Faster, Please! — The Podcast

If you’re looking for a smart and punchy companion piece to my new book, The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised, then you are in luck. Look no further than venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s wonderful new mega-essay, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”If there’s a sentence or even a word in that manifesto that I disagree with, I have yet to find it. That’s why I am so delighted to have Marc Andreessen, a founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz — as well as the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape — on this special episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast. In This Episode* The time for techno-optimism is now (1:19)* Why has there been a downshift in innovation? (8:56)* The importance of embracing AI (16:08)* Slouching towards Utopia: Marc’s response to AI critics (23:27)* The economics of techno-optimism (36:29)* The future of domestic technology policy (44:38)Oh, by the way, the transcript of our conversation will be posted tomorrow, November 9.Hey, I have a new book out! The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! 🆙↗⤴📈* Amazon* Barnes & Noble* Books-A-Million* Target* Walmart* BookshopFrom the Introduction of The Conservative Futurist: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Johan Norberg’s work revolves primarily around economic and intellictual history and attempting to learn lessons from past financial systems. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Johan takes us through his version of capitalism, giving an especially interesting perspective on the economic system of his home country. Johan is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of several books. His latest is The Capitalist Manifesto: In Defense of Global Capitalism, available now. In This Episode* “Capitalism” and its meanings (0:55)* The state of contemporary capitalism (2:34)* Coordination in capitalism (7:59)* The cyclical nature of economic systems (13:54)* Swedish capitalism  (16:56)* The case for capitalism (21:48)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationJames Pethokoukis: Let's begin with a little definitional work here. Capitalist Manifesto: “Capitalist” is a word people assign a variety of meanings to. What is the capitalism that you're talking about here?Johan Norberg: Yeah, it's not a great word. Quite often it's misunderstood; people think it's all about capital. It's not. We can have capital in many different economic systems. To me, free-market capitalism is about a decentralized economic system with private property where decisions are made locally, decentralized, not command and control, and the prices and wages and things are set in voluntary negotiations rather than top-down.The economist Deirdre McCloskey hates the word "capitalism." She prefers "innovism" or "trade-tested progress." Should we insist on using a different word to describe the world’s dominant socio-economic system?Deirdre McCloskey is right. Capitalism is a bad word. I would much prefer “innovism” or something like that. But I've realized that in order to communicate with people, I'd better use some of the words that they are using. And I've realized that we're stuck with the word “capitalism” and the whole concept of capitalism, and if we don't fill it with meaning, those of us who like free markets and free trade, I've realized that somebody else is going to fill it with meaning, and in that case, we are losing the debate. Go to where the sinners are. That's my take.Twenty years ago, it seemed like markets had won. Capitalism was changing the world and bringing people out of poverty. President Clinton declared "the era of big government is over." China was opening its economy. What happened? Why did you feel the need to write this book in this moment?That's exactly why I wrote this book, because nowadays it seems like nobody likes free markets and free trade anymore. I've realized that, in the US, and that should be a place where people appreciate some of this, fewer people believe in capitalism than believe in ghosts nowadays. And there's this lack among politicians and governments everywhere in belief in global capitalism. There's this whole, repatriate stuff, subsidize specific businesses and sectors back home, rather than having global supply chains. So that's why I wrote this.I think this is all based on a complete misunderstanding of what has happened in the world in the past 20 years. It's not that markets have failed. On the contrary, despite the fact that we've had 20 rough years with financial crises and wars and the Great Pandemic and stuff like that, and yet we've seen, when you look at objective indicators of human living standards, more progress than ever before over these 20 years. When it comes to the reduction in poverty, more than 130,000 people lifted out of extreme poverty every day over the past 20 years. We've seen an increase in global GDP per capita of roughly a third. We've reduced child mortality by almost half, which means that four million fewer children died last year than in 2002. And this is because entrepreneurs and innovators, they keep innovating ourselves out of problems all the time — if we give them some freedom to do that. And that's what I'm worried about: that they'll have less freedom in the future if we do not keep on pounding and keep on explaining this.Those are some pretty impressive statistics. But people don't seem to notice. We keep hearing the same narrative of "late-stage, failed capitalism.” Why is that?I think the financial crisis is a very important part of this. If some capitalists do bad stuff, people lose faith in capitalism and I think we saw this in the US but also around the world. There's this sense that perhaps we shouldn't imitate what America is doing if these are the consequences. And I don't think that the financial crisis was a result of unleashed market forces. And I even wrote a book on this a couple of years back, Financial Fiasco. I think there were massive regulatory failures and central banks and ministers of finance trying to make capitalism very safe by implementing a very homogenous structure on everybody, telling everybody to go into the same way, searching for the same AAA-rated securities and stuff like that. And if everybody behaves in the same way, if that fails, there's massive disaster. We need decentralization partly to minimize risks like that. But — doesn't matter, we don't have to go into history. I think this partly explains why we're in this lack of trust in capitalism right now.But also other things. People, when they're afraid of the world, they tend to retreat. They don't want to explore. They don't want to innovate. It triggers their fight-or-flight mechanism and sometimes the societal fight-or-flight mechanism. You want to hide behind walls and tariff barriers and strong, big governments that protect you, and that is a misunderstanding of how we get out of crises. And this is what I think we've learned from these past 20 years. Yes, lots of bad stuff happened. It makes us afraid. It triggers some sort of evolutionary tendency to get away from openness and learning and discovery processes and instead we want just one instant solution to all the problems.But what we're learning is, how did we get out of the pandemic? We did it by having thousands of entrepreneurs constantly finding new ways to rebuild supply chains and find replacements for the resources they couldn't get. And innovators who were looking for new treatments and coming up with a vaccine in a record period of time. It didn't take a thousand years as it usually does, coming up with a vaccine against polio, but more like three months. But try to tell that to our reptilian brains. When we're fearful, we want one simple solution. And as H.L. Mencken once put it, there is always a solution to every problem: it is “neat, plausible, and wrong.” And it's so dangerous because it involves replacing all that discovery, all that learning and wisdom of millions with just the preferences of a few people at the top.Let me read a brief tweet by the right-wing populist writer, Sohrab Ahmari: “We are entering a new age of industrial war. The ‘California ideology,’ neoliberalism, Reagan-Clintonism — whatever you want to call it, it’s kaput. We’re going to see close coordination between state, enterprise, labor. It took security threats to bring us here. I’ll take it.” Why won't you take it?That's a scary prospect to me. There is a reason why he’s talking about this Silicon Valley thing, because that worked splendidly, and one of the reasons it succeeded was that the outcomes weren't decided in advance by any kind of command-and-control thing. It was, as some criticized it in the ‘70s, it looks more like the Wild West, allowing entrepreneurs and innovators to experiment with crazy ideas, even in garages. And that's the way to … if you want to explore all possible avenues and ideas, we have to let everybody go out and look for it. I think the reason why Sohrab Ahmari is wrong is that he thinks that there is one solution to all the problems we face. Perhaps there is, but I don't know one and he doesn't know it. We have to allow more eyeballs to look at the problems and more brains to go out thinking hard about these things, and that involves not starting geopolitical divisions and nationalist temptations, but it involves having lots of people in other places helping us to find the solutions in a division of labor where we learn from what they're doing.Why has America been so successful so far? When people say that it's failing, this American, this Washington consensus thing, please keep in mind that just 15 years ago, the American economy was slightly smaller than the European one. Now it's almost a third bigger. It's not entirely broken, but some of the fixes might break it, I'm afraid, if we continue doing things like this. Why is it successful? Well, look at different areas. Look at AI. Why is America so successful? We thought that China would come up with it. Well, one reason is that the Chinese have to teach machines not just what to say, but also what not to say, but also the fact that America is learning from others. More than half of America's top AI experts have education or background in other countries and almost a third come from China. So if we want to win against China and everybody else, we also have to allow lots of Chinese to do the work for us.This notion of close coordination between state and business and labor, where does that work well? Is there a model? Is there an example of that kind of formula working elsewhere?A leading European economist just published a book called, I think it's some 50 of them, called Questioning the Entrepreneurial State, where they evaluate this whole idea that we would have this close coordination between governments and businesses, and what they say is that the history of it, at least in Europe but they look around the world as well, is that it's usually a full employment program for lobbyists and for attorneys who just reformulate everything that businesses would usually do as something that fits with this new industrial policy thing. If it was successful, you would look up stuff on the internet by using Quaero, because that's the close coordination stuff in Europe with the European and German and French governments heavily funded a “European Google.” The whole idea was that we will own the digital future by heavily subsidizing this one project. It doesn't work, because you lose some of the trial and error, you lose some of the mechanisms whereby we understand what's a success and what's not.It's okay to fail. Industrial policies fail all the time, but so does big tech. Entrepreneurial capitalism as well. But the great thing with free markets and not having the governments investing heavily in one particular model is that you replace this trial-and-error, constant experimentation and feedback and adaptation that comes when you work on markets and you're risking your own resources. Once you do that by having the government picking a winner, then, when you lose out, you spend more money on these projects instead. And you lose this learning process whereby we're constantly channeling capital and labor to more successful ones. What people would tell you is that China is the most successful place where we’ve had this…Yes, there seems to be a cyclical component to this belief. I mean, I'm old enough to have seen the version where Japan had figured it out. That didn't turn out so well. And then I think you have people who looked at China. If you have a natural inclination to like the idea of central planning and you eschew the kind of natural chaos of capitalism, you could point to China So that's why I wonder if this is a passing phase, because China doesn't seem like they're able to pull it off either.Yeah, but that'll keep on moving, then, and find another example where it seems to be working. Because it's always easy to find out in retrospect that something seemed to be working. And if the government is involved somewhere, they try to give it credit. But until recently, I think 49 American states tried to spend heavily to create a biotech cluster in their own state to attract businesses from other states. And if one of them succeeded, people would've said, “Look, this is because of this top-down government intervention,” but probably not, right?And it's the same thing with China. Yes, China has been tremendously successful for 30 years, but in which sectors? In the sectors that the government didn't plan for it, in places where we saw grassroots capitalism, farmers secretly privatizing their land, starting village enterprises. And then, and only then, did the Communist Party see that, “This seems to be more successful than what we've been doing recently, so allow them to continue to experiment,” experiment in export processing and stuff like that. But they wanted to keep it elsewhere so that it wouldn't spread throughout the rest of the economy. But it was so successful that it did. That's what succeeded: when people experimented. Entrepreneurs were allowed to innovate. What was it that failed? The large, state-owned enterprises. They were less productive. They were wasting cheap credit and ruining, destroying resources over the years. And once the government gets involved, there's plenty of research into this, they find less productive businesses and they become even less productive if they get access to this cheap credit and cheap land. And I think people are coming around to that now as they're seeing that China has many problems, some of them related to demography, as well. But they would need innovation, strange new business ideas, crazy people in garages coming up with new ideas. That's exactly the thing that top-down governments don't really like, and what they've been doing over the past few years is just destroying tech businesses, [education] businesses, and the gaming industry in China because authoritarians aren't good at spotting where the true potential lies.I wonder if you could clear up a question that confuses many Americans. Do you come from, and are you currently living in, a capitalist country?Yes, I am.We don't know. We're not sure. We're very confused about Sweden.Yes, I know, and that's because lots of perceptions, just like the ideas, are stuck in the 1970s. Sweden had a brief period of some 20 years when we really experimented with socialist ideas, but this was also the moment — the only moment in modern economic history — when Sweden lagged behind other countries. So up until the early 1970s, we had a very limited government, low taxes, free markets, and free trade — that made us rich. It made us so rich in Sweden that we thought that we could experiment with these ideas. Just stop thinking about how to create wealth, just spend it, redistribute it. And that resulted in an awful 20, 25 years when companies like Ikea and Tetra Pak and the greatest entrepreneurs, they just left Sweden because it wasn't possible to do business in Sweden.This is what people still remember: the 1970s. We did all these things: doubled the size of the government, jacking up taxes and so on. At the same time, it looked like a fairly successful place, it's a rich place. But it's like that old joke: How do you end up with a small fortune? Well, you start with a large fortune and then you waste most of it. And that's what we did. This is actually why, since that terrible economic financial crisis that we had in the early 1990s, Sweden has once again liberalized markets quite drastically compared to other places, and we're now back to a system which many Americans would actually think of as more free market in many ways than the US system.As you know, people think of Sweden and Scandinavia more generally as big government with a giant welfare [system], cradle-to-grave welfare, all the welfare you would ever want. So in what ways is Sweden maybe more market friendly than the United States, and perhaps some ways which would greatly surprise many Americans as well as Bernie Sanders?Yeah, I'm trying to tell the Bernie Sanders of the world that if they want to be like Sweden, they would have to do plenty of things. They would have to become more free trade-oriented in many ways. They would have to reform social security, partially privatize it with individual accounts, they would have to introduce a national school voucher system so private schools get the same funding as the public ones. They would actually have to lower taxes in many ways on the rich, and they would have to abolish taxes on property wealth inheritance and lower the corporate tax, and instead put most of the tax burdens on low- and middle-income households, because that's the dirty little secret of the Swedish welfare state. We learned in the 1970s that if you want to have a big universal welfare state that's very generous, in that case, everybody is going to have to pay for it.You have to redistribute over people's life cycle, rather than trying to get the rich to pay for it all, because we realized that the rich are too few and the economy is too dependent on them. So if we are trying to get them to pay for it all, they will flee Sweden, they will move to other places, leave their resources elsewhere, and we won't get the new businesses, the new successful ones that we all depend upon. So for 30 years, we didn't create a single net job in the private sector, the ‘70s, ‘80s, and the ‘90s. So instead, you have to move towards more taxing consumption, 25 percent value-added tax, and making sure that the poor and middle income households pay the bulk of income taxes. So, counterintuitively — and this is something that people really don't get—Sweden has a much less-progressive tax system than the United States does, less-progressive tax system than almost any other rich country because we've learned that the poor are loyal taxpayers. They don't move, they don't dodge taxes, and they don't have tax attorneys.What is the quick pitch for capitalism? If you're on an airplane next to someone who's heard a lot about inequality and wage stagnation and losing to the Chinese, how do you make the case for market capitalism?It's much, much better than you think, but it could be even better. It is much better because we can see, look at the long-term indicators and the data, and perhaps this is where I lose my fellow passenger. But wage stagnation was a phenomenon in the ‘70s and ‘80s, partly because we had to rebuild the economy because it was at risk of becoming much less competitive and we were about to lose jobs everywhere. Once we did that, from the ‘90s and onwards, we've had a tremendous increase in wages, and we can measure this in wages and total compensation and increase in 60 percent. I'd say if you look at the best indicators, but even more interesting is what can you do with those resources? And then you see that all those amenities and goods and technologies that we all considered luxuries in the ‘70 and ‘80s, we're getting close to 100 percent possession in American households.The poor people who fall below the poverty line in the US now own more amenities like that — washing machines, television sets, dryers, clothes washers, and of course cell phones and computers — than the rich did in 1970. That tells you something. If you look around the world, we've actually had the best era ever when it comes to poverty reduction, and we've even, since the turn of the millennium, reduced global inequality for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. So it's much better than the headlines. If you look at the trend lines, they're much better. Yeah, tell me about that. Give me a little of that “could be even better.” Give me a little flavor of that.Yeah. I think that we've lost — you know this and you just wrote a book on this — we've entered a period where we've thought that things cannot be better. We've tried to protect old business models and old ways of doing things, and often in a low interest rate environment, I think protected many businesses that should have been put out of their misery so that capital and labor could go to the new sectors, to the frontiers of the economy. We are seeing some of that happening now with everything from mRNA technology to the new space race to AI, but we're in a mindset and a regulatory situation where we don't want to experiment with the new weird stuff. But we have to do that because that's the only way where we'll get the new goods and services and jobs in the future. So here’s to the crazy ones, as Steve Jobs would put it. And in that case, we can't be too protective of our old, safe ways of doing things. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

More than 20 years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama characterized the Information Technology revolution as "benign" but cautioned that "the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a post-human stage of history." From Twitter to CRISPR to ChatGPT, a lot has changed since then. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Dr. Fukuyama shares his thoughts on those developments and the recent advances in generative AI, as well as the cultural importance of science fiction.Dr. Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His books include The End of History and the Last Man, Our Posthuman Future, and 2022's Liberalism and Its Discontents, among many others. Other writings can be found at American Purpose.In This Episode* The consequences of the IT revolution (1:37)* Can government competently regulate AI? (8:14)* AI and liberal democracy (17:29)* The cultural importance of science fiction (24:16)* Silicon Valley’s life-extension efforts (31:11)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe consequences of the IT revolutionJames Pethokoukis: In Our Posthuman Future more than 20 years ago, you wrote, “The aim of this book is to argue that [Aldous] Huxley was right [in Brave New World], that the most significant threat posed by contemporary biotechnology is the possibility that it will alter human nature and thereby move us into a ‘posthuman’ stage of history. This is important, I will argue, because human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species.” But then you added, “It may be that, as in the case of 1984” — and, I think, parenthetically, information technology — “we will eventually find biotechnology’s consequences are completely and surprisingly benign.” After 20 years, and the advent of social media, and now it seems like possibly a great leap forward in AI, would you still characterize the IT revolution as “benign”?Francis Fukuyama: That's obviously something that's changed considerably since I wrote that book because the downside of IT has been clear to everybody. When the internet was first privatized in the 1990s, most people, myself included, thought it would be good for democracy because information was power, and if you made information more widely available, that would distribute power more democratically. And it has done that, in fact. A lot of people have access to information that they can use to improve their lives, to mobilize, to agitate, to push for the protection of their rights. But I think it's also been weaponized in ways that we perhaps didn't anticipate back then.And then, there was this more insidious phenomenon where it turns out that the elimination of hierarchies that controlled information, that we celebrated back then, actually turned out to be pretty important. If you had a kind of legacy media that cared about journalistic standards, you could trust the information that was published. But the internet really undermined those legacy sources and replaced it with a world in which anyone can say anything. And they do. Therefore, we have this cognitive chaos right now where conspiracy theories of all sorts get a lot of credibility because people don't trust these hierarchies that used to be the channels for information. Clearly, we’ve got a big problem on our hands. That doesn't mean that the biotech is not still going to be a big problem; it's just that I think the IT part has moved ahead very rapidly. But I think the biotech will get there in time.While I think most of the concern that I've heard expressed about AI, in particular, has been about these science fiction-like existential risks or job loss, obviously your concern has more to do, as with in Our Posthuman Future, how it will affect our liberal democracy. And you point out some of the downsides of the IT revolution that weren't obvious 30 years ago but now seeing plainly obvious today.To me, the coverage of AI has been really very, very negative, and we've had calls for an AI pause. Do you worry that maybe we've overlearned that lesson? That rather than going into this with kind of a Pollyannaish attitude, we're immediately going into this AI with deep concerns. Is there a risk of overcorrecting?The short answer is, yes. I think that because of our negative experience with social media and the internet lately, we expect the worst from technology. But I think that the possibilities for AI actually making certain social problems much better are substantial. I think that the existential worries about AI are just absurd, and I really don't see scenarios under which the human species is going to face extinction. That seems to be this Terminator, killer, Skynet scenario, and I know very few serious experts in this area that think that that's ever likely to materialize. The bigger fears, I think, are more mundane ones about job loss as a result of advancing technology. And I think that's a very complicated issue. But it does seem to me that, for example, generative AI could actually end up complementing human skills and, in fact, could complement the skills of lower-skilled or lower-educated workers in a way that will actually increase economic equality.Up till now, I think most economists would blame the advance of computer technology for having vastly increased social inequality, because in order to take advantage of existing technologies, if you have a better education, you're going to have a higher income and so forth. But it's entirely possible that generative AI will actually slow that trend because it will give people with lower levels of education the ability to do useful things that they weren't able to do previously. There's actually some early empirical work that suggests that that's already been a pattern. So, yes, I think you're right that we've kind of overreacted. I just think in general, predicting where this technology is going to go in the next 50 years is a fool's errand. It's sort of like in the 1880s asking somebody, “Well, what's this newfangled thing called electricity going to do in 50 years?” Anything that was said back then I think would've been overtaken by events very, very rapidly.Can government competently regulate AI?Anyone who has sat through previous government hearings on social media has been underwhelmed at the ability of Congress to understand these issues, much less come up with a vast regulatory structure. Are you confident in the ability of government to regulate AI, whether it's to regulate deep fakes or what have you — why should I be confident in their ability to do that?I think you've got to decompose the regulatory challenge a little bit. I've been involved here at Stanford, we have a Cyber Policy Center, and we've been thinking about different forms of IT regulation. It's a particular challenge for regulators for a number of reasons. One of the questions you come up with in regulatory design is, “Is this something that actually can be undertaken by existing agencies, or do you actually need a new type of regulator with special skills and knowledge?” And I think, to me, pretty clearly the answer to that is yes. But that agency would have to be designed very differently, because the standard regulatory design, the agency has a certain amount of expertise in a particular sector and they use that expertise to write rules that then get written into law, and then things like the Administrative Procedure Act begins to apply. That's what's been going on, for example, with something like net neutrality, where the FCC put the different regulations up for notice and comment, and you go through this very involved procedure to write the new rules and so forth. I think in an area like AI, that's just not going to work, because the thing is moving so quickly. And that means that you're actually going to have to delegate more autonomy and discretionary power to the regulatory agency, because otherwise, they're simply not going to be able to keep up with the speed at which the technology advances. In normative terms, I have no problem with that. I think that governments do need to exercise social control over new technologies that are potentially very disruptive and damaging, but it has to be done in a proper way.Can you actually design a regulatory agency that would have any remote chance of keeping up with the technology? The British have done this. They have a new digital regulator that is composed of people coming out of the IT industry, and they've relaxed the civil service requirements to be able to hire people with the appropriate knowledge and backgrounds. In the United States, that's going to be very difficult because we have so many cumbersome HR requirements for hiring and promotion of people that go into the federal civil service. Pay, for one thing, is a big issue because we don't pay our bureaucrats enough. If you're going to hire some hotshot tech guy out of the tech sector and offer him a job as a GS-14, it just isn't going to work. So I don't think that you can answer the question, “Can we regulate adequately or not?” in a simple way. I think that there are certain things you would have to do if you were going to try to regulate this sector. Can the United States do that given the polarization in our politics, given all of these legacy institutions that prevent us from actually having a public sector that is up to this task? That I don't know. As you can tell, I've got certain skepticism about that.Is it a worthwhile critique of this regulatory process to think of AI as this discreet technology that you need a certain level of expertise to understand? If it is indeed a general-purpose technology that will be used by a variety of sectors, all sectors perhaps, can you really have an AI regulator that doesn't de facto become an economy regulator?No, you probably can't. This is another challenge, which is that, as you say, AI in general is so broad. It's already being used in virtually every sector of the economy, and you obviously don't want a “one size fits all” effort to govern the use of this technology. So I think that you have to be much more specific about the areas where you think potential harms could exist. There's also different approaches to this other than regulation. In 2020, I chaired a Stanford working group on platform scale, which was meant to deal with the old — at that point it was a kind of contemporary problem­ — but now it seems like an old problem of content mediation on the internet. So how do you deal with this problem that Elon Musk has now revealed to be a real problem: You don't want everything to be available on social media platforms, but how do you actually control that content in a way that serves a kind of general democratic public interest? As we thought about this in the course of this working group deliberation, we concluded that straightforward regulation is not going to work. It won't work in the United States because we're way too polarized. Just think about something like reviving the old fairness doctrine that the FCC used to apply to legacy broadcast media. How are you going to come up with something like that? What's “fair and balanced” coverage of vaccine denialism? It's just not going to happen.And what we ended up advocating was something we called “middleware,” where you would use regulation to create a competitive ecosystem of third-party media content regulators so that when you use the social media platform, you the user could buy the services or make use of the services of a content regulator that would tailor your feed or your search on Google to criteria that you specified in advance. So if you tended progressive, you could get a progressive one. If you only like right-wing media, you could get a content regulator that would deliver what you want. If you wanted to buy only American-made products, you could get a different one. The point is that you would use competition in this sphere because the real threat, as we saw it, was not actually so much this compartmentalization as the power of a single big platform. There's really only three of them. It's Google, Meta, and now X, or the formerly Twitter, that really had this kind of power. The danger to a democracy was not that you could say anything on the internet, the danger was the power of a single big platform owned by a private, for-profit company to have an outsized role over political discourse in the United States. Elon Musk and Twitter is a perfect example of that. He apparently has his own foreign policy, which is not congruent with American foreign policy, but as a private owner of this platform, he's got the power to pursue this private foreign policy. So that was our idea.In that particular case, you could use competition as an alternative to state regulation, because what you really wanted to do was to break up this concentrated power that was exercised by the platforms. So that's one approach to one aspect of digital regulation. It doesn't deal with AI. I don't know whether there's an analog in the AI sphere, but I think it's correct that what you don't want is a single regulator that then tries to write broad rules that apply to what is actually just an enormously broad technology that will apply in virtually every sector of the economy.AI and liberal democracyIn response to the call for a six-month "AI pause," critics of that idea pointed to competition with China. They suggested that given the difficulties of regulating AI, we might risk losing the "AI race" to the Chinese. Do you think that's a reasonable criticism?This is a general problem with technologies. Certain technologies distribute power and other technologies concentrate it. So the old classic 19th-century coal- and steel- and fossil fuel–based economy tended to concentrate power. And certainly nuclear weapons concentrate power because you really need to be a big entity in order to build a nuclear weapon, in order to build all the uranium processing and so forth. But other technologies, like biotech, actually do not concentrate power. Any high school student can actually now use CRISPR to do genetic engineering. And they make biotech labs that will fit in individual shipping containers. So the regulatory problem is quite different.Now, the problem with AI is that it appears that these large language models really require a lot of resources. In fact, it's interesting, because we used to think the problem was actually having big data sets. But that's actually not the problem; there's plenty of data out there. It's actually building a parallel computer system that's powerful enough to process all the words on the internet, and that's been the task that only the largest companies can do. I think that it's correct that if we had told these companies not to do this, we would be facing international competitive pressures that would make that a bad decision. However, I do think that it's still a risk to allow that kind of power to be not subject to some form of democratic control. If it's true that you need these gigantic corporations to do this sort of thing, those corporations ought to be serving American national interests.And again, I hate to keep referring to Elon Musk, but we're seeing this right now with Starlink. It turns out Starlink is extremely valuable militarily, which has been demonstrated very clearly in Ukraine. Should the owner of Starlink be allowed to make important decisions as to who is going to use this technology on the battlefield and where that technology can be used? I don't think so. I don't think that one rich individual should have that kind of power. And actually, I'm not quite sure, I thought that the Defense Department had actually agreed to start paying Musk for the Ukrainian use of Starlink. I think that's the actual appropriate answer to that problem, so that it should not be up to Elon Musk where Starlink can be used. It should be up to the people that make American foreign policy: the White House and the State Department and so forth. And so, I think by analogy, if you develop this technology that requires really massive scale and big corporations to develop it, it should nonetheless be under some kind of state control such that it is not the decision of some rich individual how it's going to be applied. It should be somehow subject to some kind of democratic control.On a normative level, I think that's very clear, but the specific modalities by which you do that are complicated. For example, let's say there's a gigantic corporation that is run by some lunatic that wants to use it for all sorts of asocial reasons, proliferating deep fakes or trying to use it to undermine general social trust in institutions and so forth. Is that okay? Is that a decision that should be up to a private individual or isn't there some public interest in controlling that in some fashion? I hate speaking about this in such general terms, but I think you have to settle this normative question and then you can get into the narrower technical question of, is it possible to actually exert that kind of control and how would you do that?You've questioned in your previous writings whether liberal democracy could survive a world with both humans and posthumans and where we’re manipulating human nature. Can it survive in a world where there are two different intelligences? If we had a human intelligence and we had an artificial general intelligence, would such an entity pose a challenge our civilization, to a democratic capitalist civilization?It's hard to answer that question. You can imagine scenarios where it obviously would pose a challenge. One of the big questions is whether this general intelligence somehow escapes human control, and that's a tough one. I think that the experts that I trust think that that's not going to happen. That ultimately, human beings are going to be able to control this thing and use it for their own purposes. So again, the whole Skynet scenario is really not likely to happen. But that doesn't solve the problem, because even if it's under human control, how do you make sure it's the right humans, right? Because if this falls into the wrong hands, it could be very, very destructive. And that then becomes a political question. I'm not quite sure how you're going to want to answer it.The cultural importance of science fictionYou mentioned Skynet from the Terminator franchise. Do you worry that we're too steeped in dystopian science fiction? It seems like we can only see the downside when we're presented with a new technology like a biotechnology breakthrough or an AI breakthrough. Is that how it seems to you?I actually wrote a blog post about this. I really read a lot of science fiction. I have my whole life. There's a big difference between the sorts of stories that you saw back in the 1950s and ‘60s and the stuff that has come out recently. It's hard to generalize over such a vast field, but space odysseys and space travel was very common, and a lot of that was extremely optimistic: that human beings would colonize Mars and then the distant planets and you'd have a warp drive that would take you out of the solar system and so forth. And it was kind of a paean to unlimited human possibilities. Whereas I do think that, especially with the rise of environmentalism, there was a greater consciousness of the downsides of technological advance. So you got more and more dystopian kinds of imaginings. Now, it is not a universal thing. For example, I also wrote a blog about two kind of global warming–related recent science-fiction books. One is TheMinistry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. And that actually is a very optimistic take on global warming, because it's set in the 2050s and basically the human race has figured out how to deal with global warming. They do it, I think, through a bunch of very implausible political scenarios, but there's a ministry for the future that wisely…That book seems a little too comfortable with violence and compulsion for my taste.The other one is Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock: Basically, there's a single rich oligarch in Texas that takes it upon himself to put all this sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere to cool the earth, and he succeeds, and it then changes the climate in China and India. I don't know whether that's optimistic or pessimistic. But I actually do think that it's very useful to have this kind of science fiction, because you really do have to imagine to yourself what some of the both upsides and downsides will be. So it's probably the case that there's more dystopian fiction, but I do think that if you didn't have that, you wouldn't have a concrete idea of what to look for.If you think about both 1984 and Brave New World, these were the big dystopian futures that were imagined in the 1950s. And both of them came true in many ways. It gave us a vocabulary, like, “Big Brother,” the “Telescreen,” or “Epsilons,” and “Gammas,” and “Alphas,” and so forth, by which we can actually kind of interpret things in the present. I think if you didn't have that vocabulary, it would be hard to have a discussion about what is it that we're actually worried about. So yes, I do think that there is a dystopian bias to a lot of that work that's done, but I think that you’ve got to have it. Because you do have to try to imagine to yourself what some of these downsides are.You mentioned a couple of books. Are there any films or television shows that you've watched that you feel provide a plausible optimistic vision?I don't know whether it's optimistic. One of my favorite book series and then TV series was The Expanse, written by a couple of guys that go by a pseudonym. It's not optimistic, in the sense that it projects all of our current geopolitical rivalries forward into a future in which human beings have colonized, not just the outer planets, but also intergalactically, figured out how to move from one place to another, and they're still having these fights between rich and poor and so forth. But I guess the reason that I liked it, especially the early parts of that series, when you just had an Epstein Drive, I mean, it was just one technological change that allowed you to move. It’s sort of like the early days of sailing ships, where you could get to Australia, but it would take you six months to get there. So that was the situation early on in the book, and that was actually a very attractive future. All of a sudden, human beings had the ability to mine the asteroid belt, they could create gigantic cities in space where human beings could actually live and flourish. That's one of the reasons I really liked that: because it was very human. Although there were conflicts, they were familiar conflicts. There were conflicts that we are dealing with today. But it was, in a way, hopeful because it was now done at this much larger scale that gave hope that human beings would not be confined to one single planet. And actually, one of the things that terrifies me is that the idea that in 100 years, we may discover that we actually can't colonize even Mars or the Moon. That the costs of actually allowing human beings to live anywhere but on earth just make it economically impossible. And so we're kind of stuck on planet Earth and that's the human future.I wrote a small essay about The Expanse where I talked about having a positive vision. As I saw it, this is several hundred years in the future, and we're still here. We've had climate change, but we're still here. We've expanded throughout the universe. If an asteroid should hit the earth, there's still going to be humanity. And people were angry about that essay, because this is a future but there's still problems. Yes, because we're still part of that future: human beings.Silicon Valley’s life-extension effortsGetting back to biotechnology and transhumanism and living forever, these things you wrote about in Our Posthuman Future: What do you make of the efforts by folks in Silicon Valley to try to extend lifespans? From a cultural perspective, from your perspective as a political scientist, what do you make of these efforts?I think they're terrible. I actually wrote about this and have thought about this a lot, about life extension. In fact, I think human biomedicine has produced a kind of disastrous situation for us right now because by the time you get to your mid-80s, roughly half of the population that's that old has some kind of long-term, chronic, degenerative disease. And I think that it was actually a much better situation when people were dying of heart attacks and strokes and cancer when they were still in their 70s. It's one of those things where life extension is individually very desirable because no individual wants to die. But socially, I think the impact of extending life is bad. Because quite frankly, you're not going to have adaptation unless you have generational turnover. There's a lot of literature now, Neil Howe has just written a new book on this about how important generations are. There's this joke that economists say, that the field of economics progresses one funeral at a time. Because, basically, you're born into a certain age cohort, and to the end of your life, you're going to retain a lot of the views of people that were born going through the same kind of life experiences. And sometimes they're just wrong. And unless that generation dies off, you're just not going to get the kind of social movement that’s necessary.We've already seen a version of this with all these dictators like Franco and Castro that refuse to die, and modern medicine keeps them alive forever. And as a result, you're stuck with their kind of authoritarian governments for way too long. And so I think that, socially, there's a good reason why under biological evolution you have population turnover and we humans don't live forever. What’s the advantage of everybody being able to live 200 years as opposed to let's say 80 or 90 years? Is that world going to be better? It's going to have all sorts of problems, right? Because you're going to have all of these 170-year-old people that won't get out of the way. How are you going to get tenure if all the tenured people are 170 years old and there's no way of moving them out of the system? I think that these tech billionaires, it's a kind of selfishness that they've got the money to fund all this research so that they hope that they can keep themselves alive, because they are afraid of dying. I think it's going to be a disaster if they're ever successful in bringing about this kind of population-level life extension. And I think we're already in a kind of disastrous situation where a very large proportion of the human population is going to be of an age where they're going to be dependent on the rest of the society to keep them alive. And that's not good economically. That's going to be very, very hard to sustain.Micro Reads▶ IBM Tries to Ease Customers’ Qualms About Using Generative A.I. - Steve Lohr, NYT |▶ Six Months Ago Elon Musk Called for a Pause on AI. Instead Development Sped Up - Will Knight, WIRED |▶ AI is getting better at hurricane forecasting - Gregory Barber, Ars Technica |▶ The promise — and peril — of generative AI - John Thornhill, FT |▶ Uber Freight Taps AI to Help Compete in Tough Cargo Market - Thomas Black, Bloomberg |▶ Why AI Doesn’t Scare Me - Gary Hoover, Profectus |▶ A top economist who studies AI says it will double productivity in the next decade: ‘You need to embrace this technology and not resist it’ - Geoff Colvin, Yahoo! Finance |▶ Meta is putting AI chatbots everywhere - Alex Heath, Verge |▶ The Big AI Risk We’re Not Talking About - Brent Skorup, Discourse |▶ Mark Zuckerberg can’t quit the metaverse - Laura Martins, Verge |▶ This robotic exoskeleton can help runners sprint faster - Rhiannon Williams, MIT Technology Review |▶ The bizarre new frontier for cell-cultivated meat: Lion burgers, tiger steaks, and mammoth meatballs - Jude Whiley, Vox |▶ A power grab against private equity threatens the US economy - Drew Maloney, FT |▶ Risks Are Growing of a Double-Dip ‘Vibecession’ - Jonathan Levin, Bloomberg |▶ NSF partners with the Institute for Progress to test new mechanisms for funding research and innovation - NSF |▶ It’s Too Easy to Block a Wind Farm in America - Robinson Meyer, Heatmap |▶ Can we finally reverse balding with these new experimental treatments? - Joshua Howgego, NewScientist | This is a public episode. 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Is climate change an impending existential threat, or a serious but manageable problem we can tackle with innovation and human ingenuity? Zeke Hausfather joins this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to explain the basics of climate modeling and give a clear-eyed assessment of the risks we face and the measures we can take.Zeke is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst. He is the climate research lead for Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth.In This Episode* Human impact on the climate (1:11)* Global temperature forecasting (6:33)* Low-probability, high-risk scenarios (15:07)* Reducing carbon emissions (17:06)* Carbon capture and carbon removal (25:25)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationFaster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks!Human impact on the climateJames Pethokoukis: How do we know that our planet is warming? And secondarily, how do we know the actions of people are playing a key role?Zeke Hausfather: That's a great question. In terms of how we know it's warming: We've been monitoring the Earth's climate with reasonably dense measurements since the mid-1800s. That's when groups like NASA, NOAA, the UK Hadley Centre, my own Berkeley Earth group, have been able to put together reliable global surface temperature estimates. And we've seen in the period…That's since the 1980s?1850.1850. NASA was not around in 1850.No. But enough measurements were being taken both at weather stations around the world and on ships in the oceans that we can reconstruct global temperatures with an accuracy of a couple tenths of a degree going back that far. We know that the world has warmed by about 1.2 degrees centigrade since 1850 with the vast majority of that warming, about 1 degree of it, happening since 1970. That isn't in much dispute in the scientific community at all. Now, going further back is harder, obviously. We only invented the thermometer in the early 1700s. There are a few locations on land that go back that far, but to go back further in time, we need to rely on what we call climate proxies: things like ice cores, tree rings, coral sediments, pollen in lakes — various natural factors that are in some way related to the temperature when those things occurred.Those have much higher uncertainties, of course, but we do know using those reconstructions that current temperature levels are probably unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years and are at the high end of anything we've seen in the last 120,000 years or so. Certainly if current temperatures were to stay at today's levels for another century, they'd be higher than anything we've seen in 120,000 years. But it's harder to precisely make those claims because the time resolution of these indirect proxy measurements is very coarse when we go back further in time. You might have one ice core measurement reflect a hundred-year average period, for example, rather than a specific year. We know from the temperature record that the world has warmed. How do we know that human activity is playing a role? Well, we've known since the mid-1800s, due to pioneering work by folks like John Tyndall or Arrhenius, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane are critical to maintain a habitable planet. Without greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the Earth would be a snowball and life would probably not exist.We also know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased pretty dramatically. We have measurements from ice cores going back about 800,000 years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a reasonably high resolution. And because carbon dioxide is well mixed, knowing it in one location in one ice core gives us a good picture of carbon dioxide for the whole planet. And we know that prior to the year 1850, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere varied between about 170 to 280 parts per million. They're lower during ice age periods; they're higher during warmer interglacial periods. But since the 1850s, that value has increased dramatically. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 50 percent. It's gone from 280 parts per million, which was over the last 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age, up to about 420 parts per million today.And that reflects a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't think people realize quite the magnitude we're talking about. The amount of carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere by digging up stuff from underground and burning it is roughly equal in mass to the entire biosphere. We took every single bit of life on Earth and burned it. That was about how much CO2 we put up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Or to put it another way, it's equal in mass to all of everything humans have ever built: the pyramids, every skyscraper, every road. We took all that mass and put it up into the atmosphere. That's the amount of CO2 we've emitted. And so that's had a pretty big effect on what we call the radiative forcing of our climate, essentially the amount of outgoing longwave radiation — or heat, in common parlance — that gets absorbed and reradiated back toward the surface. And the estimate…That’s the key mechanism we're talking about here, right?Yeah. Sunlight comes in from the sun, which provides pretty much all the Earth's energy. It gets absorbed by the surface of the Earth and reradiated as heat. That heat goes back out to space. Ideally, those two things should be an equilibrium: The amount of energy entering the Earth system matches the amount that leaves the Earth system, and the Earth stays a happy, healthy temperature. What we've seen in the last century, and we can verify this over the last few decades directly through satellite observations, is the amount of heat entering the Earth system is larger than the amount of heat leaving the Earth system. So the Earth is out of thermal equilibrium and is heating up. Most of that heat is going into the oceans, about 90 percent of it. But about 10 percent of that heat that's trapped goes into the atmosphere, and that's responsible for the warming we've seen.The climate is a hugely complex system, and when you're trying to project the response of the climate to our emissions, you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty around what we call feedbacks in the climate system.Global temperature forecastingLooking forward, various climate models, which is what we use to forecast what's going to happen next, look at what we've already put into the atmosphere and what we're continuing to put into the atmosphere, and they make a forecast about how that will impact temperatures going forward. Do I have that part right?Yep.Okay. So based on what these models are saying, what is reasonable to expect in coming decades as far as temperature increases and their impacts?The amount of future warming we end up having depends largely on how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases we emit. If we keep emissions roughly at current levels for the rest of the century — we're emitting about 40 billion tons of CO2 per year — if we keep that steady, we don't increase it at all, we expect somewhere in the range of 3 degrees centigrade warming by the end of the century, so that would be a bit above 5 degrees Fahrenheit warming globally, relative to the pre-industrial period or 1850. We've already experienced 1.2 degrees C. We'd have another 1.8 degrees C or so on top of that by the end of the century. If we emit more, it could be higher than that. If we emit less, it could be lower than that.That said, that's sort of the average estimate across the 40 different modeling centers around the world that do these sort of exercises. In reality, the climate is a hugely complex system, and when you're trying to project the response of the climate to our emissions, you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty around what we call feedbacks in the climate system. As an example: As we warm the surface, we get more evaporation and the atmosphere can hold more water vapor before rain falls out as the air is warmer. This is a fairly well-known physical relationship. And so for every degree of warming, you get about 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere. Now, water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, and so that enhances the warming the world experiences. Because it's warmer, that water vapor can stay in the atmosphere — because usually the water vapor itself is very, very short-lived and can't force the climate by itself because it just rains out if you get too much.There are also uncertainties in how clouds respond to our emissions. More water vapor in the atmosphere leads to more cloud formation in some regions. Higher temperatures and changing wind patterns lead to changing cloud dynamics. Our emissions of other things like aerosols, small particles from burning fossil fuels also affect cloud formation. And how that all pans out and how those clouds change the balance of heat trapped versus heat reflected varies a lot across models. And for all these reasons, we like to give a range of what we call climate sensitivity, which is essentially, how sensitive is the climate to our emissions? And we usually define that as, if we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere — which is roughly what we're on track for by the end of the century today, we've already increased it by 50 percent — how much warming do we get at equilibrium? And that value is generally around three degrees C per doubling of CO2, but with a pretty wide range. In the most recent IPCC report, we said it could be anywhere from 2.5 degrees C at the low end of the likely range to about 4 degrees at the high end, 2 degrees to 5 degrees is the sort of very likely range that we gave in the most recent IPCC report.I recently watched an Apple TV+ miniseries called Extrapolations, and it looked at climate change and how it would affect us over the entire century. That was the number they really fixated on: 3 degrees Celsius. The environment they showed was pretty chaotic: lots of very, very bad heat waves, hurricanes, flooding. Civilization wasn't going to get wiped out or anything, but it seemed pretty nasty. So are we talking kind of really nasty climate effects from three degrees of warming Celsius?When we say 3 degrees, it sounds like a very small number, especially to us Americans are used to talking about things in Fahrenheit. But even when we think about the temperature from day to day, it might change, let's say 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow, and that's noticeably warmer; 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit is the difference between 85 degrees and a bit above 90 degrees, but it doesn't sound huge. But the problem is, that's a global average number and no one lives in the global average. In fact, the global average is mostly the ocean. It turns out that where people do live, on land, is warming about 50 percent faster than the world as a whole. So if we talk about 3 degrees centigrade — or let's talk Fahrenheit for a moment, let's say 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit — over land, increase that by 50 percent, so let's say 8 degrees Fahrenheit globally over land where we all live. Even higher than that in high-latitude regions like the Arctic. We have bigger feedbacks associated with snow melting and exposing darker surfaces, so some regions are going to see really big changes.To put this number in perspective, the last ice age, which I think everyone would acknowledge was a very different planet than we have today, was only about 6 degrees centigrade colder than current temperatures globally. Obviously it was much colder in the northern latitudes, which were covered by ice sheets, but the tropics were not that much colder. And so it averages to about 6 degrees difference. So that would have impacts. Exactly what those impacts would be depends a lot on the systems we're talking about and the adaptive capacity of those systems. The natural world, I think in many ways, is going to be the worst hit by these changes. There are a lot of plant and animal species that live in fairly narrow ecological niches. And particularly in a world that's very fragmented by roads and human habitation, it's a lot harder for those plant and animal species to migrate to more temperate regions to be able to survive. So certainly there's a concern around large-scale extinction of many plant and animal species that can no longer live in the ecological niches that they've adapted to over the last tens of thousands of years and can't migrate quickly enough to adapt to that.In terms of impacts to human systems, there's a lot of different impacts from climate change and the degree to which those are catastrophic is going to depend a lot on how wealthy we are and how well we can adapt to it. If by the end of the century we're in a world that's similar to today, that has huge amounts of inequality with billions of people living at a dollar a day, I would worry a lot about the ability of people in those societies to adapt to more widespread extreme heat events, larger floods associated with more water vapor in the atmosphere, sea level rise, some of these other impacts. If we live in a world where we're all very wealthy and relatively equal on a country-by-country basis and within countries, then we have a much bigger ability to build sea walls, to have air conditioning inside, to genetically engineer crops to be more heat tolerance, the many other ways that humans can adapt to these changes. And so I think in many ways I see climate change less as an existential risk by itself and more as an existential risk multiplier. If we are in a world of weak institutions, of failing governments, of high inequality, I see climate as something that could help push societies over the edge. But I don't necessarily think at least a 3-degree world would be one that is the end of civilization by any stretch of the imagination, if we get our act together on these other issues.What is what you described as what is sort of the “business as usual” forecast, and then what is the, we really get serious about policy, and we can talk about what those policies are, that reduce carbon emissions?The good news is “business as usual” has already been changing a fair bit. Nowadays, it looks like business as usual is global emissions staying relatively flat. A decade ago, it seemed like doubling or tripling global emissions by the end of the century would not be out of the question. Certainly if you extrapolated the trends from previous decades, that's where we were headed. Nowadays, global coal use has largely plateaued and arguably is going to shrink in coming years. We have cheaper alternatives. Electric vehicles are taking off. There are many other technologies that are being developed and becoming increasingly cheap. And so it's harder to imagine a world where we're still burning massive amounts of coal, oil, and gas in 2100.We can reduce emissions, we can develop new technologies, and we can get them widely adopted. And if we do that and if we get emissions to zero by, say, 2070 or so globally, then we limit warming to below 2 degrees.Low-probability, high-risk scenariosDoes that make the very worst-case scenarios that maybe we were talking about a decade ago just highly unlikely?It certainly makes the worst-case emission outcomes highly unlikely. If we look at 3 degrees, for example, that could really end up anywhere between 2 degrees and above 4 degrees if we get unlucky because of the uncertainty in how the climate system responds to our emissions, because the Earth is such a complex system. Climate change is both planning for the central outcome but also trying to mitigate those risks. In some ways, we want to reduce emissions not just to get that mean down, but also as an insurance policy against the 5 or 10 percent more catastrophic potential outcomes there. I don't think we're necessarily completely out of the woods on a 4 C world by the end of the century if we roll sixes on all the proverbial climate dice, but I think we have made a lot of progress in making those outcomes less likely.Today we're headed toward, as I mentioned earlier, about 3 degrees of warming if emissions stay relatively constant, or a little bit below 3 degrees. But we can do much better than that. We can reduce emissions, we can develop new technologies, and we can get them widely adopted. And if we do that and if we get emissions to zero by, say, 2070 or so globally, then we limit warming to below 2 degrees. If we get emissions to zero by 2050, which is going to be a much harder lift given the amount of infrastructure in place today that relies on fossil fuels, then we could limit warming to maybe about 1.6 or 1.7 degrees. And if we build lots of machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere, plant lots of trees, do other things to actually get negative emissions, models suggest we could get temperatures down to 1.5 degrees, only 0.3 degrees above where we are today, by the end of the century.We are really on this acceleration of private sector and government spending on these technologies. But I think government does play a role here. I think most economists would acknowledge that what we're dealing with here is an externality. Reducing carbon emissionsWhen I look at what our responses might be, I tend to think, what will happen to emissions in a world where our responses will be constrained by our low collective tolerance for suffering and pain and deprivation and sacrifice? To me, that's a pretty important constraint. If there's one lesson I think we learned from the pandemic, it’s people don't like shortages. We don't like to rough it in any way. In a world where, at least in the West, that's our attitude, how do we get emissions down in a somewhat timely manner?I think a lot of it relies both on the combination of human ingenuity and governments playing a role in catalyzing that ingenuity and allowing these technologies to scale. We've seen the biggest successes in mitigating climate change in technologies that slot in nicely to replace things that we enjoy today. We don't talk about it much, but Texas is the renewable energy capital of the US today, because it's cheaper to generate electricity with the wind and sun there than it is to burn coal and gas. Similarly, we've seen an explosion of electric vehicles in places like China and Europe, and the US is catching up, not necessarily because everyone there is a tree hugger, but because they're really fun to drive and they perform better and are lower cost in some cases than conventional vehicles. The more we can follow that model of developing new technologies that don't involve sacrifice, that don't involve necessarily giving up things we enjoy today, I think the more successful we're going to be.And that's led to a lot of money being spent on these things. In the last year, the globe spent about $1.1 trillion on mitigation technologies: renewable energy, electric vehicles, nuclear power, heat pumps, all that sort of stuff. That's up from $200 million a year or so a decade before or 15 years before. And so we are really on this acceleration of private sector and government spending on these technologies. But I think government does play a role here. I think most economists would acknowledge that what we're dealing with here is an externality. And by an externality, I mean it's something that has a social cost, but no one individually pays for it when they put carbon dioxide or other emissions in the atmosphere. So there has to be some role of internalizing that externality, either through (as economists would like to do) a price on carbon, or in a world where you can't do that for many reasons, subsidizing the good stuff to essentially account for the benefits it has of displacing fossil fuels, both in terms of their affecting climate change, but also conventional pollution. I think we discount a lot, particularly living in a place like the US, which has done a lot of work on this, how disastrous fossil fuels are for public health. There's somewhere in the range of a couple million people dying prematurely globally from pollution, particularly outdoor air pollution. And if you go to a place like India or China and walk around outside, it's pretty catastrophic some days in terms of the brown soup that is the air. We get a lot of co-benefits by cleaning up these conventional pollutants, particularly in places like Southeast Asia or South Asia, as well as reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.Reducing emissions, going to zero emissions, pulling emissions out of the air: Do these scenarios work with just renewable energy sources or is this a world that's using nuclear energy in some form far more than we currently are?So I think we necessarily need a variety of energy sources here, and there's been a lot of work done in recent years by the energy modeling community on this front. Renewables are great. Solar is super, super cheap; to be honest, a lot cheaper today than any of us thought it would be a couple decades ago. Wind is increasingly cheap. But they're also intermittent. The sun doesn't shine all the time; the wind doesn't blow all the time. Batteries are part of the solution to deal with that, but they're not a perfect solution. We tend to find that you get a much lower cost in scenarios where you also have a sizable chunk, maybe 20, 30, 40 percent, of your energy coming from what we call clean firm generation. Things like nuclear, like enhanced geothermal, potentially fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, though those have some challenges in implementation, to support large amounts of renewable energy on the grid.You end up with a much more expensive system if you try to shoehorn in 100 percent renewables, and to be honest, it's pretty unnecessary. So I think we are going to see, and we're already starting to see, bigger investments in things like next-generation nuclear. I think we just need to figure out how to build them on time and on budget. The biggest problem with the nuclear industry in the US — certainly regulations have contributed to it — but I think it's just our inability to build these giant, bespoke megaprojects. Nuclear goes super over budget for the same reason the “Big Dig” in Boston does: You have this 10-year-long, many, many billion-dollar megaproject that has construction delays and all these other problems. The more we can learn from what renewables have gotten right, make things small, modular, pumped out in an assembly line, and less contingent on these giant construction projects, I think the better outcomes we'll see for things like nuclear.There's an economist, he passed fairly recently, Martin Weitzman from Harvard, and he wrote about the economics of climate change. And there's one quote that always sticks in my mind. He wrote that “Deep structural uncertainty about the unknown unknowns of what might go very wrong [with the climate] is coupled with essentially unlimited downside liability on possible planetary damages” and a “non-negligible” probability of a “collapse of planetary welfare.” He's talking about, you can't write off the possibility that we get some very bad outcomes. And I guess that's what worries me: If we're doing something to the atmosphere that we've never done before, what if the models are wrong and we get something really catastrophic, that really becomes a true existential risk? How much should I worry about that?I think we're all worried about unknown unknowns. For me, the odds of those happening, which are somewhat unknowable by definition, increase the more we push the Earth out of the climate we've seen for the past few million years. Right now we're around the range of what we saw in the Last Interglacial Period, about 120,000 years ago. If we get temperatures up to 3 degrees centigrade globally, we will be out of the range of anything we've seen for the last two million years or so, if not further back. And we know if we go further back into the Earth's history, there's some scary stuff back there. There are periods where we see very rapid increases of temperature associated with 90 percent extinction of all life on Earth, like the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum. And we don't have great explanations for all these things. A good example is, for warmer periods in the Earth’s past, we think there's a mechanism where if temperatures get high enough, maybe 5 degrees above where they were in the pre-industrial period or a bit above 4 degrees above where we are today, suddenly all the stratocumulus cloud decks that cover much of the Earth's oceans disappear. And that leads to another 4 degrees warming on top of that. That sort of behavior seems to help explain some of these rapid warming events in the Earth's more distant past.Now, we think we're pretty far from experiencing something of that today. But maybe our models are wrong, or maybe the Earth is much more sensitive than we think. And again, rolling sort of sixes on the climate sensitivity and carbon cycle feedback dice leads us into those sorts of conditions. And so Marty Weitzman, who I did have the pleasure of knowing before he passed, had a great phrase to sum up that quote, which is that “when it comes to climate change, this thing is in the tail,” which is a very nerdy way to put it: The tails of these probability distribution functions, the low-probability but high-impact events, are really what should drive a lot of our concern around this and push us to reduce emissions more than we otherwise would if we were just planning for the most likely outcome.But whenever we talk about carbon dioxide removal, it is always important to emphasize that this stuff is expensive and it only makes sense to do at scale in a world where we're already cutting emissions dramatically. Carbon capture and carbon removalPeople will say, “What if the models are wrong?” and they assume they're only going to be wrong to the benefit of humanity. Maybe they're wrong to the detriment of humanity.We talked a little bit about reducing these emissions. You have carbon capture, where you pull it out of the air. How close is that technology to being something that can scale?When we talk about carbon capture, that's often a different thing than when we talk about carbon removal. Carbon capture generally means taking an existing fossil fuel plant…That could be trees too, right?Yeah, but carbon capture is mostly taking an existing fossil fuel plant like a coal, oil, and gas plant, sticking a unit on that captures the carbon coming out of it, and putting that underground. And there's a lot of funding for that in the new Inflation Reduction Act. The record on that over the last few decades has been a bit mixed. It's been hard for folks to make the economics work in practice. It's really complicated technically, but a lot of folks are confident that we can get there with some of those technologies. If a coal plant with carbon capture is going to be cheaper than a nuclear plant or renewable plant is a separate question. And I'm a lot more skeptical on the economics of carbon capture there.Now, carbon dioxide removal is a slightly different thing. And there we're talking about technologies that don't stop emissions from coming out of a smokestack, but instead take carbon that's already in the atmosphere and pull it back out. And most of our models suggest that we are going to need a lot of that down the road, in part because we can't fully get rid of all of the emissions from all of the parts of our economy. And the real challenge with climate change, or what I like to call the “brutal math” of climate change is that as long as our emissions remain above zero, the Earth continues to warm. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for an extremely long period of time; it takes about 400,000 years to fully clear out a ton of fossil CO2 we emit today through natural processes. So we end up needing a lot of carbon removal to both balance out what we call residual emissions and potentially to deal with overshoot. If we figure out that we really don't want temperatures to go above 1.5 degrees, but they're headed toward 1.7, we're going to have to pull a bunch of carbon out of the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. It's only a small part of the solution. Maybe 10 percent of the solution to climate change writ large is carbon dioxide removal. But for a problem as big as climate change, 10 percent still matters a lot since solar is probably 20 percent, electric vehicles are probably 20 percent, heat pumps might be 10 percent. And there's a lot of technologies people are developing to do that. Direct air capture is the one that gets a lot of press: the sort of big fans that suck carbon out of the air, though they're incredibly energy intensive. But there are a lot of ways that leverage natural processes as well. Planting trees is a good one, though it has a lot of challenges in keeping the carbon in those trees in a warming world, particularly as we see more wildfires, more pine bark beetle outbreaks that used to die in cold winter temperatures and don't anymore. And so it's hard to justify planting trees as a way of permanently taking carbon out of the atmosphere, but it's still quite valuable. There's also a lot of interesting work being done around using biomass to sequester carbon, so taking residues from commercial timber operations, burning them, and putting their carbon content underground. Something called BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, that a lot of people are excited about.Then there are other interesting ways to leverage the natural carbon cycle. For example, over long periods, the weathering of certain types of rocks like basalt or olivine drives a lot of atmospheric CO2 absorption over the course of millions of years. And so a lot of scientists are trying to figure out ways to speed that up. If you take rock dust and spread it on farm fields, it can help manage the pH of soils, it can add some nutrients. And it turns out that as that basalt dust weathers, it absorbs carbon to the atmosphere, it turns it into stable bicarbonate and then flows out to the ocean and eventually forms limestone on the bottom of the ocean. Stuff like that, or adding alkalinity directly to the ocean to counteract ocean acidification, can also lead to more CO2 uptake from the air, because the amount of carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs in the atmosphere depends on how acidic the surface level of the layers of the water are. Scientists are working on tons of different technologies here. And actually my day job these days with Stripe and Frontier is helping support companies to do that. So there's lots of exciting stuff there. But whenever we talk about carbon dioxide removal, it is always important to emphasize that this stuff is expensive and it only makes sense to do at scale in a world where we're already cutting emissions dramatically. If you keep burning fossil fuels willy-nilly and spend a ton of money on a bit of carbon dioxide removal, it's not going to make any difference.Why are you interested in this subject?I think it's an underexplored area. Certainly until the last few years, no one was really putting any money or resources into it at scale. And it's something that is going to have to be an important part of the solution in the next few decades, and so I think this is the decade that we should be spending resources to figure out what works and what can scale for decades to come. We probably should spend about 1 percent of the money we spend on reducing emissions, but historically we've been spending a lot less than that.And why are you also more broadly interested in the entire topic of climate change rather than, I don't know, tax policy or something?I come to it from a scientific background. I just find the Earth's climate fascinating. It's super complex. It's hard to fully understand. We've really made leaps and bounds in progress over the last few decades, but there's so much we still don't know. And so it's just a fascinating area from a scientific standpoint, but it's also one where the importance to the society is quite large. I try not to wade too much into the policy solutions to it, but certainly helping understand the likely impacts of our actions affects a lot of choices that policymakers and others make. There's no one right answer. To your question earlier, people debate renewables versus nuclear and all these other things. Knowing what the impacts of climate change are, what the risks are, and how we can actually get to certain outcomes based on our decisions, I feel like is really important to set the stage for people to use the science in the real world. And it's exciting to work in an area of science where there is a practical, real-world application of it. And not just studying one plant species that lives on top of one mountain in a remote part of the world. We're looking at these big questions that affect everyone over the next century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

As the cost to launch a rocket into orbit has come down over the past decade, a slew of startups have joined the emerging space economy. But is there enough business for all these companies? And what's the broad economic case for space? In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I'm chatting about those questions and more with Michael Sheetz.Michael is a space reporter for CNBC where he also writes the "Investing in Space" newsletter.In This Episode* The business case for space (1:05)* SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the other players in space (4:03)* How much demand is there for space services? (10:15)* To the Moon and Mars (13:59)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe business case for spaceJames Pethokoukis: How do private companies intend on making money in space over the next decade?Michael Sheetz: The first and foremost way is the tried-and-true way when it comes to making money in space, which is providing communications data and other services back to people here on Earth. You're talking about communication systems like Starlink, which are the next generation of communication services that have been around, from the geo-communication satellites of decades prior. That's the primary, immediate way that people are making money right now in space. The second way that people are making money in space is by launching satellites for other customers: You're talking about the rocket business, the transportation business. You see stuff like OTVs, or orbital transfer vehicles. That's a way to deliver stuff into space.Then there's a third kind of newer way, which is just microgravity research in general. That's coming to the fore really in the last decade as NASA has really opened up the International Space Station as a testbed for commercial technologies and not just NASA's own technologies. And a lot of companies see that as really just a first foray into that ground. Some of them are trying to do it in their own way by sending capsules into orbit and bringing them back, not going to a space station. The other way is by sending it to a space station, and there are actually four or five major projects underway in the United States to build private space stations in orbit. Those are companies that are either working together or building their own solo units, and they're all just kind of vying for a future in which you don't just have one giant space station, because the International Space Station is huge, but instead of the ISS, you have lots of these little space stations that people can sign agreements with. Say a pharmaceutical company wants to test out a new drug in orbit, they'll sign a research agreement with a company that's going to fly them up there, test it out, fly it back down. They might have astronauts on board. They might not.The other way — this is the other kind of nascent sector — is the lunar infrastructure world, and that's all very much a new space race, if you will, because there's a geopolitical element there. We’ve got India, we have China both firmly in that mix. China has been arguably one of the most successful at landing on the Moon in the last decade. And NASA, instead of trying to fly themselves to the Moon for these cargo missions and research, they've actually gone to companies and said, “Hey, bid on these contracts, deliver services to us. We'll put our payloads onto your spacecraft, your lander, your rover, and then get it down to the Moon and either get us back data or even return materials.” But mostly just, “Let's try to figure out if we can actually make use of the water that's believed to be on the surface of the Moon.” And that's a really big key point: The first round in terms of trying to make use of the Moon is all about, can we harvest the resources that are on the lunar surface?SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the other players in spaceMuch of the conversation among regular people, to the extent they're aware of really what's going on, what you've just described so wonderfully, is SpaceX. Maybe they've heard of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin. How far behind is Blue Origin of SpaceX? Do we have a feel for where that company is?I, at this point, wouldn't even put it as really a competition, because SpaceX is very much in a league of their own. Blue Origin has so dramatically taken a different approach to development, very much more akin to the aerospace and defense contractors of the past. It's fascinating because both companies are actually very similar sizes in terms of personnel, but SpaceX has taken this approach of, let's just get one win after the other and try to just break things a little bit at a time and keep pushing further that way. Whereas Blue Origin is taking the route of, we want everything to work the first go, the first launch, the first landing on the Moon, all these other nuances in there. And so far, SpaceX's strategy has been dominant. Now, the United States is not looking at United Launch Alliance, one of the existing providers for rocket launches, as its primary source of both getting astronauts and satellites in orbit, they're looking to SpaceX. There's a flipping of the head that's happened in the last decade.In this next decade, and even just in the next three to five years, it's a really critical point in Blue Origin's history where the company has been around longer than SpaceX, albeit they took a very different approach at the beginning and have taken a very different approach in recent years as well. But they need to show not just for the customers that they signed contracts for—such as United Launch Alliance, delivering engines for them, or different contractors like NASA, providing services to the Moon—they need to show that they can start delivering on those contracts and start actually competing. Maybe not head to head right away, but at least start to get some actual performance and execution as opposed to basically at this point saying, “Here's our grand architecture of everything that we want happen over the next 100 years,” which would be amazing. I can totally see where Jeff's vision for people in research laboratories and living in Lagrange points and all these kinds of things could happen. But you have to make some first inroads, and they haven't yet done that. It's a one-horse race right now.Since we've been talking about those two companies: Are the goals the same but the strategies and timelines different or are they fundamentally trying to achieve different things?They very much have distinct missions when you just look at how they think about where they're going, the trajectory of the company, the trajectory of the space industry writ large. They do have very similar fundamental steps that they have to achieve to get towards those missions. When you look at one of their main products at Blue Origin, for example, with their New Glenn rocket, you still have to do the same basics of, fly a satellite to orbit, land it a couple times successfully, start reusing it and show that you can reuse it efficiently. Those are all things that Falcon 9 did and now SpaceX is going to have to do with Starship as well. They both have similar incremental steps, even if their broader mission targets aren’t the same.I think one really interesting thing about where the space industry is at today is that it actually really isn't about just SpaceX versus Blue Origin, but it's also Rocket Lab. It's also Maxar. It’s also Planet. There are all these different pieces of the broader architecture that are in the space economy and they're all kind of vying for different revenue streams within the space economy. But when we talk about SpaceX and Blue Origin, and I think we might be kind of oversimplifying the industry just into launch and basic transportation as opposed to what it really is in a lot of ways, which is infrastructure. And that's the kind of holistic approach, when you think about the companies that are players in that, where you start actually seeing Rocket Lab just did their 40th electron launch. Yeah, it’s a small launch. No, it's not the same service as Falcon 9. But they've carved out a really important niche in that, and they're trying to use that to not just build a larger rocket, Neutron, but also build out a very strong space systems division and then provide services.Sort of like how SpaceX did with Starlink where they were like, “Look, we've got the rocket business down. Let's go find revenue sources.” The first one right off the bat was, “Let's get better internet service, broadband into hard-to-reach areas at low cost comparatively to years past, and we'll do it in a way that just really provides this holistic coverage: You can go anywhere in the world, plug it in, it will connect to one of our satellites.” As opposed to just the regional focus of past communication systems. I think one really important key aspect of where the industry is at today is the fact that there are all these different companies that may not have billionaire backers, but they have big investors behind them, they have big revenue coming in: Planet and Rocket Lab, we're talking about pulling over $100 million in revenue a year. That's not inconsequential. Maxar and the like and others are really trying to further establish themselves. I think of Iridium with their communication systems.There are all these different players that have their pieces of the overall industry. Some of them compete head-to-head, some of them don't. And I think that's where you start to see an industry that isn't at a little bit of, for lack of a better way of saying it, a single-fault failure situation, where if Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos loses interest in space or something worse happens to them, all of a sudden the US progress in space evaporates. That's not the case today, and I think that's the most actually exciting thing about where the broader space economy is at.How much demand is there for space services?Is there enough business for all these companies? Are there enough people who want to put things in space and do things in space to justify this archipelago of companies that you've just described, or do people talk about [how] there's going to need to be a shakeout? Or is it just that there's so much potential demand, boy, it is going to be hard to fulfill it all?I'll give an example to answer your first question, but I want to hit the second aspect of what you talked about first. There is going to be a shakeout right now, and I think there is a shakeout underway. We've seen a lot of M&A [merger and acquisition] activity this year. We've seen a couple bankruptcies. We've seen a couple of people get acquired for likely very little money, and that's because the free money of the past has gone away, especially in a high capital-intensive industry with high risk. Even as we're seeing now, Viasat, one of the most established players, had their crown jewel new satellite malfunction shortly after getting into orbit. Then the company they recently acquired, a UK company, Inmarsat, one of their recently launched satellites malfunctioned in orbit. So now Viasat has got two malfunctioning satellites that they're trying to deal with. This is a really high-risk business that we're talking about, and that opens up new potential for M&A, and it also opens up new opportunities as valuations have come down where companies that might not have been either competing with each other but could see each other as compatible are now starting to join forces effectively. And other companies that had a stronger position coming into this shakeout period are starting to take advantage of that, as well as investors who are behind those companies.This first thing that you talked about, and I'll give the example, I think the data communications world is the perfect example of, is there enough money and is there enough demand to go around for everybody? When you look at just purely broadband services, which actually there's quite a bit of variety within how you provide those services, which kind of customers you target, that realm has seen no shortage of demand. Every single company you talk to, whether it's a company that provides regional-focused broadband service to enterprises in one location or another company that goes after transatlantic flights and providing in-flight Wi-Fi, every single executive I talk to across that data communications business says, “We need more satellites and orbits so that we can provide more supply because there's more demand than we can provide.”And we're talking about what's already one of the most crowded parts of the space industry, from an established perspective, with multiple players around the world providing services all over the place. The fact that all of those guys are looking at this hockey stick from a demand perspective and all the different layers that they can provide service to — whether it's households, governments, businesses, shipping companies, whatever — that's where there's a lot of excitement around, this established market is even growing at a high rate, what about all these other little nascent markets? I'm not talking space tourism. That might be a fun place to watch that people always get excited about. It’s one of the lowest revenue sources in the industry. I'm talking about the lunar infrastructure that I mentioned before. Remote sensing is one of the wildest frontiers in the last decade, and when you look at the varieties of companies that are competing and the customer capture that they're getting and the new applications that are coming out of that, it's absolutely wild. And so I think those new growing verticals are just showing that, yes, there's still demand, it's still growing.To the Moon and MarsAssuming that the US, NASA, we're going to go to the Moon, we're going to stay on the Moon, we're going to build stuff on the Moon, over the next 15 years will most of those rockets be NASA rockets taking people and stuff to the Moon, or SpaceX rockets?I don't even think it's just going to be SpaceX rockets. I think Starship definitely, if they continue to make progress… But mind you, it's been a little bit of a bumpy road in recent years. We have some reliability issues with the Raptor engines we’ve got to still work out. Albeit the first flight was called a success, I think rightfully so, but it's an incremental one and they still have a lot of steps to go. And when you go back to years past, just even flying humans on Starship, SpaceX has been very candid about saying, “Look, we want to do hundreds of these flights before we put people on this thing.” So maybe it's not Starship, at least in this decade, that's flying tons of people to the Moon. But you've got a workhorse in Falcon 9 that can deliver lunar payloads. It is going to deliver lunar payloads even in the next year.You've got a number of other rockets that are coming online to deliver services. NASA's own rocket, SLS, really isn't going to fly more than once a year at best. And that's pretty optimistic. I see that as lifting the biggest stuff that we need to try to get there, such as getting Orion and Lunar Gateway and all these other things. But really the core of it is, when we're talking about building infrastructure on the Moon in a way that you have a sustained presence, that's a group effort. This is not a single company, single agency doing that. That's something where you need the services of the likes of Firefly building their lunar lander, Astrobotic out of Pittsburgh building their lander. You need Rocket Lab to get Neutron flying. You want Relativity to have Terran R flying. You want this robust ecosystem of transportation devices sort of like we do of any other method of transportation here in the United States and globally, where it's not just one company that builds all the ships. Even in airlines, Boeing and Airbus dominate; however, they're two of a broader ecosystem of several other companies that have carved out niches for them making regional aircraft and stuff like that. And that's what's going to be needed to build that broader lunar infrastructure.I love the notion of going to Mars and colonizing Mars. What is your sense of other people in the space industry who don't work for SpaceX, what do they make of that goal that Elon Musk talks about? Do they view it as just Elon being Elon, these kind of huge aspirational goals? Or do they think this is something we can do as a space industry over the next quarter century?One of the most fascinating things, I think, is that you would get a huge variety of answers from people in the space industry on whether or not (1) they fundamentally agree with that premise that we should be doing it, what it should look like, etc., and (2) how we're going to make it happen if they're even in favor of doing so. And I think that's an amazing reflection of the different interests and the variety of folks who are in this industry, the inspiration that they take from the different missions of either their companies or agencies or projects that they're working on. I think at its core, it's something that still feels too far out to really put a pin in it because there's not a right way to do it currently and not an effective way to do it currently. And so it's something that, sort of like with the Moon and the Artemis Accords providing this new framework of cooperation and how we use resources and space, going to Mars, it's only really going to become a question of how should we be doing this once we're actually getting closer to doing it.I think a commercial company getting a lander on Mars is going to be a first start in that new era. But even that I don't see happening for another five to six years at least, and that's just maybe a small spacecraft. So that's a question I think is extremely open ended. But I do see us on this trajectory where it's not just the Moon, it's not just Mars, it's other planetary bodies, it's asteroids, it's all these other things of exploration where once we start getting into the realm — and you can look at any of the explorers of the past to kind of find your guide for how this happened, there were people who made that first foray into a new land and a new realm, and then after that we're like, “Okay, so we can do this. Cool. Now let's try to figure out what this should really look like and what establishing a settlement on another planet would really look like.”My short answer is, we're so far away from it in a realistic sense that I think what I would point people to now, with the fear of them losing interest in what space can really provide to the rest of humanity and the benefits it provides, that they should be looking at the current infrastructure that we have here on Earth and how it benefits us and makes our everyday lives better, one, and two, the real near-term possibilities of what the United States putting a presence on the Moon, China putting a presence on the Moon, India putting a presence on the Moon, what that looks like geopolitically, what that looks like from a resources standpoint, how we can compete in a way that's not leading to some sort of new conflict in space. That just seems like a place where things could escalate really quickly and poorly. As opposed to what's really happening right now is, in the next couple of years we're going to see more and more spacecraft landing on the Moon, and I think that's an exciting near-term future. What we do on Mars, what we do on asteroids, what we do elsewhere, it's going to be something down the road. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

The podcast discusses the feasibility of top-down economic planning and the flaws of socialist planning, with insights from guest Pete Boettke. It explores the history and aspirations of techno socialism, renewed interest in rationalizing the economic system through AI, and the potential of technosocialism to improve the economic system. Lastly, the podcast touches on the dangers of concentrated power and the potential future of socialism with advancements in artificial general intelligence.

Over the past 15 years, the cost to launch a rocket into orbit has declined dramatically thanks to SpaceX. Today, we're witnessing the launch of a new Space Age — one built around billionaires like Elon Musk, but also a flowering of smaller private ventures. To discuss the state of play in the emerging orbital economy, I've brought Ashlee Vance on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast.Vance is the author of the new book, When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach. He previous wrote, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future in 2015.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In This Episode* How SpaceX launched a new Space Age (1:13)* The companies building a “computing shell” around the planet (8:37)* The proliferation of satellites (15:07)* The downsides of the emerging space economy (24:07)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationHow SpaceX launched a new Space AgeJames Pethokoukis: The book begins with a story of the first successful orbital launch of a SpaceX Falcon 1. There were three failed attempts, the whole thing is looking pretty dicey about the future of the company in this effort, and on the fourth attempt, September, 2008, they're able to get to orbit and release a payload. Before September, 2008, what does the space economy/space industry look like? Where are we starting?Ashlee Vance: The starting point: sort of sadly, it looked a lot the same for many, many decades. We had this nation-backed space program, [which was] dominant. There were just a handful of nations, really, that were the major players in all this. Some wealthy people at various stages had come along and tried to commercialize space and make their own rockets, and had varying degrees of success, but no staying power. It ended up that it always takes longer and costs more than you think. And NASA was always sitting there really as your main competitor and undermining your business. With the Falcon 1, it really was this watershed-type moment where finally somebody had succeeded. Yes, SpaceX had people from traditional aerospace, but Elon [Musk] certainly was not from the aerospace world. He had a lot of 20-somethings on his team who had never done this before. It just signaled this new era, or the possibility of a new era, because you had people just who hadn't been part of the old guard doing this thing.The goal here was to get a rocket into space and get it there way cheaper than what NASA was doing. What was the key breakthrough that allowed that decline in costs? And why didn't NASA just do this?NASA, and in particular the Department of Defense, had desired this type of thing for a long time: a low-cost rocket that could get to space quickly and often. It seems like this should be doable, but they had really struggled to make it happen. The DOD had funded various efforts. There's a couple things going on. SpaceX had this huge advantage, I think, of this clean slate to this. They came at this without the usual baggage. And in this case, the baggage means a lot of military government contractors who are pricing things quite expensively. They're doing things the way they've always done them, which means you probably don't want to see any sort of failure so you're building it in a ton of redundancy and spending all this extra money to make sure you look good when this thing goes.SpaceX comes in with this clean slate. The original pitch deck for SpaceX described it as like the Southwest for space. Cost was like at the top of [Elon Musk’s] mind and he wanted to make this cheap. They did have some breakthroughs. The physics around a rocket are the physics, and we've known this for decades. There's not much room for huge breakthroughs in engineering that nobody has thought of yet. But they did come in with this modern, Silicon Valley–style approach to software, particularly to electronics—although this kind of comes in later in SpaceX's history—where SpaceX was going to build a lot of the electronics themselves, often turning to consumer-grade electronics instead of what people call space-grade, which means it's built by a military contractor, it probably costs a thousand times what it should cost, but it's guaranteed to work in space. They had this clean slate. They did things as cheap as possible. The team was small. It wasn't this bloated contractor. That was their primary advantage at the beginning, I would argue. Over time, as they've gotten much bigger and much more money is coming in, there's a whole host of technological advantages. But on the Falcon 1, it really was that clean slate, this low-cost approach.Obviously if you're beginning your book, which is not a history of SpaceX, but you're beginning with SpaceX, then that must have marked an important inflection point where you could sort of imagine two paths. One path: the 2010s look a lot like the 2000s, which look a lot like the ‘90s. Versus this very different path.Why is SpaceX important in creating this new path, and what do things look like now?Yeah. I'm so glad you called that out and you phrased it the way you did with these two paths, because a lot of people—my editors were giving me grief for, “Why are you spending so much time talking about SpaceX in the prologue of this book that's not going to be about SpaceX?” But as you pointed out…By the way, having dealt with book editors, I can imagine that conversation quite easily.I wanted people to know how fragile this was, and where it did it come from? You mentioned it: Three of the previous rockets had failed, SpaceX was running out of money, they were running out of credibility, people had been on this island, Kwajalein, for six years, basically losing their minds. If this rocket does not go, I think we do end up in that scenario that you were just talking about, where the 2010s look pretty much like they always had. It was important to me just to give people this history, how hard this is. I see this as this inciting incident. It's funny, because you kind of go from governments and then there were like honest-to-God billionaires. When Elon started SpaceX, he was rich, but he wasn't rich like he is now. We're talking about like a hundred million dollars he put into SpaceX. So the bar had come down quite a bit. But in that moment when this rocket flies and then in the years that follow, when SpaceX really starts to hit its stride, this unlocks all of this.There was so much enthusiasm for space and young kids who wanted to get into this industry, and it had been slow and boring and the excitement had sort of come out of it. You had the generation of people who had grown up watching Apollo. Those people were getting older, and there wasn't something new to look at for a lot of people who were much younger. And here it is. Here's this company that's making commercial space real. And this guy, Elon, is quite eccentric and interesting, and some people sort of want to be like him. I write about it in the book: It was sort of like the four-minute mile to me. It's like, once somebody does it, then all of a sudden you see lots of people now are breaking the four-minute mile. This thing that seemed impossible, it turns out is possible. You have this unlocking in your head of what people can do. And so I just think across the world, it unlocked this passion, this latent engineering smarts and energy, and made this seem real. So you end up with startups all over the world chasing rockets and satellites.The companies building a “computing shell” around the planetIn the book, you write, “The future that all these space buffs have already started building is one in which many rockets blast off every day. These rockets will be carrying thousands of satellites that will be placed not all that far above our heads. The satellites will change the way communications work on Earth by, for one, making the internet an inescapable presence with all the good and bad that entails. The satellites will also watch and analyze the earth in previously unfathomable ways. The data centers that have reshaped life on our planet will be transported into orbit. We are, in effect, building a computing shell around the planet.” Other than SpaceX, who are the companies building that computer shell?The one that comes to mind is the next sort of central actor in the book, which is this company called Planet Labs, which is based in San Francisco. For people who don't know, they already surround the Earth with about 250 imaging satellites. They can take, and they do take, pictures of every spot on the Earth's landmass every day. Multiple pictures. Unlike even the world's biggest governments, China, Russia, the US, which have spice satellites obviously, but they only have a handful of spy satellites. And they tend to only look where interesting things might be happening. Planet sees everything that's happening all the time. And this is not some far-off concept. They had this full constellation up and running in 2018 and have just been adding to it ever since.At the time they launched, in low-Earth orbit there were about [2,000] satellites. And Planet had put up about 250. They were about 10 percent of all the satellites in space, just from this small private company in California that grew out of NASA Ames, the Silicon Valley center. And so they're indicative of, today, we have many, many, several companies trying to build these space internet constellations, each of which require on the order of 10,000 to 20,000 satellites. You've got more imaging satellites along the lines of Planet that do all kinds of different things. And then you got a ton of scientific satellites. The whole premise is that there are many more ideas yet to come.When you watch a spy movie, they're always talking about "retasking the satellite,” like there's only one satellite over all of Asia or something. But what we're talking about now is satellites everywhere, looking everywhere, any time you want.Yeah. That movie stuff is true. That's usually what had to happen. Just as like SpaceX brought the cost of rocket launches down and created this revolution in rocketry, I argue Planet had an attendant effect satellites. I didn't mention before: A traditional satellite is like the size of a school bus, costs $500 million to $2 billion to make. People sit there working on it for like six years. It's supposed to go into space and stay there for 20 years. You can imagine the electronics on a 20-year-old satellite that's trying to do its job…I can also imagine the tension of that launch going wrong.Like, that can't go wrong for many reasons. And once the satellite gets up in space, it also has to work, right? That's why you're spending $2 billion, because if that thing doesn't work, a lot of people are losing their jobs at a company or a military outfit is in dire straits. Planet rethought this whole thing. They're like, “Let's make them much smaller. Let's put them closer to Earth.” Almost like a disposable sort of thing. They're sending up dozens at a time. They've had rocket launches — a couple, they had bad luck at the beginning — that blew up and they lost all their satellites on those. But it wasn't a make-or-break moment for the company, because these satellites are relatively cheap: $100,000 each.They rethought the whole thing, and then they were able to surround the Earth. It basically like a line scanner, and the Earth just turns under these satellites, and it's just photographing all the time. It sounds a lot like what we were talking about before, espionage and spy stuff, and there are uses for that. Although the resolution on these, you can't see somebody's face or anything like that. You mostly look at something like the size of a car. These satellites are geared to what I call monitoring the real-time activity of humans on Earth. Where are we building stuff? Where is our oil being stored? Where is it going? How are our forests? How many trees are in the Amazon? Is somebody cutting them down? The sort of movement of economic activity and environmental activity on Earth.It reminds me of, if you're trying to determine like the GDP of a country that may not be particularly honest with its government statistics, you could either accept the statistics and try to figure it out, or you could just look at it from space. How many lights are going on? Is there more activity? And try to gauge it in a more visual way. Are there companies doing that for more private-sector reasons?This happens today. China will say, “We have this much oil in our reserves.” Well, it turns out these satellites can spot all your oil storage systems. Because of the way the oil storage systems work, where they have these floating lids that can go up and down depending on how much oil is in there, the satellites can actually measure the shadow that's being reflected on the side of this tanker. And you could calculate, people argue, very accurately how much oil is being stored. We do this with places like Saudi Arabia. China comes out with its official economic metrics, and now we have a version of the truth where people come back and say, “No, you have way more oil stored up than you've been letting on.” I think this is going to be a big deal. Not to go on a huge tangent, but China's economy appears to be slowing. I'm quite certain the government will put the best possible spin on things and how they're performing. You can look not only at oil, you can look at construction — how many buildings are going up, how many houses are going up — all kinds of economic indicators.We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The proliferation of satellitesWhat has the growth in the number of satellites looked like in recent years? And do you have a sense of how that growth will continue over the next decade?I can do that one. Easy. From like 1960 to 2020, in low-Earth orbit, we had managed to put up about 2,500 satellites. And it was not on an exponential curve. We kind of got a whole bunch up, and then every year you would add maybe 20 to 50 depending on what was going on. It was this very slow, steady march the last few years. So that's 2020: 2,500. Already, as we're sitting here today, there's now about 10,000. So that number has almost quadrupled. It's getting close to quadrupling by the end of this year. We are now on an exponential curve, and almost all of those satellites are commercial satellites, not military or government satellites that have been added. We're going to go from 10,000, if you look at all the launch manifests for the rocket companies, we get to 100,000 in the next decade. And quite likely 200,000 the decade after that, or maybe sooner. This is a totally new era of what it looks like right above our heads.The astronomers can't be happy.No. I'm sort of baffled by some of this, because SpaceX and Starlink have been the major driver of this huge increase as they're trying to build out their space internet system. Spacex is now the world's largest satellite manufacturer by several orders of magnitude. And this was no secret. They had to apply for all these licenses to put these satellites up years in advance. There were other people trying to build a space internet. The astronomers never complained until the second SpaceX did its first launch and put the satellites up and everyone could see this kind of string of pearls flying above them as the satellites start to spread out. I was amused and sort of baffled, I guess, that they waited until this was already underway to really start kind of complaining about this. But the die is cast as far as I can tell. You could argue for the Earth-bound telescopes, this is not great. On the other hand, if rocket launches are coming way down, if we're finally putting Moore's Law in space, the opportunity to put scientific instruments above this low-Earth orbit field and do a whole bunch of interesting things increases quite dramatically. If you had to build up $300 million for a rocket launch in the past just to have a go at putting your scientific instrument up, and now you can do it for anywhere from call it like $6 million to $60 million, it's a new era where more people really should get a chance.Earlier, you talked about SpaceX as the Southwest Airlines of space. But that's really not what it is anymore. Today, it's the high-end company. And other entrepreneurs have filled that space below it. Is that right?Exactly. SpaceX built that Falcon 1, which was meant to cost just a few million dollars to launch, and then quickly abandoned it. The second it worked, it moved to the much larger Falcon 9, in part because we didn't quite yet have companies like Planet Labs. Planet Labs came around 2012, a few years after the Falcon 1 launch, and really was the first to start thinking about all sending up thousands or hundreds of satellites. And so SpaceX retired the Falcon 1, you had kind of this gap, and then all of a sudden — some of these companies are real, some of them aren't — there's about a hundred rocket startups trying to make a rocket. Even SpaceX today, the Falcon 9 runs about $60 to $70 million a launch. Now you have dozens of companies trying to do launches starting at, if you believe these numbers, like $2 million a launch. Probably like somewhere between $5 and $12 million is a realistic figure. The leader in this category is in the book, this company Rocket Lab founded by Peter Beck. And they have made a rocket called Electron, which has flown now dozens of times and is really sort of like a perfectly engineered small rocket.If we can have the internet everywhere for everybody, what does that enable? What do these satellites enable?I think starting with space internet is a good one. Even though we often feel like we're connected to the internet all the time and we have our cell phones, the truth of it is there are these huge gaps all around the planet. And it probably means more on an infrastructure sense than it does on an individual not being able to check their email for a few hours. What we are creating now is a blanket of internet that will have the Earth always connected. This part makes a lot of sense to me. It's very obvious. I just think this is the next step of our technology build out. Just like in the ‘90s, we had to put data centers and fiber everywhere to sort of get the internet going; now, you want this persistent internet that can connect people and all sorts of devices all the time. And that's what we're building in space: This internet heartbeat that's washing over. Everything you've ever heard about, like Internet of Things, sensors on container ships reporting back, or things out in the farm checking the soil moisture: None of this really has worked. And the reason why, is because we haven't had this sort of persistent internet connection. If you think about like a world full of drones and flying cars and self-driving cars — all these things that have to be talking in remote spots to have all this work. It's just this glue that needs to be there. That's like case number one that I think does check out.And then of course, you have three-and-a-half billion people that just cannot be reached by fiber optic cables today, and they're not allowed to participate in the modern economy. There’s such obvious evidence that the second high-speed internet arrives in a country, education levels go up, economic levels go up. This is just like a fairness thing in letting the whole world participate in what's going on.That's fantastic because sometimes I think people are unaware of what's going on. Maybe they're kind of aware of SpaceX, but that's pretty much it. And when they think of SpaceX, they're probably mostly thinking of, Elon Musk wants to take us to Mars. I don't think they understand very much about the satellites, unless they've heard astronomers complain about it. I don't think they understand the economic and business case and just that it's all happening.This is why everyone focuses on the Moon and Mars. And it's all cool and everything, and it is still just very far out. This is why I wrote the book. I was like, you people do not understand that we are building a legit economy right over our heads. And this thing is pretty well underway and I think it is going to change life here on Earth quite quickly.Are any of the companies that you're looking at involved with creating like new space stations? There's been a lot of talk about creating new space platforms. What they'll do up there, I'm not sure exactly. There's talk about creating different kinds of products and shooting movies and doing biotechnology research. Are any of the companies cover involved with those efforts?Yeah. In the book, I spend less time on things like space habitats and some of these other businesses. But yes, I do talk about them briefly. But more importantly, I suppose for this conversation, all this is happening. In the past, you've had the International Space Station, this multinational, huge, bureaucratic thing that actually works pretty well. But that’s who's driving it. And now we have a handful of startups making space habitats. We've got SpaceX leading the way with, I guess you could call it tourism: being able to send people to these things, private citizens. This is already happening. We've had private astronauts now going to space on SpaceX rockets. And so they'll go to those habitats. A fascinating startup called Varda launched just a couple months ago. They have put what you could argue is the first manufacturing system in space. It's making medicines. You can do things without gravity pushing on molecules in space that you can't do on Earth. They're trying to make a whole new class of pharmaceuticals and bring them back to Earth. I think that's just the earliest example. There are things like asteroid mining that I thought were total jokes and are still quite far off, but there's a startup, Astro Forge. Same thing: They set up their first test earlier this year. All this stuff is actually happening now. The business cases on these things, I think some will work and some won't, but we're going to find out.The downsides of the emerging space economyWhat's the unnerving aspect? I write about this a lot: We immediately jump to the downsides. What are the costs? So I didn't want to certainly lead with that, but are there things about this that people should be concerned about? Space junk, other things?I am optimistic on the whole. History would tell us that when humans find a new territory in which to conquer, usually mistakes are made. It doesn't always go really well. We have a reality setting up right now where you had this handful of governments moving very slowly, launching a rocket once a month. Now we're moving to like every day and thousands of satellites, and it really is a bit of ‘whoever gets their first wins’ sort of scenario. Once you start adding a race to these things, that often that doesn't go well.The thing that everybody is worried about is these satellites crashing into each other and creating a debris field in low-Earth orbit. And obviously none of these companies want that to happen. They're the ones spending hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to build these things. And we do have systems in place to track this stuff, but that becomes a nightmare. There is a scenario called the Kessler Syndrome, where one of these things breaks apart and it just starts ripping into everything else, and then low-Earth orbit becomes essentially unusable. That's not only bad for this new stuff that we're talking about, but there's things like GPS that make the modern world work that would no longer work if that happens. That's a huge issue I think we're going to have.If you think about, these were nation states that had a lot of control. The rockets are essentially ICBMs more or less. You had a select group of space-faring nations. I think that's all going to change quite soon. Whoever wants a rocket blasting off from their country can have one. Almost anywhere can afford a satellite. You're talking about like a hundred grand just to kind of get going. You're going to have nation states that no longer can really be controlled the way they were or that now have access to space. Are they going to follow all the same rules that everybody else has been following for decades? Probably not.And then I think the real wild card is Russia. This is a country whose space program was already flagging. SpaceX has eaten up a ton of their business. It's rife with corruption. The war in Ukraine has made them unusable for many, many countries as far as sending up satellites and people. And they are a wild card. Space is not just some flight of fancy for Russia. It's something that's baked deep into the national pride and is near and dear to their hearts. They have no commercial space companies, startups at all. Are they a rational actor in this new world as they see there being this dominant superpower that’s going to go away?I'm going to finish by asking you the Mars question about SpaceX: Is that going to happen? Do you think that is a serious goal for that company that you can see happening on some sort of timeline that Elon Musk has talked about?I'm pretty sure it will. I mean, for Elon, you’ve always got to take everything he says with a grain of salt on timelines and ambition and all that. He tends to set these goals. They usually don't happen anywhere close to what he said, but they usually do happen. And in this case, it's not just Elon, right? I know enough of the SpaceX top engineers. They are very convinced Starship is real, that it can get to Mars, I think for sure. You're going to see years of just sending industrial equipment and things like that to Mars long before you send a human. The human question is still…things have to get better. That's a long ride to Mars. And you better be sure you can come back if you want to. A lot of stuff has to happen between here and there. But will SpaceX start putting stuff on Mars in actually sort of the relatively near-ish future? Yes. I'm quite convinced of that. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

On Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I've interviewed guests on exciting new technologies like artificial intelligence, fusion energy, and reusable rockets. But today's episode explores another Next Big Thing: biotechnology. To discuss recent advances in CRISPR gene editing and their applications for medicine, I'm sitting down with Kevin Davies.Kevin is executive editor of The CRISPR Journal and author of the excellent 2020 book, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.In This Episode* CRISPR advances over the past decade (1:13)* What CRISPR therapies will come next? (8:46)* Non-medical applications of gene editing (13:11)* Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPR (18:43)* Longevity and genetic enhancements (25:48)Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Below is an edited transcript of our conversationCRISPR advances over the past decadeWhen people talk about AI, for instance, they might be talking about different versions or applications of AI—machine learning being one. So when we talk about CRISPR, are we just talking about one technique, the one they figured out back in 2012? Are there different ones? Are there improvements? So it's really a different technique. So how has that progressed?You're right. CRISPR has become shorthand for genome editing. But the version of CRISPR that was recognized with the Nobel Prize three years ago in 2020 to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier was for one, we can call it the traditional form of CRISPR. And if I refer to it again, I'll call it CRISPR-Cas9. Cas9 is the shorthand name for the enzyme that actually does the cutting of the DNA. But we are seeing extraordinary progress in developing new and even more precise and more nuanced forms of genome editing. They still kind of have a CRISPR backbone. They still utilize some of the same molecular components as the Nobel Prize–winning form of CRISPR. But in particular, I'm thinking of techniques called base editing and prime editing, both of which have commercial, publicly funded biotech companies pushing these technologies into the clinic. And I think over the next five to 10 years, increasingly what we refer to as “CRISPR genome editing” will be in the form of these sort of CRISPR 2.0 technologies, because they give us a much broader portfolio of DNA substitutions and changes and edits, and give the investigators and the clinicians much more precision and much more subtlety and hopefully even more safety and more guarantees of clinical efficiency.Right. That's what I was going to ask. One advantage is the precision, because you don't want to do it wrong. You don't want mutations. Do no harm first. A big advantage is maybe limiting some of the potential downsides.In the ideal gene-editing scenario, you would have a patient with, say, a genetic disease that you can pinpoint to a single letter of the genetic code. And we want to fix that. We want to zero in on that one letter—A, C, T, or G is the four-letter alphabet of DNA, as I hope most of your listeners know—and we want to revert that back to whatever most normal, healthy people have in their genetic code at that specific position. CRISPR-Cas9, which won the Nobel Prize, is not the technology to do that sort of single base edit. It can do many other things, and the success in the clinic is unquestionable already in just a few years. But base editing and, in particular, prime editing are the two furthest developed technologies that allow investigators to pinpoint exactly where in the genome we want to make the edit. And then without completely cutting or slicing the double helix of DNA, we can lay up the section of DNA that we want to replace and go in and just perform chemistry on that one specific letter of DNA. Now, this hasn't been proven in the clinic just yet. But the early signs are very, very promising that this is going to be the breakthrough genome-editing technology over the next 10 to 20 years.Is CRISPR in the wild yet, or are we still in the lab?No, we're in the clinic. We are in human patients. There are at least 200 patients who have already been in or are currently enrolled in clinical trials. And so far, the early results—there are a few caveats and exceptions—but so far the overwhelming mood of the field is one of bullish enthusiasm. I don't want to complete this interview without singling out this one particular story, which is the clinical trial that has been sponsored by CRISPR Therapeutics and Vertex Pharmaceuticals for sickle cell disease. These are primarily African-American patients in this country because the sickle cell mutation arose in Africa some 7,000 years ago.We're talking about a pretty big share of the African-American population.This is about 100,000 patients just in America, in the US alone. And it's been a neglected disease for all kinds of reasons, probably beyond the scope of our discussion. But the early results in the first few dozen patients who have been enrolled in this clinical trial called the exa-cel clinical trial, they've all been cured. Pretty much all cured, meaning no more blood transfusions, no more pain crises, no more emergency hospitalizations. It is a pretty miraculous story. This therapy is now in the hands of the FDA and is speeding towards—barring some unforeseen complication or the FDA setting the bar so high that they need the investigators to go back and do some further checks—this should be approved before the end of this year.There's a catch, though. This will be a therapy that, in principle, will become—once approved by the FDA and the EMA in Europe, of course—will become available to any sickle cell patient. The catch will, of course, be the cost or the price that the companies set, because they're going to look for a return on their investment. It's a fascinating discussion and there's no easy answer. The companies need to reward their shareholders, their investors, their employees, their staff, and of course build a war chest to invest in the next wave, the next generation of CRISPR therapies. But the result of that means that probably we're going to be looking at a price tag of, I mean, I'm seeing figures like $1.9 million per patient. So how do you balance that? Is a lifetime cure for sickle cell disease worth $2, maybe $3 million? Will this patient population be able to afford that? In many cases, the answer to that will be simply, no. Do you have to remortgage your house and go bankrupt because you had a genetic quirk at birth? I don’t know quite how we get around this.Different countries will have different answers with different health systems. Do you have a sense of what that debate is going to be like in Washington, DC?It's already happening in other contexts. Other gene therapies have been approved over the last few years, and they come with eye-watering price tags. The highest therapy price that I've seen now is $3.5 million. Yes, there are discounts and waiver programs and all this sort of stuff. But it's still a little obscene. Now, when those companies come to negotiate, say, with the UK National Health Service, they'll probably come to an agreement that is much lower, because the Brits are not going to say that they're going to be able to afford that for their significant sickle cell population.Is it your best guess that this will be a treatment the government pays for?What's interesting and what may potentially shift the calculus here is that this particular therapy is the disease affects primarily African-Americans in the United States. That may change the political calculus, and it may indeed change the corporate calculus in the boardrooms of Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics, who may not want the backlash that they're going to get when they say, “Oh, by the way, guys, it's $2 million or you're out of luck.”There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease.What CRISPR therapies will come next?And after this CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease is available, what therapies will come next?Probably a bunch of diseases that most people, unless they are unfortunate enough to have it in their family, won't have heard of. There are companies that are studying using CRISPR to potentially correct the mutations that cause genetic forms of blindness, genetic forms of liver disease. It turns out the liver is an organ that is very amenable to taking up medicines that we can inject in the blood. The other big clinical success story has come from another company in the Boston area called Intellia Therapeutics. Also publicly traded. They've developed CRISPR therapies that you can inject literally into the body, rather than taking cells out and doing it in the lab and then putting those cells back in, as in the case of sickle cell.I’m not sure that was actually even clear: that you can do it more than one way.Yes.And obviously it sounds like it would be better if they could just inject you.Exactly. That's why people are really excited about this, because this now opens up the doors for treating a host of diseases. And I think over the next few years we will see a growing number of diseases, and it won't just be these rare sort of genetic diseases with often unpronounceable names. It may be things like heart disease. There's another company—they're all in Boston, it seems—Verve Therapeutics, which is taking one of these more recent gene-editing technologies that we talked about a minute ago, base editing, and saying that there's a gene that they're going to target that has been clearly linked with cholesterol levels. And if we can squash production of this gene, we can tap down cholesterol levels. That will be useful, in the first instance, for patients with genetic forms of high cholesterol. Fair enough. But if it works in them, then the plan is to roll this out for potentially thousands if not millions of adults in this country who maybe don't feel that they have a clearly defined genetic form of high cholesterol, but this method may still be an alternative that they will consider versus taking Atorvastatin for the rest of your life, for example.Where are the CRISPR cancer treatments?They're also making progress, too. Those are in clinical trials. A little more complicated. Of course, cancer is a whole slew of different diseases, so it's a little hard to say, “Yeah, we're making progress here, less so there.” But I think one of the most heartwarming stories—this is an n of one, so it's an anecdotal story—but there was a teenager in the UK treated at one of the premier London medical schools who had a base editing form of CAR T therapy. A lot of people have heard of CAR T therapy for various cancers. And she is now in remission. So again, early days, but we're seeing very positive signs in these early clinical tests.It sounds like we went from a period where it was all in the lab and that we might be in a period over the next five years where it sounds like a wave of potential treatments.I think so, yeah.And for as much as we've seen articles about “The Age of AI,” it really sounds like this could be the age of biotechnology and the age of CRISPR…I think CRISPR, as with most new technologies, you get these sort of hype cycles, right? Two and a half years ago, CRISPR, all the stocks were at peak valuations. And I went on a podcast to say, why are the CRISPR stocks so high? I wasn't really sure, but I was enjoying it at the time. And then, of course, we entered the pandemic. And the biotech sector, perversely, ironically, has really been hit hard by the economy and certainly by the market valuations. So all of the CRISPR gene-editing companies—and there are probably at least eight or 10 now that are publicly traded and many more poised to join them—their valuations are a fraction of what they were a couple of years ago. But I suspect as these first FDA approvals and more scientific peer review papers, of course, but more news of the clinical success to back up and extend what has already been clearly proven as a breakthrough technology in the lab with the Nobel Prize—doesn't get much better than that, does it?—then I think we're going to start to see that biotech sector soar once again.Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise.Non-medical applications of gene editingThere are also non-medical applications. Can you just give me a little state of play on how that’s looking?I think one of the—when CRISPR…And agriculture.Feeding the planet, you could say.That’s certainly a big application.It’s a human health application—arguably the biggest application.I think one of the fun ones is the work of George Church at Harvard Medical School, who's been on 60 Minutes and Stephen Colbert and many other primetime shows, talking about his work using CRISPR to potentially resurrect the woolly mammoth, which sort of sounds like, “That's Jurassic Park on steroids. That's crazy.” But his view is that, no, if we had herds—if that's the technical term—of woolly mammoths—roaming Siberia and the frozen tundra, they'll keep the ground, the surface packed down and stop the gigatons of methane from leaching out into the atmosphere. We have just seen a week, I've been reading on social media, of the hottest temperatures in the world since records began. And that's nothing compared to what we're potentially going to see if all these greenhouse gases that are just under the surface in places like Siberia further leach into the atmosphere. So that's the sort of environmental cause that Church is on. I think many people think this is a rather foolish notion, but he's launched a company to get this off the ground called Colossal Biosciences, and they're raising a lot of money, it appears. I'm curious to see how it goes. I wish him well.Also, speaking of climate change, making crops more resilient to the heat. That’s another I’ve heard…One of the journals I'm involved in, called GEN Biotechnology, just published a paper in which investigators in Korea have used CRISPR to modify a particular gene in the tomato genome to make it a higher source of vitamin D. And that may not seem to be the most urgent need, but the point is, we can now engineer the DNA of all kinds of plants and crops, many of which are under threat, whether it’s from drought or other types of climate change or pests, bacteria, parasites, viruses, fungi, you name it. And in my book Editing Humanity, which came out a couple of years ago, there was a whole chapter listing a whole variety of threats to our favorite glass of orange juice in the morning. That's not going to exist. If we want that all-natural Florida orange juice, we're not going to have that option. We've either got to embrace what technology will allow us to do to make these orange crops more resistant to the existential threat that they're facing, or we're going to have to go drink something else.I started out talking about AI and machine learning. Does that play a role in CRISPR, either helping the precision of the technology or in some way refining the technology?Yeah, hopefully you'll invite me back in a year and I'll be able to give you a more concrete answer. I think the short answer is, yes. Certainly, there are a lot of computational aspects to CRISPR in terms of designing the particular stretches of nucleic acid that you're going to use to target a specific gene. And AI can help you in that quest to make those ever more precise. When you do the targeting in a CRISPR experiment, the one thing you don't want to have happen is for the little stretch of DNA that you've synthesized to go after the gene in question, you don't want that to accidentally latch onto or identify another stretch of DNA that just by statistical chance has the same stretch of 20 As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. AI can help give us more confidence that we're only honing in on the specific gene that we want to edit, and we're not potentially going to see some unforeseen, off-target editing event.Do you think when we look back at this technology in 10 years, not only will we see a wider portfolio of potential treatments, but we'll look at the actual technique and think, “Boy, back in 2012, it was a butchery compared to what we're doing; we were using meat cleavers, and now we're using lasers”?I think, yeah. That's a slightly harsh analogy. With this original form of CRISPR, published in 2012, Nobel Prize in 2020, one of the potential caveats or downsides of the technology is that it involves a complete snip of the double helix, the two strands of DNA, in order to make the edit. Base editing and prime editing don't involve that double-stranded severance. It's just a nick of one strand or the other. So it's a much more genetically friendly form of gene editing, as well as other aspects of the chemistry. We look forward to seeing how base and prime editing perform in the clinic. Maybe they'll run into some unforeseen hurdles and people will say, “You know what? There was nothing wrong with CRISPR. Let's keep using the originally developed system.” But I'm pretty bullish on what base and prime editing can do based on all of the early results have been published in the last few years on mice and monkeys. And now we're on the brink of going into the clinic.One medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?Bioweapons and the ethics of CRISPRThis podcast is usually very optimistic. So we're going to leave all the negative stuff for this part of the podcast. We're going to rush through all the downsides very quickly.First question: Especially after the pandemic, a lot more conversation about bioweapons. Is this an issue that's discussed in this community, about using this technology to create a particularly lethal or virulent or targeted biological weapon?Not much. If a rogue actor or nation wanted to develop some sort of incredibly virulent bioweapon, there's a whole wealth of genetic techniques, and they could probably do it without involving CRISPR. CRISPR is, in a way, sort of the corollary of another field called synthetic biology or synthetic genomics that you may have talked about on your show. We've got now the facility, not just to edit DNA, but to synthesize custom bits of DNA with so much ease and affordability compared to five or 10 years ago. And we’ve just seen a global pandemic. When I get that question, I've had it before, I say, “Yeah, did we just not live through a global pandemic? Do we really need to be engineering organisms?” Whether you buy the lab leak hypothesis or the bioengineering hypothesis, or it was just a natural transfer from some other organism, nature can do a pretty good job of hurting human beings. I don't know that we need to really worry too much about bioweapons at this point.In 2018, there was a big controversy over a Chinese researcher who created some genome-edited babies. Yeah. Is there more to know about that story? Has that become a hotter topic of discussion as CRISPR has advanced?The Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, who performed those pretty abominable experiments was jailed for the better part of three years. He got early release in China and slowly but surely he's being rehabilitated. He's literally now moved his operation from Shenzhen to Beijing. He's got his own lab again, and he's doing genome editing experiments again. I saw again on social media recently, he's got a petition of muscular dystrophy families petitioning Jack Ma, the well-known Chinese billionaire, to fund his operation to devise a new gene editing therapy for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and other forms of muscular dystrophy. I wouldn't want He Jiankui let within a thousand miles of my kids, because I just wouldn't trust him. And he's now more recently put out a manifesto stating he thinks we should start editing embryos again. So I don't know quite what is going on.It seems the Chinese threw the book at him. Three years is not a trivial prison sentence. He was fined about half a million dollars. But somebody in the government there seems to be okay with him back at the bench, back in the lab, and dabbling in CRISPR. And I don't know that he's been asked, does he have any regrets over the editing of Lulu and Nana. There was a third child born a few months later as well. All he will say is, “We moved too fast.” That is the only caveat that he has allowed himself to express publicly.We know nothing more about the children. They're close to five years old now. There's one particular gene that was being edited was pretty messed up. But we know it's not an essential gene in our bodies, because there are many people walking around who don't have a functional copy of this CCR5 receptor gene, and they're HIV resistant. That was the premise for He Jiankui’s experiment. But he has said, “No, they are off limits. The authorities are not going to reveal their identities. We are monitoring them, and we will take care of them if anything goes wrong.” But I think a lot of people in the West would really like to help, to study them, to offer any medical assistance. Obviously, we have to respect their privacy. The twin girls and the third child who was born a bit later, maybe they're being protected for their own good. How would you like it if you grew up through childhood and into your teenage years, to walk around knowing that you were this human experiment? That may be a very difficult thing to live with. So more to come on that.There’s no legitimate discussion about changing that in the West or anywhere else?Obviously, in the wake of what He Jiankui did, there were numerous blue ribbon panels, including one just organized by the National Academy of Sciences, just a stone's throw from where we're talking today. And I thought that report was very good. It did two things. This was published a couple of years ago. Two important things came out of it. One is this all-star group of geneticists and other scientists said, “We don't think that human embryo editing should be banned completely. There may be scenarios down the road where we actually would want to reserve this technology because nothing else would help bring about a particular medical outcome that we would like.” And the one medical scenario that they laid out would be, what if two people with a deadly recessive disease like sickle cell disease, or perhaps a form of cystic fibrosis, wanted to have a healthy biological child?There are clinics around the country and around the world now doing something called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. If you have a family history of a genetic disease, you can encourage the couple to do IVF. We form an embryo or bunch of embryos in the test tube or on the Petri dish. And then we can do a little biopsy of each embryo, take a quick sneak peek at the DNA, look to see if it's got the bad gene or perhaps the healthy gene, and then sort of tag the embryos and only implant the embryos that we think are healthy. This is happening around the country as we speak for hundreds, if not thousands, of different genetic diseases. But it won't work if mom and dad have a recessive, meaning two copies of a bad gene, because there's no healthy gene that you can select in any of those embryos. It would be very rare, but in those scenarios, maybe embryo editing is a way we would want to go. But I don't see a big clamor for this right now. And the early results have been published using CRISPR on embryos in the wake of He Jiankui did have said, “It's a messy technique. It is not safe to use. We don't fully understand how DNA editing and DNA repair works in the human embryo, so we really need to do a whole lot more basic science, as we did in the original incarnation of CRISPR, before we even dare to revisit editing human embryos.” Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. Longevity and genetic enhancementsAnother area is using these treatments not to fix things, but to enhance people, whether it's for intelligence or some other trait. A lot of money pouring into longevity treatments from Silicon Valley. Do we know more about the potential of CRISPR for either extending lifespans or selecting for certain desirable traits in people?This sort of scenario is never going to go away. When it comes up, if I hear someone say, “Could we use CRISPR or any gene editing technology to boost intelligence or mathematical ability or music musical ability, or anything that we might want…”Or speed in the hundred meters.“…or speed in the hundred meters, to enhance our perfect newborn?” I would say, what gene are you going to enhance? Intelligence—are you kidding me? Half of the 10,000 genes are expressed in the human brain. You want to start meddling with those? You wouldn't have a prayer of having a positive outcome. I think we can pretty much rule that out. Longevity is interesting because, of course, in the last 18 months there's a company in Silicon Valley called Altos, funded by Yuri Milner, employing now two dozen of the top aging researchers who've been lured away from academia into this transnational company to find hopefully cures or insights into how to postpone aging. That's going to be a long, multi-decade quest to go from that to potentially, “Oh, let's edit a little embryo, our newborn son or daughter so they have the gift of 120 years on this decaying, overheating planet…” Yes, there's a lot to wade through on that.And you have another book coming out. Can you give us a preview of that?I'm writing a book called Curved Air, which is about the story of sickle cell disease. It was first described in a paper from physicians in Chicago in 1910 who were studying the curious anemia of a dental student who walked into their hospital one day. That gentleman, Walter Noel, is now buried back in his homeland, the island of Grenada. But in the 1940s, it was described and characterized as the first molecular disease. We know more about sickle cell disease than almost any other genetic disease. And yet, as we touched on earlier, patients with this who have not had the wealth, the money, the influence, they've been discriminated against in many walks of life, including the medical arena.We're still seeing terribly, tragically, videos and stories and reports of sickle cell patients who are being turned away from hospital rooms, emergency rooms, because the medical establishment just looks at a person of color in absolute agony with one of these pain crises and just assumed, “Oh, they want another opioid hit. Sickle cell? What is that?” There's a lot of fascinating science. There's all this hope in the gene editing and now in the clinic. And there's all this socioeconomic and other history. So I'm going to try to weave all this together in a format that hopefully everyone will enjoy reading.Hopefully a book with a happy ending. Not every book about a disease has a wonderful…I think a positive note to end on is the first American patient treated in this CRISPR clinical trial for sickle cell disease four years ago,Victoria Gray, has become something of a poster child now. She's been featured on National Public Radio on awhole series of interviews and just took her first overseas flight earlier this year to London to speak at a CRISPR gene editing conference. She gave a lovely 15-minute personal talk, shaking with nerves, about her personal voyage, her faith in God, and what's brought her here now, pain-free, traveling the world, and got a standing ovation. You don't see many standing ovations at medical conferences or genetics conferences. And if ever anybody deserved it, somebody like Victoria Gray did. Early days, but a very positive journey that we're on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

"The promise of eternal life has conventionally been the dangled carrot of religion. It is now the holy grail of Silicon Valley," writes novelist Lionel Shriver in a recent National Review cover essay. In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Lionel joins me to discuss why some tech billionaires are chasing after immortality and the serious challenges that would accompany extended human lifespans.Lionel is a columnist for Britain's Spectator magazine. Her books include We Need to Talk About Kevin and Should We Stay or Should We Go.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.In This Episode* The promise and peril of immortality (1:11)* Storytelling and optimism (6:44)* Lifespan vs. healthspan (12:23)* Post-humanity (19:19)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationThe promise and peril of immortalityJames Pethokoukis: In the National Review essay, you make it clear you are not a medical expert, you're not a research scientist; you're a writer of fiction. Of all the things you could have written about, both as an essay and also in your book, Should We Stay or Should We Go, what originally created your interest in this topic of longevity?Lionel Shriver: I should also clarify that, for someone who's writing about life extension, I am not immortal either. So I have no qualifications for this aside from having applied myself to it imaginatively. The book you mentioned, Should We Stay or Should We Go, is a novel about a couple that has vowed to kill themselves once they both reach the age of 80 because they don't want to fall apart. They don't want to burden others with their own crumbling. It's a parallel universe book that explores any number of different futures for this couple. And one of those futures is why I suspect I was approached to write this essay for National Review, and it's one in which there's a cure for aging. Basically, my characters live forever. Everyone in the world looks 25 and they never look any older. I have addressed myself to what that future might look like and not just look like, but feel like. What would it feel like to address yourself to a future that was potentially infinite?In the novel, it starts out great. It was exhilarating to watch your spouse, rather than get older and older, get younger and younger and return to the age when you fell in love. And everyone is healthy. There are no limitations anymore. And all your choices are also potentially infinite. You can try out every profession. It's no longer a matter of, what are you going to be when you grow up? You can be whatever you want, and then you can change your mind. It'd be something else. You can move to any city. All your choices are just this kind of smorgasbord of what you might sample. And that seems fun to begin with.That sounds like a near-utopian scenario.Yeah. The trouble is that when you think about it, one of the things that gives our lives urgency is finitude, that our decisions matter because you can't undecide them. The way we choose to spend our time matters because there's a limited amount of it. There's no redo. And effectively with eternal life, there is a redo. There's infinite redo. You can just go back and do something else. You can just go in a different direction. If you marry the wrong person, you can just marry someone else and you won't have given them, say, 10 years of your precious life. I mean, yes, but there are so many years left that it doesn't matter. And the trouble is that once you remove that, then nothing seems to matter. And that is depressing. When you remove that urgency, you also potentially remove meaning. And everything becomes arbitrary.One of the things that happens to my characters is their characters start to decay. In some ways, they trade places in terms of what kind of person they are. The wife has always been the more optimistic and reflective and joyous, whereas her husband was more programmatic and more of an ideologue. And as the hundreds of years go by, he becomes much more himself reflective and philosophical and she becomes impatient and misanthropic. Because character itself becomes arbitrary. In the essay, I'm trying to look in a nonfiction sense at, what would it really be like both emotionally and practically to have a permanent human population? And that raises huge practical problems, too. Like, you don't have any children anymore. You can't.Storytelling and optimismIs it easier for you to come up with the more dystopian scenarios? Oftentimes, I'll criticize sci-fi writing, television, books as overly focused on the dystopian. It’s almost like a lack of effort. In this case, is that basically justified: that it's very hard to write a scenario where everything kind of turns out okay if people are living forever?It is hard to write. It's always hard to write positively. It's hard for me even to write characters that are purely lovable. Since I don't know any. And it's hard to write happy endings. I do write happy endings, but they're hard to get there. And I feel you have to earn them. You can't just have happily ever after and that's it. There is one chapter in Should We Stay or Should We Go which is purely positive. It’s called “Once Upon a Time in Lambeth,” which is the neighborhood in London where they live. And it's the perfect old age. It's what we would all want. They grow only more physically beautiful as they age until people are stopping on them on the street wanting to take their pictures or paint their portraits because they're so striking. They grow only more in love and they have only a better sex life. It gets more and more rich and imaginative and exciting. Young people admire them because they both started second careers and had become hugely successful. And young people flock around their dinner table and want to hear their wisdom. Meanwhile, outside in the rest of the world, the Israeli-Palestinian problem is solved at last, Africa is a thriving economic power, etc. The thing is that there's a point only a few pages into this particular chapter that you get it: This is a satire. This is the one scenario that won't happen.It’s almost so ridiculously…It's ridiculous. In fact, it's hilarious. Optimism can be funny. And in some ways, it's also an illustration of kind of a fictional problem. Because without bad things happening, there is no story. And what makes that particular chapter a story is your growing consciousness that this is not possible. That this is ridiculous. That you are being made fun of, basically, because this is what you want and, you know, give us a break. You're never going to get it. This is hilarity at your expense. I am sympathetic with your frustration with science fiction. And it's not just science fiction. Literary fiction has a lot of unhappy endings and tragedy and dysfunction in it. That's the nature of story. It's a requirement. No badness, no story. The genres vary in terms of what that scale of badness is going to be and whether or not it's eventually going to resolve into something more palatable. But fiction is by its nature about disaster.Would your critique be the same if instead of talking about living hundreds of years, our lifespan was doubled? Instead of everyone living to be at least, on average, 75, 80, 85, it was 150, 175.To a degree. Though I think that issue of urgency, of how you spend your time, once you bring it down to, for argument’s sake let's say 150 years, that's probably less of an issue. But the practical problems do become more intrusive. If we're all living to 150, then we are going to have a huge elderly population and hardly any young people. And that poses a lot of economic issues. One of the things that I posit in the essay is that living substantially longer means the end of retirement. You can't live to 150 and retire at 65. It's economically impossible. So that means working for a long time. And the irony of this whole discussion, of course, is that the real problem we are facing is people living too long. People living too long in terrible shape. That's the real economic crisis.Lifespan vs. healthspanIn that National Review essay, you write that you’re more interested in expanding the human healthspan than the human lifespan. Extending our healthy years but not necessarily delaying death seems like a very different project.Yes. And I try to make the distinction between different projects. A lot of the Silicon Valley people are looking at longevity from the perspective of, “Let's cure death. Let's basically try to live forever.” But a much more modest group of people, and more practical, are looking at not necessarily living any longer, but living well longer. And I'm very sympathetic with that project. I'm like anyone: I don't fancy falling apart, and I would rather keep my wits about me and still be able to totter out on the tennis court and then preferably drop dead on the baseline one day. And that would be that. That's a laudable goal. And if we can get closer to that, we'd save ourselves a fortune.When we talk about the Silicon Valley quest to cure death, does this really all come down to a fear of death by people who maybe don’t hold traditional religious views of the afterlife? Or do they want to live longer so they can, I don’t know, start more companies? What’s the motivation here?I drew that distinction in the essay. There are two different things that might motivate you to extend life as long as possible. And one of them is clearly fear of death. We don't know what happens. I have my suspicions — you're not there anymore. And it's possible that the actual experience of death is not that bad, although the lead-up can be pretty grim. But the other thing that might motivate you is appetite, is desire, is wanting more. And that is something I am sympathetic with. I admire people who generate enthusiasm for living, for everything that it offers, for relationships, for love, even for another good glass of red wine. That is a positive motivation for this kind of research, which is going on all over the place. There's a lot of money being thrown at it. And I admire that. I think one of the questions you have to ask yourself in this whole life extension thing is, how much appetite would I have for continuing to be here? How many years does it prospectively give me joy to get up in the morning? And what would I be looking forward to? Is there any point at which you've just had enough red wine? (A prospect I find almost unfathomable.)If we're looking at a civilization where people are living longer and it's richer, we're solving all these other problems and we're heading out to the stars, it seems to be like there would be a lot to be curious about. There would be a lot to see and do, and I'd hate to miss it. I'd hate to miss all this really great, cool stuff by only living to 90 years old.There's another chapter in which my couple, as in most of these chapters to keep the story going, do not kill themselves when they're 80 years old. They live to well beyond 100 in relatively decent shape. They're okay, but the rest of the world isn't. Basically they live to see the end of Western civilization. This takes place in Britain. Britain has become completely overwhelmed with migration from Africa and the Middle East, which by the way demographically is very likely and is already happening. Meanwhile, there's a homegrown anarchist movement, because young people see no future for themselves; the place is in a state of economic collapse. They burned down parliament and they've shredded all the pictures in the National Gallery, etc. Basically, Western civilization is over. And the question that chapter asks, as the house they live in is invaded by migrants and taken over and they're exiled to the attic and basically eating dog food, if they could roll back the clock, would they like to live to see this or not?And I think that's an interesting question, because the way you describe the future as you see it, which inspires your curiosity, is more inventions, space travel, all these wonderful, fascinating things happening. Well, you know what? More than wonderful, fascinating things happen; things fall apart. And I have great difficulty on my own behalf answering the question that chapter poses. And the couple disagree. One of them would have been happier to die earlier and not see this. And the other one is so interested in the story that they've been involved in. And of course, if you're a news reader especially, you're involved in all kinds of stories all the time. I certainly am. And one of the sacrifices of dying is not finding out how some of them end. But the other one is so interested in the story that even if the ending is dark, he's glad to see it because he wants that narrative appetite to be satisfied. To me, that's one of the biggest questions on longevity. Do you want to stick around if the world takes a serious turn south? Do you want to stick around for that?Post-humanityThe political scientist Francis Fukuyama has written about what he calls our "post-human future." If death is an important and intrinsic part of our humanity, then immortality or near immortality moves us to being something that is no longer human as we know it. And because liberal democracy is built on the idea of human equality and a connectivity among humans everywhere, through all time, he worries about life extension or other enhancements undermining that equality. Does that concern you?Well, to a tiny degree, we've already got that differentiation based on economic profile, which does partially determine your life expectancy. People in Western countries who are themselves well off are likely to live substantially longer than either people outside Western countries or people within Western countries who are poor and generally in worse health. So we are not quite the same already. We're not looking at the same lifespan. One of the other things I did address is the likelihood that should these longevity efforts be availing, the chances are extremely high that they would be expensive and therefore available to the elite and only the elite. And therefore, that kind of division that we're living with already would grow greater. And I posited that it was not impossible that the resentment on the part of the lower classes could become homicidal.I think if you're really talking about effectively evolving into a slightly different species, then you would be generating a huge amount of political tension. And also you'd create this sense — and this is the kind of thing that science fiction explores all the time — of an overclass and therefore a kind of overlord class that lives very much longer and is likely to be hoarding the wealth and living remotely from everyone else. And I think that's more likely than the elite uploads themselves to robots or a computer. When you were talking about the nature of humanity, what it's like to be a person: I find the disembodied versions of a human future unlikely. Were we ever to achieve it, that's where we would really part ways with the species as it has always been.We experience the world in bodies and therefore we have all these senses and vulnerability to physical injury and disease. We have a very complicated relationship to our bodies, which I've written about at length. It's of great interest to me. And therefore, if we were in robots that you whose injured arm, you could simply screw a new one on — much less if we were in some kind of jar, effectively, like those brains in a jar in 1950s sci-fi movies — that never seems enviable, does it? To no longer have the embodied experience. The embodied experience comes with a lot of pain, but it also comes with a lot of pleasure.Are you optimistic, meaning that you think this research is going to pay off in dramatically longer lives, whether or not it's immortal? People are taking this very seriously. Again, we have researchers who've said someone who might make it to 150 has already been born. Do you think, directionally, this is happening and we need to be talking about it seriously now and thinking about it seriously?There's never any harm in thinking about anything. And it's interesting, so yes. My main concern would be further progress in, strictly speaking, extending longevity but not making enough progress on that business about extending healthspan. And then you've just got a bigger problem on your hands. So that, great, you've got a bunch of people who are 125 and they're drooling and don't remember their own names. This is not a future that we should be looking forward to — not personally and not socially. It's that health span thing that I think that we should be focusing on. And that means concentrating especially on dementia research, continuing to improve joint replacement. (I keep waiting on replacing my own knees, which are a complete wreck, because I just want them to inject some stem cells in them and not carve them out.)We should be focusing on medical technology that will improve the experience of being older, rather than just make people technically able to get older. And I do think a certain amount of deliberateness here as to where you put your resources is merited. I wish that drug that the FDA just approved did better than delay dementia by five months, for example. That's a start, but it's kind of discouraging. It's so small. I personally am not planning on devoting the rest of my life to living as long as possible. There's a kind of circularity to that or an implicit pointlessness. I want to spend what time I've got doing something else rather than just trying to stick around a little bit longer. So while I get my exercise and I try to eat sensibly, I'm not going to be one of those people who is totally obsessed with diet and aA million dollars a year on this infusion, this transfusion…Right. Some of these people: This is what they spend all day doing. There’sone guy who gets regular transfusions from his own 17-year-old son. He obviously spends hours and hours every day at his exercise regime. He takes hundreds of supplements. (I foresee acid reflux.) I'm not going to do that. If that means that I take five years off my life expectancy and get to do something else and finally finish the last series of Succession, I'll take that. I'll take short and sweet.Faster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Nuclear fusion holds the potential to provide the world with cheap, clean, virtually inexhaustible energy for the future. For decades, the technology was dismissed as sci-fi fantasy. But a series of recent technological breakthroughs — including a net-energy gain ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last December — and spate of startups have made both government and investors increasingly optimistic. To talk about the state of the fusion industry, I’ve brought on Andrew Holland, chief executive officer at the Fusion Industry Association.In This Episode* The importance of recent fusion breakthroughs (1:17)* What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion? (5:58)* Environmentalism and fusion energy (14:09)* Will fusion be the main energy source of the future? (18:57)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe importance of recent fusion breakthroughsJames Pethokoukis: Until recently, fusion energy was a government science project that you didn’t hear much about. But now we have dozens of startups involved and frequent media coverage of big breakthroughs. What happened?Andrew Holland: It's results. Results, results, results. Science is progressing. Things have happened on both sides of the science of fusion. Plasma physics has been around for 60 years. It's really hard. It's really challenging. And they had to create a whole new area of physics, plasma physics, to be able to understand how to do fusion. They did that for 60 years, and it was continued short progress here and there, two steps forward, one step back. Until we got to the point probably about five or 10 years ago where the scientists said, “We think we know how to make this work.” But then what's happened is that startups and new thinking came in and applied all of the other technological advances that were out there—things like material science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, high-speed computing—as well as new business practices, putting those in effect onto what had been this kind of staid field of government science.Putting those two together, and that's where the real developments and changes and things are happening. In fact, there are 38 members of the Fusion Industry Association now, with a few others around the world that are stragglers. And it's been just this almost Cambrian explosion of different technologies and ways forward and paths to get there. And everybody is competing to be the one to get there first and the one to get there best. So it is an exciting time. And we're seeing the effects of all of this other technology coming into plasma physics. Things have really changed.So how significant was that breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore last year, both for the technology and also for investor and public awareness? Yeah, it is significant in the kind of public awareness and public assessment of it. I can tell you that our website had its highest day ever in December when the announcement from the NIF happened. And I can tell you just kind of anecdotally a lot of that awareness came about. But the nature, I think, of an exponential curve, a Moore's law–type thing where it doubles every year, doubles every so often—is that when it's exponential, it's going straight up, but for a long time it looks pretty flat. So a long time below the level, it's been doubling and doubling and doubling over a number of years. It just started from a very low point. Those inside the field knew that something was happening, but it never broke out. It never got into the New York Times. It never got into Twitter discussions. It was all sort of inside baseball discussions.It's been a completely new thing for the fusion community to now have a lot of interest coming into it. That said, though, the investors were a little keyed in a little bit earlier. Since the NIF announcement, we've seen some new deal flow. We've got about $6 billion invested in private fusion. Of that, most of it came in before the NIF announcement. Investors were looking at this. Investors were aware of it. We are still seeing some of the deal flow that post-NIF takes some time. There's a lot of due diligence that investors do and stuff like that, so we haven't yet seen the real explosion from NIF of investment and running. But I think we're due to pretty soon.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. What should policymakers be doing to promote fusion?What is the policymaker awareness and action on this technology?We're getting there. In March of 2022, the White House held an event calling for a “bold decadal vision on commercial fusion,” basically saying, can you get to commercial fusion in 10 years? It's an aggressive target. Our company said, yes, we can—with your help. The White House put in not an aggressive amount of budget in the scheme of billions and trillions even in the IRA and various other subsidy measures. Instead what they've started up is what's called a new milestone-based public-private partnership. The government gives pay-for-performance metrics on how to invest in fusion companies. Basically, the companies will say, “We think we can do this, this, and this.” And then the government says, “Okay, we'll pay you X amount for each of these milestones when you reach them.” Instead of the old way of doing a public-private partnership, which is you have to account for all the money you put in and we'll give you a fixed dollar amount and all this sort of stuff.This is actually the way that NASA invested in SpaceX. It's a way to promote innovation in the companies while also protecting the taxpayer, because it is still risky in a business sense to put money into fusion. It's a really innovative new model for getting there. The DOE just put out these awards a couple of weeks ago in late May. It's gone to eight companies fusion companies, all doing work here in the United States.We're seeing this as kind of a starting gun of competition around the world. The Brits have an aggressive program for a commercial fusion pilot plant. The Germans just put out a roadmap for how to get there. The Japanese have one. For a long time, the government science people have been cooperating together at ITER, which is the publicly funded science experiment in the south of France. It will get net energy when it turns on, and will be a significant experiment, but it's different than a commercial direction. And now we see all these countries and companies racing towards this. And honestly, we also see the Chinese making aggressive plans and moving forward on their own internal pathway as well. The NIF, in many ways, was kind of a starting gun for this process, and we're seeing it happen around the world.You have diversity: You have government, you have the private sector, and there's also a diversity of technological approaches as well. It’s not just one thing, right?Yes. There is a huge diversity in technological approaches. Of the 38 member companies you have of the FIA, none of them are taking the exact same technological pathway. It is, instead, a broad family tree of fusion with, at one end, laser-inertial fusion—which is like what the NIF did: taking lasers and firing them on a tiny pellet of fuel—and on the other end is magnetically confined fusion energy—which is using giant magnets to confine a plasma at extreme temperatures to get fusion out that way. And then in between, there are all sorts of other magneto-inertial types, which is a mix of one or the other. Some use electric pulses, some use giant pistons, some use plasma guns: all sorts of different ways of confining and controlling the plasma. And this is kind of what you'd expect in a new technology: We just don't quite know yet which is the one that will get there first—well, NIF got there first—but which is the one that will get there first in a commercially relevant manner. And then which one will then also show that it's the most commercially competitive as well. While you shouldn't probably expect 38 companies to all get there and all be the most successful there, there are multiple different ways forward. And they will probably all have different markets and different places that pick up each around the world. But exciting times in the technology.We have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. Whether it’s on the regulatory side or the funding side, what should government ideally be doing right now?Three key things. Number one is the regulation. Because fusion is a nuclear technology, it is going to be regulated in the United States by the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We've been engaged in a process—I've spent a lot of time on this—with the NRC in public that we've been contending that because fusion is so different from nuclear fission—just physically different, like you cannot have a meltdown, there is no long-lived radioactive waste, the fuel is isotopes of hydrogen or other not-dangerous fuels—so because of the physical differences, fusion should not be regulated in the same way that nuclear fission power plants are. And over a multi-year process, we convinced them. And the commission, a bipartisan group of Republicans and Democrats, five members, voted unanimously in April to regulate fusion separately from nuclear fission. It will be regulated like a medical isotope facility, an accelerator. This is a really important thing because it allows a lot more innovation. It should keep costs down. It doesn't mean there's no regulation, it just means it's regulated in the appropriate manner. That's number one.Number two is the public-private partnerships that I talked about. I think it is important that our companies have access to the public programs, have access to the national labs. The researchers have been doing this for a long time, so to be able to work with them—ideally with government dollars, the government dollars would pay at least part of it.And then number three is, we have to make sure we're not asking for special subsidies, but we have to make sure that fusion gets the same subsidies as all the other clean-energy technologies. Fusion just needs a level playing field. We think we'll compete just as well as any other technology.Is that not the case right now?It's not clear that it's the case right now. The IRA subsidies, for example, don't mention fusion. You wouldn't expect it to; this has come so quickly that it doesn't mention fusion. We think it will be designated as a clean technology. There's no reason it won't be. But Treasury has to make that designation. There's going to be a couple of early application programs for the tax credits for manufacturing stuff, and we're going to test that and we'll see if they give any of those competitive tax credits to fusion.Environmentalism and fusion energyEnvironmental groups: Are they pro-fusion? Are they against fusion? Do they view it like nuclear fission? What is the reaction of that community? Because obviously it would be very helpful if those groups were very positive about your efforts.The groups at this point, I'd say most of them, are in a wait-and-see mode. It depends whether a group is a membership organization, which has kind of a grassroots membership and they have to see where their members are, or whether it's more of a “we can think of the best way forward.” We've had good interactions so far with a number of the bipartisan environmental groups. We haven't seen yet where places like Sierra Club or NRDC will come down. We think they should be positive about it. We've made some initial outreach. Some of our companies have worked directly with their local environmental groups as they do the outreach necessary to build new experiments and programs and stuff like that. It's, at this point, still uncertain. But maybe an example from Europe to see where we are: German Greens basically shut down the nuclear fission industry in Germany. On the other hand, the government of Germany now—SPD, so a left-wing government—has announced a pretty substantial investment into nuclear fusion. There is a good evidence that environmentalists won't be against it. Now, it's still mostly to be determined, and we're setting the groundwork to educate people, make them aware that this is not something they should be afraid of. Certainly we think there's no reason for them to oppose it, but it's not my choice.It just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. Environmentalism and fusion energyWhen people hear “nuclear,” lots of them think about radiation and meltdowns. How do you begin to educate people that fusion is different from fission and maybe shouldn’t carry that kind of baggage?It's some work. It's some work, and education in the broad general public is really challenging on any policy issue, much less complicated science. So this is not an easy thing. We have to go in with eyes wide open. We have to be clear and direct, and we can't hide from anything. It is nuclear fusion, right? It is a nuclear reaction in which there are neutrons produced, there is radiation. You don't want to stand next to an unshielded fusion power plant. That would not be good for your health. But we know how to shield it. We know how to protect it, and it will be safe when it's running. But we have to go out in there and demonstrate that. And we can't just tell people, “This will be safe.” We have to engage with them, we have to talk to them, we have to understand what their concerns are. All this sort of stuff.Because we're a new industry, we get to start from zero instead of, unfortunately our cousins in nuclear fission, they're starting from negative so they've got to build it back up. And many of our scientists are also in fission world, and our companies don't want to see them fail, certainly. But it just seems like fusion has inherent benefits that will allow us to really expand faster and not have the drawbacks that fission has had. It's all about speed. When you talk about our energy problems—climate, clean energy, energy security—it's not about building one power plant. It's about building tens, hundreds, thousands of these. And for that, you need speed. That's why we think it's really important to get the regulation right. And regulation is downstream of public perception, so you’ve got to get people to want this. If they want it and you get the regulation right, there's no reason you can't build these things as fast as you can roll them off an assembly line.Will fusion be the main energy source of the future?Should it be part of the energy mix, like solar and wind are today? Or is this the technology that will power the future like fossil fuels power the present?If we get this right, if we get the deployment right, there is no reason that this can't be the thing that powers humanity for the rest of humanity's existence. There's a saying that once you build the first fusion power plant, the only thing you can build better is a better fusion power plant. We know that the energy system is really complicated. It's really competitive. So in the early days, fusion is going to have to compete. Fusion is going to have to get down to cost. It can't have the same problems as nuclear power or even that we're starting to see in solar or wind of deployment. You've got to be able to build these and deploy these. In the long term, once you have fusion, what you have is abundant power. And ideally abundant cheap power. When you have that, you can do all sorts of other stuff like desalinate salt water and get rid of water problems. If you've got abundant energy, you can create all sorts of energy-dense liquid fuels. That means you won't need oil anymore. You can just with feedstock do that. You can do a lot of cool stuff in space. It takes you from going to Mars in a year and a half to going to Mars in a month. And that just fundamentally changes us. You can have a shuttle going back and forth between the Earth and the Moon. Fusion power means that you have all sorts of new options for this. And it takes energy from something that you pull from out of the ground or you get from weather and turns it into something that is fundamentally a manufactured good. And that's really cool and really kind of changes our security paradigms, our environmental paradigms, and just makes it a real opportunity here to develop and move forward in a new way.Micro Reads▶ Big Tech’s Battle Royale Is Coming. The Winner? You. - Joanna Stern, WSJ | ▶ After Affirmative Action, We Can Still Fix the Education Pipeline - Jonathan Chait, New York | ▶ Billionaires and Bureaucrats Mobilize China for AI Race With US - Jane Zhang, Sarah Zheng, Bloomberg | ▶ The 2023 Long-Term Budget Outlook - CBO | ▶ European companies sound alarm over draft AI law - Javier Espinioza, FT | ▶ Big Tech Has a Troubling Stranglehold on Artificial Intelligence - Parmy Olsen, Bloomberg Opinion | ▶ Welcome to the big blimp boom - Rebecca Heilweil, MIT Tech Review | ▶ Genetic marker discovered for the severity of multiple sclerosis - Grace Wade, New Scientist | ▶ Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today - Editorial, Nature | ▶ The Path to Abundant Air Travel - Gary D. Leff, Discourse | ▶ Preserving Meaning in a Technology-Driven Society - Michael Westover, Profectus | This is a public episode. 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