Faster, Please! — The Podcast

As private and government interest in nuclear fusion technology grows, an array of startups have arisen to take on the challenge, each with their own unique approach. Among them: LaserFusionX. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I talk with CEO Stephen Obenschain about the viability of fusion energy, and what sets his approach apart.Obenschain is the president of LaserFusionX. He was formerly head of the Plasma Physics Division branch at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.In This Episode* Viability of commercial fusion (0:58)* The LaserFusionX approach (7:54)* Funding the project (10:28)* The vision (12:52)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationViability of commercial fusion (0:58)Pethokoukis: Steve, welcome to the podcast.Obenschain: Okay, I'm glad to talk with you. I understand you're very interested in high-tech future power sources, not so high tech right now are windmills…Well, I guess they're trying to make those more high tech, as well. I recall that when the Energy Department, the National Ignition Laboratory [NIF], they had the—I guess that's over about maybe 15 months ago—and they said they had achieved a net gain nuclear fusion, using lasers, and the energy secretary made an announcement and it was a big deal because we had never done that before by any means. But I remember very specifically people were saying, “Listen, it's a great achievement that we've done this, but using lasers is not a path to creating a commercial nuclear reactor.” I remember that seemed to be on the news all the time. But yet you are running a company that wants to use lasers to create a commercial fusion reactor. One, did I get that right, and what are you doing to get lasers to be able to do that?I don't know why people would come to that conclusion. I think we are competitive with the other approaches, which is magnetic fusion, where you use magnetic fields to confine a plasma and get to fusion temperatures. The federal government has supported laser fusion since about 1972, starting with the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission]. Originally it was an energy program, but it has migrated to being in support stockpiled stewardship because, with laser fusion, you can reach physics parameters similar to what occur in thermonuclear weapons.Yeah. So that facility is about nuclear weapons testing research, not creating a reactor—a fusion reactor.Yeah. All that being said, it does advance the physics of laser fusion energy, and what the National Ignition Facility did is got so-called ignition, where the fuel started a self-sustaining reaction where it was heating itself and increasing the amount of fusion energy. However, the gain was about three, and one of the reasons for that is they use so-called indirect drive, where the laser comes in, heats a small gold can, and the X-rays from that then that drive the pellet implosion, which means you lose about a factor of five in the efficiency. So it's limited gain you get that way.Your way is different. It sort of cuts out the middleman.Okay. The better way to go—which, we're not the only ones to do this—is direct drive, where the laser uniformly illuminates the target at the time that Livermore got started with indirect drive, we didn't have the technologies to uniformly illuminate a pellet. First at NRL [Naval Research Laboratories], and then later at University of Rochester in Japan, they developed techniques to uniformly illuminate the pellets. The second thing we're doing is using the argon fluoride laser. The argon fluoride laser has been used in lithography for many years because it's deep UV.The unique thing we have been trying to do—this was when I was supervising the program at the Naval Research Laboratory—was to take it up to high energy. We started years ago with a similar Krypton fluoride laser, built the largest operating target shooter with that technology, demonstrated the high repetition rate operation that you need for energy and NIF will shoot a few times a day—you need five to 10 shots per second to do a power plant—demonstrated that on a krypton fluoride laser, and, more recently, we switched to the focus to argon fluoride, which is deeper UV and more efficient than the Krypton  fluoride. And that basically—at NRL when I was supervising it—reached the energy record for that technology. But we've got a long ways to go to get it to the high energy needed for a power plant.Now, what the immediate goal of my company is to get the funds and to build a beam line of argon fluoride that would have the energy and performance needed for a power plant. One of the advantages to laser fusion: you want have a situation where I'm building more than one of something, so for an implosion facility, you have many beam lines, so you build one and then you have the advantage of building more, and a learning curve as you go toward a power plant. We developed a phase program where first we build the beamline, then we build a NIF-like implosion facility only operating with the argon fluoride, demonstrate the high gain—which is a hundred plus for a power plant—and then, after doing that, do the physics in parallel, develop the other technology you need, like low-cost targets. (They can't be expensive. The NIF targets are probably tens of thousands. We can't spend that.) We're going 10 shots per second. All the technologies required for a pilot power plant build a pilot power plant, which, in my view could be maybe 400 megawatts electricity. However, its main function would be to develop the procedures, test the components, and so forth for the follow-on, mass-produced power plants. So one, when you build a pilot power plant, you want to operate it for a few years to get the kinks out before going to mass production. The vision is to go from the beginning of that to the end in about 16 years.So the challenges are you have to generate enough heat, and you have to be able to do this over, and over, and over again.Right. That's right. It has to be high reliability. For an implosion facility, a hundred-thousand-shot reliability is okay. For a power plant, it's got to be in the billion-shot class.And at this point, the reason you think this is doable is what?I think we have confidence in the pellet designs. I have a lot, and I have colleagues that have a lot of experience with building large excimer systems: KrF [Krypton Fluoride Excimer Laser], ArF [Argon Fluoride Excimer Laser]…Those are lasers?Yes. And we have credible conceptual designs for the facility.There’s a lot of companies right now, and startups, with different approaches. I would assume you think this is the most viable approach, or has some other advantages over some of the other things we're seeing with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which gets mentioned a lot, which is using a different approach. So is the advantage you think it's easier to get to a reactor? What are the advantages of this path?The LaserFusionX approach (7:54)Well, for one, it's different. It's different challenges from the Commonwealth Fusion Systems. There is overlap, and there should be collaboration. For example, you have to, theirs is also deuterium-tritium. However, the physics challenges are different. I think we're farther along in laser fusion to be able—it's a simpler situation than you have. It's very complex interactions in tokamak, and you also have things… have you ever heard of a disruption? Basically it's where all of the magnetic energy all of a sudden goes to the wall, and if you have something like what Commonwealth Fusion Systems—they’ve got to be careful they don't get that. If they do, it would blow a hole in the wall. We don't have that problem with laser fusion. I think we're further along in understanding the physics. Actually, the National Ignition Facility is ahead of the highest fusion gains they've gotten in facilities. I think that they're somewhere just below one or so with the jet. They're up at one and a half. To what extent are the challenges of physics and science, and to what extent are the challenges engineering?Well, the physics has to guide the precision you have on the laser. And I won't say we're 100 percent done in the physics, but we're far enough along to say, okay. That's one reason where I envision building an implosion facility before the pilot power plant so we can test the codes and get all the kinks out of that. Nothing's easy. You have to get the cost of the targets down. The laser, okay, we've demonstrated, for example, at NRL—And NRL is…?Naval Research Laboratory.Naval Research Lab, right.A hundred-shot operation of the KrF laser. We use spark gap for that. We need to go to solid state pulse power, got up to 10 million shots. We need to get from there to a billion shots. And some of that is just simply improving the components. It's straightforward, but you've got to put time into it. I think you need really smart people doing this, that are creative—not too creative, but where you need to be creative, you are creative, and I think if, basically, if you can get the support, for example, to build (a beam line is somewhere around a hundred million dollars). To build the implosion facility and pilot power plant, you're getting into the billion shot, billion dollar class and you have to get those resources and be sure enough that, okay, if the investors put this money in, they're going to get a return on it.Funding the project (10:28)I think people who are investing in this sector, I would assume they may be more familiar with some of the other approaches, so what is the level of investor interest and what is the level of Department of Energy interest?Well, one of the challenges is that, historically, the Department of Energy has put money into two pots. One, laser fusion for stockpile stewardship, and magnetic fusion for energy. That's starting to change, but they don't have a lot of money involved yet, to put money into laser fusion or inertial fusion energy. And one of my challenges is not that the companies are aware of magnetic fusion, they don't understand the challenges of that, or laser fusion, or what's a good idea and a bad idea. And like Commonwealth Fusion systems I think has a good technical basis. If you go the next one down to Helion Energy, they're claiming they can burn helium three made from deuterium interactions, which violates textbook physics, so I'm very… I wonder about that.Would it surprise you, at the end of the day, that there are multiple paths to a commercial fusion reactor?Oh no. I think there are multiple paths to getting to where I get fusion burn, and maybe I make electricity. I think ultimately the real challenge for us is: Can we go reasonably fast? At 16 years, I'm considered somewhat slower than others. The ones that are saying five years I think are delusional. The ones that are saying 50 years, or say never, I don't think understand that yeah, we're pretty far along in this.How big, or rather, how small, theoretically, could one of these reactors be? I know there's been talk about using nuclear fusion as a way to provide power for these new data centers that gobble up so much power that they're using AI for. Would this be the kind of reactor that would power a city power, a big factory power, a data center, all of the above?I think you can get down, at least with our approach, to a couple hundred megawatts. However, my own vision is you're probably better off having power stations for some of the nuclear—with these, the big nuclear plants have multiple reactors at one place, and you'd get the advantage, for example, in our case, to just simply have one target factory and so forth. I don't think we're going to be able to compete. I don't know how small modular reactors go—a hundred megawatts or so, I would guess, and probably can't get down there, but one of my own goals is to get the size down as much as possible, but I think we're talking about hundreds of megawatts. The vision (12:52)What's the big vision? Why are you doing this?Why am I doing it?Yeah, what's the vision? What drives you and where do you think this goes over the next two decades?I may have the best route to get there. If I thought one of these other ones were going to get there, no problem… but all of us have challenges, and I think we can get there. I think from a standing start. As far as getting investment, I've just had pre-seed money, I don't have the big bucks yet. I’ve brought on people that are more experienced than me at extracting money from VCs and investors. (I was told you know a few billionaires.) Basically, for me, I need a few tens of millions to get started—like I'd say, about a hundred million to build the beamline. And then after that… actually I have a conference call on Friday with a representative of the investment bank industry that is very dubious about fusion.I mean, you can understand the skepticism, as a technology. What do they say? “It's the future of energy and always will be.”But the really good thing, I think, about the private investment is that the public investment has been too much focus on big machines which will give you physics, but have pretty much zero chance of being a direct path to fusion energy. You know, $25 billion and I make 500 megawatts thermal, occasionally, and we show that to a power plant executive, they're going to say, “You're kidding me.” We hope to get down cost for the power plants in the few-billion-dollar range.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

Dr. Spencer Weart, an expert in Astrophysics and History, delves into the cultural influences behind nuclear energy fear. Topics include the history of radiation, rise of nuclear fear, changing generational attitudes, and nuclear fear in today's media.

John Bailey, Senior fellow at AEI, discusses the potential for AI in education, emphasizing personalized coaching for children, the impact on teaching quality, addressing learning loss from COVID, concerns about cheating, and the adoption by teachers. Exploring AI's role in providing career guidance and medical diagnoses, as well as the challenges and opportunities of AI adoption in education.

Readers and listeners of Faster, Please! know how incredible the untapped potential of nuclear power truly is. As our society (hopefully) begins to warm to the idea of nuclear as an abundant, sustainable, and safe source of energy, a new generation of engineers and entrepreneurs is developing a whole new model of nuclear power: the microreactor.Here on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with James Walker, a nuclear physicist and CEO of NANO Nuclear Energy about the countless applications of his company’s under-development, mobile, and easily-deployable nuclear reactors.In This Episode* Why the microreactor? (1:14)* The NANO design plan (7:11)* The industry environment (11:42)* The future of the microreactor (13:45Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationWhy the microreactor? (1:14)Pethokoukis : James, welcome to the podcast.Walker: I would say the way NANO got going is probably of interest, then. When we first entered the nuclear space, and my background is a nuclear physicist, nuclear engineer, so I knew that there's a very high bar to entry in nuclear and there's a lot of well-established players in the space. But, really, when we actually took a look at the whole landscape, most of the development was in the SMR space, the Kairos, the Terra Powers, the NuScales, and we could see what they were doing: They were aiming for a much more manufactural reactor that could deploy a lot faster. It was going to be a lot smaller, fewer mechanical components, smaller operating staff to bring down costs. So that all made a lot of sense, but what I think was missing in the market—and there are a few companies involved in this—was that the microreactor space looked to be the larger potential market. And I say that because microreactors are more readily deployable to places like remote mining sites, remote habitation, disaster relief areas, military bases, island communities… you put them on maritime vessels to replace bunk fuel, charging stations for EV vehicles... Essentially hundreds of thousands of potential locations competing against diesel generators, which, up until now, up until microreactors, had no competition. So the big transformative change here is—obviously SMRs are going to contribute that, but—micro reactors can completely reshape the energy landscape and that's why it's exciting. That's the big change.You gave some examples, so I want you to give me a couple more examples, but I'll say that I was thinking the other day about the expansion, partially due to AI, of these big data centers around the country. Is that the kind of thing—and you can give me other examples, as well—of where a much smaller microreactor might be a good fit for it, and also tell me, just how big are these reactors?AI centers and data centers are particularly a big focus of tech at the moment. Microsoft even have people deliberately going out and speaking to nuclear companies about being able to charge these new stations because they want these things to be green, but they also want them in locations which aren't readily accessible to the grid. And a lot of the time, some of the power requirements of these things might be bigger than the town next to them where they've got these things. So their own microreactor or SMR system is actually a really good way of solving this where it's zero carbon-emitting energy, you can put it anywhere, and it is the most consistent form of energy. Now you can out-compete diesel in that front, it can go outcompete, wind or solar. It really has no competitors. So they are leaning in that direction and a lot of the big drive in nuclear at the moment is coming from industry. So that's the big change, I think. It's not strictly now a government-pushed initiative.What's the difference between these and the SMR reactors, which my listeners and readers might be a little bit more familiar with?SMRs, the small modular reactors, obviously if you think of a large conventional nuclear power station, you're thinking dozens and dozens of acres of land being occupied by essentially a big facility. An SMR brings that down by an order of magnitude. You still need to probably have an area about 10 city blocks, but the reactor itself is much, much smaller, occupied by a much smaller footprint than that.Microreactors are much smaller, again, so if you take our design as an example, the whole system, the core and the turbine that produces the electricity, all fits within an ISO container. If you think of the standard shipping container you see on the back of a ship or you see on the back of a truck or a train, that's where you're really looking at. And the reason for that is that we're trying to make it as deployable and as mobile as possible. So conventional transportation—infrastructure, trucks, trains, ships—get these things anywhere in the world. Helicopter them in, if you really want. And once they're down there you've got 10, 15, 20 years of power consistently without that constant need to import fuel like you would with the diesel generator. That's the real big advantage of these things. Obviously SMRs don't have that ability, but they are more powerful machines. So you're powering cities, or bit towns, and that kind of thing. They are catering to different markets. They're not exactly competitors, they're very complimentary.But even for big grid systems, micro reactors could play a big part because they could be intermittently placed within a grid system so that you have backup power systems all the time that's not reliant on one major area to produce power for the entire grid system. It can always draw power from wherever it needs. And there's a big advantage to micro correctors there.Other examples of where microreactors could be used: We know that the military is very interested because they have an obligation to be able to self-power for at least two weeks. And obviously micros can take you well beyond that for, like, 50 years, so that easily meets their requirements. They're looking to get rid of diesel and replace them with microreactors and they're putting money in that space.I would say a big market is going to be things like island communities that predominantly run on diesel at the moment, and that means it's expensive and it's polluting, and they're constantly bringing in diesel on a daily basis.  Countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, where they have the majority of their population on these island communities that all run on diesel, you would essentially be taking hundreds of millions of people off diesel generator and putting them onto nuclear if you could bring in that technology to these areas.And the US actually has an enormous population on island communities that run on diesel, too, that could be replaced with microreactors, and you could then have a zero carbon-emitting solution to energy requirements and less energy insecurity.  The NANO design plan (7:11)Would they need to be refueled and how many people would it take? How many technical people would you need to operate one of them?The idea here with our reactors is that we don't want to refuel at-site. What we would likely do is just decommission that reactor and remove it and we would just bring in a replacement. It's this less messy, there's no refueling process, it's easier to license that way. The interesting part about this is that we actually would probably only need a couple people on site while the reactor is running, and the reason for that is because obviously we need someone for physical security and maybe a mechanic on site who can just do some sort of physical intervention to modify the mechanical equipment.The way these will likely work is that you'll have a central location where it monitors the behavior of dozens of reactors that are deployed at any one time. And you have all your nuclear engineers and your operators in that space and they monitor everything.So you don't need a nuclear engineer at each site. And that way these things are very deployable and, to be honest, everybody who's going to work on these things are going to be quite bored. There's not going to be a lot to do because reactors are mostly self-regulating systems, and the intervention that's needed on a daily basis is very minimal. So even for the hub, it's mostly just an observation exercise to check on transient behavior as it's operating and then maybe some tweaks here and there, and that's essentially all that would need to be done for these things. And then you can bring down your OpEx costs very considerably.So just a bit about the technology itself: You're working on two different reactors? Can you explain the differences in reactors and where they are in the development-deployment stage?We have two expert technical teams working on two different reactor designs, and that's partly so we can de-risk our own operations. So we know that even if one meets critical problems, the other one will be able to go on, so we're just doubling our chances of success. The MO we gave to both of them was the same: It has to be modular, it needs to be passively cooling, it needs to be able to be shipped anywhere in the world, so it needs to be fit within an ISO container. And we gave both teams that MO. They both came up with very innovative and novel solutions to that problem.So the Zeus reactor, which draws from the scientists and engineers down in California, their solution was just completely remove the coolants and use a thermal conduction. And if you do that, you can remove all the mechanical systems in the reactor. You reduce the size, you reduce the pumps, and then you have something that's very, very simple and size shrinks right down and you can get it in that ISO container system. That's very innovative, that's the Zeus reactor.The Odin team, their solution was, “Well if you could introduce some initial heat into the system for a salt-based system and the uranium is providing that natural heat, and you create a natural circulation so you can remove pumps and you can remove circulatory systems and that way, again, you can shrink the reactor right down.”So two very different solutions to the same problem, and that's how they differ. Odin does have a coolant that has a natural circulation that moves it around and Zeus has removed the coolant completely, which is more novel, I would say, and relies on a thermal conduction mechanism where the uranium just gets hot and it conducts through a solid core to the periphery where heat just gets removed by a naturally circulated air just going around.Is there a difference with how much power each kind could potentially generate from a shipping container sized unit?There was, originally, but I think the constraints of having to confine it to a shipping container almost got them into the same ballpark. So they're now both about, well, I'd say Zeus is maybe four megawatt thermal, Odin, it might be five megawatt thermal, but the power of the electric, once the conversion goes through, it brings them out to that one, one-and-a-half megawatt electric power output.And what can that power?A thousand homes for 20 years, mine sites, oil and gas sites for bringing the oil to the surface, remote communities, military bases…Plenty of power for that kind of thing.Plenty of power for that kind of thing. And also a big upside would be places where there's communities that completely are removed from the grid, desalination plans, medical facilities. Suddenly that all becomes very possible. You can unlock an enormous amount of wealth from landlocked resources, which just aren't economic because of fuel requirements to mine those things. So you can unlock trillions of dollars of value in resources just by having microreactors come into these remote locations. The industry environment (11:42)Whenever I talk with an expert about this topic, we eventually get to these two questions: One question is sort of, what is this technology’s timeline? So there’s that technology question. And then the second issue: What’s the regulatory environment like for you folks?You're going to see SMRs come online first. They're going to get licensed first. They've got a bit of a head start. Microreactors, at the moment, all of the main contenders, including us, are basically at the same point. We're going into physical and test work that's looking at about a two-year process to collect all the data and licensing. Licensing is actually the longest-lead item that's about just under four years. That takes us all out to about 2030 where, before you have a commercial deployment of a microreactor, you're able to go anywhere we want.I would imagine SMRs, it's going to be several years before that. But then once microreactors can deploy, you'll see many more of them being deployed than SMRs.Would they be regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)? Is that who the chief regulator is?Yeah, the NRC deals with all commercial ventures. So if it's defense or public, then you obviously would be DOE or DOD. NRC manages commercial ventures, so they're going to be in charge of the licensing for all micro and SMRs. I would say to your comment about the regulatory environment, I assume there are going to be adjustments made to the way these things are licensed because they are a very different product to a big conventional civil power plant, which is gigawatts or multiple gigawatts down to one megawatt. It's a very different device, very different operating system. I anticipate there will be changes. If there are not, that might complicate the deployment of microreactors.We do know they are aware of the need to modify the regulatory framework around these new systems. So we're hoping obviously in time for when we go to licensing process, and all the other microreactors are probably hoping the same, that that framework is in place so we can be assessed on their own criteria.The future of the microreactor (13:45)Are you viewing this as primarily initially as an American market or as a European market, as an Asian market? What do you see as the potential market for this? Once we're up and running,The first market will be the American market, and that's going to hit things like mining sites, military bases, data centers, AI centers, things removed off from the grid; but then you can expand very quickly in this state to something like charging stations for your EV vehicles in the middle of nowhere. If you bring diesel generators in to power those things, it defeats the point. And you can't just put wind and solar farms wherever you want because they're very locationally dependent on weather systems. But microreactors actually mean you can suddenly electrify the entire country. So you can periodically cite charging stations or EV vehicles throughout the whole country, and that'll be tens of thousands of potential essentially recharging stations that you can then drive your EV vehicle across the country because there could be periodic charging stations for all these vehicles. So it'll begin with that way.And we'll see a similar thing in continents like Europe that have more sophisticated grid systems. But then as this expands into places like Southeast Asia and Indonesia, the Phillippines, Thailand, big island community countries where microreactors are replacing diesel generators and making them more green. And then in places like Africa, large swathes of population cut off from grid completely, and then you'll see them deploying into those areas for desalination, medical facilities, and then ultimately mining projects.Big picture then, what’s the dream? What does the technology and the company look like in 2035 or 2040?So I would say 2035, what we want to do is we want to be really deploying thousands of these things across the world. Not just the States and North America, but internationally. There's essentially an unlimited market for these. We won't sell the reactors, but we will sell the power. So we'll be an operator for all these companies, industry partners, mining companies. We hope to be putting these things on ships and replacing bunker fuel and maritime vessels.We won't be hitting the main grid systems, exactly. I think SMRs will pick up a lot of slack there, but for the first time, we'll be in a position to really start taking our microreactors, and the cost of these things by 2035 will have fallen to such a point that they will be more economic than diesel generators in the middle of nowhere that rely on a constant importation of diesel and the associated costs with that, it could be very transformative. It could create an enormous amount of wealth, it could improve the health of the planet across the board, for locations that are cut off, cut off. And for NANO, I already believe we'll be a massive company anyway, but there'll be a lot of blue-sky potential for expanding into other industries.You're designing, you're developing, would you be the manufacturer, ultimately, of these reactors?Yes, we'll be the manufacturer of these things. As I mentioned though, we won't sell them because people won't be interested in a big upfront capital cost with the associated operating liability. So we will just sell power. You need 10 megawatts for 20 years? We’ll supply that. You need 16 megawatts for five years? We'll supply that, too. And that'll be the business model.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

The US Space Force, the newest branch of the American military, takes national defense to a new frontier. Here on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I sit down with AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison to discuss the state of the Space Force and its evolving mission.Harrison has served as senior vice president and head of research at Metrea, a defense consulting firm, been a senior fellow for defense budget strategies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, directed the Defense Budget Analysis and Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and served as a captain in the US Air Force Reserve.In This Episode* Creating the Space Force (0:53)* A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)* Defining the Mission (11:40)* Conflict and Competition in Space (15:34)* The Danger of Space Debris (20:11)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationCreating the Space Force (0:53)Pethokoukis: I was recently looking at an image that showed the increase in the number of satellites around the earth, and it's been a massive increase; I imagine a lot of it has to do with SpaceX putting up satellites, and it's really almost like—I think to an extent that most people don't understand; between  government, military, and a lot of commercial satellites—it's really like the earth is surrounded by this information shell. And when looking at that, I couldn't help but think, “Yeah, it kind of seems like we would need a Space Force or something to keep an eye on that and protect that.” And I know there was a lot of controversy, if I'm not mistaken, like, “Why do we need this extra branch of government?” Is that controversy about why we need a Space Force, is that still an active issue and what are your thoughts?Harrison: To start with where you started, yes. The number of satellites in space has been growing literally exponentially in the past few years. I'll just throw a few numbers out there:  In 2023 alone, about 2,800 new satellites were launched, and in that one year it increased the total number of satellites on the orbit by 22 percent, just in one year. And all the projections are that the number of satellites, number of launches, are going to keep growing at a pace like that for the foreseeable future, for the next several years. A lot is going into space, and we know from all other domains that where commerce goes conflict will follow. And we are seeing that in space as well.Like the Navy protecting the shipping lanes. Yeah, exactly. So we know that to a certain extent that's inevitable. There will be points of contention, points of conflict, but we've already seen that in space just with the military dimension of our space. Back in 2007, I think a lot of the world woke up to the fact that space is a contested environment when the Chinese tested an anti-satellite weapon, which, by the way, produced thousands of pieces of space debris that are still in orbit today. More than 2,600 pieces of debris are still in orbit from that one Chinese ASAT test. And, of course, that was just one demonstration of counter-space capabilities. Space has been a contested war fighting domain, really, since the beginning of the Space Age. The first anti-satellite test was in 1959, and so it has become increasingly important for economic reasons, but also for military reasons. Now, when the Space Force debate kicked into high gear, I think it took a lot of people who weren't involved in military space, I think it took a lot of people by surprise that we were having this debate.Yeah, it really seemed like it came out of nowhere, I think probably for 99 percent of people who aren't professionals tracking the issue.In reality, that debate, it started in the 1990s, and there was a senator from up in New Hampshire who had written a journal article basically talking about, “Hey, we need to separate space into its own military service.” You had the Air Force chief of staff at the time in the mid-1990s, General Ron Fogleman. He said that the Air Force should eventually become an Air and Space Force, and then one day a Space and Air Force. So you had the seeds of it happening in the ’90s. Then you had Congress wanting to look at, “Okay, how do we do this? How do we reorganize military space?” They created a commission that was led by Donald Rumsfeld before he became Secretary of Defense for the second time. That commission issued its report in 2001, and it recommended a bunch of reforms, but it said in the midterm, in five to 10 years we should create a separate military service for space, something like a Space Corps.Nothing happened, even though Rumsfeld then became Secretary of Defense. We kind of took our focus off of it for a while, there were a few other studies that went on, and then in 2016, two members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat, Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper, who were on the House Armed Services Committee, they took this issue up. They got so fed up with the oversight of looking at how the Air Force was shortchanging space in many ways in terms of personnel and training and funding and modernization, that they then put a provision into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that would've created a Space Corps, they called it: a separate military service for space. And that bill actually passed the full House of Representatives.The Senate did not have a similar provision in their bill, so it died. It didn't make it into law—but then, all of a sudden, a couple of years later, President Trump, pretty much out of the blue floats this idea of creating a Space Force, and he did it at a rally that was at a Marine Corps base out in California, and, for some reason, it caught on with Trump. And then you already had the votes, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives who had already pushed this, and so it started to gain momentum.It was very controversial at the time. The secretary of the Air Force at that time was adamantly opposed to it. Eventually, Trump forced it on the civilian establishment at DoD, and Congress ultimately enacted it, and the Space Force became a military service in December… I think December 20th, 2019. Now, there was some question, will the Biden administration keep it?Is this here to stay?It is written into law, so a president cannot unilaterally take it away, and, at this point, it's got its own roots in the ground and the Space Force is not going anywhere.A little bit off topic, but was there a similar debate when they separated the Air Force out of the Army?There was, yeah, and it lasted for a long time. So you had folks like Billy Mitchell who were in the Army Air Corps way back before World War II—I think in the late ’20s, early ’30s—they were advocating for a separate military service for Air. And I believe Billy Mitchell actually got court marshaled because he disobeyed orders from a superior about advocating for this with Congress.And so the idea of a separate service for Air pretty much died out until World War II hit. And, of course, that was a war that we were brought into it by an attack that came from the air, and that really brought air power into full effect in terms of a major component of military power. So then, at the end of World War II, the Air Power advocates got together, they created the Air Force Association to advocate for a separate military service and they got it in the National Security Reform Act in 1947, I think the Air Force actually stood up in 1948.It took longer, I would argue, a lot more advocacy and it took a World War, a crisis, to show us how important Air was to the military in order for us to actually create an Air Force. Now, I think, thankfully, we did that in advance of a crisis in terms of creating the Space Force.Right now, what the Space Force does, is it tracking satellites, tracking and space debris, is it a monitoring and tracking service? It's not a fighting service yet?Well, yes and no. A lot of what the Space Force does on a day-to-day basis is they provide space-enabling capabilities to the other military services. So if you want to get intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance from space, you can go to the Space Force. Separately, we have intel space that's run through the National Reconnaissance Office—that has not changed its organization. If you want to get GPS, the Space Force runs our GPS constellation of satellites, and they're responsible for defending it against all forms of attack, which it is attacked daily. If you want satellite communications, the Space Force delivers that. If you want missile warning… So the Space Force delivers lots of enabling capabilities for other parts of the military. At the same time, it is tasked with defending those capabilities, and it's not just against kinetic forms of attack where an adversary is literally trying to shoot a satellite out of the sky.A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)I guess that's the first thing that popped in my mind. Too much science fiction maybe, but…Well, that is real, that's a real threat. The truth is there's not a lot you can do to actively protect against that—at least, we don't have a lot of capabilities right now—but the forms of attack we see on a daily basis are cyber, electromagnetic, and other forms of non-kinetic attack like lazing the sensors on a satellite. You could temporarily, or even permanently, blind the sensors on a satellite with a laser from an aircraft or from a ground station.I'll give you an example: When Russia invaded Ukraine, at the very beginning of the invasion, one of the first attacks they launched was a space attack. It was cyber, and it was against a commercial space capability. What they did is they exploited a vulnerability, previously unknown, in ViaSat modems. ViaSat's, a commercial satellite communications company, they had some sort of a vulnerability in their modems. The Russians, through a cyber attack, basically bricked all those modems. They locked them out. The Ukrainian military relied on ViaSat for satellite communications, so it locked up all of their terminals right at the beginning. They could not communicate using Satcom. Incidentally, it locked up lots of ViaSat terminals across Europe in that same attack. So we see this happening all the time. Russian forces are constantly jamming GPS signals. That makes weapons and drones much less effective. They can't use GPS for targeting once they go into a GPS-denied environment.But the Space Force has ways to overcome that. We have protected military GPS signals, we have ways of increasing the strength of those signals to overcome jamming. There's lots of things you can do with counter-space and then counter to the counter-space.The problem is that we kind of sat on our laurels and admired our advantage in space for a couple of decades and did not make a concerted effort to improve the protection of our space systems and develop our own capability to deny others the advantage of space because others didn't have that same advantage for a long time.Well, that has changed, and the creation of the Space Force, I think, has really set us in a positive new direction to get serious about space defense and to get serious about denying others the advantage of space if we need to.Defining the Mission (11:40)The Chief of Space Operation at the Space Force recently published a short white paper, which I guess begins to lay out kind of a doctrine, like, “What is the mission? How do we accomplish this mission?” Probably the first sort of Big Think piece maybe since Space Force became a branch. What did that white paper say? What do you make of it?Yeah, so I think one of the criticisms of military space for a while has been that we didn't really have space strategy, space doctrine, we didn't have a theory of space power that was well developed. I would argue we had some of those, but it's fair to say that they have not been that well developed. Well, one of the reasons you need a military service is to actually get the expertise that is dedicated to this domain to think through those things and really develop them and flesh them out, and so that's what this white paper did, and I think it did a pretty good job of it, developing a theory of space power. He calls it a “theory of success for competitive endurance in the space domain.”And one of the things I thought was really great that they highlight in the paper, that a lot of US government officials in the past have been reluctant to talk about, is the fact that we are under attack on a daily basis—gray zone-type aggression in the space domain—and we've got to start pushing back against that. And we've got to actually be willing and able to exercise our own defensive and counter-space capabilities, even in the competition phase before we actually get to overt conflict, because our adversaries are doing it already. They're doing it to us. We need to be able to brush them back. We're not talking about escalating and starting a conflict or anything like that, but when someone jams our satellite communication systems or GPS, they need to feel some consequences. Maybe something similar happens to their own space capabilities, or maybe we employ capabilities that show them we can overcome what you're doing. So I thought that was a good part of the theory of success is you can't just sit by and let an adversary degrade your space capabilities in the competition phase.How much of the focus of Space Force currently, and maybe as that paper discussed what the department's mission is, focused on the military capabilities, protecting military capabilities, the military capabilities of other nations, versus what you mentioned earlier was this really expanding commercial element which is only going to grow in importance?Today, the vast majority of the Space Force's focus is on the military side of providing that enabling military capability that makes all of our forces more effective, protecting that capability, and then, to a lesser extent, being able to interfere with our adversaries’ ability to use space for their own advantage.They are just now starting to really grapple with, “Okay, is there a role for the Space Force in protecting space commerce, protecting commercial space capabilities that may be economically important, that may be strategically important to us and our allies, but are not directly part of a military capability?” They're starting to think through that now, and it really is the Space Force taking on a role in the future that is more like the Navy. The Navy does fight and win wars, of course, but the Navy also has a role in patrolling the seas and ensuring the free flow of commerce like we see the US Navy doing right now over in the Red Sea: They're helping protect ships that need to transit through that area when Houthi Rebels are targeting them. Do we need that kind of capability and space? Yeah, I think we do. It is not a huge priority now, but it is going to be a growing priority in the future.Conflict and Competition in Space (15:34)I don't know if such things even currently exist, but if you have satellites that can kill other satellites, do those exist and does the Space Force run them?Satellites that can kill other satellites, absolutely. That is a thing that exists. A lot of stuff is kept classified. What we know that's unclassified is, back in the 1960s and early ’70s, the Soviets conducted many tests—a couple of dozen tests—of what they call a co-orbital anti-satellite system, that is a satellite that can kill another satellite, and there's still debris in space from some of those tests back in the ’60s and ’70s.We also know, unclassified, that China and Russia have on-orbit systems that appear to be able to rendezvous with other satellites, get very close. We've seen the Russians deploy a satellite that appeared to fire a projectile at another Russian satellite—looks like a test of some sort of a co-orbital weapon. So yes, those capabilities are out there. They do exist. We've never seen a capability like that used in conflict, though, not yet, but we know they existLooking forward a decade… One can imagine a lot more satellites, multiple space platforms, maybe some run by the private sector, maybe others not. One could imagine permanent or semi-permanent installations on the moon from different countries. Are plans being made to protect those things, and would the Space Force be the one protecting them? If you have a conflict between the Chinese military installation on the moon and the American, would that be in the Space Force domain? Again, it seems like science fiction, but I don't think it's going to seem like science fiction before too long.Well, that's right. We're not at that point today, but are we going to be at that point in 10, 20, 30 years? Perhaps. There are folks in the Space Force, like in the chief scientist’s office that have thought about these things; they publish some papers on it. There's no real effort going into that right now other than thinking about it from an academic perspective. Should that be in the mandate of the Space Force? Well, I think it already is, it's just there's not a need for it yet, and so it's something to keep an eye on.Now, there are some rules, if you will, international agreements that would suggest, “Okay, some of these things should not happen.” Doesn't mean they won't; but, for example, the main treaty that governs how nations operate in space is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The Outer Space Treaty specifically says that you can't claim territory in space or on any celestial body like the moon or Mars, and it specifically says you cannot put a military installation on any celestial body.So, should China put a military base on the moon, they would be clearly violating the Outer Space Treaty. If China puts a scientific installation that happens to have some military capabilities on it, but they don't call it that, well, you know, what are we going to do? Are we going to call them before the United Nations and complain? Or if China says, “Hey, we've put a military installation in this key part of the lunar South Pole where we all believe that there is ice water, and if anyone tries to land anywhere near us, you're going to interfere with our operations, you might kick up dust on us, so we are establishing a keep-out zone of some very large area around this installation.”I think that there are some concerns that we could be headed in that direction, and that's one of the reasons NASA is pushing forward with the Artemis program to return humans to the moon and a set of international agreements called the Artemis Accords, where we've gotten, I think, more than 20 nations now to agree to a way of operating in the lunar environment and, to a certain extent, in Earth orbit as well, which will help make sure that the norms that develop in space, especially in deep space operating on the moon, are norms that are conducive to free and open societies and free markets. And so I give credit to former NASA administrator, Jim Breidenstein and the Trump administration; he came up with the Artemis Accords. I think it was wonderful. I would love to see us go even further, but NASA is still pursuing that and still signing up more countries to the Artemis Accords, and when they sign up to that, they can be part of our effort to go back to moon and the Artemis program, and right now we are on track to get there and put humans back on the moon before China. I just hope we keep it that way.The Danger of Space Debris (20:11)Let me finish up with a question based on something you've mentioned several times during our conversation, which is space debris and space junk. I see more and more articles about the concerns. How concerned are you about this? How should I think about that issue?Yeah, it is a concern, and, I mean, the physics of the space domain are just fundamentally different than what we see in other domains. So, in space, depending on what orbit you're in, if something breaks up into pieces, those pieces keep orbiting Earth indefinitely. If you are below about 600 kilometers, those pieces of debris, there's a tiny amount of atmospheric drag, and, depending on your mass and your surface area and solar weather and stuff, eventually things 600 kilometers and below are going to reenter the Earth atmosphere and burn up in weeks, months, years.Once you get above about 600 kilometers, things start staying up there much longer. And when you get out to geostationary orbit, which is 36,000 kilometers above the surface of the earth, those things aren't coming down, ever, not on their own. They're staying up there. So the problem is, imagine every time there was a shipwreck, or a car wreck, or a plane crash, that all of the debris kept moving around the earth forever. Eventually it adds up. And space, it's a very large volume, yes, but this stuff is whizzing by, if you're in low-earth orbit, you're going around 17,000 miles per hour constantly. And so you've got close approach after close approach, day after day, and then you run the risk of debris hitting debris, or debris hitting other satellites, and then creating more debris, and then increasing the odds that this happens again and again, the movie Gravity gave a dramatic effect to this.I was thinking about that scene as you're explaining this.Yeah. The timeline was very compressed in that movie, but something like that, the Kessler Syndrome, is theoretically possible in the space domain, so we do have to watch out for it. Debris is collecting, particularly in low Earth orbit above 600 kilometers, and ASAT tests are not helpful at all to that. So one of the things the Biden administration did is they instituted a unilateral moratorium on antisatellite testing by the United States. Well, it's easy for us to do. We didn't need to do any anti-satellite tests anymore because we already know we can do that. We have effective capabilities and we wouldn't want to use kinetic anti-satellite attacks anyway, ’cause it would hurt our own systems.We have been going around trying to get other countries to sign up to that as well, to a moratorium on ASAT testing. It's a good first step, but really you need Russia and China. They need to sign up to not do that anymore. And India, India conducted a kinetic ASAT test back in, I think, 2019. So those are the countries we really need to get on board with that.But there's a lot of accidental debris production that happens as well. When countries leave a spent rocket body up in orbit and then something happens. You know, a lot of times they leave their fuel tanks pressurized or they leave batteries on there, after five, 10 years in orbit, sometimes these things explode randomly, and then that creates a debris field. So there's more that we can do to kind of reach international agreements about just being smart stewards of the space domain. There are companies out there that are trying to work on technologies to clean up space debris. It's very hard. That is not something that's on the immediate horizon, but those are all efforts that should be ongoing. It is something to be concerned about.And actually, to circle back to the chief of space operations and his theory of success in his white paper, that's one of the tensions that he highlights in there, is that we want to use space for military advantage, including being able to deny other countries the ability to use space. But at the same time, we want to be good stewards of the space domain and so there's an inherent tension in between those two objectives, and that's the needle that the Space Force is trying to thread.I have one final question, and you may have no answer for it: If we were to track a large space object headed toward Earth, whose job would it be to stop it?So it would be NASA's job to spot it, to find objects like near-Earth orbit asteroids. Whose job is it to stop it? I think we would be figuring that out on the fly. First of all, we would have to figure out, can we stop it? Is there a way to stop it? And it would probably require some sort of an international effort, because we all have a common stake in that, but yeah, it is not in anyone's job jar.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. 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What if there were a way to generate massive amounts of affordable, carbon-free energy with minimal environmental or safety risk? Sounds too good to be true, but nuclear fusion just might be the kind of energy source that America—and the world—has been waiting for.Michl Binderbauer is the CEO of California-based TAE Technologies, a company trying to develop an aneutronic commercial fusion reactor. Michl joins us on this episode of Faster Please! — The Podcast to explain how his team is trying to make fusion power a real thing.In This Episode* Fusion’s Moment (1:11)* The Technical Challenge (12:11)* The Economic Challenge (15:33)* The Role of Government (22:20)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: What is sort of the current state of your company's technology, and in describing that, could you tell me how it sort of differs from other approaches in the field, keeping in mind I am not a nuclear physicist?Binderbauer: Understood. Alright, well it's a great introductory question. So TAE has been around, as you probably have read, for a good two decades plus, but the 25 year anniversary was just this past April, actually. We're at the stage now, it’s really exciting, where the machine we're under construction on now, which we call Copernicus, which is our generation six, is actually intended to get us to a point to demonstrate that we can harvest more energy than we have to feed it. And this is on a really engineering comparison, how much energy comes into the site and deploys on the machine versus how much can you harvest. To be fair, this is not a full power plant, so we're going to measure the heat output, the collective heat output on it. Now that's where we're going, and that's really enabled by 20 plus years of a journey of, interestingly enough, a lot of scientific nuance discoveries, but mostly technology development.What you learn is that the journey that we were on was mostly one of underestimating the complexity of power supplies, vacuum systems, heating systems in the form of us, this means energetic particle beams, and the technological tool chest around those things and making that work as a symphony, as a nice orchestra to do what we need it to do, and that's really where we spend most of the time, and now we're at the point where there's a confluence in understanding the science, understanding or having full practice capability, mastery of the tools, bringing these two things together in the sixth generation machine to drive net energy output. That's the goal. The other thing you asked me was how do we differ and to kind of contrast that a little bit?Because this is a very interesting moment for fusion, broadly, which are a number of startups, of course some of my listeners might be familiar with the breakthrough from the National Ignition Facility, which isn't really meant to create a nuclear power plant, but it was a great proof of concept that we can do some sort of fusion here. So I guess in a somewhat understandable way, given my own personal limitations, what are you doing that's sort of different than maybe some of the other companies such as, I mean I've written about Commonwealth Fusion and a few others, as well.Of course. Let me start by saying that, for most of that I should give credit to my brilliant PhD mentor who was a technical co-founder and co-founder in general of TAE. Norman Rostoker was his name, and Norman had an illustrious career in the field of fusion science and, in fact, accelerators and a few other areas of physics. He was a sort of polymath and really broad guy, which probably was a critical ingredient to get to where we are today. And so while he was very instrumental in the early days of the field in putting together a lot of the fundamental theory and things that I always joke and say, “You can't get a PhD in this field without suffering through a lot of the stuff he discovered.” But he also was very critical at the later stage in his career and he looked at this and said, “If we want to build something that caters to power production in a civilian way with good economics and the right kind of maintainability and practicality, then maybe what we're doing as a field today on the large sort of federal or national program-funded research was sort of missing the mark a little bit because it was building towards the Tokamaks, which some of your readers may know, those  donut-shaped machines, the biggest of which is under construction in the south of France right now, it’s a big international project. And Norman looked at that and said, “That can get us to maybe net energy but not necessarily practical net energy or economic net energy.”In the end it's about an applied end product that we're going after, not textbook knowledge, in a sense, or a proof point for a laboratory experiment. With that in mind, when the company, before it even started—this is in the early ’90s when I became a student—he had a very delineated philosophy of end in mind: Let's look what this needs to look like. And that's pretty trivial to define, right? If I ask you, what do you think a good power plant should look like, you could probably tell me. If we can make it non-polluting, great, we want to make sure that it doesn't have maintenance every day. It's up most of the time and it can compete with what the grid needs today in terms of economics, who else makes power with from coal, the gas to whatever else. And that's kind of how we started, we said that would be the ideal reactor, and now how can we cater to that. And what is the gap if you reverse engineer from there to today that you have to fill? And that's really where we started and that led to a remarkably different trajectory.One of those, the first one, frankly, was fuel, right? When you think about tritium, which is the conventional goal set, and that's a fuel that's heavy hydrogen, when you “burn” that, quote-unquote, you get neutrons, which we know from fission, those are what propagates the fission process, and if you have a lot of neutrons, you get radioactivity. And tritium by itself is also used in our warheads. It's not the ideal material you loose in a civilian setting, it's typically classified, et cetera, so there's all these headaches and there's very little tritium, by the way, to go around. There's like 50 kilograms of free tritium in the world, and that's super expensive, something like $30,000 a gram or so is what's usually quoted. So there's a lot of handicap there if you want to turn that into an economic prosperous thing. And so we said, “Alright, well, what else is terrestrially possible?”And so not to be philosophical and say God gave us a very narrow bookshelf, but it kind of is. On one end you've got the neutronic fuel cycle with tritium, and then on the other end of this small bookshelf you have hydrogen and boron which are copiously available, both. There's no radioactivity to go in, and by the way, when they burn you get three helium particles, which is where our initial name came from, Tri Alpha Energy, we call helium particles in nuclear physics alpha particles. And so you look at it and you say, “Oh, that's pretty good!” I don't have radioactivity as a byproduct, I don't have to worry about shielding, I don't have high costs associated with those things. And by the way, if you look where boron is used today, it's dirt-cheap commodity products, it’s detergents and soaps and cleaning products and things like that. So, in a way, it fits the bill.Now its big handicap is it needs a higher burn temperature to cook.Very hot.Yeah. You look at tritium on one end, that's about a hundred million degrees, which already sounds insane, but keep in mind, as a physicist, we sort of define that as just the energy state in that material beyond the gas. We call these plasmas. This plasma is at a hundred million degrees for tritium. If you want to burn boron, you need about a billion degrees. Now that sounds absolutely crazy, but it's not the stove plate hot of a solid. It's a very few particles that get to zip around in the container at very high energy, and that gets you to that definition of eventually a billion degrees.By the way, for reference, the big Hadron Collider at CERN, the LHC, that actually makes charged particle clouds with temperatures up to five trillion degrees. So we can actually do this. Amazingly, humans have a technology base to actually do that. So we started with the idea of if we wanted that fuel cycle, we've got to find the container and the process that can hold that together and create those energetic states we need. And that led us ultimately to what is referred to as a “field reversed configuration,” and I won't bore everybody with the detail of that, it's a mouthful to begin with, but it's a very interesting magnetic container.I will say that much, that instead of, in the case of most other confinement systems where you have a lot of magnets on the outset—and by the way the magnets are a big cost component in a reactor, they're superconducting, they're large in scale, complex to manufacture—and in this case, in the FRC, most of the field is actually created by the plasma itself.So plasma is discharge particles, if they flow, they create a current and the current can make a magnetic field, and so the plasma can self-envelope with a magnetic field that it generates from its currents and that can help, believe it or not, hold it in place. It sounds kind of perverse, but it works. And the idea behind that was derived about 50 years ago—almost everything infusion had some origins back many, many decades ago—but it was always considered too finicky to make work because one thing you can appreciate, if there's anything wrong in the flow in the plasma, well then the fields start to deteriorate so it can very quickly get into negative feedback cycle unless you can keep it stable and well controlled.And that's what we developed now. So now we have this perfect incarnation of it where we can run at will for as long as we want. We control this with active feedback today with extremely fast circuits and very smart software that's machine learning based, that self-corrects, recognizes patterns, and stuff. So take it as a supposition. Now we have ability to make these field reversed configurations at scale, meters in size, and can hold them steady as long as we want. And now what's interesting about that container is that has a much easier scalability, from a physics perspective, to those high energy conditions. This is why it's the right container to marry with the hydrogen boron, and most people just didn't go there for two reasons, I would think.One is that when the field works mostly on, say, Tokamaks, then there is so much knowledge base developed there that, in a way, it self-propagates and the incoming young people that get graduate education, they work on what's the most prolific thing, which happen to be Tokamaks. So it sort of self-propagates.And the other thing, of course, is people felt that confinement or the ability to hold this material together is already really stressful, and so if you have to go to a hundred million degrees, let's try to celebrate there before we bother going further. Norman was more maverick and said, “But that's not a good endpoint to be, so why don't we shoot for something a bit more out there that can really bring all that together. As a graduate student, I was game for that. I thought this was a brilliant idea. It appealed to me enormously to say let's connect what we're trying to do to the applied end product, and that's where we started, first in the university and then built the business.neutral beams, the plasma maintains lasting, high-temperature field reverse configurations.The Technical Challenge (12:11)Where you are right now, what is required to get to the endpoint, which is a commercial reactor?  Does that require continuous incremental progress and success, or does it still require something that you might call “leaps” in the technology? Where are we to get to that endpoint?Of course I should also explain that temperature increments like you're walking up a ladder, there's different steps to it. At the step where we are now, we're operating today the machine, the generation five—which we actually call “Norman” by the way, in its honor, we named it Norman. The reason that was fitting is because it established the scientific proof that you can actually create stable, long-lift field reversed configurations with the right attributes, and today we're doing that about 75 million degrees in the current machine that runs every day about 50, 60 experiments. So we know we can scale, we're really sure we can scale this to a hundred million degrees. What gives a hundred million back to the fuels, that doesn't give you boron but that gives you tritium. If you think about an approach of sequences, is you ramp up to a billion degrees, somewhere you have to cross a hundred, so you have something harvestable there from an economic opportunity.And so Copernicus, the next machine generation six that I alluded to earlier is the machine that's going to enable us to get into the tritium-level regime. This machine is going to show net energy capability at the a hundred to 150 million degree mark, which is typically where people operate with tritium. We were slated to do that by about ’26, somewhere late-’25 into ’26, and that's what we're constructing and fully projected to do. Now assuming success on that—which I believe is very much in our favor, we've been less than a factor of two of those operating conditions already and we have the engineering and the mastery, the operational mastery on this in hand—then the next step after that is to scale that up and build a machine that's about a factor of eight or so up in energy, and that gets you into the regime of the boron operation, and that's the stage when we think we will have net energy demonstrated out of hydrogen boron, and that's probably early 2030s.So again, coming back the next three years, make a machine that gets into the tritium equivalent operational regime. One thing I should point out, perhaps people may question, are we using tritium in the machine directly? We are not. What we're doing, and I can get into why that is, Commonwealth for instance—you mentioned earlier Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS)—they're trying to be a bit more ambitious and build this Tokamak and eventually fuel it with tritium. That has a much larger price tag and operational complexity because tritium is not an end game for us. I just want to enable the energetic state to burn tritium without actually doing it. The field has today sufficient enough confidence and maturity to understand that if you can hold the material together at a hundred, 150 million degrees with the right density and everything, yes, you could make tritium-based net energy if you wanted to, and that'd be for somebody else to do, but TAE wants to march on and build its boron reactor.The Economic Challenge (15:33)So there's a technical challenge that you feel like you're on track and you're sort of hitting some milestones there, and then there's sort of the economic challenge that we just don't want to get this thing to work, you want to get this thing to work so it makes sense that someday this thing can get plugged into an electrical grid. How do you feel about that aspect? How pricey or inexpensive or expensive will this energy be, assuming the not-insignificant technical challenges are met sometime in the next decade or what have you?Yeah, so great question. Obviously, we haven't built one yet. We haven't built the prototypes yet, let alone the full power plant, but there is actually a quite sane projection forward to those cost points from the fact that, after 25 years of working on this, we have a pretty good sense what we need. We have a great supply chain and partnerships established with people who built, not exactly this, but things like this. So you can do some estimates and you also know, as I said earlier, magnets are one of the biggest items, so there's a large amount of cost in there. The other big item that between those two controls more than two thirds is the heating equipment, and that can be radiofrequency heating like a microwave basically, or what we mostly use is injecting highly directional beams of atomic particles, neutral atoms that come in and then they collide with the fuel and then they basically transfer the energy that we directly shoot in and it becomes heat in the machine.So those two things, the heaters and the container system, the magnets, are the big expense items. When you get a sense for where you need to be and what the geometry looks like and so on, you can actually make a reasonable estimate at cost, and so I'm saying this, at the same time I'm asking for forgiveness if we're going to be off because obviously, in the end, there'll be a lot of detail that'll add to that. But I think what we believe, and I have confidence that that's correct, that the first generation of plants coming out of this, let's say it's somewhere in the mid-2030s, we'd have the first commercial plants installing and not plant one, which is a hand-built one-of-a-kind, right? But if you built maybe tens of plants, you will be at a point where you have some learning curves that bring prices down, you kind of know now how to do it. I wouldn't say it's mass produced yet, but it's going into a more efficient production cycle. I think we will slot in somewhere in the midfield today of generation assets.So if you're looking at solar, wind—solar maybe more than wind today—but you also add things like gas in the US, those are on the low end of the economics in terms of what they call LCOE, the Levelized Cost of Electricity, and then if you look at the upper end, you will find nuclear and the things where there's a lot of safety margin built in. We’ll be somewhere in the field in between there. That gets you pretty competitive right there because it has two other incredible attributes. One is that there is really no variability in fuel costs because it’s literally free because you need so little. Fusion is super high energy dense, so you don't need much.And the other aspect is that it doesn't pollute, really. There's no carbon involved, there's really no radioactivity to speak of. And so you are ending with something that can be baseload power, that's dispatchable, as they call it today. The human controls when it's on and when it's not, not the sun or the wind. And you have essentially green energy. In that sense, even if it's more expensive than some of the cheapest things today, but it's midfield, it'll be very competitive on a global basis and it'll be an important component that the world will need.How big a facility would you need to power Cincinnati or Chicago? My only experience is looking at the rather big nuclear fission reactors which are fairly big, so would this be a lot smaller than that?Well, two things: There's the machine size and then there's the installation size, the site. In nuclear fission today you have exclusion zone around the plant. There's a lot of the plot of land that it's on and then some incremental infrastructure, safety, security shielding and so on adds a lot of additional cost and scale. If on the boron machine, the actual machine is a couple, maybe three double-decker buses back-to-back, something like that, maybe a bit taller, but not that much. So that would be comparable to a large gas turbine, for instance. Or if you are in a hydro plant and you're looking at the generating units, they'd be sort of on that scale. So it's not outsized relative to what conventionally is used in the utility space today.Now if you look in the land footprint, it's pretty minimal. You're looking at a handful of acres at most. In fact, maybe even less over time. Now that's with hydrogen and boron because you then don't have radioactivity to speak of. You don't have the chance during an accident. The worst-case accidents that a plant like that would suffer would be industrial scale things. Things like a bad fire in a factory would just be similar, but it doesn't have nuclear meltdown capability. There is no chain reaction kind of thing, like we know from Chernobyl—and by the way, this isn't just true for TAE, this is true for all of fusion, it makes it really safe. So those attributes will shrink the site down. So if you're asking me how much can we get out of one of these systems at that scale, probably somewhere in the order of half a gigawatt, 400 to 500 megawatts is sort of what we're shooting for.It's a larger gas turbine system and if you wanted to get gigawatt-level power like you would get out of a fission nuclear plant today, you would probably have, say, two, three of these units next to each other. What I really think the world will go to and what we hear from talking to a lot of the utility people, it's a more distributed grid, ideally. You have things on the 300–500 megawatt scale that deploys in a way where you have more redundancy if you needed it, there's more reliability, et cetera. This is the scale that I think you would look at, so feeding a city like Chicago out of one plant, or the whole Chicago metropolitan area, is not going to happen. You would have a distributed set of systems, and you think 400 megawatts or so, you get a few hundred thousand households that run on that, and then you scale from there.The Role of Government (22:20)You've been working on this for some time and obviously I work at a think tank, so I always think, do you want government to do something that it's not doing? Do you want government to stop doing something that it's currently doing? I know I've certainly talked to some startups, newer startups, they're in partnerships with the Department of Energy. So what is your engagement currently and what would you need, or not need, from government going forward to get to where you need to go?That's a great question and one that has evolved. In the past, we've been purely privately funded and we built everything we've done so far on private capital and we're kind of the oldest of that. Now, as you said, there's a lot of younger companies in the space too, and I think this is great. We get more shots on goal and it makes us more valid. We’re not the only lone idiots out there. There's actually reason to believe that there's many smart people trying now, so that's a good thing.Now where we're going, though, is a stage where I think public-private partnerships actually start to make sense. When you look at the history of any kind of energy technology that came about, nuclear is sort of—I hate to use it because it seems like we're so similar, we're obviously very different in some ways, we share the taxonomy “nuclear,” but that's about it—but fission, if you look at the evolution, it gets subsidies. There's a risk offtake for the early plants that the government tends to shoulder. That can be a loan guarantee, it can be other kinds of financial arrangements, and then eventually it becomes commercial enough in the sense that people believe in the viability, they have a good sense for its reliability and so on, and then it just propagates into the market in a very capitalist free market sense. That transition out of the lab into that stage of really rolling out at scale I think is where we absolutely need to count on government support.In fact, what's wonderful to see now, over the last couple of years in particular, and you read about this, the White House last year had a summit where we and a few others in the front running in the private sector were there together with the national labs and people from DOE, and we had a very productive conversation about what the White House framed a bold decadal vision for fusion. Important in that is the recognition that it's not always 30 years away and always will be, it's much closer. And what can we do proactively and collectively to accelerate that?I think that's what's really heartening to see, that as we're getting to that proof point, now we're getting net energy and then we want to leap to a prototype and a power plant. We're going to need that help, and there is a public-private partnership around multiple things on the technology or production side, but then also moving into the ultimate: How do you fund and risk underwrite these early plants when utilities typically are more risk averse? That we see on the federal level, and then on the state level, I don't know if you follow that, but recently California and North Carolina had a couple of bills coming out—for instance, California, we've had this nuclear moratorium where everything nuclear in nature is sort of not tolerable, and that's been modified. Fusion now is excluded out of that and in fact is now part of what they would call the benign side of the future of energy. In fact, the California bill made it very clear that it's to be treated as clean energy, essentially. And so in North Carolina, so you have now a blue state and right state looking at and saying, we want this. We need this, and we recognize the chance is high that over the next decade this comes about.The other thing I can add is that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they just this year in a sort of landmark first step, the commission ruled in terms of where do we slop the regulatory framework around fusion. It's not in the old Part 50, which deals with the fission world, but it's going to be in a world that's much closer to where you would regulate medical accelerator that makes pet isotopes for oncology scanning and stuff. So they recognize that this is, while nuclear in taxonomy, it's a very different form of risk to the public, and therefore the level of regulation is lower, and that's equally important.The interaction with the government is super important now, and we're very heartened by the fact that we see there's really a nearing and a mutual excitement about bringing that out as quickly as possible against the backdrops from climate change to whatever else people are worried about with the national security and energy independence.Obviously, from my perspective, what I like is the idea that if fusion can succeed, it becomes eventually a source of abundance because there's so much fuel here that we can harvest and we think we can do this at very economic levels, that you can lift up those parts of the world that today are living on the other side of the gradient in a very sort of depressed, low quality of life. In fact, if you look at all the energy use projections or demand projections forward, you can see that we're going to more than double, and most of the demand comes from the underdeveloped world. Fusion can be a very big contributor to a more equitable world as a whole. It's all these attributes that I think get people really excited, and now it's no longer just this visionary dream. We're really, really close to doing it. I think that's why you see the government and everybody coming together now and beginning these earnest conversations over the next few years: How do we structure programs from regulation to working together to ultimately loan guarantees and other things in a public-private partnership, and bring it to the grid. 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

Science. Ownership. Speed. Openness.These are the four pillars of Andrew McAfee’s observed structure for successful companies. It is the “geeks,” the leaders at the forefront of cross-industry innovation, who embrace these norms and have the potential to redefine business as we know it. In order to break ground and create the kind of future we dream of, organizational leaders need to banish the fear of failure, embrace mistakes, and accept hard feedback with open arms.Andrew is a best-selling author, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His books include More from Less and The Second Machine Age, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson. Today on the podcast, we discuss the ideas captured in his most recent book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results. In This Episode* The universal geek (1:35)* The four geek norms (8:29)* Tales of geeks and non-geeks (15:19)* Can big companies go geek? (18:33)* The geek way beyond tech (26:32)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.The universal geek (1:35)Pethokoukis: Is The Geek Way really the Silicon Valley Way? Is this book saying, “Here's how to turn your company into a tech startup”?McAfee: You mentioned both Silicon Valley and tech, and this book is not about either of those—it's not about a region and it's not about an industry, it's about a set of practices. And I think a lot of the confusion comes because those practices were incubated and largely formulated in this region called “Silicon Valley” in this industry that we call “tech”. So I understand the confusion, but I'm not writing about the Valley. Plenty of people do that. I'm not writing about the tech industry. Plenty of people do that. The phenomenon that I don't think we are paying enough attention to is this set of practices and philosophies that, I believe, when bundled correctly, amounts to a flat old upgrade to the company, just a better way to do the thing a company is supposed to do. That needed a label, because it's new. “Geek” is the label that I latched onto.But there's a universal aspect to this, then.Yeah, I believe there is. I understand this sounds arrogant—I believe it's a flat better way to run a company. I don't care where in the world you are, I don't care what industry you are in, if you're making decisions based on evidence, if you're iterating more and planning less, if you're building a modular organization that really does give people authority and responsibility, and if you build an organization where people are actually comfortable speaking truth to power, I think you're going to do better.One reason I'm excited about this book is because, you as well, we think about technological progress, we think about economic growth and productivity and part of that is science and coming up with new ideas and a new technology, but all that stuff has to actually be turned into a commercial enterprise and there has to be well-run companies that take that idea and sell it. Maybe the economist’s word might be “diffusion” or something like that, but that's a pretty big part of the story, which I think maybe economists tend not to focus as much on, or policy people, but it's pretty darn important and that's what I think is so exciting about your book is that it addresses that: How to create companies that can do that process—invention-to-product—better. So how can they do it better?Let me quibble with you just a little bit. There are alternatives to this method of getting goods and services to people, called “the company.” That's what we do in capitalist societies. Jim, like you know all too well, over the course of the 20th century, we ran a couple of experiments trying it a different way: These collectivist, command-and-control, centrally planned economies, those were horrible failures! Let's just establish that right off the bat.So in most of the parts of the world—I think in all the parts of the world where you and I would actually want to live—I agree with you, we've settled on this method of getting most goods and services to people, most of what they consume, via these entities called companies, and I don't care if you're in a Nordic social democracy, or in the US of A, or in Southeast Asia, companies are the things getting you most of what you consume. I think in the United States, about 85 percent of what you and I consume, by some estimates, comes from companies. So, like them or hate them, they're incredibly important, and if a doohickey comes along that lets them their work X percent better, we should applaud that like crazy because that's an X percent increase in our affluence, our standard of living, the things that we care about, and the reason I got excited and decided to write this book is I think there's an upgrade to the company going on that's at the same level as the stuff that [Alfred] Chandler wrote about a century ago when we invented the large, professionally managed, pretty big company. Those dominated the corporate landscape throughout the 20th century. I think that model is being upgraded by the geeks.It's funny because, I suppose maybe the geeks 50 years ago, maybe a lot of them worked at IBM. And your sort-of geek norms are not what I think of the old Big Blue from IBM in the 1960s. That has changed. Before we get into the norms, how did they develop? Why do we even have examples of this working in the real corporate world?The short answer is, I don't know exactly. That's a pretty detailed piece of corporate history and economic history to work on. The longer answer is, what I think happened is, a lot of computer nerds, who had spent a lot of time at universities and were pretty steeped in that style of learning things and building things, went off and started companies and, in lots of cases, they ran into the classic difficulties that occur to companies and the dysfunctions that creep in as companies grow and age and scale. And instead of accepting them, my definition of a geek is somebody who's tenacious about a problem and is willing to embrace unconventional solutions. I think a lot of these geeks—and I'm talking about people like Reed Hastings, who's really articulate about what he did at Netflix and at his previous company, which he says he ran into mediocrity—a lot of these geeks like Hastings sat around and said, “Wait a minute, if I wanted to not repeat these mistakes, what would I do differently?” They noodled that hard problem for a long time, and I think via some conversation among the geeks, but via these fairly independent vectors in a lot of cases, they have settled on these practices, these norms that they believe—and I believe—help them get past the classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era that you and I know all too well: their bureaucratization, their sclerosis, their cultures of silence. They are just endless stifling meetings and turf wars and factions and things like that. We know those things exist. What I think is interesting is that the geeks are aware of them and I think they've come up with ways to do better.The four geek norms (8:29)It's funny that once you've looked at your book, it is impossible to read any other sort of business biography of a company or a CEO and not keep these ideas in your head because I just finished up the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and boy, I just kept on thinking of speed and science and the questioning of everything: Why are we doing this? Why are we building this rocket engine like this? Who told us to do that? Somebody in legal told us to do that?Exactly.So certainly those two pop to mind: the speed and the constant iteration. But rather than have me describe them, why don't you describe those norms in probably a much better way than I can.There's a deep part of the Isaacson Musk biography that made my geek eyes light up, and it's when Isaacson describes Musk's Algorithm—I think it's capitalized, too, it's capital “The,” capital “Algorithm,”—which is all about taking stuff out. I think that is profound because we humans have a very strong status quo bias. We're reluctant to take things out. It's one of the best-documented human biases. So we just add stuff, we just layer stuff on, and before you know it, for a couple different flavors of reason, you wind up with this kind of overbuilt, encrusted, process-heavy, bureaucracy-heavy, can't get anything done [corporation]. You feel like you're pushing on a giant piece of Jell-O or something to try to get any work done. And I think part of Musk's brilliance as a builder and an organization designer is to come up with The Algorithm that says, “No, no, a big part of your job is to figure out what doesn't need to be there and make it go away.” I adore that. It's closest to my great geek norm of ownership, which is really the opposite of this processification of the enterprise of the company that we were super fond of starting in the ’90s and going forward.So now to answer your question, my four great geek norms, which are epitomized by Musk in a lot of ways, but not always, are:Science. Just make decisions based on evidence and argue a lot about that evidence. Science is an argument with a ground rule. Evidence rules.Ownership. We were just talking about this. Devolve authority downward, stop all the cross-communication, coordination, collaboration, process, all that. Build a modular organization.Speed. Do the minimum amount of planning and then start iterating. You learn, you get feedback, you see where you're keeping up to schedule and where you're not by doing stuff and getting feedback, not by sitting around asking everybody if they're on schedule and doing a lot of upfront planning.Finally, openness, this willingness to speak truth to power. In some ways, a good synonym for it is “psychological safety” and a good antonym for it is “defensiveness.”If anything, from what I understand about Musk, the last one is where he might run into challenges.That's what I was going to say. The ownership and the speed and the science struck me and then I'm like… the openness? Well, you have to be willing to take some abuse to be open in that environment.There are these stories about him firing people on the spot and making these kind of peremptory decisions—all of that is a violation, in my eyes, of the great geek norm of openness. It might be the most common violation that I see classic Silicon Valley techies engage in. They fall victim to overconfidence like the rest of us do, and they're not careful enough about designing their companies to be a check on their own overconfidence. This is something Hastings is very humble and very articulate about in No Rules Rules, the book that he co-wrote with Erin Meyer about Netflix and he highlights all these big calls that he was dead-flat wrong about, and he eventually realized that he had to build Netflix into a place that would tell him he was wrong when he was wrong, and he does all these really nice jobs of highlighting areas where he was wrong and then some relatively low-level person in the organization says, “No, that doesn't make sense. I'm going to go gather evidence and I'm going to challenge the CEO of the company with it.” And to his eternal credit, Hastings goes, “It's pretty compelling evidence. I guess I was wrong about that.” So that, to me, is actually practicing the great geek norm of openness.So someone reading this book is thinking that this book is wrong. Where would that come from? Would that come from overconfidence? Would it come from arrogance? Would it come from the idea that if I am in the C-suite, that obviously I have it figured out and I can probably do all your jobs better than you can, so why are you challenging me? Why are you challenging the status quo? “Hey, that's how we got here was through a process, so trust the process!”It's one of the main flavors of pushback that I hear, and it's very often not as naked as you just made it, but it is, “Hey, the reason I'm sitting in this executive education classroom with you is because I'm fairly good at my job. I made some big calls right, and my job is to provide vision to my team and to direct them not to be this kind of lead-from-behind more coach-y kind of leader.” That's one flavor of pushback I get. Another one is a very pervasive tendency, when we come across some challenging information, to come up with reasons why this doesn't apply to us and why we're going to be just fine. It's some combination of the status quo bias and the overconfidence bias which, again, two of the most common human biases. So very often when I'm talking about this, I get the idea that people in the room are going, “Yeah, okay, wow, I really wouldn't want to complete with SpaceX, but this doesn't apply to me or to my industry.” And then finally, look, I'm clearly wrong about some things. I don't know exactly what they are. Maybe the incumbents of the Enterprise Era are going to mount a surprising comeback by falling back on their 20th-century playbook as opposed to adopting the geek way. I will be very surprised if that happens and I'm taking bets like, “Let's go, let's figure out a bet based on that,” but maybe it'll happen. I'm definitely wrong about some things.Tales of geeks and non-geeks (15:19)Given what you've said, I would certainly think that it would be easier to apply these norms at a newer company, a younger company, a smaller company, rather than a company with a hundred thousand employees that's been around for 30 years. But it's possible to do the second one, right?It is possible. Let me violently agree with you, Jim. You and I are of a vintage and we're both Midwesterners. We both remember Arthur Andersen, right? And what an iconic American Midwestern symbol of rectitude and reliability and a healthy culture that kept the business world honest by auditing their books. Remember all that? Remember how it fell apart?I knew people, and if you got an interview with Arthur Andersen, they're like, “Wow, you are with the Cadillac of accounting consulting firms.”But beyond that, you were doing a valuable thing for society, right? These people had status in the community because they kind of kept companies honest for a living.That’s right. That's right. You were true of the truth tellers.Yeah. It was a big deal and a lot of your listeners, I think, are going to be too young to remember it firsthand, but that company became a dysfunctional, unethical, ongoing, miserable train wreck of an organization in its final years before it finally fell apart. It could not have been more surprising to people of our vintage and where we came from. I tell the story of how that happened a little bit in the book to drive home that cultures can go off track in profound ways and in AA’s late years, if someone had teleported The Geek Way and waved it around, would it have made any difference? I'd like to hope so, but I kind of don't think so.However, to tell a more optimistic story, I had the chance to interview Satya Nadella about his turnaround at Microsoft, which I think is at a level maybe even above the turnaround that [Steve] Jobs executed when he came back to Apple. The amount of value that Nadella has created at Microsoft in nine years now is staggering, and Microsoft is back. Microsoft has mojo again in the tech industry. But when he took over, Microsoft was still a large profitable company, but it was dead in the water. It wasn't innovating. The geek elite didn't want to go work there. The stock price was flat as a highway for a decade. It was absolutely an afterthought in anything that we care about. And so I use Nadella and I learned from him, and I try to tell the story about how he executed this comeback, and, to my eyes, he did it in a very, very geek way kind of a way.Can you give me an example?My point in telling that story is: I do think it's possible for organizations that find themselves in a bad spot—Established organizations.Established. Large, established organizations find themselves in a bad spot. Those kinds of leopards can change their spots. I firmly believe that.Can big companies go geek? (18:33)What are the first steps to change the corporate culture of a big company?That's why I'm so blown away by what Nadella and his team were able to do. Let me pick out a couple things that seem particularly geeky to me that he did. One was to say that—it doesn't matter if you develop them or not—you do not own code or data at Microsoft. What he meant by that was, subject to legal requirements and safety and some guardrails, if you want to grab some of the code repository at Microsoft to go try something or some data and go try something, you have the right to do that. That just eliminates huge amounts of gatekeeping and hard and soft bureaucracy and all of that inside the company. And that led to things like Copilot. It's a very, very smart way to start dealing with bureaucracy: just saying, “No, you don't get to gatekeep anymore.”He also did fairly obvious things like make sure that their really dysfunctional evaluation system was over. He also emphasized this thing that he called “One Microsoft,” which at first sounded like just CEO rah-rah talk. And it is to some extent, but it's also incredibly clever because we humans are so tribal. In addition to the status quo bias and the overconfidence bias, the third easy, easy bias to elicit is “myside” bias. We are tribal. We want our tribe to win. I think part of Nadella's brilliance was to say, “The tribe that you belong to is not Office versus Windows versus Bing versus… the tribe you belong to is Microsoft.”And he changed compensation, so that it also worked that way. He worked with incentives—he took an Econ 101 class—but he also kept emphasizing that “we are one tribe,” and that makes a difference if the leader at the top keeps saying it and if they behave that way. I think one of the deepest things that he did was act in an open way and demonstrate the norm of openness that he wanted to see all over the place. He got a ton of help with it, but if you talk to him, you immediately realize that he's not this table-pounding, my-way-or-the-highway kind of a guy. He's somebody that wants to get it right, and if you have an idea, you might get a fair erring for that idea. He also embraced agile methods and started to move away from the old ways that Microsoft had to write software, which were out of date, and they were yielding some really unimpressive projects.So as he and I were talking, I was doing my internal checklist and I kept on saying, “Yep, that's speed. That is science. That is ownership. That is openness,” and just emphasizing, as I listened to him, I just kept hearing these norms come up over and over. But one thing that he clearly knows is that this ain't easy and it ain't fast, and cultural change is a long, slow, grinding process, and you've got to keep saying the same thing over and over. And then I think, especially as a leader, you've got to keep living it because people will immediately sense if what you're doing is not lining up with what you're saying.One bit that popped out, because obviously I'm in Washington and I see a government that doesn't work very efficiently, and you wrote, “To accelerate learning and progress, plan less and iterate more,” and to iterate means to experiment, it means you're going to fail. And boy, oh boy, failure-averse organizations, you can find that in government, you can find it in corporate America, that acceptance of: try something and if it fails, it's a learning experience. It's not a black mark on your career forever. Now let's go try the next thing.Exactly. To me, it's the most obvious thing that the geeks do that's starkly different from Industrial Era organizations, “plan less, iterate more.” The great geek norm of speed, and there are a bunch of exemplars of that. The clearest one to me is SpaceX, where they blow up a rocket and that is a win for them, not a loss. And even if it gets written up in the press as, “Oh, Starship blew up, or whatever”—they don't care, right? They'd rather that it didn't blow up or that it stayed together longer, but if they got the learning that they were looking for, then they're like, “Great, we're going to incorporate that, we're going to build another rocket, we're not going to put any people on until we're very, very, very sure, but we're going to blow up a bunch of rockets.” From the start of the company, that has been an okay thing to do.They also are willing to embrace pretty big pivots. The first plan for Starship was that it was going to be a carbon fiber rocket because carbon fiber is so strong and lightweight, but their method for making it was too slow, too expensive, and had a reject rate that was too high. The thing’s now made out of stainless steel! It's the opposite kind of material! But they said, “Look, the goal is the goal, and the goal is not to stick to the original plan, the goal is to build a great big rocket that can do all kinds of things. The way we get there is by trying—legitimately trying—a bunch of stuff and failing at it with the eyes of the world upon us.”I want to draw a really sharp distinction between the process and the product, and what I mean by that is a failure-tolerant process can yield an incredibly robust, safe product. We don't need to look any farther for that than the Dragon Capsule that SpaceX makes, which is the only capsule currently made in America that is certified by NASA to take human beings into space. It's how all Americans these days get back and forth to the ISS. NASA doesn't have one. NASA gave a contract to Boeing at the same time it gave one to SpaceX. Boeing still has not had the first crude test of its capsule. This geek way of speed, it's uncomfortable, and you got to be willing to fail publicly and own it, but it works better.Is the geek way, to some degree, an American phenomenon?So far.I was going to say, can the geek way be implemented in other countries? Is there something special about American culture that allows the geek way to work and to be adopted—I said universal earlier, maybe I meant, is it truly universal? Can it be implemented in other places?Jim, you and I, as proud Americans, like to believe that we're an exceptional country, and I do believe that. I don't believe the geek way only works with a bunch of Americans trying it. I travel lots of different places, and especially the energy that I see among younger people to be part of this transformation of the world that's happening (that you and I are lucky enough to get to observe and try to think about), this transformation of the world in the 21st century because of the technological toolkit that we have, because of the amount of innovation out there, the thirst to be part of that is very, very, very widespread. And I don't think there's anything in the drinking water in Munich or Kyoto or Lima that makes this stuff impossible at all. It is true, we're an individualistic culture, we're kind of mouthy, we celebrate these iconoclastic people, but I don't think any of those are absolutely necessary in order to start following norms of science, ownership, speed and openness. I hope those are universal.The geek way beyond tech (26:32)We’ve been talking a lot about tech companies. Are there companies which really don't seem particularly techie (even though obviously all companies use technology) that you could see the geek way working currently?I haven't gone off and looked outside the tech industry for great exemplars of the geek way, so I have trouble answering this question. But think about Bridgewater, which is really one of the weirdest corporate cultures ever invented, and I haven't read the new biography of Ray Dalio yet, but it appears that all might not be exactly as it appears. But one thing that Bridgewater has been adamant about from the get-go, and Dalio has been passionate about, is this idea of radical transparency, is the idea of openness. Your reputation is not private from anybody else in the company at any point in time. So they've taken this norm of openness and they've really ran with it in some fascinating directions. In most organizations, there's a lot of information that's private, and your reputation is spread by gossip. Literally, that's how it works. Bridgewater said, “Nope. We really believe in openness and everything that's important about your performance as a professional in this company, you're going to get rated on it by your colleagues, and you're going to have these visible to everybody all the time inside the company so that if you start espousing how important it is to be ethical, but your score as an ethical leader is really low, nobody's going to listen to you.” I think that's fascinating, and I think as time goes by, we're going to come across these very, very geeky norms and practices being implemented in all kinds of weird corners of the global economy. I can't wait to learn about it.I would think that, given how every country would like to be more productive, every country's having a white paper on how to improve their productivity, and this, to me, is maybe something that policymakers don't think about, and I'm not sure if there's a policy aspect to this, but I hope a lot of corporate leaders and aspiring corporate leaders at least read your book.Well, the one policy implication that might come up is, what happens when the geeks start unignorably beating up the incumbents in your favorite industry. When I look at what's happening in the global auto industry right now, I see some of that going on, and my prediction is that it's going to get worse instead of better. Okay, then what happens?Save us! Save us from this upstart!Exactly, but then there could be some really interesting policy choices being made about protecting dinosaur incumbents in the face of geek competitors. I hope we don't retreat into nationalism and protectionism and that kind of stuff. What I hope happens instead is that the world learns how to get geeky relatively quickly and that this upgrade to the company spreads.The only thing I would add here is I would also urge business journalists to read the book so you understand how companies work and how these new companies that work, companies that look like they are—and not to keep harping on SpaceX, but so many people who I think should know better, will look at SpaceX and think, “Oh, they're failing. Oh, that rocket, as you said earlier, the rocket blew up! Apollo had a couple of problems, they're blowing up a rocket every six weeks!” And they just simply do not understand how this kind of company works. So I don't know. So I guess I would recommend my business journalists to read it, and I imagine you would think the same.That recommendation makes a ton of sense to me. Jim. I'm all on board with that.Andrew. This is an outstanding book and a wonderful companion piece to your other work which is very pro-progress, and pro-growth. I absolutely loved it, and thanks so much for coming on the podcast today,Jim, thanks for being part of the Up Wing Party with me. Let's make it happen.Absolutely. Thank you.Thank you, sir. 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

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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