranging from ramen to curry rice to tempura to like the rice thingies
0:02:54 on a stick. There’s even the like triangle rice ball that looks like it had a bikini wax.
0:03:00 Right, there’s also the fish cake, which is the white one with the purple sorrel in it.
0:03:06 And I was like, “How could there not be dumplings?” Because it’s such a universal food,
0:03:12 because there’s like pierogies in Poland and momos and gyoza and empanadas. It’s just like
0:03:15 a food from around the world. I mean, technically a samosa is a dumpling.
0:03:25 Samosa, ravioli. And I was like, “Okay, emoji are universal.” And then dumplings are universal.
0:03:31 How could there not be a dumpling emoji? And just in my mind, I was just like clearly whatever
0:03:34 system in place has failed. How do you solve a problem like the dumpling emoji?
0:03:38 Yeah, and I found out that emoji are regulated by the Unicode Consortium, which is a non-profit
0:03:45 organization based in Mountain View, California. It now has 12 full voting members that pay $18,000
0:03:50 a year just to vote on issues, including like emoji and other kind of like technical numbers.
0:03:51 Are all those numbers in Mountain View?
0:03:58 No, so of those 12, nine are U.S. multinational tech companies, Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo,
0:04:04 Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members,
0:04:09 one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese telecom company Huawei,
0:04:13 and the last is the government of Oman. That’s a really interesting crew.
0:04:16 It’s an interesting crew. And they have these quarterly meetings.
0:04:20 And then I just shop. And they’re very welcoming. They’re like, “Thank you for coming. What brings
0:04:26 you here? Tell us about yourself.” It felt like showing up at church. Like a new church,
0:04:29 you’re a new member. They all knew each other very well. They’re very excited that there’s
0:04:35 like someone young and diverse that’s just like randomly shown up. And so I, in that process,
0:04:43 learn how you get emoji passed and how they’re regulated. And so in January of 2016, we submitted
0:04:48 a full proposal for dumplings, takeout box, chopsticks, and fortune cookies and got those
0:04:54 all passed. So those will be in Unicode 10, which means that that’s announced in June of 2017.
0:04:58 And so they’ll actually hit your phones several months after that. I was like,
0:05:02 “Wow, billions of keyboards will be impacted by this.” That’s amazing.
0:05:05 Were there other proposals submitted at the time? Oh, they’re constant proposals.
0:05:10 There’s this whole process that people like Jenny, some of them make it through.
0:05:14 It’s a lot of work. It does reduce some good, useful bars actually for making sure quality
0:05:16 gets through at some point. Yeah. And to their credit, the Unicode Consortium
0:05:22 has an amazing list of emoji criteria where they say, “Okay, here’s what we’re looking for
0:05:27 for emoji. It’s got to have like, you know, kind of a unique meaning in that it’s not covered by
0:05:31 other stuff, but it also should have like, you know, some ambiguity. So it’s not just like
0:05:35 literally one thing. It could be used in other contexts.” Also, there’s one of the more interesting
0:05:41 rules, which is no celebrities, deities, or logos. Whoa. The Easter Island head is kind
0:05:46 of a violation of that one, but that’s got its own story. A couple of years ago, with a big update,
0:05:51 the Easter Island head showed up in like the back of the travel section of emoji. And I was like,
0:05:55 “What is that doing there? Who’s traveling to Easter Island so often that they need to use
0:05:58 the Easter Island head emoji?” And it kind of just stuck in my mind. And then I started using it in
0:06:04 this kind of like, slightly culturally insensitive way to like reference some supernatural phenomenon
0:06:07 that I didn’t understand, right? Like if I was in a conversation with somebody and I was just like,
0:06:10 completely flummoxed, I’d just like, send that one. Yeah. It’s like your version of Bermuda Triangle.
0:06:14 Yeah. Yeah. I was just like, who knows? Stone face. Other people use it for like,
0:06:19 stoned, right? Like, there’s lots of combinations in there. The reason why it’s in there is that
0:06:25 there’s a statue in downtown Tokyo, I think it’s a Shibuya station that is called Moyai,
0:06:30 which is a name of just like, it’s a proper noun of that statue, which was made by an artist
0:06:36 that was like a reference to original Easter Island head. So it turns out Japanese teenagers use
0:06:42 this waypoint to meet each other. And so that’s how it ended up in Japanese cell phones. And that’s
0:06:46 why it ended up in emoji. The artist used this inspiration of Easter Island. The interesting
0:06:51 twist is that when you look at it on the iPhone, it doesn’t look anything like the statue in Tokyo.
0:06:56 At some point, Apple was like, we’re not going to make it like this Tokyo’s one. We’re going to do
0:07:03 the original one. Android, on the other hand, their Moyai emoji looks like the Tokyo station one.
0:07:07 So fascinating. I read a study, I actually included in our newsletter months ago, of someone
0:07:12 comparing how emojis look on different platforms and how it actually changes meaning. Because
0:07:15 you can actually think you’re sending one thing and you get something else.
0:07:19 That’s going to happen in any system that has standardization. Like, you’re going to try really
0:07:24 hard to make sure people hue to the specification. But you know, people do their own implementations
0:07:30 and things change. In fact, the whole reason why emoji are in Unicode was because you would send
0:07:35 your friend an emoji and then their cell phone would actually just render the incorrect one.
0:07:39 It could be so much worse. And the fact that there is a standard means that like,
0:07:41 you only get these like weird edge cases.
0:07:46 There’s still some interesting vestiges of like the different telcos between Apple and Google.
0:07:52 One was DoCoMo and the other one was SoftBank. So they’re basically, depending on who their partner
0:07:58 was locally, they kind of inherited those generations of emojis. For example, on Apple,
0:08:02 women with bunny ears is like two women dancing in kind of like a let’s party kind of way with
0:08:07 their bunny ears. Whereas on Android, it’s just the headshot of a woman with bunny ears.
0:08:10 And it’s referencing this slightly misogynist part of Japanese culture of
0:08:15 bunny woman, which is itself a reference to the Playboy bunny. And so like they were cocktail
0:08:20 waitresses working in nightclubs. That made its way into the Japanese set. And then so when it
0:08:23 came over to America, like I think Apple must have been like, let’s make this a little more fun.
0:08:27 One of the easiest things actually to get emoji pass is showing that a vendor uses it.
0:08:32 Another argument is for completion. This is actually why chopsticks got passed fairly easily
0:08:36 because we had like knife and fork. Oh, so you need completion of a set.
0:08:40 You need completion. So that’s you can tell a whole story like stringing together a bunch of
0:08:44 no, I just think that it’s like they’re engineers, right? You can’t have ABCDE and
0:08:50 actually, one of the weird issues is that they’re red, yellow, green, purple, blue,
0:08:55 hearts, not orange. So one of the big lobbying efforts has been to fill in the orange. So the
0:08:59 case of the Apple bunny ears and the Japanese bunny women, that was a case where there was an
0:09:03 intentional translation translation to sort of obscure the cultural reference. More than that.
0:09:08 They often try the map technically the same emoji, but it’s like rendered and sort of interpreted
0:09:12 differently. They like emoji that can have multiple meanings. You can also just have like
0:09:16 emoji to have one meaning, but it really has to be a really good one was going to be one meaning.
0:09:21 So for us, the Chinese takeout box, for example, one of the arguments that we made,
0:09:26 we made is that it’s, it’s one, it’s an iconic shape. It also symbolizes both an entire cuisine,
0:09:30 which is Chinese food, and also a means of eating, which is delivery and takeout, right?
0:09:36 And so, so in that one symbol, you get a lot of sort of secondary meaning. And with fortune
0:09:40 cookies, like it’s technically a cookie, but it also means like mysterious in the future and the
0:09:44 unknown and like so like so our primary secondary meaning one of the criteria for an emoji to get
0:09:49 past is that it has to have a certain element of ambiguity to it. So I love this. I’ve been thinking
0:09:53 about this so much. When I did emoji deck, it was more of an experiment around crowdsourcing
0:10:00 an emoji itself. Like I wasn’t like so much interested in making a formal case that emoji
0:10:04 could be a language because it was still so early. Could it get there maybe one day? Yeah.
0:10:08 But Unicode makes a really good point. They’re like, emoji’s not a language. It shouldn’t be a
0:10:13 language. The value is that it’s ambiguous. And I’ve really come around to that thinking and this
0:10:17 idea that the charm of sending an emoji is that it can be interpreted in a couple of different
0:10:22 ways. And, and that’s actually why we value it. And, and I’ll go further and say that a lot of
0:10:26 people ask me why emoji have become so popular. And I think it’s tied to the fact that we now
0:10:33 are just inundated with text. We live in a text culture, right? We, we communicate via text.
0:10:41 Our careers are run over email. We read constantly. Everything we do is mediated through almost
0:10:47 literal words. And so emoji represents this kind of reaction to that. And the popularity of emoji,
0:10:51 I think, is largely due to the fact that we need some other way of expressing ourselves over text.
0:10:57 If the pipes are so mechanical, like phones and machine, you no longer have the nonverbal
0:11:01 aspects. So this is actually replacing sort of this, this human element of the glimmer in your
0:11:05 eye or like the cheeky, the blush on your cheek. There’s an emoji that does that.
0:11:09 You think about the amount of signal you get from somebody’s voice on an analog telephone.
0:11:12 And when you strip that out and all you’re communicating is like LOL, you don’t actually
0:11:18 know how sincere that laugh is or that chuckle or whatever that person’s trying to convey.
0:11:23 And so emoji gives us a much bigger palette to convey this kind of like extra like limbic
0:11:27 meaning that we want to have in our, in our communications, but we, we can’t because we’re
0:11:31 just, we’re texting all the time. So to break down the taxonomy of figural representation,
0:11:35 not using literal text, let’s talk about where emoji fits. We have emoticons,
0:11:41 which are like a colon and a parentheses and that gives you a smiley face or like a semicolon and
0:11:45 a parentheses and that gives you a wink. Right. Using punctuation. Using punctuation is emoticon.
0:11:48 Often ascii-ish. Right. Because it’s not ascii art as well.
0:11:52 Some of the earliest references to emoticons go back to the 19th century as well where people,
0:11:58 yeah, yeah. People were using colons and dashes and parentheses to express like a wink. It goes
0:12:03 way back. It’s important to add in hieroglyphs and iconography. Other humans have had this idea
0:12:07 before, right? Like the, the medium and the technology is kind of like incidental.
0:12:11 I’m so glad you brought that up because it’s so important to not get caught up in technology time.
0:12:16 Well, technically technology includes like sticks and on stones. So that does go back in time,
0:12:22 but in the context of this machine web that we live in, then we have emoticons as part of the
0:12:25 taxonomy and then we have emoji. But how would you guys define emoji?
0:12:29 It’s Japanese. Drawing language. Emoji. I don’t know how to pronounce in Japanese,
0:12:34 but the Chinese. The emo is not for emoticon or emotion or anything. It’s just totally
0:12:41 coincidental. Wow. It’s hard not to just hue to the Unicode standard and say it’s the,
0:12:49 it’s the set of icons defined in Unicode that represent objects and nouns and actions and.
0:12:53 The way that I explain it to people is an emoji is a character, an emoji is something you can
0:12:58 put in the subject line of an email because it literally is text. So, so in the same way that
0:13:04 Unicode is kind of defined a standard to unify all the graphical representation of different
0:13:08 languages throughout the world and even non languages. So like, you know, the windings and
0:13:12 all that kind of stuff. Emoji actually slip into that entire system. So there is literally
0:13:19 what they would call a code point assigned to each emoji. Or sorry, not every single one because
0:13:24 now they’re like compound emoji, but there are code points assigned to emoji, which basically
0:13:30 says, you know, when you, when a computer sees this code point, they render it in a certain way.
0:13:34 But that, that it’s important to kind of wrap your head around what’s actually happening inside
0:13:39 the computer because the emoji is being sent as text. If your computer supports UTF-8, UTF-16,
0:13:45 that’s just like a standard way for your computer to handle text, whether it’s your phone or your
0:13:50 laptop, then it’s being told render this emoji. But it’s actually up to your computer’s operating
0:13:55 system, whether it’s OSX or iOS or Android or whatever, to go fish out a little image and put
0:14:00 it on your screen. And so that image is actually controlled by the hardware manufacturer or the
0:14:05 software manufacturer, you know, when it’s actually rendered on your screen, the operating systems
0:14:09 choosing which image to show you. And those images are actually stored, you know, in the same way
0:14:13 that other images are stored on your computer as little PNG files. And so Apple, you know,
0:14:17 puts those on your computer and your computer chooses to render those, which is why you may get
0:14:21 slightly different, you know, interpretation. Right. I’m glad this is actually really interesting
0:14:27 because recently Facebook just introduced their own emoji and that like basically hijack Apple
0:14:31 emoji. So you can turn that honor off, but essentially they’ve, they will replace, they’ll
0:14:35 swap out all the ones on the app. And Twitter’s had their own set for a while. And so why is that?
0:14:39 So they’re interesting copyright considerations here. My guess is a lot of those companies are
0:14:44 doing it because, A, they can afford to make their own set. B, they want to avoid the legal
0:14:50 liability of using Apple set. And C, like they think they might kind of have some like moment of
0:14:55 like, Hey, did you see Twitter’s new emoji? Right. And so they’re, you know, these large companies
0:15:00 are kind of innovating on emoji. Yeah. Yeah. Like re-innovating and re-illustrating their emoji.
0:15:04 And I think, you know, I think Microsoft actually just evolved to a new set or wasn’t
0:15:08 Android. I think it might have been Google Android. They, they just upgraded to make it
0:15:11 seem a little bit more normal. Like they had gone from like- That’s just not a
0:15:15 the terrible blue and white. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s like the blobby ones or-
0:15:19 Yeah, the Android, I think Google had blobby ones for a while. Now they’re doing somewhat normal ones.
0:15:26 Scariest emoji ever, the Microsoft emoji are like blue and gray. And they look like monsters
0:15:29 that hide underneath your bed. Why? Why are they blue and gray? I think it’s just like-
0:15:33 It doesn’t attempt to be like, like different from like a yellow skin tone.
0:15:37 Well, also, you have to, part of the original emoji is you wanted things that were
0:15:43 skin tone neutral. So Apple and Google chose yellow, but Microsoft for some reason chose gray.
0:15:47 Oh, gray. Cause I was going to say for Hindu, like blue is actually not a bad thing to have your skin
0:15:51 blue. It’s like a god. The other thing is if you have your own set of emoji, you can actually
0:15:58 start adding to that set without going through the unicode. So like a very good example is the
0:16:02 gay family emoji originally where they’re not, it’s not actually one emoji. You know,
0:16:09 the one where it’s like man, man, kid, kid. That is actually a compound emoji of four characters
0:16:14 glued together using something called a quote zero with joiner, which is basically like an invisible
0:16:20 glue. So if you are sending that emoji to someone else who doesn’t have the ability to render that,
0:16:25 it actually unravels itself into like a multiple character. Now what you’re seeing is a lot of
0:16:31 vendors making compound emojis. So like actually one of the places where this is being debated
0:16:34 for use is the need for a professional female emoji, right? Cause one of the big problems right
0:16:40 now on the existing set of women as represented by emoji is like, there are only like really
0:16:45 four roles for women to play compared to men. You know, men, you can be a sleuth or you can be,
0:16:51 you know, a policeman. You can be sort of a medical worker. You can even be Santa Claus,
0:16:58 but as a woman, the four things you can be as a role are basically bride, princess, dancer,
0:17:02 ploy by bunny. That’s it. Oh my God. It just goes to show you how the, I mean, of course,
0:17:06 this is the politics of human life play out in these systems. I mean, the perfect example I was
0:17:11 thinking of is a rifle emoji. And the case of, I believe Apple, Google and Facebook,
0:17:16 Charlie Warzel at Buzzfeed wrote a really detailed article investigating this and about how they
0:17:20 sort of help suppress as part of the Unicode consortium, the rifle emoji. Right. Emoji already
0:17:25 has a gun in it, right? And it’s like, okay, so how many more versions of that do we need? And
0:17:30 you’re right, it’s absolutely a political topic. I mean, that issue manifests itself in so many
0:17:35 other places in emoji. The country flag stuff is super interesting because that uses kind of what
0:17:39 Jenny’s talking about with these compound emojis. Unicode didn’t actually want to decide which
0:17:44 flags were and weren’t in emoji. So they did. Right, because you’re legitimizing then political
0:17:49 issues. What they did was they built this kind of like meta country system so that you would
0:17:54 actually be pairing these country letter emojis together. So CNN would go together and then
0:17:59 it would be up to your phone to decide if you showed the Chinese flag. They pushed that decision
0:18:03 making, that like political decision making of which flags to support off to the handset
0:18:08 manufacturers. Microsoft actually does something weird there. What do they do? They just show the,
0:18:12 they don’t show a flag. They show a flag plus the two letters. Right, right. Microsoft doesn’t render
0:18:17 it normally. Yeah, to the point about politics being kind of embedded in emoji. It’s not just
0:18:23 because these are icons that represent the parts of our lives that we feel passionate about. It’s
0:18:27 because there’s a finite palette. It’s not like language where you can only, you know, you can
0:18:31 kind of combine say whatever you want. It’s combinatorial. You can take multiple combinations
0:18:35 and turn into whatever you want. You get way more degrees of freedom to kind of express yourself.
0:18:39 There’s a finite number of food items that are ready to go in there. And when you think about the
0:18:43 vast like multitudes of humanity, whether it’s, you know, people’s relationship status or structural
0:18:48 orientation or skin color, it’s like, like emojis never going to be able to express that. And so
0:18:54 like how do you contain this thing that’s like growing and kind of has to grow as more and more
0:18:59 people use it, but also by definition has to be a finite list of icons. Well, how do they handle
0:19:03 the skin tone issue? Because one of the things that I noticed is that an apple, because I use
0:19:08 an Android, so I didn’t notice this, you can press down on a thumbs up, for example, and then you
0:19:14 can pick among 15 different shades to like pick a skin coat shade that’s closest to you. It’s based
0:19:20 on a Fitzpatrick skin tone. Yeah, it’s actually used, it’s the same skin tone system that dermatologists
0:19:24 use to categorize. This reminds me a little bit of being a kid when like you had Crayola box,
0:19:28 I remember that the only shade you had, there was like a nude shade or like a skin tone. Yeah,
0:19:33 nude was always Caucasian. I remember using sepia to represent my skin color. I mean,
0:19:37 there’s a great history about this in, this is going to sound weird for me to say, but like women’s
0:19:42 pantyhose like had this issue where nude was always considered Caucasian. And people were like,
0:19:47 this is ridiculous. It was one of the earliest blind spots of emoji, I remember. Right. Well,
0:19:51 I mean, if you have like only white men designing them, do you remember when Slack, there was this
0:19:56 guy who wrote a post about Justin Brown, and I remember it was so meaningful because it’s such a
0:20:02 minor seemingly arbitrary thing. But then it is true, like the first time I saw that I could find
0:20:09 my skin color in a system and to be able to use it was kind of amazing and empowering. And I’d
0:20:13 think there’s something significant about that. I would totally agree. I don’t share your experience
0:20:19 as that as the person on the other side. And so it’s funny for me because I don’t,
0:20:29 he’s a white male. Yeah. I don’t share that like sense of identification with the
0:20:38 bright white skin. Right. I’m like, it feels odd to opt into that, which speaks to my privilege
0:20:42 as a white male. I mean, if you’re not exposed to it, you’re not exposed to it. The bottom line is
0:20:45 if you’re any person of color, you’re always aware of your color. Especially if you’re in a
0:20:49 context where everyone else is not the same color as you. And so when I texted my friends who are
0:20:53 not white and I’m like, should I be choosing that one? And I just choose to choose the yellow
0:20:59 skin tone. That’s just like the way more comfortable. To my solution is I often send four. It’s like,
0:21:05 it’ll be like yellow, light, dark, and then like the beige one. It’s like a Benetton add emoji.
0:21:11 Emoji, that’s fabulous. So now the kind of evolution is that we have yellow for like all the
0:21:15 human face characters, and then you can choose skin tones for some of them. But it doesn’t get at
0:21:20 like more nuanced issues about like cultural and racial identity, having to do a facial structure
0:21:24 or hairstyle. Oh, right. That’s a great point, actually, because one of the pet peeves I have
0:21:28 is when I used to go to foreign countries and look at billboards, it always glorified that
0:21:32 aquiline knows the face structure, whereas there’s a totally different type of face structure in
0:21:38 different areas. Emoji probably won’t ever have that amount of like customization and Unicode gets
0:21:45 this. And they actually say like, we’re adding like 60 emoji a year. This is fun, sustainable.
0:21:50 We feel like the future is inline images. And that kind of breaks my heart as like kind of a,
0:21:55 you know, nerd standardization guy who like, who really appreciates all the hard work that went
0:22:00 into Unicode and the idea that it is a standard, because if you’re just sending inline images
0:22:05 forever, then like, you know, you have no idea what’s going to be on the other side if they can
0:22:10 render the image. So stickers, I mean, so Kim Emoji, for example, Kim Kardashian’s quote Emoji,
0:22:16 they’re not actually emoji, those are just stickers or images that you can text back and forth.
0:22:20 But, you know, again, you know, standards, can you put it in the subject line email and those
0:22:24 you can’t you can’t so that therefore they don’t qualify. So they’re not technically emoji. Right.
0:22:28 So then going back to our hierarchy, we went from emoticon to emoji and now stickers. Stickers are
0:22:33 basically inline images. I mean, stickers are just images that you can pick from a palette or
0:22:37 like, and I think you can, you know, in certain apps, you can like apply a sticker to an image
0:22:41 that it like sits on top of it. But you’re then in this kind of like proprietary ecosystem of
0:22:46 that’s okay. But like, you think about the stuff that really works and the stuff that
0:22:51 really changes the future of the web and communication, it’s all standardized.
0:22:55 You’re saying this as a standardization person, because my friend Connie, who wrote a wonderful
0:23:01 post on the topic of stickers, argues that emoji are very limited for what you need to do because
0:23:05 she feels that you have so much more expression and the ability to convey so much more with
0:23:09 stickers than you do with emoji. Emoji doesn’t preclude the use of stickers. There is some
0:23:17 subset of images that are universal enough that should be hardwired into the operating systems
0:23:24 and are basically can be cross-platform that an iOS device can talk to, you know, Microsoft windows
0:23:29 and can talk to like an Android device can talk to your Mac laptop. Like the fact that at least
0:23:33 there is you’re not going to get little square boxes as long as your operating systems are
0:23:37 fairly up to date. Well, that goes to your point about why standardization is important,
0:23:42 because you’re now giving up that you’re in this proprietary ecosystem like WeChat or Line,
0:23:45 and you only have their stickers set and you can’t always transfer all these stickers across.
0:23:49 I mean, also, if you think about the accessibility issues around stickers, right, like people using
0:23:53 screen readers, they’re not going to be able to interpret an image and like emoji actually have
0:23:59 names. And so in theory, there’s much better accessibility for emoji for somebody who’s visually
0:24:07 impaired. Like for example, last year, Oxford English Dictionary chose Facebook Tears of Joy,
0:24:14 which I always thought looked very sad. The thing with the eyes and it’s like balling, but
0:24:18 that’s actually Face of Tears of Joy. And that is how you know that because, you know, all these
0:24:23 emoji have. They say the label. Oxford put that in there. So the word of the year was an emoji.
0:24:27 Part of the reason they chose that was that it ended up as number one on my friend’s site called
0:24:31 Emojitracker.com. Oh, right. That’s right. The Emojitracker, which tracks all the use of emoji
0:24:35 on Twitter. And for a while, it was just like, it was like the heart emoji or something or just
0:24:39 the smiling face emoji. So I think it’s really interesting when the top emoji shuffle because,
0:24:44 you know, whenever you start texting with somebody who hasn’t used emoji before,
0:24:49 they’re like choosing like the safest ones. Going back to this idea of some of the companies
0:24:55 owning their own emoji and some of the proprietary open tension between standardization,
0:24:59 freedom of expression. What do you make of this notion that part of what we’re doing here is
0:25:04 essentially also creating a more machine-readable web in terms of emotional reading? Because
0:25:09 essentially you’re now adding a whole new layer where you can codify people’s emotions, sentiment,
0:25:12 in ways beyond just a black and white like don’t like. I’ve been thinking about this so much,
0:25:17 actually, and not in the context of emoji, but actually Facebook reactions. Yeah, me too. I used
0:25:20 to assign and edit top ads on this topic because it was very accessible. Yeah, I think it’s a really
0:25:25 interesting topic because if you look at traditional sentiment analysis in the data world,
0:25:29 it’s kind of a joke. You have to have training data, you have to know good cases.
0:25:33 Right. And just to interject for a moment, as someone who’s been tested a million of those
0:25:38 systems and can never find one that actually works for my needs, they’re so binary. You
0:25:42 don’t get anything useful and you’re not getting insight. One of the reasons there is that words
0:25:47 have these degrees of freedom. They can be used sarcastically and you would never know it based
0:25:53 on the semantics. And so traditional sentiment analysis is really broken because you’re using
0:25:58 these kind of like stale, rigid, semantic definitions. What’s really interesting about
0:26:03 Facebook reactions is you think you’re saying, “I love this thing,” or “I’m sad about this,”
0:26:09 or “I’m angry about this,” but what you’re actually doing in conjunction with that is giving Facebook
0:26:16 really great labeled data for sentiment analysis. That’s right. Machine readable data. That is a
0:26:22 coley grail of emotional sentiment understanding. When I was at Wired, I assigned a piece to a
0:26:28 sociologist, Evan Solinger, because I wanted to coin this phrase, the mood graph, because we have
0:26:33 an interest graph, social graph, all kinds of other graphs that link all these nodes and ideas,
0:26:37 and now to have a mood graph to essentially be able to put your pulse on someone’s mood,
0:26:41 something very finite yet constantly changing. It’s just a fascinating thing to be able to
0:26:46 codify this. The sentiment stuff generally coley started strongly with human face and body.
0:26:52 So, I think this is also why people agitate so much for emoji that look like themselves,
0:26:56 like the redheads, and people with beards, and people who are bald.
0:27:00 Or anyone with curly hair. People with curly hair relate to other people with curly hair.
0:27:04 And so, I think people really love seeing themselves represented in emoji, which is why
0:27:09 Bitmoji, which is highly, highly, highly customized stickers in sort of emoji spirit.
0:27:13 Oh, and my cousins and I use Bitmoji on WhatsApp all the time. I think there’s something really
0:27:19 symbolically important about Bitmoji, because you are putting yourself in it and conveying in
0:27:23 this sticker form. The fact that Snapchat bought it, I think, is really telling.
0:27:24 Oh yeah, for a hundred million dollars.
0:27:28 Right, especially given that they are changing this culture of how you express yourself through
0:27:32 your facial expressions with face swapping and filters. Connie and I made the argument that it’s
0:27:36 sort of like selfies, as selfies as a form of stickers. So, what we’re talking about the machine
0:27:40 readable is a little distinct than this, but it’s sort of an interesting idea.
0:27:44 I also think it ties into this slightly dubious notion of the Uncanny Valley,
0:27:47 where if you want to try to represent yourself and you want to have like configurability around
0:27:52 that, it needs to be kind of cartoonish for it to be believable. I think what we’re seeing with
0:27:56 Snapchat filters, and I don’t know if you guys have played with Snow yet. That’s like a,
0:27:59 it’s like, take Snapchat filters and just multiply them by a thousand. It’s like,
0:28:04 it’s like, just like amazing amounts of diversity around the amount of stuff you can put on your
0:28:11 face. It is this weird convergence on identity and emoji that’s kind of happening.
0:28:14 I agree. And in fact, this is going to be a little, sound like a little out of left field for a
0:28:19 moment, but the whole notion around the Chewbacca mask lady, when, you know, that was the most
0:28:23 popular Facebook live video ever, it got like unprecedented views. And there was simply a woman
0:28:27 who was trying on her Chewbacca mask in the car and she’s laughing and giggling about it.
0:28:32 And then she puts her mask on and then she takes it off and she laughs so uninhibitedly.
0:28:37 It’s insane. And I make the argument that what was so empowering because it was totally took off
0:28:42 for obvious reasons is not the fact that she was laughing so uninhibitedly. It’s a fact that
0:28:47 it took putting on and then taking off the mask for her to do that, which is a lot,
0:28:50 not unlike what happens with communication through these filters and being able to now
0:28:56 express yourself through these cartoon like ways. I mean, honestly, it takes me back to like theater
0:28:59 and like Shakespeare in like seventh and eighth grade. I remember having these like really intense
0:29:03 discussions about like what it is to put on a mask and what a mask represents about yourself.
0:29:07 It’s a very Cambilian idea, right? The Joseph Campbell like mask and the myth and the man.
0:29:10 You’re right. There’s a theater, I mean, that’s why people say improv is so interesting for any
0:29:14 career field. But I think that there is an interesting moment now coming together with
0:29:20 selfies, stickers, emoji, bitmojis all together where we do have this new emotional web coming
0:29:25 together. And using emoji as the first time I thought about this could be kind of like putting
0:29:34 on a mask over your words to convey to yourself this extra, this kind of additional layer,
0:29:37 this emphasis of your emotion that you otherwise might not get.
0:29:41 Okay. So going back to you writing an entire book in emoji and yet you’re saying that you’ve kind
0:29:46 of evolved into thinking that emoji is not necessarily language, but clearly it is a visual
0:29:51 language and it is a tool for communication. It’s not complete. So how did you translate that?
0:29:54 I mean, what were some of the trade-offs and decisions you made? And by the way,
0:29:58 for the audience, that book was like 2009 or that was like many years ago.
0:30:01 So what emoji space were you working off? Did you make them up? Like what’d you do?
0:30:06 So I’d gotten in a text from my college roommate whose wife is Japanese. He sent me an emoji and I
0:30:11 was like, what is that? They told me you could download like basically a Japanese app and it
0:30:17 would like awaken your iPhone to the emoji keyboard. It just spoke to me in the like,
0:30:21 like you have to hack the iPhone to get the special keyboard of like Japanese icons. And I
0:30:26 was like, oh my God, I want this so bad. I was like, this is amazing. I should write a book
0:30:29 in emoji. And I was like, oh, that’s a lot of work. And I don’t know if I can write a whole book
0:30:32 in emoji. And then I was like, well, maybe I can translate a book in emoji. I was like, okay,
0:30:37 what books would work? And I was like, well, it has to be in the public domain because I worked
0:30:41 a lot in like the copyright reform space. Nobody’s going to just like, let me translate their
0:30:44 book into emoji without a lot of effort. For a moment, I thought about the Bible and I was like,
0:30:48 that’s too obvious. What’s like, what’s like totally even more inappropriate.
0:30:55 So Moby Dick came to mind as like this, this like impossible book to trans to put into these
0:30:58 symbolic characters. As soon as I thought, I was like, no, I can’t do that. That’s crazy. And I
0:31:00 was like, that’s like too hard. Honestly, it’s a little bit like, I just came back from saying
0:31:04 Hamilton. And so it’s a little bit like the idea of putting a wrap to like the founding fathers.
0:31:08 That’s what I find so fascinating. I would say Hamilton was probably a mashup of mediums and
0:31:13 time and culture. And it’s like one of those things where you tell to somebody and they’re like,
0:31:16 you can’t do that. That’s crazy. And then you’re like, well, the fact that you just said that made
0:31:21 me want to do it. And so not only that, there are not one, but two whale emoji. Were there at that
0:31:29 time? No, there’s only the original, the cute one that kind of was battling the cute whale.
0:31:35 The second, I think it’s called sperm whale didn’t come up until later. So I was like, okay,
0:31:39 wow, that would be really interesting to do all of Moby Dick because it’s also like really long.
0:31:44 I mean, it’s 10,000 sentences. And okay, well, if I don’t want to do this, maybe hire somebody to
0:31:48 do this. And I was like, experimenting with mechanical Turk at the same time. I think it was
0:31:53 like one of the original Amazon web services. It was like, it would later become part of that
0:31:58 AWS umbrella. I remember people using it for research and stuff. Right. It’s still used for
0:32:02 research. It’s still being valuable for that. But a couple other people have done an experiment
0:32:09 here or there of using it off label. I had made a task of mechanical Turk just to ask Turk workers,
0:32:14 if you could ask anyone like to do anything on mechanical Turk, what would you have them do?
0:32:17 And they came up with this long list of stuff. And I don’t think translate a book into emoji
0:32:20 was one of them, but there’s some creativity out there. I was like, okay, I’m going to,
0:32:24 I’m going to try this thing, or I’m going to hire people to translate Moby Dick into emoji,
0:32:28 some portion of it and see if this works. So I did the first chapter and the results came back
0:32:33 and they were hilarious. They’re so good. What do you mean you did the first chapter? Like,
0:32:38 did they break it down word by word? So how do you capture that in emoji? So I decided I was
0:32:43 going to do it as on a per sentence basis. And that actually turned out to be one of the challenging
0:32:48 parts of the project was like, splicing sentences is actually like kind of like a classically hard
0:32:52 and all natural language processing problem. And so I kind of like figured out a hack to like
0:32:55 chop it up. And I wrote a lot of regular expressions to basically book into sentences.
0:33:00 But you decided basically the sentence was a unit of analysis, not a phrase in the task.
0:33:04 And you say, pick any of these emoji and then actually wrote my own little emoji picker because
0:33:09 these things didn’t exist at the time. I had gotten the emoji from a friend. He had reverse
0:33:17 engineered the iPhone SDK and basically hacked out the PNG files from the software kit to basically
0:33:21 have the raw emoji in image form. And so I took that and just made like a little JavaScript,
0:33:25 like HTML thing and you know, dump that into mechanical Turk and like came back and I was like,
0:33:30 hey, this works. And so I think the sentence that’s kind of like on the cover of the book,
0:33:35 if you go to the website, it’s like the website being Emoji Dick. Emoji Dick.com.
0:33:41 Call Me Ishmael is the first sentence of Moby Dick. And the emoji that the Turk worker chose was
0:33:49 telephone man with face, sailboat, whale emoji. That’s perfect. The rest of it was just like
0:33:53 indecipherable emoji nonsense. And some of the people were just like, all right, give me my
0:33:57 five cents. I’m going to click some random emoji. And other people just like clicked every single
0:34:03 emoji. So the plan became have people translate the same sentence multiple times. So you get
0:34:08 three different emoji translations for one sentence and then have another set of tasks
0:34:14 where people vote on the best, most appropriate translation. So like of the three, which one
0:34:18 got the meaning across the best. And I was like, oh, I’m just like getting really excited about
0:34:21 this. And I started doing the math on how much it was going to cost. And I was like, oh, it’s going
0:34:25 to be thousands and thousands of dollars. That summer I met the Kickstarter guys that started
0:34:28 talking with Andy Bayo. He was like, you should put on Kickstarter. So that night I went home and
0:34:32 put it on Kickstarter launch the next day and ended up working for them. And by the way, how
0:34:36 much is the campaign? How much money did the campaign make? My goal was like 3,500 and I ended
0:34:41 raising 3,700. So I worked on it for nights and weekends for another eight or nine months. And
0:34:46 then self-published it on Lulu.com. You can still buy it. It gets printed on demand. Do people still
0:34:53 buy it? I’ve sold like thousands of dollars of emoji deck. And I’d say hundreds of copies,
0:34:59 probably like five or 600 copies of it have sold since then, which is not a lot. I bet this podcast
0:35:02 is going to sell a bunch. Yeah, well. You better share some of the proceeds with me. Okay, so there
0:35:07 are two copies. One, there’s a black and white copy, which is like the easy to print one. And
0:35:12 that’s like $20 or $30. And then there’s the full color one, which like is obviously preferable
0:35:18 because emojis are so colorful. But when you’re printing on demand, 800 pages of color, laser,
0:35:24 hardbound copy, it’s actually really expensive. So that thing costs like $180.
0:35:26 Right, because you’re not printing in bulk. Because you actually save money when you’re
0:35:31 printing in bulk. So I have to sell that one for that much. And people still buy it. In 2013,
0:35:36 the Library of Congress contacted me and they said, “We would like to acquire emoji deck as our
0:35:40 first emoji book.” I was like, “Are you sure?” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, we’re sure.” I was
0:35:46 telling a friend and David Gallagher, I think you must know from the times. And he’s like, “You
0:35:49 know, everyone submits their stuff to the Library of Congress. It’s not that big of a deal.” And I
0:35:53 was like, “No, man, they asked for it. Like they’re acquiring it.” I think it’s a big deal because
0:35:57 it’s a curatorial point of view. Totally. They’re saying, “This is a cultural moment. It’s not just
0:36:01 a book that was published. And we need to figure out how to acquire it.” I was like, “All right,
0:36:07 I’ll spare a copy. I signed it. I sent it to them.” And then they sent me this little certificate in
0:36:11 digital form. And what’s hilarious, and this is my favorite part, is that it’s somehow listed as a
0:36:15 translation of “Moby Dick.” So when you look up “Emoji Dick,” it says all these libraries have it
0:36:19 because it’s really just saying that they have a translation, they have the original “Moby Dick.”
0:36:22 Now it’s got a life of its own and people still discover it.
0:36:25 That’s amazing. I mean, you actually even created an art show. Did you base on this?
0:36:31 Friends of mine put together a kind of emoji survey art show and there were some really great
0:36:36 stuff. And their emoji tracker was there. There was a programming language built out of emoji.
0:36:40 I mean, emojis can have their URL. I mean, that’s another thing. They’re literally text. So you
0:36:44 can have like emoji, well, I don’t know, but you can have emoji in your email address.
0:36:47 Oh, you can. Oh, you can also buy emoji domains.
0:36:52 So you have an emoji book, you have emoji art shows, emoji hackathons, emoji hackathons.
0:36:57 So our big news this week is that in November in San Francisco, we are going to throw the
0:37:01 first ever emoji con. What? Is it like Comic Con?
0:37:05 It’s like Comic Con, but emojis. I really hope people show up dressed in emoji costumes.
0:37:08 Yeah, I’m going to show up as, oh, you guys are, Ying’s going to show up as a dumpling emoji for
0:37:13 sure. Or like, you know, poop emoji or like the ghost emoji. So it has many different
0:37:17 elements to it. So one is definitely sort of this whole emoji learn aspect where it’s like
0:37:22 panels and talks. And there’s a sort of emoji film festival. And then there’s an emoji hackathon.
0:37:27 And then there’s an emoji art show. And then of course, the opening party emoji where, you know,
0:37:31 our goals only have food that is also, also emoji. So why a conference? I mean, of course,
0:37:35 I see the cultural significance, but to bring people together around this first,
0:37:38 this idea of a first every emoji con, like, what’s the significance of that?
0:37:42 I thought it already existed. And to me, to be honest, when you just said that, I was like,
0:37:46 what? Yeah. And then I was like, the fact it didn’t exist. And I kind of have this issue where
0:37:51 of like, I think something needs to be, I will make it exist. Right. So we did that with dumpling
0:37:55 emoji. We did it with emoji con. And so we actually have some really cool sponsors. We’re
0:38:00 going to have a lot of kind of emoji activists kind of out there. And also, you know, from our
0:38:05 perspective, you know, there are a lot of policy decisions around emoji. And obviously, the world
0:38:09 really cares about emoji, whether or not it’s a rifle emoji or the condom emoji or like professional
0:38:13 women emoji. Part of the goal of emoji con is to open up that discussion. So it is not just how
0:38:17 that the Unicode level. So to hear… So our Unicode members going to be attending this conference?
0:38:21 Oh, members of the Unicode emoji subcommittee, including like, you know, the co-chairs. And
0:38:26 we timed it in November between the Unicode conference itself and the Unicode technical
0:38:32 committee meeting. And also, like, it’s right around election day. Well, you guys, thank you
0:38:35 for joining the A6NZ podcast. Thanks for having us. This is so much fun. This is so much fun.
0:38:39 So much fun. We could keep going. Hours and hours on emoji con. Yeah, I wish we could.

0:00:03 – Hi, everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast.
0:00:05 I’m Sonal, and I’m excited to do another one
0:00:07 of our co-hosted episodes with Mark Andreessen,
0:00:11 who joins me in interviewing MIT economist Andrew McAfee,
0:00:14 who we’ve actually had on the podcast a couple of years ago
0:00:17 on a great episode with his co-author Eric Brynjolfsen
0:00:19 on their book, “Machine Platform Crowd.”
0:00:22 But Andy’s new book takes a very different turn
0:00:24 from that previous series of books and focus
0:00:27 on the theme of bits to focusing on atoms,
0:00:30 the physical world, basically the environment.
0:00:33 It’s called “More from Less,” the surprising story
0:00:36 of how we learn to prosper using fewer resources
0:00:37 and what happens next.
0:00:39 And I think it’s a really important book
0:00:42 contributing to the important dialogue we’re having right now
0:00:43 on taking care of our planet
0:00:45 and also of taking care of human progress,
0:00:47 especially because these two don’t have to be
0:00:50 a zero-sum game of the two in conflict with each other.
0:00:52 So what does it take to go from that narrative
0:00:54 of extraction and destruction
0:00:56 to one of protection and progress?
0:00:58 So in this episode, we cover everything
0:01:01 from what capitalism’s role is in all this,
0:01:03 including what it is and isn’t,
0:01:06 to the global environment, including China and India.
0:01:08 And throughout, we discuss the technology
0:01:12 from energy use and types of energy to dematerialization.
0:01:14 And surprisingly, the idea of that
0:01:16 well before software was even invented,
0:01:17 stay tuned for that bit.
0:01:20 But we quickly begin with the technology
0:01:23 and effects of the Industrial Revolution.
0:01:24 – The industrial era kicked off
0:01:27 the Industrial Revolution and the James Watch steam engine
0:01:28 and all those other technologies
0:01:32 was this period of amazing human growth,
0:01:34 the growth of our economies, growth of our prosperity,
0:01:36 growth of our population.
0:01:39 And that was great in a sense,
0:01:41 but it really did feel like there was a trade-off
0:01:44 between improving the human condition
0:01:45 and improving the state of the world.
0:01:48 And in the industrial era, if you looked at the evidence,
0:01:49 you could make a pretty strong case
0:01:51 that we were increasing our growth
0:01:54 at the expense of the planet that we all lived on.
0:01:56 We took more resources from the earth every year.
0:01:57 We chopped down more trees.
0:01:59 We cleared more cropland.
0:02:01 We took more fossil fuels out of the earth.
0:02:03 We polluted more.
0:02:04 We either domesticated animals
0:02:06 or drove them to the brink of extinction.
0:02:10 And the reason I decided to write more from less
0:02:12 is I don’t think that’s true anymore.
0:02:15 The evidence supports the idea that in the richest countries,
0:02:17 and I’ve got the best data for America,
0:02:19 that that trade-off between the human condition
0:02:20 and the state of the world
0:02:22 is actually in the rear view mirror.
0:02:25 Because in almost all the ways that we could care about,
0:02:27 improving the human condition,
0:02:29 we’re taking fewer resources from our planet.
0:02:30 We’re polluting it less.
0:02:32 Some of the animals that we pushed to the brink
0:02:33 are coming back.
0:02:35 I didn’t hear that story being told.
0:02:37 And so hence the book.
0:02:39 – So one thought that struck me
0:02:41 in looking at the example of the Industrial Revolution,
0:02:44 which everyone points to is a greatest story of progress.
0:02:45 Do you point out that it ended slavery
0:02:47 but increased child labor?
0:02:49 – There were some pretty nightmarish situations
0:02:51 early in the industrial period.
0:02:53 There really were factories full of kids
0:02:56 under the age of 10 working 14 hour days.
0:02:58 And some of these kids weren’t even sent there
0:03:00 by their parents, they were orphans.
0:03:02 And this was what we decided to do.
0:03:04 I consider that a moral mistake
0:03:07 and different than what kids were doing on farms before.
0:03:09 But in most rich countries,
0:03:12 slavery ended early in the industrial era.
0:03:15 Child labor ended before the 20th century,
0:03:17 but we didn’t start dealing with pollution
0:03:20 and species that we pushed to the brink of extinction
0:03:22 until much, much later than that.
0:03:24 So we kind of looked after ourselves first
0:03:26 and then the rest of the planet afterward.
0:03:29 – So Andy, I wanna probe the conflation of capitalism
0:03:31 and extraction of resources
0:03:34 when it doesn’t actually have to necessarily be that way.
0:03:36 But one stat in particular that struck me on that front
0:03:39 is that research emerged showing that the US GDP
0:03:42 was closely intertwined with energy consumption.
0:03:43 You talk about this in your book.
0:03:46 Clearly there’s something about more energy consumption
0:03:49 tied with the success of an economy.
0:03:52 If you draw a graph of the US economy,
0:03:55 the real GDP of the US from 1800 to 1970,
0:03:57 and then you add one more line to that graph,
0:04:00 which is total energy consumption per year
0:04:03 from 1800 to 1970, those lines are really hard to tell apart.
0:04:06 They sit right on top of each other.
0:04:09 And there’s this whole stream of research
0:04:11 that turned into an assumption
0:04:14 that if you told me what your energy use per capita was,
0:04:16 I would tell you what your GDP per capita was
0:04:19 or the state of advancement of your society.
0:04:23 And we almost use those two things as proxies for each other.
0:04:25 One of the super weird things
0:04:28 is that that relationship has completely broken down
0:04:29 in the United States, where again,
0:04:31 I know the evidence really well,
0:04:35 total US energy consumption has been basically flat
0:04:37 since at least the end of the Great Recession
0:04:39 and maybe even before that started.
0:04:41 Now, in the old fashioned way of looking at things,
0:04:43 you say, “Oh my God, there was this massive recession.”
0:04:45 Absolutely not, it grew like crazy,
0:04:49 but we’ve divorced energy use from growing the economy.
0:04:50 And one of the broad points I make in the book
0:04:52 is that story is very broad.
0:04:56 We’ve divorced most other kinds of using up atoms,
0:04:58 using materials from our prosperity growth.
0:05:02 And that relationship is not unique to America.
0:05:04 It exists elsewhere and it will spread
0:05:07 as we spread capitalism and technology.
0:05:09 One of the things that I had fun with in the book
0:05:11 was trying to defuse tension
0:05:13 because there are a lot of audiences
0:05:14 where if you say capitalism,
0:05:16 they start throwing rotten tomatoes at you.
0:05:19 They just can’t hear the word, it’s so triggering.
0:05:21 So one thing I try to do is say like,
0:05:23 “What do I mean by capitalism?”
0:05:26 And I don’t mean cronyism, I don’t mean corporatism,
0:05:29 I don’t mean regulatory capture or financialization.
0:05:30 These are all real things.
0:05:33 These are all perversions of actual capitalism.
0:05:36 – Yeah, I hate that capitalism gets a bad rap.
0:05:39 And while we may argue for a better form of capitalism,
0:05:41 can you just break it down and sort of tease apart
0:05:43 the myth from the facts when it comes to
0:05:45 like what is capitalism?
0:05:46 I think sometimes people are using different labels
0:05:48 for different things, quite honestly.
0:05:51 – Yeah, and let’s be clear on what we’re cheerleading about.
0:05:55 Capitalism is the best way the earth has ever come up with
0:05:58 to get goods and services into the hands of people.
0:06:00 Now that’s a really important thing for a society to do
0:06:03 if you don’t want your people to starve or die of exposure.
0:06:04 And when I talk about that,
0:06:06 I mean a few pretty specific things.
0:06:08 First is that private companies are responsible primarily
0:06:10 for producing those goods and services.
0:06:12 That’s not the government, it’s not individual,
0:06:14 or craftsmen or artisans or anything.
0:06:19 Number two, they use prices that are not centrally set
0:06:22 or controlled and prices convey a huge amount of information
0:06:24 about abundance and scarcity
0:06:26 and where you should allocate your attention.
0:06:28 So we really need prices to be floating around
0:06:29 in an economy.
0:06:32 We need your property rights and your contracts
0:06:36 to be respected by a working court system
0:06:38 that believes in protecting those things
0:06:40 so that if you’re an upstart, if you have a good idea,
0:06:43 either the government or some big powerful company
0:06:46 or some billionaire can’t just come and take it from you
0:06:49 without compensating you and without your agreement
0:06:50 on that stuff.
0:06:52 One of the most important phrases for capitalism
0:06:53 is voluntary exchange.
0:06:55 You can’t force me to sign a contract,
0:06:56 you can’t make me buy a product
0:06:58 or forbid me from buying a product,
0:07:01 you can’t stop me from moving to another state.
0:07:03 So you just have this, it’s free flowing,
0:07:06 but there are these hard and fast constraints
0:07:08 and rules about it.
0:07:10 If you get those things right,
0:07:14 the goods and services will become abundant to people.
0:07:16 One of the things I loved writing the book
0:07:21 was that Adam Smith nailed all of these topics in 1776.
0:07:23 And yet here we are almost 250 years later
0:07:26 and we’re arguing about things that he kind of put to rest
0:07:27 a long time ago.
0:07:30 He said you need actual competition,
0:07:34 not cronyism for the benefits of capitalism to a crew.
0:07:35 Amen to that.
0:07:36 – He actually went further.
0:07:36 He actually called business people
0:07:38 the enemies of capitalism.
0:07:41 He’s got that famous quote that men of trade
0:07:44 seldom meet together even for merriment,
0:07:47 except it winds up in a conspiracy against the public.
0:07:48 – Yeah, he basically argued,
0:07:49 it’s like what modern libertarians actually argue,
0:07:51 which is basically to the extent that business people
0:07:53 like start to get involved in political policy,
0:07:55 they try to rig the political system in their favor.
0:07:56 And then that trips the line
0:07:58 between so-called capitalism and corporatism.
0:08:01 And then politically, that’s sort of the distinction
0:08:04 between being pro-business and being pro-market.
0:08:06 – Or being pro-incumbent and pro-market.
0:08:07 – Right, exactly.
0:08:08 What you want is you want to be pro-market.
0:08:10 This is what we run into in our business,
0:08:11 ’cause we launched these new companies
0:08:13 that don’t have any political power whatsoever.
0:08:14 And they go into these industries
0:08:16 that in some cases are heavily dominated by incumbents.
0:08:18 And invariably what you find is an intertwining
0:08:20 of the incumbents with the regulatory system,
0:08:23 often under the color of consumer protection,
0:08:24 that it actually turns out what’s happened
0:08:25 is the incumbents have rigged the system.
0:08:28 They’ve rigged the politics for their own preservation.
0:08:30 And the hypocrisy gets exposed in the form of like,
0:08:32 you just have a product that’s just obviously better.
0:08:35 And then the captured regulatory state
0:08:36 comes to try to shut it down and protect incumbents.
0:08:39 – Well, my favorite one of that was for a while,
0:08:41 I think France or Paris had the requirement
0:08:43 that a limo had to go back to its home station
0:08:46 for 15 minutes before picking up another customer.
0:08:49 Why on earth would that be?
0:08:50 – That’s right.
0:08:51 Well, this is always the absurdity of,
0:08:53 would you really rather like stand out in the rain
0:08:55 with your arm up, seriously, right?
0:08:58 And by the way, would you really rather have a system
0:08:59 in which the driver is able to like eyeball you
0:09:01 in the street and decide to not give you a ride?
0:09:03 – I was about to say because what people don’t talk about
0:09:05 is the disproportionate impact on people
0:09:06 who don’t look like there’s someone
0:09:08 who you want to give a ride to
0:09:10 and now you can get a ride anywhere by anybody.
0:09:11 – Yeah, exactly.
0:09:13 But then there’s this risk that you become the thing
0:09:16 that you hate, which is always a danger.
0:09:18 – We also need to acknowledge there are problems
0:09:20 that capitalism itself doesn’t solve.
0:09:22 People getting left behind,
0:09:24 inequality of some kinds of opportunity,
0:09:28 the lack of a safety net, pollution, species loss,
0:09:31 absolutely, these are well understood,
0:09:34 sometimes called failures, market failures,
0:09:36 and we need to be thoughtful about those things.
0:09:38 But again, Adam Smith, I don’t think he talked about
0:09:40 species loss and extinctions,
0:09:43 but he got these things right in 1776.
0:09:45 And it kind of frustrates me that there’s still
0:09:47 this big Marxist hangover going on
0:09:51 where people willfully or ignorantly misunderstand
0:09:53 this economic system that we have.
0:09:56 – So in the 20th century, were capitalist systems
0:09:59 or communist systems worse for the environment?
0:10:00 – Oh my God, there’s no comparison.
0:10:03 I think the single saddest and most tragic story
0:10:05 that I learned when I was researching the book
0:10:07 is about the Soviet whaling industry.
0:10:10 The Soviets signed up for all the treaties
0:10:12 to sharply limit the whale hunts.
0:10:15 And then they ignored the treaties that they signed,
0:10:16 which is bad enough.
0:10:18 And they killed about 200,000 additional whales
0:10:21 over the decades before they finally stopped.
0:10:24 The crazy part of the story is why they killed
0:10:26 200,000 additional whales.
0:10:28 And the answer is for no good reason at all,
0:10:31 they didn’t eat the meat, they didn’t need the blubber
0:10:33 ’cause they were already self-sufficient in oil.
0:10:35 The only reason they did it was because they had
0:10:37 Stalinist five-year plans for growth
0:10:41 in the fisheries industry and whales weigh a lot.
0:10:42 And if you kill lots of whales,
0:10:45 you grow your fisheries industry.
0:10:47 There’s this heartbreaking story about the guy
0:10:50 that was in charge of the fisheries industry.
0:10:53 And he was such a pro at executing
0:10:54 Stalinist five-year plans,
0:10:56 he was named a hero of the Soviet Union.
0:10:59 And one of the Soviet scientists went to him at some point
0:11:01 and said, “We have to stop this.
0:11:04 There will be no more whales for our children to see.”
0:11:07 And his reply was, “Our descendants will not be the ones
0:11:09 to fire me from my job.”
0:11:10 – Dan.
0:11:11 – So, you know, we can talk, the capitalist systems,
0:11:16 we made pollution mistakes, yes, and we corrected them.
0:11:19 What closed communist systems did was keep making mistakes
0:11:22 under cover of darkness for no good reason.
0:11:24 – I mean, this is very relevant to current events, right?
0:11:26 One of the things that is very common
0:11:27 in the United States right now
0:11:29 is the theory that capitalism is responsible
0:11:30 for environmental degradation.
0:11:33 And unless we convert to a socialist system immediately,
0:11:36 like the environment is doomed.
0:11:40 And therefore, the very clear assumption in the statement
0:11:42 is the shifting to a socialist command and control system
0:11:44 will lead to better environmental outcomes.
0:11:45 That’s a very common theme right now.
0:11:47 Like how do you address that in present times?
0:11:49 – Yeah, and it’s a tiny bit hidden, right?
0:11:51 Because the people who make that argument,
0:11:53 I hear them railing against capitalism
0:11:55 and saying we need to take better care of the planet
0:11:56 via some alternative.
0:11:57 And then they get kind of vague
0:11:59 about what that alternative is.
0:12:02 But I think they’re all either dodging the fact
0:12:05 or low balling that they want central planning.
0:12:07 They want a command and control economy.
0:12:08 And let’s call that what it is.
0:12:11 It’s something between socialism and communism.
0:12:13 And the thing that we need to keep in mind
0:12:18 is that the capitalists, the free societies of the West
0:12:21 were the ones that dealt with their pollution problem
0:12:23 earliest and best.
0:12:24 And what I consider the great triumph
0:12:26 of the environmentalist movement
0:12:28 that kicked off around Earth Day
0:12:31 was that we, the people demanded that we stop having
0:12:34 polluted air and dirty water and things like that.
0:12:37 And we got it via things like the Clean Water Act,
0:12:39 the Clean Air Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
0:12:42 These were landmark pieces of legislation.
0:12:44 The single most important thing that happened
0:12:46 after the legislation was passed
0:12:50 was we got clever about how to reduce pollution levels.
0:12:51 The story of cap and trade
0:12:54 for reducing particulate emissions from power plants
0:12:58 and reducing sulfur dioxide is such a fantastic story
0:13:00 because we put together this coalition
0:13:04 of environmentalists and conservative economists
0:13:08 and we put in place a market system for trading pollution,
0:13:10 which sounds weird and bad,
0:13:13 except that it has cratered our levels
0:13:15 of SO2 and other particulate pollution
0:13:16 and done it for about one-fifth
0:13:18 of the originally estimated cost.
0:13:21 It was just this extremely efficient thing to do.
0:13:23 So the notion that capitalist systems
0:13:26 have no way of dealing with increasing pollution
0:13:28 is just dead flat wrong.
0:13:30 – When I was reading the book,
0:13:32 one thing that struck me was,
0:13:34 do you think that with developing countries today,
0:13:36 like India, China, I mean,
0:13:37 one would argue they’re more developed
0:13:38 than fully developing.
0:13:39 However, you define it,
0:13:42 that they even have to go through an extractive phase first
0:13:46 in their first phase of figuring out how to use their resources.
0:13:47 Like I guess my question is,
0:13:50 why couldn’t they leapfrog this extractive phase
0:13:53 and just go right to a more practical phase
0:13:56 when it comes to the acceleration of technology?
0:13:58 Do you think that extractive phase has to happen?
0:14:00 – It’s pretty clear to me that America and the UK
0:14:02 and I think most other super rich countries
0:14:04 are past peak stuff.
0:14:06 If you weighed our economy year after year,
0:14:09 it would weigh less year after year.
0:14:12 India and China and Bangladesh are not yet at peak stuff,
0:14:14 but they will get to that point
0:14:18 much early in their GDP per capita trajectory
0:14:20 because Nigeria is not gonna lay
0:14:23 an extensive copper telephone network across the country.
0:14:26 They’re not gonna build as many coal plants per capita
0:14:29 as we did because that’s just economically inefficient to do.
0:14:31 I’ll be surprised if the Chinese
0:14:33 have as many private cars per capita
0:14:35 as we did earlier in our history
0:14:36 because it’s really impractical
0:14:40 to have that heavy expensive asset sit idle 95% of the time.
0:14:42 So I do think that this technologically
0:14:45 very sophisticated economy is going to get countries
0:14:47 through this resource transition
0:14:50 much earlier than we went through it.
0:14:51 – So one of the things that’s so striking,
0:14:53 carbon emissions right in the US are falling.
0:14:55 And you tell me they’re starting to fall
0:14:56 in certain parts of Europe as well.
0:14:58 – Yeah, the EU in general
0:15:00 has been on a shallow downward trend.
0:15:02 – Yeah, there’s lots of advances being made
0:15:04 in energy efficient technologies of all kinds.
0:15:06 So I wouldn’t imagine like this will continue.
0:15:08 Let’s take the strong advocates for dramatic action
0:15:10 at their word that we’re gonna run into real trouble globally.
0:15:13 How do you not progress from there to believing
0:15:15 we have to take a very different approach
0:15:16 from a foreign policy standpoint,
0:15:18 in particular towards China and India,
0:15:21 potentially up to and including a course of actions.
0:15:23 Just because if you look at the graph
0:15:24 of global emissions growth,
0:15:26 it’s very clearly to like gigantic examples.
0:15:29 – So we’re going to invade them
0:15:31 to make them reduce their carbon emissions.
0:15:34 Like I don’t see how that plays out.
0:15:36 Let me give you a couple of softer ways
0:15:38 ’cause I think there are a couple of important ones.
0:15:40 One is they gave the Nobel Prize
0:15:42 to Bill Nordhaus last year
0:15:45 for his work about how to deal with global warming
0:15:47 and the notion of a carbon dividend.
0:15:49 When Nordhaus proposed his carbon tax,
0:15:52 and I like the phrase carbon dividend better
0:15:54 because it’s not a tax where the government keeps the money,
0:15:56 you pass through the government directly to people
0:15:58 and give them a carbon dividend,
0:16:01 hopefully skewed a little bit toward lower income people.
0:16:03 As part of that, you also do what’s called
0:16:04 a border adjustment,
0:16:06 where you look at all the imports into the country
0:16:09 and if they come from high carbon sources,
0:16:11 you tax them just like you would
0:16:13 if they were made in this country
0:16:14 with high carbon sources.
0:16:17 I think that’s really strong incentive
0:16:19 for our main trading partners,
0:16:21 and China’s probably exhibit A here,
0:16:24 to start literally cleaning up their act in this regard.
0:16:28 The other thing is, we have one source of power,
0:16:30 we have one way to generate power
0:16:33 that is scalable, clean,
0:16:36 somewhat economical and not intermittent.
0:16:37 And it’s called nuclear.
0:16:40 And there are a couple of countries like France and Sweden
0:16:41 that have cheap electricity
0:16:43 and the cleanest power in Europe.
0:16:45 And we’re running away from it in the rest of the world.
0:16:47 I find this completely perverse,
0:16:50 why not put together an international coalition?
0:16:54 And along with that, an international patent bank
0:16:55 so that it’s cheaper to produce
0:16:58 the new generation of nuclear reactor.
0:17:00 I’m pretty sure that will get the cost down
0:17:02 to the point where it becomes an economic no-brainer,
0:17:04 even for low-income countries
0:17:08 to start transitioning into a clean energy environment.
0:17:09 I would do both of those things
0:17:12 way before I would try to coerce other countries
0:17:15 into changing their energy profile
0:17:18 or doing it in a way that would slow down their growth
0:17:19 or impoverish their people.
0:17:21 – So I’m glad you brought up nuclear.
0:17:22 I was gonna ask you that.
0:17:26 So many groups just flatly rule out nuclear as an option.
0:17:27 So what’s going on there?
0:17:30 And what’s the way through that?
0:17:32 – I honestly don’t know the answer.
0:17:35 Why are they so stridently anti-nuclear?
0:17:37 There’s probably a bundle of things going on.
0:17:39 One is because of everything
0:17:41 from Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Godzilla
0:17:44 to Three Mile Island and Fukushima and Chernobyl.
0:17:46 I mean, I just finished watching
0:17:48 their Chernobyl mini-series on HBO.
0:17:51 So I have this kind of visceral ick reaction
0:17:55 to the idea of super widespread nuclear power,
0:17:57 but I think our homework is always
0:17:59 not to trust that initial ick
0:18:00 and to go look at the evidence.
0:18:02 And when you actually look at the evidence
0:18:04 and look at the issues,
0:18:05 I don’t know how you come away
0:18:08 and you can accept a nuclear advocate.
0:18:10 And we worry about things like nuclear waste.
0:18:12 And we should worry about nuclear waste,
0:18:14 but we don’t then say, well,
0:18:17 how much harm is caused by the pollution
0:18:19 from other kinds of power generation.
0:18:22 Worldwide, there are clearly hundreds of thousands
0:18:26 of deaths a year from people breathing coal dust
0:18:28 and people breathing the emissions from coal plants.
0:18:30 So the death toll, it’s not even close.
0:18:32 And this is backed up by very good research
0:18:34 published in The Lancet and elsewhere.
0:18:36 There’s a nice article in Our World and Data
0:18:39 about relative safety levels and death rates
0:18:40 from different kinds of power.
0:18:43 You walk away from that nuclear’s biggest cheerleader.
0:18:45 So I don’t quite know why the reaction
0:18:48 is so strident and visceral and negative.
0:18:51 All I can say, it is not based on evidence.
0:18:54 And I’m starting to see a coalition forming
0:18:56 that pushes back against that to say,
0:19:00 we’re getting this deeply wrong on an important issue.
0:19:02 – So, okay, so you were talking about cap and trade.
0:19:05 What made that so successful compared to other attempts?
0:19:07 Obviously, there’s a market-based mechanism,
0:19:08 but give me more details.
0:19:13 – Cap and trade, the basic idea is make pollution expensive,
0:19:15 attach a cost to it.
0:19:17 In other words, put it inside the market.
0:19:19 Pollution doesn’t naturally have a price.
0:19:21 And when that’s the case,
0:19:23 no matter what the press release says,
0:19:24 businesses have a strong incentive
0:19:25 to go pollute if it’s free.
0:19:28 Okay, put a price on it.
0:19:31 And then here’s the brilliance of cap and trade.
0:19:34 Allow companies to buy and sell that pollution
0:19:37 or more specifically that right to pollute with each other.
0:19:41 So if I’m super dirty and I can’t clean up quickly,
0:19:43 I gotta buy the right to pollute,
0:19:44 but I’m willing to buy that right
0:19:47 if it’s cheaper than the cost of me cleaning myself up.
0:19:50 Somebody will sell me that right and make some cash
0:19:52 because they’re already really clean
0:19:54 and they don’t need that right.
0:19:56 So this was a line of economics research
0:19:58 that got started with legendary
0:20:00 Nobel Prize winning economist Ronald Coase
0:20:04 and descendants of his ideas got put into practice
0:20:06 early in the Reagan administration
0:20:09 with the help of like the Environmental Defense Fund.
0:20:11 So this beautiful alliance forum to say,
0:20:13 hey, let’s try this market-based thing
0:20:15 for dealing with pollution.
0:20:16 They overcame whatever reluctance
0:20:20 was there from the incumbents again and they did it.
0:20:22 And then the research is pretty clear
0:20:24 that we can just look at what happened
0:20:26 to a particular admission from these kinds of plants.
0:20:30 America’s skies are just 90 plus percent cleaner
0:20:33 than they were when that legislation was passed.
0:20:36 And the cost of doing it is a fraction
0:20:38 of the original estimate of that.
0:20:41 So there’s a reason for these kinds of crazy fans of markets
0:20:42 for getting things done.
0:20:45 They work and when you can put things like pollution
0:20:47 in a market and you do this with cap and trade
0:20:50 and carbon dividends and things like that,
0:20:53 these are the most efficient ways
0:20:55 to deal with the problem.
0:20:57 – Don’t China and India have to sign up for the same thing?
0:20:59 – One of the problems with carbon
0:21:01 is that the harms from it are not local
0:21:03 and they’re not immediate.
0:21:07 So maybe the fast growing high carbon countries right now
0:21:10 will choose to ignore it for a while longer.
0:21:12 We have a couple of mechanisms to get them to not do that.
0:21:15 And like I said, if you do a border adjustment
0:21:17 for the high carbon products that we import,
0:21:20 that’s a really strong incentive to do things better.
0:21:23 If we can make it cheaper for them to be green.
0:21:25 And personally, I think nuclear
0:21:28 and a patent bank or cheap technologies around nuclear
0:21:30 is the path to do that.
0:21:34 We clearly have to help the currently low income world
0:21:36 get rich on a lower carbon trajectory
0:21:38 than they’re on right now.
0:21:39 That’s different than saying
0:21:42 that they can’t use more energy year after year.
0:21:44 I’m not gonna deny them that right to prosperity.
0:21:45 – Exactly.
0:21:47 – But we really want them to get cleaner quicker.
0:21:50 I think we have tools to do that.
0:21:52 And I don’t think that the Chinese and the Indians
0:21:54 are indifferent to the longer-term health of the planet.
0:21:56 I really don’t believe that.
0:21:58 – I mean, they’re living with it in a physical way.
0:22:00 Everyone there is facing it and experiencing it
0:22:01 in a very real way.
0:22:03 And we had this podcast a few years ago
0:22:05 with Evan Osnos at the New Yorker.
0:22:06 We were talking about China.
0:22:09 One of my favorite things that he talked about
0:22:12 is how because of the growth of the middle class in China,
0:22:14 that there is now a huge cohort of people
0:22:16 demanding a better environment
0:22:18 precisely because of the market dynamic.
0:22:21 No, not just that, getting a better environment.
0:22:22 So I found this great research
0:22:24 that I put in more from less.
0:22:26 A very good economist looked at what happened
0:22:28 when China finally got serious about urban air pollution.
0:22:30 And the reason they got serious about it
0:22:32 was people were leaving the cities
0:22:35 even if they didn’t have government permission to do it.
0:22:37 People were leaving because their kids
0:22:39 were just clearly getting sick
0:22:41 and gonna have stunted lives.
0:22:44 So China took action and they brought down
0:22:46 their country-wide particulate pollution
0:22:49 by 30% in four years.
0:22:50 And they did it what these draconian means,
0:22:54 but they did it and they took us in the United States
0:22:57 12 years to get that same 30% reduction.
0:22:59 So even one of the points I make in the book
0:23:01 is democracies are probably more receptive
0:23:02 to the will of their people,
0:23:05 but there are interesting exceptions in both directions.
0:23:08 And China was clearly receptive to the will of its people
0:23:11 not to choke off their children with pollution.
0:23:12 – Right, right.
0:23:13 I read a ton of Chinese sci-fi
0:23:14 and it’s literally the recurring theme
0:23:16 is basically about the end of the world
0:23:17 and like environment.
0:23:18 But Andy, I was-
0:23:18 – Is that right?
0:23:19 That’s cool.
0:23:20 – Yeah, it’s a really big theme.
0:23:21 You have to read a lot of different Chinese science fiction
0:23:22 authors to see this,
0:23:24 but that’s basically my genre this year.
0:23:26 One thing I wanna ask you,
0:23:28 I understand from the market dynamics point of view
0:23:32 why cap and trade was such a successful idea and example
0:23:33 and it’s been proven out,
0:23:36 but why couldn’t a government have simply mandated?
0:23:38 Like we will just simply put a limit on this.
0:23:40 Draconian measures like China did.
0:23:43 Why would that not be as effective?
0:23:44 – Sometimes we did.
0:23:46 That’s how we actually brought down CFC emissions
0:23:47 so drastically.
0:23:52 We just mandated that they be reduced by X% over time
0:23:54 until they got down to close to zero.
0:23:57 The reason that worked is that there’s a relatively small
0:23:58 number of industries,
0:24:00 a relatively small number of companies
0:24:01 and a relatively small number of products
0:24:04 that used chlorofluorocarbons.
0:24:05 And to be a little bit more cynical,
0:24:09 the other reason that ban worked was somebody eventually
0:24:11 whispered to the incumbent companies,
0:24:12 the CFCs you’re making out right now,
0:24:13 they’re off patent.
0:24:16 The new generation of coolants and propellants and whatnot,
0:24:17 those can be under patent.
0:24:19 This can be a big revenue source for you.
0:24:23 And so they finally got industry on their side.
0:24:24 Fiat can work.
0:24:27 For example, it is just flat illegal
0:24:29 to dump waste at sea in America.
0:24:30 We just did that via Fiat.
0:24:31 We didn’t put a price on it.
0:24:34 You cannot hunt animals in national parks.
0:24:38 You cannot hunt deer or duck outside their seasons.
0:24:40 So sometimes you wanna do things by Fiat,
0:24:43 but I kind of think if you can put it
0:24:46 in a market mechanism, and it’s appropriate to do that,
0:24:48 I think you’ll get better solutions quicker.
0:24:49 Maybe that’s not right,
0:24:51 but I’ve got this deep faith in markets.
0:24:54 Once you put things in them and price them
0:24:57 to deal with that price in a very fast way.
0:25:01 If you change a business’s cost structure quickly,
0:25:03 man, businesses will run from that increased cost,
0:25:05 like gazelle run when they smell a lion.
0:25:07 It’s just amazing how quickly it’ll happen.
0:25:10 – I will tease or torture Andy a little bit
0:25:11 in that as you’re probably well aware,
0:25:13 support for market-based systems
0:25:14 like cap and trade have collapsed.
0:25:16 – One of the points that I bring up in the book
0:25:19 is that sometimes the crazy side of the argument wins.
0:25:22 And I think the crazy is winning on nuclear these days.
0:25:24 I think the crazy is winning on GMOs.
0:25:27 I think the crazy is winning on vaccines
0:25:29 in way too many communities.
0:25:30 So as much as I love evidence
0:25:32 and trying to think through things,
0:25:34 we better be very good communicators about our solutions
0:25:36 ’cause the crazy can win.
0:25:37 – Can we quickly talk on GMOs
0:25:39 and the myths and misconceptions around GMOs?
0:25:41 And why did you think it was important
0:25:42 to talk about GMOs in your book?
0:25:44 – The reason I thought GMOs were important
0:25:47 to include in this book is they are great ways
0:25:48 to help us tread more lightly on the planet.
0:25:50 The crop yields will go up.
0:25:52 You can grow them in different places.
0:25:55 If climate, as climate change happens,
0:25:57 you’re gonna need plants that are hardier,
0:25:59 can survive heat waves and droughts and things like that.
0:26:02 The GMO toolkit is our best toolkit
0:26:03 for accomplishing those things right now.
0:26:07 And yet it’s stridently opposed by governments
0:26:09 and all kinds of groups around the world.
0:26:11 And even the EU itself,
0:26:13 in addition to the National Academies of Science
0:26:15 and just about every country that you can think of,
0:26:18 has reviewed the evidence and they’ve all come down
0:26:22 and said there is no evidence that GMO crops
0:26:25 are less safe for the environment or for humanity
0:26:27 than conventional techniques.
0:26:28 We can get past the point of saying,
0:26:29 well, it remains to be seen.
0:26:31 No, we need to go do these things.
0:26:35 And the reason I get exercised about this
0:26:37 is when I look at things like golden rice,
0:26:39 which is this strain of rice
0:26:43 that has beta carotene injected into it via GMO techniques.
0:26:46 So that you provide vitamin, is it A?
0:26:48 It’s a vitamin A deficiency.
0:26:52 Happens to babies who are weaned on rice gruel.
0:26:54 And it leads to blindness.
0:26:57 And that deficiency is responsible
0:27:00 for about a million deaths a year around the world.
0:27:04 Great, your anti-GMO, honestly, that volume of deaths,
0:27:05 that’s on you.
0:27:07 – So you discussed in the book,
0:27:09 the very famous at the time, I guess in the 70s and 80s,
0:27:11 a very famous debate between two at the time,
0:27:14 very accomplished people, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich.
0:27:16 And it’s largely been forgotten,
0:27:17 but it’s a highly relevant debate
0:27:19 and maybe even more relevant today than it was at the time.
0:27:20 And maybe you could describe their debate
0:27:21 in the famous bet.
0:27:24 – Yeah, my favorite bet of all time was the bet
0:27:26 between these two guys, Julian Simon,
0:27:29 pushed back against the dominant narrative
0:27:31 around the time of Earth Day,
0:27:34 which was that growth will come to a bad end,
0:27:37 that we cannot keep this headlong, uncontrolled,
0:27:40 market-based growth for a bunch of reasons,
0:27:43 primary of which was, they’ll become too many of us,
0:27:45 the Earth will not be able to feed everybody,
0:27:48 and we’re gonna crash into a massive famine.
0:27:52 And the prime exponent of that view was Paul Ehrlich,
0:27:53 who still is at Stanford,
0:27:55 and wrote a book called “The Population Bomb”
0:27:58 where he essentially said, look, nothing we can do
0:28:00 will prevent hundreds of millions of people
0:28:01 from starving in the years ahead.
0:28:04 But if we do things like force population control
0:28:06 and we take control of the means of production,
0:28:08 we might be able to stave off
0:28:11 the worst things that could happen.
0:28:12 And one of the things I learned
0:28:14 was that Simon agreed with that
0:28:16 and wrote things about population control.
0:28:17 Then he switched his view
0:28:20 in this wonderful instance of intellectual honesty
0:28:22 and humility, and he said, wait a minute,
0:28:27 we keep on not seeing famines happen, resource crises.
0:28:28 We just don’t see these things.
0:28:29 Instead, the evidence shows
0:28:31 that most things are getting better.
0:28:33 And he got laughed out of a lot of rooms
0:28:37 and Ehrlich kept on putting out this gloom and doom,
0:28:39 stripping the planet narrative,
0:28:41 and finally Simon challenged him to a bet.
0:28:45 And Simon said, pick any time period of at least a year
0:28:48 and pick any bundle of resources that you want.
0:28:49 And at the end of the time period,
0:28:52 if the resources are more expensive in real terms
0:28:53 than they are now,
0:28:56 which kind of means they’re more scarce than they are now,
0:28:57 I’ll pay you the difference.
0:28:59 If they’re cheaper, you pay me the difference.
0:29:01 I think this probably appeared
0:29:02 like a sucker’s bet to Ehrlich.
0:29:07 He picked five resources, Tungsten 10, Chromium Copper,
0:29:09 and I forget the fifth one.
0:29:10 And he said, all right,
0:29:12 let’s put a 10-year period on the bet.
0:29:14 By 1990, the real prices
0:29:16 of all five of those things had fallen.
0:29:17 The price of the total portfolio
0:29:19 had declined by more than half,
0:29:21 and Ehrlich mailed Simon a check
0:29:23 to acknowledge that he’d lost the bet.
0:29:24 I didn’t talk about it very much.
0:29:27 He didn’t attach any kind of note to that check.
0:29:30 So I love that episode so much.
0:29:32 And I’m trying to do round two of that.
0:29:33 I’m using the Long Bets website,
0:29:35 which is part of the Long Now Foundation,
0:29:36 started by Stuart Brand and others,
0:29:38 and I’m offering bets.
0:29:41 I’m saying, for example, that no matter what,
0:29:43 I’m saying that resources are gonna become more affordable.
0:29:45 I’m agreeing with Simon on that,
0:29:46 but I don’t stop there.
0:29:48 I say, in 10 years from now,
0:29:51 I bet we’re gonna use less total energy, not per capita,
0:29:54 but total energy America-wide in 10 years
0:29:57 after a decade of continued economic growth.
0:30:00 That’s how confident I am in the one-two punch
0:30:03 of capitalism and tech progress
0:30:05 to take costs out of the system
0:30:07 and energy and resources cost money.
0:30:09 That’s just my reasoning.
0:30:11 If you think I’m wrong, step on up.
0:30:14 With Long Bets, you both put the money up front,
0:30:16 you designate a charity that will get it at the end,
0:30:17 and we’ll see what happens.
0:30:19 – So there’s two historical figures in the book
0:30:20 who are heroes of mine.
0:30:22 – Julian Simon and- – And Bucky Fuller.
0:30:23 He came up with this idea, I think,
0:30:25 and I think you say it was 1927.
0:30:26 – Yeah, the ’20s.
0:30:28 – Yeah, maybe just explain his idea,
0:30:30 ’cause that was a remarkable insight
0:30:33 at a time when there was probably no actual
0:30:36 logical foundation to expect what he was saying.
0:30:40 – So Fuller was this crazy polymath,
0:30:45 and he popularized, for example, the geodesic dome.
0:30:47 That’s kind of what he’s best known for today, I think,
0:30:50 which is the structure that can bear a great deal of weight
0:30:54 and very heavy loads while weighing very, very little.
0:30:57 And Fuller thought that we would see more and more examples.
0:30:59 There were plenty of opportunities to do that kind of thing
0:31:01 all around the economy.
0:31:05 And I found this crazy book that he wrote in the ’20s,
0:31:07 and he said, “Look, I did a bunch of calculations.”
0:31:09 And he said, “I thought it might be possible
0:31:11 to satisfy all of our wants and needs,
0:31:14 essentially while using less stuff,
0:31:15 while using fewer materials.”
0:31:18 And he called the process ephemeralization,
0:31:20 making things more ephemeral.
0:31:22 That’s a real mouthful to say.
0:31:25 So we use the phrase dematerialization more often now,
0:31:28 but Fuller was the guy who said,
0:31:32 “Gang, we can do this in the 1920s,” which is crazy.
0:31:34 – That’s so crazy, that’s pre-software.
0:31:35 – Oh, here at the economy in those days,
0:31:39 it was what Joel McKeer calls the Wheaton-Steel economy.
0:31:40 That was during the era where GDP
0:31:41 versus became an economic metric,
0:31:42 and it was literally like tonnage.
0:31:43 It was like, how much–
0:31:44 – Yeah, we were weighing things around.
0:31:46 – You weigh your output, right, in tons.
0:31:49 – Yeah, and then we started counting dollars instead,
0:31:50 and that was a huge innovation.
0:31:53 So the fact that Fuller came up with that that early
0:31:57 was just this weird intellectual shooting star.
0:31:59 – So if I recall correctly,
0:32:00 and maybe I’ve made this up in my own head,
0:32:03 but I think that one of the lines he used was,
0:32:05 ephemeralization is the process of making,
0:32:07 making more and more with less and less.
0:32:09 But then he added a line, he said,
0:32:12 “Until eventually we are making everything with nothing.”
0:32:14 – I think he did go that far.
0:32:16 He also said in 1927,
0:32:20 he said it’s the number one economic surprise of world man.
0:32:24 And so here we are, you know, 90 years later,
0:32:26 and it’s still surprising to people.
0:32:28 – So one thing that just blew my mind,
0:32:30 ’cause I had not actually read that or known that,
0:32:32 how could he come up with that in 1920?
0:32:34 This is before software even existed.
0:32:35 Like what would give him,
0:32:38 ’cause I understand now, Mark, in 2009,
0:32:40 when you wrote “Software is Eating the World,”
0:32:42 like I could see someone making that now.
0:32:45 What gave him the hutzpah to say that in 1920?
0:32:46 Like that’s insane.
0:32:47 – I have no earthly idea,
0:32:49 and I don’t think we would have got
0:32:51 to this resource turning point.
0:32:54 I don’t think we would have achieved absolute dematerialization
0:32:57 without the digital world, without the computer.
0:32:59 I think what software is giving us back the world,
0:33:02 because it’s letting us slim, swap, optimize,
0:33:05 and evaporate our resource use.
0:33:08 And I don’t know how we would have got there in a world
0:33:10 where we’re still using slide rules and file cabinets.
0:33:11 Maybe we would have,
0:33:13 but in my multiverse,
0:33:15 we don’t get there in the universes
0:33:17 that don’t have the digital revolution.
0:33:19 A lot of people, when they talk about dematerialization,
0:33:20 they talk about it very literally,
0:33:22 like you’re replacing an object,
0:33:23 a hard object with something,
0:33:24 it’s software counterpart,
0:33:25 but we just make it clear.
0:33:27 It’s actually even deeper than that,
0:33:28 ’cause when you do think about ride sharing
0:33:30 and all this entire economies
0:33:31 that are growing off the mobile phone,
0:33:33 that is what enables the end of ownership.
0:33:35 When you think about the fact that today,
0:33:38 kitchens can be delivering food to you,
0:33:40 that is a thing that changes the shape of cities, et cetera.
0:33:42 I think a lot of times when people talk about dematerialization,
0:33:45 they take it very literally as like the one-on-one replacement
0:33:47 of something physical with something digital,
0:33:48 and it’s actually bigger than that.
0:33:51 It’s like a whole services economy reshaping things.
0:33:53 I talk about these four different vectors
0:33:55 for dematerialization.
0:33:58 Trimming out how much aluminum is in an aluminum can,
0:33:59 that’s slimming it down.
0:34:01 Swapping out one resource for another,
0:34:03 that’s when rare earths get expensive,
0:34:05 we walk away from them.
0:34:09 Optimizing, using the load factor for airlines
0:34:13 has increased from the mid-50s percent to 80% now.
0:34:14 You’re just making better use
0:34:17 of these resource-intensive assets that you have,
0:34:20 and then evaporate, replace it by nothing at all.
0:34:23 The smartphone has made me not print out maps
0:34:25 or print out film anymore.
0:34:27 We have these different vectors
0:34:28 for dematerialization to happen,
0:34:30 and the point that I make in the book
0:34:32 is they’re happening in obvious ways and subtle ways,
0:34:34 and big ways and small ways,
0:34:36 and the foreground and the background in every industry,
0:34:39 simply because stuff costs money,
0:34:41 competition makes you wanna save money,
0:34:42 and the digital toolkit offers you
0:34:44 these great opportunities to do that.
0:34:46 I think the story is just that simple,
0:34:49 and if that’s true, it’s not about to end.
0:34:50 – So if you take full-estought
0:34:52 and your thought to their logical extremes,
0:34:55 how close can you get ultimately some day
0:34:57 to making everything with nothing?
0:35:01 Like if we’re sitting here 50, 100, 200 years from now,
0:35:02 like what are the prospects for being able
0:35:04 to take physical inputs out,
0:35:07 either 99.99% reduced or taken out entirely
0:35:09 from many of the things we’ll be consuming?
0:35:12 – That depends on how many of us there are
0:35:17 primarily, I think, but I think we can go a lot farther
0:35:19 down the dematerialization curve than we are right now.
0:35:21 It’s not crazy at all to imagine that,
0:35:25 let’s say in 2100, that we’re primarily an urban species.
0:35:27 We live in these densely populated cities
0:35:32 that are a lot closer to Singapore than Delhi, for example.
0:35:35 We’re growing a lot of our food
0:35:39 in very vertical, energy-intensive environments.
0:35:41 When we need to build a new building,
0:35:43 we’re just recycling the steel and the metal
0:35:46 that we used for the previous generation of buildings.
0:35:48 We’re already doing that a lot right now.
0:35:51 And grow our textiles in weird vats
0:35:54 with Petri dishes of bacteria or something.
0:35:57 That’s no longer crazy to think about.
0:35:59 Will we be getting our protein from living animals
0:36:04 or from scaled-up Petri dishes in 2100?
0:36:05 – Lab-grown meat, yeah.
0:36:06 – And who knows about staple crops
0:36:08 if we’ll need cropland for that.
0:36:11 But I’m for damn sure that we’re gonna need
0:36:13 a much, much smaller acreage of cropland
0:36:17 for all of humanity in 2100 than we do right now.
0:36:18 So I don’t know.
0:36:19 I don’t have a good way to guesstimate
0:36:21 where those lower floors are.
0:36:23 They’re a lot lower than they are right now.
0:36:26 And I really think that, let’s take 2100 as the year,
0:36:28 we’ll be this species that occupies
0:36:31 a very small physical footprint on the planet
0:36:32 without depriving ourselves.
0:36:35 And then we go into nature kind of because it’s cool
0:36:37 and because we want to,
0:36:39 as opposed to because we need to strip it
0:36:41 to satisfy our growth.
0:36:42 – I have a question about R&D,
0:36:43 the role of research and development
0:36:45 and kind of delivering on the dream that you’re talking about.
0:36:46 ‘Cause obviously everything you’re talking about
0:36:48 is sort of dependent on future development
0:36:51 of advanced technology and creation of new knowledge.
0:36:54 The last like 20 years, I would say there’s been
0:36:56 basically like two dramatic events
0:37:00 in energy-related R&D in the US.
0:37:02 And one is this incredibly positive outcome
0:37:06 with respect to fracking and liquid natural gas.
0:37:09 There’s been all kinds of positives to come out of that.
0:37:10 And even in the energy industry,
0:37:11 like a lot of experts were shocked
0:37:13 on how well that stuff has worked.
0:37:14 The curves are amazing
0:37:15 ’cause it’s like energy production in the US,
0:37:16 falling, falling, falling, falling, falling.
0:37:18 And then all of a sudden it just like takes off
0:37:19 like a rocket ship, right?
0:37:20 When like nobody was expecting it.
0:37:22 – To the surprise of everybody.
0:37:24 – Yeah, so that was the good news surprise.
0:37:26 The bad news surprise was Silicon Valley
0:37:30 embarked on a very big push to do so-called clean tech,
0:37:33 green tech, particularly between 2010, 2012.
0:37:36 It was a huge push and there were a lot of extremely smart
0:37:37 and accomplished people here in the Valley
0:37:39 who thought that this was the new frontier
0:37:41 for American technology, for venture capital.
0:37:44 And with obvious, both huge potential positive benefits
0:37:46 for the world, but also a huge opportunity
0:37:47 to build new businesses.
0:37:49 And I think there were hundreds and hundreds,
0:37:50 possibly even thousands of companies
0:37:52 and a very large amount of money and effort.
0:37:54 And a lot of people put a lot of work into this
0:37:55 that the results were extremely disappointing
0:37:57 on a number of fronts.
0:37:59 I mean, there were maybe a few isolated cases of 6/7.
0:38:01 One might say we got Tesla and SpaceX out of that, right?
0:38:03 In which case, fair enough.
0:38:04 But even beyond that,
0:38:06 companies had a much harder time developing
0:38:08 and/or commercializing those technologies
0:38:09 or just ended up in dire straits
0:38:10 that people didn’t expect.
0:38:13 So I’m very curious of your assessment of what went wrong
0:38:15 in the Silicon Valley clean tech, green tech adventure
0:38:18 and what should we learn from that?
0:38:20 You know, both as an industry and as a world,
0:38:22 like how might we, if we’re gonna try that kind of thing
0:38:24 again, like if we’re gonna try to double down on R&D here,
0:38:26 like what lessons should we learn from that
0:38:27 in terms of how to do it better?
0:38:29 – I only know it from a great distance.
0:38:32 Here’s a super naive way to look at it.
0:38:34 If we think about solar,
0:38:36 solar has become dominated by China primarily
0:38:38 because it’s a flavor of manufacturing
0:38:41 that they were already pretty good at,
0:38:43 and it’s just a scale economies game.
0:38:45 And they’re quite good at scaling up huge factories
0:38:47 and turning out whether it’s a liquid crystal display
0:38:50 or a photovoltaic panel.
0:38:53 So I think that’s just very, very tough competition.
0:38:57 The other thing that I do believe about solar and wind
0:39:00 is that they have a place in the energy portfolio,
0:39:03 absolutely, but Germany’s experience
0:39:05 with trying to become much more reliant on renewables
0:39:08 has not gone very well at all for a couple reasons,
0:39:12 a deep one of which is it’s dark sometimes
0:39:14 and it’s not windy a lot of times.
0:39:17 We have this very serious problem of intermittency
0:39:19 with those renewables.
0:39:21 So they have to be backstopped with something.
0:39:23 And if you turn off your nuclear stations,
0:39:25 if you decommission them like Germany is doing,
0:39:27 you get backstopped in their case
0:39:30 with some very dirty cold powered plants.
0:39:32 So they’ve kind of got the worst of both worlds.
0:39:34 Their electricity prices are really high
0:39:37 and their carbon emissions per unit of energy are really high.
0:39:40 You look next door at France, which is very nuclear
0:39:42 and you see neither of those two problems happening.
0:39:45 So I think at the individual competition level,
0:39:48 going up against China in a scale game is really, really tough.
0:39:49 And I think there are some policy mistakes
0:39:52 that can make that situation worse.
0:39:54 Does that play at all with your experience?
0:39:55 – I think those are definitely big components.
0:39:58 You may know this, the sort of appendix
0:39:59 to that whole saga was, yeah.
0:40:02 So there was a huge push for solar panels,
0:40:03 including some very advanced.
0:40:05 We actually have here in the conference room,
0:40:07 we actually have an old cylinder solar panel
0:40:08 that I keep around just ’cause it’s such a great story.
0:40:10 It’s a cylindrical solar panel, right?
0:40:11 That would have the huge advantage
0:40:12 that it could basically follow the sun.
0:40:13 – Checking.
0:40:14 – It could track the sun.
0:40:15 The only problem with it was it ended up
0:40:17 being a four X worse value proposition,
0:40:19 price performance value proposition,
0:40:21 the conventional solar panels all in.
0:40:22 That was one of the trainwrecks out here
0:40:23 that actually took down the whole
0:40:25 US government DOE program to fund clean tech.
0:40:27 But the kicker on the whole solar thing is okay.
0:40:29 As you said, it became a mass manufacturing game.
0:40:31 And so it kind of became like memory chips in the 80s.
0:40:33 It lent itself to the Chinese ecosystem,
0:40:36 which is sort of is able to do mass manufacturing at scale.
0:40:37 – Quickly and well.
0:40:38 – Right, right, exactly, right, exactly.
0:40:40 And so the Chinese have been able to undercut
0:40:42 a lot of their American competitors.
0:40:46 The kicker to that is the pro environment administration
0:40:48 then reacted to that by putting tariffs
0:40:49 on imports of Chinese solar panels.
0:40:51 Therefore, making it cost ineffective
0:40:52 for Americans to deploy solar panels
0:40:54 that otherwise would have been much cheaper.
0:40:57 – So tariffs are, with the possible exception
0:40:59 of a border adjustment tariff,
0:41:01 because we got to bring down carbon, right?
0:41:04 Tariffs are just econ 101 bad idea.
0:41:06 – Well, it went beyond though, just the specific mechanism.
0:41:07 It was more an expression of values
0:41:09 in the part of the United States government,
0:41:10 which is in theory, we care about the environment
0:41:12 in practice, like we’re more worried about
0:41:13 like other things.
0:41:14 And so we’ll trade off the environment.
0:41:16 – So, you know, the mantra is all should be
0:41:19 let markets work to develop the goods and services
0:41:20 and let free trade happen.
0:41:24 And that’s where prosperity will come from and innovation.
0:41:25 – For me, I wasn’t the thick of that
0:41:28 ’cause we were at the heart of this whole clean tech movement
0:41:29 when I was at park.
0:41:31 We had a huge investment in photovoltaics.
0:41:33 I was my first big white paper.
0:41:35 My question is, why can’t it just be just a timing thing
0:41:36 like everything else?
0:41:39 Like it was just too early, the wrong time.
0:41:41 The ecosystem wasn’t built out for balance
0:41:44 of system components and services and everything else.
0:41:46 The subsidy models were wrong.
0:41:48 ‘Cause I actually hope that we can get some R&D
0:41:50 to the future with clean tech.
0:41:53 – We are getting cost declines with solar and wind.
0:41:54 The price of the installed price
0:41:56 and then the price per unit of energy
0:41:58 once they’re installed is going down
0:42:00 at a really attractive rate.
0:42:02 So it’s not that we’re failing with these things.
0:42:04 What I was trying to point out earlier
0:42:06 is there are just some basic problems
0:42:07 with that style of energy,
0:42:10 especially because we’re not getting the battery revolution
0:42:13 and the battery nerds that I talked to say,
0:42:15 look, there’s an energy density limit here.
0:42:17 So you’re pushing up against some physics.
0:42:19 And it’s not that we can’t do anything about it
0:42:21 or that we should stop research.
0:42:23 Of course we should continue that going,
0:42:25 but you gotta backstop it with something.
0:42:26 – With some portfolio, right.
0:42:29 – And if that’s something, in my view,
0:42:31 should also be clean, it should be nuclear.
0:42:33 And then let’s let the battle rage
0:42:36 for which is the cake and which is the icing.
0:42:38 I kind of think nuclear is gonna be the cake
0:42:41 and we’ll have a little solar and wind icing
0:42:42 if we get it right.
0:42:43 But maybe I’ll be wrong about that.
0:42:47 Well, I just don’t want us to keep putting huge amounts
0:42:49 of carbon in the air to generate electricity.
0:42:50 We don’t need to do that.
0:42:52 – So this is where, I don’t think environmentalism
0:42:53 for the most part is actually about the environment.
0:42:54 I think it’s about something else.
0:42:55 And the reason I say that is because,
0:42:56 exactly Andrew’s point,
0:42:57 I think we actually have the answers.
0:42:58 I think we have the answers.
0:42:59 And I think they’re nuclear,
0:43:01 which is just like in practice
0:43:02 and incredibly safe technology
0:43:03 contrary to what everybody believes.
0:43:04 – Plus one to that.
0:43:05 – And then I think, look,
0:43:06 it goes back to the tariff thing.
0:43:07 Like let the Chinese build solar panels,
0:43:09 let them ride the manufacturing cost curve down
0:43:10 and like buy their solar panels.
0:43:11 – Plus one to that.
0:43:12 – Right.
0:43:13 And we do have two magic technologies.
0:43:15 Like we have the box that generates power
0:43:16 by splitting the atom.
0:43:19 And we have the sheet that converts sunlight for free.
0:43:21 And both of those are like incredibly modern
0:43:23 production techniques for nuclear and solar.
0:43:26 Like would just be like spectacular what you could do.
0:43:29 If you engineered new nuclear plants today from scratch,
0:43:30 like properly with the technologies,
0:43:33 most of the functional nuclear plants in the West today
0:43:35 are like on average there.
0:43:37 Is it, are there any younger than like 30 or 40 years old?
0:43:39 Is the average just got to be over that?
0:43:40 – I think that’s right.
0:43:42 I don’t know when the last new one we built was,
0:43:43 but it’s been a while.
0:43:45 – And so if we took current technology and did that,
0:43:46 there are some really amazing ideas
0:43:47 of things that we can do.
0:43:48 I don’t think this has anything to do with the environment.
0:43:50 – Well, what I find hopeful though,
0:43:52 about what you just said is that we have the answers
0:43:54 and that’s really important.
0:43:56 And so a lot of these things come down to market
0:43:59 and other dynamics, regulatory, politics, all of that.
0:44:01 So it’s not a technological limit,
0:44:02 which I find very helpful.
0:44:06 – It’s also not a policy mystery anymore.
0:44:08 We have these essentially magic technologies
0:44:10 where we should be stepping on the accelerator
0:44:11 with them super hard.
0:44:14 If we really wanted to clean up the planet
0:44:17 and stop polluting it with greenhouse gases.
0:44:21 If we wanted a policy toolkit to reduce carbon, we have it.
0:44:23 It’s worked for other kinds of pollution in the past.
0:44:25 Carbon is not mysterious.
0:44:28 It’s just comparatively politically difficult.
0:44:30 Now, I think some parts of the world
0:44:34 will be more clearheaded than others.
0:44:36 And I hope somebody else will show us the way
0:44:37 and their evidence is gonna become
0:44:39 unignorable at some point.
0:44:40 – I also just wanna make one pitch
0:44:43 for the iPhone moment in clean tech,
0:44:46 which I know people think can be very much of a long shot.
0:44:47 But I think a lot of technology waves
0:44:49 do have their major iPhone moment
0:44:52 where there is a technological tip
0:44:53 that then drives everyone else
0:44:56 to make cheaper versions of that thing later on
0:44:59 once there is this desire and demand and pull and draw
0:45:01 to have the thing.
0:45:02 And I actually have to say one thing
0:45:04 that I did find promising about Tesla
0:45:07 and their move into solar for the home
0:45:10 and battery is sort of this back door, this Trojan horse
0:45:11 that the car is a Trojan horse
0:45:13 to actually powering your home.
0:45:15 That is a very powerful idea.
0:45:17 And over time, who knows where that can go, but.
0:45:17 – I will say one thing
0:45:20 that’s from a consumer psychology standpoint.
0:45:22 Elon making electric cars sexy.
0:45:23 – Yeah, that changed the game.
0:45:24 – That’s a big deal.
0:45:27 – It was way better than Leonardo DiCaprio driving a Prius
0:45:28 which is what I drive.
0:45:30 – That is an absolutely a big deal.
0:45:32 And Sonal, to what you said,
0:45:34 I’m thrilled that there are people willing
0:45:37 to make some pretty risky bets on things.
0:45:39 On the technology and the innovation front,
0:45:41 I agree with Mark, we have some magic bullets.
0:45:43 We also need, I’m gonna mix my metaphors.
0:45:46 We need lots of other shots on goal, right?
0:45:49 And the innovation and the entrepreneurship ecosystem
0:45:53 are a way for us to get more shots on goal, hallelujah.
0:45:54 – Yeah, and I’ll just say one last thing on that.
0:45:56 One of the things that I find really fascinating
0:45:58 is that there is this phase with a lot of technologies
0:46:02 where there is that very down moment where things go down.
0:46:03 It seems like it’s dead.
0:46:05 And in fact, the thing is being built out
0:46:08 under the very surface and you don’t realize that’s happening.
0:46:10 And so to me, the death of the clean tech boom
0:46:13 is actually promising because Mark, you alluded to this,
0:46:16 but it did fund, Elon Musk rode those subsidies
0:46:18 to fund Tesla in the early days.
0:46:20 And so who knows what can happen next.
0:46:23 – And I still think there’s a big place for government R&D.
0:46:27 Again, more shots on goal, more attention to this,
0:46:29 crazy ideas.
0:46:32 And the reason Paul Romer won the Nobel Prize last year
0:46:35 was he said economies grow on ideas.
0:46:37 Human capital is the gating factor
0:46:39 for increasing our growth and prosperity.
0:46:42 Let’s get more human capital out there.
0:46:43 Well, Andy, thank you so much
0:46:45 for joining the A6NZ podcast.
0:46:48 Your new book out October 8th.
0:46:50 More from less, the surprising story
0:46:52 of how we learn to prosper using fewer resources
0:46:53 and what happens next.
0:46:55 Thank you for joining the A6NZ podcast.
0:46:56 – Sonal and Mark, thank you for having me.
0:46:58 This has been a blast.
0:46:58 – Thanks, Andy.